The Happy Heart Is A Lovely Dreamer

[Carnath-Emory]

The parlour, a gilded tribute to the transformation of Euclidean architecture into aesthetic delight. Crimson drapes hold the impudent sun at bay, a check upon its swollen excess. Too much is too much. Rich carpeting will not acknowledge that it ever suffered beneath your shoes; upon the side-table a selection of delicate pastries awaits your interest.

The artist occasionally paints in blood with steel. Today her medium is watercolours. A slender brush, as sharpened as any quill; the delicate hand, deft in its application of thin paint to thirsty paper. Colour blooms beneath her touch, and in the instant between one heartbeat and the next it is stunningly out of control -

There are twenty-seven pretty blossoms upon the page, and this one will be the next. The artist is yet to tire of crimson flowers. When she does, she will commit this page to the hearth's gentle flames, for this is Myrken, and that's what we do to what's dead.

Twenty-eight silver pretty blossoms, then. A strange flower, beautiful, but too fanciful. The hearth accepts her offering. Gentle flames feed upon the fruit of meticulous inspiration. Her collar is a noose. She loosens it, but only for a moment.

Surfaces glisten like fresh-spun mornings. Tomorrow there'll be a game of battledore and shuttlecock upon the lawn, if the weather permits; it always does. Perfect picnic baskets. Duck confit and pomegranate juice. In the wind, the grass shall ripple just so.

[Carnath-Emory]

If the morning has grown still and expectant -
If the very air should seem impertinent, damp upon the brow and heavy in the lungs -
If not a single breath of breeze will emerge to stir the sitting-room's delicate curtains -

Then before her golden rays were stolen away, a lady might do well to repair to her garden, where even delicate colour will thrive beneath the blanket of heavy sunlight, there to arrange herself upon the gilded chaise-lounge and refresh her throat from a wine-glass that glistens like damp exhaustion. The pleasant restorative is depleted all too soon, as if it was never there.

Even that cannot bring a sigh to peculiarly parched lips.

Hands that once set aside steel have found their fulfillment in a dozen gentler occupations. On some days it will be the paintbrush, as slender as any author's quill, entrancing the eyes with the restrained chaos of blossoming colour. Today, the brush misplaced - perhaps it has escaped her, perhaps it wants for a moment's rest from a lady's demanding skill - it is the transformative effect of an artist's touch upon pristine parchment. A folded corner describes a jaunty little ear, two careful creases produce a wagging tail. Bisected twice over, turned amongst the fingers just so, the haughty crane defies the prison of her hands and darts free amongst a willow's gentle branches until it fades from view, snatched up as if by the branch itself.

It is time to start over from the beginning.

A single pomegranate, split open with a pretty butter-knife, will reveal at least twenty and no more than thirty seeds. Thirty individual sweet-tart moments; berry-stained fingertips and easy laughter. Crinkling parchment overflows her palms, a rustling abundance of seeds falling loose between her fingers. According to promise, we are very well off. Upon the horizon, gathering clouds play contrapuntal to tumbling paper and wrinkled gifts: the whisper of faraway winds, a threnody, the artist imagines, for the coming of storms.

The distant grey of sullen stormclouds never makes good on its promise of rain.

[Carnath-Emory]

The library is a study in restrained grandeur.

Bookshelves do not quite stretch to the horizon. Wheeled ladders do not convey petitioners towards the heavens. What warms the hearth is hardly a bonfire, but books that have fueled young minds can nourish hungry flames, too, and there are so many of them here. So many. While the evening is cool with unfulfilled promises, the lady who has retreated to the library's hearth feeds its fire with a generous hand; according to thermodynamics, we are very well off.

There is a sort of magic at work here. Upon the lady's silken lap there rests a novel of substantial dimensions, parted to a chapter which she cannot read. It's not the book's fault. For hours its words have squirmed upon the page, writing and un-writing and all in the name of communication: a fruitless effort for unappreciative eyes. The tome yields its page - but not without a futile attempt at resistance; penned originally by a generous author, the thing seems to have been possessed by a spirit far less gracious.

If only her wrist was a bit less supple.

