The Flesh is Weak

The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Mon Mar 27, 2023 8:25 am

It was a disorienting way to awaken. Had he been dreaming? Did his last waking memories simply linger? Had it just been silence? Could he even dream at all anymore? Did he dream with the weight of consequence? He knew something was amiss, and that in itself was reassuring. To think something was amiss could mean paranoia or anxiety, but in the worst case, that was still a better sort of madness than reckless abandon. If forced to chose, he'd rather question everything than accept everything. He did not have to choose however, which was the more preferable scenario by far.

What then, had happened? He was in a bed. It was his bed. There was no sign of Fionn's 'father.' It had been her 'mother/sister' then. Either he had pushed himself too hard or he had pushed the man too hard and she had intervened. On some level, the notion of forfeit was disappointing, but the truth of the matter was that he would begrudgingly grant himself credit for even having been in the fight. That was an encounter to plan for. No, it was an encounter to outright avoid. He would have sooner brushed up against her dreaded High Queen than this man. One could work with contrast. Blurring was endlessly harder.

He sat up with far less difficulty than he was expecting. Meg did her job well, even with a difficult patient; especially with a difficult patient? She could redirect such impulses, he imagined. How many times had she tended to Fionn after a skinned knee? After something far worse? Only a broken heart and the rupture that came with it would have given her trouble. But no, there was not time for such thoughts. There would be something near him, be it water or broth or some sort of fairy tincture. You could damn well eat their food and drink their libations if it was your home that they were in. There was some limit to all of it.

Meanwhile, he had lost more precious hours, maybe even another day.

"Benedict? Are you near? Do you think there's a chance of us talking without interruption? Things keep happening. They outpace our ability to take stock."
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Niabh » Tue Mar 28, 2023 6:22 am

All Tuatha had glamourie, but, as with any skill, some people were better at some things than others. If you knew someone well, their telltale signs were plain as a thumbprint. Meg would have recognized Fionn’s handiwork in the parlor even if the Queen had been a thousand miles away. Fionn’s glam bore every possible flourish and curlicue, every detail flawless and carved in crystal, with all the self-consciousness and show-offiness of a young woman, but always so well done as to make them worth flaunting. Meg, meanwhile, crafted quiet. Things seemed a little more hushed, details warm and soft and muted. She had tidied the bedroom, true, but she left behind a gentle glow of comfort and safety; the wood shone more richly, the curtains wafted like a sigh of relief, the lamplight fell a little more warmly upon the walls. Moreover, it felt exactly like her, as distinct as a whiff of her scent. Nothing bad would happen in this room.

Clustered on the bedside table stood the ubiquitous pitcher and cup, a more substantial meal than the day before, a small sulfur-yellow confection balanced on the rim of the platter, and a cup of tincture whose steam had mostly faded. The rest of the table’s available space was occupied by the raven, who stood expectantly with his head canted and the long green stem of a daffodil pinched in his sharp beak. The flower did not move as he spoke.

“I guess we can talk. She said to eat your stuff.” Very carefully, as if performing a rope-walking trick, he bent forward and set the daffodil on the other side of the meal tray. “She’s, ah, been cleaning your house a lot. Kind of in shifts while you’ve been asleep. The little one’s back at camp because it's Butterfly Day. Oh!” He suddenly perked up, giving his wings an excited shake. “I think I got an in at the camp. The bard’s raven is supremely bitchy but she’s a gossiper, and she’s pretty fed up with bein’ here and wants someone to complain to. I pretended to be fed up, too, so she started commiseratin’. I’m spying!” He sounded pleased with himself.
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Wed Mar 29, 2023 9:01 am

Burnie had not truly been back in Myrken all that long. His abode in Razasan had been more empty than not, filled only with what he needed to work and what he needed to live. Wherever his mind was in those days, it was not in that room, even if his body might had been. His home here had an opposite problem. It was a relic of a previous life, one full of many strange and varied activities. He was never much of a natural scientist, but one did not ply his trade of general nuisance in an accursed place without collecting the most bizarre odds and ends. Then he went away for years and gave little heed to what happened to most of them. Immorality would serve her well in tidying this place.

Still, he didn't seem disturbed by the notion. Not that notion nor that of more substantial sustenance. Not even Benedict's spying. "I would like to hear what this raven has to be fed up over." But first, for with Burnie there was almost always a but first, he wanted to speak. That was, of course, almost always exactly what the 'but first' was. "It was a trying encounter. My apologies for drawing you into it but I was better off with a witness and a buffer both." That sentence would have sufficed, but Benedict was a friend so Glenn added one more. "He had me at a disadvantage and you helped to equalize things just by being here." Regard gave way to curious wist. "In another life he and I might have been the worst of enemies or the greatest of allies, but in the here and now, it'll be best if we just give one another ample space."

