Chapter 1: The Satyr-King & the Shattered Warning
King Bacchus shifted on his divan, the silken pillows exhaling a cloud of rose and myrrh. His jeweled horns, polished to a blinding gleam, caught the dappled light filtering through the stained-glass canopy overhead. It was usually peaceful here, in his inner bower. Usually. The constant, low hum of the Whispering Glades—the gossip of leaves, the murmur of streams, the secret chatter of growing things—that was the sound of his kingdom’s health. Its heartbeat.
It had gone quiet.
Not silent. But quiet. Like a held breath.
“Report,” Bacchus said, his voice a smooth, high tenor. He didn’t look at the centaur standing stiffly beside the bubbling lotus pool.
Chiron’s hooves shifted on the moss. “The western thicket is mute, Majesty. The Ash-Dryads haven’t sung their dawn chorus in three days. The air in the Hollow of Echoes just… sits there. It doesn’t echo. I stood in the center and shouted. The sound died at my feet.”
Bacchus plucked a fat, honeyed fig from a silver plate. He took a small, deliberate bite, buying a second to think. The sweetness cloyed. “And the borders? The Mycelial Veins?”
“Intact. No sign of breach. No foreign pollen, no strange spores. The guards sense nothing.” Chiron’s face was grim. “It’s coming from inside, Sire. The Glade is… frightened.”
A flicker of irritation crossed Bacchus’s round, effeminate face. Fear was a scent; it lingered. It made things difficult. He was about to order a doubling of the dew-wine ration—a little distraction often soothed the roots—when the world shattered.
The stained-glass canopy above his head exploded inward.
Shards of cobalt and emerald rained down. Bacchus flinched, throwing a perfumed sleeve over his eyes. Chiron reared, his sword half-drawn before his hooves found the floor again.
A small, feathered missile shot through the jagged hole, executed a frantic spiral in the middle of the chamber, and landed with a skid on the marble table, sending plates of fruit and decanters of shimmering liquor flying.
Queen Screetula shook glass dust from her wings. She was chicken-sized, a compact bundle of slate-grey feathers and razor-sharp edges. Her eyes, black and bead-bright, fixed on Bacchus. Her daughters, Rilka and Zazka, landed on the back of the divan with twin thumps, preening smugly.
“A little dramatic for a social call, Screetula,” Bacchus sighed, brushing a fragment of glass from his robe. “That was sixteenth-century elven craftsmanship.”
“Stuff your craftsmanship,” Screetula screeched. Her voice was like nails dragged over slate, but it carried a trembling urgency that cut through the perfume. “You smell that? No, of course you don’t. You’re drowning in lily-farts. My girls caught it ten leagues out. Due north.”
Bacchus inhaled slowly. Beneath the roses, the myrrh, the spilled wine, and the sharp, clean smell of broken glass… there was something else. A copper-tinged tang, faint but unmistakable. It wasn’t forest-blood, the sap of a cut branch or a wounded beast. This was different. Older.
“Blood-scent,” Screetula said, her head cocked. “Old blood. Thick blood. On a wind that has no business carrying it.”
“Perhaps a rock-troll had a nosebleed,” Bacchus offered, his mind racing.
“Don’t play the fool with me, Bacchus. It doesn’t suit you. Only the chinless wonder on your council thinks you’re just a decorated goat.” She hopped closer, her talons scraping the marble. “The wind doesn’t blow from the Barren Deeps. The wind blows toward them. Always. Something over there is pulling the air. Pulling the scent. And my girls saw the tops of the Crimson Sighs, from up high. The canopy is wilting. In patches. Like bruises.”
A cold knot tightened in Bacchus’s gut. The Crimson Sighs were the oldest trees in the Glade, their roots woven deep with the kingdom’s foundational magic. A wilting canopy was not silence. It was a scream.
Rilka, a harpy with a sneer permanently etched into her beak, leaned down from the divan. “We told her not to bother. You satyrs are all hoof-deep in revelry and vanity. You’ll just throw another party until the shadows eat the guests.”
“Quiet, chick,” Screetula snapped without looking back. Her gaze was locked on Bacchus. “I’m not here for an alliance. I’m not here for your council. I’m here because rot in your Glade means blight on our Crags. It means fewer game, sour water, restless spirits. I’m telling you to look. Your pretty vines are hiding a sickness.”
