Impovulosi

Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Mon Aug 20, 2018 3:34 pm

Mornings, for Gloria Wynsee, began well before Sunwake. The soldier's alarm — two mugs of wine and a bowl of boiled broth before bed — stirred her to consciousness an hour before the roosters gave their call. By then, when the first colors of the day bled through the sky and started to burn away the morning mist, she had already called for a bath (one of the Gruelmaster's few commodities, being so close to the canals of Port Zenith) and had worked her hair into its twelve necessary knots — one for each hour of a true day. To break her fast, she ate soft seedbread and minted quince. It was fine; it was just fine.

Few of these comforts were native to Myrken. Here, with the anvil at the meeting of her collarbones and embroidered on the shoulder of her dress, she felt due them. Important. Worthy. A woman who could enjoy a regualr bath (albeit with the last night's water); a woman who could choose the satisfaction of sweet jam, even if her nose had been beaten into a peasant's permanent slant.

She was out of the Gruelmaster by the day's seventh hour, and marched with purpose down the winding runnels and avenues of the city. Razasani mornings were a flurry of color and stench, especially along the lowstreets. Mongers slapped out the days fish. Boys and girls seeking a penny or two swept horseshit from the cobbles with thistlebrooms. Crowds converged on the bazaar. Gloria Wynsee shoudered her way through them, holding her skirts away from the refuse, piloting her broad frame through slow-moving passers-by at the extension of her wooden hand.

Today was Visiting Day. And she hated Visiting Day, especially on days with a half-winesick head and a pulsing, loathsome ache behind her brow.

* * * *

First, she visited the home of Aremeda Follox, where she stood in a dark green room and tilted her chin toward meager commands and expectations. Collect the day's dues, whether in money, blood, or fear. Aremeda Follox said the same names she always said; she exposed her forearm while she spoke to Gloria, and let her surgeon carve the lines of soft, white milk into her skin until the scars bled anew and she sought sleep behind dreary lids.

Second, she visited Volani Guerro, who said she'd have the twelve-an'-one-shillin's at the top of the for'night, Gods as my witness, which was good and well, but did not save her from a swollen lip. It took only one lazy strike. Gloria promised several more had fifteen not been met by week's end. Then she complimented the lady's anklet, for it was very fine, very turquoise, and she wished for it, a desire for a coveted object never spoken aloud.

Third, she met a man at the fourth Port Zenith dock, and stood sweating black onto her white bonnet-rim until he jammed a tiny leather satchel of into her palm, fat with greenish bulbs, its bottom damp and foamy. They did not speak; they never spoke, but if they did, she would compliment the woven bits of twine in his beard. When he left she stared at the glinting daggers of water cut apart by the shoreline winds and imagined she was standing on the edge of the whole world.

Her last visits were effortless and unremarkable. They bored her.

A final visit was paid to Twice-Marked Kualdin underneath the overhang of the livery stables on Dolister Way. She smiled a cork-colored smile at him and slipped two shillings into his open palm. It was nice to see him, him and his elfen cheer, the rings in his ears, the dust of the flourmill under his fingernails. She said, "How do you fare, Kualdin," very properly, and he rolled the two shillings between his knuckles before he looked left, looked right, and ensured the street was appropriately dull and absent of onlookers.

"The usual?" he asked her.

"My two shillings' worth," she said.

He nodded. Then, with courteous ease, he came forward, balled his fist, and proceeded to pound it viciously into the barrel of her stomach, right underneath her ribs. He did not watch her as she doubled over; instead, he gazed at the street with disconnected amusement, as if this was all perfectly normal. Gloria started to stand, wiping saliva from her lip before he cocked his elbow and hammered her again. She coughed into the hay. He dragged her up by the collar, and one of her sharp, Sun-bleached eyes rolled up to meet him. "Not the face," she whispered to him.

"What do you take me for," Kualdin said. "Some kind of fucking savage?"

By midday, she'd completed her necessary visits, and found herself standing — ribs swollen and bruised, stomach revolting with tight pain — at the intersection of Jowick and Cadderly. Her satchel, full of tax and poppy, sagged heavliy enough at her skirt-hip that she could rest her elbow upon it. The Glass Sun battered down upon the cobbles with unrelenting force. Tarsweat drenched the neck of her tunic and crawled down into the small of her spine. It would have been right, in that moment, to turn on her heel and work her way back toward the lowstreets with Follox's claim. But with sweltering afternoon yawning wide and free before her, Gloria Wynsee found herself driven ill at the thought of rat'vak work; the Sun, after all, was hers. Fully, truly hers, by birthright and blood. And she ought to be in it, and savor it, and let her heart beat beneath it.

A friend's abode was just up the street — was he a friend, she wondered, or was it but a paltry line of letters that simply sounded like friend, with no meaning or gravity? Should she call, there would surely be tea, and conversation, and she could fill the sluggish pit of her brain with a dutiful helping of memories. Glenn Burnie, former governor of Myrken Wood, had certainly been the last soul she'd intended to crash into in Razasan, but on any day, he would do. They could clap words against one another. She could keep the whetstone of her mind working. Ever since she'd arrived in Razasan, they'd said so much, but almost nothing at all. Or had they?

You should tell him. You should confide in him. His life is but an economy of secrets. And suddenly, you would be worth everything in the world.

Gloria Wynsee swallowed the stone in her throat, and began to march up the avenue toward his dwelling.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Tue Aug 21, 2018 2:11 am

Not far from his door, she pitched the slippers over a fence. No one could see her feet under these long city skirts, the streets were not too much dirtier than actual dirt, and the calluses on her heels were probably thicker than the frail leather the shoes afforded. Her traveling clothes were stowed at the stable and her whole skin crawled to strip off the green dress and toss it over the fence to keep company with the shoes. This get-up made her feel like a sausage squashed in a casing. A sweaty sausage. Bath in short order, too. Wash the smoke and tultharian stench from her hair.

