#raethian

[tryst-art-archive]

Many Many Years Assignment

In the oldest days, the world had been a water droplet with a pebble at its core. It floated through the recesses of space while burning rock, hidden by blue oceans, came to the surface of the world and cooled. After a time, the great, cool rock now marking the world was pulled into pieces, forming continents. These continents eventually came to be inhabited by life.

              The first intelligent beings to come to the world of land and water were the Dragonfolk who knew and know all things. The Daemen and the Raethians followed the Dragonfolk and were in turn followed by the Humans. A myriad of other creatures came to inhabit the world before, after, and in between the rise of these races, but did not come to dominate the globe’s continents as those four did.

              After thousands of years of history, the world saw the Dragonfolk settled into their isolated archipelago, the Verde Islands, and the Raethians content on their small, round continent, Raeth, while the Humans and the Daemen settled onto the long western continent, Nassab.

              And thousands of years of history would follow in which other groups and other continents would rise and fall.

 

              In a verdant field of rolling hills and lush meadows, stood a castle. The castle was of worn gray stone, and a throng of buildings huddled under its rule. The buildings in turn were surrounded by fields and thatch-roofed houses that supplied the food for the buildings and caste. Around the fields and thatch-roofed houses were rolling hills, and around the hills were meadows which were surrounded by forest, and the world spiraled out from there, to the  minds of those who lived in this city surrounded by hills, all the way past the shores of Nassab, and out to the Islands of Cryparta, Raeth, the Verde Islands, and a host of other exotic places.

              And this was fine.

              But it happened, once, that the verdant fields and meadows, that the smooth, grassy hills, and the tall, friendly trees, turned against the castle of stone and its city and its thatch-roofed houses.

              It happened that, one day, plants killed as men do.

 

              Long before he had ever been born, his unimaginably ancient relatives had watched something positive become something thoroughly negative.

              And they had shrugged.

              But that was the nature of the Daemen, when push came to shove, and most of them were fairly sadistic, anyhow.

              Other persons, with more knowledge of life and nature, had not shrugged, however, and they had decided to do something about the darkness that now plagued the world. One of these persons had come to the village of his ancestors, the village he had grown up in, and had said, “Here is great good turned to evil. Who will not be tempted by it?”

              And it was his unimaginably distant grandfather who had stepped forward and said, “I will not.”

              Personally, it was his own conviction that this remarkably far-off relation had just been pushed out of the crowd by someone with a mind for a joke and gotten saddled with the job. But who was he to say?

              So the one who had come gave to his grandfather a vibrant, green stone that glowed with the string of life that writhed inside it, and she, the one who had come, said, “Then you and your kin will be guardian of this until such time as it must be restored.” And then she told him a story and a plan.

              They then broke apart the great, green stone, and to his far-distant grandfather’s kin and clan, the pieces of the stone were distributed. For centuries, they passed from Daeman to Daeman as one person died and the next took up his or her inheritance.

              And always there was one who bore a mark upon their right cheek – a sigil like a cross whose right side had been combined with the number-three – and always this one held the legend that the others remembered not.

              And the pieces became a sign of the clan, and the sigil became a burden to the bearer, and, somehow, no one was ever tempted. At least, not by the verdant, green stone that now hung in pieces about an entire, massive family’s necks.

              The secrets of the tale that the one who had come told were never uttered to those who need not know, and, somehow, everything was fine.

              Until recently.

 

              A little less than four decades ago, a small Daeman boy was born. His parents loved and cared for him in the usual method of the Daemen which is to say, hardly at all.

              This small Daeman boy grew with a piece of stone hanging from his neck, his dark hair flopping in his eyes, and the conical ears of his race poking out from his head horizontally, with that usual racial inconsistency common to Daemen. The small boy played in mud and enjoyed little things and proved to be less cruel and dramatic than the rest of his race. He would always prefer to let the lizard crawl along his arm than to try to separate it from its own.

              But such is the nature of a misfit child in any society as it is the nature of society to be very, very peculiar.

              At the tender age of  ten, which is the Daemen equivalent of five human years, the small Daemen boy was brought before his town’s leader where he was made to stand quietly while the old Daeman looked him over and thought.

              “Well,” the man had said after a time. “You certainly are unfortunate, boy.” The man’s voice had sounded like paper; paper being crumpled and uncrumpled, crumpled and uncrumpled.

              The boy had looked up at him from between strands of dark hair, and had said nothing, though he certainly inquired.

              “Indeed,” the voice had crackled. “You have been truly unfortunate in the timing of your birth. Why, you could have cropped up sooner, or perhaps you could have been the child your mother’s womb now coddles. But no matter, you have come when you have and there is naught else for it.”

              The boy’s head had tipped to the side, and he had frowned.

              The man had considered the boy and had allowed himself a tired old sigh. “Your name is Asher, is it not?”

              The boy had brightened then, pleased to be introduced to a subject he knew something of, and had nodded vigorously.

              “Well, Asher. I have something very important to tell you,” the man had said. Then he told the boy a story and a plan.

              And not a moment later, the boy had been brought to the village temple and had had a cross bred with the number three sliced, carefully, into his face.

              His right cheek had stung for a week.

 

              The stone castle that had stood, so bold, in a field of plants had been replaced by its surviving people and their children. Where it once sat, a bulbous building of man and science stood in its place. Metal like polished copper formed the organic shapes that made an immense, entirely enclosed, city several hundred feet above the ground, supported by thin legs. The city was one of metal and rubber; on maps it was called the Metal City, but its inhabitants called it MetC.

              Its inhabitants had never once in their lives seen the sun nor walked upon the earth nor breathed fresh air. They lived entirely isolated from all things of nature with false food and walls of sienna brown and turquoise. They passed through boxes that scanned their DNA for unacceptable genes and trapped them if one such was found. Some of them lived in old, silver pipelines that ran through the city and that had once been used for the city’s cleaning crew but now were the “Homeless Pipelines” – the realm of the rejected genes who stole now to live.

              MetC feared all outsiders and brought nothing within its walls if it could prevent such, though there was still one door to the outside. All of MetC’s air was reprocessed and then processed again. Plant life was outlawed, and any who could do anything to change that a criminal.

              But of these things, the most curious was the single way in and out: A turquoise, metal box – both door and scanning device – led to a balcony from the old stone castle and to true, open air.

              Not to mention several hundred feet of empty space between the balcony and the ground.

              And if you survived that drop through guile or magic or miracle, there was a whole country’s worth of desert to get through.

 

              When the boy, Asher, aged twenty years (though he was, in all respects, the equivalent of a ten-year-old human), one of his older brothers, Jiff’un, went missing.

              It was not and is not unusual for Daemen to wander off for an extended period of time without saying anything about it, but usually there’s something in the Human newspapers about horrible demons terrorizing the local populace in that instance. As there wasn’t, Jiff’un’s absence was of some concern.

              Several small search parties set out to locate Jiff’un, and though the local populaces were thoroughly terrorized and plenty of small hints of Jiff’un’s passing through a town or village discovered, the boy was never found, and it was, with a shrug and a sigh, presumed that he had been killed by some overzealous man whose farm had been razed by a passing Daeman and who didn’t particularly care which Daeman was responsible.

              After a suitable period of mourning, life in Asher’s hometown resumed as normal, though down, Asher and the village elder noted wryly, one small, green shard of stone.

 

              Ella hadn’t been born when the outsiders came, but Rhoder had been four and while that made his memory of the event faulty, at best, he did remember something.

              The outsiders had come through the desert in a little vehicle with a small, black box in their hands. They drove up to MetC and two guards who had been standing on MetC’s incongruous stone balcony had thrown to the outsiders a ladder. The outsiders climbed up, black box in hand, and passed through the DNA-scanning checkpoint that served as door without having their DNA scanned; for one day, the checkpoints that so plagued the anomalous inhabitants of MetC did not serve their purpose, and the homeless ran rampant and free.

              The outsiders passed through the throngs and crowds of MetC’s startled inhabitants and went unimpeded by the checkpoints that may have declared them unfit for MetC’s halls. The city’s guards brought the outsiders to a massive vault, recently installed, and disappeared inside with them. Later, when the outsiders and guards reappeared, the tiny obsidian cube was nowhere in evidence.

              The outsiders left, promptly, the way they had come. The checkpoints came back online and life resumed.

              The Homeless Pipelines were alive with talk of the incident for weeks, and much was speculated.

              But no one could puzzle out what was in the box.

 

              Roughly two years ago, a shiver of fear ran through the Metal City’s general populace.

              Something and gotten inside MetC without being invited.

              And that something set off the Checkpoints without ever once getting trapped inside them.

              The rejects of the Checkpoints were both exhilarated and afraid. That it was possible to evade the Checkpoints was nothing short of exciting and allowed a sorrowful people some hope while inspiring others to seek out the method to avoiding the Checkpoints. But that something could evade the Checkpoints… well. What power was that?

              Naturally, the populace as accepted by the Checkpoints was simply terrified, and they became doubly so when MetC’s guards began expressing genuine fright.

              The something that had gotten inside the supposedly impenetrable citybecame known as “The Shadow” for its ability to appear from shady corners and envelop a man in such darkness as the reason for the man’s chilling screams could not be fathomed. The Shadow appeared in man-form, but with no features to distinguish for shadow and darkness clung too close to its frame. The eyes, however, burned through the darkness and paralyzed all who found their own eyes locked with those hellish ones just before they experienced a highly uncomfortable death.

              But the Shadow seemed to be limited to MetC’s vaults of food or treasure or water – places that the average person passed without ever really knowing about. The Shadow appeared in engine rooms and the places dedicated to circulating MetC’s reprocessed air. The Shadow flitted here, flitted there, and once or twice flew through the Homeless Pipelines like a shot.

              But never once did it harm a civilian.

              This did not stop the civilians from fearing and wishing to harm it.

 

              Theo unscrewed the metal plate and sorted through a series of wires. It took what seemed a lifetime, but he finally located the dark green one and yanked it from its place. He had all of five seconds to put the wire back, he knew, but supposed that it would be enough.

              The fourteen-year-old boy pulled a small plastic box from his pocket and forced the green wire through a hole in its top. He then fastened a black wire hanging from the box’s bottom into the place where the green wire had been. He screwed the metal face plate back in its place and dashed off around the corner and into the Homeless Pipelines.

              Ella was already there, waiting. “So?” she said.

              “Should be fine. We just need to wait and see if the thing starts beeping ‘cause it’s been tampered with.

              “How long do we have to wait?”

              “Just one minute.”

              “Okay.”

