Leaving the window open was a mistake. While Godric tossed and turned in a listless noon-hour sleep a cacophony of road noise drifted into his dream, floating to the place between sleep and waking that become a crossroad for our world and others. Clangs and bangs and rumbling howls forming intermittent explosions clumped into something unwanted towards the end of his slumbered hours.

Had been on a hilltop in his car to observe drifting stars in midnight sun until they coalesced and stepped down from the sky to chase him. The one's he'd read about. A constellation meant to have appeared last Saturday night—a fixture of uncertain myth and legend leering from medieval tomes as a lingering dread. The same mentioned in Phoenician scrolls of fevered celebration. Both describing a celestial pattern to which no known stars match. All part of the infamous theory of Doctor Zell. That is, a new constellation forming The Great Satyr—Pan himself—would appear! But Saturday night passed without such an entrance. Zell was wrong.

Yet before Godric's sleep-eyes it stepped from the sky; a thing constructed of oil-born and yellow-painted pentagrams held together by translucent strings of forces unknown; livid, red and dark in silhouette against the storm-purple sky. Landed on cloven feet atop a distant sun-soaked ridge of gold, smashing trees beneath. Dirt rose high into the air around its legs, casting shadows over the happy wood, trunks tumbling down the ridge before it. A step brought it into the valley—a stomp that splattered a river as though it were a puddle—the flowing course reversed by its power.

Godric turned the ignition—must escape! But the engine died instead of catching. He tried again—the engine exploded. The car consumed by blue flames as the hood shot away and the thing came closer with a step that cracked the wind-screen. Azure flames burned high as Godric screamed while the stars neared—a meteor-hand gripping the car, crushing the body like a vise. Durst awoke feeling nothing at all while a trunk honked by outside atop a screaming engine.

Terror became an almost peaceful emptiness, and Godric was immediately disturbed by it as though it were horror. Or rather it provoked a deep awareness that something was wrong about his presently devoid mind. But even this alarm managed to raise no further emotion alongside it. The same sort of placidness of emotion that he had seen his father receive bad news by—and that had always been more worrying than anger. Now he embodied it himself, and that was yet more disturbing.

It was three-thirty in the afternoon.

Pulled himself into a sitting position and ran his fingers through his black hair and glanced at the window. Outside his workplace glared from a low hilltop across town.

A perfectly fine sight when he moved in and didn't yet work there. The one-time mansion and now-museum overlooked Clemsworth—it had done so for a century already—enclosed by a small park and numerous trees. The mansion had replaced a dilapidated castle, which itself had filled the absence of Roman forts that sprung up there periodically, and before even that had been frequented as a tribal hillfort.

The town around it was nothing much. The center being a consciously maintained storybook picture despite the glass-and-steel town hall. All rather dear if not a little artificial, though the rest of the town didn't match that.

Patches of old houses in the east and south ends of town existed still, and plenty stood outside it's bounds, but all were interspersed with modern dwellings. The north-end was the worst—a scuzzy-looking place—unappealing to tourists; too industrial, too low-income. But he couldn't see any of that from the south.

Despite the noise during his sleep nothing seemed to move out there beyond a handful of cars and people, but even these were lazy. All the trees were still, the air too, as though awaiting permission to move in great bursts. Clouds clung in place, and birds hopped among unmoving branches.

The studio apartment around him was still barren after two years because he didn't think he'd be here that long, and for the first year had carried a mental impression that he'd somehow gather the means to get someplace better in the next two months, so why bother? But he'd started to let that go now, and the apartment's emptiness became in his mind simply how it was until one of his little projects finally proved the key to a better life.

The thought of that eternally stunted move and long line-up of failed attempts made something stir and the emptiness began to recede into deep-seated stress.

"Just have to get my ducks in a row with the day-trading..." he mumbled. "Or perhaps publish my notes when I've worked out what happening at the museum..." he frowned and stared at the floor, trying not to count how many things were supposed to have happened by now, but hadn't. Pulled himself out of bed and started turning over how'd he break into day-trading again.

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