The Happy Heart Is A Lovely Dreamer

[Glenn]

In Myrken, one's throne was very often one's outhouse. For the general populace, the prevailing thought was this: that still made them better than anyone named Chewdry. "Maybe," He'd say softly. When had she gotten so fond? It was despite him. They had been through something. No, they had been afflicted by something and it may have taken effect differently and he may not be done with it yet. Well, whatever it was, it was a bit offputting. "You're just terrible at sitting still," which was rich coming from him but also entirely true.

They continued to gather below and wasn't that remarkable? It was remarkworthy certainly. "They're coming to you down there? Your flock? The world's most reluctant sheepdog in her big, bad castle with its hidden walls and gardens full of orchids. What does it matter if you don't sit, Ariane? What does it matter if you're just going to pace in a circle instead?" To say that he was mixing metaphors would be too kind. It would involve him actively knowing what a metaphor was.

"When it comes to you, Ariane, the only people with any question are ones who obviously are trying to avoid themselves. That's not right. Okay. Okay. It's only people with every reason to question themself that would ever have any reason to question that she wasn't you. Does that make sense?" He was trying at least. Maybe he was also ignoring the thought of whatever was in his body now and whatever it meant that he was here and here alone, but at least he was trying.

[Carnath-Emory]

"That's true," she murmurs - to the boy who sometimes paces; the boy who climbs, who flies, and despite all of that she doesn't begin to deny what has never been more true than it is now. She'd spent four days thinking about very little but the job put immediately in front of her. Mapping it out, moving it forward; advancing her pieces, holding her ground; getting it done, getting it right, contingencies, contingencies, contingencies -

And isn't that why they're having this conversation now? In this dreaming-place, where sometimes she loses her hold upon defenses that have served her since she was very young indeed. But most of all because here, only here, she is absolutely out of reach of all that work, and if she cannot be her work, she must be her self.

But it's more than that, of course. She begins to know this, and perhaps he always had. Perhaps that was why he spoke these words, served her these questions. Perhaps it was also why she answered.

"Those aren't mine; those down there," a motion of her hand. "Although that sounds like something that ought to be funny," and her glance is wryly brief. They exist in the shadow of stretching trees, of branches unfolding from empty air. Overhead, a scattering of crows meets its sudden, silent end. "Thrones should be sat by the competent or the harmless, and Elliot - " this thin smile. "I am neither. I'll curse Chewdry's name as gladly as the next man, but all the same I can name for you a dozen, right this moment, who'd be far worse than he." A slow gaze; some thin shift of her shoulder, as she shakes her head. "No. I'm not like you, Elliot; I'm not like Cherny. I don't care for thrones and I don't want to save the world, the 'day'. And I don't disagree, and I thank you for your words, but I think that - right now - "

What occurs by the bonfire is hardly even a commotion. An airing of views, perhaps: indistinct words and unmistakable gestures, even before they part ways. The pale-haired princeling; the unassuming lord, crimson-haired and clad in dun browns, and each chooses a different path. In their wake, a bewildered stirring, so lost as to be almost silent.

" - you are avoiding your self. Look." And when she turns this small measure, when she lifts her hand, it is to indicate the hourglass which rests incongruously upon the bench near her side: glass that captures firelight, glass and its steady trickle of sand. Some remains. Some has fallen still, below. "In - an hour, perhaps that - he is to wake me." Steady eyes for his, now. "And then I go to fetch Gahald to safety."

[Glenn]

She's provided him such stimuli for distraction. She's provided him quite the scene to watch, everyone going their own way, some great cause that was beyond his ken. What had she said, though? This was of both of their making. It seemed hard to believe. He wasn't even sure he could wrap his head around what might have been going on down there, with all those people. Maybe, had he not been the first true victim, the first casualty of many, he might have been part of something like that, a resistance, a secret society sewing words into sleeves and hiding messages upon walls, but somehow, he doubted it. The best way to fight hypocrisy is to expose it head on. That's what his life was all about. You couldn't hide and expose a truth or else thta truth would simply stay hidden. Of course, he couldn't do anything at all.

"Sometimes you're so stupid, Ariane." She provided him with such stimuli, and he provided her with something else entirely. His tone was not chiding. It was not a jibe. It was not unkind. It simply was. "The reason why you're the only one who can save the day is because you're the last person who would ever want to. For someone who's lived so much and looks like she's always trying so hard to think, sometimes I don't think you know much of anything at all."

