While [Narkissa] Slept

Re: While [Narkissa] Slept

Postby Cherny » Sun Mar 17, 2013 3:00 am

Cart shafts gently set to the polished floor, the Gatherer stooped, knelt awkwardly with his sister's urging, head bowed at the approach of the Regent's man. He trembled at the touch upon his masked face, but turned his head into it, nuzzling at that callous palm like a doting pet; desperate even for the illusion of praise, no matter that it was offered by such a hand, a hand well-suited to enacting the Regent's cold, clean will.

He was silent throughout their exchange, Killer and Taker, glass eyes blank, unreadable, though as they spoke he listened; head turning to follow their conversation as razor shards of meaning slid from between their words to cut through the fog behind his mask. The light of Brown's blazing hand reflected in his eyes as he turned to the once-seamstress, first one eye, then the other, head tilting quizzically. No questions, though, for he
understood, and that knowledge set his scab-black fingers to shaking.

He flinched but once, fiercely, as she spoke of taking his mask, a spasm that twitched his head to the side in reflexive denial. He rose, or
tried, but with knees too weak to support him he could manage only to hobble half-crouched towards his sister, ragged coat-tails brushing the floor, arms spread to help his balance as if the floor pitched and rolled beneath unsteady feet. At last he knelt before her, clutching at her skirts; his hand crawled spiderlike upwards until palsied fingers could curl about her wrist, her good wrist with its good hand and good blade.

A pressure, there, a pull, gentle but insistent, pleading, to draw that knife away from her breast, to where it should most properly lie. Its tip dragged under his jawline, tracing a thin welt across grey-mottled skin; over the veins of his throat and tight-shivering tendons, to rest beneath his ear before his grip tightened upon her wrist, holding it fast, head tipped back to meet her downturned gaze.

He understood.
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Re: While [Narkissa] Slept

Postby catch » Wed Mar 20, 2013 7:38 am



Blood, and blood again - Blood - they bring him blood, and flesh, and the only marr of the beauty-House is that which lurks in the shadow, a shambling form, hunched back and rippling muscle. He, too, is chained, but he is truly a beast, a Thing of man-make and some humped killer, his life bound to the strong iron collar, and the muzzle that covered his face, keeping massive jaws and yellowed teeth from snapping, from the constant, annoying gnaw of his teeth on his chain. He was no pet. His rippled, tufted hide was crusty with old gore, and around his sleeping-place, artfully hidden, were the splintered remnants of bones.

Those chains, that bed, had served another, but her spirit had broken; Dream-lady spirit who swore to protect, swore to serve, but never like this. They had needed another, and he had stepped almost eagerly into the role, lept into the collar and the muzzle, for all the deaths he had caused during his long stalk-and-capture. He had expected him, because he know what they wanted when the Regent's men had begun. It was all anyone ever saw of him. Brute. Beast. Thug. Haik-Slayer.

He met those names, and he embraced them, because his will to survive was so great.

"Give me his heart," he whines, though he dares not step from the shadows, padding on the beautiful, shining floor on all-fours back and forth, his great back sloping from slate-shoulders. He dared not come closer to the Killer, for her eyes were more terrible than his own, and - though he was no coward - he knew enough to see when he had no hope. His dull beast-eyes, surrounded by black instead of white, were bright with avarice, and hot, yellow threads of drool dangled from his rubbery, black lips, to spatter on the ground.

"His heart, his heart - he took mine, took it and ground it under his heel. Once he knew about Haik, About Haik," - and then he laughs, a nasty laugh that was like a man's, but broken, a sobbing, bestial chuckle that shook his misshapen body by it's ferocity. "Oh, please - his heart. I am so hungry."
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Re: While [Narkissa] Slept

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Apr 03, 2013 5:25 am

Such proper Myrkenites. Never could get ol' Killer to say Myrkenite instead of Myrkener. One last little bit of defiance in a heart that has otherwise bent to the realities of the age. An affectation, one that was allowed because everything else had submitted. It was a tiny illusion that kept the whole edifice from crumbling in upon itself. In the Regent's Myrken, architecture was ever so important after all. Brown smiled. Of course he did. When did he do much else? When did he have reason to do anything else?

