Your earliest memory is of whimpering, of sitting in the chair and squirming as your mother...
Exalted: Out Of The Eater
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To Keep Us Free
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Your earliest memory is of whimpering, of sitting in the chair and squirming as your mother murmured to you and bound your blistered hands. Cool salve squishing against the raw, red, welts. Coarse linen sticking to the pale skin of your palms. Her own hands so strong, so massive in comparison that it seemed like she could pick you up and snap you in half; your arm, your spine, like dry twigs in her grasp. But she was only ever gentle with you, only ever kind, and even if her face is gone from your memory now, replaced by a smear of tanned skin and black hair, and even if her voice is just a low, indistinct murmur in the back of your brain you will always remember her hands cradling yours.
Dirt under both your nails, the soft ivory of your beds cracked and torn. The low banked fire smoldering behind her while a black iron pot bubbles. Thin skeins of smoke and steam rising, intertwining, escaping through the hole in the thatched roof. A night's sky worth of stars shining beyond and they are distant, cold things to you. Scarlet sparks and snowy white points and sapphire drops against a vast swirl of purples and pink; Mercury herself like a fat fleck of gold, a drop of yellow against the backdrop, beaming down on your dinner of rice porridge and meat scraps. Of stale bread and river-fish cooking in the coals. Your father (his whole outline a charcoal smear) in the background, your brothers, your sisters hazy silhouettes as they play with the children from the other family (or were there two). In your mind their laughter is the staccato echo of a stone tossed down a rocky gorge: ringing out and clattering against the sides, fading as it bounces away, vanishing from view.
Did you ask her then? You must have because you remember the way her hands stilled for a second and how she sank down to her knees on the packed dirt floor. Holding you by the trembling wrists; your fingers half crooked and curled in, a bit of blood welling up between the rags. You lifted your head and her eyes- you can't remember her eyes, you've tried so long and so hard and you think, you think sometimes that they must have been like yours. That same shade of muddy brown, loamy earth. Her hair dark as yours, worn to the shoulders and did it stick up in licks and spikes like yours too? Or is that all from your father, that broad-shouldered shadow?
"We're helots my love and this is our lot. This is our life," and you know the words and the gentle tone but you can't hear her voice, it's just a ripple of sound, an impression of syllables, the rush and babble of a brook just beyond a copse of trees, "This is the life you will have Alexius, my Alexius. We work, for the Empire, for the City. You'll be strong, won't you? You'll survive won't you? For me."
Your father standing behind her, stooping down and gently resting his palm on your head. Pushing just a little, tilting your chin up, turning your face up to stare at the black socket where his features should be. "You'll build calluses soon son, it'll get better."
Was that the moment you realized?
Was that the moment you understood? Who you were, what you were?
Helot. Slave. Filth. Scum. Work. Labor. More. Give more. Give everything. Give everything you are. Hollowed out. Gutted out. So hungry you chew a piece of leather just to pretend. Are you starving? Are you dying? Godsdamn insect. Shackles cut into your wrists. Are you looking at me? Are you looking at me you worthless piece of shit? You don't deserve this. Pain blooms across your cheek from the force of the strike. Hot blood dripping like tears. For this the Dragons made your kind. You don't deserve this. There's been some mistake. There's been no mistake. You don't deserve this!
The noonday sun beats down on you; its heat an almost physical thing, a tangible weight. Settling on your shoulders, drawing sweat from faintly tanned flesh, the drops evaporating almost instantly. Above you a bird beats flaming wings, every feather a brilliant, burning blotch of crimson and copper; its three claws the color of new coals and fresh soot. It rides its own thermals, circling and wheeling above the ruler straight fields. A sea of barley rustling in the warm, dry breeze that stirs in time with the crow's own pinions. The ground is dust, your tongue is covered in dust; it collects in the creases of your thin tunic, the folds of your cotton leggings, the pockets of the padded jacket with its sleeves tied around your waist. Stirred up by the passage of countless steel-shot boots and horse hooves.
Clotting black and sticky at your feet as blood drips, syrupy thick, onto the thirsty earth. Sluggish rivers giving way to curdling puddles, scabs in the bone dry soil. There's a faint pleading behind you, an old man's voice; quavering and desperate. A sound like a spade sinking into river clay, a splatter and a choked scream and the begging stops. A pair of soldiers come into view a second later, grey breastplates shining like mirrors. A skirt of dark leather strips hanging over longer folds of wine dark cloth. Ring mail drawn up over their noses like a rich woman's veil, hair bound beneath rounded helms. They grunt with effort as they drop the elder on the slow-growing pile, turning on their heels and striding away. The strains of their fast and easy conversation drifting back over the crowd.
His mouth is still open, one blue eye glassy and staring at you. As you watch a fat, glossy green fly lands on his lip. Scuttling in stop-start motions over his cheek. Drinking from his watery, still teary eye before taking wing.
A man beside you is softly sobbing, sick, half-strangled sobs that twitch his shoulders and struggle, stillborn in his chest. A woman beside you, her skin like cracked hide, her expression bleak. All around you the assembled ranks of the village: men and women, young and old, nearly five hundred strong. You don't look at the dead man in front of you. You don't look at the Captain as she rides by, resplendent in her lamellar, helmet adorned with eagle wings over the ear. You don't look at the soldiers as they begin dousing the mound in oil, another carrying a torch, and something in you, some not-so-buried part already braces for the stench of roasting flesh, the smell of rendered fat. You just straight ahead at the fields in silence, at the horizon; eyes flicking above you, now and then, to the suncrow as it's joined by another. By a third. By more mortal ravens, until it's a gyre of ink dark plumage twisting and turning and threading through itself as the birds wait for the soldiers to leave. For the feast to start.
A torch lands on a tangle of limbs and greasy flames shoot skyward. Tar-black banners blooming, deepening as it spreads. The crows croak their approval, cawing racuously.
Your calloused hands hang at your side. Beyond the far fields the seventh wall of Lookshy rises up, high enough to score the sky. A purple tinged span, stretching across the world. Wrapping around you. Closing you in.
In the reckoning of the Realm it is the Year 768, 11 Descending Fire. The final weeks of the Summer harvest.
And today?
Today Agricultural Settlement Zero One Nine: Sublime Bounty of Sextes Jylis is being liquidated. Bound elementals are being brought from the City proper to complete the harvest on schedule. All able bodied helots are to be re-tasked to the front. Be glad! They still have use for you. Be glad! You live another day. Be glad! You aren't on the pile. Yet.
The bonfire grows, it spreads, caressing the old man's cheek like a lover. His wispy beard catching alight as his skin chars and carbonizes. Peeling away from the meat below, from the cracking bone. His eyes are the last to go. They stay on you the entire time.
Fields. Horizon. Crows. Wall.
Take nothing with you, Lookshy will give you everything you need. The City provides, ever and always. But you have one thing you take, nonetheless. One thing left from your mother, from your father. One small, worthless thing, that is still yours. Even after all that's happened.
[ ] A small blue stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Mela: Elemental Dragon of Air. She who uplifts, who inspires and enlightens. Who breathes spirit into cold flesh. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small black stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Daana'd: Elemental Dragon of Water. She who changes, who is chaotic and secretive. Who is sublime. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small white stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Pasiap: Elemental Dragon of Earth. He who endures, who anchors and sustains. Who forms the foundations. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small green stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Sextes Jylis: Elemental Dragon of Wood. He who encroaches, who nurtures and heals. Who overcomes all. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small red stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Hesiesh: Elemental Dragon of Fire. He who consumes, who destroys and renews. Who cannot be contained. Who held sway when you were born.
Dirt under both your nails, the soft ivory of your beds cracked and torn. The low banked fire smoldering behind her while a black iron pot bubbles. Thin skeins of smoke and steam rising, intertwining, escaping through the hole in the thatched roof. A night's sky worth of stars shining beyond and they are distant, cold things to you. Scarlet sparks and snowy white points and sapphire drops against a vast swirl of purples and pink; Mercury herself like a fat fleck of gold, a drop of yellow against the backdrop, beaming down on your dinner of rice porridge and meat scraps. Of stale bread and river-fish cooking in the coals. Your father (his whole outline a charcoal smear) in the background, your brothers, your sisters hazy silhouettes as they play with the children from the other family (or were there two). In your mind their laughter is the staccato echo of a stone tossed down a rocky gorge: ringing out and clattering against the sides, fading as it bounces away, vanishing from view.
Did you ask her then? You must have because you remember the way her hands stilled for a second and how she sank down to her knees on the packed dirt floor. Holding you by the trembling wrists; your fingers half crooked and curled in, a bit of blood welling up between the rags. You lifted your head and her eyes- you can't remember her eyes, you've tried so long and so hard and you think, you think sometimes that they must have been like yours. That same shade of muddy brown, loamy earth. Her hair dark as yours, worn to the shoulders and did it stick up in licks and spikes like yours too? Or is that all from your father, that broad-shouldered shadow?
"We're helots my love and this is our lot. This is our life," and you know the words and the gentle tone but you can't hear her voice, it's just a ripple of sound, an impression of syllables, the rush and babble of a brook just beyond a copse of trees, "This is the life you will have Alexius, my Alexius. We work, for the Empire, for the City. You'll be strong, won't you? You'll survive won't you? For me."
Your father standing behind her, stooping down and gently resting his palm on your head. Pushing just a little, tilting your chin up, turning your face up to stare at the black socket where his features should be. "You'll build calluses soon son, it'll get better."
Was that the moment you realized?
Was that the moment you understood? Who you were, what you were?
Helot. Slave. Filth. Scum. Work. Labor. More. Give more. Give everything. Give everything you are. Hollowed out. Gutted out. So hungry you chew a piece of leather just to pretend. Are you starving? Are you dying? Godsdamn insect. Shackles cut into your wrists. Are you looking at me? Are you looking at me you worthless piece of shit? You don't deserve this. Pain blooms across your cheek from the force of the strike. Hot blood dripping like tears. For this the Dragons made your kind. You don't deserve this. There's been some mistake. There's been no mistake. You don't deserve this!
It's not your fault.
It's not your fault.
The noonday sun beats down on you; its heat an almost physical thing, a tangible weight. Settling on your shoulders, drawing sweat from faintly tanned flesh, the drops evaporating almost instantly. Above you a bird beats flaming wings, every feather a brilliant, burning blotch of crimson and copper; its three claws the color of new coals and fresh soot. It rides its own thermals, circling and wheeling above the ruler straight fields. A sea of barley rustling in the warm, dry breeze that stirs in time with the crow's own pinions. The ground is dust, your tongue is covered in dust; it collects in the creases of your thin tunic, the folds of your cotton leggings, the pockets of the padded jacket with its sleeves tied around your waist. Stirred up by the passage of countless steel-shot boots and horse hooves.
Clotting black and sticky at your feet as blood drips, syrupy thick, onto the thirsty earth. Sluggish rivers giving way to curdling puddles, scabs in the bone dry soil. There's a faint pleading behind you, an old man's voice; quavering and desperate. A sound like a spade sinking into river clay, a splatter and a choked scream and the begging stops. A pair of soldiers come into view a second later, grey breastplates shining like mirrors. A skirt of dark leather strips hanging over longer folds of wine dark cloth. Ring mail drawn up over their noses like a rich woman's veil, hair bound beneath rounded helms. They grunt with effort as they drop the elder on the slow-growing pile, turning on their heels and striding away. The strains of their fast and easy conversation drifting back over the crowd.
His mouth is still open, one blue eye glassy and staring at you. As you watch a fat, glossy green fly lands on his lip. Scuttling in stop-start motions over his cheek. Drinking from his watery, still teary eye before taking wing.
A man beside you is softly sobbing, sick, half-strangled sobs that twitch his shoulders and struggle, stillborn in his chest. A woman beside you, her skin like cracked hide, her expression bleak. All around you the assembled ranks of the village: men and women, young and old, nearly five hundred strong. You don't look at the dead man in front of you. You don't look at the Captain as she rides by, resplendent in her lamellar, helmet adorned with eagle wings over the ear. You don't look at the soldiers as they begin dousing the mound in oil, another carrying a torch, and something in you, some not-so-buried part already braces for the stench of roasting flesh, the smell of rendered fat. You just straight ahead at the fields in silence, at the horizon; eyes flicking above you, now and then, to the suncrow as it's joined by another. By a third. By more mortal ravens, until it's a gyre of ink dark plumage twisting and turning and threading through itself as the birds wait for the soldiers to leave. For the feast to start.
A torch lands on a tangle of limbs and greasy flames shoot skyward. Tar-black banners blooming, deepening as it spreads. The crows croak their approval, cawing racuously.
Your calloused hands hang at your side. Beyond the far fields the seventh wall of Lookshy rises up, high enough to score the sky. A purple tinged span, stretching across the world. Wrapping around you. Closing you in.
In the reckoning of the Realm it is the Year 768, 11 Descending Fire. The final weeks of the Summer harvest.
And today?
Today Agricultural Settlement Zero One Nine: Sublime Bounty of Sextes Jylis is being liquidated. Bound elementals are being brought from the City proper to complete the harvest on schedule. All able bodied helots are to be re-tasked to the front. Be glad! They still have use for you. Be glad! You live another day. Be glad! You aren't on the pile. Yet.
The bonfire grows, it spreads, caressing the old man's cheek like a lover. His wispy beard catching alight as his skin chars and carbonizes. Peeling away from the meat below, from the cracking bone. His eyes are the last to go. They stay on you the entire time.
Fields. Horizon. Crows. Wall.
Take nothing with you, Lookshy will give you everything you need. The City provides, ever and always. But you have one thing you take, nonetheless. One thing left from your mother, from your father. One small, worthless thing, that is still yours. Even after all that's happened.
[ ] A small blue stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Mela: Elemental Dragon of Air. She who uplifts, who inspires and enlightens. Who breathes spirit into cold flesh. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small black stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Daana'd: Elemental Dragon of Water. She who changes, who is chaotic and secretive. Who is sublime. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small white stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Pasiap: Elemental Dragon of Earth. He who endures, who anchors and sustains. Who forms the foundations. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small green stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Sextes Jylis: Elemental Dragon of Wood. He who encroaches, who nurtures and heals. Who overcomes all. Who held sway when you were born.
[ ] A small red stone, carefully etched with a crude image of Hesiesh: Elemental Dragon of Fire. He who consumes, who destroys and renews. Who cannot be contained. Who held sway when you were born.
Table Of Contents
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Introduction: To Keep Us Free
Prologue: Unworthy
Part One: Born To Die
Part Two: On The Nature Of Daylight
Part Three: Eat Me Alive
Part Four: Manifest Divinity
Part Five: Lament
Part Six: Red Skeins
Part Seven: Bad Moon Rising
Part Eight: The Fire Sermon
Part Nine: Daybreak
Part Ten: Jawbone
Interlude One: Intercalate
Chapter One: A Wilderness Of Wolves
Part One: The Man Who Sold The World
Part Two: From Nowhere
Part Three: Throne Of The Wolf-King
Part Four: All You Need Is What You Want
Part Five: In The Forests Of The Night
Part Six: Dissociation
Part Seven: From Below
Part Eight: Sunshine
Part Nine: Antagonist
Interlude Two: Abel In The Dark, Abel In The Night
Part Ten: Blood Of The Lamb
Part Eleven: Chrysaor
Part Twelve: Jam Session
Part Thirteen: Flickering Low
Part Fourteen: Hunger
Fanworks
Duty Demands by @Maugan Ra
Shades Of The Enslaved by @Omicron
Lookshyan Slasher-Spirits by @EarthScorpion
Frozen Beauties by @EarthScorpion
Existential Ectoplasmic Entities by @NonSequtur
O! the husk by @mothematics
No Man, No Monster So Mighty by @mothematics
Homebrew: Innocence Lost by @Gnarker
Artwork: Harrower's Familiar by @Camellia
Homebrew: The Accuser by @LupineVolt
Supplements
Lookshyan Empire Profile by @Chehrazad
Prologue: Unworthy
Part One: Born To Die
Part Two: On The Nature Of Daylight
Part Three: Eat Me Alive
Part Four: Manifest Divinity
Part Five: Lament
Part Six: Red Skeins
Part Seven: Bad Moon Rising
Part Eight: The Fire Sermon
Part Nine: Daybreak
Part Ten: Jawbone
Interlude One: Intercalate
Chapter One: A Wilderness Of Wolves
Part One: The Man Who Sold The World
Part Two: From Nowhere
Part Three: Throne Of The Wolf-King
Part Four: All You Need Is What You Want
Part Five: In The Forests Of The Night
Part Six: Dissociation
Part Seven: From Below
Part Eight: Sunshine
Part Nine: Antagonist
Interlude Two: Abel In The Dark, Abel In The Night
Part Ten: Blood Of The Lamb
Part Eleven: Chrysaor
Part Twelve: Jam Session
Part Thirteen: Flickering Low
Part Fourteen: Hunger
Fanworks
Duty Demands by @Maugan Ra
Shades Of The Enslaved by @Omicron
Lookshyan Slasher-Spirits by @EarthScorpion
Frozen Beauties by @EarthScorpion
Existential Ectoplasmic Entities by @NonSequtur
O! the husk by @mothematics
No Man, No Monster So Mighty by @mothematics
Homebrew: Innocence Lost by @Gnarker
Artwork: Harrower's Familiar by @Camellia
Homebrew: The Accuser by @LupineVolt
Supplements
Lookshyan Empire Profile by @Chehrazad
Last edited:
Prologue Part One: Born To Die
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
PROLOGUE: UNWORTHY
There are no gods for helots. If there ever were they were taken and bound in the Subjugation, shackled as were their faithful. If there ever were they turned their coats and betrayed their worshippers or were scythed down and slaughtered by the dragon-scaled lords of Lookshy. Or simply carried forth on the prayers of exiles fleeing the carnage as they spread across the half-empty, Contagion-gutted Scavenger Lands; refugees alongside refugees.
There are no shrines for helots. If there ever were they were torn down, destroyed in the Subjugation, congregations driven forth into the dark or barred within while the fires were set. If there ever were they are graves and ghosts now, host only to soot-caked skeletons and worms. Only known by the impressions they left behind; an imprint upon stone, rotted cloth on a high crag, sunken foundations forming depressions in regimented, razor-perfect fields.
You worship as your brothers and sisters do, as your parents did, as theirs did, as did generations unbroken back to the last days of Deheleshen. To the advent of Lookshy from the ashes of Contagion and Invasion, come to deliver the world from an existence without itself. You pray beneath an empty sky, with your head bowed and your knees in the dirt. The morning mists clammy against your skin; The Listener to Untold Sorrows holding forth his sermon. You pray to gods that do not know you, do not love you, and are not yours. Gods of Industry and Military Might, Gods of Fertility and the Fortress-City that Spans Rivers. Daevas of Obedience and Meekness and Fidelity. You pray knowing your incarnation is bound, shackled to a slow turning, ever-grinding wheel and that is only with death that you will be free. That is only your suffering, your service, that will absolve you from past-lives full of sin.
There is no mercy for helots. Mercy is for citizens, for men and women; you? You're just...a thing. An effigy of meat and ivory, dead behind its mud-brown eyes. Hair stitched into its cold scalp; a few shades darker than those irises, edging into nearly black, standing up in licks and small spikes. Wearing features that someone once said are more suited to a smile and was it a compliment? Was it a warning, a cruel joke? The Encrypted Ones take the strong, the beautiful, the brave and leave them hanging half-gutted from the trees; with their fingers like fat sausages and tongue bloated between pried apart jaws. A wretched sort of fruit made all the worse when it's ripe.
Maybe you're lucky in that sense: if you're handsome it's not meaningfully more than anyone else. If you're pleasant to look upon, to speak to, to see smile it's never been enough to be dangerous. Not tall enough to stand above a crowd nor short enough to be mistaken for the weak, the ill, the infirm. Able to do the work demanded with a body that's all muscle and bone and little else and precious little of that to begin with. There's never been a day where you haven't been able to count every rib. There's never been a time when you haven't been able to all but see the sinews work beneath the skin.
What a wonderful helot you are. If they could stamp a million in your mold you know they'd be glad to do it, and what is that if not a compliment? What more could any slave desire? Is that not something like affection?
...How would you know?
You've had men or, maybe it'd be more accurate to say that they've mostly had you and maybe that was something near enough. A kind of warmth, a sort of heat, something to clutch close in the darkness and stillness and pre-dawn hush. And you adore the Dragons because even the Listeners to Untold Sorrows say that anyone, anything, can find peace and balance within the Five. Can be blessed and beloved in turn. The Dragons made all mankind, their names are written on your organs, tattooed on your tendons and etched into the very essence of your being. Pasiap, Daana'd, Mela, Sextes Jylis, and Hesiesh. Your Hesiesh. You venerate them with each and every breath. Venerate him.
Avatar of the Elemental Pole of Fire, Lord of the South: the Destroyer and the Renewer. A living, raging, inferno who cannot be contained, cannot be constrained; who can never be extinguished, who will never cease.
Who will never cease.
You were born in the last week of Ascending Fire. And a year later, when your mother and father knew you'd survive and grow, they gave you a gift. She was the one who found it when she was walking back from the fields: a stone small as a forefinger and a thumb touched together. A wind-polished rock that gleamed red as cherries, red as fresh spilled blood; baking in the Summer sun and hot to the touch. She glued it to a wood backing and bound it tightly, your father etched it, set it with the impression of coils and claws and a reptilian face in profile. Some latent shred of artistry, brought back out into the light if only for a night. When they gave you to the Listener for your naming you wore it around your neck on a leather thong.
He's always been there for you; something like a constant companion, something like an enduring dream. A creature of flame wrapped around you, embracing you with arms of ember and smoke; claws that gleam molten resting so gently on your chest. A kind of comfort for the long hours alone, when the emptiness inside threatens to eat you alive from the inside out. Those nights that are so cold beneath the ragged blankets that you're afraid the enamel in your teeth will chip and crack they're chattering so hard.
If you can hold affection for anything you hold it for him. If you can love anything you love him. And if you can do that then maybe the feeling within you will grow and spread like so much fire and one day, in this life or the next, you can be more than just an effigy. More than just a thing, silently screaming with a mouth long-since sewn shut.
You stand in the square, in the dust and the blood and feel the leather cord rest around your neck. You feel the stone itself beneath your tunic, flat against your chest and it's a kind of warmth, a sort of heat. Something better than the roaring pillar of orange and yellow, the bodies within breaking as they decohere. The heat distortion roiling through the air like liquid fat and shed oils, grease floating on the skin of the water.
"Helots face front!" Instinctive discipline and the bare bones of drilling, long experience and the expectation of blows, make the response, if not perfect, then at least automatic. The curve of keloid over your right cheekbone aching at the memory as you pivot in place with the others. The bonfire bathing half your face in its ambient glow. The entire block shuffling, shifting, around you.
Ahead: the open road, flanked on either side by waves of golden grain. The shadow of the Talon-Captain passes by, racing along the ground and you feel more than hear the heavy impact of hooves. The commander and her escort close enough that a brief wind tugs and toys with locks of your hair. All around you men and women in scarlet and silver and dark brown leather are forming up. A few setting out already in neat, razor-lined columns; perfect formations.
Behind you, all around you: the sounds of whips slithering to the ground. Hunch down, grit your teeth; breath hitching as the long lines of paler tissue across your back throb. Tiny tremors working their way up through your limbs. There's an ear splitting crack, like a wood log shattering, and the front lines of the block jerk into motion. The five hundred of you unfurling in an accordion motion as the ranks compress and squeeze together and space out again, uneven paces and asymmetrical strides ruining the synchronicity. Fear and punishment driving you on. Everyone walks past the pyre, some around you tilt their heads and turn to see it up close and personal.
But no one looks back. They don't let you.
An hour in and your thighs are already burning, this steady, slow-chewing ache that starts at heel tendons and works its way up to the base of your spine. Sweat dripping down your back, a damp blotch that runs across your lean shoulders and down to your tailbone. Planned fields and packed dirt roads have given way to sparse groves of cypress trees, yellowed grass in the shade. To the paved Shogunate road, faintly cracked slabs of supercrete; lines of paint and stripes worn down and eroded by centuries of wind and rain and elemental exposure. Broad enough that even marching almost twenty abreast the Talon and its convoy barely take up half of it.
Other companies have joined you since you left Sublime Bounty, flowing up the curving ramps that fan out from the ancient, elevated avenue. The trickle of humanity growing, bloating, as the theme reconvenes, rebuilding itself to full muster. The mass of shepherded helots doubling once, then again, until you're lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces. The inhabitants of other villages, agricultural settlements and construction crews and fishing enclaves melted and merged together. Jostling you and pressing in on every side; flinching instinctively as you hear whip-cracks on the fringes. The sharp cries of the injured.
Still, small mercies. It's been long enough that you can talk if you're careful and the crowd around you stirs with muttered conversation. Words lost beneath the whisper of countless cloth-and-hide shoes, beneath the steady trudging of the soldiers ahead and behind; the impact of their boots like rolling thunder, punctuated by the jingle of shining chain. The marching music rings out over the landscape; a steady, utilitarian tempo beneath stirring strings and light pipes. Underneath it all the creak of the wagoncarts piled high with rations and casks of chilled water (some for you, most for them).
