The Life Never Known

The Life Never Known

Postby Carnath-Emory » Tue Jul 02, 2013 3:43 pm

Every minute of your life has prepared you for this moment.

He is an uncertain silhouette through gauzy veils, but you have seen his face twice and you have spoken with him once; he is younger than you'd imagined, charming where you'd expected he would only be cold. You are not afraid, although it wouldn't have mattered if you were: your price was negotiated days ago, coin enough to reel the stumbling fortunes of your House back from the edge of utter disaster. They sealed the agreement with three glasses of wine - your father and this man who has fairly purchased his bride - and this morning your mother spent hours on the intricacy of your okruchivanie braids; this morning she wove the silver kopecks and tiny blades into your hair with her own worn hands, a keen-edged warning to any who might think to steal away your virtue before your husband could claim what he'd bought.

You are a commodity and you are not unwilling. The prospect of a girl-child - another mouth at the table, hands only good for embroidery and women's things - had brought them only tears, but you'd grown into a face fair enough to promise some worth, and the matchmaker had promised good fortunes soon enough. You have counted away the years, and sometimes even the days, impatient for the moment in which you would blossom into valuable womanhood, and - this is years too soon, they had said; even your mother had admitted as much. Years too soon, and it's a wonder he would even accept a girl half-grown. But the need of your House was urgent, and your father's hand was sure, and when you were sequestered away to begin a week's work upon your dowry, you knew that the exchange was suddenly imminent, and your heart was nothing but light.

He is an indistinct shape through gauze and heirloom lace, but the tremble of your hands is not echoed in your heart. Your skin was cleansed three times in the devishnik that was the previous night, and with your giggling friends you played the games that your brides played. How false your tears, as you lamented the loss of your freedom; how you'd struggled to contain your laughter as you swore that you'd hid krasota, your youthful beauty, in some corner or other of the room and that it might be theirs if they were only quick to find it. My fate, you'd cried, my fate is to be a woman wed, old and cold and worn, and what need have I of loveliness now? You'd pressed pretty ribbons into their hands, after; colourful as promises, precious as the parting touch of girlish fingertips, and it was the end of all the childish things you'd tired of years before.

His hands are reverant upon the pokryvalo that is your gauzy shroud. His lips are light like feathers when they touch to yours, in the ritual kiss that has the men stomping their feet in sturdy approval. When he ushes you away from your House you do not spare a backwards glance for what you were glad to leave, and deep into the night you discover that his gentleness is enduring; when you wake in his arms the morning next, it is not with the pain you'd known to expect but a smile that feels unfamiliar upon your lips.

You are Ariane of House Carnath-Emory. You are twelve years old. It is the beginning of a life which is to surpass all your childhood's dreams.
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Re: The Life Never Known

Postby Carnath-Emory » Tue Jul 02, 2013 3:56 pm

Leaving is your choice; the destination is his.

It isn't even the cold that drives you both, in the end: it is not one winter stretching tiredly into the next, long nights, short days, the glacial creep of seasons that are hardly seasons at all. It's not the failure of one harvest and then another; it's not even a child's sudden, silent death, and - his eyes or yours? You wonder; you will always wonder. In the end what has you sewing wishes into his garments, and helping them load the carts with your own hands, is not the circumstances but their inevitability; the sour, cold cruelty of it all. To Better Days, you toast, he and you both, and together you depart for new roads with so very little regret at all.

South, he determines - was decided, in truth, from the start of it all. As far south as we can go, and then a bit farther -

But you lose a horse in the final stretch of the Spinster Mountains, and you lose whole days circumnavigating the Ippolit River, which a crippled cart proved unfit to cross. You reach the capital not in a state of utter disrepair, but something very near to it, and that night in the lodgings you'd brought with too much of your dwindling funds, he asks the question you'd known was to come.