His matter-of-fact tone didn't survive that little rant. By the end it was glum, almost depressed. "You're right about one thing though. I'm avoiding myself. I'm afraid." It wasn't said with chattering teeth or overdramatically, which didn't mean it wasn't dramatic at all. "I just am, okay? We've got an hour." They had an hour and no idea what they were doing in the least. At this point, he knew or thing or two. Solena had taught him some things very well. "I think, first, we need to figure out the right questions. I have one, okay? I'm here with you, right? Why is that? Does that mean that you are somewhere in there with me?" They shared fates on some level, after all. That was the only common ground between them. Maybe there was an image of Ariane within Elliot Gahald's mind. If he had helped free her, maybe that image could help free him. If that was the case though, why hadn't it already?

[Carnath-Emory]

She would have deferred to the expertise of a former Governor whose passion is for strategy, to a man with long experience in the uprooting of tyrannical regimes. And when the point was reached at which it was no longer tenable to defer, it would not have been secretive resistance for her; it would not have been quiet and cautious cunning. By that point, a lifetime's instinct would have - had - screamed for direct and decisive confrontation. The similarities between them are few, this unlikely pair. Few, but distinct.

And now, all the same, she's frowning at him.

"What, and do you think that this is natural to me?" A broad wave of her hand; this, which cannot possibly be limited to the breadth of their present predicament. "I look like I'm trying hard at thinking, Elliot, because I'm not very good at it." The words break away, abandoned by a voice that had begun to sharpen into sudden anger. She is a scowling stiffness flattened back against the wall, a hand raked back through the dark of her hair; by the distant bonfire faces lose definition, their world grows waveringly imprecise -

And that wasn't even what he'd meant, and she knows it, and as she looses her breath in a rough exhale, her narrow glance confesses that much.

"You'd be stupid, not to be." Afraid, he'd said. As they both already knew, and hadn't she and Cherny spoken of this days ago? Days or weeks, the issue of fear and courage and action. There is no slight in her tone. "Is that the problem, then? We're asking the wrong questions?" It's possible. Usually she knows when she's doing that, usually the sensation of it grates at her, ephemeral and nagging. A woman might ask herself, in a moment like this, how much these last weeks' experiences have dulled the edges of her; how much it has honed her in ways not expected or wanted or right...

"You're here with me, and you never were before. Not you." There is an implication there which she need not voice. Galacia, after all. He can't be unfamiliar with what that can mean. "I know a means for doing such a thing; a means, but not the - the way of it - " A quick wave of her hand, as dismissive as it had been the first time she did this. "And it's irrelevant; this is more akin to the Koschei's way; you are not visiting into my sleep but trapped in it - "

A question threatens, a question and a dozen other things besides. This time, at last, she sets it all aside in favour of addressing what he'd already asked.

"You're clearly not just a memory, an imagining." Confronting words, spoken by a woman who reckons him capable of hearing them now. "We know this already, mn? I'm not good for imagining, and before this we'd spoken twice and I'd heard a half-dozen rumours; not enough to imagine you well, not like this. I would never have - conjured an Elliot to wrest me out of my self. It would have been almost anyone but you." A slow breath; her eyes are sometimes for his, are frequently for her own scuffed boot-toes. "But we were similarly made, I think. You and I. Her death - restored - the others to themselves, even Agnieszka. But not you. And it hadn't already been done - " a shift of the shoulder. "Then not me, either."

...we have been swept up in this, you and I...

"So perhaps - " But how she struggles with the idea of this; her mouth visibly wrestles with it. "I might ask him - " a glance. "Gahald. When he is secured, I might ask him." Assuming that he will even speak with her, with the swordswoman that the Lady had become. "But why would she hide you inside me? It - mne pizdoi nakrylsja!" And the whole of her's pushed free of that wall, sharp with the shake of its head. "It makes no sense. That she would do this, that she would allow. Such an oversight, when every other part of it was so careful."

[Glenn]

"Thinking's easy," said by someone who very likely had just gotten thinking confused with doing; he was so apt to do the latter that there was rarely much need to do the former, except for now he was trapped and all the doing in the world probably couldn't accomplish much more than to make Ariane scratch herself in the waking world at an inappropriate time and that wasn't much to write home about, even if most of his family could read and only a very few could. "Your problem is that you're too self-confident about it." That might not have been the correct word he was looking for. There wasn't time to double back and poke at it though.

They were on to ticking time and questions about questions. It was giving him a headache. "You didn't know me very well. This happened to both of us. Maybe she was just bugnuts and me being here is just a side effect, and if she had done this to everyone in Myrken, then they'd all be in each other's brains and that's why she didn't. She figured it out and stopped doing it to people? That's why we're the only ones who wouldn't turn back right?"

