Henbane and Hemlock

Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Rance » Tue Mar 04, 2014 11:47 am

The night was long; she screamed, thrashed, twisted in the arms of Rememdium attendants. One hand gripped their sleeves, tore at them, fingers snaring like hooks on the edges of their too-white garments; the other hand was a phantom, a ragged, mutilated stump that trembled like a broken branch against the wind.

She was well beyond the point where a voice -- its denials, its pleas -- could ever matter. Out in the bloody snow, she'd fallen long past the apex of reason and somewhere down into the muddy depths of delirium. That was the truth of pain: it was, for any body or creature, a natural warning, a snarling reaction of nerves, muscles, and flesh to foreign intrusion, signals and sparks that shouted to the mind pull back, pull away, flee from the catalyst of this burning, scorching, harrowing agony--

The wolf-beast's jaws had clamped, crunched, severed too quickly for mere pain to fill its role as deterrent, as a warning. So the pain fled like a frightened beast, and she was left empty.

A blur, flickering images that existed out of time, somewhere else.

(Duquesne, so warm and familiar. Had he something to teach her? Had he a new lesson, a grand vision of reason to offer her? No, just his chest, heartbeat thrumming behind his ribs like an ebbing, muffled lullaby. And Noura? Noura will be fine. Did you see its eyes? Did you hear how it spoke Mama, Mama and seemed so lost; it swung at her, too, held a knife like some infant trying to brandish a chisel. Cherny, where was Cherny; he was crying, I touched his cheek, I swear to the Nameless I reached out from the snow and touched his cheek.)

Two seeds of henebon dissolved on the tongue (refused, refused), then were lodged into her throat by an attendant's thumb until hot saliva filled her mouth and she knew she was going to be ill, let me go, let me up, I can't. To wash down the acid and bile, tincture of hemlock, milk from the green teat of the poppy, both mashed together and rendered into stringy fluid in the bowels of the stone mortar.

Set to sharpen the saw. The bones are splinters. Did they bring the hand?

No hand. It was teeth, had to be teeth, just like what got to the boy; twisted her wrist into the back of its jaw and--

I know. I know.

Did someone put the iron to heat?

Aye, it's white, nearly glowing. Like a star.

--gnawed on her like gristle. You ever see bones this color? Is that--

A finger under her cheek jabbed against her neck. Her jaw clicked, opened wide; poppy-milk and hemlock were cold webbing on her tongue, trickling like a worm into the recesses of her throat. The liquid had hooks hidden in it, invisible and ghostly. Crawling up through her nostrils as menthol and mint. Reaching with an apparition's vaporous fingers into the soft meat of her brain. Whispering to her, seductive, sweet-tongued, voice of her mar'dak in the haze, tingling fingers that slithered icy serpents along the undersides of her wrists and inside the channels of her thoughts. Something scraped against her bones a thousand leagues away, grinding, but all she heard was her mother saying, sleep, it's safe to sleep, it's safe to sleep, it's safe to...

There was magic in the infirmary, subtle and clever. No matter of power or the occult, but of scholarship and study, the kind done by healing hands and vibrant minds. Black henbane, hemlock, and poppy. Poisons, all, but wielded judiciously--

For three days she slept. Shallowly breathing. Unmoving. Right hand at her side, the other a bandage-bound pugel, stinking of burnt flesh and juniper.

It's safe to sleep.
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby channe » Fri Mar 07, 2014 5:54 am

Agnieszka puts the fabric bag on the table next to Gloria's sickbed. The sound it makes is audible -- not enough to wake her if she's asleep, but warning enough if her eyes are still closed.

It hadn't been that long ago that Agnieszka had been in a room very much like this, recovering from a gut wound that kept her bedridden for months. Did this one have the little window where Catch would climb in with his knives and his spit and his anger? She's not looking. No. Instead, she's dropped the bag on the table next to Gloria's bed, dragged the chair across and sat quietly, waiting to be acknowledged, if such a thing could even happen in Gloria's drugged-up state.
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Rance » Fri Mar 07, 2014 9:45 am

Dignity was often the first sacrifice.