Your refusal is ferocious, as unseemly as if the Sikasoon wilds had infected you with some of their feral heat. What would it be, to turn back now, having come so far? Having fought their way through so much, what would it be for them to stagger, humbled, back to the arctic home that they'd condemned with such finality? It is loud voices then - his, yours - raised well into the night, but by morning you have reached a compromise and it drives you towards the roads again. The capital, he explains: all that stone and opulence, too rich for my blood. Too rich for my purse, he means, and there's no arguing that at all.

Vineyards, he'd promised, when this first began. As far as the eye can see...
You never reach them.

But there are always small towns where a man who's sold most of his inheritance can sell his sword-arm as well, and you do good business there. He with his clever blade and you with your weaving; sometimes there's thread to spare and you embellish tiny flowers about the edge of a lady's skirt-hem, sometimes you work little wishes into a collar or a cuff, and those are the days that there's fruit to follow your supper and a husband who's recalled how to smile. Sometimes, late into the night, he whispers tales that he has heard: knights scale glass mountains in your dreams, canny youths trick promises from witches -

One cold evening, thieves come upon your small home. Men's with wolf's eyes, hot and hungry, suspecting a woman there alone and thinking to gain something from it. You beat them away with a poker and raw desperation, but barely so, and when he returns to blood and wreckage you beg him in staggered gasps for something more than stories. He is reluctant - knowing better. But they'd scarred your face with their knives, and the sight is ugly beyond ugliness; there is no disguising the distaste with which his eyes linger upon that seeping wound. Within the day there is a rapier for your hand, bought by your stitches and your husband's slow exhaustion; within the week you've come to love the lessons, and your passion for the way steel carves through air eclipses the quiet regret with which he guides your hand.

It is the end of everything.
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Re: The Life Never Known

Postby Carnath-Emory » Tue Jul 02, 2013 4:09 pm

In the moments when you can believe that coin is everything, your heart is nothing but content.

It's a lucrative business, this, and two swords are better than one; your mutual efforts pay your way from one town to the next, each larger than the one before. You never reach the vineyards he'd promised so long ago, but together you tour the burning streets of Zwill, the corridors of troubled Orvere, rife with insurrection. Never Lanesse, for there are spies in Lanesse, the stories go, dark men with cold machinations and instinctively you recoil - but you spy a fine prospect in E'strielle, only to discover your husband cautious, fearing some credibility in fresh rumours of eldritch rebellion. In the end he demures from it and, disappointed, you search for tempting opportunities elsewhere. There are fewer stories for your ears these days, fewer laughing whispers deep in the night, but it's so easy to forget that you'd ever wanted for those when every day is a living story, when the adventure seems so wonderfully endless.

You can mark the passage of years with pins upon a map: six months in Wrexham; that engagement near Ruann; a troubling matter in Threminor, where it was elves and silver fletching and a warlord's hungry hand stretched across it all. It's that last which saps at the dwindling patience of a man weary beyond exhaustion, but Onwards, you insist, ever onwards and ever more, and when he asks you, one difficult night, if ever you sometimes wish it were the north again, pretty threads for your trade and bright berries on the supper table, you silence his appeal with a glance and the night becomes colder than it need have been.

You never mention the dreams in which men with wolves' heads seep silent like shadows from a room's dark corners, from the deeply-shadowed edge of a sooty hearth.

When you set your sight on a province famed as far as Ricathair for the calibre of its violence, he protests with an anger that even the prospect of ruinous E'strielle had failed to rouse. Days of cold silence follow your furious insistence; when either of you speak at all, it is with a voice too loud for civility. At the peak of one particularly vicious fight he sweeps a dozen glass keepsakes from a shelf with the whole strength of his body and you stare, terrified. But later, much later, as you soak the blood from his palms and soothe the hair back from his brow, your whispered appeal finds a man too drained to protest further, and that next morning both of you ride for Myrken.

Within the month he is one of the dozens who perish at Townsedge.
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Re: The Life Never Known

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Jul 03, 2013 3:19 am

Baie. Faith. Order. Belief. How many words do you need for a thing, when vengeance is all it amounts to in the end?