He was getting frustrated and for good reason. "I can't even fight her. I can't get her back. I can't do anything but piss on her grave. Is that it? And don't give me the whole bullshit about how I can get my body back and that will show her. It won't. She's dead. Did you kill her? At least tell me that you killed her. Or Niall. Niall killing her is okay too."

[Carnath-Emory]

"Your problem - "

The third time they spoke, it was Darkenhold's lawns and a sudden confrontation, fueled by a boy who had confounded her until he didn't. In the midst of all his words, and there were so many of those, she'd sketched a circling pattern into the dirt between them like a demonstration: everything had looked like spirals back then, and suddenly he had, too - and here she crouches upon that rooftop perch, now. Here she crouches by his side, drawing that selfsame pattern upon the dusty timber; a single swift motion of her fingertip. " - is that you think while you're talking, and when your thinking's run out, the talking keeps going. 'Round and around, all those words, going very quickly and leading nowhere, until all that's - "

A blink. A muffled groan.

"Khuem grushi okolachivat'! Now I'm doing it myself." And she is slumped back then onto the heels of her hand, but the mouth's crooked line whispers of smiles, and almost manages to produce one. "No. No, this is pointless. This - speculating at her, her process; it's acorns at forests, it wants for focus, a point from which to start. No. This is what he told me." He. There is an empty satisfaction to be had in reducing the man to a pronoun. "There were - swain, they called them. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, and they were as clay molded beneath her hands. A simple work - by comparison to what was done to us. You see? And there was we two: you and I. Those others, they simply followed where they were led. Without thought; wholly her creatures. But we - we believed," and does he hear? That here, the word has such weight. "For that we were crafted over again in a way that led us naturally to that belief. That is only - a part of what were done to us, but these things, I say these only to distinguish, you see? Between they and we. And it is why we would not turn, upon her death: that we were not called by her, but made, and what she had made, I think, would endure."

Has. Clearly. And here is a cruelty now, that after all of these words, his assertion - his question - is more difficult than the explanation she'd struggled with. She listens; it never grows easier; by the end of it her eyes are set evenly upon his own, and with silent regret. "You can't fight her. I know what it is, to - want that, more than almost anything - " A soft shake of her head. "I intended to kill her. I intended to have the head from her neck and the heart from her chest, and I intended to - " Does she even need to say it, here? Are the words even necessary, in the moment that her thoughts are aflame with nothing but the idea of a body flung bloodied onto the streets, like: Look. See this. Know that it is done and this is over. A pause, now. A tiny shake of her head. "A thing happened. When I woke from it, when all of Myrken woke, I stood in her room with her corpse at my feet and a weapon in my hand. I was not alone."

I closed her eyes.
I wished her gently to her home.

"So. Perhaps it were me. Perhaps it were Agnieszka, although she were swained by then. But there she stood, as bloodsoaked as I."

[Glenn]

"At least I have something to say."

Words tossed out without meaning. Something to say. The Ballad of Elliot Brown. it was said with a small rolling of his shoulder, as she crouched by his side. "And it's not whatever vomit comes out of your mouth. Crumb Grush Okolovialt. Muhnm muhmn muhmn num num." His mouth moved, chin bobbing up and down as he let out utterances into the air. For a moment, the appeared out of his mouth, words floating through the air with terrible penmanship. Then, there was silence for there was no further delaying.

She was explaining a thing and the thing was everything to him even if he understood it not at all. Didn't she see? She said the word belief and it was nothing. It drifted past him, through him. One shoulder had shrugged and now the other one fell. It was everything to him and nothing at all. "What did we believe? What does he believe?" Her he and his were different. Would she recognize that even as he failed to recognize the weight of her belief. She had wiped them off the map. For those of a certain age, even those who were beloved of Galacia, she had erased them from Myrken's history. Had she ever realized that? Would she realize it now?

It's why he was able to move on so quickly. His teeth grit as she spoke her words, as she uttered her broken remembrance. "So you don't even know," and so he didn't even have that. He was a boy at an age and he was skilled with daggers and he had so much reason to hate. "I'll tear it down," his words were quiet but not soft. "I'll tear everything she built down, everything and everyone. She led people, pushed them to where she wanted them? I'll break it all, break them all, and expose how ugly it all was. Everything she believed in, I'll expose as filth and muck. Anyone who thinks like she did, I'll ruin. I'll ruin their life and then I'll end it." Until even the memory of her was gone forever.

