Impovulosi

Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 30, 2018 5:35 pm

A neck was a neck. A child, if granted proper instruction and placement, could choke out a goliath — and Larrice played the former part quite well. Gloria, though inches taller than him, was back-bent against him, sinking into him, twisting her hips and bucking, but never quite finding a space for fair motion. Larrice's bicep tightened. Twig and twine though he was, he needed only apply a faint pressure from his other hand to the back of her bonnet. Her face swelled, distorted, and her eyes bulged. A long web of saliva dangled from her front lip. An elbow aimlessly snapped back, but caught nothing but wall.

Meanwhile, Aremeda's lizard-like neck twisted fitfully to one side, leather-rough skin bending across the bones set in her collar. She stared at the sickly captor with one bleak eye. Her teeth — they were each their own little square, well-shaped, the last vestiges of a beauty sacrificed to age — tightened into a rubbery smile. "Stole you," she said. "She steals things all the time — though often with my expressed permission. I shouldn't blink an eye to presume that one's foul business becomes another's fouler habit. To fall victim to it is a disappointment solely yours to bear. If you did not wish to be stolen, then you simply should not have been.

"Yet, here you are. In my home. Against your will," Follox reasoned, "and most certainly without my invitation."

In response to the Other Woman's formal gesture — as if they were present here to conduct some kind of appropriate bargain! — Follox scraped her foot across a crack in the floor and spit, a bloody dollop, in front of the table. Court gestures be damned, the crumbling Lady Follox did not concern herself with the niceties: she simply stared, unblinking, at the Other Woman. Examining. Rolling the purple strand of silk in regular circles around her knuckles, then unfurling it, and starting again.

Everything she did was slow. Everything she did took long, measured moments. That canvas face could stare for hours.

She'd time. Neither of them did.

Gloria, meanwhile, scraped at Larrice's forearm, beat at it, but the hand was losing its fortitude. The fists became slaps; the slaps became flaps. One of her trembling legs had already failed her. Those pulpy eyes and purpling lips mouthed a desperate morass of words, all of them unintelliglble: either a plea for help, help from the Other Woman, or consternation over the surge of betrayal caught like a boulder in her throat.

With a satisfied, lady-like care, Follox flattened her left palm, and draped the silk across it so that it pooled across her knuckles. A white thumb smoothed out the wrinkles. She smiled with pleasure at the flatness of the silk, but the smile vanished when she locked her gaze once more upon the captive woman's. And woman was but a title of address, in this case: though Follox did not concern herself too greatly with the non-Razasani, she neither found herself too beguiled by her guest's unique appearance, remarkable and noteworthy as it was.

"You look disheveled. As someone still shaking her sleep, I sympathize," Follox said. "I'm more than willing to let you depart at your will and put the day behind you, but there is a matter of wasted time to consider. Should I provide this kindness without price, I'd grant you a charity I've given no others. Rites are to be observed. My reputation, on the street and on the tongue, is something I loathe to sacrifice even at the behest of a moment's kind consideration."

She tapped a finger upon the fold of silk.

Behind Follox, the cadence of thundering footsteps echoed up from the guts of the home. Her Oster and Tibalt.

"I want one of your teeth. Just one, however you dignify the request," she said. "After that, you are free to go."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:36 am

The woman spoke slowly. That helped. Not much, once she managed to piece together what she was saying, but enough to impress upon her the depth of the shit she was in. The shit Gloria had dragged her into, and she hoped that grey bastard wrung her neck until her damn eyes swung from their cords for dragging her into this. The shifting dream, already largely forgotten upon waking, gave this scene the slippery sense of macalla, as though she had already been here once before but couldn’t remember how it had ended last time.

Last time it ended with a finger.

No. Let’s not even give this one that much credit. For all her faults, the High Queen was still queen, still Tuatha. It occurred to her that she could crash through this presumptuous husk of a tultharian like a horse through a bank of winter canebrake.

How far would you get? That’s the rest question.

The answer was, as ever, As far as I get before I need to ask the question again.

As she sat—slack-faced, dull-eyed—upon the table’s hard edge, listening to this strange white-garbed tultharian deliver her slow, deliberate speech, she clasped her hands in her lap like a dutiful if dim-witted pupil and crossed her dangling ankles behind one another. Her gaze fixed to Follox’s face, aware of the thundering footsteps that so clearly signaled that others were coming. Who and how many she did not know, nor what they would bring with them. In her lap she rubbed her thumb against the two small nubs where her fingers had been.

And then the clencher. Her payment for passage. A tooth. A tooth, of all things.

