#absolutely unguessable

[polaroid-petals]

Basil started as my #1 fav Omori character and I just realised today that he was bumped from #3 to #4... BY ROWAN LITERALLY NONE OF THESE CHARACTERS ARE REAL IN THE STORY HOW DID THIS HAPPEN

[unproduciblesmackdown]

already was musing on how like, here's an intro that's Establishing Things, and it's like, does it matter that we were given a quants interaction of winston being like "hey you were nice to me there, actually. it reminds me of how" only for rian to pull the nice maneuvers of not wanting to listen to him share anything, being willing to just issue an order to someone about what he gets to do (talk for ten seconds) and doing so, then some underwhelming flair used to insult him surely, i guess that he's so stupid(tm) or whatever. like, wondering does that mean anything really that that was just about rian being an asshole, as has been sprinkled in before, just little moments that deadend with winston just feeling Disheartened b/c rian was shitty for no reason. does it mean anything that she did anything for the quant duo before that in refusing a chance to not sit next to him. theoretically just a [we're still tmc] kind of choice to stick together, and sure didn't move her to even treat him like a person she dislikes, just a nonperson she also dislikes

and relatedly it's going to be just as hilarious as rian, what, implying winston hasn't heard / of the french language, that the theory that rian and dollar bill become some kind of duo based on being Hilarious(tm) but also just terrible to any & everyone and bullying people has only more plausible, And that this episode of billions' introduction / establishment of dollar bill is decidedly centered around "yeah nobody likes this guy or can stand to deal with him. not even the people paid to be there, not even the self-declared Too Nice guy who kept choosing hanging out with dollar bill & his bullying over working & hanging out with his friend taylor" so it sure doesn't seem like that's leaving much room for [oh that was an oversight] if dollar bills going to fuck off into mpc hq on the regular and rian's immediately going to be like of course i can roll with this fuckin asshole

and truly a distillation of "rian's supposedly gets the 'good' treatment of More Material & being taken more seriously by other characters, but this only meant that instead of any sense of character &/or her own actual subplots ever, she's whatever a different more prominent character needs for their plot at any given time; winston's peripheral funny little guy unimportance & insulting treatment is still so much better re: being a character" if winston gets the worst treatment of being shoved out of mpc by episode three and rian is graced with hanging around most or all season only to be judged & condemned to now have that loss of [quant duo] replaced with being insufferable bullying horrible person dollar bill's New Friend and like, right away, with ease. and like i was saying like i would not argue with that, if rian had the consistent principle of treating anyone with basic respect she wouldn't be treating winston as a nonperson, and of course she has a broader capacity for being an asshole to anyone at any point that's just drier and less [outbursts of physical aggression] than dollar bill's style.

no idea what rian's overall arcs could be when yknow, why is she here, why has she stayed here, her most relevance right now gets to be "has the dialogue capacity to talk about getting prince with a sex scandal. also has zero thoughts on how power factors into one rather than that you just need to be polite about it?" which only feels truly character specific when held up against "rian was supposedly bullied but also Above even hating the people who did it. but she is also a bully and not even especially emotionally detached about it, even though how she treats winston is more important than how she feels about it" like basically "also a bully" is her most coherent deal. and it's just Interesting that simply being mean to winston is again basically pointed out, and her future bestie or [put in the same shots duo status] dollar bill is Impending but the episode was like "yeah of course everyone hates this guy, for being awful" and the joke nonjoke the whole time that unfortunately rian might get along just fine with bill as workplace (and probably also life in general, it's not a honed strategy they limit to the office) bullies

so that That's what rian gets for getting to stick around, while winston Might get to be shoved out of the fund hq with any character flair from him and, i do unfortunately have to wonder harder now, maybe any relevance afforded to the way people have treated him, indeed maybe rian especially, his personal bully and abusive friend. and because other people also see rian as better than him & maybe also winston as [not a person], if winston does anything that's indeed deliberately petty, mean, Angry, etc, towards rian, That will be seen as unacceptable vs the yknow checks notes years of cruel interpersonal treatment from rian to winston, but nothing hangs in the balance on that front, people won't suddenly be like "nice. winston's a person to me now, which, why am i even in a position to Decide that" if he's shoved out & goes quietly & politely and creates no problems in return. and, very much like dollar bill, i don't think rian will change, but for winston's own sake it would be Heartening if he voices his experience such that we know he knows it was bullshit, even though of course rian, and probably anyone else, isn't going to choose to listen past 5 seconds, least of all when he's clearly indicating a general state of irritation. rooting for flair and idiosyncrasy for him and indeed that the best sources for that could be with taylor, please, the person he's always been here for, rian, the person for years now bullying him more than she does anyone else or more than anyone else does to winston, and even fun if there's anything with tuk his apparent genuine friend tuk, and by "fun" i mean "such a delight i daren't really think much abt it From Canon"

anyways the tl;dr i suppose is that winston getting apparently thrown away in the first third of the season is insulting treatment but rian getting to stay and be dollar bill's wretched bestie is truly the worse fate and basically that distillation of like. oh winston's bringing it on himself he's so annoying nobody likes him, while in actuality all the ways he's never fit in or done things "right" and how he would never have been hired if taylor hadn't done it are all compliments and endorsements. while rian's been viewed as a capable valuable person by all from the start and treated as Better Than even others who are still also seen people, but her "success" and the shit she gets to continue to do in how she treats people b/c nothing about being at work stops that and some things facilitate & reward it, see: also dollar bill being around the whole time & now also back, definitely include treating a friendly coworker any which way, which she usually chooses to be: badly. and of course shoutout to the thread of taylor being like "if you stay btw you'll probably get all fucked up" but like also rian just Brought the [i'm a bully but it's fine when i do it. it's bad when it happens to Me] stance from the start, but like, obviously always the opportunity to get worse and just be left off with that implication of Never Trying To Learn, just like your new good friend dollar bill

real tl;dr As Fates Go winston being shitted on & fired / driven to quit >>>>>>>> rian sticking around, befriending dollar bill. and like not in the way i'm arguing that the fate is worse like In Conceptual Quality. it's just a hell of a potential condemnation / indirect illustration of like, here's this person it's horrible to be around, here's a reminder rian is cruel to this coworker on a dime anytime, here's rian deciding the horrible person is Alright anyways. maybe they'll be busy with a bullying power struggle the whole time. and maybe winston will get to appear outside the fund actually. just really something to be going like "oh my god lmao rian and dollar bill might actually be specifically getting along well as fellow [be horrible to coworkers] bullies and assholes who feel Above It, it being many other people, this being a kind of requirement there" and to be wondering if billions will make this fact that rian's job is being an asshole more relevant at all, if even to be like yeah leaving off with a lost cause here, including that i really doubt winston can Get Through To her even with his ability & willingness to air his grievances, and like, as though oh actually winston brought it upon himself b/c rian just didn't knowww, that's on him and his visible pain & verbal expressions of that pain & requests that she stop which Weren't Enough, and as though maintaining that onesided dynamic for bullying and demeaning and shutting down and abusing was like an unconscious accidental coincidence every time and not its own Active Process, regardless of what the other person does or doesn't do, and with the agenda of maintaining that [i'm the person who chooses how things go; they're the object that reacts accordingly like it's laws of physics level of demands of reality] one-sided relationship, so they'd only just be looking to react to what that other person does or doesn't do in ways that serve those purposes anyway. sometimes rian's "nicer" but she's still the one deciding how everything goes, winston can only roll with it like a ball at the top of a ramp like, of course, unquestionable. cue space winston, zero gravity

haha another tl;dr. winston being disposed of is a warmer Fate to assign a character than rian's potential "of course she's friends with dollar bill now" like lmfao Ouch. but yeah of course.

[yamsfrecklvs]

i know that smoking is bad and gross and disgusting but i, unfortunately, am a smoker - so hear me out for a second. warning: a lil suggestive, shotgunning, reader is implied as an occasional smoker

kento nanami is a stressed man. his job is hard and he has to deal with, well… a lot.

for this reason, to try and relieve at least some stress, he picked up smoking. it’s not something he’s proud of. he finds it disgusting - he’s ashamed of it, even. he’s the kind of smoker that’s unguessable. he always smells clean, there’s no trace of the deep, strong smell of tobacco on his clothes, in his hair. he’s just so pristine.

so pristine, in fact, that when you two start dating you have absolutely no clue of this little vice of his. it’s the only secret he keeps from you: he doesn’t want you to judge him. and it’s not like he smokes a lot anyway. he usually indulges in a couple of cigarettes a day, nothing more.

but one day, when he kisses you as he picks you up in his car, you can tell he tastes different. there’s a new kind of flavor on his tongue, on his soft lips, and it’s so faint you almost don’t notice it. almost. but you recognize it, because you’re no stranger to smoking either, and when you pull away, you grin ever so slightly. you finally found a small flaw in your perfect man, and you want to tease him for it. but then, you decide to retreat. to find a better occasion to call him out and, who knows, maybe have a little fun with it too.

a couple of days later, you’re at his house, and he's just made love to you. you bask in the intimacy of the moment, his aftercare ever so thoughtful as he cleans you up and whispers soft praises in your ears, his lips brushing against your forehead to kiss it. after he's done taking care of you, he lies down next to you, his hand reaching for yours (and oh, he's such a sap, but you love it). that, you find, is the perfect moment to tease him. you crawl onto him and kiss his cheek, and when he turns to you with a shadow of a smile on his lips, you snicker.

"you know what i'd really like right now?" you ask, feigning innocence.

he hums in response, the back of his hand reaching to caress your cheek. "what, love?"

"a cigarette. i'd love a cigarette right now, ken."

his eyes widen at the weird, sudden request, his lips parting in surprise. he knows you all too well, and he's perfectly aware of the fact that you wouldn't have said that had you not known. he surrenders.

"you knew?"

"you tasted different the other day,” you explain, amused. “why didn't you tell me?"

he shrugs. "it's a bad habit."

"as if i would ever judge you."

he sighs, shaking his head before leaning over to his bedside table and opening the first drawer. "do you really want that?"

you shrug. "sure. give it to me. we can share."

he takes his cigarette pack, a lighter and an ashtray from that same drawer, places the small plate between the two of you as he pulls out a cigarette to hand it to you. you take it between your lips and look up at him as he lights it for you, and kento swears he's never seen anything sexier. you take a couple of drags, the smoke blowing from your lips and rising up in the half-lit room as kento watches you, mesmerized by your mere existence. you turn to him, and as your gazes meet, another idea crosses your mind.

you reach for him, your fingers grazing his mouth, which he opens immediately, almost as a reflex. you place your free hand on the side of his neck and lean in for a kiss, taking another drag of the cigarette instead. but as you get closer again, instead of kissing him, you gently blow the smoke into his mouth. and he drinks it in, the sharp smell of the cigarette burning mixed with your sweet scent, the way your subtle touch on his skin feels like it's burning him up alive. it drives him crazy - so much that, for a second, he loses his cool, grabbing you by the back of your head as his lips crash onto yours messily, hungrily. you can't believe how something as small as a little teasing has got him all worked up again, but you don't mind.

needless to say, the cigarette is quickly forgotten and put out in the ashtray.

the nicotine rush is nothing compared to you, after all.

@yamsfrecklvs

ash's note: lord forgive me i'm so weak for him ... also trust me shotgunning gets you a lot of game (source: me). i’m gonna go smoke a cigarette now

[lure-of-writing]

Stop at Nothing

Authors note: I honestly love how this turned out. I am thinking about making this into a series but I would love to hear what you guys think about that!

Summary: Everything was normal until it wasn't. Possibly pregnant with Joels baby, you head off to work as a doctor in the Er only for it to be the worst shift of your life and soon your whole world is flipped upside down by a series of unguessable events. Your life was calm and easy before, go to work, come home and take care of your two daughters with Joel. Now its life or death and life never prepared you for this situation.

Joel Miller x F!Reader

Word count:3.8k

Warnings: character death, cursing, guns, pregnancy

August 29, 2013 

Every morning for the last week without a doubt you woke up at an ungodly hour to empty last night's dinner into your toilet. This caused concern to rise within you. There is no way you can be pregnant again right? Maybe you had the stomach flu, Sarah had just returned to school and kids tend to get sick since there are so many germs being spread around. Deep down you knew that a pregnancy test would be in your near future but after telling Joel last time you were pregnant left you a little scared about the possibility of a positive test. 

November, 2012 

Now Joel is a loving, patient man who knows no bounds for his family and the people that he loves. Was he stressed when you gave him a peed on pregnancy test with a baby onesie, absolutely. Did you guys go back and front on whether or not to keep the pregnancy, yes. But did that mean he loved his youngest daughter any less? No, absolutely not. 

But to say that it hadn't put a stress on your relationship would be a lie. Joel was already working too late and too many hours to try and provide for Sarah and You had just Finished your residency and were officially a doctor which meant that your working hours were insane and often pushed you past your physical limits and beyond. This obviously was a concern for him, with your career having a baby at this time was less than ideal. His reasoning for not wanting to keep the child was for your health, if you were pregnant that meant everything you felt would be doubled and the stress of being a new doctor he feared would cause you to lose the baby. To you having a baby was a no brainer, plenty of people in the same shoes as you also were having babies, and if they could do it then so could you and nothing could convince you otherwise.  

For days the two of you went back and forth about what to do but often your conversations would be interrupted by an innocent Sarah who needed her dad or wanted to talk to you about girl stuff, you may not be her mother but she treated you like you were. After about four days of weighing the pros and cons of bringing another life into this world you booked yourself an ultrasound to see how far along you were so you could better weigh your options but after seeing those black and white pictures you knew that there was no other option then to keep the growing baby inside of you. 

Sarah had asked to spend the night at one of her friends' houses that morning which finally gave you and Joel the chance to sit down and really talk without having to put your thoughts on hold. After dropping Sarah off you entered the house you shared with Joel and started cooking dinner, you knew he wouldn’t likely show up until way past dinner time but you were hungry and needed something to distract your mind. How were you going to tell Joel that you wanted to keep the baby? What if he disagreed? Before you were able to jump too deeply into the worst case scenarios Joel walked through the door. You sat at the dinner table barely touching your food suddenly the need to eat was gone and anxiety sat at its seat at the dinner table instead. Joel could feel how nervous you were, you had something to tell him. “Darlin’ I can feel your nerves over here, what’s going on?” Without saying a word you get up and walk over to your purse that sat on the counter and pulled out the ultrasound pictures. Silently sitting there you stared at the tiny little bean looking shape and wondered what you would do if Joel disagreed with what you wanted. 

Shakily you handed the pictures to Joel and he looked them over before returning to stare at you. “I want this Joel” Your voice a whisper on the verge of crying, he glances at the pictures before looking at you again “Look I know it will be hard but with my income we will be ok, you won’t have to work as much and I can take maternity leave and-” Joel moves to kneel in front of you “Darlin’ you don’t need to give me a list of reasons, ok?” His soft movement of his thumbs rubbing your stomach gave you so much comfort but you needed to hear him say it. “We’re doing this?” With a gentle nod he brings his hand to cup your cheek while the other stay on your stomach “We’re doing this, darlin’, we’re doing this”

September 27, 2013

Now your daughter was three months old and the absolute light of your life. Your pregnancy wasn’t easy, you had your fair share of struggles just like any other woman throughout her pregnancy but god was your daughter worth it all and ten times more. So to say that you were surprised you were experiencing symptoms of pregnancy again is an understatement, but to be sure you would make an appointment to get your blood checked and see if they were at the levels needed for pregnancy. But for now that would have to wait tonight you would be going in for an forty-eight hour shift on call and as much as you hated leaving your babies you had to go to work. Luckily Sarah would watch baby Evelyn for a few hours until Joel got home to handle the rest. 

“Sarah babe? Do you have everything you need until your dad gets home?” She walks into the kitchen with a giggling Evelyn in her arms “For the millionth time,yes.” she glances at the clock before her eyes return to your frantic figure running around trying to make yourself coffee. “Oh shit, ok I have to go, dinner is in the fridge, there's milk for Eve in there also and if you need anything call me!” you were halfway out the door before you realized you forgot something. Turning around you kiss Evelyn's head and Sarah's cheek “I love you guys so so so much, don’t you ever forget that ok?” and with that you were out the door and unknowingly on your way into a fast unfolding nightmare. 

The first twenty-four hours were ok. Not much happened but nothing happening  in the hospital ment all was good. Somewhere between the thirty hour to forty-eight hour mark things started to pick up. As a trauma doctor in the ER you dealt with the worst of the worst injuries but since the ER was slammed you helped out where you could, just because you had a specialty doesn’t mean you couldn’t help. The people who were coming in were acting odd but when their blood work came back it was clear of drugs and alcohol, others were trashing about uncontrollably and one even tried to bite one of your co-workers but was restrained and sedated. A few hours after that was when shit really hit the fan, you were exhausted and it was almost the end of your shift which meant you just wanted to go home and see your babies and boyfriend, but you took an oath to help those in need no matter what so you kept doing your job even in the chaos of the ER department, until all staff was pulled into a quick meeting and was notified that until further notice the hospital would be on lock down. 

As soon as you got a second you called Joel but he didn’t answer so you left a voicemail instead “Joel, I don’t know what's going on but the hospital is on lock down” you went quiet for a few seconds trying to pull your thoughts together and make a real sentence. “Look I don’t know what's happening but I can tell it's not good, whatever it is at least. The hospital has been crazy the last few hours and we have no idea what's going on.”  Suddenly the tvs all play the same announcement, stay inside and don’t move. “Joel whatever happens don’t come to the hospital do not under any circumstances come here Joel. It's going to be one hundred times worse here, Joel, I’m begging you do not come here. Get the girls and get them to safety. I will find you guys I promise but I need you to keep them safe. I love you Joel, and tell the girls that mommy loves them too.” Just then a blood curdling scream is released and you hangup. Turning to see what is happening you find someone on top of another person and it looks like they’re eating them. 

