Curses and Candlelight

Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Tue Jan 12, 2016 4:21 pm

Lying in her bed, she stares at the dark void of the ceiling and listens as the winter wind rattles against the wooden walls. The gusts whisper with a ghostly voice through the cracks and crevices chewed into the planks by years of weather and wear. Some nights the Crawl Moon's light pries like a silver knife between the creases of the shutters, but tonight, the sky is coal. The stars hide behind a black canvas.

Gloria is motionless. A cairn of moth-eaten coverlets and shedding furs cover her to the chin. In the dim light of a lone candle, her breath rises, a scant vapor, toward the ceiling. This is tonight. This is every night. The taper sags, sputtering out its last hour of fire. Sometimes she allows her eyes to wander toward the dark blots staining the wall above her headboard, wondering how many times she's struck that same spot, how many times she's savaged her knuckles against the wood.

A week. One week since the return of the horned girl. The room was very different with her in it; the room was very different without Ailova occupying the other bed.

Before, she'd never thought to sleep with a knife — her Liam — tucked against her hip.

In the silence and shadows, Gloria lifts her head just enough off the pillow. "Phor," she says, a hoarse summons tossed over toward the other bed. Was the girl sleeping?

"I want you to — to tell me about the curse."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Antichthon » Tue Jan 12, 2016 7:09 pm

Even outside the golden city, the dreams of Myrkentown were vibrant. When she controlled the dream, it was an outlet for her sadism. When she didn't...

Fear kept Phor awake, listening to the wind. She imagined the inn falling through nothingness, and found it comforting. Something about being so small, limited, contained, felt satisfying. Safe. Nothing existed beyond the inn. No one could enter, or leave. They were a ship in the void. She could understand it. She could control it.

Gloria broke the trance. "Mnh." Phor rolled onto her back and snuggled deeper into bed, blankets like a cocoon. So warm. She met Gloria's gaze in the dim candlelight. "I don't know much," she said, raspy. "I was four. The crops died that year. People said it was me."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Wed Jan 13, 2016 1:19 am

People said it was me.

She clutches the furs and coverlets with her remaining fingers like they were an anchor to a wild, storm-tossed ship. Sometimes in the dark of night she imagined sinking all the way down into her bed, letting the downy and calami and hay suck her right out of her bedclothes and her dingy sleeping-gown and deposit her into another place altogether, a better place, a half-dreaming fantasy where she wasn't her.

But the candle, in its tired, shadow-casting dance, reminded her that she was still here.

"Crops everywhere die every year. Sometimes they thrive, sometimes they wither," Gloria reasons, the bedding rustling as she shifts herself enough to prop the elbow of her mutilated arm between her ribs and the bed. She meanwhile nudges back her sleeping-cap, freeing a waxy tangle of black hair. She scratches vigorously at her scalp, relieving it of distress. "Blaming their death on a four-year-old girl sounds—"

like Jernoah

"—like a shit-poor excuse by people who haven't got anything else to blame."

Her mouth tastes foul. A porcelain pitcher of twice-boiled water sits on her nightstand, its presence a ritual vestige of her pregnancy. Boil it all. Boil it twice. Drink even when you aren't thirsty. She reaches for it, but hesitates.

"Who said it was a curse? Could they prove it was one?"
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Antichthon » Wed Jan 13, 2016 8:29 am

"I was four," she reiterated, now defensive. "How could I understand anything?"

On the side of Phor's bed sat her pair of dolls, neglected over the recent week. The one made in her image was barely held together, stained with horseshit, stabbed and tortured and frayed, particularly around the groin. She hugged it close. "I think the crops were doing bad ever since I was born. And people didn't like me, they said I acted wrong." Phor grimaced, trying hard to remember. "An elder came to our house once. Sprinkled stuff on me. Didn't tell me anything, my eldest brother told me she was testing for curses."

The memories came easier, now. "They never told me anything. My parents didn't, either. Only Gofth talked to me about it. Said I should be glad our crops died too, 'cause otherwise they'd think I was a witch and throw me off the cliff.

"And it wasn't just me. There were other kids. I think some were killed for being witches. But I remember others being traded to the caravan with me, so I wasn't the only one cursed."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Sat Jan 16, 2016 1:09 am

"It certainly doesn't sound like very buoyant reasoning," Gloria says.

And it didn't. How, she wonders, could a child so young be misconstrued for a witch? Happenstance and assumption were dangerous weapons when wielded together — coupled, of course, with a dubious application of fear and all too often, an unchecked religious zealotry. A plague of bloatgut among the cattle? That virgin ought to be hanged! The beer's fallen quiet too early in the fermentation cask? That boy, there, with the hobbled leg, he must be a warlock.