He had been focused on the food, had been calculating how best to even start with it, but now his eyes turned upwards. "It's been a long time since I played chess. There were a couple of years when I was much younger though, but the thought of him makes me want to devise a new board game, one with two boards, two sets of rules, two objectives, entirely different game pieces, save for one queen at the center of both boards. Maybe if I make it to old age, hm? I can call it Benedict's Burden."
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Niabh » Mon Apr 03, 2023 4:41 am

“Would you believe that’s the first time I ever talked to him face to face? See, back home I’m a long-ranger, and he never has much call for us. Even when I got sent Here, which was on his orders, I never saw him; I just got the order. But you hear stuff, and the Lady’s talked about him enough that I got the gist.” His head cocked, and he squinted at Glenn. His head cocked in the other direction, only deeper, as if the change in angle would bring Glenn into better focus. Ravens have very good eyesight, though this does not necessarily make them perceptive. “You can decide to give him space, if you want, but gettin’ him to give you space is another matter.”

Not for the first time, he wished he’d had a chance to talk to the Queen, or at least to see her—how she was doing, how she looked, how she felt about all this. Particularly how she felt about having His Lordship back in the game. Even if she was pissed at Glenn, she might look on him as an ally, or at least a better option than His Lordship. That could get bad quick, using the both of them to deflect one another. His Lordship might do it out of sheer boredom, but Glenn might not rise to the bait.

Outside of that tangled mess, he just missed her. It was selfish of him. It had been nice, getting to know her; it made him feel special to be her confidante. Queens did not often stoop to dealing directly with ravens, and an active Queen had no time for such common matters as friendships. But then, normally he wouldn’t have time to be friends with anyone, either. Everyone had their role in Court, and this was fast shaping up to a miniature Court. He would have been excluded anyway. He wondered if Glenn would even have a place in what was coming.

“She’s fed up because she can read the weather, same as me. They set up camp with a baking hearth and a callstone. A callstone is basically permanent. So’s a hearth, kinda, but not like a callstone. You can abandon a hearth; you don’t just leave your callstone.” The opportunity to interact with another raven after such a long silence left him chatty and at ease. Every sentence was punctuated with a flit or a twitch. He even picked up Glenn’s spoon and began to roll the stem around, but it chattered, and he quickly put it back down, only to take up the daffodil again, twirling it like a parasol. “But the kicker for me is that the Queen did langill and it didn’t work, so now everyone’s takin’ it as a bad omen, which it kind of is? I mean, sometimes langill don’t work anyway, so maybe it’s because she hasn’t done it in a while or maybe you just can’t do it Here, but the real point is that you don’t do langill unless you plan on stickin’ around for a while.”
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Thu Apr 13, 2023 5:02 am

"Who gave you the order then?" He had a relatively strong grasp upon the big picture but specific details like that only distracted. There were simply too many to learn and while you never knew what you might uncover by tracing one to the next to the next, getting lost in fairy minutia was a dangerous path. There was some reputational dignity in getting lost in a fairy Queen instead. It didn't matter much to him, but it was, at least, an amusing thought. "No, no matter. You can tell me that when things have quieted down."

And from the sound of it, that wasn't going to be any time soon. Glenn was itching to jump to his feet and run around a bit, but there was a sense, much like glamourie, the medicine's effect might be just a bit of a mirage. This may have been unfair to Meg and her unquestionable talents, but he was a man who had lost months of his life in Golben feeling hearty and hale. Best not to push the body without good reason or against physician's advice (and yes, in that exact order). He too wished that he could see her. The biggest issue at play, the biggest danger, the biggest unknown, was Glenn reaching out to Gloria. To do so would lead to war, but they both knew that if he truly felt something was moral and right, political consequences wouldn't stay his hand. He'd devise some sort of third option that could well make things all the worse. Rarely did he have a strong moral feeling about anything, but when he did there was little stopping him. Either they could make some sort of deal for him to be silent or he would tell her or he would invoke whatever third way he might envision. They would be able to move on after that, one way or another. If "another" was war, then at least their positions would be clear. Now everything was still murky.

"No, this is good," these thoughts left aside, he refocused on Benedict and the news at hand. "Not that she's staying and setting up court here, but at least that we have something direct to work through. There are a hundred such things, but this is at the crux of them. So is it," and one finger popped up to help keep track; hopefully the raven would not make a snatch at it, "her connection to Catch, a desire not to leave him, for instance," and there was the second finger, "or machinations surrounding the child; I had thought she might establish a connection with her over a distance so she could return home, but perhaps not. And she may simply wish to steal her away with force and numbers now that other options have been closed off to her." Finally came the third finger. "Which leaves us with something other plot or plan or reality that she cannot avoid we do not yet know enough to understand. What do you think it is, of the three?"
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Niabh » Sun Apr 16, 2023 1:28 pm

Occasionally, the raven found himself stumbling over the fact that Glenn still didn’t know a lot about the courts—that he had to ask. Between the copious letters piled between them and the heroic battles whenever they were in each other’s presence, Glenn and the lady should have exhausted every subject between them, but then you ran into these jarring little pockets: an off-hand question, a lack of basic information, a blank look. The Queen, of course, must maintain some discretion over the goings-on of her Court, and no Tuatha anywhere would ever tell a human every single secret, but sometimes…it seemed like they hadn’t really talked much at all.