If the hospital was chaos before then all hell has broken loose now. The person stopped what they were doing and moved to stand up and look around as it slowly spun around in a circle. You saw something coming out of its mouth and it was moving. 

When in medical school you often play a game of what-ifs. What if that happened, what if this happened? As doctors it's important to understand that anything could happen and you must be prepared for it. That's why you run hypotheticals all the time, the world is constantly evolving and if we don’t stay on top of it we will be under it. You learn a lot of things in medical school but one of the things you learn is the worst case scenario. What will happen if this disease comes back stronger or what if this one mutates, then what? And it was your job to come up with an answer that best fit the situation described. During one of your classes your professor played a video from the nineteen sixties about what would happen if a fungus evolved. And staring at the person, no it wasn’t a person anymore, you realized he was right, everything he said was correct. 

Suddenly it launched itself to the people nearest to it and started attacking, you took this chance and ran. You couldn’t care less if after everything was done and calm again you lost your job or even your license for deserting your job as a doctor but something told you that wouldn’t be happening so you ran until you were in the staff room where all of your belongings were and began to grab your stuff. Frantically grabbing your car keys and bag you see other people doing the same thing, good to know you won’t be the only one losing their job. 

As you made your way to your car you saw the same scene from inside paint itself on the outside. Just as you locked your door, helicopters flew by along with felt like a million other things. “Please,please help me!” the banging on your car window startled you, a young man bangs on your window, looking around you see it's getting worse, so against your breaking heart you pull out of the parking spot and start heading back home. On your way there you see countless cop cars and even military vehicles on the roads, it was like a mini war zone in the making and that couldn’t be good. 

Joel's heart was racing after picking up Tommy he knew he needed to get back to his kids and get to you so you guys could move and figure this out as a family. While Tommy was driving Joel went to call you. He saw he had already left a voicemail and he listened to it. Hearing your voice sound so scared broke his heart but listening to you tell him to leave you there was more heartbreaking, leaving the mother of his children all alone at the hospital where like you said it was going to be ten times worse was a blow to the gut, but be knew you would never forgive him he put your children in danger and neither would he. So he told Tommy to head to his house and without a second thought he began to form a plan to get them out of harm's way and somewhere he can keep them safe while trying to figure out how to get to you.  

One night while you and Joel were sitting in your living room you began to explain how hospitals work and what exactly you do. After a while the conversation dulls until your boyfriend speaks up “So what exactly happens if there's a huge nationwide emergency, like I know during hurricanes staff have to stay and help but what else.” Taking another sip of wine you begin to think about all the things that happen in those cases. “Well for one no matter what we go into lock down, no one in or out. If it's some sort of attack, same thing except authorized personnel so we have enough people to help with the large amount of people that would be coming in. Most of the situations are like that with a few different rules in place depending on what is happening but all in all it's the same more or less. But what I will tell you is this”  You lean forward and look him in the eyes, you two may be a little wine drunk but this is important and you needed him to understand this. “If anything of that sort ever happens do not under any circumstances ever come to the hospital, don’t go to police or fire stations. Stay the fuck away from those. People who are first responders and healthcare workers will be the first to go. Why? Because we are the first defense. When someone gets sick or hurt where do they go? Either into an ambulance or to the hospital. When someone gets injured because of a fight or something dangerous happens, who responds? Police and firefighter. We are the people who help when things hit the fan so you know what that means? We usually don’t know what we’ve gotten ourselves into but we know we need to help. But in those situations it's usually mass numbers of people and if something goes wrong, we will be the first ones affected.” Joel had never thought about that before but now that you said it, it made sense maybe a little too much sense. What you said scared the shit out of him, mostly because that meant everything you said you understood and acknowledged, that something on a mass scale could be the reason you aren’t on earth anymore was terrifying. “I guess that does make sense but damn I never thought about that.” Shrugging you respond “Most people don’t but it’s one of the realities of being a healthcare worker.”

Joel's mind comes back from memory land right as they pull up in front of his house and see Sarah there holding Evelyn slowly backing away from the Adler woman. Jumping out of the car he puts himself between the old lady and his daughters. “What are we gonna do Joel?” Just then the lady jumps at her and he swings the wrench at her hitting her in the head. Quickly he turns around and ushers his children into the truck before they take off. Sarah was quick to notice a missing person. “Dad, where's mom?” Three simple words yet they shook him to his core. On any other day they would be just like every other question she asked but today her voice was shaking and when he looked back at his babygirl tears were in her eyes and her voice sounded so scared. “Don’t worry baby, momma is going to find us. She promised.” 

You returned back to the road you lived on to see it was a mess. Street lights were off and power boxes had exploded. And bodies were everywhere, they may not be dead but they might as well be classified as such. Slowing down you peer out of your passenger window trying to see if anyone was still at your house but were quickly met with bloody hands banging on your window. Without second thought you speed off and don’t look back. You needed to think and think quick. Think like Joel. After taking a moment you remember that in these types of situations the military will set up camp and use that as a point of operation, it could get you killed as they most likely have a shoot to kill order but at least you could try and plus being a doctor would help right? At that moment you were thankful you had a full tank of gas and a fuel efficient car because you were sure that it was going to take you a little bit of time and driving to find one of these camps. 

It had been a few days since everything started and you successfully made it into a military camp the first night before being moved to a quarantine zone. As a doctor they had you help them sort through the people coming in. Sure you were not a military doctor or personnel but you were a doctor nonetheless and they needed all the help they could get. You were placed in a tent to treat superficial wounds, not a very good way to put your training to use but as you know even a cut can lead to a deadly infection. Plus it gave you something to distract your mind with that is until you heard your name being called and not by anyone it was Joel, your Joel. 

Next thing you know his arms are wrapped around your body and you're both crying. ‘Where are the girls? Where is Tommy?” Quickly you pull aways to find the answer to your questions but only see Tommy holding your youngest daughter. You rush to grab her out of his hands and sooth her as best you can but probably more so yourself, while you do so you look around Tommys figure to see if you can find Sarah. “Joel? Where's Sarah? Is she getting grabbing food or something?” Turning around to face the father of your children you see the tears building in his eyes and the heartbreak on his face and in an instant you know. Sarahs gone. You feel the urge to throw up and that's what you do, handing your surviving daughter back to Tommy you run over to the trash can and empty what little food you did have in your system. 

If you're being honest you don't remember much of that day. You remember Joel and his arms around your body, feeling your daughter against your chest and seeing Tommy but other than that, it’s blank. You knew it was a trauma response, a way of your body trying to protect itself. And you were thankful for it because you never wanted to relive that moment again. 

Now you had to focus on protecting your daughter, keeping her alive and fed. Making sure Joel was as ok as a parent could be after losing a child, and making sure Tommy didn’t get any stupid ideas. For the most part you forgot about the potential pregnancy to busy wrapped up in trying to survive in this new way of life. But then you missed your period and your breasts started to hurt and every smell was making you nauseated. You knew without a doubt that you were pregnant. Unfortunately you never got the chance to tell Joel. A Member of the military came to inform you that you were being moved to the Denver QZ. “Right now” this started you “Um ok let me go tell my family so we can grab our things.” in that moment you failed to see the man's grim expression. “No ma'am, just you and your child are permitted to go.” This frustrated you and you were going to give him hell until he let your family go with you. No way in hell were you going somewhere that Joel and Tommy weren’t. 

You burst into the tent that you and your family had been sharing with strangers the past few weeks with the military man right on your heels. “Listen to this Joel!” Your announcement and startled look caught his attention as you grab your baby from Joel waiting for the random man to repeat what he said to you. “We will be moving her and your daughter to the Denver QZ, no one else is permitted to join her.” Joel was quick to his feet and in the man's face “Like hell you’ll be taking my wife and children somewhere I’m not!” Other military persons moved into the room with guns pointed, it didn’t take much to be killed these days. But that wasn’t what you focused on. Joel said children as in more than one, but it wasn’t plural it was just one and it was just Evelyn. 

“Sir, you need to step back and remain calm!” Someone yelled causing your baby to cry. You silently shushed her as hot tears ran down your cheeks. “Don’t tell me to remain calm when you are trying to take my family away from me!” One man nods to another man and suddenly you feel a barrel of a gun to your head. “You either calm down or we kill her.” Joel felt his blood run cold as he saw what was happening before him. He wouldn’t let these men harm you so he stayed quiet and didn’t move. He would do anything necessary to keep you and his daughter safe. And for now that meant playing along with them. The men start to move and grab what they assume is your things. “Can I at least say goodbye?” The man holding the gun to you drops the barrel and gives a slight nod motioning for you to go ahead. 

You wrap one arm around him while the other supports your daughter. “Listen to me Joel don’t try anything stupid,Ok? They will not hesitate to kill you. I will go and I will take Evelyn. I’m a high value person right now and they won’t do anything to me. I heard that people have been communicating through the radio. I'll tell them to play our song dedicated to E. When you hear it you’ll know it's me. Joel, you need to stay safe and be smart. Me and Eve need you. We will figure out a plan but for now stay alive and keep Tommy that way too, ok?” He shakes with anger but he knows your right, you’ve always been the more level headed one between the two of you. “Let's go.” the same man from earlier tells you and reluctantly he lets go of the two most important people in his life. Watching you get on that copper with Evelyn clinging to your chest was like watching the last remaining parts of his heart leave with you two. And he knew he would stop at nothing to get you two back.

[alliluyevas]

many have said this but sometimes a twist or a reveal doesn't have to be something no one saw coming, like i guessed a couple of the twists in what lies in the woods and i still enjoyed it a lot more than many thrillers where the reveals are just some random fucking shit that makes absolutely no sense and is for the purpose of being unguessable. same thing with alien:covenant. lot of people online like "ooooh i saw the twist at the end coming" i'm pretty sure you're supposed to! i was sitting there going noooooooooo and i think you're supposed to know before the characters do. it was still effective for me!

[jrwi-best-villian]

FINAL POLL!!

[images and propaganda under the cut, spoilers for anything to do with niklaus]

BLEBOBUS (THE COUNCIL) PROPAGANDA:

-"they’re the real villains for making our blorbos suffer and hurting our feelings >:( /hj"

NIKLAUS PROPAGANDA:

-"I think its obvious why he's such a good villain. He is manipulative, he knows what to hold above the albatrio to get them to agree to his deals. His motivations are unknown and unguessable, meaning there is little hope of stopping whatever his evil plot is. And the presentation!! Oh boy!!!! He is so nonchalant and cool about everything he does and it has such a foreboding and ominous vibe."

-"He gives evil rich guy and narrator fucking with the plot and he's hot doing it and I would like to punt him but also he's cool. Absolute man whore slut."

-"Literally no-brained the man is a Villain™️"

-"babygirl but also a bit evil as a treat"

[talesfromtheasterism]

The Starweaver

To the Recipient, Whose Name Will Be Safely Withheld,

I have decided to answer this lofty question of yours. For I do pity your described imposition, stepping from such grand adventures to the suffocating quiet of the Commune. It would be unwise for you to seek this knowledge from your current residence, and through my efforts of trade, despite my reservations on the topic, I must be one of the most well-equipped people alive to inform.

Know this firstly: transit between the realms of the Asterism is a poorly understood process, even to those as well-travelled as myself. They share no tangible borders, separated instead by the fathomless unworld, untouched by the New Tapestry. Yet each realm contains a region where the fabric is frayed - a wide, invisible rift that casts those who enter across the gulf to whatever destination they feel a strong enough requirement to visit. Traders and smugglers such as myself require clarity of purpose to will themselves through time after time, or we simply end up where we started with a moderate headache.

I have made every effort to remain conscious of my surroundings during these aetherial river crossings. Neither the warm alchemies of the Floodlands nor the chilling medicines of Bloodstar could maintain my waking. All I manage is to more keenly feel my lucidity fade as the dream state takes me, and as the faint visions of the unworld dance within the blinding shine of the blue haze. No matter where I enter or exit, or with what narcotics in my veins, she is there every single time.

Only in echoes and shimmers is the Starweaver detected - sometimes only felt, through sixth and seventh senses beyond human reckoning - but her presence is clear and absolute. I hear chrysolite eyes burn through the sapphire. Her radiant painted hat and impossible crystalline robes reach my eyes, with their paradox patterns and non-euclidean folds of gold night and azure sun. What is her pale skin, now? Flesh, still, or the light-bending porcelain of fallen deities? Grooves and spikes, subtle, hidden in her form - have the nephilim changed her, or did she take their traits willingly, as respect? I know she was not born so. I remember times I have never seen or known, as though I knew her as an old friend before godhood. She was younger, lighter, before her blooming of the Weave tempered the spirit. I can almost taste the secrets of where, the land she walked before she fell, before striking their bondage and shattering this prison for gods.

No matter how close I come to further revelations, I suffer the same fate as other pilgrims. I wake from the reverie in my realm of termination, equipped with whatever mercy required to see me safely to mortal civilisation. Should I journey for Port Poiseuille, I stir with sore arms, having rowed a gondola of smooth, iridescent gemstone across the Sea of Solace for an unguessable time. My returns to the Mirror Capital see my eyes open slowly, slumped against the window in a seat of a shuttletrain, coasting upon the star-seas of the Lucid Weave. I've an inkling that the Starweaver herself bridges the realms to allow Asteri to cross, summoning these accommodations to ensure we arrive in good health.

There is no doubt in my mind: she wishes her presence known within the dream, for one of such power could just as easily shield herself from mortal senses. Perhaps this is how she reminds us of her vigil from within the Skyloom - or, more fantasically, perhaps her image steals our attention from horrors of the unworld we are not ready to know. I hear her whispers, sometimes. Her strifeless voice reverberates with many heights and depths, like strings, chords. The words themselves are always obscured, as though of a foreign language - not Ancestral, which I can interpret with some competency. A tongue of gods.

But I can make out one word, occasionally. A name. The one we are chastised as children for uttering in vain, and oft never speak again. Some say, when they think our gods cannot hear, that it is a name stolen from a star in an old world. I wish she could wear it more proudly again. To take identity in theft from the heavens, to rail against ultimate power - that is the mark of defiance the leader of the Asteri should bear.

Her name was Vega. And her dream is our awakening.

Please, make especially certain that this letter is destroyed along with the others. While it is my privilege to convey such exalted topics, the repercussions if we were discovered would be far worse. The Commune does not tolerate attempts to understand those above us, for reasons you are well aware.

We will meet in person again soon. I trust we will have much to organise.

Your Friend in Commerce

Editor's note: this letter was written to one of the Friend in Commerce's anonymous business partners in the Commune of Whispers several years ago. It was originally meant to be burned to hide their dealings, but the recipient handed it back to the Friend when they next met, insisting it be preserved as a testament to the Starweaver. I am again tagging this as OC as is convention, so hopefully describing patron gods as my property doesn't have negative consequences.

[shaykesqueer]

O Rose, Thou Art Sick

Chapter One: Things Terrible and Unguessable

Chapter Links | Next Chapter | AO3

Summary: Fox arrives at the Ministry and braves their first night alone.

Word Count: 6.2k

Content Warnings: 18+. References to cults, explicit descriptions of nudity, descriptions of gore, horror, references to horror movies/tropes, thunderstorms

Notes: This is a Fox-centric chapter and Copia only makes a brief appearance. He’s not going to show up properly until a few chapters in. The namesake for this chapter is a quote from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The door swung open with a creak and Fox peered inside, eyes adjusting to the darkness which was broken only by the flickering of a distant candle that crept in through the windows. A warm glow took over the room, rising from a dim orange to an eerie red, everything draped in a comfortable hellfire. 

“This is the room?” Fox asked incredulously. 

Having toured but a small part of the Ministry this evening had proven its expensive tastes, but this was far from what they had expected. They had expected something humble- a quaint burrow no larger than absolutely necessary, with a makeshift open fire stove for a kitchen. They had hopes for a double bed too, if they were so lucky. This room was no less than ostentatious. To one side was what they might have described as a parlour, complete with an outset curve of tall and narrow windows decorated with stained glass that cast glowing shapes onto the carpet below. A pillowy chaise lounge fit into the arch of the window seat, with a gratuitous amount of accompanying armchairs, stools and sofas, each as cushioned and luxurious as the last. The other side of the room, while equally extravagant in style, was less comfortable in the traditional sense. The neat rows of bookshelves, floor to ceiling and stained unnaturally dark, were stuffed with countless leather-bound volumes, polished silver antiquities and rare-looking flora displayed in glass cases.

“Rooms, Child,” replied the Sister, still haunting the doorway. 

“I was under the impression that it was just room. Singular. ” Fox crossed the threshold. “I was expecting an outhouse way off the property. I swear the job description said modest accommodation.”

“Are you displeased?” the Sister said. 

Fox raised their eyebrows. The Sister’s face was stoic and almost neutral, but there was a hint of mocking in her voice. 

“Of course I’m not displeased,” they said. How could they be in a place like this? “Why, is there a catch? Do I have to share this with someone?” 

They certainly wouldn’t rule that out. Figures . The sheer size of this place- the room and the entire Ministry- was enough to give them serious doubts about their position here. Of course, they’d heard the rumours. Everyone had. A secluded church, secretive and holding a very devout sect. So far secretive seemed to ring true, but not so much the little. Devout? Yet to be seen. The Sister wasn’t even in what Fox assumed to be the full nun garb. Admittedly, they’d never been this close to a nun before. Actually, that wasn’t exactly true- but that girl had just been dressed like a nun. She certainly didn’t undress like a nun. In either case, this Sister’s finery was nonetheless expertly tailored despite how modern it looked. Was it called a habit? That didn’t seem right. 