Glance to your right and see a young girl with red rimmed eyes and a running nose. Walking hand in hand with a stone-faced man, his features too similar to be anything but a close relation. His shoulders set against the crush of people, forcing them to move around him, around them. Holding her like he's seconds away from dragging her in and wrapping his arms around her or carrying her outright. You hear the girl's voice, soft and gutwrenching, as she asks a question. You only catch a single word, a half-choked "mama?" The corner of the man's mouth twitches, he starts to reply and it's then that he notices you, his expression changing into something wary bordering on outright hostile as he pulls the girl in closer. You can't even find it in yourself to fault him.
You look to your left. "Do you know where we're going?" You ask.
The man runs his tongue over slightly too-sharp teeth and grimaces. "Not a fucking clue," he replies.
Part your lips and pause, your gaze lingering on him. He's straw blonde and suntanned, younger than you by at least a few years yet still he stands head-if-not-shoulders taller. A solid jaw and open, almost trusting features, that still smolder with a deep intensity. Muscle clings to him, even half-starved and half-wasted he still looks as if he's been fed fairly regularly. A fisherman's son? You're jealous.
"Alexius," you say after a second.
"Jason," he replies, grey eyes flickering over you. A moment and he slows his stride, you adjust your pace, the two of you walking side by side. You open your mouth to say something, to add something, suddenly so hesitant, almost shy when the world around you darkens. A shadow sweeping over the crowd. You hear a distant thrum, a vibration faintly resonating in the hollow parts of your chest. You see people pointing, gesturing. Slowly, slowly, you look up.
The airship is a massive thing, a single titanic arrow-head wing wreathed in visible wind-currents. Enormous props slowly turning, at the back, bound elementals as thick as any fog around the blades. The underside studded and blistered by an arc of ribbed oblongs. Beams of sunlight filtering through the colossal crimson membranes. Gleaming off the latticework of gantries and and lightweight cabins that cling to the underside in a spider's web of steel. The heraldry of Gens Nefvarin emblazoned across the largest portions. Surrounded by a flight of smaller craft, riverine junks taken to the sky. Bristling with cloth sails on every side and suspended beneath long balloons of their own. Sharing the prevailing, concentrated gale. Gliding along, barely seeming to move and yet easily, trivially, outstripping the ground-bound army. The shadow receding, the temperature spiking as it leaves you entirely.
The two of you are silent.
"I mean," you say at last, "That's a good sign right?"
"Wouldn't bother with all this if we were just going to be digging our own graves eh?"
You laugh at that, he joins in. Gods you hope he's right.
But. Still. Gallows humor aside, you're making a friend, you think. That's good. He looks like he can take care of himself too and that's even better because you don't have anyone else right now. And you don't want to be by yourself with no one to watch your back when you finally arrive to...wherever you've been tasked to. "The Front".
Keep the conversation going.
[ ] Ask if he's seen the Dragonblooded in charge of this theme. Every significant army division has at least one, if not more, and you know many by reputation. And for good reason.
[ ] Ask if he knows anything about The Front. You don't get many soldiers in Sublime Bounty but maybe he's heard more. It must be getting bad if they've got so many of you like this.
[ ] Ask Jason about himself. It's useful to know more and it's always good to be wary, informers and collaborators are everywhere. But you've always excelled at keeping your head down.
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Prologue Part Two: On The Nature Of Daylight
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The crowd sweeps you along; a constant pushing, a continuous force. A tide you couldn't turn against even if you tried. Bodies packed in on every side, once somewhat-regimented rows jagged and sloppy and shuffled into each other as the distance and strain begins to tell. A plume of dust hangs overhead, fine grit and silicates coating the inside of your mouth, your nose, the corners of your lips. The ambient heat turns the already still, hot air up to sweltering. Pushing the temperature higher and higher until until it feels like every breath is pulled from the inside of a stone oven and you're dripping wet, soaked in sweat. Eyes stinging with the salt. Mirages ripple across the roadway, the stone seeming half-submerged before it nears. Rising from the distortion. Crumbling arteries and raised earthworks feeding in and branching out in great, lazy arcs every so many miles. The path itself arrowing to the horizon, flat and even as an anvil-top.
A collection of thoughts struggle and twitch in the back of your head, a den of stirred snakes. You're hungry and you don't know when you'll be fed. More importantly you're thirsty and you don't know when they'll let you drink. Have helots started to fall? It's only been an hour or so, the sun hasn't reached the zenith yet. There are still shadows on the ground. But soon...soon yeah soon.
It'll start soon. You remember how it goes.
There are no gods for helots but there are always masters. A hand that reaches down from on high to shape and sculpt, to organize and relocate. This many to the fields. This many to the City to work the halls and homes and villas of the citizenry. This many to the canal docks and riverine ports. This many to the lumber yards, this many to the mines.
This many to the ragged edged, open pits of sucking earth; to the abattoirs of mud and blood-spattered bodies. This many to the stakes; wrists and ankles bound and a spear piercing the chest, left displayed for the crows. This many to poisoned bread and tainted meat; white foam dripping from their lips as toxin chews them apart from the inside out. This many to the river shallows swirling with clouds of scarlet and this many to pile high on the pyre.
This many to the children. Their children.
Their children hunt you. Lookshy's youth, the dedicated and the promising and the prominent; pulled from the masses of new, raw recruits and plucked from dynastic family trees. Placed under the care of the very keenest, the very cruelest officers the Empire has to offer. Pleasing their parents with your deaths. The next generation of senior commanders and civil officials writing out their loyalty to Lookshy in your blood, because only those who were willing and able to kill for the City so young could ever be expected to lead it.
From their ranks come the very worst.
"...Do you know who the General is," you ask tentatively, your voice so soft that Jason has to tilt his head in to hear the question, "I didn't recognize the banners at the village."
His expression clouds, he grimaces. He drags his forearm across his brow as the two of you walk and takes a second to shake the moisture from his fingers before he responds. Like he's trying to figure out how to word it before giving up and saying it all in one go. "Aikaterine Sidonia, I saw her at the riverside when they were clearing out Dock Complex Zero One Three"
"Oh," you say.
Oh.
There are many things to one could say about Aikaterine Sidonia. She is of the blood of Sextes Jylis and a close cousin to the current Matriarch of her family. Her aunt once held the rank of Blessed-in-Purple Eternal: first among equals, first among the Conclave and the City it governs. She and her cousin both number among the Archontic Conclave itself, those three hundred Exalted whose decisions set the course of the Empire. She is pious, beloved of the gods and her clan wealthy beyond compare and even if everyone knows she holds her command more for her kinship than military merit none would dare question her skill; not aloud, not in private, not in the hushed silence of their own heads.
You know all this but that's not why you know her. And that's not the story that's told about her. Because there is, really, only one story to be told about Aikaterine Sidonia: The Festival of Falling Flowers.
Emancipation isn't unknown, usually after the slave's distinguished death and usually for the helot's family if they can be found. Not common, no, but it can happen. When her heritage was made manifest Aikaterine Sidonia insisted on a grand gesture, a display of goodwill for the faithful. You were a boy then, caught in the awkward years between child and teen, rubbing shackle-scraped wrists as you listened, wide eyed. Awed and envious in equal measure: five thousand to be set free. Five thousand to be liberated. Five thousand of the truly faithful, as chosen by the village Listeners to have their chains struck. To be born again by the grace of the dragons.
You remember seeing the procession as it wound past the titanic canal; men and women, young and old, crowned with flowers and flanked by soldiers. Taken on a long circuit of the Aikaterine temples: the complex to Mars Carrion Crow, Crone-Goddess of War. The shrines to the Sebastokratorissa of Cinnamon and Smoke, Green-Wood Cataphract, the Nine Ivy Handmaidens. Rejoicing, weeping, proud; something so long caged within them unbound for the first time in their lives.
Five thousand lead away to the villa of the Aikaterine, just within the seventh wall.
You wonder, sometimes, how they died in that darkness, on those ancestral grounds. What it was like hearing the chuckling of the guards, the rasp of steel as swords cleared leather sheaths; feeling the chains draw tight and the collars catch, the cell door slamming shut with your fingers inches from the threshold. You imagine those flower crowns falling as blades cut into unarmored flesh and arrows riddle soft organs; tearing those ridiculous outfits to rags. But even that's just so much speculation really, because nobody knows what happened to those five thousand, what she did, what theatricality she had to cap off the night of celebration.
All anyone knows is that not one of them were ever seen again.
Overseers were still laughing about it years later as you worked to repair the outer fortifications. Can you blame them?
What a good joke.
Your hands are trembling again, fingers curling and flexing. The scar beneath your eye aching, the memory of a gauntleted hand and the impact of metal on bone shuddering through. Someone says your name and you don't really notice. Someone says your name and you'd respond you suppose but it's suddenly so hard to breathe, like all you can get are little sips, like there's a cloth drawn tight over your nose, your mouth.
Jason cuffs your arm and you flinch so intensely you all but stumble out of place, out of position; losing your balance, almost falling in the crowd, the crush of people, and then his hand is on your elbow. Tugging you back, steadying you, gently guiding you closer to him and out of the path of the marchers just behind you. Both your eyes reflexively going to the mounted guards that ride alongside the column, waiting to see if they've noticed the little eddy, the stir in the center. Both of you relaxing, the tension ebbing from your spine as you exhale together.
"It'll be fine, I think. She's cruel but she's- enh, shit. What's the word? Where you're inconsistent and easily bored?"
"(Capricious?)," you murmur, half remembered phrases from a Listener's sermon bubbling up.
"Capricious yeah, it's not as if she'll have much attention for us."
You nod. You open your mouth to apologize, to say something grateful, "Why do you care?" falls out instead. Barely audible, almost ashamed. And despite the now long-distant dawn seeing his smile is like seeing the sun come out all over again. The first sliver just cresting the horizon to strip away mist and paint the sky in pinks and orange. The kind of expression that almost works the eyes shut, like a happy dog. Unselfconscious and something like certain, almost cocky, even if you see the matching flinch, the inward wince, as he looks away.
"I don't have anyone either you know? And you were over here, looking so sad," a shrug of those sinewy shoulders, hair like spun gold mussed up as the wind slowly stirs, "...Besides, you're kind of skinny, so I figured if worst came to worst I could probably take you hah!"
You crack a grin at that too; a snarled up, crooked thing but, well, it is true.
Music plays, the road wears on, you talk more on your plans, your strategy for survival. Talking until exhaustion squeezes your lungs and your throats feel worn and cracked. But you don't mind because for the first time in years and years you...remember what it's like. To have a friend.
That night you sleep side by side on the cold earth. Wrapped up in your padded jackets, shivering as you try to preserve what few scraps of heat you have; husband them between you. His arms, larger and stronger, around your lean chest. Your back against his breast. All around you the miserable masses of humanity, bedded down like beasts in faint depressions and small grassy hollows by the side of the road.
The tents of Lookshyan soldiers a few hundred paces away in neat, perfect rows of white canvas. Firelight flickering, casting shadows down the temporary streets. A man tries to run in the night, two more helots are kicked awake to deal with his body. You watch as they vanish into the dark, spades over their shoulders.
They march you out of the heartland. The rising sun searing your eyes, the setting sun roasting your neck each and every day. They march you until the walls of the City are just a memory. Until you see mountains rear up in the distance, white-capped even in the heart of Summer, flanks thickly forested and riven with deep valleys. Until Jason frowns and says he thinks you're only a few days travel from the Yanaze.
Messathalene is to the North but across the river, Thorns and the Marukani are straight South. Port Calin is back the way you came. Are they just going to march you all the way to Nexus?
You find out as the exhausted column descends upon the middling-sized Mining Outpost One Five Two: Ivory Bones of Immaculate Earth. A bare bones, military-planned settlement surrounded by tier-etched foothills and chalk-white quarries; milky, clouded blue creeks trickling through sheer ravines. Blocks of limestone sitting at the depot, waiting to be carried to the river and sailed down to the City proper. Left sitting because the Yanaze, Lookshy's leash on the throats of the Scavenger Lands is compromised.
Xauma has seized the riverine ports on the North shore. Three days before you arrived the Wolf-King crossed the waters and took the towns of the Triadic River Ministry by storm.
Within the week he'll be here.
Ivory Bones of Immaculate Earth is meant to house a small military garrison and a steadily replenished force of helot laborers, the town's population has never risen above two and a half thousand souls since it was first built. It is currently hosting more than twice that in legionaries and auxiliaries from the Aikaterine theme alone. To say nothing of you.
It's already seething with activity as your escorts herd you like so many sheep down the rocky, gravel-laced trail and into the town square. The sun poised at the start of its long, gradual descent below the horizon. Its light the color of molten copper, drowning the world in an angry, sullen glow. Jason looks to you, questioning. They're starting to carve out sloppy chunks of the helot forces, strong backs and limbs for the thousand things that need doing. You look down the slope to the town center, unease stirring in your gut as you see the governor's home draped in rich, green-threaded banners. Surrounded by guards in green-tinged jadesteel.
She's here.
And you have options and opportunities.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups starting on the earthworks and fortifications. It'll be hard labor but you can see that they're being fed and watered first and you've barely had any of either all day. Hunger and thirst chew on you.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups being sent to help set up the army's camp. Soldiers can be dangerous if the mood takes them, but you can see the heaped supply wagons by the first tents. Maybe you can get actual blankets.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups being stabled in the town itself. The public square is right beside the municipal magistrate's manor but they seem like they're getting a chance to actually rest before they're rotated on.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups being attached to the scouting parties. It'll be more traveling, at speed too even, and with soldiers. But you and Jason will be able to overhear what they share, maybe even learn more.
A collection of thoughts struggle and twitch in the back of your head, a den of stirred snakes. You're hungry and you don't know when you'll be fed. More importantly you're thirsty and you don't know when they'll let you drink. Have helots started to fall? It's only been an hour or so, the sun hasn't reached the zenith yet. There are still shadows on the ground. But soon...soon yeah soon.
It'll start soon. You remember how it goes.
There are no gods for helots but there are always masters. A hand that reaches down from on high to shape and sculpt, to organize and relocate. This many to the fields. This many to the City to work the halls and homes and villas of the citizenry. This many to the canal docks and riverine ports. This many to the lumber yards, this many to the mines.
This many to the ragged edged, open pits of sucking earth; to the abattoirs of mud and blood-spattered bodies. This many to the stakes; wrists and ankles bound and a spear piercing the chest, left displayed for the crows. This many to poisoned bread and tainted meat; white foam dripping from their lips as toxin chews them apart from the inside out. This many to the river shallows swirling with clouds of scarlet and this many to pile high on the pyre.
This many to the children. Their children.
Their children hunt you. Lookshy's youth, the dedicated and the promising and the prominent; pulled from the masses of new, raw recruits and plucked from dynastic family trees. Placed under the care of the very keenest, the very cruelest officers the Empire has to offer. Pleasing their parents with your deaths. The next generation of senior commanders and civil officials writing out their loyalty to Lookshy in your blood, because only those who were willing and able to kill for the City so young could ever be expected to lead it.
From their ranks come the very worst.
"...Do you know who the General is," you ask tentatively, your voice so soft that Jason has to tilt his head in to hear the question, "I didn't recognize the banners at the village."
His expression clouds, he grimaces. He drags his forearm across his brow as the two of you walk and takes a second to shake the moisture from his fingers before he responds. Like he's trying to figure out how to word it before giving up and saying it all in one go. "Aikaterine Sidonia, I saw her at the riverside when they were clearing out Dock Complex Zero One Three"
"Oh," you say.
Oh.
There are many things to one could say about Aikaterine Sidonia. She is of the blood of Sextes Jylis and a close cousin to the current Matriarch of her family. Her aunt once held the rank of Blessed-in-Purple Eternal: first among equals, first among the Conclave and the City it governs. She and her cousin both number among the Archontic Conclave itself, those three hundred Exalted whose decisions set the course of the Empire. She is pious, beloved of the gods and her clan wealthy beyond compare and even if everyone knows she holds her command more for her kinship than military merit none would dare question her skill; not aloud, not in private, not in the hushed silence of their own heads.
You know all this but that's not why you know her. And that's not the story that's told about her. Because there is, really, only one story to be told about Aikaterine Sidonia: The Festival of Falling Flowers.
Emancipation isn't unknown, usually after the slave's distinguished death and usually for the helot's family if they can be found. Not common, no, but it can happen. When her heritage was made manifest Aikaterine Sidonia insisted on a grand gesture, a display of goodwill for the faithful. You were a boy then, caught in the awkward years between child and teen, rubbing shackle-scraped wrists as you listened, wide eyed. Awed and envious in equal measure: five thousand to be set free. Five thousand to be liberated. Five thousand of the truly faithful, as chosen by the village Listeners to have their chains struck. To be born again by the grace of the dragons.
You remember seeing the procession as it wound past the titanic canal; men and women, young and old, crowned with flowers and flanked by soldiers. Taken on a long circuit of the Aikaterine temples: the complex to Mars Carrion Crow, Crone-Goddess of War. The shrines to the Sebastokratorissa of Cinnamon and Smoke, Green-Wood Cataphract, the Nine Ivy Handmaidens. Rejoicing, weeping, proud; something so long caged within them unbound for the first time in their lives.
Five thousand lead away to the villa of the Aikaterine, just within the seventh wall.
You wonder, sometimes, how they died in that darkness, on those ancestral grounds. What it was like hearing the chuckling of the guards, the rasp of steel as swords cleared leather sheaths; feeling the chains draw tight and the collars catch, the cell door slamming shut with your fingers inches from the threshold. You imagine those flower crowns falling as blades cut into unarmored flesh and arrows riddle soft organs; tearing those ridiculous outfits to rags. But even that's just so much speculation really, because nobody knows what happened to those five thousand, what she did, what theatricality she had to cap off the night of celebration.
All anyone knows is that not one of them were ever seen again.
Overseers were still laughing about it years later as you worked to repair the outer fortifications. Can you blame them?
What a good joke.
Your hands are trembling again, fingers curling and flexing. The scar beneath your eye aching, the memory of a gauntleted hand and the impact of metal on bone shuddering through. Someone says your name and you don't really notice. Someone says your name and you'd respond you suppose but it's suddenly so hard to breathe, like all you can get are little sips, like there's a cloth drawn tight over your nose, your mouth.
Jason cuffs your arm and you flinch so intensely you all but stumble out of place, out of position; losing your balance, almost falling in the crowd, the crush of people, and then his hand is on your elbow. Tugging you back, steadying you, gently guiding you closer to him and out of the path of the marchers just behind you. Both your eyes reflexively going to the mounted guards that ride alongside the column, waiting to see if they've noticed the little eddy, the stir in the center. Both of you relaxing, the tension ebbing from your spine as you exhale together.
"It'll be fine, I think. She's cruel but she's- enh, shit. What's the word? Where you're inconsistent and easily bored?"
"(Capricious?)," you murmur, half remembered phrases from a Listener's sermon bubbling up.
"Capricious yeah, it's not as if she'll have much attention for us."
You nod. You open your mouth to apologize, to say something grateful, "Why do you care?" falls out instead. Barely audible, almost ashamed. And despite the now long-distant dawn seeing his smile is like seeing the sun come out all over again. The first sliver just cresting the horizon to strip away mist and paint the sky in pinks and orange. The kind of expression that almost works the eyes shut, like a happy dog. Unselfconscious and something like certain, almost cocky, even if you see the matching flinch, the inward wince, as he looks away.
"I don't have anyone either you know? And you were over here, looking so sad," a shrug of those sinewy shoulders, hair like spun gold mussed up as the wind slowly stirs, "...Besides, you're kind of skinny, so I figured if worst came to worst I could probably take you hah!"
You crack a grin at that too; a snarled up, crooked thing but, well, it is true.
Music plays, the road wears on, you talk more on your plans, your strategy for survival. Talking until exhaustion squeezes your lungs and your throats feel worn and cracked. But you don't mind because for the first time in years and years you...remember what it's like. To have a friend.
That night you sleep side by side on the cold earth. Wrapped up in your padded jackets, shivering as you try to preserve what few scraps of heat you have; husband them between you. His arms, larger and stronger, around your lean chest. Your back against his breast. All around you the miserable masses of humanity, bedded down like beasts in faint depressions and small grassy hollows by the side of the road.
The tents of Lookshyan soldiers a few hundred paces away in neat, perfect rows of white canvas. Firelight flickering, casting shadows down the temporary streets. A man tries to run in the night, two more helots are kicked awake to deal with his body. You watch as they vanish into the dark, spades over their shoulders.
They march you out of the heartland. The rising sun searing your eyes, the setting sun roasting your neck each and every day. They march you until the walls of the City are just a memory. Until you see mountains rear up in the distance, white-capped even in the heart of Summer, flanks thickly forested and riven with deep valleys. Until Jason frowns and says he thinks you're only a few days travel from the Yanaze.
Messathalene is to the North but across the river, Thorns and the Marukani are straight South. Port Calin is back the way you came. Are they just going to march you all the way to Nexus?
You find out as the exhausted column descends upon the middling-sized Mining Outpost One Five Two: Ivory Bones of Immaculate Earth. A bare bones, military-planned settlement surrounded by tier-etched foothills and chalk-white quarries; milky, clouded blue creeks trickling through sheer ravines. Blocks of limestone sitting at the depot, waiting to be carried to the river and sailed down to the City proper. Left sitting because the Yanaze, Lookshy's leash on the throats of the Scavenger Lands is compromised.
Xauma has seized the riverine ports on the North shore. Three days before you arrived the Wolf-King crossed the waters and took the towns of the Triadic River Ministry by storm.
Within the week he'll be here.
Ivory Bones of Immaculate Earth is meant to house a small military garrison and a steadily replenished force of helot laborers, the town's population has never risen above two and a half thousand souls since it was first built. It is currently hosting more than twice that in legionaries and auxiliaries from the Aikaterine theme alone. To say nothing of you.
It's already seething with activity as your escorts herd you like so many sheep down the rocky, gravel-laced trail and into the town square. The sun poised at the start of its long, gradual descent below the horizon. Its light the color of molten copper, drowning the world in an angry, sullen glow. Jason looks to you, questioning. They're starting to carve out sloppy chunks of the helot forces, strong backs and limbs for the thousand things that need doing. You look down the slope to the town center, unease stirring in your gut as you see the governor's home draped in rich, green-threaded banners. Surrounded by guards in green-tinged jadesteel.
She's here.
And you have options and opportunities.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups starting on the earthworks and fortifications. It'll be hard labor but you can see that they're being fed and watered first and you've barely had any of either all day. Hunger and thirst chew on you.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups being sent to help set up the army's camp. Soldiers can be dangerous if the mood takes them, but you can see the heaped supply wagons by the first tents. Maybe you can get actual blankets.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups being stabled in the town itself. The public square is right beside the municipal magistrate's manor but they seem like they're getting a chance to actually rest before they're rotated on.
[ ] Slip in with one of the work groups being attached to the scouting parties. It'll be more traveling, at speed too even, and with soldiers. But you and Jason will be able to overhear what they share, maybe even learn more.
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Prologue Part Three: Eat Me Alive
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's kind of funny isn't it? Thirst has a taste, hunger has a flavor all its own. The absence of the thing becomes a presence in and of itself.
A mouthful of sand, of mud and fired river-clay, coating your tongue and caking the inside of you throat. A throbbing in your softer tissues, in your kidneys, matched by a muffled pounding in your head. Hammers wrapped in cotton, every heartbeat an impact on the inside of your skull; your brain swollen two sizes too large for the bone that encloses it. Below: a nest of rats, worrying away at the inside your stomach. Bald, worm-like tails trailing over the lining of your guts as the sleek-furred things chitter and scratch; crawling over each other, circling, searching for a way out. Your body riding that borderline, straddling that boundary between intense nausea and near starvation.
It hurts but you can bear it. It aches but you've been here before. You know your limits don't you? Better than most, better than those soldiers that surround you maybe. You know how much more you have left in you; how many more shaky miles on unsteady legs, how many more ragged, wheezing breaths with torn up lungs. You know you could keep going if you had to, you've done it before and isn't that the way you handle everything?
You've done it before. You've had worse. You can do this. You can survive, you can endure, and you never think you can in the moment but then you grit your teeth and put one foot in front of the other anyway. Shoulder the next burden, no matter how much your arms tremble. And there's the joke because one day you'll think you can and won't be able to. One day you'll give up, give in, and the broken, bandaged up mess you are on the inside will finally implode. And you'll die there kneeling in the dust, tears streaming down your face and bawling as twenty-something years of suppressed anger and grief and pain and shame comes flooding out in a single instant. In the handful of seconds before the sword is drawn and the blade bites into your throat.
Or...maybe not. Maybe at the end you'll die as you lived: mute and meek and with nothing really worth saying anyway. It doesn't really matter, it doesn't bear thinking about; either way that day's not today.
You think. You hope. You never know, it might be if you can't make up your fucking mind.
It's late afternoon now and the vast crowd of unsorted helots mills aimlessly all around you. Most purposeless, too exhausted to really keep moving, not brave enough to actually sit. Some searching, looking for separated companions and lost kin; you hear their voices, tense and fraught. Calling out names as loud as they dare; a list, a litany of half-heard syllables and desperate questions, floating on the breeze.