Phor seeks comfort in her odorous little doll, mutilated and picked apart, torn and brutalized. The horrific travesty stares Gloria in the face from across the room. She feel its mismatched eyes glaring into her bones. The lifeless gaze unsettles her. As if driven by some unseen force, she suddenly swings her bare feet from the bed, away from the fading warmth of the cloth-wrapped stone under the linens. Extricating herself from the furs and coverlets brings a shock of cold. She tugs her cloak away from a nearby chair. Underneath is a series of beaten old books, her extremely meager library — she'd precisely seven books and another half-volume whose last hundred pages had been eaten away by mold and water. They were stacked in a tiny pyramid.

She tosses one of them to her bed, hovers over it, and begins to thumb through the pages as if looking for a lost artifact.

"The truth, Phor," she explains, "is that societies without recourse or wherewithal often prey upon the unsuspecting and the innocent to carry the burdens of their failures and — and their mistakes. Jernoah was no different; they accused, tossed blind judgments, labeled children with curses or claimed they were vessels of sin. So they derived a process by which they thought they could identify the cursed from the mere unfortunate. There's a verse—"

Her fingertip darts through pages of H'zlz ar G'leuse, running across songs of courage and descriptions of battle. Finally, she stops. She juts her fat fingertip down on a stanza. "Ah," she studiously exclaims. Then, with her knotted hair bouncing against her shoulders, she turns her head and smiles across the room at the smaller girl.

"Stand up," Gloria encourages, bidding the other girl near. "I think we can find out once and for all."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Antichthon » Sat Jan 16, 2016 7:40 am

"Buoyant" was a new word, but the context was clear. "I don't care how they knew I was cursed," Phor said, even more defensive. "'Cause it doesn't fucking matter. I just want the curse gone."

Gloria didn't like her doll, that was clear. Phor couldn't shake the thought, it isn't your doll that unsettles her. It's you. She hugged it all the tighter as Gloria explored her little library. Then Gloria started preaching about societies and their failures and blah, blah, blah. Phor's eyes glazed over. She grunted to make it sound like she was listening, but she didn't have the energy to put up with one of Gloria's long-winded speeches right now.

The order to stand got her attention, but she only threw her sheets over her head. "We don't need to 'find out,' stupid. We need to get rid of it. Stop being an idiot."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Sun Jan 17, 2016 4:21 am

For a moment, there is silence. A breath, maybe, coiling in her chest like a snake—

Then she throws the book, neither playfully nor out of light-hearted humor: no, her fingernails scrape gashes out of the tome's leather as it leaps from her hand. For a moment — an impulsive, vengeful second — she wants nothing more than to launch the book at the girl. Instead, H'zlz ar G'leuse claps against the wall on Phor's side of the room and falls flat to the floor. Her voice becomes a scourge of hard iron. Her previous excitement vanishes. Her words come out as sharp, breathy barks.

"And insulting the only person who cares enough about your well-being—" Ailova still thinks you're a murderous little wretch, she doesn't say, though Nameless, does she want to, "—certainly is a poor way to go about it.

"You want to be rid of it, Phor? Then cease being a thankless and mouthy little shit, especially to one of the few people willing to extend their charity to you. Otherwise?"

Her heels drum against the floor. The hem of her nightgown snaps around her knees. She wrenches the door open, her hand trembling. A tiny droplet of saliva gleams on her lower lip, its roundness a silvered bauble in the candlelight.

"Otherwise," Gloria says, "get out of my room."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Antichthon » Sun Jan 17, 2016 5:26 am

The book slammed against the wall. Beneath the covers, Phor instinctively covered her face to protect from blows that never came.

Once Gloria said her piece, and she was sure a beating wasn't to follow, Phor rolled over and screamed into her pillow. It wasn't as good as Gloria's but it did its job, keeping her from waking half the inn with her rage.

She made sure it was all out--or as much as she could get--before sitting up, red-faced, and saying, "Sorry." Her hands remained under the sheets, to hide the rude gestures she was making as hard as she could. She kept that way for a while, but a halfhearted apology alone wasn't going to be good enough, was it? She stood, retrieved the book, and sat on the edge of the bed with it in her lap. "Fine. Do whatever it is you wanted to do."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Sun Jan 17, 2016 12:04 pm

They both marshal their urges in their own ways, Phor with her screaming into the sweat-mottled bank of the pillow, and Gloria with the tightening of her hamhock fist around a knot of gown-fabric, clenched so tightly in her four-fingered fist that she could feel her blunted nails biting into her palm.

She closes her eyes. She closes the door.

The next few minutes pass without incident. By the dim, dancing candlelight, the seamstress goes to her bed and retrieves the clay pitcher of water from its saucer and brings it to Phor's bed. There, she stands for a hesitant moment as if to inquire, wordlessly, if she might sit. Finally she does, the bedframe groaning underneath her. She perches on its edge, watching the horned girl and the book. She hugs the pitcher in the crook of her blunted arm.