Fortunately, Glenn excused him from answering that question. Unfortunately, the excuse kept him from asking several questions of his own that Glenn might have found fascinating, mostly because he was cringing on the inside about how giving his opinion on any of those options skirted pretty close to treason. Dash it all, even if he was exiled from Court, he was still a Niall; she hadn’t cast him out of the whole clan, and he still owed her that much loyalty. He didn’t want to see her get hurt. He had to trust that Glenn wanted that as much as he did.

But there had been that stumble.

He set down his parasol and grew sober. “I don’t know exactly what you mean by force of numbers. That would depend on what kind of force they were up against, right? How many people do you think are going to come for her if she tries to make off with this kid? I thought it was just, y’know, Gloria. And if it’s just Gloria, somebody’ll just put an arrow through her and be done. If it’s more than that…”

Sobriety didn’t last long. He began to twitch and fidget as he wrestled with his words. “If it’s more’n that, then it wouldn’t need to be too damn many, let’s say. This is a bare bones encampment. They’ve got a few fighters but they didn’t come here to fight.” He was pleading his case, and it was just as embarrassing for him as it probably was for Glenn. “So no. I don’t think it’s the kid. At least not that way. And I was wonderin’ about Catch, myself. He went out wanderin’, the way he does, and the lady’s said a couple times that she hoped the spring would bring him back, so maybe that’s what she’s waiting on? Maybe she wants to say goodbye to him or something.”

That reminded him, and he perked up and leaned in for some of his newly acquired gossip. “See, what’s goin’ around camp is that the Queen’s fallen in love with a tultharian. That goes a few different ways. The Queen falling in love is good, because that means succession. Falling in love with a tultharian is bad, because no one wants a mongrel Queen.” He felt only the slightest tick of misgiving about using that term, but it was already out, and he was on a roll, and the best solution seemed to be putting as much distance between the single word and the conversation at large as quickly as possible. “Falling in love with a tultharian Here is both bad and bad timing, because no one wants to gang about while she figgers this out. But they don’t have a clue about Catch. The bard does, and Meg does, and I think His Lordship does, but everyone else thinks Catch is you, so as far as they know, they’re all stuck waitin’ on some dumb lovestruck girl to make nice with her buachaill.

One did not question a Queen’s priorities, but that didn’t mean one could not have an opinion about them. The bard’s raven told him gleefully that the camp had several opinions, all of them negative.

“I don’t know what’s up, but I bet His Lordship’s up to something. Maybe separate from whatever she’s up to, maybe part of it, I don’t know, but he’s never not up to something so the odds are in our favor. I thought he wasn’t even supposed to be Here. I thought that was the rule: there always has to be a Niall on the Hill and while she’s here, it’s him. I know she must’ve told you that.
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Tue Apr 18, 2023 3:28 am

"Gloria sent the child somewhere to be protected," he offered without any further explanation to the where or the who. It wasn't that he was concerned about being spied on necessarily, for that was no way to live and her own fault (she would reap the consequence of it), but certain specifics would only matter so much to this conversation. Others, though? They went much farther. "From Myrken. From Catch. From herself. Bravery and cowardice and sacrifice and selfishness all in one, just the sort of terrible mix to lead us to this moment." But that was Gloria in a nutshell, wasn't it?

As for them, just what had they been doing? Just what was he if not some sort of lover. What was she after if not an heir sprung from her loins? "Her people's stories are simple and direct. We've bathed in the minutia of each other's ideas, hopes, dreams, fears. So deep that we drowned in them many times over. So deep that she's not rid of me and I've not thwarted her. In time, which they have, her court might come to understand it, but they would be terrible bored and disappointed with it. Better they hang on to the fantasy of what they can't yet understand."

Yet they were still struggling to understand Fionn and her will. "When I last saw her, she was unmoored in time and space, unstable. If you caught her in the right moment, the right blink, she would be as wise and one with her power as she had ever been. Most likely thought, you'd catch something else entirely, something virulent." And he caught her more than once and look at what it got them? "If He is behind this, then it could be out of fear to return her home in her current state, something as simple and innocent as that."

And if he was not? "If she has it in her head she can't return without an heir, then she can't wait and leave things up to chance when it comes to the child. The power within it would give her everything she, and more importantly, her people, might need for the future. What would be more ideal would a child of her and Catch, but," and here, finally, did he falter slightly, for she hated to be spoken about in this way so. If he knew nothing, he knew that. "I do not see her in a rush to have a child of her own. I do not think it possible with Catch anyway. Purity and purity whereas with he and Gloria, it had been purity and sludge, a seed and a fertilizer. For her to mate with Catch instead, it would take the kindling of a thousand souls."
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Niabh » Tue Apr 25, 2023 10:03 am

The raven tilted his head in confusion and gave two quick hops toward the edge of the table, stopping only when his wingtip clipped the edge of a spoon, which clattered to the floor. “Bugger. I’ll get that. So…what, this other person, the one that’s got the kid now—they’re the one who might get involved?”