Suddenly it was difficult to maintain the subtle glaze of stupidity on her face. A tiny hot flame squirmed, delighted, in her chest, nearly drowning the pain in her lungs in pure joy. Oh, it was never about the prize itself—what would anyone do with a tooth? Wind a silver wire around it and wear it for a necklace? Did she have a whole drawerful of them, mementos of old tolls collected? Fionn never had; it was shocking, really, how little she really wanted the things she demanded and how fast she lost them once the deal was done. But the thing itself would always be lost or traded or squandered, sooner or later. The thing never mattered. It was about what you could make them pay. It was about finding out how much they really wanted the thing you alone could grant. It was about power, and pettiness—two traits that ran parallel in her very bones. The wraith understood this. Fionn could almost respect her for it. But understanding did not make two queens in this room.

With a wriggle of her hips she was off the edge of the table, coarse carpet barely felt under the thickened soles of her feet, walking toward Follox as if she could not even see the woman through the blind blackness of those eyes—as if she would walk into and through and over her.

“Thou’rt rude,” she remarked, before the heel of her hand shot toward Follox’s inner shoulder, before a bare dirty foot snaked behind the woman’s ankle.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Sun Sep 02, 2018 7:41 am

Follox, like a carved statue, stared right back: her limitless, transported stare met the challenge, invited it, and grinned, a woman willing — willing, or far too distorted on the milk of poppy to register the possibility of an oncoming threat. The poisoned being approached her, but her skeletal hand moved in a sharp, whipcrack-fast arc in the air, hand flat, toward the door through which she'd come. Her fingers tightened into a clenched fist.

Stay.

There stood Oster and Tibalt, one a waxy-skinned woman holding a leather bound bludgeon, the other a broad, unremarkable fellow whose meaty hand hovered near to a knife cross-sheathed along his belly. No Lady, however legitimate or fictionalized her legacy of royalty — whether bought by the blood in her veins or the blood she demanded be shed — moved through life without muscle.

She fell like a broken twig, her shoulder jammed back, her legs swept with wild abandon. She crashed to the floor, a shattered plate covered in skin and gown. One of her hands scrambled desperately for the muddy green hem of the Other Woman's gown, grabbed it, and tugged at it with all the eager excitement of a little girl being granted a corn-husk doll. Follox grinned, grinned so widely that her teeth ground bloody canyons inside her cheeks. "I saw you in the leaves of my tea," she said, the tiny specks of her pupils little more than bits of black sand. "I saw you in them yesterday, and the day before, and weeks before that. Rude indeed — and so very pleased you've come, even if you've intruded upon me to reap what you must."

Follox's chipping, yellow nails dug into the fabric of the Other Woman's skirt, tried to wrench her down with her. A pinkish foam squelched between the gap in her eyeteeth.

"I saw you in the cards, drawn before Sleep, but never before the Gilded Vessel. Good omens," Follox snarled, "come always at a precious price."

Behind them, a hoarse, stuttering gasp broke the silence. A heavy body collapsed to the floor. Gloria. A wet, sucking heave, muffled by the floorboards, begged for precious air.

Then the whicker of sharpened steel being drawn free from a scabbard. Larrice had pulled a blade.

Follox rocked her head to the left, still holding to a tangled knot of green skirts, almost laughing herself to ribbons underneath them. "Father always said, 'Ask for a tooth from Death. If He or She comes to call, and gives to you of Their mouth, then they cannot be Death, cannot be'—" One of Follox's spasming hands flew to her own neck, and withdrew from her gown-collar a tiny moleskin bag, which her trembling digits sought desperately to open. The stitched hide tore. Brown, white, yellow, a vast collection of teeth — molars and incisors and cuspids, some still flecked in dry blood, some cracked, some whole — clattered to the floor like fallen dice.

Each ugly tooth was different. There were ten of them. Twenty. Thirty. More.

Her breath stank of old blood and metal. Follox dared never look away from the Other Woman.

"'But Death? Death will refuse. Death will take from you what It must. For Death, being bone and little else, has no teeth to spare.'"
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Mon Sep 10, 2018 11:16 am

A pity for Follox that the woman she addressed struggled to grasp more than one word in every three, and every third word was Death, Death, jangling in discordant chorus like iron chimes. The delicate ear-tips trembled as they strained forward, trying to understand the flow of words from the jabbering, blood-flecked mouth and hadn’t she seen that somewhere else today? Blood in the mouth, staining the teeth, the teeth scattering on the floor, crunching and jabbing under her bare foot like…a lamp? No, that was wrong. They were nothing like a lamp.

Looking down at the woman’s face, her own blank expression shattered into a smile and a quick, two-note laugh of delight, inviting Follox to share her silly imagining of a lamp made all of teeth. Even through the laugh, one could hear the wet rattle in her chest, raw as frost.

