The Day after the Ball: Folly

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby catch » Wed Jul 17, 2013 11:00 am

"What is a story."
The dull man-beast asked this,
his voice
a wet throb, like his wound,
emotionless.

"Is it good, hard work, a back full of stripes.
Is it the death-sleep after labor.
What does it taste like."


the Fat Man is the one who does not answer, but uses
a single, fat finger
to root about in his nose; his eyes
gone far past them.
his thoughts, too, a grayness
thinking of the salt of a nose-treasure
on his tongue.

the muzzle-faced man makes
no comment on her direction.
obediently he bends, and gathers
what deadfall he may, scraping
with his good, strong hands
twigs and branches from above,
and rotting, sun-burned leaves.

the tigers are no longer tigers.
they are men.
children.
their grey, little faces
masks of disinterest. they crouch
eleven of them
against the ground.

they wait, as the man
builds his fire
setting it alight with grunts and strikes of substance
against substance
until the heat merrily crackled,
the flames
Grawnya
the only color to this place,
for the light only showed how
terribly
colorless
everything else was.

the man squatted on his haunches
and looked to her. they all looked to her
eleven children
a madman
a toad
and waited for her Story.
User avatar
catch
Member
 
Posts: 699
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Dulcie » Wed Jul 17, 2013 11:12 am

"No, no, that's not what a story is." She insisted. But the beast man obediently set about gathering up things for the fire.

There was so much lifelessness here. There was no joy, no emotion. Nothing beyond the tiniest bit of success at the fat man wrestling about in his nose. There were gray children to sit about the gray fire, everything almost as if the color of slate.

The hollow faces looked at her and she grimaced, turning her gaze back over her shoulder at where they had come from.

"You know, on second thought, I think I might just go and find my own way out." No thanks for the fire, or for the journey here. She would get up with her walking stick and start to try to walk away, wanting to leave all of the grayness there behind her. It made her skin crawl feeling those empty little lifeless eyes staring at her back.
User avatar
Dulcie
Member
 
Posts: 806
Joined: Sun May 18, 2008 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby catch » Wed Jul 17, 2013 11:23 am


walk away
to where, to where,
for the Fat Man squats at the junction
of two paths,
and the tiger-children waited
just beyond the flames.

and their lips bared,
hungry
for air; for blood;
for chunks of the flesh
missing
from their bodies
masticated by Fiddler's jaws.
for life snatched away.


"A story," they half-croak, half-growl
half-moan.

"A story - what is a story?
Does it taste good. Does it taste like cakes,
like summers we have known?
Tell us a story."


they shook together, weaved back and forth,
a wall of grey and sticky, wet flesh
and moaned, like
November trees in the wind,
their teeth and claws ready to rend
if they did not get
their story.
User avatar
catch
Member
 
Posts: 699
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Dulcie » Mon Jul 22, 2013 5:21 am

There was no leaving, no going anywhere, and so the Storyteller came back and sat down in front of the tiger children.

"A story is words. Wonderful words that paint pictures in your mind. I have just the story for the twelve of you." Her count was a little off however. Eleven tiger children, a fat man and a beast man, but there was room in her cast for an extra member"

She walked back, trying to stop the horrible shudder that went up her spine at the vacancy of the faces, settling down in front of the fire, seated cross legged as she focused on the fire and not the many bodies about her.

"It's the story of twelve dancing princesses." She'd take a deep breath then, drawing on her power, hoping that the story could change the characters that sat before her into the harmless members of the story's cast.

"There was once a King with twelve beautiful daughters. Every night he would lock the princesses in their room, and in the morning all their dancing shoes would be set in front of the door, completely worn through. The King offered a great reward to any man that could discover their secret. If one could prove where the girls had been he would allow them to marry any of his daughters that he chose, and thus become his heir. If they failed on the other hand, they would be put to death.

Our story is of a road weary soldier who came upon this castle and decided that he would try his hand at solving the mystery. Many had come before him of course, but none had ever left the castle."

She paused then, feeling the magic of the story beginning as she looked up, waiting to see the reactions among the fat man and the tiger children.
User avatar
Dulcie
Member
 
Posts: 806
Joined: Sun May 18, 2008 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Rance » Tue Jul 23, 2013 12:56 am

AND DO YOU OFFER THIS YET-UNIDENTIFIED ARTIFACT [object, relic] BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOTHING ELSE?