High in the vaulted ceilings, a flutter of pale wings interrupted the room's sterility and summoned the Regent's eyes heavenwards.

They were thrusting responsibility upon him again. That's what they did and then he dealt with it. He solve problems and he did it with an ever-present smile, an honest, earnest thing, because why not? In the game of Myrken Wood, Brown had been the real winner, perhaps the only winner. He was the protagonist. The main character. It was his story and everyone else was sacrificial wood for his everburning flame, kindling that fell to ash whenever he tried to get close. Did it matter though so long as he burnt brighter than all the others?

"Our dear Chairknee. Such ideals. So much better than me." After all these years it seemed unnecessary to bring up any of these old things, but it was a thorn in the foot of Brown. Unfortunate too, considering he used that foot to stomp down upon Myrken's dissidents and nonconformists.

Frantic and futile, the beat of delicate wings against the ceiling's seamless contours, a hairline fracture forced through the Regent's endless calm. A soundless summons clung to her lips like some stunned, wanting ghost -

"I valued that and I valued you." They've had this talk a thousand times now. The Gatherer could hardly find much to say in return and Brown was gracious in his victory. "That's why it was so important to find a role for you. We value you. You are valued." One needs a man with ideals at the end of the world.

- the thinnest frown worked its way across her brow -

He was shrouded by a cloak of impossible shadows, inky tendrils ever lengthening as he moved further away from the Regent, the incandescence to his vicious dark . More than that, he was garbed in a swagger that had become more and more intolerable each year. It all suited him, though, which was the most wretched thing of all. "So it is with little joy that I do this, but why am I here, why are we here, but to pull the masks off all of Myrken Wood's monsters - "

"
Brown."

One word, just one, overcoming him with a haste that had seemed all but impossible a minute before. The swagger was reversed, as were the shadows. The Gatherer and his mask were left aside as the dashing rogue pulled back to the Regent, his eyes snapping towards the creature, the oh-so-beautiful gnat with feathers. It was not towards that feathered interloper that he ventured however. No, it was to the Regent, to she who had uttered that word. Upon reaching her, he would place his palm upon her shoulder, would smile reassuringly. That hand, the one with the onyx triangle embedded within it, took on a dark glow.

One tiny drop. A shining quicksilver bead. It rolled across the Regent's shoulder, trailing thin residue as it passed, as if her body was trying to devour it, to make it hers again, but onward it continued all the same, driven by his touch and his will. It reached his hand -

in that moment they
gasped

- and it was the only sound breaking the stark silence now that he had finally ceased speaking. The tiny bead was gathering speed now, as it traveled his flesh, abandoning that laconic idleness in favour of speed and sudden purpose. It navigated his shoulders like liquid lightning, gathering momentum as it passed his neck, descending his left arm until it reached its crescendo at his hand, fused in an instant to that wonderful, piecemeal pendant. He outstretched his right hand, the bead pooling until it lanced towards the ceiling, a hairsbreadth needle, a two-dimensional extension of intent. Pierced through, the pretty bird fell to the floor in a rustle of dry sound, a sudden rush of brilliant russet soaking through its paper folds.

Upon the far wall, miswrought clockwork ticked out the moments during which the tiny intruder died, impaled upon the glittering filament of their will.

"Tweet. Tweet. Tweet." The laugh was a pleasant, melodic thing as he looked to the ground to his handiwork. The Regent's Hand extended his own to the Gatherer then. "Let's end this little bit of unpleasantness." Now, as his palm upon her shoulder started to glow darkly once more, what began to gather beneath his palm was not a droplet but a slow tide. It was something far more than a gasp, when
Will began to communicate that bristling flood from her flesh to his, and he could not help but grunt as it passed over his neck, consuming his arm in its mounting haste for the brilliant glow of his palm. There it hovered, a bristling hunger barely leashed.

"I'm sorry, old friend," he spoke in a voice without remorse or sympathy, a voice that was bored more than anything else, "but this may sting."
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Re: While [Narkissa] Slept

Postby Rance » Wed Apr 03, 2013 7:34 am

Little compartments in her dilapidated mind. The once-seamstress saw the world in shades of blood and filth-smeared gold, the proper servant of Glenn Burnie's Golden Myrken Wood. Had crawled, clambered, struggled away from lowly Jerno seamstress to beloved blade-bearing blight-killer, finest half-Marshall any gilded city filled with the dead and wishing-to-die had ever known.

