the Newis Glad:

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the Columns.

The existence of the murals had leaked out of the rail yards by the late 1940s. “Art blooms in strange places but in all Portland perhaps the strangest is under the Lovejoy ramp to the Broadway bridge,” the Oregon Journal offered in passing.

A reporter at The Oregonian took a wrong turn coming out of downtown one evening, dodged an oncoming freight train, and unexpectedly found himself “surrounded by birds and animals” as well as “a fantastic half-tree, half-human that grappled with the night.”

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of landscape.

This is a truly magnificent passage and we see in it Eddison’s similarities to Tolkien, Peake, and earlier pre-genre fantasy writers who understood landscape—and the artful rendering of it in literary form—to be absolutely integral to making their fantasy worlds, in some sense, real or real-seeming, and a key aspect of the verisimilitude so many fantasy writers use at the same time to denaturalize readers’ from their own world, rendering “reality” in new, critical perspectives. The scene begins with a moment in the changing of the seasons that quietly transitions readers from the big reveal at the end of the first chapter, and from there pulls the reader almost as a camera might move slowly through a forest in the opening scene of a film, lingering on tiny images and small happenings that each seem so delicately real and together prove the hapticity of this fantasy world.

Summer is here, if you want it.

Now that nos. 45 and 46 are complete and in the world, a number of elements of this new season, Summer, the third season of the epic, might well be coming into focus. —Head over to Chapbooks, and scroll down to the brand new section where the third season chapbooks will be collected, and you’ll notice that no. 45 is the first installment of vol. 5, the Greene Chapel—and that no. 46 is the first installment of vol. 6, Eleleu Ie.

the most Recent installment:

the Two ways This might go–

“There’s two ways this goes down,” she says. Bared fingertips grip a hilt wrapped in dulled wire, simple, straight, and above it quillions clean straight bars, and over about it all and her gloved fist a glittering net of wiry strands that meet in thick round worked steel knots all gathered together in a cord that swoops to end at the great silvery clout of a pommel. “That’s it.”

“No,” he says, “no, it’s not.” All in black, black slacks rolled up at his shins, black turtleneck, his pink hands held out empty to either side, and his bald head pinkly shaking, no. “There’s but one way we might go out from this moment we have freely, each of us, entered into. Our terrible, freighted moment will come to its ending only when you stick me with your steel, and down I crumble, into dust. For if you will not do this,” and one of those hands is lifted, up, and even in this harsh light, bright light flares between his curling fingers. “I will let out your life,” he says, drawing down a sneering curl of cutlass from the air.

Her right foot slips back, blade of her sword dipping as she holds her free hand up between them. “That’s not,” she says, “nobody’s, done anything yet, that can’t be undone.”

“Oh, but Huntsman,” he says, a sliding shuffle-step toward her, cutlass angled up and back, above his head. “One of us will.”