Saying it aloud brought a dim memory out of the shadows. Things that were not immediately required in the raven’s mind by necessity grew mercifully foggy, but play the right chord and a raven can remember every word. “She said once that it would be done right under your nose. I…I think the plan was not so much that it was gonner get done behind your back, but that since she were havin’ the kid do the actual lifting, you’d be able to vouch that she never left Myrken because she’d be right in front of you when it happened.”

When had she said that? Back in the city, when she’d sent him off to trail Gloria. Why had she had him trail her? To see if she hid the child somewhere nearby. And that was when she’d realized her first snatch had missed; she’d assumed, as any Tuatha woman would, that a child would never be further than a day’s walk from its mother. And then, abruptly, she stopped mentioning it. The raven would bring it up out of boredom, and all she ever said was, I’m setting my head upon it.

It seemed much longer ago than it was. That was when it all started to crumble. She’d stumbled back to Myrken iron-scored, and Catch had healed her, and…she started to go astray.

All that was a dark mutter in the back of his mind, where other things he should have noticed waited to be woken. Meanwhile he was distracted by a spoon. He hopped off the edge of the table and strutted, head low, under the bed. “Look,” he called out, “you don’t know history. They’ve let way woodlier Queens’n her go right on Queening. At least this one still knows how to read and feed herself and ain’t decided that the gods have called her to live on a skellig. When the hell did Meg clean under here? I didn’t see her do it.”

He came backing out, head down to avoid the rail. After a certain point he stretched up proudly, spoon pinched in his beak. “I’m not all-the-way discounting that maybe she’s way woodlier than I thought she was. When ravens go mad we just pull out all our feathers. When you folks go mad, you go all kinds of mad. You forget where you are, you talk to invisible people, you write a bunch of poetry, you set houses on fire. Never anything normal.

He made an effort of pitching his head all the way back, then trying to trebuchet the spoon back onto the table. He did one better: he let go too soon, and the spoon went spinning off behind him.

“Feck.” He shuffled himself upright with great gravitas, as if there had never been a spoon. “I don’t think she and Catch are that kind of an item anyway,” he agreed. “I mean, she took herself elsewhere last Season to get away from him as much as anyone. But you and me both know that Catch is…well, he’s something. With the Tuatha, if you ain’t Tuatha, you’re tultharian, end of story. Maybe if they saw him, they’d feel different. I have a question.”

He took a tentative hop forward. The raven was much larger than a Myrken raven; his eyes came to the edge of the bed, giving him the look of a small, attentive butler. “Once we have determined the reasons why they’re making camp here, what are we going to, um, do? Is the goal to make them stay or make them leave or make them leave without her or what? I feel like I need to know this to continue.”
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:38 am

Theoretically, Gloria had a general interest in children. It was in moments like this that it was undeniable. He had never become close to her. The Raven might hem and haw about the fact that Glenn did not know many key things about the Queen, but words had been traded between them, so many words, and almost all of them meaningful. The truth of the matter was that any one person contained an ever-shifting universe to explore. A cartographer such as he might focus on one area or another, might map out an entire region here or there, might have the broad sense of the entirety of it, might capture the most important landmarks, but there were limits, both practical ones such as time and all too human ones such as bias and preference and pride. He knew what he knew and it was considerable, but there was so much he'd have not gotten to in another decade even.

That was he and the Queen.

He and Gloria was another matter entirely. Too alike. Too different. Too much pride. All true. But the timing. She had arrived when Glenn was at his worst. By the time Glenn came out of it, she was fully formed and developed. Had she but arrived a few years earlier they would have been the friendliest of enemies and the worst of friends. As it was, he barely knew her at all. Moreover, he went out of his way to avoid learning about her child. Though he didn't know her well, he still regarded her. On some level, she had supplanted him, as he had supplanted others. He respected her role, or at least a role that he had decided she occupied, and he sympathized. It was a blind sort of sympathy though, like looking at someone behind you in a mirror. Your own frame would always be at least partially in the way. He knew she would not want him to be a part of her child's life, so he went out of the way to ensure his own ignorance. That was true even now, even after he knew the child to be the target of the Queen's avarice. In this case, what he knew had he known it might cause harm. Or maybe it was a fool act (a selfish act) of neutrality.

An act that could not go on much longer. "I'd say that his schemes would drive her one way or the other, but I imagine he'd just adapt to the situation. What has he but time? Were I to actively oppose him in any way, I would have to get used to that. He would make a terrible foe, one who might wait out any storm you send his way."

It wasn't that Burnie's house had been dirty or unkempt. It was that, in a way that one might think these fairy folk might appreciate, it had been the illusion of clean. Things were in piles. Piles were kept straight. Even the dust seemed to line up in a queue. No more. Now it was actually clean. At least these weren't the sort to spin gold or cobble shoes. At this point of his life, he did much better with the absence of something than with a surplus of it. In fact, it was that absence that he was staring off at now. "If I ever start to write poetry, you'll know I'm beyond hope." See, wasn't that a rousing notion? Not that he should be abandoned then, but that hope still sprung incremental. A nice notion wasted on a creature more interested in practicalities than gestures. Practicalities and silverware. Mostly silverware, but Glenn would continue to kid himself in the name of friendship and companionship. Even a raven could contain a galaxy or two if you looked hard enough.