The bright sun directly overhead erased the shadows, leaving her naked and exposed. She walked with head down, eyes nearly shut, blinkered against the constant shuffle and surge of bodies in the wan hope that if she didn’t have to see how outnumbered she was, she would not be outnumbered. The smell was inescapable. Like dowsing a campfire with a bucket of old piss. The same charred, acrid, somehow creamy smell settled on the back of her tongue and couldn’t be swallowed or scraped away.

She forced her mind to focus only on whatever lay ahead of her, not what she left behind. At least until she was well out of the city. She’d have plenty of time to dwell on it, long nights along the road to Myrken without even the raven to banter with, or even—she realized with sudden distress—her pen and ink to pin her rambling thoughts to a page. All her writing things had been in her satchel. The idea of doing without made the road seem all the longer.

That such a slight loss struck so unexpectedly and so deeply took her by surprise. She was used to writing now, to the luxury of letters, the idea of having an ear to hear her somewhere far away. Little battles waged between them at the point of a quill knife. Watching the sky for the raven’s shadow in hope of a reply, fretting over the possibilities when the reply was slow in coming. Her fingers itched to grip the quill, a sensation as visceral and irritating as the rub of her sticky stays against her ribcage.

Didn’t matter. She could buy some more paper, or borrow it, before she left the city. It wasn’t as if he would be expecting one just now. He’d better not even be awake. His letter—or at worst, the raven’s report—would be her first sign of how things would proceed from now on.

And now she had slipped into thinking of what lay behind her. Dash it all.

At a corner, she paused to brush her upper lip with the side of her hand, to lift her heavy hank of hair and lend some cool to her sweltering neck. The glam was muted to suit the street: a young mortal woman, tall but too broad of bone to be mistaken for willowy, pretty enough to admire in passing but not worth slowing down for, fashionably pale but for the blaze of freckles that spanned the bridge of her nose. She squinted upward at the sun to calculate the time until dusk, then up and down the street for a landmark that would lead her back to the stables.

Her hunter’s eyes picked out the shape first, slightly taller than the usual run of tultharian, coming toward her. Then the hunched, protective set of the shoulders, the off-kilter gait—she’s hurt, injured, something wrong, her ribs or mayhap her back. Only then did the face come into focus, but by then she already knew who she was looking at.

Her expression did not change, but her stomach plunged like a ball of lead, and under the blazing heat of noonday, her whole skin prickled with cold.

You’re tultharian amongst tultharian. They don’t look at each other Here any more than they have to. Still she felt as gawky and exposed as a painted maypole planted on the street corner until a second thought slipped coolly into mind: Besides, she only knows Niabh.

Calmly, buoyed by anonymity, she glanced up the street again with casual impatience as a creaking peddler’s wagon lumbered into view to impede her crossing. Her heart pumped icy river gravel. It was entirely possible that if she was headed this way, she might be coming to see Glenn, a reasonable notion that filled her brain with a sharp-edged jealousy the man himself would almost certainly not appreciate: no, you leave him be, he doesn’t need you, he’s mine. In the layer beneath that jolting initial cat-scratch, she was more rational. Certes they lived in the same city, it could be a casual call, could be anything at all. Could be Glenn even counted her as one of his hirelings, running his business, bringing him news.

A sour smile crossed her face. Well, this should be interesting. She wondered what Gloria would make of him. She wondered if he would tell her what had happened. She wondered mostly if he would come to the door at all.

The cart rolled away. She crossed to the opposite corner and began to thread her way against the stream of bodies, keeping the girl visible out of the corner of her eye, fearful of losing her to the crowd. Not rusting likely. Once aware of Gloria’s presence, she felt her, like an ant crawling down her own arm: the air she displaced as she moved, the hallucinatory vibration of the girl’s heavy walk quivering in her own bare soles. If she bore down and concentrated, she imagined she could even smell her, a sharp-sour vinegar tang.

It would be worth it to know if they met.

At the far corner, she crossed the street again, back to where she had come from. Now she had Gloria’s back to follow. She used the city-murmur the way she would have used the lash of branches in the wind or the splashing of a brook to cover up her own forest-silence. The heat and brightness evaporated. Her thoughts locked into a single line: curious, inquisitive, opportunistic, while her face was stunningly blank, empty to the point of idiocy. A fox sniffing after what might be a thread of hot blood in the morning air.

Let’s just see where this goes.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Tue Aug 21, 2018 3:01 am

With every step she took closer to Glenn's temporary abode, a strange pulse of energy went through her: nothing unnatural, but rather, a restless and unexpended surge of movement, the kind that kept one's legs awake at night, or that needed stifling beneath a blanket of drink. She strode, as always, with intent and direction, like an arrow shot forward toward her destination. The whole while, her fist pounded against her thigh, a pock-pock noise against crisp, blue skirts that had a constant rhythm between her footsteps. And when that motion refused to silence the barrage of noise between her ears, she gripped her kirtle up in her lone hand and squeezed it, wrung it, like a washrag.

Gloria Wynsee was a being of ritual, practice, and repetition: this path, however familiar, broke the quiet rites of scheduling that dominated her Visiting Day. Outside her usual path around the city, which she'd perfected for precision, time, and efficiency, the satchel grew loads heavier, a greater burden now than it was a mere responsibility. But it was worth it, wasn't it, to feed that nagging obsession tucked in the back of her brain. If you cannot be home, then you can speak of home; if you cannot visit home, then you can imagine it. And if you cannot look upon the faces you choose, then you look upon those which you are granted.

Like baths, like minted quince, Glenn Burnie, too, was a commodity.

Those on the street around her were but a blur of bland colors, bloused trousers, and muddy skirt-hems. A peddler's wagon rumbled by, its canopied top swaying left, right, left, right, and each time daring the risk of a full teeter as it rattled across the cobbles. Iron pots, rusted shovels, and ropes dangling full with taper-holders sang a disharmonious song. She waited, too, for it to pass, and then saw before her, up a squat span of stairs, the wooden doorway to his home.

