The Day after the Ball: Folly

[catch]

"I am a wishing-goat."
a wet, parting sound
of lip-wounds and wet-flesh.

and he laughed, for he found
her pain
her screams
to be something altogether curious;
for pain, as all things,
was fleeting.

it could be a sad existence.
the moment
ever-turning, ever-wheeling
Time forever suspended
like a unicorn in flight
under a flickering moon.
but he hadn't the mind to care
to pity himself
for the next feeling, the next emotion
lay just ahead.

he waited, patient, a great couch
of insubstantial solidness.
his tendrils would touch, curiously, at a
wound.

"The cakes are wrong," he tells
Grawnya, his voice utterly serious.
faintly disapproving.
"That was a nasty trick. A nasty trick."

but, tame as any beast, when she held out her arm,
he took it, gently, into his mouth
and pulled.
and pulled.
a wet, parting sound,
like bubbles surging around them
in the ground.

and he would protect her from it
simply by being there.

[Glenn]

Sanity, if you are to wonder, is having your elbow bleed but your cheek not hurt.

Insanity on the other hand, is experiencing quick flashes of hunger for no reason.

Burnie knew about insane. More than that, however, he knew so well about control.

Golben, a defiance of his control; a lapse. His child. It threatened to drag him down.

Hunger. Just for a moment it gnawed. He remembered the crushed sweets in his bag.

Rhaena. It was a wistful thought. His love, his lady, his victim of neglect. His Betrayer.

"You taste of mushrooms and bloated self-recrimination left out in the rain," He mused.

The strip was taken begrudgingly, was affixed to his elbow with all too much experience.

They started to move. "Before this is over, we'll taste tiger's flesh." And thus defy hunger.

"Hunger be damned. Your kindness be damned. Tigers be damned and Golben be damned."

[Dulcie]

She'd wait until that last nail was pulled from her flesh, the second manacle wriggled out of just as the first one had been, pitched across the area she rested in. This time however she didn't sob, or cry. This time she laughed, tilting her head back as she let her merriment roll straight through her belly to her lungs.

"Oh the cakes were never wrong. They were just what they were supposed to be. Harmless really." She'd spread her arms out wide then and breathed in. Oh there were so many stories in this place. She could feel the presence of the mirrors, of stories being whispered in the labyrinth. There was power here, still so much power and she breathed it all in. For a moment her skin would seem to glow a golden shade and blood stained clothing would disappear, shifting into a green corset and black leather pants. She'd stretch her limbs eagerly and look at the presence that had rescued her.

"Well aren't you just a helpful creature? I'd say it's time we start finding our way out of this mess." She'd look at her wrists and grin, the wounds already healed.

"Just one last thing." She mused as she extended one hand and spoke a few words in a language that hardly seemed to make any sense at all. She glowed again for a moment, and suddenly, flying through the air and slamming right into her hand was the walking stick with the runes. "There now. Now we can start finding a way out of here."

[catch]

"The Cakes were wrong,"
the creature breathed, his voice rising
over the labyrinth
a great, rumbling roar
of brass bells.
and though both he
and she
were creatures that hated iron
were creatures of power
were creatures of making
creatures of undoing.
he plucked at the fabric of her,
the very fabric
a single tendril unfurled to draw
along her, like a taunt string.

"The Cakes were wrong," he said,
allowing the words to ripple through
where she was. to let her know
where they stood, he and she.

and how the tigers may like the flesh of her
when he was finished.

his story shone before her
not just one, but many
rises and falls, birth and death
spun again and again and again
before the Weaver; and though she
a creature of power
may speak his story, from
one end to the other,
never would she reach an end.

like liquid song he rose,
and when he rose, his shoulders crowded the
sky. the earth moaned.
he could take a step out of
tainted Golben, and be free.

"My cakes are wrong," it says, now, quite
smug.
"Tygers will not like my cakes. They will like yours."

a rustle. A moan of hunger.
a flash of orange.
she could see how he kept them
at bay, for, better than
a Storyteller
they knew what they faced.

[Dulcie]

She let him argue about the cakes, staying silent in those moments where he insisted on their wrongness, though he would notice as he spoke how her skin would seem to glow the more passionate his speech became. She'd breathe in, and though the change was subtle she would look younger, healthier, stronger.

