The Art of the Possible

Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Tolleson » Sat Dec 14, 2013 11:42 am

Stumbling onto the stage, is the tall stick of a girl. She is reluctant and immediately feels the unease of unwelcome stares. This wasn't her place, it was Burnie's. By appearances to those that did not know her, she was a half starved, exhausted, commoner; clean enough but in ill-fitting clothes that hung off the too tall frame of skin and bone. But who did not know her? She had questioned, aided, and consoled more than half the town through an alliance with the constables office. She had opened the Inquisitory, searched for answers across a spectrum of inquiries from lost keys to lost children, offered meals and rooms, personal coin and condolences to widows and even parents over the last months. And what was more, she had opposed all of the violence on both sides, and though it wasn't well advertised to anyone outside the movement, her position had been firmly against Rhaena's reign.

Her hair is pulled back tight at her temples, the rest a wavy cascade of unruly locks down her back. But the fraying bits of fire that curl and frame her face add a softness to her pleading expression as she begins to speak. "Peace! Please... peace," her voice rose and broke, she held up her hands and they trembled.

"You seek blood, and I would say t-to you... it has already been spilled... a man hanged and a woman murdered, countless memories and minds in pain, lost." The plea is impassioned as she addresses the man in the crowd directly, though her voice is a loud and raspy shout to all before the stage.

"T-t-though her actions are regret-t-table... she saved us.. let us not continue t-t-t-this cycle of death and hatred it is a fire that will consume us," It is a terrible lie, she knows it too, but she has become better with lies. "feeding t-t-the fire of anger ...and frustration with the... t-the ... t-the t-t-tinder of blood does nothing to douse the flame."

There is worried glance across the stage at Glenn, he might have smacked her down with the cane if he still held it. It was time to get him off the stage, constables, take your cue.
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby catch » Sat Dec 14, 2013 12:45 pm

Glenn was a God.

This statement, this certainty, had been a core of Catch's soul for such a long time, that it might as well be truth. He had never had a word for what Glenn was to him, until the Wormwoman supplied it, until Gloria had stumbled over the words to explain it. He had helped bring him in. He had helped feed him, clothe him. The mapmaker had taught him, words and ways of thought. His endless patience earned trust. His endless wisdom brought inspiration. Even when Catch was at his most rude - when Catch was at his darkest - Glenn would take his hand, and bring him up. Dust him off. Give him food and warm beds once more, and teach him, once more, letting the words flow from him like hot milk. Giuseppe was a demon, a devil, a beast that put his fist into Catch's face on Glenn's orders, and Catch had forgiven Glenn. Glenn had come from the maggot-holes, full of maggots, full of darkness and the tap-tap-tap of a cane, and Catch had forgiven him. Glenn had left him, all of them, at the party where Rhaena's wickedness was evident.

He had not returned.

When he had, he had not come to Catch, had not explained what had happened, had not soothed him or brought forth the lesson - had not even thanked him, or damned him, for what he had done.

But that was alright. Catch could forgive him. Catch could still forgive him -

The only thing that held him together at that moment, when Cherny translated, when he spoke, what fateful words left the boy's lips, was the acceptance of that silver, bright light. It held tight to the disparate parts of him, even as they crumbled. It held onto his soul as the Wolf thrashed and raged and the blood rained down onto the Fat Man's head. There is only the tramble thatgoes through Catch's frame, a single and violent spasm, and fingers that clutch tight to Cherny's legs with a desperate strength.

Glenn was a God. He shattered to pieces, there upon the stage.

"I did it!" His head comes back, a violent twitch into the squire's belly, and like a wounded animal he cries, he thunders, a lunatick's truth, hardly coherent words in the midst of his great, bell-like voice. "The Wormwoman didn't, I did! I killed her, I tore open her skin and drank her blood! I did, I did, I did!"
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Rance » Sat Dec 14, 2013 2:45 pm

Standing amid the crowd, she heard Ariane's words as though they were standing in a thin, glass tube -- the woman's mouth moved and she heard the phrases with her eyes, reading them not through sound, but sight.

"Did he say your name," she asked, her dry lips drawn into an abrupt line. "He said mine, he said Mister Calomel's. He said Agnieszka's. Names give them focus. Reacting like animals has -- has already happened, Ariane. Do you think I wanted to see that man's corpse hanging like an ornament from that tree? Do you think I prefer to see people die?

"I may be a Jerno, but I'm not heartless. The violence is -- is inevitable. These people hurt, and they hate, and do you think the Governor playing them like instruments will calm the waters? That cunt wove lies in and out of our brains for months, so why do you assume that a speech full of the same will do anything but infuriate?"

