Midnight Calling

Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Fri Oct 05, 2018 4:29 am

The noise came with fury in the middle of the night: against Glenn Burnie's door, a rapping, violent and powerful, as if the portal itself might fall away at the hinges at every blow.

A rain had swept across Razasan earlier in the day. Well past midnight it continued to drum at the cobbles and at the thatch and slate of Razasani roofs. Sometimes it ebbed with a furious, thunderous strength, and lightning would flash in the distance; other times, it quieted to a soft hiss of mist and drizzle, taking mercy on the muddy streets and alleys.

With mounting impatience, the sound became more broad: the tight fist turned to an open hand, the palm blasting impetuously on the woodgrain, now a boom rather than a thud.

For four nights she sat as still as a statue in her room at the Piggsowen, half-clothed, the cold steel of Liam pressing against her thigh and clutched in a white-knuckled grip. When drunken feet shuffled through the tavern's hallways, she made solid every loose muscle in her body and skulked, trembling, toward the door. She held the blade poised near the jamb and murdered her breath.

She would kill them. If they came near, if they broke through the lock, she would have their eyes for her own. So quick she would be that they'd never know until they awoke in the Afterplace that they'd even been killed at all...

Once, when a carriage rattled past in the night, the glowing lanterns hanging on its frame throwing a starburst of light, the knocking stopped.

Then the rain crescendoed to a great, interminable rush.

And the knocking began again.
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Glenn » Tue Oct 09, 2018 1:06 am

Burnie, even when he had been governor, had never been one for aristocratic trappings. His clothes were often plain, colors muted; earth tones. He often traveled in relatively educated circles and that admittedly limited his acquaintances to a degree. Past the gathering of information and entirely practical swordsmanship, his only real hobby had been the trading of books. Rhaena, towards the end, had certainly leaned in that direction. Those things aside, however, this was a man who carried callous disdain for his social betters. He rarely even hid it.

Therefore, even in Myrken, even at his height, he did not have a doorman. Here, in Razasan, in far more humble trappings (the pond was bigger, the fish smaller, though not, perhaps as small as a certain fairy queen might have him at her most piqued), there was less opportunity and less need. Less opportunity, less need, more delay, thus her second round of knocking, and maybe even a third, for it would be a few minutes still before he opened the door, and then not entirely. There was a shirt. There were trousers. Both were brown. His feet were bare. A sword was nearby, though not in hand. There was a candle on a nearby table and little light to be found past it.

"There are couriers to deliver letters, Gloria. I value your opinion but perhaps not so urgently for this exchange?" He had yet to invite her in. Did she know his tricks? He was off balance still, clumsily awakening, too clumsily perhaps, so he offered a little quip to buy himself a moment. Maybe she did. Something else then? "I was dreaming. You were in it, a barrister. You handled yourself well, fairly in the face of monstrosity. I fear that you'd no longer act as such and I apologize for that loss of innocence. Whatever I had been, wherever I was at that time, I certainly did nothing to protect your innocence."

There, that allowed him to rub his eyes, to put a hand over a yawn, and then and only then, willingly oblivious to whatever haste she might be possessed by, he opened the door the rest of the way to allow her in.
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Tue Oct 09, 2018 4:33 am

All his words were were words. Noises to take up spaces. Sounds to fill the air. Like the titter of a bird, the chatter of an animal's useless language. Between the frantic, pressurized heartbeats drumming through her brain, she heard some of his words — barrister and innocence and apologize, all words with sharp edges and hard angles — but responded more immediately to the opening of the door. Haste indeed. She barreled past him, the hem of her street-dusted patchwork skirts cracking like a banner against his ankles.

With the light of the candle cresting across her skin and the sprawl of her shadow splashing out across the stoop behind her, her broadness, her tallness, seemed all enhanced by the clever and illusive tricks of light and darkness. The musty scent of midnight and exertion followed her: she sweat, and sweat profusely, her face a map of black droplets, her eyes the wild steel of an unsheathed blade. A thumb mopped beads of oily tarsweat back into the hair of her brow, underneath the cap of her bonnet. Wiped across her nose. Swiped itself clean along her hip.

