An Amateur's Inquisition.

An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Sep 04, 2013 5:20 am

She'll say, weeks later, that it was dreams which led her to this moment. She'll say that it was monkey-boys and memory-books and the whispering songs that mountains will sing. She'll swear that it was the complicated mind of a horse-shaped thing and an exchange that mirrored an Inquisitor's months-ago visit, stories for stories, a trade and a game and anything but playful. She'll say it was promised moonlight, that it was sunlit wildflowers and wolf-green eyes; that a desert's consuming warmth had led her back towards herself -

But these words she'll whisper, and only to certain ears.

It had kept her in the attic for hours. For all of a night and part of a day, she'd paced its confines: pretty slippers on floorboards worn smooth, pacing out the restless need of an unraveling mind. To feel is also to recognise, she'd written into her book and it had been nothing but necessary to end where she'd begun: in the dark attic space that was her first Myrken home, where her mind might steep in the half-remembered echoes of a life that was never, was always, her own.

Three girls had marked out their spaces here; three girls had hung blankets to delineate between My Room and Yours.
Frayed ribbons pinned to windowsills, to lend the grim attic a little colour. Old letters burned in candle-flame; to breathe here is to remember the scent of dying words.
And so much more. So much more than that.

When she emerged, it was because the moment spoke to her; perhaps she is yet a creature of intuition.
And when she descended the attic stairs, it was with eyes setting immediately upon one-half of what she knew she had to find.
Sometimes, just sometimes, the world provides.

"Gloria." There. By the barcounter. Hunched over her steaming something. "With me. Now."

With the hope that the girl will acquiesce, for otherwise her hands will have to seize her by the collar and drag. These are not reluctant hands. But they are hands which might not know how to stop, once it's begun, and there are things more important here than a moment's mindless brutality. There is the journey they're to take: this very brief march across a tavern's lawn, towards the shack at its rear.

She'd promised, after all.
And this has already taken far too long.
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Rance » Wed Sep 04, 2013 5:50 am

Gloria.

Lukewarm broth would not drink itself. Books would not read themselves. Her things were sprawled across the bar in front of her. Pages bent open until the spine to which they were attached should nearly scream. Two slivers of lonely charcoal. Industry, this. Industry and learning, that she ought keep her mind from dancing too deeply into do you know what you have done -- the greatest fear of fifteen sand-swept years.

But the sugared broth had gone without a hand to hold the tin mug, nor did she read or write. She instead stared at the scattered grains of parchment-sand speckling the bar before her, a desert spilled from a tiny sewn bag. Her moistened fingertip slid through them, felt them bite into her calluses. The girl was in the process of scrubbing the tiny bits of sand on her teeth and scraping them on her tongue when the name, the voice, stirred her from her reverence.

The seamstress saw dusty slippers. Her black-crescent eyes were little dollops of granite as they fell upon the older woman. Upon the scar. Gloria's face seized, a silent startle cut off by a breath--

(Had she known, had she any idea that a fracutre had grown into a crack, that a crack had snarled under the weight of an awakened mind, that a fog had broken, that there was so much shattered glass, she might have spoken sooner--)

Months ago, the Marshall's words: I place trust...in my understanding of Niall, and my capacity for managing difficult circumstances.

Weeks ago, the Marshall's words: I will cut you from crotch to throat and leave you to die.

Perhaps those two subjects had met. Perhaps the Lady Marshall knew what had transpired.

When they were outside in the cooling summer Sun -- the seamstress had obeyed the command without question, without complaint, and followed in silence to where the grasses crawled up for her ankles and the heat called the tarsweat out on her brow -- the girl said:

"Shall I take off my clothes, that they would not be further bloodied? Cherny put -- put a great deal of work into repairing my skirt." A Storyteller's garment, dried blood and colors of a hundred different hues. "I'll not see it torn, if you demand on starting at -- at the crotch. I will not see his handiwork soiled."

A quivering, sweat-soaked palm reached for the tiny handle in the sheath strapped to her satchel.

"I am in the business of bringing harm to those who were once my friends. I will let your blade do its work, but -- but if I may claw out your eyes, if I may give you another scar in the process, Lady Marshall, it is because I know that when you stir, you will appreciate that I was willing to struggle."
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Sep 04, 2013 6:21 am

Dusty slippers and crumpled silk, and braids that have loosened into a tangle. I myself remain a slight ruin, and she does not speak the words at all but only smiles for the warmth of them, quietly smiles with a mouth she'd thought fit for nothing but anger. Still...

"I think not," and for a time these are all the words she will speak. This and only this, and a sometimes sidelong glance towards a girl who has obeyed, a girl ingrained with an obeisance towards authority. The Governor's own words, written in the Governor's own hands, secreted away in the drawers of a desk she has not approached in days. This girl, who speaks in terms of wholesale violence, and the marshall's answer lies in hands that curl into loose fists. In want. In desperate, silent want.

