What are you?
The question is superficially simple, but the connotations are complex and this is the gift you have been given, this comprehension, this clarity that lets you turn it over in your head like you would an interesting stone. Lets you hold it up to the light and examine it and isn't that, in and of itself, a marker of how divergent you are? How deviant you've become?
That you have the time at all, such decadent luxury. That you can think absent the shudder-shock of a pick digging into parched ground, the impact chaining up your aching arms, across your twisted-tight back. That you can think absent the steady throb of rubbed raw palms, the thunder of blood in your head, your tongue coated in dust and grit and two sizes too large for your mouth.
All around you the room is quiet. All around you the room is still. Furniture swathed in soft shadow, the air cool. The heavy drumming of the Calibration downpour against the armored glass blurring and hazing that omnipresent orange glow.
You are a helot. Even after everything that's happened to you, everything that you've done, everything you've become you are still a helot. This isn't a choice, this isn't a decision, only a kind of recognition: that is the only identity you have. The only material you have with which you can construct yourself.
There is nothing else.
Then the question becomes: what is a helot? Absent the poetry, and the miserable longing, close your eyes and step outside the visceral experience of it: what is a helot?
Step back from the window. Close your eyes, press your palms to your face and push your fingers through your snow white (bone white) hair. The answer is easy, it's something you've known on some level all your life: a helot is not a human being, a helot is not a person. A helot is a measurement. A rough estimation of extractable labor over a single being's lifespan.
Easily tallied in aggregate, trivial to extrapolate. Like children's sums, a tutor's lessons; simple problems scratched out on paper and a citizen-child with their tongue between their teeth, trying to work the math in their head. "You have fifty work crews of five hundred bodies each. Assuming all helots on the project are initially healthy and work continues at a consistent speed during both Winter and Summer, approximately many Seasons would it take to complete a canal ten miles long, twenty five meters wide, and ten meters deep across level terrain. For the purposes of the exercise you may additionally assume that all attritional losses are trivially replaced and obedience remains constant."
Solve over the next half-hour. You may use your abacus.
A click of bead on bead. A scratch of pen on parchment, one portion of one tally. One among hundreds encompassed by a dripping black mark. That's all you are-
Were, you remind yourself, that's all you were. Because now you're something else, a sort of paradox, a kind of logic-joke. You are a helot who has no work. You are a helot with leisure that is not merely the product of unforseen constraints or unexpected delays. That is not the grudging, glowering acknowledgement that you need to sleep, you need to eat, that you need to breathe or else you will break down utterly.
A helot with nowhere to be. A helot with nothing to do.
Set up. Punchline.
So…how do you resolve it? How do you reconcile Is with its inverse? And what does that fusion look like?
A stupid question. Look through the cage of your fingers to the covered mirror in the corner of your room. You already know what it looks like.
Your skin is ash grey and tinged with lavender shades. Your skin is drawn too tight, framing muscle and sinew in a rictus grip. Your skin parts as you move, red mouths opening as you shift. Between your knuckles; along your forearm, the flesh of your bicep splitting bloodlessly at some unseen seam, the crimson crescent beneath your eye never closing, the wound re-opened for good now it seems. All across your body veins bulge, they slither and snake; bloated serpents winding just beneath the surface. A bit of richer amethyst, a touch of sickly green; they spill down your cheeks like a nightmare mock-up of tears, curling beneath your jawbone. Your body is still half-burned, half-destroyed for all that it inconveniences you none. But you've seen how the fire twists, how its touch scars, the body flowing like soft wax and melting tallow. For you it's something else.
Something between a partial flensing and an acid etching. Something like the face of the moon, like those depressions and mottled colorations that the Listeners say are seas of healthsome mercury. But it's nothing so wholesome for you: the surface scraped thin, the blood vessels clustering thick. A living -"living"- latticework cascading down your arm, your leg, your side.
Your eyes have changed too, you hadn't- you didn't realize that. Not until you were taken to your quarters. Not until you saw your reflection for the first time. You hadn't even thought to consider it but not even that remains untouched, not even that is held constant. Irises the color of the setting sun, of molten gold; underlined by deep shadows and charcoal smears, the tell-tale marks of sleep deprivation and enduring exhaustion. The sclera of your left is laced with thicker threads, the capillaries swollen but intact. Your right is drowned in purple-black: the sky at twilight and deep tissue destruction.