Bacchus rose from his divan. His stature was diminutive, but the movement carried a sudden, unexpected gravity. The room seemed to still. “Chiron.”
“Majesty.”
“Take the wardens. Not the border patrols—the deep-root tenders. Go to the Crimson Sighs. Go to the Hollow of Echoes. Dig. Not with shovels. With your hands. Feel what the earth won’t say.”
Chiron bowed, his face set, and clopped out swiftly.
Bacchus turned his dark, liquid eyes back to the harpy queen. “My thanks, Screetula. For the warning. And the demolition.”
Screetula let out a derisive click. “Thanks. Useless currency.” She beat her wings, lifting off the table. “We’re doubling our sentinels on the spire peaks. Whatever this is, it’s a feeder. It moves slow, from the inside out. You find the core. You cut it out.” She circled once, heading for the shattered ceiling. “Or we will. And we’re not surgeons.”
With a final, ear-piercing shriek, she and her daughters arrowed back through the hole and into the sky.
Bacchus stood amidst the ruin of his tranquility. The perfumed air was now laced with cold, outside wind and that faint, persistent copper tang. The silence of the Glades pressed in on him, no longer just an absence of sound, but a presence. A waiting.
He walked to the edge of the lotus pool, ignoring the glittering glass. His own reflection looked back: the delicate horns, the embroidered robes, the face of cultivated indulgence. The face others underestimated.
He dipped a single finger into the water. The image shattered.
“Old blood,” he murmured to the empty, wounded room.
His kingdoms was not sick. It was being poisoned. And the first symptom wasn’t the silence, or the wilting trees. It was the scent of a wound that had yet to be seen. Someone, or something, was bleeding out deep in the heart of his woods, and the forest itself was too afraid to make a sound.
The silence in the bower was now a physical thing, a weight against his eardrums. Bacchus stared at the rippling water, his mind clicking through possibilities like beads on an abacus. Poison from a rival court? Some ancient geas waking from under a forgotten stone? A cult of root-gnawing heretics? Too simple. The Glades would have screamed for those. This was quieter. This was intimate.
A soft, wet cough came from the archway.
Bacchus turned. A dryad leaned against the jamb, but she was not one of his lovely, laughing tree-spirits. This was Ash, from the western thicket. Her skin, usually the smooth grey of bark, was blotched with sickly yellow. Her hair, a cascade of dry leaves, was shedding onto her shoulders. A faint, sweet-sour smell came off her, like overripe fruit giving way to mold.
“Majesty,” she whispered, her voice rasping. “Forgive the… intrusion.”
“By the roots, Ash. What happened to you?”
She took a shuffling step forward. Her movements were wrong, jerky, as if she’d forgotten how her limbs worked. “It’s in the network. The mycelial web. It feels… tired. We all feel tired. And then we feel nothing.” She coughed again, a thick, rattling sound. “But it’s not just feeling. It’s taste.”
Bacchus was at her side in an instant, his small, soft hand on her arm. Her skin was fever-warm and slightly damp. “Taste?”
“In the sap-flow. In the water drawn up from the deep stones.” Ash’s eyes, wide and glassy with pain, found his. “It’s a faint tang. Like rust. Like a spoon left in blood. It’s everywhere now. We tried to filter it, to close off the capillaries, but it’s already in us.” A tear, not of water but of sticky, amber resin, traced down her cheek. “It’s changing the song, Bacchus. The root-song. It’s making it slow. And hungry.”
A cold clarity washed over him. Not poison in the soil, but in the bloodstream. The very circulatory system of his kingdom was infected. The harpies smelled the symptom—old blood—but the disease was being pumped through the veins of the world itself.
“Show me,” he commanded, his voice leaving no room for debate.
He followed her out of the bower, through corridors of living, woven willow. The palace was too quiet. Satyrs and naiads usually filled these halls with music and gossip. Now, they moved quietly, their eyes downcast, their postures slumped. A satyr guard nodded as Bacchus passed, his usual smirk absent, the garland on his horns looking wilted.
They didn’t head for the gates. Instead, Ash led him down a spiraling ramp, deep into the earth beneath the palace roots. The air grew cool and damp, smelling of rich loam and stone. The bioluminescent fungi that lined the walls pulsed with a slow, lazy light.