"What I require of you is names. People you can trust. People who have not lost their minds. There must be some left yet," a pause here, just short of the shack's door. "There must be some; my home does not yet hold the whole town behind its gates," and this is where she turns on her, this girl who was once the Lady's Myrkener. This is where she levels her gaze upon her, this girl who was once her friend, and she has not even taken an accounting yet of what might have died in shattered glass and desperate pretense. Tenuous in her grip upon her self, she has not even begun to examine its crimes.

"I need details. I know - " A glance for skirts, for the memory of blood and what it had cost a boy's hands. The hand is a fist and the fist wants very suddenly to hit -

Raps sharply upon the door instead.
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby catch » Wed Sep 04, 2013 6:49 am

The door swings loose upon it's hinges at that authoritative knock, a beckoning rattle that sends forth a tiny plague of hummingbirds - one, two, and four - fleeing the noise and the clatter, uttering their teeny little clicks of displeasure, father a tiny, ruby jewel that flashes in the sun, and mother and two fat, little chicks of draber color. They do not hover, as they usually do, but the scuttle away, four buzzing points against an autumn sky, diminishing until there was nothing to see of them. They follow the heat in the air, drawn like poison from Myrkentown, the summer of fevered madness abandoned in favor of other climes.

Swing the door open further, and the fear that he is not there - that he has, somehow, been taken - would be comforted by the large mass within, a sprawling figure that sat at the beautifully-carved table, his legs twisted among snarling, rearing, mythical beasts. There is a copper smell of blood in the air; the dolls, nailed to his walls, stare out in blank-eyed, lazy-eyed, empty-eyed silence. So many dolls. They litter his house like precious gifts, orphans of the rubbish-heaps that no longer existed.

At their entrance, his eye would lift from his task; the beautiful, metal eyepatch is set aside, draped carefully over the chair-head behind him, and he would stare with his single, wet eye, so black in the dimness of his shack that it writhed out, tendrils of black smoke that gripped the shadows. In his left hand, there is a kitchen-knife, stolen from the Dagger; his right is a ruin before him, splayed out on the table, skin and flesh carefully peeled back to show the shining bone beneath.

He stares at them, wordless, unrecognizing, Gloria and Airy Ann, Airy Ann who is so disheveled and shattered. Airy Ann who holds only a faint sign of fingers. At length, he gestures sharply to the remaining chairs, and bends back over his work.

"I have t-t-to cut out the worms," he snarls, his voice a harsh slither of rough paper across copper bells. "I have to c-c-cut out the lies. What do you want."
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Rance » Wed Sep 04, 2013 7:38 am

The seamstress -- she'd not the whiteness of vision Mister Catch had, the ability to understand the fabric and stuffing of a being as he might -- noted the discord of the Lady Marshall's garments, the rumples and dust, the tangles of clothes that only previously been so fine. And while she knew it should mean something, the girl was blind in the brightness of her terrors--

--for the Lady Marshall knew, had sensed some ruse, some force of pressure behind a spearwielder's death that extended well beyond the falchion-tooth of a squire's steel. Or so a frightened girl believed. And this would be where Gloria Wynsee's skin would meet the reality of that chamomile threat brewed for her in Darkenhold, wouldn't it? A mirror-edged knife squeaked against its seamed leather. The Glass Sun struck a chorus against it, reflecting the grass, the tall angles of the shack's stately boards.

People who have not lost their minds, the Lady Marshall said.

"No."

A row of white knuckles clenched the leather-wrapped handle and the bottom of her hand settled against the tin-cup bottom of the glass knife. Ariane raised a tense knuckle to the door of Mister Catch's shack, rapped a rhythm--

"He did -- did nothing wrong. Those posters may tell you otherwise; those posters may tell you lies. If you are here to -- to rid Rhaena Olwak of her fearful lunatick and of me, I will not let you hurt him. And idiot I may be, maggot-brained and -- and stupid, I will not simply give you a list of people that she can hollow."

Had she greater sense, had she not been so tired and sluggish with wear, the Jerno might have understood: it was no ruse, Ariane had not simply learned what it meant to work in the mud, as she herself had once spun in lies to the Lady Marshall. But all she saw was Rhaena's Ariane, a tampered mind, a lost little lamb without armor. A tool. One capable, despite her petticoats and pampered braids, of violence.

The door moaned open.

--it writhed out, tendrils of black smoke that gripped the shadows. In his left hand, there is a kitchen-knife, stolen from the Dagger; his right is a ruin before him, splayed out on the table, skin and flesh carefully peeled back to show the shining bone beneath--

The black oil in her tooth became bold and mad.

I have to c-c-cut out the lies.

Gorge rose in the girl's throat, sour and thick, leaps and bounds of old food that the muscles of her stomach began to deny. A stench, blood and hewed muscle, something being opened -- a sleeve thrust itself underneath her nose, over her mouth.

