Scene 5

Before Fyndraxis had created his keep, he had gone about a bit of a spiritual experiment. He had been fed up with his life being dominated by the narrative, and decided to live as a bird for a while. Nominally, this was pure escapism, but he also wanted to find out if changing his physical form to something non-human would affect his mind in any way.
He had chosen the form of an owl. It suited his temperament. He had always been a bit of a nocturnal creature, and the way that they silently moved through the night had always appealed to him. For centuries, he perched in trees, swiveled his head in astounding ways, and coughed up pellets of bone and hair. He hunted wild rabbits and mice, mostly for something to do, but for the most part he explored.
When he was an owl, he realized that the higher that he flew, the less of a hold the narrative would have upon him. So he flew and explored and came up with the ideas that would eventually culminate in his keep.
One evening, just before sunset, while he had been out on his rodent extermination campaign, he came across a piece of anomalous sky. It all happened extremely quickly, because the piece of sky wasn’t very large at all, and he flew through it in a little less than a heartbeat, but he was briefly transported to someplace completely different.
When he flew through this patch of sky, suddenly he was transported into darkness. There was nothing for him to see there, but he could smell that he was underground. He could smell rich black soil shot through with roots and a fine lace of mycelia. The smell was unmistakable and intoxicating. It was the smell of being beneath the earth. He spent the evening flying back and forth through this piece of sky, briefly experiencing a moment of peace.
Rather quickly after that experience, he had gone about the process of making his keep. He placed his keep so that this anomalous area of sky was located in the tallest tower in a place that he would use as his bedroom. He didn’t sleep. That biological function wasn’t in the cards for him, but once the keep was built, he could retreat to this underground place and kind of hibernate.
Time moved differently in this underground place. While he was underground enjoying a nice relaxing dirt nap, ages would slip by in his realm. When he returned, he would take note that the continents had slipped around a bit in his absence. Time mattered little to him, so he regarded this as more of a curiosity than anything that required actual attention.
When he had become familiar with the use of his computer, he immediately went about analyzing this anomaly in the landform text file that he had found. It took him a rather long time to track down the anomaly in the code, the file was something like four terabytes, but once he had found it, he noted its difference from the other data.
He summoned his Python to do his bidding, and search the landform file for more anomalies, but there was just that singular instance. It was something that he could recreate, but when he did so, it merely led to the same result. It would just be another portal to the same peaceful darkness.
Having had kind of a busy day, he found himself in the mood for one of his forays into darkness. His brush with the narrative in Grenoble and the business with his solicitors had left him pretty drained, so the prospect of spending some time surrounded by dirt was rather attractive.
Preparation for one of these naps was quite minimal, so when he arrived in his sanctum, all he had to do was walk into his bedroom and he was off to his underground vacation in the sky.
Normally, when he crossed the threshold to his bedroom, he felt as if he were being submerged in a tepid bath of india ink, but what greeted him this time was something completely novel. He was greeted by a forest in high summer.