The name for this magic is origami: the means by which a lady's delicate fingers transform dull text into a rose of ravishing contours, the art by which tiny petals drip from her palms as the little crane escapes her blossoming intentions, loosing itself with a song like the bright ring of steel and fluttering upon crinkled wings towards the ceilings -

Hers is a temperate frown. Dissatisfaction requires that, like its predecessors, this book be consigned to the flames.

Were she to find the appropriate author, the necessary title, her art might not all turn into cranes. But that's alright. This is a library, after all. Its stock is abundant and the evening is long. It's only a matter of time. It is a solemn task and a solemn event, a token of the barbarism eternally evident in her adoptive homeland. There are words for this, but she prefers a thin, polite smile, a sign of her affection and a reminder that it was not at all the book's fault. It was simply the way of things. It could not be -

An undignified yelp escapes her lips.

The book falls from fingers made fragile through surprise.

An origami crane, returned for revenge has lodged itself, beak bent just so, into her forehead.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Night after night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. Possession and deposession. The flowers of the moon, the broad-backed palms of jungle growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of a child, the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snow-flakes, the floorless bottom where smoke blooms into flesh. And what is flesh but moon? and what is moon but night? Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.

[Carnath-Emory]

Spiteful bird: it comes away beneath her fingers and savages them for their tenderness. Paper wings collapse amongst even the gentlest hands, pale feathers and papercuts and everywhere the copper-sweet scent of shouldn't and can't and want. What slights the flesh has quickened the heart.

"What have you done!" she cries, to an audience which rustles its dry amusement. Books are obstinate, less interested in written than read; she will have no help from those.

"All I want to do," she sighs, casting an accusing glance towards the ceiling's murals, but the figure which is their centerpiece gazes down with nothing but scorn for a girl and her useless hands. "All I want to do is love you," she breathes all the same, mindless of the face she's lifted towards their eyes: hairline fractures in the porcelain of her skin, things she needn't see to know. Its outstretched hand is a challenge, is a gleaming accusation; stung, she averts her eyes.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Night after night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. Possession and deposession. The flowers of the moon, the broad-backed palms of jungle growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of a child, the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snow-flakes, the floorless bottom where smoke blooms into flesh. And what is flesh but moon? and what is moon but night? Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.

[Glenn]

To avert your eyes is to accept your own helplessness in the face of change, to hide from it, to attempt to void it through pretending it is not there. Life is change, though.

"You've changed."

The voice tells you one thing immediately. You aren't alone. You know somehow that it is the face above you, the face attached indirectly to the outstretched hand. It defies its own reality to accuse you! How dare it! Things should be as they are. Reality should not be mutable, no matter the weight of the accusation! There was a proper order to thi... You had hesitated in opening your eyes and now there was a carefully folded sparrow lodged into a tiny crack upon your forehead.

"I was afraid of you, you know."

The voice is behind you now! It was always behind you. You turn your head, the sparrow (and why a sparrow? What a paltry bird to take the time and effort to fold!) falling to the ground, paper transforming feathers as it plummets. You do not witness this in your haste, but it is a truth and you know it anyway.

"Now you're just sad."

An invader. A man in black. You do not even recognize him at first. The clothing is fine but the style is overstated, that of a braggart, of a peacock in monochrome, yet somehow sleek and functional as well. It's a balance that took effort. Why a sparrow? Why this? It is punctuated with the Lady Marshall's own necklace, that of opal and perfectly stated grace.

"Then again, I suppose I am too, huh?"

He is perched now, having stolen a column from the mural, somehow, miraculously. He looks down at you from upon it, a few feet above your head. He is your Lady's knight, but he is very much not. He is Elliot Brown. He is clad in all black. He is perched, and with a definitive crunch, you know that he's pilfered the mural's apple as well.

"You want a bite?"

[Carnath-Emory]

What crawls the ceiling so slowly is change, is art as a tool of perpetual motion. The barbaric juggernaut strains beneath the weight of lifting his sword for a blow that might come to fruition before year's end; the hand outstretched -

seize this
seize this, if you're able

- will be weeks in folding a fist about what cannot be stolen. Life is the static drip-drip of feathers through their hourglass, life is the ruin of her pretty skin (why a sparrow? why is it always her face?) and the slow descent of blood across the bridge of her nose.

"What a horrid boy you were."