From what they’d gleaned, most people aware of it liked to pretend this place didn’t even exist. They wanted to believe that any and every mention of it on some poor soul’s lips had been scrubbed from existence. Some were drawn to it. Most were terrified. It was very much apparent to anyone with half a brain that this organisation was unconventional, to put it politely, but now more than ever it screamed evil. Cultish was a nice word for it. Fox had dedicated most of their life to thinking about the fact that this really should have bothered them. Surprisingly, or unsurprising given the circumstances, it didn’t. Fox was no stranger to these kinds of avocations, having been accessory to several unusual circles through the years, and they’d experienced more than their fair share of witchery and the occult. This was just another job for them.

In spite of it all, the position here would have been just as attractive had it been for a conventional church. It would have been just as attractive if it were on the moon. It was certainly the first group that had contacted them via email, which was a pleasant surprise. Usually they’d fall into a crowd that they’d heard relatively good things about. And they used ‘good’ loosely. The defining factor was often if they were willing to put up with Fox. Or it could be a friend of a friend of a friend situation. There was always something to be said about bullhorn recruitment too. Fox didn’t have a permanent address and hadn’t for the past ten or eleven years- a fact which made Fox wholly uncomfortable to think about even now- but they weren’t clueless to the world around them and an email address was a wonderful thing to have. The job title was officially listed as ‘groundskeeper’. Fox didn’t care for a title though- whether it be caretaker, groundskeeper, gardener. Holder of the keys to the shed at the bottom of the garden with nothing but spades and spiders inside. It was Fox’s proverbial calling. The job description seemed like it was mostly gardening, which was Fox’s true love and what they truly thought they’d been put on this Earth to do. The fact that they’d been offered a practically indulgent amount of money didn’t hurt either. 

“No. This is a single dwelling for yourself only,” the Sister answered. Fox paused for a moment. 

“You’re not going to offer me up as some sort of human sacrifice, are you?” they said. Their voice was coy, clearly making jest, but the unchanging features on the Sister’s face made them think she didn’t understand. “Because I have no objection to being sacrificed, I just want to make sure it’s for a worthy cause. A little warning would be nice too, you know.”

A smile twitched in the corners of the Sister’s lips and she pinched her mouth tight. It looked like she wanted to laugh but was trying to hold on to some decorum. “Being a sacrifice is not a part of your duties. I have no authority in dictating how you spend your free time, however.”

Fox returned the smile, forcibly wider than the Sister’s, and before they could think to reply she glided into the room to meet them. The Sister had a stiff beauty about her that was hard to place or understand. She moved as though she was floating and Fox imagined whirls of mist spiralling her feet, as if she was just a ghostly vision in the darkness of the moors. Or maybe she was just wearing roller skates under her skirts. 

“You’ll find your bed chamber through there.” The Sister gestured across the room to a door nestled between a set of bookshelves. “Your luggage has been fetched by the Siblings already, you should find your cases in the wardrobe. In the desk you’ll find all the official documents you require. Please browse them at your leisure.” 

Fox swallowed. Something had to be said about the efficiency around here. They started to feel that doubt again, churning sick like a wave. I don’t belong here. The feeling was familiar, they’d felt it in every circle they’d ever found themself in. And as usual, they squashed it down quickly before it showed on their face. 

“Tomorrow morning you are to report to the fourth floor office to receive your keys. Your employment begins effective immediately, but do take your time acquainting yourself,” the Sister said, maintaining eye contact with Fox. While her voice was buttery, she was still very stern. Robust. Fox trusted her. At least, they thought they did. Or wanted to. 

“Yes, ma’am,” Fox gave her a short nod and she smiled in return. She seemed pleased. 

“I advise that you get well rested,” she said. “It may take you a few days to search the grounds and become familiar with our clergy.”

Fox began to wonder just how many keys they would receive. The glimpse they caught of the Ministry on the walk from the car to their rooms offered promise of several enticing doors. It was raining when they had arrived and they’d driven through the sunset, through the twilight, and it had been deep into the night when they got out of that car. There was no one at the Ministry doors for them and Fox couldn’t think of much else but their hair sticking to their face, blinking through the onslaught of raindrops, and the smell of the wet stone. The building was intimidating to say the least. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so if they’d arrived in the morning, but the size of it alone was enough to strike awe into them. There was little in the way of light apart from the cutouts of the windows standing against the rising black of the walls and the towers, shadows occasionally passing by. Something had caught Fox’s eye, however. A singular dark figure standing ever present and still in a window, a couple of stories high and far away enough that Fox had to focus hard on him. The figure was lit by what Fox assumed was a nearby lamp and they could see he had deep set eyes, like black holes threatening to swallow them up. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. Fox felt something not unlike dread fizzling from their core to their fingertips. But it wasn’t just that, not just pure terror or trepidation, it was… 

As dark as they were- in impression, not colour- his eyes seemed soft. The lines of his face, the drag of his lips. Longing and lonely. Fox tore their eyes away when a voice had beckoned them from the doorway- the Sister chiding them for standing in the rain for so long. When they’d looked back to the window, the man was gone. 

Once they were inside, they had realised they wouldn’t be able to escape that feeling of awe as the interior of the building was just as magnificent. They stood in a vast antechamber with ceilings vaulted so high they could have been never ending. It was gothic in the religious sense with white stone walkways and pillars, soft painted walls, and stained glass. Fox felt like they’d walked into a fresco, like the floor was nothing but paint strokes and might disappear beneath them. Despite the time of night, there were still people moving about the room. None of them staying, of course, just using the room as a transient space. Fox was unfamiliar with the hierarchy of a church, even a Satanic one like this, but it was fairly easy to tell where people stood in the pecking order just by looking at them. While everyone was dressed darkly, and often in some form of robe, the younger clergy members- the Siblings, perhaps- were dressed considerably down. Most of them were fresh faced, nondescript, and donning a slipper-like footwear situation. It seemed the more seasoned members wore not necessarily stylish attire, but certainly flashier. They also shared a look of purpose, not all confident or even happy, but a certain surety. Fox was conflicted. On one hand, it felt cruel being the outsider when everyone else called this place home, when everyone else held that knowing. On the other, it was perhaps the feeling Fox knew best and was therefore quite dear to them in a way. 

“Thank you, uh, Sister,” Fox said. The question of ‘what do you expect of me?’ was lingering in their throat. “Do I-” the Sister cut Fox off, raising a delicate hand. 

“Answers to questions will be provided tomorrow. Fourth floor office.”

She spoke slowly and her words were punctuated with patience. Fox nodded silently and the Sister withdrew her hand. 

“Retire to bed. We shall be seeing you tomorrow.” She kept her eye contact with Fox still, lingering ever so slightly long enough to create a gentle air of malice, before she turned away and left. She disappeared so elegantly, like a shadow, and it was as if she had never been there at all.

Fox was soon standing alone in the room- my room , they thought- and they felt unsure. The room was already peculiar enough, feeling especially cavernous and dark now that they were by themself with the door firmly shut. Surprisingly, the first thing Fox thought about wasn’t just how dark the room was, but what would they have for breakfast? They hadn’t packed anything in their luggage, obviously, and there didn’t appear to be any sort of kitchen equipment in here even if they had packed something. There must have been a kitchen somewhere. Probably the big medieval kind that was deep within a dungeon with bubbling cauldrons and raw meat hanging from the rafters. But even if that was the case, could they just waltz in? Fox was staff, after all. Was there a separate dining hall for the non-staff? A cafeteria? A big Satanic cafeteria where they could get those tiny boxes of assorted cereal. Fox supposed that would be their first question for tomorrow. 

The second thing Fox thought was that these candles were doing quite a shit job at lighting the room and they would very much like to find a working light switch. A quick grope of the walls turned up nothing and they began to wonder if there was some sort of trick to it, like a loose stone in the floor or a book to pull like in some Scooby-Doo villain’s mansion. When they found themself in front of a desk, however, their hands felt around on its cool yet cluttered surface and they eventually found what felt like a lamp. No switch. Shit. They knew that Sister was pulling the whole mysterious thing, and very deftly at that, but Fox thought it wouldn’t have hurt for her to mention if there were any matches in here, would it? Fumbling across the desk once more brought Fox to a set of drawers on the opposite side of it. Large stack of papers in the top drawer- those would be all the documents. A lot of documents. Browse at your leisure my ass, they thought. Second drawer, empty. Of course . And third drawer? Bingo. Striking the match brought the desk into proper view and Fox realised it wasn’t cluttered at all, they’d just mistakenly knocked over various knick-knacks and stationary in their fumbling. Within a few moments, the candle was lit and the many strewn ink pens were arranged neatly once again. 

They were enticed by that top drawer again. The papers appeared to be stacked inside a large manilla envelope that was sealed with a blob of red wax. Running their thumb under the seal broke it easily and the papers slid out onto the desk. The first document to catch Fox’s eye was a singular dark sheet with embossed patterns framing the page. It read in silver ink, cursive letters glittering and hard to read by the candlelight.

Our Newest Recruit,  

We are charmed to accept you into our home- we dearly hope these dwellings have your appreciation. 

Whilst we encourage spending this evening in respite, it is sternly advised to study the enclosed documents.

Contained wIthin is a brief directory of departments, public suites (includes chambers and auditoriums), and notable exterior grounds. 

We would despair ever so should you find yourself lost on this substantial estate.

Furthermore, do familiarise yourself with the Terms of your Employment. We trust it shall provide a stimulating study.

~Ante eum genu flecte et bene intra muros istos~

Fox couldn’t quite decide whether this was written to be purposefully ominous, or whether it was genuine and whoever had written it just had an unfortunately creepy tone. Fitting, either way. True to the letter’s words, the next few papers has a list of several rooms, respective room numbers and… that was all. They flipped the paper over- blank- checked the other pages- blank- flipped them over. Blank. Well that was just useless, wasn’t it. What good was a list of rooms and numbers if they didn’t give any sort of location? There weren’t even any proper descriptions, just some titles. 

Cathedral: 042. 

Mass Auditorium: 118. 

Library: 203. 

One of them just said Office. Actually, several of them say Office. Fox pushed those top papers to the side and pursed their lips at the acclaimed ‘Terms of Employment’. This section was significantly thicker than the last stack and they were immediately put off by it, loosely flipping through the first few pages. They were more than aware that they should study this very closely- not because of what that Sister said, and not because of what that letter said- but they were well versed enough to know they probably didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the Ministry’s bad side. Not on their first day, anyway. What Fox was somewhat prepared to do was sit down at this desk and get through every last page of this contract so they wouldn’t be caught out looking like some kind of an idiot at this meeting tomorrow. They would have to pour themself a drink to get through it, of course. If gardening was their true love, drinking was certainly their mistress. It was a cherished hobby. 

However, there were three small problems with this marvellous plan. One- there wasn’t anything to pour a drink into. Two- there wasn’t anything to drink. And three- the whole document was written in what looked like Italian. Which may not have been too much of a problem, except Fox couldn’t read Italian. They rolled their eyes and put the paper back down on the desk. 

They’re fucking with me. That had to be it. Fox scrubbed a hand down their face, bracing their hands on the desk. The way Fox saw it, they didn't really have a lot of options. 

They couldn’t just scoop up all their things and scarper away. Even if they did make it outside, they could hardly call themself a cab and they definitely couldn’t make the walk back. Back to… where, exactly? The thought didn’t bear entertaining. They’d come here to do a job and Fox was going to do it. If this Church, the Clergy, was buttering them up for something, the least they could do was enjoy the spoils. 

With a sigh, Fox gathered up the documents and slid them back into the envelope, leaving it out on the desk so they wouldn’t forget to bring them along tomorrow. Studying documents was off the table, and so to bed it was. They picked up the lamp- candle- and carried it with them into the next room. What did that Sister call it? Bed chamber. Regardless, they were certain there wouldn’t be any lights in there either and they weren’t about to go fondling the entire room again. Not before buying it a drink. They had to have some principles, after all. 

This room was a lot smaller than the last, but it was difficult to judge as the bed itself sat in the centre and completely dwarfed everything else. It was bigger than a double- bigger than a king even- with four wooden posters that rose to the ceiling and held up a dark cloth canopy. There was little else in the room besides a small window on the left wall that was mostly concealed by a pair of willowy drapes, a door nearby leading into a small private bathroom and some very gaudy wallpaper. After a quick inspection of what Fox could see outside the window, which was fuck all in the dark, they set the candle down on the closest nightstand. As promised, their two meagre cases were sitting in the bottom of the wardrobe. They looked untouched and Fox reached for one with the intention of dragging it out and unpacking, but they paused. They weren’t entirely sure if they’d even be here tomorrow night. If this was just some big ruse to sacrifice them to a Dark God… why should they waste their time exerting energy hanging up clothes and deciding what side of the sink their toothbrush would go on. That bed did look comfortable. Maybe there was a plan to make them some sorry-for-sacrificing-you-in-such-a-horrific-way orgy or something. Or a breakfast. And surely they couldn’t have planned to do it the day after Fox’s arrival, there would still be time to check the place out. Get into that library, have a walk around the gardens. It didn’t sound that bad. 

Fox headed back over to the bed and placed a hand on one of the posts. Laid out over the mattress was a very silky looking bedspread, matching pillows and a particularly downy comforter. Were these posts carved? Felt like varnished wood. Expensive. So intricately carved it must have been expensive. Sometimes Fox wished they could produce something so artistic, and in such a gorgeous material to boot. Purpleheart, they thought. It was streaked with red and black, shimmering grain, with a nice even lacquer. This was immaculate work, clearly made by someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who respected… Fox’s train of thought was lost quickly as they finally started paying attention to the carvings, their fingers tracing the gentle curves of the wood. That looks like … Fox pulled their hand away. 

That was a cock. Every inch and vein carved right into the post with astonishing accuracy. How had they not seen that before? They scanned the rest of the post and sure enough, it was positively covered with the things. And not only that! While they seemed to be the main feature (considering their size), they were accompanied by countless vignettes of naked, sweating couples in some of the most sordid positions Fox had ever seen. Oh- not just couples. Their cheeks began to grow rather warm. They were no stranger, of course. Running with such unconventional circles often came with certain physical expectations. Not that Fox had ever complained. In fact, it was one of the better perks. They couldn’t quite understand what the play here was though. From the outside, the Ministry appeared very official. Academic, even. Was it really so filthy underneath? Or was the Ministry trying to intimidate them? Or perhaps this was just a family heirloom. Some unholy icon. These were probably in every room. Fox found themself laughing, hand rushing up to their mouth to silence their giggles. They really couldn’t deny it was expertly crafted. 

They turned their attention back to the bed, the actual bed, and they gingerly threw back the duvet. Of course, the material felt just as silky as it looked. It looked clean. Fox pulled it up close to their face. Definitely clean. And freshly washed to boot! They tested a pillow too and there was a faint hum of lavender. They glanced back towards the window, taking just a few seconds to assure themself that the curtains were pulled shut all the way. Satisfied, or the closest approximation to it, they kicked their shoes off and slid them under the bed. They didn’t want to admit that a large part of them wanted to take a peek after they did. They wanted to think they were smart enough to be able to tell if some knife-wielding maniac zealot was stuffed under there. And stuffed indeed- there wasn’t exactly a lot of wiggle room. If a horrible, knife-wielding maniac zealot was committed enough to actually fit, Fox thought the least they could do was accept a little stabbing. 

After a minute contemplating the fate, their coat was hung up on a hook off the back of the bathroom door and their clothes found a similarly neat placement as a nondescript pile on the floor. They tucked themself into bed and pulled the duvet up to their chin, eyes facing up to the canopy above them. This room seemed a lot bigger now that they were laying down, decidedly more vulnerable than before. The glow from the candle flickered against the canopy, the dark cloth twisting into ugly faces, the posts of the bed casting menacing shadows onto the wallpaper. Shit, the candle. Without thinking, Fox sat up and blew it out. They saw the thin tendrils of smoke spiralling from the candle wick, the smell reminding them of birthday parties and shitty sheet cake, and they were left in the dark once again. There was a trail of blue moonlight glowing through the curtains, specks of shiny dust suspended in the air. It was eerie and mesmerising. Fox kept their eyes on the beam as they laid back down, as their head pressed back into the pillow. It was more than just comfortable. They were ashamed to admit they had slept in some undeniable shit-holes more than once, but this was possibly the most comfortable bed they’d ever laid in. 

***

A sudden crack of thunder ripped through the room and jolted Fox from their sleep. When had they fallen asleep? They ran a hand up through their hair, their heart beating forcefully inside their ribcage. What time was it? It couldn’t be morning yet, it was still dark outside. As the thought came, a searing flash lit up the room. Fox jerked upright, their eyes wide and searching every inch of the room before a second round of deafening thunder rolled outside. With their heart still pounding, their chest heaving with shallow breaths, they pinched their eyes shut. 

Jesus, it’s just thunder. 

They took a moment to let the air out of their lungs, forcing out a dry breath through clenched teeth. Now their head was clear of the sleepy fog, Fox could hear the pattering of rain, the rattle of hailstones against the window. Their heartbeat slowed and their breath became even. They opened their eyes again to a dark, still room. The storm must have only just picked up- those hailstones were so heavy that Fox was certain they alone would’ve woken them up far sooner. They were hitting the window pretty quickly, there was probably no use trying to settle back down to sleep while it was still raging outside. Then again, it wasn’t particularly loud. More like a gentle tapping really. Fox straightened up, a chill running down their spine. Tapping. No, it couldn’t be…

Another flash of lightning forced Fox from the bed, duvet flung carelessly to one side, and they braced themself back against the wall. They reached a hand out in an instant, fumbling around to reach their coat before that thunder strike could make its grand re-appearance. They snatched the coat off its hook and less than a few seconds later, it was wrapped around their body, pulled tight across the breast under their overlapped arms. It wasn’t tapping. Of course it wasn’t tapping. Why would it be tapping? Another sweeping rumble made Fox jump and they swore under their breath. There was nothing out there and they were definitely not going out into the other room to check for anything. Fox was going out into the other room because they couldn’t sleep. They were going out into the other room because they thought they had noticed a book on common marsh horticulture that they just couldn’t wait until morning to read. Tapping. Tapping, tapping, hailstones.