Little compartments tied away with waxed thread, stitched together like a rotten blanket to be seen as one greater, gasping whole. It transpired in a matter of moments, but she -- eye-flickering, one-handed, shaking, proud, and afraid -- saw them as movements, as acts played out by nameless jesters and fools. A willing disconnection.

For those few moments, the Killer was a seamstress again, and a lover of

poetry.

PART THE FIRST, THE BROTHER-GATHERER

When she made a good rat stew that he liked,
he often touched her wrist.
Her good wrist. That was how he
smiled.

When she praised him on his spacing and his economy of thread,
he often touched her wrist.
Her good wrist. That was how he
smiled.

When he knew it was his time,
he prostrated himself before her on the ivory floor.
Masked little bird
tweet tweet tweet
without a voice.
He touched her wrist
He touched her good wrist.

And as only Cherny could, like for belly-filling stew flecked with street-gold and for needlework that did not truly matter, he smiled.

And the Killer said, "I cannot; I did only as they asked. You see? You
must see, with -- with all your beautiful little eyes that you took from them. You have to see that I love you, t'oddah -- but I can't, I can't."

A proper Jerno never lied.

PART THE SECOND, THE HAIK-SLAYER, THE EATER

His heart, his heart - he took mine, took it and ground it under his heel.

Eater was there, a tarnished human fob in the unlit corner rattling his chains and heels scraping splintered bones. Eater, who had once so kindly touched her back and taught her how to be sick; Eater, who ate bones and golden stones and whole bricks of iron and now hearts,
hearts, a prized-possession meal that could be squished between palms until the jelly trickled through the rusted gate of his muzzle without ever even removing it.

Eater, Haik-Slayer, who had -- with his vicious teeth -- chewed off her hand years before. She had awakened to see him hovering over her, her blood like little ruby beads dangling from his curling chin-hair.

And the Killer said, "Any heart but his, Son. You -- you may have any heart. Mine, if you wish. But not his. Wash your hands with Sow Mother Pig curds all you like, you are not allowed.

"I am a Killer," she said across the ivory chamber, the Regent's proud domain, "and should you dare try, I will cut your heart from your chest and fill your belly with it."

PART THE THIRD, THE REGENT

whose silver blood had become the lynchpins
that held Glenn Burnie's Golden Myrken Wood
together
Like shining little stone-headed pins
stuck into the soft fabric of
a dressmaker's mannequin,
the one-thousand
acus of the just and true
strengthening a malleable, bendable, soft-stone city
that gleamed in the dying sun
and burned its bodies to black smoke and sticky ash
and made
asked
encouraged
suggested
commanded
young women to kill their darling siblings
and how
And how, with a Perfect Stroke
taught when the phrase
House Carnath-Emory once had a history in her
life
she expected a student-seamstress
to shed the blood of her closest.

With one word, now--
"Brown"
--exacted the cool shadow-laden conservatism
that had kept Glenn Burnie's Myrken Wood from crumbling to its
Old-man knees as the diamond-clad Young-man Cities
around them
threatened to put pillow to lips
and give decrepit Myrken to his
One True God.

With one word, now--
"Brown"
--before liquid silver crackled and hissed
and the main character, protagonist became
a weapon
(a little bird was dead, an interloper
tweet tweet tweet)
for the Regent to smile upon.

And the Killer said, speaking past the assassin to the being behind him, "Do you remember when we laughed, we
laughed, about slaves? The first time that -- that we met, I laughed about slaves, and you did not understand."

"I remember that," she said. "I remember that, Regent."

PART THE FOURTH, BLACK AND BROWN


The silver was his. Mythical. Uncanny. He was a siphon for the mercury, dragging it out of the Regent's veins and making it his. The once-seamstress' breathing increased, rapid and matching the doe-skin drum pounding, pounding in her chest. Cherny's dead-dirty fingers grabbed at her skirts, occasionally finding a hole in the patchwork. Yet, she stood firm as Brown spoke --
I'm sorry, old friend, but this may sting -- into the air, as weightless as all his other words.