"Marvelous" She breathed, her green eyes glistening as she looked at the creature that had rescued her. "You taste of spring flowers from many a year ago. How long I've missed such power. Do go on if you care to. I should love to hear how horribly my cakes affected you."

Her smile was filled with mischief, and as the tigers began to approach her, she'd only look over at the creature beside her and grin. "I've so missed a good challenge. That old body was practically useless. Here kitty kitty!"

She'd stand at the ready, the runes on the walking stick blazing with light as she prepared for the approach of the big cats.

[catch]

from her, laughter
from her, power
his words held a Power, but they are not for her.
her tendrils stretch, sticky, terrible
bloated
and latch.

and she would see it, her mouths
upon the creature, suckling
from him,
and suckling. there is much power, here,
and his lips need not give voice
to the stories.

they are there. thousands
millions of them. from sorcerer Lothaine
to desert Jernoah.
and each one ended one way.
each one came with
fire
blood
the splitting of flesh.

they pour and they pour,
and they pour
faster and faster into her.
and there is a mirror, a mirror for her to see
herself. the beast nothing more
than an undefinable colour,
a colour out of space.

and in that mirror she grows, more
bloated
and in the mirror, shoe loses her vibrancy
the image of her stock-still, turning
slowly
like a mannequin in a mirror.

faster and faster, until the
feardeathpainoblivion
was all that could be discerned. The
mirror-image mouths a scream, begging to
be heard. but it cannot,
and it grows ever more and more
bloody
gore-strewn,
until it cannot move, stock-still,
staring at her twin,
her head slightly cocked.

and that gore creeps into the ground,
past the mirror's edge,
and it's bloody, formless tendrils
thick
ropey
reach out. not tygers, but this gore,
the gore of a hundred thousand stories
a hundred-thousand world.

they reach sticky hands for her, and in the mirror-world
they are anathema.
they are more disastrous than Iron could be.

and through this, the creature stands.
docile.
his eyes brimming with the wickedness of cakes.

[Rance]

We'll taste tiger's flesh.

"Is that how it works," Audmathus observed. "That at the moment Glenn Burnie feels slighted by the world around him, he must act rather than speak; he must engage in stone-faced reconsideration of the the situation that surrounds him?"

For he had wrapped the wound. Acknowledged it. And in Glenn's face, like the tear in a monarch's wing, there was a momentary weakness that let through the sight of the light behind it -- imperceptible, almost, or not there at all; Glenn Burnie did not need to be readable to be read, as humans were more than bland words on starched pages. But the drow was still keen of sense and primed on dominance, and like the striped beasts that snarled and breathed hot, wet breath several rows beyond their placement in the edgeless hedgerows, he knew that Glenn Burnie could bleed.

And to bleed meant one could die.

And the reminder of death, in moments like these, often caused a very inspiring recalculation of one's chances for survival.

"Rhaena Olwak lost her hand to a drow," he said, as if he could but pry the past out from the soil of Golben and make it his own, "and you spent time beneath the surface, enduring what as a boy you might not have even fathomed. These are moments that shape the futures of men and women, Glenn. They cause tremors, shifting in the plates of the conscience, a realignment of the chemicals that drive your needs and wants as a human.

"This was premeditated. You were not discarded in Golben because your lovely bride wanted to be rid of you. Base murder would have been a far cleaner solution." He scrubbed a wet palm down his own nose and mouth, setting the black flesh alight with the shine of his blood, a crude warpaint left at the behest of a motion of thought and introspection. If they ceased seeking some sense of direction, they'd starve here; they'd be left as bones, no matter their easy talk and abrasive confidences.

"She would not have simply tossed you into this pit. She would have taken the care to deposit you in a specific location, and the Storyteller in one just as intentional. Perplexing minds seek to perplex -- and you, Glenn Burnie, are perplexed.

"Where would she plant you -- and where, then, the Storyteller? This is a game, and one she hopes you will play. You know her. And it is imperative that you best her at her own schemes."

[Glenn]

Glenn Burnie could bleed.