Measure by measure, inch by inch. Progress.

"Thank you," she says, "for the apology." A pause. Then she pats the island of her knee underneath the sea of her dingy nightgown. "Let me see the back of your hand. Won't you? To test for a curse is effortless. Painless. Any fool can do it," Gloria adds, managing a faint, yellow-toothed smile. "It — it requires no sense of magic, no dabbling with the occult. And should we request the company of someone who — who can derive a resolution to your curse, they'll want to know we've confirmed validity before moving forward."

Gloria's round chin dips down, and her eyes try to catch Phor's in quiet complicity.

"I should know. For I've been examined too many times to count."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Antichthon » Sun Jan 17, 2016 12:53 pm

This didn't feel like progress. This felt like being controlled, and humiliated, and threatened, and...Stop.

The door closed and the minutes passed. She kept her eyes on the wall and let the winter wind fill the silence. When Gloria arrived at the side of her bed and asked to sit, Phor, still avoiding eye contact, gave a faint nod. She tried not to bristle when thanked for the apology. "Yeah."

The conversation went to curses, which was a welcome return. It was easy to test for a curse? "Don't you need the book?" Phor let it slide between them. She gave Gloria the back of her hand and met her complicit gaze with a furrowed brow. "You've been tested for lots of curses? Why?" A beat. "You aren't lying about it not hurting, right?"
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Mon Jan 18, 2016 3:41 am

"I don't need the book," she answers. "The words are mostly in here—" she drums a fingertip against her temple, "—because a good Jerno doesn't pass her Odos without reciting them from memory. And I promise you, I'm not lying." She dips that same fingertip into the pitcher of water and removes it. A glistening droplet of water dangles stubbornly on her fingertip, its fat bulb gleaming in the candlelight.

She hangs her finger over the back of Phor's hand. It takes forever for the droplet to fall. It strikes the spine of the girl's hand and rolls off toward her wrist and out of sight.

You've been tested for lots of curses? Why?

"Because sometimes I stared too long at the candleflame," she explains. "Because I polluted my bedclothes well past any age of logic or reason. Because where other girls got blemishes on their noses, they frequented my neck, right under the collar of my dress."

Another droplet. This one slips forward between Phor's knuckles, refusing to follow the path of the previous.

"Because my mar'dak — my mother — perished from a consumption they couldn't identify."

A third droplet. This one rolls off toward Phor's thumb and, when it falls, vanished amid the rough bedsheets.

"Because I killed a Calamity, and no child who is not cursed — despite being afraid, despite being desperate to survive — should dare interrupt the natural order of things."

A few more moments pass without any further conversation, but the hefty young woman's body coils with a tight, reactive tension. Regardless, Gloria continues to test the back of Phor's hand with more beads of water, and each one of them slides away in a different direction, absolutely unwilling to do anything but follow their own paths. Then, with an air of affable, clinical acuity, Gloria surrenders Phor's hand and tries to look the child in the eye.

"Have you ever stared so long at a candleflame that you couldn't draw your gaze away no matter your desire to do so?"

And then:

"Open your mouth. Let me see your teeth." A careful addendum: "I won't hurt you. You have my word."
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Antichthon » Mon Jan 18, 2016 8:33 am

Odos. Where had she heard that before? In a dream? In a Golden Dream? Or had Gloria babbled about it before? Ach, living in Myrkentown played havoc with one's sanity. She watched the drop of water on Gloria's fingertip with apprehension. "Don't mess up and turn me into a frog or something."

She flinched when the water hit the back of her hand, but it was only water. She relaxed, a bit. The next one fell, and the next, each taking a different path. Gloria had to be doing that somehow, controlling the water. It was creepy. Gloria talked about her past experiences, a welcome distraction. "Those sound like stupid reasons to think you're cursed.

"Stupid for them to think, I mean," she hastily corrected. She wasn't trying to start another fight. "Except your mother dying. I guess that's not stupid, if you were her last baby." When the baby survived but the birther died was cause for suspicion in the mountains. "Though your mother might've just been being reborn in you." Also a mountainous belief. "And--what's a Calamity?" Desert monster was Phor's guess. Gloria had talked about those before. "How'd you kill it?"

"Have you ever stared so long at a candleflame that you couldn't draw your gaze away no matter your desire to do so?"

She looked at Gloria like she was weird. "Uh...No. We didn't have candles in the mountains. And after..." Her memories of the years after the mountains but before Myrkentown were a hazy, hellish mass. "I don't remember if there were candles."

It was a mistake to ask Phor to sift through her painful memories and then follow up with a line like, "let me see your teeth." She slapped a hand over her mouth and recoiled before she even knew what hit her. Whatever she said next was unintelligible, which was probably a good thing. She stood and did a lap around the room to shake out the sudden shock, fear and disgust.