              One minute later, no warning systems had sounded; the two teenagers exited the Pipelines to gaze upon the Checkpoint at midnight. The empty hallway stared back, and Theo broke into a grin.

              “Awesome! That means you should be able to get through Box 3A2QN59 now!” he said.

              “Is it safe? Should we test it?” Ella said, biting her lip.

              Theo shrugged. “If you want to try it, then go ahead.”

              “Well, that would be best, right? Better to find out that it doesn’t work now than have you go through all the trouble of getting the rest of them set up and then find out that they don’t work when all four of us are running for our lives and get stuck in the Checkpoint, right?”

              “Well, sure, yeah,” Theo said. “Makes sense. But I’m totally positive that they’ll work.”

              Ella bit back her remark on that not being a guarantee of success but rather approached the Checkpoint instead.

              The turquoise doors snapped open to engulf her, making her jump back, startled. Theo laughed at her fright, and she shot him a silencing look before stepping, hesitantly, into the machine’s maw. The doors closed with the same speed with which they had opened. A hiss of air, as of the doors sealing themselves shut, shivered through the air.

              Ella’s skin broke out into goosebumps and she glanced nervously at her surroundings, which were markedly bare and gaudily turquoise.

              There was a blank screen on one wall which was the only thing to look at.  She directed her gaze to it, only to see the screen burst to life. The bottom of the screen displayed a series of Gs paired with Cs and Ts paired with As. To the left of the screen, the double-helix of  a DNA strand began to spin, slowly at first, but then picking up in speed so that it was hard to distinguish its features. The letters along the bottom began scrolling by, almost too fast to read, and on the right of the screen words appeared and flashed by rapidly so that Ella caught, at most, half a word.

              She saw blue flash by once, and presumed that the machine had just read the genes determining her eye color. Walnut slipped by, and she guessed that meant hair even as she read dryad and knew that the machine had spotted the anomaly that barred her from the Checkpoints – her ability to sense life and grow plants; her nature magic.

              Hundreds of other brief phrases flashed by, and she wasn’t always sure what the pieces she caught referred to though others were quite obvious. Slim and short  made perfect sense, but hemoglobin count  and O+ didn’t seem to be pertinent to anything.

              As the awe at seeing her DNA whiz by began to fade, the process slowed and, eventually, the DNA stopped spinning, the letters stopped flying, and the only words on the right of the screen were

HUMAN – ANOMALY: DRYAD

SEARCHING DATABASE…

SUBJECT ACCEPTED. Please proceed through door

              The door to Ella’s right shot open, and she quickly filed through, letting loose a breath she hadn’t known she’d held.

              Theo was on the other side of the Checkpoint, setting up Box 3AB2945K for his own travel through the would-be barrier. He screwed the faceplate hiding the machine’s inner workings and his modifications from sight, grinned, and slipped into the machine. A surprisingly short time later, the doors on Ella’s side slid open and he came out laughing.

              “Man, I love this stuff,” he said. “Computers are so fun!” He bustled over to the far end of the corridor and the Checkpoint stalls located on that side. Generally speaking, MetC’s corridors were broken, by the Checkpoints and a sense of common courtesy, into two “traffic lanes.” Thus, the Checkpoints on the right side of a hallway allowed passage through in only the forward direction for persons on that side. The Checkpoint stalls on the left side did the same, but for people traveling on the left side. Thus, Theo had to modify the Checkpoint stalls on either side of a Checkpoint so he and his companions could move through Checkpoints regardless of their direction.

              Presently, he did so, and the two compatriots passed through their respective stalls, still uneasy with watching their DNA spin before them, but finding the sensation of uncomfortable peculiarity already fading. Theo went on to set up two more pairs of Checkpoint boxes that his other companions might pass through.

              “I’m going to start carrying these little modifiers around,” he said. “So if we get in a tight spot and I haven’t set up the boxes at a given Checkpoint yet, I’ll always have the tools to save our hides.”

              “Sounds like a plan,” Ella said agreeably. “Anyway, we should get back to the safehouse before Daiza and Rhoder start worrying.”

              “Yeah. Man, those two fret like they were our parents or something.”

              Ella grinned in response and started off toward their little hideout, Theo in tow.

 

              A year after the Shadow’s arrival, MetC’s guards chased the Shadow from a vault and trapped it in one of the Homeless Pipelines. Then they flooded the lines with water from the sewage reprocessing vaults.

              When the lines were drained, not a soul was dead. The Homeless who had been in the line in question jibbered about a man made of shadow with glowing red eyes who scooped them up and took them through small shadows into another pipeline. They said the shadow-man had gone back for every last person before finally sitting with the people he had saved until the lines were drained. Then the Shadow had passed back through a little dark space in the corner of a wall with not so much as a farewell.

              Two days later, the Shadow appeared again, in the chief guard’s room.

              The chief was dead, and scratched onto his wall was a message: NO MORE CIVILIAN DEATH.

              And that was all.

 

              Ella and Daiza had grown up in the Homeless Pipelines as friends and compatriots. When Ella was five, the two girls met the eleven-year-old Rhoder, a pretty burly kid who had been on his own in the Pipelines for longer than was necessarily healthy. He and the girls joined up as a group, and he proved to be an invaluable asset. Some nine years later, the trio met a twelve-year-old Theo who gladly became the fourth member of their posse and who happened to have managed to locate and hide an unused apartment outside of the Pipelines. This secret two-room “house” had become their hide-out and home, and it was certainly a grand improvement from the Pipelines where anything could and usually did happen.

              It was also far more secret. The Pipelines were generally ignored by the local populace unless someone got a little too bold and stole their supper from the wrong civilian, but the fact remained that people knew it was there; which, of course, meant that, at any time, someone might come in and arrest you and goodness knows what your punishment for being born would be.

              In any case, the apartment was a safe place hidden behind one of the peach-colored metal wall panels. Knock three times to get the inhabitants’ attention; they’ll check the security cameras Theo aimed to watch that corner, and then they’ll let you in.

              Ella banged thrice on the panel and waited until she heard the soft whoosh of the apartment’s actual door sliding up. The panel swung open to admit Theo and herself; Daiza was standing in the entrance way and shut the doors behind them. “You two are late!” she said. “You’re so incredibly, awfully, amazingly late!”

              “Yeah, yeah. Sorry, mom,” Theo said. He ducked to avoid her flying hand and scurried up the three stairs and into the living space and, from there, the corner of the large room that contained his workstation and the monitors connected to security cameras throughout MetC whose footage he had learned to loop and alter, thus preventing any of MetC’s security forces from witnessing his or his fellows’ movements.

              Daiza frowned after him then turned to Ella. “So? What took you?”

              “It just took Theo longer to rewire the Checkpoints than he thought. When he pulled a wire from the first one, an alarm went off and we had to scurry into the Pipelines to avoid the guards who started coming our way. Apparently the thing’s on some sort of timer and if you take out a wire and don’t put it back soon enough, the alarm goes off.”

              “What?! You almost got caught!”

              Ella laughed. “Not really. The guards thought that it was the Shadow that set off the alarm, so we went to a different set of Checkpoints and made the modifications on those, and everything went fine.” She grinned broadly. “The modifications work, Daiza! We can go wherever we want now!”

              Daiza couldn’t help the small grin that twitched onto her face then. “Well, modifications or no, you two should probably eat something.”

              The girls walked into the living space; it was every room a house required all combined into one sizeable area. A couch, table, and bookshelf of illegal books took up most of the space, and two sets of partitions blocked off the kitchen-area and the sleeping space, respectively. A few pots of equally illegal soil were scattered throughout the apartment with plants, grown special by Ella and her magical green thumb, thriving within them. The sleeping space was simply a space with sleeping mats on the floor, and the kitchen was similarly limited, though there was a small oven, stove, and a tiny refrigerator. Mostly, though, the kitchen was small counter space with cutlery, pots, pans, plates, and a few bowls. Theo’s workspace had taken up a corner across from the kitchen. Several TVs, computers, and a hoard of other tools and devices that Ella, Rhoder, and Daiza didn’t understand were all hanging off the walls or sitting on a relatively low desk. Theo could generally be found here, in a bean-bag chair or a rolling office chair, working on some knick-knack or other. Beside his workspace was the door to the bathroom which contained a sink, a toilet, and a basin. There was also a pump system that Theo had rigged to get water from the sink into the tub and to move the used tub water through to the sink. (After all, they had had to make do with what plumbing was already in the apartment, and a tub hadn’t been involved. Apparently, the apartment had been half-constructed when Theo found it. He therefore found ways to ensure that they had all the basic amenities they required without drawing attention to themselves or their apartment.)

              The house was, all in all, a small, make-shift space, but none of the group noticed, for it was the most any of them had ever had.

              Rhoder stepped out of the kitchen space with a pan of some sort of soup in his hand. “’Ey, Ella!” he said, beaming. “Hungry?”

              “You bet,” she said.

 

Theo stretched and leaned so far back in his chair as to almost tip it over.

              Ella peered ‘round the partition between kitchen and living space to look at him; Theo grinned, sheepishly, back. “Almost fell,” he said by way of explanation.

              She shrugged, nodded, and resumed reading the evening newspaper (swiftly stolen perhaps two hours before from the nearest newspaper stand).  No news of the alteration to the Checkpoints. It had been a week since that first venture out, and Theo had gone out with Ella or Daiza or Rhoder several times since to modify several of the other Checkpoints. But, apparently, no one had noticed any change.

              Well, good.

              She flipped back to the front page to begin reading the news in earnest.

              “Anything good?” Daiza asked, coming over and leaning on the back of Ella’s chair.

              She shrugged. “Well, more about that Shadow. Apparently it’s appearing more often and doing more damage. ‘Experts theorize that the Shadow is looking for some artifact’ blahblahblah… ‘the Shadow appears to have left the western half of MetC and has not been spotted in the southeastern section of the city for nearly two weeks. Northeastern residents are advised to…’ diddle-dee-dee. So forth, so on.”

              “Huh,” Daiza said. “Weird.”

              “Yeah.” Ella flipped to the next page only to have the paper ripped from her hands.

              “Look at this!” Daiza exclaimed. “Just check out this headline! ‘Ancient Artifact to be Moved. Residents Blocked From Sector NE12.’”

              Theo popped around the corner. “Loot?!”

              “Totally!” Daiza whipped around and answered the boy’s beatific grin. “We have got to check this out.”

              Rhoder came over presently, hands in pockets. “What are we checking out?”

              “An ancient artifact!” Theo announced. “I bet we could sell it on the black market for thousands, whatever it is. Think how much we could buy!”

              “That only works if it’s a worthwhile artifact,” Ella pointed out. “If it’s just some dusty old document, I doubt the black market’ll have much of an interest. What is it?”