Lift your chin; enjoy the wind that comes down from the North, from the Yanaze River. A steady, cool thing that dries the sweat and leeches away some of the oppressive, omnipresent heat. A brief reprieve after the day, too little and too late to make much of a difference but not unappreciated. It helps blunt your hunger, your thirst, the two needs all but screaming in your ears. Your hand drifts up, thumb touched to the scarlet stone hanging just beneath your tunic. Feeling the outline of the little rock. Pressing the toker closer to your chest in a nervous gesture as you think.
You lick your lips despite yourself. Feeling chapped, dead skin catch and tug; feeling the corners of your mouth, small cuts stinging. Your palm slips down until it's pressed to your sunken stomach. The shadow of muscle just beneath the skin, like stones sunk beneath a few millimeters of water. The bone of your ribs all but showing through the cloth, fabric hanging loose, flesh stretched so tight. Your fingers half-crook themselves into claws; like you can keep the rats caged, like you can keep them from eating their way out through your navel and spilling, glossy and fat onto the ground.
"(I...how hungry are you? I think we can-)"
And then Jason cheerfully takes you by the arm and promptly steers you through the crowd of dead-eyed men and empty-faced women, the hundreds waiting to be portioned and partitioned. Narrowly dodging a unit of heavy infantry wading into crush, empty space forming around them as everyone abruptly tries to be somewhere else, anywhere else. They clink like a rich man's purse with every step, crimson cloth barely muffling the shifting mass of metal. Swathed in scarlet coats, crowned in silvery steel; overlapping fishscales spreading over their chests and backs, trailing thickened leather layers that hang over their thighs, the tails of their long coats. A heavy skirt sewn with more glittering mirrors. Every step is a swaying, a parting of strata. Like fanned sheets of paper, ruffled back by a pair of thumbs. Their eyes just points of light in the shadows of their helms, above the aquiline, angled masks that cover their cheeks, their jaws. Their line spreads out behind you, cutting you off from the rest. A no man's land, growing wider with every passing second.
He lets you go then, lets you walk ahead, and you glance back with a shy, almost sheepish expression. Absently pushing back stray spikes of hair as the two of you join the crowd clustered around a half-unpacked wagon. A line of guards in lighter armor, dark hide strips and a single piece of harness for the vitals, chain veils for faces. They don't speak to you, they don't even look at you, don't even touch you. One shoves a torn off chunk of bread into your hands, another drops a strip of some smoked meat into your grip. There's barrels of water just past them; long-handled ladles bobbing in the dark, fractals of frost, faint snow still clinging to the insides.
A few deep draughts of water, just enough, the minimum you need; so cold you almost gasp and gag as it ices its way down your throat. You go in for another and a guard jerks his chin, hand on the hilt of his sword, and you drop the ladle with a swallow. Fading back into the reduced crowd, still hundreds strong here. Jason follows you a second later; maneuvering you like a shield or a battering ram through the knots of helots, the dazed stragglers, to a cleared, raised rock. A dusty ledge but you'll take it and you all but sob as you finally let your legs give out and slump down. Him groaning under his breath as he lowers himself beside you. Still wearing that faint, utterly unapologetic smile, those grey eyes gleaming with something that could be amusement. And it's nice you think. To see someone who could almost be happy despite everything.
You forgot what that was like.
The two of you sit in comfortable silence. A small island of stability, security, amidst the press. His body so close to yours, his leg against yours, the two of you together, he with you and you with him and you-
You forgot what that was like too.
Stare at the food in your hand, the scraps, and you have to fight the urge to drool. It's really not much, some kind of dark rye and a slice of savory pork. You want it. You want it more than anything you've ever wanted in your life, you want it so badly it hurts. But that's...exactly it isn't it? Because you can bear it, because you know your limits, because you've done plenty with even less and you- if the two of you make it through this, if you survive at all, it won't be because your hunger was oh-so-slightly slaked by a bit of pig.
You have to jerkily lift your arm like a mechanical crane, swinging your hand over his lap, all but prying your fingers apart to let it fall. Eyes going back to your own diminished meal so you don't have to watch it vanish. The rats screech in protest, subsiding for a second as you ravenously rip into the half-loaf that's all you have left.
"Wh-"
"You're stronger than me," you say through a mouthful, fighting down the urge to snap at him, "Matters more that you can keep it up, keep from losing it. I'm already a scarecrow. I need less anyway."
It's not really even a lie either but you hope he doesn't offer it back. You don't think you can part with it a second time. You don't think you can keep from snatching it from his hand and cramming the whole thing into your greedy maw. But he doesn't. Because in the end he's like you, he understands, he can see the facts laid out before you. Instead he just looks at it, jaws parted, paused in the middle of whatever he was going to say; that small smile flickering, fading a few degrees before he nods shallowly.
You grunt in something like appreciation.
You try not to be too jealous of him. The people who live on the riverside don't really have it easier, they're only fed more because they have to lift more, but you still think about it as you chew. Wondering if you could have been taller, could have been stronger, if your shoulders would be broader and your chest deeper. Wondering if you were just born slender or it's a product of your parents hedging their bets, feeding their firstborn, feeding the youngest and most vulnerable ahead of the middle child. Wondering what it'd be like to be actually muscular, actually masculine, instead of this thing of twine and stitched rawhide. You bet it'd feel pretty great, at least before the next sweep.
A torn off chunk of meat drops on top of your last bite of bread. You tense up, gritting your teeth, eyes cutting to your right. To the blonde haired man with a jawline to kill for, staring off into the middle distance. He shrugs without looking back.
"One chunk wouldn't make much-" a flash of faintly yellowed teeth and it's gone, it's gone and you're sitting with your head hunched down, tears prickling the corners of your eyes, feeling just a little lower than an animal. Doing your best to ignore the way the rats celebrate. He shifts next to you. Drapes his arm around your bony neck, brawny forearm resting along a pectoral. He doesn't say anything else, just pretends not to notice as your breath hitches with small, sad hiccups.
You get half an hour to sit there and soak in it. Half an hour to just enjoy the feeling of being something like desired, to have something like affection. He doesn't just want to fuck you, you think. You honestly wouldn't mind if he did: it's fine, it's the way it works. You take what companionship you can find with who you can find it and you're on the better side of average, he could do worse. No he just...seems to like you. The two of you watching as the long snake of humanity winds its way through the village to the vast, empty square cut into the slope below. The army's tents already springing up on every side of Ivory Bones like a forest of canvas.
You could have been hit by a bolt of lightning out of the blue sky at any point during those thirty minutes and you would've died happy.
It ends with a sharp, shrill whistle. You start to your feet, you turn and to help him up but he's already there. Faintly amused at your instincts, at the way you avert your eyes and try to fight down the flush that feathers its way up your cheeks. And no, you don't hold hands as you muster up with the other laborers, the other slaves, you don't invite that kind of attention. But your fingers do brush his and he glances at you, half-surprised and half expectant. It's a good look on him, you find that you like it.
They march you out through the gates, into the surrounding plains. The quarries barely a quarter mile away, to the East the mountain ramparts reach up; white peaks so cold, so remote, so out of reach.
About the work they have you do what is there to say? The sky is stained orange by the time you start, streaked with yellows and reds as the sun slips lower and lower. It's an ugly, infected light, a kind of feverish glow that's captured and reflected in the heads of the pick-axes and spades they passed out to you. Thaumaturges call upon their elementals, dogs of stone and shattered earth, hydra-headed rock-worms, marble-sculpted scorpion-men with gemstone eyes, to make the first fissures, carve the first cracks into the unyielding ground. A shudder underfoot, a kind of tearing, a sort of parting; like the edges of a laceration being pulled away from each other. A shallow cut scored into the soil, widened into a true wound.
They bid you dig and so you dig.
You peel back the skin of the Creation. Gouge out it's loamy flesh, turn those first furrows into ditches, those ditches into trenches; hundreds of metal spikes and metal wedges ripping and tearing into the ground. Hundreds of helots working in almost silent synchronicity. There's no singing, no talking, just gasps of exertion and hoarse wheezing as backs slowly wrench themselves up to screaming and hands are worn red. You and Jason, two among the thousand; faceless and irrelevant. But with every thrown shovelful on the earthworks slowly taking shape you finally get a chance to look back. Stare back the way you came at the solid pillar of white perched on the rim of the world; still as thick as your finger, even at this distance. The Elemental Pole of Earth, vast beyond all imagining. Descending to the blurred out base, rising to spear the heavens. Five hundred foot high thunderheads like wispy, puffy halos at this distance, ringing the titanic column.
Realize you've been staring for longer than a handful of heartbeats, you make to throw yourself back into the labor before anyone sees. But then a... shadow passes over you, a shape in the clear late-afternoon sky. You frown and tilt your head back. Jason notices, mimicking the motion a second later.
It's the airship from before, returning from the North. It's escort reduced, the underside scorched and blackened in great starbusts of soot, enormous claw-marks along the bellies of the cabins. Two of the propellers have stopped working entirely, the air currents around them laced with smoke. Sparks spinning out with every turn of the enormous turbines. It limps past you, for a moment you think it'll stop at the village, at the army camp but it doesn't. A few of the escort craft split off but the rest just...keep going.
Back West. Back to the City.
You and Jason exchange a look and as one get back to work. Trying to ignore the slow-curdling feeling in your stomach.
It is the 21st of Descending Fire. Calibration is coming. It won't spare you.
But...still. It's easier if you let your mind drift, it's easier if you just let your focus slip. Whatever's going to happen then there's nothing you can really do about it right now. And, sure, coherent thought is hard when you can barely breathe but you have rote memory. Old stories from a dimly recalled family.
[ ] Think on the Divine. There are no gods for Helots but that is so very far from imagining that there are no gods. They exist everywhere within the Empire, governing Creation in the name of the Dragons. And even if their stories are not your stories...well. They're still pleasing things nonetheless.
[ ] Think on the Dead. Helots walk hand in hand with their own deaths, always shadowed by their own demise. And you know enough to know that in the land of the slaves the other side and its monsters are closer to the waking world than they should be. It's a grim topic true, but familiar for all that.
[ ] Think on the Damned. You know them from sermons delivered by the Listeners, the inhabitants of a world of brass and green fire. As far from Creation as Creation is from the Unconquered Sun. But your mother had stories as well. And for all that it's forbidden it's still delicious to dwell on them.
[ ] Think on the Outsiders. Creation is a walled garden and they are the beasts that prowl the Wyld without. Creatures of nightmare and insatiable hunger, unquenchable drives. In this Iron Age their raids rarely penetrate past the Empire's borders, but the scars they left during the Invasion run deep.
A mouthful of sand, of mud and fired river-clay, coating your tongue and caking the inside of you throat. A throbbing in your softer tissues, in your kidneys, matched by a muffled pounding in your head. Hammers wrapped in cotton, every heartbeat an impact on the inside of your skull; your brain swollen two sizes too large for the bone that encloses it. Below: a nest of rats, worrying away at the inside your stomach. Bald, worm-like tails trailing over the lining of your guts as the sleek-furred things chitter and scratch; crawling over each other, circling, searching for a way out. Your body riding that borderline, straddling that boundary between intense nausea and near starvation.
It hurts but you can bear it. It aches but you've been here before. You know your limits don't you? Better than most, better than those soldiers that surround you maybe. You know how much more you have left in you; how many more shaky miles on unsteady legs, how many more ragged, wheezing breaths with torn up lungs. You know you could keep going if you had to, you've done it before and isn't that the way you handle everything?
You've done it before. You've had worse. You can do this. You can survive, you can endure, and you never think you can in the moment but then you grit your teeth and put one foot in front of the other anyway. Shoulder the next burden, no matter how much your arms tremble. And there's the joke because one day you'll think you can and won't be able to. One day you'll give up, give in, and the broken, bandaged up mess you are on the inside will finally implode. And you'll die there kneeling in the dust, tears streaming down your face and bawling as twenty-something years of suppressed anger and grief and pain and shame comes flooding out in a single instant. In the handful of seconds before the sword is drawn and the blade bites into your throat.
Or...maybe not. Maybe at the end you'll die as you lived: mute and meek and with nothing really worth saying anyway. It doesn't really matter, it doesn't bear thinking about; either way that day's not today.
You think. You hope. You never know, it might be if you can't make up your fucking mind.
It's late afternoon now and the vast crowd of unsorted helots mills aimlessly all around you. Most purposeless, too exhausted to really keep moving, not brave enough to actually sit. Some searching, looking for separated companions and lost kin; you hear their voices, tense and fraught. Calling out names as loud as they dare; a list, a litany of half-heard syllables and desperate questions, floating on the breeze.
Vesta? Florian? Anna? Megas? My sister, have you seen my sister? She has eyes just like mine.
Appa? Michael? Pateria? Nazres? My brother, have you seen my brother? He looks just like me, we're twins.
Appa? Michael? Pateria? Nazres? My brother, have you seen my brother? He looks just like me, we're twins.
Lift your chin; enjoy the wind that comes down from the North, from the Yanaze River. A steady, cool thing that dries the sweat and leeches away some of the oppressive, omnipresent heat. A brief reprieve after the day, too little and too late to make much of a difference but not unappreciated. It helps blunt your hunger, your thirst, the two needs all but screaming in your ears. Your hand drifts up, thumb touched to the scarlet stone hanging just beneath your tunic. Feeling the outline of the little rock. Pressing the toker closer to your chest in a nervous gesture as you think.
You lick your lips despite yourself. Feeling chapped, dead skin catch and tug; feeling the corners of your mouth, small cuts stinging. Your palm slips down until it's pressed to your sunken stomach. The shadow of muscle just beneath the skin, like stones sunk beneath a few millimeters of water. The bone of your ribs all but showing through the cloth, fabric hanging loose, flesh stretched so tight. Your fingers half-crook themselves into claws; like you can keep the rats caged, like you can keep them from eating their way out through your navel and spilling, glossy and fat onto the ground.
"(I...how hungry are you? I think we can-)"
And then Jason cheerfully takes you by the arm and promptly steers you through the crowd of dead-eyed men and empty-faced women, the hundreds waiting to be portioned and partitioned. Narrowly dodging a unit of heavy infantry wading into crush, empty space forming around them as everyone abruptly tries to be somewhere else, anywhere else. They clink like a rich man's purse with every step, crimson cloth barely muffling the shifting mass of metal. Swathed in scarlet coats, crowned in silvery steel; overlapping fishscales spreading over their chests and backs, trailing thickened leather layers that hang over their thighs, the tails of their long coats. A heavy skirt sewn with more glittering mirrors. Every step is a swaying, a parting of strata. Like fanned sheets of paper, ruffled back by a pair of thumbs. Their eyes just points of light in the shadows of their helms, above the aquiline, angled masks that cover their cheeks, their jaws. Their line spreads out behind you, cutting you off from the rest. A no man's land, growing wider with every passing second.
He lets you go then, lets you walk ahead, and you glance back with a shy, almost sheepish expression. Absently pushing back stray spikes of hair as the two of you join the crowd clustered around a half-unpacked wagon. A line of guards in lighter armor, dark hide strips and a single piece of harness for the vitals, chain veils for faces. They don't speak to you, they don't even look at you, don't even touch you. One shoves a torn off chunk of bread into your hands, another drops a strip of some smoked meat into your grip. There's barrels of water just past them; long-handled ladles bobbing in the dark, fractals of frost, faint snow still clinging to the insides.
A few deep draughts of water, just enough, the minimum you need; so cold you almost gasp and gag as it ices its way down your throat. You go in for another and a guard jerks his chin, hand on the hilt of his sword, and you drop the ladle with a swallow. Fading back into the reduced crowd, still hundreds strong here. Jason follows you a second later; maneuvering you like a shield or a battering ram through the knots of helots, the dazed stragglers, to a cleared, raised rock. A dusty ledge but you'll take it and you all but sob as you finally let your legs give out and slump down. Him groaning under his breath as he lowers himself beside you. Still wearing that faint, utterly unapologetic smile, those grey eyes gleaming with something that could be amusement. And it's nice you think. To see someone who could almost be happy despite everything.
You forgot what that was like.
The two of you sit in comfortable silence. A small island of stability, security, amidst the press. His body so close to yours, his leg against yours, the two of you together, he with you and you with him and you-
You forgot what that was like too.
Stare at the food in your hand, the scraps, and you have to fight the urge to drool. It's really not much, some kind of dark rye and a slice of savory pork. You want it. You want it more than anything you've ever wanted in your life, you want it so badly it hurts. But that's...exactly it isn't it? Because you can bear it, because you know your limits, because you've done plenty with even less and you- if the two of you make it through this, if you survive at all, it won't be because your hunger was oh-so-slightly slaked by a bit of pig.
You have to jerkily lift your arm like a mechanical crane, swinging your hand over his lap, all but prying your fingers apart to let it fall. Eyes going back to your own diminished meal so you don't have to watch it vanish. The rats screech in protest, subsiding for a second as you ravenously rip into the half-loaf that's all you have left.
"Wh-"
"You're stronger than me," you say through a mouthful, fighting down the urge to snap at him, "Matters more that you can keep it up, keep from losing it. I'm already a scarecrow. I need less anyway."
It's not really even a lie either but you hope he doesn't offer it back. You don't think you can part with it a second time. You don't think you can keep from snatching it from his hand and cramming the whole thing into your greedy maw. But he doesn't. Because in the end he's like you, he understands, he can see the facts laid out before you. Instead he just looks at it, jaws parted, paused in the middle of whatever he was going to say; that small smile flickering, fading a few degrees before he nods shallowly.
You grunt in something like appreciation.
You try not to be too jealous of him. The people who live on the riverside don't really have it easier, they're only fed more because they have to lift more, but you still think about it as you chew. Wondering if you could have been taller, could have been stronger, if your shoulders would be broader and your chest deeper. Wondering if you were just born slender or it's a product of your parents hedging their bets, feeding their firstborn, feeding the youngest and most vulnerable ahead of the middle child. Wondering what it'd be like to be actually muscular, actually masculine, instead of this thing of twine and stitched rawhide. You bet it'd feel pretty great, at least before the next sweep.
A torn off chunk of meat drops on top of your last bite of bread. You tense up, gritting your teeth, eyes cutting to your right. To the blonde haired man with a jawline to kill for, staring off into the middle distance. He shrugs without looking back.
"One chunk wouldn't make much-" a flash of faintly yellowed teeth and it's gone, it's gone and you're sitting with your head hunched down, tears prickling the corners of your eyes, feeling just a little lower than an animal. Doing your best to ignore the way the rats celebrate. He shifts next to you. Drapes his arm around your bony neck, brawny forearm resting along a pectoral. He doesn't say anything else, just pretends not to notice as your breath hitches with small, sad hiccups.
You get half an hour to sit there and soak in it. Half an hour to just enjoy the feeling of being something like desired, to have something like affection. He doesn't just want to fuck you, you think. You honestly wouldn't mind if he did: it's fine, it's the way it works. You take what companionship you can find with who you can find it and you're on the better side of average, he could do worse. No he just...seems to like you. The two of you watching as the long snake of humanity winds its way through the village to the vast, empty square cut into the slope below. The army's tents already springing up on every side of Ivory Bones like a forest of canvas.
You could have been hit by a bolt of lightning out of the blue sky at any point during those thirty minutes and you would've died happy.
It ends with a sharp, shrill whistle. You start to your feet, you turn and to help him up but he's already there. Faintly amused at your instincts, at the way you avert your eyes and try to fight down the flush that feathers its way up your cheeks. And no, you don't hold hands as you muster up with the other laborers, the other slaves, you don't invite that kind of attention. But your fingers do brush his and he glances at you, half-surprised and half expectant. It's a good look on him, you find that you like it.
They march you out through the gates, into the surrounding plains. The quarries barely a quarter mile away, to the East the mountain ramparts reach up; white peaks so cold, so remote, so out of reach.
About the work they have you do what is there to say? The sky is stained orange by the time you start, streaked with yellows and reds as the sun slips lower and lower. It's an ugly, infected light, a kind of feverish glow that's captured and reflected in the heads of the pick-axes and spades they passed out to you. Thaumaturges call upon their elementals, dogs of stone and shattered earth, hydra-headed rock-worms, marble-sculpted scorpion-men with gemstone eyes, to make the first fissures, carve the first cracks into the unyielding ground. A shudder underfoot, a kind of tearing, a sort of parting; like the edges of a laceration being pulled away from each other. A shallow cut scored into the soil, widened into a true wound.
They bid you dig and so you dig.
You peel back the skin of the Creation. Gouge out it's loamy flesh, turn those first furrows into ditches, those ditches into trenches; hundreds of metal spikes and metal wedges ripping and tearing into the ground. Hundreds of helots working in almost silent synchronicity. There's no singing, no talking, just gasps of exertion and hoarse wheezing as backs slowly wrench themselves up to screaming and hands are worn red. You and Jason, two among the thousand; faceless and irrelevant. But with every thrown shovelful on the earthworks slowly taking shape you finally get a chance to look back. Stare back the way you came at the solid pillar of white perched on the rim of the world; still as thick as your finger, even at this distance. The Elemental Pole of Earth, vast beyond all imagining. Descending to the blurred out base, rising to spear the heavens. Five hundred foot high thunderheads like wispy, puffy halos at this distance, ringing the titanic column.
Realize you've been staring for longer than a handful of heartbeats, you make to throw yourself back into the labor before anyone sees. But then a... shadow passes over you, a shape in the clear late-afternoon sky. You frown and tilt your head back. Jason notices, mimicking the motion a second later.
It's the airship from before, returning from the North. It's escort reduced, the underside scorched and blackened in great starbusts of soot, enormous claw-marks along the bellies of the cabins. Two of the propellers have stopped working entirely, the air currents around them laced with smoke. Sparks spinning out with every turn of the enormous turbines. It limps past you, for a moment you think it'll stop at the village, at the army camp but it doesn't. A few of the escort craft split off but the rest just...keep going.
Back West. Back to the City.
You and Jason exchange a look and as one get back to work. Trying to ignore the slow-curdling feeling in your stomach.
It is the 21st of Descending Fire. Calibration is coming. It won't spare you.
But...still. It's easier if you let your mind drift, it's easier if you just let your focus slip. Whatever's going to happen then there's nothing you can really do about it right now. And, sure, coherent thought is hard when you can barely breathe but you have rote memory. Old stories from a dimly recalled family.
[ ] Think on the Divine. There are no gods for Helots but that is so very far from imagining that there are no gods. They exist everywhere within the Empire, governing Creation in the name of the Dragons. And even if their stories are not your stories...well. They're still pleasing things nonetheless.
[ ] Think on the Dead. Helots walk hand in hand with their own deaths, always shadowed by their own demise. And you know enough to know that in the land of the slaves the other side and its monsters are closer to the waking world than they should be. It's a grim topic true, but familiar for all that.
[ ] Think on the Damned. You know them from sermons delivered by the Listeners, the inhabitants of a world of brass and green fire. As far from Creation as Creation is from the Unconquered Sun. But your mother had stories as well. And for all that it's forbidden it's still delicious to dwell on them.
[ ] Think on the Outsiders. Creation is a walled garden and they are the beasts that prowl the Wyld without. Creatures of nightmare and insatiable hunger, unquenchable drives. In this Iron Age their raids rarely penetrate past the Empire's borders, but the scars they left during the Invasion run deep.
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Prologue Part Four: Manifest Divinity
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The heartlands of the Empire are lush and fertile, tamed forests and irrigated fields bounded by the City's sevenfold walls. The metropolis itself spanning the Yanaze and sprawling for miles in every direction. Surrounding geography riven by a secondary river network; itself the cumulative labor of generations of helots, their bleached white bones buried in the muck at the bottom. You were raised in these provinces, at times close enough to the sixth wall to kiss the sorcerer-sculpted stone. But Lookshy itself was always a shadow against the sky to you. A distant silhouette backlit by the descending sun: something impossibly ancient, something so very rare, and not for you. Never for you.
But the heartlands are ten days gone now and you're here, borne on a convoy crawling its way East. Maybe not at the frontier no but closer to that crumbling edge, that twilight border where the City's control is weaker and so many of the forts stand ungarrisoned. Where the towns and settlements are fewer, thinner, and the empty space between them yawns so very wide. The wind keening and moaning, veiled in skeins of dry, sandy soil, rising up to a scream as it howls through the desolation. Through the nothing.
The mountains to the East glow golden with the last rays of Sol Invictus as he slips down the vault of the sky, plunging towards the Western oceans. The range's snow-shrouded slopes shining, splendid, even as bruised purples and softer indigos collect in their valleys. In the space between peaks where the darkness comes early and lingers long. You don't know their names, you don't even know where you are but you...
Feel a kind of kinship with this place. It's hard and unmerciful, it does not love you but there's an honesty in that. You don't think the steppe loves anyone. A kind of equal, omnipresent disdain for master and slave alike. You can appreciate that.
You pull on your padded jacket, shivering even in the sunlight. Even in the brutal kiln of a Scavenger Lands Summer. You're still soaked to the skin, your tunic and pants damp from the exertion of the march, but you can already feel the warmth being leeched away. The wind started almost the second you left Ivory Bones proper, it hasn't stopped since. At least the coat, coarse and dusty though it is, is dry.