No explanation was given when she returned to the bed, and she hoped she didn't need one. She opened her mouth, hesitantly. Outside of a loose molar, her teeth were young and healthy.
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Wed Jan 20, 2016 12:09 pm

Though your mother just might've been being reborn in you.

The shadows are unable to keep a smile from her face.

"A sweet thought, that. One I like. So I'll embrace it."

...what's a Calamity?

The smile dwindles. She looks at a smudge on the wall over Phor's shoulder.

"A man. Someone like us. There were books and songs that foretold his coming, that he might kill or maim or raze cities. A Calamity is not bad nor cruel by nature; they're pawns, beings with purpose who cannot flee their fate. And sometimes in Jernoah, by holy rite, they're groomed to fulfill that role." The recollections are offered in knots of tightly-wound words, abandoning her own words and knowledge to replace it with that gleaned from books and old lessons. She swallows. Her mouth had become dry, gummy.

How'd you kill it?

"He fell upon my trowel. I didn't know who he was," she adds, driven to tone of defense. "I didn't know who he was, so he fell six times upon my trowel until — until he came apart in my hands."

When the examination continues, the young woman expresses no startlement at Phor's sudden recoil. She does not question, does not interrupt, but instead watches the girl pace and stride in wild circles, willing the stubborn demons of ragged memories out of her little mind. When Phor returns, the seamstress' smile has too, but the expression is false, soured, off. Her pupils are wide, gaping, hungry for light. Her breath slips out of her in reedy gasps. She sweats, black and stinking, like she's been running, running, running for hours—

Phor's mouth opens. Gloria leans forward and gazes into it.

"You're cursed," she says, as if having garnered some evidence of truth out of the inspection.

The candleflame leans, leans to the left, tired, exhausting, dying, making the shadows sway and ebb.

"Tell me, truly: Do you want to be rid of it, Phor?"
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Antichthon » Wed Jan 20, 2016 8:11 pm

Something about Gloria's description of a Calamity didn't sit well with her. "Isn't everyone a Calamity, then? No one can flee their fate, 'cause if they do, it's not their fate, right?" It was Gloria claiming Calamities were beings like them that interested Phor most, though. "You don't think I'm bad and cruel by nature?" She'd been told the exact opposite under the crown's care, and she already believed it anyway.

"He fell six times upon my trowel until — until he came apart in my hands."

"I guess his fate was to fall six times on your trowel." She shrugged in a where the fuck is the problem here? sort of way. "I think your people are really, really stupid. Don't be mad at me, I'm just saying."

Gloria had been growing progressively weirder over the last few minutes. At first Phor thought it was her imagination, but no. There was something off about her. "Um. Are you okay?"

Then the results of the curse testing were in, and Gloria's weirdness was forgotten, for the moment. "You're cursed. "Uh, yeah." Duh, she wanted to say, but there was also an unmistakable sense of relief in her expression, as if the news was somehow comforting. The's next question earned a scoff, but an anxious scoff, because Gloria's weirdness was back. "Of course I do. Why wouldn't I?"
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Re: Curses and Candlelight

Postby Rance » Thu Jan 21, 2016 4:23 pm

"Do I think you're bad and cruel by nature," Gloria says to the air. "No. I do not think people are so simple, Phor, nor do I believe, anymore, in the blindness and inflexibility of fate.

"Curses can be banished. Like mine," she adds, "and like yours."

So capable as she often is of words, the seamstress falls into a dull and weary silence. The horned girl's criticisms of her people are deflected with a weary, hollow smile. She mops at the new orchard of sweat-beads on her forebrow with the too-long sleeve of her ruddy sleeping-gown, then unsteadily unfurls herself from the bed and departs the urchin's side with a gentle pat of her palm to Phor's knee. Something about the seamstress had been depleted in the past few minutes — a fervor, an air — and she's left standing, a weary figure yearning for her bed.

"I'm fine," Gloria says, scraping her palm down her face. "I'm not mad. Suddenly, I'm—" she replaces the pitcher of water on her nightstand, her lone hand rattling with a quiet tremor whose evidence she tries to squeeze away inside a fist.

"I'm tired. And I don't feel well. I've sometimes not got the right set of sails to — to navigate through old memories."

She blows out the dwindling candle. The room falls into darkness. She clambers back into her bed, slips herself beneath the furs and coverlets, and tucks her forehead against the cold wood of the wall. The tarsweat chills her skin, turns it wet and filmy. She does not remember to locate her knife. Gloria crams her knuckles into her mouth. She bites on them, digs her teeth into the skin.

But before she sleeps? She frees her chin from the blankets, looks over her shoulder, and offers gently:

"Goodnight, Phor."
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