Mercy, and Other Costly Mistakes (nsfw)
25. Death
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
25. Death
This is the way Shard of White Obsidian, the once-favoured daughter of the Lair-Mother, whom her countless victims had called a defiler, a despoiler, and a demon, died: with prying shears grasping the split plates of her shell, and with strong porcelain hands ready to pull. Hers was not the death of the body, however, which, while inevitable, was only promised for later. It was a more insidious death, one that left her still breathing and still bleeding, but no less obliterated: it was the death of the soul.
When her siblings bolted her to a steel table and presented to her the tools of her unmaking—the hammer and the chisel, the shears and the saw, the scalpel and the cleaver—Shard made a promise to herself that she would not beg for reprieve. After all, her captors were her kin, and she knew them well enough that there would be no real mercy coming, only ever an illusion of it meant to render the deferred torment even more intense. The promise broke quickly: as her siblings turned her body into a shattered porcelain plain mottled with lakes of gushing black blood, Shard screamed for any kind of relief; then she couldn't scream again, so she was given a chance to regain her voice, before the tools were put again to her shell and her flesh.
But, unfortunately, that was not enough to kill: not the body, and not the spirit. At the end of the day, Shard was put on that plateau of pain past which suffering becomes distant and abstract, too vast to encompass with thought or experience. And yet, she lived, and worse yet, she remained with herself, buoyed on the surface of an endless, drowning sea. For her siblings, this was a mark of their failure, because they took their sister in to do more than just torment her, but to destroy, like she had destroyed so many of them before.
Circling around the bloodied table, they conferred with each other, looking for a new approach, one that would bring them their long-awaited revenge for what she had done to Blood-Slick Thorn, but really for the more profound injustice that was the fact that Shard used to be in their shared mother's greatest favour. Neither the hammer nor the chisel, neither the shears nor the saw, neither the scalpel, nor the cleaver would achieve it alone: a change in approach was needed.
Throughout the next day, they did not touch her a single time. Asphalt-like scabs closed over the bleeding wounds, the robust physique of a Lair-Mother's child refusing to give up even on a body long past repair. They gave her water to drink, ushering back a kind of consciousness into what they had reduced into a quavering sort of nothingness the day before. And when Shard could again recognize them, and name them, the one called Cuts made her an offer.
"Do you remember, back in my temple?" it asked, the black wedge painted freshly over its head.
Of course, Shard could not reply in kind, not with her mouth pried open, and tongue pulled out. All that was left to her was to watch her sibling, deftly balanced on a low stool, beholding its victim with an inciting smile.
"I asked you then," Cuts continued, drawing complex shapes in the air with the tip of her extended claw, "if you would not like to be a piglet of mine. No hands. No feet. No tongue. A very sorry life. But a life. And you wouldn't even have to suffer too much, too often."
It took into its hand a splitting saw, and scraped a fleck of dried blood from between the pointed teeth. This is where Shard's death began in earnest: with her mind conjuring up the image of being turned into Cuts' permanent trophy, of a life reduced to dumb humiliation and ceaseless abuse, but a life nonetheless. Her mind then put the image against the idea of the saw biting again into the cracks of her shell, against the idea of the wet crack of more of her body being permanently laid bare, against the idea of the bowl filled with the shards of her growing even more full. Death was in the way the scales tipped.
Cuts had to sense that, so it applied the saw. Tenderly, though, less to hurt, and more to remind Shard of its tangibility and proximity. Once the awful, grinding sound died down, it perched itself back up.
"Do you think we could convince Mother," it asked its siblings, "to let us keep her that way, forever neutered? Would it not make for a better lesson than the pit?"
Others chimed in with their opinions, trilling in favour, or voicing concern that Shard was too broken to serve well in this function. But Cuts dismissed that, and went on to argue if this experiment in punishment was to work out well, maybe the Lair-Mother could even be convinced to patch up the gaps left in Shard, to make her serve all the better as their little piglet.
"Our little bitch," another sibling, whose name was Ruining Motion, and who wore a veil over its face offered.
"Yes," Cuts agreed, nodding eagerly. "A bitch! She has insisted on that femininity, has she not? Perhaps we should not take it away from her, if it is so dearly held."
Helpless not to follow the discussion closely, and growing wretchedly hopeful that perhaps her future would have in it something other than the chisel and the hammer, Shard died by degrees. She moved her fingers, thinking of the world where empty stubs replaced her hands; she breathed laboriously in, and out, every expansion of her chest another jolt of spearing pain.
"We should have her teeth filed, though," Dream of Midnight, whose body was splattered in silver and gore, suggested. It took a metal file and touched it to a Shard's fang.
Others laughed in a multitude of hungry voices.
"Why not pull them out altogether, then?" Nothing Riddle, who, true to its name, never revealed its porcelain skin from under its coiled robes, replied. "Why let her bite at all?"
"I still think it is pointless," Poetry of Fall shrugged from above its basin, where it was currently trying to remove crusted blood from the instruments of torture. "So much effort, for so little gain. Let's just give her to Mother."
"Maybe, maybe," Cuts nodded again, pointing at Motion to grab the shears.
It had them inserted right below an exposed piece of Shard's shell, the cold metal pressing into the bloodied flesh beneath, the delicate pull slight enough to precisely foretell the cataclysmic pain that could follow at a single motion. Then, Cuts reached into Shard's mouth, and freed it, releasing the jaw and the tongue, drawing only a single tiny wound across its inside.
"Now," it said, letting Motion lean on the shears ever so slightly. "Tell me, sister. Would you want to be our bitch? Or is this," between its fingers, it flashed a little scalpel blade, "what you prefer?"
Though the answer was obvious to Shard, she was still too alive to say it freely. She choked on the words, until delicate encouragement made her spit them out from her steel-clenched throat.
"Say it louder," Motion demanded, applying a little bit more pressure to the shears, tearing the shell just a little bit away from the flesh.
This, alone, was enough.
"I want to be your bitch!" Shard whimpered as close to a shout as she could manage.
The reward was instantaneous: the pressure did not increase. Still, Cuts appeared unconvinced, the scalpel still dancing circles in its fingers.
"Unfortunately for you, the offer is no longer free," it explained. "You should have taken it back then. Now, I have more on my hand, and I am not sure if I am ready for the commitment. But maybe, maybe you have something you can still give, hmm? You had such riches given to you, sister."
"Your pain is stale," Dream added. "Feed us better…"
"...and we will convince Mother to take mercy on you," Riddle clacked.
"Maybe," Poetry shrugged again, "they can't guarantee it.
Motion pulled once more; Cuts played with the blade, waiting for Shard, and Shard, trapped a single stroke away from the obliterating pain, finally received the small mercy of having her soul die in full. She whispered out a name she had already betrayed too many times, and when the offering was accepted, her siblings left her in peace.
And thus, there was no more Shard. What remained bolted to the table was a breathing vessel, mostly broken, but not entirely. It was going to serve well as a toy, completely given in, and fully emptied. Whatever had once filled it drained away, leaving behind bare life, tender flesh, and nothing more. It watched the room it was in impassively, without a thought or a feeling, having finally found a measure of peace. Though its body hurt, the pain reached it as if from behind a thick veil, subdued and flat. For Cuts, this was an enjoyable sight, and it spent long hours discussing with its siblings how they would train their bitch, once Mother was convinced. With the soul being so obviously dead, the successful convincing was looking increasingly likely; Mother would have no use in punishing something so insensate. Only Poetry worried that they would too be held responsible for failing to deliver Shard alive into their mothers' hands, which was an honest concern to have, but what could they do but wait?
After some time, Motion and Dream vanished from the cellar, and when they returned, they held in their claws a mortal girl with a cleanly shaved head, and eyebrows painted on with kohl. The girl had once meant something to the shell that used to be Shard, but fortunately not even the sight of her—nor the overwhelmingly sweet and familiar taste of her fear—managed to rouse anything out of the cracked vessel. It observed idly as its siblings held the girl, who named Ifi, aloft, and explained to her, in great and vivid detail, just how deeply Shard's treachery ran.
All the way through this conversation, the girl's eyes were primed somewhere else: on the ruined body bolted to the table. She just could not pry them away from the open wounds and the ruined landscape of the once-pristine shell, not even when Cuts slapped her across the face to grab her attention.
"Is she dead?" she demanded to know, her voice laden with so much worry and so much fear that even the dumb, empty body that used to be Shard could not help itself but to savour this wonderful feast.
It could also see how its siblings were already getting drunk on this. They had not yet even laid their claws on her, and already she was feeding them such exquisite agony of the heart; Shard had truly paid for the survival of her flesh in full, and more than that.
To think that they didn't need to shed blood to draw even more out of this mortal. Still kept off the ground, the hem of its robe collecting dust and dried blood, Ifi had it presented to her what was the reason she was called to this place.
"You will help us," Cuts crooned, deliriously sated, and yet hungry still, "remove those parts of her that are no longer necessary. You will make sure she doesn't bleed out as we take her tongue away."
If the shell could think, instead of simply letting the stimuli flow through, perhaps it would note that it was ridiculous for it to be referred to as "her", given how Shard was dead, and only flesh remained. But it could not, so instead it just submerged itself deeper and deeper in the bottomless ocean of Ifi's fear and despair, without even noticing the false note lacing its calamitously sweet taste.
"Once you do," Motion added, preparing the surgical instruments for the amputations, "we will kill you, just the way we like."
The broken vessel acknowledged, though without the surprise it should have evoked, that this promise prompted no new bloom of delicious anguish. Ifi was still looking at it, her eyes still wet with tears; she was ignoring Cuts.
"So she is alive," she exhaled with deep relief.
Cuts slapped her again, the sound echoing off the walls of the torture chamber.
"Have you not heard?" it demanded. "You will help us cripple her. And then..."
It left its voice hang, a claw pointing out at the piles of implements of torment scattered all around. Ifi shook her head, uninterested in the sight. Slowly, her fear began to recede, its sweet wave withdrawing further and further back. But its taste was not as quick to leave. It lingered behind, increasingly bitter with each passing second. A delicate quake of nausea went through the emptied shell: a sign of what was to come.
When Ifi did not react again, Cuts shook her violently, petulant.
"Do you not see?" it asked, wincing at some unseen sensation. Voracious greed laced its voice, reaching for more of that honeyed terror, and finding only less of it. "How are you not afraid?"
Finally, for the first time since getting dragged in, the alchemist looked away from the bloodied ruin on the steel table. Worry, exhaustion, and sadness marked her face as she stared straight into the featureless mask that was Cuts.
"I am already dying," she explained, so very light, so very gentle.
The words passed through the cracks in the shell, and came close to finding something left inside. But then, another sick tremor shook the body, making it twist in the bonds. An awful, frothing bile bubbled up its restrained throat. It noted that it wasn't the only one feeling it. Its siblings glanced around nervously, confused as the overwhelming high of Ifi's fear transmuted into a gnawing sickness.
"And so are you," the alchemist whispered, her voice cracking slightly in pain and in triumph.
Black, stinking foam gushed from behind Motion's veil, half blood, half poison. It screeched in mortal pain, the sound quickly turning into a wet gurgle as it clattered the floor, its swinging arms dragging trays of murderous steel down with it. Cuts froze in shock, and before this shock could turn into a realization, or into murderous intent, it was bent in half with a hacking cough, black goo splattering everywhere around it. Ifi slipped from its hand, jumping back as the Lair-Mother's children turned their claws on her in a desperate, final act of violence.
Dying in the flesh, the shell that used to be Shard saw none of the slashes find its mark. It watched porcelain bodies stumble, trip, and collapse. None of them died instantly; the Lair-Mother's children were known for their iron grip on life. The mess of blood, bile, vomit, steel, and porcelain writhed on the torture chamber's floor, wheezing breaths and horrid damp screeches marking its slow passage into the stillness of death. The emptied vessel could feel it taking it over, too, the burning course of a toxin turning its blood into fire. It hurt. It really hurt. Thankfully, the pain was far away.
In half crouch, the alchemist spat out blood herself, and then, hands shaking, she grabbed something from under her robe: a flask. The cork fell out, and she gulped down half the liquid inside, before coughing again; but it was a different sound, more complete. Her eyes returned to the table, and to the dying body bolted to it. That body could feel the burning, hot pain the alchemist broke through as she dug herself up from the floor, and carefully stepping over the horrid swamp of death churning underneath her feet, made her way to the broken vessel.
She poured the rest of the flask into the broken body's mouth, and forced it to swallow. The liquid met with the black froth somewhere in the throat, and parted it, draining down into the body and blood, stopping its boil. In its wake, there was a new pain, just as distant, but far less deadly. But the alchemist didn't know that.
"Please work," she prayed, waiting to see if she was going to survive and, more importantly, if the shattered remains of Shard were to live, too. "Please work."
The words were a softly repeated litany, braided together with heavy, pained breaths. Around the table, the torture chamber slowly went still, the bodies of Lair-Mother's children finally succumbing to the poison. In the silence that followed, every breath and every heartbeat resounded bell-like.
"Please work," Ifi asked one last time. Then, after a short, tight pause, she added: "It did."
The broken vessel was going to live, and so was the alchemist. The antidote evaporated the poison, leaving only a faint, acrid taste behind. Ifi exhaled again, leaning against the table, legs buckling her under.
"Shard," she said in a tired whisper, "it worked. Sun and stars, what did they do to you…"
She was seeing the ruin of the body again, this time without the veil of fear; she had to force herself to look at the scabbed over wounds, or at the pile of broken shell fragments in a bowl by the table. With each look, with each detail registered, her fear started returning, the golden wave swelling once more and sweeping into the wounds of the emptied vessel, once more lifting it up blissful waters.
"Shard?" a new kind of worry lanced through the alchemist. Smaller than the fear before, but infinitely sharper. "Shard, can you hear me?"
The body could hear, but that meant nothing. The sound was registered as any other stimuli would be. What voice could come out of an emptied, broken dish? What thought, what feeling? There was nothing.