              “Uhm…” Daiza skimmed through the article, frowned, then carefully examined it, running a finger along each line. “It doesn’t say,” she said at last. “There’s no description, no picture, no nothing.”

              “Probably just stupid MetC security crap,” Theo said. “And if they’re keeping what it is a secret, it must be valuable. C’mon, let’s find out what we can and go after this thing!” The boy bounded round the kitchen partition and hopped into his chair, nearly upsetting it again. His fingers flew across the keys of the main computer as he searched for information, and information he found.

 

              Ella tapped the earpiece. “Say that again?” she said.

              “There should be an air vent nearby. Can you see it?” Theo’s voice crackled over the earpiece.

              “Oh, sure. I see it.”

              “What’s that tone for?”

              “Oh, nothin’ much, It’s just, y’know, about ten feet above me.”

              Theo snorted. “Baby. Arright, um… head down the pipeline to your left then take a right at the first intersection. There’ll be one pipe going up and another going down. Take the upward pipe and follow it for, like, five hundred yards. There should be another vent there. In the ground.”

              “Okay.”

              Ella turned and headed down the first pipeline and took a right at the first intersection.

              The Pipelines were, among other things, dim. Red and half-working yellow lights provided the only light, and though the Pipelines were made entirely of a silvery metal, they sure as hell didn’t reflect light all that well. The circular tubes were, furthermore, closed off from the intensely bright, artificial light that the rest of MetC, even the present day’s routes for the city’s cleaning crew, enjoyed. Though doors with the yellow-and-black stripes of WARNING or CAUTION appeared frequently, very few of them actually led to the outside, this deep in the Pipelines.

              The Pipelines also echoed. The floor was an industrial grating raised perhaps six inches, perhaps a foot above the bottom of the pipeline that had a nasty tendency to clang. In more inhabited sections of the Pipelines, the noise was decreased some if only because people’s bodies muffled some of the sound, but this far back in the Pipes?

              Well, things sucked back here. Ella was jumping at shadows. The little red lights in these tunnels looked like eyes in a shadowy face, if you caught them out of the corner of your eye, just so. It made her think of the reports and descriptions of “the Shadow” and recall some artist renderings.

              Creepy.

              She came to the sloping pipes and followed the one that was rising until she noticed a small vent low in the left-hand wall. Here she stopped. “Theo, I’ve found the vent and I’m going in,” she said.

              “Okay,” Theo’s voice came back.

              Using a screwdriver, she removed the vent from its place and crawled into the rectangular shaft behind the grate. “How far do I go in this thing?” she asked, crawling on hand and foot.

              “Checking that now,” Theo said. She could hear him typing over the earpiece.

              Ella snorted and kept crawling along for a good hundre—

              “HOLY--!”

              A piece of loose vent gave way under Ella’s weight, and it was a fortunate thing that her reflexes were as sharp as they were for, hanging from the edge of the vent with one hand gripping the metal and bleeding as the edge of the vent bit into her skin, Ella had ample time to notice that she was several hundreds of feet in the air – and she, honestly, couldn’t see the ground. Theo was chattering away in her ear, panicked.

              “Shut up, Theo! I’m busy!” she snapped.

              She could barely make out some guards on a catwalk far below, but they apparently had missed her scream and never heard the piece of venting hit the ground. This calmed Ella some, though, of course, not entirely. She swung her free hand up to grasp the edge of the vent and winced when the metal began to cut that hand, too. Cautiously, she began a slow pendulum motion, throwing her weight forward and back. There was some sort of rib-like structure some three feet in front of her presumably used to help this tube-like room maintain its shape. If she could swing just enough, she could probably land her feet on the thing and use her momentum to get up onto it. There was definitely enough of a ledge for her…

              …maybe.

              She swung back and forth for what seemed an age, grinding her teeth against each recurring bite on her hands from the vent’s edge. At length, she decided her momentum was probably sufficient and, anyway, she couldn’t maintain a grip on the vent for much longer.

              So she swung forward with extra force and let go.

              Her feet did, indeed, connect with the ledge of the rib and her momentum threw her forward enough to be balancing on the very edge of it.

              But it wasn’t enough to throw her all the way to safety.

              She teetered, pinwheeling her arms and shifting her weight backward and forward in an effort to maintain balance, all the while knowing that she would fall.

              And fall, and fall, and fall.

              And who knew if she would ever touch bottom?

              For a split second, she felt equilibrium return. For a small moment, she thought she was home free. And when she thought it, she relaxed, and then she fell backwards.

              What would strike Ella as strange later was that she was sure, she was deathly positive¸ that her feet had left the ledge, that she was half a second into a fall when, suddenly, somehow, she found herself standing on the ledge.

              She thought it strange, too, that before she found herself safe, standing and stable on the ledge, she felt what must have been a hand on her back that pushed her up, back to the ledge. It was, for all the world, like the stabilizing hand of a parent. And like that parental safety line, the pressure of the hand remained, ready to catch her should she fall again, until she turned her head to see who could possibly be there.

              And there was nothing but a sensation that someone had disappeared.

But—

              “Ella! Are you alright?!”

              She winced away from the sound of the earpiece. “No need to shout, Theo. I’m okay. Well, my hands are a mess, but otherwise I’m okay.” Ella sat down and began to rummage in her bag of supplies in search of bandages.

              Theo paused – probably to take a calming breath. “Okay. Where are you?” he said.

              “Um…” she said, and took in her surroundings, even as she began bandaging her hands. To all appearances, she was in a dark tube with a grill catwalk running through its center. Circular metal “ribs” marked the tube at regular intervals – it was one of these that she was standing on. “I think I might be in the vault,” she said after a moment. “It’s a bit scarcer than the vaults usually are, but it’s just as dark and heavily guarded.”

              “Oh. Then no problem then,” Theo said.

              “Well, not exactly. I’m kinda on the ceiling.”

              “…what?”

              “Yeah, I know. Hold on. I’ve got an idea.” Ella began rummaging through her bag again, searching for a coil of rope. “There’s these big holes in the flat parts of these, like, support arcs in the ceiling – that’s what I’m standing on, Theo.”

              “And?” he said.

              “Well, if I can tie a rope through two of them, to the metal in between, it should be sturdy enough to hold my weight. Then I can use it to get to the catwalk.”

              “She said like it wasn’t totally risky,” Theo replied in a dull monotone.

              “Oh, shush. Keep quiet if you aren’t going to say anything helpful.” She set about tying the rope between two holes with several sturdy knots, then began to slide down the rope.

              The end of the rope was perhaps a yard, horizontally, from the catwalk, but only a foot above it. Ella exercised her weight-swinging move again and landed, safely, on the catwalk, thanks to a little rope-swinging, Tarzan-action. There were two guards she could see on the catwalk presently – both too far off to be little more than vague blotches of approaching light.

              Okay, she thought. I can’t stay on the catwalk. She cast about for another place to go, and the holes in the grilled catwalk caught her eye. Ah ha!

              When the guards happened by a few moments later, Ella was nowhere in evidence. “Anything happenin’, Hank?” one said.

              “N’aw. Same old, same old.”

              Ella chuckled mentally to herself from her position hanging beneath the catwalk with fingers and toes (she had taken off her shoes and plopped them in her bag) clinging to the catwalk grill. Slowly and carefully, she began moving, first the left foot, then the right arm, now the right foot, now the left arm.

              “So I heard this rumor,” the first guard said.

              Hank cut him off, saying, “Oh, hell, not another one of your stories.”

              “Hey, hey, hey! This one’s totally legit! I heard it from the boss-man himself,” the first guard said. “He said that people’ve seen the Shadow around these parts. He thinks the Shadow’s gonna come into this vault!”

              “Aw, that’s crap,” Hank said. “How’d he know that?”

              “I dunno, man, but I brought an extra clip just in case.”

              “Oh, like bullets can harm that thing. It’s a shadow; it’s insubstantial.”

              “Yeah, whatever, Hank. You say that again when I’m killin’ the Shadow and getting’ the girls.”

              “Aw, whatever, man.”

              The guards moved off, and Ella moved, silently, below them.

 

Her heel struck cool metal, surprising her.

              The catwalk ended at a massive, silver pedestal formed by successively thinner metal cylinders stacked atop one another. Two guards stood at the end of the catwalk bordering the plinth, leaving Ella at a loss for how she was going to get up onto the thing. After some thinking, she moved so that her hands clung in almost the same space as her toes, then let her feet swing loose. For a moment, it felt as though the sudden shift in her weight would dislodge her fingers and she would fall, but her fingers remained strong, if abused.

              It took some nerve, but Ella unhooked the fingers of one hand from their place and moved them forward, then did the same with the other hand, bringing herself closer to the metal cylinder that she meant to climb onto. It looked like there was a small ledge between the wall of the thinnest, topmost cylinder and the one below it. She moved forward again and got the balls of her feet on the ledge then cautiously let go of the catwalk with one hand, sliding her hand up to grip the edge of the topmost cylinder. Once she felt fairly secure, she slid her other hand to the edge, and began moving around the cylinder until she was roughly opposite the catwalk. Then she pulled herself up on to the top of the plinth and, crouching, examined the situation.

              The guards were still standing at the end of the catwalk, looking out over it and occasionally murmuring between themselves. The only other thing of note in the area was a small, glass table with a black box in the middle of it and a glass over it.

              Something in the box felt alive.

              Okay. That was weird. Better not worry about it right now, though.

              Quietly, Ella padded over to the table and lifted the glass up to—

              Alarms blared through the vault, echoing and jumping off of walls and being lost in the darkness. The guards at the end of the catwalk spun around, guns raised while Ella just stood there, stupidly, a deer in headlights.

              The guards began to move to fire and Ella thought Ohnohnohnohnohnohno and—

              A shadow dropped from the ceiling, startling the guards and causing one to shriek, “It’s THE SHADOW!” before he was quite separated from his voice box. The other guard turned to run but he was soon incapacitated as well.

              And then the Shadow turned to Ella with glowing, red eyes and the dark formlessness of nighttime fear, and all she knew was that something about it felt so positively, alive, more alive than anything that size rightfully could, but now its mouth opened in a wicked grin and it said—

              “Way to not check for traps, y’moron.”

              Well that kicked her back into gear. “Excuse me?”               Shots rang out behind the Shadow who whipped around with a snarl. “Grab that box!” he said to Ella. Paying her no more mind, he gestured to either side of himself and two massive, lithe beasts made of darkness rose up from the ground and barreled down the catwalk to the guards who had fired the shots in question. The creatures pounced on the guards, smothering their horrified screams but not blocking them out entirely.

