Chapter 44

    The sky was dimming, the last rays of sunlight casting a yellowish hue across the city as dusk settled in. The buildings, tall and weary, seemed to sag under the weight of the fading day, their shadows stretching long and thin across the streets. I wandered aimlessly, my thoughts swirling in time with the changing light, trying to make sense of the fragments in my mind. It felt like the whole city was holding its breath, waiting for night to fall.

    As I walked, I found myself muttering under my breath, words that came out jumbled, half-formed. A lexicon of half-forgotten phrases and old memories that no longer seemed to mean what they once did. The language had changed, or maybe I had, but the words didn’t fit the way they used to.

    “Yellower lexicon...” I muttered to myself, the phrase hanging in the air, absurd yet oddly fitting.

    The city had always spoken in a language of its own, a language of alleyways and echoes, of secrets whispered in darkened corners and promises scratched into peeling walls. But now, as the dusk settled in, that language felt different. Older. More elusive. The meanings had shifted, the signs had faded, and I was left with a dictionary of half-truths and riddles.

    I stopped at the edge of a small park, the kind you could walk through in a minute without noticing it was there. A place where the trees leaned in close, their branches intertwined like conspirators sharing a secret. I stood there, my hands in my pockets, watching the shadows lengthen across the grass, and I began to speak again, as if telling the keynotes of some lost speech I’d once prepared.

    “Achilles,” I said softly, the name feeling strange on my tongue. “Burke. Limbo.” I let each name hang in the air, as if speaking them aloud could somehow bring the scattered pieces of the puzzle into focus.

    But it didn’t. The more I spoke, the more the names seemed to lose their meaning, to blend into the growing darkness like the yellows of the sunset fading into gray.

    “Hi hi,” I coughed, my voice breaking the stillness. The words were absurd, almost comical, but I wasn’t sure if I was laughing at the city or myself.

    A throaty sound escaped me, a cough that echoed in the quiet. I hadn’t meant to make a sound, hadn’t meant to disturb the peace of the dusk, but there it was—a reminder that I was still here, still part of this strange, unfolding story.

    I could feel the tension building, the sense that something was about to happen. The dusk seemed to stretch on longer than usual, as if the city was waiting for a sign, for someone to break the silence and let the night come in.

    I coughed again, a deep, rasping sound that tore through the stillness, and I found myself thinking of Madeleine, of the way she used to laugh when I tried to recite poetry to her, back when things were simpler. She’d always said I had a voice for mystery, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. The words felt old and used-up, like the “yellower lexicon” I’d spoken of, and I didn’t know if they held any meaning anymore.

    “Hi hi.”

    The greeting echoed again, as if I were calling out to a part of myself that had gotten lost somewhere along the way. The dusk had a way of making you feel that way—like you were standing at the edge of something vast and unknowable, trying to make sense of a language that no longer spoke to you.

    I turned away from the park, my thoughts still tangled, and began to walk back toward the lights of the city. The night was coming on now, swallowing the last of the yellow light, and I felt a strange resolve settle over me. The words might have been fading, the language might have been changing, but there were still things that needed saying, still truths that needed finding.

    Achilles was still out there, somewhere in the darkness. And Burke? He was playing his own game, one that didn’t care about the yellows of dusk or the meanings that had shifted with time. Limbo, with his spectral presence, hovered at the edges of it all, an enigma that seemed to grow more elusive with every step I took.

    But even if the words had changed, even if the keynotes had become mere echoes, I was still here. I was still Sid Jangler, walking through a city that spoke in shadows and half-truths, trying to find the path that led back to the light.

    “Hi hi.” I whispered it one last time, the words feeling both absurd and right as they left my lips. The city didn’t answer, but that didn’t matter. I was still listening.