Hers was no restful sleep. It was a necessary slumber, a veil to abate the pain of the mangling acts the Rememdium attendants had performed in the interest of her continued health: grinding and smoothing the splintered edges of severed bones; cauterization of the foul and dripping stump. Despite the seeming peace of sleep, her body fitfully rebelled against the anesthetics they'd introduced--

Hemlock and henbane, poisons whose properties were sure to bring death if not applied in the most exacting measures.

Their results were immediately visible: her flesh was pale, lathered in a blackened sweat, flaking above her nose, along her cheeks, and just beneath the round of her chin. Eschar, resembling a gray ash, littered the edge of her blanket. All too often, the cramped room was redolent with the stink of a body's refuse, for a body forced into unconsciousness would seep when it must. The Rememdium staff had been attentive in the changing of bedgowns and linens, but humours were not predictable, and the hemlock made it impossible to awaken to attend one's more private needs.

And so the room reeked of old shit, of sour, feverish sweat.

(Somewhere distant, beyond ranges of mountains and sprawling fields of sand, where the flecks of glass gleamed like crystals across the distorted loam, she was praying. She was surrounded by wolves, could feel their wet breath on her neck. Their jowls were foaming, sticky with saliva, and they all had thousands, thousands, thousands of teeth--)

A chair scraped against the floor.

A bag knocked against the bedside table.

(No, no wolves; she blinked away the blindness from the Sun and there was Veteran Arkessa standing above her, slender and tall, wiry-haired and once-beautiful, her nose a peeling lump of clay. She trickled warm water from a pliable lump -- a dried jah'zoon bladder -- into Gloria's mouth and said, Drink it all. Out here, it's no waste. Out here, indulgence isn't blasphemy.)

She flinched. As if her body was trying to tell her she was awake, she was alive. But the eyes, glued and tacky with discharge, refused to open, forgot they could.
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Shobits » Fri Mar 07, 2014 9:54 am

The Rememdium, almost unknown to Endymion. You only needed one hand to count the times, this creature had visited. Once to visit Raia, another to drop of the injured Elliot so many months ago, and just the other day with Tennant to bring Gloria in. Gloria was the reason the creature was there now. The scent of Danger and his need to Protect were still in the air, but his utter NEED to follow through on the instincts had lessened after the second night of watching the roads and the forest for any threats heading for the town. Right now he was human again for the first time since the attack and was spending an afternoon to see to the seamstress.

Endymion did not very much like the town's medical center though it was a necessity for any town. The air of sickness panged his heart, but at the same time the hope of well wishers balanced that negativity. Contrary to the cause, Endymion had to remind himself that humans were no herd creature to have a predator waiting to pick off the ill, but the building still whispered to him. The ill needed to be watched and protected... a predator had indeed been the reason his friend needed to be here and Endymion would make sure there was no second occurrence.

He avoided the rooms of others, sick, medicine addled, and the near dead would see him for what he was and Endymion had no wish for his appearance to make them think some sort of Death Angel had come for them. He didn't do that anymore, hadn't since Raia's inadvertent summoning of him to this plane of existence. Quick and to the point of his visit, Endymion went to where Gloria was held, flowers similar to the ones he had made for Raia. That was the human tradition, right? Flowers for the ill?


Why had he not healed Gloria when he had the chance? But no... he Hadn't had the chance... Cherny had the seamstress's hand, without that the healing would have been too much of a shock to Gloria's already ragged and weakened body.
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby channe » Fri Mar 07, 2014 12:46 pm

It's obvious that Agnieszka thinks she's still asleep. The older woman tilts her head to one side, looks at her hand, her face, her fever.

"Shitty that this happened to you, Gloria," she says, quietly, and then reaches in her pocket for a scrap of parchment and the stick of graphite she uses to mark the maps to write a small note. She then makes to get up, the graphite back in her bag, her gloves sliding back onto her hands. They are well-tooled leather, black, beautiful -- not for riding, but for daily wear. She ties the note to the string of the bag.

The note says: "FOR GLORIA, FROM AGNIE."
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Rance » Fri Mar 07, 2014 1:28 pm

A hiss. Scarcely a word, more the rolling slither of a rattle -- a dry tongue battering against the roof of a rancid mouth. Some recognition in her rolled from the tips of inward-angled toes, up through the arches of her knees, grazed along her hips, meandered between her aching ribs, and ended in some distant lobe in her brain as a burst, an explosion.