Oh Ariane Emory, the boy before you didn't possess the words and the thoughts to understand belief, no, but look at what he had instead.

[Carnath-Emory]

It was laughter, at first. Laughter, as he filled the air with noise and tortured little scribbles; laughter until even smiling became impossible, and then for a time it was nothing at all.

He asks what no-one ever had - not in the days following her return to her self; not in the weeks which preceded them. Effusive thing that she'd been then, no opportunity had gone neglected, no chance, no silence: no space that she might fill with adoration, with words like fevered vows. But it was ever a passion left unexplained - what need to elaborate upon so clear, so undeniable a truth? she would as soon have described the setting of the sun, the dampness of summer rain.

"We believed that we were ushering our world into an age of Perfect order. Or at least I did; there was never any reason to ask Gahald. My belief was that we were of one heart, you see? He and I, and all her most loyal servants. As all of Myrken would soon be. A single heart, a single striving hope." Fingertips have brushed that spiralling mess aside, and what they sketch in its place is flawlessly curved; only in this dreaming world could a swordswoman's single touch create a perfect circle. "With Rhaena Olwak at its center: our focus, our - guiding star; our salvation, burning away our - flaws," how the word struggles. "Creating us anew. It was like to be an end to - endless violence, to thoughtless manners. The ugliness of - crude words, brutal - thoughts." A soft snort from nostrils delicately flared; a subtle clench the length of her jaw. "Choose a page from a book, a book of tales, tales meant for children too young to know what life is. Wipe away the - dragons, the quests, the wars; what's left is the world which we meant to create. We believed that we were - chosen from amongst the many, that we were to be the first, the proudest and most true. I was her handmaiden, and Gahald her loyal Knight - "

An instant in which she radiates, the air like a simmering heatwave.
As if sometimes she, too, burns.

"It was a, a madness; an abomination. It was - " laughter after all, humourless and hard. " - fucking nonsense; are those better words? Are those good? It was that," and her jaw clenches cold against threatening sickness; her skin's subtle glitter is slow to subside. "What he believed was - none of that, I think, although at the time I imagined - otherwise, I - "

This long. It had taken her this long to realise the hazard of not assigning a man his name. This long, and her jaw clenches closed against what words there might have been; stays that way even as their world gently shudders, stays even as the boy becomes dangerously quiet. If he had shouted those words, she might have answered them more readily; she might have dismissed them as necessary anger, essential and sound; she might have echoed those sentiments, knowing. Even now, there is a part of her which yearns -

"What, then - you would extract a cost from those who've already paid it? You would expose a thing already laid bare? Throw your lot in with those who are hanging women in the streets, is that it? For that they imagine them responsible, you know? For what she'd done, for what she's already died for. You'd ruin what's already ruined," and even saying these words she knows; knows what smoulders hot in his eyes.

She'd been only a few years older, after all. Only a very few, and her outrage was just as fierce; her heart as committed to just such ruin.

[Glenn]

She reacted and he couldn't quite manage to find the joy in it all that he did, even though he was the architect of the words. It had been more exasperation than anything else. On some level, he knew it was funny and on most levels, he knew she wasn't laughing at him (she's had plenty of opportunities as of yet to do just that and has rarely done so), but he wasn't quite in the mood for joy. That she couldn't, herself, prevent it, was oddly endearing, though. It wasn't at all like what people said about her and it wasn't much like what he had seen with his own eyes, no matter how much of that had ultimately been falsehoods.

It was a fleeting thing, regardless, so they were soon down to business. "She would have hated that." It was a strange place to go, but she mentioned story books and he only knew one person who was out of a story. She was his tether, his lifeline, his back up if all of this failed. It was a world without Galacia and all she fed upon; that' what Araine was describing. "And so would she." This being Solena, of course, for this was a world without the freedom to be, without those wide spaces in between holes in society. This was a world knitted up nice and neat. "And I don't know what she'd think at all," which upset him, though there was no time for it. Niall. How much of who she had always been was a response to the world around her? She wanted to bring it all down but was that because she couldn't imagine that world that Ariane described to ever truly exist. If it could, if it wasn't something unimaginable, if the rules of life would be forced changed, would she change her mind? No, out of sheer stubbornness she wouldn't.

Ariane though? She had gone so far out of her way to paint it as a ridiculous, horrible thing. It made him wonder. Was she trying to convince herself? There was no time to question it though and no real inclination, for he knew that he hated it and he knew that everyone he cared about hated it, so he spoke of hurting, of ripping, of tearing.

