18°41'34.2"N 12°55'10.6"E

  Bilma, Niger

  23.05.2024 – 18:00 UTC +01

  “The Cúró Jòró is unique. Some rooms are off limits, but… I guess I could give you a tour,” she said. Her eyes lingered on me before shying away. “Alright then. Follow me.”

  “We will start from the garden.” I nodded and followed her past the library shelves and towards the wall with the oil paintings. She waved her hand, and the wall folded and unfolded, reshaping into a corridor.

  “A Manifold within a Manifold?” I asked.

  “There are plenty, yes,” the girl said.

  I made a mental note of the location: it was by a painting of mountains. I was not sure if they were mountains in Niger or Chad, but it was one of the few paintings that did not depict forestry. And I needed to memorize, recalling what my books advised: it was all about knowing where to look. Manipulating them was not the hard part.

  “So, the garden is dedicated to the unique flowers of A?r and Tibesti. Normally, you would have to travel all the way to their dangerous territory to track them down. But Miss is growing them here.”

  The garden was nothing less than an impressively hot greenhouse. For the first time in the past hour, I was really appreciating the scale of the Cúró Jòró. What I thought was the main room before was only the entrance.

  On our left and on our right, a tilted scree slope with beds of soil starting from knee height reached more than five meters high, on each side. From the soil, different kinds of plants cast their spread like a wide net. The soil differed.

  “The orange and the purple you see, it is volcanic soil,” Tiwalade said, pointing at the slope to our right, “like the soil in Tibesti. The purple flowers, you see them? Nepeta tibestica. Miss insisted we needed this, so she invested a lot in the soil.”

  “And the other one? The silver soil?” I pointed to the other slope.

  “That’s because of the granite. The hardness and sterility of the A?r Mountains. We have plenty of their flowers there. I am really proud of the Maerua myself.”

  “I see,” I said, unsurprised by the witch’s obsession with her own culture of obscure herbs. My mother had a similar obsession. Flowers could be used to set up hexes, enhance them, or weaken them. I was sure they had found many Cursed ways to abuse their supply.

  “Let’s not linger long here. The light is dangerous,” Tiwalade said and picked up her pace. Looking up, I saw that the glass ceiling of the greenhouse had an unusual milky coating. “Enhancing UV, to mimic the mountaintops.”

  I followed her down the aisle, past a crossroads and more slopes, and into another wall. With a flick of her wrist, another corridor unraveled.

  “Just how big is the Cliff?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know all of it myself,” she admitted. She then pointed back: “The crossroads in the middle of the Garden? I use it to orient myself. We came from the Common Room. On the left aisle, you get to the door to the Dorms. We call it the A?r Wing, because…”

  “Because that’s West. And you have the granite slopes placed there. And the Tibesti Wing?”

  I pointed in the other direction, past the scree slopes of orange.

  “That’s the Miss’s rooms. Out of bounds for us.”

  I nodded. That would be where I needed to break in then.

  “And this way?” I pointed in the corridor Tiwalade had just opened.

  “This is the Veranda. It’s quite cool. Let me show you.”

  ? ? ?

  It was both golden and muddy. A dull glass, a glass full of veins of air, but also transparent enough to look into the city. It was not really a veranda, not in the traditional sense of an open-air balcony. But it was a sort of vitrine. A way to look into Bilma, but from above, like a ten story building, perhaps.

  “That makes no sense,” I said, “how is all of this in here?”

  I had entered the Inside Cliff from the ground floor, heading down a pathway covered in vines. Then we had walked through a Garden whose roof was blistered by the sun, and then had walked into a corridor that led to this room. A room whose three walls were lined with bookcases, furnished only with six armchairs. And whose fourth wall was all made of glass, peering into Bilma from an eagle’s view. My mind was boggled.

  “Don’t try to make sense of it. They are all closed dimensions. Pocketed one in the other,” Tiwalade explained as if this was the most casual thing in the world.

  I walked closer to the glass wall. The Veranda. It was really a window to Bilma. I could see the lakes of water, the traffic. The Kaouar cliffs in the background. And I could see something else as well. Not behind the glass, but in the glass itself.

  An itch, an insatiable Calling.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “These are not malformities of the glass,” I whispered. I was referring to the veiny structure that you could see if you paid attention. Some thin and imperceptible. Some wider, deeper. Making shapes. I stepped back, even farther back than where Tiwalade was standing.

  I squinted my eyes. I could almost see a shape, yes. It made sense. But there was more to see. The lines that crossed… no, that could not be right.

  “Say Tiwalade. Could I stay the night with you here? Wait for your Miss Yahaya.”

  “Really?” Tiwalade asked, almost too excited, “I mean, I can make arrangements. I could set you up a space on the couch in the Common Room. The Dorms are all full.”

  “Are they?” I whispered. Again, I tensed my Hearing. Nothing, we were the only two beating hearts nearby. It was not the first time she implied more people were here, but she was not being consistent. I decided not to address it. If the couch was all she could offer, the couch would be where I slept then.

  ? ? ?