Words that had no meaning, no substance, feather-light things that were meant as the sheath to cover the secret of his violence, his talent for murder.

She watched the bird crumple to the ground, lifeless and stiff, gleaming with precious metal.

Her eyes tried to seek out some apology from the Regent as if to say,
I have always been loyal, I have always been good. Then, they flicked over to Brown, their colors hard and honest, her bald head tilting.

It did not matter whether or not the Gatherer carried the infection or whether his veins were as clean as a pulpit's blessing-water.

The Killer's knife had one more victim in the day, however predictable, however essential. Its edge scraped across Cherny's throat before it pierced, pressed, and wrenched along it, splitting flesh and underskin, freeing the red beneath. Her stump flat across his masked cheek and ear. Keeping him steady, so steady. Cradling his head like he were just some little boy begging for comfort. Her tears were silent, but they were there.

Elliot Brown could not have this.

In the end, all pairs --
all pairs -- become just one.

I cannot do what you asked me. The Killer had lied to them, though Jernos rarely knew a lie. I can't, I can't, but there was blood.

Myrkeners knew how to lie.
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Passerine

Postby Cherny » Fri Apr 05, 2013 12:15 pm

A touch, a caress, a cut, a kindness, the Gatherer's death shivering through blade and hilt into the Killer's hand as she drove it home. A yielding as it punctured waxy skin, too close-wrapped over muscle and cartilage that rasped and resisted the passage of well-honed steel; His hand tightened clawlike about her wrist, her good wrist, adding sinewy strength to her own, urging her on; at last a wet grinding of metal on bone, quick and clean and practised a thousand times.

A last tightness of spindly fingers upon her skin before his hands dropped to hang at his sides, vital tension drained from bony limbs, head lolling back as he gazes sightlessly at the vaulted ceiling, where a thousand silver pins hold a thousand paper birds.

Stitches dissolved and at last his mask split wide in a gaping maw; teeth too far apart in blackened gums, jaws stretched to fill that beakish mask, his tongue long gone, crawled away when only bitter truths remained to tell. His breath was cold, bitter cold, drawn from aching voids where no stars shone, and two thousand paper wings shivered and stirred overhead.

A last breath released behind his mask, hoarse and rasping and filling the Regent's chamber with a soft hiss that stretched out for long moments. Too long, more breath expelled than hollow ribs could possibly contain, and yet rising, strengthening with each passing instant such that his frail form shuddered with it; first the hiss glass-sands beneath a hateful sun, then the sussurus of dappled forest leaves; deeper, richer, the rush of ocean breakers and the roar of mountain cataracts; sounds long-forgotten and forsaken in Glenn Burnie's Myrken Wood yet here recalled, released, returned, and the Regent's hall thundered with it.

Amid the tumult, then, a sliver of sound, pure and clear as mirror-crystal, a singular, haunting note that swelled and multiplied, thrumming in the air and the space beneath the air, rising until the din that came before is revealed as a heralding silence.

Cherny could not speak, could not sing, had lost his songs and words long ago - devoured by stronger Words, consumed by a greater Song he kept locked away behind his teeth, until at last Gloria's knife broke the chains of will that bound it. A Song of Ending, now rushing out from the vessel that had contained it for so long, and he grew light in her arms, radiant, weightless, a husk consumed by the effort of holding in a Song that blazed behind his ribs like a paper lantern. He was dead, he was dead, but his throat worked and pulsed to shape the Words, a cut-string puppet jerking and twitching in vile mockery of life.

The Song overflowed the Regent's hall, racing down halls and corridors, through chambers and vestibules, pouring through the Meetinghouse's great doors in a flood, a song of grief and loss and disappointment and regret, a song of what could have been and yet now can never be, a song of hopeless yearning and chill despair.

The Song rolled down streets and alleys like a shining tide, and as it swallowed them the wretches and beggars of Glenn Burnie's Myrken turned their faces to the Regent's palace, an answering song dragged pallid and gasping from their throats.

