The Colour Photograph of a Ruined Elendel

Revealed by Marasi inside the tire factory to be a fake — a still photograph of a painted-plaster diorama in the hoax studio hidden behind the factory floor. The Set did not travel to a ruined future or excavate a ruined past; they built a model of a fallen Elendel — buildings collapsed, miniature corpses, fine ash by the boxful — and used low-angle evanotype cameras to manufacture, frame by frame, the image of an Elendel that has already ended. MB2:TLM:Ch 45

An evanotype photograph in colour, brought back by Tobal Copper in the last weeks before his death and shown to Marasi and Wax by Maraga Dulcet — the *above-the-fold image for the story she will never write*. Depicts an ashen landscape under a stark orange sky, falling ash heaped over the tops of broken buildings and ruined walls — a city that looks unmistakably like Elendel. Reading the image as a photograph, not a painting, would mean an image of a future that has not happened yet; reading it any other way is no comfort. MB2:TLM:Ch 33