"Shard!" Ifi raised her voice to a shout, and when that didn't help, her fear exploded into a bloom of pain so sublime that nothing before could compare. "Shard!"
To the emptied vessel, it was like sinking into the sun. Like being lifted up from the base world, and surrounded with a pleasure beyond description, a beatific bliss beyond words, experiences, or thoughts. The Lair-Mother's children were taught to eat pain and drink fear, to feast themselves on misery: and those feasts were so filling that few of them ever strove to reach past the easy harvests of murder and terror. But, in that moment, the emptied vessel had to wonder just how much of a waste this was, when breaking your lover's heart could elevate it to such lofty heights. Nothing would ever feel so good again.
Nothing ever should. This was wrong. The broken vessel did not deserve this feast. It was not-
"Don't you fucking dare, Shard!" from somewhere far away, a voice reached it, a familiar one. It was strung so tightly with despair, but held together by fury.
There were hands on its shell, warm, demanding. The touch was so very familiar. So very close to-
"No, no, no," Ifi pleaded with the empty torture chamber, and with the empty shell. "Please. No."
She didn't deserve to suffer like that. It should not be making her suffer like that. She should not be making her suffer like that. She had been hurt enough. Shard had hurt her enough. Something stirred in her, some remnant grasping at the edges of consciousness, and trying to pull herself up from the abyss. It almost worked. But Shard was a ruined mess, and her body could no longer hold her self inside. She slipped, and felt that moment of lucidity leak out, as if through a sieve, once again leaving behind an empty, dumb vessel.
Above the broken body, Ifi sat still, hands folded on the head, staring at the living flesh that nonetheless no longer seemed to contain the monster she came to love. It seemed impossible to believe, and even harder to accept, that all that was left to her to reclaim was just some broken porcelain, and some raw meat. The litany of denials, of profanities, of pleas, failed to reel Shard back in. In its place, resignation crept in, extending its welcoming, soft embrace with the promise that it could all be declared over, and finished.
"At least I killed them, right?" the question came out small and flat, a piece of flint chucked into black depths. "The ones who did this to you."
Her hands were on the cracked shell, feeling the edges where the porcelain fractured, pressing against the sharp edge. They refused to let go, however futile it really was. It seemed that even dead Shard could not stop hurting this girl, nor drinking her pain. It dripped like a soft rain from a summer sky, so bright, so vibrant. If the shell could want, it would want for nothing but to stay in this light forever.
Screws groaned as Ifi undid the bolts holding the shattered body's arm to the table; she wove her fingers with its, holding the hand as if it could mean anything.
"I should hate you, you know?" she asked, only a little less cracked than the ruin she held in her hands. "I should have let Villis kill you. I should have thrown you out. I should have left you here to rot. I should have never let you give me hope."
None of it was true, and even the broken vessel could register as much. The words had hooks at their ends, slipping into the many openings left in what used to be Shard, looping through the bare flesh and pulling taut, drawing the last vestiges of guilt from where it settled in bone and muscle.
"Everyone kept telling me that," Ifi's voice reeled the lines back in, straining under the weight of what it was trying to dredge up from the bottom. "Everyone. Myself included. And what of it? I'm here, you're saved, and not even here anymore."
There was space for a single breath; for one more blossoming of that divine pain, the one that felt too good to endure, the one that even the dead shell could not bear without shame.
"Everything you do is betrayal. I should hate you. But, instead, I..."
"I'm sorry," Shard said, whispering through a throat shot from screaming.
The veil parted; the hooks anchored the soul to the remains of the body, pinioning them in place with guilt, regret, and something else, that should remain without a name, lest Shard betray it, too.
"Shard?" the alchemist's voice ground to a halt over a single question, suspended between obliterating despair, and the single burning moment of hope.
"I'm sorry," the Lair-Mother's child said with the last of its voice.
Then came the time for a silence of confusion, of relief, of dry, cracked fury at everything that had culminated in this swamp of dead bodies and shattered lives. But they made it through, to the simple declaration waiting on the other shore.
"You damn better be," the alchemist exhaled, the fear cut off as if with a knife, replaced by tender, exhausted, exasperated joy. "Because I am not forgiving you ever again. You fucking monster."
This is the way Shard of White Obsidian, the once-favoured daughter of the Lair-Mother, whom her countless victims had called a defiler, a despoiler, and a demon, died: with prying shears grasping the split plates of her shell, and with strong porcelain hands ready to pull. Hers was not the death of the body, however, which, while inevitable, was only promised for later. It was a more insidious death, one that left her still breathing and still bleeding, but no less obliterated: it was the death of the soul.
When her siblings bolted her to a steel table and presented to her the tools of her unmaking—the hammer and the chisel, the shears and the saw, the scalpel and the cleaver—Shard made a promise to herself that she would not beg for reprieve. After all, her captors were her kin, and she knew them well enough that there would be no real mercy coming, only ever an illusion of it meant to render the deferred torment even more intense. The promise broke quickly: as her siblings turned her body into a shattered porcelain plain mottled with lakes of gushing black blood, Shard screamed for any kind of relief; then she couldn't scream again, so she was given a chance to regain her voice, before the tools were put again to her shell and her flesh.
But, unfortunately, that was not enough to kill: not the body, and not the spirit. At the end of the day, Shard was put on that plateau of pain past which suffering becomes distant and abstract, too vast to encompass with thought or experience. And yet, she lived, and worse yet, she remained with herself, buoyed on the surface of an endless, drowning sea. For her siblings, this was a mark of their failure, because they took their sister in to do more than just torment her, but to destroy, like she had destroyed so many of them before.
Circling around the bloodied table, they conferred with each other, looking for a new approach, one that would bring them their long-awaited revenge for what she had done to Blood-Slick Thorn, but really for the more profound injustice that was the fact that Shard used to be in their shared mother's greatest favour. Neither the hammer nor the chisel, neither the shears nor the saw, neither the scalpel, nor the cleaver would achieve it alone: a change in approach was needed.
Throughout the next day, they did not touch her a single time. Asphalt-like scabs closed over the bleeding wounds, the robust physique of a Lair-Mother's child refusing to give up even on a body long past repair. They gave her water to drink, ushering back a kind of consciousness into what they had reduced into a quavering sort of nothingness the day before. And when Shard could again recognize them, and name them, the one called Cuts made her an offer.
"Do you remember, back in my temple?" it asked, the black wedge painted freshly over its head.
Of course, Shard could not reply in kind, not with her mouth pried open, and tongue pulled out. All that was left to her was to watch her sibling, deftly balanced on a low stool, beholding its victim with an inciting smile.
"I asked you then," Cuts continued, drawing complex shapes in the air with the tip of her extended claw, "if you would not like to be a piglet of mine. No hands. No feet. No tongue. A very sorry life. But a life. And you wouldn't even have to suffer too much, too often."
It took into its hand a splitting saw, and scraped a fleck of dried blood from between the pointed teeth. This is where Shard's death began in earnest: with her mind conjuring up the image of being turned into Cuts' permanent trophy, of a life reduced to dumb humiliation and ceaseless abuse, but a life nonetheless. Her mind then put the image against the idea of the saw biting again into the cracks of her shell, against the idea of the wet crack of more of her body being permanently laid bare, against the idea of the bowl filled with the shards of her growing even more full. Death was in the way the scales tipped.
Cuts had to sense that, so it applied the saw. Tenderly, though, less to hurt, and more to remind Shard of its tangibility and proximity. Once the awful, grinding sound died down, it perched itself back up.
"Do you think we could convince Mother," it asked its siblings, "to let us keep her that way, forever neutered? Would it not make for a better lesson than the pit?"
Others chimed in with their opinions, trilling in favour, or voicing concern that Shard was too broken to serve well in this function. But Cuts dismissed that, and went on to argue if this experiment in punishment was to work out well, maybe the Lair-Mother could even be convinced to patch up the gaps left in Shard, to make her serve all the better as their little piglet.
"Our little bitch," another sibling, whose name was Ruining Motion, and who wore a veil over its face offered.
"Yes," Cuts agreed, nodding eagerly. "A bitch! She has insisted on that femininity, has she not? Perhaps we should not take it away from her, if it is so dearly held."
Helpless not to follow the discussion closely, and growing wretchedly hopeful that perhaps her future would have in it something other than the chisel and the hammer, Shard died by degrees. She moved her fingers, thinking of the world where empty stubs replaced her hands; she breathed laboriously in, and out, every expansion of her chest another jolt of spearing pain.
"We should have her teeth filed, though," Dream of Midnight, whose body was splattered in silver and gore, suggested. It took a metal file and touched it to a Shard's fang.
Others laughed in a multitude of hungry voices.
"Why not pull them out altogether, then?" Nothing Riddle, who, true to its name, never revealed its porcelain skin from under its coiled robes, replied. "Why let her bite at all?"
"I still think it is pointless," Poetry of Fall shrugged from above its basin, where it was currently trying to remove crusted blood from the instruments of torture. "So much effort, for so little gain. Let's just give her to Mother."
"Maybe, maybe," Cuts nodded again, pointing at Motion to grab the shears.
It had them inserted right below an exposed piece of Shard's shell, the cold metal pressing into the bloodied flesh beneath, the delicate pull slight enough to precisely foretell the cataclysmic pain that could follow at a single motion. Then, Cuts reached into Shard's mouth, and freed it, releasing the jaw and the tongue, drawing only a single tiny wound across its inside.
"Now," it said, letting Motion lean on the shears ever so slightly. "Tell me, sister. Would you want to be our bitch? Or is this," between its fingers, it flashed a little scalpel blade, "what you prefer?"
Though the answer was obvious to Shard, she was still too alive to say it freely. She choked on the words, until delicate encouragement made her spit them out from her steel-clenched throat.
"Say it louder," Motion demanded, applying a little bit more pressure to the shears, tearing the shell just a little bit away from the flesh.
This, alone, was enough.
"I want to be your bitch!" Shard whimpered as close to a shout as she could manage.
The reward was instantaneous: the pressure did not increase. Still, Cuts appeared unconvinced, the scalpel still dancing circles in its fingers.
"Unfortunately for you, the offer is no longer free," it explained. "You should have taken it back then. Now, I have more on my hand, and I am not sure if I am ready for the commitment. But maybe, maybe you have something you can still give, hmm? You had such riches given to you, sister."
"Your pain is stale," Dream added. "Feed us better…"
"...and we will convince Mother to take mercy on you," Riddle clacked.
"Maybe," Poetry shrugged again, "they can't guarantee it.
Motion pulled once more; Cuts played with the blade, waiting for Shard, and Shard, trapped a single stroke away from the obliterating pain, finally received the small mercy of having her soul die in full. She whispered out a name she had already betrayed too many times, and when the offering was accepted, her siblings left her in peace.
And thus, there was no more Shard. What remained bolted to the table was a breathing vessel, mostly broken, but not entirely. It was going to serve well as a toy, completely given in, and fully emptied. Whatever had once filled it drained away, leaving behind bare life, tender flesh, and nothing more. It watched the room it was in impassively, without a thought or a feeling, having finally found a measure of peace. Though its body hurt, the pain reached it as if from behind a thick veil, subdued and flat. For Cuts, this was an enjoyable sight, and it spent long hours discussing with its siblings how they would train their bitch, once Mother was convinced. With the soul being so obviously dead, the successful convincing was looking increasingly likely; Mother would have no use in punishing something so insensate. Only Poetry worried that they would too be held responsible for failing to deliver Shard alive into their mothers' hands, which was an honest concern to have, but what could they do but wait?
After some time, Motion and Dream vanished from the cellar, and when they returned, they held in their claws a mortal girl with a cleanly shaved head, and eyebrows painted on with kohl. The girl had once meant something to the shell that used to be Shard, but fortunately not even the sight of her—nor the overwhelmingly sweet and familiar taste of her fear—managed to rouse anything out of the cracked vessel. It observed idly as its siblings held the girl, who named Ifi, aloft, and explained to her, in great and vivid detail, just how deeply Shard's treachery ran.
All the way through this conversation, the girl's eyes were primed somewhere else: on the ruined body bolted to the table. She just could not pry them away from the open wounds and the ruined landscape of the once-pristine shell, not even when Cuts slapped her across the face to grab her attention.
"Is she dead?" she demanded to know, her voice laden with so much worry and so much fear that even the dumb, empty body that used to be Shard could not help itself but to savour this wonderful feast.
It could also see how its siblings were already getting drunk on this. They had not yet even laid their claws on her, and already she was feeding them such exquisite agony of the heart; Shard had truly paid for the survival of her flesh in full, and more than that.
To think that they didn't need to shed blood to draw even more out of this mortal. Still kept off the ground, the hem of its robe collecting dust and dried blood, Ifi had it presented to her what was the reason she was called to this place.
"You will help us," Cuts crooned, deliriously sated, and yet hungry still, "remove those parts of her that are no longer necessary. You will make sure she doesn't bleed out as we take her tongue away."
If the shell could think, instead of simply letting the stimuli flow through, perhaps it would note that it was ridiculous for it to be referred to as "her", given how Shard was dead, and only flesh remained. But it could not, so instead it just submerged itself deeper and deeper in the bottomless ocean of Ifi's fear and despair, without even noticing the false note lacing its calamitously sweet taste.
"Once you do," Motion added, preparing the surgical instruments for the amputations, "we will kill you, just the way we like."
The broken vessel acknowledged, though without the surprise it should have evoked, that this promise prompted no new bloom of delicious anguish. Ifi was still looking at it, her eyes still wet with tears; she was ignoring Cuts.
"So she is alive," she exhaled with deep relief.
Cuts slapped her again, the sound echoing off the walls of the torture chamber.
"Have you not heard?" it demanded. "You will help us cripple her. And then..."
It left its voice hang, a claw pointing out at the piles of implements of torment scattered all around. Ifi shook her head, uninterested in the sight. Slowly, her fear began to recede, its sweet wave withdrawing further and further back. But its taste was not as quick to leave. It lingered behind, increasingly bitter with each passing second. A delicate quake of nausea went through the emptied shell: a sign of what was to come.