Catch beyond, a mountainous shadow hunkered in his weather-beaten shack. The seamstress standing unsteadily in the grass, and between them, a Marshall, a Rhaenaswain, an idol reshaped into a dainty crystal toy. Her voice quivered with untruth, a bloated guarantee that rang with too much youth to be brave, but it was a promise nonetheless:

"You touch him," Gloria whispered, "and while I -- I do not want to, Lady Marshall, I will cut the backs of your legs into pretty ribbons. You are hers. He will not be. Nor -- nor will I."
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Sep 04, 2013 11:24 am

It ought to be interesting. The way in which Gloria's palpable fear alchemises into reckless intent - although they're alike sometimes in that sense, she and the seamstress; it is the very image of the girl she'd sometimes been, the woman she might have become, if Governor Burnie had once sat in Gad Phuri's place. The subtle creak of glass on leather - though surely it draws a glance and keeps it, colourless eyes which know the sound of a weapon half-drawn. That, that alone, ought to be the most interesting thing in all the world.

If only there were room enough left in her for interesting.
If only there were room for anything at all but -

"Oh, Gloria." Glour'eya. The mind cannot decide; wanting only to shout, the mouth is careless with its words. "I need a list of people I can keep. I need a map - "

A clench of the jaw, banishing shattered glass and bleeding hands. This is the way that words, like muscle, are capable of gathering momentum; the way that - like a wall, like a shout - no, like a fist, a single careless syllable can thrust all that momentum into a staggering pause. She staggers, this onetime Marshall, between one word and the next. She spares an uncomprehending glance for the mention of posters. And impatient in the end with the idea of even recovering her dialogue's pace, she steps past, and into a door which yields beneath the weight of her hand.

It must seem, in this moment, that she does not even notice. So swift, her glance; so fleeting, her delight when an opening door yields a flutter of tiny, feathered wings. It was a smile, sudden and staring; it was fierce joy and it is already fled, but long after the moment has passed, she will remember. Their casual defiance of the brutal tug of earth and sod and soil; how they fled for the skies, starling-swift and chattering their rebukes. It is a gift. It is a gift, and she silently treasures it even as the door yawns wide and captures her eyes with its waiting darkness.

She has been here before, but it was at a point many miles from the tavern, many miles from Myrkentown proper. Wildflowers,
fierce sprays of colour beneath abundant sunlight; she'd darted free sometimes to gather one or two, but selectively so. Nothing
but the best. The soft creak of old hinges. A shape framed by the doorway, unrelenting black silhouetted against the lingering gloom.
Its unfathomable depth, swallowing him whole: a thing fallen into shadows, plunging beyond the reach of her desperate hand and
"My lord," she'd whispered, breathless in the presence of enormities. "My lord, do not forget your promise -


This is how a weapon crosses such thresholds: in a single, decisive step. A hand shakes free the coat she'd held bundled beneath her arm: a storm of dark fabric here in the greater gloom of Catch's home, gentling only in the moment she slides her arms into its too-long sleeves. Tall in the collar and elegant in its lines; hers, in every sense that actually matters, and so very necessary. Look at him, after all. Look at him.

And she does. Steady and quiet, she watches this, and approaches flanked by vacant-eyed dolls and stagnant sickness.

"I think ... you've no lies at all, Catch." The eyepatch - there; what its absence reveals is only what she already knew, and still the sight is nothing but a thin, keen wound through the middle of her. The flaying blade is considerably more. It would have her hands to clench; it would have her voice to shout; my will is good, she'd promised herself before ever she loosed herself from that attic space, and still, still -

This challenges.

"I think the worms you'd cut free are not yours at all. Isn't that so?" Small now, small, the tilt of her head. Every motion must be small lest it become inadvertently large - even when she sinks into this crouch by his table's edge, all loosely-folded limbs and steady eyes. Even now. "I think you do not need to do that." A tilt of the narrow chin, to indicate that ruin of blood and gleaming bone. "It's a good hand, you know? It's not your hand that's gone wrong."

Pretty ribbons.
Oh. It would be.

"Glour'eya." Gloria. She'll ask, later. She'll ask him which one it should be, and then maybe the remembering will stick. "Threatening's best when the other's already afraid. Lacking that, you do better to ambush. But be sure," a sidelong glance, "that your first blow cripples."
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby catch » Wed Sep 04, 2013 11:52 am

Gloria has the right of it, she does. She with her knife, she with her clumsy jernoah-words. She threatens Airy Ann, and Catch wanted to tell her that it was not necessary. That here, struggling with her worm-paths, is a thing much less like porcelain and much more like steel. But it was hard. It was hard making those words when part of himself does not believe it. He doubts his senses, because they have played cruel tricks before. He doubts his friends, because Airy Ann would babble on about flowers, and Gloria would urge her, yap her on, tell her to gut him good. And if those fingers were lesser, then what would it matter? They would strengthen again.

"The Wormwoman is a liar," he tells the coat-draped form next to him. He does not feel the pain. His fingers curl into a fist, a squelching of flesh and gore, blood that squeezes through his fingers, and the knife is pounded into the polished surface. "I t-t-touched her. I sh-sh-shook her hand. M-m-my hand is, is full of lies."