Nothing was particularly rousing about Benedict's question, and it moved him to shift his head towards the bird, from nothing to something. "I can't get past my immediate decision. Do I tell Gloria or do I not tell Gloria? Morally, I should. I'm too deep into this and know too much. It would lead to war and bloodshed but it's still the right thing, and I must do it. Once done, I'd immediately try to broker peace and stop the war, of course." And he'd get swept away in the midst of it, dragged under, spat out a broken corpse. It wasn't a hard thing to imagine and it was a very hard thing not to imagine. "Now then, she can buy my silence if I can secure reasonable terms, Gloria's prolonged safety at the least, or, at the best, her actually living up to the bargain forced upon her twice to challenge Gloria fairly over the span of decades for the child's love. Well, that's a loophole then, isn't it?" It was the sort of loophole that would cost her enough that she'd want to consolidate her holdings, which, in this case, would be freedom to exist in Myrken and letters with Glenn to her heart's content. "I'm afraid to say, however, that time is against us here. If there's a deal to be made, it must be made soon."
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Niabh » Thu May 04, 2023 1:29 am

Sometimes being friends with Glenn required great patience. “The reason I asked that,” he explained slowly, “is because I’m lookin’ ahead to a time where I gotter pick what side I’m gonner be on. Right now, I’m on your side, because right now, your side is also her side. But I also understand that Glenn’s side is always Glenn’s side. You’ve always got some…abstract moral purpose you’re tryin’ to uphold. So I’d kind of like to know what that is before I go to war for it. I think I might already know. But I’m not sure.”

In the dark interim between the raven falling out of favor and Glenn’s reawakening, the raven had been adrift. A raven must serve someone. All of Glenn’s philosophy could never undo this instinct; they’d been bred to it. In the air, their sense of direction was flawless; closer to earth, they often found themselves directionless and eager to be told what to do. Without the lady, without Glenn, the raven had been locked in an airless cage, beating his wings in panic, alone with his thoughts and with his dim inklings of independence. It was dreadful, and he had no intention of ever returning.

Maybe it was a scheme, a little. The lady wouldn’t have him at all, so the choice became Glenn by default. The vague hope stirred in him that maybe if he helped Glenn, Glenn would bridge the rift with the lady and the raven could go back to Court. It wasn’t a totally selfish move, though. He really didn’t want things to escalate. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt—not even Gloria, and he barely even knew Gloria. It was just…and there his brain got stuck.

“Look, why would she have to buy your silence? Can’t you just, you know, stay silent for free?” Then he remembered to whom he was speaking. “Glenn, I don’t like this for her, I don’t like it for them, and I don’t like it for you, either. Both of you are sort of doing one of those things. Those…diplomatic things where one side really doesn’t want to set the other side off because it’ll just end badly for everyone, but someone’s going to have to and no one wants it to be them. What’s that called? A stand-up, that’s the word. It’s just that it’s not going to take long for someone to figger out that the best way to stop standin’ up is by getting rid of you.

And that was the heart of the matter, wasn’t it? The lady hadn’t struck him down when she had the chance, and that was what kept pecking at him. He fiddled with the unruly thought, unraveled it a little.

“What I think is, bottom line, she doesn’t have to have this kid. The red mote ain’t on her. I think the kid’s just fine, wherever it is, because if she really believed the kid was in danger, she’d’ve already snatched it up; she wouldn’t have come up with this whole elaborate plot and taken all this time. And I think…” He rolled his tongue in a nervous trill, his eyes glancing everywhere except at Glenn, with all the blank-faced wild placidity of any beast. “I think if she were serious—if she were really serious—she probably would have killed you when you said you were gonner stop her. You know that. So on her side of things, there’s still time to try to talk some sense into her. There’s still a slim chance she’s receptive. But if you go to Gloria first, then there ain’t gonner be any more time. The stand-up’s over. Because Gloria’s gonner act right then and there. But also…I don’t think you really want to tell Gloria.” He regarded Glenn with gravity. “Because then she’d swoop in and snatch the whole problem away from you and you don’t like bein’ deprived of your puzzles any more’n I like people messin’ with my button collection.”

Even from his position as an outsider, he grasped the general dynamics at play. He was also vaguely aware that Glenn was overstepping himself, and he wasn’t sure that Glenn knew by what vast measure he was overstepping. Glenn was used to dealing with the Queen as herself, as a person and an independent actor. In a strange way, Glenn had never met the Queen. Glenn barely seemed to acknowledge that she was a Queen. Glenn wasn’t a great respecter of rank or title; he liked to think it didn’t matter when it came to day-to-day interactions. With the clan around, it was going to matter.

Again, the raven wished that he had a little more information about what was going on at camp. If they were installing calling stones and engaging the Queen in rituals, then they were most certainly treating her like the Queen. But how much was she really participating? How much queenliness could she invest when she was only truly mentally there part of the time?