When Ifi did not react again, Cuts shook her violently, petulant.
"Do you not see?" it asked, wincing at some unseen sensation. Voracious greed laced its voice, reaching for more of that honeyed terror, and finding only less of it. "How are you not afraid?"
Finally, for the first time since getting dragged in, the alchemist looked away from the bloodied ruin on the steel table. Worry, exhaustion, and sadness marked her face as she stared straight into the featureless mask that was Cuts.
"I am already dying," she explained, so very light, so very gentle.
The words passed through the cracks in the shell, and came close to finding something left inside. But then, another sick tremor shook the body, making it twist in the bonds. An awful, frothing bile bubbled up its restrained throat. It noted that it wasn't the only one feeling it. Its siblings glanced around nervously, confused as the overwhelming high of Ifi's fear transmuted into a gnawing sickness.
"And so are you," the alchemist whispered, her voice cracking slightly in pain and in triumph.
Black, stinking foam gushed from behind Motion's veil, half blood, half poison. It screeched in mortal pain, the sound quickly turning into a wet gurgle as it clattered the floor, its swinging arms dragging trays of murderous steel down with it. Cuts froze in shock, and before this shock could turn into a realization, or into murderous intent, it was bent in half with a hacking cough, black goo splattering everywhere around it. Ifi slipped from its hand, jumping back as the Lair-Mother's children turned their claws on her in a desperate, final act of violence.
Dying in the flesh, the shell that used to be Shard saw none of the slashes find its mark. It watched porcelain bodies stumble, trip, and collapse. None of them died instantly; the Lair-Mother's children were known for their iron grip on life. The mess of blood, bile, vomit, steel, and porcelain writhed on the torture chamber's floor, wheezing breaths and horrid damp screeches marking its slow passage into the stillness of death. The emptied vessel could feel it taking it over, too, the burning course of a toxin turning its blood into fire. It hurt. It really hurt. Thankfully, the pain was far away.
In half crouch, the alchemist spat out blood herself, and then, hands shaking, she grabbed something from under her robe: a flask. The cork fell out, and she gulped down half the liquid inside, before coughing again; but it was a different sound, more complete. Her eyes returned to the table, and to the dying body bolted to it. That body could feel the burning, hot pain the alchemist broke through as she dug herself up from the floor, and carefully stepping over the horrid swamp of death churning underneath her feet, made her way to the broken vessel.
She poured the rest of the flask into the broken body's mouth, and forced it to swallow. The liquid met with the black froth somewhere in the throat, and parted it, draining down into the body and blood, stopping its boil. In its wake, there was a new pain, just as distant, but far less deadly. But the alchemist didn't know that.
"Please work," she prayed, waiting to see if she was going to survive and, more importantly, if the shattered remains of Shard were to live, too. "Please work."
The words were a softly repeated litany, braided together with heavy, pained breaths. Around the table, the torture chamber slowly went still, the bodies of Lair-Mother's children finally succumbing to the poison. In the silence that followed, every breath and every heartbeat resounded bell-like.
"Please work," Ifi asked one last time. Then, after a short, tight pause, she added: "It did."
The broken vessel was going to live, and so was the alchemist. The antidote evaporated the poison, leaving only a faint, acrid taste behind. Ifi exhaled again, leaning against the table, legs buckling her under.
"Shard," she said in a tired whisper, "it worked. Sun and stars, what did they do to you…"
She was seeing the ruin of the body again, this time without the veil of fear; she had to force herself to look at the scabbed over wounds, or at the pile of broken shell fragments in a bowl by the table. With each look, with each detail registered, her fear started returning, the golden wave swelling once more and sweeping into the wounds of the emptied vessel, once more lifting it up blissful waters.
"Shard?" a new kind of worry lanced through the alchemist. Smaller than the fear before, but infinitely sharper. "Shard, can you hear me?"
The body could hear, but that meant nothing. The sound was registered as any other stimuli would be. What voice could come out of an emptied, broken dish? What thought, what feeling? There was nothing.
"Shard!" Ifi raised her voice to a shout, and when that didn't help, her fear exploded into a bloom of pain so sublime that nothing before could compare. "Shard!"
To the emptied vessel, it was like sinking into the sun. Like being lifted up from the base world, and surrounded with a pleasure beyond description, a beatific bliss beyond words, experiences, or thoughts. The Lair-Mother's children were taught to eat pain and drink fear, to feast themselves on misery: and those feasts were so filling that few of them ever strove to reach past the easy harvests of murder and terror. But, in that moment, the emptied vessel had to wonder just how much of a waste this was, when breaking your lover's heart could elevate it to such lofty heights. Nothing would ever feel so good again.
Nothing ever should. This was wrong. The broken vessel did not deserve this feast. It was not-
"Don't you fucking dare, Shard!" from somewhere far away, a voice reached it, a familiar one. It was strung so tightly with despair, but held together by fury.
There were hands on its shell, warm, demanding. The touch was so very familiar. So very close to-
"No, no, no," Ifi pleaded with the empty torture chamber, and with the empty shell. "Please. No."
She didn't deserve to suffer like that. It should not be making her suffer like that. She should not be making her suffer like that. She had been hurt enough. Shard had hurt her enough. Something stirred in her, some remnant grasping at the edges of consciousness, and trying to pull herself up from the abyss. It almost worked. But Shard was a ruined mess, and her body could no longer hold her self inside. She slipped, and felt that moment of lucidity leak out, as if through a sieve, once again leaving behind an empty, dumb vessel.
Above the broken body, Ifi sat still, hands folded on the head, staring at the living flesh that nonetheless no longer seemed to contain the monster she came to love. It seemed impossible to believe, and even harder to accept, that all that was left to her to reclaim was just some broken porcelain, and some raw meat. The litany of denials, of profanities, of pleas, failed to reel Shard back in. In its place, resignation crept in, extending its welcoming, soft embrace with the promise that it could all be declared over, and finished.
"At least I killed them, right?" the question came out small and flat, a piece of flint chucked into black depths. "The ones who did this to you."
Her hands were on the cracked shell, feeling the edges where the porcelain fractured, pressing against the sharp edge. They refused to let go, however futile it really was. It seemed that even dead Shard could not stop hurting this girl, nor drinking her pain. It dripped like a soft rain from a summer sky, so bright, so vibrant. If the shell could want, it would want for nothing but to stay in this light forever.
Screws groaned as Ifi undid the bolts holding the shattered body's arm to the table; she wove her fingers with its, holding the hand as if it could mean anything.
"I should hate you, you know?" she asked, only a little less cracked than the ruin she held in her hands. "I should have let Villis kill you. I should have thrown you out. I should have left you here to rot. I should have never let you give me hope."
None of it was true, and even the broken vessel could register as much. The words had hooks at their ends, slipping into the many openings left in what used to be Shard, looping through the bare flesh and pulling taut, drawing the last vestiges of guilt from where it settled in bone and muscle.
"Everyone kept telling me that," Ifi's voice reeled the lines back in, straining under the weight of what it was trying to dredge up from the bottom. "Everyone. Myself included. And what of it? I'm here, you're saved, and not even here anymore."
There was space for a single breath; for one more blossoming of that divine pain, the one that felt too good to endure, the one that even the dead shell could not bear without shame.
"Everything you do is betrayal. I should hate you. But, instead, I..."
"I'm sorry," Shard said, whispering through a throat shot from screaming.
The veil parted; the hooks anchored the soul to the remains of the body, pinioning them in place with guilt, regret, and something else, that should remain without a name, lest Shard betray it, too.
"Shard?" the alchemist's voice ground to a halt over a single question, suspended between obliterating despair, and the single burning moment of hope.
"I'm sorry," the Lair-Mother's child said with the last of its voice.
Then came the time for a silence of confusion, of relief, of dry, cracked fury at everything that had culminated in this swamp of dead bodies and shattered lives. But they made it through, to the simple declaration waiting on the other shore.
"You damn better be," the alchemist exhaled, the fear cut off as if with a knife, replaced by tender, exhausted, exasperated joy. "Because I am not forgiving you ever again. You fucking monster."
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D'aaaaawww! That ending was extremely heart warming, despite all the blood and gore. Nothing for helping to set boundaries in a relationship like killing your partner's awful family members.
As far as Ifi's ending gambit goes, I was expecting a little quirk of chemistry, but instead we got revenge served warm! "But I am already dying" has to be up there as one of the best lines to coldly say to a motherfucker as you kill them and all their friends.
As far as Ifi's ending gambit goes, I was expecting a little quirk of chemistry, but instead we got revenge served warm! "But I am already dying" has to be up there as one of the best lines to coldly say to a motherfucker as you kill them and all their friends.
26. The Work
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
26. The Work
And after everything, joy.
There was a moment—so wonderfully extended, so sweetly reluctant to end—when the world ceased to matter. Ifi held Shard's hand in her own, and felt the warmth of her flesh sink into the blood-stained porcelain. So what that Shard lay shattered, that her body was more scabbed wounds than complete shell? So what that Ifi wasn't even sure if she could unfasten the below-spawn from the torture table without having her fall apart in her hands like a broken dish? So what that the stench of ugly death filled the cellar, rising from the mire of bile and ankle deep blood? It all felt small, insignificant, and transient compared to that which was to last: them, together.
Perhaps it was the lingering poison, not yet fully neutralized. Ifi had bound death to her fear, and served to all who sampled it; it stood to reason, then, that the antidote would have to kill fear as well. But however much sense the lyricism of alchemy made, the reason seemed easier to pinpoint: times like this, it was easy to imagine that things would, eventually, work out.
"Don't worry," Ifi promised, "I'll put you back together."
Already, her mind was racing to the workshop, to the potentials of the Noble Art, to questions of how; because it was possible to put Shard back together. It had to be possible; to think otherwise was to violate the sanctity of this moment, and of those fingers so tightly woven together. But faith alone could not move a body out of a killing room, let alone carry it over to the sanctuary of an alchemist's workshop.
That called for the help of others.
"Did you come here to finish me?" Shard asked suddenly.
For the first time in minutes, or maybe hours, Ifi looked away from the broken and bloodied body of her love, and saw Villis descend into the cellar, girded for battle. In his hand, there was a killing spear; from his wrist swayed a striking charm, glowing pale yellow with the power contained inside. When he stepped inside, he carried himself like a coiled spring, ready in all directions, awaiting an ambush. Then, his feet sank into the mess of porcelain, bile, and steel that littered the floor, and the tension left him, replaced by a strange kind of sadness.
"No," he replied in a voice that bore the mark of stunned disbelief. "Only to help."
"Then help," Ifi demanded, pointing at the table. "We need to get her out of here."
He bound the striking charm securely around his forearm; he propped the spear against the wall, and carefully stepped through the swamp of death, and towards Ifi and Shard. The torture devices the below-spawn used were familiar to his hands; quickly, he guided Ifi through how to dislodge the flat of the table from its mooring, while still keeping Shard securely bound to it. As he worked, he kept glancing at his enemy's free hand, searching for a hint of an extended claw. But, of course, there were none.
Before they left the torture chamber, Ifi wrapped the bowl with pieces of Shard in a shred of cloth. Villis followed her gestures with strange, quiet curiosity, but asked no questions. Instead, he gave commands; told the alchemist how to grip the table securely, and when her legs buckled under the strain, he made sure to shoulder the bulk of the weight on the way up from the cellar, and into the streets. Only once they were securely in the carriage, the table held fast by the draft golem did Ifi think to ask about how Villis knew to come.
"I was worried the demons were going to try to get to you," he explained with a small shrug. "So I made sure to leave look-outs by their den. I came as quickly as I could."
On any other day, Ifi would begrudge him from withholding from her where Shard was being tortured, back in the High City. But now, another question burned its way through her thoughts.
"But why come at all?" she asked, watching the ramshackle streets of the Lower City roll past the carriage.
"You keep asking me that question," he muttered, unsure. "And I am wondering the same thing about you."
When they passed the Middle City limits and reached Ifi's shop, he helped her carry Shard inside, and clear the room in the laboratory of the tabletop. The below-spawn herself seemed to lapse back into some kind of unconsciousness, which Ifi quickly deepened with an extra dose of slowmilk, just to keep the pain away. The bowl with the shards landed on a nearby bench; Villis looked for a chair, and sat himself down.
"Why are you staying?" Ifi asked, lining up a series of wakefulness tonics for use. There would no sleeping in the coming night, and little on the nights to come.
"Because once Alisa realizes what you have done, she will send someone to deal with you."
"Ah."
The elixir rolled down her throat with the familiar, galvanic taste. Cold, unpleasant energy spread through her, thinning exhaustion into a light cloud she could stride through. Shard slept nearby, her body a sore ruin that required a repair, and Ifi would provide. Only how? For a moment, she waited, head rested on folded hands, thoughts trying to conjure up some restorative recipe that would undo the damage. Obviously, there was none: she could not grow a new shell for Shard, not transplant her into one, even if she had somehow acquired it. All that remained was to somehow piece her back together.
With a piece of damp cloth, she started to clean the broken-off shards, their sharp edges never far from slicing her hands open. Bowl after bowl of dirty-black water went down the drain as the pristine white pile grew. There were so many pieces, chipped and cracked; but some of them fit together, holding onto the impression of their old integrity, just waiting for something to knit them together again.
Villis raised an eyebrow when she abruptly left the laboratory, only to return moments later, holding in her hands a small volume bound in red leather. There, in that little book, in an obnoxiously opaque poem, hid the lesson on how to make tangible the essence of attraction, which holds souls together and makes their love pure. Which, in other words, could mean a kind of glue.
The Descent into the Depths of Solitude, and the Triumphant Return Into the Light of Truth. Surrounded by the remains of her lover, and convinced somewhere deep inside that she could be reassembled, Ifi found in herself a new, fresh appreciation for what this title suggested. She had already probed those depths, and made for herself a home in them. Now was the time to leave, and ascend. Maybe she was too quick to dismiss her teachers' insistence on the desire of matter towards perfection.