The root chamber opened before them, a vast, cathedral-like space. The great taproots of the palace trees descended from the ceiling, thick as towers, glowing with a soft inner luminescence. Between them, like a neural network woven from ghostly thread, pulsed the mycelial web—the fungal communication system of the Glades. It normally shimmered with rushing patterns of light: gold for alerts, silver for song, blue for water-flow.
Now, the light was sluggish. Murky. Patches of the web were dark entirely. And where the light did pulse, it carried a distinct, bruise-like purple tint.
“There,” Ash gasped, pointing a trembling finger.
At the base of the largest root, where it met the dark earth, the web was not just dark. It was corrupted. The fine, silvery threads were thickened, blackened, and glistening with a viscous, tar-like slime. From it, those ugly purple pulses traveled upwards, climbing the root like an inverse sap.
Bacchus knelt. He ignored the dirt on his perfumed robes. He reached out.
“Don’t!” Ash cried.
He touched the blackened web. It was warm. Unpleasantly, organically warm. A jolt shot up his finger—not pain, but a profound, desolate loneliness, coupled with a gnawing, empty need. It was the emotional resonance of the rot. It wasn't mindless. It was wanting.
He snatched his hand back, wiping his finger on the moss as if he could scrub the feeling away. “It’s feeding,” he said, his voice low. “It’s not just an infection. It’s a parasite. And it’s feeding on the life-song of the Glades.”
Ash collapsed to her knees beside him, weeping silent resin tears. “What do we do? We can’t cut it out. It’s in the roots. It is the roots now.”
Bacchus stood, his mind ice-cold and racing. Decadent king. Perfumed goat. They all thought that. Let them. It meant they never saw the calculator behind the eyes. “We don’t cut it out,” he said. “We find its mouth.”
He looked at the pulsing, diseased web, following the trail of purple light back into the deeper darkness of the earth. “It’s tasting blood-scent because it’s craving sustenance. Something bled, deep down. Something old and powerful enough that its blood is a feast. This… thing… tasted it. Got a craving. And now it’s drinking the Glades because it can’t get to the source.” He turned to Ash, his gaze sharp. “The Crimson Sighs. Their roots go deepest. All the way to the old stones. To the places we sealed.”
Ash’s eyes widened in understanding, then dread. “The Barren Deeps are just a story. A scare-tale for sprouts.”
“Every story has a first draft written in something real,” Bacchus said, already striding back toward the ramp, his soft slippers silent on the earth. “Chiron is digging in the wrong place. We don’t dig where the sickness is. We dig where the hunger came from.”
He paused, glancing back at the corrupted web, at the shuddering dryad. The sweet-sour smell of her decay filled his nose. “Tell no one of this. If this rot craves attention, we will not give it a feast. We give it a surgeon.”
Billy the satyr was, by most definitions, a blithe spirit. He was also, by Bacchus’s more precise definition, a lovable idiot. Currently, he was whistling a jaunty tune, a wicker basket hooked over his elbow, as he picked his way through the fern-crowded floor of the Sighing Woods. The dappled light was still good, and the quest was simple: find the neon-bluish clusters of Dancer’s Delight mushrooms before sundown. A little harvest, a little personal enjoyment later, a perfect evening.
“Come on, you shy little buttons,” he murmured, pushing aside a broad leaf with the tip of his curved hunting knife. “Uncle Billy just wants to say hello.”
The woods here were quieter than usual, but Billy figured that was just because the dryads were having one of their silent meditation phases. Tree-spirits. So moody. His own problems were more immediate. Like the distinct lack of bluish caps.
He crouched, examining a rotten log. Nothing but common brown slugs and a family of pissed-off beetles. Standing up, he stretched his back, his goat legs flexing. A faint, weird smell hit his nostrils. Not decay, exactly. Not forest. It was metallic. Coiny. Like licking a bronze statue after a rain shower.
“Huh,” he said to no one.
He followed the scent. It was faint, but it had a direction, pulling him off the deer trail and into a thicker stand of ancient, knotted oaks. The canopy here was so dense the light turned a gloomy green. The usual background chatter of bugs was absent.
The smell got stronger. So did another feeling—a low, fizzy ache behind his eyes. Magic. Old magic. The kind that made the tiny horns on his forehead tingle.
“Okay, maybe not Dancer’s Delight,” he muttered, a thread of excitement weaving through his caution. “But something.”
