The Fiddler

[Glenn]

The inspection will find a lad caught in between mild and even perhaps unsure concern and utter confidence. Maybe that's why he agreed to it, because the boy only seemed two-thirds as sure as he tried to. If he was lying, there would be a different emotion shrouded around his body or instead none at all. Still, he passes muster one way or another and they are soon starting down the path. One, two three steps, a few more, before Waldemar asks his question.

Now, with the boy leading, with him brazenly given the geezer his back, Marek cannot see Elliot's face. What he can see is the dagger held up, Galacia's talon, black as night and many times more deadly. One nick from it had revealed Treadwell's form, one slash had almost destroyed Endymion. What would it reveal were he to turn and cut the mill-owner now? "It detects magic, especially the nasty sort. Doesn't like you one bit. The rest isn't that hard to figure out. The tracks are here. People saw the kids led off." Then, with only a slight bit of hesitation he tacked on a bit of truth to his lie. "And it feels right. Maybe it's hearing the song, maybe it's not, but it feels right, ok?"

[Waldemar]

A curved blade, wickedly sharp, and as the youth describes its alleged properties the older man frowns, lips moving for a moment before he lifts his left hand; tips of forefinger and thumb pressed together, circled, held briefly before his eye. In the next moment he snorts, hand dropping to his side once more.

"On the basis that like knows like, I presume?" That he's bold enough to show it off is useful in terms of advance warning, though not very encouraging in a broader context. "No. A petty lie, or you've no idea what you have there." Or possibly some combination of the two. Further through the woods, and the miller keeps a decent pace despite his uneven strides and increasing reliance on his stick. Occasional glances to the leaf-litter confirms that they're on the right path, in any case, darker loam exposed by the kicking of merry young feet.

"What else do you know of it? The thing ahead." Not the wicked knife, that he's seen quite enough of to sate any curiosity he might have had.

[Glenn]

It was a good lie and he was a good liar. What he wasn't, of course, was any sort of expert on magic. Up until a year ago, he hated it with a passion, like any good Myrkenite. Niall was the exception of course. Nova had changed that. Nova and Galacia and who knows what else. Maturing, perhaps? He certainly didn't like Waldemar much but he wasn't about to show weakness in asking how he knew about the lie. Better to ignore those words and storm on, both metaphorically and physically.

What else did he really even know, though? Not much. This was a feeling more than anything. "The children seemed out of it, right? We're not. I've got protection. What about you?" He wasn't about to tell the old man about his ring. Showing the dagger had more purpose than that. "Past that, it uh, whatever it is, might be trying to eat them."

[Waldemar]

"Protection?" His tone feigns surprise, for all that a tight-lipped smile twists his lips for a moment. "Surely that's what you're here for? You and that knife." What other use is there for a swaggering bravo still convinced of his own invulnerability? Particularly one wielding a blade that so far outstrips his grasp. A little further, following scuffed and trampled undergrowth and music so faint as to seem imagined.

"I don't see you at St. Iona's, Brown. Do you attend chapel elsewhere?"

[Glenn]

That was, of course, the moment where the owner of the haunted mill who has a veritable army of magically animated walking scarecrows asked the young thief with the cursed dagger about his religious proclivities. What he received in return was a small but focused rant, surprisingly earnest, as the two continued to walk towards a menace that they could only barely imagine.

Elliot Brown's religious beliefs as he approaches the end of his teenage years

It's like this, Marek. I grew up pious and proper, right? Way I ought to be. My ma and pa got that right for the most part, but when i ran off to join the Order, I had to convert to this Zachean faith and most of the things were the same, basically, ok? The numbers were a little different and the names too, but it was all pretty much the same. Then, after Snowstill, I started to see things, though, you know? Out there, out in the woods. I saw all sorts of things that just couldn't be and none of the old stories made sense anymore. You see enough things, though? You see enough things and you start to see some true ones, some real True ones. Some of those stories? The old ones that don't make sense anymore? You find out some of them are really, truly true. One of them especially. I put my faith in her. Shut my eyes. Fell back. She caught me. I haven't looked back since.

So what do they think of moving scarecrows at St. Iona, huh?

[Jirai]

"He's talking about me, you know." Words pitched to carry to the odd pairing of thief and... well, the speaker had no idea who Waldemar was, actually. "All of that about faith and falling back and such." The tone was conversational, lazily amused as she spoke to her companion. They were just off to the side - perhaps they'd been walking and their path had intersected this one, or perhaps they hadn't been there a moment before and had simply appeared. With this pair, who could tell? "Though I have to say, I don't know what this is about scarecrows."

[Suede]

"I am perfectly aware of how much a stalwart gentleman can depend on you to catch them in their hour of need, Qu'essan." His tone was smoother than her's, less amused and vaguely hinting at contempt for nothing specific as he stood just behind Jirai with a twitching of his lips suggesting he was resisting the urge to grin fully at the pair collecting themselves on the path. They were likely walking, those two often went on private strolls through the woods for pleasure.

"Scarecrows? They are entirely unable to scare a single crow, but if they move maybe they might be more effective. Do you want one as a pet?" Talking as if the owner of supposed scarecrows were not easily within earshot.