              The Shadow turned again to Ella and held his hand out to her. “C’mon,” he said. “We need to get out before reinforcements come.”

              “But—“

              “No but, girl. Either you come with me or you go with them. Now come on.”

              Not much of a choice, she thought, and took his hand.

              The fight to escape was strange, at best. She and the Shadow barreled down the catwalk, single file, and stopped when guards appeared before them. Invariably, the Shadow would gesture somehow and darkness would take a shape and smother the guards, leaving them dead when it left but never quite showing how it had killed them. Once or twice, a particularly brazen guard ran straight up to the Shadow and Ella, and, on these occasions, the Shadow would produce a short knife from seemingly nowhere and kill the guard with a swift slice through the throat.

              They ran to some uncertain point of the catwalk whereupon the Shadow stopped and, after dispatching another pair of guards, asked, “You had a rope; where is it?”

              Startled, Ella said, “It should be hanging about a yard to the left of the catwalk… There. It’s there. But how did you--?”               And without any explanation, the Shadow picked her up in its arms and leapt, catching the rope in one hand and urging her to grasp it and start climbing.

              So she did, all the while thinking that the Shadow smelt like apples and wondering how a shadow could have a scent.

 

              Ella crawled out of the vent, swearing at Theo. “Just have the hideout ready when we get there!” she hissed. The Shadow exited the vent after her, somehow seeming to be entirely unimpressed with her or her gang of friends.

              “FINE!” Theo shouted; then the earpiece went silent.

              Ella spun around. “Okay, Mr. Shadow-man, you—“

              “Have a name, actually.”  The glowing red eyes faded to vaguely blue gray, and the shadow dripped away to reveal a man roughly her age in appearance with conical ears sticking out from his head horizontally. A mop of dark hair sat on his head, long enough to start falling into his eyes where it was shortest in the front. There was a sigil on his right cheek, plainly cut into his face long ago; it was a cross-shape with a number-three shape sliding off the right horizontal of the cross. His clothes were nothing like those of MetC’s people and were surprisingly clean for clothes that he ought to have been wearing for two years running.

              Ella gasped at the sight of his ears. “You’re a demon!”

              “We generally prefer Daeman,” he said. “My name is Asher.”

              Silence fell before Ella managed to force some words out. “Um, I’m Ella,” she said lamely.

              “Fascinating,” was the sarcastic reply.

              “You don’t have to be so rude,” she snapped.

              “Of course I do,” Asher said. “It gets things done. Now, that box you just stole? I’d like that back, please.”

              “…Back?”

              He nodded. “Yes, back. This place stole it from my people, and I need it.”

              Ella hesitated. It could be worth a whole lot of money. And why give it to this total stranger…? Well, he did have those Shadow powers. “Why do you need it?” she said at last.

              “Hopefully to save the world.”

              That got a quick bark of laughter out of her. “Save the world? That’s ridiculous.”

              “Not exactly,” he said. He seemed to think for a moment then added, “Look, why don’t you open it?”

              Ella hesitated.

              “It isn’t going to bite you,” Asher said.

              “No, of course not,” she replied quickly, too quickly. She was cautious in taking out and opening the box, nonetheless. Inside the obsidian case was a small, green gem. Inside the gem, a bright squiggle writhed and squirmed. “It’s alive,” Ella breathed.

              “You can use Earth Magic?”

              She nodded slowly. “What is this?” she asked, tearing her eyes away from the faintly glowing stone with an effort only to see a similar glow emanating from beneath Asher’s shirt.

              “It’s a shard of the Atrice,” he said.

              “What?”

              “I probably shouldn’t tell you, but… well. The Atrice is a large stone filled with more life than you could possibly imagine. Hundreds of years ago, a particularly greedy man created a device that used the Atrice’s life and power to destroy and kill people en masse. It only ever struck once, but that was enough. Have you ever wondered why MetC abhors all plant life and everything to do with the natural world?”

              It seemed like a nonsequitor, but… “Are you suggesting that MetC was targeted?”

              Asher nodded. “Hundreds of years ago, there was a city made of stone standing in this very spot. It was prosperous and fine, and the people only as selfish as the rest of the world’s people. It became the test subject for the Atrice-weapon. It was swarmed by plants that tore down the buildings and decimated livestock. The plants in the fields pulled themselves from the ground and strangled the people who worked over them. All of the plant-life for miles simply uprooted itself and came to destroy the old stone city. Then all of the plants died, and once they’d rotted away and decomposed, the barren land left behind slowly became a desert, and the few survivors of the cataclysm set to making a new home on the ruins of their old one, but this one, they decided, would be plant proof. And it is. Mostly.

              “MetC, the metal city; isolated and alone, it stands as a bulbous blemish on the landscape of a red-brown desert that none quite know how to survive. No plant could survive that desert, and any that did would be unable to get in to MetC. Anything plant-like – such as yourself with your plant-magic – is trapped inside and left in places, like these ‘Homeless Pipelines,’ where it can be safely monitored and occasionally exterminated.”

              Ella was silent for a moment. “But why is the Atrice broken up?”

              “After it was used to incite a holocaust, a small group of humans and one Dragonfolk man – yes, Dragonfolk – banded together to take the Atrice and destroy the weapon. Thanks to a changeling child, they accomplished their first task, but they failed in the latter and only managed to hide the weapon away. But, they had the Atrice and supposed that this was the important part. They broke the crystal into hundreds of pieces, and then wondered what to do with them. They reasoned that someone had to guard the crystals, that they couldn’t just leave them lying about, not when one little shard contained so much life.

              “So it happened that the changeling came to a village of Daemen and asked for guardians there. I don’t know what possessed her to seek aid from us, but she found what she needed in the form of my grandfather of I don’t know how many centuries gone by and his family. The pieces were distributed amongst them and then amongst their children and so forth and so on, until every member of my family, even very distant members, had a piece of the Atrice. When one family member died, the piece passed on to his or her nearest, unadorned kin. No one Daeman had two pieces, and no one Daeman would, the changeling had said, until such time as the Atrice must be reformed. She had also stipulated that there always be one child who be marked as different from the others, and there always has been.

              “All of this was done to prevent the Atrice from being misused again,” he finished.

              Ella considered for a moment. “And you want me to give you this shard?” she said after a time.

              “Yes.”

              “But you already have one.” She gestured to the glow from beneath his shirt. Asher nodded and tugged the gem, which hung from a string, out into the open. It was significantly larger than the shard that Ella held, and it was multifaceted. The life emanating from it was simple ludicrous in the scale of things. “You’ll notice that I already have several, however,” he said.

              As Asher held it, it began to pull away from him, stretching out toward the shard that Ella held in its box. The shard jumped once, twice, then leapt the distance to Asher’s chunk of the Atrice. For a moment, Ella was blinded by a brilliant flash of light and a brief sense of all the life the Atrice represented and every shard’s approximate location. When the light cleared, Asher held a marginally larger stone.

              “Sorry,” he said. “The Atrice has been called to reform. The pieces are trying to rejoin their fellows, and I’m responsible for seeing that they do.”

              “But… you said it’s not supposed to be all together!”

              “Not before now, it wasn’t. Some years ago, one of my cousins disappeared, and with him a piece of the Atrice. It was concerning, but ignorable. Or it was until more of my family members disappeared or appeared dead with their Atrice shards missing. Someone was stealing the Atrice from us, as far as we could tell. When we looked further into the matter, we found that the old Atrice weapon had been recovered and whoever had found it was trying to reform the Atrice.

              “Which, naturally, is no good. I’ve been sent to put the Atrice back together before the enemy can.”

              Ella was silent for a full five minutes then. “What makes you think I’d keep quiet about this stuff?” she asked.

              Asher shrugged. “Well, to be honest, I need help collecting the pieces of the ATrice.”

              “And?” she prompted.

              “And you’ve got skill in Earth Magic – you should be able to sense the pieces when I can’t see them.”

              “And?” she asked, grinning.

              “And I’m sure you’d love to get out of this Metal City,” he said with a grin.

              Ella’s smile broadened. “Just let me pack my bags.”

[foxglovethings]

💀: Which of your muses would probably fight each other if they met?

Not including Horde vs. Alliance tensions, because that’s boring.

Baby belf Lanarellys ( @scourgestalker) would hunt down Mary in a heartbeat and put an end to her if she could, if she ever found out about her definitely-not-a-necromancer studies.

Lane ( @lanerakes) has already worked against Mary in the past. He was following her for a bit to see if he squad was responsible for some (unrelated but IC) increase in warlock activity and missing kids around the Lamb. If it really came down to it, he’d assist @malrek in putting her down, but he prefers to let other people take the fall for that sort of thing whenever possible.

And Raethian would probably just strangle Verana ( @veranabelodas) to death for being way too god damn talkative.

[cuhlan]

Ain’t Our Victory

Cuhlan rose from next to a dosing Lisana and stepped out of the ruined cottage and onto the small, wooden deck they’d called the “Perch.” His head pounded from his efforts the night before, and even now his breathing came to him hard. Two nights in three days he’d drained himself dry, and then innervated himself to push beyond his natural limits. His entire body ached from the stress he’d placed on it, and his joints creaked and protested as he slowly made his way out onto the porch.

His nostrils flared a bit as the now-familiar scent of the sea breeze from the sound mingled with the smell of a hundred orc corpses beginning to turn foul—today would be a day for burning. For cleansing.

“So…you’re all alive, still,” came a gruff, male voice from his right, and he turned to look at one of the local Kul Tirans coming up the ramp from the fishing shack below.

“Aye,” Cuhlan said, his voice raspy. “For the most part, it seems you’ve the right of it, there.”

“I didn’t evacuate,” said the fisherman. “I thought I could help, somehow. Stand with you. But…when I heard those drums, I ran.”

Cuhlan smiled wearily at the man. “Smart,” he said. “Got hairy, there. Best you did.”

“You’re injured?” asked the fisherman.

Cuhlan sat down on the lip of the perch, overlooking the bay. The bullet wound in his shoulder twinged a bit, and the bruises from the cannon shot sent spurs of pain through his aching body as he did. “Some,” he said, “Though I reckon I came off light in the matter, all told. Need to go see to them’s as have it worse, in a moment.”

“Hmm,” said the fisherman. “If they look worse than you, then things must have gotten bad.”

Cuhlan’s mind swam a bit as he reviewed the list, in his mind. The Lord Steward—Cuhlan had never seen Hinik so broken as the night before. So many ruptured organs, so many wounds. He’d found the man on the field, more than half-dead, and even half-conscious using his body to shield his wife and her friend. It had taken an intense effort just to stop Lord Hinik from bleeding to death, and there was more work needed if the man was to ever find his way onto a field of battle again.