"You've taken what I could give you simply that I might have your audience."

A GRACIOUS KINDNESS [charity, allowance] ON OUR PART; YOU HAVE ABUSED WHAT LITTLE POWER YOU HOLD FOR FAR TOO LONG.

"I've no need to do spellwork any more; my constitution is dwindling."

BUT NOW THAT YOU HAVE CALLED UPON US, YOU HAVE YET TO SHOW US THE OBJECT [artifact, relic] THAT WILL CONVINCE US TO CARRY YOU TO HIM [the human, the man].

"I can only provide it upon my arrival. I ask of you, acumenus, an extension of this arrangement. In the form of your confidence. That upon being relocated to the human's side, I will give you your due."

YOU HAVE BEEN STRIPPED OF CENTURIES OF LEARNING [knowledge, intellect], MULTITUDES OF TALENTS [abilities, skills]. YOU ARE AN INSECT; A BEING STRONGER THAN YOU COULD SLAUGHTER YOU WITH BUT A SIDELONG GLANCE.

"Then all the more reason to have faith in my ability to deliver."


They walked for some time in silence after Glenn's proclamations, the drow's bleeding elbow leaving the same continuous trail of spattered blood behind them. Occasionally they doubled back over in the maze upon their path; he would never say anything, but would simply turn and seek out the the nearest intersection of hedgerow and thorns to choose an alternative angle.

"The wonder to me," Audmathus finally said, "is that you think you've some manner of mastery over the world with your philosophies and your clever theories, Glenn Burnie. But not even those, however honed and sharp, will keep your throat from a blade that has work to do. And even princesses, however tragic they may be, will suffer their dresses a little blood to bury a problem that simply won't say where he's been put."

There are things that she cannot possibly see and things that she cannot possibly understand.

Blind spots.

Sleep that was not sleep; a belly that wanted for too much food, guts whose few waters and oils were expelled because they'd nothing else to digest. Dirty hands, fingers scraped almost free of their skin. He stumbled because he could not walk straight anymore -- his muscles had gone dry, and all he wanted for was a little bit of water, a relief, a chance to rest. But the maze was endless. Lefts became rights. Rights became lefts. One corner was the same as its predecessor and its follower. Left became right. Right became left. Became left, became right, left, left, right, left--

When they came to another intersection, Audmathus thrust out a hand to pause the governor in his pace. Meanwhile, his free hand shifted down to the handle of the tarnished blade at his other hip. Discarding Shadowdancer had been intentional; the neglected blade stirred in its sheath with quivering excitement.

"Do you smell that," he asked, his nostrils flaring.

Wet and moist flesh the texture of a meat left out too long.

Sweat, the spoor of a working-crew driven long through the day and forced to endure the burning fury of the sun.

Unwashed skin, the black grime of stagnation left to mold on folds of fat that could not be reached--

No sound, just the wretched aroma, the odor of unraked back alleys and gluttony that steeped in its own stews. A Fat Man.

"Someone else," the drow whispered.
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Glenn » Tue Jul 23, 2013 1:33 am

Audmathus was the problem. He was the alien element, not the mirrors or the tigers or the storyteller somewhere in the labyrinth, the storyteller, telling her tale even now, the storyteller that they were almost upon. It was Audmathus. There were elements of familiarity in him, the history Glenn knew, as spotted as it was, the resemblance in root and stem with Faeryl, the general drow tendencies, the weight of failure. It wasn't enough, not here, not now. Audmathus didn't fit into their story anymore and he had never fit quite right into Glenn Burnie's story. His presence was surreal, off-putting. It threatened to shift the balance when there was one thing which the dispatched Governor simply could not allow to change: above all else, he had to stay the protagonist of his own story.

It meant controlling the conversation as much as possible. Glenn Burnie had to feel as if he could affect the world around him or else what was he? There was nothing he feared more than being helpless in the face of fate or destiny or some supreme being. Everything he did was to ensure that he and those around him could stand no matter what darkness poured down upon them, no matter the cost for that insolence and defiance. At least they would be on their feet.

"In the end, Audmathus, that blade could take us all, whenever, wherever. We work with what we have to prevent it, but more than that, we work with what we have to make it meaningful. If we could be taken at any moment, then we damn well make sure that the moments we have are used to the fullest." He bowed his head, half exposing his neck and half being positively courtly. "Mortality. Everything you and yours lack. Our greatest gift and our most terrible curse. Someday I'll shatter every hindrance nature has imposed upon us, but that one? Mortality? I'll think twice about that one."