"How much time do you think I have?" she asked Villis, making sure she had enough ingredients prepared for a simple saturnine tree.
"You will have enough," he promised. "And not more."
He was right. In the morning, dour-faced men with iron-bound cudgels and glass badges marking them the rulers of life and death banged at Ifi's door. The alchemist did not budge from her seat, watching with familiar wonder as flakes of gold spiraled down from the branches of the saturnine tree, settling at the bottom of the flask. Villis, however, went out to meet them; they left after the conversation, carrying with them a small message to be delivered to Master Glassmaker's own hands.
With a glass full of gold powder, Ifi continued to read and reread the poem, to find in it clues for how to render the essence of attraction tangible. Long unused dictionaries of allusions and reference books for allegories surrounded her, and an ever growing mound of quickly scribbled notes. So many of the reagents to be used were horrible poisons: vitriol of phosphorus, quicksilver salts, bitter water; the trick in the creation of the elixir of love was to find the perfect balance between them, so that they would neuter each other and leave only their beatific properties. But what Ifi was attempting didn't have to be so careful, as she was to bind them all together in the panacea of liquid gold, and hope that the thickened paste would serve to sanctify the power of attraction.
Midway through the day, the whizz of distillation rigs woke Shard up from her sleep; Ifi gave her water and restorative potions, and a numbing salve onto the open wounds. For all her damage suffered, the below-spawn held onto life and lucidity strongly; her kind was not easy to put down.
"You have to strike the heart," Villis explained from over the book he was thumbing, "or the brain. Or, I suppose, feed them horrible poison. That was a brilliant idea, by the way. It may yet save your life."
Even caught up in her work as she was, Ifi still had to admit some pride at hearing that. But other tasks lie ahead of her: a paste to taste and mix, and then a love to reassemble. She focused on it, potion after potion sharpening her thoughts until it felt like her mind was a stack of needles pointing outwards; such was clarity. Around her, Shard and Villis conversed, in low voices talking about the past, and the future, and how things could have gone otherwise. It was a bitter and unpleasant conversation, and Ifi was lucky to miss most out it.
"Don't you ever try sorry to me," Villis would exclaim, his voice falling into a register brittle like glass. "You do not have the right. You never will."
Bolted to the table, Shard protested, and defended herself, and then stopped. The conversation returned to a lower intensity, though it grew slow and sluggish, letting the alchemist concentrate more. With a small stick, she applied some of her gold paste onto the edges of two pieces of shell. It filled the gaps; as she squeezed the shards together, some of the paste rose up, hardening quickly to a low ridge joining the pieces together hard and fast. All that was left needing to be done was to file the excess and polish the shell. Ifi counted the shards remaining, and imagined just how many days would take.
No matter.
Some of the elixirs she took deadened the ugliest emotions, and left only mute focus. In its cold light, the whole task took on the shape of a puzzle; and the parts of her that could never stop loving admired the chance to grow so familiar with the topography of Shard. Ifi measured the body, found where the plates had gotten snapped, and made sure that there was a fit between the shell still holding to the flesh, and the pieces she was working with. Then, in the morning after the second night, she smeared the underside of a small shard with a healing salve, and checked if it would stick to Shard. When it clicked in place, and stayed there even as Ifi withdrew her hands, Shard whimpered in careful vulnerability.
"You are really putting me back together," she said, reaching towards the restored part of her.
Ifi brushed her hand away.
"Don't touch, or I'll bolt it back down," she said, a small part of her wondering about how it would feel to be bolted down by Shard. That the thought wafted around her mind at all was a good sign.
At some point, she slept, or maybe just collapsed; Villis woke her up, bringing her a steaming mug of coffee, and demanding that she ate before she was to disappear into the laboratory again. Outside, it was a late afternoon, the sky painted in smudges of pastel blue and pink. Downstairs, Shard writhed impatiently on the table; Ifi rushed to see if the glue was still holding. It was; a golden ridge marked her success, as hard as the shell it was joining. Relieved, the alchemist returned to the puzzle arrayed on her workbench, and the battery of potions meant to let her keep her mind primed on the task at hand.
"How long do you think it will take?" Shard asked.
"Don't rush me," she replied harshly, but not unkindly.
Her work was too precise to accommodate a conversation, anyway, leaving no room for it. Every step was a new challenge. Sometimes, parts of Shard were missing, or lost to chipping and powdering. But the paste Ifi had created filled in the gaps well, spreading into small golden pools where it reached those voids. Under the alchemist's hands, Shard's shoulder slowly emerged back as a complete shape, now branded with a sparkling web. Ifi set it back on the below-spawn later that night, finding a new metal fastener to make sure it stayed attached correctly. Even through the glimmering haze of elixirs keeping her afloat and conscious, the act of adding to her lover's bondage put a smile on her face. Gently, she slapped Shard's face, before returning to the porcelain puzzle.
"Hey," the below-spawn snorted. "I'll remember that!"
There was something in those words that made it all worth it, and more. Ifi let herself lean back in her chair and stretch, uplifted by pride, and something more.
"I'm counting on it," she laughed, returning to work.
Around the time of the next morning, much of Shard was reassembled, large porcelain plates splattered with gold and waiting to be mounted back onto the flesh. Ifi weighed one of them in hand; she had never stopped to think much about it before, but as it rested in her palm, she considered how it was possible that something this rigid and hard could yield itself to the easy grace with which Shard moved. Shouldn't it be more like plate armor, bulky and unwieldy? More importantly, was whatever magic that gave this its flexibility going to return, or would Shard remain forever crippled by a fundamentally alien body grafted onto her flesh? Ifi couldn't allow herself to worry, lest she risked losing focus, but it was difficult not to wonder, or not to rush forward with testing. No, she had to put her faith in the craft, and in the art, in alchemy's grand promise. She had to hold to the meaning of what she was doing.
As the morning gave way to another lovely afternoon, Villis returned to the laboratory from his watch-post on the shop's main floor. He approached Ifi's bench, and for a time observed her put together a plate that would cover Shard's stomach. A chunk of it was nowhere to be found; he recognized it readily.
"I should have aimed higher," he mused. "But it was never meant to be a killing blow."
With an inarticulate groan, Shard voiced her protest; Villis shrugged it off, following the work of Ifi's hands with rapt attention. For the alchemist, it was the trickiest part; no longer joining parts together, but building one anew, out of alchemical gold and mysterious poisons. Strip by strip, she applied layers of the glue, slowly shaping it into an extension of the plates around it. It was a laborious process, even by the standards of her whole task, and yet pleasing in excess of mere restoration. It meant something more, and though the details, the specific names or proper analogies could find no purchase in Ifi's addled mind, she recognized the significance just by the galvanic charge it seemed to hold under her touch. She battled through a temptation to impress some mark of her, a name or a sigil, into the golden mass, but how garish would that be? No, no matter what, Shard's body would remain forever marked not by the wounds it had suffered, but by the hand that built it back up.
"I will need your help again," she announced to Villis, readying herself for the final reassembly.
He had rough hands, used to violence more than care; or so Ifi assumed, until she saw the tenderness with which he held onto the shards of Shard and the measured pressure he put onto them as the alchemist set them back into the openings of the below-spawn's body. It should not be a surprise to her, she thought. He was a glassworker before he was a hero. Maybe it even pleased him more to work again with porcelain than to make his life matter with violence.
"How does it look?" Shard asked, straining to get a look at the reworking of her body; but the metal band kept her head away, and Ifi refused to give her a mirror.
"How does it feel?" she asked back.
"Incomplete."
"Then have patience."
Completion appeared so tantalizingly close. Ifi took a step back, surveying a white body marked by a network of golden ridges; for the first time, no hint of flesh showed, no crack, no opening. She reached to the bolts fastening Shard down, then withdrew her hand. She, too, had to have patience; now was the time to wait for the attraction to solidify, and then for the work that still remained to be done.
"One more night," she made a promise, a wave of exhaustion threatening to drag her to the bottom of sleep. "And remember, no touching."
Upstairs, in the kitchen, Villis seated her at the table. From what little supplies remained in the alchemist's cupboard, he made a shockingly hearty stew, and served it to her, steaming hot. Eating was a struggle; the poisons that kept Ifi upright straining the body in dangerous ways. But she did eat, and she did feel better at the end. Once the bowl was empty, she crashed, the unspoken "why are you doing all of this" retained on her lips.
She never got around to asking it. In the morning, Villis was gone, having left a note warning that he would be back by evening, and likely with difficult company. The implication went over the alchemist's head, for something else, and ar more important, held all of her attention. She found one last bottle of liquid wakefulness sequestered away, downed it, and rushed back to Shard.
A steel file, a roll of sandpaper, a metal brush, a sponge and a bottle of polish; the last step might have seemed mundane compared to the fine magic of transmutation and restoration. Ifi knew better. She set the strongest glowing charm into a socket above Shard's table, moved a chair next to it and ran her fingers across the rough, ridged surface of the below-spawn's restored body. Then, she touched the file to the hardened glue, and ground down and to the side. A crystal-fine whine bounced off the laboratory's walls.
"Ifi?" Shard asked at the surprising touch.
"Shh," the alchemist whispered. "It will take a while."
The labour progressed so very slowly. First, she filed the glue, then she sanded what remained, and only made it perfectly flush with the gradual work of the brush. But her hands were on Shard all time, her warmth soon fully seeped into her, the porcelain body yielding to her perfecting touch. The glue—the elixir—the work—had done more than just set. As its excess was scrubbed away, it revealed perfectly thin golden lines, shining with greedy, needy light. In places, the gold spread and pooled, painting a new geography of Shard, no longer immaculate, but mottled, marked, tried and true. If Ifi had harboured any doubts as to the efficacy of her alchemy, they dispersed without a trace. Or maybe not on account of beauty, but only the sheer pleasure of that touch, of being allowed to hold the body so close and so tender, to work it until it gained a mirror sheen.
Shard's free hand reached for Ifi, and Ifi leaned into it, letting it brush her skin and drink her warmth. Rhythmically, she polished the remade shell, imagining what this hand could do to her—but some other day. So she fastened it again, to make sure it did not interrupt the finishing touches too much. Shard grumbled in protest, but did not resist; words that were in her mouth melted down until all that was leaving was a low, undulating purr, in tune with the motions of Ifi's hands.
And then, all of a sudden, there was nothing more left to file, to sand, to polish. Shard lay on the table, gleaming like a freshly-cut gem, the golden warp spread over her shining with a light that was not entirely reflected. Reluctant to release something that marvelous from her hold, the alchemist nonetheless moved to undo the bindings, finally releasing the below-spawn from her bondage.
"Can you stand?" she asked in a voice that surprised her with its firmness.
She helped Shard up, watching her struggle to keep her balance, but only for a moment. Soon enough, everything was back as it used to be. The glue held; the plates did not snap or bend. They joined to the flesh below, growing from it their necessary properties, indistinguishable from those gained in the vats of the Lair-Mother's kingdom; or perhaps better than that. What could compare, after all, with love and mastery?
"How do you feel?" she demanded to know.
"I don't know," Shard hushed.
"Then keep your eyes down."
Two stairwells separated them from the mirror in the bathroom above, and the conclusion of this work. They walked up slowly, savouring every step of a life returned and of a hope fulfilled. Ifi held Shard's wrist tightly and possessively, like she had always wanted to be held, and guided her towards a better life, like she had always wanted to be guided. But she had to also acknowledge a kind of a defeat; all her life, she had refused the dream of alchemy as anything but a tool, scoffing at those seeing it as a path to a better life. But perhaps she had spent too much time thinking of the High City buffoons and their bad poetry, and not enough of the basic truth of what transmutation could accomplish.
Shard's feet clicked against the tiled floor of the bathroom; Ifi put the light charms on, and breathed.
"Look up," she ordered, pointing the below-spawn at the mirror.
Her love obliged. She raised her head and stared directly into her new reflection, splayed with gold. Her fingers touched the shining trail that began by the neck, and followed it all the way down to the golden pool that filled what a killing spear had once broken open. She trembled, and Ifi only held tighter.
"It is perfect."
And so it was, and so was the work completed, and so was the change affected upon the world, indelible and undeniable.
And after everything, joy.
There was a moment—so wonderfully extended, so sweetly reluctant to end—when the world ceased to matter. Ifi held Shard's hand in her own, and felt the warmth of her flesh sink into the blood-stained porcelain. So what that Shard lay shattered, that her body was more scabbed wounds than complete shell? So what that Ifi wasn't even sure if she could unfasten the below-spawn from the torture table without having her fall apart in her hands like a broken dish? So what that the stench of ugly death filled the cellar, rising from the mire of bile and ankle deep blood? It all felt small, insignificant, and transient compared to that which was to last: them, together.
Perhaps it was the lingering poison, not yet fully neutralized. Ifi had bound death to her fear, and served to all who sampled it; it stood to reason, then, that the antidote would have to kill fear as well. But however much sense the lyricism of alchemy made, the reason seemed easier to pinpoint: times like this, it was easy to imagine that things would, eventually, work out.
"Don't worry," Ifi promised, "I'll put you back together."
Already, her mind was racing to the workshop, to the potentials of the Noble Art, to questions of how; because it was possible to put Shard back together. It had to be possible; to think otherwise was to violate the sanctity of this moment, and of those fingers so tightly woven together. But faith alone could not move a body out of a killing room, let alone carry it over to the sanctuary of an alchemist's workshop.
That called for the help of others.
"Did you come here to finish me?" Shard asked suddenly.
For the first time in minutes, or maybe hours, Ifi looked away from the broken and bloodied body of her love, and saw Villis descend into the cellar, girded for battle. In his hand, there was a killing spear; from his wrist swayed a striking charm, glowing pale yellow with the power contained inside. When he stepped inside, he carried himself like a coiled spring, ready in all directions, awaiting an ambush. Then, his feet sank into the mess of porcelain, bile, and steel that littered the floor, and the tension left him, replaced by a strange kind of sadness.