Jellion, still. Cuhlan had no idea if his oldest friend would even remember him, when he woke at last. But at least Big Blue had missed the carnage of the previous night, safe in his bunk up in the inn.

Falerelan – Cuhlan still heard his screams as the allied priest pulled him back from the brink of death with the Light, sending him into a ball of pain. The two of them had fought side-by-side, and Cuhlan felt a pang of guilt that Fal had taken so much the worst of things.

Serena—whose wounds on muster were such that Cuhlan didn’t like having her fight in the first place. She’d taken things hard as well, crushed by a large rock. The list went on. Bwok, Chess, Raethian, Minnie—the whole damned outfit had taken such a beating.

And then there were those whose injuries were deeper than physical. Cuhlan remembered with horror that thousand-yard stare that had haunted Raysse’s eyes. And…and one other. He looked over his shoulder, back into the hutt where Lisana slept.

Lisana, who abhorred talk of death and destruction. Lisana, who urged him always towards peace, towards acceptance. He’d watched her rain magical death on swathes of the Horde last night, watched the peaceful, kind woman he loved leave a stunning trail of destruction in her wake. How many of those bodies rotting on the outskirts of Fallhaven were her doing? He’d lost count. When she woke—would she regret? Look to him for comfort? Or embrace the horror of the battlefield as he once did? As with Jellion, he wouldn’t know the true extent of that damage until she stirred to life.

And then there was the loss. Vatherya, of the Army of the Light. Cuhlan had known so little about her, but when she’d approached to volunteer it had been his shoulders that took that burden. He’d told her — damnit, he’d TOLD her — that the night was going to be dangerous. She’d fought with the Army for thousands of years, an ancient being of war who had come to an end in the middle of this rotting little Kul Tiran town, dying for people she had barely met. Vatherya. Cuhlan resolved to remember the name, at least, even if he could remember little else about her.

Cuhlan shook himself out of his near-dream state to see the fisherman looking down on him with a concerned expression.

“You sure you’re all right?” asked the big Kul Tiran man.

Cuhlan nodded to him—there was no sense in this man taking on any of his burdens.

“Good,” said the fisherman. “It’ll be nice to get back to life as usual, in these parts. Don’t mean any offense, but you Alliance folk have a tendency to bring troubles along with you.”

Cuhlan gave him a weak little smile, then rose and turned away from him. He began to slowly trudge his way back up to the town square. He spared a glance for the blown remains of the North Bridge, and looked up at the now-cratered Overlook where he, Lisana, and Fal had made their stand and drawn the Horde into their deaths.

About him, the townsfolk of Drustvar had begun their day, bustling about making repairs to the town and beginning the burning parties for the corpses. They looked to their farms, and their families. They smiled to each other in relief and celebration over their victory. And they kept a wide berth around the wounded Stewards.

Was it respect or fear? And was there a difference? Cuhlan couldn’t tell as he entered the inn and began to stumble up the steps to do his duty. But even now, the noncombatants had begun to return by ferry from their stay at Vigil Hill. Families reunited and rejoiced in their victory.

And the Stewards had bled.

Cuhlan kneeled next to Jellion’s bed, looking at the still-sleeping face of his friends. “Big Blue,” he said. “All you have to do is look out there, and somethin’ becomes real clear. This ain’t our victory. Might be Fallhaven’s. Ain’t sure it’s ours.”

Once more, as always, the old druid took up his duties caring for the broken Stewards while outside, the townsfolk’s celebratory mood continued into the day.

[rasekstories]

Waiting on the Road Home

Fireflies. They were the eyes of the forest when it was dark; the swirls and patterns of stars beneath the canopy of dense trees that covered all but the chilly banks of Drustvar. They hovered around gas lamps along the road, winking in and out, undisturbed, as if nothing at all had happened.

Raethian sat in the middle of the western road, one leg stretched out in front of her. The cobblestone had been blown to hell, leaving scars of dirt and carnage strewn across the once quiet route. Broken corpses, trolls and orcs and goblins, jutted out from the shadows like bramble bushes and old trees, tugging at the edges of her vision.

Don’t look. Focus.

Her leg throbbed despite the mist. Her leathers, burnt and torn by fire and shrapnel, clung to her like a second skin. Dried blood and dirt mingled together beneath her hands; beneath the water she poured over top. Paint on a tattered canvas.

She ran a thumb over the radio at her side, checking to be sure it was on and functioning, as she’d done a dozen times over the past hour. The wounded were stable, the dead tended to. Cinn had long since gone to check on her mechanical children. Out there, in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, it seemed only she and the fireflies were awake.

Minutes passed. Maybe hours. It was hard to see the moon through the trees, and the quiet reverie of the forest stretched time out before her in a thick, uncomfortable tension. Scenes from the battle played themselves out in her head like nightmare. Fal reaching for his gun, his body bent and bloody. Serena collapsing behind the forge, too far to reach. Zeyad falling in the road as the bombs went off behind him. Lady Raysse’s voice booming over the din of battle.

She was pulled from her thoughts by a rustle in the wood not far from her. She placed a protective hand over her radio, still silent, and clambored to her feet. It was harder than it should have been, and she winced, sucking in a sharp breath through her teeth.

Focus.

The man who stumbled out of the woods was barely recognizable. His face and sandy hair were caked in mud and blood, ash and grease from goblin engines. His shirt was torn in several places and she could see, by the silhouette from the gas lamp, that several pieces of armor were missing.

“Love.” His voice was rough and and low, warm and tired all at once. He stepped onto the road and Rae rushed to greet him, falling into his arms with a cry of relief.

“Malrek! You made it!”

He held her close, letting the cool of her skin mingle with his own, the familiar smell of good dirt and jasmine almost overpowering as he buried his face in her hair. “Of course I did.” He mumbled, planting a kiss above her ear. “I’m home.”

[ask-an-earwig]

this is a little late but, oh well. If you are ever unfortunate enough to experience an invasion of minor Raethian demons in your own world, here's a bit of useful information.

     1. Blessed objects, salt, and certain kinds of binding circles, constructed with the proper materials,* can be effective in containing or deterring them. Although mid and higher class demons can find ways to get around these measures, lesser demons have a very low tolerance and are typically non-sentient. They will go the route of least resistance, so as long as you pose a challenge they will simply go elsewhere and leave you be.

     2. Each Raethian demon has an ‘element’ associated with them. By identifying that association, it can be used to determine their strengths and weaknesses, and use them against the demon. For example, rot demons become stronger after draining life energy; isolate them from power sources and they will weaken. Or, spray a fire demon with a hose, and it will have far more difficulty igniting your lawn.

     3. Although lesser demons are not typically bloodthirsty, they will become aggressive if confronted or approached. They do not value human life, and can and will seriously harm bystanders who choose to remain in their path, or can't get out of the way in time. It is recommended to stay as far from them as possible, if you cannot properly ward your shelter. As long as you stay out of their way, they generally will not give chase.

    4. Lesser demons may, occasionally, be accompanied or commanded by mid-class demons. If a demon is spotted which seems fluent in human speech, do not engage. Although their sentience may make them seem more reasonable, most are tricksters with a love of toying with mortals. They can also be incredibly vindictive, and may lay down curses on people who slight them.

    5. If you have access to a Nexus Den,** they can be useful places to wait out the storm or enlist help until the Order*** gets involved. All Dens are fortified with the proper enchantments to prevent demons from entering, and have numerous heavily armed guards who would rather avoid unwanted attention on the immediate area. In other words, even though they're safe from the demons themselves, having Order members ‘snooping around’ isn’t exactly in their best interest.

*do not attempt a magic circle of any kind unless properly trained. an incorrect circle is not only embarrassing, but can also attract even more demons to laugh at your expense. or burn down your home, whichever strikes their fancy.

**Nexus Dens can be found hidden away under most large cities, and act as a home for various inter-dimensional entities that cannot participate in the surrounding society. Always practice good street sense and manners when conducting any kind of business there, since not all of its citizens are trustworthy.

***The Divine Order typically will arrive for investigative purposes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours after a temporal disruption. If demons are found, they will relocate the entities back to their home world safely and repair minor damage. Larger scale incidents will result in a deeper investigation, and depending on the situation, potentially mindwipes and other procedures that ensure the secrecy of parallel universes from the general populous.

[papapiusxiii]

green box cerido_costiera dei cech so2010

A "green" volume in the green.

The "Green box" project is a renovation of a small disused garage, accessory to a weekend house on the slopes of the Raethian Alps. A structure realized with light metal galvanized profiles and steel wires wraps the existent volume and transforms it into a tridimensional support for the climbing vegetation. It is composed mainly of deciduos vegetation: Lonicera periclymenum and Polygonum baldshuanicum for the main texture on which to climb up the secondary texture of Humulus lupulus and Clematis tangutica. On the basement there are groups of herbaceous perennials (Centranthus ruber, Gaura Lindheimeri, Geranium sanguineum, Rudbekia triloba) alternate with annual ones (Cosmos bipinnatus, Tagetes tenuifolia, Tropaeolum majus, Zinnia tenuifolia) and bulbous to ensure a light but continuos flowering.

The interior of the pavilion is a room for the gardening tools, a great passion of the owner, an area for coking and a space for conviviality. Materials are left rough and simple; galvanized steel for the kitchen, larch planks for floors and big sliding doors, windows in unpainted galvanized steel, simple pipes for the water supply.

A small green shelter in the vegetation, a privileged observation point. Park that is left in the garden.

landscape: gheo clavarino

[acinovathsunora]

A Hero

“A hero was needed. One who would sacrifice everything to save his people. And so that was what we made. Hero’s of lambs. Until one day, when the monster came to claim his prize, he was struck down, by the greatest hero we’d ever know. It wasn’t through skill, or cunning, but simply by an accident. And from there, his fate was written. He would travel all the lands, striking down those who stood against him, who sought to bring harm and fear to others. He would be a hero.”

Acinovath blinked as he stared up at the rope before him wondering what exactly it was that made him recall that story. Rolling his right shoulder gently, he could feel the leather harness that helped keep his new arm steady. His new arm. Another odd, unfamiliar thought.

He supposed that’s how he always envisioned himself, or at least who he’d wanted to be. Not just a hero, but the hero. Someone who could, and would, stand against everything and prevail. The ultimate good in the world, unchallenged by all, his deeds laid out before the world, undeniable in their victory. That wasn’t who he was though. Not anymore, if ever he really was. He was tired, he was bitter, and he was broken.

Or was he?

