Golben: 24,531 and Five

Re: Golben: 24,531 and Five

Postby Glenn » Wed Oct 09, 2013 4:57 am

"Are we going to do this, Calomel? Now, here?" Wynsee had backed off and he was starting on, not even looking at either of them. "Silver haired. Square jaw. Patient. Cool. Collected. A hero. That's what you are, yes?" One step took him towards his fate, one step and then the next and then the next. There was nothing to fear from behind, not this close at least; Darkenhold was far away. "You emerged out of nowhere when Myrken needed you the most. You changed all the rules. You opened the door that was ever closed so that Burnie could walk on through it.

"And then you left." An easy snipe, far too easy but then Calomel had started the same way. When the one in a trio with the most nuance was the seamstress, things had gone terribly wrong. His pace increased. "You opened many doors, Calomel, didn't you? Your secret. Your manhandling of the Council, stomping upon the clergy. She doesn't forget, Calomel. The first bloodless atrocity would have been yours, and why not? You play at human compassion, no more. It is a game. Life is something to bide the time."

Finally, the southerner would turn, would walk backwards, would stare at him. "You don't look a day older than when I met you years ago." That Giuseppe himself looked younger was incidental. "Perhaps your children are like you, but what of your wife, your friends? You meddled in mortal affairs and made those connections and now you're going to see them wither and die. I die today, Calomel, but that is the far easier of the burdens. You've made your own doom. Nothing I can say or do would be worse than what you've chosen for yourself." He'd shrug his shoulder a bit, would smile at Wynsee, and would walk on all the more. "She has a right to speak, Governor. She's lived this story. You wrote yourself out of it."
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Re: Golben: 24,531 and Five

Postby Rance » Wed Oct 09, 2013 5:59 am

She was content with her thread. A hundred times she had condemned the delicate work her fingers had been born to do -- in Jernoah, her life would be threads, her future would be threads, her fingers would bleed and the needles would pierce her until she smiled -- but now, it was her quiet sanity, a discourse arranged between mind and fingertips and hedgelimbs in finely-worked knots. The two men bantered with a tense familiarity. Giuseppe struck with a sweeping broadsword of words and Cinnabar deflected them; Cinnabar returned a bevy of verbal quarrels and Giuseppe slapped them down with a palm.

Let them snap and argue; let them sow discord between themselves. Histories bled out between their teeth, tales obscured amid vague jabs that were the cork-plugs of past-written tales. She was in the presence of a man who had once been governor; she was the accompaniment for an assassin. A Council trampled by authority; a confidant of trust to a one-time enemy.

What fine fictions they all were.

Giuseppe's boots inspired forward momentum. The stout girl fell into pace beside Cinnabar Calomel, but her steps were stiff, her hands continuously engaged in the constant unraveling of string. Her weary shoulder never came too near to him.

"You're here to -- to retrieve the Governor," said Gloria, eyes obscured beneath a bonnet's edge. "And should you find him alive, you follow this thread. If it's not been disturbed, it will lead you to -- to the guardsman's entrance. You will require a key, or -- or a great deal of brute force." Stuffed into the waistband of her patch-ridden skirt was a stately key, a hand-shaped trinket of black iron as large as the line between wrist and middlemost finger. But note, CInnabar, that it was not offered, it was not freely given--

"A killer of children," said the girl under her breath. "Eleven children. Eleven. Perished. Gnawed to wet pieces by a beast in the woods. It existed because her tongue spoke of it in a tale and gave life to a thing that ought only stay in nightmares. Eleven children, Mister Calomel. I knew none of them, but -- but I might have. Eleven funerals," the girl said, her breath a rapid cadence of memory. "You could see the greasy smoke from their bodies as they burned for miles out. From their bodies or -- or the pieces of them that remained.

"The Storyteller told her stories. Too many of them. And among them, one to--" bring Dreams of prophecy to life in my mind, "--alter the Lady Olwak from a woman of kindness to -- to what she has become.

