Show Me Your Glory [Fiddler]

[catch]

Begins



Ariane Carnath-Emory


It had never been easy between them. Noble Hrimfax, jewel of House Sleipner, entrusted like a parting gift to a reluctant recipient; of course it hadn't been easy. If there'd been some common thread between them besides a quiet yearning for the General's return, if the one weren't bound in inherited love and the other by breathless fear; even their flaws ran in different directions. She'd had to grow into him, this horse far too large for her, and she did it incautiously, hardly about to fear some bruising falls - and even then, he was seldom her mount of choice. Not even when she wielded him like a weapon against insurgent Janeiro, not even when a change of government had freed him from Meetinghouse stables and made Darkenhold his lasting home. His was an arrogance to rival even her not inconsiderable own, a capacity for violence over which she fretted except that sometimes it was laughter and sometimes it was delight - and when they first rode like they have today, all headlong breakneck speed and leaping those few obstacles they couldn't just crash right through, it could be something other than angry resentment, something more like -

"No," she's gritted near his flickering, heedless ear, "zapret'ty, dolboy'eb; izmudohat' -" A steady grate of sound, pleading and threatening by turn, even as she half-stood in the stirrups and struggled to manage it against the horse's mounting excitement. Like the steel in her veins he is all thoughtless distraction, each restless shift of the heavy body threatening to dislodge what clings to reins and saddle and sometimes hair. Like that silver body rushing hungry within her own, he challenges her ability to restrain, and "No," she breathes, and surely there's no hearing it now, "we do not, we do not do this - "

Catch Sings, and it hits them like a sandblast.

It is a shout through the heart of their world, abrading the senses and thrusting steel and stallion far out of her control. Its answer is the slow creak of stretching joints, the rustle of bristling steel; its rival is a woman's stunned cry, exultant and shocked and very nearly breathless. In the evening's light, dark Hrimfax gleams blackly iridescent, an oil-slick of interlocking scales and articulated tail, for ordinarily he is a horse-shaped thing because he is wanted to be -

But what he never was is a horse.

Catch's hands, boneless and burning, touch to the smooth chest of a thing which is still growing, and in this moment he exists in the shadow of a coiling neck, a maw become aquiline and glittering. Bunched shoulder-muscles are only slowly beginning to flex and she must seem smaller in their midst, for all that the armour has cloaked her in a tumble of bristling steel; she might seem insignificant and at threat if not for the laughter which is bright, bright even within the steel which is her helm. For this is Hrimfax made manifest, and

they never do this, they never ever do this

as he draws to his full height, as the leathery wings stretch slowly from his sides, it is with a roar of basso sound. A roar like a challenge, that resonates through bones and nerves, that churns earth and blisters air.

[catch]

Catch


"You are beautiful!"

He finds the human-words, torn from his mind and his throat, as hot air sears his lips, steals his breath away with more than heat. His eyes squint against the power of the bellow, tears and tendrils ripped away in greasy strands about his face. His hard hands burn with the furnace that beats under them, the great belly of the beast, a silver Wonder taken from him, far above. His words are for her, and him, all but lost in the roil and howl of his roar.

The Fiddler is far behind, the Glutton a smear on the ground. It was them, now, just them, and Catch drags his hands from the beast, crouching blindly against the ground, holding great handfuls of it in his excitement, in his pleasure. He Calls back, the commanding peel of Bells, a great, silver sound that should not come from a throat of flesh.

He cannot stop his laughter, even as the dragon-beast makes his blood boil, silver blisters bubbling his skin, bursting in a wet slap of freed tendrils and rippling muscle.

[Carnath-Emory]

Alone, now; she knows it with a hasty turn of the helmed head, a quick and pale-eyed search of tangled forest and ruined earth. It's the far-away Fiddler that commands the world's attention, just as it rightly ought to; all eyes are turned there with only a broken Councilor left to remain - and that one's gone so far beyond seeing anything at all. We never do this,

she'd said, there where heavy curtains hid them away from the dawning sun and each breath filled
her lungs with the scent of woodsmoke and oil and skin. I never do this, she'd whispered, and it was with
her hands that she spoke these words, with a touch like bloodletting, like a surrender to raw excess

but even Myrkentown is miles away, distant enough to be quarantined from the things that wild-eyed monsters will do. They're alone here, so utterly alone, and all her furious, desperate insistence has come to nothing, for dark Hrimfax has shed hooves and mane and pelt with raw vigour and his enthusiasm is intoxicating; she cannot quite help but be caught up in its breathless grip. There is no easy resisting it -

And in the midst of such sudden freedom, there is no reason to even want to.

You are beautiful! cries the Catch, and she has no breath left for words, but he will have his answer in the serpentine stretch of Hrimfax's gleaming throat; in the slow stretch of dark wings, haughty and proud. He will have his answer in a woman's laughter; for all that he's agitated her steel into a bristling chaos, there's no mistaking the sound of her smile. Beautiful, he'd shouted at them both, even as the silver threads churned loose across his skin and hers, and there should have been some sympathy for those hurts, but his was a laughter to rival her own and there was no thought left for that at all. Not when the sudden tension of these wings loosed them from the dark soil, a slow bunching of the powerful legs thrusting leaving them unshackled and airborne and - I know, she's laughed.

We are.