The Stewards were good, that much he knew. They didn’t tolerate injustice as they saw it, and they welcomed him eagerly, and with open arms. Raysse was good, and she loved him. Rathlorian was an absolute terror and couldn’t tolerate him. That thought made him smile, to think that after everything, now Rathlorian depended on his good graces. Despite their history though, Acinovath did his best to see he was cared for. For Raysse, and in a way, for himself. To prove that he was still in control.

He’d always wanted to be the hero, but looking back, he realized he didn’t need to be. Not the hero at least, but a hero. His world was filled with hero’s, and he had surrounded himself with the very best of them. Raysse, Hinik, Raethian, Jellion, Lizzy, and so many more, who all stood by him. Who had all helped him when he was most certain he would fall.

Reaching up with his right hand, he curled his metallic fingers around the rope. With a determined look, he placed his left hand on the rope as well, bracing himself as he began to pull. After a moment, a tell-tale groan could be heard, as the anchor holding the rope into the beam above him finally came free, falling to the dirt at his feet as the rope began to coil around it. Looking down at the rope in his hands, Acinovath gave a simple nod before letting it drop.

No. He wasn’t broken in the slightest.

[tryst-art-archive]

Khra-nicles: Narrators Scrap

Condescending minutes slipped by in the conga line of time. I fidgeted unhappily; they were making me wait just for the sake of being rude; they always did.  They’d be hoping I would think and brood and make myself nervous. The fact that it was working only served to irk me.

              At length, the tall members of the Narrator’s Council slipped into the Audience Chamber, moving with a faint rush as of the wind through reeds. Surrounded by Dragonfolk eyes with their unnamable quality of Knowing, I rose from my chair and stared coolly down at them, my own Knowing eyes staring back, but from a Raethiann face.

              Well, “staring down” isn’t quite right. Sitting, they were at my eye level. Standing, they towered above me; I’m unusually short for a Narrator.

              The moderator of the Council, Mevit (whose name was half decent as far as Dragonfolk names go), presently opened the meeting with the traditional phrase: “I Know.” I shuddered inside at the sentence (spoken in the language of the Dragonfolk, of course); I had always been highly atypical of the Dragonfolk and had always been righteously proud of the fact. My long removal from the Verde Islands to the land of animal-men, Raeth, had further deteriorated the Dragonfolk thread in me. The Raethian “mellowness” (as they say in P’tak) had seeped into me and though I was pretentious for a Raethian, I was unduly casual for a Dragonfolk woman. The occasional trips to the human continent, Nassab, had striped away various Dragonfolk sensibilities, leaving me strange to humans, Raethians, and the Dragonfolk alike.

              But I hardly minded any of that; what bothered me now was the complacency in that single “I know.” There were undertones there. Tones of “I KNOW because I have been CHOSEN and you, who are so much more foolish than I, could never hope to KNOW AS I KNOW. I humbly request that you do not attempt to fool thineself.”

              “Rhawen Evergreen Fox,” Mevit said, saying the name like it was something foul. “Do you know why we have called you here?”

              “Not for tea and biscuits, I expect,” I replied, unamused. Vihemeth frowned at me, looking more like a person deserving such a godawful name in doing so. He’d just love it if I behaved myself and did as I was told, I thought. He’s a good man, but he’s still Dragonfolk in the end.

              Mevit had said something, but I’d missed it, calling attention to my ignorance with a distinctive “Wut?”

              It was hard not to laugh at Mevit when he was angry. “We have called you here,” he said slowly, “to discuss your latest Tale regarding one Kriamiss Orientere.”

              “Ah, yes. And I think it’ll be a good one, too. Perhaps you’d like to read what I have down so far?”  Oh, sarcasm! Truly, you are my friend.

              “That is unnecessary; we here have no desire to read code-breaking drivel.”

              “Oh,” I said. But what ran through my mind was righteous anger; such an insult! Me! A nearly-omniscient Narrator, charged (amongst others) with recording the great histories of the world, write drivel? Oh, there would be hell to pay.

              “‘Oh’, indeed.” Mevit glared over steepled fingers, trying too look menacing but really trying to hard for it to be effective. “Rhawen E. Fox, you are charged with the heinous crime of placing yourself in your own Tale and interfering with its natural flow.”

              “And for wearing that horrid form!” Glaivde added in her shrill voice. She had recently spent some time with a noble family on Nassab and wore a human form; she appeared as exactly the sort of wrinkled old woman to own such a nails-on-the-chalkboard voice. The stereotyping was rather comical.

              Ignoring Glaivde, I responded with my best scolding mother voice. “Why, Mevit, I’m surprised at you. How can you presume to know what the Creators intend for a Tale?” (Much to my pleasure, Vihemeth looked a bit like he was going to blow a gasket; how I do love vexing him.)

              I was rewarded with an affronted gasp on all sides; Mevit’s was followed by the spluttered statement, “W-we are omniscient, Rhawen, and—“

              “Nearly omniscient, Mevit,” I corrected. “And you forget that I share that same omniscience with you and the rest of those noble Narrators here gathered. If any Creator wished our omniscience to know their designs, I would know them as sure as you would. No Creator has condemned my action, though I have broken the rules and done so consciously.” Murmured disgust drifted through the room. Consciously neglecting the Narrator’s code?! Preposterous! Unthinkable!

              “Blasphemy!” was the particular adjective to fly from Glaivde. It summed up their mood nicely.

              Vihemeth rose, hands on table, leering over me. “What nonsense are you suggesting, Rhawen?” It was, perhaps, incredibly lucky that his posture prevented the others from getting a clear look at his face, for behind that queer Dragon quality in his eyes, his everlasting sympathy for me was plain to see and all the political maneuvering in the world would not have saved his reputation – that one thing that seemed to save me, again and again, from losing the station of Narrator, my reason for being.

              I dropped my eyes from his and looked toward Mivet instead. “I merely suggest that the rules be broken this once. After all, I have already taken up the Tale and must see it through to the end.”

              “That is as may be. We cannot argue the necessity of completing a Tale.” Mevit exchanged nods with his fellows. “However,” he said now, the old hatred flaring, “that still begs the question: what is to become of you and your Tale afterward? You have broken the rules, Rhawen. The impartiality of the Tale is tainted by your personal involvement, and the old rule that we never write of ourselves broken.”

              In a fit of frustration, Vihemeth threw out, “At least you haven’t written of one of our Council meetings!”

              A small smile slipped onto my face, just for Vihemeth to see, and he looked suddenly terribly afraid, breathing, “Oh, you wouldn’t… would you? No, Rhawen, don’t—“

              But I turned away from him; Mevit was jabbering again.

              “I believe it would be wise for us to revoke your right to Narrate and destroy the Tale in question upon its completion.”

              A stony cold silence entered the room; this was a radical move. Not unheard of, but still terribly harsh.

              Presently, the unthinkable happened; Glaivde spoke in my defense.

              “Mevit,” she began timidly. “Are you certain of the wisdom of this? Her crime is steep, indeed, but to both prevent her further Writing and destroy the Tale… well. That’s just… cruel, isn’t it?”

              Mevit began softly, gaining volume and passion as he spoke. “Need I remind you, Glaivde, that Rhawen has been a thorn in our side for many years now, constantly pushing against the limitations specified by the Narrator’s Code, constantly just being out of our judicial grasp. Well, not today.”

              “You look like Maroc.” The tyrant’s name slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it, and the silence that settled was the silence before the ice cracks and the frozen waters swallow you whole.

              “I am no tyrant, Rhawen.” It was a quiet phrase. Deadly quiet.

              Words tumbled out, unchecked and unstoppable. “No. At least, not in name. This Council eats from your hand, though. Surely you know that much. Surely you’ve learned to use it. And this is why you want me gone, isn’t it? It isn’t about the Narrators’ ideals or any thing else like them.” I could feel the horrified stares of my fellow Narrators. They knew all this, had known all this, but here I was, in ill graces, committing virtual or literal suicide by saying the things that were better left unsaid.

              Mevit and I stared at each other for a long time. At length, he said, “Go. You and your Tale are safe.” There was a tacit “for the time being,” understood by all.

              I bowed, and left the room. I could hear the clamor of their voices as I walked down the hall.

[tryst-art-archive]

Dialect Assignment

Condescending minutes slipped by in the conga line of time. I fidgeted unhappily; they were making me wait just for the sake of being rude; they always did.  They’d be hoping I would think and brood and make myself nervous. The fact that it was working only served to irk me.

            At length, the tall members of the Narrator’s Council slipped into the Audience Chamber, moving with a faint rush as of the wind through reeds. Surrounded by Dragonfolk eyes with their unnamable quality of Knowing, I rose from my chair and stared coolly down at them, my own Knowing eyes staring back, but from a Raethian face.

            Well, “staring down” isn’t quite right. Sitting, they were at my eye level. Standing, they towered above me; I’m unusually short for a Narrator.

            The moderator of the Council, Mevit (whose name was half decent as far as Dragonfolk names go), presently opened the meeting with the traditional phrase: “I Know.” I shuddered inside at the sentence (spoken in the language of the Dragonfolk, of course); I had always been highly atypical of the Dragonfolk and had always been righteously proud of the fact. My long removal from the Verde Islands to the land of animal-men, Raeth, had further deteriorated the Dragonfolk thread in me. The Raethian “mellowness” (as they say in P’tak) had seeped into me and though I was pretentious for a Raethian, I was unduly casual for a Dragonfolk woman. The occasional trips to the human continent, Nassab, had striped away various Dragonfolk sensibilities, leaving me strange to humans, Raethians, and the Dragonfolk alike.

            But I hardly minded any of that; what bothered me now was the complacency in that single “I know.” There were undertones there. Tones of “I KNOW because I have been CHOSEN and you, who are so much more foolish than I, could never hope to KNOW AS I KNOW. I humbly request that you do not attempt to fool thineself.”

            “Rhawen Evergreen Fox,” Mevit said, saying the name like it was something foul. “Do you know why we have called you here?”

            “Not for tea and biscuits, I expect,” I replied, unamused. Vihemeth frowned at me, looking more like a person deserving such a godawful name in doing so. He’d just love it if I behaved myself and did as I was told, I thought. He’s a good man, but he’s still Dragonfolk in the end.

            Mevit had said something, but I’d missed it, calling attention to my ignorance with a distinctive “Wut?”

            It was hard not to laugh at Mevit when he was angry. “We have called you here,” he said slowly, “to discuss your latest Tale regarding one Kriamiss Orientere.”

            “Ah, yes. And I think it’ll be a good one, too. Perhaps you’d like to read what I have down so far?”  Oh, sarcasm! Truly, you are my friend.