Take the pick in your hands. Swing it, send it biting deep into the parched earth. Work it free in a small cloud of grit and shredded roots. A cascade of dirt streaming down the sides of the steadily widening trench, rocks the size of your thumb bouncing, carried on the current. Jason digs his shovel into the unstable ground, whorn shoe sending the blade deep. Lifting a spadeful of dirt and debris with a grunt and tossing it across the gap on the already ankle-high pile. Rinse. Repeat. The same motions mimicked up and down the lines of workers, mirrored so slightly out of synch; the ripple-walk of a centipedes legs.
A whip cracks, a voice cries out, and you all flinch as one. Eyes down, focus on the task in front of you. Metal strikes rock and chips of porous grey spray out, stinging where they hit. Your forearms ache, the tendons nestled between the bone throbbing. Molten lead slowly drips its way down your back, framing your hips. The curved, crescent scar just below your eye itches and burns. A blow from off to your left, heavy and so horribly loud, the sound of a side of meat falling with a wet smack to the floor. You don't turn to look, you just try to breathe. Every exhale a ragged, shuddering gasp. Every inhale raw and greedy and desperate.
In front of you a girl staggers and stumbles, almost falling beneath her burden. Forcing herself back up to a shambling walk along the slopes, stone the size of a full grown chicken in her arms. Nobody stops to help. Nobody gives her a second look. Just work, it's all you can do. Work until you're done. Work until it's over. Work until you fall.
Strike. Shovel. Rinse. Repeat. The only way out is through.
They don't let you sing, they don't let you talk, and that makes it so, so easy to get lost in your own head. To slip into a kind of trance to the tune of hundreds of men and women digging. Your body just a machine of twisted sinew and striated muscle, stretched on a rack of bone and swathed in skin; running through rote motions. Paying just enough dull attention to keep from hitting anyone. Hurting anyone. It's still hard to think as such: the pain distracts, every impact rattles your head and disorders your thoughts. Your own breath rasps in your ears, a constant, harsh, scrape on already sensitive nerves. But you're experienced enough to let the fog take you without a struggle, to let the half-remembered stories swirl and slosh in your brain.
What was it your mother said? Lookshy is the Empire, Lookshy is the City, Lookshy is the Goddess. Each bears the same name because they are the same and to speak of one is to speak of the three.
Your mother's close to ten years gone now; left behind when they took you for the work crews, for the shackles. When they finished with you and just folded you into the nearest village: half a nation away from your childhood home. Time has taken almost everything you have left of her, your father, your brothers and sisters. But you still have that little red stone around your neck, and you still have her stories.
Lookshy has two heads: one that faces East towards the uncowed Scavenger Lands and river-provinces, the petty kingdoms that will one day bow before her; one that faces West towards the slow-rotting Scarlet, the ancient enemy that she will one day see broken on her shores. She is regal and righteous, she is the spirit of democracy and at her feet kneel all the armies and slaves of the immaculate state. She is dragon and eagle both and her feathers are stained the dark purple of a rich wine; her scales the polished perfection of amethysts. Every claw the faintest, palest shadow of Saturn's scythe. When she appears in the heart of Archontic Conclave she does so dressed in the richest of worm-spun silks and the most ancient of Shogunate armors and all rise to press their hands to their hearts and pay witness to her arrival. Her long, flowing sleeves and the tails of her robe waving in an intangible breeze like the banners and pennants of the themes at muster. The suit she wears over is of the gunzosha, those who give their lives in service of greatness, and is etched with sacred marks and edged in gold. Every ornament on her is like the least spark of the Sun himself.
She is a giant and she carries no sword for the nation is her sword. But the shield she bears in her hand is crystal cut in a flawless mirror, the colors running so deep they could be black. And within its reflection is contained the whole of her realm. Her children are the Porphyra and they are multitudes; when she raises her hand they attend her, ready for battle. Puissant spirits with a raptor's plumage and a serpent's skin.
She is Lookshy and there is only one to whom she bows.
You pause in your labor. Tapping your pick to the lip of the earthworks, you've been boring down steadily. It's already almost waist deep and wagon-wide and runs for hundreds of meters in either direction. The sun is balanced on the horizon, searing face sullen and red. Bisected by the Imperial Mountain, a thread of darkness across the sky. The world beyond the peaks to the East is already swathed in every shade of dusk. Shoulder the pick, swing, try to swallow the muted goan as your right side explodes into pain. Push through.
Conflict is like...the ground beneath your feet, the trees, the breeze, the fire in your small hearth and the water you drink. It's inevitable, ineffable, irresistible. Temples to Mars acknowledge this, accept this, and are severe things; beautiful but harsh and unyielding. Tended in reverence by somber priests in ruby robes. Humbly pledged to her lesser aspects and least agents. You've heard that the floors there are rose marble, that the glass in the great windows is tinted pink and carmine and bloody murals decorate the walls. But there are no grand ceremonies held there and few rites, for what use is there pleading with a Maiden to change her mind? Pay her the fear and awe that are her due but do not ask her to intercede, never rise to such heights of arrogance.
Because the red-handed goddess commands and Lookshy follows.
They light torches and lanterns as night falls. The crack of the whip becomes louder, more frequent and with every strike an itch forms, deepening between your shoulderblades. They keep you out there longer and longer, pushing you harder. The entire line panting, sucking down greedy lungfuls of air like a living thing, run down and brought to bay. Jason's teeth are gritted, the veins in his arms and neck swollen. It isn't until your legs are shaking, your arms trembling, and you're seconds from pitching down onto your knees that the whistle blows, sharp and shrill.
Form up in orderly lines, you the walking dead, the hollow-eyed and the gaunt. Set your tools in a pile while the guards scan the crowd, while they count each and every piece. It's a punchline in search of set up, because what would a half-starved slave do with a pick they couldn't hide, could barely stand to swing? What is a helot going to do with a shovel besides dig their own grave? But you know and everyone knows that if they're missing one they'll keep you out here longer. You know that if they're missing one they'll turn and tear into you, rip into you, and come away with chunks of your flesh between their teeth, with your blood on those leather lashes and your bone exposed to the air. Each and every instrument finds its way back.
There's a sound behind you, you turn your head. Watching as the thaumaturges and their elementals even out the rougher sides and square out the bottom. As they compact the vast mound of loose soil above into a solid rampart. A pause, a single, perfectly drilled motion; the men and women in long coats and chain shirts beckoning as one. With a noise like a sharpening knife razored shards of stone burst out from beneath the grass. Spearing out from the flanks of the channel, a thicket of swords.
One small portion of the vast arc slowly taking shape, curving around the mining town.
They march you back, torch-lit and filthy. Jason slips his arm around your waist and for all that he's a ruin too he's somehow still in better shape. You feel guilty for leaning on him but not that much. You're not that heavy and if you fell you don't think you could get up again. You pass by a second stream, a column of helots heading out in the opposite direction, guided on by another shift of soldiers; the crowd that was penned up in the town square you think. Their faces ashen, pallid and shadowed. You see the eyes of a few flicker towards you, weighing you, gauging you, trying to take in what you've endured, you see their expressions falter and fall as they take in the grime, the black streaks on your cheeks like a mockup of a noblewoman's makeup. Most don't bother and when you get to the square you smell it, you hear it, you see it and you understand.
She made them up to look like battle standards, long lances bearing the weight of helot "heraldry". The bodies stripped, arms outstretched, spearhead and haft piercing their chests from the back. Steel slick, crusted with long dried gore. Flies wreathing the nude corpses like tendrils of fine smoke even as that sickly sweet smell, human waste and human fear and ruptured human viscera, slithers up your nose and squirms down your throat.
"(Come on)," Jason murmurs to you, one hand on the back of your head, fingers in your hair as he gently but firmly turns your face away, "(let's find a place to sleep.)"
In the end it's easier said than done. The barracks sit by the governor's manor, surrounded by broad boulevards, separated by physical space and tangible status. Resting on a small hillock, overlooking the identical row houses for the helotry. The bunks originally made to hold a fraction of the population, each one now packed full to bursting. You can see doors wedged open, people curled up just outside the thresholds, along the foundations, beside the gutters cut in the ground for flash floods. A layer of exhausted men and women, packed in tight.
It takes you a bit but you and he find your way back to that ledge you ate your supper on. It's not much but the lip offers you something like shelter from the prevailing wind and when the two of you huddle in close it's almost, almost comfortable. Your cheek to his chest, his hands on the small of your back.
The twisted faces of the dead, jaws slack and heads lolling, watching you with filmy eyes as you bed down as best you can.
For once your dreams are almost lucid.
[ ] You dream of something between lust and love. Arms around your waist, the hands on your hips changing from one heartbeat to the next; from things of ash and smoldering ember to Jason's, just as calloused and worn as yours.
[ ] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
[ ] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
But the heartlands are ten days gone now and you're here, borne on a convoy crawling its way East. Maybe not at the frontier no but closer to that crumbling edge, that twilight border where the City's control is weaker and so many of the forts stand ungarrisoned. Where the towns and settlements are fewer, thinner, and the empty space between them yawns so very wide. The wind keening and moaning, veiled in skeins of dry, sandy soil, rising up to a scream as it howls through the desolation. Through the nothing.
The mountains to the East glow golden with the last rays of Sol Invictus as he slips down the vault of the sky, plunging towards the Western oceans. The range's snow-shrouded slopes shining, splendid, even as bruised purples and softer indigos collect in their valleys. In the space between peaks where the darkness comes early and lingers long. You don't know their names, you don't even know where you are but you...
Feel a kind of kinship with this place. It's hard and unmerciful, it does not love you but there's an honesty in that. You don't think the steppe loves anyone. A kind of equal, omnipresent disdain for master and slave alike. You can appreciate that.
You pull on your padded jacket, shivering even in the sunlight. Even in the brutal kiln of a Scavenger Lands Summer. You're still soaked to the skin, your tunic and pants damp from the exertion of the march, but you can already feel the warmth being leeched away. The wind started almost the second you left Ivory Bones proper, it hasn't stopped since. At least the coat, coarse and dusty though it is, is dry.
Take the pick in your hands. Swing it, send it biting deep into the parched earth. Work it free in a small cloud of grit and shredded roots. A cascade of dirt streaming down the sides of the steadily widening trench, rocks the size of your thumb bouncing, carried on the current. Jason digs his shovel into the unstable ground, whorn shoe sending the blade deep. Lifting a spadeful of dirt and debris with a grunt and tossing it across the gap on the already ankle-high pile. Rinse. Repeat. The same motions mimicked up and down the lines of workers, mirrored so slightly out of synch; the ripple-walk of a centipedes legs.
A whip cracks, a voice cries out, and you all flinch as one. Eyes down, focus on the task in front of you. Metal strikes rock and chips of porous grey spray out, stinging where they hit. Your forearms ache, the tendons nestled between the bone throbbing. Molten lead slowly drips its way down your back, framing your hips. The curved, crescent scar just below your eye itches and burns. A blow from off to your left, heavy and so horribly loud, the sound of a side of meat falling with a wet smack to the floor. You don't turn to look, you just try to breathe. Every exhale a ragged, shuddering gasp. Every inhale raw and greedy and desperate.
In front of you a girl staggers and stumbles, almost falling beneath her burden. Forcing herself back up to a shambling walk along the slopes, stone the size of a full grown chicken in her arms. Nobody stops to help. Nobody gives her a second look. Just work, it's all you can do. Work until you're done. Work until it's over. Work until you fall.
Strike. Shovel. Rinse. Repeat. The only way out is through.
They don't let you sing, they don't let you talk, and that makes it so, so easy to get lost in your own head. To slip into a kind of trance to the tune of hundreds of men and women digging. Your body just a machine of twisted sinew and striated muscle, stretched on a rack of bone and swathed in skin; running through rote motions. Paying just enough dull attention to keep from hitting anyone. Hurting anyone. It's still hard to think as such: the pain distracts, every impact rattles your head and disorders your thoughts. Your own breath rasps in your ears, a constant, harsh, scrape on already sensitive nerves. But you're experienced enough to let the fog take you without a struggle, to let the half-remembered stories swirl and slosh in your brain.
What was it your mother said? Lookshy is the Empire, Lookshy is the City, Lookshy is the Goddess. Each bears the same name because they are the same and to speak of one is to speak of the three.
Your mother's close to ten years gone now; left behind when they took you for the work crews, for the shackles. When they finished with you and just folded you into the nearest village: half a nation away from your childhood home. Time has taken almost everything you have left of her, your father, your brothers and sisters. But you still have that little red stone around your neck, and you still have her stories.
Lookshy has two heads: one that faces East towards the uncowed Scavenger Lands and river-provinces, the petty kingdoms that will one day bow before her; one that faces West towards the slow-rotting Scarlet, the ancient enemy that she will one day see broken on her shores. She is regal and righteous, she is the spirit of democracy and at her feet kneel all the armies and slaves of the immaculate state. She is dragon and eagle both and her feathers are stained the dark purple of a rich wine; her scales the polished perfection of amethysts. Every claw the faintest, palest shadow of Saturn's scythe. When she appears in the heart of Archontic Conclave she does so dressed in the richest of worm-spun silks and the most ancient of Shogunate armors and all rise to press their hands to their hearts and pay witness to her arrival. Her long, flowing sleeves and the tails of her robe waving in an intangible breeze like the banners and pennants of the themes at muster. The suit she wears over is of the gunzosha, those who give their lives in service of greatness, and is etched with sacred marks and edged in gold. Every ornament on her is like the least spark of the Sun himself.
She is a giant and she carries no sword for the nation is her sword. But the shield she bears in her hand is crystal cut in a flawless mirror, the colors running so deep they could be black. And within its reflection is contained the whole of her realm. Her children are the Porphyra and they are multitudes; when she raises her hand they attend her, ready for battle. Puissant spirits with a raptor's plumage and a serpent's skin.
She is Lookshy and there is only one to whom she bows.
You pause in your labor. Tapping your pick to the lip of the earthworks, you've been boring down steadily. It's already almost waist deep and wagon-wide and runs for hundreds of meters in either direction. The sun is balanced on the horizon, searing face sullen and red. Bisected by the Imperial Mountain, a thread of darkness across the sky. The world beyond the peaks to the East is already swathed in every shade of dusk. Shoulder the pick, swing, try to swallow the muted goan as your right side explodes into pain. Push through.
Conflict is like...the ground beneath your feet, the trees, the breeze, the fire in your small hearth and the water you drink. It's inevitable, ineffable, irresistible. Temples to Mars acknowledge this, accept this, and are severe things; beautiful but harsh and unyielding. Tended in reverence by somber priests in ruby robes. Humbly pledged to her lesser aspects and least agents. You've heard that the floors there are rose marble, that the glass in the great windows is tinted pink and carmine and bloody murals decorate the walls. But there are no grand ceremonies held there and few rites, for what use is there pleading with a Maiden to change her mind? Pay her the fear and awe that are her due but do not ask her to intercede, never rise to such heights of arrogance.
Because the red-handed goddess commands and Lookshy follows.
They light torches and lanterns as night falls. The crack of the whip becomes louder, more frequent and with every strike an itch forms, deepening between your shoulderblades. They keep you out there longer and longer, pushing you harder. The entire line panting, sucking down greedy lungfuls of air like a living thing, run down and brought to bay. Jason's teeth are gritted, the veins in his arms and neck swollen. It isn't until your legs are shaking, your arms trembling, and you're seconds from pitching down onto your knees that the whistle blows, sharp and shrill.
Form up in orderly lines, you the walking dead, the hollow-eyed and the gaunt. Set your tools in a pile while the guards scan the crowd, while they count each and every piece. It's a punchline in search of set up, because what would a half-starved slave do with a pick they couldn't hide, could barely stand to swing? What is a helot going to do with a shovel besides dig their own grave? But you know and everyone knows that if they're missing one they'll keep you out here longer. You know that if they're missing one they'll turn and tear into you, rip into you, and come away with chunks of your flesh between their teeth, with your blood on those leather lashes and your bone exposed to the air. Each and every instrument finds its way back.
There's a sound behind you, you turn your head. Watching as the thaumaturges and their elementals even out the rougher sides and square out the bottom. As they compact the vast mound of loose soil above into a solid rampart. A pause, a single, perfectly drilled motion; the men and women in long coats and chain shirts beckoning as one. With a noise like a sharpening knife razored shards of stone burst out from beneath the grass. Spearing out from the flanks of the channel, a thicket of swords.
One small portion of the vast arc slowly taking shape, curving around the mining town.
They march you back, torch-lit and filthy. Jason slips his arm around your waist and for all that he's a ruin too he's somehow still in better shape. You feel guilty for leaning on him but not that much. You're not that heavy and if you fell you don't think you could get up again. You pass by a second stream, a column of helots heading out in the opposite direction, guided on by another shift of soldiers; the crowd that was penned up in the town square you think. Their faces ashen, pallid and shadowed. You see the eyes of a few flicker towards you, weighing you, gauging you, trying to take in what you've endured, you see their expressions falter and fall as they take in the grime, the black streaks on your cheeks like a mockup of a noblewoman's makeup. Most don't bother and when you get to the square you smell it, you hear it, you see it and you understand.
She made them up to look like battle standards, long lances bearing the weight of helot "heraldry". The bodies stripped, arms outstretched, spearhead and haft piercing their chests from the back. Steel slick, crusted with long dried gore. Flies wreathing the nude corpses like tendrils of fine smoke even as that sickly sweet smell, human waste and human fear and ruptured human viscera, slithers up your nose and squirms down your throat.
"(Come on)," Jason murmurs to you, one hand on the back of your head, fingers in your hair as he gently but firmly turns your face away, "(let's find a place to sleep.)"
In the end it's easier said than done. The barracks sit by the governor's manor, surrounded by broad boulevards, separated by physical space and tangible status. Resting on a small hillock, overlooking the identical row houses for the helotry. The bunks originally made to hold a fraction of the population, each one now packed full to bursting. You can see doors wedged open, people curled up just outside the thresholds, along the foundations, beside the gutters cut in the ground for flash floods. A layer of exhausted men and women, packed in tight.
It takes you a bit but you and he find your way back to that ledge you ate your supper on. It's not much but the lip offers you something like shelter from the prevailing wind and when the two of you huddle in close it's almost, almost comfortable. Your cheek to his chest, his hands on the small of your back.
The twisted faces of the dead, jaws slack and heads lolling, watching you with filmy eyes as you bed down as best you can.
For once your dreams are almost lucid.
[ ] You dream of something between lust and love. Arms around your waist, the hands on your hips changing from one heartbeat to the next; from things of ash and smoldering ember to Jason's, just as calloused and worn as yours.
[ ] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
[ ] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
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Prologue Part Five: Lament
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Your body is an atlas of scars.
Pale ridges of knotted tissue and raised up ropes of stitched together skin. Shiny knicks and smaller, glossy marks on your forearms and shins. Strands of keloid criss-crossing your chest and webbing their way across your back; clustering thickly around your wrists, around your ankles where the metal bit deep. An arc over your right cheekbone where faintly tanned flesh split; something to see every time you catch a glimpse of your own reflection, every time you see your face mirrored back in standing water or a scrap of polished metal. You can feel them catching and tugging against you when you move, a latent, lingering stiffness that clings to the surface. And there's so many, you have so many, that you can't even begin to remember where they're all from. Which floggings, which beatings, who held the whip and why. Which ones they gave to you and which ones you gave to yourself, worrying away in the night with soft nails because you knew -you knew- that if you ever drew steel you wouldn't be able to stop. That you'd slit yourself open and die there in the dirt, the ghost of a smile curving up the corners of your mouth. Finally at peace.
...They really did a number on you, didn't they?
It's not your fault, don't blame yourself. You were broken before you were even born. You've never had a chance to be anything but what you are and you're so far gone that you wouldn't know how. You ate the cage, secreted it away in your stomach and now it lives within you: you carry your prison with you always and all the guards need to do is raise their hand to make you flinch back from the bars. Maybe that's why you can only think of freedom as an abstract, a series of associations. Containers for something formless, something invisible and unknown.
Freedom is sleep.
Freedom is death.
Freedom is the sea.
Freedom is the empty City, drowned by the waves, swallowed up by the silence. Freedom is the empty jail, locks long-broken and manacle chains corroded into so much rust. Freedom is a world without soldiers or slaves, without hunger or want or pain or fear. A world where you won't have to hurt and in the end, at the heart of everything, there's just that simple, almost childlike desire: to not have to hurt anymore. To not have to wake up day after day, this shattered thing of crushed-in ribs and broken bones wearing the face of a helot. Imagining that it's human.
Freedom is an unwinding, peeling away the blood-stained bandages and letting the shattered thing finally fall apart.
The dream takes you in gentle hands. It's a familiar one, a kind of comfort for one who can carry nearly nothing with him. Who owns precious little and has so few things to call his own. But no matter what you will have this, and even if your higher soul forgets for months and years your animal self, your feral guts, will remember. Will clasp it close and never let it go.
You hang suspended over the abyss; toes pointed down and arms outstretched. You're floating, a million miles from anywhere and anything; an eternity of water extending in every direction. Fathoms beneath your feet, open ocean on every side. A soft, sapphire glow, a cerulean haze, that darkens by degrees, bleeding into a perfect blackness far, far below. The heat is gone now, the sun long-vanished and it's just Luna, just moon and her throne, that shines. Caressing the feathery mess of your hair, the long licks and stray spikes that sway in the current, strand separating from strand. Your lungs are full of mercury.
It starts on the outside and works its way in. Dried sweat and caked on filth unspooling in long, gauzy ribbons of grey. The grease and oil in your hair washing free, the fabric of your clothes lightening as clouds of dirt billow out. Then the jacket itself, the pants and tunic, unlacing; threads unweaving themselves and squirming away like so many startled worms. A textile clot that dissolves into long skeins of thread that dissolves into nothing. Leaving you naked, leaving you nude; the marks that mar your evaporating, dissolving in the brine like so much painted on dye. As if it was all just a trick of brushes and paints and a bit of sculpting clay. Like it was never really true at all.
The outer layers of your skin next: sheets of half-translucent tissue, white as fine muslin, curling away in ribbons. Hair gone like a dandelion puff in a gust of wind. The red meat beneath the surface, the glossy tendons and milky-clear cartilage detaching and slithering into the deep. Purple-grey viscera slipping from beneath bleak ribs and muddy brown eyes floating free, rootlike nerves trailing. Everything sloughing off, the burdens falling one by one until you're just a skeleton. Just so many polished ivory bones, acid-etched with things unsaid, things you could never say, will never say. Your head tipped back, flayed jaws gleaming, tongue melting into so much scarlet mist. And then the salt water chews that up too, erodes it into so much fine-grained dust, snow-white grit carried away on tidal forces. The line of destruction sweeping up over your sockets and you have no lids left but you feel like you close them anyway. It's over. You can stop now. You can rest now.
Freedom is an ending.
You jerk awake with a strangled gasp, gagging, panting as you hunch over. Shoulders hitching, rising and falling; eyes scrunched shut a second later as you choke down a low, miserable moan. As you feel every muscle anchored to your spine obligingly twist itself into a knot of crimson cords at the sudden motion, a snarl of sinew that spans your entire back. Pulling every extremity in, crushing you in a giant's hand. You hiss a curse, something about Hesiesh's balls, as you try not to audibly whimper, not to outright sob. This is your fault, you should have tried to stretch yourself out at least a little, you shouldn't have just laid right down. Too late to do anything now but ride it out.
Tears prickle your eyes, hot and harsh. You try to ignore the way your lips slowly peel back from your teeth despite yourself. The corners of your mouth stinging, cracking as the small cuts re-open, the rictus snarl still just a drop in the bucket compared to the nightmare-cramp currently working its way through your body. The giant's fingers squeezing.
"(Fuckgodsshitfuckowowow)."
And then, bit by bit, it ebbs. It fades. It dwindles down to something manageable and you almost retch as you draw in weak, shuddery breaths. Head between your knees and hands resting in the dirt; every ounce of focus you have bent on not vomiting up the few mouthfuls of sour water and bile that's all you really have left in your stomach.
The early morning air is cool and damp; thick tendrils of mist wreathing the village, swaddling the camp just beyond. Lanterns glowing in the murk like miniature stars, supply wagons rising up, their shadows hulking-huge in the fog. In a few hours the sun will rise and burn it all away, already the east horizon is brightening into bruised shades; the rich blues and deep purples herald his approach. But for now the square might as well be alien terrain, foreign and strange; all but carpeted in bodies. The "battle standards" a stain on the leaden grey, just visible now and then through the swirling, low-hanging clouds.
Push a shaky hand through your hair, your eyes flicking to the side. Jason's gone; left at some point before you woke up. You just stare dully, worry warring with indifference, with apathy and that "well what did you expect" feeling that you can't quite name but know oh so intimately. And then you hear the sound of a woman politely clearing her throat and you realize that he might not be here but that doesn't mean you're alone.
Slowly, slowly, ignoring the way your neck protests, you turn and look at the woman standing not five paces to your left. Ducking your head as you noisily swallow, gaze darting up and away and back again.
She's old. Her skin the color and texture of worn leather, her hair the color of iron ore. It's hard to tell with you on the ground and her above but you think you'd stand taller than her if you straightened up (like you could) and set back your shoulders (like you would) and that alone is impressive. She…smiles at you and you see that her mouth is filled with teeth like tempered steel. Metal glimmering in the half-light; matched at the throat, the wrists, to mineral veins. She's all earth and stone you realize; the back of her hands split and fractured, flesh into fissures like a cracked cliffside but solid for all that; implaccable and unyielding for all that. And it's hard to miss the way her knuckles are flattened like a brawler's.
