Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Glenn » Wed Jan 22, 2014 8:01 am

Burnie had spoken, yes, clearly, firmly. His vision was blurred, though. Weakness was overtaking him on so many levels, mentally, physically. His vision was the least of it. Calomel approached and it was as if he had seen him for the first time. His reaction was peculiar. "It speaks ill of one of us that I half think you an apparition, Cinnabar. Myself most likely." The focus he had brought to bear only moments before was scattered now. He was on the verge of collapse.

Somewhere, elsewhere, everything was nearing a head. An ending was nigh. He could feel it and do nothing. The roll of the die was coming and it was not his hand making the throw. He'd set up the board, only to be taken away before the final move. Here it came, miles and miles away.

In all of Myrken, there was no one less likely to resign himself to his fate than Glenn Burnie, yet here he was. Calomel was an indicator, an adult presence, despite the fact he was younger than any of them in so many important ways. "Too many damned plates, Cinn. Too many. I think I've dropped a few." The stumble was sudden. The fall was abrupt. Something was starting to happen elsewhere and Burnie was ever so connected to elsewhere. There were stimuli here and fell things elsewhere. His body, the starved, hopeless thing, was all too human. He prided himself so on it and on some, maddened, desperate level, he prided himself still, even as it gave way beneath him.

--------------------
Burnie fell. Giuseppe did not.

This was why he was here. A moment of redemption. How few people owned this chance, to define the end of their own story? He had compromised. He had betrayed. He had done dark deeds, but no one ever remembers that, not really, not in the face of sacrifice and heroism. He had become a monster, a monster's monster, yet he could die a man.

All he had to do was kill a withered, long-eared creature, a being who had more substance to her hiding behind the veil of antiquity than she did now as her true self. All weight had left her bones, revealing nothing but a hollow exterior of meaningless beauty. He knew a thing or two like that. All he had to do was kill her. No, not even that. All he had to do was allow it.

It played out in his body language, trembling hesitation. Oh, Giuseppe had gone too far, far too far. One can sell everything that matters, one's service, one's loyalty, one's arm and action. He'd gone further than that. He sold his flesh, his spirit, his very soul. He sold these things for so many reasons, to try to make an impact, to try to make it matter, and then, when that wasn't enough, for survival. It was an endless back and forth, an endless given and take. He would overcommit in one direction in order to ensure a legacy and then bounce back the other way when his actions looked to lead towards his demise.

One more day.

That's all he ever asked for in the end. It's all he ever needed: just one more day in order to right the wrongs, to fix the imbalances in his life.

Now, he finally had the chance to do it, to put everything right before it was too late, not everything, no, but enough. All he had to do was act. All he had to do was end the Storyteller, end himself, end his story, and this horrible chapter for Myrken Wood; all he had to do was nothing.

But then, imagine what he could do if he just had one more day to set things right? Imagine what he could create out of the chaos that this would cause. Imagine what one more page of his story might buy them all. All he needed was one more chance.

"No," his voice was soft, accented heavily but quiet. "No, I think what we need here is a story, something with a rainbow to carry all of us out of here. What I think we need is peace. She's a creature of her nature. You are. we are. She deserves another chance too."

And he reached. His hand reached forward to grasp Gloria's, to stop her, to change the path of this tale, to change the path of his life once more, damn the consequences.

Giuseppe was a creature of stories, a monster of choices. He traded bits of himself again and again for what he wanted and then, again and again, for but another chance. Eventually, there was no semblance of who he had been left. Eventually, there was nothing left to him but smoke and mirrors. Darkness and ideas. Ideas could change the world, but they needed a focus, and his focus was gone. Stories could move the heart but not if they had the wrong ended, not if they traveled the wrong path.