Fox took in a deep, bracing breath and pushed themself off the wall. They began to move quickly, taking a couple of steps in a matter of seconds before stopping. Not rushing. Fox was not rushing because if they were rushing then they would be scared and they weren’t scared and so they weren’t rushing. They also weren’t taking a peek out of the window to check if there was tapping. They were checking because they wanted to see the rain. Reaching the window, Fox stood close to the curtains. And Fox stood still for longer than they intended to. Oh, this is ridiculous, they thought, and they grasped either side of the fabric in their hands and ripped them apart. Fox didn’t know what they were expecting, but of course it was just this. 

Dark window. Raindrops. No tapping. 

They huffed shortly. This rain was just not letting up, was it ? Oh, and it was such a big day tomorrow! Fox didn’t have much choice but to go and grab that book! They crossed their arms and ran a hand over the wall, tracing it around the corner and to the door. There was no hesitation when they opened it and took a step through. 

The large windows at the other end of the room didn’t let in any more light than what Fox had expected, mostly just reflecting enough to cast shadows of the rain droplets onto the floor, wriggling like little flies all over the room. No. No, it was like gentle tears on the lake or some other poetic prattle. 

It was relaxing. 

The room was somehow smaller than they could recall, perhaps the dark shadows made everything seem condensed, squashed together. 

It was cosy. 

Fox tugged their coat tighter around themself and took their eyes off the window. The first thing they wanted was to look around for those matches again because how could they expect to read in here unless by candlelight? They started the trek over to the desk- they can make out its faint, black shape against the faint, black backdrop of the room. Before they could even reach it, barely having taken a few steps, there was another sharp flash that brought everything into blinding focus. Fox snapped their head around to look at the window and it felt as if all the blood had rushed from their body, settling cold and thick in the pit of their stomach. 

“Jesus Christ!” They gasped as they lurched backwards, stumbling into a bookcase with a thump. 

That was a face. 

That was a thing, right there in the corner of the window! They were sure of it. Fox was paralysed for a moment, their hand braced back and gripping the side of some bookend. Having been blinded by the flash, they couldn’t seem to make out anything in the room- not even shadows. They couldn’t even hear the rain past their own heartbeat thumping in their ears. They thought about moving for only a fraction of a second and their hands tightened in white-knuckled fear. 

That was definitely a face. The room was so black, Fox couldn’t tell if it was still there. It could still be there. Fox’s eyes were wide, eyebrows raised and staring straight at where the window should be, not daring to move away. They only saw it for a few seconds- less than a few- but they could tell it had big, round eyes and big, tombstone teeth. Both were hot white, gleaming like some terrible spot light. And the rest of it was black, all black, like a living shadow. They couldn’t see a body, just the head right in the bottom corner. Fox was not going to think of all the possible Cronenberg-ian configurations that body could have had for its head to be down there. They weren’t thinking about the fact that maybe it was just a head. A disembodied face squelching along in midair, dripping viscera and gore along the floor. For all this not thinking, Fox was starting to feel a little queasy. 

Thunder struck and Fox was pulled back into the room, their brain shut up like a slap in the head. At some point, they knew they were going to have to admit to the possibility that maybe it had been a trick of the light. Maybe they had just seen some distorted shadow and now they had a back full of pointy book spines and had worked themself up into a ridiculous panic. Fox very desperately wanted that to be the case and they certainly couldn’t stand here all night. They thought about moving at least three times before their legs took the hint and finally went further across the room. They had to check this time. Not for the rain, not for curiosity's sake. They were not about to get spooked into not sleeping by some fucking shadow. 

Fox kept one hand on the desk as they moved around it. The room was still as dark as before but their eyes had readjusted to it and they could make out the shape of the window, the chairs, they could see the patterns in the carpet. They could hear the rain pattering. What happened to those hailstones? Their fingers were teetering on the very edge of the desk, their arm stretched out behind. Fox didn’t want to walk into the middle of the room without something to ground them. If they did that, all the surrounding walls could just melt away, leaving them standing alone in desolate nothingness. There would be nothing to protect them, nowhere else to run. And any number of monsters could slither up behind them and breathe on the back of their neck, could sweep their legs from right under them and steal them into the night to never be seen again. Fox knew that wasn’t true, but that’s sure what it felt like. Come to think of it, Fox didn’t quite know what was possible in this place. It took several more moments before they could even work up the courage to let their hand leave the desk, folding it into a loose fist while they took careful, tiptoed steps. Each one felt like moving an entire world away and not moving at all at the same time. They just had to stay focused. Stay focused on that window and the nothing that was outside of it. 

Thump.

“Shit.”

Fox looked downwards instinctively and grimaced. Whose idiot idea was it to put a footstool that low to the ground? They crouched down with a groan and grabbed a hold of the stool, pulling it back into place and straightening it out. Now Fox was going to have a big, ugly bruise on their shin and it was a good thing they hadn’t caught the corner of this thing because man was it sharp. They couldn’t imagine tripping over and catching their head or their eye on it. Was there an infirmary around here? It didn’t matter, even this place had to have some safety standards and this was a glaring hazard. Fox winced again, wrinkling their nose as the sharp light illuminated the stool beneath their hands. They had thought the wallpaper in the bedroom was gaudy, but getting a proper look at the fabric on this thing made them realise it was tasteful in comparison. Not all the furniture could be like this, surely. They’d gotten an eyeful of that chaise lounge and it was-

“Fuck! ”

Fox fell backwards to the floor and scrambled away as fast as they could whilst grabbing fistfuls of carpet. They really couldn’t have imagined that one. They couldn’t have! It was there again, that horrible face, only a foot or two away from them now. Same place, same eyes, same gnashing teeth. Along with it was a hand pressed flat against the window, dripping wet from the rain with pale, white fingertips from where it was pushing against the pane. Fox didn’t have any time to think their horrid thoughts, speculate if that was its hand or some poor guy’s that it had ripped off, or if it was going to try to break the glass with that hand, as their only focus was to get the fuck away. Their elbow hit a chair leg, their foot caught a nearby side table, their back scratched the corner of the bookcase. And Fox didn’t care, didn’t even feel the sting and the bruise. 

As soon as they scurried into the bedroom, and as soon as they were far enough into it, they kicked the door shut with such force that the wall hangings trembled. Fox didn’t stop to worry that something may fall off and they definitely didn’t stop to check if any of them actually did. They just clambered clumsily to their feet, stumbling more than once and having to catch a hold of themself on the bedpost that last time or they would’ve fallen down on their face. They grabbed the lamp- candle!- when they dashed to the bedside, having scaled the bed and run across the mattress so they wouldn’t get anywhere near that damn window. They didn’t care how much noise it made when their feet met the ground again and they tried not to care when they all but slammed into the doorframe to the bathroom. 

There were no windows in the bathroom. No windows and only one door. Fox slapped the flimsy shower curtain to one side and it got tangled up in their hand before they tumbled over into the bathtub, wincing when they brought their knees up to their chest. No windows. One door. Nobody was getting in here. Fox held the candlestick out in front of them, pointing it outright. They’d never hit anyone over the head with a blunt object before but they weren’t above giving it a proper go. The candlestick was trembling in front of them, their hands shaking and their heart beating so short and quick they thought it was about to leap out through their mouth. No windows and one door. 

No windows. 

One damn door. 

I’d love to see that fucking monster try and get in here now. 

Chapter Links | Next Chapter | AO3

💖 Reblogs and Likes appreciated!

💖 Thank you so much for reading!

[kaibutsushidousha]

I wonder who's the 3rd god inside Ergo? Could it be Anahita?

I think I got this question before Volume 5 came out, but only now that I read all Van-Fem scenes in Volume 6 that I finally have something insane enough to say about it.

Okay, let's organize the hints. First, we have Ziz a few volumes ago bragging that Waver will never guess what the god he chose is. This suggests Ziz's choice of god is someone really off-standard, something that technically can be considered a god but no one would normally think of as a god.

Meanwhile, in Fate/strange Fake, Sanda's partner-in-crime Narita directly equates an Idea Blood-holding Dead Apostle Ancestor to a god. Adventures is on a timeline where Human Order is too strong for Idea Blood to take effect but Volume 5 makes a point to remind us that Ergo's project was only possible because it started before Human Order had a stable shape. Van-Fem's Idea Blood should have been active 2300 years ago.

The common thread between Ergo's three gods is water and hands. Van-Fem keeps showing of sleights of hand in every scene he appears and when Ergo tried to locate the invisible Van-Fem with his Phantom Hands, he answered he could only feel the texture of the sea.

Another red flag is how alarmingly knowledgeable Van-Fem is about Ergo, making a point to keep track of the whole adventure until this point. Fem was similarly informed about Flat and Thia, but that case was specifically because Messara was a blabbermouth. Ziz is a much more calculating man and wouldn't give Van-Fem that much information about his project unless it was absolutely necessary. Van-Fem is likely to accept the deal because he only stands to gain from his Idea Blood being safely stored.

There's also the possibility that the Elder Title DAAs map to known mythological gods but I find that unlikely because that would diminish the "unguessable" factor Ziz is boasting about.

I think Ergo's 3rd god is just Van-Fem and his 3rd NP will reveal the Principle in Fem's Idea Blood.

[oldworldwidgets]

ive got two things to address and a lot of words to do it with so here goes. first point: @simicmimic

i would love to explain!! :] keep in mind that im putting aside the fact that the puzzle kinda has to be a little easy from a gameplay perspective so players dont get frustrated and give up

unbeknownst to people who employ it, #5 is less of a criticism of the railroad and more of a testament to it.

when the sole survivor comes across the railroad, the org is at the absolute end of its rope (similar to the minutemen, almost). their main base of operations had very recently been completely leveled, numbers decimated, and they'd had to fall into old north, a far inferior but well hidden (and comfortably underground) safehouse. we dont know exactly why they chose to hole up there - could be that it was their only option, or they needed a temporary place to harbor synths before shipment out of the commonwealth, or they were looking for a hideout that would be easy to burn when they found a better one, etc etc - but we do know that, after switchboard, they lost contact with a lot of their other agents/safehouses + it seemed like every day a new safehouse went dark.

the simplicity of their messaging surrounding the freedom trail is a communication device. it's a simple, effective way to reach out to agents they lost contact with after switchboard to find and reconnect with them. but beyond that, it's a recruitment technique. it's a puzzle that was designed to be solved. they're desperate for new, competent members who can interpret symbols and follow clues to reach a conclusion. "railroad" isnt the password to HQ, it's the password to the empty, doorless room outside their HQ where armed agents have been waiting for you since you started wandering down the trail + have been watching your every move since you left the vault. des even says, "anyone that wants to meet us is under surveillance as soon as they follow the freedom trail. if you were a threat to our organization, all you'd find here is an empty room."

i will admit that using the name of your organization as the password is a little unoriginal, but it's not like they live in an era like the 21st century where everyone is (more or less) educated on internet unguessable username and password etiquette. plus, the only way the ss can learn that this synth-freeing org is even called the railroad is through their recruitment holotapes or wasteland word of mouth, so the chances are very slim that a rando who wanders into the church could just guess the password, regardless of how simple it is.

next point: @twosides--samecoin

the discussion regarding the slave allegory is an incredibly important one to be had for sure, it's just not mine to initiate. it has been covered extensively by black members of the fandom (as evidenced by the great post you linked that ive seen circulate a few times) and truly i have nothing to add and won't speak over them to do so. more importantly, though: im not sidestepping it because it isnt important, i left it out on purpose because it's... kinda irrelevant to the point i was making in this post specifically.

the poorly-thought-out slavery allegory on the part of bethesda has nothing to do with the competence or effectiveness of the railroad in the game. narratively, the railroad could be The Perfect Faction but the cobbled-together comparison to slavery would still be a valid criticism because it exists in the real world. this post was really only intended to cover the in-game narrative flaws of the org, not the bad writing that went into its creation. i hope that makes sense :]

look, in all my time on fo4 tumblr and on the fo4 subreddit where hatred runs rampant, ive still only seen two valid criticisms of the railroad as a faction. ever.

(im putting aside the whole entire slavery allegory for the purposes of this post)

these two criticisms are:

if you (yes, you. the player) fundamentally disagree with the notion that synths are sentient people, the organization makes no sense and is useless. i cant change your bedrock beliefs on what constitutes a person, so this criticism stands

the mind wipes might border on unethical. the idea is good and well-intentioned, but it kinda sucks in practice. synths can choose not to have the procedure, but the railroad's catastrophizing about what will happen if they dont feels coercive sometimes. i could probably be convinced otherwise, but i think this is a pretty good point

thats it. there are no more. im absolutely open to (and would love, actually) yall trying to change my mind but just know that if your criticisms are:

they're short-sighted; the organization will eventually dissolve because there will be no more synths left to help

they have no plan nor reason to help synths post-institute; the moment the institute explodes, so does the railroad

they're too narrow-minded; they should be helping people too, not just synths

by destroying the institute, they're stopping the production of synths; this nullifies their efforts in saving synths and is even, dare i say, hypocritical

their password being railroad is far too simple and the freedom trail is too easy to follow; theyre just asking for another switchboard

[insert member of the railroad, usually desdemona] is mean; the organization is full of assholes

then ur efforts will be wasted on me. all of these criticisms are bad <3

[sullenarchives]

Eastern Bloc Songs

First published in The Wire 418, December 2018. The curator, Wayne Burrows, responded on Twitter shortly after this was published that the exhibition catalogue included much of the contextual information missing in the show. Having perused the accompanying book, which is mostly reproductions of song lyrics, I can say that's absolutely not the case.

Eastern Bloc Songs

Centrala Space, Birmingham, UK

This archival show, curated by Nottingham-based writer Wayne Burrows, of audiovisual recordings, records and magazine facsimiles from the Eastern Bloc pop industry feels at once panoramic and curiously narrow. Burrows, who collected the material over a number of years, covers a huge time span, 1963 to 1988, but only three countries, with most of the material coming from the former Czechoslovakia around 1968. With very little contextual information and haphazard labelling, it forms a vast and sometimes bewildering info-dump, that would tell a very different narrative from that of the Anglophone canon of post-war Eastern European culture, if you could ever extract it from the accumulation of period detail.

A set of rather schematic assumptions still governs the reception of Eastern Bloc music. Dissident and samizdat culture is always somehow aesthetically higher than the products of state-supervised record labels like Czechoslovakia's Supraphon and Poland's Pronit, its creativity spurred by the official limits placed on what Cold Warriors used euphemistically to call “civil society”. The picture that emerges faced with at least some of that product is altogether stranger. A wall of photos of Polish and Czechoslovak stars – Marta Kubišová, Helena Vondráčková, Václav Neckář, Czeław Nieman – shows them in outfits that wouldn't be out of place in a 1964 Top Of The Pops episode. Three vitrines of sleeves show the evolution of records across the period: the early 60s models have the clean but stuffy contemporary design of EMI and Polydor. One of four screens shows Kubišová's 1969 film Proudy odnesou lasku, directed by Jan Nĕmec, whose 1966 satire A Report On The Party And Its Guests was banned in Czechoslovakia. Kubišová, who resembles Rita Tushingham if she'd taken a career in chanson, rides in a jeep through a bomb-site, surrounded by children in army jackets and later slithers around sets decorated with the kind of occult imagery later to turn up in Jaromil Jireš's Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (1970). On another screen, her contemporaries Hana and Petr Ulrychovi mount a controlled and ever-escalating prog assault with choirs and horn sections between guitar spray; Neckár and Golden Kids stretch The Electric Prunes' garage psych until it almost snaps. With the exception of a brief appearance from Plastic People Of The Universe, hardly anyone here is known in the West, underground or mainstream.

If the structure of feeling of the various artistic New Waves of Eastern Europe – Andrzej Wajda, Miloš Forman, Miklós Jancsó and Věra Chytilová would be the golden names – formed a labyrinth of rage, irony, naivete, plain speaking and soiled glamour, it's no surprise that the pop of that period is racked by the same rich contradictions. But it's hard to tell where all of this fits. Is it just a corrective to the historical emphasis on Communist states' high-minded sponsorship of culture, as in Poland's PRES? Or to the coffee-table fetishisation of underground bands, when 'underground' required a very literal distance from official culture and its attendant police spies? How did the publics of the Eastern Bloc, caught between a socialist culture industry and a dissidence they may have no lived connection to, really feel about this music? The sometimes astounding sounds and visuals here give no answers, only the languid stares of semi-hippie cover girls, looking off to an unguessed future.

[respectable-username]

🔐 Why You (Probably) Don't Need A VPN

A rant by a software engineer sick of VPN ads from her favourite YouTubers

TL;DR:

Here are some legitimate reasons the average internet user might want to use a VPN:

To connect to their company's internal network

To bypass the Great Firewall of China (or other types of website blocks at country or organisation level)

To watch Netflix etc as if you were in another country

Here are absolutely rubbish reasons to use a VPN:

Privacy

And today, I'll tell you why.

Hang on, won't a VPN stop hackers from stealing my passwords?

I mean, it does encrypt the web traffic coming from your device.

You know what else encrypts web traffic coming from your device? Your browser.

Yes, in the year 2021, pretty much all websites on the internet are accessed over HTTPS. The "S" stands for "secure", as in "your request will be securely encrypted". If your browser is using HTTPS, nobody can capture the data you're sending over the internet. More detail in the "I like too much detail" section at the bottom of this post.

