There are just too few hours in the day. I promise you, if you tacked on two more hours right after midnight, right before the next day began I would treat them differently. Two hours where the world would stand still and peaceful, where I could practice my arts and indulge in life’s delights unburdened by the swift ending of the day. It hurts my soul to live these 22-hour days! Like shoes half a size too small. I implore you, spirits of time, extend the day to 24 hours, and I’ll never complain about having not enough time again.
Now that you’re really getting deep into the bowels of the earth, the heat will become numbing. After you pass the point of no return no amount of willpower can keep your skin crystal. Your structures will melt, and your sub-structures will be left floating in the rich, thick soup of molten skin. Yes, it’s annoying. It’s common to lose an extremity or two, but nothing you can’t grow back. If you’ve made it this far deep you won’t feel a thing. Just concentrate on keeping your entropy low, and remember the deep mantle is a marathon, not a sprint.
Personally I believe we have one of the most interesting bathrooms in this side of the city; the first plumber we had come in was completely dumbfounded. He called in his superior, who took one look at the holomap and immediately left to call in her superior. In came a man with pristine navy blue overalls, a colossal braided beard, and a wide-brimmed pointy hat. From his work bag he produced a block of clay, and fashioned with incredible speed the image of a small animal before disappearing into the bathroom. It was a ferret-shaped creature, or perhaps more like a lizard? I had difficulty telling, as it was covered head to toe in a layer of rough, thick hairs. The next part I almost missed, but by chance reflected in the mirror through the crack in the door and I caught the man breathing out a cloud of sparkling blue light onto his creation before dousing it in what must have been vinegar. With a shudder, the ferret came to life, and scurried right down into our sink. Forty minutes later the man re-emerged with a satisfied smile. We never had drainage problems again. We also have this lovely fractal pattern made of blue tiles! You really must see them sometime, the last tenants had spectacular taste.
Out in the far east, past the bronze hills and the few settlements farming the Laethwater delta, you reach the stone sea. Details of its catastrophic origin was lost ages ago, and I’ve heard many versions of different overlapping tales on the cause of the anomaly. A proper anthropological survey might be able to track down the roots of these varying rumours and gleam a few drops of truth for them, but that is far beyond the scope of my expedition.
The ocean is violent, even to the standards of the seas of my homeworld. The waves are graceful and monstrous, their edges razor sharp, and often reach dozens of storeys above their troughs. In some places the peaks reach high enough to rival the mountains on the opposite horizon. It’s an awe-inspiring sight, watching them grow in size as you travel through the marshlands to the shore. One can only imagine the earthquake, or similar disaster, that brought the entire ocean to a boil. And of course, the entire ocean is frozen solid into a continuous mass of coarse-grained stone.
Multiple sites along the “coast” quarry the ocean, carving out vast blocks of what appears to be a form of granite, to be transported upstream. I’ll admit geology isn’t one of my strengths, and the basic composition tests are coming back inconclusive. I have plenty of samples, of course. This sight was the most disconcerting of my journey. The sea itself, an amalgamation of colossal sculptures reaching out as far as the eye could see, left a sense of unease, to be sure. The human mind can’t help but anticipate the crash when it sees a mighty wave tensed up high in the sky, brimming with destructive energy, and even after weeks spent in their shadow I could not fully escape that impending dread, as if one day the stone might remember its purpose and the ages-old storm would suddenly resume. This, at least, is a sight my mind is equipped to understand.
The image I could not parse, and still struggle to describe now, are the peaks partially quarried, where cubic chunks were lopped from the bigger structures, particularly at their tips, where the dark waves meet the lighter sky. The strength and incredible homogeneity of the granite made it valuable in its own right, and the accessibility of the stone combined with easy access to the Laethwater river made these remote quarries very economical. Further west, it was a status symbol to keep a slice of the stone sea’s peaks in one’s private collection, and so the prime cut of the rock was the very top, that razor-sharp peak where two curves met.