"We come to kill the teller of the tales," she said, then promptly added: "Rather, he does." She thrust her chin up enough to indicate Giuseppe striding in front of them, her voice softened to an accent-mangled whisper. The rims of her eyes stung, her nostrils flared for breath that she hoped might be dry, painful to draw. "I come because she was my friend. He will do the work. I will cower and close my eyes and cover my ears. I don't want to -- to see it; I don't want to see the blood or hear the rocks rattle in her lungs when her last breath sputters out of her."

She could have practiced the words; she could have perfected her recitation of the facts in order to render them less ironclad, less cold and exhausted, but her limbs drooped with the weight of what felt like weeks and her tongue was a flap of swollen leather.

"The Storyteller was my friend. She deserves, as a matter of course, death. But I'll not let her be alone when it finds her."

I put her here, she never said. I rallied for her life. I thought to be kind.

"Are you to be trusted, Mister Calomel?" came the next question, a sudden and short inquiry that spilled from her lips before she had a mind to bury it. She was no woman, no Miss as he chose to call her -- just an ugly, misshapen adolescent with soil-brown skin and a meager tin-hilted knife at her waist. "Or are you just a story, too?"

Watching him, examining, her prying gaze dared to look beyond the silver sheen of his hair. She shouted to Giuseppe while never taking her attention away from their new compatriot:

"How long, Black Man. How long until this is done?"
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Re: Golben: 24,531 and Five

Postby Cinnabar » Wed Oct 09, 2013 12:10 pm

"If not here and now, when and where?" The assassin speaks, needles, and when the once-Governor smiles there's little amusement in it. "You're correct on some counts more than others. My patience, for one, is quite finite." A threat? Perhaps. A warning, at the very least.

"You remember things differently, sir, and altogether unkindly. Were I still in the Governor's office now, where would that leave you? Still running errands and cutting throats for some thrusting young Rasazan lord, hm? Preferable to where you are now, I'll admit." He has placed the man's face at last, has recalled their first encounter, years and lifetimes ago. The rest, though, the apportioning of blame, has the silver-haired man's smile widening. "I left Myrken Wood in a better state than I found it, which is more than can be said for many of my predecessors. What Glenn did with the office is upon his own shoulders, and those of his advisors."

The smile fades as the assassin turns to invoke Calomel's family, his wife and children, but he waves a hand as if to brush those dark predictions aside.

"Hush your beak, doom crow. If that's my doom then it's a kind one, and I welcome it. I'll be glad for the time I have with them, and grateful for the gift of knowing them; I am, every day. When the time comes for grief then I'll grieve, but not before. Eyes ahead, now. Walk on."

No more retorts for the Man in White, his attention instead turning to the girl at his side, with her thread, her clever fingers and stained clothes. His gaze is a steady evaluation, and he listens as the girl explains. A nod at the mention of eleven children murdered, of the Storyteller condemned to the pit in which they now wander. This part he knows, more or less.

"Your account is too lurid, Miss Wynsee. Eleven children slain is all that need be said; any more, and you risk sounding ghoulish." Quiet reproach, though it's possible her attempt to stir outrage has found success in the chill to his gaze, the tension at jaw and temple.

The narrative she reels out along with her thread is incomplete, however, and before he was Governor he was a Constable. A nod towards their guide, though his words are for the girl.

"What does he gain from this? From the Storyteller's death. He serves Rhaena, hm? Chief Inquisitor, I hear, to whom all secrets flow. An ideal position, for a man like him. Why leave that behind?" He lifts his voice so that the other man might more clearly hear. "Is it an atonement, sir? Do you seek redemption in the witch's blood?"