Catch looks up to Gloria, and she could see it, the utter and complete hopelessness, the Darkness of a midnight sky. Hopeless? Not entire. As his eye roves and rambles, and it rests on Airy Ann, it is the keen, bloody eye of a winter-starved wolf. Lists and maps. Catch utters a grating sort of laugh, the laugh of a carrion crow, and at the sound of it, the roots that dug deep into the earthen walls, roots of wild vines that clothed the house, sprouted into delicate, white flowers.

"R-r-reach under my b-b-bed, Gloria," he says. No Miss. Not for her; maybe not ever again. "Get me my, my horn."

The last, three words were spoken with a terrible resolve, words that caused his throat to swell, a booming after-sound that made the shack shudder free a scattering of earth. Delicate. Dangerous. Desperate. Even if he promised Airy Ann, what good were promises made in Myrkenwood?
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Rance » Wed Sep 04, 2013 3:23 pm

She followed, with reluctance, into Catch's shack. The cramped structure bowed around them, as if it could scarcely handle the presence of three unlikely guests let alone its sole proprietor. A list -- Ariane needed a list, one of people to keep. A verb whose questionable choice disturbed the bedraggled seamstress, enough that her hand refused to pull itself away from that leather-bound hilt at her satchel-side.

"Understand," said Gloria -- and whereas her fear may have been tangible, her tight-muscled attempt to be reasonable was an oil in her voice, a mud, "that -- that this list you desire, Lady Marshall, is growing smaller. Understand that those we wish to trust have even been driven to -- to make themselves untrustworthy out of the sheer desire to proclaim their individuality.

"Understand that if I were to know names, I protect those names with the ferocity of a knife I don't know how to use. Because should I make the wrong decision by you? Should I be so gullible, should I be a stupid, afraid girl and extend my trust to someone I admire so greatly simply because she appears to be what we need--"

The jaw shuddered, the voice buckled, but the knife found its way to being. It breathed, reflective and jagged, protective.

"Then Rhaena might just as easily have the rest of us if I am wrong. I -- I beg you to understand my caution; I plead for you to know that when I say you must prove this reversal, it is not because I am being difficult.

"It is because I am frightened. I have been nothing but wrong."

There was the matter of the jacket, a finely-tailored piece dashed across with ridges of dust. Ariane snapped it into life as if she were striking a rubberwood whip through the air, worked her arms through its sleeves, drew it on like plate over the beauty of her dress -- a Lady's dress. Even as Ariane turned the shack into a lesson on threats and ambush, even as she trilled her name only the way that the Marshall could, Gloria Wynsee refused to be anything but stiff and rigid.

She never looked upon the torture and damage Catch gave to his hand, nor did she soften her heart to the willing and vulnerable way that Ariane prostrated herself beside him. He was cutting the lies out. He gleamed with agony and pain -- this, too, the seamstress had caused. This too was her doing.

Like a Dream.

Like Niall.

Her stare never left Ariane as she told Catch, "No." A simple return. "I told you I'd never touch it; I told you I'd never let anyone else touch it. Should Rhaena be in this room--" Ariane her gaze, her ears, her insight, "--she cannot know. Besides, Mister Catch..."

She squatted down on the floor behind Ariane, a timid series of gloved fingers reaching out to scoop up the train of the lady's tarnished dress, a forceful motion that invited no permission -- and with one, two, three firm-elbowed thrusts, she jabbed the point of her glass knife through the loose skirt-fabric. Shredding. Tearing to pieces and ribbons. Destroying something perfect, an act that must, must ring as murder to the heart of a Lady Marshall.

"I know you keep it elsewhere. I know you -- you wouldn't be daft enough to keep it under your bed."

Over Ariane's shoulder, something just for Catch.

A wink.
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Carnath-Emory » Thu Sep 05, 2013 7:08 am

His hand is full of lies.

His hand is full of lies, and now he's bleeding them out all over a tabletop.

It is not a wince, when that hand clenches into a fist. Bone and tendon violates what muscle's left, crushing blood from the meat and this is not precisely a wince, but surely a subtle tension marks her mouth's corners. Small motions, from a creature defined by its tenuous restraint. Small words. Something not so small, when his knife hits wood with a thud like brutal punctuation, and it sings to her; it sings, and in that moment it is everything that she wants -

"So was I," she murmurs, when the moment's raw exhilaration has bled back from her nerves. "Flaying the skin back from my head would have done - so very little to change that," but his laughter flutters dark ink through her cheeks, her throat, and in this moment her understanding of this room extends beyond the bleak despair of a ruined hand and her blood's silent demands. In this moment, she understands the chill hostility of her surrounds.

This small, wry smile, for a sensation that is nothing but familiar.