She wears Listener's garb that has been- not mutilated, no but muted. Made into something that can withstand long travel on the road. A white shawl knotted over one shoulder, a cloak the color of sand dunes, hood drawn up beneath a broad brimmed hat. A cassock of a kind from throat to ankle, belted at the waist, and here is the sole nod to station. The buttons are polished stone.
The priestess leans on her walking stick and unslings a waterskin, offering it to you wordlessly. You reach up with a trembling hand, half-cowering back already. Expecting it to be pulled away as you take it, expecting the strike from the stick, Listeners are usually kinder than the soldiers but the difference is a matter of apathy and antipathy. They don't overtly disdain you. Rare is the one who will deign to touch you.
The skin settles in your hand, she watches as you hesitantly raise it to your lips.
Cold, crisp water washes down your parched throat and the noise you make is barely human. You down it in great greedy gulps, throat bobbing, belly aching before you physically tear yourself away and hand it back, significantly lighter than before. You drank more than you meant to, more than you should have. You'd be on your knees right now, begging forgiveness if you could wrench your body into the right pose, if everything wasn't so heavy, so stiff.
"I'm- I'm sorry Sister," you start, "I didn't mean to-"
A hand that could snap your collarbone like a twig settles on your shoulder.
The woman shrugs, replies in a faintly accented tongue. Tinged with something Northern, from the lands across the Yanaze, "It is only water my brother, you are thirsty and I am not."
Everything in your brain grinds to a halt.
"I-" you start again and then stop, voice hoarse because you have nowhere to go with the thought, "...Don't understand" you finish lamely.
"My name is Listener Karatzas," she says, "the armies here put out the call for more hands to attend the flock and see to the helots. And the fighting men and women I suppose. I came to do the Dragon's work."
"Oh, revered Sister I am sorry for wasting your-"
"Do not apologize."
"So-" you snap your jaws shut hard enough you can feel the click of enamel on enamel. She continues, utterly unconcerned, untroubled, and a piece of you wonders if this is still part of the dream. Something strung together by your half awake mind out disparate thoughts and scattered impressions.
"I am here to minister to the sick, to the deprived," she says gently, "and I see here that there is much deprivation. Is that not so?"
You nod after a second; after you realize that she's waiting on you to respond, that this is a conversation instead of- what? A trick? A trap? There are no guards here, this deep into the makeshift pen. There's nobody who's paying attention, nobody who cares. Just you and she. Her hand drifts up, fingertips on your jaw, tipping your head back so that you'll look at her, properly look at her. The Listener's thumb gently touched to the scar under your eye.
"Ah, look at you. They've treated you abominably haven't they?" She asks, not unkindly. You're shaking, something fundamental inside you cracking under the- the pressure? The release? As you nod again. "All of you, so much like this. And there's so many of you here. What were they thinking, piling you all in like this? But I suppose that's the way of Southern soldiers, they cannot imagine themselves free unless they see men in bondage, and then what do they do? Sell themselves to extortionists and gilded clerics and call it liberty. Lies built on lies, how far we've all fallen from grace."
You're weeping now, you think. You can't tell, but your cheeks are wet and your eyes ache and something's dripping from your nose. Lift the back of your hand to your face and shakily drag it across your lips, Listener Karatzas seems as if she couldn't care less.
"They refuse to let us hold a single service for the slaves, they insist on these shifts. Hmph, well I think that fair is as fair does and that I, myself, will hold a proper reading tonight for those who would attend. And I think I would like it if a boy as brave as yourself would attend."
"(...Aren't you afraid?)" you mumble after a moment, staring up at her as the heavens lighten, the fog thins around you, "(That I'll report you for-)" for the things she said. For her kindness. For the way she's speaking to you, treating you all wrong, like no one should.
"Will you?" She asks mildly.
A pause, you slowly shake your head and she pats your cheek. "Then what have I to fear? Tonight, boy, at the storehouse near the Northern wall. The army seized all the grain, moved it to their camp and it's no church to be sure but I find it suits me just fine. Come if you will, there's no shame if you do not."
And then she just...walks off. She just leaves. And you watch her as she goes, as she vanishes into the fogbank; your own hand creeping up to where she touched you, your pain almost entirely forgotten. You're still sitting like that when Jason walks out of the gloom a few minutes later, a pair of bowls in his hands. Steam shimmering over the surface; rice porridge and a few scraps of meat. He sees you're awake and his footsteps slow. That almost-smile fading, replaced by a grimace. He holds out one for you, averting his eyes as you take it. Sitting down beside you with his own.
"I'm sorry, heh, I must have worried you," he says at last. "They started doling out rations early and I didn't want you to go hungry. And I didn't want to wake you because, to be honest, you looked like dogshit. You probably thought I just left huh?"
"(It's fine)," you reply. You don't tear into the meal, not at first, just sit with it cradled on your lap. Enjoying the faint heat that seeps through.
He makes an ambiguous sound around a mouthful of broth, equal parts "I don't believe you" and "I don't want to argue and make it worse". You take it and you're grateful for it and you don't hold it against him, you really don't, you're just...processing a lot, right now, turning the meeting with the woman over in your mind. Trying to place that accent in her head, a quiet exhale escaping as it finally clicks, as you realize where you've heard that cadence before:
On the tongue of a man from Messathalene.
You have some time to talk before the morning shift starts and Jason is the only one you have who you can talk to, the only one who you can confide in, who you can really trust. If only because you're probably dead if you don't. But he is kind and it's been more than a week and he hasn't tried to hurt you. And he does seem to care for you.
Try to reach out to him. Be honest, confess something sincere.
[ ] Tell him you're afraid of what the army'll do if they win or, worse, if it seems like they might lose. There's so many helots here and the troops are taking all the food. You don't know how you'll make it through if they decide to just...deal with you all here.
[ ] Tell him you're sorry you thought ill of him, he's been good to you and you have precious few friends as it is. That you- that you care about him too. Even if he could do better than you. Even if you might drag him down, get him killed. Even if you're barely human.
[ ] Tell him you're almost looking forward to Xauma's arrival in a perverse kind of way. They're monsters sure, but let's be honest: being eaten alive would almost be a relief in and of itself, wouldn't it? Maybe they'll tear off your head, at least it'll be fast.
[ ] Tell him how you used to dream of being different, of being something other than what you are. There are no Dragonblooded among the helots but as a child everyone hopes don't they? That maybe it'll be true for them. Maybe it'll be true for you.
Pale ridges of knotted tissue and raised up ropes of stitched together skin. Shiny knicks and smaller, glossy marks on your forearms and shins. Strands of keloid criss-crossing your chest and webbing their way across your back; clustering thickly around your wrists, around your ankles where the metal bit deep. An arc over your right cheekbone where faintly tanned flesh split; something to see every time you catch a glimpse of your own reflection, every time you see your face mirrored back in standing water or a scrap of polished metal. You can feel them catching and tugging against you when you move, a latent, lingering stiffness that clings to the surface. And there's so many, you have so many, that you can't even begin to remember where they're all from. Which floggings, which beatings, who held the whip and why. Which ones they gave to you and which ones you gave to yourself, worrying away in the night with soft nails because you knew -you knew- that if you ever drew steel you wouldn't be able to stop. That you'd slit yourself open and die there in the dirt, the ghost of a smile curving up the corners of your mouth. Finally at peace.
...They really did a number on you, didn't they?
It's not your fault, don't blame yourself. You were broken before you were even born. You've never had a chance to be anything but what you are and you're so far gone that you wouldn't know how. You ate the cage, secreted it away in your stomach and now it lives within you: you carry your prison with you always and all the guards need to do is raise their hand to make you flinch back from the bars. Maybe that's why you can only think of freedom as an abstract, a series of associations. Containers for something formless, something invisible and unknown.
Freedom is sleep.
Freedom is death.
Freedom is the sea.
Freedom is the empty City, drowned by the waves, swallowed up by the silence. Freedom is the empty jail, locks long-broken and manacle chains corroded into so much rust. Freedom is a world without soldiers or slaves, without hunger or want or pain or fear. A world where you won't have to hurt and in the end, at the heart of everything, there's just that simple, almost childlike desire: to not have to hurt anymore. To not have to wake up day after day, this shattered thing of crushed-in ribs and broken bones wearing the face of a helot. Imagining that it's human.
Freedom is an unwinding, peeling away the blood-stained bandages and letting the shattered thing finally fall apart.
The dream takes you in gentle hands. It's a familiar one, a kind of comfort for one who can carry nearly nothing with him. Who owns precious little and has so few things to call his own. But no matter what you will have this, and even if your higher soul forgets for months and years your animal self, your feral guts, will remember. Will clasp it close and never let it go.
You hang suspended over the abyss; toes pointed down and arms outstretched. You're floating, a million miles from anywhere and anything; an eternity of water extending in every direction. Fathoms beneath your feet, open ocean on every side. A soft, sapphire glow, a cerulean haze, that darkens by degrees, bleeding into a perfect blackness far, far below. The heat is gone now, the sun long-vanished and it's just Luna, just moon and her throne, that shines. Caressing the feathery mess of your hair, the long licks and stray spikes that sway in the current, strand separating from strand. Your lungs are full of mercury.
It starts on the outside and works its way in. Dried sweat and caked on filth unspooling in long, gauzy ribbons of grey. The grease and oil in your hair washing free, the fabric of your clothes lightening as clouds of dirt billow out. Then the jacket itself, the pants and tunic, unlacing; threads unweaving themselves and squirming away like so many startled worms. A textile clot that dissolves into long skeins of thread that dissolves into nothing. Leaving you naked, leaving you nude; the marks that mar your evaporating, dissolving in the brine like so much painted on dye. As if it was all just a trick of brushes and paints and a bit of sculpting clay. Like it was never really true at all.
The outer layers of your skin next: sheets of half-translucent tissue, white as fine muslin, curling away in ribbons. Hair gone like a dandelion puff in a gust of wind. The red meat beneath the surface, the glossy tendons and milky-clear cartilage detaching and slithering into the deep. Purple-grey viscera slipping from beneath bleak ribs and muddy brown eyes floating free, rootlike nerves trailing. Everything sloughing off, the burdens falling one by one until you're just a skeleton. Just so many polished ivory bones, acid-etched with things unsaid, things you could never say, will never say. Your head tipped back, flayed jaws gleaming, tongue melting into so much scarlet mist. And then the salt water chews that up too, erodes it into so much fine-grained dust, snow-white grit carried away on tidal forces. The line of destruction sweeping up over your sockets and you have no lids left but you feel like you close them anyway. It's over. You can stop now. You can rest now.
Freedom is an ending.
You jerk awake with a strangled gasp, gagging, panting as you hunch over. Shoulders hitching, rising and falling; eyes scrunched shut a second later as you choke down a low, miserable moan. As you feel every muscle anchored to your spine obligingly twist itself into a knot of crimson cords at the sudden motion, a snarl of sinew that spans your entire back. Pulling every extremity in, crushing you in a giant's hand. You hiss a curse, something about Hesiesh's balls, as you try not to audibly whimper, not to outright sob. This is your fault, you should have tried to stretch yourself out at least a little, you shouldn't have just laid right down. Too late to do anything now but ride it out.
Tears prickle your eyes, hot and harsh. You try to ignore the way your lips slowly peel back from your teeth despite yourself. The corners of your mouth stinging, cracking as the small cuts re-open, the rictus snarl still just a drop in the bucket compared to the nightmare-cramp currently working its way through your body. The giant's fingers squeezing.
"(Fuckgodsshitfuckowowow)."
And then, bit by bit, it ebbs. It fades. It dwindles down to something manageable and you almost retch as you draw in weak, shuddery breaths. Head between your knees and hands resting in the dirt; every ounce of focus you have bent on not vomiting up the few mouthfuls of sour water and bile that's all you really have left in your stomach.
The early morning air is cool and damp; thick tendrils of mist wreathing the village, swaddling the camp just beyond. Lanterns glowing in the murk like miniature stars, supply wagons rising up, their shadows hulking-huge in the fog. In a few hours the sun will rise and burn it all away, already the east horizon is brightening into bruised shades; the rich blues and deep purples herald his approach. But for now the square might as well be alien terrain, foreign and strange; all but carpeted in bodies. The "battle standards" a stain on the leaden grey, just visible now and then through the swirling, low-hanging clouds.
Push a shaky hand through your hair, your eyes flicking to the side. Jason's gone; left at some point before you woke up. You just stare dully, worry warring with indifference, with apathy and that "well what did you expect" feeling that you can't quite name but know oh so intimately. And then you hear the sound of a woman politely clearing her throat and you realize that he might not be here but that doesn't mean you're alone.
Slowly, slowly, ignoring the way your neck protests, you turn and look at the woman standing not five paces to your left. Ducking your head as you noisily swallow, gaze darting up and away and back again.
She's old. Her skin the color and texture of worn leather, her hair the color of iron ore. It's hard to tell with you on the ground and her above but you think you'd stand taller than her if you straightened up (like you could) and set back your shoulders (like you would) and that alone is impressive. She…smiles at you and you see that her mouth is filled with teeth like tempered steel. Metal glimmering in the half-light; matched at the throat, the wrists, to mineral veins. She's all earth and stone you realize; the back of her hands split and fractured, flesh into fissures like a cracked cliffside but solid for all that; implaccable and unyielding for all that. And it's hard to miss the way her knuckles are flattened like a brawler's.
She wears Listener's garb that has been- not mutilated, no but muted. Made into something that can withstand long travel on the road. A white shawl knotted over one shoulder, a cloak the color of sand dunes, hood drawn up beneath a broad brimmed hat. A cassock of a kind from throat to ankle, belted at the waist, and here is the sole nod to station. The buttons are polished stone.
The priestess leans on her walking stick and unslings a waterskin, offering it to you wordlessly. You reach up with a trembling hand, half-cowering back already. Expecting it to be pulled away as you take it, expecting the strike from the stick, Listeners are usually kinder than the soldiers but the difference is a matter of apathy and antipathy. They don't overtly disdain you. Rare is the one who will deign to touch you.
The skin settles in your hand, she watches as you hesitantly raise it to your lips.
Cold, crisp water washes down your parched throat and the noise you make is barely human. You down it in great greedy gulps, throat bobbing, belly aching before you physically tear yourself away and hand it back, significantly lighter than before. You drank more than you meant to, more than you should have. You'd be on your knees right now, begging forgiveness if you could wrench your body into the right pose, if everything wasn't so heavy, so stiff.
"I'm- I'm sorry Sister," you start, "I didn't mean to-"
A hand that could snap your collarbone like a twig settles on your shoulder.
The woman shrugs, replies in a faintly accented tongue. Tinged with something Northern, from the lands across the Yanaze, "It is only water my brother, you are thirsty and I am not."
Everything in your brain grinds to a halt.
"I-" you start again and then stop, voice hoarse because you have nowhere to go with the thought, "...Don't understand" you finish lamely.
"My name is Listener Karatzas," she says, "the armies here put out the call for more hands to attend the flock and see to the helots. And the fighting men and women I suppose. I came to do the Dragon's work."
"Oh, revered Sister I am sorry for wasting your-"
"Do not apologize."
"So-" you snap your jaws shut hard enough you can feel the click of enamel on enamel. She continues, utterly unconcerned, untroubled, and a piece of you wonders if this is still part of the dream. Something strung together by your half awake mind out disparate thoughts and scattered impressions.
"I am here to minister to the sick, to the deprived," she says gently, "and I see here that there is much deprivation. Is that not so?"
You nod after a second; after you realize that she's waiting on you to respond, that this is a conversation instead of- what? A trick? A trap? There are no guards here, this deep into the makeshift pen. There's nobody who's paying attention, nobody who cares. Just you and she. Her hand drifts up, fingertips on your jaw, tipping your head back so that you'll look at her, properly look at her. The Listener's thumb gently touched to the scar under your eye.
"Ah, look at you. They've treated you abominably haven't they?" She asks, not unkindly. You're shaking, something fundamental inside you cracking under the- the pressure? The release? As you nod again. "All of you, so much like this. And there's so many of you here. What were they thinking, piling you all in like this? But I suppose that's the way of Southern soldiers, they cannot imagine themselves free unless they see men in bondage, and then what do they do? Sell themselves to extortionists and gilded clerics and call it liberty. Lies built on lies, how far we've all fallen from grace."
You're weeping now, you think. You can't tell, but your cheeks are wet and your eyes ache and something's dripping from your nose. Lift the back of your hand to your face and shakily drag it across your lips, Listener Karatzas seems as if she couldn't care less.
"They refuse to let us hold a single service for the slaves, they insist on these shifts. Hmph, well I think that fair is as fair does and that I, myself, will hold a proper reading tonight for those who would attend. And I think I would like it if a boy as brave as yourself would attend."
"(...Aren't you afraid?)" you mumble after a moment, staring up at her as the heavens lighten, the fog thins around you, "(That I'll report you for-)" for the things she said. For her kindness. For the way she's speaking to you, treating you all wrong, like no one should.
"Will you?" She asks mildly.
A pause, you slowly shake your head and she pats your cheek. "Then what have I to fear? Tonight, boy, at the storehouse near the Northern wall. The army seized all the grain, moved it to their camp and it's no church to be sure but I find it suits me just fine. Come if you will, there's no shame if you do not."
And then she just...walks off. She just leaves. And you watch her as she goes, as she vanishes into the fogbank; your own hand creeping up to where she touched you, your pain almost entirely forgotten. You're still sitting like that when Jason walks out of the gloom a few minutes later, a pair of bowls in his hands. Steam shimmering over the surface; rice porridge and a few scraps of meat. He sees you're awake and his footsteps slow. That almost-smile fading, replaced by a grimace. He holds out one for you, averting his eyes as you take it. Sitting down beside you with his own.
"I'm sorry, heh, I must have worried you," he says at last. "They started doling out rations early and I didn't want you to go hungry. And I didn't want to wake you because, to be honest, you looked like dogshit. You probably thought I just left huh?"
"(It's fine)," you reply. You don't tear into the meal, not at first, just sit with it cradled on your lap. Enjoying the faint heat that seeps through.
He makes an ambiguous sound around a mouthful of broth, equal parts "I don't believe you" and "I don't want to argue and make it worse". You take it and you're grateful for it and you don't hold it against him, you really don't, you're just...processing a lot, right now, turning the meeting with the woman over in your mind. Trying to place that accent in her head, a quiet exhale escaping as it finally clicks, as you realize where you've heard that cadence before:
On the tongue of a man from Messathalene.
You have some time to talk before the morning shift starts and Jason is the only one you have who you can talk to, the only one who you can confide in, who you can really trust. If only because you're probably dead if you don't. But he is kind and it's been more than a week and he hasn't tried to hurt you. And he does seem to care for you.
Try to reach out to him. Be honest, confess something sincere.
[ ] Tell him you're afraid of what the army'll do if they win or, worse, if it seems like they might lose. There's so many helots here and the troops are taking all the food. You don't know how you'll make it through if they decide to just...deal with you all here.
[ ] Tell him you're sorry you thought ill of him, he's been good to you and you have precious few friends as it is. That you- that you care about him too. Even if he could do better than you. Even if you might drag him down, get him killed. Even if you're barely human.
[ ] Tell him you're almost looking forward to Xauma's arrival in a perverse kind of way. They're monsters sure, but let's be honest: being eaten alive would almost be a relief in and of itself, wouldn't it? Maybe they'll tear off your head, at least it'll be fast.
[ ] Tell him how you used to dream of being different, of being something other than what you are. There are no Dragonblooded among the helots but as a child everyone hopes don't they? That maybe it'll be true for them. Maybe it'll be true for you.
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Prologue Part Six: Red Skeins
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Deep blues into paler shades, purples into scorched reds, the sky is streaked by bars of tangerines and oranges now, the colors like the flesh of fresh-picked orchard fruit. The mist is melting, the dawn is coming and with it the heat: that pitiless, mindless pressure; it'll beat down on you, bear you into the dust. Every breath turning your lungs, the space between your ribs, into a kiln. Firing your bones like clay, heating them until they char and crack.
The Unconquered Sun gives life. He cannot be said to be merciful.
You sit in the darkness, in the stillness; in a small scrap of shadow, of sheltered offered by the ledge at your back. Sniffing as you rub the heel of your palm against your nose, wiping up some of the mess, cleaning yourself up as best you can. Legs crooked in front of you and bowl balanced on your lap. Silvery tongues of steam curling up, the warmth bleeding into your calloused palms.
It's just you and Jason here, alone in the crowd of the still sleeping and the already stirring. An inch of space separating you from him and it feels like a chasm, like something cavernous that yawns so very wide. Does he think you're angry with him? Are you angry with him? Is he afraid? Are you? You don't know, you can barely tell what you're feeling anymore. It's harder to ascribe names, easier to manage associations and sensations: this is an itch, ants on marching in a line along your spine. Crawling over your chest, their legs like pins and needlepoints pricking your skin in a hundred places.
"...They're going to kill us," you say quietly, not quite looking at him. You feel more than see him turn his head, an expression you can't quite make out beneath a spray of hair yellow as straw, as ripe grain. Paler than you and he still tans to this even golden brown. You can see the smile in your head, those slightly too sharp teeth. Those tendons that shift around his throat, anchored at his collarbone. Curves of dense chest muscle filling out his tunic, broad shoulders set back. In another life he'd almost look heroic. The brave knight lingering just within the shell of a fisherman's son.
"Alexius-"
"You know what these are don't you?" And for once you effortlessly override him, your voice flat and even; you drop your eyes to the morning meal cradled in your hands and tilt it to the left, to the right, watching as the milk-white gruel oozes up the sides, scraps of piscine meat stuck in the matter alongside shreds of green, "I wasn't sure at first heh, until I heard that they took all the grain from the helot quarter. But then it made sense. They're putting us on starvation rations. They don't have enough to feed us and the army, we were never supposed to stop here I think."
He's studying you out of the corner of your eye, grey irises trained on yours. You shrug self-consciously as you lift the bowl to your lips anyway. You barely have to chew, it goes down easy. Drag your sleeve over your mouth.
"We were meant to go to the Triadic River Ministry, they'd have actually been able to host everyone there wouldn't they? But then that fell while we were still a few days out. So now they're just stuck here, with a few thousand slaves they don't care about and can't care for. Even if they win they'll still have to put the city to siege right? And what'll happen to us then?"
A second of hesitation, just a second and then he shuffles in closer. Hip to hip, all but ankle to ankle. Fingers wrap around your wrist and squeeze. "We still have at least a week before Calibration," he says, "there'll be more wagons. We might have just marched faster than some of the trains, if they were trying to reinforce the Ministry before the wolves crossed the River."
You don't push him off, you just stare dully down at your food. Leaning into it a little; the motion reflexive, almost automatic. "And if they lose?"
"Are you scared?" He asks gently, you nod, "I'll look after you. You know that don't you?"
"(S'okay to say you just want to fuck me)," you mumble.
Jason laughs at that, a short, sharp bark; something between surprise and genuine amusement. He glance over and he's smirking, scrubbing at his own cheeks, trying to hide the faint flush that creeps up his face. You exhale, grinning slightly despite yourself. Tipping your head, resting it on his arm. He shifts beside you, taking more of your weight (as if there was much to take at all). You're half-curled against him now, one of his hands resting on a bony hip. The gesture equal parts possessive and protective. You think you like it.
"You're a brave one huh? You barely know me."
You smile faintly, "I barely know anyone, and helots have to be brave right?"
"Oh?"
A few more mouthfuls, throat bobbing, and just like that breakfast is gone. You run your thumb around the inside of the glorified cup. Licking up a piece of river fish. Your voice soft, words equal parts shy and spiteful. Half formed thoughts floating free without much consideration as you idly follow the idea to the very end. "Soldiers get to be important, they get arms and armor and training and if they live they get everything they need and if they die bravely then they get everything they want. Wonder how long it'd take them to start screaming if they had to dig ditches in the sun all day, heh? And then get speared through the back for no good reason by some piece of shit with arms and armor. They don't have to live like they're cursed. They just...get to live."
There's a long, long, silence. You glance over, Jason has all but buried his face in his bowl. Eating just you started talking. He catches your eye apologetically as he, freshly committed, tries to finish it past as possible. You hear him start to choke and you pat his back as he faintly gags, forcing the blockage down his throat and gasping out a "sorry". Doing his best to be cheerful even as he tears up. Even as he looks away, one foot tap tap tapping the ground, the grip on your flank tightening.
Is he nervous? You'd be lying if you said it wasn't encouraging in its own way to be on the other side for once, to be the one who could reciprocate. Who could be strong.
"Heh," you lean in and kiss his cheek, coarse stubble and chapped lips; it's a little awkward and for all that it's as basic a display as you can get you're still not very good at it let's be honest. For a second you feel him tense up, feel the start of a recoil; but before you can process it, before you can really pull back, he turns into it. Free hand sinking into your shaggy hair, fingers digging into your scalp. His mouth on yours.