He spoke and she responded.

His eyes shut.

They opened, full of hate and frustration. Before the wind had whipped about and the waves had crushed. Now? Now they were all internalized in his eyes. "How dare you say that! What gives you the right! You can't stand here and take that away from me! You can't!"

But she had and they both knew it. It was a scalpel to the heart, precise, the exact right words, the exact right notions. Part of him wanted to be stubborn, wanted to rail against them and hurt the shells of these people out of spite that she'd do this to him.

Maybe someone out there was clever enough to figure out another way. Wind gave way to silence. Raging storms gave ways to three brisk tears. Maybe someone out there was clever enough to know what else to do, how else to strike back, to lash out, to force a justice of satisfaction and an equitable revenge.

That person wasn't Elliot Brown. With but a few words she robbed from him, better than any true thief could, one of the only things he had left.

[Carnath-Emory]

Three women; three different ways of hating the same thing. Galacia, clearly. Niall; she doesn't need to hear the girl's name to be sure of that, and it has so little to do with her capacity for hate or even the plight of Elliot Brown, although surely that had sealed it. Niall - is pragmatism as informed by a lifetime's cold brutalities; of all people, the swordswoman had been certain, she would recognise the suffocating futility of Rhaena's vision. And the third ... Nova, perhaps. Nova, of whom she's had no word in weeks, since well before this began. Someone ought to have questioned that. If only for his sake, someone ought to have made sure of her - but she was so slow to realise what had become of this boy, and by the time that she had -

Well, by then it was too late for her, too.

He spoke. She responded. It was the blooded iron of long, cruel experience; it was a history, a confession honed into the weapon that would kill the intentions of a boy who could burn the world with all that rage. It is to stand before Beatriz Kanaya a second time, and this time the throat that knife bleeds is her own.

He comes at her like a storm. His outrage is everything that she'd known to expect, and that does nothing to change the fact that his words are the wind that might scathe the skin from her bones; his words, the crushing hurt in his eyes. If she is firm in the face of this, if the tide that he is crashes against cliffs that do not yield, it is because that is all she has ever known how to be; if she is unswayed - but oh, she's not; she's not, and nevermind that her expression does not falter - it is because conviction is the heart and the core of her, and never moreso than now, for this.

"Everything that I've done. Everything that I've been. Every - terrible - "

Their world stutters and swells.

"The only thing that it's worth is ensuring that it doesn't happen all over ag - "

An instant during which her mouth shapes soundless words.

" - that I didn't end this three years ago, when I might have. Before she could - "

And does she even realise? For she's flung a sudden glance at that hourglass, at the trickle of sand that has retained all a desert's merciless heat: how it burns beneath the cruelty of a sun that isn't even here, how it gleams. And so much of it yet remains, but their world is bleeding its colours, and it's just them, now. Just them.

" - as soon as - the moment that I can. You hear? The very moment, Elliot."

[Glenn]

It is not Ariane that fades. It is the very world itself. Does she wonder what happens between their visits? Does she wonder where he goes? Does she wonder what he does? Does he crawl through her head, through her memories, through her darkest desires and fondest hopes? Does he even exist at all? Is she the main character of this story? Does everyone else exist only to further along her life and her cause? Does it all revolve around her? Why would they need a sun when she is here?

Wasn't that Rhaena Olwak had wanted? Wasn't that what she would have achieved? Save for Elliot and Ariane, the rest of Myrken would have revolved around her, existent only to serve her whim, to be part of a new story she had written.

All save for Elliot and Ariane. That wasn't it at all, of course. She was the villain of Ariane's story and here was Elliot, the definition of a supporting character. When she closed her eyes, he was not there, or at least when she woke up, he wasn't.

He misunderstands. He could understand every bit of that, all of it, and he would still misunderstand. He think she says that it would not happen again, that Rhaena Olwak could not happen again, that this could not happen again to Myrken.

He thinks Rhaena Olwak the villain of her story.

He thinks many things, Elliot Brown, each one a dagger thrown straight and true.

One would never strike at the heart of Ariane Emory that way. Her armor was far more than physical. He understands much but not nearly enough.

Ariane Emory is the villain of her own story. What she would prevent, what she had ensured, was that her own actions would not repeat once again. Explain that to an impulsive teenager at the very end of his rope. Explain that to a boy who thinks he knows everything and who has lost all that he is.

Her words ring hollow now, when they had been so true a moment before.

The world fades around them. Then, it is Elliot, not Ariane, that fades next.

Her last sensation before awakening.