Sometimes it meant control. Sometimes it meant action.

Silence. Just the stench. A halting hand? No, there'd be none of that. They had steel. They had surprise. They were fresh now. Caution could only lead to a disadvantage later on. Perhaps it was the feeling in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps it was his audience. Perhaps it didn't matter. Glenn Burnie walked onward.

As he did, a voice became clarion clear. He walked onward. He listened. He raised a hand to Audmathus and gave the drow the most honest smile that he yet to give, a smile between friends, a smile between compatriots on an adventure, and then he walked forth.

"He failed," this to the storyteller, this to the audience, "because a soldier is a soldier. If he is a foot soldier, a veteran, then he knows of following orders, of staying in line, of marching one foot after the next." Left becoming right and right becoming left as the marching went on and on unto time immemorial. "If he was a general, then he was used to giving orders, used to following strategy, used to anticipating and adapting, but not used to this. He was not a man of thought but of action."

There he was, standing before the crowd, staring the storyteller dead on, rude. "Then came an inspector, a royal inspector, a taxman," a nod to the fat man, though ever slight, "a man of numbers and booklearning, a hard man, a helstone, we might say, which is not a common noun, but it really ought to be. He investigated all the possibilities. He checked all of his numbers. He declared the impossible impossible and he failed as well. He failed because he was a man of thought, not action." There was something almost manic in his voice now, something that threatened lapse just upon the sight of her. She was unfettered and it drew a sparkle to his eye.

"And then she came, this woman of iron, with her painful Northern words, and her experience, a woman not of book-learning, but of every other sort, a woman who found joy in the wonder of life and humor in the darkness of it all. She was a woman of both thought and action, of the two not married but instead embroiled in the most torrid of affairs." He would look back now, would glance to Audmathus, half expecting him not to be there. He quieted now, passing the story on to her, to him, to the monsters around them, a gauntlet thrown down.
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby catch » Fri Jul 26, 2013 2:13 pm

There is no stir at the
storyteller's story.
no question to form in
fang-filled mouths,
and, more terribly, no interest.
The wound-mind Virgil stared
straight ahead. The Fat Man dug
for another treasure.
The tiger-children, in number
eleven
gazed at the ashen ground.
brief, stirring interest,
but then
nothing
as they struggle to put words to
pictures, and failed.

"What use is stories,"
the tiger-children said,
their voices terrible and dead.
not even disappointed. a great, sucking hole
of nothingness.
Like Virgil's black-split head.

"Fill us. Fill our bellies with stories.
Fill our flesh with feeling.
All of our feelings, they are gone
gone - gone - gone into dirt
and into worms."


and they lunged, then, at the Story-teller,
and the ash thickened as it fell
and Glenn, who saw this all
would feel the warmth at his shoulder
the slide of a muzzle across his neck,
and loving tendrils tickling his ear.


"Your Northern Woman is dead,"
the Beast whispers,
tinged with laughter and hysteric sadness.
and the smell of flowers in decay.

"The Lady scooped out the steel
and planted flowers in her Airy skull.
How will you fix it, Glenn Burnie.
How will you f-f-f-fix it, how will you
be free, b-b-before I
am.
Unleashed."


the ash cleared. There is no Virgil at
Glenn Burnie's shoulder.
Before them is the section
of hedge
and plant, the stench of something
lingering on the air.
Like ashes.
User avatar
catch
Member
 
Posts: 699
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Dulcie » Sun Jul 28, 2013 7:21 am

The scene was gone in the mist, the reality that seemed to be fading away to an ethereal haze. There was some evidence that there had been life there once. The cold remains of a fire, the charred wood stacked one atop another and places where the dirt had been disturbed by little tiger-children paws.

But most importantly there were tracks, soft little foot prints in the dirt that seemed to have the slender shape and design of lady's shoes. They led away from the area and out back into the labyrinth.
User avatar
Dulcie
Member
 
Posts: 806
Joined: Sun May 18, 2008 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Rance » Sun Jul 28, 2013 12:18 pm

And then she came, this woman of iron, with her painful Northern words...