Things were quite lovely now that she didn't have to listen to any of them.

The sliding blade sheared through her merriment, the rasp of steel on leather setting her own teeth into a painful grimace. Her head snapped toward Larrice. A dark cloud furrowed her brow. “No.”

Her knee thudded into the puddle of loose teeth, the impact heavy enough to vibrate the wooden floor. The other knee landed full-weight atop Follox’s clutching hand, pinning it. She scraped her fingers through the spill of teeth and caught up a dozen or so, scarcely able to feel their stone roots biting the palm of her nearly numb right hand. Her stronger left reached for Follox’s black hair to wrap it around her wrist like a rope, to wrench the woman’s face upward.

Her black gaze dropped, almost imperceptibly, to where Gloria sprawled: Gloria, clawing at her own throat, clawing at the floor. Perhaps she had lost something. Perhaps she’d lost a tooth? That would be terrible. Goodness knew she hadn’t any to spare.

Gloria,” she called in her own rolling tongue, sweet and cheerful as a girl who has spotted her friend at the fair, “come here, there’s lots of them—” as she shoved her handful against Follox’s mouth, driving them hard with the heel of her hand, grinding them against the woman’s gums.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Tue Sep 11, 2018 4:29 am

On one side of the room—

Breathing. A secondary function to motion. If the body survived, then so too did the capacity to take in precious air: survival was not dependent solely on breath, though the mind certainly demanded that one think so. With a long ribbon of saliva hanging from her mouth and her nostrils clogged with snot dislodged during the desperate struggle to breathe, Gloria crawled along the floor and attempted to marshal command over her faculties. To still the spinning thoughts. To dull the burning pain inside her skull. To take in the cooling balm of true, full breath. No time. No time to be fragile, or wait for her body to agree.

No, the Other Woman commanded. Larrice, blade held underhanded, ceased his forward motion when he came face-to-face with the pits of those black eyes staring through him.

Swimming under the surface of Gloria's skirts, a cold steel against her shin, lay Liam in her boot. The trembling fingers found his handle.

When the point erupted red and gleaming from the front of Larrice's knee, driven from behind, he crumpled to the floor. His own blade sprung from his grip, clattered across the boards, and slid to a halt amid the halo of scattered teeth around Follox and the Other Woman.

Palm sticky, head throbbing, her name rang out, carried on an unfamiliar tongue. A beacon of clarity and conscience in the cacophony. Gloria. Spoken once. Spoken aloud.

And yet she'd never offered it.

On the other side, a thousand miles away—

Follox twisted, bucked, and lashed out at the offending handful of broken teeth with her filmy tongue, her whole face a wrinkled canvas under the pressure applied to her gums and the tug of her waxy hair. She breathed and snarled like something primal, her whole body heaving and contorting underneath the confines of her rumpled sleeping-gown. Beneath the Other Woman's knee, the wrist was bird-boned, a fragile slip of skin and calcium that might have blown apart like powder at a discourteous wind. Some of the teeth gouged into her gums, ripped into her lips, and one even rammed into the pit of her left nostril. Pain, however, was no deterrent, not with the milk of the poppy dulling the world and forming a membrane between her wild inner narrative and the reality around her.

Lips like shredded ribbons. Gums chewed apart. Laughing, too, because it was all so funny, it was all so fitting, and all so terribly slow—

The knife skittered close. Follox's eyes leaped to it.

Fingers of her free hand dared to reach, formed into a bony ball, and battered once, twice, three times on the floor.

Then she bit. Down on the shards of rotten teeth. Down on her own tongue. And if still it was near, down on the sweaty, dirty span of the palm pressing in on her mouth.

And all of it was happening so quickly, so rapidly, that Oster and Tibalt had only then begun to move.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Tue Sep 11, 2018 5:45 am

Her hand, her whole arm from the torn shoulder down, had gone cold and sluggish from the creeping of iron in her veins, but she was not yet so deadened that she could not feel the woman's teeth sink through her palm. She let out a tiny, strangled cry--outraged, disgusted--before she ripped her hand backwards, tearing the wound wider, and no doubt flooding Follox's mouth with the bitter, coppery taste of blue blood. On reflex she simply slapped Follox across the cheek, with the sort of swift uncalculated rap a woman might apply to the nose of a naughty lapdog that snapped at the sugar cubes.

Her good left hand twisted into the woman's hank of hair so tightly that her wrist shook in rage. The desire surged into her mind to simply slam the woman's face into the floor over and over until it was obliterated, until those ill-mannered teeth of hers mingled with all those scattered ones she had collected. She deserved it.