He doesn't believe it, not for a moment, and his tone makes that eminently clear. The girl's question gives him pause, however, and he grants it a consideration that takes them a dozen paces or more further into the maze. Trust. Eventually:

"You've eyes and a brain, hm? Use them. Decide for yourself."
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Re: Golben: 24,531 and Five

Postby Glenn » Wed Oct 09, 2013 1:31 pm

Calomel was poised. He had answers. Of course he did. This was a game. It's all a game to him. Burnie didn't feel that way but then he was kind to his friends. He had blind spots, such blind spots. Towards Emory most of all. Giuseppe didn't. Oh, he had spots but they were of a different color. He lied to himself but only about himself, never about the world around him. More than anything else, he had tried to impart that unto Wynsee, even upon the boy Cherny, whether he wanted it or not.

Calomel was far too old for such things. Still, some response had to be made. "Advise? That is what you think I did, yes? What I did, Governor, was to bandage a wound, a wound that would have flooded Myrken Wood with blood. You were not there. I was. He came back a monster. I stopped him. I saved him. I saved you all. And then, creature, I paid the price. A price. He pays another now. I pay a third. Wynsee here pays so many. It builds character, you see. Everyone pays a price but you. What does that say about your character?"

He spoke of redemption, of what Giuseppe sought. "Closure, yes? Isn't that what we all want here? An end to a story gone wrong. What strange authors, we. What strange authors, we."
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Re: Golben: 24,531 and Five

Postby Rance » Wed Oct 09, 2013 4:30 pm

"Too lurid," she repeated, a sharp twist of her chin, the return of her eyes to the stony ground packed beneath their falling feet. "Too few words and that is all they are. I would rather ghoulish; I would rather be horrified each time I think of the terrible things that have been done. It may make it easier to -- to watch and do nothing as a woman I once considered a friend is killed.

"Right as it may be, deserved as it is, that does not make the reality any less hideous. You understand," she added -- for he must, as sure as his hair was the shine of untarnished coins, as certain as was the long map of his past. A governor he had been, and yet he still lived. The notion of that -- his continued life after political service to his land -- was so vastly unfamiliar that she could only stare upon him like he was some foreign artifact. A stahl never outlived their appointment.

And then: Trust.

You've eyes and a brain, hm? Use them. Decide for yourself.

"My decisions," the seamstress said, "are not always the most informed. And my character--" her voice higher, thrown like a stone at Giuseppe, "--is to be defined by me, and me alone. I am not your Junior Inquisitor anymore, Giuseppe. I've said to you my last good morning. Here, whether we were governors, advisers, or stupid children with -- with too many toys to break no longer matters."

Her final spool was thinning. A few hundred yards and she'd have no more. The colors would be gone, their path left to nothing more definite than their toes dragging through the dust. They had been here days, weeks, it seemed. The seamstress ignored the sluggish emptiness in her belly; the Sun, though it had moved earlier with such purpose across the sky, now seemed frozen far above them, as if time itself had forgotten how to spin.

Enough bickering, thought the girl who only minutes before had brought fist to bear against the Black Man. Now, though, she fancied herself some forceful totem of wisdom -- no, of drive, the Jerno tether to their insatiable needs to better one another with their smooth words and cool, alchemical demeanors.

To Cinnabar, Gloria Wynsee said, "What matters is the governor who still lives."

She turned after that to Giuseppe. "What matters is the Storyteller. Closure," reminded the girl. "Nothing else. Not your arguments, not -- not your differences."

Authors they would be. Amid a thousand intersecting hedgerows and the hollowed-out memories of a Pit that had once been a thriving town, a place of peace and happiness--

The last filament thread fell free from her fingers. Could that she cry, she would, but the channels in her eyes had gone dry and she found herself slowly forgetting what there was to weep for at all.

Weeks. It felt like they'd wasted so many here.
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Re: Golben: 24,531 and Five

Postby Cinnabar » Thu Oct 10, 2013 6:08 am

"Suffering as virtue. One's value weighed by how much one has lost." The southerner sets a decent pace, but by no means so swift that he wants for breath. "That's a very Myrken Wood way of seeing things, sir. You've gone native, hm?"

Further through the maze, and the girl's spool unwinds to nothing; he unhooks a half-filled waterskin from his pack, holding it out for the seamstress to take. Her defiance of the southerner's words earns her another appraising look and a brief but approving half-grin, and a shrug for her quiet rebuke.