What she hated more than Visiting Day was visiting homes. A room, a chamber, a flat, they were innocuous things, completely devoid of the stories and memories that burned themselves like invisible wards into the four walls of a true home. Catch's shack, it was a home, and cruel things had happened there; Elliot Brown's family's farmhouse, it was a home, and she'd been witness to the blissful, dangerous ignorance of his family. Darkenhold, too, was a home, and Ariane and Proctor Duquesne had left so much of themselves in molding that it was suffocating.

In others' homes, her skin felt naked, the sand-scarred sleeve of a pre-Odos choirgirl. Ready to strip the clothes from leaking corpses. Singing jerethedral songs. Allowed to enter, instead of naturally present. Always formal.

The knuckles beat at her thigh again as she climbed the steps and stood before the door, her hawkish nose but an inch from the wood.

Then the hand rose, touching the wood, before it drew back, curled into a fist, and—

The hairs on the back of her neck lifted straight up, irritating the backtongue of her bonnet. She rubbed at it vigorously, as if to rid herself of a fly.

Like a blot of black ink on white parchment, the Jerno woman stood for several moments on the stoop.

She deflated. Her skirts swirled around the cuffs of her boots. Suddenly, she turned away from the door and put her back to it. The wine of her momentary impulse spilled out of her, and courage fled her. She never knocked.

You told it in a letter, didn't you, that you would one day say why you'd come to Razasan. But is it worth saying? Or is it worth burying?

Gloria squinted up at the Glass Sun, then sat down upon the stair, a silent sentinel. She dug at her brow with her fist, grinding at the hard bridge of her forehead until she grimaced.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Tue Aug 21, 2018 3:33 pm

As surely as though the sheer force of Fionn’s guesswork had guided her there, Gloria’s path swung toward Glenn’s door.

Her heart squeezed in vicious delight; she did not grin, but felt the glow spread behind her breastbone. She enjoyed being right—possibly even more after so recently escaping Glenn.

To give herself time to view the outcome, she slowed to a saunter and pretended to give her skirts a tweak and a quick shake, a gesture picked up from watching tultharian women discreetly pull a tangled overskirt free of its petticoats. It was possible that for a single moment the two women were equally eager and anxious and trepidatious to see if the door would open. In Fionn’s case, there were no losses: if it did, she could be annoyed with Glenn for disobeying; if it didn’t, she could gloat that she had snatched the opportunity right out from under Gloria’s nose. Either way she would know something Glenn didn’t know she knew.

She was scarce but five strides away when Gloria spun and pressed her back to the door. In that dizzying moment, Fionn saw her whole, down to the moon-marks on the hem of her skirts, the bulging bag at her hip, the false hand, the way she looked so much younger than Fionn remembered, as if time had not merely stood still but turned backwards, and the salt-grey expression—a look Fionn could not name nor even guess at—as resolve drained out of her features.

Their shadows intersected like an eclipse, the fine down on her nape and the ridge of her spine lifted and tugged, and she thought caught, caught, now I’m caught before Gloria plunked herself upon the steps, rubbing her brow.

In a flash of green silk like the smooth mottled flank of a river trout, the tall woman whisked by: bright curls bouncing on her back, face outwardly unchanged but crestfallen and confused beneath the smooth mask, heart hammering. She forced herself to neither glance back nor speed up. Her trembling fist lifted to her face as if to stifle a cough, and she pressed the side of her thumb to her lips to ward off the last lingering trace of ill fortune. Had she felt that chill in the Woods, she would have turned on her heel and headed back for the treeline and daylight no matter what she was chasing. You didn’t question, only heeded.

That was a warning, little queen. This seeming’s too near to your own to let it be known. You don’t dare let her see it. You know she’s here, you know she knows Glenn—fine, you knew all that before. That’s as much as you need to know. Next time you feel like doing something so foolish, you remember who you’re doing this for.

Catch. Aye, him.

But still she shuddered.

Behind her breastbone, a hard spire stirred with nauseating slowness.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Wed Aug 22, 2018 1:54 am

There was a lesson once told them in the jerethedral, and they were all so plainly bored of it, but they were altogether one in their boredom: Desra was beside Glour'eya, and while they were not friends, they stood next to one another in the gaggle of naked children. Together they stewed in their displeasure at the demonstration, whispering crude insults and disparagement upon Mothersister (and especially her bountiful backside) while she scraped with soapstone upon a flat tablet.

"A Calamity," Mothersister said, "becomes inevitable, as the Nameless intend for them to be. If the world is shaped as a cone — as surely we know it to be — then It and all that governs It exert the greatest known forces upon the trajectory of our being. Marda," she sharply addressed, and snapped a thin reed of rubberwood across one girl's mischievous arm, "you will cease relieving your nose of its waste under this roof.

She continued. "Imagine then, if you will, two stone balls cast simultaneously against the inside of the cone, one to the left, one to the right, each in its own separate spiral, each taking an entirely different journey—"


Her ribs smarted and throbbed with every one of her heartbeats. Kualdin had given her quite the knocking, but it had been worth every penny of those shillings. With feet spread and spine bent, she sat upon the porchway as if she was a permanent fixture on it, a thing made out of rock and draped in fabrics too bright, too Razasani for the dirt-colored darkness of her skin. Her hand slid down from her brow and draped between her knees. The world revolved around her. It was strange, really: stay still, and everything seemed to move faster, with greater purpose, with more focus.

A woman dressed in green crossed the way in front of her, and Gloria almost laughed; she certainly looked startled, a truth told by the ripple of motion in the skirts, and the scuffle of feet across the ground. Like she'd collided with some invisible wall, ricocheted off, and resolved to go in a different direction with greater speed and intent. What Gloria managed for her, even if the woman did not see it, was a dull, counterfeit how-do-you-then smile, the thin and noncommittal thing one provided to nameless passers on the streets, or women and men whose shoulders came too close when browsing the bazaar. That emotionless smile was, at its core, but a wistful acknowledgment: You exist. We are in one another's presence. And I see you.

A strange, limitless tension rolled off the woman as she passed, a stiffness of the spine, a refusal of the hips to roll in concert with the pumping legs.