The pounding on the floor distracted her. Her head whipped around, snarling, at the creaking leather as the two guards began to stir. Say true, she'd forgotten all about them in the face of rudeness. One did not dare treat one's guests so.

Her blood-slick hand fumbled at the side of her leg. Her fingers felt like so many thick, greasy sausages, but she was still quick. A little gold flash appeared in her hand, the tiny bronze knife that she could scarcely feel, and she willed her hand to grip. With her other arm she dragged Follox toward her, hugged her like an enormous doll against her own hammering heartbeat. Part of her was lucid enough to marvel how little there was to her, how light she felt, how delicate, like a new-hatched bird.

The whole world threatened to swim away from her, the edges of the room alternately receding and suddenly swinging back into sharp focus; the door taunted her, sometimes near enough to touch with an outstretched hand before suddenly jerking back to the far side of the world. She clutched the elderly creature all the harder, convinced that she might melt and leave her with nothing, no shield between her and the iron and the blank hostile faces approaching.

Crouched on the floor, breath rasping like a split bellow, she looked like a wild dog prepared to fight to retain its bone. Fragile though it was, the little knife was sharp enough to part flesh and fat like butter, and she could scarcely feel how much pressure she was even applying. Its point pressed into the spongy softness beneath the bony corner of Follox's jaw.

"No," she snarled to the approaching guard--and then gnashed her teeth in panic when the word she needed wouldn't come. "No. You--drop. You drop that." She jerked her chin toward the man's blade. "You let I go."

She risked a quick, cold glance at Gloria. The grey man, crumpled on the floor grasping his spurting knee, was irrelevant; he might have turned into a heap of old rags for all Fionn minded, but Gloria, Gloria...

They'll kill her for this, she thought.

The memory came in reassuring reply, One day, you’ll remember that I tried to run. I tried to end this before it began and you wouldn’t let me. You’ll remember.

One day seemed to have come a lot sooner than Fionn anticipated.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Wed Sep 12, 2018 3:07 pm

Oster and Tibalt — all they were, truly, were bodies and obstacles, neither remarkable nor unique, just flesh stretched across muscle and bone — scraped to a halt, Oster with her bludgeon, Tibalt with his poised shortsword. Silenced in motion. Still in their noise, even in their breath. As if the slightest imperfection of their shoulders might suggest action, and they'd inadvertently bring the delicate glass world to a crumbling end.

Larrice whimpered, clasping a red palm around a red leg, his fingers cradling the wet, white, oozing fat that had been once the cap of his knee. He snarled a trembling, "You bitch, you bitch," out around ropes of spittle. Gloria, still gasping for precious air, used him as a support, jamming the heel of her lone palm against the side of his head to buoy her balance and help her gain her feet.

Follox folded and bent like a sliver of pliable leather and clay under the Other Woman's influence. As if pulled by a puppeteer, her fragile form hardly struggled; she kept laughing, a gaping, bloody smile yawning on her face, her sunken eyes dancing with a wild curiosity around the room. The bronze blade lay like a leaden tongue along the curve of her jaw. Its coolness distracted her from the heat beneath her flesh. "Do you think this frightens me," she asked, before barking the question a second time: "Do you think this frightens me?" Underneath the edge of the ironless weapon, her blue vein pulsed a minstrel's beat. Had flesh been neither barrier nor prison, it might have leaped out, dared to wrap like a braid right around that threatening point—

Tibalt leaned forward, daring a step. Oster's broad hand shot out flat against his chest.

Gloria returned the Other Woman's look with a dark, questioning glance, the bloodshot span of her eyes struggling for focus.

"Ghalish. Ghalish in fero del wolom k'l fera-fera," arose a rasping, stumbling voice from inside the cage of the Other Woman's arms, where Follox lay at the will of the blade. Her dry lips and damaged tongue rolled out a serpentine threat, one spoken in a language that bore a bounty of decades and generations. As if the words themselves had gone dusty and cold inside her heart, and were only now cast out to the world, free to roam. "Rilech yol chola yol chela. Impovulosi, impovulosi, impov—"

On the edge of each consonant, the air in the room hummed and popped, as if suddenly casting invisible sparks. The kind of prophetic energy that throbbed on a mountainside before a grand crash of thunder and lightning. Words bearing weight. Words brandishing power.

With her stained teeth clenched in a rictus grin, Aremeda Follox snapped her blank stare up toward the Other Woman.