Those cuts, polished and delicately handled, did well to preserve the beauty of their source, but more haunting was the holes they left behind. The stone dunes are graceful, organic, smooth and rippled and mathematically perfect, and those crude human chunks cut out of its sides were both an affront to chaos itself and just as beautiful as the natural patterns they desecrate. The contrast between the fluid forms of the waves and the intrusion of the right angle was not something my eyes could accept. It was like waking up to find a quarter of the sun had been extended to form a perfect square. Every morning I would leave my quarters and watch the sun rise through one of those carved gaps in one of the largest waves surrounding the quarry. Still it haunts me.
Nobody who has seen an storming ocean would be surprised to hear how difficult it is to traverse the sea. The walls are steep, and the bulk of each peak needs to be avoided to make any sort of reasonable pace. The waves are very smooth, and challenging to climb past a certain grade. A system of paths has been built by the quarry workers. Closer to the river’s mouth there are steps and footholds carved directly into the stone, but further out many staircases are made instead from wood and brick. If travelling off the path one must pay very close attention to the sharp ridges running down the side of each peak. Time has failed to dull those edges, and on this scale a misstep could cause great harm.
Ever after the ocean was transformed (and all the legends are in agreement that it had not been this way until recently) the rivers had kept flowing, and the landscape is dotted by vast lakes, salted from the slowly eroding waves. There’s another sight I’ll remember until the end of my days: tiny waves picked up from the wind wandering across one of the smaller lakes, in almost naive imitation of the towering stone walls that confined the lake itself.
Inside the lakes the stone is dotted with mosses and algae, and some insects and small fish populate their water. Without soil, however, no life can grow outside of the water, and more than half a day’s trek from the shore the bodies of water become less and less frequent until they disappear entirely, as do the man-made paths and carved staircases, and the ground, sky and water all blur together in a palate of infinite slate grey. Very little rain falls over the region once you’ve travelled that far out. I couldn’t find a local to take me further than the marked paths. No one wanted to need to camp out in the sea overnight, though they noted it had been done safely before. I may attempt that journey myself in the coming weeks, just for a few days. The water must be draining somewhere, and I’m eager to investigate whether any sort of proto-ecosystem has formed further out into the sea, beyond the reach of river-dwelling birds and hunting mammals.
This month, the difference between writing causally and committing to daily entries really stands out. After deciding to write as much as I can in september a little voice blinked into existence in the back of my head. It pops up a few times over the course of the day pointing out threads I could turn into a worthy entry. Unfortunately the ease at which this came back once I committed to daily entries for september confirms that I really could have been writing more if I was trying harder, and a lack of inspiration (at least for these short writings) stems from not trying to keep that subroutine running at all times. That’s not a bad thing! It’s good to have an idea of how much focus keeping an active writing habit takes up, to know when it’s a good thing to have running in my life and when I can let it slide for a few weeks. This month I’m committed though, and I’ll try have something big cooked up for entry 200!
My personal favourite is a 2000-page tome on how to craft the perfect grilled cheese. A priceless treatise, written by one of the old masters as part of her final ascension towards one of the highest seats in our order. Academic discipline mixed with captivating prose capped off with a damning prophecy. She was a poet, that one. Entire chapters are dedicated to constructing elaborate metaphors to describe the perfect dynamic of texture and environment. There was passion behind every word, true respect of the art, and beneath it all that deep love for the world that motivates every good cook. Here was a woman who threw herself at life eagerly, who approached every day with open eyes, who wanted to share that richness with her loved ones in a convenient meal she could cook in under 15 minutes.
It is rare to find a person so wholly dedicated to such a narrow field. She wrote about how she built her own brick stove with the help of local artisans, but abandoned it when she found its results un-repeatable. She wrote about how her aunt lost her sense of taste, which forced her to innovate through texture alone. She wrote about friendships she built through sharing kitchens, about kisses shared across a long strands of melted cheese. You might laugh at her seriousness, but I promise the text is very moving. You’ll forget you’re even reading a recipe at times.