[Carnath-Emory]

The swordswoman had an interest in tigers - in, specifically, the peculiarly luminous qualities of a tiger's eye, and this made the Carnival her inevitable destination. The warhorse had an interest in velocity - the sort accomplished through the brisk application of hooves to earth, to soil situated outside of Darkenhold, with its stables and its walls and its general sense of confinement. Compromise had led the two of them towards the heavy forests, an excess of energy had them achieving an excellently breathless pace, and such was the delight of both warhorse and rider that they'd hardly noticed the damage until they were right in the middle of it. Even then, it might not have mattered -

if not for a swordswoman's curiosity,
and a slug-beast's appetites,
and a Catch's vicious determination,
and a horse-thing's keen sense for blood.

In the end, it's all just a matter of convergent hungers.

She's shouting something, when she realises - and even then, she hasn't begun to identify what squirms and shudders there on the ground, for Catch is intent upon vivisection, and whatever he's downed, its face is a mess of blood. She's shouting something, and it might have been Catch's name; it might simply have been noise - something to shift his attention from prey to Marshall, if the thunder of Hrimfax's hooves hadn't already managed that. For they're moving at speed here, the horse and its rider; they've lurched into the haste that the both of them love so well, because Catch has made himself a living slaughterhouse, and whatever he's torn at seems in no fit shape to protest -

And this sharp tug against the reins has horse and rider galloping to herd Catch away from it.

[Treadwell]

A bloody, battered, bruised, cut up lump: that is Aloisius Treadwell. There he lies, his yellow garments and his face and floofy white beard all stained in red, with knuckles and cheek slowly swelling beneath the flabbiness from the continued beating. And there he is, unresponsive save for breathing, unaware of galloping hoofbeats or maddened Catch.

[catch]

Bits of fat are strewn about, terrible, quivering things still pulsing and twitching, a heat steaming on the spring-wet loam. There was so much of it, so much, but Catch, for the first time in a long time, was unhurried. Sanity had itself in his grip, a terrible, bestial sanity, so that his war dance had ended, and now he cut with purpose, with a Doctor's steady hand, squatting in his flower-wet operating theater, not one part of his knife or skin showing it's surface, only red.

It is not the hoofbeats that alert him. It is he. The stallion, sky-stallion, the copper tang of him heavy against his mouth. Or was that blood? One and the same. Catch's head twists, and he is like some beast, no longer the calm, quivering, beautiful thing that had faced down the Fiddler and the Glutton. His neck is too long; his face is too long. It is blood and shadow, surely, that coat him, that makes the flicker of silver so startling against his skin. His eyes are empty, empty, full of star-light, reflective as a cat's, and it is a cat's hiss he utters, thick blood dripping from his knife, his hands, as he raises them, a grim memory of pagan ritual from a world long past.

she had put the blood on his lips, a single, red line.

It is not until the last moment that he springs away, until the hooves would nearly bear him down, and he does not ask why the stallion dares, why the Airy Ann dares. He is not so far gone to question them, or their motives. They come between he and his prey, but aside from that single, terrible utterance, that unnatural hiss, he says nothing, makes no noise. He springs ever ahead of Hrimfax, a broad, silver-bronze thing, a brilliant shadow, dancing with the stallion as if they were brothers, with Airy Ann witness and participant both.

[Waldemar]

The older man listens, and the story he hears is probably not an uncommon one; it'd be hard to say what proportion of Myrken's people - pious and proper - might have done likewise, compared to those who clung yet tighter to their faith in the face of the land's horrors.

"They don't think of them at all." The challenge, the implicit threat brushed easily aside. A while longer before he speaks again, a score more yards down the forest track.

"I have my protection, Brown. More than a lost boy with a wicked knife can provide." The words are hardly kind, but he speaks them without the venom the youth might expect. "Some of the stories - the pleasant parables, the reassurances that soothe those who suffer - are just that, but no less valuable for it. If you are a good person - if you follow the rules - all will be well in the end. That is a truth. A really, truly true one.

"There are other truths in the stories - not the parables, but the histories. But you have to read them for yourself, because they don't make comforting sermons for chapel. More true than what you've fallen into, even."

Whatever he might've added is interrupted, however, by voices to one side of the path; the miller stops, leaning on his walking stick as he turns to take in this unlikely pair. He and the youth are perhaps slightly better-matched, Elliot in his muted finery, Waldemar in austere but well-tailored black, decent cloth in a conservative cut. Respectable.

At the drow woman's assertion he spares a glance for the youth beside him, brows lifted in quiet inquiry - Really? Her? - with a curl of faint disappointment to his lips. When he looks back to the other two, though, his manner is entirely polite, if somewhat clipped.

"Sticks, straw, and some old sacks are all that's required, if you've a field in need of one. Good day." A nod for Elliot, then, stick lifted to indicate the path down which they should be hastening.

[Cherny]

The miller's boy crouches some distance away, silent, staring, narrow shoulders hunching that outsized patch-coat up around his ears, thin limbs trembling in its depths. He watches as Catch goes about his grisly work, silvery skin and hair slicked with clots of crimson and globs of yellowy fat.