The young woman that stood in the center of his main-chamber, sucking breath, her shoulders coiled with tension, was a Myrkener shaken free of her disguise: this tattered dress, with its elbows outblown and unmended, with its imperfections and holes scattered by a map of discolored patches, was one of her many old things; her face, with all its blemish-scars, its hawkish nose, was an old thing too, despite her youth. She watched him, observing him in all his tired brown-and-brown, all his unremarkability and intangibility.

All the kindness that Razasan had offered her had been stripped away.

At Glenn Burnie's feet, with a thud, she dropped a burlap feed sack, a thing unslung from over her shoulder. It reeked of seed and hay and something powerfully sour. A snake of fabric dared to fall free of the bag like a tongue from an unresponsive mouth.
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Glenn » Tue Oct 09, 2018 6:04 am

For the second time in a few days, Burnie looked up to his ceiling. In this moment, mercifully, he could not see it. He could barely see her. Presumably, she could barely see him. "Perhaps this could be the dream and you might actually be a barrister?" That was unlikely. Was this unlikely? Honestly, he wasn't sure? One might argue that it was more of a surprise that it hadn't happened sooner. "In a moment like this," he continued on, "with you uniquely unforthcoming, I need more evidence to decide upon both a proper course and a proper attitude."

So it was that he poked at the bag with his naked foot. With Gloria, one could never entirely be sure. It could have been some strange sort of discharge of emanation. It might have been some sort of monster egg or growth that had gained sentience. With Gloria, the imagination could truly run wild. Most likely though, it was a head.

His mind churned at speeds he could not hardly control. He wondered what she wondered, in this moment? Did she think that he would think it was a head? Was there any coherent thought at all behind eyes he could barely even see? He certainly wasn't about to put his foot anywhere near them. He wondered further for a dangerous moment if she was thinking that he was thinking about what she was thinking of. Did she know him that well? Did she know anything at all currently.

Truly, she could have just answered the letter. He'd allow for a sigh, the slightest of sighs, before speaking anew, quick and to the point for once in his life. "Forthcome, Gloria."
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Tue Oct 09, 2018 9:42 am

Sometimes he could be so infuriating. Actually, he was always infuriating (that was what her rushing mind, like a drowning pigeon, told her in those moments); just looking upon him now, standing in his home with a cool ease that she had never known, refusing to respond in kind to her frantic breath and pounding heart, despite how both of them beat against the floorboards, the baseboards, the wall—

The eyes clamped shut. Her nostrils turned to slits, then flared, and they did this several times. Filling herself with the larger, necessary breaths that a hasty rush through the city depths had stolen from her.

In response to the touch of his foot, the sack was, at least, extremely pliable. It contained no skull, no disembodied head; it was, at meager glance, but a tangle of soiled clothing. The heel of one lone boot stuffed inside blinked up at the ceiling with its wooden heel and rusty hobnails.

"Forthcome?" Gloria repeated, her voice hovering somewhere between a strained squeal and a hoarse bark. She jerked her chin toward the bag. "Forthcome — and I shall ask you to do the very same, Glenn Burnie. Open it, and tell me if anything in there strikes you familiar." For lack of business for her lone hand, she took up the candle by its ringed plate, casting a greater arc of light across the room: the shadows moved, danced, snaked away from chairs and tables and their own bodies in different directions. She held the taper aloft, in idle exploration, before the object of her desire caught her eye: in the wall, its stones as black as night, was a tiny hearth filled with dunes of ash.

She moved toward it, leaning forward like the frontman of a phalanx, skirts sweeping behind her. She hunched into the fireplace, set the candle upon the mantelshelf, and dragged dry logs from the rack to stack within, each clomping into the fireplace like a hollow bone.

"Razasan has been killed for me. And even against my better judgment, whether or not you deserve the blame, I feel fit enough to heap it upon you, Glenn."

Staring into the hearth. As if that would light a fire all on its own.

"I still find myself surprised when chaos erupts in the world: I presume — that with enough time in life, whether measured by experience or just by the amount of heartbeats with which I have been blessed — chaos should eventually pass me by. It should find other more fitting objects of affection to disturb.