The man in black wears a reprobate's smile, weathered with use but not without its charm. Some tiny, desperate animal creeps within the dark of those eyes, cowers in the shade of their fierce charisma and then, and then, and then the peacock is just a boy and the girl is just bloodstained alabaster.

"The world is a vale of tears. You'd know that if you knew how to read."

Clinging, clinging as she peers between the ladder's rungs.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Night after night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. Possession and deposession. The flowers of the moon, the broad-backed palms of jungle growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of a child, the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snow-flakes, the floorless bottom where smoke blooms into flesh. And what is flesh but moon? and what is moon but night? Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.

[Glenn]

Powerful legs. He had them. A dancer's legs were powerful. No one ever much thought of that. It was always the grace. He could have been a dancer in some troupe that might have some day existed in Myrken. Instead, he ended up a knight. How fickle fate might be. He might have even ended up planting flowers. Here and now, though, he was using this powerful legs to hang precariously, upside-down and backwards, over the edge of the column. When he peered at her, it was with hair dangling down, unkempt. You could dress up something wild, but it was no less wild for the effort.

"I had an argument with your architect," her silver duck noose as it were, "who, weirdly enough, never shows up in your dreams, except for as an oncoming storm maybe (is that him?), one that you usually whisk away with some flowery smelling water. Is that weird? I think it is," foul reprobate, she says? Well, fine, let her. It only encouraged bad manners. My Dreamwitch called me her little prince, you know. I rather hated that, except for that I didn't at all. He arched his back more, extending his hand out as if to do a one-armed handstand onto nothing. As he did, the outstretched hand of the mural was simply there, reaching not down but up and he balanced against it at an impossible angle, as if through his sheer force of will.

"We spoke about books. I said that there was nothing you could learn in a book that you couldn't learn better through just living. He said that there is knowledge that's lost, that no one knows, and that you could only learn in a book, like an old design. I had to give him that, but I don't know how useful that stuff is, right?" He pushed forward in order to slip through the fingers of the hand. The act seemed to spur on some strange whistling noise, if only from the friction. It was enough to bring forth a wind and enough to whisk up the fallen sparrow, slightly dabbed with blood, which grew in size as the breeze took it upwards. The young man in black landed upon it, and the paper bird simply hovered there in the air, allowing him to perch himself once more.

"That bit about tears, though? That sounds like an idea, and good ideas aren't lost, because anyone who thinks can come up with them. So we all wear a veil of tears, huh? I think mothers in Myrken do, sure. It's easier to move things in water, though, right? Easier to move something down a river than on land. So they all make a river with their veils of tears that they wear, and then, we're able to move past the things we never would be able to otherwise."

[Carnath-Emory]

He's not even a peacock at all. Not really.

"There are monkeys in the books. You'd never know that by living, as they all died long before ever you were born. There are monkeys in the books and when they are terribly distressed, they pluck the fur right out of their skin. One little hair at a time until there's nothing left at all, and that's what you seem like to me, you horrible boy: a tragic little monkey wagging its bottom in the - "

Handstands upon the palms of legends. Monkeys capering upon bird's backs. Let him have his sport.The lady's answer is a haughty sniff and delicately-averted eyes.

"He's not my architect, you know." She'd intended upon ignoring him - close your eyes; ten seconds and he'll be gone - but there are certain matters that must not go uncorrected, and if she ascends the height of this ladder she might look him in the eye as she manages this one. Little red stains on the wood where her hands have been; sticky fingers, the taste of pomegranate seeds fed one by one to laughing lips -

"It never does storm, anyway." A sullen glance. Trailing silk coils protectively about the rungs below her feet. "Summer drags on and on, endless as all the pages in all the books, hot but never burning, grey but never storming," an outflung arm directs his eyes towards a wall of windows

LOOK

where gather the clouds that jealousy hoard their rain. "It might as well be a desert. I wonder," for she's drawn level with him now; slippered toes precariously balanced, a cautious glance around the ladder's edge. "I wonder if you'd rather that, little boy. There'd be no tears for either of us there. The Glass Sun would burn them from our eyes. Would you still be sad if it was the desert?"