"And these stone balls, though they take different paths, suffer the same fate. Though they may move across the inner surface of the cone entirely independent of one another, as they circle closer and closer to the bottom-most point, they share the same space. They brush close to one another. They threaten to—"

The woman robed in green was but a fleeting thought: she was there, then she was gone, carried off on hot, Razasani winds. And Gloria would have returned to her silent escapade, sitting listlessly on the stoop, were it not for a sudden and unexpected flare of pain in the confines of her jaw. At first, it was a subtle agony, a stirring ache that made one of her cracked teeth ring like a bell. Her throat clicked against the pressure. To silence it, her tongue lashed against the stalactite of the offending tooth.

"They threaten to crash together. And eventually, they do. For that is how Greater Forces work upon us, and bring Calamities to life."

A black worm, tugging at the root, eager to awaken from its slumber, thrashed against the inside of her mouth. Its emergence, however rare, always sent her heart into a wild hammering and stirred the dark sweat from her pores. She clapped at the side of her mouth with her hand, and feared she would vomit, with how the swelling, black fluid whipped and snapped uncontrollably in the cage of her jaw.

She clenched her teeth against it. Her heartbeat stuttered, ground to a dead halt, then convened with the pace and rhythm of its partner a thousand leagues away...

The Black Oil stabbed against her inner cheek, again and again, as if trying to break through her flesh. Her head turned in the direction of its force. The woman in green. The mercurial fluid kept jabbing more vigorously at the membrane of her inner mouth. A fleck of broken tooth swam on her tongue. A howl only she could hear awakened inside her ears, deafening her, forcing her dull eyes to a wild, bewitched gape. Her lone hand had shot down to grab at the collar of her dress, squeezing and wrenching at it with fingers that had become violent hooks.

She slammed shut her eyes. Locked down her jaw.

Then, teetering, she found herself standing, and barked aloud the only name she could, for it hung in the air all around her, and clogged her conscience like mud. She threw the noise toward the woman in green, as if she must, or threaten to perish on the spot—

"Catch," she said.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Wed Aug 22, 2018 12:01 pm

She both heard and felt it at the same time: the single barked word—Catch—like an echo of her own thoughts bouncing back toward her, and the shuffling of Gloria's body as she stood. There was no time to wheel back and confront while the opportunity lay in her grasp, or to bolt and disappear to preserve what was left of anonymity; no time even to wonder how she had been betrayed. All her planning undone by that single name, coupled by a gentle twang behind her breastbone, soft as the keen of a harpstring snapping, as the slow rotation gave way to a vicious twist.

Surprise more than pain bent her double, as if she had somehow walked full-speed into an invisible wall, belly-high, knocking her to a rough halt. One hand clutched her knee for balance. Her jaw dropped open to gasp, but the mouthful of air made it no further the back of her throat, which let out a single toad-like utterance of disbelief. Her chest refused to inflate. A vast rubbery hunk had wedged itself between her breastbone and her mouth and she couldn't get enough air to either hack it up or swallow it down.

Hunched like a hag, she reeled back toward Gloria with vast eyes turned to featureless windows, revealing nothing but the starless void that filled her skull. Something of the question lingered in her feral, lovely face—what happened? what went wrong?—along with a trace of panic, of pleading. But her teeth were gritted into something like a savage grin, the cords in her neck stood up like vaulting, and whatever lay in back of those black eyes was utterly without reason: a fox in a snare, knowing only that it was trapped and vulnerable and that it would tear apart anything that tried to touch it before it died.

Then, mercifully, painfully, for no reason at all, there was another click in her chest. Vomit surged up her throat, springing from the corners of her mouth, and she cupped her hand to her face in time to retch a hot slurry into her palm, blue-green strings dripping from her fingers to the pavement. Her nostrils filled with the wet copper reek of her own blood.

Between rough gasps for breath she stared, horrified, into her own hand. In the middle of the mess floated a spongy tendril, dark blue from blood and with the consistency of congealed fat. Her fist squeezed tight around it.

Nearly smothered on this little thing. A lump no bigger than an apple seed.

Her last stave at rationality wondered Did she do it? Or did it happened to both of us at once? Her mouth—

And then it didn't matter. Something hard was nudging the back of her throat, striving to break free.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Wed Aug 22, 2018 5:23 pm

As if strung by a tether, she found herself dragged forward, almost against her will, toward this unfamiliar woman on the street. Had she not obeyed the demand of the Black Oil, it would have torn out each one of her remaining teeth just to free it of the anchor of Gloria's body. In a disjointed, staggering dance of sorts, her boots scuffed across the cobblestones and carried her with them. Once, the hem of her embroidered moon-skirt caught underneath the lip of her boot, and she almost plummeted to the ground were it not for a deft shift of her watery legs.

The woman in green crumbled like a felled tree, right over onto herself. Sucked at the air like a gilless fish, and consequently, sucked Gloria in closer to her orbit. It was the eyes that pierced the once-seamstress first: where they should have been, she gazed upon an abyss, right through the Other Woman's pupils, and feared for a moment she would fall right into those black pits and never crawl her way back out...

Every vein in the Jerno's dark body sprang to violent attention as, with a snarl of demand, she imprisoned the Black Oil behind her brittle teeth. It would stay put; it would be civil, even if she needed brain herself on these very stones to see to it. Her trembling hand reached out as the woman, looking very suddenly trapped, suffocating, and confused, seemed ready to burst like an overfilled water-bladder—

Have I done something, her brain screamed over the tumult of her rushing heartbeat. Nameless, have I done something to her?

And burst she did. Gloria heard a damp, warning cluck as the muscles sprang and bulged in their opposite facility, and she watched in frozen revulsion as the woman desperately tried to capture the sickness as it blew out of her. To watch someone be sick, in Gloria's experience, was the strangest and most disconnected sensation: she went cold, and her limbs set themselves to a a wild and nervous storm of tingling.

But she sprang into motion before her thoughts could tell her otherwise.