Features that could be fragile if they weren't so stark; a face that could have been handsome if it wasn't so hungry. The edge of your mouth is tattered, an uneven, ragged patch like so much half-charred paper. Leaving you with too-sharp teeth on display, a perpetual smirk. The start of an eternal snarl.
Nothing alive looks like you do now, nothing could, but you suppose that makes sense in its own way. In the end death is the great reconciler. The cessation and the continuation, the function collapsing, all impossibilities resolved into a single point. The everything that is nothing. Null.
Void.
You pluck a doormouse from the cup and crunch it between your fangs. It's good. You think, as you lick honey-glaze from honed enamel, violet-tinged tongue briefly visible through the rent in your face- you think that you'd like to be outside for a bit. There's no real reason, if you want quiet you have your room. If you want to savor the coolness, the softness, the shadows and the comfort you have your room. And it's not as if you'll be any less alone with your thoughts out there than in here it's just-
A flickering emotion, something amorphous and formless that's more a taste, a sensation, than a discrete feeling. You've never seen a proper garden before. Something that wasn't reserved for small, scrappy herbs and sweet peppers; little cuts of olive and fig. Something that didn't exist purely for the sake of sustenance, for a sliver of added flavor and necessary nutrition. That was there just...to be there. Just to be beautiful. Water and fertile soil and hours of work from strong backed laborers and careful, meticulous gardeners poured into something that offered up no real explanation. Whose presence required no justification.
Yes, you decide, you'd be happy to see something like that.
The Wolf-King calls his palace In the Forests of the Night and are you surprised? At which part? That the man who greeted you all but lounging half-naked on his throne would pick something so melodramatic and pretentious or the fact that, as you walk through it you...understand. You see the poetic logic, the thematic strain running through it all. That it makes a kind of sense and that you find that vaguely aggravating all on its own.
The woods grow deep in Xauma. The woods grow dark. A sea of fiery boughs and black bark. The wild encroaching upon the carcass of the shattered, long-dead Shogunate city. Far, far below your feet thigh-thick roots choke supercrete gutters and crack cement and shallow, slow-moving rivers course where once there were roads. In the near distance tendrils of fog wend their way through the skeletal remains of titanic towers, a burial shroud for the dessicated remains. Their gutted interiors exposed here and there: in the places where the great glass panes, lovely as any cathedral's windows, have cracked and given way, plants clinging like parasites to the monolithic exterior, crawling and probing and burrowing into the open wounds. The places where the exterior has sloughed away like a landslide down a mountain slope, exposing honeycombed cross sections of rain-soaked rooms and empty halls. It's a skyline of jagged fangs and broken bones. Pillars that could run to Heaven carved in half. Ruins piled upon ruins.
And you can see it all clearly, see the colossal complex -a university a sleepy voice inside you murmurs- not a quarter of a mile away. See the snapped-off spars of colossal bridges that would have spanned the rivers that flow into the Yanaze. See the Yanaze itself, that great East-bound dragon now just a splash of shining, glistening ink in the distance; the intersection with the River of Tears lost somewhere in the gauzy caul of grey rain. But even that doesn't trouble you as much as it should and your eyes scarcely strain, even in the gloom. The shadows holds no great difficulty for you.
Not anymore.
It's funny isn't it, in an abstract kind of way. You walk along the leviathan vast flank of the defunct war machine alone, your familiar slithered back into your red pendant after hissing, snapping at the drops of falling water, your guards, your loaned guides, leading the way. You feel your clothes plastered slowly, steadily, to the pale flesh beneath, the alien corpse-anatomy (but it's an abstract kind of sensation isn't it? Like man reading the words "cold" and "wet" off a scrap of paper for all they affect you). You pause along a walkway, hand on a metal railing and glance down at the sea of lights that spread out beneath In the Forests of the Night's clawed limbs.
What lays down below? You don't have to tax yourself too hard to tell: homes built from the plentiful stone and ample timber. Strong and sturdy, rising in tiers up the hillsides, cannibalizing and incorporating and hollowing out the metropolis as they go; what was once a mere district now a fast-growing kingdom in its own right. Shrines nestled in the carefully cleaned and lovingly repaired wreckage of the Shogunate sprawl. Rice paddies and harvested fields spreading in a geometric band across city lots and cavernous halls. Everywhere orange and red lanterns paint the pre-dawn air with all the colors of a warm, flickering fire.
