11/19/21 Snippet, THE STARS ARE WRONG.

This is getting interesting to write.

Jak’s good humor guttered and died as we approached our destination. After full dark, the neighborhood of Crooked Point was no safe place for a single Guardian, and it did not welcome us in the morning gloom, either. I fancied I could feel eyes watching us as we moved through silent, too-wide streets. Some muttered it was naught now but the southernmost point of the Razor District, and so not worth any attention besides the scourge’s. Others were more sanguine, and dismissive of the muttering; but no respectable person visited Crooked Point these days. But then, a Guardian is not quite respectable.

But respectable or not, my heart sank to see the ongoing degeneration of the neighborhood. This was a better place, in my childhood, full of incense and vapors and the calls of priests; but all of that had drifted away, pushed aside by an increasing stream of Kee, backwards tribesmen from beyond the western walls. The new immigrants were brutes, ill-formed to our eyes, with the degenerate stamp of the ancients on their faces; and there was something very profane in the way they laughed, or cried. But the Kee proved useful, doing the hardest work for the meanest pay, with sullen but silent industry. So Seacity let them gather in the Razor District, and did not concern itself about the queer rituals and customs that the new arrivals brought with them.