Disclaimer: I do not own Welcome to Night Vale. I'm not actually that awesome. Just another mediocre fanfic writer, wreaking havoc upon another fandom with the abusive alliteration and surrealist snobbery of my purple prose - sincere poetry oddly similar to the stuff written ironically for Poetry Week. But this wasn't government-mandated, so I'm afraid I have no excuse. I'm so sorry, so very very sorry.

Night Vale

I.

Welcome to Night Vale,
the sign reads,
and he remembers that moment clearly,
seeing the flickering-
green? purple? Well, some color, anyway-
sign
on the edge of town,
vortex sandstorms
flitting out in the distance,
absorbing the sunset's capricious flashes.

There ought to have been some sort of disclaimer on that sign,
he thinks in moments of cynicism.
Welcome to Night Vale.
As if it were that simple.
A cheerful smile, a "Hey, new neighbor!" and a batch of arsenic cookies.

But he realizes later
that maybe that was all he needed to hear

Night Vale.

Night-
never light or clear,
even in the burning desert sun
scorching off prisms of sand
until everything is ultraviolet lightning
and you close your eyes

You close your eyes to the sun

You close your eyes to this life
the currents of unconscious, he realizes,
that the real world just doesn't show.
The bloodlust, the hate - all public, all accepted.
Freud might have approved. Less repression that way.
He certainly feels more free.

But it's there in Night Vale, it's clear as only night can be,
and in the abundance of light
sometimes he needs

for a moment

to shut his eyes

and

Vale-

vale- a fantasy word
of green hills and forests,
a place for knights to battle strange dragons, to gaze into weird wild wellsprings and cavernous chasms,
to fall in love with starry-eyed, flaxen-haired maidens
Not used anymore in common parlance.
Romantic, but passe.
And besides, here the dragons are running for mayor and the chasms attack you with Lilliputians and the love interests are-
well, someone else.

But also vale - a Latin goodbye.
Ave atque vale, they said. Hail and farewell.
They said that to the dying gladiators. Or something.
To the world outside, he was probably dead.
Lost to the cause of science.
A martyr. A gladiator.

Noble sacrifice, in flammas.
Like the twin paradox, like relativity.
Who knows how many years had passed for them?
His family could be dead.
Drowsily, he thinks over that and nods.

Vale. 2 syllables. Sounds like valley.
Valley.

But here there are no mountains-
how can people "not believe in mountains"?-
So the valley can't really have a meaning
Without some sort of opposite, some sort of contrast.

Like the town.
Endless evil, with no knowledge it's not perfectly good.
The perfect innocence of a flat plain,
twisting,
spiraling,
cragging and breaking at approximately 67.5 degree angles to reality (he's done the math)
endlessly downwards in a valley
with no bottom
or top.

Welcome to Night Vale,
the solemn voice intones.

Carlos shivers and thinks back.

Welcome indeed.

That's all he needed to know.