"No," he replied in a voice that bore the mark of stunned disbelief. "Only to help."
"Then help," Ifi demanded, pointing at the table. "We need to get her out of here."
He bound the striking charm securely around his forearm; he propped the spear against the wall, and carefully stepped through the swamp of death, and towards Ifi and Shard. The torture devices the below-spawn used were familiar to his hands; quickly, he guided Ifi through how to dislodge the flat of the table from its mooring, while still keeping Shard securely bound to it. As he worked, he kept glancing at his enemy's free hand, searching for a hint of an extended claw. But, of course, there were none.
Before they left the torture chamber, Ifi wrapped the bowl with pieces of Shard in a shred of cloth. Villis followed her gestures with strange, quiet curiosity, but asked no questions. Instead, he gave commands; told the alchemist how to grip the table securely, and when her legs buckled under the strain, he made sure to shoulder the bulk of the weight on the way up from the cellar, and into the streets. Only once they were securely in the carriage, the table held fast by the draft golem did Ifi think to ask about how Villis knew to come.
"I was worried the demons were going to try to get to you," he explained with a small shrug. "So I made sure to leave look-outs by their den. I came as quickly as I could."
On any other day, Ifi would begrudge him from withholding from her where Shard was being tortured, back in the High City. But now, another question burned its way through her thoughts.
"But why come at all?" she asked, watching the ramshackle streets of the Lower City roll past the carriage.
"You keep asking me that question," he muttered, unsure. "And I am wondering the same thing about you."
When they passed the Middle City limits and reached Ifi's shop, he helped her carry Shard inside, and clear the room in the laboratory of the tabletop. The below-spawn herself seemed to lapse back into some kind of unconsciousness, which Ifi quickly deepened with an extra dose of slowmilk, just to keep the pain away. The bowl with the shards landed on a nearby bench; Villis looked for a chair, and sat himself down.
"Why are you staying?" Ifi asked, lining up a series of wakefulness tonics for use. There would no sleeping in the coming night, and little on the nights to come.
"Because once Alisa realizes what you have done, she will send someone to deal with you."
"Ah."
The elixir rolled down her throat with the familiar, galvanic taste. Cold, unpleasant energy spread through her, thinning exhaustion into a light cloud she could stride through. Shard slept nearby, her body a sore ruin that required a repair, and Ifi would provide. Only how? For a moment, she waited, head rested on folded hands, thoughts trying to conjure up some restorative recipe that would undo the damage. Obviously, there was none: she could not grow a new shell for Shard, not transplant her into one, even if she had somehow acquired it. All that remained was to somehow piece her back together.
With a piece of damp cloth, she started to clean the broken-off shards, their sharp edges never far from slicing her hands open. Bowl after bowl of dirty-black water went down the drain as the pristine white pile grew. There were so many pieces, chipped and cracked; but some of them fit together, holding onto the impression of their old integrity, just waiting for something to knit them together again.
Villis raised an eyebrow when she abruptly left the laboratory, only to return moments later, holding in her hands a small volume bound in red leather. There, in that little book, in an obnoxiously opaque poem, hid the lesson on how to make tangible the essence of attraction, which holds souls together and makes their love pure. Which, in other words, could mean a kind of glue.
The Descent into the Depths of Solitude, and the Triumphant Return Into the Light of Truth. Surrounded by the remains of her lover, and convinced somewhere deep inside that she could be reassembled, Ifi found in herself a new, fresh appreciation for what this title suggested. She had already probed those depths, and made for herself a home in them. Now was the time to leave, and ascend. Maybe she was too quick to dismiss her teachers' insistence on the desire of matter towards perfection.
"How much time do you think I have?" she asked Villis, making sure she had enough ingredients prepared for a simple saturnine tree.
"You will have enough," he promised. "And not more."
He was right. In the morning, dour-faced men with iron-bound cudgels and glass badges marking them the rulers of life and death banged at Ifi's door. The alchemist did not budge from her seat, watching with familiar wonder as flakes of gold spiraled down from the branches of the saturnine tree, settling at the bottom of the flask. Villis, however, went out to meet them; they left after the conversation, carrying with them a small message to be delivered to Master Glassmaker's own hands.
With a glass full of gold powder, Ifi continued to read and reread the poem, to find in it clues for how to render the essence of attraction tangible. Long unused dictionaries of allusions and reference books for allegories surrounded her, and an ever growing mound of quickly scribbled notes. So many of the reagents to be used were horrible poisons: vitriol of phosphorus, quicksilver salts, bitter water; the trick in the creation of the elixir of love was to find the perfect balance between them, so that they would neuter each other and leave only their beatific properties. But what Ifi was attempting didn't have to be so careful, as she was to bind them all together in the panacea of liquid gold, and hope that the thickened paste would serve to sanctify the power of attraction.
Midway through the day, the whizz of distillation rigs woke Shard up from her sleep; Ifi gave her water and restorative potions, and a numbing salve onto the open wounds. For all her damage suffered, the below-spawn held onto life and lucidity strongly; her kind was not easy to put down.
"You have to strike the heart," Villis explained from over the book he was thumbing, "or the brain. Or, I suppose, feed them horrible poison. That was a brilliant idea, by the way. It may yet save your life."
Even caught up in her work as she was, Ifi still had to admit some pride at hearing that. But other tasks lie ahead of her: a paste to taste and mix, and then a love to reassemble. She focused on it, potion after potion sharpening her thoughts until it felt like her mind was a stack of needles pointing outwards; such was clarity. Around her, Shard and Villis conversed, in low voices talking about the past, and the future, and how things could have gone otherwise. It was a bitter and unpleasant conversation, and Ifi was lucky to miss most out it.
"Don't you ever try sorry to me," Villis would exclaim, his voice falling into a register brittle like glass. "You do not have the right. You never will."
Bolted to the table, Shard protested, and defended herself, and then stopped. The conversation returned to a lower intensity, though it grew slow and sluggish, letting the alchemist concentrate more. With a small stick, she applied some of her gold paste onto the edges of two pieces of shell. It filled the gaps; as she squeezed the shards together, some of the paste rose up, hardening quickly to a low ridge joining the pieces together hard and fast. All that was left needing to be done was to file the excess and polish the shell. Ifi counted the shards remaining, and imagined just how many days would take.
No matter.
Some of the elixirs she took deadened the ugliest emotions, and left only mute focus. In its cold light, the whole task took on the shape of a puzzle; and the parts of her that could never stop loving admired the chance to grow so familiar with the topography of Shard. Ifi measured the body, found where the plates had gotten snapped, and made sure that there was a fit between the shell still holding to the flesh, and the pieces she was working with. Then, in the morning after the second night, she smeared the underside of a small shard with a healing salve, and checked if it would stick to Shard. When it clicked in place, and stayed there even as Ifi withdrew her hands, Shard whimpered in careful vulnerability.
"You are really putting me back together," she said, reaching towards the restored part of her.
Ifi brushed her hand away.
"Don't touch, or I'll bolt it back down," she said, a small part of her wondering about how it would feel to be bolted down by Shard. That the thought wafted around her mind at all was a good sign.
At some point, she slept, or maybe just collapsed; Villis woke her up, bringing her a steaming mug of coffee, and demanding that she ate before she was to disappear into the laboratory again. Outside, it was a late afternoon, the sky painted in smudges of pastel blue and pink. Downstairs, Shard writhed impatiently on the table; Ifi rushed to see if the glue was still holding. It was; a golden ridge marked her success, as hard as the shell it was joining. Relieved, the alchemist returned to the puzzle arrayed on her workbench, and the battery of potions meant to let her keep her mind primed on the task at hand.
"How long do you think it will take?" Shard asked.
"Don't rush me," she replied harshly, but not unkindly.
Her work was too precise to accommodate a conversation, anyway, leaving no room for it. Every step was a new challenge. Sometimes, parts of Shard were missing, or lost to chipping and powdering. But the paste Ifi had created filled in the gaps well, spreading into small golden pools where it reached those voids. Under the alchemist's hands, Shard's shoulder slowly emerged back as a complete shape, now branded with a sparkling web. Ifi set it back on the below-spawn later that night, finding a new metal fastener to make sure it stayed attached correctly. Even through the glimmering haze of elixirs keeping her afloat and conscious, the act of adding to her lover's bondage put a smile on her face. Gently, she slapped Shard's face, before returning to the porcelain puzzle.
"Hey," the below-spawn snorted. "I'll remember that!"
There was something in those words that made it all worth it, and more. Ifi let herself lean back in her chair and stretch, uplifted by pride, and something more.
"I'm counting on it," she laughed, returning to work.
Around the time of the next morning, much of Shard was reassembled, large porcelain plates splattered with gold and waiting to be mounted back onto the flesh. Ifi weighed one of them in hand; she had never stopped to think much about it before, but as it rested in her palm, she considered how it was possible that something this rigid and hard could yield itself to the easy grace with which Shard moved. Shouldn't it be more like plate armor, bulky and unwieldy? More importantly, was whatever magic that gave this its flexibility going to return, or would Shard remain forever crippled by a fundamentally alien body grafted onto her flesh? Ifi couldn't allow herself to worry, lest she risked losing focus, but it was difficult not to wonder, or not to rush forward with testing. No, she had to put her faith in the craft, and in the art, in alchemy's grand promise. She had to hold to the meaning of what she was doing.
As the morning gave way to another lovely afternoon, Villis returned to the laboratory from his watch-post on the shop's main floor. He approached Ifi's bench, and for a time observed her put together a plate that would cover Shard's stomach. A chunk of it was nowhere to be found; he recognized it readily.
"I should have aimed higher," he mused. "But it was never meant to be a killing blow."
With an inarticulate groan, Shard voiced her protest; Villis shrugged it off, following the work of Ifi's hands with rapt attention. For the alchemist, it was the trickiest part; no longer joining parts together, but building one anew, out of alchemical gold and mysterious poisons. Strip by strip, she applied layers of the glue, slowly shaping it into an extension of the plates around it. It was a laborious process, even by the standards of her whole task, and yet pleasing in excess of mere restoration. It meant something more, and though the details, the specific names or proper analogies could find no purchase in Ifi's addled mind, she recognized the significance just by the galvanic charge it seemed to hold under her touch. She battled through a temptation to impress some mark of her, a name or a sigil, into the golden mass, but how garish would that be? No, no matter what, Shard's body would remain forever marked not by the wounds it had suffered, but by the hand that built it back up.
"I will need your help again," she announced to Villis, readying herself for the final reassembly.
He had rough hands, used to violence more than care; or so Ifi assumed, until she saw the tenderness with which he held onto the shards of Shard and the measured pressure he put onto them as the alchemist set them back into the openings of the below-spawn's body. It should not be a surprise to her, she thought. He was a glassworker before he was a hero. Maybe it even pleased him more to work again with porcelain than to make his life matter with violence.
"How does it look?" Shard asked, straining to get a look at the reworking of her body; but the metal band kept her head away, and Ifi refused to give her a mirror.
"How does it feel?" she asked back.
"Incomplete."
"Then have patience."
Completion appeared so tantalizingly close. Ifi took a step back, surveying a white body marked by a network of golden ridges; for the first time, no hint of flesh showed, no crack, no opening. She reached to the bolts fastening Shard down, then withdrew her hand. She, too, had to have patience; now was the time to wait for the attraction to solidify, and then for the work that still remained to be done.
"One more night," she made a promise, a wave of exhaustion threatening to drag her to the bottom of sleep. "And remember, no touching."
Upstairs, in the kitchen, Villis seated her at the table. From what little supplies remained in the alchemist's cupboard, he made a shockingly hearty stew, and served it to her, steaming hot. Eating was a struggle; the poisons that kept Ifi upright straining the body in dangerous ways. But she did eat, and she did feel better at the end. Once the bowl was empty, she crashed, the unspoken "why are you doing all of this" retained on her lips.
She never got around to asking it. In the morning, Villis was gone, having left a note warning that he would be back by evening, and likely with difficult company. The implication went over the alchemist's head, for something else, and ar more important, held all of her attention. She found one last bottle of liquid wakefulness sequestered away, downed it, and rushed back to Shard.
A steel file, a roll of sandpaper, a metal brush, a sponge and a bottle of polish; the last step might have seemed mundane compared to the fine magic of transmutation and restoration. Ifi knew better. She set the strongest glowing charm into a socket above Shard's table, moved a chair next to it and ran her fingers across the rough, ridged surface of the below-spawn's restored body. Then, she touched the file to the hardened glue, and ground down and to the side. A crystal-fine whine bounced off the laboratory's walls.
"Ifi?" Shard asked at the surprising touch.
"Shh," the alchemist whispered. "It will take a while."
The labour progressed so very slowly. First, she filed the glue, then she sanded what remained, and only made it perfectly flush with the gradual work of the brush. But her hands were on Shard all time, her warmth soon fully seeped into her, the porcelain body yielding to her perfecting touch. The glue—the elixir—the work—had done more than just set. As its excess was scrubbed away, it revealed perfectly thin golden lines, shining with greedy, needy light. In places, the gold spread and pooled, painting a new geography of Shard, no longer immaculate, but mottled, marked, tried and true. If Ifi had harboured any doubts as to the efficacy of her alchemy, they dispersed without a trace. Or maybe not on account of beauty, but only the sheer pleasure of that touch, of being allowed to hold the body so close and so tender, to work it until it gained a mirror sheen.
Shard's free hand reached for Ifi, and Ifi leaned into it, letting it brush her skin and drink her warmth. Rhythmically, she polished the remade shell, imagining what this hand could do to her—but some other day. So she fastened it again, to make sure it did not interrupt the finishing touches too much. Shard grumbled in protest, but did not resist; words that were in her mouth melted down until all that was leaving was a low, undulating purr, in tune with the motions of Ifi's hands.