"So imagine my bewilderment, that when chaos bites at my heels—" she wiped a stray dollop of spit from her lip, the words still coming too fast, "—it does so not twenty paces from your doorstep."
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Glenn » Thu Oct 11, 2018 3:59 am

"Yes, of course, go muck about with my hearth. Be welcome. My home is your home." Burnie's voice lacked intonation as he watched her. In fact, it was soft enough (and spoken as she was speaking) that she might not have heard it at all. He could feign being put upon as well as anyone here in the middle of the night, one of his first dreams in years having been interrupted.

Still, he did listen to most of what she said and at the end of it, he was consumed with a particular quandary. He had too much to say, too much to respond, and on this night, in this place, in front of this entity, as opposed to a letter, with her in the particular mood she seemed to be in (underpinned, certainly, by vexing but legitimate distress), he'd never be able to get it all out. Truly, why did anyone ever speak to anyone else in person? Or maybe it was just Gloria Wynsee that was the problem? How often had that particular thought crossed through some poor soul's mind?

To begin, abstraction: "It's best not to view chaos as personified. It provides false expectations. That's true with any such concept. You can look at probability, perhaps. That is," and wasn't it sticking that he could use such phrases so deftly in his speech as he did in his writing, ways to hold the position of speaking as one might hold the walls of a castle from an invading force, "if something bad happens to you six times, it is bound not to happen the seventh. I think it is far more useful to look at patterns, however, and at the potential causality that drives them. In short," said, of course, without the slightest hint of irony, "bad things will happen so long as you do not actively, as opposed to passively, take measures to prevent them. This is the pattern of your life. My condolences."

Was there more? Of course there was more. He did not go into the foul-smelling parcel, nor did he make any effort to assist her with the fire. He did move one, and only one, step closer to her however. "In part, my condolences only in part, for much of the measures one must take to avoid such misery are either draconian and liable to cause misery or harm to others or, in truth, how I've spent my last few years. That's the mystery of your claims, Gloria. I've spent years boxed away, not rocking any boat at all, certainly not the boat of government or society here in Razasan. I can think of certain lapses, but they often reached back to Myrken, not inwards and outwards within this city." Then, because there was little harm in admitting something that went nowhere at all, especially as it would both rile her and placate her in term (which would shift matters more onto his terms as it would be a known quantity, at least), "though I did once look into your debts to see if I could ameliorate them. In the end, I decided against it as that would have been a violation of your privacy and agency and at the very least, of your pride."
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Thu Oct 11, 2018 9:26 am

A stack of long-dried wood formed a makeshift home in the fireplace's mouth. While he spoke, she quietly and diligently worked, doing the task of two hands with one: brushing aside dunes of ash to clear a spot; stacking the split wedges of wood that they might better conduct flame; finally, from one of her skirt-pockets, withdrawing a few sheets of paper — they might be quite familiar to him — only to crumple them and stuff them beneath the kindling.

She overturned the stalk of the candle, poured wax across it all, and set the tongue of flame to an edge of paper.

Embers. Smoke. A flicker of fire. It caught. Within minutes, fluttering like a flag, a young flame unfurled its arms and tossed its orange light in cascades across the floor.

Nameless, he could talk; he always could, and whether or not she found it increasingly useless to listen or increasingly futile to interrupt, even she was unsure. But long after his waxing proclamations, she kept staring into the fire as if she might just consider leaning forward and pouring herself into it.

"Glenn."

Impatience. Or absolute patience. Asking for his silence, or at least his cooperation. Simultaneously refusing to be sparked by his endless spiral of nonsense, and yet fully willing to let it exist. Did he ever taste the bullshit in his own mouth? Had he become so used to its taste, to its texture and odor, that his mind had gone numb to it? He overwhelmed, and it was madness; she retreated from him, yet still squatted in front of the fire — she found greater comfort and conversation in the ribbons of fire than the blathering man behind her, who might as well have been on a scaffold, would have been better suited clapping and shouting his righteousness out to the masses, in full apology to himself, in front of all of Myrken Wood, look at me, look at how much I have done, look at how kind I have been...