He's better at it. Even if his breath does smell a bit like fish and when he finally breaks away and presses your forehead to his, whistle sounding harsh and shrill in the background, the bloated corpses atop the battle standards swimming out of the murk, you're both smiling.
"I-" he starts, he pauses, you can see him carefully choosing words, the idea slowly taking shape and his voice even, deadly serious, "-will make sure you survive, alright Alexius?"
"Alright Jason, I...I trust you."
And so you tell him about Listener Karatzas and the service she's holding tonight.
They have you near the road today, the Iron Age thing of crafted stone and military engineering that curves over and through the rolling hills and dying grass, eventually merging into the Shogunate highway miles away. You can see it as you dig (Jason has the pick today, you the shovel), glistening like a river of oil in the far distance. As if someone dipped a brush in ink and stained the landscape with a single, savage stroke.
In the North, towards the Yanaze, a storm stalks on scorpion legs. The mother a monster the size of the nearby mountains or, at least, the smaller slopes. Her shell a hundred shades of grey and azure, verging into charcoals and cobalt blues; her cloud-sculpted chitinous stomach black as soot. She's an old thing, thickly armored in thorned thunderheads and jagged spurs; her claws heavy with rain and swirling wind, her stinger hiked high and fat with a destroying deluge. Lightning strikes with every footfall, chaining down jointed, arthropodal limbs. Faint booms reaching your ears seconds later as sound travels over the steppes. Her unarmored young clinging to her back in a fluffy white mass. Smaller sparks dancing within the larger mass as they adjust their grips, as they cling and clamber over each other.
Something of the unease from earlier, from the other day, returns: this Calibration is going to be a bad one.
Still, you're lucky or, at least, your push towards the first work shift was prescient: by early afternoon you're back in the village proper. Back behind another section of the entrenchments and earthworks that wrap around the mining town. You and the hundreds of others limping past a column of fresh workers, the next shift all wearing the same, faintly sick expression. Your hands cracked and aching, every sinew in your back throbbing as one sure. But he's alive and you're alive. And you have things to look forward to now, don't you?
Precious draughts of fresh water from wooden casks, the eyes of the soldiers lingering on every sip you take; more bread and dried meat. He finds you both a spot to sit and rest, your backs to a sunbaked wall. You share half of your food (it's easier this time, barely) and he drapes an arm over your shoulders and slyly slips a hand along the inside of your thigh after you're done. And you enjoy it and you let him even if the two of you are too exhausted to do anything else besides enjoy each other's presences. Uncaring or indifferent to the people passing, the odd look; it's not as if there's any privacy in the village anymore. It's not as if there's any space left at all really. The inside of every row house has men and women stacked in like cord wood, lean bodies packed in coffin-sized cubbies. Every flat surface remotely in the shade has a person or three with their arms draped on their knees. A festival crowd, a feast-day throng, endlessly milling. Waiting for the show to start.
The square around the "battle standards" is emptied, when the wind stirs you can smell the sickly sweet carrion sweet. If you look up you can see the thick haze of fat-bodied flies, wreathing the helot bodies slow-curing in the sun.
When night finally falls it's a mercy. The world's always more beautiful in the dark.
The storeroom is a large thing. Timber and poured concrete and thatch: a squat, ugly brick of a structure nestled against the Northern wall just like you were told. Somewhere towards the center of the Helot Quarter, that meticulously planned sprawl of razor sharp streets and narrow barracks. Every inch of land maximized, laid open and nearly impossible to defend by design. But there's so many of you now that the idea matters less and less; they'd have to wade through the bodies to get in and you know not a single Citizen would care to.
There are helots at the doors, arms folded across their chests as they warily scan the gathered crowd and it is a crowd. You weren't the only one told it seems; nor the only one who shared the message, spreading it along. You slip your hand into Jason's just...because you can, because you want to, because he likes it even if he seems anxious as well. His head half-turned from you as he watches the seemingly self-appointed guards, as he shifts his attention to the people all around him. Keeping you close beside him.
Listener Karatzas stands inside, on the second level; a narrow walkway running around. People are already climbing up the ladders to sit near her, perching on the gantries above. You and Jason are swept along.
People here are mixing, mingling, talking actually talking as everyone gets settled. And everywhere you hear the same word, repeated again and again: Xauma. Xauma.
Xauma.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who serves the army thaumaturges. She's telling a few others how her master seems almost frightened of late, and always keeps salt close at hand.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who was seconded to a scouting party. One of his arms is wrapped in a blood-dappled bandage, and he's miming about...something with big jaws.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who's been personally attending the magistrate and his "guest": Aikaterine Sidonia. She seems badly rattled and, as you watch, fidgets with her tunic.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who says he was tasked to a talon of heavy infantry. His face is shadowed as he recounts the soldier's moods and he looks run absolutely ragged.
The Unconquered Sun gives life. He cannot be said to be merciful.
You sit in the darkness, in the stillness; in a small scrap of shadow, of sheltered offered by the ledge at your back. Sniffing as you rub the heel of your palm against your nose, wiping up some of the mess, cleaning yourself up as best you can. Legs crooked in front of you and bowl balanced on your lap. Silvery tongues of steam curling up, the warmth bleeding into your calloused palms.
It's just you and Jason here, alone in the crowd of the still sleeping and the already stirring. An inch of space separating you from him and it feels like a chasm, like something cavernous that yawns so very wide. Does he think you're angry with him? Are you angry with him? Is he afraid? Are you? You don't know, you can barely tell what you're feeling anymore. It's harder to ascribe names, easier to manage associations and sensations: this is an itch, ants on marching in a line along your spine. Crawling over your chest, their legs like pins and needlepoints pricking your skin in a hundred places.
"...They're going to kill us," you say quietly, not quite looking at him. You feel more than see him turn his head, an expression you can't quite make out beneath a spray of hair yellow as straw, as ripe grain. Paler than you and he still tans to this even golden brown. You can see the smile in your head, those slightly too sharp teeth. Those tendons that shift around his throat, anchored at his collarbone. Curves of dense chest muscle filling out his tunic, broad shoulders set back. In another life he'd almost look heroic. The brave knight lingering just within the shell of a fisherman's son.
"Alexius-"
"You know what these are don't you?" And for once you effortlessly override him, your voice flat and even; you drop your eyes to the morning meal cradled in your hands and tilt it to the left, to the right, watching as the milk-white gruel oozes up the sides, scraps of piscine meat stuck in the matter alongside shreds of green, "I wasn't sure at first heh, until I heard that they took all the grain from the helot quarter. But then it made sense. They're putting us on starvation rations. They don't have enough to feed us and the army, we were never supposed to stop here I think."
He's studying you out of the corner of your eye, grey irises trained on yours. You shrug self-consciously as you lift the bowl to your lips anyway. You barely have to chew, it goes down easy. Drag your sleeve over your mouth.
"We were meant to go to the Triadic River Ministry, they'd have actually been able to host everyone there wouldn't they? But then that fell while we were still a few days out. So now they're just stuck here, with a few thousand slaves they don't care about and can't care for. Even if they win they'll still have to put the city to siege right? And what'll happen to us then?"
A second of hesitation, just a second and then he shuffles in closer. Hip to hip, all but ankle to ankle. Fingers wrap around your wrist and squeeze. "We still have at least a week before Calibration," he says, "there'll be more wagons. We might have just marched faster than some of the trains, if they were trying to reinforce the Ministry before the wolves crossed the River."
You don't push him off, you just stare dully down at your food. Leaning into it a little; the motion reflexive, almost automatic. "And if they lose?"
"Are you scared?" He asks gently, you nod, "I'll look after you. You know that don't you?"
"(S'okay to say you just want to fuck me)," you mumble.
Jason laughs at that, a short, sharp bark; something between surprise and genuine amusement. He glance over and he's smirking, scrubbing at his own cheeks, trying to hide the faint flush that creeps up his face. You exhale, grinning slightly despite yourself. Tipping your head, resting it on his arm. He shifts beside you, taking more of your weight (as if there was much to take at all). You're half-curled against him now, one of his hands resting on a bony hip. The gesture equal parts possessive and protective. You think you like it.
"You're a brave one huh? You barely know me."
You smile faintly, "I barely know anyone, and helots have to be brave right?"
"Oh?"
A few more mouthfuls, throat bobbing, and just like that breakfast is gone. You run your thumb around the inside of the glorified cup. Licking up a piece of river fish. Your voice soft, words equal parts shy and spiteful. Half formed thoughts floating free without much consideration as you idly follow the idea to the very end. "Soldiers get to be important, they get arms and armor and training and if they live they get everything they need and if they die bravely then they get everything they want. Wonder how long it'd take them to start screaming if they had to dig ditches in the sun all day, heh? And then get speared through the back for no good reason by some piece of shit with arms and armor. They don't have to live like they're cursed. They just...get to live."
There's a long, long, silence. You glance over, Jason has all but buried his face in his bowl. Eating just you started talking. He catches your eye apologetically as he, freshly committed, tries to finish it past as possible. You hear him start to choke and you pat his back as he faintly gags, forcing the blockage down his throat and gasping out a "sorry". Doing his best to be cheerful even as he tears up. Even as he looks away, one foot tap tap tapping the ground, the grip on your flank tightening.
Is he nervous? You'd be lying if you said it wasn't encouraging in its own way to be on the other side for once, to be the one who could reciprocate. Who could be strong.
"Heh," you lean in and kiss his cheek, coarse stubble and chapped lips; it's a little awkward and for all that it's as basic a display as you can get you're still not very good at it let's be honest. For a second you feel him tense up, feel the start of a recoil; but before you can process it, before you can really pull back, he turns into it. Free hand sinking into your shaggy hair, fingers digging into your scalp. His mouth on yours.
He's better at it. Even if his breath does smell a bit like fish and when he finally breaks away and presses your forehead to his, whistle sounding harsh and shrill in the background, the bloated corpses atop the battle standards swimming out of the murk, you're both smiling.
"I-" he starts, he pauses, you can see him carefully choosing words, the idea slowly taking shape and his voice even, deadly serious, "-will make sure you survive, alright Alexius?"
"Alright Jason, I...I trust you."
And so you tell him about Listener Karatzas and the service she's holding tonight.
They have you near the road today, the Iron Age thing of crafted stone and military engineering that curves over and through the rolling hills and dying grass, eventually merging into the Shogunate highway miles away. You can see it as you dig (Jason has the pick today, you the shovel), glistening like a river of oil in the far distance. As if someone dipped a brush in ink and stained the landscape with a single, savage stroke.
In the North, towards the Yanaze, a storm stalks on scorpion legs. The mother a monster the size of the nearby mountains or, at least, the smaller slopes. Her shell a hundred shades of grey and azure, verging into charcoals and cobalt blues; her cloud-sculpted chitinous stomach black as soot. She's an old thing, thickly armored in thorned thunderheads and jagged spurs; her claws heavy with rain and swirling wind, her stinger hiked high and fat with a destroying deluge. Lightning strikes with every footfall, chaining down jointed, arthropodal limbs. Faint booms reaching your ears seconds later as sound travels over the steppes. Her unarmored young clinging to her back in a fluffy white mass. Smaller sparks dancing within the larger mass as they adjust their grips, as they cling and clamber over each other.
Something of the unease from earlier, from the other day, returns: this Calibration is going to be a bad one.
Still, you're lucky or, at least, your push towards the first work shift was prescient: by early afternoon you're back in the village proper. Back behind another section of the entrenchments and earthworks that wrap around the mining town. You and the hundreds of others limping past a column of fresh workers, the next shift all wearing the same, faintly sick expression. Your hands cracked and aching, every sinew in your back throbbing as one sure. But he's alive and you're alive. And you have things to look forward to now, don't you?
Precious draughts of fresh water from wooden casks, the eyes of the soldiers lingering on every sip you take; more bread and dried meat. He finds you both a spot to sit and rest, your backs to a sunbaked wall. You share half of your food (it's easier this time, barely) and he drapes an arm over your shoulders and slyly slips a hand along the inside of your thigh after you're done. And you enjoy it and you let him even if the two of you are too exhausted to do anything else besides enjoy each other's presences. Uncaring or indifferent to the people passing, the odd look; it's not as if there's any privacy in the village anymore. It's not as if there's any space left at all really. The inside of every row house has men and women stacked in like cord wood, lean bodies packed in coffin-sized cubbies. Every flat surface remotely in the shade has a person or three with their arms draped on their knees. A festival crowd, a feast-day throng, endlessly milling. Waiting for the show to start.
The square around the "battle standards" is emptied, when the wind stirs you can smell the sickly sweet carrion sweet. If you look up you can see the thick haze of fat-bodied flies, wreathing the helot bodies slow-curing in the sun.
When night finally falls it's a mercy. The world's always more beautiful in the dark.
The storeroom is a large thing. Timber and poured concrete and thatch: a squat, ugly brick of a structure nestled against the Northern wall just like you were told. Somewhere towards the center of the Helot Quarter, that meticulously planned sprawl of razor sharp streets and narrow barracks. Every inch of land maximized, laid open and nearly impossible to defend by design. But there's so many of you now that the idea matters less and less; they'd have to wade through the bodies to get in and you know not a single Citizen would care to.
There are helots at the doors, arms folded across their chests as they warily scan the gathered crowd and it is a crowd. You weren't the only one told it seems; nor the only one who shared the message, spreading it along. You slip your hand into Jason's just...because you can, because you want to, because he likes it even if he seems anxious as well. His head half-turned from you as he watches the seemingly self-appointed guards, as he shifts his attention to the people all around him. Keeping you close beside him.
Listener Karatzas stands inside, on the second level; a narrow walkway running around. People are already climbing up the ladders to sit near her, perching on the gantries above. You and Jason are swept along.
People here are mixing, mingling, talking actually talking as everyone gets settled. And everywhere you hear the same word, repeated again and again: Xauma. Xauma.
Xauma.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who serves the army thaumaturges. She's telling a few others how her master seems almost frightened of late, and always keeps salt close at hand.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who was seconded to a scouting party. One of his arms is wrapped in a blood-dappled bandage, and he's miming about...something with big jaws.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who's been personally attending the magistrate and his "guest": Aikaterine Sidonia. She seems badly rattled and, as you watch, fidgets with her tunic.
[ ] Join the conversation with one of the helots who says he was tasked to a talon of heavy infantry. His face is shadowed as he recounts the soldier's moods and he looks run absolutely ragged.
Prologue Part Seven: Bad Moon Rising
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Your Listener stands on the lip of a slatted ledge, her pulpit a platform once used to stack boxes of salted fish. Her flock are slaves. Her cathedral an emptied out storehouse, a looted warehouse, and it is packed to the rafters. It's fine, there's plenty of room.
The army took everything here.
Every sack of dry grain, every cut of smoked meat, every cask of fruit or crate of foodstuff is gone. The building stripped bare, leaving only the hollow interior, the gutted husk: a place absent its purpose, barren and bleak in its own way. The floor is a single slab of cool grey stone, a poured foundation. Lashed-together ladders lean on wooden walls, rising to the upper levels and shadowed timbers arch high overhead. Lanterns flicker on the narrow gantries, the landings that ringing the central open space. Yellow-orange tongues of flame that paint the temple in a bonfire glow. The lower levels saturated in twisting, red-tinged light; the rafters lost in darkness, just the suggestion of exposed structure and the underside of layered thatch. The air here is heavy, still. Thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and burning oil.
There's at least a hundred people here; the church has no decoration but the crowd is a mosaic all its own. Flesh done in gradients of fur and feather and scale. Monsters twisted into human shapes. You've heard that in the West, the Realm devises complex systems and citizen-tiers for their subjugated populations; dividing and segmenting and segregating, a scaffolding of relative positions and absolute favor. Martial race or menial? Celestial in affinity or corrupt in aspect? Capable of higher reasoning and mature thought or restricted, hobbled by one's primitive instincts? Lookshy holds you in no such regard: you are the weak, you are the cowardly and the craven. You are all alike in your unworthiness, all equal as you kneel in the dirt.
If who you were mattered at all, you'd be a Citizen now wouldn't you?
Even so, there are stories and you know some of them.
There, in the shoulder-to-shoulder press, rising above the rest: the spotted leopards, the grassland lions, the thick-furred tigers. Beastmen stripped to the waist or clad in overlarge jackets, bodies dappled in spots or stripes or uniform tawny-gold. Abhor them, they came from Outside in the armies of the raksha and the City broke them upon its walls. Their bondage is their atonement, chaos and Wyld things made to serve the designs of enlightened women and disciplined men. You know that they must clip their pelts short and cut their claws to the quick, paring them back to the soft beds.
There, against the walls, on the edges, in knots of their own kind: the river-serpents. Their frames long and lean; too many slitted black eyes glittering in saurian faces. Frilled hoods climbing up their shoulders, anchoring into their scaled scalps. Scorn them, they were born from the filth of the Yanaze and stood against the founding Gentes, siding with the tyrants of Deheleshen against what was good and right. Against the course of history, the future path. Black mud clings to their bodies, wetland greenery sprouting from lanky limbs. The blessings of a God. It means nothing.
And there, lining the highest levels, hunched over and peering down at the assembled mass: the ossifrage, the bone-eaters. Black wings and heavy, hooked beaks. The yellow-white feathers of their chests and necks and scalps stained rust red. Hate them, when the City found their tribe they knew them to be degenerate corpse-eaters, ghost-worshippers. Vultures feasting upon the bones of citizens; they were scourged with fire and salt as all wicked things must be. One turns and you see her face has been half shattered, pink tissue welling up between the cracked keratin.
Stories are just ghosts, pieces of the past that haunt you; dogging your footsteps. An echo where there was no sound, a murmur where there was no conversation. You know that in their academies they teach the children of Lookshy the history of your own ancestors. They say that you were born from uncivilized barbarians and stupid brutes, that your forefathers and mothers were feeble and feckless and their very blood seethed with impurities. That slavery was a kindness, a taming of beasts.
You're all just beasts to them, in the end.
Snippets of discussion float through the air, you have some time before the sermon starts. You tug Jason's arm, tipping your head towards a small throng around a river-serpent. He starts a little, rubbing his neck sheepishly. Just past his ear you see a serious faced young woman scowling at nothing. Her hair the color of ash and cold, crumbling coals; a padded vest baring deeply tanned, deeply muscled arms. Her focus shifts and she catches your eyes; holds them for a moment, just a moment, a second of connection in the churn and then it's gone and so is she.
A shudder works its way down your spine as you slip into discussion, the dull roar of the crowd fading away. Shake yourself like a dog shedding water, you're jumping at nothing. All you're doing is attending a service, all you're doing is being a faithful Immaculate, a dutiful son. Repeat it to yourself until it sounds almost true.
"-alt, sacks of the stuff," The river-serpent is talking and her voice is a hissing, lyrical rasp. She passes a palm over the ridges that crown her spade-shaped skull, thickened scales jutting out over half a dozen eyesockets, a nervous gesture. "And he's been hanging prayer strips from his tent."
"But he's not an exorcist?" Someone asks, you and Jason get a few glances before the circle obligingly shifts and makes room. The river-serpent shakes her head, a side-to-side sway. "So why?"
"Xauma, you idiot," someone else mutters.
"But they don't have necro-"
"They have oaths," she says softly, "I-I heard him talking about it. He said the Wolf-King made deals with things under the earth, in the ground, that they gave him an army. Pledged him the dead and the still-living. That it was the only way he could march against the City. Lookshy burned Xauma a long time ago, but he said it used to be almost as big. A million people. Maybe more."
A million people, gone in an instant. Can you imagine? You can't can you? Your brain can't envision it, can't grasp a hold of what it must be like; a pyre in the village square except the pile of bodies stretches out through the fields, crushing the stalks and heaping up against the distant walls. A bonfire for the dead except the flames ripple out in great crackling waves, scorching the soil beneath your feet, vast curtains of black smoke rising to choke out the sun.
A million people. Can you imagine what they became? Down there in the dark, shackled by their sins, soaking in their own spiritual corruption. You shudder again.
"(You were in the camp, how much salt do they even have?)" The question barely audible but she catches it still, you see her flinch and glance away.
"Not enough," she says. "Don't think they even have enough for themselves. More was supposed to arrive today from the South, but Xauma's hunting the convoys. They have raptors serving them, white-winged creatures that fly by night."
Run your tongue over your teeth, feel Jason's attention on the exchange. Silently listening, saying nothing but his expression intent beneath the semi-affected curiosity. You remember the airship as it passed you on the march heret; that massive arrow-headed wonder of industry and sorcerous skill. Its sheer span swallowing you all up in the shade, an entire fort clinging to the underside. You remember it as it limped back across the sky, the ugly gouges that scored its underside shiny, the missing compartments wrenched free from the whole, the torn and half-lamed escort.
No wonder they're scared.
Jason starts to say something, to ask a question of his own, only to be cut off by the sound of stamping. A walking stick slamming against a solid surface, cutting through the din, the chatter. Conversation dwindles and dies in an instant, the quiet rustling of cloth and sandaled feet as every face turns towards the far side of the storehouse; to Listener Karatzas, your minister. In her hand she holds a single worn tome; its backing the brown of rich, fertile earth and its pages creamy white. Unconcerned, unperturbed, by the reverent hush, the almost apprehensive stillness, she scans the upper levels, her eyes dropping to the ground floor and the congregation that spills out the doors. Her gaze passes over you, you think, but all you can see from where you stand is a collection of impressions, mapped over your own recollections: the wisps of iron grey hair that frame her face, the hood and the broad brimmed hat, those teeth that shine, gleaming in her mouth; the reflected sparks of a dozen lanterns.
And then she begins. And her voice is thunder and fire and the landslide as it cascades down the stony slopes, grinding and roaring over the mountain slopes.
"They say you are the meek! And to ensure this they have seen you abused, mutilated and shamed. To ensure this they send soldiers amongst you to slaughter and maim and keep you shackled by fear. But I am not afraid, for I have faith! In the Dragons! In the world that they have made! In you! And I stand before you tonight to tell you that your masters lie. Even the most impious soldier would say that I am holy, sacred in a way a helot is not and can never be. Something like a citizen in my own right," She spreads her arms as if to embrace you all and you? You're squeezing Jason's fingers all but bloodless, the tears returned, you're rocking up on your tip-toes as if you can be that much closer to her. That much nearer.
"But they are wrong," she says, "for you are my sisters and my brothers and my brethren in faith if not in blood. And that it is not you who should be afraid."
You don't cheer, you can't, you can barely bring yourself to raise your voice. But as she begins to read from the Text, to recount the story of Pasiap and the Pilgrim and the Tyrant Humbled, you see the same expression on everyone's face and feel it mirrored on your own: joy, raw and radiant and awed.
Who is it who offers first? Who asks and who reciprocates? Do you even know? Does it even matter?
There's no real privacy in the helot quarter but the two of you still find a space, a little alley between the buildings where the shadows cluster thick. It's cramped but it's cool and the wind is softer here, people walk past now and then but none cut through, none disturb you. You kiss him and he buries his face in the crook of your neck, the joint between shoulder and throat. His arms wrapped around you, his hands slipping lower. Your own exploring him, feeling the hard planes of muscle and the starker spars of bone. Stroking the heavy brawn of his breast, fingers gliding across the tanned skin; lacing together beneath his tunic, across his back. Savoring the way you make him shiver despite himself. Blonde hair hangs half over his eyes, he doesn't quite look at you.
"Do you enjoy me?" Jason murmurs.
"I think you're beautiful," you say. He laughs, a hitching, hiccuping noise in the sharp bark and holds you tighter. He steps in closer, all but pinning you against the wall. It goes fast after that, a steady degeneration. Preparing you and asking if you're alright and then kinder concerns giving way to harsh gasps and barely stifled moans. He's gentler with you than he really needs to be; like he's worried you'll break or shatter in your grip. You take him with your back braced against the side of the building, your legs around his waist. The two of you more than half naked, nearly nude but for open jackets and hiked up shirts.
His face buried beneath your jaw, your nails digging into the dense muscle, both your breathing coming in ragged pants as you finish. He makes no mood to clean up, to get decent, just standing there chest to chest. Letting it last as long as he can.
"(It'll be alright)," he says, repeating it like a mantra as the two of you cling to each other. The rest of the world dead and gone. "(It'll be alright, I'll make it alright)."
In the morning you wake to see a hundred carrion crows circling the town of Ivory Bones, watching, waiting, as a new brace of "battle-standards" are raised, the old ones, the rotting carcasses finally cut down. The next day they slash everyone's rations, working you all double-pace. Working you until your arms are trembling, shaking, and the haft of your pick is stained scarlet, smudged in crimson. Only some of it yours. The day after you and the others watch as a column of armored cataphracts spills out of the gates of the town, pouring through the narrow paths through the earth-works. Quilted red cloth over bronze-washed scale. Their chargers draped in barding, faded gold segments rippling with every step. They burn like the setting sun. Hundreds of pounds of armored strength, veteran soldiers. Packs of mounted scouts, skirmishers in chain at the front. They return that evening, bloodied and battered and badly diminished in number. And all throughout Listener Karatzas walks among the slaves and speaks to so many of you, she says she will hold another service to welcome calendar's end, to huddle together against the encroaching dark. All throughout the week Jason stands beside you, watching you; you take comfort in each other when you can, you're there for each other still when you can't. You hold him in the night as he mumbles, caught in the grip of his own nightmares. You don't judge him, you understand.