And then, all of a sudden, there was nothing more left to file, to sand, to polish. Shard lay on the table, gleaming like a freshly-cut gem, the golden warp spread over her shining with a light that was not entirely reflected. Reluctant to release something that marvelous from her hold, the alchemist nonetheless moved to undo the bindings, finally releasing the below-spawn from her bondage.
"Can you stand?" she asked in a voice that surprised her with its firmness.
She helped Shard up, watching her struggle to keep her balance, but only for a moment. Soon enough, everything was back as it used to be. The glue held; the plates did not snap or bend. They joined to the flesh below, growing from it their necessary properties, indistinguishable from those gained in the vats of the Lair-Mother's kingdom; or perhaps better than that. What could compare, after all, with love and mastery?
"How do you feel?" she demanded to know.
"I don't know," Shard hushed.
"Then keep your eyes down."
Two stairwells separated them from the mirror in the bathroom above, and the conclusion of this work. They walked up slowly, savouring every step of a life returned and of a hope fulfilled. Ifi held Shard's wrist tightly and possessively, like she had always wanted to be held, and guided her towards a better life, like she had always wanted to be guided. But she had to also acknowledge a kind of a defeat; all her life, she had refused the dream of alchemy as anything but a tool, scoffing at those seeing it as a path to a better life. But perhaps she had spent too much time thinking of the High City buffoons and their bad poetry, and not enough of the basic truth of what transmutation could accomplish.
Shard's feet clicked against the tiled floor of the bathroom; Ifi put the light charms on, and breathed.
"Look up," she ordered, pointing the below-spawn at the mirror.
Her love obliged. She raised her head and stared directly into her new reflection, splayed with gold. Her fingers touched the shining trail that began by the neck, and followed it all the way down to the golden pool that filled what a killing spear had once broken open. She trembled, and Ifi only held tighter.
"It is perfect."
And so it was, and so was the work completed, and so was the change affected upon the world, indelible and undeniable.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Awwww
27. Mercy
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
27. Mercy
Inevitably, the elixirs took their toll. Once the work was complete, Ifi stumbled out of the bathroom, her grip on Shard's wrist going slack, and tried to mumble some new command. No words formed on her lips, however; she gurgled something incoherent, and then finally her legs gave in. The Lair-Mother's child rushed forward, caught her before she smashed all the way to the floor, and lifted the alchemist to the nearby bed.
There was so little of her, lost in the folds of her voluminous robe. In Shard's arms, she may as well have weighed nothing at all; as with all mortal life, it bore a mark of profound fragility. It could be torn apart so easily, splayed open and bled dry. A single twist of the claw would end it, in a gush of scarlet, intoxicating pain. And as always, the temptation remained; that little pull of tension at the tip of her fingers, ready to extend and sharpen with just a thought.
She lay Ifi in bed, and put a pillow under her head, took a step back. Was she ever going to fully unlearn the ways of looking at that girl as if she was nothing but meat? The old hunger gnawed at the back of her soul. Which was not to say that there was a threat; other, stronger desires held it in check. And those desires expanded in Shard's mind, eclipsing visions of evisceration and slaughter. She ran her fingers around her wrist, where the last motes of Ifi's heat lingered. No, she would not allow the girl to think she had her fully tamed.
No, no, no. Ifi was going to suffer for her dominant pretense. The Lair-Mother's child smiled at that notion. It was going to be a maddeningly impatient wait for the alchemist to wake up.
It was a surprising kind of lust, at once intimately familiar, while also unlike anything Shard had felt before. It spread from the gold-joined cracks in her shell, expanding into the flesh below, digging its little roots in the black veins and metal bones. Once, she would have reacted to it as if to an alien body, seeking to tear this parasite away; but if this was Ifi's spell, then she welcomed it gladly. The alchemist was owed as much, and infinitely more.
The air downstairs reeked of Ifi's alchemy, of her sweat, of her exhaustion, of her toil. Shard threw the windows wide open, hoping that this at least would mute the want; it certainly made breathing easier. Another kind of pleasure accompanied this busywork; the budding realisation that she was where she wanted to be.
The thought had crept up on her, and when it hit in full, Shard found herself forced to pause and sit down. For a moment, she was reduced to admiring the golden web now adorning her shell, trying to make sense of everything she could no longer feel. The great hunger that had been driving her for as long as her memories could reach was nowhere to be found. She tried to imagine climbing back to the pinnacles of power, and the idea carried no taste, brooked no fascination. What would have once propelled her ever forwards was now still, and at peace.
Alas, it too was interrupted.
The door to the shop swung open. Shard jumped up, instincts already extending her claws as she dropped to the floor, ready to face the intruders. Her old enemies were back.
"Hello there, Shard," Master Glassmaker threw down the hood of her capacious cloak, old hate glinting in her grey eyes. "I was under the impression you were supposed to be dead."
Behind her, there was Villis, face tense, a striking charm held securely in the palm of his hand. He did not let it extend yet, however, though he watched Shard's hands carefully. The Lair-Mother's child straightened, doing her best to not let the urge to kill—or sheer panic—cloud her judgment. It was an uphill struggle.
"Alisa," she hissed.
"That's Master Glassmaker for you, thank you," the woman smiled back, striding inside, Villis following close behind.
She looked around, surveying the emptied display cases, and the general mess left by Ifi's hasty work. At Shard, she did not look, though she made sure to keep her burned profile turned towards her all the time. The meaning behind the gesture couldn't be more clear.
"What do you want?" Shard asked, trying not to think about the way their last meeting went; those details would not help either of them in the conversation.
"Is there a chair somewhere?" Alisa ignored her, quickly turning around before spotting the seat behind the counter. "Perfect."
Somehow, Shard ended up staring down at Master Glassmaker leisurely slouched in Ifi's chair, hands playing with the underside of the old wooden counter.
"So, to answer your question," she said, "I am here to inform the owner of this shop of her impending arraignment for royally fucking up my plans…"
Muscles tensed underneath Shard's shell, her body drawing itself tight and taut; her fingers ground against each other as she hid the extending claws in balled fists.
"...not to mention her absolutely rancid taste in women. A hanging offense, in my city."
Villis sighed wordlessly; Shard dropped into a lower hunch, head trained on Master Glassmaker and her extending smile.
"Look at her," Alisa chuckled dryly, waving Shard away as she spoke to Villis. "You weren't kidding! So protective. You were going to try to gut me, huh?" she turned to the Lair-Mother's child. "Just because I threatened to hang that Ifigenia? Honest answers only, please."
Shard exhaled, glancing at Villis; his face remained inscrutable. But she knew Alisa enough, or at least she knew enough about her to recognize what this all was: a game. And one she was in no position to try to interrupt.
"Yes," she nodded, trying to keep her tone neutral. Her claws withdrew back; she opened her hands and demonstrated them to Villis.
"Incredible," Alisa snorted. "You're not only honest, but also domesticated! Wonderful, really. Villis, be a dear and fetch coffee. I don't think this little creature will be trouble."
With another heavy sigh, he nodded, and left for the kitchen, constantly looking back, as if expecting Shard to try something; she couldn't blame him for that. Looking at Master Glassmaker, she was sorely tempted. She froze in place instead, staring at the woman and trying to imagine what she was after.
"Just to clarify," Alisa continued, "you will not be trouble because if you so much as twitch, I will let this wonderful charm fry you…"
Her hand was below the counter; the slight electric charge in the air reminded Shard of the security system Ifi had threatened her with, all those weeks ago.
"...something you should be familiar with," the grin on Master Glassmaker's face turned positively murderous; she ran her hand on the deformed side of her head, letting her fingers mark out a bumpy trail across all the knotted scar tissue.
For a moment, there was silence, marred only by the wheeze of the kettle in the kitchen.
"Not even a word snapped back, huh?" Master Glassmaker shook her head. "You surprise me, Shard. What happened to you? Aside from the obvious."
"I don't want you to hurt Ifi," she replied.
"Which means I should have her skinned alive," Alisashrugged back. "Just as a matter of principle."
Only a few feet separated Alisa from Shard, and Master Glassmaker was old and life-weary; her reflexes should not be the sharpest. If the Lair-Mother's child was to take a lunge, she could probably sink her claws into her throat before the shocking charm erupted. And then, of course, Villis would storm inside and kill her. Which, as she was beginning to suspect, could be the point.
"Are you trying to provoke me?"
"Yes, obviously," Alisa snorted. "Shard, sweetheart, do you have any idea how disappointed I was to hear you somehow made it out alive? And that it was that little miss alchemist, who swore up and down that she was nothing but your victim, who bailed you out?"
Villis returned from the kitchen, a steaming mug in hand; he left it in front of Master Glassmaker, withdrawing to her side. If anything, he looked bitterly exhausted. The disfigured woman blew the steam away, then tasted the coffee. This, finally, managed to wipe the smile from her face. She reached under her cloak, to find a small hip-flask inside. A strong stench of Lower City moonshine hit the air as she poured the contents into the mug. She screwed the bottle back, leaving it on the counter.
"But, apparently, I can't have nice things. Where is she?"
"What do you want from her?" Shard repeated her question, straining to not let her voice rise.
"To have an honest heart to heart about what she did, and to explore potential ways of moving forward," Alisa replied, sipping. "But no. Don't worry. Villis talked me out of having her hang. As for you, however…"
Again, she sipped; Shard felt the power she held press down on her life, and on her future. Once again, as ever, all her dreams of freedom had to concede to the fact that there would always be someone whom she belonged to. Without meaning to, she put her hand to the golden pool where the spear had once pierced her.
"I am sorry for what I did," she whispered, and she was genuine; or at least tried to. Somehow, she couldn't stay certain if the regret she was experiencing was the one expected of her.
"As I have already explained to you," Alisa's voice dropped a pitch, "it's long past time for that. Do you remember what I promised you, when you left me to die?"
It was night then; an ugly autumnal one. Shard dragged a weeping body, half its face bleeding blood and pus, and left it hooked hanging from the Mason's Bridge, so that others would get the message that not even Glassmakers were safe, if their treachery ran deep enough. And of course, that body was screaming and shouting things back at her, as they all did in their terminal moments. The words slid off her shell that night, right into oblivion; why commit to memory the refuse of history?
"Do you?" the question sounded again, this time serrated at the edges.
Gold marked Shard's body where she had been restored; gold, love, hope. It remade where she had been destroyed, and dredged her up from the bottom of despair to a new life, and a new peace. But it seemed that there were limits to what alchemy could transmute, and the past was beyond its reach.
"No," the Lair-Mother's once-favoured child admitted, finding in herself a new kind of shame.
The air crackled as the charge gathered in the shocking charm in tune to the abruptly tensing expression on Alisa's face. Shard braced herself for pain. None came. Villis' hand landed on Allisa's shoulder, gripping lightly.
"And maybe that is for the better."
A sense of betrayal flashed through Master Glassmaker's face, followed by sharp anger. In an instant it was gone, leaving in its wake the wreckage of years of unanswerable rage. But that too drained away, disappearing into apast whichcould neither be altered, nor relieved. The older woman breathed out, shrugging away the unbearable weight of history, and took a sizeable gulp from her mug. Coffee and booze splashed out as she smashed it back to the counter.
"You will leave the city," she passed her judgment, not a shred of humour left in her voice. "You will scurry far enough that not even from the highest tower will I be able to spot you. You will never return, not in a year, and not in ten generation's time, because if you do, every promise I have made will be fulfilled, to the last drop of your blood. This is all the mercy you can expect from me, Shard, and far more than you have ever deserved. Now, where is the alchemist?"
Villis stepped in before Shard could give voice to her shock.
"Probably upstairs, and asleep," he pointed.
"Well," Master Glassmaker lifted herself forcefully up, the mug in her hand. "I will be waking her up, then. You two stay here."
When she left, Shard slumped; the future that had, just moments ago, felt clear and at peace was again a dark churn. Everything she had thought she gained slipped like sand between her fingers, vanishing into nothing, and…
"She will follow you, you know," Villis shifted a step closer; there was something akin to pity on his tired face. "She will not let you leave alone."
Again, there was a stab of shame; how could she ask that of Ifi, how could she demand that the alchemist give up her life just to follow her into exile, far beyond the civilized city, where barbarian tribes dwelt? How could she expect her to follow? Even if she did, even if Villis' calm assertion was a lifeline tethering her back to hope.
"How do you know?"
Villis eyed the hip-flask Alisa had left, and after the briefest hesitation, opened it again, taking a long swig. He wiped his mouth with the flat of his hand, and chuckled dryly.
"Shit, Shard, what sort of an answer do you expect?" he gave her an askew look. "She is madly in love with you, and wouldn't hesitate to sell the world just to stay at your side. Please tell me you noticed as much."
In the silence that followed, Shard could almost hear the conversation happening upstairs; but the walls and the floors were thick, and whatever words seeped through them, they could reach her only as general impressions. She felt small, and guilty, but also knew that Villis was right. There could be no doubt; the gold that marked her stood in testament to that. And, really, it wasn't even that much of an ugly feeling; quite the contrary. If it terrified her, then not because she wanted to escape from it, but because she knew it was not a responsibility she had ever expected to bear. But then again, that made no reason to refuse it.
"Just be good to her," Villis murmured, emptying the flask. "She deserves better."
"I will try," Shard promised, meaning it with all of her being. "I will do my best."
The tones reaching from above were measured, calm; Shard could not sense despair, nor surprise there, but rather something else—a timbre of quiet resolve, and maybe, almost, relief. Villis was no longer looking at Shard, his eyes staring through the window, and out into the night's sky. An unspoken question waited between the two of them.
"Why?" even if she could only approach it, she tried to put it into words.
"Why what?"
"Why everything. If not for you, then me and Ifi…"
He cut her off, harshly, as if he couldn't bear to hear the rest of it. But she got honesty out of him.
"Because I wanted to see if I could get myself to forgive you."
"And?" Shard asked, though she already knew the answer.
"No. Of course not."