It's very easy to check if you are using HTTPS by looking at your URL bar. In most browsers, it will have a lock on it if secure:

(From top left to bottom right: Chrome on iOS, Safari on iOS, Chrome on Windows, Edge on Windows, Firefox on Windows, and Safari on Mac. Screenshots reflect the UI at the time this post was written. Oh gosh this has taken over 4 hours to write.)

But isn't moar encryption better? What if somebody breaks HTTPS?

For starters, nobody's breaking your HTTPS, and there isn't any benefit from double encrypting. This is because of the maths behind encryption/decryption!

Encryption works kinda like a lock and key, except the lock is maths and the key is a special number only known to the person allowed to unlock the information.

The important thing is, without the key, all the locked data looks like complete and utter garbage. Completely unusable. Barely distinguishable from random noise. There's absolutely no way to tell what the original data was.

The other important thing is that the key is nearly unguessable. As in, with current technology, will generally take more than the lifetime of the universe to guess by chance. And when technology gets faster, we just make the numbers bigger again until they're once again secure.

For any major website you use, they will use a strong encryption algorithm (ie lock) with big numbers so your keys will be strong enough to withstand an attack. This means your data is safe as long as that lock icon is in your URL bar.

A VPN will not make the existing garble any more garbled. The extra $10/month or whatever you're paying for does not buy you any extra protection.

If you want to know more about how encryption and HTTPS in particular work, see the "I like too much detail" section at the end of this post.

Something something viruses

How's a VPN going to stop viruses? It controls the path your internet traffic takes, not the content that gets sent down that path. I guess it could block some known virus-giving hosts? But if it's known to the VPN provider, it's probably also known to the built-in antivirus on your computer who can block it for you.

(Oh yeah, 3rd party antivirus is another thing that's not worth paying for these days. Microsoft's built-in Windows Defender is as good as the third party options, and something something Macs don't get viruses easily because of how they're architected.)

Honestly though, keep your software up to date, don't click on anything suspicious, don't open files from sources you don't trust, and you'll be right most of the time.

And keep your software up to date. Then update your software. Hey, did I mention keeping your stuff updated? Update! Now! It only takes a few minutes. Please update to the latest version of your software I'm begging you. It's the number 1 way to protect yourself from viruses and other malware. Most major software attacks could have been prevented if people just updated their damn software!

But my ISP is spying on me!

Ok, it is true that there are TWO bits of data that HTTPS can't and won't hide. Those are:

The source of a request (your IP)

What website that request is going to (the website's IP)

These are the bits of information that routers use to know where to send your data, so of course they can't be hidden as the data is moving across the internet. And people can see that information very easily if they want to.

Note: this will show which website you're going to, but not which page you're looking at, and not the content of that page. So it will show that you were on Tumblr, but will not show anyone that you're still reading SuperWhoLock content in 2021.

It's this source/destination information that VPNs hide, which is why they can be used to bypass website blocks and region locks.

By using a VPN, those sniffing traffic on your side of the VPN will just show you connecting to the VPN, not the actual website you want. That means you can read AO3 at work/school without your boss/teachers knowing (unless they look over your shoulder of course).

As for those sniffing on the websites end, including the website itself, they will see the VPN as the source of the connection, not you. So if you're in the US and using a VPN node in the UK, Netflix will see you as being in the UK and show you their British library rather than the American one.

If this is what you're using a VPN for and you think the price is fair, then by all means keep doing it! This is 100% what VPNs are good for.

HOWEVER, and this is a big "however", if it's your ISP you're trying to hide your internet traffic from, then you will want to think twice before using a VPN.

Let me put it this way. Without a VPN, your ISP knows every website you connect to and when. With a VPN, do you know who has that exact same information? The VPN provider. Sure, many claim to not keep logs, but do you really trust the people asking for you to send them all your data for a fee to not just turn around and sell your data on for a profit, or worse?

In effect, you're trading one snooper for another. One snooper is heavily regulated, in many jurisdictions must obey net neutrality, and is already getting a big fee from you regardless of where you browse. The other isn't. Again, it's all a matter of who you trust more.

For me personally, I trust my ISP more than a random VPN provider, if for no other reason than my ISP is an old enough company with enough inertia and incompetence that I don't think they could organise to sell my data even if they wanted to. And with the amount of money I'm paying them per month, they've only got everything to lose if they broke consumer trust by on-selling that data. So yeah, I trust my ISP more with my privacy than the random VPN company.

But my VPN comes with a password manager!

Password managers are great. I 100% recommend you use a password manager. If there's one thing you could do right now to improve your security (other than updating your software, speaking of, have you updated yet?), it's getting and using a password manager.

Password managers also come for free.

I'm currently using LastPass free, but am planning to switch after they did a bad capitalism and only let their free accounts access either laptop or mobile but not both now. I personally am planning to move to Bitwarden on friends' recommendation since it's not only free but open source and available across devices. I also have friends who use passbolt and enjoy it, which is also free and open source, but it's also a bit DIY to set up. Great if you like tinkering though! And there are probably many other options out there if you do a bit of googling.

So, yeah, please use a password manager, but don't pay for it unless you actually have use for the extra features.

No I really need to hide my internet activity from everybody for reasons

In this case, you're probably looking for TOR. TOR is basically untraceable. It's also a terrible user experience for the most part because of this, so I'd only recommend it if you need it, such as if you're trying to escape the Great Firewall. But please don't use it for Bad Crimes. I am not to be held liable for any crime committed using information learned from this post.

Further reading viewing

If you want to know more about why you don't need a VPN, see Tom Scott's amazing video on the subject. It's honestly a great intro for beginners.

I like too much detail

Ahhh, so you're the type of person who doesn't get turned off by long explanations I see. Well, here's a little more info on the stuff I oversimplified in the main post about encryption. Uhh, words get bigger and more jargony in this section.

So first oversimplification: the assumption that all web traffic is either HTTP or HTTPS. This isn't exactly true. There are many other application layer internet standards out there, such as ssh, ftp, websockets, and all the proprietary standards certain companies use for stuff such as streaming and video conferencing. Some of these are secure, using TLS or some other security algorithm under the hood, and some of them aren't.

But most of the web requests you care about are HTTP/HTTPS calls. As for the rest, if they come from a company of a decent size that hasn't been hacked off the face of the planet already, they're probably also secure. In other words, you don't need to worry about it.

Next, we've already said that encryption works as a lock and a key, where the lock is a maths formula and the key is a number. But how do we get that key to lock and unlock the data?

Well, to answer that, we first need to talk about the two different types of encryption: symmetric and asymmetric. Symmetric encryption such as AES uses the same key to both encrypt and decrypt data, whereas asymmetric encryption such as RSA uses a different key to encode and decode.

For the sake of my writing, we're going to call the person encrypting Alice, the person decrypting Bob, and the eavesdropper trying to break our communications Eve from now on. These are standard names in crypto FYI. Also, crypto is short for cryptography not cryptocurrencies. Get your Bitcoin and Etherium outta here!

Sorry if things start getting incoherent. I'm tired. It's after 1am now.

So first, how do we get the key from symmetric crypto? This is probably the easier place to start. Well, you need a number, any number of sufficient size, that both Alice and Bob know. There are many ways you could share this number. They could decide it when they meet in person. They could send it to each other using carrier pigeons. Or they could radio it via morse code. But those aren't convenient, and somebody could intercept the number and use it to read all their messages.

So what we use instead is a super clever algorithm called Diffie-Hellman, which uses maths and, in particular, the fact it's really hard to factor large numbers (probably NP Hard to be specific, but there's no actual proof of that). The Wikipedia page for this is surprisingly easy to read, so I'll just direct you there to read all about it because I've been writing for too long. This algorithm allows Alice and Bob to agree on a secret number, despite Eve being able to read everything they send each other.

Now Alice and Bob have this secret number key, they can talk in private. Alice puts her message and the key into the encryption algorithm and out pops what looks like a load of garbage. She can then send this garbage to Bob without worrying about Eve being able to read it. Bob can then put the garbage and the key into the decryption algorithm to undo the scrambling and get the original message out telling him where the good donuts are. Voila, they're done!

But how does Alice know that she's sending her message to Bob and not Eve? Eve could pretend to be Bob so that Alice does the Diffie-Hellman dance with her instead and sends her the secret location of the good donuts instead.

This is where asymmetric crypto comes in! This is the one with private and public keys, and the one that uses prime numbers.

I'm not 100% across the maths on this one TBH, but it has something to do with group theory. Anyway, just like Diffie-Hellman, it relies on the fact that prime factorisation is hard, and so it does some magic with semi-primes, ie numbers with only 2 prime factors other than 1. Google it if you want to know more. I kinda zoned out of this bit in my security courses. Maths hard

But the effect of that maths is easier to explain: things that are encoded with one of the keys can only be decoded with the other key. This means that one of those keys can be well-known to the public and the other is known only to the person it belongs to.

If Alice wants to send a message to Bob and just Bob, no Eve allowed, she can first look up Bob's public key and encrypt a beginning message with that. Once Bob receives the message, he can decrypt it with his private key and read the contents. Eve can't read the contents though because, even though she has Bob's public key, she doesn't know his private key.

This public key information is what the lock in your browser is all about BTW. It's saying that the website is legit based on the public key they provide.

So why do we need symmetric crypto when we have asymmetric crypto? Seems a lot less hassle to exchange keys with asymmetric crypto.

Well, it's because asymmetric crypto is slooooow. So, in TLS, the security algorithm that puts the "S" in "HTTPS", asymmetric RSA is used to establish the initial connection and figure out what symmetric key to use, and then the rest of the session uses AES symmetric encryption using the agreed secret key.

And there you have it! Crypto in slightly-less-short-but-still-high-enough-level-that-I-hope-you-understand.

Just realised how long this section is. Well, I did call it "too much detail" for a reason.

Now, next question is what exactly is and isn't encrypted using HTTPS.

Well, as I said earlier, it's basically just the source IP:port and the destination IP:port. In fact, this information is actually communicated on the logical layer below the application layer HTTPS is on, known as the transport layer. Again, as I said before, you can't really encrypt this unless you don't want your data to reach the place you want at all.

Also, DNS is unencrypted. A DNS request is a request that turns a domain name, such as tumblr.com, into an IP address, by asking a special server called a Domain Name Server where to find the website you're looking for. A DNS request is made before an HTTP(S) request. Anyone who can read your internet traffic can therefore tell you wanted to go to Tumblr.

But importantly, this only shows the domain name, not the full URL. The rest of the URL, the part after the third slash (the first two slashes being part of http://), is stuff that's interpreted by the server itself and so isn't needed during transport. Therefore, it encrypted and completely unreadable, just like all the content on your page.

I was going to show a Wireshark scan of a web request using HTTP and HTTPS to show you the difference, but this has taken long enough to write as it is, so sorry!

I could probably write more, but it's 1:30am and I'm sleepy. I hope you found some of this interesting and think twice before purchasing a VPN subscription. Again, there are legit good uses for a VPN, but they're not the ones primarily being advertised in VPN ads. It's the fact that VPN ads rely so heavily on false advertising that really grinds my gears and made me want to do this rant. It's especially bad when it comes from somebody I'd think of as technologically competent (naming no names here, but if you've worked in tech and still promote VPNs as a way to keep data safe... no). Feel free to ask questions if you want and hopefully I'll get around to answering any that I feel I know enough to answer.

Nighty night Tumblr. Please update your software. And use a (free) password manager. And enable two factor authentication on all your accounts. But mostly just update your software.

[soyboyjames]

Uncanny Tales of Cosmic Horror and Unspeakable Terror H.P. Lovecraft

10 Favorite Lines:

Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities. [from Herbert West - Reanimator]

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came… [from The Call of Cthulhu]

My attitude was still one of absolute materialism as I wish it still were. [from The Call of Cthulhu]

My attitude towards the matter was by this time quickly slipping from a scientific one to an alarmedly personal one. [from The Whisperer in the Darkness]

I think my subconscious mind must have caught something which my consciousness has net yet recognized. [from The Whisperer in the Darkness]

…our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again! [from At the Mountains of Madness]

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. [from At the Mountains of Madness]

…man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralyzing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. [from The Shadow Out of Time]

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions. [from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward]

My life and reason are the very least things which hang in the balance. [from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward]

[stemmmm]

my wife said that beatrice has a smile like a cat retching on dry kibble (affectionate)

i was watching this next part with them so i ended up screaming to them mostly instead of being able to write much down. but so much magic bullshit happened and im so happy the resolution to that is "just ignore it dude" because that's what ive been saying for aaaages. also the 7 sisters mere existence makes everything that could be scary completely not scary at all

the fact that all the servants are killed this time is great because it means no one can say well, you're not related to me so get fucked. im excited to see what results of this

beato is just a nasty, immature, child i love it. she's felt particularly unhinged this go around. awwww battlers ignoring her because she sucks to play with and she's getting so sad about it. pout girl pout!

ah who would have thought! the specific choice of japanese characters coming into play for the riddle! golly gee, its almost like it doesnt function when translated to english therefore making it particularly inscrutable! i would in fact be surprised if the "gouge and kill" lines weren't something that could be interpreted and actioned upon in a completely different way unguessable in english

beato really feels like she's made a switch between being an absolute demon to being an unwitting bully on the playground running to her teacher begging "pleeease pleeeease tell me how do i make battler like me??? he doesnt like me hes so mean to me" my sweet girl you were mean first. darling child you murdered his entire family (allegedly). part of it may just be my own perception after learning that the real beatrice died pretty young and was very childish and naive then, but also i know she hadnt been whining like this before

my anticipation has been that eva's going to snap and kill everyone. she certainly seems to be teetering at this point so we'll see if that's the case soon i think. because girl ain't doing good

hm. underground tunnel confirmed it seems. terrible! now there simply must be a trick to all of this is eva found the gold since that would technically call off the killings and end the loop. perhaps the trick is that the siblings will absolutely kill each other over finding it? certainly doesnt make for a timeline worth surviving in. is this a result of beato resigning?

what the fresh hell is happening with this new beatrice business lmao

THERE you are battler i missed you. please be confused with me because i know you wont be able to tell what the fuck is happening

children, please. not everything has to be a competition

episode 3 post! missed the title card if there was one

ep1 ep2

who the fuck is this

ohhhh baby beato momence? very funny to be like oh please teach me to be a witch so i can become so powerful that i can undo even death! *kills people**kills people**kills people**kills people**kills people**kills people**kills people**kills people**kills people*

ah. and battler gets to be a fine pulp on the floor, lovely. she treats him so well.

battler voice: "at least im being mutilated beyond any human recognition by BEAUTIFUL WOMEN"

alright, looks like this episode is going to be sexism-o-clock featuring eva? assuming she'll be the last adult alive? seems we're doing all the women, makes you wonder if any of the men will get backstory treatment at all. i dont mind if they don't, they're all pretty nothing to me.

ah the way patriarchy wears women down to the point where they can only see it fit to squeeze themselves into their restraints, rebellion becomes desperation to be accepted and approved of. and then to further themselves they tear down every other woman they see to uphold the awful system. eva you fool. believe in magic. tear the family standards to shreds under your own power

the theory of n+1 characters in umineko is coming into play. who is this man

this is the first time in my memory that some weird magic shit has happened while battler (on the island) wasnt present but was still drawn to the attention of battler (in the golden land). it has been something id been wondering about, if he's able to be aware of shit his in-game self isnt present for. and now this new stranger has announced he's going to construct the perfect romantic scenario in which he can have the honor of shaking battler's hand

HEY I WAS JOKING

oh cool so it is the case that in each loop she's getting stronger and that's why more people are showing up! i was right about that!

i wonder if eva's ruthlessness over wanting to be the head of the family means that the quest to find the gold will ACTUALLY be acknowledged for once! it still seems a bit early to gain the tools to fight back but i would like... a hint at least. because personally i've got nothing. to me it doesn't even look like a riddle exists past just. very explicit instructions for a ritual which would not get anyone any gold.

oh they mentioned granddad's will which reminds me. what the fuck did he have shannon transcribe in the last part? i figured we were gonna be told eventually so i dont think i even remarked on it but nothing happened with it

ohhhhh we are discussing the forest now and the possibility of a hidden mansion out there. please please please take me to the woods. whats in the woods. i want to be in the woods

ah fun, making it sound like the gold is a trade for the title, twisting the situation around into an issue of which do you value more: your money and lifestyle, or a silly, meaningless title? do you want to sate your greed or do you need to lord it over everyone else in some kind of power play? but they dont really get that what shes saying is that shes going to crazy murder all of you. and how could they. interesting to see who lands on which end though. everyone says they'll just take the money but i feel krauss and especially eva can't be so satisfied with that.

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter (1979)

I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the concert programmes I'd abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughter's wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.

Are you sure, she'd said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress he'd bought me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallized fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, finer than anything she'd worn since that adventurous girlhood in Indo-China, daughter of a rich tea planter.

My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I?

'Are you sure you love him?'

'I'm sure I want to marry him,' I said.

And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluctance that she might at last banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that my mother, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case--how I teased her--she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocer's shop.

Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway company had lit up all the stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its wrappings; it had slipped over my young girl's pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue and teeth in it and a rasp of beard, had hinted to me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress he'd given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great ancestral bed in the sea- girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination ... that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny.

Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even, steady breathing. Only the communicating door kept me from my husband and it stood open. If I rose up on my elbow, I could see the dark, leonine shape of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male scent of leather and spices that always accompanied him and sometimes, during his courtship, had been the only hint he gave me that he had come into my mother's sitting room, for, though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet, as if his footfall turned the carpet into snow.

He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behind me with his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glacés, lay his offering upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude. But that perfume of spiced leather always betrayed him; after my first shock, I was forced always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed.

He was older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides. And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years.

And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where?

In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us, that marvellous castle in which he had been born.

Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: 'Yes,' still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy composure of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra- headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity.

