A Rain of Frogs

The Return of the Orange Virgin

The house that was a city grew and, as is the way with cities, buried its past beneath an ever-advancing present. In the cellars of the Queen, where three corridors met to form a Y, three stone heads graced the capital of a buried pendentive. The heads were malign at first glance, a dead craftsman’s nightsweats and horrors: vaguely a cow, a goat, and a manticore. Each had some resemblance to the beast it portrayed—and not without an idiot twinkle—but seen through a glass cast with a ripple in it, reflected in a mirror with peeling silver. They were figments, and existed nowhere in nature. They were the past and they were buried. They had been surrounded, enveloped and eventually forgotten in a subcellar of the great masonry sprawl as addition after addition was piled over them.
—The Return of the Orange Virgin

There are three ways to get anywhere—the way you know, the way someone has told you and the way that is intuited for you. I am already here, so that leaves two.*