Across the golden city a thousand thousand silver nails gleamed like shivering stars, and the Song set them free to fall.
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Re: While [Narkissa] Slept

Postby catch » Fri Apr 05, 2013 12:54 pm


The Third

The Grand Hall would always be littered with bones, tiny-bones, if they were not swept away. The once-Son, his heavy chain rattling, darted from the shadows to which he belonged, and he scooped the little silver-struck birdling into his black, calloused hands, and retreated with his prize back into the shadows. It is such a little thing, a delicacy of tiny meats and brittle bones, so that for a moment he sits on his haunches, and he admires it. It is so pretty. Perhaps he should save it, save it, pin the little wings against the wall, pretend that it still flew - pretend that it is Cherny, come to speak kind words to him once more.

He was not made for pretty things.

He tore the birdling to pieces, the better to stuff every bit of it past the grill of his muzzle, and he ate and he wept as he watched, bleakly, the Killer's final stroke -



The Second

They felt it first. Quickened-blood, quickened-mind, they, more than others, attuned to his pulse. The beasts threw their heads back, and they rattled, a vast and terrible howl, for they could not sing - they were only beasts - they could not sing. They were only beasts, and as the catalyst snapped it's delicate lines, they threw down their makeshift weapons. They slunk down cobbled streets, and their minds were once more the minds of animals, though their bodies remained twisted, ruined. Fox and rat, raven and thrush, cat and horse, each ran, they ran, on hands and feet that were no longer built for their running, their eyes mad and wild with terror, and they tore themselves to pieces in the Labyrinth, trying desperately to escape.

He, alone, stood, in the ruins of his army, his throat vibrating with the need to speak, yet he had none to speak to. His vast hands gripped the maggot-dripped sword, and he lifted his head, and past the blindness of human-tears from dog-eyes he looked to the stars.The Hungry came, since now he had no army, and he fought blind, for he was a warrior, a warrior, and though he could not sing, he spoke the Finishing-words, he spoke of Cherny, he spoke his praises, and in the end it was a misting-pile of blood and gore that he died, brought down by their sheer numbers, torn viciously asunder as they desperately devoured.



The First. The Last.

The Song came to him, filled his back, ran across his spine as the remnants of Myrkenwood cowered, their eyes cast upwards. They echoed without knowing. The terrible gift he had given the boy, Eater, blossomed like petal-flowers, the boy's ribs shimmering with cheerful-things, the like of which could not be found in Burnie's kingdom, innards torn out to show the beautiful, multi-colored petals that he had given the boy so long ago, like a porcelain doll laid out before a door-step. Catch turned his whole face to the stars, the calling of the stars, and his throat unfurled to them.

Once. Twice. His throat made a noise that no throat could make, the brass-and-silver claxon of bells, and it put force behind that Song. It put command.

The thousand-silver point of the Stars answered the boy Cherny's call.

He had never needed the chain. As his throat swelled, it snapped, the beautiful, jeweled collar clattering to the gold-paved streets. He had waited, waited so long,f or this moment, the like of which had not been seen in the world since Lothaine's fall, of which Jernoah was but a poor imitation, because he had been lost. In Myrken, he found himself. Myrken was the one thing he would never be able to forgive.

His first step changed him, the heavy foot-fall a clatter of silver-shod madness, writhed in smoke that dripped, impossibly, upwards, striking unlikely, multi-colored sparks from the gold of the pavement. He Called in that booming, terrible voice, flexing nostrils cast upward, spitting smoke and unlikely fire, molten blood that spattered from someplace beyond the squamous writhe of tendrils where a mouth should be, and was not. The first few those spatters touched, they screamed, and the mad-elf Solena was made fortunate. It spilled from him, unable to halt, unable to stop that which Cherny had set in motion. The gold turned to rivers underneath their feet, and they melted into it, wishing to scream, but unable to, their mouths stolen from them to coax forth the crescendo of the Song.