"I'm here to see my friend safely out of this place. It's been too long already. Far too long."

A glance for the sky, for where the sun hangs overhead as it had done for... for far longer than it should. He turns his head as they pass intersections, gazing down hedge-lined avenues to the crater's rim, trying to orient himself, to find their position within the pit. According to the sun it's been a day, a night and half a day, and yet it feels like so much longer - his hand lifts to his jaw as if expecting to find untidy whiskers beneath his touch. Not hours or days, but weeks. Weeks wasted, wandering in the shadow of high hedgerows.

"And what matters most is getting home again, once we've done what we need to. You've people who'll be worried for you, hm?"
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Re: Golben: 24,531 and Five

Postby Glenn » Thu Oct 10, 2013 6:27 am

"It draws us, Myrken does. Emory. Myself. Burnie. Wynsee. There are, ah, how to say this, elements of Myrken in everyone's life, Cinnabar Calomel. Every human's life that is." A respectful nod of the head, off to the side, to the man behind him. "We survive those qualities, yes, but if we survive too many of them, we end up here, where we belong, where we fit." Then it was to Wynsee because it was more use to her than to someone just playing at human. "Levels of abstraction, girl. Dissipiated Myrken in our lives. Myrken in and of itself. And concentrated Myrken, for that is what we have here. Golben."

He walked towards his death, towards his certain death. Oh, this was a fell place. it was. Tables could turn. Tides could change. The storyteller might be the only one of them to survive, but if that was the case, what did he have to return to? A different sort of fate, a different sort of judgement. Either Olwak would be victorious and end him for leaving her or Emory would be triumphant and his end would be far more intolerable. It wasn't her killing him that he couldn't bear. It was facing her at all. Every step felt like a hundred. There should have been serenity, but then there never was. Oh, the first step was serene. The second step, glorious, righteous. The thousandth step? It was everything else. It was every little horror nipping at his heels. It was every doubt, every regret. It was the fear of the unknown. Fire was pain. Fire was decay. Fire was ruin. Fire was known. Death was so, so much more. With every step, the judgment of death, of whatever lay on the other side became more fearsome than fire, more fearsome than even facing Emory. A thousand-thousand steps. He could feel them, each and every one of them bringing him closer and closer and closer.

As they walked on paleness overtook him. As they walked on, his quips failed him. As they walked on, he began to sweat.

Every moment was an eternity. Every sin became a litany in his mind. For Giuseppe, as moments stretched, as steps drove him to darkness, the pages turned, the final page beckoned. The book was written. They were not authors at all. There was nowhere to run anymore; there was nowhere to turn. His own actions, the large an the small, the planned and the desperate, had damned him, had robbed him of choice, had put him upon the rack of inevitability. With every step, it stretched him a bit more thin. Upon entering Golben, the end was before him.

Now? The end was everywhere and it grew ever nearer. The Man in White walked on, terrified at each moment that with his next step, he would leave his body behind.
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Re: Golben: The Black Hour

Postby Rance » Thu Oct 10, 2013 10:40 am

The old tale--

They called it Laboron. There, they would tame beasts; they would force the minds of barbarians and madmen to become those of architects and engineers. Lock them away for years, dictate their evolution that they might overpower the endless halls of mirrors and hedges with the application of mind and memory, escape as greater creatures to the wild blue sky above.

But a thousand beasts came and went and died; the wardens of Laboron found their corpses dessicated on the ground or tangled in the hedges, starved and dehydrated, turned to hard leather by the unforgiving sun. There was no success -- criminals, beasts, lesser men and women were sentenced to years in Laboron with a single caveat: should they find their way out of the labyrinth, might they find the maze's end, freedom would be theirs to claim.

In a hundred years no minds grew. In a hundred years the bones of a thousand convicts littered the halls of Laboron.