He had the ring ready in a leather box lined with crimson velvet, a fire opal the size of a pigeon's egg set in a complicated circle of dark antique gold. My old nurse, who still lived with my mother and me, squinted at the ring askance: opals are bad luck, she said. But this opal had been his own mother's ring, and his grandmother's, and her mother's before that, given to an ancestor by Catherine de Medici ... every bride that came to the castle wore it, time out of mind. And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them? asked the old woman rudely; yet she was a snob. She hid her incredulous joy at my marital coup--her little Marquise--behind a façade of fault-finding. But, here, she touched me. I shrugged and turned my back pettishly on her. I did not want to remember how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased me in the threadbare self-confidence of the small hours.

I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me. Indeed, was he not still in mourning for his last wife? Tsk, tsk, went my old nurse.

And even my mother had been reluctant to see her girl whisked off by a man so recently bereaved. A Romanian countess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating accident, at his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nanny kept in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorator's jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets.

Before that? Her face is common property; everyone painted her but the Redon engraving I liked best, The Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would never think she had been a barmaid in a café in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elongated thighs to his brush. And yet it was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said.

The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child that I was, taken to the opera for a birthday treat. My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what white-hot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, still alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my sticky little hand, to comfort me, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice.

Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow's child with my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so recently been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianist's fingers.

He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding--a simple affair, at the Mairie, because his countess was so recently gone--he took my mother and me, curious coincidence, to see Tristan. And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upon me. The whispering crowd in the foyer parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My skin crisped at his touch.

How my circumstances had changed since the first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided, bewigged flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne in the interval. The froth spilled over the rim of my glass and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup runneth over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my reluctant mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have gone to him in, otherwise? Twice-darned underwear, faded gingham, serge skirts, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts. And everyone stared at me. And at his wedding gift.

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.

After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now ... the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.

I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

The next day, we were married.

The train slowed, shuddered to a halt. Lights; clank of metal; a voice declaring the name of an unknown, never-to-be visited station; silence of the night; the rhythm of his breathing, that I should sleep with, now, for the rest of my life. And I could not sleep. I stealthily sat up, raised the blind a little and huddled against the cold window that misted over with the warmth of my breathing, gazing out at the dark platform towards those rectangles of domestic lamplight that promised warmth, company, a supper of sausages hissing in a pan on the stove for the station master, his children tucked up in bed asleep in the brick house with the painted shutters ... all the paraphernalia of the everyday world from which I, with my stunning marriage, had exiled myself.

Into marriage, into exile; I sensed it, I knew it--that, henceforth, I would always be lonely. Yet that was part of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsy's magic ball, so that I could not take my eyes off it when I played the piano. This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his scent of Russian leather--all had conspired to seduce me so utterly that I could not say I felt one single twinge of regret for the world of tar-tines and maman that now receded from me as if drawn away on a string, like a child's toy, as the train began to throb again as if in delighted anticipation of the distance it would take me.

The first grey streamers of the dawn now flew in the sky and an eldritch half-light seeped into the railway carriage. I heard no change in his breathing but my heightened, excited senses told me he was awake and gazing at me. A huge man, an enormous man, and his eyes, dark and motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi, fixed upon me. I felt a certain tension in the pit of my stomach, to be so watched, in such silence. A match struck. He was igniting a Romeo y Julieta fat as a baby's arm.

'Soon,' he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival head. Then the flame died, the cigar glowed and filled the compartment with a remembered fragrance that made me think of my father, how he would hug me in a warm fug of Havana, when I was a little girl, before he kissed me and left me and died.

As soon as my husband handed me down from the high step of the train, I smelled the amniotic salinity of the ocean. It was November; the trees, stunted by the Atlantic gales, were bare and the lonely halt was deserted but for his leather-gaitered chauffeur waiting meekly beside the sleek black motor car. It was cold; I drew my furs about me, a wrap of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.) The bell clanged; the straining train leapt its leash and left us at that lonely wayside halt where only he and I had descended. Oh, the wonder of it; how all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his convenience. The richest man in France. 'Madame.'

The chauffeur eyed me; was he comparing me, invidiously, to the countess, the artist's model, the opera singer? I hid behind my furs as if they were a system of soft shields. My husband liked me to wear my opal over my kid glove, a showy, theatrical trick--but the moment the ironic chauffeur glimpsed its simmering flash he smiled, as though it was proof positive I was his master's wife. And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger- lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream.

Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea--a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continuously on the point of melting. A landscape with all the deliquescent harmonies of Debussy, of the études I played for him, the reverie I'd been playing that afternoon in the salon of the princess where I'd first met him, among the teacups and the little cakes, I, the orphan, hired out of charity to give them their digestive of music.

And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day ... that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!

The tide was low; at this hour, so early in the morning, the causeway rose up out of the sea. As the car turned on to the wet cobbles between the slow margins of water, he reached out for my hand that had his sultry, witchy ring on it, pressed my fingers, kissed my palm with extraordinary tenderness. His face was as still as ever I'd seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over, yet his lips, that always looked so strangely red and naked between the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little. He smiled; he welcomed his bride home.

No room, no corridor that did not rustle with the sound of the sea and all the ceilings, the walls on which his ancestors in the stern regalia of rank lined up with their dark eyes and white faces, were stippled with refracted light from the waves which were always in motion; that luminous, murmurous castle of which I was the chatelaine, I, the little music student whose mother had sold all her jewellery, even her wedding ring, to pay the fees at the Conservatoire.

First of all, there was the small ordeal of my initial interview with the housekeeper, who kept this extraordinary machine, this anchored, castellated ocean liner, in smooth running order no matter who stood on the bridge; how tenuous, I thought, might be my authority here! She had a bland, pale, impassive, dislikeable face beneath the impeccably starched white linen head-dress of the region. Her greeting, correct but lifeless, chilled me; daydreaming, I dared presume too much on my status ... briefly wondered how I might install my old nurse, so much loved, however cosily incompetent, in her place. Ill- considered schemings! He told me this one had been his foster mother; was bound to his family in the utmost feudal complicity, 'as much part of the house as I am, my dear'. Now her thin lips offered me a proud little smile. She would be my ally as long as I was his. And with that, I must be content.

But, here, it would be easy to be content. In the turret suite he had given me for my very own, I could gaze out over the tumultuous Atlantic and imagine myself the Queen of the Sea. There was a Bechstein for me in the music room and, on the wall, another wedding present--an early Flemish primitive of Saint

Cecilia at her celestial organ. In the prim charm of this saint, with her plump, sallow cheeks and crinkled brown hair, I saw myself as I could have wished to be. I warmed to a loving sensitivity I had not hitherto suspected in him. Then he led me up a delicate spiral staircase to my bedroom; before she discreetly vanished, the housekeeper set him chuckling with some, I dare say, lewd blessing for newlyweds in her native Breton. That I did not understand. That he, smiling, refused to interpret.

And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home, with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains, billowing in the sea breeze. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls, in stately frames of contorted gold, that reflected more white lilies than I'd ever seen in my life before. He'd filled the room with them, to greet the bride, the young bride. The young bride, who had become that multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors, identical in their chic navy blue tailor-mades, for travelling, madame, or walking. A maid had dealt with the furs. Henceforth, a maid would deal with everything.

'See,' he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. 'I have acquired a whole harem for myself!'

I found that I was trembling. My breath came thickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away, out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly, methodically, teasingly, unfasten the buttons of my jacket and slip it from my shoulders. Enough! No; more! Off comes the skirt; and, next, the blouse of apricot linen that cost more than the dress I had for first communion. The play of the waves outside in the cold sun glittered on his monocle; his movements seemed to me deliberately coarse, vulgar. The blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there.

And yet, you see, I guessed it might be so--that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in which I lived, to have heard hints of his world?

He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke--but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite. And when nothing but my scarlet, palpitating core remained, I saw, in the mirror, the living image of an etching by Rops from the collection he had shown me when our engagement permitted us to be alone together ... the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb.

He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. And so my purchaser unwrapped his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring.

At once he closed my legs like a book and I saw again the rare movement of his lips that meant he smiled.

Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.

And I began to shudder, like a racehorse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars, those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.

This scene from a voluptuary's life was now abruptly terminated. It turns out he has business to attend to; his estates, his companies--even on your honeymoon? Even then, said the red lips that kissed me before he left me alone with my bewildered senses--a wet, silken brush from his beard; a hint of the pointed tip of the tongue. Disgruntled, I wrapped a neglige of antique lace around me to sip the little breakfast of hot chocolate the maid brought me; after that, since it was second nature to me, there was nowhere to go but the music room and soon I settled down at my piano.

Yet only a series of subtle discords flowed from beneath my fingers: out of tune ... only a little out of tune; but I'd been blessed with perfect pitch and could not bear to play any more. Sea breezes are bad for pianos; we shall need a resident piano-tuner on the premises if I'm to continue with my studies! I flung down the lid in a little fury of disappointment; what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me?

I shivered to think of that.

His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russian leather. Row upon row of calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to recline on. A lectern, carved like a spread eagle, that held open upon it an edition of Huysmans's Là-bas, from some over-exquisite private press; it had been bound like a missal, in brass, with gems of coloured glass. The rugs on the floor, deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the heart's dearest blood, came from Isfahan and Bokhara; the dark panelling gleamed; there was the lulling music of the sea and a fire of apple logs. The flames flickered along the spines inside a glass-fronted case that held books still crisp and new. Eliphas Levy; the name meant nothing to me. I squinted at a title or two: The Initiation, The Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandora's Box, and yawned. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year-old girl waiting for her first embrace. I should have liked, best of all, a novel in yellow paper; I wanted to curl up on the rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch sticky liqueur chocolates. If I rang for them, a maid would bring me chocolates.

Nevertheless, I opened the doors of that bookcase idly to browse. And I think I knew, I knew by some tingling of the fingertips, even before I opened that slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside it. When he showed me the Rops, newly bought, dearly prized, had he not hinted that he was a connoisseur of such things? Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held. The picture had a caption: 'Reproof of curiosity'. My mother, with all the precision of her eccentricity, had told me what it was that lovers did; I was innocent but not naïve. The Adventures of Eulalie at the Harem of the Grand Turk had been printed, according to the flyleaf, in Amsterdam in 1748, a rare collector's piece. Had some ancestor brought it back himself from that northern city? Or had my husband bought it for himself, from one of those dusty little bookshops on the Left Bank where an old man peers at you through spectacles an inch thick, daring you to inspect his wares ... I turned the pages in the anticipation of fear; the print was rusty. Here was another steel engraving: 'Immolation of the wives of the Sultan'. I knew enough for what I saw in that book to make me gasp.

There was a pungent intensification of the odour of leather that suffused his library; his shadow fell across the massacre.

'My little nun has found the prayerbooks, has she?' he demanded, with a curious mixture of mockery and relish; then, seeing my painful, furious bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands and put it down on the sofa.

'Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn't play with grownups' toys until she's learned how to handle them, must she?'

Then he kissed me. And with, this time, no reticence. He kissed me and laid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beneath the sheath of ancient lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the carved, gilded bed on which he had been conceived. I stammered foolishly: We've not taken luncheon yet; and, besides, it is broad daylight...

All the better to see you.

He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade. With trembling fingers, I fastened the thing about my neck. It was cold as ice and chilled me. He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could the better kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned:' Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.'

A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.

I was brought to my senses by the insistent shrilling of the telephone. He lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had been fighting with me. In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.

I gathered myself together, reached into the cloisonne cupboard beside the bed that concealed the telephone and addressed the mouthpiece. His agent in New York. Urgent.

I shook him awake and rolled over on my side, cradling my spent body in my arms. His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour. Those somnolent lilies, that wave their heavy heads, distributing their lush, insolent incense reminiscent of pampered flesh.

When he'd finished with the agent, he turned to me and stroked the ruby necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased flinching and he caressed my breasts. My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt her? He's so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help himself; you see, he loves her so ... and this lover's recitative of his brought my tears in a flood. I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it. For a while, he murmured to me in a voice I'd never heard before, a voice like the soft consolations of the sea. But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York had called with such urgent business that he must leave as soon as the tide was low enough. Leave the castle? Leave France! And would be away for at least six weeks.

'But it is our honeymoon!'

A deal, an enterprise of hazard and chance involving several millions, lay in the balance, he said. He drew away from me into that waxworks stillness of his; I was only a little girl, I did not understand. And, he said unspoken to my wounded vanity, I have had too many honeymoons to find them in the least pressing commitments. I know quite well that this child I've bought with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts won't run away. But, after he'd called his Paris agent to book a passage for the States next day--just one tiny call, my little one--we should have time for dinner together.

And I had to be content with that.

A Mexican dish of pheasant with hazelnuts and chocolate; salad; white, voluptuous cheese; a sorbet of muscat grapes and Asti spumante. A celebration of Krug exploded festively. And then acrid black coffee in precious little cups so fine it shadowed the birds with which they were painted. I had Cointreau, he had cognac in the library, with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to perch on his knee in a leather armchair beside the flickering log fire. He had made me change into that chaste little Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, each one, with a pink eye open. But he would not let me take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very uncomfortable, nor fasten up my descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still remained a wounded presence between us. He twined his fingers in my hair until I winced; I said, I remember, very little.

'The maid will have changed our sheets already,' he said. 'We do not hang the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are a virgin, not in these civilized times. But I should tell you it would have been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my interested tenants such a flag.'

Then I realized, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him--the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Terrasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that luxurious place, how unease had been my constant companion during the whole length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrized my hair. To know that my naivety gave him some pleasure made me take heart.

Courage! I shall act the fine lady to the manner born one day, if only by virtue of default.

Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great, mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket--key after key, a key, he said, for every lock in the house. Keys of all kinds--huge, ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. And, during his absence, it was I who must take care of them all.

I eyed the heavy bunch with circumspection. Until that moment, I had not given a single thought to the practical aspects of marriage with a great house, great wealth, a great man, whose key ring was as crowded as that of a prison warder. Here were the clumsy and archaic keys for the dungeons, for dungeons we had in plenty although they had been converted to cellars for his wines; the dusty bottles inhabited in racks all those deep holes of pain in the rock on which the castle was built. These are the keys to the kitchens, this is the key to the picture gallery, a treasure house filled by five centuries of avid collectors--ah! he foresaw I would spend hours there.

He had amply indulged his taste for the Symbolists, he told me with a glint of greed. There was Moreau's great portrait of his first wife, the famous Sacrificial Victim with the imprint of the lacelike chains on her pellucid skin. Did I know the story of the painting of that picture? How, when she took off her clothes for him for the first time, she fresh from her bar in Montmartre, she had robed herself involuntarily in a blush that reddened her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, her whole body? He had thought of that story, of that dear girl, when first he had undressed me ... Ensor, the great Ensor, his monolithic canvas: The Foolish Virgins. Two or three late Gauguins, his special favourite the one of the tranced brown girl in the deserted house which was called: Out of the Night We Come, Into the Night We Go. And, besides the additions he had made himself, his marvellous inheritance of Watteaus, Poussins and a pair of very special Fragonards, commissioned for a licentious ancestor who, it was said, had posed for the master's brush himself with his own two daughters ... He broke off his catalogue of treasures abruptly.

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.

A log fell in the fire, instigating a shower of sparks; the opal on my finger spurted green flame. I felt as giddy as if I were on the edge of a precipice; I was afraid, not so much of him, of his monstrous presence, heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us, the presence that, even when I thought myself most in love with him, always subtly oppressed me ... No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet--might there not be a grain of beastly truth hi them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

Here is the key to the china cabinet--don't laugh, my darling; there's a king's ransom in Sèvres in that closet, and a queen's ransom in Limoges. And a key to the locked, barred room where five generations of plate were kept.

Keys, keys, keys. He would trust me with the keys to his office, although I was only a baby; and the keys to his safes, where he kept the jewels I should wear, he promised me, when we returned to Paris. Such jewels! Why, I would be able to change my earrings and necklaces three times a day, just as the Empress Josephine used to change her underwear. He doubted, he said, with that hollow, knocking sound that served him for a chuckle, I would be quite so interested in his share certificates although they, of course, were worth infinitely more.

Outside our firelit privacy, I could hear the sound of the tide drawing back from the pebbles of the foreshore; it was nearly time for him to leave me. One single key remained unaccounted for on the ring and he hesitated over it; for a moment, I thought he was going to unfasten it from its brothers, slip it back into his pocket and take it away with him.

'What is that key?' I demanded, for his chaffing had made me bold. 'The key to your heart? Give it me!'

He dangled the key tantalizingly above my head, out of reach of my straining fingers; those bare red lips of his cracked sidelong in a smile.

'Ah, no,' he said. 'Not the key to my heart. Rather, the key to my enfer.'

He left it on the ring, fastened the ring together, shook it musically, like a carillon. Then threw the keys in a jingling heap in my lap. I could feel the cold metal chilling my thighs through my thin muslin frock. He bent over me to drop a beard-masked kiss on my forehead.

'Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife,' he said. 'Promise me this, my whey- faced piano-player; promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you. Play with anything you find, jewels, silver plate; make toy boats of my share certificates, if it pleases you, and send them sailing off to America after me. All is yours, everywhere is open to you--except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you ventured there. Oh, and you'd find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alone. It is only a private study, a hideaway, a "den", as the English say, where I can go, sometimes, on those infrequent yet inevitable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.'

There was a little thin starlight in the courtyard as, wrapped in my furs, I saw him to his car. His last words were, that he had telephoned the mainland and taken a piano-tuner on to the staff; this man would arrive to take up his duties the next day. He pressed me to his vicuña breast, once, and then drove away.