The ground sloped down into a small, rocky gully. At its base, half-hidden by a curtain of sickly-looking ivy, was a crack in the mossy stone. The metallic, coppery smell was pouring out of it. So was the magic. It vibrated in his teeth.
Billy chewed his lip. On one hand, unknown holes in the ground were, generally speaking, bad news. On the other hand… he was here. And curiosity had dumped him in trouble before, but it had also, one memorable time, gotten him kissed by three river-nymphs simultaneously.
He slid down the gully on his haunches, landing with a soft thud. He pushed the ivy aside. The crack was just wide enough to squeeze through if he turned sideways and sucked in his stomach.
“Great,” he whispered. “A gourmet lunch and a spelunking adventure.”
He wedged himself in. The stone was cold and slick with something that wasn’t water. It squeezed his chest, and for a panicky second he thought he was stuck. Then he popped through into a wider space.
He wasn’t in a cave. He was in a… pocket. A perfect, spherical hollow in the bedrock, like a giant air bubble that had been sealed for millennia. The air was thick, stagnant, and heavy with that copper stench. The walls weren't stone. They were woven. A dense, petrified lattice of roots and fungal filaments, glowing with a dim, internal purple light. It pulsed slowly, like a sleeping heart.
And in the center of the floor, it bled.
A viscous, oily puddle of liquid darker than wine, with a sheen like a raven’s feather, seeped from a gash in the woven wall. The puddle wasn’t spreading. It was being absorbed, drunk up by thin, black, root-like tendrils that snaked out from the base of the lattice. As he watched, a single drop welled up and fell with a thick plink. One of the black tendrils quivered and edged closer, thirstily sopping it up.
Billy’s jaw hung open. The awe lasted about three seconds.
Then the lattice moved.
It wasn't a shift. It was a contraction. A slow, deliberate squeezing that made a sound like grinding bones and wet earth. The gash in the wall oozed more dark fluid. The black tendrils writhed, pressing eagerly against the source.
And the purple light in the lattice flared, just for an instant. In that flash, Billy saw shapes trapped within the petrified weave. Not roots. Bones. Small, delicate animal bones. A bird skull. The shattered antler of a young stag. All bound and fossilized into the structure.
This wasn't a natural formation. It was a organ. A digestive organ. And it was hungry.
A low, sub-audible groan vibrated through the floor, up through Billy’s hooves, into the marrow of his legs. It wasn't sound. It was pure, deep-rooted want.
The basket fell from his numb fingers. The cheerful, blithe-spirited part of his brain finally shut off, leaving raw, goat-smart survival instinct in its place.
He backpedaled, scrambling for the crack. The lattice shuddered again. A long, black tendril peeled itself away from the mass and slid, sinuous and probing, across the floor toward him. It moved with a horrible, deliberate patience.
Billy didn't scream. He didn't have the breath. He threw himself into the crack, stones scraping his sides, tearing his tunic. He heard the soft, slithering whisper of the tendril following him into the narrow space.
He burst out into the gully, falling onto the moss. He didn't stop. He scrambled up the slope on all fours, hooves skidding on wet stone. Only when he was twenty yards up the deer trail did he dare look back.
The ivy over the crack hung still. The woods were silent. The green gloom was just gloom.
He leaned against a tree, chest heaving. The cheerful whistle was a forgotten ghost in his throat. He looked at his hands. They were smeared with a thin, sticky residue from the cave walls. It smelled of copper and, faintly, of rot.
He had gone looking for magic mushrooms. He had found a mouth. And it had tasted him on the air.
He needed to tell someone. Bacchus. Chiron. Anybody.
As he turned to run, a cold thought pinned him in place. The lattice had bones in it. Old bones. But among them, he’d seen something else in that pulsing purple flash. Something that hadn’t been there for millennia. Something fresh.
A silver oak-leaf clasp, of the kind the palace dryads wore.
The infection wasn't just in the roots. It was hunting. And it was already getting fed.
The silver clasp gleamed in his mind’s eye, a tiny, brutal fact. It wasn’t ancient. It was yesterday. One of the dryads was already… processed.