Of course Glenn Burnie could bleed. Glenn Burnie was human. That was the entire point of Glenn Burnie. If he wasn't mortal, he would have no advantage over the creatures that preyed upon Myrken Wood. If his life wasn't ever fleeting, especially so due to the danger he was in, he would not have been able to grow and thrive and to rise to the challenge. If he was immortal and unending. If he was indestructible and incapable of feeling pain. If he was some monolithic creature of unlife, some hulking Fiend, then he wold be pulled under like all the rest. As it was, he was life and movement and inspiration, and when he was pulled under he found his air between the pages and he found his hope between the lines. His ever-approaching death did not force him to move; it gave him meaning.

It was just that meaning didn't matter much if you were eaten by tigers.

"Mm." He hadn't much time to think. Audmathus had been a surprise. Golben had been a surprise. Tigers had been a surprise. Mirrored golems? He had expected those. No, no, they were a surprise as well. Shadowdancer. Walking into a wall that wasn't there. Catch or something like him. The Storyteller's screams. Betrayal and fine clothes and a ruin of his own making. "She, being Rhaena, put me here for safe keeping. She either knew about the tigers or she didn't. She either knew about the traps or she didn't. She did know about the her, being the storyteller, though." The labyrinth was big, but Burnie was skilled at such things. He had shouted at his beloved for the first time in years. One reason? She'd sent the Storyteller away before he could have her, before he could tear every secret she had out of her skull and make the unknown, the terrifying, the dark, his own, to bring it into the light and neuter it.

That is what Glenn Burnie did and he did it because he was human. He and his kind would tear apart every bit of wonder in the world, and all of this he would have done before Underdark. What would he do now. "She's to distract me so that I don't escape too soon." Then, back to Audmathus with what could only be described as a sad smile. "It'll work too. I'm only human after all."

[Rance]

"But will it work," the dark elf asked, a shifting of his feet bringing him from behind one of Glenn's shoulders so that he could speak over the other. "And is this the place your love should bring you if she wishes you--"

Scrambling at the hard soil, scraping his fingers on the minute shards of stone until they went red. There was the elbow of a rock there, visible and gray, and as old as war. A weapon. His fingernail caught on the lip of it, ripped with a screeching tear from the base of his middle digit, leaving a strip of torn flesh and jagged nail-shard over the soft, wrinkled skin beneath.

The stone would do. When he dislodged it, clenched it in his bleeding fingers, he turned to swing it--

"--to be kept safe?

"Analyze it again, Glenn," Audmathus suggested, stepping past the governor to reach out and brush his palm across the tightly-knitted branches of the hedgerows. "You're either wrong, or you're misinterpreting her sadism as though it's merely a quirk of her otherwise shining nature. If this was a safe place for you, there'd be no Storyteller, no writhing alter-beast to greet us. If this was a safe place for you," he said again, "I would not be here either."

He led them on a few more strides, dribbling warm patters of blood in their wake. The ground was too hard and unyielding to retrain their footprints.

"Refrain from blinding yourself with your broken heart, Glenn Burnie, and approach this matter with your all-too-able mind. Don't discredit her deviousness."

Audmathus jutted his chin down to indicate the black sword in the governor's hand, its jagged edge wearing the histories of old blood.

"If you saw her now in front of you," he asked, "would you relieve her of her life?"

[Glenn]

"She's a princess, Audmathus. How many of those have you dealt with?" Burnie smiled at him now, even as they continued on. One wonderful things about the drow was that just to look at their face, to remember the sneers, the turgid scents of mold and rot that they seemed to unconsciously relish in their 'land,' it meant that you could make any expression at all and still turn it sour. This smile was sour, but at least it was a smile.

He tried to imagine Audmathus dealing with a princess, with anything deserved to be called such; did Rhaena Olwak deserve it? For all the good and all the ill it represented, she did. The angel of Myrken. "Our childhoods were not dissimilar, you and I. Neither of us were taught how to love. You never did. I learned it from books. I was sold in the womb to a monastery like you had never seen, Audmathus, like you can never imagine. You know the academy we shall build? If we could build it from that foundation, it would be glorious indeed, glorious and even fitting.