Her knuckles wrinkled against the seam as she stuffed her hand into her skirt-pocket and withdrew from it a tiny, blown-glass vial pinched between her stout thumb and sooty forefinger.

Without turning her head from the fire, she held it out to him.

Curled at the bottom of the vial was a tiny tangle of unraveled fabric, a knot of vibrant green strands — hardly thicker than hair — torn away from the whole. A few brown flakes of rust flecked the bottom.

"Forthcome," she said.

For somewhere in there, he possessed words she wanted to hear.
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Glenn » Fri Oct 12, 2018 1:14 am

Fire meant heat. It meant light. It meant a smell and a sound as well. It was sensation to coexist with Gloria, with her sweat (the sight of it more than the scent; always that) and her small writhing motions, with her withered tone that ought to be withering instead and the object she'd placed into his hands. Burnie had a natural curiosity, of course, more overpowering than a thousand fires or a hundred Wynsees, but it was ever occasionally countered by obstinance. He was nothing if not human. Yes, he examined the vial, but he did so with no real recognition. This was a scholar, a being who tried to contain and ascertain the truths of the world with the only means he had, recording, classification, organization, comparison. Yet he did so with indelible ink, for his own mind was much more apt to delve into ideas and ideals. Rhaena had been different. She was a trader; she was a woman whose very identity, whose face to show the world, was covered in color and fabric. She noticed and because she noticed, for years of his life, he never had to. He was never so inclined, but a lack of necessity atrophied such awareness even further.

"I wonder if we walk different paths but in the same direction." He held the vial even closer to the fire, staring at it with not just a lack of recognition but with a lack of concentration as well. It was a focal point to other places. "This is a physical thing, evidence, perhaps. That's not quite the right word. It could be evidence. No, I prefer proof. This is proof, a tangible, physical thing. It is rarely what I offer. Do you know I sent Tennant to find just this? Proof, proof of Berdini's ill-deeds. Or maybe that is evidence. I think with evidence, you need proof already. You need proof that there is a crime in the first place and then you need evidence to prove the culpability of the criminal."

He'd turn to her, finally, a certain distance to him as he worked his way through this distinction. If she had just told him more, they wouldn't be here, but she hadn't and here they were. "It need not just be a crime. Evidence implies understanding, or at least explanation. Proof is merely the marker that something exists. You've given me proof then, I suppose, whatever this may be and whatever it may indicate, and you've come seeking evidence." Despite having no idea of what he held, he was assured in two things: first, he could explain a great many things; second, Gloria would not be here if she did not think he could provide what she needed. "Fine then. Explain your proof and I'll handle the rest."
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Fri Oct 12, 2018 5:46 am

Tethered to the fire like a moth to a flame, the young woman stared into the hearth. Fire danced against the gray, Sun-scorched pinpoints of her eyes. Did Glenn Burnie know how penetrable he was, how silly and transparent he could be? The vial was his; she gave it to him, and returned her fingers to her brow, to squeeze together the flesh above her nose and dull the ache that grew more furious. Obtuse was a good word for him; obtuse was a fine word, indeed. She had wanted to talk about none of it, had not wanted to string words together to reflect upon the images, like flashes of cold steel and blurry red, that dashed across the shadows of her mind—

"Follox is dead," she said, her words dry as old bones. "And I watched. I watched as she opened her throat like a fish-belly against a woman's knife. A woman — a being — in a green dress that I found sick to death just past your stoop."

A friend would first inquire of your plight.

"A woman who knows Catch."

A friend would ask then about your wellness: are you well, are you distraught, are you hurt?

"A woman who, if she knows Catch, I can only presume knows you."

Her heartbeat punched against the insides of her veins. If one looked hard enough, they might see it pulsing out against the softness of her temples or flicking against her skin at the inside of her wrists. Panic ran in stark, tarsweat rivulets along the creases beside her nose and drew black blotches of perspiration along the bend of her back. So close to the fire, she might as well have been traipsing on the surface of the Glass Sun itself. Her knees popped when she unfurled to her full height, blocking the majority of the fire's blazing warmth. Her dirty digits fell to her hip, touched the waistline where a ratty bodice bloomed into a shelf of tattered skirts. There, lashed beside a tiny pouch, was a knife, and her fingers thought upon it; they danced near it, around it, never touched it, but seemed curious of it.