She spoke so quickly, so sharply that she scarcely had the room between gasps of breath to form sound. Her toes were against Ariane's now, the space between them occupied only by bursts of hot breath. To any of the pulsing bodies peopled around them, they were little more than another pair on the brink of disagreement, volatile and ready to burst. "And lies they are. Tell me. Look me in the face and -- and tell me they're not. Look me in -- in my very stupid eyes and tell me you think this is right."

Those seconds could have passed with reasonable peace between them, molded into nothing more than a debate, a heated disagreement -- but it was Genny Tolleson's voice that shattered the glass around them, her unsure and stammering monologue pontificating peace not merely for Glenn Burnie, but for the Inquisitory as well.

And then:

I killed her, I tore open her skin and drank her blood! I did, I did, I did!

Gloria Wynsee never looked away from the Dauntless woman.

"Animals reacting. Traps and -- and threats and meals. And my brother is sitting there amid all of it. How long do we wait, Ariane? How long do we hope?"
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Dulcie » Sun Dec 15, 2013 2:15 am

Agnie? The thought went through Dulcie's mind and she shook her head. It wasn't possible. She and Agnie had been the only ones who even cared about what had happened to Rhaena. She loved Glenn as she loved all her friends, but she had lived in Myrken long enough to know politics when she saw them, and Agnie was quite clearly now the scapegoat for this horrific event. She shook her head and turned away from the crowd, leaving in the direction of the woods that hid her little cottage.

If Agnie needed a safe place to stay she would always have it at Dulcie Miller's home.
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Carnath-Emory » Sun Dec 15, 2013 5:42 am

"It wouldn't be words, Glour'eya, if I reckoned you heartless."

As if a woman were steel, even in a slender blade's absence; as if the implication were clear and present."Understand?" Gloved fingertips capture the girl's chin, but their touch is gentle where for a time, her eyes had not been. Only a presence, only enough to keep the seamstress' eyes upon her own. "I wouldn't have the time left for words."

The crowd does not crush the two creatures that stand here in its midst. It is not a seething mob gone hungry for harm, it does not even jostle at their shoulders; they are two voices amongst a sea of many, but the rest are not much louder than they. But a press of passing shoulders has them together - Genevieve Tolleson up there upon the stage, and even the folk who don't recognise her are eager to look -

Toe-to-toe they stand, the swordswoman's head bowed to accommodate the disparity of their heights. Gentling eyes have lost none of their urgency, but how quiet her words; steady and quiet in the space they've made for themselves here.

"What I know is two things. The first," and with a forefinger lifted between them, silent indication. "Is that - whatever else we might think of it all, whatever else it might mean - in this moment every - word - the Governor - speaks - intends to calm a population, support a Government and save Agnieszka's life. Second," and two fingers now, as if a gesture might command a girl's attention when all around them that very population is a sea of small motion and quiet words, and the Marshall just another shape amongst the rest. "If you terrify them into anger right now, into panic, then dozens suffer. Here. Immediately. Indiscriminately - do you know that word? It means that after a very short while, they stop caring who they're hurting. As surely as if it were a hanging - multiplied tenfold. That, before I can gain some control of it - "

... oh, Catch.

Three ways that could go. Of the three, she places her hopes upon Cherny, and keeps to this instead - because Cherny and Catch are all the way over there, and before her right now is a young, young Gloria who's need is no less profound.

"Is that what you want? You tell me now, if it is. Tell me now, so that I can do what I must do to keep the blood from our streets. But Glour'eya - you're not heartless; you never have been. If it were panic you wanted, if it were chaos and violence and hurt, you wouldn't be asking me this now. You wouldn't waste words on me." A small shake of her head, a flick of fingers as if a thing were discarded. "You want truth - "

Look me in the face, and she does. She does.

" - and an end to all this sickness. I do too. I know that it has - weight; that it chokes. How waiting feels impossible, how it feels to want to do - anything, anything and everything and all at once," as Genevieve Tolleson draws eyes, up there upon the stage; commands some real attention, between stammering word and hesitant pause. "But this is not the way: here, now. This buys you another Haberdasher's. Another Townsedge," where her husband had fallen crushed beneath the chaos of rampant Baie and panicking
no
where Kanashia had falle -

Her jaw delicately clenches against tumbling recollection.

"Go to him - after this. If you wish, I'll go with you. But this is not the time."
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Rance » Sun Dec 15, 2013 12:00 pm

There would have come a day--

"Do you remember, Ariane," and they drank not tea, but a hard bottle of something sharp and volatile, the kind of liquid that burned on the tip of a tongue like a pek'oret sting. "Do you remember when all of that strangeness occurred? I was so young and you were the most brilliant creature to me. You were. I thought I'd want nothing more than to turn out just like you."