            “That is unnecessary; we here have no desire to read code-breaking drivel.”

            “Oh,” I said. But what ran through my mind was righteous anger; such an insult! Me! A nearly-omniscient Narrator, charged (amongst others) with recording the great histories of the world, write drivel? Oh, there would be hell to pay.

            “‘Oh’, indeed.” Mevit glared over steepled fingers, trying too look menacing but really trying to hard for it to be effective. “Rhawen E. Fox, you are charged with the heinous crime of placing yourself in your own Tale and interfering with its natural flow.”

            “And for wearing that horrid form!” Glaivde added in her shrill voice. She had recently spent some time with a noble family on Nassab and wore a human form; she appeared as exactly the sort of wrinkled old woman to own such a nails-on-the-chalkboard voice. The stereotyping was rather comical.

            Ignoring Glaivde, I responded with my best scolding mother voice. “Why, Mevit, I’m surprised at you. How can you presume to know what the Creators intend for a Tale?” (Much to my pleasure, Vihemeth looked a bit like he was going to blow a gasket; how I do love vexing him.)

            I was rewarded with an affronted gasp on all sides; Mevit’s was followed by the spluttered statement, “W-we are omniscient, Rhawen, and—“

            “Nearly omniscient, Mevit,” I corrected. “And you forget that I share that same omniscience with you and the rest of those noble Narrators here gathered. If any Creator wished our omniscience to know their designs, I would know them as sure as you would. No Creator has condemned my action, though I have broken the rules and done so consciously.” Murmured disgust drifted through the room. Consciously neglecting the Narrator’s code?! Preposterous! Unthinkable!

            “Blasphemy!” was the particular adjective to fly from Glaivde. It summed up their mood nicely.

            Vihemeth rose, hands on table, leering over me. “What nonsense are you suggesting, Rhawen?” It was, perhaps, incredibly lucky that his posture prevented the others from getting a clear look at his face, for behind that queer Dragon quality in his eyes, his everlasting sympathy for me was plain to see and all the political maneuvering in the world would not have saved his reputation – that one thing that seemed to save me, again and again, from losing the station of Narrator, my reason for being.

            I dropped my eyes from his and looked toward Mivet instead. “I merely suggest that the rules be broken this once. After all, I have already taken up the Tale and must see it through to the end.”

            “That is as may be. We cannot argue the necessity of completing a Tale.” Mevit exchanged nods with his fellows. “However,” he said now, the old hatred flaring, “that still begs the question: what is to become of you and your Tale afterward? You have broken the rules, Rhawen. The impartiality of the Tale is tainted by your personal involvement, and the old rule that we never write of ourselves broken.”

            In a fit of frustration, Vihemeth threw out, “At least you haven’t written of one of our Council meetings!”

            A small smile slipped onto my face, just for Vihemeth to see, and he looked suddenly terribly afraid, breathing, “Oh, you wouldn’t… would you? No, Rhawen, don’t—“

            But I turned away from him; Mevit was jabbering again.

            “I believe it would be wise for us to revoke your right to Narrate and destroy the Tale in question upon its completion.”

            A stony cold silence entered the room; this was a radical move. Not unheard of, but still terribly harsh.

            Presently, the unthinkable happened; Glaivde spoke in my defense.

            “Mevit,” she began timidly. “Are you certain of the wisdom of this? Her crime is steep, indeed, but to both prevent her further Writing and destroy the Tale… well. That’s just… cruel, isn’t it?”

            Mevit began softly, gaining volume and passion as he spoke. “Need I remind you, Glaivde, that Rhawen has been a thorn in our side for many years now, constantly pushing against the limitations specified by the Narrator’s Code, constantly just being out of our judicial grasp. Well, not today.”

            “You look like Maroc.” The tyrant’s name slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it, and the silence that settled was the silence before the ice cracks and the frozen waters swallow you whole.

            “I am no tyrant, Rhawen.” It was a quiet phrase. Deadly quiet.

            Words tumbled out, unchecked and unstoppable. “No. At least, not in name. This Council eats from your hand, though. Surely you know that much. Surely you’ve learned to use it. And this is why you want me gone, isn’t it? It isn’t about the Narrators’ ideals or any thing else like them.” I could feel the horrified stares of my fellow Narrators. They knew all this, had known all this, but here I was, in ill graces, committing virtual or literal suicide by saying the things that were better left unsaid.

            Mevit and I stared at each other for a long time. At length, he said, “Go. You and your Tale are safe.” There was a tacit “for the time being,” understood by all.

            I bowed, and left the room. I could hear the clamor of their voices as I walked down the hall.

[diksonastick]

Religion is a very feared thing. Most Raethians do not partake in it. They don't fear the end. The universe will just reboot and restart. Everything will be cleansed and everyone will be enlightened. It's like wiping the memory on a computer.

How do the people of your world believe the world will end? Is it a belief rooted in religion? Science? Do they fear it?

[foxglovethings]

I don’t have a blog for Raethian, so just gonna... leave this here.

[foxglovethings]

🐎: Which of your muses is the fastest?

No magic involved? Raethian. She’s super athletic and goes for endurance over strength, so in a straight foot race she could easily outrun the rest of them.

Magic involved would definitely be Evain. I mean. She’s a druid, so... just turn into a cat and book it.

[rasekstories]

Malrek and the Ettin

All the Stewards under the House of Da’Kien had gathered in Vigil Hill to watch the road to Drustvar. Raysse, the queenly wife of the Lord Steward, was there. The younger Lady Kien and her consort Kale were there, and Lisana Cloudgaze and the old bear by her side. There was Rellisa Thrum and her younger cousin, and the mage Danielle who watched him lovingly, and Cinn the Tinker, who took care of many things, and Acinovath and Falerelan at the back of the crowd, and many more.

They found lot of work for themselves while they waited for the Lord Steward, and entertained themselves with drinks and stories and patrols until he returned. Many of them were good times, but some were not.

Lorthanil was small compared to the other Ancients, not being quite an Ancient yet himself, and surrounded by others who were unlike him. His mother, as he knew her, was a medic for these Stewards, and confined to bed with injuries quite often. Lorthanil would stand at the side of her bed and show her flowers, quietly, even when her eyes were closed.

His father, as he knew him, was a giant man with a greatsword at his back and a patch covering his right eye. He was gone from them more often than not, but when he was home he would sit the little Ancient on his knee, and ask him questions he couldn’t answer and tell him stories of the world outside.

One day, early in the morning before the sun was up, Lorthanil saw his father readying his armor for a long journey. He saw the dried meat, the cheese, the hard bread wrapped and stored safely in his leather bag. He saw the beaten chestplate polished and repaired, strapped across father’s chest. He saw the sword oiled and sharpened.

His father was quiet. He heard his mother say his name in her sleep, but it was not in the old language, and meant nothing of acorns and seasons and the budding leaves, so Lorthanil forgot it frequently.

He followed his father into the breaking dawn. “I’m going to be gone for a little while.” he said, in his quiet voice. “You have to look after Rae for me until I get back.”

This was how it usually went. His father would leave before the sun was truly up, his mother would wake, and sigh, and the two of them would take to the Hill and look after the other Stewards and each other until his adventure was done and he returned home.

But it was spring now, thought Lorthantil, looking around their home. The ground was wet from rain, the earliest flowers had already begun to bloom, and the trees that stood tall against the sky opened their eyes and groaned and creaked and shook the snow from their branches.

It was time for an Ancient to have adventures too.

Lorthanil followed his father into the mountain, many paces behind so he would not be seen. When his father grew suspicious and turned to look, he would freeze, and raise his branches to the sun, and bloom with delicate spring blossoms to fit in with the other trees. His father must not have noticed, because he kept going and did not say anything at all.

Their way was through a pass in the mountain, where the snow was still thick and the wind cut through to the bone. They had been walking for many hours, and Lorthanil saw his father stoop with hunger and weariness. It was then that they came upon the cave of a hill ettin, sitting on a rock outside of his home by a meager fire.

“My name is Malrek,” said his father, “I’ve come a very long way from Vigil Hill and am tired, and hungry after so many miles. Could you spare me a seat, and some of the food you’re cooking at your fire?”

The ettin told him he could sit by his fire and enjoy his company, but the broth he was cooking was too thin, and there was not enough meat to share with human travelers who wandered up into the mountain.

Lorthanil sat by a bramble off the path from them, resting his limbs and drinking in the sunlight that dipped below the mountain tops and cast long shadows along the snow and rock. He listened to them speak of many things. He listened to the ettin speak of things he understood: The change of the rivers at the turn of the seasons; of the newness of the elk and kits and bear cubs that took their first steps; of birds returning to the island from the mainland to the south. He listened to his father talk of blood and battle and the rolling tide; of his woman back home and the days stretched out before them like a woodland path.

He watched the ettin watch his father, and stir his pot of too-thin broth, and marveled at the size of his limbs and brow, not much smaller than an Ancient’s.

The two of them sat and talked until the sun went down completely, and the ettin climbed to his feet and stretched his arms over his head. “You have been very good company, Malrek of Vigil Hill, but my soup is not yet done, and I have no other meat to keep my belly full. You are unfortunate in that there are many dangers in the mountain, and when I am done eating you, there will be no bones or flesh to find.”

The ettin reached for his club, but Malrek was much faster. He had his greatsword in his hand before he was on his feet; a gleam of steel under the growing moonlight. Lorthanil watched between his branches as the two circled one another, his father dancing out of the way at the ettin’s heavy swings.

It was hardly more than a moment, it seemed, that the ettin stumbled, and turned too late, and his father drove his blade into the giant’s eye. The mountains echoed with its howling cry, and the rumble of earth and rock as it fell to its knees in pain and defeat.

“Don’t kill me!” The ettin begged. “Take your blade from my eye and leave me. I have nothing to offer you, but if you let me live you may travel unhindered, and the mountain will be good to you, and bother you no longer.”

Lorthanil knew there was good in this. The mountain had many dangers, those visible to humans and not. The snows and trees could bury his father forever if they wanted to, he knew. But a promise of safety from the ettins of the mountain could let him rest for awhile, and regain his strength, and be bothered no longer.

His father saw this too, for he was wise about these things. When he pulled his blade from the ettin, its eye came with it, glittering and black like ice.

Lorthanil watched as his father hurled it high into the sky and looked up, and saw, at the very same time, what looked like a shooting star.

[rasekstories]

An Aside

Alcohol, needles, catgut stitches, clean linen bandages. Fading light filtered through the lodge’s solitary western window, mingling with the glow of the lamp by the door. There were enough supplies for several emergency packs they could carry about, and the rest was good for storage. If they could find a place that didn’t leak and mold to hell, anyway.