"They trained me not to say prayers or to taste lashes in the name of some god, but to control people, to find the mathematics at the heart of all of us, to figure out what moves people and what draws them," The words came freely once again; they flowed. This was a tale told before. "Part of that was learning of people's dreams, their aspirations, their escapes. I was a boy who came too close to the fire and I found that their dreams became mine, their aspirations became mine, their escapes became my own. The princesses in their stories? They were mine as well,

"and that is what she is. A Princess from a story, and for her, there are blind spots, gaps where reality and her story do not cross. The problem is this: there are gaps between my aspirations, my vision, and reality. I bridge those gaps. It is my life's work. For her, there are gaps between her fiction and her reality and she bridges them with a power none of us possess. There's still a hole under that bridge, and that is where we are now, Audmathus." And the storyteller. And the Catch creature, here at the gap beneath the bridge, Golben.

He pointed Shadowdancer and made it live up to its name for a few long seconds. Were she here, I would relieve her of her burden."

[Rance]

"An incorrigible need to be right, the overwhelming reliance upon forcing those beneath them into subjugation, a near-parasitic compulsion to try to modify the fabric of the world into something that suits their sensibilities. Princesses," he said. "Where I am from, Glenn, we call them matrons, and whether they are princesses in birthright or merely in self-absorbed arrogance, I have certainly parlayed with my fair share."

With no mention of the fact that he and Glenn, if in very different ways, fit a similar profile.

…there are gaps between her fiction and her reality and she bridges them with a power none of us possess.

"Your lady is taking the route everyone else merely dreams to. She has the resources and tools to succeed in it. And by all means, she has."

The drow watched as Glenn Burnie examined the length of the blade, traced the lines between shadows and light with it. It was an empty shell, a thing whose enchantments had long-since faded; it was an oyster's corpse crushed beneath heels of waterlogged beachmen, or the rotten trunk of a tree whose grand, ringed insides had turned to crumbling dust. It could cut, it could swing, but Shadowdancer was only a name anymore, a clever and pristine identity given to tool that could hew bone and separate skin.

But that was all it could do.

"Relieve her of her burden," he repeated, neither laughter or mockery in his wheezing voice. "A very human response to a very simple question. I admire your tenacity for refusing to come to my level of understanding on these matters, Glenn. But however much of a storybook princess she is, it is imperative that while you are here, you recognize her for what she is:

"Your lady," Audmathus said. "Your enemy. She has put the monastery boy in a pit with all her other problems and expects them to solve themselves. Brutality is a fine solution when one turns their eyes away from it or gives it a closed environment in which to flourish. You know her, Glenn. Every moment you linger is another for your lady exploit this power she possesses. She wields it recklessly, as all usurpers do. All with the desire to undo what you have done.

"Lead us to the Storyteller," he deferred, surrendering himself to the judgment of his human compatriot, even taking a step back and offering out his bloodied palms as if ceding the dance to Glenn. "It might be a welcome change to bore another with our words, after all."

[Glenn]

The Governor laughed. How couldn't he when Audmathus proved his point. It wasn't a harsh thing. It was only a little bitter. It was even better than the smile he'd gave the dark man a moment before. "You have terrible stories 'where you are from.' A princess can have grace and kindness, can tinkle with a joyful laughter and, bring succor to the hearts of those around her. She can inspire. Look at what happened at Wrexham! Look at the mix of the horrible and the wonderful. If the best you can imagine when I say that word is Faeryl, then all you know is the cruelest parody. Perhaps my Rhaena is the most tragic." Burnie spat, because he could, in defiance of his beloved, at all of drow kind. "What a tedious life your kind live, Audmathus. So many years of all the worst life has to offer. Not a moment of earnest, honest enjoyment. Your skin does not represent darkness or evil. It represents an emptiness, a life lacking any life at all. You poor bastard. I could have shown you better."

Just a blade. A sword was never just a blade and this one especially so. Perhaps it could have sundered mountains once. Perhaps it could have parted a sea. Perhaps it could have called down the power the heavens or spewed fire from its pointed tip. Now? Now all it could do was to be an extension of Glenn Burnie's hand and an extension of Glenn Burnie's will. Now all it could do was change the world through him. Such a small thing compared to what it once was?

