Far Away from Home

Far Away from Home

Postby Rance » Fri Feb 27, 2015 5:08 pm

So much to drink, so much to smoke.

Dame de Lanz ("You name a daughter Dame if you expect great things from her," she'd earlier slurred to a younger gentleman at the tea-house) wandered out the gates of Myrkentown with her skirts dragging like a muddy tail behind her. She did not step as much as she galloped, trying to compensate for the loose, altered state of her mind--

("These are great things you're going to do," the sweet man with the smooth, black hair had told her. "It's simple: you pierce this little nugget on the end of this awl, here, and dance it just above the fire, like so."

"Like this? Oh, this is positive debauchery," Dame tittered, watching as vaporous snakes of brown, opaque smoke curled up from the skin of the tiny pill. "And do you breathe it in?"

"You breathe it in," he whispered, "like incense, and you let the smoke carry your mind into tranquility. Here, lean over it with me..."
)

--hours ago, it seemed, but couldn't feel the cold, couldn't give a piss for the cold anymore, could she; no, no, because what was she anymore, she wondered, but frigid within and without? Nothing, she was nothing, nothing at all with a head full of sweet-smelling smoke. A floating, sagging lump of fifty-two years of unrealized potential, a farmer's daughter who'd fucked a starry-eyed scholar for a ring, had taken his name, de Lanz, de Lanz. Over a year ago, she'd done such fine work for Lady Rhaena, had battered skulls and bodies that weren't dressed adequately, and how she missed that ashplant cudgel! The hollow knock it made against dirty skulls! The masquerades, the balls, where she hoped she'd catch a shine in the Lady's eye--

She blinked.

Where was she?

Dame de Lanz stood like a lost foal on the snowy outskirts of one of the forests well beyond Myrkentown's borders. Trembled, too, like a stupid, palsied child. She'd forgotten her cloak, and her steely hair draped itself as a veil over her wrinkled face. But by the One God, she felt beautiful with the opium warming her blood and setting her pores ablaze; she could just drift along the winterscape for years and years and drag her boots. Crisken would still be scribbling away on his books. Wouldn't he? Wouldn't he?

She sprawled a knotted hand in front of her unfocused eyes, lifted it into the moonlight.

"I miss my ring," Dame de Lanz told the sky, "and I miss you, and I miss us. Don't you miss me? Don't you miss how we used to dance, you old fool?"

She blinked.

Where was she?

The midnight woods bent in around her, and the wood, the snow, the sky, they weighed so much!
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Re: Far Away from Home

Postby Antichthon » Sat Feb 28, 2015 8:06 am

It was not happy.

It had been baited out and attacked. By that damned hunter, and that damned man. While the wounds had been minor, the mere fact that they had managed to wound It was alarming. In retrospect, It should have stayed and finished them off, but at the time, It had been concerned that the spears of light were just the first step of a larger trap. Now they were gone. Returned to their ugly little city to spread word of the location of Its home, and the fate of their lost people.

There were many caves. It was confident It could avoid or defeat whatever the city threw its way. But that meant It would have to be awake and aware, when all It wanted to do was sleep and digest.

So there were many reasons for It to be in a bad mood during Its now-necessary patrol of Its territory. And when It found Dame, the fact that the woman was clearly no hunter, no soldier, no threat, did not dissuade it. It was upon her, faster than any horse. But the woman would see nothing, hear nothing, and certainly smell nothing. If not even the wildlings of the woods could sense it, what chance did this woman have?

One blow to the back of the head. And while It could have hit her with force enough to crush an elephant's skull, It only struck with the force to knock her out. Why? Because despite Its frustration, this old woman was lost and helpless. It just didn't have the heart to kill her. At least, not without giving her a chance.
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Re: Far Away from Home

Postby Rance » Sat Feb 28, 2015 11:03 am

One moment she was lost in tracing the veins of frozen sap on a treetrunk with her fingertip.

A blow to the head never made noise. Not to the skull that suffered it.

The next moment, in a flap of loose garments and a tangle of stiff limbs, Dame de Lanz fell into the powdered snow.

Unconsciousness bled over her, a sensation that was liquid in its relief: she never remembered her sagging cheek making a flat, clapping pock! against the snow as her body crumbled. A string of glass beads strung about her neck had somehow burst, spraying little dollops of brown-dyed glass into the whiteness. Two eyes leered off into the woods, seeing nothing. The lid of one twitched, snapped open and closed as a nerve desperately struggled against the unresponsiveness of its brethren.