Giuseppe could have done nothing. He could have made that choice. In the end, though, there was a right choice and a wrong choice. Giuseppe was a being made of wrong choices and near-endless chances. On this day, there was only one way the narrative could flow. If he could go back to the beginning there might be enough substance to him to stop this tide. As it was, he was a wisp in the wind. As it was, he was swept away. "That's quite enough, Gruma." He reached for Gloria Wynsee's hand and found that he could grasp nothing at all. His hand went through hers, it, like himself, more shadow than man. He tried to speak out, but his voice was gone. He tried to move forward, but his legs were no more. He tried to draw a dagger, to kill the girl he just said they had to preserve, but he had no arms left. He tried to scream, but no head remained. No Giuseppe.

He was gone, an extraneous plot thread in a story that he had bogged down with his litany of poor choices.

There were no more chances.
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Guppy » Wed Jan 22, 2014 4:04 pm

There were words. Meaningful words, she supposed, but they merely bored her. Gloria tended to fill space with inane chattering. Instead of listening, she let the cadence wash over her. Allowed the emotion behind the words to register.

In the end, it was Gloria that held the shard of mirror-glass in her hand and threatened the Storyteller, not Giuseppe. It felt as if they stared at one another, though a fragment of time. Through the vision the Golben-entity crafted for her. The creature's lips curved upwards, smugly, and a hand stretched out to catch at Gloria's hand. Fingers came to wrap around her fist. Her plan was to guide the blade just slightly to the left side. It would avert its path and leave Giuseppe unharmed.

Time stood still for the creature as the Dark One reconsidered his plight. He grasped at straws, seeking peace out of his own self preservation. Selfish notions overcoming the heroic whim. Now that, that was entirely something that she should have expected. Her hand tilted to the side as she pondered over her reasons for being here.

Why had she come?

Because no others would. She had seen his worth when others did not. She had been so angry that he had gone without granting her a proper farewell. Furious that he, another ageless creature, would leave her to rot among the flimsy little mortals. By his own admission, he took notice of her, but he never afforded her the consideration she felt she deserved. Because he had attempted to change into something that he was not.

He was no hero. He was no better than she was.

As she saw his final actions, her gaze narrowed and time began again. Her hand remained, wrapped around the seamstress' appendage. Her jaw set. Joined hands continued towards the Storyteller's chest. Together.

"Goodbye, Giuseppe."
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Jirai » Sat Jan 25, 2014 11:39 am

Dark eyes regarded it - him - impassively for several long moments. Then, finally, she moved to join him, producing her own knife in silent acquiescence to his demands.
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Dulcie » Mon Jan 27, 2014 1:30 pm



"I could have made you anything child. You could have been a queen among peasants." She breathed in the moment before the dagger plunged into her heart. She made no attempts to resist it. There was no point in trying. This was where her life had been meant to end, and there was no escaping a place this desolate.

There was nothing beautiful or elegant in her death. There was the oozing and spluttering of nearly black blood that poured from the wound and coughed from the lips that were too beautiful to believe. Her body didn't crumple, but instead shuddered to the ground as the life left it, stolen away by something as simple as the rust that dusted that mirror shard knife. She did not melt into nothingness or return to the veil of the world from which she came, instead she died there at the bottom of the pit gasping and sputtering until the light finally dimmed in her forever open eyes.

As her lasts breath left her so did the effects of the stories she told, each fading as instantaneously as they had begun.
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Rance » Mon Jan 27, 2014 3:52 pm

IT

It was a blur caught between two words -- silhouettes and shadows of the past, soil and air of the now. The earth beneath her feet permeated pleasure and satisfaction as she reached into the fray as though she could change it, affect it, alter the histories emblazoned in the air and engraved in very skin of the hedgerows and mirrors towering around them.

But she didn't change it; she encouraged it, lent her palms to a glass-knife pommel.

THIS IS HIS PUNISHMENT [reckoning, consequence]. DO YOU REALIZE THIS NOW, INTERLOPER? YOU CANNOT CHANGE LAW [edict, creed]. NOT HERE.

YOU ARE, OTHERWISE, INCONSEQUENTIAL. NOW, YOU SEE THIS; NOW, YOU KNOW.

A hand passed through hers. Giuseppe's. Trying to intercept her.