"Mn -- Yes. I remember."

"And do you remember," and Gloria Wynsee was laughing now, each spasm in her mirth punctuated by a hand that raised and then fell to clap against her knee, "how I was so foolish, I thought I could change everything, put the world into such fine order because I came from a world that was in such disarray. And we fought. We spat at one another. I thought I was so clever. But it was just too much emotion and so little logic. I used to stutter then. I used to cry so easily."

And Ariane smiled, scar and all, perfect.


But that wasn't then. That was only a potential permutation, a future that might never be, a flicker of circumstance that came to the young girl's brain as she stared up into the Marshall's face. And perhaps Ariane had never seen eyes that were so witless before -- so witless, willing, and sharp, so scorched and burnt by the Sun that their color had long ago bled away to leave steely gray, and the pupils never swelled nor reduced, but stayed simple, spark-sized, and sharp as a hemming needle.

If you terrify them into anger right now, into panic, then dozens suffer. Here. Immediately. Indiscriminately - do you know that word?

"If you think that's what I would want, then what do you know of me? But it is there -- the panic, the anger, it's there and I'm afraid of it." And better it be turned, her lips never said, toward a common point than spread out like fire, for to utter such a thing would turn against every disgust she'd had seeing those toes dangle and sway in the wind. "I wanted to know from her. I wanted her words, her eyes, her stare. I wanted to know that she knew nothing about -- about any of this, that she was just as broken as you were, as I was, as everyone was, when the Lady reigned.

"I was with him and Calomel and -- and Giuseppe. We were in Golben, and he knows no wiser than any of us what happened here, whose blade went to work, who struck. To know that is a defiance of -- of the only common truth we all share after the Black Hour. Don't you see that, Ariane? Don't you," she asked.

"I want an end to all this sickness," the girl repeated, wielding Ariane's words as she'd already done months ago, brandishing a Lady Marshall's Darkenhold threat against Noura. "But making us believe we're all sick and that he's the exception, in having this knowledge, isn't a solution. Neither is hanging. Neither is killing."

And what she never answered, what she couldn't answer:

Then what is?

The weight and the wait, both astoundingly crippling virtues that the girl felt straining her shoulders and clawing at her skin. To Ariane's final words -- Go to him - after this -- the black-sweat face dipped down in an agreement, a promise, a guarantee. But because she'd already said too much (What was Haberdasher's, she wondered; what was Townsedge?), she folded like a fabric doll beneath the Marshall's advice, then surged forward past her, shattering their pocket of seeming silence, shouldering her way through the membrane and back into the reality of what was around them--

* * * *

From the stage's edge, a broad-nosed man with a sprawl of white and bristling hair shouted to Genny, "Saved us? Open your eyes, you dumb Inquisitor bitch, or get back to your feckin' pies and let men handle this. She took that Governorship because her mind was already mince!"

"What lor' of it thar wot," prattled an orchard-hand. "Profe! Bring us profe. Ain't that wot yar do, Inquisitor?"

And as Catch bellowed his ownership of the deed, a circle of people around him bent back as if pushed away by the sheer dominance of his voice, his claim.

"We'd sooner believe the lunatik," crowed a woman with a square jaw and a prominent, shining nose. "Proof indeed. Show us. Show us!"
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Carnath-Emory » Sun Dec 15, 2013 2:26 pm

Ask her if she's ever seen a face wearing such eyes as those. Ask her, and she will reply with two words that are place-names, that are grotesque blights upon Myrken history. Townsedge, she will say; Haberdasher's Row, and it will be only half of the truth, because Gloria Wynsee is more, far more, than any of those who'd struggled and hit and fought and fled and died, on those days.

Ask her -

and perhaps she'd have said nothing at all. Just as she'd had so little to offer a seamstress who'd spoken with her days ago, weeks ago; who'd asked. Just as she'd given so little to what was a very giving Agnieszka, last night; they'd managed something like a long-overdue reconciliation all the same, but even an excess of very good wine had done little to loosen her tongue. Just as she'd hesitated over her letters for the Governor, once it became apparent that he was actually able to read them; they'd fallen so easily back into the rhythm of query-and-supply that had been their habit since his return and hers.