She turned her neck against the whisper-fine edge of the bronze. Turned until the bones shot up like scaffolds under her neck. Turned until the taut rope of that vein snapped in two under the fine blade. Turned until the papery skin split open wide, and so did the straining muscles, so that blood spilled out of her like a relentless waterfall, and those final words — Impovulosi, impovulosi! — rang like chimes in the air, until they bubbled into nothing but bursts of aimless breath.

Skeletal, violent, a vulture hand raked for the Other Woman's, and dared the blade go deeper.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Wed Sep 19, 2018 2:50 pm

Do you think this frightens me?

Those words Fionn understood clearly, even if the logic behind them escaped her. Follox might have been a squawking magpie repeating the only words it knew. Everything stank of tultharian and dead flowers, driving all the sense out of her. Fionn cared for nothing, not for her words, not for her fear or the lack of it, only that the woman’s fragile body formed a barrier between herself and the rest of the room.

Hoisting the woman high against her chest, Fionn lumbered to her feet. She shuffled-slid toward the door, eyes fixed on the frozen guard as she skirted a wide circle around them, behind them. The woman’s heels skimmed across the floor.

The hot blood spilling down the back of her arm seemed to revive some of the feeling in her fingers, and the thick rotten smell of it jolted her back to something nearer lucidity. She jerked the knife’s point away from the woman’s neck lest she impale herself upon it, but there was so much blood, so much. Everything became slippery: her forearm across Follox’s chest, her already tricky grip on the knife. Her foot caught on something—the hem of Follox’s gown, or her own—and she stumbled, ankle overturning, and sent her veering. Her hip bang hard into a table bearing silver; a fluted vase full of dried narcissus teetered and crashed.

Her head pounded in rage. She was going to ruin everything. If she died—

She gave Follox a vicious shake, snarling in her own tongue, “No! No! Damn thy bones, tha will live!” as if the force of her decree could will the wound to suck in all the blood and seal itself. Saliva leaked from the corner of her lips.

The rise of the woman’s words built like thunder on the delicate passages inside Fionn’s ears, pressed on her temples like a pair of relentless hands to crush her skull. Her glams, bound up in iron, strained at their at their chains, lunging at a threat it sensed but could not reach.

Abruptly she froze, unable to move another step. The door was at her back. Her knees sagged. She hugged Follox to her breast like a child with a beloved rag doll, but the woman suddenly seemed to have turned to a sack of lead.

She let her forehead dropped to the crook of Follox’s shoulder. A strangled, anguished scream rattled her throat. “Stop it! Stop talking! Stop!

Her head twisted, serpent-like. Her teeth met with a crunch in the gristle of Follox’s ear.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Fri Sep 21, 2018 1:38 pm

It had all gone quite to hell, hadn't it.

There was a lot of blood. It was like a fillet of beef upon a plate: drain the excess blood, and yet more ran; drain that, and yet still more, and more, until one might find themselves questioning how much fluid a tiny, kidney-shaped sliver of meat could really contain—

And the same with Aremeda Follox, whose sharp and limitless grin, opium-drowned, turned to the Other Woman. The blood just kept lurching out of her, reaching like a storm surge, bursting with every pulse of a heartbeat out from the jagged canyon in her neck. The teeth came; the teeth chewed, clenched down on her ear, crunch-snap, but the grin never faltered. The muscles, strained in their fatal smile, locked into place. The eyes, each a fading wink of light, did not blink. They too smiled.

I am very happy, Follox mouthed, with a pinkish foam crackling between her teeth.

She was very happy.

The world, obeying the Other Woman, fell into silence. A weight lay upon the air, heavier, heavier still, growing greater as the frail woman's fluids hemorrhaged slower, slower. Follox lost her name somewhere amid it all. Instead, she became just some white-clad burden, her neck rocked back at a fierce and unnatural angle, not a human, not a being, but a burden, her dress a damp curtain of stone and blood, her limbs like ore chiseled from the heart of some rockvein.

Two fingers, bent like pincers, lay across the Other Woman's collar, infantile and curious.

Then the woman died.

Some demands were simply too great to meet, bones be pure or bones be damned, and—

—and two hammerheads collided each other just a meter away. Oster and Gloria. The seamstress, her nostrils and throat still whistling from the trauma of Larrice's grip, threw herself with wild abandon at the armed guard, whose motion had been fully arrested. Skirts embroidered with clever moons snapped with intensity against the air. A palm jammed up, up, catching Oster's chin, driving it aside, against the wall with desperate, repeated surges. The cudgel harmlessly tipped to the floor. Two pairs of feet slipped and scuffed through smears of blood and the husks of crushed narcissus.

Tibalt, meanwhile, veered for the alien intruder.

Just beyond the door, the heat of dying day beckoned.

"What have you done," Larrice whispered over and over. "What have you done?"
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Fri Sep 21, 2018 2:51 pm

And then she died.