What this was, between the ribbons of Black Oil hanging from the corners of Gloria's mouth and the turquoise dollop of foam in the Other Woman's palm, was horrifically unnatural. Should any passing eyes see them, they would ask after them, inquire, demand answers. And that could not happen. Not here in Razasan, where this lone name — Catch — had awakened bodily chaos in both of them. She hooked her elbow into the Other Woman's, dragging her rapidly toward the concealing darkness of a bleak alley cleaved between two buildings. Here, the Glass Sun failed to find them. The foetid reek of window-tossed swill clung to the neglected bricks around them.

The Other Woman clenched the regurgitated vinegar-mother lump inside a fist.

Gloria tried to lock eyes with her, muffling her own mouth — and the tendrils of Black Oil flailing across her tongue — with the back of her wooden hand. Her voice spilled out of her in a quavering rush, its sounds and breaths shot through with tremors of pure, uncontrollable fear. "Look at me," she bleated. "Look at me. What afflicts you? What sickness is this?"

(Were they even the right questions to ask. Could the woman even answer at all?)

"Do — do you know him," came another one, desperate to engrave reason into this wild new dilemma. "Tell me true: do you know him?"
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Thu Aug 23, 2018 7:20 am

Her brain pulsed along with her own expanding heartbeat, screaming run, run, go to ground, while her body, formerly font of a thousand pleasures, source of all manner of grace and quickness and cleverness, refused to obey the order. Her legs quivered and collapsed, folding under her. There would be no running when she didn’t know if her lungs would fail her at the next breath.

Gloria’s grab for her arm slid her along the walk, scraping a patch of hide off her knee and the back of her bare foot before she could gather up enough gumption to get her feet under her and dig in her heels. She should have screamed. A tultharian woman would have screamed if she thought she was being robbed or abducted or gods-forbid about to be raped in some unnatural and unthinkable manner by a hulking foreign madwoman in an alley. Only a quarter of it was that she couldn’t. Her throat was raw clear down to her navel; if she screamed for help she’d soon enough be screaming in agony before anyone else heard it. That was the other three-quarters: you did not let an assailant know you were injured. You didn’t cry out. You didn’t speak. You saved your breath for the fight.

The alley’s shadow enclosed them.

The slam from bright daylight to dusk briefly dazzled her as her sensitive pupils rapidly swelled to adjust. Did Glenn know such a miserable place existed just beyond his own wall, downwind of his door? Did they learn to ignore these smells too, the way they blotted out everything else? Did Gloria gravitate naturally to squalor? The narrow dark space, the raw sweet reek of tultharian waste fermented in the heat, might have her ill under even the best of circumstances. As she was now, the palpable foulness and entrapment emptied her head entirely of any thought other than the urge to escape it.

Gloria babbled something at her—look at me, look at me. She was scared, and that was good, but she was scared for the wrong reasons and that was also good, for it meant the glam was not yet shattered, her true self was safe, the plan could yet be salvaged. Her intentions were intact; therefore she would survive. Fionn seized on that idea with both hands, tightened her teeth around it, dragged herself along with the strength of its certainty. You are going to live and you are going to get her. You will reach the other side of this and you shall win, so dinnae dare die, thou sniveling wee shite, tha doesn’t dare die this close to a victory.

Her blunt nails scraped at the meat of Gloria’s forearm…only for her body to stiffen. She whipped her head violently to the side and expelled a syrupy torrent of viridian blood down the length of her own arm, soaking hot and immediate through fragile silk and tangling in her hanging red-gold hair.

She coughed twice, then abruptly sagged like a sack of wheat, clutching rather than clawing at Gloria’s arm. A moan dragged out of her aching chest, the first sound to escape her: involuntary, disgusted, anguished. She resented it, resented Gloria for forcing her out of her silence.

Her tongue swirled around her inner mouth, gathering up a wad of sour residue before spitting it at Gloria’s chest with as much force as she could muster.

Limp in her arms, she glared at the woman with all the hostile, infuriating muteness of a sullen child refusing to apologize. Gloria’s voice jangled in her skull: Do you know him? Do you know Him? Him, Him…aye, that’s right, just so, tha dars’t nae speak His name to me, keep His name out of thy mouth, bitch, keep it out thy rotten unworthy mouth.

As it was, she only barely understood what was being asked. Words were so many slippery minnows darting through the air, skating through her fingers.

Her mouth.

The black eyes, already seeming to comprise better than a third of her face, widened still further, the shoddy light of the alley bounced off the back of them like a mirror, filling them with the unearthly green-blue glow of a cat in a dark room. Their glitter shifted and fixed above the grey ledge of Gloria’s false hand where a black wormhead wavered and strained, seeking escape.

gods save us her mouth be full of worms

The woman lunged back to life, no longer yanking herself away but shoving her weight forward to sock her square shoulder into the other woman’s flank.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 23, 2018 9:47 am

The Other Woman still became sick, a tapped keg that never stopped leaking, and the reek of it began to close in on her: a malodorous wave of rusted metal and fermented blood, one that was destined to get upon her, and this, her finest dress. The sickly woman folded against her, only to be captured in the soft guidance of Gloria's mannish arms, supported and cradled like a length of fabric unfit for touching floor. The Other Woman scraped, caught a tag of skin with a dull fingernail, and drew blood; she spit, too, a violent expectoration that Gloria found impossible to identify as fury, fear, or function—

Impulse suddenly beat its drum to life in the back of her brain. The instinct of a Jerno. She should be beaten. Here, right here, like a choirgirl who'd given the wrong note, the Other Woman should be battered; one did not spit upon a benefactor, nor shred at her like some half-minded fool. Nameless, for a moment, with the Black Oil still slithering between her cracked teeth, all Gloria Wynsee wanted was to ball up her fist and bring it down in a blow across the crown of that pretty flaming hair (That, flashed one of those vulnerable, nonsensical thoughts, belongs to Genny), and hear a crack or a rattle, maybe set the teeth to snap against one another to tutor this needful thing in painful courtesy.

But Gloria knew that place. That place, where agony and terror coalesced and murdered the ability to think, slaughtered the capacity for even the most infantile words. Knew, even looking upon the Other Woman's incensed face, what that place was like — when all sense and logic bled away under the canopy of pain or illness, and get away was all that mattered. Binary simplicities. Fight, or flee. Survive.