"I don't think it's what you want," she'd murmured into the girl's quick response, and here their words are each the mirror of the other's, for: "I wanted to know you were certain of it," she'd continued a moment after, and it was something like a smile which her mouth shaped then, the smallest things and heavy with its silent regrets. "Go to her; to them both. In a quieter moment, when they can hear your questions over everything that they feel. Go - "

And the girl speaks a thing with the power to wrench sudden outrage from a swordswoman's throat. You do not speak that name, she might have have whispered, cold and hard and quiet - but there lies hurt and anger enough to consume her utterly. There, and it would only have been the beginning, and she knows it. She knows it so very well.

The stifled throat draws a slow breath

my will is good
and in the place of those words that should and cannot be, there comes a clasp of gloved fingertips upon Gloria's shoulder; there comes the quiet, long watch of her eyes, as the young rhetor turns away.

"Do you remember, Ariane?" that girl might say to her one day. "Do you remember?" she might ask - on that day or this, and how a swordswoman would smile, in a moment like that. Like silent, knowing laughter, and leaning - as one does, when about to confide - "Glour'eya," she would say. "Didn't you know? That I've always liked you just the way you are."
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Glenn » Mon Dec 16, 2013 1:56 am

Chaos unfolded before him.

It was his own fault, for the most part. He had been out of commission for so long. He had been away from the pulse of his people. He dealt with yesterday's threat when it was today's that plagued their hearts and minds (and stomachs). They had been victimized by authority and that was how he had spoken to them. He didn't ask enough questions and why, why was that?

It was because he was sacrificing enough by being there, by vilifying the woman who was to be his wife, who represented so much of what he had stood for, even if the representation had become bloated and warped. Somehow, on some emotional level, he thought that would be enough. It cost him, but it did not earn them anything. It was that emotional level that was the problem. He was just beginning to deal with such things again.

It had made things personal when they should be anything but.

In some ways it still did. The blowback came quickly and fiercely. Genny stepped into the breach and it was well she did. He was weakened severely by his speech. It all unfolds before him, Catch's proclamation, Gloria's reaction, the careful shuffling away of a few select people in the crowd and the swift rise to riot from the rest.

Here is an interesting thing about speeches. When you've given enough, you start to notice things. The same people very often push to the front of the crowd time and time again. Oh, they don't always make it to the front, but they tend to make it close enough. It was a mix, really, a merchant able to hire a guy to do the pushing for him, a well-respected smith who people know better than to wrong unless they want to alienate the entire 'industry' as it was, the old codger with forty grandkids who will gladly do the pushing for him, the midwife who knows everyone's secrets and that no one will cross. It made certain things easier, though, by no means simple. Some of it was simply Glenn being Glenn. in some ways, he was far better and far worse than any mere midwife.

When Burnie spoke again, it was preceded with a shout. "Enough!" He had no cane and he had little strength, but he would say his piece. If they were to overwhelm him with rancor and malice after that, with fists and stones, so be it. "You," A beady finger went to the merchant in the second row, the one with the large man beside him wishing that, perhaps, they were further back. "Thomas, who am I? Did I not make you a map five years ago. You," the point to the midwife, "Theresa? Did I not find that book for you, the one with the herblore from Heath? You helped people with that, didn't you?" The third point was to the old man. "Geoffrey. I've dined with you and yours. I've been into your home and you into mine. I surveyed your eldest's farm for him. You know me. You all know me.

"Am I Helstone? Am I here to further my own career?" They pulled Helstone down. "To use the lot of you as a stepping stone? Am I Bromn?" They replaced him with Bromn. "Am I here to show my family a thing or two? Is that why I'm here? Am I them? Have I grown fat and rich on your pain and suffering? I've made money, yes, but I put it all back into Myrken, into my town and the land around it. I've made money for all of you and I've helped put food on your tables because you matter to me, even in this moment." Something grew hard and harsh in his voice; something grew dark in his voice. It was another shout, though not quite a scream. "Look at me! Do I look like I haven't known hunger?" He was gaunt. Before he had been athletic. If not handsome, he had been pleasant enough in a plain sort of way. Now, though, he was a ghost of a man, pale with sunken eyes. He had lost half of his body weight and only some of it had returned. "You," and this was to the orchard hand. "Unlike the others, you do not know me. I am Glenn Burnie." Those sunken eyes were upon him. His entire focus. "Tell the crowd! Do I look like I have not known hunger?"

It was just a momentary question for Glenn was then back to the masses, barely allowing the man to answer, if at all. Instead, he stepped before Genny, in part to protect her (at least symbolically), but all the more to lean back subtly against her so he did not fall over in what he was about to do next. "Do I look like I haven't seen loss? That I don't know what it's like to lose my family!" At that, he pulled a ring off of his left hand, an understated thing but nice enough certainly. It was not a strong throw and it was vaguely in Gloria Wynsee's direction. "You are the only family I have left. All of you. From the cruelest, most merciless of you to last man you strung up to that lunatik right there. You're all I have left."