She felt it in the lessening of weight in her arm, as if the woman's spirit was the only thing that gave her frail body substance.

She drew back the knifepoint, brushing away the plucking chalky fingers from her collar like a clinging moth. It was always very strange to see one of them die. Even with one as old as this one, who must have had plenty of life for one of her folk, it was a little sad, as if one should have taken better care of them.

The world turned in a slow and languid waltz. She had plenty of time.

Cautiously, Fionn unwound her wrist from Follox's hair. Her expression was mere puzzled consternation, curiosity, wondering how in the world that happened. The head lolled back against her shoulder as though she but swooned, lacerated lips fallen slack and wide-open. The view down her cavernous throat would be all that Fionn remembered, later.

Revolted, she unconsciously wiped a hand across her lips, saw the bright smear of blood on the back of her knuckles--not blue but red, the very color of her hair. A half-moon of grey gristle stuck to the side of her jaw. She did not feel it.

The rude bitch died.

Hot anger rose and boiled, turning her face dark and setting her sore chest to heaving.

The rude bitch had died, in one last unforgivable, unavenged act of discourtesy.

Next time you'll be nicer to your guests, she thought.

A rushing and a wet, meaty thud to her side snapped her head up sharp, brought her back to where she was: Gloria, Gloria, good, she wasn't going to lie there like a stump and take it, good for her. The lead-filled cudgel struck the floor with a hollow boom, distant cannonfire in the streets. But then there was this other, this vulgar hired hand and his iron, coming at her as if there were still something to be saved.

Fionn bared her teeth in a vulpine grin and held still, waiting, waiting, until he was near enough, until his trajectory was fixed. She gathered all the strength she had in her good left arm and, with a wild shriek of laughter, shouted, "Catch!" as she thrust the body of his mistress upon him, before she ducked and propelled herself, knees sliding in the slick puddle of blood, across the floor to seize the leather-bound cudgel.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Sat Sep 22, 2018 12:43 am

Gloria did not relent. That was not her way. Never had been. Not in matters of conversation or conviction, nor in circumstances of conflict or aggression. She rarely obeyed the tenets or the limitations of her body. She and Oster engaged one another in a sloppy melee, scraping and tearing at each other with abandon: Gloria rammed a hand viciously against Oster's temple; Oster pummeled the seamstress' chest with the fallen hammer of her left fist. What meager combats the young woman had experienced were all matters of attrition: withstand, withstand, and victory would eventually emerge.

So their arms, in a wild fray, swung and swung, and there was no time for pain, not when Oster's elbow whipcracked across the underside of her jaw. Every muscle in her body begged for stillness.

Stay standing. Refuse to be bowed.

An errant swath of vibrant red color drew her eyes in a seconds' distraction.

Blood, blood, all in one wild array of smears and puddles. The Other Woman, with a snarl of noise, threw the dollish flag of Follox's body like a sack of grain. Was she dead, she wondered. Is that what dead looked like, loose and half-airborne, a life lived only to end as a tool for momentary distraction? Tibalt staggered, the oncoming burden crashing into his arms as he rose them up to deflect her. He bellowed, a burst of noise that was both surprise and horror but dedicated to neither. Follox's body cracked and scraped across the wood as he disentangled himself from the corpse and brought his dull shortsword to bear, his momentum altered and his onslaught temporarily halted.

Meanwhile, the cudgel was all hers, a weapon both crudely-shaped and yet eerily well-weighted, its knotty head gone brown from old stains. That totem of abuse had served Oster well, and so notable was its lost that Oster shouted toward the Other Woman, "Unhand that, you fuckin' dog—" before Gloria's meaty hand gripped Oster's throat and began to ram the back of her skull against the hunter-green wall, thud, thud, thud, like a drumbeat, and Gloria was shouting, too, and screaming, and (she would not admit to such a thing later, should she live) sobbing, because it was always blood—

Tibalt jabbed out the shortsword in a series of hesitant, duty-bound thrusts toward the Other Woman. He hacked, sliced, casting the edge out, steel whickering threateningly in the air. Trying for her.

And out at the far reaches of the Other Woman's shackled glamourie, like bits of waterweed brushing across a swimmer's toes, a peculiar sensation invited itself to be known even to that, her iron-poisoned extra sense.

Eyes. Many of them. Watching her. Set deep in the walls. Set deep in the world.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Thu Sep 27, 2018 1:56 pm

Kneeling on the floor, she swung the cudgel against the pursuing blade, knocking aside its tip. The weight behind the weapon took her by surprise: the momentum sent her sprawling on her arse and nearly yanked her shoulder clean out of its socket, leaving her whole chestspoon exposed. She scrabbled backwards as best she could out of reach, cumbered by the weight of the cudgel and by the tiny dagger still clenched in her other hand. Her heels slid uselessly across the slick floors.