Calibration is coming and it won't spare any of you. Calibration is coming and with it an answer to the question that's been plaguing you. Calibration is coming, tonight the Unconquered Sun will set and he will not rise.
It is dusk. It is starting.
You and Jason kneel alongside the others, the hundreds, the thousands close enough that there's barely any room to sink down lower. You do it anyway, every helot genuflecting before the horizon, sinking down to prostrate themselves in the dust alongside every guard in the camp. A Listener -not her, not yours- begins to sign a hymn. The mournful melody drifting out over the marshaled soldiers and slaves. The sky above burns like molten copper, the shadow of the Silver Chair interposed upon face of a divine inferno. A black disk carving Sol Invictus into a blazing crescent. One by one the Maidens flicker and flare to life around them. Yellow and blue and red and green and violent, a coronet of color; a pentacle framing the Sun and Moon as together they start to sink below the rim of the world.
The song ends, you press your forehead to the stone and make to rise along with the rest only for Jason to catch your arm. You freeze, hesitant and unsure, studying him with concern.
"Is everything-"
"Don't," he says, his voice thick and hoarse. He won't look up at you, he's just staring off, into the middle distance, at the impaling spears; at the raven worrying at the ruins of a woman's face. Ripping gory strips from glistening bone. "Don't go to her sermon tonight. Listener Karatzas. Don't, just stay by me."
You...smile, awkwardly, uncertainly, not quite understanding. Not quite comprehending. But you can feel the pressure in his grip, feel the tension, feel the strain as he makes claws out of his hands.
"Jason if you're worried we can-"
"It's not that," he hisses, rounding on you and you can see, now that his eyes are glassy, bloodshot, the skin around them slightly swollen and puffy. All around you the helots are milling about, the edges of the crowd dissolving and fraying as people filter away. Nobody pays attention to you to,w nobody has the energy to care. "Xauma is coming now Alexius, they'll be here in a few hours, less maybe. Sidonia's ordered the army to liquidate the slaves. You were right. You were fucking right."
The smile slowly, slowly slips from your face. Every feeling ebbs away, empties you out. Somewhere, far from you, you feel the panic start. A rolling wave building and building, rising to catastrophic heights.
"Oh," you say.
But...Jason has a plan, right? Jason has a way out and even if it's not fully fleshed you're smart enough and you're clever and you can take a lot of punishment. You'll improvise. The two of you can make it through.
Still. These might be the last meaningful words you get to say to him.
[ ] Tell him you love him. You don't...know if you do, really, you don't know what love feels like. But he makes you feel something like whole, something like wanted, and you want to make him feel the same way too.
[ ] Tell him that it'll be alright. That he's done the best he can but you're just helots, and if you survive it'll be luck as much as skill and if you die it...won't matter as much to you. Because you'll be together.
[ ] Tell him thank you. He was there for you that first night, he's been there for you in the days since. You don't know what you are to each other exactly but he is your friend. And you would die for for your friends.
[ ] Tell him you're scared. You've never been especially courageous, you've never wanted to stand out of the crowd. But he gave you the confidence to go to Listener Karatzas's sermon. And so you'll be brave.
The army took everything here.
Every sack of dry grain, every cut of smoked meat, every cask of fruit or crate of foodstuff is gone. The building stripped bare, leaving only the hollow interior, the gutted husk: a place absent its purpose, barren and bleak in its own way. The floor is a single slab of cool grey stone, a poured foundation. Lashed-together ladders lean on wooden walls, rising to the upper levels and shadowed timbers arch high overhead. Lanterns flicker on the narrow gantries, the landings that ringing the central open space. Yellow-orange tongues of flame that paint the temple in a bonfire glow. The lower levels saturated in twisting, red-tinged light; the rafters lost in darkness, just the suggestion of exposed structure and the underside of layered thatch. The air here is heavy, still. Thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and burning oil.
There's at least a hundred people here; the church has no decoration but the crowd is a mosaic all its own. Flesh done in gradients of fur and feather and scale. Monsters twisted into human shapes. You've heard that in the West, the Realm devises complex systems and citizen-tiers for their subjugated populations; dividing and segmenting and segregating, a scaffolding of relative positions and absolute favor. Martial race or menial? Celestial in affinity or corrupt in aspect? Capable of higher reasoning and mature thought or restricted, hobbled by one's primitive instincts? Lookshy holds you in no such regard: you are the weak, you are the cowardly and the craven. You are all alike in your unworthiness, all equal as you kneel in the dirt.
If who you were mattered at all, you'd be a Citizen now wouldn't you?
Even so, there are stories and you know some of them.
There, in the shoulder-to-shoulder press, rising above the rest: the spotted leopards, the grassland lions, the thick-furred tigers. Beastmen stripped to the waist or clad in overlarge jackets, bodies dappled in spots or stripes or uniform tawny-gold. Abhor them, they came from Outside in the armies of the raksha and the City broke them upon its walls. Their bondage is their atonement, chaos and Wyld things made to serve the designs of enlightened women and disciplined men. You know that they must clip their pelts short and cut their claws to the quick, paring them back to the soft beds.
the overseer was a fat woman, a jovial woman, her body thick with muscle from years of service on the front lines, blurred by years more of good eating.
you remember the way her tiger-skin belt strained to contain her waist.
"I could always use another," she used to say as she slapped her stomach, laughing at her own joke.
you remember the way her tiger-skin belt strained to contain her waist.
"I could always use another," she used to say as she slapped her stomach, laughing at her own joke.
There, against the walls, on the edges, in knots of their own kind: the river-serpents. Their frames long and lean; too many slitted black eyes glittering in saurian faces. Frilled hoods climbing up their shoulders, anchoring into their scaled scalps. Scorn them, they were born from the filth of the Yanaze and stood against the founding Gentes, siding with the tyrants of Deheleshen against what was good and right. Against the course of history, the future path. Black mud clings to their bodies, wetland greenery sprouting from lanky limbs. The blessings of a God. It means nothing.
he sat on the bench, arms resting on his thighs. towering over you, sighing as he pressed a cool cloth to the back of his neck.
you asked what happened to his teeth, your small hands reaching up to touch your own canines.
they were pulled when he was born, he said, to take his venom and make him "safe".
you asked what happened to his teeth, your small hands reaching up to touch your own canines.
they were pulled when he was born, he said, to take his venom and make him "safe".
And there, lining the highest levels, hunched over and peering down at the assembled mass: the ossifrage, the bone-eaters. Black wings and heavy, hooked beaks. The yellow-white feathers of their chests and necks and scalps stained rust red. Hate them, when the City found their tribe they knew them to be degenerate corpse-eaters, ghost-worshippers. Vultures feasting upon the bones of citizens; they were scourged with fire and salt as all wicked things must be. One turns and you see her face has been half shattered, pink tissue welling up between the cracked keratin.
at night, when you two were done, he'd wrap his useless wings around you and hold you kindly. what happened to him wasn't your fault. more than anything he wanted to fly.
he was smiling, you think, when he looked back at you.
he was smiling, you think, when he went over the cliff. useless wings outstretched.
he was smiling, you think, when he looked back at you.
he was smiling, you think, when he went over the cliff. useless wings outstretched.
Stories are just ghosts, pieces of the past that haunt you; dogging your footsteps. An echo where there was no sound, a murmur where there was no conversation. You know that in their academies they teach the children of Lookshy the history of your own ancestors. They say that you were born from uncivilized barbarians and stupid brutes, that your forefathers and mothers were feeble and feckless and their very blood seethed with impurities. That slavery was a kindness, a taming of beasts.
You're all just beasts to them, in the end.
Snippets of discussion float through the air, you have some time before the sermon starts. You tug Jason's arm, tipping your head towards a small throng around a river-serpent. He starts a little, rubbing his neck sheepishly. Just past his ear you see a serious faced young woman scowling at nothing. Her hair the color of ash and cold, crumbling coals; a padded vest baring deeply tanned, deeply muscled arms. Her focus shifts and she catches your eyes; holds them for a moment, just a moment, a second of connection in the churn and then it's gone and so is she.
A shudder works its way down your spine as you slip into discussion, the dull roar of the crowd fading away. Shake yourself like a dog shedding water, you're jumping at nothing. All you're doing is attending a service, all you're doing is being a faithful Immaculate, a dutiful son. Repeat it to yourself until it sounds almost true.
"-alt, sacks of the stuff," The river-serpent is talking and her voice is a hissing, lyrical rasp. She passes a palm over the ridges that crown her spade-shaped skull, thickened scales jutting out over half a dozen eyesockets, a nervous gesture. "And he's been hanging prayer strips from his tent."
"But he's not an exorcist?" Someone asks, you and Jason get a few glances before the circle obligingly shifts and makes room. The river-serpent shakes her head, a side-to-side sway. "So why?"
"Xauma, you idiot," someone else mutters.
"But they don't have necro-"
"They have oaths," she says softly, "I-I heard him talking about it. He said the Wolf-King made deals with things under the earth, in the ground, that they gave him an army. Pledged him the dead and the still-living. That it was the only way he could march against the City. Lookshy burned Xauma a long time ago, but he said it used to be almost as big. A million people. Maybe more."
A million people, gone in an instant. Can you imagine? You can't can you? Your brain can't envision it, can't grasp a hold of what it must be like; a pyre in the village square except the pile of bodies stretches out through the fields, crushing the stalks and heaping up against the distant walls. A bonfire for the dead except the flames ripple out in great crackling waves, scorching the soil beneath your feet, vast curtains of black smoke rising to choke out the sun.
A million people. Can you imagine what they became? Down there in the dark, shackled by their sins, soaking in their own spiritual corruption. You shudder again.
"(You were in the camp, how much salt do they even have?)" The question barely audible but she catches it still, you see her flinch and glance away.
"Not enough," she says. "Don't think they even have enough for themselves. More was supposed to arrive today from the South, but Xauma's hunting the convoys. They have raptors serving them, white-winged creatures that fly by night."
Run your tongue over your teeth, feel Jason's attention on the exchange. Silently listening, saying nothing but his expression intent beneath the semi-affected curiosity. You remember the airship as it passed you on the march heret; that massive arrow-headed wonder of industry and sorcerous skill. Its sheer span swallowing you all up in the shade, an entire fort clinging to the underside. You remember it as it limped back across the sky, the ugly gouges that scored its underside shiny, the missing compartments wrenched free from the whole, the torn and half-lamed escort.
No wonder they're scared.
Jason starts to say something, to ask a question of his own, only to be cut off by the sound of stamping. A walking stick slamming against a solid surface, cutting through the din, the chatter. Conversation dwindles and dies in an instant, the quiet rustling of cloth and sandaled feet as every face turns towards the far side of the storehouse; to Listener Karatzas, your minister. In her hand she holds a single worn tome; its backing the brown of rich, fertile earth and its pages creamy white. Unconcerned, unperturbed, by the reverent hush, the almost apprehensive stillness, she scans the upper levels, her eyes dropping to the ground floor and the congregation that spills out the doors. Her gaze passes over you, you think, but all you can see from where you stand is a collection of impressions, mapped over your own recollections: the wisps of iron grey hair that frame her face, the hood and the broad brimmed hat, those teeth that shine, gleaming in her mouth; the reflected sparks of a dozen lanterns.
And then she begins. And her voice is thunder and fire and the landslide as it cascades down the stony slopes, grinding and roaring over the mountain slopes.
"They say you are the meek! And to ensure this they have seen you abused, mutilated and shamed. To ensure this they send soldiers amongst you to slaughter and maim and keep you shackled by fear. But I am not afraid, for I have faith! In the Dragons! In the world that they have made! In you! And I stand before you tonight to tell you that your masters lie. Even the most impious soldier would say that I am holy, sacred in a way a helot is not and can never be. Something like a citizen in my own right," She spreads her arms as if to embrace you all and you? You're squeezing Jason's fingers all but bloodless, the tears returned, you're rocking up on your tip-toes as if you can be that much closer to her. That much nearer.
"But they are wrong," she says, "for you are my sisters and my brothers and my brethren in faith if not in blood. And that it is not you who should be afraid."
You don't cheer, you can't, you can barely bring yourself to raise your voice. But as she begins to read from the Text, to recount the story of Pasiap and the Pilgrim and the Tyrant Humbled, you see the same expression on everyone's face and feel it mirrored on your own: joy, raw and radiant and awed.
Who is it who offers first? Who asks and who reciprocates? Do you even know? Does it even matter?
There's no real privacy in the helot quarter but the two of you still find a space, a little alley between the buildings where the shadows cluster thick. It's cramped but it's cool and the wind is softer here, people walk past now and then but none cut through, none disturb you. You kiss him and he buries his face in the crook of your neck, the joint between shoulder and throat. His arms wrapped around you, his hands slipping lower. Your own exploring him, feeling the hard planes of muscle and the starker spars of bone. Stroking the heavy brawn of his breast, fingers gliding across the tanned skin; lacing together beneath his tunic, across his back. Savoring the way you make him shiver despite himself. Blonde hair hangs half over his eyes, he doesn't quite look at you.
"Do you enjoy me?" Jason murmurs.
"I think you're beautiful," you say. He laughs, a hitching, hiccuping noise in the sharp bark and holds you tighter. He steps in closer, all but pinning you against the wall. It goes fast after that, a steady degeneration. Preparing you and asking if you're alright and then kinder concerns giving way to harsh gasps and barely stifled moans. He's gentler with you than he really needs to be; like he's worried you'll break or shatter in your grip. You take him with your back braced against the side of the building, your legs around his waist. The two of you more than half naked, nearly nude but for open jackets and hiked up shirts.
His face buried beneath your jaw, your nails digging into the dense muscle, both your breathing coming in ragged pants as you finish. He makes no mood to clean up, to get decent, just standing there chest to chest. Letting it last as long as he can.
"(It'll be alright)," he says, repeating it like a mantra as the two of you cling to each other. The rest of the world dead and gone. "(It'll be alright, I'll make it alright)."
In the morning you wake to see a hundred carrion crows circling the town of Ivory Bones, watching, waiting, as a new brace of "battle-standards" are raised, the old ones, the rotting carcasses finally cut down. The next day they slash everyone's rations, working you all double-pace. Working you until your arms are trembling, shaking, and the haft of your pick is stained scarlet, smudged in crimson. Only some of it yours. The day after you and the others watch as a column of armored cataphracts spills out of the gates of the town, pouring through the narrow paths through the earth-works. Quilted red cloth over bronze-washed scale. Their chargers draped in barding, faded gold segments rippling with every step. They burn like the setting sun. Hundreds of pounds of armored strength, veteran soldiers. Packs of mounted scouts, skirmishers in chain at the front. They return that evening, bloodied and battered and badly diminished in number. And all throughout Listener Karatzas walks among the slaves and speaks to so many of you, she says she will hold another service to welcome calendar's end, to huddle together against the encroaching dark. All throughout the week Jason stands beside you, watching you; you take comfort in each other when you can, you're there for each other still when you can't. You hold him in the night as he mumbles, caught in the grip of his own nightmares. You don't judge him, you understand.
Calibration is coming and it won't spare any of you. Calibration is coming and with it an answer to the question that's been plaguing you. Calibration is coming, tonight the Unconquered Sun will set and he will not rise.
It is dusk. It is starting.
You and Jason kneel alongside the others, the hundreds, the thousands close enough that there's barely any room to sink down lower. You do it anyway, every helot genuflecting before the horizon, sinking down to prostrate themselves in the dust alongside every guard in the camp. A Listener -not her, not yours- begins to sign a hymn. The mournful melody drifting out over the marshaled soldiers and slaves. The sky above burns like molten copper, the shadow of the Silver Chair interposed upon face of a divine inferno. A black disk carving Sol Invictus into a blazing crescent. One by one the Maidens flicker and flare to life around them. Yellow and blue and red and green and violent, a coronet of color; a pentacle framing the Sun and Moon as together they start to sink below the rim of the world.
The song ends, you press your forehead to the stone and make to rise along with the rest only for Jason to catch your arm. You freeze, hesitant and unsure, studying him with concern.
"Is everything-"
"Don't," he says, his voice thick and hoarse. He won't look up at you, he's just staring off, into the middle distance, at the impaling spears; at the raven worrying at the ruins of a woman's face. Ripping gory strips from glistening bone. "Don't go to her sermon tonight. Listener Karatzas. Don't, just stay by me."
You...smile, awkwardly, uncertainly, not quite understanding. Not quite comprehending. But you can feel the pressure in his grip, feel the tension, feel the strain as he makes claws out of his hands.
"Jason if you're worried we can-"
"It's not that," he hisses, rounding on you and you can see, now that his eyes are glassy, bloodshot, the skin around them slightly swollen and puffy. All around you the helots are milling about, the edges of the crowd dissolving and fraying as people filter away. Nobody pays attention to you to,w nobody has the energy to care. "Xauma is coming now Alexius, they'll be here in a few hours, less maybe. Sidonia's ordered the army to liquidate the slaves. You were right. You were fucking right."
The smile slowly, slowly slips from your face. Every feeling ebbs away, empties you out. Somewhere, far from you, you feel the panic start. A rolling wave building and building, rising to catastrophic heights.
"Oh," you say.
But...Jason has a plan, right? Jason has a way out and even if it's not fully fleshed you're smart enough and you're clever and you can take a lot of punishment. You'll improvise. The two of you can make it through.
Still. These might be the last meaningful words you get to say to him.
[ ] Tell him you love him. You don't...know if you do, really, you don't know what love feels like. But he makes you feel something like whole, something like wanted, and you want to make him feel the same way too.
[ ] Tell him that it'll be alright. That he's done the best he can but you're just helots, and if you survive it'll be luck as much as skill and if you die it...won't matter as much to you. Because you'll be together.
[ ] Tell him thank you. He was there for you that first night, he's been there for you in the days since. You don't know what you are to each other exactly but he is your friend. And you would die for for your friends.
[ ] Tell him you're scared. You've never been especially courageous, you've never wanted to stand out of the crowd. But he gave you the confidence to go to Listener Karatzas's sermon. And so you'll be brave.
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Prologue Part Eight: The Fire Sermon
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Corpse-child, born of dust, born of filth, born of the unloved and the unwanted, torn from your mother, ripped from your father, your past obliterated and your future turned to ash, tell us all: how does it feel?
Scarecrow stuffed with straw, branches for bones and thread for nerves, garbage of Creation, open your mouth and say it, proclaim it with as much pride as you can because everyone wants to know: how does it feel?
Dead man walking, how does it feel?
Are you happy, carrion-thing? Are those tears of joy that trickle down your cheeks? The Sun is setting; the shadows stretch long and your liberation is at hand. Aren't you glad? Carcass, why do you cry? You're going to be set free, freed of each and every burden, every shackle shattered, every sin scourged clean in a single red instant. You're going to be reborn and no, birth is never clean but if you're lucky maybe it'll be quick. Lift your throat and be glad. Kneel and give praise. What did you have before you but another thirty, forty empty years? Everything good you've ever had is gone, gone so long that even the memories of happier times are lost, smeared across your subconscious into a bleary, blurry nothing. All you have left is the horror. All you have left are the ghosts that haunt you. Why fight on for the sake of such obscene things?
Just give up.
Just give in.
Just let them take you.
It's never fair.
It was never your fault.
Y-you are not...you are not sick. You are not sick, it's the world that's sick. You are not wrong, it's the City that's wrong. You are not unwanted, you are not unloved, because he's here and you feel like you're drowning, crushed by the oncoming wave, sucked down by the undertow, but you can still feel his hand in yours: calloused palm to calloused palm, your fingers folded around it, clasping it as if in prayer. Squeezes so tight you see his fingertips start to turn white. You cling to him as the crowd buffets you on every side. The soon-to-be slaughtered filtering past you, exhausted and weary and searching for a place to rest. Don't look at them, look at him.
You see his face, see his pretty grey eyes, and it hurts you to see him suffering. To see the pain, pulsing like exposed muscle, flayed veins, between the cracks of his composure. He's raw in a way you haven't seen him before, a thing eaten alive from the inside out and it's only the half-shattered shell that's keeping him together at all. But you can help can't you? He steadied you and you can steady him. He was there for you, he's been there for you every day since you met, you can be here for him.
"...Jason," your voice is thick and you have to swallow down the lump in your throat but your eyes are mostly dry now; he flinches, tendons in his throat standing taut and he can't meet your gaze but it's alright, it's alright, you understand, "I'm here. I'm here for you, because of you. I wouldn't- I don't know that I would've lasted this long without you looking out for me. You're my friend and I- just saying I'm grateful sounds like such trash. It's more than that and I- it doesn't matter, because I won't-"
You choke it down again and fuck you're about to start crying again but you smile anyway. It's weak and it feels like it takes every ounce of strength in your body to force those muscles up, every scrap of willpower you have not to let your focus slip behind him to the soldiers watching, the scarlet-coats bloody red, the chain shining. But you press on because you have to: because the way out is through, because the way through is with him and because you've struggled so long and so hard but you'll keep going anyway. Because you don't want to drag him down with you. Because he makes you want to be better than you are, more than you are, doesn't he?
It's a dazed, half-awed realization. A kind of awakening, the kind of thing you can't really process right now as you doggedly stumble on. But you clutch it close to your chest as you continue.
"-I won't let you fall. My life is all I have to give so I'll give that if I have to and I'll be brave, I'll be brave for you alright? So just tell me what to do and I'll do it."
He opens his mouth, he closes it. The sky is the color of peach-flesh and cataphract scale, all of heaven in that half-light, that flickering, washed out glow. You can see night falling on the horizon, darkness mantling the mountains. You can see the stars, the lesser gods and goddesses, twinkling bright in great technicolor bands, burning out in sectors and swathes; as well planned as any Imperial farm. He finally speaks, the words small and miserable and ashamed but he's pressing on too. He's trying to save you too. Despite the cost, despite his own fear, his own helpless, twisted up fury and you don't know what love is, but you think that...maybe one day you could love him.
"My commanding officer won't call off the attack. I'll have to claim you as a conscript, but they won't touch you as long as you're with me."
And for a second, for one, treasured second you don't understand.
You can feel it, feel it as the tension in your jaw and your teeth chains across your features. Grinding under the strain until something gives beneath the stress, until something snaps and your smile fractures, cracks shooting out; webbing your from ear to ear. His hand slips and you don't realize at first, you don't quite comprehend why or how until you look and see your own hanging heavy at your sides.
Take a step away.
Take another.
You back into someone and they half-heartedly snarl something unkind under their breath but you barely notice. All you see is...him, for the first time, all those little clues you didn't piece together, all those little tells that didn't quite make sense, the information you ignored. You see the way his own hand twitches, like he wants to reach out for you, to pull you closer, to take it back. You see the self-loathing, see the disgust, and he doesn't weep even though you know he wants to. Even though if he did you might cross over, walk back, if only to wipe them away. If only to hold him and be held.
Tell the world you shadow, you shade, how does it feel? How does it feel to realize that the one thing you hate more than yourself cares about you more than you ever could? That there isn't a trace of anger or clever, calculated, cunning on his face? Just agony for what he's done to you, regret and apologies and so, so much hate and none of it for you. All of it because of you.
You say nothing, you can't. You just turn, swaying, drunken and dazed and force yourself to put one foot in front of the other. And then another. You take a third and then tanned hand shoots out to catch your shoulder.
Turn your head to stare at him, spine all but creaking like ancient hinges and hundred year old wood. Vertebrae almost squealing as they slide across each other, something snapping wetly in your brain. You don't know what he sees on your face but Jason releases you, flinches back as if scalded. Arms raised as if to shield himself from you, to ward you away. Keep moving, another step, another two and then you're lost in the crowd. Melting away into the press, one helot among the masses, and you hear him swearing, moment of misery forgotten as instincts kick back in but by then it's too late.
"ALEXIUS!"
You're already gone.
"Alexius please don't-"
You don't look back.
"(-I'm sorry)."
Dead man walking, how does it feel?
The Sun is gone, the blackness above immutable and absolute. Spoilt, not broken, just mildly marred, by an ambient orange glow that filters from everywhere, from nowhere. All amber and honey and flickering, fatty hues, like there's some massive lantern hidden just below the horizon. You can hear the clink and jingle of soldiers as they move through the alleyways. Somewhere, on the other side of a row-house a woman barks terse orders. Hear the cries and confusion as the wooden door slams shut and is barred from without. Hear the frantic pounding, the muffled pleading.
You smell sickly-sweet fumes in the air. Across the quarter something searingly bright surges to life, raging and snarling and clawing at the desolate heaven. An echoing roar nearer, from just an alley over and half your body is bathed in the heat. You don't have to look behind you to see the columns of soldiers that pour into the district. You don't have to look past them to see the arc of steel and flesh and bared, blued blades that seals off the military barracks from the slave settlement. A low barrier of crumpled and blood-soaked bodies at their feet and churning water elementals at their backs. You already know. You already understand.
You thought...you thought you could warn someone, that you could save someone if you were fast enough, that maybe you could run or hide and wait it out. But walls of Ivory Bones hem you in. Past them? The fortifications you broke your backs raising, fully manned by an army thousands strong, encircling the settlement utterly; finally completed.
Skeins of dust and dirt whisper past your feet, the hems of your trousers snapping in the Summer breeze. There's screaming on the wind.