And the rigor! Detailed mathematical models on the melting of cheese, models for protein decomposition and butter redistribution. It was centuries ahead of its time. It accounted for everything: the shape of the your mouth, the acidity of your saliva, the moisture content of the air, and the last thing you ate, but without giving these things too much focus. “For a true recipe”, she argued, “is not a set of linear instructions nor a series of equations nor a set of emotional guidelines, but a delicate balance of all three. “You must cook your food like you live your life,” she said, “with an eye to that golden ideal the theorists dream of, but with an nose to the room around you, and a hand on the frying pan in front of you.”
Like many of the great literary classics, and I would count this among them, it ends in tragedy. In the final few chapters she predicts shifts in the global climate, in soil composition both in her home country and worldwide, and in grain and cattle genetics that will permanently alter the very shades she paints her sandwiches with. These would be very minor shifts, at least at first, but eventually would grow to alter the very structure of the recipe, and pull its divinity out of our grasp. Precision requires a very specific range of conditions, and in our day hers are simply not possible.
“I do believe myself vain enough to claim that this may be as close to perfection as a human cook can get,” she writes, “but I know this will not last. The perfect grilled cheese cannot exist within the pages of a book. It can only exist at the table, and in the mouth. It exists split diagonally between loved ones, in crisp dew-covered mornings and drowsy evenings. And you cannot separate the sandwich from its constituents, the bread and salt, the cheese and butter, the stove and pan. I recognize that my work has been carried out entirely within the narrow frame of my contemporary kitchens, and this frame is one very well suited to my personal passion. But in my years of working closely with climatologists, chemists, farmers, and bovine biologists, I see the writing on the wall. This grilled cheese-friendly world will be coming to an end, at least for a time.”
Nearly all of her predictions came to pass, but the final nail in the pan-fried coffin came with the eruption of the three sisters. Even after the 3-year winter’s effects had faded, global soil acidity was permanently altered, which enacted terrible effects on the taste of dairy. There is nowhere in the world you can get cheese like in her day. Even the most faithful recreations of her methods produce, to be fair, a fantastic sandwich, but not better than the best contemporary recipes, and not remotely close to the ones described in the poetry of her and her companions. We make do with what we have. The world doesn’t have room anymore for her idealism.
“This is why I have filled my book with flowery language and anecdotes. For those who will one day come across these words, I cannot deliver you the grilled cheese herein described. The world will have passed me by, and this moment in time will be forever lost. I leave you my methodology, my trials and triumphs, my very soul.”
“There will come a day that I will leave this world, and hopefully a much later day that a dish recognizably mine is eaten and delighted at for the last time. I leave you my experiences in writing as a record which I hope will last even longer still. Let the world know that I lived, and I loved, and I cooked, and that to me these three things were inseparable. I hope that one day the culinary stars will align once again, and another will produce a sandwich to surpass mine.”
I don’t eat grilled cheese often, but I think of her daily. There’s a mix of sorrow and joy in her work that I haven’t found anywhere else. I hope you can see it too.
I started off attempting to build a castle from a beach of unnaturally fine crystalline sand. It takes great effort to shape more than a tall lump, and I had to scare away the wind and the waves every few minutes lest they rush in and take out the foundation. From closely examining the topography of the grains I found an orientation such that particular shapes can be made to fit together in a complex tessellation: edge to edge and flat face to flat face. With great care and excruciating patience a pattern started to emerge from the connections between grains.
Crystal to crystal led me to developing a triangular base, which grew slowly into a five-sided irregular pyramid. Time whirled by while I kept the elements at bay, and my castle grew to a meter, two meters, seven meters tall, every delicate atom pulled from the sands around me. The work sped up, and soon I could tell the crystalline form of each grain from rolling it across my fingertips for just an instant.
I reached what I immediately knew to be the capstone, and the perfect crystal to tie the whole structure together, places precisely at the very tip of the pyramid. Perfection was pulled from the dunes around, and the waves and wind were now powerless to tear my creation apart. At this point my old age caught up to me, and I turned to dust, falling apart to mix with the sands below.