Inside those black, unwholesome pits on that lovely, fragile face, she saw that word writ in desperation, a command carved into the recesses of a blank mind: Survive.

The shoulder drove through her. Gloria skittered back, barking out a hoarse bluster of sound, a collection of curses in this tongue and in another. The blow set white-hot fire to burn anew in her lungs and across her ribs, where Twice-Marked Kualdin's fist had earlier thundered. She sucked in a hacking breath that withdrew the tendrils of the Black Oil like the ribbons of a flag captured in a voracious tunnel of wind. The worming liquid slapped, dashed, spattered across the inside of her mouth, then slithered back down her throat.

It answered obediently to pain.

What the Other Woman had done, though, was to invoke one of Gloria's most prominent set of conditions: those of a scrapper, a fighter who would sully her skirts in blood and shit and mud if she must; of a pit-tempered combatant who had learned, very quickly, that to be in, against an assailant's body, was the most efficient positioning for the gathering of breath, the silencing of pain, and a precious second or two of rest. So her arms came out, tried to wrap the Other Woman up in them, and put this possible fight to its immediate end. She grabbed with that lone hand at whatever opportunity availed itself: at the arm, at the skirts, at the shoulder, and sought to yank her back—

"Stop. Stop. Be civil," Gloria gasped hoarsely against the woman's ear, her cheek smearing against the warm offal clumped in her hair. "Help. You need help. Listen to my voice, if — if to nothing else in this moment. I intend no harm, but — but a world that sees you like this will as quick as kill you like a plague-dog on the fucking street."

Her breath came in hot, acidic gusts.

"Were you sent to me? Did Ruann send you?"
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Thu Aug 23, 2018 3:01 pm

For a moment she considered hunching her back as if she were about to puke again, in hopes that the threat of being splattered might be enough to convince Gloria to thrust her to armslength. With the stabbing in her chest, she didn’t know if she could fake-heave without triggering herself to really heave, and there was still too great a risk what might happen if she lost too much blood, if she did more damage atop the unknown quantity, what Gloria might do to her if she fell unconscious or unable to fight back.

But when Gloria pleaded in her ear to stop, to be civil, the realization came upon her: Gloria was being decent. Gloria was decent, in her coarse way; she remembered that much from their meeting down by the forest’s edge. They had shared bread like two proper ladies. She had been afraid, with fury boiling just under fear, but decent just the same. There had been no iron between them then. That terrible revelation of Catch was a year away.

Gods be praised, that was enough decency to dig a knife between her ribs if Fionn could but game it right.

Gloria told her stop and, whimpering, trembling, she subsided. The truncated left hand with its two neat stumps wrapped around Gloria’s wrist as if for balance. The insensible wood could not feel the tension in that hand, how it braced itself.

Staring wide-eyed and dazed at Gloria’s burnt-sugar face, she blinked rapidly, the mute-animal fury melting away. What color were mortal tears, cloudy or clear? Couldn’t remember. Best not to go that route, then. But she did remember how their faces looked just before: how they sagged like one of her old sand-sculptures drying out on the shore, clumps dropping off before the whole structure collapsed. Her lips fell open, blood crusted in their corners, and she hitched in a sharp, tremulous hiccup of air.

Through the roughness of her scalded throat, it was hard to find the proper pathetic note. The result was a little scratchier than she would have liked, a childish keening. She shook her head furiously, strands of soaked hair slapping both their faces like tiny knotted scourges. “No-o-o…

Her shoulders squirmed, a worm on a hook, as she pushed feebly at the woman’s burly arms. She tried to let the bones melt out of her legs so that Gloria would be forced to hold up every sagging stone of her. Would it be laying it too thick to clutch Gloria’s hem if she let her sink to the ground? She decided that yes, it probably would.

“Please,” she panted, struggling even with the single common word. “No sent. No Ruann.” Sent slurred to shan’t; the r of Ruann rattled like gaming-house dice. Her accent came trickling back like early sap, thick and husky. That she was losing words now gave a nervous edge of truth to her panic. “Just. Don’t hurt no more.”

Soft and insidious, warm and persuasive, the glam seeped out of her, seeking out the portal’s of Gloria’s perception to magnify and distort, shrinking the incident to insignificance, turning it into a near comedy of manners, a humorous overreaction on everyone’s part. Mistaken, this was all some sort of terrible mistake, a freak accident. Look at this pathetic whimpering creature, stupid as a rabbit, no good, not worth it. Let her crawl home.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 23, 2018 4:34 pm

Be civil, she had said, an age-old enchantment of Gloria Wynsee's — words to inspire calmness, to demonstrate through language her own commensurate civility. That was how good souls spoke; those were words no Jerno would ever use. Be civil, she had said, and the Other Woman did exactly that: her tension fled her, and she became a trembling leaf in a violent wind. Smaller, smaller still, and less than living, like a specimen of glass meant to be broken instead of admired.

When the woman's fight had left her, so too had Gloria's, and she was left standing several strides away, the anchor to those quivering, grasping hands. The mutilated one, grabbing at the stalk of her carved false-hand, drew Gloria's attention like a glimmering bauble. She looked upon the tiny lumps where fingers ought to have been. Her mouth peeled back in a grimace of sympathetic agony. You poor thing, the eyes screamed. You poor, shattered—

The noises emerged, a stumbling mess of foreign words struggling to stitch themselves into a shared Standard.

No sent. No Ruann...Just. Don’t hurt no more.

A flash-quick hurricane stormed across Gloria's wide face. Her egg-shaped chin crinkled. The busted teeth clenched tightly enough that, with any more pressure, they might crumble to powder. "I — I won't hurt you," she said as pressure in her skull began to mount. "Do me no intended harm, and I'll visit none on you. You're unwell, deeply unwell, and—" her frantic words, burdened by their own lilting accent, began to lose their edge, "—and I would be nothing worth her heartbeat if I did not see to such a..."

—pathetic whimpering—

"...whimpering creature."