He hopped closer to the edge of the bed and leaned in. “The clan’s here now. That changes everything. They’re going to have her back, they’re going to protect her, but also she’s more vulnerable because of them. She has to make decisions for all of them now. It might be all you’d have to do is say hey, cut this shit out or I’m going to Gloria and that will put the clan in danger. It might actually work, especially with Meg and the little’un around. Only problem is…” He made a low, dark sound, a bit too reminiscent of a taut rope creaking on a gallows. “…threatening the clan’s gonner paint a bullseye on your back.”
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Mon May 15, 2023 2:26 am

Glenn could hardly blame the raven for being so desperate, and desperate he obviously was. Take away the relative passage of time between human and tuatha and bird (and he had no idea how long Benedict was going to live relative to those of his peers not of a fairy court); Glenn had been unconscious for days. That meant that his friend here was further along in the story, further along with his own thoughts, further along mired in the situation before them. He had reached points that Glenn was still a few days away from, except for that it was so obvious and blatant as they spoke that the human could not deny what the raven was feeling.

"You're not entirely correct," and here, he couldn't help but smile, even if it was an apologetic thing, apologetic for its own sake but also for how he knew it would make Benedict feel. "On two points that are the same point. You're correct in that if she wanted the child so badly and that this was all she wanted, she would have killed me. You are correct that I do not want to tell Gloria." Apologetic had briefly veered towards sympathetic, even fond, but quickly slingshotted back to the closest you'd get to actual guilt on Glenn Burnie's face. "It was a striking thing," and there was wist, just to make it all the more muddled, "when she realized how far I'd go to stand against her. She resigned herself then that if she couldn't have me as her friend, then she would most certainly not lose me as her rival. You have to understand, Benedict, that the impulses are not all that different." Could he understand that? It was counter-intuitive, but then he'd seen it first hand. "We push one another. We drive one another. We challenge one another. Even our friendship had an element of competition, the sort that her people likely relish and that I, frankly, can't get enough of. For me to oppose her would be us still playing together, just with different stakes and on different sides. She took me by surprise, but I understand now."

That was her, and there was no guilt there. In what was to come though? Well, that was another matter. "All that ends when I go to Gloria. It's not just a matter of me not being able to solve things anymore. Escalation will lead to..." and there it was, Burnie's voice fading off. There was a reason he danced around such topics, that he leaned into obfuscation and obstinance. For a man so prone to introspection and outright musing, there were certain truths he couldn't so easily look at. "But you said it true, did you not? The clan's here now. What do I want? I want to find a compromise that lets us continue our correspondence until I grow old and wither or she bores of me of her own choice. I want to balance that with being able to live with myself and my actions. I want to manage it in a way that minimizes bloodshed and horror. She, being who she is, seems to be far more flexible in how she gets what she wants. She, being what she is, now finds herself constrained nonetheless." A dangerous situation, but one that he still saw a path through, a charge through the center, even if might not give anyone involved what they wanted, not all of it, at least. "I need make haste then. My silence has value. It can purchase time for everyone, maybe even she and I included, but if I don't sell it soon, others will make the decisions for us."
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Niabh » Mon May 22, 2023 6:59 am

A tight bowstring behind the raven’s keel gradually unwound. He wasn’t much good at reading expressions in human faces, particularly ones as furtive as guilt, and he came from a part of the world where the inhabitants did not trouble themselves with that preoccupation. But Glenn had blurted out an entanglement that shouldn’t have had anything to do with the problem at hand, but suddenly made everything make sense. The raven didn’t lead him there; Glenn took the step himself.

“Be honest, I’m mostly worried about you in all this. Her? Paugh, she’s the Queen of the Nialls; she’ll be fine. They always are. There are just some people, you know, who can do that. They get themselves into just enough peril that the temperature rises, just a little, and then somehow they always come out on the other side without a scratch on ’em. That’s what it means to be Queen. And in the end, when they really are ready to step out, they choose their moment. And that’s where they stay, forever. It’s the biggest glamourie of all: you get to choose how history will look at you. But you…the stakes are higher.”

He fixed Gleen with a glass-blue eye, then clucked sadly. “Feckin’ hell. I think you’ve stepped in it. I think you’re one of them sad mortals who got hisself swained by the Queen and can’t go back again. You picked the long path, but you got there at last.” He gave his wings a flip and a shrug, glancing downward. “Granted, you’re pretty fortunate, since this time the Court came to you.”

As soon as he said it, he wondered if he should’ve have. A lot of the raven’s thoughts came just that way. You got sucked into Court, and they dazzled you; they coaxed you with flattery, they cajoled, they extrapolated. If they ever got a splinter of knowledge, they’d hone it into a dagger and stab you in the back with it. It was why ravens typically didn’t say anything. Because you didn’t know where someone could take it, or how much they could glean. Glenn had a flash of that about him, too, though whether he had always possessed it or whether the Queen had rubbed off him were unknown, and origins didn’t matter now—he had it.

If the raven were lucky, Glenn would dismiss the very possibility and claim he was incorruptible. But the raven knew there were ways and ways to bewitch.