His eyes searched through the crowd again, ending finally on that broad nosed man with the white hair. "Even you, friend. Even you, even though you would decry someone like Genevieve Tolleson here, someone that frankly, is more of a man than you'll ever be, for while you're looking to tear something down, to destroy it, so that you can feel better, she's thinking of ways of keeping order and helping to feed your family, of keeping people safe."

He looked back out to the crowd, extending his arms. If they wanted to tear him down, so be it. Helstone had survived Haberdasher's Row with flesh and blood and life. If his own people were so unwilling to be better than this, if they were so scared and tired and lost and unwilling to live up to what he had seen in them so many times before in so much worse conditions, then let them tear him down and work it out on their own. "The Creature, the Storyteller, the witch is dead. Rhaena Olwak is dead. Others," and no, at this stage he could not hide his vitriol, "have been strung up and are dead. Some who have been made great have been pulled down. Others who have benefited unduly will now benefit their neighbors to get all of us through the winter. I have known hunger and I would not see any of you suffer more from it, but what you do now, this terror you inflict amongst yourselves only makes it harder to prepare. We cannot yet control nature, but we can control our own. We can prepare and we can react, or you can keep hanging people and when times get tough, you can devour your neighbor instead of helping him. If that's what you want, please, start with me, for that is no Myrken I wish to live to see." And there he was, arms outstretched, leaning back onto Genevieve for support, more pale than when he began and looking like, perhaps, he might not survive the day even if everyone only gave him pats of the back and not outright violence.
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Cherny » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:29 am

He'd not been thinking. He'd not considered his words before he spoke them, caught up first in sifting meaning from the Governor's speech, and then lost in outrage at what he found, what he realised. He's telling lies, a startling epiphany that drops from his lips into Catch's bestial ear.

Even broken and warped as they are, there's a strength in the addled man's fingers where they tighten upon the boy's legs, enough to draw a hiss from between his teeth, enough to earn the madman a sharp pinch for the skin of his hand - something to draw his attention and remind him to be careful. Except then he's shouting, bellowing his denial across the market square even as Sera Genny - he knows her first as a baker of pies, and wonders for a moment why she's up there - does her best to quell the increasingly restive townsfolk.

As the echoes of Catch's shout fade, Cherny is abruptly aware of the mass of humanity that fills the square, the weight of bodies that press shoulder to shoulder and surround him and his friend, the surprised and angry and resentful faces turning in their direction. A woman nearby shouts lunatik, and the boy has a good idea where that will lead.

"C-catch, we have t-to go." Leaning forward to whisper urgently into the man's ear, cool hands pressed to the furnace of his brow, fingertips spread to either side of his scar as if to hold in his brains. "Look, there's t-too many people - there's g-going to be t-trouble, and they'll h-hit us with c-clubs."

The Governor steps up to speak again and Cherny takes the moment to look about, twisting in his perch on the madman's broad shoulders, dark eyes for the rooftops as much as for the crowd. There, there, a narrow gap between shopfronts, and he pushes and pulls at Catch's scarred skull, striving to turn his face away from the podium, towards a way out. Not wrenching, not commanding, but an insistent pressure that makes it easier to turn this way than that, to look here rather than there.

"Th-that way. We h-have to go."
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Guppy » Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:54 am

The wildling had heard of the upcoming speech, taken hold of the paper that declared the Governor's imminent words and she tugged it from its moorings. She had clutched the poster in hands chilled with winter's bite and chewed on her lips as her eyes ghosted over the words. Words that blurred as she looked through them. She recalled, in that moment, the posters she had painstakingly nailed to the wooden walls of businesses, to silent-standing fences in the dead of night. Her miniscule role had been forgotten, of course. She was not important, not like Cherny or Cat or Son. The Lady Marshall had not spoken with her since, had not thanked her for her sacrifice, had not made mention of the violence done to her. When she had been dragged, screaming, in front of the Lady Rhaena Olwak, when she had been beaten and dragged to the stocks to be lashed for her crimes - no one came for her. She still wore the bruises. No one came but an ostracized elf and a boy whose anger oft got the best of him. A boy who had been given his own heavy dose of violence. Glenn Burnie did not speak of them, The Unsung and True Heroes of Myrken.