(We pray here, Arkessa said, reaching down to cup the younger girl's cheek. The Nameless live just above those mounts, and we come to speak to them. Do you want to speak to them? she asked, her voice a soothing roll of felt. Arkessa had been a mother many times over; she had been a mother every year since she was twelve.

No, Gloria told her, turning her cheek away from the water. I don't; I refuse them. I refuse it.

You ask them forgiveness, Glour'eya, so the Calamities don't come again. Do you want the Calamities to come again?

No. I'd prefer they stay as stories.

Then your duty is to pray and ask them for forgiveness. And for this, you pay with words; you pay with blood. Haven't you done something worthy of this remittance?

Yes, the girl said. Many things. But they frighten me. This place frightens me. How do you talk to a thing you cannot see?)

Dull and witless, her senses punctured holes through the haze of the hemlock; first, a few gnarled, broken morsels of sound: Shitty -- happened -- you -- ria. The noises were scraping knives of glass against her inner ears. There was mint in her mind, mint and menthol, mint and menthol and music, a cacophony of broken scents. Somewhere in her left side, in an arm that wasn't hers, an ache, a hollow, pulsing throb--

You ought to wake.

(--drink this water. You're parched, it's been a long journey, and the Nameless will want you at your best, Veteran Arkessa said, pouring water until it struck her cheek, her nose, her lips.)

Water, forbidden water; there was no water near her, scarcely anything in the bare room, but her body conflated the insubstantial nature of the realities behind her eyes into something tangible, something real: the very first thing she felt was a trickling warmth between bedridden knees, a vile repulsion from her body that tore the hemlock veil clouding her mind. The warmth that flooded the bedding set her gasping, suddenly convulsing with a memory of function and substance, the tenable and corporeal crashing against the visions that had clouded her addled conscience.

The girl's eyes snapped open. Her chest expanded, depressed, then seized. Fingers on a remaining hand clenched like claws at the soiled bedsheets. It was real; this was real, and--

You ought to wake.

Agnieszka and Endymion both were bland silhouettes, somehow distant but somehow so very near. Suffocating her. With cloudy, pin-prick pupils, she stared upon them as if they were foreign gods. The word that came out of her was imperfect, frightened, and confused. It was an army of a invisible fists trying to hammer the wall of drugs that strangled her mind.

"Please," Gloria said, without reason: "Please?"
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby channe » Fri Mar 07, 2014 1:45 pm

This is not Agnieszka's first time seeing someone as sick as Gloria.

Her first pitched battle was far away from Myrken Wood; she escaped it with bare slashes and the blood of other men. The others in the medical tent weren't as lucky; the howling, the screaming -- anyone not in the King's Black, that is, and they'd used hemlock. That's what makes it easy for her to be dispassionate enough as she slides back into the chair next to Gloria's bed. "What do you need?" she says, quietly. "Need me to get the doctor?"
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Rance » Fri Mar 07, 2014 2:17 pm

The light, the noise, they were all weights pressing against her chest. Her visage was a whitened splotch, her short sprawls of black-and-ash hair an oily stain against the down-filled pillow. Her eyes rolled like loose marbles inside her sockets, snapping left, right, rolling up, shifting down. Trying to understand, gather information, acclimate and orient. Flaking lips peeled back into a silent grimace. Her yellowed, broken teeth framed an unsure tongue that tried to form phrases but exhausted itself in the attempt.

Across her stomach and the knotted sheets, her left arm was a mummy of bandages. The thickness of forearm and elbow tapered to a dull point near a wrist, and beyond it, there was nothing. The edge was rounded, uneven, speckled with blotches of muddy red.