“Look, now that you’re back, there’s no need to escalate things to Gloria just yet. I was hopin’ you had a plan. Please tell me you have a plan. I can give you a rundown of all the moving pieces if you come up with a plan.” He let out a rill of frustration. “Paugh, this would be so much easier if she’d just give up on the kid! I understand why she wants this kid, but this town is lousy with raggedy little street urchins. Why can’t she just snatch up one or two?”
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Tue May 23, 2023 12:53 am

"Not sad."

The raven was an expert in mimicry. Expert wasn't even the word for it. For Benedict, it was innate. If there was craft and skill in it, Burnie was unaware. Would he believe it? Of course. Would he accept it? Absolutely. The raven was his friend and took great pride in so many aspects of his being and Glenn would not deny a single one. It seemed innate, however; at the root of it, some sort of instinctual stored memory. Was there a limit to how many voices he could retain? Was it systemic? Adaptive? Was it perfect recall or had he some sort of method for identifying and predicting patterns in the being he was mimicking? Even if there was some limit within the bird's brain at what could be stored, the weight of wist in his human companion's voice now, a lifetime gathered, dust upon a cloth dragged across every inch of the world, could certainly never be forgotten.

"Lonely."

Three words at the end of this brief pause. Months. Years. A bottomless well. And here, the bottom.

The climb began anew.

"Gloria," always a shaky first step. "would claim that it has nothing to do with her majesty's unique properties, neither in presence or in personality, that instead, it is a unique failing of me. She would claim that I am drawn to power and mystery. Mistake after mistake after mistake. She strives, I think, for simplicity, to quiet a voice within her that cannot be quieted. Philosophies and religions preach the value of peace, still waters, silent meditation, placid acceptance, to be one with fate and accepting of one's lot. To do so will lead to contentment, health, happiness, fulfillment."

Three words and the moment had most certainly passed. Now he was laying back once again, hands behind his head, relaxed, pensive, talking and talking as he looked to the ceiling. "The world is strange. It's full of wonder and terror, full of loss and grief and great joy. It's full of magic, Benedict. To shut all of that away, all of the strife and trouble and.." It took this long, but realization crept in that in the midst of all of the truths they were awash in, he might still lose the bird. "It's running away. It's cowardice. It's hiding for the sake of your own sanity and the most paltry of forced contentments. It's not me.

"And yet despite that, I'm not bewitched by what she is." His voice had gotten colder, more drawn out, more serious. There had been verve and now there was merely focus. "It's never been about what she is. It's always been about who she is. She's as alive than anyone I've ever met. It's not her sparkle, her shine. It's her notions, her responses, her ideas, that mix of intelligence and wisdom and responsibility and passion and absolute, shocking ignorance. What she is only matters due to the shift in perception that it brings alongside it." Colder and more serious gave way to something darker still. "And here, you can putt putt and say that this is how they get you, but isn't it? Be whatever you need, whatever you want, whatever fills the hole within you. The perfect predator to feed upon your soul. Maybe, but let us extrapolate that forward. For her to become exactly what was needed to prey upon me, she did not have to become a being of beauty or lust. She had to become a being of pure complexity." There was a further extrapolation here, but Glenn Burnie was simply not capable of it. For him, there was nothing loftier than such complexity, active contemplation as opposed to a passive sort. Someone else, however, seeing her as a creature that had been forced to adapt in order to devour him whole as per her nature, would see this complexity as the basest of cruelties.

He was already onto his next thought or back to his last, wholly incapable of reaching that conclusion. "Such complexity, existing in this world, well, it just doesn't matter the origin of it. It is. She is. I choose to believe that it is who she is and not some artifice forced upon both of us due to any preternatural hunger other than the sheer connection of loneliness. Gloria's right to a degree. If not her, then someone or something else and maybe someone or something else still. But I'm glad it was her, and I will fight for our friendship, just as I will fight for ours, Benedict."

All of that led back to the child, and Glenn Burnie, staring up at the ceiling, somehow found a way to sink into his bed just a bit more. "You know the court better than I, but I've been assuming that she's not after any old child. It's not just the parentage, though that's part of it, not being able to have him except for through the girl. No, I think she's longing for an heir."
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Niabh » Sat Aug 05, 2023 12:44 am

The raven had a pretty good idea of how deep Glenn reached for that answer, and what it cost him. You don’t give a lot away, he’d told Glenn once. He wondered if they’d all still be sitting here if only he’d bothered to admit that to the person who most needed to hear it. At this point in the proceedings, it didn’t seem like it had too much value. Things were beyond the point of being patched up with earnestness.

“Yeah. She was lonely too. Back at the beginning, when I first came here to serve her? It took her a couple days to sus out I weren’t spying for somebody and after that, she was feckin’ giddy to see me. She would get a few drinks in her in the evenings and we’d go back and forth playing this little word game. Dumb puns.” The wistful hitch in his voice hinted that the puns were not as dumb as he let on. “But then she’d get just enough drinks in her to mention that one of the things she missed most was just talkin’ to someone in Tuathailli.”