Billy’s legs moved before his mind caught up, propelling him down the deer trail in a blind, hoof-clattering sprint. The peaceful green gloom of the Sighing Woods now felt like a held breath, every shadow a potential tendril. The usual orchestra of crickets and whispering leaves was absent, replaced by a silence so thick it pressed against his eardrums. All he could hear was the ragged saw of his own breath and the thunder of his heart.
Don’t stop. Don’t look back.
He skidded onto a main path, the hard-packed earth a welcome change from the soft, grasping moss of the gully. Reason seeped back in, cold and nauseating. He had to tell Bacchus. Not a guard, not a warden. The king himself. The old goat might preen and perfume himself, but Billy had seen the sharp, unblinking look in those golden eyes during a trade dispute with the river sprites. Bacchus saw angles. And this was an angle that could gut the whole kingdom.
He was halfway to the palace glen when the change became impossible to ignore. The ferns lining the path weren’t just still. They were brittle. A light tap from his hoof as he passed snapped a frond clean off, crumbling it to dust. The air lost its loamy freshness, carrying instead that same coppery tang, now mixed with the sweet-sour decay he’d smelled on the dryad in Bacchus’s bower. It was in the air. It was in the water. He could taste it on his tongue, metallic and wrong.
A figure stepped onto the path ahead, and Billy nearly screamed.
It was Chiron, the centaur’s face grimed with sweat and dark soil. His hands were caked in dirt up to the forearms. Behind him, a half-dozen root-tenders—bulky, earth-elemental folk with fingers like gnarled wood—looked similarly exhausted and spooked.
“Billy?” Chiron’s voice was rough. “You look like you’ve seen a root-grubbing demon.”
“Worse,” Billy panted, leaning on his knees. “Where’s the King? I need—”
“We all need,” Chiron interrupted, his tail lashing. “The Crimson Sighs… their roots are fouled. Not sick. Replaced. There’s a… a network of black fibers, like veins, pumping something that isn’t sap. It’s fighting us. We tried to cut one strand.” He held up a hand. A livid, purple-black burn, like a chemical stain, wrapped around his palm. “It defends itself.”
“It doesn’t just defend,” Billy said, straightening up, his voice dropping. “It hunts. I found where it’s… feeding. On something old. But it’s taking new things, too. It’s got one of the dryad’s clasps in it, Chiron. It’s here, and it’s eating now.”
Chiron’s stallion-half stamped, a sharp, nervous sound. “Feeding? On what?”
“I don’t know! Blood that isn’t blood. Black stuff. From a hole in the world.” Billy’s words tumbled out in a rushed, terrified jumble. “It has a mouth, Chiron. A wet, hungry mouth in a cave, and it’s licking its lips.”
The root-tenders murmured amongst themselves, their deep, rumbling voices filled with dread.
“Right,” Chiron said, decision hardening his features. He turned to his team. “Theron, double-time back to the spire. Activate the perimeter wards. Not just the borders—inner rings, around the granary trees and the heart-springs. Go.” The largest elemental nodded and loped off, his footsteps heavy thumps that faded into the woods.
Chiron looked back at Billy. “You’re with me. The King’s in the root chamber. He already knows it’s in the veins.”
They found Bacchus not on his divan, but deep in the throbbing, purple-tinged heart of the root chamber. He stood before the pulsing, corrupted web, his hands clasped behind his back. He’d changed out of his silken robes into simpler, dark green leathers. The jeweled horns remained, glinting with cold fire in the sickly light.
He didn’t turn as they entered. “Report from the Sighs confirms it. It’s a vascular takeover.” His voice was calm, analytical, as if discussing a blight on grapevines. “Your panic, Billy, suggests you’ve found the stomach.”
Billy blurted out everything—the gully, the crack, the spherical cave, the woven lattice of bones and roots, the weeping black fluid, the probing tendril. He showed his hands, the sticky, coppery residue still clinging to his skin.
Bacchus finally turned. He took Billy’s wrist, bringing his hand close to his face. He didn’t smell the residue; he watched it. A tiny, almost invisible filament of the black stuff seemed to quiver on Billy’s skin, straining toward the pulsing light of the corrupted root-web nearby.
“It’s attracted to its own kind,” Bacchus murmured. “Communal. A colony organism.” He dropped Billy’s hand. “You said it was feeding on a source. Old blood. A wound.”
“Yes, sir. From deeper in. The stuff was seeping out, and the… the mouth… was drinking it.”