And yet somehow you feel so much more comfortable up here. Beyond the firelight, where shrouded, glass-caged bulbs paint the downpour with shades of amber and sullen coals.
You stop for a second, you hold your one-sided staring contest for a moment but no more, no more. They're waiting for you up ahead, a towering-tall wolf woman in blue-trimmed armor and a smaller, slighter man in a matching cloak. The pair flanking the entryway, the bulkhead between them hissing open as unseen mechanisms spin and catch. Mechanical jaws pulling apart.
You walk past them on bare feet, feeling the water sluice away between the grating. Not even blinking as lightning crackles overhead, a blue-white coil snaking from cloud to cloud before striking the raised spines that bristle from the palace's "back". Far in the distance you see their silhouettes: gleaming slick black carapace and grey legs wreathed in vast banners of mist; scorpion tails hiked high as they carry thunderheads in their claws. A ragged line advancing across the horizon, driving the winds before them. Goliath and gargantuan, standing astride the whole world; visible for a moment and then gone the next.
The doors groan shut behind you. The guards take up their posts on either side of the entryway.
The wind immediately relents, the gale giving way to a gentle, wet breeze. The storm turns from a deluge to a fine patter of drops. Raw elemental force constrained and harnessed, bridled and dragged down to something half-tame, pleasant. You sniff the air, head twitching one way, then the other, scenting it out. Hah. You can smell it, hidden in the walls. In coiled conduits that run beneath the deck plating. Some small scrap of salvaged systems, linked into the palace's heat and power grid. Conduits and cables snaking deeper into the war machine's construction.
It's the small chirp of your elemental that pulls you back. Your necklace smouldering bright. Something skeletal and shedding cinders coalescing around it, muscle made of gelatinous fire, coal dark scales crawling over the creature's form. Dragon-bat digging its claws into your collarbone, the hooked digits of its wings snagging on your tunic as it scrabbles up onto your bony shoulder. A warm, heavy weight; already comforting, already familiar. You reach up a hand and gently scratch its throat, fingers sinking into the grey-white ruff of fur.
The gardens were built into what was one of the palace's skydocks, a small, half-hidden harbor tucked behind layers of ablative panel, sheltered by the beast's ribs. But whatever craft were stationed here are long gone. Taken, you imagine, by retreating crew and officers as they fled from the immobile juggernaut. Or maybe just shot down, in whatever final battle saw Xauma murdered and the palace crippled. It's not as if you can tell-
Ah. Look at you. You came here for a little peace of mind and all you can think about is such morbid things. You're doing this place a disservice really, it's not like it disappoints: recessed docking bays that have been transformed into nurseries, the climates within carefully adjusted and modified. Delicate things, fragile things blooming within in all the shades of every season. Flowers with ten-petal blossoms, each one as ghostly pale and as rigid as fine ceramic, the insides of their throats a bruised purple. Beautiful bouquets of sunny yellow, pastel pink and sky blue, twisting around each other in drunken spirals as they climb neatly spaced stakes. Golden thorns gleaming wickedly in the half light, gilding the thin stems of bloody-red blooms and emerald shoots. Autumn's own finery: coal-dark growths that seem to shed sullen orange embers, low-creeper overflowing its planter. And everywhere, everywhere, the soft silvery-white glow of the moon-touched and the half-mad.
It really is amazing, isn't it? You can walk a year in a single turn of this place. Fifteen months in fifteen steps.
Outside the arcades elevated platforms hangover placid pools of floating plants and water. Trees with iridescent leaves, each one a razor-thin shard of opal, strung with Calibration lanterns. The flickering candlelight reflected, focused through the natural array.
You hesitate and sit on a bench beneath one. Hands on your knees; nowhere you have to go, nothing you have to do. The guards at the door but it's still just you, only you, surrounded by a rainbow, a riot of color.
And also that figure at the far end, with a pair of small shears and a metal canister, humming to themselves as they tend a potted plant.
Who was not there when you walked in.
And you didn't hear the bulkhead open.
Them too.
You stare.
[ ] Channel your inner boldness and confront them! Address them directly! Accuse them a little! You see this coy cat-and-mouse-sudden-appearing act they're doing and you're not going to have any of it!
[ ] Ponder the problem. You know that they're here and they must know that you know. So clearly they're waiting to see what you're going to do. But wait- they must know that you would know that they know…