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Night ḁ̻͖͕ͅf͎̣͝t̳e̝̟̬̙̠r̴̤ night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. Possession and deposession. The flowers of the moon, the broad-backed palms of jungle growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of a child, the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snow-flakes, the floorless bottom where smoke blooms into flesh. And what is flesh but moon moon? and what is is moon ̩̬̖̰b̺͇͙̳͓̣̀ͅu̥̺̙ṱ͎̱̠̰͙͖̀ ̙̮night? Night is longing, longing,longing, beyond all endurance.

[Glenn]

"Okay, so monkeys, right?" He led with words but they were interspersed with action. She had tried to meet his eyes, tried to reach his level. There'd be none of that on her terms, even if it was her dream. He rolled forward, right off the floating sparrow. As he did, he snatched a wing with his hand. The roll continued, once, twice in midair, the sparrow flipping along with him, growing smaller and smaller with the rotations until it was small enough to throw. Just before hitting the ground he did just that, aiming for yet another crack with Solena-trained precision. "Past making some stupid metaphor, how are monkeys useful at all. And it is stupid. Don't think it isn't. It's dismissive. And there's nothing more small minded than being dismissive."

The bow was a sweeping thing, a bravo's bow, not a knight's bow. It was not perfection but instead it was flourish, it was brazen, it was an invitation for someone to drop a very large rock upon his head. His eyes were downcast, but not in a humble reverence, not in prayer or meditation. It was defiance. The boy was staring defiance upon the very earth beneath him, staring defiance at gravity itself. "So congratulations. Your books have taught you be small minded and petty." He began to applaud, not breaking the bow, yet as he did, his stubbornness won out and slowly, ever so slowly, no hands, no sparrows, nothing but his will and his sheer defiance, Elliot Brown began to hover off the ground. Had he knocked her off the ladder with the sparrow? If not, he will be back upon her level, finally, at his terms. If so, he'll be looking down upon her again.

"Don't you see, Ariane? Even in the desert, I would bring Autumn. I'm bringing it to you now." Elliot Gahald took the cold of winter and brought forth spring.

Elliot Brown did something else altogether.

[Carnath-Emory]

How wide, the eyes which peer at him from around the ladder's edge; how cautious, the cling of her hands. Her skin leaks tiny beads of arterial scarlet, and even now they trace a slow and glistening line across the narrow bridge of her nose.

A lady is hardly a lady without her jewels.

"Monkeys aren't useful at all. That's rather my point." Look at this one, though, dazzling a lady's eyes to spite her voice's cool disdain. Heels over head, he flies, impervious to the tittering shelves and their dusty gossip. Look at all this splendid defiance: he hasn't spared an eye for the windows and their swollen clouds, scoffing at the troublesome physics of ascent and collapse. The shelves sprout balconeys, sweating splinters in the wrenching labour of birth, as overhead the hourglass surrenders a single feather and a titan's sword loosens bronzed blood -

In the empty air between them, the sparrow hangs suspended and still.

"I'd like to have Autumn." A concession, as remote as her eyes. "Autumn is best for orchards. I don't much care for apples


their taste is the cold, still moment
the expectation, the silent breath
and murder rushes after

but I've made a promise, you see, and my promises are always good. I'm not sure what you're good for, monkey-boy, but I don't imagine it's 'bringing'." He'd brought her a sparrow, though. Look, look how it spreads its wings. A wordless invitation; her eyes watch, thoughtful. "No. You've rather the look of a boy who likes to take. A monkey on the ceilings, stealing what glitters and fumbling at locks. Is that your business here? Lockpicking?"

Warm little bird-body, swollen with the weight of what it struggles to contain.

"How presumptuous."

Tender little thing, head flung back in the instant that the steel emerges like a blade from its throat. Impaled, in a heartbeat that scatters feathers and ruptures what flesh remains, a contained detonation of meat and bone and -

"You should've asked the architect. I'm sure he'd have been so much more obliging."

Elliot Brown's defiance invites a rock to the head. Ever-contrary, the ground opens beneath him instead. At the last possible moment she takes it back, takes it back, and his hand slides between her fingers as he plummets into darkness.