The words fell onto her like a cascade, crashing into her conscience and spilling over onto her tongue. Boiling up from the depths. Scalding her brain. That was all her own noise, wasn't it; that was the wild, uncontrollable, judgment of her impulse, impulse, impulse, creating narratives inside her own mind and forcing her to fight against their cruelty. Stupid as a rabbit, no good, not worth it—

The Black Oil dared her to say rotten things, perform horrific deeds, didn't it, didn't it. Gloria's burning eyes blinked once, twice. She stiffened. She withdrew from the Other Woman, and took it upon herself to free her lone hand and clap it across the side of her own head, gripping it, squeezing until the edges of her fingernails bit into the sand-scarred darkness of her pockmarked cheek. Let her crawl home. Let her crawl home, dancing around inside her head, behind her brow, between her ears.

Only a Jerno would make so self-serving a condemnation.

She gagged wetly on Black Oil. It refused to crawl all the way back into the cave burrowed in her molar. Discomforted, paranoid, afraid, it was a trembling snake ready to bite in the presence of a disturbance...

(The glam found a half-footing in her, like one or two stuck claws of a whole beast's paw; the rest, a silent storm, splashed against hatches battened by intransigence, stubborness, and the dollop of blood pulsing in her tooth. Or perhaps, because the words and thoughts became hers, she refused them — for what she despised more than anything was a girl born on the Glass Sea, brown as dirt, who fractured everything she touched.)

"I shall not hurt you, rabbit," Gloria said. "If I've done this to you, if I've driven you ill, then — then allow me to make it right.

"If you do know him, then in his name, at least let me see you safely home."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Sat Aug 25, 2018 6:44 am

The more words came out of Gloria’s mouth, the more Fionn’s wretched confusion became less feigned and more fact as she tried to pick up more than two words in a row. I won’t hurt you… no harm…nothing…see to… The words kept doubling, the meanings shifting subtly into unknown and unfamiliar nuance, because—she realized in a burst of clarity—Gloria didn’t speak the common either. She was translating it, aye; she had her own language in her head and Fionn kept trying to borrow both, leading to a clamorous mental juggling act. It was a difficulty she’d had before with other outsiders; sometimes she’d found herself picking up the wrong tongue and quickly making excuse. That was when she was in her full wits, sharp-edged, carefree and playing games. Now was none of that, and she gambled for an escape.

Gloria broke away from her, and she, too, withdrew to cower against the far wall of the narrow passage, face twisted into the rat-like, craven cunning of a Myrken urchin. She cast a desperate glance to the alley’s far end, hoping for a glimmer of daylight, the start of another street, an exit. Nothing but shadow and the ghostly line of a wooden fence that, in her wavering perception, may as well have been far-flung as the horizon.

Hunched, she struggled to comprehend Gloria’s slow words. If you know him…if you do know him…then in his name, let me see you safely home.

To her own amazement, she laughed: a single bright, broken laugh, a crystal goblet smashed on the cobblestones, as much astonished as amused. Glass splinters grinding in her lungs, too, but she couldn’t keep from it. His name. His Name. The one name they had between them. The one name it might even be possible she would heed. Had she done it on purpose?

Her gaze fixed back on Gloria’s face, forcing herself to inhale slow and easy and to spit out every word as clearly as she could. “Tha dars’t nae speak His name.

She doubled over coughing, tongue curled and rags of blue-tinged drool pouring out of her, little black spots flashing in front of her eyes. The spasm made the alley lurch underfoot like a board balanced across an arched root, to and fro. She was going to faint after all.

By the gods, an I must tip, she’ll tip too. Let’s knock this whole city off-kilter.

She forced the swinging, sick feeling outward, thrust it as far from herself as she could.

Paving stone and mortar gave a deep, inexorable grinding, like the gurgling of the belly of a beast upon which they both stood. The alley lifted gently underfoot, tilted ever so slightly. A few pebbles and nuggets of detritus danced past their feet toward the open street.

Eerily silent, the street side lifted in counterpoint, all the pebbles dancing back the other way as somewhere, at the dark end of the alley, a metal pail overturned with a clash against the far fence.

Then the street thumped into place and then dipped lower than its own gutters as the world canted to a dizzying diagonal and a flood of trash spilled into the newborn ravine.

The woman stood stone-still, rooted the spot, one fist clutched to her chest as the world bucked hellbent to toss Gloria back into the street.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Sat Aug 25, 2018 1:04 pm

And toss her, it did.

The ripple of power that rolled through the alley turned it into a whipping, lashing tongue, one that snapped up, then crashed down, and brought Gloria with it. Pebbles and upended cobbles leapt into the air. Muddy water ran in rushing rivers as the puddles themselves overturned. Grasping understanding of a world turned upside-down was unnecessary. To try to reason out this wild, seismic echo was to waste time; instead, she shouted, tumbled backward, struck the edge of a building, and crashed to the filthy street, which pitched like the deck of a ship caught in a storm's fury.

To assemble her balance became suddenly fruitless; she crashed, spun, until her knees struck cobble and chewed whole fillets of flesh from them. Her hand shot out, desperate to find the lip of some off-set brick or some savior outcropping of masonry.

If the world continued to tip, she'd fall right off its edge.

The laughter crashed like shards of broken glass against her ears.

Tha dars’t nae speak His name.

What she thought, as she found herself sprawled on an angle of street half-in, half-out of the Glass Sun, was this: that the excuse of Coincidence was a comfort people gave to themselves to fully surrender their destiny to a world that seemed so far beyond control. Would Coincidence strike here, too, so far from Myrken Wood, where Coincidence was an ever-present beggar of bloody memories and circumstance? Would it plague her even here, in Razasan, a mere stone's throw from Glenn Burnie's stoop, where the Black Oil had been dragged out of her, and a woman in green all but turned her innards outside at the mere mention of Catch, Catch, Catch...

Gloria Wynsee refused to be beguiled or enchanted by the wondrous simplicity of Coincidence. Here, there were answers to be found and understood.