He strode through the town that had housed him, fed him, saw him comfortable. The town that had made him such a Good Citizen. He could have stepped over it, for his glory stretched to the stars themselves, the silver-points that gathered around his flowing mane, the glory of a thrice-bound horn, from which hung a weeping, black spider, a maddened, white wolf, a quiet, red stag. They had been bound long ago into it, and set the Power into his brow, and he bore it like a sword, great and sweeping scythe to split the clouds asunder, the roiling, oily clouds that had cast their pall across the City-town. He took his time. There were many to hunt, many to cleanse, and he saw each one like a beacon, for they sang - their eyes reached for him on tendril-stalks, they screamed and dragged their melted halves from the golden river-streets, trailing smoking viscera behind.

He hunted, and the sound of bells followed him; and when the Star-Crowned hunter was finished, his mismatched eyes turned to Regent's hut, a gaudy, inglorious thing, shabby and melted without his Glory to uplift it. He dragged his head from the heavens, and the tendrils of his mouth tore, and where once singing-birds had fluttered and struggled, impaled on silver lances, now his tentacles strove, groped, struck; a single, great eye, blue as a summer's day, cast down into the meeting-hall, maddening-howls dis-timing the golden bells.
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Re: While [Narkissa] Slept

Postby Carnath-Emory » Fri Apr 12, 2013 2:38 am

What a good dog he is, crude but devoted. What a fine mutt, who'd long ago learned the Regent's lesson: that what would subdue is fit only to be consumed; that having devoured, we leave behind not one contaminating speck of blood, not one ragged little morsel to defy this chamber's sterile calm. There may be blood on his hands when he's done crushing bones, but not on the floors, because he is a diligent dog and he will lick clean those tiles clean 'til they shine.

Gloria was swifter than Brown. What miracles this Myrken had wrought. "Now we'll never know." Spoken as the Killer did her deed, as the Gatherer released his death curse, as the sky itself began to fall. As the Gatherer's song swept these slaughterhouse halls like summer sunshine, agitating a thousand tiny wings into a fluttering harmony that sung counterpoint to ticking clockwork, a glorious dissonance that swiftly became more than its sprawling mass could withstand. And as bronze mechanisms wrenched themselves asunder, as emerald glass shattered into so much glittering sand, this engine perished not with the groaning cry of torn steel, but a sigh of soft, soft relief....

Brown found himself disappointed. Not in any of those things, but instead in a bit of curiosity forever to be unsated. He was a thirsty one, the man in black with his glowing hands and his thrice-mortgaged, ever-shadowed heart. "Ah well." Insatiable, but quick to move on. "I suppose we all knew this was going to happen sooner than later."

What was more powerful in Glenn Burnie's Myrken? What was more binding? Death or life? Best to look at Burnie himself. His death had bound Catch in the most monumental ways, had taken him upon that final step between beast and man. It had moved him, but not as much as Cherny's death had. Were Burnie alive now, were he able to speak those words, to reason, to logic, to give meaning to an endless swirl of power and tragedy, perhaps this could all be stopped.

He was gone. Like all that glittering clockwork, like the broken petitioners sunken back into the streets; like the tiny bird swallowed down into a good dog's belly. It was the Regent that remained. Brown. The Killer -

"It's time." Brown had so many words, so many. As many as the Regent did not. Now, though, there was little left to say. He had spent so much time at the Lily, but never paying attention to anything but what he wanted and needed. The idea of an Act ending, of an Age ending, was lost upon him. Power, though? Power was what he found.

His hand gripped down upon the Regent's shoulder.

"We always knew it would come to this. Didn't we?" There was a sprinkling of kindness in his voice. No, of mercy. It did nothing to staunch the flow of steel from her pores, a trickle mounting swiftly into a steady flow, cascading bright across her skin in its haste to have at his hand. "I'd say that you never could slay the dragons, Emory, but they were the only ones you ever really cared to slay. Not the rest of the monsters. Not this monster. Damned lucky to have me. Haven't I always told you that?"

His answer was written in the cold clench of the Regent's hands, in limbs drawn wire-taut beneath the torrent of living iron. His answer was had in the exacting turn of her head but not in the direction of her gaze; her face was for Brown, just like the steel that was fleeing her veins - but like the words which she spoke then, these abattoir eyes were for the Killer alone.

"
How quickly we've come to speak one another's language - Glour'eya."

It was the parched whisper of a woman who stared long into the coming sun.