She remembered the screaming, howling crowd surrounding her in the stocks, calling for her death. They despised her for what she stood for. She was a pale imitation of Olwak, one fallen from her grace, but she would serve their bloodlust well. The fact that Rhaena was the one distributing the punishment did not much matter to them. It was enough. She recalled their lust for violence against a simple girl who had been foolish enough to fall to Elliot's gentle charms. She had not noticed that they had been hiding the poisonous touch of his Lady. Perhaps she had not wanted to notice. She was a girl who, goaded by Gloria's steadying words, had thought to take down Olwak's ruffled reign of terror from within her fold. In the end, she had done little and fooled no one. The people did not love her, the politicians did not notice her, and life moved on without her.

So, it was with a growing sense of apathy that she arrived within the square. Caution made her choose a spot somewhat isolated from the proceedings. She leaned against a wall behind the crowd with arms crossed over her chest. She listened to the crowd's angry cries, their cannibalistic howls in the face of Glenn's words and she observed the mounting threat of violence. She watched as the people pressed forward towards the makeshift stage and the presumed uncaring, unseeing people in power. The rich, those who would fare this famine without blinking an eye, began to drift away nervously. Those who would lose more children to lack of food, who had heads shaved and knuckles rapped - they remained.

They wanted blood. They wanted revenge. They did not want pretty words from a man who had no strength to stand, much less to lead them.

There was a howl - Catch - at the back of the crowd, an addled man's bleat. I did it! Nacreous eyes caught and held on the young squire held aloft. There was danger for him here. A woman with red hair, a woman that had taken Elliot to be healed, staggered onto the stage to protect the Governor from the building fury. Things were devolving and she was reminded of cur dogs fighting over a bone. Pressing her lips together, she sighed with frustration before attempting to press further into the crowd. She had promised herself that she would not get involved. Nonetheless, she made her way towards Cherny and Catch, aiming a well-placed elbow in the ribs or a stiff shoulder to those in the crowd that unknowingly halted her forward progress. They would not notice gentle requests to move or polite mutterings. One answered violence with violence in this muddy, broken town. That was something she had learned well.

Burnie spoke again and she ignored his words. The torrent of the crowd's anger was unlikely to be stemmed at this point. Dimly, she heard the boy request to be taken away, but that would not stop her chiding. She owed him. She would take the opportunity the silence afforded to try to catch hold of the squire's dangling ankle. "Cherny," she hissed, dwarfed by Catch upon the ground, her eyes glittering and angry, "What do you think you are doing? If they recognize you, you will be killed." Her hands would attempt to press against Catch's back to gently nudge him forward and away. Fear made a low whine of entropic magic gather at the base of her spine. Runes flared to life, inked upon her skin.

---------

At a safe distance from the crowd, hidden in shadow, a woman rattled the numerous coins in her pockets. Coins that she had promised to the angry voices within the crowd. She fastened a cold, apathetic gaze upon the floundering Governor. It was a start.
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Tolleson » Mon Dec 16, 2013 4:51 am

Go back to her pies. Get off the stage. She should, shouldn’t she? This was no place for her, she wasn’t meant to bring voice to such words, especially to a fiction. The words spill a ruddy flush of anger across her cheeks just as the familiar voice of the madman rings out over those gathered. She winces against the crowd, as if the words are hot iron to flesh.

Inhale. She drew in air for only a moment, but deeply while she listened to the world, a cacophony of sound, of frustration. She listened to the emotion of the crowd like a thick and viscous drone. No, she felt it. It was a hot rush, a swirling river, it hit her with force and threatened to sweep her away. But still she held firm and when she could take no more air in, she stopped. In her mind a tiny bell tinkled and everything else became distant and muted, it was a specific sound, a memory of the small thing which had once been braided into her hair. It jingled softly, jovial, and clear.

The quick successive flashes returned. A younger Rhaena, with two good hands. Her brother Kals laughing his barrel-laugh. A mug of ale shared with Agnieszka. Glenn Burnie, certainly, even Genny herself. Flick, flick, flick, from one to the next. Then gone.

‘You will learn. I do not think that opening up will be your problem, but rather the opposite. That will take focus.’

Rhaena was here, present in this very moment, a living memory in her mind. Focus, her voice repeated, focus.


When her eyes opened again, no more than a second later, Glenn was eclipsing her, protecting her, leaning upon her. She caught him and gave a stern look to a handsome young man at the stage side as he spoke, a constable who was quickly up and beside them to lead the governor off with some dignity, while he still possessed the ability to stand. She would not let them tear him down, nor allow him to do it to himself.

A moment before she had been on the verge of tears but now, half behind the man married to Myrken itself, rose a clear voice; it is sturdy, loud, and projecting out beyond the bold old man, the orchard chap, and even the square jawed woman. Though the temptation was great to scowl at the man who had accused her of neglecting her job, her eyes and tone are even, the very essence of temperance. “Peace! You are… are all reasonable and your request is just! For I do have proof.”

