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    Four Warders and a Well
    Four Warders and a Well
    Four Warders and a Well
    Ebook33 pages28 minutes

    Four Warders and a Well

    By Erik Harssan

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Four warders
    guard three rooms
    over two days
    and make one cosmic discovery
    that ends their former lives

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherErik Harssan
    Release dateDec 14, 2016
    Four Warders and a Well
    Author

    Erik Harssan

    Slayer of windmills

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      Book preview

      Four Warders and a Well - Erik Harssan

      Four Warders

      and a

      Well

      by

      Erik

      Harssan

      Copyright 2016 Erik Harssan

      Smashwords Edition

      He stood on a great grid of glazed white tiles. At the round snouts of his boots began a simple repeating pattern of identical squares, laid tightly in straight lines that blended into a solid white surface in the distance, except for the occasional blue dot. A thin spread of blue tiles disturbed the simplicity by popping up in odd places, without matching any obvious pattern, as far as he could see.

      He resolved to make up a rule for them.

      At first glance their placement seemed almost orderly, though off by some measure he could not quite define. A longer look revealed how awfully close they came to a wide spiraling flow, swept along by circular waves that drew them into a rotating vortex near the center. But something had happened at the last instant, just before the floor froze, some outside force had warped the flow and morphed the waves, pushing the blue tiles into all the wrong places. Now each tile broke the pattern in its own way, their only common trait being a stubborn refusal to obey his rules.

      His first attempts consisted of basic repetitions and mirrored symmetries. He soon improved upon them with periodic extensions, and other minor variations one could reasonably expect from such a well-laid floor. His most successful rules worked over large swaths, but none worked everywhere, and that bothered him.

      So he thought up more elaborate rules. He added predictable exceptions, and combined expansions with incremental contractions, and when they continued to fail he contrived ever more complex ones, applying alternating inversions and sequential branching with self-spawning splits, but to no avail. It did not matter how complicated a rule he came up with, the blue tiles would defy him by being where they did not belong.

      He drew air through flared nostrils, and stared coldly at the nearest blue tile, a snug little square on his left.

      You miserable waste of misplaced clay, he muttered, and gave it an unfriendly thump with the butt of his halberd.

      Is it the floor that angers you? asked a flat voice on his right. Another halberdier stood there, facing straight.

      It is, he admitted. "They did the

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