Finally he looked North. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal, and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of warmth fled from him. And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-White rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks.
The manager told Trout a little about what the planet looked like to him. It was a place where he had a wife and two kids, he said. They didn’t know he ran a theater which showed blue movies. They thought he was doing consulting work as an engineer so late at night. He said that the planet didn’t have much use for engineers his age anymore. It had adored them once.
“Hard times,” said Trout.
Shadows make things easy,
So I made you mine.
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