Nothing. Nothing was left. And there was no one left to hear--

The words came and went, Temperance's and the Storyteller's. The diminutive tigers became nothing more than an old memory, and ashes scattered like defunct remembrances across the divoted ground of the Golben pit. The dark elf and the governor were left there with the gnarled skeleton of a long-cooled firepit and a haphazard trail of footprints depressed into the ground, hardened as if what had once been mud had solidified, dried, and left fossils of a traveler's past passage in the earth.

Days old. Weeks old.

No clammy scent of Fat Man flesh; no resonance of mighty proclamation (I am unleashed, unleashed, unleashed) to echo and tangle in the hedgerows. Just this: behind Glenn Burnie, the shuffling scrape of dark feet across the stony dirt and an honest peal of laughter -- it was too fine, too fine not to have a fair helping of laughter at the vanishing of Glenn's willing audience.

But he was still there. Red eyes and serrated-toothed smiles, an elbow dripping splotches and blossoms of blood like sloppy art across the dirt.

"A theatrical entrance," he praised, just from behind Glenn's left shoulder. "Finely rehearsed. Properly delivered. The evidence of a man who listens to himself all too much and heeds others around him all too little, especially when they've been talking to him the entire time. You control nothing here, Glenn Burnie. Not with your words, not with your profound and exultant declarations. Nothing is in your hands that won't slip out from between your fingers.

"There's no one here--" and he swept his hand to display it. Ashes and footprints, and that was all. "No one except us.

"No one except you."
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Glenn » Mon Jul 29, 2013 1:55 am

Your Northern Woman is dead

It was always Ariane between them. Two perfect young people moving in a beautiful unison and Ariane Emory there to cause the strife. She provided him with the means for violence, no matter how much she wanted anything else. She fostered his distrust for magic, though it did not need much fostering. She applauded his pigheaded stubbornness, so long as it was not against her. Meanwhile, Rhaena herself was magic, was mind-tampering, was a foolish girl besotted upon a foolish boy, and the two of them made foolish decisions that cost them all. It was Glenn Burnie's existence which still Ariane Emory's prejudiced hand when it came to the girl trader who had enabled her student to such amazing feats of self-destruction.

Then they grew up and everything became so much better and so, so much worse.

The Lady scooped out the steel
and planted flowers in her Airy skull.


The Brown boy had been a test case. That was the worst of all the things Rhaena had hidden from him during his time in Rasazan. The rest was bad. That was the worst, a sort of mind murder of someone precious to him. Obviously on some level, Rhaena knew what it was, but she wasn't guilty about it, just crafty. To her, she was making Ariane happier, was making her fit in, was finding a role for her, was protecting Glenn in a way that was impossible for him to understand. If she had been malicious, it would have been one thing. That she was not meant something else, insanity, pure and unbridled as no one had ever been insane before. She was one half princess, one half tyrant, and only he could put her down. Only he could save Ariane. Only he could restore Myrken. Only he could stop this.

It was Ariane on the line. He became emotional for the first time in years. He moved too quickly and with the wrong support. He was blind to a possibility as only Rhaena or Ariane could make him. In the ways that mattered most, he failed.

How will you fix it, Glenn Burnie.
How will you f-f-f-fix it


Catch, or the non-Catch, becomes manifest and they are left alone. Burnie, as he is want to do, shouted at nothing at all in his absence, in the Storyteller's. "Maybe that would have been the entire point of inserting her in the story!" Frustration welled. There was every indication that he was days, weeks late in making his growling proclamation, but it had to be said anyway. He was almost beside himself in frustration. Audmathus spoke on and the Governor turned to him, turned and walked towards him. One step. Two steps. Three.

"Facts. First," a finger jotted out. "I am awake. I know this. We won't even argue it. Second, you..." and here he'd advance further. "are not some figment of my imagination. I didn't know you nearly well enough for that. Anyway, I do know myself. If I was going to summon someone for that role, she'd have nicer breasts," he went so far as to try to kick forward, to launch a quick, nasty thing at Audmathus' shin. "Three, we're not alone at all, no matter what you are. Tracks. The storyteller. She needs an audience to make her power work. By now, she'll want to find us as much as we want to find her. Come on."
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Rance » Mon Jul 29, 2013 2:56 pm

A day after the ball.

The folly? Governor Glenn Burnie believed himself to be untouchable. A mistake to believe that even here, in the bowels of some desolate hell, inadvertently styled in the image of some Laboron, he had some sense of control, agency, a destiny manifested at his will--

A folly.

