Travels in Orbis Immobilis

The islands of Sescut and Cutset rise from the black sea as mounds of yet deeper black. As one arrives sailing by boat through the night one somehow glimpses them before they are really there, sensing them as looming premonitions in the great cold distance. Then before one realises it they are present: gaps in the firmament, long, low and pitiless, lying on the horizon, preventing the stars from meeting the ocean. Eventually, one sees the palest glow dancing around them, as though they are decorated with a firmament all of their own, and one wonders whether that glow imperceptibly gave warning of their presence before they became visible. (It is much later that one realises that that this glow must originate in the infamous illuminous fungal forests which grow on those dark islands and are frequently the only reason their names are known in other lands.) I arrived on Sescut's largest port, Telluctet, as most visitors to the island do. It is the only place on either island where h...

On the evening after my Wise and Munificent Master commissioned me to begin this task which has become my life's work, I was visited by a dream while I lay slumbering on my veranda. In it, a  vision came to me of a world in which the sun was not fixed in place, but moved across the sky from East to West and sank beneath the horizon at night. I was terrified by this phantasm of an alien land, where one could never be sure where one was at any moment, and where the weather changed from hour to hour, and where nothing was still. I imagined myself commissioned to travel in such a world and give an account of its inhabitants and climates, subject as they were to a moving sun. I thought such a task impossible, and I grew yet more afraid when I considered the consequences for my family and I when my Wise and Munificent Master became disappointed at my inevitable failure. I resolved to flee, and never to return to my home. When I awoke, my real task - which had seemed so daunting and dif...