Two nights later, she dreams of autumn deserts after all.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Night ḁ̻͖͕ͅf͎̣͝t̳e̝̟̬̙̠r̴̤ night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. P̷͓̖̦͓̞͖ͅo҉̗̖̞̹̱ͅş͎̝̭̟̭s̞͍̥e̮̩sṣ̥̙̮̜͡i͍̺̬̙͙ͅon and deposession. The flowers of the moon, the broad-backed palms of jungle growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of a child, the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snow-flakes, the floorless bottom where smoke bͦlȏom̊̓ͭ́̊s into flesh. And what is flesh but moon moon? and what is is moon ̩̬̖̰b̺͇͙̳͓̣̀ͅu̥̺̙ṱ͎̱̠̰͙͖̀ ̙̮night? Night is longing, longing,longing, beyond all endurance.

[Glenn]

He found the first drops of rain when she was aged four. Dauntless winters were cold. Her clothes were bulky and warm. Icicles had formed, long drips of water, water that he could not touch. She could, and wanted to and did, but the water had dripped all the way down before it froze. The ground beneath her was frozen and her clothes left her too little room to move. She ran too fast and feet got away from her. She slipped and fell and the clothes could not protect her from the hard, unforgiving ground. He took the first drops from her tears.

He found the second drops when she was eight and in love. It wasn't much more than a rat, and her mother wanted to kill it with the rest - only one sort of girl would keep a cat and a stray one at that, she said; a girl who was very obviously a fool and wanted to kill it with the rest, but she begged until begging didn't work and then she stole it away to her room anyway. Scrawny thing, all eyes and stomach. She couldn't let go of the idea of it anyway. Its fur would be soft against her cheek. She would hoard tiny bits of her own dinner to feed it later from her hand. Something small and soft and tender, just for her. Something to love, and the first time she hugged it to her chest it scratched itself free, ran and ran and never looked back.

He found the third when she was eleven and staring through windows. Trouble, if she was caught, and she didn't care, because they were dancing in there and she wanted it more than anything. They were dancing, steel back and forth across the cold stone floor: today her brother had swords and tomorrow he'd have their father's horse; by year's end, perhaps, he'd be off to find his fortune amongst Nikolaev's guard. Clumsy boy. She wanted to laugh when he fell again, fell again, but the want was so fierce that she could hardly breathe; envy, hot and angry and stinging and she hardly even noticed when the first raindrops began to slide down the windowpane.

The final drops were his own, the cold, bitter tears of a boy forced to burn his heroes and his peers amidst muffled screams and a quickly encroaching rot. The tears needed to be cold and the tears needed to be bitter, for they were to cool the desert and send summer into full retreat.

He had made a dare. He had made a claim and now? Now she found herself in a dream that was only indirectly of her making. The air was cool and the sky was overcast. Rain fell but he seemed to somehow dance between their drops. She did not. Lightning struck the sand once, twice, thrice, and the result was glass, a table rising up before her and upon it a chessboard. The glass of the table was cracked but the pieces, one side beautiful, the other side rough and jagged, were both smoky through and through. On this chessboard, both sides were grey.

[Carnath-Emory]

Girls in white dresses are good for only one kind of dancing, and it's not the sort practiced by rogues in chance rainstorms. Even the sorts of rogues that have stolen though memories - that have stolen from them, too, and emerged largely unstained.

Even the sort that, taunted with locks, walk right through an unattended door instead.

Clever boy. She wants to stare, when he slides across the sand like it were glass beneath his feet, but the air's so heady with ozone that she's helpless but to laugh. Look how he does it: again, again; again in the moment that all the world slows to an aching crawl. Each glistening raindrop, descending with all the weight of a lifetime's slow sorrow. His wrist's narrow tilt, a hairsbreadth's distance between his skin and its clinging touch -

Cascading lightning jolts the world back into motion and leaves her shivering at the chessboard's edge.

"It's the sport of gentlemen, isn't it." But the colours are all wrong. It shouldn't matter and perhaps it really doesn't; for a time her hands only know the texture of glass like water, slick beneath her touch and far less unreliable. Her dark hair's damp, but her hands are as well, and to touch her fingertip to the surface is to watch as a single droplet bleeds across the pale of her skin, descending knuckles and traversing nails - "Like badger-baiting and fox hunts." - and when lightning flickers feverish through the clouds it illuminates a playing-board that glistens with something other than rainfall -

"I thought I would die here." Her head lifts; her eyes, stark black lashes against cheeks the rain's bled pale. "These murderous sands. You're a marvelous dancer. For a monkey."

