Chapter 26: The Quiet Room at the End of the World

I had given a great deal of thought, over the preceding weeks, to how one ought to dismantle a man's architecture without making it feel like destruction. The answer, I had concluded, was to do it in the order the thing was built — foundation first, then wall, then roof — so that each piece of the collapse was legible, so that nothing fell without reason, and so that the man standing in the ruin could see, at each stage, exactly what had held it up and why it no longer did.

The ash plain was very quiet. The riders on the terrace had not moved. They were, I thought, waiting to see whether this would resolve itself without them.

I opened my journal.