Amid her dizzying discombobulation, she snared a cobblestone, dislodged the corner of a fingernail, and tried to pull herself to her feet, to sense, to the Other Woman—

Liam's cold steel still lay against her shin in the cuff of her boot, draped underneath crisp skirts and worn-thin petticoats. If necessary. If required.

But not yet. Rght now, only a fist. And Glass Words. Stubborn, challenging, hard as stone, ready to slice.

"F'a ar'buth ar venod, en, al oorgot stal'vak ja stal'vik ul Catch?"

Fear poured out of her. A dull, present truth, a spoor in the air. But it did not break her, did not silence her. It never had. Not with the Black Man, not with the Red Devil, not with the Storyteller, nor with Rhaena Olwak, nor any of the other phantoms that danced in the shadows of her mind.

"Stop this," she barked again, in the Standard. "Please. For my sake — and for yours."
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Niabh » Sat Aug 25, 2018 2:36 pm

And she bolted like a rabbit toward the far end of the alley, running upward along an impossible downward slant, a distortion that rendered the basic geometry of the world meaningless.

It wasn’t going to be much of a bolt, but she had enough left in her that if she could just get out of reach, get out of sight, get to the stables, get to her horse, get out, one last hard sprint was all she needed. And maybe she’d end up spending a week in the woods beyond the walls knitting her fool self together to recover from a single stupid misstep, and maybe she’d be wiser and more sober hereafter, but the plan would be secure and she would be safe.

Her palms slapped flat against the fence to catch herself. She folded nearly to a squat, thighs against burning chest, and squeezed her hand over her mouth while she sucked in breaths through her nose. She could hear a crackling of dried leaves in her lungs when they filled, and a broken-bellows wheeze when she exhaled. The pounding blood in her temples temporarily staved off the urge to faint.

Hunched as she was, the grey vertical planked towered smooth and insurmountable. It seemed impossible to stretch herself high enough to climb, but then she saw she wouldn’t have to: one of the boards hung askew like a rotten tooth, and the one beside it pivoted from a single nail, pried partway loose and left to swing. Gods bless all street urchins, who knew the need for quick escapes.

She threw a glance at the alley’s open end, where Gloria, still caught in the grip of the glam, appeared to be crawling her way back up the tilted ground with her very fingernails. It hurt too much to cackle, but she managed an impish grin…a grin that twisted and faded as, to her astonishment, Gloria crawled her way back to her feet.

The words sailed the length of the alley to strike like so many hurled stones, buffeting her one by one. The language didn’t matter. She heard. Her face screwed up in rage and agony, an expression much closer to tears than her early feigned attempt.

Loud as she could, ill-guided and foolish, she hissed back in the same tongue, “Better me than you.

And then she was scrambling up, stumbling over her own heels to push herself through the gap in the fence. She shoved the loose board aside, turned her broad shoulders sidelong and squeezed through the gap—

As her foot touched the other side, the back of her gown caught, ripped. An icy claw drove her stark-stiff, sending electric bolts shooting down the backs of both arms, as a bent, rusted, and long-forgotten nail raked across her shoulderblade.

She collapsed, fell heavily on one hip, and did not rise.
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Re: Impovulosi

Postby Rance » Sat Aug 25, 2018 3:47 pm

Better me than you.

Sharp Glass Words, turned back around, thrown down the tilting latitudes of the bending world, wielded not with the clumsy loose tongue of a neophyte in the language, but rather, with exactness: someone who, when she snarled "Ar'ek d'al ar," knew to emphasize the final syllable with a gouging tongue and a burst of breath. The curse struck Gloria in the gut, right where the basket of her breath, barely filled, had already been crushed. She knows Jernoan. She knows it. She knows Catch. She knows Glass Words, and

The Other Woman was just a blur of color and movement in the twisting pinpoint of clarity at the end of the horizon, a thousand leagues away, down the other end of the alley, where the lines and angles of the world were yet tight, rational, and measured. Running. Fleeing. Getting away.

She knows me.

Hers was not a permanent resilience. She stood only for seconds before, like a drunkard at the apex of a bender, she collapsed back down to palms and knees.

The Other Woman slithered through a gap in the wood — to Gloria's deteriorating consciousness, a gash torn in the fabric of the off-kelter world itself — and was gone. The silhouette vanished in a flutter of soiled green skirts, and with her, all possibility of answers and knowledge. But the dress grabbed a jagged corner, like some invisible hand sought to hold her back. Then the Other Woman, almost freed, crumpled like a tower made of paper and built on a foundation of sand.

All at once, reality flooded Gloria Wynsee's senses. The tilted world's lines snapped back to rigidity. The angles of bricked walls and cobblestone streets wrapping in an endless pinwheel around her loosened their grip and rolled back out like a regal carpet. As the altered angles of the tilted world dissolved, ash blown away from an open palm, Gloria found herself breathing through a haze of confusion and fright, her body but an infant's crawling on the dirty ground. Her skirts dragging through mud and offal, she dared to stand. Nausea crowned her throat. The tha-thum, tha-thum, tha-thum beat its tribal drumskins against her inner ears. On ships, in carriages, the conflict between the perception of motion and the realization of her bodily stillness often crippled her senses and stomach. Here, the same affliction belabored her.

Once she'd regained her footing, she lunged a trembling forefinger down her throat. Her spine bucked. She promptly vomited.

But the fog started to clear from her head. Heartrate started to plummet. Pressure in her veins subsided.

Gloria Wynsee demanded stillness of the world, and received it.

Hers was not a rapid nor powerful approach toward the far end of the alley, where the figure lay sprawled and silent. She steadied herself against the wall, scraped her shoulder along it, and carried herself with the wary fear that it would all turn to wild, warped ribbons again.

Finally, she came upon the still body.

Better me than you.

At her side, hidden in her dress, skulking among the winking eyes of embroidered moons, her fist formed a bludgeon.

Better me than you.

A quivering boot-tip reached out, probing. Sought out the shoulder. Tried to turn the collapsed figure over the hinge of its hip, that through her wet eyes, might see the face.

Better me than you.
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