But for her ragged breathing, she was utterly silent, face blank. A casual glance might have mistaken that expression for fearlessness. A longer look might have made one wonder if she understood the danger at all.

What she did understand, so far as she thought at all, was that she would have to be twice as fast as he to match a heavy cudgel blow for blow with a light, swift sword.

But his thrusting seemed uncertain, hesitant. As if he didn’t want to be doing this anymore.

Had he loved his mistress? Had he sworn himself to her? Would he mourn her loss? Was there any reason to defend her now that she was gone?

Thud, thud, thud in the back of her skull, a black horse galloping over a great distance, and she couldn’t tell if it was coming from inside of her head or outside anymore, only that the room pulsed in and out in time with its hoofbeats.

Even in the face of iron, she froze, breath hitching in her throat. Her whole back prickled, ear tips quivering, eyes widening in the sudden certainty that he was doing it on purpose He was driving her backwards, back toward something she knew was waiting. A whole wall of iron spikes. Dozens of them, studding the walls. If she moved another handspan she would impale herself on them, one point would burst through her throat, through her eye—

The stony expression shattered. In a blind panic, she dropped both dagger and cudgel and scrambled on hands and knees, far as she could from the danger she could sense but not see.
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Mon Oct 01, 2018 4:27 am

Gloria had far overleaped her natural threshold of exhaustion: she had been stripped down to her bare components, nothing but muscle and bone working through the necessity of survival. She coughed, still desperate for air through the bruised column of her throat, hacked until spittle foamed on her lips, and her teeth snap, snapped together as if trying to keep pace with the beat she pounded against the wall with Oster's skull. Eventually, the head was going to come apart; eventually, if she did not stop, she'd hold broken bones and brains in her hands (you should stop, it's been enough). Eventually the arms would start twitching (there's one; she's dancing a jig, don't you see) and the body would go limp and at least it could no longer threaten, could no longer act—

Stop. Stop, she commanded herself.

Oster, her face a pulp, sunk like a sack of wet flour to the floor. Gloria turned her head, her cheek and brow spattered with a starscape of fresh blood.

Tibalt sliced and teased at the Other Woman, a half-hearted attempt of the blade that, from across the room, Gloria Wynsee could barely discern. Maybe it was the blood blurring in her eyes. Maybe it was the rapid-fast whirlwind of the world scraping by her ever-slowing senses. But Tibalt seemed so fast, and the Other Woman whipped that cudgel about in a strange mixture of willingness and fear. That alien face, locked in its solid, unaffected stare, reminded Gloria of the carvings on jerethedral walls: likenesses formed from molded sand that, when summoned from the passions of their creator, never perfectly attained humanity, no matter how greatly they tried for it.

Then the dagger and cudgel fell. Like a snapped twig, the Other Woman crumbled, and at first Gloria thought it due to a blow, some errant and lucky strike by the man's flicking point. She scrambled, cowered, and rolled away like a pillbug, exuding fear—

Was it the blade, its inner iron? For Tibalt, strangely dazed, lost his bravado by the passing moment — had he watched it, Gloria wondered, when the skin split open? Did it scare him, with how fragile she was to tear, like damp paper? Mechanically, as the Other Woman shrunk away, Tibalt shuffled forward, snarling, "Why, why," through the gaps of his teeth, until his eyes were just oozing, weak and wet, and the fragile thread that connected him to his strength finally snapped.

Drawn like a moth to flame, Gloria's lone hand was suddenly around the cudgel's wrapped handle, dragging it up from the floor.

It felt fine. It felt quite fine.

From behind, Tibalt's head cracked to the side, and he fell like a broken doll.

For the first time in what seemed like hours, silence fell upon the hunter-green room, heavy as a blanket. Heaving, her bonnet hanging askew, her shoulders and elbows as heavy as lead, Gloria stood above the Other Woman. Around them, the broken wreckage of the room lay still, shattered, or bleeding: Follox's corpse, Oster's crumpled frame, and Tibalt's; a fractured vase, a wheezing Larrice, a world turned entirely upside-down.

Gloria's voice, strained, soft, and afraid, came out of her in one hoarse syllable:

"Go."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Mon Oct 01, 2018 9:59 am

In a flash, Fionn splayed full-length on her belly, feeling the seams rip along her underarm as her hand shot out and snatched her fallen knife. Snake-like she whipped her body around, ending coiled on her knees, poised with the blade gripped against her thigh. Her right arm dangled bonelessly beside her hip. The knife was woefully, ridiculously tiny, the blade scarcely longer than the hilt, but it had killed once today already, and so sufficed. The unseen enemy lurked behind her, turning her entire back into a map of electric prickling, skin anticipating where each iron needle would jab.

