Delirium: -nikraria-

If you come to Nikraria, do not look for the catacombs. Do not ask for the map. When the white fog rolls in, do not breathe.

The true delirium arrived at midnight, riding the fourth chime of the Drowned Bell.

I refused the salt bath.

That was Day One of Delirium. By Day Three, the walls of Nikraria began to breathe. Not metaphorically. I pressed my palm to the plaster, and I felt a slow, wet inhalation. The city, I realized, was a single organism. The canals were its veins. The bell towers were its teeth. The people? We were just fleas dancing on a hot skillet. Delirium -Nikraria-

A child in a yellow coat handed me a mushroom growing from a brick. “Eat it,” she said. “It remembers the before-time.” I put it in my pocket. Later, I found the pocket sewn shut. I had never owned a needle.

“I know,” I said.

And the mirror-woman? She was standing behind me. Smiling with a thousand cracked lips. I am back in my room now. The pier. The rust-smelling sea. If you come to Nikraria, do not look for the catacombs

I looked out the window. The canal was a spine. The cathedral was a skull. The fog was the exhalation of a sleeping god.

She is remembering you.

On the second night, I woke to find my left hand writing in a language I did not know. The letters were spirals. Snail-shell sentences. It wrote: “The spine is a ladder. The blood is a staircase. Climb down.” I burned the page. My hand wrote it again on the wall in ash. The true delirium arrived at midnight, riding the

And if you see a woman made of mirrors walking backward on the water—

I am writing this from a room at the end of a pier in the city of Nikraria, where the sea smells of rust and old prayers. Three days ago, I was a cartographer. Now, I am a cartographer of the inside of my own skull.