A glance is spared for the subtle commotion several rows deep, Gloria, perhaps Ariane, and someone else. Someone this crowd needn’t pay attention to, and so her eyes quickly divert, dancing across faces, trying not to catch the eyes of anyone for fear she might lose what nerve she’d mustered.

“T-the account the Governor has relayed to… all of you is confirmed by the blood and evidence, as well as admissions of honorable Marshall Ariane Emory and Laralynn Smithwick, t-t-the house-maid of the late Ms. Rhaena Olwak. T-the two and miss Mrs. Agnieszka River were the only t-three individuals found to be present during the … the black hour, by t-the investigations of both t-the Inquistory and Constabulary… these findings were independent of Glenn Burnie or the… the council.”

Her eyes eventually could no longer wander, Catch was a large person and easily spotted and his rather overt admission had made him a center of attention. “Further more… even… our Mister Catch,” she refused to acknowledge or give credence the title of lunatik, more because of the posters than knowing it to be true or not.

“Even he, and the stoutly virtuous Miss Gloria Wynsee can attest t-that t-the Marshall was free of influence, if it had not been your daughter to bring justice... it would have been her.”

While some of this was rather circumstantial, or rather, all of it was – she was calm, giving the crowd the names of people they knew, calling them out, and most importantly giving them something other than hot rage to think about.

“Peace now... be civil and I will stay... I will answer each one... and, and all of your questions, in t-turn as I am able.” Peace in exchange for questions answered, proof provided. It was surely a test to see what this crowd wanted more, blood or answers.
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby channe » Mon Dec 16, 2013 5:41 am

Genny was going to get herself killed.
The governor was going to get himself killed.

That is, finally, enough.

Agnieszka cannot walk away from that.

She stops her egress, accompanied by her two guards. She skirts the outside of the crowd until ducking down behind the stage where the people have not been allowed to go. She makes her way up the stairs -- two, three, four, and isn't Ariane going to be just apoplectic? It's obvious she is hurt, that she can barely walk. She'll walk across the stage to Glenn and Genny, and here is Genny talking about answers, and they'll overwhelm her, won't they? With her shaking shoulders and her stuttering. She wasn't fast enough. Answers wouldn't be fast enough.

Agnieszka was.

Agnieszka on the stage, counting on the fact that there was still fear left to spare.

"Calm the fuck down," she snarls at the audience, her voice as loud as ever. "That woman, that monster," she says, "was a sister to me." She pauses. Looks at the crowd. "I've become a kinslayer for all of you. A kinslayer. My family is Dauntless; you know that that means. I am damned for you! Do you think that is something I would choose?" She takes a deep breath, that last ripped from her throat. "But I did choose it, because I love Myrken. She controlled me. She made me do those things. She made me the monster. And in the end --" apparently, and the look she shoots the Governor is not exactly happy -- "I reminded the whole world what Myrken is. What Myrken does. We kill the monsters that threaten our families. I killed the monster that threatened you. I may be a monster now, Myrken Wood, but I am your monster, Myrken Wood, and I did what I did because Myrken is my blood and my breath, and I'll do it again to any outside threat that threatens my family or yours." Which she's nearly out of. "This revenge shit is over. You've heard the Governor's true words and the words of the Inquisitor. I remain Chairwoman of the Defense Committee and every murder of a Myrkener against a Myrkener, for whatever reason, will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. There will be no more hangings. Revenge is done. It just makes you weak. And you are not weak, Myrken Wood. SO GO THE FUCK HOME. All of you. You are better than this."
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Rance » Mon Dec 16, 2013 9:59 am

There were times where her threads would tangle and twist together. Not even the finest seamstress could remedy such a trespass -- it was an inevitable downfall of the profession, no deft fingers could separate a too-stubborn string from its mass without cutting, extirpating individual threads from the knots.

Ariane's fingers left a soft series of depressions against her skin beneath the fabric of her dress. She stumbled forward, jutting out elbows to bite her way through the tightly-woven crowd as Glenn Burnie began, again, to speak--

You are the only family I have left. All of you. From the cruelest, most merciless of you to the last man you strung up to that lunatik right there. You're all I have left.

A glimmer of metal, a silvered insect plummeting toward the ground. The ring that Glenn Burnie had thrown landed in the mud and slush between the tips of her toes. She leaned forward, plucking it up betwixt thumb and forefinger, even holding it up before her eye so that she could examine the world through the circlet of fine metal.

Family.