And then, ashamed, they shot up to her collar, rubbed there, smearing black.

Later, they could talk of Tennant and Berdini. Later, they could talk of barristers, of proof, of evidence; later, they might even have tea—

All she wanted was to be as cold as New Dauntless.

"Forthcome," she said again, almost snarling it, for it had started to lose its meaning, "the way a friend should, if you know how to be one at all."
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Glenn » Fri Oct 12, 2018 6:14 am

"Follox was not a good person." Such a simple statement from Burnie, not shocked, not surprised. He'd let her speak because really, friend or no, if someone's about to tell you about blood and horror, it does make sense to listen. He appreciated stories for what they were, crafted containers for information. It was a matter of discerning the truth and the meaning and the worthy falsehoods within. Now though, out the other end of it, that's what he led with. "I almost dove down that hole." He'd mentioned something of that sort. "She was and interesting. She saw a dagger in everyone's hand. If she had accepted my offer, things would have ended differently for you, though maybe not her. Probably not her." Then, for once, he actually reacted. His eyes shut. He squeezed the vial just a little tighter. His voice, when it left his lips once more, was softer, carried not by his tongue but by the small draft noticed most easily through her ever-shifting shadow blocking the light of the flickering flames. "certainly not her, I suppose."

When did he suppose? Occasionally, perhaps. Rarely. Now. He had softened already and it was with that softer, almost fraternal gaze that he looked upon her once more. "Are you hunted by her people? What was your role in all of this? You watched." That last one wasn't a question but instead a statement. "If you have some specific questions, I'll have some specific answers for you. In general, she's dangerous, fickle, fair, bound by rules that matter nary a bit here, both sympathetic and insufferable. Do try not to make enemies of magical creatures, Gloria. That's the only thing worse than making friends of them."

Though currently making friends of Glenn Burnie. Did he have friends? Was every interaction a battle, a competition? Was it always striving towards something else? Would it ever be enough? "Are Meeda's people after you, Gloria?" Friend or no, he would get to the center (though not the heart) of the matter.
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Fri Oct 12, 2018 9:01 am

"I would rather first make sense of them than make enemies," she said, hand still resting against her belly, stare still leveled toward the flame. But what he had already done—

...she's dangerous, fickle, fair, bound by rules that matter nary a bit here, both sympathetic and insufferable—

—was solidify that he knew. Knew of her. Knew her. And if that reedy caterpillar of vulnerability in his voice had slithered its way closer to truth than to histrionics, that he knew her as well. Wasn't that the way of it? No. No, not with Glenn — and Gloria gave a sharp shake of her head in response to the dialogue in her ever-turning mind. Intimacy of a physical sort was too base, too mundane for him; he craved in other ways, was riotously insatiable, but on levels Gloria preferred never to fully discern.

"Had I desired to make an enemy of her, or eliminate her, I would have had the opportunity — and well could have, given her state. You should know me well enough that no creature intimidates me enough that I will not spit in its eye or go for its throat," she said to the fire. "But she required aid, so I sought to render it — with the aid of Follox's compatriots. It—" her hand raised, sliced at the air, then trembled in it, the motion her finest representation of blurriness, of fog, "—became a catastrophe." And that was the blunt approximation she offered, until the words caught like stones in her throat and she pressed the pads of her fingers against the inner corners of her eyes, either to wipe them, or gouge the images away.

Finally, Gloria turned, squaring her face not far away from his. Her tongue dashed at her dry lips. The jut of her collarbone rammed against the neckline of her dress. Her skin, her poise, her stance, it all rippled with tension.

"They know neither her face nor her name, Glenn, but they know mine — and before long, they'll be on the hunt. It would be a great relief to them — and to me, when their brigands come knocking — if I had a name or an identity to provide them."