That was how it should have been. Gloria Wynsee knew it. She had no agency here in Myrken Wood--

--but the point of the dagger punched into the Storyteller's chest. Black blood welled up around the gleaming fang of glass, sputtered out of those too-fine lips, splattered the girl's cheek. For a fleeting second -- and time seemed still, the sound of tearing flesh and bursting bone-plate a howling white-noise in her ears -- she stared at the back of her bloody knuckles and thought there was another hand there, a guiding touch, an invisible vehicle of locomotion and encouragement.

Giuseppe, the Black Man, vanished, crumbled away into nothing; the light winked, guttered, and faded in the Storyteller's eyes.

You could have been a queen among peasants.

After the woman's last breath, the seamstress fell to the ground with the Storyteller's body, collapsing atop her, driving knees into the wet dirt under those once-frail ribs. In a moment of wildness, the girl yanked out the blade from its mortal poise -- this is mine, like my brain; this is mine, this is mine! -- and wrenched it down, bellowing, screaming nonsense--

Down came the glass-edged knife adorned with flecks of rust.

Again.

And again.

Several times, a staccato rhythm of point piercing lifeless skin; each time, the dagger and its patron grip drove further into the Storyteller's chest; each time the mirror-glass shard moaned, creaked, bent how no glass should, threatened to shatter. Her wild tangles of black hair dripped. Her patchwork skirt-fronts were strewn with long, artistic jets of fae-blood. Nobody existed around her, but (she didn't want this, didn't want to do it, knew she mustn't, knew she must, wanted to do it, wanted this) but the knife blinked up, blinked down, monotonous, violent--

Over and over again.

Ghe-doz, ghe-doz!

The makeshift crossguard broke free with one blow. With no hilt to guard it, Gloria's fist jerked forward, scraped in an angle across the tongue of the weapon until she was gripping glass. The edge so violently chewed into the skin underneath her ring-finger, ground against her bone, that the knife split the digit free at the knuckle with lurid ease. She never registered the pain, just kept crying, gouging, stabbing, would keep defiling and destroying until there was nothing left. Until all the betrayals, the lies, the stories were gone. Until the Dream was nothing more than ashes in her mind.

This is mine.


NIALL

The spearwielder moved forward, a knife shining in fist.

The cork-eyed tradesmen opened his mouth in a yawning smile, his brittle and age-worn teeth a fencework inside the hack-slash grin twitching between his cheeks. When he spoke, the words were deeper, more resonant, thrumming along the shelves and in the glass of every abandoned bottle perched on the shelves around him. This was his domain; the artifice uncoiled from his tongue and brought to bear the familiar vibrato of the conscience behind those blind, porous plugs through which he saw her, the world, everything.

THIS IS HER PUNISHMENT [reckoning, consequence]. DO YOU REALIZE THIS NOW, INGENUE? YOU CANNOT CHANGE LAW [edict, creed]. NOT HERE.

A stiff hand lunged out to motion to the boiling, bubbling mass of slag, the wrinkled fingers highlighted with the melted mass's hot, dawn-orange glow.

AN INCH SHOULD DO. THAT WILL BE ADEQUATE ENOUGH FOR YOUR FREEDOM.
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Guppy » Fri Jan 31, 2014 4:22 am

Giuseppe's hand was smoke against her knuckles before he vanished in a flurry of words. In the end, the man was felled by the death of his architect. Death rightly caused by Gloria and her silent companion. The seamstress' glass blade remained true and found itself buried in the storyteller's belly.

Warm fluid fell upon the creature's hand. Perhaps it was merely a vision, but still she lapped it away. Instead of iron, it tasted of salt. Her hand, removed from Gloria's still-moving one, was lifted to brush at her damp cheeks.

The voice taunted her from the recesses of her mind and her slitted eyes rolled with irritation. "I have never been and never will be inconsequential."

The creature, the demon, turned to leave. She called to her forgotten puppet.
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Jirai » Mon Feb 10, 2014 9:10 am

Punishment.

Hatred was not an unfamiliar emotion for the young woman. Was it really any surprise that each word the being spoke invoked that feeling? Only half of it was for him, though.