"
Now I am you, and you are me - "

And then, as the last of this living armour tore free of her flesh, it was nothing at all.

Brown, however, was no longer brown at all, nor black. Consumed by stolen steel, Brown was glorious, the knight he was always meant to be, the knight that Myrken deserved, its true paladin, espousing its ideals, its horrible wonders and wretched light. The metal of his armor continued to flow, his chestplate catching those shadows, the gleaming, stern face of the most handsome woman in the realm staring out at its would-be destroyers, scowling, never screaming. The face of Myrken's true knight took on a wry expression beneath his helmet. "I should just go. Walk away. It's not worth it. Here, at the end, I see that now. What a terrible place to call home? I should just walk away."

Such power, though. The stars themselves. Brown had taken within himself the best this province had to offer. He was the sum of its monsters and creatures and legends. Now there was godhood before him. Myrken's last gift. Even he couldn't turn his back on that.
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Re: While [Narkissa] Slept

Postby Rance » Fri Apr 12, 2013 5:43 am

Cherny deflated in her arms. He blew the Song out of him. An inevitability. The Gatherer's final apology. The Killer's desperate weapon.

What do you do when you realize a knife cannot kill enough?

What do you do when you realize that a rotten kingdom must fall--

--that in the end, all roads end, all prayers diminish, all gods and men are finite.

Her bald head was tilted, her wooden teeth clenched so tightly between her gums that they began to creak and splinter. She dug the knife into Cherny's throat, that special place just beneath jawbone, that sweet spot right behind the ear. She could not watch as his mouth became a bisection of his wretched face, and even clapped her stump to cover an ear as countless paper wings burst to life.

The Song rattled the very core of Myrken Wood, shaking free the silver spikes with seismic power. The curse resonated with a perfect tone to split the earth and turn gold to dust. Across the cobble streets of Myrken Wood, where Catch-Catch-Catch

(greater than any one man alone
and who vastly outweighed the very definition
of human
with his Glory
goodness
and Good Citizenry)

cleansed the avenues of their lingering souls, where Many-Fights

(remember him, remember
whose mind was a wall of words and
loved his BEAST
more than ever a man might gold
or a woman her child)

was abandoned by his loyal compatriots and was left as the final bastion between the Hungry and Myrken Wood, finely-tuned echo rumbled through the earth, coaxed it to split. Great, invisible hands -- call them gods, call them retribution, call them nothing at all -- began to drag whole sections of the town into the crease.

Buildings teetered and then fell into oblivion, not with the cries of crumbling masonry or snapping beams, but with sighs of soft relief. Bricks of gold shook free and sang notes as they clapped to the cobblestones and then rolled off into the growing pit. The world underneath Glenn Burnie's Golden Myken Wood stretched wide its gaping maw as the Song awakened a hungry sinkhole, dragging dirty citizens, decrepit children, ravenous Hungry, the Hawks, the legacy of a whole land within.

Yet, in the Regent's slaughterhouse, two pairs of eyes watched each other.

Elliot Brown. Glour'eya Wynsee.

She let Cherny's body fall from her. Her jittering fingers whispered across his coat-sleeve before his weight took hold and dragged him down to a floor marbled with blood. The Gatherer was dead. The Regent, in all her speechlessness -- and at the end, she said
Old Words -- shattered into a thousand glittering stars, and they became all Elliot's, all his own.

She looked down to her palm, not to the knife within it, but to its replacement. Where the knife had been was a palmful of blood overrunning her fingers, sticky and wet, and her fist was clasped around the handle of a basket-handled blade.

A familiar schiavona. Its weight was perfectly balanced. A million tongues had been cut out on its tip. The last hopes of a hundred families had withered to rusty brown in its filthy groove.

The once-seamstress raised her stump up, but there were fingers there, sprouted from the skin like mushrooms. She touched the swordswoman-scar beneath her cheek and heard a whirring, wild-crying chant of metal and gears along her forearm. A bracer she had not been wearing minutes before.