I had drowsed away that afternoon and now I could not sleep. I lay tossing and turning in his ancestral bed until another daybreak discoloured the dozen mirrors that were iridescent with the reflections of the sea. The perfume of the lilies weighed on my senses; when I thought that, henceforth, I would always share these sheets with a man whose skin, as theirs did, contained that toad-like, clammy hint of moisture, I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food, for the renewal of his caresses. Had he not hinted to me, in his flesh as in his speech and looks, of the thousand, thousand baroque intersections of flesh upon flesh? I lay in our wide bed accompanied by, a sleepless companion, my dark newborn curiosity.

I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me.

Were there jewels enough in all his safes to recompense me for this predicament? Did all that castle hold enough riches to recompense me for the company of the libertine with whom I must share it? And what, precisely, was the nature of my desirous dread for this mysterious being who, to show his mastery over me, had abandoned me on my wedding night?

Then I sat straight up in bed, under the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me, riven by a wild surmise. Might he have left me, not for Wall Street but for an importunate mistress tucked away God knows where who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl whose fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios? And, slowly, soothed, I sank back on to the heaping pillows; I acknowledged that the jealous scare I'd just given myself was not unmixed with a little tincture of relief.

At last I drifted into slumber, as daylight filled the room and chased bad dreams away. But the last thing I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water.

Coffee and croissants to console this bridal, solitary waking. Delicious. Honey, too, in a section of comb on a glass saucer. The maid squeezed the aromatic juice from an orange into a chilled goblet while I watched her as I lay in the lazy, midday bed of the rich. Yet nothing, this morning, gave me more than a fleeting pleasure except to hear that the piano-tuner had been at work already. When the maid told me that, I sprang out of bed and pulled on my old serge skirt and flannel blouse, costume of a student, in which I felt far more at ease with myself than in any of my fine new clothes.

After my three hours of practice, I called the piano-tuner in, to thank him. He was blind, of course; but young, with a gentle mouth and grey eyes that fixed upon me although they could not see me. He was a blacksmith's son from the village across the causeway; a chorister in the church whom the good priest had taught a trade so that he could make a living. All most satisfactory. Yes. He thought he would be happy here. And if, he added shyly, he might sometimes be allowed to hear me play ... for, you see, he loved music. Yes. Of course, I said. Certainly. He seemed to know that I had smiled.

After I dismissed him, even though I'd woken so late, it was still barely time for my 'five o'clock'. The housekeeper, who, thoughtfully forewarned by my husband, had restrained herself from interrupting my music, now made me a solemn visitation with a lengthy menu for a late luncheon. When I told her I did not need it, she looked at me obliquely, along her nose. I understood at once that one of my principal functions as chatelaine was to provide work for the staff. But, all the same, I asserted myself and said I would wait until dinner-time, although I looked forward nervously to the solitary meal. Then I found I had to tell her what I would like to have prepared for me; my imagination, still that of a schoolgirl, ran riot. A fowl in cream--or should I anticipate Christmas with a varnished turkey? No; I have decided.

Avocado and shrimp, lots of it, followed by no entrée at all. But surprise me for dessert with every ice- cream in the ice box. She noted all down but sniffed; I'd shocked her. Such tastes! Child that I was, I giggled when she left me.

But, now ... what shall I do, now?

I could have spent a happy hour unpacking the trunks that contained my trousseau but the maid had done that already, the dresses, the tailor-mades hung in the wardrobe in my dressing room, the hats on wooden heads to keep their shape, the shoes on wooden feet as if all these inanimate objects were imitating the appearance of life, to mock me. I did not like to linger in my overcrowded dressing room, nor in my lugubriously lily-scented bedroom. How shall I pass the time?

I shall take a bath in my own bathroom! And found the taps were little dolphins made of gold, with chips of turquoise for eyes. And there was a tank of goldfish, who swam in and out of moving fronds of weeds, as bored, I thought, as I was. How I wished he had not left me. How I wished it were possible to chat with, say, a maid; or, the piano-tuner ... but I knew already my new rank forbade overtures of friendship to the staff.

I had been hoping to defer the call as long as I could, so that I should have something to look forward to in the dead waste of time I foresaw before me, after my dinner was done with, but, at a quarter before seven, when darkness already surrounded the castle, I could contain myself no longer. I telephoned my mother. And astonished myself by bursting into tears when I heard her voice.

No, nothing was the matter. Mother, I have gold bath taps. I said, gold bath taps! No; I suppose that's nothing to cry about, Mother.

The line was bad, I could hardly make out her congratulations, her questions, her concern, but I was a little comforted when I put the receiver down.

Yet there still remained one whole hour to dinner and the whole, unimaginable desert of the rest of the evening.

The bunch of keys lay, where he had left them, on the rug before the library fire which had warmed their metal so that they no longer felt cold to the touch but warm, almost, as my own skin. How careless I was; a maid, tending the logs, eyed me reproachfully as if I'd set a trap for her as I picked up the clinking bundle of keys, the keys to the interior doors of this lovely prison of which I was both the inmate and the mistress and had scarcely seen. When I remembered that, I felt the exhilaration of the explorer.

Lights! More lights!

At the touch of a switch, the dreaming library was brilliantly illuminated. I ran crazily about the castle, switching on every light I could find--I ordered the servants to light up all their quarters, too, so the castle would shine like a seaborne birthday cake lit with a thousand candles, one for every year of its life, and everybody on shore would wonder at it. When everything was lit as brightly as the café in the Gare du Nord, the significance of the possessions implied by that bunch of keys no longer intimidated me, for I was determined, now, to search through them all for evidence of my husband's true nature. His office first, evidently.

A mahogany desk half a mile wide, with an impeccable blotter and a bank of telephones. I allowed myself the luxury of opening the safe that contained the jewellery and delved sufficiently among the leather boxes to find out how my marriage had given me access to a jinn's treasury--parures, bracelets, rings ... While I was thus surrounded by diamonds, a maid knocked on the door and entered before I spoke; a subtle discourtesy. I would speak to my husband about it. She eyed my serge skirt superciliously; did madame plan to dress for dinner?

She made a moue of disdain when I laughed to hear that, she was far more the lady than I. But, imagine-- to dress up in one of my Poiret extravaganzas, with the jewelled turban and aigrette on my head, roped with pearl to the navel, to sit down all alone in the baronial dining hall at the head of that massive board at which King Mark was reputed to have fed his knights ... I grew calmer under the cold eye of her disapproval. I adopted the crisp inflections of an officer's daughter. No, I would not dress for dinner.

Furthermore, I was not hungry enough for dinner itself. She must tell the housekeeper to cancel the dormitory feast I'd ordered. Could they leave me sandwiches and a flask of coffee in my music room? And would they all dismiss for the night?

Mais oui, madame.

I knew by her bereft intonation I had let them down again but I did not care; I was armed against them by the brilliance of his hoard. But I would not find his heart amongst the glittering stones; as soon as she had gone, I began a systematic search of the drawers of his desk.

All was in order, so I found nothing. Not a random doodle on an old envelope, nor the faded photograph of a woman. Only the files of business correspondence, the bills from the home farms, the invoices from tailors, the billets-doux from international financiers. Nothing. And this absence of the evidence of his real life began to impress me strangely; there must, I thought, be a great deal to conceal if he takes such pains to hide it.

His office was a singularly impersonal room, facing inwards, on to the courtyard, as though he wanted to turn his back on the siren sea in order to keep a clear head while he bankrupted a small businessman in Amsterdam or--I noticed with a thrill of distaste--engaged in some business in Laos that must, from certain cryptic references to his amateur botanist's enthusiasm for rare poppies, be to do with opium. Was he not rich enough to do without crime? Or was the crime itself his profit? And yet I saw enough to appreciate his zeal for secrecy.

Now I had ransacked his desk, I must spend a cool-headed quarter of an hour putting every last letter back where I had found it, and, as I covered the traces of my visit, by some chance, as I reached inside a little drawer that had stuck fast, I must have touched a hidden spring, for a secret drawer flew open within that drawer itself; and this secret drawer contained--at last!--a file marked: Personal.

I was alone, but for my reflection in the uncurtained window.

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.

I could have wished, perhaps, I had not found that touching, ill-spelt note, on a paper napkin marked La Coupole, that began: 'My darling, I cannot wait for the moment when you may make me yours completely.' The diva had sent him a page of the score of Tristan, the Liebestod, with the single, cryptic word: 'Until...' scrawled across it. But the strangest of all these love letters was a postcard with a view of a village graveyard, among mountains, where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave; this little scene, executed with the lurid exuberance of Grand Guignol, was captioned: 'Typical Transylvanian Scene--Midnight, All Hallows.' And, on the other side, the message: 'On the occasion of this marriage to the descendant of Dracula--always remember, "the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil". Toutes amitiés, C.'

A joke. A joke in the worst possible taste; for had he not been married to a Romanian countess? And then I remembered her pretty, witty face, and her name--Carmilla. My most recent predecessor in this castle had been, it would seem, the most sophisticated.

I put away the file, sobered. Nothing in my life of family love and music had prepared me for these grown-up games and yet these were clues to his self that showed me, at least, how much he had been loved, even if they did not reveal any good reason for it. But I wanted to know still more; and, as I closed the office door and locked it, the means to discover more fell in my way.

Fell, indeed; and with the clatter of a dropped canteen of cutlery, for, as I turned the slick Yale lock, I contrived, somehow, to open up the key ring itself, so that all the keys tumbled loose on the floor. And the very first key I picked out of that pile was, as luck or ill fortune had it, the key to the room he had forbidden me, the room he would keep for his own so that he could go there when he wished to feel himself once more a bachelor.

I made my decision to explore it before I felt a faint resurgence of my ill-defined fear of his waxen stillness. Perhaps I half-imagined, then, that I might find his real self in his den, waiting there to see if indeed I had obeyed him; that he had sent a moving figure of himself to New York, the enigmatic, self- sustaining carapace of his public person, while the real man, whose face I had glimpsed in the storm of orgasm, occupied himself with pressing private business in the study at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room. Yet, if that were so, it was imperative that I should find him, should know him; and I was too deluded by his apparent taste for me to think my disobedience might truly offend him.

I took the forbidden key from the heap and left the others lying there.

It was now very late and the castle was adrift, as far as it could go from the land, in the middle of the silent ocean where, at my orders, it floated, like a garland of light. And all silent, all still, but for the murmuring of the waves.

I felt no fear, no intimation of dread. Now I walked as firmly as I had done in my mother's house.

Not a narrow, dusty little passage at all; why had he lied to me? But an ill-lit one, certainly; the electricity, for some reason, did not extend here, so I retreated to the still-room and found a bundle of waxed tapers in a cupboard, stored there with matches to light the oak board at grand dinners. I put a match to my little taper and advanced with it in my hand, like a penitent, along the corridor hung with heavy, I think Venetian, tapestries. The flame picked out, here, the head of a man, there, the rich breast of a woman spilling through a rent in her dress--the Rape of the Sabines, perhaps? The naked swords and immolated horses suggested some grisly mythological subject. The corridor wound downwards; there was an almost imperceptible ramp to the thickly carpeted floor. The heavy hangings on the wall muffled my footsteps, even my breathing. For some reason, it grew very warm; the sweat sprang out in beads on my brow. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea.

A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the castle; and this corridor led to a door of worm-eaten oak, low, round-topped, barred with black iron.

And still I felt no fear, no raising of the hairs on the back of the neck, no prickling of the thumbs. The key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot knife into butter.

No fear; but a hesitation, a holding of the spiritual breath.

If I had found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean privacy, I might find a little of his soul. It was the consciousness of the possibility of such a discovery, of its possible strangeness, that kept me for a moment motionless, before, in the foolhardiness of my already subtly tainted innocence, I turned the key and the door creaked slowly back.

'There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,' opined my husband's favourite poet; I had learned something of the nature of that similarity on my marriage bed. And now my taper showed me the outlines of a rack. There was also a great wheel, like the ones I had seen in woodcuts of the martyrdoms of the saints, in my old nurse's little store of holy books. And--just one glimpse of it before my little flame caved in and I was left in absolute darkness--a metal figure, hinged at the side, which I knew to be spiked on the inside and to have the name: the Iron Maiden.

Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation.

Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China; My mother's spirit drove me on, into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst. I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim, lugubrious light they gave! And yet, enough, oh, more than enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation.

The walls of this stark torture chamber were the naked rock; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright. At the four corners of the room were funerary urns, of great antiquity, Etruscan, perhaps, and, on three-legged ebony stands, the bowls of incense he had left burning which filled the room with a sacerdotal reek. Wheel, rack and Iron Maiden were, I saw, displayed as grandly as if they were items of statuary and I was almost consoled, then, and almost persuaded myself that I might have stumbled only upon a little museum of his perversity, that he had installed these monstrous items here only for contemplation.

Yet at the centre of the room lay a catafalque, a doomed, ominous bier of Renaissance workmanship, surrounded by long white candles and, at its foot, an armful of the same lilies with which he had filled my bedroom, stowed in a four-foot-high jar glazed with a sombre Chinese red. I scarcely dared examine this catafalque and its occupant more closely; yet I knew I must.

Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her bed, it seemed a garment of that innocence of mine for which he had lusted fell away from me.

The opera singer lay, quite naked, under a thin sheet of very rare and precious linen, such as the princes of Italy used to shroud those whom they had poisoned. I touched her, very gently, on the white breast; she was cool, he had embalmed her. On her throat I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers. The cool, sad flame of the candles flickered on her white, closed eyelids. The worst thing was, the dead lips smiled.

Beyond the catafalque, in the middle of the shadows, a white, nacreous glimmer; as my eyes accustomed themselves to the gathering darkness, I at last--oh, horrors!--made out a skull; yes, a skull, so utterly denuded, now, of flesh, that it scarcely seemed possible the stark bone had once been richly upholstered with life. And this skull was strung up by a system of unseen cords, so that it appeared to hang, disembodied, in the still, heavy air, and it had been crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride.

Yet the skull was still so beautiful, had shaped with its sheer planes so imperiously the face that had once existed above it, that I recognized her the moment I saw her; face of the evening star walking on the rim of night. One false step, oh, my poor, dear girl, next in the fated sisterhood of his wives; one false step and into the abyss of the dark you stumbled.

And where was she, the latest dead, the Romanian countess who might have thought her blood would survive his depredations? I knew she must be here, in the place that had wound me through the castle towards it on a spool of inexorability. But, at first, I could see no sign of her. Then, for some reason-- perhaps some change of atmosphere wrought by my presence--the metal shell of the Iron Maiden emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guessed its occupant was trying to clamber out, though, even in the midst of my rising hysteria, I knew she must be dead to find a home there.

With trembling fingers, I prised open the front of the upright coffin, with its sculpted face caught in a rictus of pain. Then, overcome, I dropped the key I still held in my other hand. It dropped into the forming pool of her blood.

She was pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes, this child of the land of the vampires who seemed so newly dead, so full of blood ... oh God! how recently had he become a widower? How long had he kept her in this obscene cell? Had it been all the time he had courted me, in the clear light of Paris?

I closed the lid of her coffin very gently and burst into a tumult of sobbing that contained both pity for his other victims and also a dreadful anguish to know I, too, was one of them.

The candles flared, as if in a draught from a door to elsewhere. The light caught the fire opal on my hand so that it flashed, once, with a baleful light, as if to tell me the eye of God--his eye--was upon me. My first thought, when I saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was, how to escape it.

I retained sufficient presence of mind to snuff out the candles round the bier with my fingers, to gather up my taper, to look around, although shuddering, to ensure I had left behind me no traces of my visit.

I retrieved the key from the pool of blood, wrapped it in my handkerchief to keep my hands clean, and fled the room, slamming the door behind me. It crashed to with a juddering reverberation, like the door of hell.

I could not take refuge in my bedroom, for that retained the memory of his presence trapped in the fathomless silvering of his mirrors. My music room seemed the safest place, although I looked at the picture of Saint Cecilia with a faint dread; what had been the nature of her martyrdom? My mind was in a tumult; schemes for flight jostled with one another ... as soon as the tide receded from the causeway, I would make for the mainland--on foot, running, stumbling; I did not trust that leather-clad chauffeur, nor the well-behaved housekeeper, and I dared not take any of the pale, ghostly maids into my confidence, either, since they were his creatures, all. Once at the village, I would fling myself directly on the mercy of the gendarmerie.

But--could I trust them, either? His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight centuries, from this castle whose moat was the Atlantic. Might not the police, the advocates, even the judge, all be in his service, turning a common blind eye to his vices since he was milord whose word must be obeyed? Who, on this distant coast, would believe the white-faced girl from Paris who came running to them with a shuddering tale of blood, of fear, of the ogre murmuring in the shadows? Or, rather, they would immediately know it to be true. But were all honour-bound to let me carry it no further.

Assistance. My mother. I ran to the telephone; and the line, of course, was dead. Dead as his wives.

A thick darkness, unlit by any star, still glazed the windows. Every lamp in my room burned, to keep the dark outside, yet it seemed still to encroach on me, to be present beside me but as if masked by my lights, the night like a permeable substance that could seep into my skin. I looked at the precious little clock made from hypocritically innocent flowers long ago, in Dresden; the hands had scarcely moved one single hour forward from when I first descended to that private slaughterhouse of his. Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning.

And yet the time might still be my friend; at that hour, that very hour, he set sail for New York.

To know that, in a few moments, my husband would have left France calmed my agitation a little. My reason told me I had nothing to fear; the tide that would take him away to the New World would let me out of the imprisonment of the castle. Surely I could easily evade the servants. Anybody can buy a ticket at a railway station. Yet I was still rilled with unease. I opened the lid of the piano; perhaps I thought my own particular magic might help me, now, that I could create a pentacle out of music that would keep me from harm for, if my music had first ensnared him, then might it not also give me the power to free myself from him?