The bulge in her throat lifted, hovered, then dropped. The seamstress' tone softened, but edged itself with rusted steel.

"How important is she to you," Gloria said, "that I stay mute should they come for my skin?"

And how long, if they've been watching where I go, until they come for yours?
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Glenn » Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:41 am

He smiled. Was that surprising? Maybe, maybe not. It is not that he had been a miser when it came to Gloria Wynsee and affection over the last many months, but it had been at certain times and in certain ways, reserved and refined. It had been doting at times, casually amused at others, certainly always in more pleasant and amiable circumstances. Did she realize, though, how long it'd been since he had been in one quite such as this? That she could discern with a bit of empathy and enough calm to think through it (and she was thinking through things; that was obvious).

There were, of course, many things that she could not know.

Had I deserved to make an enemy of her, or eliminate her, I would have had the opportunity, —

It had begun with the exacting language, that particular syntax that placed the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end. It bloomed fully only with the slight pause, however. She was speaking as he spoke, as if every utterance was a speech to be heard by a petulant, oppressive world. It was only with her trembling hand that he put away that smile, instead, reaching out to put a hand upon her shoulder.

She was a jagged stalagmite, jutting up uncomfortably before him. Here it took some real effort not to smile again. "Gloria, I am happy to provide you with the truth, for it is obvious that you've earned it through a good, <i>neighborly</i> heart and even better intentions, but I assure you that that truth will provide you no shelter from whatever corporeal forces may come knocking. You'll believe it. They won't. Her importance to me is irrelevant to this current situation, though you won't be satisfied by that. Let's see," and here he'd withdraw his hand for this took some real thought, "affectionate correspondent, potential business associate, victim and perpetrator both, travelling dignitary with whom I negotiate though my current title is nothing more than a honorific, uneasy friend, personal and mutual bugbear, certainly not a lover."

Then, thinking through those categories and how many might also apply to a Gloria or an Egris or maybe even a Follox, if things had been different, he'd add, with just a little hint of wist. "Meeda is dead? You're sure. I imagine what people she had will be more interested in consolidation than revenge. If you tell them something that satisfied, they'll be more than happy to embrace the closure it provides. Unfortunately," and here his eyes would narrow with reiterated seriousness, "the exact truth will do anything but satisfy."
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Wed Oct 17, 2018 2:44 am

His hand touched her shoulder. Though it was a motion meant to disarm, what met his tough beneath that rough, pilling wool was flesh as stone. Wholly unwilling to unwind. He softened before her, unraveling like a spool, both in words and composure — here was a humanity she'd rarely seen — but she was sharp as shears; her eyes, like gray bearings, were full of hardness.

Correspondent. Associate. Dignitary. All words that offered the false comfort of information, but turned into ambiguous vapor when left too long to burn in the fires of the mind.

"Do not withhold from me what you spend your life trying to uncover, Glenn. Knowledge and truth are our shields — and sometimes," she added, "our weapons." If survival dictates it. "This being knew my name. She spoke it, as if having known it before. A slip of the tongue from someone trying to obscure herself to me. Superfluous as — as it might have seemed, my time at the Inquisitory was anything but: I know of only too many creatures which may fall so ill from the prick of a rusted nail, and am hardly fool enough to think you'd befriend one out of simple kindness."

Slower, now, her words. When unrushed, Gloria Wynsee's voice almost lost the lilt of its accent, and so too vanished all but the smallest morsel of her stutter, that incomplete knot that connected Jernoan thought, Standard tongue, and voice. He asked for confirmation of Meeda's death, and just as he'd touched her, she sought now to touch him: a thumb extended, she would try to press it to his chin and angle his eyes toward the bag of secrets slumped near the fire.

"My clothes. Her blood," she said, "and some of mine. But mostly that of others. Much of — of Follox's." The young woman's voice dared a tremulous pitch, but veered back straight. "A neck oughtn't have so much in it, but it did. It did. To ensure your compatriot's safety, it required the knocking of other skulls. It all crumbled to — to pieces, but you understand, Glenn. We build what we must, even out of splinters." Gloria's lone hand started to flex, unflex, tightened to a fist, opened as if to grasp the handle of the world. "It is not the what she is that I care about; it is the who.