Four leather packs, oiled and cured, sat empty at the edge of the table. They looked more expensive than they should have been; flourished and stamped and dyed to match the colours of the House of Stewards, but as long as they kept the water out she wouldn’t dwell too much on it.

She had her own, of course. The pack around her back held enough supplies for her and a couple others, plus her own additional fancies. A sea stalk flower. A pipe. A leather portfolio lined with bloodthistle. The little pink potions she’d been experimenting with. The new packs wouldn’t need all that.

“Rae?” Quiet, soft, thick with sleep. Malrek shuffled up behind her, resting a calloused hand on her hip.

“You’re up.” She smiled, busying herself with the packs. He’d come in with the ships that morning, when dawn’s rosy fingers stretched out across the harbour and paved the streets with new light. He stank of tar and sweat and brine.

Malrek cleared his throat. “Any coffee?” He slipped away from her, crossing the floor to paw through their food stores by the hearth. “And what are you doing?”

The drawback of a wayward man. He’d left on some salvaging mission before she was awake nearly a week earlier; hunting down rumors off the coast of Kul Tiras aboard a schooner he’d talked his way onto. The Lady’s Piety, or something like that. A privateer vessel bought out by a merchant several years before. The name, no doubt, was a shabby attempt at currying the favor of the tidesages, upon whose blessings a crew would gladly sail.

The Inquisitor had missed a lot sailing with the jacks, and more than that acting as a forward scout in Zuldazar the week before. And skulking around Stormwind in beggar’s clothes the week before that. A litany of felt absences that picked away at her, flickering in and out like the radio static that kept them connected.

“We’re trying a new approach, shona.” She heard him hum behind her, smiling at the familiar nickname. “One for Dave, one for Raysse, two extras for anyone who wants one. Maybe Acinovath? He’s my new boss, you know.”

Two mugs set on the table. A kettle by the fire. “I’m your boss.”

“One of many.”

“Don’t be crabby, babe.” His tone was almost playful.

“I’m not being crabby!” Rae tilted her head to the side, a little pout growing on her lips. “I’m just worried.”

“About what?” Malrek’s became serious. He was at her back again, arms around her waist, planting kisses along the nape of her neck.

“About this.”

She tied the first pack off with a leather cord, setting it aside at the other end of the table. It occurred to her that she could stitch names into each of them if she really wanted. Your name, your pack. Don’t lose it. No exceptions.

“We can’t let another patrol like that happen again.” she said, “We have to be more careful.”

“We will be.” Kisses on the back of her neck. “I’ll be there.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

“You promise?”

He stopped, looking over her carefully organized supplies. The empty, expensive bags. The kettle was boiling behind them, two lonesome mugs waiting on the counter. The basin out back she’d insisted he wash in as soon as he got there.

Orange and red, sunset rays like summer roses, cast a warm glow over her skin. He pulled her closer.

“I promise.”

[rasekstories]

Past and Future by a Fire Pit

There was dirt under his fingernails, and little white scars along his knuckles like a boxer that could hardly be seen through years of sun and weather. She could see by the flickering light of the campfire outside a small burn between his thumb and forefinger, the light hair on his arm, the colour of an old tattoo. She kissed his thumb, his first finger, his second. He did not wake.

Their tent was a two person set up; almost too small to sit up in at the middle and lined with just enough blankets to make the sand and the clay of Nazmir mildly comfortable. When she slept it was with her head on his shoulder, or his arm around her middle and his nose buried in her hair. He snored a little, but it was alright.

Last night she had a dream. Her brother in his knight’s armor, auburn hair tied at the back of his neck. He was standing on the shores of Northrend; so cold the icicles clung to his nose and eyelashes. She saw his sword in his hand, shield gone. His left arm hung limp at his side. The great dark figure that tore through the ice towards him was fiercely hungry, and its roars like an avalanche echoed off the white cliffs.

She yelled for him to run, but her voice never reached him. He crumpled like a doll into the sand, stained red, a cry for home caught in his throat.

Did they see it the way she had? She wondered. The way her brother had? Sequestered in the safety of Eversong, her greatest threat the dwindling Shadowpine tribe to the south of the city. The twisting curling spread of red-gold fingers above fair tree trunks. The bleed into deep green, into sickly blue, into the gate that forbade them from traveling into the Plaguelands.

Did they see the elves that fought beside them in Northrend? At the gates of Icecrown where fathers and sons, orcs and humans, were no different from one another in the bulwark they formed against cruelty and death? Or did they just see the banner of the Horde, black on red, snapping in the icy wind?

If what they said was true, those sturdy and steadfast soldiers of the Alliance, they could not have seen it more differently. Wistful dreams of revenge against their most hated enemies, even those who stood shoulder to shoulder with them in another time. “They hurt you,” she heard in his voice, “and they hurt me too.” Their nightmare both did and did not include her, then and now, and it was hard not to feel it settling in her chest.

A low murmur pulled her back to reality; to the ragged outpost at the northern point of the swamp. To the damp ground and the hum of bugs above the water, the spit of wood in a fire, to the muffled chatter of the night watch.

Malrek mumbled something in his sleep, some nonsense, and ran his hand down her side before letting it fall, without ceremony, back into the mess of blankets. A strand of sandy blonde hair obscured the spider web of scars across his eye; an empty socket where the other was brilliant blue, and as familiar to her as her own skin. She brushed it out of the way.

Maybe it mattered, maybe it didn’t. The ties she had back home, all but severed. The dead lain still in their graves, unable to protest or approve. The willowy spectre of battles seared into the minds of those who lived through them, unable to recall exactly whose faces looked back from across the field.

Eventually they’d all have to come to terms with the damage done by others, to themselves, to the world they lived in. Eventually more ties would have to be cut and remade, wounds healed, memories recognized as just that. It was inevitable, she thought, and necessary. For their past; for their future.  But not right now.

Rae settled down in the blankets, safe in a pair of arms that pulled her closer.

For now it could wait.

[rasekstories]

Lord of Graves

The bay at Nazmir's crown was crowded, not with ships or sails, but with sand bars that stretched long across the water. A thick grove of trees grew from the bay itself; their roots holding trunks above the waves like spider legs. Thick, stubborn grass grew throughout, and in between the brush were flocks of sea birds, their mouths filled with seaweed and the muscles that clung to it. The place stank of salt and decay.

Redfield's Watch had been erected rather recently, along the edge of the mouth of the Shattered River. It was, all things considered, a pathetic camp. The barest skeleton of a contingent had been sent there, presumably to monitor activity beyond reasonable safety, and the loss of that safety meant they seldom saw visitors, or supplies, or relief. It was also where the shadows had been stationed.

Raethian was knee deep in the river. It was no deeper than that the length across, she thought, but the bottom was entirely silt and made for a slower trip. The bugs that nipped at her exposed ears and cheeks only made the pace more frustrating.

The temple that lay at the other side was a ruin of what it once was; squat and sprawling with crumbling towers, and the stonework of the black road half swallowed by the swamp. It pulsated with energy she wasn’t familiar with. Cold, quiet. A warning to those who crept too close. This place wasn’t meant for the living.

She could see the river of souls pass over the walls of the necropolis, some more defined than others. Some were sad, some were not. Some were angry, some were at peace. All knew exactly where they were going. Little ghosts that drifted like fireflies above the grass and stone; winking in and out like stars in the clear night sky.

Fingertips on the stone, wet with dew. She hoisted herself up over the wall where it was low; worn away with time and lack of care, and landed beside a stone basin filled with soot and sand. Her instinct was to stay low, scout the area in case she was seen, but there was no need: The temple was as still and dead as the trolls that rested beneath it.

The cries of squabbling birds had melted away into a stifling silence. Even the sun seemed lost behind a canopy of trees that loomed and bent overhead, reaching out to temple’s main rise with fingers dripping in hanging moss. As far as she could tell, she was the only soul alive within the walls.

A crackle from her communicator broke the eerie silence and she quickly reached to turn it off. The chances of it being for her were low, and even if it was, someone from the watch would come and find her here. It wasn’t far, even if the air and the light and the feeling in her chest made it seem like a different world.

Raethian stood at the lip of a ruined stair, hands on her hips, looking over the temple square. An identical set of stairs lie maybe one hundred meters in front of her on the other side, with two larger, longer ones coming from the main road. The door to the temple’s main chamber yawned beneath a decorative skull, flanked on either side by constructs that weren’t, or didn’t seem to be, active at all.

She’d seen the skull peppered across the swamp, in ruins and in camps, sunk into the swamp and standing proudly before altars freshly used. The Loa of Death resided deep in the ground here, and this, she had to assume, was where the dead came when it was time to wander home.

A stream of them like mist floated by her, whispering nothings to one another that made her ears twitch and her skin tingle. It reminded her of something she heard long ago, about the knights squirreled away in Acherus. But this seemed peaceful, accepting. Comfortable. She wondered if all spirits were like this when they died.

“Rae?”

She spun around, planting one foot behind her, hands out front in the familiar crane stance. She knew that voice like the back of her hand, though she hadn’t heard him approach. And when she turned to look, only the wall greeted her.

“Raethian!”

She turned again, to the temple’s open mouth. The burning eyes above the door seemed brighter; the sky darker. They seemed to watch her. A cold fear trickled down her chest and into her gut. There was no one there. Not even spirits.

“Mal?” She called out into the swamp, her voice small and wavering. No answer. Not even an echo. Only the eyes of the Loa of Death, high above her, boring holes into her heart. Brilliant and blinding, purple and white. She shielded her eyes and felt the weight of them only grow stronger.

The voice called to her again, laced with urgency. It was further still, and even as she stepped forward she felt a tug at her legs, at her chest, at her soul. Come closer, it beckoned, into the temple. Come find me. Come see what I have for you.

Raethian stopped short of the step. The voice pleaded with her, deep within the yawning mouth beneath the skull. Her ears twitched. She dug her fingers into the palms of her hands, nails leaving crescents in the skin.

“It’s not real.” She said. It sounded like him. It needed her, very badly, to go into the temple and find him, but it wasn’t him.

She turned away through sheer force, pulling her scarf up around her ears. The voice that called out to her again was hungry, demanding. A wolf chasing down a deer. She hopped the crumbling wall and slid down the bank to the Shattered River, wading back across the silt to the eastern bank, to the watch, where she hoped someone was waiting for her.

The river of souls continued behind her; a silverly ribbon against an inky sky. Its hushed whispers filled the temple court like the hum of insects, the prayers and curses of the departed, spiraling towards an open mouth and the burning eyes of the Loa of Death.