People sprint ahead of you, pulling each other by the hand, a young woman falls and a man, broad shouldered and bald, hauls her up. A woman pads past you, a boy who could be your younger brother beneath her arm. Her eyes wild, capturing the the blazes in miniature, the bonfires, your funeral pyres just sparks. Everyone scattering as if there was somewhere to go. Scrambling, crawling over each other. Crossbows sing, you see figures on the ramparts, covering the encampment's borders. Shooting those who try to scale the dry, dusty brickwork.
Ten feet away a woman crumples to the ground, hands twitching, coming up to her ruined throat. To the the steel-tipped quarrel buried in the cartilage and flesh. She looks up at you, mouthing a plea. You look away. Look up as she dies in the dirt.
...Huh. You're at the storehouse again.
You tilt your head back, half expecting to see Listener Karatzas there, impaled on the wall but no, no you suppose not. Even if she is an enemy agent, guilty of crimes against the City, she's still a holy woman. Summarily executing her would be no small thing. Do you blame her? For bringing this upon you?
No. No you don't.
Your fate was sealed the moment Triadic River Ministry fell. They were never going to let you go after that, she was never going to let you live: Aikaterine Sidonia, the woman who murdered you. You will never meet her, she will never know you, and by her hand you will be fed to the fire. By her will you are damned. The doors are open and you walk inside; it's almost as packed at that night you first heard Karatzas speak, people huddled together on every level. Did they come here thinking she would save them? Do they think they can hide too? Does it matter? This is as good a place to wait as any.
It doesn't take them long to find you.
A surge of helots shoved in, herded in like so much cattle, spilling through the entryway; stumbling and falling and caught and steadied by those still inside. A glimpse of soldiers with faces veiled in chain and grey helms dragging the doors shut.
You imagine you can hear the sloshing as they pour a trail around the sides of the structure. You imagine you can smell the oil as it seeps into the stripped, treated timbers, the dry lumber.
Dead man walking, are you afraid?
You hear the whumpf as it catches, you hear the crackling as it starts, rising fast a full-throated scream.
You don't die when the crowd surges out and crashes against the sides of its cage. The orphaned congregation is a rabid thing, blind in its panic. Howling, begging, hands hammering on unyielding walls, bodies hurling themselves against the barred gate. Pain blooms in your knees, your palms as you're thrown to the ground. As someone's foot catches your forearm, catches you in the ribs. You don't get back up because, let's be honest, what would be the point? You just kneel there, cradling your head, gripping fistfuls of your hair. Blinking away tears as you watch tendrils of fire slip through the seams, winding around seasoned wood. Weaving themselves into brilliant tapestries of gold and red and orange, burning their way to thatch.
You don't die when the smoke swallows you, tattered ribbons of steel grey and soot caressing your skin with a touch hot enough to blister. The choking black wrapping you up in its loving arms, gliding over your tongue and crawling up your nose, mingling joining together at the back to pour itself down your throat. Eyes streaming as it fills your lungs with sparks and embers, every breath coming back up in hacking, wrenching, cough. Brain throbbing, the feeling fading as your chest seizes and spasms. The beating of bloody hands is the beating of your heart is the steady drumming on the insides of your skull.
You don't die when the first flakes start to fall. The clouds ripped apart by the thermal surge, framing the roof as it ignites. The inferno rippling across layers of bone dry straw: an inverted sea, an ocean of flame above your head. It's ash at first, black scraps of still smoldering vegetation that cling to your clothes, charring fabric, scorching flesh. And then cinders, crimson and flaring to some kind of life. And then a rain of true flames. They strike you. They catch and they cling and the howling starts in earnest now and is that your voice added to the chorus as the flames start to chew through your clothes? Can you even tell? Would it make a difference?
Clutch your little red stone and press it to your chest. You're hunched in on yourself, hugging yourself, curled up around it and sobbing as the world dies screaming all around you. You hear it then: a shrieking, a torturing groaning as the waist-thick beams that held up the roof start to come unmoored. Start to twist out of their joints and anchors in showers of splinters and dust, already shattering even as they fall. As they plummet down through thin walkways, trailing streamers of smoke; crashing around you one by one like a giant's fingers. The ground shaking, bodies breaking.
Look up.
Slowly now, with your bloody eyes and seared nerves and the scent of your own roasting flesh filling your nose. Look up at the beam just above you as tendrils of fire lick away at its center. As it cracks and comes apart, sparks billowing out like a swarm of fireflies. As it starts to fall.
This one's for you.
This is how you die.
But take solace, as it hits and shatters you, darkness taking you with the sound of a hundred broken bones and pulped viscera and the sensation of your own spine snapping:
This is where you die.
This is not where you end.
You retch and blood and black saliva splatter the ground, staining the sand between your hands, flecking your fingers with ink-dark spots and red foam. It all comes up, a torrent of ichor and bile and filthy ash until you're just barely propped up on all fours. Shoulders hitching as you pull in deep, ragged breaths, too exhausted to reach up and wipe the strands of drool that hang from your lips. Hands and knees sinking an inch or two into the cool dunes as you shift your weight. Finally, finally straightening up and settling back on your haunches, palms resting atop your thighs.
Pink and purple fog swirls around you, sealing off the sky, shrouding everything past fifty feet in any direction. The mist stirred to eddies and whorls, a painter's oils brushed into the air. Foaming white breakers, waves the color of rust and metal rot, crash against the shore. Sheeting up the slope, fading, receding, inches from your knees. The sand's a pale lavender that gives way shades of deep scarlet as it approaches the rising tide; perfumed petals and exposed cardiac muscle in swirls and shaded gradients.
Somewhere thunder rumbles. A drop of rain patters to the ground, a tiny crater in the silicate grit. A small divot and a clot. You like this, you've always liked this; it's the kind of weather that makes a warm blanket and a bowl of hot food seem that much better. The kind of weather where you just want to sit inside, warm and dry, and listen to the storm as it passes. It's...nice, you decide. This is nice.
The tears come then, deep, wracking sobs as you press your palms to your face and bawl. As you give vent to everything, everything you bit back, everything you forced down, everything that's happened to you. Until you're slumped on that beach, chest spasming, breath hitching as you stare numbly up at the clouds. Waves crashing around you, cold water foaming around your hips, soaking you from the waist down before rushing back out.
There's a touch on your cheek, gentle and kind. A child's hand, you open your aching eyes in faint surprise to see a boy just...standing shin-deep in the surf. His skin grey, his throat banded by scales that might have been blue once upon a time. You can see the start of webbed spines at the back of his neck, fleshy, fanlike things along skinny arms. Ears pointed and feathering blue towards the tips, teeth sharp and sharklike. A young Dragon; with a crown hammered in the shape of a laurel wreath on his head, all but slipping down over his brow. The boy himself swallowed up by his vast, purple robes, gold trimmed and beautifully ornate. The hem floating in the water around you, billowing just beneath the surface.
He bunches up a sleeve and carefully wipes your eyes and your nose, cleaning the mess off your face.
"Where...am I?" You ask, exhausted, too worn out to be terrified. Too ground down to be surprised.
"Dead," he replies quietly, "you died when the roof collapsed. Your body is still there, or- what's left of it. I mean. This is just a place for choosing."
"If I'm dead why," he takes his hand away and your head sags, feathery hair hanging in front of your eyes, your voice a hoarse croak "why do I need to choose anything?"
"Because you don't have to stay dead."
You laugh a little at that, a wet, unhappy sound. "Why wouldn't I rather be dead? All I did when I was alive was h-hurt-" Mother, Father, friends, family, Jason gone all...gone, everything's gone. Everyone's gone. Even you're gone now. "-I'm so tired, I don't want to keep trying."
"If Aikaterine Sidonia was on her knees before you and you had a blade in your hand, what would you do?" The boy asks.
"(Kill her)," it comes out in a whisper, a rasp from a smoke-roughened throat, but there's no hesitation.
"And if Lookshy was on its knees before you and you had a blade in your hand, what would you do?"
You swallow, shoulders rising and falling as you draw in a breath. As you slowly exhale.
"I'd kill it."
"Why?"
[ ] Because it's not fair, because they killed you before you ever got a chance to live. Because they stole the future from you and took away your past and so if you could you would take everything from them.
[ ] Because they told you you were sick, that you were wrong, but you know the truth. It's the world who's sick, not you. It's the world that's twisted and wrong, not you. So break it. Reset it. That's how you heal it.
[ ] Because it's the only way for this to end. Because the only freedom you or any helot could ever have would be on the backs of a million Lookshyan dead. Fine then. If you had a choice you'd buy it with their blood.
[ ] Because you don't know what love is but you know hate, you know anger and shame and loneliness and hunger. Because Lookshy made you something less than human. So let them see the fruit of their labor.
Scarecrow stuffed with straw, branches for bones and thread for nerves, garbage of Creation, open your mouth and say it, proclaim it with as much pride as you can because everyone wants to know: how does it feel?
Dead man walking, how does it feel?
Are you happy, carrion-thing? Are those tears of joy that trickle down your cheeks? The Sun is setting; the shadows stretch long and your liberation is at hand. Aren't you glad? Carcass, why do you cry? You're going to be set free, freed of each and every burden, every shackle shattered, every sin scourged clean in a single red instant. You're going to be reborn and no, birth is never clean but if you're lucky maybe it'll be quick. Lift your throat and be glad. Kneel and give praise. What did you have before you but another thirty, forty empty years? Everything good you've ever had is gone, gone so long that even the memories of happier times are lost, smeared across your subconscious into a bleary, blurry nothing. All you have left is the horror. All you have left are the ghosts that haunt you. Why fight on for the sake of such obscene things?
Just give up.
Just give in.
Just let them take you.
it's not fair
It's never fair.
it's not your fault
It was never your fault.
your only sin was being born
Y-you are not...you are not sick. You are not sick, it's the world that's sick. You are not wrong, it's the City that's wrong. You are not unwanted, you are not unloved, because he's here and you feel like you're drowning, crushed by the oncoming wave, sucked down by the undertow, but you can still feel his hand in yours: calloused palm to calloused palm, your fingers folded around it, clasping it as if in prayer. Squeezes so tight you see his fingertips start to turn white. You cling to him as the crowd buffets you on every side. The soon-to-be slaughtered filtering past you, exhausted and weary and searching for a place to rest. Don't look at them, look at him.
You see his face, see his pretty grey eyes, and it hurts you to see him suffering. To see the pain, pulsing like exposed muscle, flayed veins, between the cracks of his composure. He's raw in a way you haven't seen him before, a thing eaten alive from the inside out and it's only the half-shattered shell that's keeping him together at all. But you can help can't you? He steadied you and you can steady him. He was there for you, he's been there for you every day since you met, you can be here for him.
"...Jason," your voice is thick and you have to swallow down the lump in your throat but your eyes are mostly dry now; he flinches, tendons in his throat standing taut and he can't meet your gaze but it's alright, it's alright, you understand, "I'm here. I'm here for you, because of you. I wouldn't- I don't know that I would've lasted this long without you looking out for me. You're my friend and I- just saying I'm grateful sounds like such trash. It's more than that and I- it doesn't matter, because I won't-"
You choke it down again and fuck you're about to start crying again but you smile anyway. It's weak and it feels like it takes every ounce of strength in your body to force those muscles up, every scrap of willpower you have not to let your focus slip behind him to the soldiers watching, the scarlet-coats bloody red, the chain shining. But you press on because you have to: because the way out is through, because the way through is with him and because you've struggled so long and so hard but you'll keep going anyway. Because you don't want to drag him down with you. Because he makes you want to be better than you are, more than you are, doesn't he?
It's a dazed, half-awed realization. A kind of awakening, the kind of thing you can't really process right now as you doggedly stumble on. But you clutch it close to your chest as you continue.
"-I won't let you fall. My life is all I have to give so I'll give that if I have to and I'll be brave, I'll be brave for you alright? So just tell me what to do and I'll do it."
He opens his mouth, he closes it. The sky is the color of peach-flesh and cataphract scale, all of heaven in that half-light, that flickering, washed out glow. You can see night falling on the horizon, darkness mantling the mountains. You can see the stars, the lesser gods and goddesses, twinkling bright in great technicolor bands, burning out in sectors and swathes; as well planned as any Imperial farm. He finally speaks, the words small and miserable and ashamed but he's pressing on too. He's trying to save you too. Despite the cost, despite his own fear, his own helpless, twisted up fury and you don't know what love is, but you think that...maybe one day you could love him.
"My commanding officer won't call off the attack. I'll have to claim you as a conscript, but they won't touch you as long as you're with me."
And for a second, for one, treasured second you don't understand.
You can feel it, feel it as the tension in your jaw and your teeth chains across your features. Grinding under the strain until something gives beneath the stress, until something snaps and your smile fractures, cracks shooting out; webbing your from ear to ear. His hand slips and you don't realize at first, you don't quite comprehend why or how until you look and see your own hanging heavy at your sides.
Take a step away.
Take another.
You back into someone and they half-heartedly snarl something unkind under their breath but you barely notice. All you see is...him, for the first time, all those little clues you didn't piece together, all those little tells that didn't quite make sense, the information you ignored. You see the way his own hand twitches, like he wants to reach out for you, to pull you closer, to take it back. You see the self-loathing, see the disgust, and he doesn't weep even though you know he wants to. Even though if he did you might cross over, walk back, if only to wipe them away. If only to hold him and be held.
Tell the world you shadow, you shade, how does it feel? How does it feel to realize that the one thing you hate more than yourself cares about you more than you ever could? That there isn't a trace of anger or clever, calculated, cunning on his face? Just agony for what he's done to you, regret and apologies and so, so much hate and none of it for you. All of it because of you.
You say nothing, you can't. You just turn, swaying, drunken and dazed and force yourself to put one foot in front of the other. And then another. You take a third and then tanned hand shoots out to catch your shoulder.
Turn your head to stare at him, spine all but creaking like ancient hinges and hundred year old wood. Vertebrae almost squealing as they slide across each other, something snapping wetly in your brain. You don't know what he sees on your face but Jason releases you, flinches back as if scalded. Arms raised as if to shield himself from you, to ward you away. Keep moving, another step, another two and then you're lost in the crowd. Melting away into the press, one helot among the masses, and you hear him swearing, moment of misery forgotten as instincts kick back in but by then it's too late.
"ALEXIUS!"
You're already gone.
"Alexius please don't-"
You don't look back.
"(-I'm sorry)."
Dead man walking, how does it feel?
The Sun is gone, the blackness above immutable and absolute. Spoilt, not broken, just mildly marred, by an ambient orange glow that filters from everywhere, from nowhere. All amber and honey and flickering, fatty hues, like there's some massive lantern hidden just below the horizon. You can hear the clink and jingle of soldiers as they move through the alleyways. Somewhere, on the other side of a row-house a woman barks terse orders. Hear the cries and confusion as the wooden door slams shut and is barred from without. Hear the frantic pounding, the muffled pleading.
You smell sickly-sweet fumes in the air. Across the quarter something searingly bright surges to life, raging and snarling and clawing at the desolate heaven. An echoing roar nearer, from just an alley over and half your body is bathed in the heat. You don't have to look behind you to see the columns of soldiers that pour into the district. You don't have to look past them to see the arc of steel and flesh and bared, blued blades that seals off the military barracks from the slave settlement. A low barrier of crumpled and blood-soaked bodies at their feet and churning water elementals at their backs. You already know. You already understand.
You thought...you thought you could warn someone, that you could save someone if you were fast enough, that maybe you could run or hide and wait it out. But walls of Ivory Bones hem you in. Past them? The fortifications you broke your backs raising, fully manned by an army thousands strong, encircling the settlement utterly; finally completed.
Skeins of dust and dirt whisper past your feet, the hems of your trousers snapping in the Summer breeze. There's screaming on the wind.
People sprint ahead of you, pulling each other by the hand, a young woman falls and a man, broad shouldered and bald, hauls her up. A woman pads past you, a boy who could be your younger brother beneath her arm. Her eyes wild, capturing the the blazes in miniature, the bonfires, your funeral pyres just sparks. Everyone scattering as if there was somewhere to go. Scrambling, crawling over each other. Crossbows sing, you see figures on the ramparts, covering the encampment's borders. Shooting those who try to scale the dry, dusty brickwork.
Ten feet away a woman crumples to the ground, hands twitching, coming up to her ruined throat. To the the steel-tipped quarrel buried in the cartilage and flesh. She looks up at you, mouthing a plea. You look away. Look up as she dies in the dirt.
...Huh. You're at the storehouse again.
You tilt your head back, half expecting to see Listener Karatzas there, impaled on the wall but no, no you suppose not. Even if she is an enemy agent, guilty of crimes against the City, she's still a holy woman. Summarily executing her would be no small thing. Do you blame her? For bringing this upon you?
No. No you don't.
Your fate was sealed the moment Triadic River Ministry fell. They were never going to let you go after that, she was never going to let you live: Aikaterine Sidonia, the woman who murdered you. You will never meet her, she will never know you, and by her hand you will be fed to the fire. By her will you are damned. The doors are open and you walk inside; it's almost as packed at that night you first heard Karatzas speak, people huddled together on every level. Did they come here thinking she would save them? Do they think they can hide too? Does it matter? This is as good a place to wait as any.
It doesn't take them long to find you.
A surge of helots shoved in, herded in like so much cattle, spilling through the entryway; stumbling and falling and caught and steadied by those still inside. A glimpse of soldiers with faces veiled in chain and grey helms dragging the doors shut.
You imagine you can hear the sloshing as they pour a trail around the sides of the structure. You imagine you can smell the oil as it seeps into the stripped, treated timbers, the dry lumber.
Dead man walking, are you afraid?
your only sin was thinking you were worth anything at all
You hear the whumpf as it catches, you hear the crackling as it starts, rising fast a full-throated scream.
You don't die when the crowd surges out and crashes against the sides of its cage. The orphaned congregation is a rabid thing, blind in its panic. Howling, begging, hands hammering on unyielding walls, bodies hurling themselves against the barred gate. Pain blooms in your knees, your palms as you're thrown to the ground. As someone's foot catches your forearm, catches you in the ribs. You don't get back up because, let's be honest, what would be the point? You just kneel there, cradling your head, gripping fistfuls of your hair. Blinking away tears as you watch tendrils of fire slip through the seams, winding around seasoned wood. Weaving themselves into brilliant tapestries of gold and red and orange, burning their way to thatch.
You don't die when the smoke swallows you, tattered ribbons of steel grey and soot caressing your skin with a touch hot enough to blister. The choking black wrapping you up in its loving arms, gliding over your tongue and crawling up your nose, mingling joining together at the back to pour itself down your throat. Eyes streaming as it fills your lungs with sparks and embers, every breath coming back up in hacking, wrenching, cough. Brain throbbing, the feeling fading as your chest seizes and spasms. The beating of bloody hands is the beating of your heart is the steady drumming on the insides of your skull.
You don't die when the first flakes start to fall. The clouds ripped apart by the thermal surge, framing the roof as it ignites. The inferno rippling across layers of bone dry straw: an inverted sea, an ocean of flame above your head. It's ash at first, black scraps of still smoldering vegetation that cling to your clothes, charring fabric, scorching flesh. And then cinders, crimson and flaring to some kind of life. And then a rain of true flames. They strike you. They catch and they cling and the howling starts in earnest now and is that your voice added to the chorus as the flames start to chew through your clothes? Can you even tell? Would it make a difference?
Clutch your little red stone and press it to your chest. You're hunched in on yourself, hugging yourself, curled up around it and sobbing as the world dies screaming all around you. You hear it then: a shrieking, a torturing groaning as the waist-thick beams that held up the roof start to come unmoored. Start to twist out of their joints and anchors in showers of splinters and dust, already shattering even as they fall. As they plummet down through thin walkways, trailing streamers of smoke; crashing around you one by one like a giant's fingers. The ground shaking, bodies breaking.
Look up.
Slowly now, with your bloody eyes and seared nerves and the scent of your own roasting flesh filling your nose. Look up at the beam just above you as tendrils of fire lick away at its center. As it cracks and comes apart, sparks billowing out like a swarm of fireflies. As it starts to fall.
This one's for you.
This is how you die.
But take solace, as it hits and shatters you, darkness taking you with the sound of a hundred broken bones and pulped viscera and the sensation of your own spine snapping:
This is where you die.
This is not where you end.
how many times have you been here?
how many lives have you lived?
what a stupid question
why not ask how many tears the sea can hold?
because that's the joke, the distinction disappears as the two mingle
categorical cannibalism, a taxonomical taboo
infinity plus one
you have always been here
first they set forth Creation
and with their hands they raised Heaven
from the guts of their King they fashioned a Hell
this is what they made as they Fell
the stillborn world
the hollow world
the ruined world
witness: the worldmakers unmade
eternity divided by zero
how many lives have you lived?
what a stupid question
why not ask how many tears the sea can hold?
because that's the joke, the distinction disappears as the two mingle
categorical cannibalism, a taxonomical taboo
infinity plus one
you have always been here
first they set forth Creation
and with their hands they raised Heaven
from the guts of their King they fashioned a Hell
this is what they made as they Fell
the stillborn world
the hollow world
the ruined world
witness: the worldmakers unmade
eternity divided by zero
You retch and blood and black saliva splatter the ground, staining the sand between your hands, flecking your fingers with ink-dark spots and red foam. It all comes up, a torrent of ichor and bile and filthy ash until you're just barely propped up on all fours. Shoulders hitching as you pull in deep, ragged breaths, too exhausted to reach up and wipe the strands of drool that hang from your lips. Hands and knees sinking an inch or two into the cool dunes as you shift your weight. Finally, finally straightening up and settling back on your haunches, palms resting atop your thighs.
Pink and purple fog swirls around you, sealing off the sky, shrouding everything past fifty feet in any direction. The mist stirred to eddies and whorls, a painter's oils brushed into the air. Foaming white breakers, waves the color of rust and metal rot, crash against the shore. Sheeting up the slope, fading, receding, inches from your knees. The sand's a pale lavender that gives way shades of deep scarlet as it approaches the rising tide; perfumed petals and exposed cardiac muscle in swirls and shaded gradients.
Somewhere thunder rumbles. A drop of rain patters to the ground, a tiny crater in the silicate grit. A small divot and a clot. You like this, you've always liked this; it's the kind of weather that makes a warm blanket and a bowl of hot food seem that much better. The kind of weather where you just want to sit inside, warm and dry, and listen to the storm as it passes. It's...nice, you decide. This is nice.
The tears come then, deep, wracking sobs as you press your palms to your face and bawl. As you give vent to everything, everything you bit back, everything you forced down, everything that's happened to you. Until you're slumped on that beach, chest spasming, breath hitching as you stare numbly up at the clouds. Waves crashing around you, cold water foaming around your hips, soaking you from the waist down before rushing back out.
There's a touch on your cheek, gentle and kind. A child's hand, you open your aching eyes in faint surprise to see a boy just...standing shin-deep in the surf. His skin grey, his throat banded by scales that might have been blue once upon a time. You can see the start of webbed spines at the back of his neck, fleshy, fanlike things along skinny arms. Ears pointed and feathering blue towards the tips, teeth sharp and sharklike. A young Dragon; with a crown hammered in the shape of a laurel wreath on his head, all but slipping down over his brow. The boy himself swallowed up by his vast, purple robes, gold trimmed and beautifully ornate. The hem floating in the water around you, billowing just beneath the surface.
He bunches up a sleeve and carefully wipes your eyes and your nose, cleaning the mess off your face.
"Where...am I?" You ask, exhausted, too worn out to be terrified. Too ground down to be surprised.
"Dead," he replies quietly, "you died when the roof collapsed. Your body is still there, or- what's left of it. I mean. This is just a place for choosing."
"If I'm dead why," he takes his hand away and your head sags, feathery hair hanging in front of your eyes, your voice a hoarse croak "why do I need to choose anything?"
"Because you don't have to stay dead."
You laugh a little at that, a wet, unhappy sound. "Why wouldn't I rather be dead? All I did when I was alive was h-hurt-" Mother, Father, friends, family, Jason gone all...gone, everything's gone. Everyone's gone. Even you're gone now. "-I'm so tired, I don't want to keep trying."
"If Aikaterine Sidonia was on her knees before you and you had a blade in your hand, what would you do?" The boy asks.
"(Kill her)," it comes out in a whisper, a rasp from a smoke-roughened throat, but there's no hesitation.
"And if Lookshy was on its knees before you and you had a blade in your hand, what would you do?"
You swallow, shoulders rising and falling as you draw in a breath. As you slowly exhale.
"I'd kill it."
"Why?"
[ ] Because it's not fair, because they killed you before you ever got a chance to live. Because they stole the future from you and took away your past and so if you could you would take everything from them.
[ ] Because they told you you were sick, that you were wrong, but you know the truth. It's the world who's sick, not you. It's the world that's twisted and wrong, not you. So break it. Reset it. That's how you heal it.
[ ] Because it's the only way for this to end. Because the only freedom you or any helot could ever have would be on the backs of a million Lookshyan dead. Fine then. If you had a choice you'd buy it with their blood.
[ ] Because you don't know what love is but you know hate, you know anger and shame and loneliness and hunger. Because Lookshy made you something less than human. So let them see the fruit of their labor.
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