Orderly Chaos Fiction

It started out of practicality. It was rare to find a decent tailor in Grünwaldstadt, and even if you did they were so expensive. And you could never find enough wool in the same colour to make them plain…

The world is big and confusing and she wants to make sense of it all. She wants to find out everything and map it out, write it on paper, pin it down so it can’t escape. But that’s easier to say than to do. Things get in the way, like a cart going down the road, or people who just won’t help, or the sheer unworkability of reality.

Sometimes a peculiar calm descends on him, not shyness or love or blind possessive rage. He sits alone, watching the world moving around him as he stays still. He ponders the feelings in his heart, the thoughts in his head, the blood on his hands.

It was years and years ago, but he still remembers. He remembers the days spent playing with his siblings, trying to grow plants in the field with his dad and his brothers, the evenings spent helping his mam in the kitchen. He remembers trying to patch the roof with tarpaulin to stop it leaking. He remembers the stone circle and the seven druids standing around it. He remembers the singing and dancing and laughing in the rain.

He’d heard a story once, a piece of idle gossip in a bar about a young man in Ankh-Morpork whose true loves died one after another, each one on a rainy day. He’d dismissed it as a fairy story, but it comes back to him now with an added sheen of convincingness. If your own life could die and leave you behind on a rainy day, why not others’?