  “Have you ever been to N’Djamena?” Tiwalade asked me when she handed me another cup of tea. I was sitting on the couch she had prepared for me back in the Common Room, when she caught me completely off guard. The lights were off, having left only a lamp by the side of the couch on to cast a grey hue on her face as she left the tea on the tea table.

  That was where I was supposed to go. That’s where the Calling needed me to be.

  “No,” I answered, “why?”

  “Okay then. I thought you had. I thought that’s where I recognized you from,” Tiwalade said. Her words were softer now, her voice more prudent now. As if she had just admitted to a mistake. I did not know what she was talking about.

  “You must be confusing me,” I said.

  “Yes, I must,” she said and nodded, “have a good night. I will be in the Dorms if you need me.”

  ? ? ?

  I flicked my wrist, imitating Tiwalade’s maneuvering from before. I tried to do it as close to the wall of the Garden leading to the Veranda, failing once again. I shuddered and rubbed my hands on the skin of my arms.

  It was freezing, and I was only in my day clothes. Some kind of air cooling ventilation system manipulated the microclimate of the Garden, bringing it to uncomfortably low temperatures. It made sense: the greenhouse was designed to imitate the mountaintops of Tibesti.

  “Fuck,” I said, trying again and again to imitate the flick of the wrist. It had been easier to do this with the oil painting in the Common Room, but even then, it had taken some minutes of trying. But I was not the master of those hexes; Tiwalade and her Miss Yahaya were. I was only manipulating them. “How long will this…”

  The corridor sprang up, not as masterfully as when Tiwalade had made it unravel, but it did.

  “Finally,” I said and rushed through the corridor into the room with the golden window. “The Veranda that is not a veranda.”

  Its glory was minimized during the night. During the day, the glass was almost transparent, allowing you to take in the view. But the view was not what I was interested in.

  And there it was: the moon. A disc of light hovered behind the glass, not bright enough to illuminate the scene, but bright enough to contrast with the glass. Silver light illuminated its impurities, which no longer looked like veins.

  “They look like a map,” I said, squinting. It was easier to picture it, but… it made no sense.

  Starting from the bottom right, a squiggly line took an unfortunate shape. It was the shape of the African Continent. The veiny structure of the glass did not map out rivers or borders; however, they were paths crossing through the continent, connections I could not comprehend. Were they supposed to be highways? That many? Or was it more metaphorical – the same way detectives connected dots in a murder board?

  I walked closer. There was a path that shone brighter, not because the moon favored it, but because it was shaped more sharply. It begun from Sierra Leone, crossing Liberia, and reaching the Ivory Coast. From then on, it diverged into many paths.

  “What the fuck?” I had realized I needed to witness this at night to understand the carved map better against a dark backdrop, but the more I looked, the less it made sense. However, it was not just the random connections through the continent, nor the sculpted path from Sierra Leone, that shocked me. It was the silver veins starting from the middle of Africa, three of them. All starting from the same point and splitting the continent into three, they were not straight lines, nor were they sculpted. They were like light flowed falsely through the glass, ripping the continent in three pieces.

  I looked at the point of convergence. I was willing to bet money that was the city of N’Djamena. With my right hand, I traced the line of light heading from north to south. I hovered it right about where I thought Bilma was, imagining this glass fracture passing right between the Tibesti and A?r Nitaq.

  The Nitaq I had tried to avoid because of an old witch in Libya. Was this line of light my path, all the way down to N’Djamena?

  I felt my heart rate rise. I could hear my heart in my neck veins, on my fingers, in my eye bulbs.

  Was all this haphazard hunt through Bilma a mockery by my fucking Curse? Had the Calling brought me here to show me an unnecessarily huge fucking map, to show me my path is just a fucking squiggly line someone can just draw?

  I touched the glass, nails against the drawn path leading south. I pushed harder and harder until my fingers reached N’Djamena.

  Was this just a dramatic demonstration of how much of a hopeless whore of fate I had become?

  I punched the window, right at the convergence point of the three lines.

  Its surface cracked, following exactly the pattern of the three lines. It did not collapse, although part of me wished I were strong enough for that. But it did deepen the three cracks.

  Now Africa looked like three big islands.

  If the Calling wanted me to find Yahaya, then I would. If that mysterious Cursed had a whole map dedicated to my fate, I was going to pry the answers from her dying hands if I had to.

  “Enough,” I said and turned my back.

  ? ? ?

  “Wake up!” I shouted while walking in the A?r Wing. The Dorms, which looked emptier than she had promised, were just three rooms in total. Three doors in a long dark corridor, to which I had forced my way from the Garden. No patient flickering of the wrist, just diving my hand into the Manifold and ripping it apart. “Wake up! I am not wasting more time.”

  I walked through the first door. It was a single room, a typical single room for a young adult. A TV, a console, a desk. A plant potted on the desk, although the lack of windows probably made it a very sad existence for that plant. Tiwalade was covered in her blankets on the single bed in the corner.

  “Wa…” I shouted as I pulled the blankets off her, but then changed my tone, “What the fuck?”