At first, when Alisa condemned her to an exile and called it a mercy, Shard had to take it for a mockery; now that Villis' words sank in, she understood how genuine it was, and how enormous. There was nothing left in the city she could return to, and the world beyond was open and vast beyond the wildest imagination.
"Thank you all the same," she whispered to Villis, who said nothing.
Some time later, Ifi descended in Alisa's company, face like stained parchment, eyes blood-shot. Shard startled, already on her feet to search for signs of distress in her lover; she found none, only the familiar exhaustion that the interrupted sleep could have barely dented.
"Hey Shard," the alchemist waved at her as Master Glassmaker motioned to Villis to leave. "I've got some bad news for you. We'll be leaving soon."
Even though she expected to hear regret in those words, to find in them a bitter resignation and protest, Shard couldn't help but to feel that they were feather-light.
"Where to?" she asked sheepishly.
"Wherever. I'm fucking done with this city."
Inevitably, the elixirs took their toll. Once the work was complete, Ifi stumbled out of the bathroom, her grip on Shard's wrist going slack, and tried to mumble some new command. No words formed on her lips, however; she gurgled something incoherent, and then finally her legs gave in. The Lair-Mother's child rushed forward, caught her before she smashed all the way to the floor, and lifted the alchemist to the nearby bed.
There was so little of her, lost in the folds of her voluminous robe. In Shard's arms, she may as well have weighed nothing at all; as with all mortal life, it bore a mark of profound fragility. It could be torn apart so easily, splayed open and bled dry. A single twist of the claw would end it, in a gush of scarlet, intoxicating pain. And as always, the temptation remained; that little pull of tension at the tip of her fingers, ready to extend and sharpen with just a thought.
She lay Ifi in bed, and put a pillow under her head, took a step back. Was she ever going to fully unlearn the ways of looking at that girl as if she was nothing but meat? The old hunger gnawed at the back of her soul. Which was not to say that there was a threat; other, stronger desires held it in check. And those desires expanded in Shard's mind, eclipsing visions of evisceration and slaughter. She ran her fingers around her wrist, where the last motes of Ifi's heat lingered. No, she would not allow the girl to think she had her fully tamed.
No, no, no. Ifi was going to suffer for her dominant pretense. The Lair-Mother's child smiled at that notion. It was going to be a maddeningly impatient wait for the alchemist to wake up.
It was a surprising kind of lust, at once intimately familiar, while also unlike anything Shard had felt before. It spread from the gold-joined cracks in her shell, expanding into the flesh below, digging its little roots in the black veins and metal bones. Once, she would have reacted to it as if to an alien body, seeking to tear this parasite away; but if this was Ifi's spell, then she welcomed it gladly. The alchemist was owed as much, and infinitely more.
The air downstairs reeked of Ifi's alchemy, of her sweat, of her exhaustion, of her toil. Shard threw the windows wide open, hoping that this at least would mute the want; it certainly made breathing easier. Another kind of pleasure accompanied this busywork; the budding realisation that she was where she wanted to be.
The thought had crept up on her, and when it hit in full, Shard found herself forced to pause and sit down. For a moment, she was reduced to admiring the golden web now adorning her shell, trying to make sense of everything she could no longer feel. The great hunger that had been driving her for as long as her memories could reach was nowhere to be found. She tried to imagine climbing back to the pinnacles of power, and the idea carried no taste, brooked no fascination. What would have once propelled her ever forwards was now still, and at peace.
Alas, it too was interrupted.
The door to the shop swung open. Shard jumped up, instincts already extending her claws as she dropped to the floor, ready to face the intruders. Her old enemies were back.
"Hello there, Shard," Master Glassmaker threw down the hood of her capacious cloak, old hate glinting in her grey eyes. "I was under the impression you were supposed to be dead."
Behind her, there was Villis, face tense, a striking charm held securely in the palm of his hand. He did not let it extend yet, however, though he watched Shard's hands carefully. The Lair-Mother's child straightened, doing her best to not let the urge to kill—or sheer panic—cloud her judgment. It was an uphill struggle.
"Alisa," she hissed.
"That's Master Glassmaker for you, thank you," the woman smiled back, striding inside, Villis following close behind.
She looked around, surveying the emptied display cases, and the general mess left by Ifi's hasty work. At Shard, she did not look, though she made sure to keep her burned profile turned towards her all the time. The meaning behind the gesture couldn't be more clear.
"What do you want?" Shard asked, trying not to think about the way their last meeting went; those details would not help either of them in the conversation.
"Is there a chair somewhere?" Alisa ignored her, quickly turning around before spotting the seat behind the counter. "Perfect."
Somehow, Shard ended up staring down at Master Glassmaker leisurely slouched in Ifi's chair, hands playing with the underside of the old wooden counter.
"So, to answer your question," she said, "I am here to inform the owner of this shop of her impending arraignment for royally fucking up my plans…"
Muscles tensed underneath Shard's shell, her body drawing itself tight and taut; her fingers ground against each other as she hid the extending claws in balled fists.
"...not to mention her absolutely rancid taste in women. A hanging offense, in my city."
Villis sighed wordlessly; Shard dropped into a lower hunch, head trained on Master Glassmaker and her extending smile.
"Look at her," Alisa chuckled dryly, waving Shard away as she spoke to Villis. "You weren't kidding! So protective. You were going to try to gut me, huh?" she turned to the Lair-Mother's child. "Just because I threatened to hang that Ifigenia? Honest answers only, please."
Shard exhaled, glancing at Villis; his face remained inscrutable. But she knew Alisa enough, or at least she knew enough about her to recognize what this all was: a game. And one she was in no position to try to interrupt.
"Yes," she nodded, trying to keep her tone neutral. Her claws withdrew back; she opened her hands and demonstrated them to Villis.
"Incredible," Alisa snorted. "You're not only honest, but also domesticated! Wonderful, really. Villis, be a dear and fetch coffee. I don't think this little creature will be trouble."
With another heavy sigh, he nodded, and left for the kitchen, constantly looking back, as if expecting Shard to try something; she couldn't blame him for that. Looking at Master Glassmaker, she was sorely tempted. She froze in place instead, staring at the woman and trying to imagine what she was after.
"Just to clarify," Alisa continued, "you will not be trouble because if you so much as twitch, I will let this wonderful charm fry you…"
Her hand was below the counter; the slight electric charge in the air reminded Shard of the security system Ifi had threatened her with, all those weeks ago.
"...something you should be familiar with," the grin on Master Glassmaker's face turned positively murderous; she ran her hand on the deformed side of her head, letting her fingers mark out a bumpy trail across all the knotted scar tissue.
For a moment, there was silence, marred only by the wheeze of the kettle in the kitchen.
"Not even a word snapped back, huh?" Master Glassmaker shook her head. "You surprise me, Shard. What happened to you? Aside from the obvious."
"I don't want you to hurt Ifi," she replied.
"Which means I should have her skinned alive," Alisashrugged back. "Just as a matter of principle."
Only a few feet separated Alisa from Shard, and Master Glassmaker was old and life-weary; her reflexes should not be the sharpest. If the Lair-Mother's child was to take a lunge, she could probably sink her claws into her throat before the shocking charm erupted. And then, of course, Villis would storm inside and kill her. Which, as she was beginning to suspect, could be the point.
"Are you trying to provoke me?"
"Yes, obviously," Alisa snorted. "Shard, sweetheart, do you have any idea how disappointed I was to hear you somehow made it out alive? And that it was that little miss alchemist, who swore up and down that she was nothing but your victim, who bailed you out?"
Villis returned from the kitchen, a steaming mug in hand; he left it in front of Master Glassmaker, withdrawing to her side. If anything, he looked bitterly exhausted. The disfigured woman blew the steam away, then tasted the coffee. This, finally, managed to wipe the smile from her face. She reached under her cloak, to find a small hip-flask inside. A strong stench of Lower City moonshine hit the air as she poured the contents into the mug. She screwed the bottle back, leaving it on the counter.
"But, apparently, I can't have nice things. Where is she?"
"What do you want from her?" Shard repeated her question, straining to not let her voice rise.
"To have an honest heart to heart about what she did, and to explore potential ways of moving forward," Alisa replied, sipping. "But no. Don't worry. Villis talked me out of having her hang. As for you, however…"
Again, she sipped; Shard felt the power she held press down on her life, and on her future. Once again, as ever, all her dreams of freedom had to concede to the fact that there would always be someone whom she belonged to. Without meaning to, she put her hand to the golden pool where the spear had once pierced her.
"I am sorry for what I did," she whispered, and she was genuine; or at least tried to. Somehow, she couldn't stay certain if the regret she was experiencing was the one expected of her.
"As I have already explained to you," Alisa's voice dropped a pitch, "it's long past time for that. Do you remember what I promised you, when you left me to die?"
It was night then; an ugly autumnal one. Shard dragged a weeping body, half its face bleeding blood and pus, and left it hooked hanging from the Mason's Bridge, so that others would get the message that not even Glassmakers were safe, if their treachery ran deep enough. And of course, that body was screaming and shouting things back at her, as they all did in their terminal moments. The words slid off her shell that night, right into oblivion; why commit to memory the refuse of history?
"Do you?" the question sounded again, this time serrated at the edges.
Gold marked Shard's body where she had been restored; gold, love, hope. It remade where she had been destroyed, and dredged her up from the bottom of despair to a new life, and a new peace. But it seemed that there were limits to what alchemy could transmute, and the past was beyond its reach.
"No," the Lair-Mother's once-favoured child admitted, finding in herself a new kind of shame.
The air crackled as the charge gathered in the shocking charm in tune to the abruptly tensing expression on Alisa's face. Shard braced herself for pain. None came. Villis' hand landed on Allisa's shoulder, gripping lightly.
"And maybe that is for the better."
A sense of betrayal flashed through Master Glassmaker's face, followed by sharp anger. In an instant it was gone, leaving in its wake the wreckage of years of unanswerable rage. But that too drained away, disappearing into apast whichcould neither be altered, nor relieved. The older woman breathed out, shrugging away the unbearable weight of history, and took a sizeable gulp from her mug. Coffee and booze splashed out as she smashed it back to the counter.
"You will leave the city," she passed her judgment, not a shred of humour left in her voice. "You will scurry far enough that not even from the highest tower will I be able to spot you. You will never return, not in a year, and not in ten generation's time, because if you do, every promise I have made will be fulfilled, to the last drop of your blood. This is all the mercy you can expect from me, Shard, and far more than you have ever deserved. Now, where is the alchemist?"
Villis stepped in before Shard could give voice to her shock.
"Probably upstairs, and asleep," he pointed.
"Well," Master Glassmaker lifted herself forcefully up, the mug in her hand. "I will be waking her up, then. You two stay here."
When she left, Shard slumped; the future that had, just moments ago, felt clear and at peace was again a dark churn. Everything she had thought she gained slipped like sand between her fingers, vanishing into nothing, and…
"She will follow you, you know," Villis shifted a step closer; there was something akin to pity on his tired face. "She will not let you leave alone."
Again, there was a stab of shame; how could she ask that of Ifi, how could she demand that the alchemist give up her life just to follow her into exile, far beyond the civilized city, where barbarian tribes dwelt? How could she expect her to follow? Even if she did, even if Villis' calm assertion was a lifeline tethering her back to hope.
"How do you know?"
Villis eyed the hip-flask Alisa had left, and after the briefest hesitation, opened it again, taking a long swig. He wiped his mouth with the flat of his hand, and chuckled dryly.
"Shit, Shard, what sort of an answer do you expect?" he gave her an askew look. "She is madly in love with you, and wouldn't hesitate to sell the world just to stay at your side. Please tell me you noticed as much."
In the silence that followed, Shard could almost hear the conversation happening upstairs; but the walls and the floors were thick, and whatever words seeped through them, they could reach her only as general impressions. She felt small, and guilty, but also knew that Villis was right. There could be no doubt; the gold that marked her stood in testament to that. And, really, it wasn't even that much of an ugly feeling; quite the contrary. If it terrified her, then not because she wanted to escape from it, but because she knew it was not a responsibility she had ever expected to bear. But then again, that made no reason to refuse it.
"Just be good to her," Villis murmured, emptying the flask. "She deserves better."
"I will try," Shard promised, meaning it with all of her being. "I will do my best."
The tones reaching from above were measured, calm; Shard could not sense despair, nor surprise there, but rather something else—a timbre of quiet resolve, and maybe, almost, relief. Villis was no longer looking at Shard, his eyes staring through the window, and out into the night's sky. An unspoken question waited between the two of them.
"Why?" even if she could only approach it, she tried to put it into words.
"Why what?"
"Why everything. If not for you, then me and Ifi…"
He cut her off, harshly, as if he couldn't bear to hear the rest of it. But she got honesty out of him.
"Because I wanted to see if I could get myself to forgive you."
"And?" Shard asked, though she already knew the answer.
"No. Of course not."
At first, when Alisa condemned her to an exile and called it a mercy, Shard had to take it for a mockery; now that Villis' words sank in, she understood how genuine it was, and how enormous. There was nothing left in the city she could return to, and the world beyond was open and vast beyond the wildest imagination.
"Thank you all the same," she whispered to Villis, who said nothing.
Some time later, Ifi descended in Alisa's company, face like stained parchment, eyes blood-shot. Shard startled, already on her feet to search for signs of distress in her lover; she found none, only the familiar exhaustion that the interrupted sleep could have barely dented.
"Hey Shard," the alchemist waved at her as Master Glassmaker motioned to Villis to leave. "I've got some bad news for you. We'll be leaving soon."
Even though she expected to hear regret in those words, to find in them a bitter resignation and protest, Shard couldn't help but to feel that they were feather-light.
"Where to?" she asked sheepishly.
"Wherever. I'm fucking done with this city."
28. Away
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
28. Away
Master Glassmaker stayed true to her side of the deal, even going beyond its terms. She ignored the offer that Ifi made for the recipe for her "demon-killing poison", and counter-bid a sum more in line with what the High Table could truly afford. It was an arbitrary amount of money, so far beyond the terms in which Ifi was taught to think that it might as well stand for infinity. With a single stroke of a pen, she went from being an established guildswoman of modest means to a fabulousley wealthy exile.