Yet, for those hundreds of years, the mastermind behind Laboron's creation -- Hessius was his name -- lived, well beyond the days during which his heart should beat. The gods deemed his immortality necessary, that he would thrive to oversee the continued function of Laboron until its purpose was met.

And to test its perfection, the gods condemned to the labyrinth Hessius's only living daughter, Aratha.

In silence, they continued on through the routes and avenues of Golben, the assassin, the seamstress, the once-governor. Every step was like the thousand before it; every minute was like those that had already passed.

Did they see the same hedges as they had before?

Did they pass the same stone jutting up from the earth like a broken tooth--

--was that the same statue of a fallen shrine staring at them as once they'd seen, or was it another?

Brackish water. A waterskin shared. Their images distorted in the mirrors, their faces like dripping shadows, Giuseppe's reflective of the White terror slithering beneath his flesh, untrue flesh, storyflesh. Cinnabar's likeness in the mirrorglass basked him with the blinding light of due filial love -- darkened, as required, with spots of agony and loss.

And Gloria's mirror was already in her hands, a little makeshift knife with a cup-bottom hilt, a shard of the Storyteller's wishing-glass that showed her what she wanted.

Wax. Red wax. Her flesh, thin and sagging and pale, her stomach distended from starvation, her limbs bloated with a want for water, so much wax splattered across her, sluggishly crawling in runnels down her scalp, clogging her ears, searing her fingertips as it spattered in blossom-patterns on the ground and hardened, hardened to crimson stone.

In Laboron, the brilliant Aratha gathered the bones of dead beasts and the tapers in their abandoned lanterns. She tore branches from the hedges and for months constructed a magnum contraption: wings of wax and wood and to wear, wings to alight her from the floor of the labyrinth to the sky, to the stars, toward her father Hessius. For if she escaped, if she jettisoned herself from the miles upon miles of hedgerows, the gods would smile upon him and let him find his final sleep.

And how the wings worked! She soared, she laughed, a too-smart girl with too many dreams. She spiraled high above Laboron until the wax began to soften from the smiling stare of the burning sun. A branch slipped away, a bone tumbled from the flapping membranes. Her wings wept red taper-wax, raining hard droplets all across the floor of the grand labyrinth--

Hessius watched in horror as his most beloved daughter plummeted from the sky, wingless, and split in half across the hedges.

The rest was forgotten--

--for as Time would have it, three unlikely compatriots did indeed find their Glenn Burnie, their Storyteller.

But a Black Hour fell, a single hour. A necessary moment. A queen bee with wings plucked free. For while Myrken Wood was thrown into oblivion and fugue, so was Golben.
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Re: Golben: 24,531 and Three

Postby Rance » Fri Oct 11, 2013 10:31 am

A vagabond girl stood in the crisp autumn wind, naked except for the patterned blanket tossed across her shoulders like a wanderer's cloak. Its tasseled edges hung low enough to obscure thighs, buttocks, and the bareness of her chest. She stood with her spine toward the pit of Golben, her shoulders knotted like gnarled wood, her black hair a tangled spiderweb around her cheeks. In the silver palm of her left hand rested the black key used to turn the locks in the doors and corridors that had ushered them back to the surface.

In the right hand, there was a knife, unfamiliar in grip but too familiar in its vision -- it was bent like a talon, curved back, its point splitting the occasional droplet of rain that killed itself across its edge.

Giuseppe's knife held the weight of a thousand lives, she imagined. Inside its steel and the carved arabesque of its wooden handle were husbands lost and dead mothers. Children too, perhaps, whose throats the Black Man deemed it necessary to draw a single line across--

"This is mine," the seamstress said to Cinnabar and Glenn Burnie as the three of them stood on the lip of Golben.

"This is mine, and I am going to keep it."

She walked whether or not they followed, her bare legs striding uneasily through wet grass.