Finally, her gaze slid over to find Agnieszka. Perhaps it was felicitous that the girl saw but did not see -- Agnieszka Kazmerrik's voice was an old figment of a memory, a storybook-story. Gloria's face was wrinkled with fright, not from the Councilwoman, but from everything else; she crushed her cheek into the misshapen pillow and tried to burrow away from the heat, the brightness, the stink. Her bleary focus only rarely pulled away from the woman sitting beside her, occasionally snapped over toward the doorway -- who was there, who was it, someone else, someone else--

"I have -- have got rocks," she said, her voice twisted with a confusion that tried desperately to ground itself in logic. "I can't -- can't hear them. I am still doing mathematics. I'm--"

If she knew it was the Councilwoman who sat beside her, the knowledge was either too slow to reach her brain, or for the time, was left forgotten. Because when the errant dissonance between her phrases came spilling out of her, she tried to correct it all by saying:

"Don't go," in whispered, childish terror. "Don't. Stay -- stay here."
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby channe » Fri Mar 07, 2014 2:33 pm

And wasn't this how she awoke, after she battled Ariane for the soul of Rhaena Olwak? So she pauses. Her face is not kind; but neither is it the half-twisted, mean thing that she usually wears when she sees Gloria. No; there's an element of compassion, here, for -- if one has no empathy for this soiled, pathetic, dreaming girl, then one has no soul at all, she thinks.

Not that she'll ever say that to Gloria aloud.

"I brought you some little winter squash pies," she says, carefully, "but I'm not sure you should eat them right now. You should wait a day or two. Don't worry. They are made to keep for up to a week." A pause, and she breathes in. "And you don't need to do mathematics right now."
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Rance » Fri Mar 07, 2014 2:54 pm

Little winter squash pies.

It was a song that danced inside of her head, giving birth to a conflict on her withered face: her lips twitched, vacillating between a grimace of agony and the discordant sheen of a smile. Maybe she understood, maybe she did not. Her capable hand -- and even it bore the signs of long-healed damage, the fourth finger little more than a severed stump -- scraped up along the bedding and found her own face. Her fingers tugged down on the skin of her cheek and lips, trying to soothe an echo of pain.

"Did -- did I forget something," she asked, half-blathered, half-certain. "I have not got any -- any coins. I have not got any..."

...pies.

Somewhere in the depths of her hemlock-blackened mind, one spiral of thought birthed another, and then another, and another.

(When she was led to the apartment, it was the odor she recognized first. It rose like incense, permeated the air along the street; freshly-leavened rolls cooked by too-great temperatures, browned crusts that she could only imagine as, with a gloved hand trailing along the stairs' rail, she ascended toward the mentioned apartment. She found herself contemplating calculations, values, nebulous hypothetical numbers -- how many pounds of the glean had they preserved, despite the famine; how many loaves and crusts could they produce before the dearth of resource reached this far, into even the baker's stores--)

The fingernails scraped desperately at her forehead, dislodging ashy flecks of skin from between the creases. Behind her hand, her eyes snapped wide, wet, flecks of yellow mucilage gleaming in the corners.

Little winter squash pies.

"Please don't go in my brain," she begged.
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby channe » Fri Mar 07, 2014 11:14 pm

"I'm not going to make you pay, silly," she says. "It's a gift." Her lips press together; they're white. "You're on a shitload of drugs so I'm going to choose not to see that as something you'd actually expect me to to do and instead something that the hemlock is telling you."

She pauses. "Why would I go in your brain?"
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Rance » Sat Mar 08, 2014 3:01 am

Agnieszka was, at one moment, a thousand meters away; the next, she was so close, so frightfully close, Gloria thought she could see the edges of her every pore, feel the scourge of her breath against her cheek.

"Oh, Nameless," she breathed, her eyes distant, leering through the Councilwoman as though she were transparent. The girl's head rolled left and right on the swivel of her neck. "Nameless. Oh, Nameless. Nameless, Nameless, Nameless," she whispered, until the word was a gummy lump on her tongue and it simply refused to carry any meaning. She twisted in the bedding, her teeth clenched behind cracked lips, her gaze trying to find some semblance of meaning in an indiscernible point of focus on the ceiling.

Agnieszka's lips were white. She did not know why that detail mattered, but it mattered, it was the hinge of the world and it held some secret, some fucking secret, a truth she couldn't decipher that burned like a cinder tucked between the lobes of her--

--brain.

"I don't -- don't expect anything. I can't pay, I absolutely cannot pay. I don't deserve gifts; I don't deserve gifts!" she suddenly burst, but the strangled shout faded right after. Her knuckles squeezed blankets, bound them into a knot, tried to smother the unseen particles between the threads that comprised all of existence. "I like gifts," Gloria whispered, before answering the question Agnieszka had left hanging in the air:

Why would I go in your brain?