"These are good cautions." Gloria. Glour'eya. Details slip between her thoughts, when those thoughts are inclined to bristle, furious. It is not difficult to keep the anger from her voice. It is exactly the trick a girl learns when she is very young and very much without means, and all the world is a brutal grip upon her will. Frustrated at every turn, she learns to hide her anger behind a passive mask, because defiance is nothing against a wall twice its size and determined to deny. But she learns to nurture that rage as well, secret and silent inside of her, until it is swollen and hot and burns so fiercely that she will never forget -

"How can you trust a thing that has been crazed, mn? How can you trust what has been compromised?" And she cannot even fault her that; she cannot even resent it as she had the Council years ago, for then it had only been suspicions; then, it had been guilt by dangerous association. This is anything but. "So. No answers yet. Yes? Instead you will tell me what you will have of me. What you will extract, for this proving - "

My horn, intones bloodied Catch; the lord commands his sceptre to his hand. Heads should bow before a tone so regal, and while it's not in her to kneel, he has surely captured her gaze. She lifts her features to him, narrow and pale within the collar's tall shadow. She parts lips upon the verge of speech, and whatever words she might have spoken die beneath the first stab of Gloria's glittering blade. Three swift thrusts, and everything tears. Three quick, capable stabs, and before she can manage a fourth the Marshall's body is a twist of motion, a scrape of boot-toes across floorboards that ends when her fist strikes the seamstress' face.

Back, almost immediately.
Back, and she'd caught her balance against the one hand at first but now both are raised clear of the girl: silent signal that this is done, that it was only to be the once.
Nevertheless, rushing steel hidden deep within her veins; a silvery turbulence, and how it roars.
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby catch » Thu Sep 05, 2013 8:33 am

She winks at him, does Gloria. A wink that meant little, a wink that meant nothing, a wink given over the bloodied body, a wink given over words of "gut her, Ser Elliot, gut the witch from crotch to breast". She is being clever, and so-quiet, his Jernoah-girl. She is bold as brass buttons, and bright as sugar-spun castles. She will not name names, a term that, for a moment, clouds Catch's face with confusion, his features crumpling into what the mad, fevered state hid. An empty, mad shell, a man ravaged by doubt and rage.

"My brains are eaten," he says, and for a moment, the pain of the ruin of his hand pierces, and nausea sweeps over him, a wavering of his form. He'd put it together. That is his job, the one thing that he was good at doing. "All the chains are broken. You'll be broken, too, again and again. You have nothing, n-n-nothing, to give me, to yourself - it will b-b-be taken away." He takes a deep, steadying breath, and the terrible sanity returns, his white, gore-streaked knuckles brought up to his lips, bathed in a deep, shuddering breath; a small wisp of silver, the brief tingle of flowering-things.

She tells him No, and in that same instant, Airy Ann strikes at her. A popping, there may be. Blood there may be. In a moment he is standing, his long legs untangling. In a moment, he towers over them both, his rage and fury thick in the air.

What would you ask of me.

"Ask what you would of me, he thunders, and the shock of it brings another tremble to the shack, buckles the floor - the ground - a small, delicate tremor that rattled tea-cups in town, a brief pause in festivities before they resume in distant Darkenhold. His eye is a field of midnight stars, of looming galaxies.

His hand melted to the paper, and his eyes ran in liquid runnels, like tears, down his cheeks; a shadow clawed it's way out, and before it went, it bowed it's head in silent salute.

"You offer me n-n-nothing! Neither of you offer me anything, save p-p-pain and betrayal! Your silly, stupid star, it offers me nothing - " And his voice drops, not so loud and clamorous as bells, but a strained smoothness. His mind writhes out through his scar, and it reaches, and it preaches death - death - a glitter of scrabbling to be felt in Rhaena's belly, like tiny, tiny spiders. His fingers splay, and the terrible wound that he had inflicted on himself had not healed - but it is a wound that is hours old, crusted and black, and not minutes.

"Wh-wh-what do you want of me, murderers. Th-th-that is a real question, isn't it?"
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Rance » Thu Sep 05, 2013 11:07 am

Instead you will tell me what you will have of me. What you will extract, for this proving--

She would have been content to shred further tails into the skirt. She took comfort in the fabric's destruction, having asked no quarter of Ariane for the deed, considered no credence -- the seamstress took, cleaving long canyons into the puddled skirt. She raised her arm for a fourth, her wet eyes intent upon the task, and would have driven down the glass point for another slice--

--until the boots scraped, the muscles turned, and the weapon in the guise of a Dauntless woman struck. Hard knuckles found their mark, crushed an already jagged nose back against a full cheek. The knife fell from her fingers. Her patchwork skirts billowed like a clumsy storm. One, two, three, four spatters of blood pattered across the floorboards of Catch's shack as the girl staggered back, a doe learning its unsteady limbs.

Her bare hand was a cup beneath her chin, catching the stamps of red that trickled from her nose. Had it not been for the shack's wall, the dolls arranged like a hangman's bodies all around her, she might have fallen. But she, like a Jerno, like Bridlespear after its Calamities, remained standing. Blood was liquid iron in the back of her throat. A map of red smears fell across the bosom of her theadbare blouse.

"You expect me," she wheezed, voice struggling around a swollen tongue and teeth vermilion-soaked from her nose, "to -- to know how to trust anymore?" You expect to trust me, Ariane? "To -- to know how to measure the selfdom of others when--"

--when I don't even know who I am any longer?

A single fist to her face. She spoke to those upraised palms, not as an angry Jerno, but as a heeled dog, a properly-trained low-streets girl.