The idea that curled vaporously inside his delicate skull was that maybe the lady had come upon Glenn the way the raven came upon her. She swooped through his window and started talking his language and they played games together. Maybe, in their weird ways, this made them happy. It was as close to making sense as any opinion the raven held so far, and it had an appealing symmetry about it. In any case, it was something he could understand, even when it carried the disheartening weight of tragedy about it. There lay Glenn, speaking with force and certainty and even, though he might be hard-pressed to hear it, a fair amount of pride and pleasure in his own logical dismissal of the very possibility that it all might be a glam. Useless to try to convince him he had just made the exact argument an intelligent, rational man in the grip of a subtle glamourie would make.

The rings around his neck rose into a ruff, as though the room had grown cold.

“Fine,” he said, his voice sharpened with hurt. “She was lonely, you were lonely, you got together, you were both a little less lonely, who cares how it happened. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s glamourie. It’s just that this is what the Nialls are known for. That red mote fixes on something and there isn’t a single thing they won’t do or be or become to get it. I’m givin’ that to you. You do what you want with it.”

He hoped Glenn never needed to do anything at all with that information, but his hope was dwindling down to a flicker. He didn’t like to think she was capable, but a year ago, he would never have thought her capable of sending him away, either. He thought what they forged was real, and he still wanted it to be real, and maybe he’d forgotten that every interaction with the Queen put him at the edge of the sucking whirlpool that was Court. It drew you in no matter how hard you pulled against its tug.

Up the hallway pattered a rush of tiny footsteps and the raven’s twisted his head toward them. Then a thump, then a wail. The raven could just make out Meg shushing, but not what she was saying. Those sounds, the scenario they painted, seemed far removed from the tableau inside this room. He almost wished he could go and be part of that story instead. But he was committed.

He gave a half-leap, caught himself on bent wings midair, and hooked downward sharply just before he could clip a bedpost. A bedroom left limited space for aerial maneuvering; there were too many tight corners, too many obstacles, and not enough up for any real height. Despite this, he managed to land powder-soft on the footboard, bobbing there for balance, back to business.

“If she wants an heir, she’s got to, y’know, have it. Otherwise it won’t fulfill the whatchermacallit, the…ah, na Dualgas an Tuaiscirt stuff, and I don’t know what the hell Catch is but he’s not any part of him gean-connah. Be honest, I don’t know why His Lordship didn’t just make the rounds a hundred years ago and spit out a few more heirs. It’d certainly take a little pressure of it just bein’ him and her. Maybe he thought they’d squabble.” He let out a frustrated and protracted croon, like the last air seeping out of an organ’s bellows. “He squabbles enough with the one he already has so maybe that’s a reasonable assumption.”
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Re: The Flesh is Weak

Postby Glenn » Sat Aug 05, 2023 2:39 am

It was a winding bit of logic, certainly. On the one hand, he knew what the raven was thinking, that it was exactly what a reasonable person would say in the midst of this hopeless grasp. On the other, he had made a very firm argument on why it didn't actually matter, the fact that what was manifested through said grasp was actually of worth in and of itself. He could extrapolate forward on the nature of reality and social interactions and how everyone was a little bit like this and here they were just a lot. Really, it was all about what you made of it for the most part when you decided to interact with other people, but the raven didn't voice much of this and thus they were both spared. In fact, it was so tight and perfect an argument that the only issues would be if it was either entirely a one way street and his perception was so warped that she was not actually acting, thinking, or feeling how he perceived her to but as a different person (but that did not seem to be the case) or that with the Court here, she would have so many other counterbalances that he would continue on with one perception and expectation but she would be something else (a stronger possibility but one that he seemed willing to push up against for the desperate sake of their friendship).

These were heavy words overall though, and they were driving him to action, to find his footing once again, to begin to seek out a change of clothes that might better suit traversing some span, even if it was just room to room within the house.

"She's far less reason to be lonely now," a casual admission, but one that they should both face. "She would, however, be better off not losing what she had gained in us, even as she reclaims other things lost. It is vanity and foolishness, but we both know it true. Look at how he spoke of her just now. Their expectations of her are woefully out of date and pathetically meager. Queen seems like the least she could be when it should instead be the most. So we'll make a try of it. If we fail, it's not due to our own efforts but the sheer impossibility of the task." And this was Myrken, and Glenn Burnie in Myrken, and he knew well that here it was the impossible tasks that were most worth attempting.

That's when the bird, raising assuredly legitimate culture issues when it came to heirs, distracted Glenn in this ill-timed moment. "We die. Frequently. Most especially as babies. In battle too. Falling into a pit in the middle of the night. Many reasons. Heirs here are a security measure. Often times, the worst thing that can happen here is to have multiple heirs live to adulthood. That's a recipe for intrigue and schism. Her people do not have that concern. Moreover, they have nothing but time, nothing but opportunity for boredom and insult and divergent interest to make a dangerous game of squabbles. That said," almost dismissively, he turned his attention back to sartorial necessities."in this case, it's likely arrogance in one's own abilities." He left it at that, which was the point of being dismissive after all.
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