And Genny spoke, too -- Genny used her name, weaved it through the air as if it were some precept of truth. As the seamstress continued to nudge and jar her way through the crowd, she thought, The Inquisitory did no examinations; the Inquisitory performed no investigations. They've done nothing; they discovered nothing. It's been quiet there. Orderly. These truths would have brought life to the place but--

Genny, too?

And Agnieszka. That was the final stroke, a belligerent and volatile reproof spoken alongside two other government representatives. Couldn't they see the cracks; could they, for all their wit, for all their intelligence, not understand what a seamstress did? They could fabricate speeches, write books, levy insults, but the more they protested, the more they promised, the more they pleaded, they stuffed their hands into fresh wounds and wrenched them apart, spilling more guts, promising more blood, ensuring more distrust--

She saw Cherny and Catch, a gleam in her periphery, redirecting toward a lesser-crowded pocket of the square. There was Noura, too, like a little ghost amid all the chaos, guiding with her touch and her words, though Gloria couldn't hear them over the din of dispute and dismay ebbing in the crowd.

In a small shear of silence, she said, very sharply, "No."

"Do you remember, Ariane," she might have said years later, "when we were all so angry, and you were the only one whose words I decided to trust? That was a strange day; that was a peculiar day, because -- and you know it as well as I -- I had my nose in everything: I'd been a Junior Inquisitor long enough to know there'd been no Inquisition investigation into Rhaena's death; I'd been in Golben with Glenn Burnie--" she drank; this was how friends did it, they drank and drank and talked and talked, "--and I'm sure his mind went as black as ours in the Hour.

"I knew too well, too, that when I looked at Agnieszka, when I heard her speak, I had to turn my back on what you suggested. Because Myrken Wood, for all its hangings, its confusion and rage, was
my family too. Perhaps more in that moment than Glenn Burnie's. One ought not lie to family, not when truth is so much more empowering.

"And if I'd known then that I was just as much of a killer as Agnieszka herself
claimed to be? I'd have shut my mouth and let someone better say what I did."

"Liars," the seamstress said, not with a shout or a cry at first, but like a shivering child leaning against the splintered wood of the podium, looking upon all three of them. "Liars. You're liars."

Because in that very small moment, hangings mattered nothing; safety, order, sense were all farces in the face of--

"You're no different from her. You're no different than Rhaena Olwak. None of you."
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby channe » Mon Dec 16, 2013 10:45 am

"And you're a foreigner who's been here for only five months!" she snarls back immediately afterward. Two can play this game, Gloria. You want a unified group with someone to hate? She'll make that happen for you. "Look at her! Look at the color of her skin! She arrived just before the Storyteller did, and she wormed her way into the government! She's probably a spy. Who are you really going to believe, Myrken Wood? You've known me and Genny all your life. You've known Glenn for years. But her? Is she even really who she says she is?"
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Re: The Art of the Possible

Postby Carnath-Emory » Mon Dec 16, 2013 11:16 am

Liars, Gloria proclaims - and that is the moment in which the Marshall begins to move with distinct purpose.

Look at her, Agnieszka retorts, aggression returned in kind - and that is the moment in which the Marshall begins to move with haste.

Faces in the crowd; an easy dozen of them happened upon before any of this nonsense properly began, and several of them not because she'd been looking but because they'd caught her attention with a greeting, with a grim-faced smile or an equable nod. Faces in the crowd, as nondescript as the fellows and families around them, and wasn't that always the Militia's very essence? Oh, they'd sported uniforms once - but only once, and not to draw a line between Militia and Myrken but to distinguish them from the Civils they'd trapped and battled upon Myrken's streets. They attract so little notice in this hour, not because they blend into the crowd but because they are the crowd, as much as any of the others around them.

But there's not a face that she doesn't know.
Not a face which doesn't have, for her, a name and some history attached.

Quiet words, here and there. A shoulder touched, an elbow caught; heads that had bowed to listen become heads that nod. There's no hesitation, not from these first few: she'd chosen those who'd understand and those who wouldn't hesitate, and they will be a living example for the rest to follow - if that even becomes necessary. Movement now, here and there amidst the crowd; movement with distinct purpose, wrought by men who bid their families return home while they take themselves in other directions entirely. While things are fetched - from not very far away; the town square, after all, and ask a swordswoman who'd lived through Townsedge and Haberdasher's if the town square had not featured in the drills she ran her men through. While over and again a man's attention is sought and gained: he and the friend beside him, perhaps, and those that hesitate are left to do as they feel is best -

She will not demand. Not of good, solid men who are not military at all but simply volunteers.

But this is preparation, and they are so careful with the positions towards which they move.
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