Deference for authority, Glenn Burnie had once written.

"I want to believe it. I want to believe you. Do you know how badly it hurts, how much it agonizes, that -- that I do not know how?"

Two worlds -- a seamstress and a Marshall, a lunatick and a Marshall.

Neither of you offer me anything, save p-p-pain and betrayal!

Her fingers were a statue-still receptacle under her bubbling nose, and only now did the unfocused eyes turn, turn, turn toward Catch. His mangled hand. The shimmering fireflies in his hair. The platinum in his blood. Black oil snarled a furious dirge on the inside of her mouth. Did he mean their stars, the stars they watched together, the Thessilane and Myrken Wood and Jernoah that lay in the cartography of a sky? He thundered. She shrunk, the pressure of his voice a thousand sandstorms against her ears. She turned her cheek, and her response to him came as only a whisper -- the kind that refused to acknowledge a truth, a shame.

"We," she said -- and she spoke for you too, Ariane Emory, for while you may have Rhaena's heart, you are a thing a lost girl loves, "are not murderers.

"Niall chose it. She made her choice, Mister Catch."

Her bare digits were latticework in front of her nose. She did not look at him when she said:

"What is one more corpse, compared to all those you have made?"
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Carnath-Emory » Fri Sep 06, 2013 6:59 am

She winked at him, and the swordswoman had barely caught a glimpse of it.
Right over her shoulder, Gloria winked at him: solemn-eyed Catch, ruined and ruinous, flayed beneath the blade of his own good knife and worse, so much worse, than when they spoke just the night before. She winked at him and suddenly

- there was a playful tease in her voice. This is how it may be done. Nothing too outright or surly: a conspiracy between the two of them. The error lay not in fear but in approaching what frightened; nonetheless she could not stay away. This is the punishment for not doing something perfectly the first time. Have you made any mistakes as of recent, to share with us this morning? The error lay in her, and a frightened silence became a humiliated retreat -

it was three weeks ago; it was shattered porcelain and aviseful eyes, and an anxious mind swallowed down into the sucking vortex of tests and pretense, the shattering dissonance of deceit as practiced in the presence of something sacred. She'd hit. For a dozen nameless reasons, and for that as well. She'd launched her fist at the girl's plump face, and even as she sprang to her feet her eyes were on the brilliance of glossy blood. Even as she raised her hands, splay-fingered and inert, her eyes were all for the way a body slightly staggers, and her mouth was a grin, slight and cold and hard.

"Enough, now?" Two quick strides across the floor, and that knife's secured beneath the toe of her boot. She nods down towards it, small and sharp. "Enough with that? I surely hope so." Loose on her toes; loose-limbed and ready, nerves excited into a song of brutal impulse that she can barely contain. The body wants to move; permitted a single moment's flex, the body wants immediately for so much more -

Colourless eyes cut a glance between the two: rampant Catch and staggered seamstress

"I expect you to be your self, and only your self. If this is impossible to believe, impossible beyond proving, I expect you to leave; I'll have what I need a different way." Cherny, perhaps. Calomel. The Inquisitory - if she must; if she is desperate enough to -

Sudden revulsion, causeless and overwhelming, and into the midst of whispers the plea of sweet Catch; into the midst of it, a shout like thunder

- an hour's ride from here, the world slows to a halt. A lady's silken skirt, captured in an instant of fluid, stormy motion. The gentleman's eyes, wide like horror as he roars his laughter. A thin stream of burnt-brown tea poised forever between the kettle and the cup -

and this time it's a swordswoman who staggers; who catches herself back upon one boot-heel, as her skin erupts in silver filaments. Whisperingly silent; bristling with urgency nonetheless and she is so swiftly overcome by this rush of molten steel. Pain. Betrayal. And she knows, she knows; the sick, sick hurt of him is like nausea through her tumbling thoughts. "No," she denies, a gauntlet thrust forth as if to stem the girl's words that way. "No. I am. And I have been. I surely will be again, and he knows it and so should you." It swallows her whole, inch by living inch; cold, pitted plate lining her shoulders, her spine. "What I want of you, Catch - "

What I want.
The gauntlet catches the table's edge, necessary support.
In the Governor's office her steel had gripped splinters from the wood -

"I want to undo it all. And that can't be had. I want that Myrken had not failed you, you and Cherny both. But neither can that." Breathless. Invigorated beyond what nerves can manage, the whole of her shakes. "I want to run. I want to outrun the wind," and she's laughing, laughing even now. "I want to leap from mountains and shatter the ground -

"But first we'll finish our game."
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby catch » Fri Sep 06, 2013 7:33 am

The silver, the steel, it consumes Airy Ann. As it ought. As it had struggled to do, the night his fist had crashed into her face. This is what faces them, the darling Jernoah-girl who is so lost, the consumed Marshall who was weak, weak, allowed the weeds to spring up and tangle her brains. Because he had warned them. He had told them. Over and over and over again, that there was a thing that was not right, that Ser Elliot was not right, and he was being made to Dance by Rhaena. And what precautions had come of it? Too few. Not enough.