"For whom will I forfeit this whole life I've built in Razasan, Glenn? Is she worth it?"
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Glenn » Mon Oct 22, 2018 7:27 am

Gloria spoke his language: knowledge and truth as shields and swords, the only defense they had against the unknown, the very tools, the only tools, that could unmake the unknown. Still, there was hesitation. He was capable of that, now some time removed from the fairy queen's visit. "You dressed as me for a ball. Down to my cane. You picked the very worst version of me, Gloria. Even what crawled out of Golben was better than that," this would be his only admonishing. Did she think she was the first? What of the ball where both he and Calomel dressed as Aloisius? It wasn't about originality but execution, and she had chosen the worst. Then, though, the worst was all she had ever known. "You danced with her then, except for she was a he and you directly sought confirmation of that fact. I assumed you had more fingers then. This is a story I heard but second hand and I did not inquire too deeply."

What was she to do with that? Did it matter? She had already pressed his head towards the fire and he had allowed it, choosing to respond not with physicality but with words. "You begin to understand what we deal with? What and who."

Now it was his time to dance, a deft motion to spin away from her, a swordsman footing, a grace he ought not to possess, but there it was. Three steps apart, looking at her coolly and calmly, on his own terms. "Your life was much like my life. An interlude. Whatever you shall be, it is not this. Wherever you shall be it, it is not here. An end is a mercy for it allows us to begin to do what we apparently could not on our own or even together. I wish I could say otherwise, for you shall not like to hear it, but your questions are hardly the right ones. You could do better, better than this life of splinters and better than her of the purest fairy blood. Shall we see to that?"
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Re: Midnight Calling

Postby Rance » Tue Oct 23, 2018 1:22 pm

"My ends and conclusions," Gloria corrected, a sharpness under her tongue, "are not for you to philosophize about, Glenn. I have forged friendships in this place. Associations both agreeable and occasionally disagreeable, but associations and acquaintances nonetheless. I have built these things. They are hardly disposable to me. And yet, should I want to preserve my life—" he'd danced away, spun, given three paces between them, only for her to close the space, not in fulfillment of a tactic of intimidation, but now, mere instinct — stay within his reach, stay within his elbows, and consume the space.

She breathed in his air. She breathed in everything.

And then, softly, she started again. Glenn cares only about his own self-preservation, and none for yours. He will prove his point on the shoulders of your pain if he must.

"Razasan is dead," the young woman repeated, scowling underneath the bill of her sweat-blackened bonnet. "And she, then, has killed it for me, this shapechanger of yours. If I could have her stones in my hand, I would twist them tighter than knots just to see her teeth crush one another into powder." The memory nearly eluded her, this masquerade of which he spoke; it had been just another day, little more than vapors of images and odors and sounds in her brain, a colorful blur of costumes and... — how had it ended? She couldn't remember; her memory was a flawed and fragile architect, some addled buffoon that tried its hand at construction and miserably failed. She possessed neither Glenn's steel-trap mind nor Duquesne's keen intellect. She'd almost forgotten, and not by Rhaena or some Red-and-Gold Summer or its Black Hour, no—

Just forgot. Or barely remembered.

A life long ago. The Myrken Wood her.

The fire was warmer than he. She pulled away, crossed her arms. Tucked her hand beneath her chin. Soothed herself like a gargoyle in the hearthlight. "I understand what we deal with only as much as I must and as much as I may. But what else I understand, Glenn, is that she is obliged to me two-fold — firstly, for her misdirection; secondly, for my giving her the gift of her life — and I will claim those rewards as I must."

She took up her satchel of ruined clothing, and withdrew only enough that her four remaining fingers could scrape across the hemline for which she'd bloodied her nose over and over again. The edge of an indigo dress lay like a crumpled husk in her hand, its lunar embroidery a soothsay against her palm. Fine things. She'd purchased fine things, only to have them ruined, ruined—

"How would you have me do better, Glenn? What better life would you fabricate for me?"
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