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Workshop resting
Mira opens the guidebook again — reflexively, hopelessly, as if the… · branchtale
A Montenegro adventure
Mira opens the guidebook again — reflexively, hopelessly, as if the 2019 Rough Guide to the Western Balkans will have a footnote on rooms that defy Euclidean geometry. It does not. Alex, meanwhile, has already raised his camera, photographing the walls in a methodical sweep: the stones are older than the ones in the passage, older than the door, older perhaps than the fourteenth century entirely. More peculiarly, the room is wider than it should be — not by a little, by half again, maybe more — and the walls curve gently outward in a way that makes his inner ear quietly complain. Vesna settles into neither of the two chairs and lifts the lid on the pot. A rope of woodsmoke and sage rises. She does not appear to find any of this unusual. It is in the far corner, behind the stove, that Mira finds the map — hand-drawn, floor to ceiling, showing the cliff and the chapel and something unmistakable beneath both.