There is an answer as to why Rhaena's tricks do not work on the addled man, and it is nothing because of what he is, what power he possesses. He would have fallen as surely as a rougeling, as a marshal. What mind could be so taken, so destroyed, when it already swam in fragments?

How do you trick someone who questions all senses, all memory, anything and everything, at every breath? Every second, every heartbeat, and in every dream, he asks - Is this real? Am I real? What do i see, now - is that a reality? Cinnabar had taught him this, and the first attempts by Rhaena, urged on by Glenn, had worked. It had made him wary of Faeryl, and - for good or ill - it had destroyed his fear of Treadwell, leaving only the loathing, the ambition to see him tipped into a Hole and forever buried.

Question everything. And though he had said what had been done to Elliot, none of them ever questioned, ever fought. They fell like lambs.

In truth, he had lost his trust in himself some time ago. Now he had no trust in these others.

"You have wings, for that," he reminds Airy Ann, after all her wishes were spilled his voice that terrible hollowness. He would sit back in his chair. He would let Airy Ann come to hers, if she would, if she could. Gloria, her blood an affront, a thing that made him want to howl and beat his brains into his table. We have our Game, said Airy Ann. Catch's single eye stared at nothing, a point just above Gloria's head.

"They t-t-took me by boat to the glass-sands, and th-th-there I toiled with others among shit-stained streets, blood splashed carelessly along the gutters. My back was torn raw, and every night my skin was boiled, my hands torn to ribbons. Like a horse, I was."

There was this Game of Memories, a small, impudent idea, sprung into Catch's head, like weeds through cobbles. It was a memory of his, and it was told to the silver statue that Airy Ann had become, but it's recipient - it's true recipient - was Gloria.

"They marveled th-th-that I, that I c-c-could take so much, and still pull the carts. They marveled th-th-that sickness was gone, that not as many rat'vak died in the night. They marveled th-th-that I, that I could fix things so well. The headsman, he t-t-took me into his house, and they f-f-fed me Black Milk, and cut little pieces off my body, t-t-tore me apart like wolves. Stronger. The headsman, he lived p-p-past thirty-five - and then forty - and they all did, th-th-the men and women who ruled.

And everything was so grand, so wonderful. So many children b-b-born, in the Pens."

His eye flickers down to Gloria. It is meaningful. Forgive him a moment, Airy Ann; he plays the Game, but this story is meant for another.

"If t-t-taking my flesh made one so st-st-strong, so powerful, th-then why not give it to the Pens? Little drinks, f-f-for each woman. One of th-th-the, the girls, only three, would babble happily ab-about having a little brother, a brother to tease, or a sister to share Soodsy with, wh-when she wept, b-b-because her mother was Chosen."

His hand reached out; it needed comfort, and Airy Ann was there, and his fingers sought to take that gauntlet. To share, as if in a Dream, with that silver, to feel it pouring, molten silk, over his skin.

"Did your m-m-mother ever recover f-f-from that, Gloria? Were th-th-those my bodies, my murders, wh-when the beasts began bursting f-f-from between legs and gnawed th-th-through bellies?"

His chin turns, and twists up; he gazes at Airy Ann, his face demanding her story in return.
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Rance » Fri Sep 06, 2013 10:05 am

Ariane Emory. A murderer who embraced her burden.

Glour'eya Wynsee. A murderer who refused to acknowledge that two things had been dashed by her bloody palms: her brother's innocence, a spearwielder's life.

There was silver and steel glittering across the Marshall's skin, droplets of mercury that hardened and thickened and reflected. A magic, a talent the seamstress could have never imagined or understood -- the woman, the weapon, an idol who hid the vicious gaslight of her post-strike smile behind a voice that demanded obeisance.

The seamstress did not instantly leave, as Ariane suggested she do if she thought believing impossible; she wavered, reached a sweat-and-blood palm toward the handle of the shack's door, but never opened it--

--for beyond even the plate-skin that slithered like a carapace over the Marshall's flesh, her attention was dragged away by Catch's story. His stutter-tongued tale, the horrors that spilled out of him like so much poetry. She managed to bleat out a denial, a stammered, "Stop talking," that wholly forgot how to be strong, sharpened glass at all.

(She knew the Histories, the Calamities -- a girl could not pass her Odos without reciting them, committing them to memory:

There was a rat'vak -- a slave -- that was thought dull and without reason, whose origin was regrettably unknown. It worked with diligence and took its discipline well. It towered among its low peers and lacked the wits to harm another...

Sisters, Brothers, and
stahls came to it, to sliver off pieces of its body, to consume them as great delicacies or work them into alchemical preparations of surpassing efficacy. Soldiers and innocents young and old were fed the Growing Rat'vak's pieces so that they might be granted the same wondrous vigour...

--and there were slithering whispers of her mother, mind-addled by smokeroot; stone-hard recollections of the Birthing Pens, take your number, beg they should not call it and you might live one more year as a whole girl, unsoiled by a man's pearls, by a man's greed, said Veteran Arkessa)

Never took her gaze, her Sun-boiled eyes off of Catch--

Did she ever recover, he asked. Did she ever recover.