“A spill from a deeper well.” Bacchus paced, his hooves clicking on the stone. “The Barren Deeps are a myth built on a truth. A prison for things that predate the Glades. Something there is wounded. Leaking. And this organism, this network, tastes it. It wants more. But it can’t reach the source, so it’s siphoning the next best thing: the life-force of everything connected to the mycelial web. It’s turning our own circulatory system into a straw.”
The horrening logic of it settled over the chamber. This wasn’t an invasion; it was a hijacking.
“What do we do?” Chiron asked, the question everyone was thinking.
“We cannot poison it without poisoning the host. We cannot cut it out without bleeding out.” Bacchus stopped pacing. A thin, cold smile touched his lips. It wasn’t pleasant. “We give it indigestion.”
He clapped his hands twice, sharp reports that echoed in the chamber. From archways high above, a whirring, clicking cloud descended. They were the Tinkerfae, a caste of mechanics and alchemists. They were humanoid, but with gossamer wings of brass and wire, and goggles over their large, multi-faceted eyes. They carried satchels and thin, arcane instruments.
“The web is compromised,” Bacchus announced to them, his voice carrying. “We cannot use it to speak or to feel the Glade. So we will use something it cannot digest. Distribute the Tinkerfae. One to every major node, every heart-tree, every spring-head. You will be our new nervous system. You will report not through the roots, but through the air, on channels of crystal and steam. You will monitor the spread. You will also,” he added, his gaze sweeping over Billy and Chiron, “begin synthesizing a counter-agent. Not a poison. A confusion. Something that mimics the deep-blood it craves, but carries a payload that makes the network… spasm. Reject its own connections.”
The lead Tinkerfae, a female with soldering-iron scars on her silver fingers, buzzed her wings. “The synthesis will require volatile components, Majesty. Sun-charred mandrake, fulminating spore-dust…”
“Take what you need from the high-risk vaults. Expedite it.” Bacchus’s eyes were like chips of topaz. “This thing is intelligent. It’s learning. It felt Billy’s presence. It’s tasted a dryad. It will accelerate.”
As the Tinkerfae scattered with a metallic whir, distributing themselves as per the king’s command, Bacchus focused on Billy and Chiron. “You two. The stomach needs to be neutralized before it develops teeth. You will lead a team to this gully. Not to fight it. To cauterize. We seal the wound it’s feeding from. Starve it of its preferred meal. Hopefully, that will slow its consumption of us long enough for the Tinkerfae to finish their work.”
“Seal it with what?” Chiron asked, flexing his burned hand.
“With the only things that have ever worked on deep-stone and older magic,” Bacchus said. “Song and sacrifice. I will send a weaver of binding hymns. And you will take a vial of concentrated heartwood sap—the life-force of a millennium-old tree. It is anathema to decay. Pour it into the wound. It will be like pouring light into a shadow. The thing will recoil. The cavity will scar over.”
“That’s a suicide run,” Billy whispered, the memory of the tendril’s slither making his skin crawl.
Bacchus looked at him, no judgment, just a bleak assessment. “It is. Which is why you will have escort. Screetula’s harpies will provide aerial watch. They see the wilt from above. They’ll guide you to the heart of the bruise.”
“The harpies won’t take orders from us,” Chiron said.
“They won’t be taking orders from you. They’ll be ensuring their own cliffs don’t fall.” Bacchus walked to a small, ornate chest and lifted out a crystal vial filled with a glowing, amber substance that pulsed with a slow, warm light. The heartwood sap. It hummed in his hand. “The sacrifice is already made. This was drawn from the eldest Sigh before it was fully consumed. It is the last pure breath of a dying giant. Do not waste it.”
He handed the vial to Chiron, then turned to Billy. “You found the mouth. Now you help stitch it shut. Your revels are over, satyr. Time to grow up.”
The command was absolute. The plan was terrifying. As Billy took a heavy, copper-tinged breath, he understood the true shape of their enemy. It wasn't a monster in a cave. It was the Glades themselves, turning against their own, cell by cell, root by root. And they were about to perform surgery on a patient that was wide awake and ravenously hungry.
ALL CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY ARE OVER 18 YEARS OF AGE!!
The Tinkerfae were being distributed, a buzzing, mechanical diaspora fleeing the corrupted web to become Bacchus’s new, dissonant eyes and ears.