She'd never seen her assailant; she'd never known there was a threat in the first place.
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Re: Far Away from Home

Postby Antichthon » Sat Feb 28, 2015 12:59 pm

When Dame awoke, it would be to utter darkness. Something was holding her, fully immobilizing her. But the magic that disguised It would mean she would feel nothing. Hear nothing. Smell nothing. As if she had been thrust into complete sensory oblivion.

Time passed. Perhaps a few minutes, perhaps an hour; without senses, time became quite an abstract thing.

But then, a voice.

"I have tried," It began. "With all sincerity, to tolerate your kind." The magic rendered the qualities of the voice unplaceable. They were just words, without form or source.

"When your loggers first grew zealous and wounded the forest beyond repair, I tolerated it. 'These are creatures more like myself than animal,' I told myself. 'Yes, they are being destructive. But you have no right to cull them as if they were merely beavers, destroying too many trees to support too many dams. Their city is young. Give them time, they'll grow, and learn to give back as much as they take.'

"When your hunters began to kill the creatures of the forest faster than they could repopulate themselves, I tolerated it. I was furious that beings like you, able to live on fruit just as well as meat, would be so greedy. But I tolerated it. Because you are people. The hunters sought merely to feed themselves and their families, when they had naught the coin to buy, or the land to grow, food of their own. The fault was elsewhere, among the fat and privileged, who took and took and took. But even they were people, and deserved a chance to learn, grow, and make amends."

Whatever was holding Dame squeezed down harder.

"And when I began to go hungry, still I tolerated it. Because I was guilty of my own excesses. So I slept often, and endured the hunger. 'I will give them more time,' I told myself. It had become so blindingly obvious that you were killing this land, that even given your kind's profound foolishness, I thought it possible you might still change your ways."

Tighter still.

"And when I began to starve, and had no choice but to steal your excess to sate my belly, I avoided killing your kind whenever possible. Because even fools and gluttons were people.

"And what happened? Those people I let live, and even paid for their goods, look for me, to kill me. Did it ever even occur to them to give me the benefit of the doubt? No. Because in the eyes of your kind, I'm the monster.

"I'm done tolerating. You may be people, but you are nevertheless beneath me, and you have proven that you must be culled. If not by me, than by famine. And I'm not willing to die while I wait for nature to take its course.

"But despite my better judgement, it still pains me to kill creatures so alike myself. And I find it only fair to allow your kind representation. So I'm giving you, Madam, so shrouded in excess, a chance to change my mind. Succeed and I will let you go, and never kill one of your kind again. Fail, and I will catch every human that enters my forest. And swallow them alive."
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Re: Far Away from Home

Postby Rance » Sun Mar 01, 2015 5:29 am

Darkness.

Her breath was a stone in her throat.

And when it spoke, it was as if the whole universe spoke. The blackness, and the unseen stars twinkling away in some veiled sky. She imagined the soil echoing with this ultimatum, speaking not into her ears, but inside her blood and inside her veins and inside her bones, where the marrow rattled and churned and her joints creaked and moaned and (by the One God, was this the tranquility of which that young fellow had spoken? An opportunity to meet, through the kindness of these wondrous chemicals, a creator, a destroyer? To dissolve like a liquid under its inquiries...

...this wasn't real; this wasn't real, but so very tangible and actual and yet, this place, it was so limitless--

The wonder of those pellets burned over the fire! That they could arrest fear itself, that they could strangulate caution or pull the stopper from her inhibition--

I have tried...with all sincerity, to tolerate your kind.

"So have I," she trilled. "I've tolerated a loveless marriage, a town that refuses to change when Kindness extends its hand and gives them opportunity. I've tolerated living and breathing for fifty-two years. And..."

A pause. Her voice rose.

"Are you answering my prayers? Have you come," Dame whispered, "because of me?"

A squeezing pressure. Constriction. Clamping into her skin and bones like the teeth of a vice. Making it harder to draw breath, to think. Applying a tension behind her blind eyeballs, pulling taut the wrinkled parchment of her skin...

So I'm giving you, Madam, so shrouded in excess, a chance to change my mind.

But one word was all she could muster: a few sounds crushed together into a lone plea, because air was becoming scarce--

"Please," Dame de Lanz told the darkness.
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Re: Far Away from Home

Postby Antichthon » Sun Mar 01, 2015 7:20 am

It growled. Not a growl of anger, but of revulsion.

"You really are an ambassador of your kind. As disgusting and worthless as the rest of them. It is a thousand years too late for 'please.'"

And then Dame would find herself forced down a narrow throat, and into the stomach beyond. And there she was not alone. The half-digested carcasses of dozens of animals and humans closed in around her. It was tight, too tight to move. And while the acid would burn, death would come only after asphyxiation.

In the darkness, a monsterous burp echoed.
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