I am awake. I know this.

"You are awake," Audmathus told him.

Second, you are not some figment of my imagination.

"You never knew me. You would have no recourse to design a shadow of thought in my shape, my likeness."

Glenn Burnie kicked, spurned; the heel struck shin, the dark elf staggered, but there was a firm and muscled thickness beneath the blow of that boot. Glenn turned, prattling, striding off toward an uncharted destination, but after the first few steps, the process became difficult, impossible--

--because the dirt beneath his feet began to sink in like a soft powder, sucking up around his legs with the hunger of wet sand. One step drove his leg to the knee into the stony soil of Golben. Whether or not he struggled, whether or not he stood as still as a steely relief, miniature cracks began to form in the flaking dirt. He sunk like human flotsam, until he was lodged to his hips in the soil. Invisible hands scraped at his legs and knees below the dirt, unseen nails raking down the edges of his trousers and biting into his flesh, peeling. Shredding at him.

Thorny ropes began to emerge from the earth around the governor, one of them lashing out for his wrist like a charmed serpent. Regardless of whether it managed to snare his wrist, Shadowdancer started to distort, change, melt before his eyes. Its curved tip drooped like warmed tar. The hilt and handle crumbled to ashes, leaving him with nothing but scalding pitch scouring his knuckles and fingertips.

Never trust a drow bearing gifts.

The earth of Golben was hungry for the governor. Its tiniest stones became jagged teeth, its thousands of roots formed into countless tongues that tried to encapsulate his submerged limbs and drag him down, down--

"This is not death, Glenn Burnie," Audmathus said from above him. His smile and his teeth blackened to age-old ash. His white hair was wrenched from his scalp, spiderwebs dashed by a prowling wind and scattered amid the hedgerows Red eyes became bulging blisters, their pupils hollowed out and filled with bootblack and blood.

"You do not subscribe to mundane ends like death, do you, Glenn Burnie? All too stubborn, all too practical and directive. But the fractured mind is a jester. It thrives on detachment. It develops whole masquerades, assigns untapped faculties to the sole purpose of compensating for the unreal and unfathomable with the thinnest veneer of reason."

The dark elf -- or what was left of him, a fluttering stranger of tattered cloak and buckling limbs, hairless and skinless -- raised a foot and pressed it down on Glenn's scalp. By then, it was nothing more than a disembodied leg. Tibia and fibula connected to the hinge of an ankle and an age-browned heel. Pressing down.

A FIGMENT [crumb, shard] OF YOUR IMAGINATION? NO.

The voice did not have sound. It was force, thought, and conscience. Inside the hollow cup of Glenn Burnie's skull, a slithering entity interjected itself but refused to be birthed through mere volume. The sentences lived in the marrow of his bones, occupied all the lonesome corners of his all-too-capable mind.

A FIGMENT OF MINE [ours], GLENN BURNIE.

The sky above Golben fell. A shattered ceiling. A million falling spears of sunglass.
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: The Day after the Ball: Folly

Postby Glenn » Tue Jul 30, 2013 3:59 am

An uncharted destination?

Did Audmathus think that Glenn Burnie ever went off towards an uncharted destination? Truly? Such a thing was impossible for him, literally impossible, for in the action of moving in any direction, no matter which, Burnie charted it himself. He charted it with every step.

Now, though, he was charting it straight into the ground. "This is ridiculous!" He shouted, suddenly. "It's not happening. You think that you can use mind tricks on me, you drow bastard! I don't have time for this," he focused, but he continued to be gripped. The sword literally fell through his fingers. "I need to get back. You said it yourself. I need to get back. CATCH!" He shouted. He hadn't called upon him for help before, but this was different. He'd bargain with his own values now. There wasn't a line he wouldn't cross to get back, just like in Underdark. When there was no answer he started to flail about. He'd never dealt with quicksand but he'd read about it. Obviously, in this case, keeping still wasn't helping. Damn it." There was a darkness in his voice, a frustration, even as the foot reached his head and started to press.

Finally, there was something else as well. "This isn't over." It was happening. He couldn't stop it. Magic could overtake Glenn Burnie if he wasn't prepared. Every single time. Why else would he hate it so? The sky was falling and the exiled Governor shut his eyes as he was submerged the rest of the way. He should have kicked the damn drow in the crotch.
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Previous

Return to Myrken Wood



Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 17 guests

cron