"She, like you, like your kind, like Sarayn and like Aloisius and Zilliah and like even Calomel and yes, topically, I suspect the Storyteller as well, are limited." There was much truth in Audmathus' final claims about her. First and foremost was this: every moment he was here was a moment she continued to misuse her power and influence. He couldn't linger, no matter how much he wanted to. "There are things that she cannot possibly see and things that she cannot possibly understand. Blind spots. I know. I've had them for so long. I know now what mine have been and I know now what hers currently are."

And he could guess of the storyteller's. They would learn those soon. She was between them and any exit from this place and it was to her that they headed now. "As for our lady of tales, I can't wait to see what she makes of you. Forget an academy, Audmathus. We should build a museum just to put you in it."

[Dulcie]

Oh she watched the mirror with great intrigue, a hand running down her real belly that didn't swell with her gluttony like the one in the mirror did. The creature beside her with it's strange changes and gore, and yet none of it seemed to disturb her.

"I have lived many lifetimes my friend, though I haven't quite seen anything like you." It was a shame that it wasn't speaking. There would be so many good stories to collect.

The tigers had stilled in their growling, lingering on the periphery of the pair of creatures.

"I suppose we are more frightening aren't we my little kittens. Well if you'll excuse us we'll just be on our way then. You will come with me won't you? I should love to get to know you better my rescuer." She'd offer a smile to the thing beside her, even going so far as to give him a little bow from her waist before she'd straighten up and look up at the heavens above.

"Now then, it's just a matter of finding our way out. I suppose it's best to find some sort of wall or end to this place. Can you see where that might be?"

[catch]

he laughs
at her, and that is the only sound
from his throat. Laughter like bells.
And though he seems so
large
that his hooves might crack the ground;
that he might take one step,
and find himself in Dauntless.
he says nothing, and sees nothing.

he is no longer there, the
Grand Creature.
it had taken its step,
and found itself beyond the confines
of Golben.

only, it is still there.
it is there as a man, a broken man,
naked and worn
his head between his shoulders
like an old nag
his face, his body, a twisting
of man and beast, a head that
was split
and dribbled pus
like a wishing-goat's cakes.

he stared at her, a mock-Catch,
his lips slightly slack
slightly drooling
nothing there in his eyes
but vacant disinterest.

he beckoned, and the tigers whined
their hunger
and would follow at their heels,
the grey Virgil's plodding steps
to take her into the maze.

while stars overhead winked,
and they were not Myrken's stars.

in the mirrors, it was only
they
a dull man with no brains
and a storyteller with no stories.
and he walked, on and on,
until it seemed that he would walk into
eternity
the smell, the miasma, of tailor-bred plants
piercing the mind like knives
a drowsy, summer scent
and the locust that crawled from
Catch's wound
chirped a lonely, drowsy sound.

every turn was like the last,
though - take heart - they never came
to a dead end, where they would need to turn
and face the tigers.
and after this eternity of walking,
there would be a man,
a man of singular girth, squatting
like a toad amid the path.
The Fat Man regarded the Storyteller with
weeping, jaundiced eyes
past flabby cheeks.

Catch stopped. The Fat Man said nothing.
They, all of them, were silent, save
for the locust trembling against the
madman's wound.

[Dulcie]

"You are a most strange creature." She commented as the thing seemed to change it's form into this sullen sort of man beast. It beckoned however, and being as how the thing had come and gone she would begin to follow it, anticipating that it planned to show her the way out.

They wound through parts of the labyrinth that were in no way related to her. There were no mirrors, no wishing goats, nothing. She frowned a little as she let him continue to lead her, her green eyes looking up, trying to track their movement by the sky, but the canopy of trees was complete where they were going and there was little available to orient herself.

"Would you like to hear a story?" She offered, though it didn't seem likely that the creature would respond.

They found a place, and another being, and she'd look between the sullen beast man and the fat one before she'd lean on her walking stick, considering her circumstances.

"Well now, I dare say we've all found ourselves at a good resting place. Perhaps we could start a fire, find something to eat and drink nearby." A warm fire often made people want to tell their tales, or to hear one. And such a thing could quite possibly help her find her way out.