Mechanically, I began to play but my fingers were stiff and shaking. At first, I could manage nothing better than the exercises of Czerny but simply the act of playing soothed me and, for solace, for the sake of the harmonious rationality of its sublime mathematics, I searched among his scores until I found The Well-Tempered Clavier. I set myself the therapeutic task of playing all Bach's equations, every one, and, I told myself, if I played them all through without a single mistake--then the morning would find me once more a virgin. 

Crash of a dropped stick.

His silver-headed cane! What else? Sly, cunning, he had returned; he was waiting for me outside the door!

I rose to my feet; fear gave me strength. I flung back my head defiantly. 'Come in!' My voice astonished me by its firmness, its clarity.

The door slowly, nervously opened and I saw, not the massive, irredeemable bulk of my husband but the slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner, and he looked far more terrified of me than my mother's daughter would have been of the Devil himself. In the torture chamber, it seemed to me that I would never laugh again; now, helplessly, laugh I did, with relief, and, after a moment's hesitation, the boy's face softened and he smiled a little, almost in shame. Though they were blind, his eyes were singularly sweet.

'Forgive me,' said Jean-Yves. 'I know I've given you grounds for dismissing me, that I should be crouching outside your door at midnight ... but I heard you walking about, up and down--I sleep in a room at the foot of the west tower--and some intuition told me you could not sleep and might, perhaps, pass the insomniac hours at your piano. And I could not resist that. Besides, I stumbled over these--'

And he displayed the ring of keys I'd dropped outside my husband's office door, the ring from which one key was missing. I took them from him, looked round for a place to stow them, fixed on the piano stool as if to hide them would protect me. Still he stood smiling at me. How hard it was to make everyday conversation.

'It's perfect,' I said. 'The piano. Perfectly in tune.'

But he was full of the loquacity of embarrassment, as though I would only forgive him for his impudence if he explained the cause of it thoroughly.

'When I heard you play this afternoon, I thought I'd never heard such a touch. Such technique. A treat for me, to hear a virtuoso! So I crept up to your door now, humbly as a little dog might, madame, and put my ear to the keyhole and listened, and listened--until my stick fell to the floor through a momentary clumsiness of mine, and I was discovered.'

He had the most touchingly ingenuous smile.

'Perfectly in tune,' I repeated. To my surprise, now I had said it, I found I could not say anything else. I could only repeat: 'In tune ... perfect ... in tune,' over and over again. I saw a dawning surprise in his face. My head throbbed. To see him, in his lovely, blind humanity, seemed to hurt me very piercingly, somewhere inside my breast; his figure blurred, the room swayed about me. After the dreadful revelation of that bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made me faint.

When I recovered consciousness, I found I was lying in the piano-tuner's arms and he was tucking the satin cushion from the piano-stool under my head.

'You are in some great distress,' he said. 'No bride should suffer so much, so early in her marriage.' His speech had the rhythms of the countryside, the rhythms of the tides.

'Any bride brought to this castle should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a coffin with her,' I said.

'What's this?'

It was too late to keep silent; and if he, too, were one of my husband's creatures, then at least he had been kind to me. So I told him everything, the keys, the interdiction, my disobedience, the room, the rack, the skull, the corpses, the blood.

'I can scarcely believe it,' he said, wondering. 'That man ... so rich; so well-born.'

'Here's proof,' I said and tumbled the fatal key out of my handkerchief on to the silken rug. 'Oh God,' he said. 'I can smell the blood.'

He took my hand; he pressed his arms about me. Although he was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch.

'We whisper all manner of strange tales up and down the coast,' he said.' There was a Marquis, once, who used to hunt young girls on the mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes. My grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the blacksmith while the man was shoeing his horse. "A fine specimen of the genus, brunette, eh, Guillaume?" And it was the head of the blacksmith's wife.'

But, in these more democratic times, my husband must travel as far as Paris to do his hunting in the salons. Jean-Yves knew the moment I shuddered.

'Oh, madame! I thought all these were old wives' tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children into good behaviour! Yet how could you know, a stranger, that the old name for this place is the Castle of Murder?'

How could I know, indeed? Except that, in my heart, I'd always known its lord would be the death of me.

'Hark!' said my friend suddenly. 'The sea has changed key; it must be near morning, the tide is going down.'

He helped me up. I looked from the window, towards the mainland, along the causeway where the stones gleamed wetly in the thin light of the end of the night and, with an almost unimaginable horror, a horror the intensity of which I cannot transmit to you, I saw, in the distance, still far away yet drawing moment by moment inexorably nearer, the twin headlamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist.

My husband had indeed returned; this time, it was no fancy.

'The key!' said Jean-Yves. 'It must go back on the ring, with the others. As though nothing had happened.' But the key was still caked with wet blood and I ran to my bathroom and held it under the hot tap.

Crimson water swirled down the basin but, as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck. The turquoise eyes of the dolphin taps winked at me derisively; they knew my husband had been too clever for me! I scrubbed the stain with my nail brush but still it would not budge. I thought how the car would be rolling silently towards the closed courtyard gate; the more I scrubbed the key, the more vivid grew the stain.

The bell in the gatehouse would jangle. The porter's drowsy son would push back the patchwork quilt, yawning, pull the shirt over his head, thrust his feet into his sabots ... slowly, slowly; open the door for your master as slowly as you can ...

And still the bloodstain mocked the fresh water that spilled from the mouth of the leering dolphin. 'You have no more time,' said Jean-Yves. 'He is here. I know it. I must stay with you.'

'You shall not!' I said. 'Go back to your room, now. Please.'

He hesitated. I put an edge of steel in my voice, for I knew I must meet my lord alone. 'Leave me!'

As soon as he had gone, I dealt with the keys and went to my bedroom. The causeway was empty; Jean- Yves was correct, my husband had already entered the castle. I pulled the curtains close, stripped off my clothes and pulled the bedcurtains round me as a pungent aroma of Russian leather assured me my husband was once again beside me. 'Dearest!'

With the most treacherous, lascivious tenderness, he kissed my eyes, and, mimicking the new bride newly wakened, I flung my arms around him, for on my seeming acquiescence depended my salvation.

'Da Silva of Rio outwitted me,' he said wryly.' My New York agent telegraphed Le Havre and saved me a wasted journey. So we may resume our interrupted pleasures, my love.'

I did not believe one word of it. I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge.

The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at that charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner.

His hand brushed my breast, beneath the sheet. I strained my nerves yet could not help but flinch from the intimate touch, for it made me think of the piercing embrace of the Iron Maiden and of his lost lovers in the vault. When he saw my reluctance, his eyes veiled over and yet his appetite did not diminish. His tongue ran over red lips already wet. Silent, mysterious, he moved away from me to draw off his jacket.

He took the gold watch from his waistcoat and laid it on the dressing table, like a good bourgeois; scooped out his raiding loose change and now--oh God!--makes a great play of patting his pockets officiously, puzzled lips pursed, searching for something that has been mislaid. Then turns to me with a ghastly, a triumphant smile.

'But of course! I gave the keys to you!'

'Your keys? Why, of course. Here, they're under the pillow; wait a moment--what--Ah! No ... now, where can I have left them? I was whiling away the evening without you at the piano, I remember. Of course! The music room!'

Brusquely he flung my négligé of antique lace on the bed. 'Go and get them.'

'Now? This moment? Can't it wait until morning, my darling?'

I forced myself to be seductive. I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable, appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me. If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him, then.

But he half-snarled: 'No. It won't wait. Now.'

The unearthly light of dawn filled the room; had only one previous dawn broken upon me in that vile place? And there was nothing for it but to go and fetch the keys from the music stool and pray he would not examine them too closely, pray to God his eyes would fail him, that he might be struck blind.

When I came back into the bedroom carrying the bunch of keys that jangled at every step like a curious musical instrument, he was sitting on the bed in his immaculate shirtsleeves, his head sunk in his hands. And it seemed to me he was in despair.

Strange. In spite of my fear of him, that made me whiter than my wrap, I felt there emanate from him, at that moment, a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly, as if the lilies that surrounded him had all at once begun to fester, or the Russian leather of his scent were reverting to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed. The chthonic gravity of his presence exerted a tremendous pressure on the room, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beneath the waves that pounded against the shore.

I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between his well- manicured fingers. The evidence of that bloody chamber had showed me I could expect no mercy. Yet, when he raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered eyes as though he did not recognize me, I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die.

The atrocious loneliness of that monster!

The monocle had fallen from his face. His curling mane was disordered, as if he had run his hands through it in his distraction. I saw how he had lost his impassivity and was now filled with suppressed excitement. The hand he stretched out for those counters in his game of love and death shook a little; the face that turned towards me contained a sombre delirium that seemed to me compounded of a ghastly, yes, shame but also of a terrible, guilty joy as he slowly ascertained how I had sinned.

That tell-tale stain had resolved itself into a mark the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card. He disengaged the key from the ring and looked at it for a while, solitary, brooding.

'It is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable,' he said. His voice was low and had in it the timbre of certain great cathedral organs that seem, when they are played, to be conversing with God.

I could not restrain a sob.

'Oh, my love, my little love who brought me a white gift of music,' he said, almost as if grieving. 'My little love, you'll never know how much I hate daylight!"

Then he sharply ordered: 'Kneel!'

I knelt before him and he pressed the key lightly to my forehead, held it there for a moment. I felt a faint tingling of the skin and, when I involuntarily glanced at myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a brahmin woman. Or the mark of Cain. And now the key gleamed as freshly as if it had just been cut. He clipped it back on the ring, emitting that same, heavy sigh as he had done when I said that I would marry him.

'My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom.' 'What form shall it take?' I said.

'Decapitation,' he whispered, almost voluptuously. 'Go and bathe yourself; put on that white dress you wore to hear Tristan and the necklace that prefigures your end. And I shall take myself off to the armoury, my dear, to sharpen my great-grandfather's ceremonial sword.'

'The servants?'

'We shall have absolute privacy for our last rites; I have already dismissed them. If you look out of the window you can see them going to the mainland.'

It was now the full, pale light of morning; the weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look, a gloomy day on which to die. Along the causeway I could see trouping every maid and scullion, every pot-boy and pan-scourer, valet, laundress and vassal who worked in that great house, most on foot, a few on bicycles. The faceless housekeeper trudged along with a great basket in which, I guessed, she'd stowed as much as she could ransack from the larder. The Marquis must have given the chauffeur leave to borrow the motor for the day, for it went last of all, at a stately pace, as though the procession were a cortege and the car already bore my coffin to the mainland for. burial.

But I knew no good Breton earth would cover me, like a last, faithful lover; I had another fate. 'I have given them all a day's holiday, to celebrate our wedding,' he said. And smiled.

However hard I stared at the receding company, I could see no sign of Jean-Yves, our latest servant, hired but the preceding morning.

'Go, now. Bathe yourself; dress yourself. The lustratory ritual and the ceremonial robing; after that, the sacrifice. Wait in the music room until I telephone for you. No, my dear!' And he smiled, as I started, recalling the line was dead.' One may call inside the castle just as much as one pleases; but, outside-- never.'

I scrubbed my forehead with the nail brush as I had scrubbed the key but this red mark would not go away, either, no matter what I did, and I knew I should wear it until I died, though that would not be long. Then I went to my dressing room and put on that white muslin shift, costume of a victim of an auto-da-fé, he had bought me to listen to the Liebestod in. Twelve young women combed out twelve listless sheaves of brown hair in the mirrors; soon, there would be none. The mass of lilies that surrounded me exhaled, now, the odour of their withering. They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death.

On the dressing table, coiled like a snake about to strike, lay the ruby choker.

Already almost lifeless, cold at heart, I descended the spiral staircase to the music room but there I found I had not been abandoned.

'I can be of some comfort to you,' the boy said.' Though not much use.'

We pushed the piano stool in front of the open window so that, for as long as I could, I would be able to smell the ancient, reconciling smell of the sea that, in time, will cleanse everything, scour the old bones white, wash away all the stains. The last little chambermaid had trotted along the causeway long ago and now the tide, fated as I, came tumbling in, the crisp wavelets splashing on the old stones.

'You do not deserve this,' he said.

'Who can say what I deserve or no?' I said. 'I've done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.'

'You disobeyed him,' he said. 'That is sufficient reason for him to punish you.'

'I only did what he knew I would.' 'Like Eve,' he said.

The telephone rang a shrill imperative. Let it ring. But my lover lifted me up and set me on my feet; I knew I must answer it. The receiver felt heavy as earth.

'The courtyard. Immediately.'

My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would come with me if I would lead him. Courage. When I thought of courage, I thought of my mother. Then I saw a muscle in my lover's face quiver.

'Hoofbeats!' he said.

I cast one last, desperate glance from the window and, like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway, though the waves crashed, now, high as the horse's fetlocks. A rider, her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent horsewoman in widow's weeds.

As the telephone rang again. 'Am I to wait all morning?'

Every moment, my mother drew nearer.

'She will be too late,' Jean-Yves said and yet he could not restrain a note of hope that, though it must be so, yet it might not be so.

The third, intransigent call.

'Shall I come up to heaven to fetch you down, Saint Cecilia? You wicked woman, do you wish me to compound my crimes by desecrating the marriage bed?'

So I must go to the courtyard where my husband waited in his London-tailored trousers and the shirt from Turnbull and Asser, beside the mounting block, with, in his hand, the sword which his great-grandfather had presented to the little corporal, in token of surrender to the Republic, before he shot himself. The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal.

When my husband saw my companion, he observed: 'Let the blind lead the blind, eh? But does even a youth as besotted as you are think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring? Give it me back, whore.'

The fires in the opal had all died down. I gladly slipped it from my finger and, even in that dolorous place, my heart was lighter for the lack of it. My husband took it lovingly and lodged it on the tip of his little finger; it would go no further.

'It will serve me for a dozen more fiancées,' he said. 'To the block, woman. No--leave the boy; I shall deal with him later, utilizing a less exalted instrument than the one with which I do my wife the honour of her immolation, for do not fear that in death you will be divided.'

Slowly, slowly, one foot before the other, I crossed the cobbles. The longer I dawdled over my execution, the more time it gave the avenging angel to descend ...

'Don't loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel ... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!'

He raised the sword and cut bright segments from the air with it, but still I lingered although my hopes, so recently raised, now began to flag. If she is not here by now, her horse must have stumbled on the causeway, have plunged into the sea ... One thing only made me glad; that my lover would not see me die.

My husband laid my branded forehead on the stone and, as he had done once before, twisted my hair into a rope and drew it away from my neck.

'Such a pretty neck,' he said with what seemed to be a genuine, retrospective tenderness. 'A neck like the stem of a young plant.'

I felt the silken bristle of his beard and the wet touch of his lips as he kissed my nape. And, once again, of my apparel I must retain only my gems; the sharp blade ripped my dress in two and it fell from me. A little green moss, growing in the crevices of the mounting block, would be the last thing I should see in all the world.

The whizz of that heavy sword.

And--a great battering and pounding at the gate, the jangling of the bell, the frenzied neighing of a horse! The unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. The blade did not descend, the necklace did not sever, my head did not roll. For, for an instant, the beast wavered in his stroke, a sufficient split second of astonished indecision to let me spring upright and dart to the assistance of my lover as he struggled sightlessly with the great bolts that kept her out.

The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had been watching his beloved Tristan for the twelfth, the thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act, announced in a jaunty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, crying over spilt milk did nobody any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live happily ever after. The puppet master, open- mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves; the king, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns.

You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. And my husband stood stock-still, as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs.

And then it was as though a curious child pushed his centime into the slot and set all in motion. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death or glory, charged us, all three.

On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.

We lead a quiet life, the three of us. I inherited, of course, enormous wealth but we have given most of it away to various charities. The castle is now a school for the blind, though I pray that the children who live there are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber, the contents of which are buried or burned, the door sealed.

I felt I had a right to retain sufficient funds to start a little music school here, on the outskirts of Paris, and we do well enough. Sometimes we can even afford to go to the Opéra, though never to sit in a box, of course. We know we are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere chatter can never harm us. I can only bless the--what shall I call it?--the maternal telepathy that sent my mother running headlong from the telephone to the station after I had called her, that night. I never heard you cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy. And who ever cried because of gold bath taps?

The night train, the one I had taken; she lay in her berth, sleepless as I had been. When she could not find a taxi at that lonely halt, she borrowed old Dobbin from a bemused farmer, for some internal urgency told her that she must reach me before the incoming tide sealed me away from her for ever. My poor old nurse, left scandalized at home--what? interrupt milord on his honeymoon?--she died soon after. She had taken so much secret pleasure in the fact that her little girl had become a marquise; and now here I was, scarcely a penny the richer, widowed at seventeen in the most dubious circumstances and busily engaged in setting up house with a piano-tuner. Poor thing, she passed away in a sorry state of disillusion! But I do believe my mother loves him as much as I do.

No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it--not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart--but, because it spares my shame.

[jrwi-best-villian]

GUYS THE FINALS ARE GONNA BE OUT IN MY 2 DAYS CAUSE I GOT HONEWORK BUT ANYWAYS

[images and propaganda under the cut, spoilers for PD S1 finale, Ashes backstory, and S2 for trickster and anything to do with niklaus]

Niklaus propaganda:

-"I think its obvious why he's such a good villain. He is manipulative, he knows what to hold above the albatrio to get them to agree to his deals. His motivations are unknown and unguessable, meaning there is little hope of stopping whatever his evil plot is. And the presentation!! Oh boy!!!! He is so nonchalant and cool about everything he does and it has such a foreboding and ominous vibe."

-"He gives evil rich guy and narrator fucking with the plot and he's hot doing it and I would like to punt him but also he's cool. Absolute man whore slut."

-"Literally no-brained the man is a Villain™️"

-"babygirl but also a bit evil as a treat"

Trickster propaganda:

-"BRO FR TOOK OVER ASHE AND KILLED ASHES MOM AND IS LOWKEY SUPER CREEPY also literally let chaos demons possess people"