Hello lovely,

After reflecting a bit more on your castle letter (your visit to Chenonceau has affected me greatly), I came to a troubling realization—this place, the beloved city, has very little monumental architecture. Sure, the husk of Cooger and Darks Pandemonium Shadow Feedstore inspires one to verse on occasion, and only a madman would deride the grand facade of the Cathedrale du Naitre (recently renovated), but castles we have none. I am not sure how I will deal with this cultural, spiritual, and structural blow. Be warned--it may involve the construction of my own little piece of architectural history.

The trouble with this project, as it now stands, is not sheer size. Any constructor worth even half his salt can make a 450,000 sq foot granite building with an almost hypnotic array of crenels, merlons, parapets, bridges, tarns, passages, bastions, towers (whether common or inaccesible and maiden inhabited) in his sleep. Hell, most of us can even plop down a couple of those inverted arabic onions with only a little difficulty. So you may be wondering, "Where, then, lies the difficulty?" In history, lovely...in history.

While I can build an edifice which rivals any in the world, and in a fraction of the time, given my otherwordly ties, I cannot imbue the structure with 'history.' How can I make a brand new building behave as though it were 1500 years old? Is it possible to convince a bit of mortar that it was actually trowelled by a skilled craftsman (with no association with the otherwhere) many centuries ago. I suppose I could whisper tender nothings to the stones in the entranceway, "Oh the things you've seen in your long, repeat, LONG, tenure as a portion of this gate." Rumors abound as to the relative naivete of respective materials. Sadly, except for the more porous stoneworks (due to the talc in the ancestries) most building materials are difficult to convince of anything. I can hear you responding in your kind, but undeniably port-soaked voice, "What about the stables which you fashioned on your uncle’s summer estate? Where there had been only rolling fields upon which his stallions inumerate might race and caper (with only an occasional lapse into cavorting) unfettered and without interruption, did you not build, in the matter of about 40 days, a grand stable of gopher and wormwood,

chinked with pitch of your own mixing. Did you not subsequently convince the stables to move themselves about the pastures to reflect the ‘stations of the cross?’ "

I can likewise imagine myself answering you. I did these things, but things are not now as they once were. It is funny, my dear, that I had forgotten that episode until you reminded me. Rather, until my lucid imagining of you reminded me. In any case, that was different. I was young and did not appreciate the scope of my attempts. Also, the stable’s behavior was the result of coercion and bullyragging, and so cannot be reproduced on an element of monumental stonework.

Yours,

MBS