Now I am you, and you are me -

The new Paladin of Myrken Wood had his weapon. He had his silver. He had his false dreams, his shattered reality, his misconceptions of truth. The corpse of a withered seamstress with worms rattling in her mouth lay slumped on the Regent's great throne. The countless paper wings rained pulp down across them all, and glass-thin cracks began to spread out from beneath her feet. She raised the schiavona in the Assassin's direction, its tip quivering as the ceiling started to spill golden crumbs to the floor.

The Marshall had been his tool of destruction, the bone up his sleeve, the card hidden beneath his tankard-bottom. A planted ruse. A secret bearer of
nothing where he thought there would be so much power, so much promise--

The schiavona turned. She narrowed her eyes at Brown.

When she felt the few inches of cold steel touch her neck, she did not hesitate. The Killer said, "What have you done to deserve this," her eyes gleaming, her oak-teeth falling from her mouth, "this terrible loneliness?"

She never let him answer. The burning weapon slid through her like a prayer, and she brought all of Myrken Wood with her.

Minute later, nothing was left. The World had swallowed it all. The terrible deeds of the past. The horrible potentials of the future. The secrets of the lives that had come centuries before and millions of years beyond it. Myrken Wood became a bleach-coaled half-memory in forgotten tomes. Gold and corpses were pulverized by eons of earthly pressure and shifting soil. Generations came and went like loose petals blown on errant winds. No one remembered a seamstress, a swordswoman, a rogue, a mill-working boy, a blood-mouthed god, a dog-warrior, a bone-eater. The moon was pulled down out of the sky and the stars were wrenched close to scorch all that remained, all that was, all that would be--

A Song of Ending. C-----'s blessing to the world.

The idea of an Act ending, of an Age ending.

But from all Ends come Birth.

The burning ashes of the world kissed and came together. They magnetized flakes of fluttering strangers in the void and brought them close. A new World was made and new civilizations were brought to life. Histories were birthed from absence. A Glass Sun was punched out of the core of the earth and blown into its orbit by cosmic wonder.

A thriving city. Swirling blasts of burning sand sliced across bronze skin. Naked children flitted in the streets. It was a place locked out of time and being, where few laws existed and gods without names were praised in blood and sacrifice.

A million years before Myrken Wood, a seamstress was dragged up the stone-plank stairs of an outdoor amphitheater and gruff-faced guards did as the Sister bid them. They wrenched up the girl's sleeve to expose her copper-skinned hand. "Please, I did not mean to kill him. I meant nothing by it. I was frightened, and I did not know he was--"

The Sister raised her glass blade. She was blind to anything but the whispers of the Nameless behind her eyes. "Our gods are not made of childish hopes and invisible dreams,
Glour'eya Wynsee. We made them out of blood, and today, we will add yours to cleanse the shame you have brought to us. To purify our city of the terrors it has done itself, as we do every year.

"Today, we mourn the death of a Calamity, and the birth of one!" the Sister cried out across the masses, the filthy, tarsweat crowds, the thousands of butcher-eager men and women.

The masses called back: "Today, we start anew. A girl for Jernoah; a mark for our sins; an exile for our comforts!"

"A Calamity to kill Calamities," the Sister hissed in the girl's ear, her breath like hot acid.

The seamstress gasped, "No," but a glass-blade twitched through the air. The hand leapt free of her wrist, bleeding, crimson falling in countless beads to the sands. Prayers replaced the skin with silver, they tore the clothes from her skin, and shut the doors behind her forever.

Jernoah. The name of a land before the sands blew away and they called it Myrken Wood.

It had not been a Song of Ending, but a Song of Creation.

* * * *

There was poison in her bed.

It was sweat. Black and thick, the consistency of oil, an ichor that crept out of pores like syrup. The room was hot, so hot, sweltering, boiling her skin, and she was crying out before she even awakened.

Short-nailed fingers were like wire claws around her eyes, as if in some wild, dreamy madness, she thought to dig them into sockets and wrench them out.

She was off the bed like a sling-tossed stone, vomiting -- Get it out, Son once said -- before she even managed to snare the chamber pot from beneath the bed, exploding from nose and mouth, spittle and food and everything in her guts splattering against tin.

The seamstress cried in her room at the Broken Dagger, the future still glinting in her eyes. A dream she could not shake.

No dream at all.
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Rance
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