But her eyes give lie to the slight her lips had spoke.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________Night ḁ̻͖͕ͅf͎̣͝t̳e̝̟̬̙̠r̴̤ night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. P̷͓̖̦͓̞͖ͅo҉̗̖̞̹̱ͅş͎̝̭̟̭s̞͍̥e̮̩sṣ̥̙̮̜͡i͍̺̬̙͙ͅon and deposession. .̧́҉ ̕T҉̢h͘͝e҉̴́ ̵fl̴͢òwe̷r͢s̀ ͠͞o̢f̨ ̴͏t͘͝h̕͠e͘ m͞ó͜òn̵̷͠, , the broad-backed palms ǫ̿̋f̽ͧ̽͒ͥ͛̒ ̇ͫ̍̂ju͂n͌̊gle̴͊̊̾ ̷̐̂͛growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of a , the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snow-flakes, t̅̋ͮ̃̉hͧ̏ͤ̈̉̂̄e͛̏͋́ ͂ͪ͌͡ḟl̴ͦͪͧͧ̿͋o̍̓ͯ̐͊͊o̔͆̀͊̑̉̚r͛͗̓̚͝l͊̀̾̔̋̚e̒͒̋̽͗̊ͦs̓̓͊͞s̛̀̓͆͒ bottom where smoke bͦlȏom̊̓ͭ́̊s into flesh. And what is flesh
but moon? and what i̶̭͇̬͇͍͔s̭̬̩ moon ̩̬̖̰b̺͇͙̳͓̣̀ͅu̥̺̙ṱ͎̱̠̰͙͖̀ ̙̮night? Night is ͘l̷̛͠ǫng̵̨͟í̛n̨͟g̕͞, longing,longing, beyond all endurance.

[Glenn]

How does one unlock a mirror?

He could unlock a door. He could unlock a heart. He could unlock a mystery. He could unlock hatred and horrors. Even hope. A mirror though? It was like unlocking a fish or unlocking one's tooth. There was no sense to it. He stood on one side, transparent surrounded by memories all the more transparent. On the other side was Ariane, gardening, living this strange dream life. He could move freely between one side and the other but he could not take things from one side to the next. What he could do, however, was go back before the mirror existed and that he did.

It led them to now. "I don't believe you keep calling me a monkey. You're Ariane Emory. I told you. I was afraid of you." He was upset, annoyed. It led to short sentences. "And you keep calling me a monkey. Well you're a poofball. You're a ..." There was the abject sense of things going wrong. That was fine. "You're what you aren't and I'm what I am and the rain? I bring it." He would let it fall upon her.

He would look down to the glass before him and move the jagged looking knight halfway across the board. It was quickly apparent that the dreamboy in black, dancing between the drops, had no idea how to play chess.

"And we are playing for no less than your very soul."

[Carnath-Emory]

There ought to be lightning again, when he moves his playing-piece so aggressively. Your very soul, he intones, the sort of announcement which ought to herald the coming of tempests, and indeed there's a moment in which she turns a hopeful eye towards the heavens. But for all that the rain's incessant - wonderful, cries the soul, wonderful and yet more wonderful - its clouds do not oblige, and the tangy breath of ozone is a promise as yet unfulfilled.

His charging knight encounters her own and the cracked-glass world ends in flames.

"That's how it all went wrong," murmurs the lady in ivory silk; does it even matter that he's not the right man in black? "It's why you were right to be afraid of me. There wasn't the lion born that knew how to make gentle choices."

The board repairs itself in a stutter of death and rebirth.

"You're not really a monkey, though." There's an apology written into the pale of her eyes. "You're a boy who wrestles beneath the bridle of what he could become. I know it's hard, the first time." Eyes which had apologised can allow for some quiet sympathy, as well. "I know it hurts."

Words barely breathed. A moment is required. A moment for sorrow and a moment for hope; a moment in which to lift her face to the rain, soft upon the whispering sands -

"This is how we must begin."