[catch]

He leaps for the air, his great wings cupping the fragrant, cool spring, a lover's caress that tore itself across his skin, crouched, blistered, bleeding. But none of it mattered, none of it cared. Catch shouts for sheer joy, leaping to his cracked feet, laughter torn in ever greater peals from him as he leaps. Hard, calloused fingers, they burn in the light, and they are far enough, far enough, to touch - a bare cushion of air - a curved, obsidian talon. He leaps again, like a mad thing dancing in full moonlight, but they are, now, beyond his reach. It is maddening. It is unacceptable, and he is torn between righteous fury and vast joy at seeing Hrimfax and Airy Ann, true-selves, above him.

His skin bulges, where hot air had cracked and turned away, tendrils slipping through, wisps of cilia that wished, dared for greater things. But it would not come to him. The weight of the world, under Fiddler and Dragon, was much too great, and his hands, his scars, denied him.

There was a real shriek of fury, now, of terror, because they were going, leaving him, becoming a speck of black, and he could not follow.

Come back, he cries, a soul-cry, because his lips were bound by the thick tendrils formed by his tears, gumming his pseudomuzzle shut, gripping and writhing at the denial wrought in patterns on his hands.

With a strength of rage he throws himself at the nearest tree, he scrambles his way, bullying and snapping, gouging great, steaming chunks of bark, melting like hot fat beneath his hands, leaving giant scars of oozing, sticking blood-sap. To the very top, where his weight sways the tree, where his weight will allow him to go no further, and he - he, a madman - has no second thoughts, but hurls himself skyward.

For this moment, he is free. His body strokes the air, suspended, and the World considers - it, briefly, considers - that it might let him go, that it might set him free, and the weight of him would be gone. There would be no beginning, and no end, as it was meant, and the Star-begotten would be free among his stars, t leave, leave, go as he will.

That is what he dreams. But reality is a chain far more real than the markings in his hands. With a cruel jerk, his body falls, as it must, to the ground. A bone-jarring impact, and Catch's wind is knocked from him, pain jerking through his tortured body. He is stunned, and he cannot breathe proper, smell proper, see proper as red and black swim in his vision. He could not even see the two above him, but perhaps that is a kindness.

[Carnath-Emory]

They are breathlessly weightless with each surge of the dark wings. This woman who is sometimes only a weapon, this horse which is oh so much more: they have lunged for the summer skies, devouring distance with each fleeting moment, for grand Catch has touched his hand to the dark beast's claws and that is enough to make this a game. It is catch or be caught, and over and over they've darted dangerously near those clutching hands, but sheer momentum is infectious and the world smells of springtime and blood and burn; they are increasingly lost to their own precious violence

this weapon, this monster
this feral beast, this laughing girl

and when his roar resonates like fine thunder through their bones, the answer is a daring shout: his or hers; even the swordswoman could not have said which throat loosed that sound, and does it even matter in the end? For it's the rider whose steel-clad arms are flung wide in its midst - like a beckons, like a reckless challenge. A challenge, even as he ascends the very tree in a fury of ruinous haste and leaps, a challenge for the beautiful Catch who can withstand their games, who could kill them so easily and who could never, never die -

His fall sharpens her gasp into a cry.

Stunned and shaking, and for all their speed there is no sparing him that tumble; they plunge for him all the same, a dart of black motion through brilliant atmosphere and hands must grip so that the sky will not seize her back up again. Plummeting haste steals the breath from her lungs, and that is how she'll hit the ground before they've properly landed at all: wholly breathless, boot-heels skidding through loose earth and the whole of her becoming a staggering dash towards him. Surely she'd shaped his name, even if the lungs could not quite manage to feed it sound. Surely there was that much, as she clawed the helm back from her face like so much glutinous quicksilver and hastened to his side:

"Oh, Catch," but the heart is a thunder within its delicate cage and she can hardly hear the words over the race of her own blood. "Oh, Catch. Sometimes we forget

how to be anything but stormclouds and sky,
sometimes and always and
but it's alright, now. It's alright now, m'aruthreddau, please - "

Please.

[catch]

His eyes swim into focus, and they do not see what they expect to see. It was their duty. It was their right, as glorious, furnace-driven winged things, of a Silver-wrought star. That. more than the fall, more than Fire, took his breath away, snatched away any words he may have wished to form. He huddled against the ground, clutching at it, feeling it weep like a jilted, lost lover -

how could he leave it? why would he wish to try? he is a terrible thing with terrible wants, and the world does not deserve him.

His eyes gazed up at her, unbelieving, the pupils of them so tiny that they were lost, lost in pools of sky-blue pale and glimmering opal, a blind thing who could just see.

"Why are you here," he finally manages, broken, just as angry as he had been at Earth and Gravity and harmless marks on his skin, a mere whisper in his struggle for air. He struggles to rise himself, but as a rabbit in a snare, all he could manage was to thrash uselessly against the ground. His hand reaches, and he does what he has told he musn't. He touches, he grips, his fingers sticky with sap, sticky with serum, extra fingers in the form of smoke, all-color tendrils gripping, probing. His forehead splits wide open, and he cannot help the sudden tears, silver, fat things, he cannot help but cry, unmanfully. The Fiddler, the Glutton - the sound of little bones snapping, of little Cat dancing away, and Cherny - Cherny! - watching him as he tore the Fat Man apart.

He weeps, clutching at Airy Ann, in the shadow of the glory that is Hrimfax, and he cannot even put to words what he felt. Worthless. Hideous. A mimicry of everything she and Hrimfax could be. He did not hide as a man, he was a man, only half of everything and nothing full. It hurt, now, where once there had been only joy. It hurt to look at Airy Ann and her not-horse, where before there had only been joy.

"Don't look at me!" he tells them, scolds them, like a child. "I was - I was Grand, once, I was Good!"