With a swift toss of her head she dashed her hair from her face, shooting wild, dancing glares about the room for the next obstacle...

They found only Gloria, only she, the last one still standing.

Three bodies on the floor. Four, counting the grey one, who now moaned and rolled quietly, gripping his wounded knee. And herself.

It had happened fast, though she was well beyond calculating time just now. Everything flowed and dripped like slow sap, the very air thickened with the smell of blood.

Slowly, shaking, she rose to her feet, long thighs tensing and bunching beneath the slippery green silk of what had only the day before been a wholly acceptable morning gown. The swaying fringe drooped from the skirt; a seam had sprung in the hip, baring a narrow triangle of rough white muslin and smooth copper skin. Her own blood and vomit had dried dark upon it, and in the shadowy room it might be mistaken for a watered pattern in the fabric. Her bosom heaved with every hard breath and her throat wheezed when it deflated. The blood smeared across her mouth and chin was shocking red, and a withered grey shape like a bitten mushroom clung to her cheek.

Still that calm stony visage, like a face carved into a tree. Her knuckles whitened on the dagger's hilt. The fathomless black eyes glittered faintly as they shifted. Gloria would know. She was watching Gloria's body, anticipating the next move.

Gloria made it.

Go.

She blinked in surprise and shook her head, faintly. The swollen violet lips trembled and twisted, parted as if to speak. "I..."

The prickling rose up her spine again, crawling up the back of her neck and tingling in the tips of her ears: danger danger danger, more of them, more of this, you can't see them but they're there, this is all going to start again and I can't, I can't, leave her, leave her to face them, she can deal with it, she deserves it--

Thought fled. She shook her head once more, a furious denial, then lowered it like a bull and plunged forward, veering to avoid the bulk of Gloria's body. She stumbled, caught herself with a hand on the open door way, then charged out headlong into the residual heat of the day. A gory sunset smeared across the sky in layers of pink and scarlet, staining the upper floors of the white plaster facades. But the buildings themselves cast their shadows, turning the streets into so many black veins running throughout the city, and the lanterns were not yet lit.

Clutching her side, she dove into the shadows. They welcomed her.
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Tue Oct 02, 2018 4:03 am

And so fled the Other Woman, like a vapor blown by a wind or like a dream half-remembered clinging to the edges of a drifting mind. The daylight of the open door cut a slice of light through the dusty air, and the silhouette, clutching to a stitch in its side, vanished out into the blinding evening sun.

The whole day was fading. The wild blur of the past few minutes crashed into Gloria, filling her body with all the shattered glass of diminishing adrenaline. Pains reminded her of their presence, and in her joints and bones became liquid lead. She touched her cheek, not with her lone hand — the cudgel, still gripped, acted as a ballast to the world — but with the wooden curl of her replacement knuckles. Wiped away the blood. Tried to pull the invisible mask down, and make it all right, help it all make sense

But the riotous bramble of words and questions kept leaping through her mind: Who was she? She said your name, she said your name...

Tibalt, still breathing, lay sprawled but unconscious. Oster's left eyelid pulsed with an involuntary spasm while her fingers, jittering, tried to find the wall. Follox did not move, could not move.

And Larrice, bloody palms cupping his knee, spit on Gloria's hem.

She came. She said your name. She destroyed a world. She tore your Razasan apart.

Gloria squatted next to Larrice, set down the cudgel, and grabbed the back of his spongy white hair. She yanked his head up at a violent angle so that their eyes could meet—

She drifted right across that street, right in your path, and broke open like a shattered pot. She was a—

—and when he began to sputter out some complaint, some curse, she sturdied her grip on his scalp, snapping him into silence before she lowered her sweaty face down close enough to his that they shared the same putrid breath. Gloria's lips peeled back, and instead of words, fury came out of her in a hoarse rage: she screamed in Larrice's face, screamed, until her dark face flushed red and her yellowed eye-whites dried like bulging pearls, screamed until the trembling cords in her throat became but a loose tangle, screamed until the noise petered to a dull croak—

She was a Calamity, she was a Calamity...

—and she dropped him, and she stood, and she took up Liam and her cudgel, and toppled over the torn hem of her moon-embroidered dress toward the door.

Night fell. They all knew her name. They all knew the name Gloria Wynsee.

The Other Woman, an alien shadow, an afterthought, had never had one.
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