He watches the methodical movements of Catch's knife with empty eyes, beyond horror at the act itself. He's seen butchery while waiting for Son, seen fat hogs hung from hooks and bled, carved apart with easy, practised motions - and is this so different? The fat man's bulk is impersonal, hard to identify as human, not in the same way as dancing children with whom he's shared a schoolroom or playground; a pale and quivering mound, a hill of gaudy tatters and gore-streaked skin that grows looser with every heaping fistful of fat the addled man casts aside. Only the glimpse of a pudgy hand marks it as having been a man.

The rider's arrival is another matter, a voice raised over the thunder of hooves, and he shrinks further into his coat, Cat's empty jacket still clutched in tight fists. If he is still, if he is quiet, perhaps he might escape attention, perhaps it all might go away; so he is still, he is quiet, his only movement being the nervous flick of dark eyes between rider and butcher and swine.

[Glenn]

Was it a threat? It was easy to expect such a thing from the rogueling. He was quick to make them, quick to carry them through. The response, though, brought forth a bit of a frown. If there was anything Elliot liked more than making threats, it was sniffing out hypocrisy. That's why he menaced Rhaena Olwak so. That's why he enjoyed breaking her frilly demeanor to reveal a scalding rage underneath. That had been a victory.

"History, yeah?" A slight shrug off his shoulders as they continued. Despite the need for haste, this talk had slowed down their gait somewhat. It was a heady thing, after all. "I like to look forward, not back.I like to make my own future, focus on that, and do it by thinking about today. People get lost in yesterday and what could have been. I take what i want, Marek, and maybe what I want is in the here and..."

And that's when they were interrupted. The man shot him a look in the midst of all of it after Jirai's little comment, and he'd respond, curtly, darkly. "Not her." Not the drowess who had stabbed him and left him for dead in the Dagger. Some people might think that inspired him, more than anything else, to pick up Solena's dagger when it was thrown beside him. They'd be wrong but it'd be a reasonable thing to think at least. Even so, they'd be wrong. Jirai didn't have that much power over his life and he certainly wasn't the altar he worshiped at. "Roschen." A curt nod to go with his curt words and then, with renewed seriousness. "Smarmy kid that looks like you two? He was as bad off as Cherny. Come on."

Elliot pushed onward down the path Waldemar marked. That his story was changing again was now moot. They were too close now to turn back.

[Carnath-Emory]

It's not the first that she's done something like this. The warbeast is no noble's mount, of course, bred for high spirits and pretty lines and a talent for fanciful maneuvering. It is no high-stepping pony, all delicate limbs and intricate dancing. But the swordswoman was made for saddles and for swords, and never mind that her childhood mount was a swaybacked old thing gone arthritic in the joints: warfare and riots had taught her very quickly how a horse can prompt people to move, and it was only years ago here in Myrkentown that she'd watched General ride this very beast at a panicking mob, tall and hard and unyielding -

A horse like this will carve through crowds like a fist through silk.

It's not until the last moment that Catch springs away; the warhorse and his staring rider thunder past him with all the force of that momentum will lend them, but only for moments. For he's fast, this very grand Catch, and he dances ahead of them like the tiger she'd come here to see, a predator engrossed in the sort of play that's not really play at all. She half-expects him to spring, and what she might have done then - oh, perhaps even the swordswoman herself doesn't know. But he's content to lure, perhaps to test; he dances ahead and they pursue, this black-pelt beast and the bright-eyed thing at its reins: a few charging steps, a sudden shying aside; again, again, putting distance between them and the bloodied mess back there but never quite failing to challenge with their sudden sometimes approaches.

Because what she wanted was his eyes.
And what she needs now is to keep them.

[catch]

She has him. They have him, for this chase, this grand, wonderful chase, overrode whatever fierce desire gripped him to see the Fat Man dead, to see his mental tormentor at last put to the Hole in which he belonged. The knife was long gone, dropped by a hand that forgot how to grip, the wet, sticky blood covered in the loam and dust of their dance.


he is ever lured by the huntsman's call, the sound of hounds
he is ever lured by bright, flapping banners, the drum of hooves.

He does not seek escape, and, for the moment, forgets that the world exists. He has done his deed. He has Sang the stars down from the sky, in Gloria's dreams, and now it is only he, he, silver Airy Ann, and the spicy heat of Hrimfax between her thighs. Like a great beast himself, his two legs spring like a goat, his four used in a shambling, bear-like run. His arms are too long. His stride is too long. He is become swifter, and swifter, and the moonlight shines silver through his skin, his passage marked by roiling, all-color smoke.

He cannot help it. He spins, and for a moment, he faces Hrimfax and Airy Ann, and she can see how he has changed - how his lewd, suggestive lips, and chin, have lengthened further, a cruse psuedomuzzle that writhes with tendrils, dripping, wet tendrils that ooze from his lips, that fall in wet plops from his face - that disappear, insubstantial as smoke, as he straightens, remembering two-legs, remembering he is a man. He towers, his arms spread is if to embrace them.

He utters a single note
a note of Bells.
Hrimfax, come out.