But she too could play a Game. She had learned, quickly and at the whim of desperate impulse. The girl emulsified the terror and recollections underneath the struggle for reason, for--

(was it him, had it been him?)

--Ariane had come to them, to her, for knowledge.

This was the piece she moved while staring glass shards through the addled man: to trust where perhaps she and Catch both believed they ought not.

"I will give you you what you ask for," she said not to him, but to Ariane. "I beg to discover that my trust is not misplaced. To -- to prove the nature of a mind is far beyond me, but I ask you this.

"Remove the dress. Remove it, and give it to me. That I may burn it, kill it, scatter its ashes to the soil. I am a murderer too. You see? I will excel in the death of fabric. Let me slaughter these textile vestiges of the Lady Marshall, if she is dead as I pray she is. And give to me--" how dare he speak of my mother; how dare he speak of what he does not know, "--a single hour to gather a proper uniform for you."

A bloody hand opened, reaching out.

"I will not stand under the same roof with a Calamity, Ariane."
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Re: An Amateur's Inquisition.

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Sep 11, 2013 7:06 am

This is not Catch.

How had it taken her so long to realise that?

Not Catch at all, this creature - when he solemnly chides, when he makes this quiet warning with a voice that speaks of authority. As if he were fluctuating moment-by-moment between two senses of self, and how long has he been like this? She has lost weeks and weeks; perhaps even whole months, and with each passing moment the ramifications of this sprawl wider and wider -

"I do," she answers him now, the Catch that Catch has learned to sometimes be. Answers him and easily, because her words had been an evidence; they had also been a confession. Wings. How she longs for it: brilliantly, explosively. To flee into the presence of the creature which owns a portion of her heart as surely as anything else ever had. To race, together; to run faster than running; to lose her breath in that weightless instant in which wings flatten the air and horse and rider break free of the earth's jealous grip. An hour's ride from here. She could make it faster than that. An hour, less than an hour, and she could do it right this minute; having flung themselves at the sky they would not wrestle with the need to return, but only run and run, run away forever -

"But Catch, this - this is so much more important than what I want."

This: a list of names; two spirits grievously wounded. The seeping hurt of this creature's precious heart, the things which his story does to Gloria's bloodied face - echoed upon her own, upon a mouth which clenches in sudden revulsion as his tale reaches the height of its horrors; upon eyes which cannot shed their sudden frown. The clean line of her jaw tightens against searing sickness, but all the same there's a hand flown to her mouth and she turns, slightly turns, a breathless retch of sound caught behind the clasp of her fingers.

Once.
Again, armoured shoulders arched through the midst of it.
Ask her now why she'd always longed to be steel rather than flesh; ask her now, as she suffers her sickness beneath armour that's only skin-deep -

"Enough." A breath of sound, whispered cool between their words. His. Glour'eya's. Gloria? Glour'eya Wyns'yh. That's how she'd write it. Just like that, and the realisation ought to have her smiling; might have, in any other hour. Not now. Not in the humid warmth of a space that is thick with whispering hostility. Catch's hand winds around her own, a gauntlet that spills thin tendrils of quicksilver across heavy fingers and their gentle cling. Enough, she says, and wants to say it again - wants to shout it this time - when Glour'eya describes a solution that is wrought in more symbolism than she could possibly have realised.

There were bodies on the tavern's lawn, because they were busy yet with killing and there'd been no time to dispose of the mess. Bodies, ragged and limp; bloodstained silk and the broken limbs beneath and the Guard, when it arrived, would not let this go unanswered. The Guard wanted bodies for its Gaol and it had them in swift order: one man and two women, three testimonies before the Council, for what the Governor deemed Murder they insisted to describe as a Reckoning, and the Council was not easy with their stubborness.

Her word was insufficient. She'd been five months with the Militia, acclimating farmers to their swords, and all the same her word was considered Unfit. A Council unable to Believe would be satisfied only with proof and without it three people would hang for sake of the villains broken beneath their hands. Proof, to support the story she'd given them, a tale of white-robed men and the things such men will do with their small knives. Proof, to keep her sister from the gallows, and there was no proving this at all except with the words those men had carved into her spine.

Shaking hands slipped the shirt from her back. Gritted teeth, as they had their fill of the sight.
Furious with humiliation, she fastened her clothes as they framed their exoneration.
And she never, never forgot -


Forgive her, Catch, the hand which had tightened slowly into a vise.

"No." His tale had drained the colour from her cheeks; Catch's tale and Gloria's distress, and it is a colourless thing which gazes towards that girl now, steel to the throat and cool with its eyes. "This is not for you to ask. And Glour'eya, you do not have the means to make it a demand." The cold heat of anger as tempered by regret; it is something short of gentle. "Leave if you will. Take your names with you; I find another way." Her gaze strays - towards Catch, towards a tabletop stained with the spill of his blood. This, too, is regret.

"I should never have brought you here."
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