A third of this fortune vanished almost immediately, after a visit at the Golem-Masons' Guild's offices. The dealer that presented the offer to Ifi expected protracted negotiations; the pile of glass he was offered instead made his eyes bulge, and all his doubts as to the nature of the order disappear like the morning mist. There could be no denying, however, that it was money well spent.
On the morning of the next day, a many-limbed crawler made its way to the front of Ifi's shuttering workshop. To call it a golem-carriage was to understall it; it was nothing short of a modest house on spindly steel legs, the alchemical furnace powering it belching black smoke into the air. It offered only a little less room than Ifi's old home, and more comforts for sure, its insides studded with enough charms to make a High City's apartment blush. The golem-masons outdid themselves, managing to fit even a small mobile laboratory inside; a far cry from the one Ifi was leaving behind, of course, but far more than she could have remotely hoped for.
From there, it was just a series of quick visits to more specialist kinds of services before she and Shard were ready to leave. At first, Ifi planned to pay her father a visit, but in the end, she just sent him his book back, and a small letter inside, to let him know that she had made it after all, and which alchemist would be best suited for taking over when it came to providing his medication. It would be a lie to say she didn't feel bad for it, but only a bit; and besides, with Shard's hand never far away from her neck, feeling bad in general seemed far-fetched.
Of course, she remained distinctly aware, even anxious, that this period of grace was not going to last forever; but such worries had never gotten her far in life, and trying to abandon them got her in love. So when she wrote instructions and punched them into the golem-brain, and Shard fired up the furnace, they left the city with no regrets, and no looking back.
Ahead of them, the road unspooled, stretching through endless fields of wheat and barley and towards the Northern Limit. Seated on the top of the crawler, Ifi watched enchanted as the mountains slowly came into view, rising on the horizon, until they loomed like a great, impassible wall. Hopefully, they would cross before the autumnal snows closed the passes and barred them from progressing beyond, into the wild unknown awaiting on the other side. But even if that was not to be, Ifi could only blush at the idea of a winter spent together with Shard, in the tight confines of their slowly-marching cabin, cut from the world, and having only each other for weeks or months on end.
A naive dream perhaps, but so very dear.
Later, she descended by the ladder back into the main cabin, where Shard lounged on a cushioned sofa, lulled to half-sleep by the crawler's gentle swaying. Sunlight filtered through the window and set her entire body aglow; though Ifi was slowly getting used to the sight, it still took her breath away with its beauty, not to mention the warm pride it fostered.
One more thing waited for the alchemist inside: a small box, delivered to the crawler the night before they left. She suspected who it was from, which is why she deferred from opening it immediately, a part of her continuing to worry that it could plant that awful seed, regret, in her mind. But, for the sake of clear conscience, it was finally time to take a peek inside.
For all the luxury of the crawler, some concessions had to be made for space; and so, the cage built into the floor—from strong, enchanted steel that could resist even a below-spawn's claw—had to double as a table, and a storage cabinet. Ifi reached inside and found the package, before locking the tabletop back inside, and dropping the box on the surface. Almost hesitantly, she undid the string holding it together, and opened the package up.
Inside, there was a familiar blue dress, and all the accessories that went with it. Ifi held them each in her hand, the memories their touch evoked so blissfully bittersweet. But inside the box, there was more than just possessions returned. At the bottom, there was another package wrapped in brown paper, and a small folded card.
Ifi spread it open and smiled. Worries of recriminations were misplaced.
"What is it?" Shard asked, stirring from her nap.
She tore the paper apart; metal glinted inside. As more of it came into view, Ifi felt a tug somewhere deep in her stomach.
"When did they even commission it?" she whispered, quiet awe creeping into her voice.
The craftsmanship could take the breath away; interlocking silver panels ringing a soft leather collar, displaying a dance of wasps and spiders chasing each other through dense foliage. The patter dazzled with complexity when close, but looking from farther away, it shimmered in countless little reflections. Even the buckle holding it closed was wrought in the shape of a twisting leaf. Ifi tried it on, feeling the panels close in as she tightened the strap; it would fit her neck as well as Shard's, always snug.
"How did they even know?" she wondered aloud, stunned in gratitude.
Shard shrugged lazily, reaching to take the collar away from her lover's hands.
"More importantly, who is wearing it tonight?"
Master Glassmaker stayed true to her side of the deal, even going beyond its terms. She ignored the offer that Ifi made for the recipe for her "demon-killing poison", and counter-bid a sum more in line with what the High Table could truly afford. It was an arbitrary amount of money, so far beyond the terms in which Ifi was taught to think that it might as well stand for infinity. With a single stroke of a pen, she went from being an established guildswoman of modest means to a fabulousley wealthy exile.
A third of this fortune vanished almost immediately, after a visit at the Golem-Masons' Guild's offices. The dealer that presented the offer to Ifi expected protracted negotiations; the pile of glass he was offered instead made his eyes bulge, and all his doubts as to the nature of the order disappear like the morning mist. There could be no denying, however, that it was money well spent.
On the morning of the next day, a many-limbed crawler made its way to the front of Ifi's shuttering workshop. To call it a golem-carriage was to understall it; it was nothing short of a modest house on spindly steel legs, the alchemical furnace powering it belching black smoke into the air. It offered only a little less room than Ifi's old home, and more comforts for sure, its insides studded with enough charms to make a High City's apartment blush. The golem-masons outdid themselves, managing to fit even a small mobile laboratory inside; a far cry from the one Ifi was leaving behind, of course, but far more than she could have remotely hoped for.
From there, it was just a series of quick visits to more specialist kinds of services before she and Shard were ready to leave. At first, Ifi planned to pay her father a visit, but in the end, she just sent him his book back, and a small letter inside, to let him know that she had made it after all, and which alchemist would be best suited for taking over when it came to providing his medication. It would be a lie to say she didn't feel bad for it, but only a bit; and besides, with Shard's hand never far away from her neck, feeling bad in general seemed far-fetched.
Of course, she remained distinctly aware, even anxious, that this period of grace was not going to last forever; but such worries had never gotten her far in life, and trying to abandon them got her in love. So when she wrote instructions and punched them into the golem-brain, and Shard fired up the furnace, they left the city with no regrets, and no looking back.
Ahead of them, the road unspooled, stretching through endless fields of wheat and barley and towards the Northern Limit. Seated on the top of the crawler, Ifi watched enchanted as the mountains slowly came into view, rising on the horizon, until they loomed like a great, impassible wall. Hopefully, they would cross before the autumnal snows closed the passes and barred them from progressing beyond, into the wild unknown awaiting on the other side. But even if that was not to be, Ifi could only blush at the idea of a winter spent together with Shard, in the tight confines of their slowly-marching cabin, cut from the world, and having only each other for weeks or months on end.
A naive dream perhaps, but so very dear.
Later, she descended by the ladder back into the main cabin, where Shard lounged on a cushioned sofa, lulled to half-sleep by the crawler's gentle swaying. Sunlight filtered through the window and set her entire body aglow; though Ifi was slowly getting used to the sight, it still took her breath away with its beauty, not to mention the warm pride it fostered.
One more thing waited for the alchemist inside: a small box, delivered to the crawler the night before they left. She suspected who it was from, which is why she deferred from opening it immediately, a part of her continuing to worry that it could plant that awful seed, regret, in her mind. But, for the sake of clear conscience, it was finally time to take a peek inside.
For all the luxury of the crawler, some concessions had to be made for space; and so, the cage built into the floor—from strong, enchanted steel that could resist even a below-spawn's claw—had to double as a table, and a storage cabinet. Ifi reached inside and found the package, before locking the tabletop back inside, and dropping the box on the surface. Almost hesitantly, she undid the string holding it together, and opened the package up.
Inside, there was a familiar blue dress, and all the accessories that went with it. Ifi held them each in her hand, the memories their touch evoked so blissfully bittersweet. But inside the box, there was more than just possessions returned. At the bottom, there was another package wrapped in brown paper, and a small folded card.
Ifi spread it open and smiled. Worries of recriminations were misplaced.
have fun on the road, lovebirds
-e
-e
"What is it?" Shard asked, stirring from her nap.
She tore the paper apart; metal glinted inside. As more of it came into view, Ifi felt a tug somewhere deep in her stomach.
"When did they even commission it?" she whispered, quiet awe creeping into her voice.
The craftsmanship could take the breath away; interlocking silver panels ringing a soft leather collar, displaying a dance of wasps and spiders chasing each other through dense foliage. The patter dazzled with complexity when close, but looking from farther away, it shimmered in countless little reflections. Even the buckle holding it closed was wrought in the shape of a twisting leaf. Ifi tried it on, feeling the panels close in as she tightened the strap; it would fit her neck as well as Shard's, always snug.
"How did they even know?" she wondered aloud, stunned in gratitude.
Shard shrugged lazily, reaching to take the collar away from her lover's hands.
"More importantly, who is wearing it tonight?"
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
And... that's it! That's it folks!
Immense thanks to @Skippy for being my trusted editor, and to all of you good readers who maintained enough interest in this story to keep me going.
Also, as uncouth as it is to panhandle like that, if you enjoyed Mercy, and Other Costly Mistakes, please consider leaving a tip at my ko-fi. This story took a lot of work to finish, and this has been a difficult year for me (as for many of us, I'd wager), so I every little bit of support counts.
And for now, until the next time!
Immense thanks to @Skippy for being my trusted editor, and to all of you good readers who maintained enough interest in this story to keep me going.
Also, as uncouth as it is to panhandle like that, if you enjoyed Mercy, and Other Costly Mistakes, please consider leaving a tip at my ko-fi. This story took a lot of work to finish, and this has been a difficult year for me (as for many of us, I'd wager), so I every little bit of support counts.
And for now, until the next time!
You and me both, girlie.
Interesting setting, but seriously, fuck that place. Maybe it'll get better now that the humans have a weapon against the monsters...assuming it gets shared outside the High Council (who range from complicit to participatory in their reign of terror). Maybe Vilis got the formula. Or maybe one of the other alchemists can make it; you think in a city threatened by inhuman murder machines, there'd be more of an effort to fight them. Or are the real monsters the ones who sit, and watch, and imagine themselves to be above the beasts?
And we end with a relationship that, if its healthiness is doubtful, is at least entertainingly messed up. Which counts for more, in my book. And I'm suddenly interested in golem magitek. I want a walking home.
And that's all...unless we get a postscript with Vilis delivering the Lair-Mother a potion of thermite...
Half Moon
In the end, there is no end.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
God, this line hit me hard. It's been a wonderful ride. Thank you.
WE DID IT GUYS
Seriously though, this was beautiful. So happy to see my disaster lesbians got a happy ending.
Initially I'd found myself typing "the happy ending they deserved" as the end of that sentence. But in fact I think the the story spends quite a lot of time exploring the idea that, to quote William Munny, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it.". Often mercy is unearned, the scales are left unbalanced; in fact, that's often the point of mercy.
Seriously though, this was beautiful. So happy to see my disaster lesbians got a happy ending.
Initially I'd found myself typing "the happy ending they deserved" as the end of that sentence. But in fact I think the the story spends quite a lot of time exploring the idea that, to quote William Munny, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it.". Often mercy is unearned, the scales are left unbalanced; in fact, that's often the point of mercy.
One's a mid-tier alchemist who could have saved herself a LOT of trouble by just buying a vibrator. The other's a bio-engineered murder machine whose every thought is literally bent towards domination, pain, or control. Together, they have wacky adventures! It's Ifi and Shard!
"How did the trip go, Shard?"
"Got called an unnatural abomination, escaped an angry mob, fought off three assassins."
"Yes, but did you get the eggs I sent you to buy?"
"Whoops..."
"How did the trip go, Shard?"
"Got called an unnatural abomination, escaped an angry mob, fought off three assassins."
"Yes, but did you get the eggs I sent you to buy?"
"Whoops..."
Kinda want to see the escapades of Ifi and Shard amongst the SAVAGE BARBARIAN TRIBES OF THE NORF, now, to be honest.
...Hey @Gargulec, do you want to come to visit London again?
Definitely 100% promise I am not going to chain you to a radiator and force you to write more Ifi and Shard Adventures.
...Hey @Gargulec, do you want to come to visit London again?
Definitely 100% promise I am not going to chain you to a radiator and force you to write more Ifi and Shard Adventures.
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
Clearly I need to write bonus sex scene content and then pay-wall them.
One's human, one's porcelain, both are entertainingly fucked up; it's The Adventures of Ifi and Shard!
*theme music plays*
Tonight, "The First Time."
"Are you ready, Shard?"
"For what?"
"Well, this is our first night in bed together, and I thought..."
"It's my turn to wear the collar."
"I mean besides that, it's our first time sleeping together..."
"Yes, in the same bed. Is that odd?"
"And...I don't have much experience...with sex..."
"..."
"?"
"Ifi..."
"Yes?"
"What's sex?"
"?!"
"Seriously, I was born in a vat."
Join us, next time!
*theme music plays*
Tonight, "The First Time."
"Are you ready, Shard?"
"For what?"
"Well, this is our first night in bed together, and I thought..."
"It's my turn to wear the collar."
"I mean besides that, it's our first time sleeping together..."
"Yes, in the same bed. Is that odd?"
"And...I don't have much experience...with sex..."
"..."
"?"
"Ifi..."
"Yes?"
"What's sex?"
"?!"
"Seriously, I was born in a vat."
Join us, next time!
- Location
- NYC
Silly question but how exactly would she plunge the hand not in her siblings mouth into her siblings brain?
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
So, for all of you who are still watching this, just a heads-up:
I am writing a new story!
May I interest you in the tale of the Boy-Toy Wife?
I am writing a new story!
May I interest you in the tale of the Boy-Toy Wife?
YOU HOWLS MOVING CASTLED THEM, YOU BASTARD!