* * * *

Fourteen-thousand four-hundred-and-fifty-five steps carried her to Stonebrook, where the half-naked girl dragged her heels through mud and crusting hroseshit. She found a small tavern where the soup was warm. Because the innkeeper did not think it proper for a girl as young as she was to let bare hints of her breasts -- "I don't care," she'd told him, exhaustion making it difficult, nearly impossible to raise wooden spoon to flaking lips -- a chamber-maid escorted the girl to a dressmaker--

"Do you care to let me measure your hips," the proper fellow said, examining her through a scraped monocle.

"I want to finish my soup," Gloria told him.

"I'd prefer it if you let go of the knife, child."

"I haven't had enough soup," she said.

The chamber-maid dragged her fingernails through her hair and flapped her palm and fingers at the dressmaker, leading the girl by her makeshift cloak through a number of motions and poses, all meant help the man draw invisible lines between the girl's hips and elbows. His measuring-string helped him cast numbers upon paper, and a few meager coins procured from Gloria's satchel helped him understand that there was indeed no need to put the weary-eyed girl through a gauntlet of measurements and sizings.

She hadn't enough for a tailored dress. Three tarnished shillings and a threepenny piece, enough for a faded gray riding-skirt too heavy for her hips and a fellow's moth-eaten sweater procured from old bins -- "Men and women die," the monocled dressmaker proclaimed, "and leave behind a number of garments perfectly suited to young ladies who haven't a suitable inheritance."

In Stonebrook, Gloria Wynsee ate four-and-a-half bowls of potato stew and said thank you, please for three mugs of honeyed mead. They told her it was fine, it was remarkable how much she could eat, it is as though you haven't eaten in weeks, child--

Before she slept -- "A room's been made for you," the chamber-maid told her, "paid in the name of one Cinnabar Calomel. Do you know him?" -- Gloria Wynsee hovered over the small room's toilet-basin and threw up whole hunks of meat and a slurry of broth. The half-digested mead burned in her nostrils. She wiped foam from her lips and carefully cradled her stomach, her stomach, which had once been a great and girthy barrel, but was now a sagging hammock over her waistline, an empty sack distended and misshapen.

"How long has it been since you've eaten," asked the chamber-maid over her shoulder.

"Yesterday," Gloria said. "I ate just yesterday."

"I hate liars," the maid scolded, before grappling for the girl's right hand. "And your finger -- how long has it been since you lost it?"

The seamstress turned her chin, looking upon her pudgy fingers peering out from beneath the sleeve of her wrinkled sweater. A thumb, a forefinger, a middle finger, a smallest finger--

A thumb, a forefinger, a middle finger, a smallest finger.

"Four," she said. "There are four. My fingers are just fine."

When the chamber-maid finally departed, Gloria Wynsee examined the gap between the third and fifth finger where a fourth should be. But all that remained was a black and red stump, a few slivers of flesh, and a single knot of golden fabric tightened around the rough and bloody edge of a digit severed at the knuckle.

Wax. Red wax. A golden tangle of thread to keep it from all pouring out.

She slept in her bed and did not thrash or whimper. She slept a dead man's sleep.

* * * *

With morning she rose; with morning, she waited in front of the inn for the cart she had been told would come. The girl squinted against the moist, fall Sunlight. A cart full of roadstones rocked and bounced through the puddles of a recent rain. The bearded man who snapped the reins and tugged the bits of the brown horses leading the wooden wagon stopped near the inn and said, "Are you Gloria Wynsee," to her, reciting the name from memory.

"I am. I was told to wait here."

"I'm moving stones down toward Myrkentown. Some bloke named Calomel asked might I give you a ride. I won't turn down a few extra coppers for company."

"Cinnabar Calomel is just a story," she said, throwing her satchel amid the stones in the back. The bag's unbuttoned flap lazily slipped open, a wagging canvas tongue. Inside, the Black Man's ever-white clothes had been stuffed with wild abandon into the mouth of the sack, dots of his skin strewn like snow amid the fabric's creases.

She dozed during the rough and rumbling travel toward Myrkentown, but like Rhaena Olwak had taught her, she still performed little ballets of math in her weary brain.

Twenty-four-thousand five-hundred-and-thirty-one.
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