But how her hand hesitates before choosing its Queen.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________Night ḁ̻͖͕ͅf͎̣͝t̳e̝̟̬̙̠r̴̤ night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. P̷͓̖̦͓̞͖ͅo҉̗̖̞̹̱ͅş͎̝̭̟̭s̞͍̥e̮̩sṣ̥̙̮̜͡i͍̺̬̙͙ͅon and deposession. .̧́҉ ̕T҉̢h͘͝e҉̴́ ̵fl̴͢òwe̷r͢s̀ ͠͞o̢f̨ ̴͏t͘͝h̕͠e͘ m͞ó͜òn̵̷͠, , the broad-backed palms ǫ̿̋f̽ͧ̽͒ͥ͛̒ ̇ͫ̍̂ju͂n͌̊gle̴͊̊̾ ̷̐̂͛growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of ą̦͉̳̦͙͈̱͎̺̈́̾̏̔̏̉̓͘͠͠ ̢̖̗̘̞̫̣̜̱̘̽̈́̓̉̋̔̄̄͠͝c͎͓͎̙̮͖̣̭̣͖̐̔́̏͗̅̕͘̕͠ḩ͈͇̳̰̟̫͉̠̺̎́͌̊͛̔͑͒̕͘i̧̜̥̼̦̜̺̰̘͎̍̿̓̃̊͂̄̚̚͝l̛̦̳͔͈̭̮̯̜̹̿͛̎͂͛̋̒͜͝͝d̨̖̹͙͔̹̦̞͉́͆̒̋̐̇̈̀̍͜͝, the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snow-flakes, t̅̋ͮ̃̉hͧ̏ͤ̈̉̂̄e͛̏͋́ ͂ͪ͌͡ḟl̴ͦͪͧͧ̿͋o̍̓ͯ̐͊͊o̔͆̀͊̑̉̚r͛͗̓̚͝l͊̀̾̔̋̚e̒͒̋̽͗̊ͦs̓̓͊͞s̛̀̓͆͒ bottom where smoke bͦlȏom̊̓ͭ́̊s into flesh. Ã̛̬͍̼̲̙̟̖̹͙̊̿̌́͗̄̏͝ͅn̢̧̰̤̪͖̫̣̼̊́̃̿̀̂̉̓̕͝ͅḑ̥̻͕̻͚͈̔̅͋̓͋̌̈́̓͑͜͝ͅͅ ̨͖̘͕͖̺̪̠̜͌̔̑̌̈́͊̈́̈́͘͝ͅwhat is flesh but moon? and what i̶̭͇̬͇͍͔s̭̬̩ moon ̩̬̖̰b̺͇͙̳͓̣̀ͅu̥̺̙ṱ͎̱̠̰͙͖̀ ̙̮night? Night is ͘l̷̛͠ǫng̵̨͟í̛n̨͟g̕͞, longing,longing, beyond all endurance.

[Glenn]

She was pushing back and it was frustrating. He had seized a goodly amount of control of this ... environment.

It was a dream and he knew it was a dream and he had some idea what that meant for him since it wasn't his dream

He had seized a goodly amount of control and her pushing back was frustrating. Moreover, her words were confusing and he wasn't sure how his chess gambit had failed. If Chess was like life you started by tossing your knight at someone. What was a bishop going to do against a guy on a horse with a sword? "It's hard the first time." He frowned. "You know it hurts." He looked away. "There was this time that I was visting Nela Kaczmarek at the teahouse, and there was a teahouse girl, and she was saying things like that to me."

It was, perhaps, a feint, for while she was deciding which queen to take, as if she'd won something with her little gesture, he snatched at the plain looking one. The pieces on his side started to shift. The King became Ariane herself, the Queen sylvius duquesne. The knights were Cinnabar Calomel and Quincy Randall, the bishops Glenn Burnie and Duke Burel. The rooks were Agnieszka Kaczmarek and Kerrak. "Hey look, Cherny's a pawn." Elliot muttered. That seemed kind of fitting. The rest of the pawns were made up of people he didn't fully recognize, mercenaries and militiamen and people who dwelled in the attic of the Broken Dagger. He had reached in and snatched people out of her memory, her real memories, but without context the significance was lost to him and he might have misplaced some or chosen wrongly altogether. "This time don't knock over the board. Cheater."