An inch. Her blade lashed out as he directed.
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Rance » Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:47 am

IT

Time was hers again.

The images vanished like puffs of sand cast against a rushing wind. There was a flicker in her periphery, a wrinkle in unseen fabric where a moment months past convened with this one. Neither with deafening crash nor insidious whisper did they meet. One second bled into the next. The images of murder and trickled away like liquid into the dirt.

It was alone.

The air chewed at It with a violent and vengeful bitterness. She'd entered Golben when autumn was coiled around the land, the leaves of distant forests set aflame by the sun burning through them at dusk. Now, the acumen's demesne was blanketed in a soft and unstirred dusting of snow. The sky hung low, overcast, the clouds heavy and flat with the weight of winter. Time had crushed itself into an unforgiving little ball and had crawled out from the Pit, had been sucked away by the tangles of shriveled hedges.

Weeks had passed. Months.

When It turned away, started to walk, her heel scraped against something hard, stonelike.

A lone fingerbone, brown and forgotten.

YOU WILL LEAVE HERE A SLAVE [servant, subservient], INTERLOPER. LITTLE MORE IS AS INCONSEQUENTIAL.

Underneath her feet were the seamstress' patchwork skirts and torn blouse, all coated in the crusted history of a Storyteller's blood. The abandoned garments were stiffened by frost, as brittle as dried paper.

Several feet away, blanketed by white powder, the Storyteller's gnarled root-cane lay, its verdant runes asleep and dormant.

NIALL

A sliver of blue flesh fell into the molten slag, flashed, and was consumed by the heat. Azure light bled through the slag like a vibrant disease.

SHE WAS FREED FROM YOUR BODY AT MY BEHEST [insistence, command]. WHEN SHE PASSES THE CIRCLE OF MY INFLUENCE, JUST BEYOND THE RIM OF THE PIT, HER PHYSICAL FORM I HAVE ALLOWED HER TO TAKE WILL FADE.

Everything that happened next was obscured with rapidity. Shards of the process were visible, but scarcely revealed: the cork-eyed Bottlemaker extracted a glob of the blue-tinted slag on the edge of the sturdy dowel. After mounting the weak footstool, he raised the tube to his lips and blew. Breath whistled through the cylinder, bulging the superheated blot of molten glass until it was bulbous and transparent. Its bottom expanded like a straining bladder. The neck stretched, burning like a glittering thread that dangled the bulb of the bottle at the end of the tube out of which it was birthed.

Niall's magic crackled and sang inside the cobalt glass as, in another moment, it hardened. The thin hair of glass from which it still dangled was slivered away by a thought.

The Bottlemaker plucked one of the corks from his eye-sockets and thrust it toward Niall.

THE BALANCE HAS SHIFTED. IF SHE WISHES TO THRIVE [live, exist], IT WILL BE ONLY INSIDE THIS PRISON THAT SHE LEAVES MY DOMAIN.

In the next instant--

--Niall would find herself standing in the snow-crusted paths of Golben, twenty yards beyond It, a blue glass bottle clasped cold and humming in the softness of her palm.
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Re: Catch a tiger by the tail: Into Golben

Postby Guppy » Sun Feb 16, 2014 2:25 am

Images dissolved around her, sand through fingers. She let them go, already debating the future with little time for the past. But first, one last farewell to the man that had driven her to this place, to this point.

"Farewell, Giuseppe. You did not deserve your significance. I told you that I would be there at your end." A stretch of silence, a moment of respect for their twisted relationship. Then, she began to move. She would use this, use him as a stepping stone for greater things. Her boot scraped against something underfoot and her attention turned there. She couldn't quite make out the bone until she stooped and lifted Gloria's forgotten digit. A wane smile slipped to her features and she pocketed it for later. It could be useful.

The voice sounded and her eyes lifted, almost as if seeking it out. Reflex more than intent.

"Hush, now. You've given me what I wanted. I've no use for you anymore."

She began to walk, not feeling the cold, given the fire of her blood. She followed the tug of her soul towards Niall and her bottle.
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