"People make pies. They rape your brain. They do. They do. Little winter squash pies," she said. "I'm afraid for you. I'm afraid for me."

Her eyes never once fell down near the very reason for her being here. The stump. The severed root of a once-hand. Did not yet even realize--

"She did it to us both. He did."
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby channe » Sat Mar 08, 2014 3:38 am

She had just come for the pies, come to drop them off and see how Gloria was doing, but there was something else here. She was a realist; she had not listened before to the dark roiling in her stomach when Rhaena Olwak started to change -- and look what had happened. Look what had happened in the hall of the King, when she'd not moved fast enough. So she sits, drops her hands, looks entirely nonthreatening.

"Gifts aren't about what you deserve or what you can afford," she says, quietly. A pause. She looks to the door.

No. She'll not leave until she's sure this is just the hemlock. Not after Gloria's obvious bar when it came to talking about Agnieszka; the words she could not say. Someone else was dipping into minds around here, and for Agnieszka, that was enough.

"Quiet," she says. "Stop. Think. It's tough to think through the medicine, but you gotta. Don't let your thoughts get ahead of you. The pies are just fine. My mama made them for you. You can trust my mama. Now."

Another pause; her grass-green eyes focused on Gloria. "Who was in your head?"
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby Rance » Sat Mar 08, 2014 4:38 am

Had it been any other moment, had the circumstances been any less laced with vile poison and with greater, more accessible normality, the conversation might have gone a different way.

"Then what are they about," she asked. "Gifts. What -- what are they about?"

It was as though this talk of gifts somehow contained a method by which to unravel the knots and tangles and fabrics of the world. Her fingers continued to scrape at her forehead, at her cheeks, feeling, feeling, leaving small prints of rancid, black sweat at the corners of her eyes and on the roundness of her blanched cheeks.

Stop. Think.

Think through the medicine. Think through the medicine. There was no medicine -- everything was just fine, just like the pies, just like her Mama's pies, her mar'dak's pies, who was in her head, who was in my head, did they plant tiny seeds and did they bloom into pain, into stabbing lancets of harrowing, scouring agony--

Such green eyes, bucolic and vibrant, a million blades of grass. The girl was mesmerized by them, by the twin voids in that Kazmerrik skull that begged of her directness, honesty, truth, truth. "Genny," she said. "But I ought not tell you. And Glenn. They were in yours, too; they scraped you out with rocks, put mathematics in your head, because you're just a scared little farm-girl and...and..."

No -- her teeth mashed together, squeaked and scraped, refusing. She threw forward her head, clenched it in the tomb of her able hand, pressed her fingers into her brow and temples until they left pressured spots on her skin. The shift in altitude was enough. Her elbows started to shudder, her hips, her shoulders. A violent, frozen tremor that brought a few labored, burning gasps out of her chest--

"You're broken. You're compromised. You know it, too."

Each word a shriveled gasp, but she managed to dislodge them from her throat before she vomited with force over the side of the bed. A wretched mucus dangled from her mouth. This was the hemlock; this was a body whose processes, for three black days, had been interrupted, and it struggled to remember its control and agency by ejecting what had gone wrong inside of it.

She deflated, crumbled back into the bed as though the air was out of her. The pillow, however stained, was a welcome companion.
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Re: Henbane and Hemlock

Postby channe » Sat Mar 08, 2014 5:17 am

"The pies are about me wanting to give you a fucking pie because I just spent three months in here and let me tell you, the food sucks. Perfectly fine with me if you don't want me to give you pie in the future. More pie for me. I like pie."

Agnieszka crosses her arms, calming her down, moving her tone back from acerbic to -- well. Not kind, per se, but at least not mean. In the culture Agnie comes from, a gift is accepted quietly, without fanfare. You certainly don't protest it. "Glenn doesn't have the ability to get in your mind," she says, quietly. "Rhaena did. She's dead. And with her died all of that. I know Genny did this to you, but that doesn't mean she did anything to me. Trust me, I would know. I might be broken, Gloria, but it's not Genny or Glenn that did it, and I'd certainly not call it compromised."

A moment's flicker before she grabs a towel near to the bed. "Where are the freaking nurses? She's gonna cough up a lung."
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