The weapon had been a regretful necessity. And then it had been a passion, one more lucrative than most. Now it is emblematic of your cold intent, for to wipe away the blood from a man's breathless, dying lips - to stare aghast at the wreckage of shattered knees and twisted spine - is to emerge as steel, cold and true and with only one single, inevitable purpose. The Baie, you learn quickly, the rampaging beast-thing that laid waste to good men in that massacre at Townsedge, is untouchable by conventional means. Its followers, however, who've murdered children in its name, who've carved eyes from girls' heads and called it worship -

Oh, they are all too human.

You terrify their nights. You haunt their days. You pin bodies to doors with the nails you find in their toolsheds, you tear tongues from mouths and feed them to their dogs. You come upon a lone woman in the dead of night and dash the poker from her hand; you paint their words upon their walls in the blood that fountains free of their broken veins. Bone cracks under an axe-handle with a sound like trees in winter ice; you know that, now. You spirit one worshipper away to a cabin miles from Myrkentown and learn the ways in which he can be made to spill secrets, the willingness with which his remnants will beg. You are the wolf-eyed thing that waits in the corner, ready with your steel and creative in your cruelty, and you do not stop.

"Disgusting," breathes a girl who's come upon your work: by then, even Myrken condemns what you've become. You do not stop. Even when they've begun to recant and even when they've begun to flee, for you are a blade whetted in blood and you left your humanity behind long ago. Like a well-honed horror you steal your way into a woman's home and flatten her with your fist, like some gargoyle-thing you crouch over her and spit your demands, and her eyes are so blue in the bloody mask of her face; her eyes are so sorrowful, so quiet.

"Oh, child," she breathes, as you ready the knife for her lungs.

"I'm so sorry," she whispers; it is as forgiveness, and it is the last she'll ever speak, and when you stagger free of the ragged corpse it is with the knowledge of her innocence searing hot through your soul.
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Re: The Life Never Known

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Jul 03, 2013 8:31 am

In the stories your husband used to tell, the prince would sometimes stumble through a wilderness in search of I know not what: dragons, sometimes; winsome maidens and true love; the bastard sat unjustly upon the true king's throne. But the only prince you've ever known died months ago to the Baie's uncaring claws, and you are no maiden at all but only your prince's sword, only the weapon you'd made yourself to be. Your wilderness is Myrken, because Myrken is all you have left, but stumble you do: through the filth you'd never noticed before; between the shallow alleys and crumbling grey walls; amongst the filthy and diseased and even they speak with loathing of the things you've done.

She comes to you like a fever dream.

Steeped in shadows and sweat and self-loathing, but she comes to you all the same, satin slippers on alley slime, and the touch of her hands raises you up from this crumbling corridor and into the gleaming warmth of her embrace. How, you plead, and what you mean is Why, and with a voice like soothing water she explains that your pain called to her, called across all the breadth of Myrkentown, and that while some might turn their faces away -

Anyone, you whisper. Everyone.

- she could not bear the song of such visceral hurt. There is yet hope, the Lady says, and you cannot begin to believe it. All is not lost, she whispers, and it a gentle breeze on raw nerves, and how you wish, how you long for it to be true. She promises that there's yet a chance to set it aside, all this blood and fire and steel, and become what you were always to be: an artist, with Myrken for her loom and a thousand colourful threads to be drawn into her design; a garden in which delicate things may blossom and thrive. There will be a cost, she warns. You've gone so far; you've done too much. There will be pain, more pain than you'd ever think you could bear, but you'll emerge reborn; newborn. In the moment her burnished eyes fix soft upon your own, you understand that what she sees is everything and that what she promises is nothing but true. When you lift your face to hers, a willing supplicant, her touch is soft like cobwebs upon your cheeks.

All things have their cost, she whispers as a haze begins to settle on your thoughts.
Every blossom has its spring, she whispers, and the shape of her words is a silhouette glimpsed through gauze.
Someday soon, Myrken will be ready for you -

The incandescence of her beauty burns away everything you've ever been.
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