The start of something.

(found in my notebook, scribbled down yesteryear, originally intended to be the beginning of something longer, which thing is now on the back-burner as more pressing deadlines loom)

When it began, it was in such small ways that nobody took notice. A small crack appeared in a wall, and all of the usual culprits were blamed: poor workmanship, deterioration with age, sudden shift in humidity. Children playing in the fields jumped over a ditch, and couldn’t reach the other side, though they had always been able to jump across before. A stone bridge that had always been there was suddenly absent one day, and not a trace of it could be found, which caused no end of frustration to those who counted upon it. But it must have been just one of those things for which no reason is ever found. These things are few and far between, and their odd occurrences become the stuff of legend. So the old bridge as certain to be remembered in late-night stories that children would whisper to unsettle each other, and to prove that they were brave. The Tale of the Missing Bridge, it would be called. And certainly that’s the way things would have gone if it had been the only oddity that summer. But when the children ran to the river the next day to see the place where the bridge had been, they discovered that not only was there no bridge, there was also no river. No river-bed. No trace left of there ever having been one. The hills that had marked the land on the other side of the river were now just in front of them, mere steps away. That night, tales were told in the inn by distant travelers, that the missing river was only one strange happening in a world where such happenings were becoming increasingly common. Where a mountain had been one day, there was now a pit that appeared to have no bottom. Healthy forests were overnight turned to barren, empty places. There were far fewer stars in the sky now than ever before, and if anybody stared at them with enough concentration, it was clear that more disappeared every night.

The world was falling apart.