[hider=OK THIS IS THE LAST ONE FOR NOW]
Tauga sprinted across Xerxes, shunting out of mind the shouts of four parents as they faded into the night behind her. It wasn't difficult. Even the grim knowledge of how unsafe the moonlit City was to a young hain armed with only a pair of trousers was easy to forget.

Five weeks.

She turned corners, clambering over places where the City was not yet finished raising and plastering mud bricks over wooden beams. The City was not large, geographically, but for the older folk who remembered a time when it had been a simple set of villages, who had lived their entire lives looking out over the green where now the Eye towered, it always felt too busy, too loud, too complex. Not so for Tauga. First of all the generations to call themselves City-dwellers was hers, and she knew the space well. Could traverse it even while her head spun.

A month, and quarter-again a month.

Tauga tumbled over an unused sack of firewood and hardly even noticed the headfirst pitch into the dirt. When she realised that her movement had stopped, she pressed her hands over her eyes and tucked her beak into her chest, panting for lost breath.

Thirty nine days, and not one of them had even told her.

In the blackness of palm against eye, something began to move and spiral. Something spread, marking out its place on her hand, her body. [url=http://66.media.tumblr.com/376ec120c6571c3abc31846739bd2fe5/tumblr_o5fi8rFayu1shpedgo5_1280.png]Something.[/url]

Tauga shrieked and clambered up, legs burning, to start running again.

Memories of voices babbled in her skull as the images came and went. Her father, quiet, worn down by labour. Mother Koonap, no less hardened by work, and still laughing. Mother Yen, the oldest, who had always assured her it would be over in an hour and Tauga would soon forget. And then her laying-mother, Sileg, who had looked away more and more as Tauga enjoyed wearing the last shell of her childhood.

Her laying-mother, whose blood ran through her veins. Whose own mother and her mother before her had always been the last to finish the second hatching. Who, in a village where most were finished in a fortnight, had taken five weeks to emerge. As she would.

Tauga knew it to be true. She had always been the one to cry when the minstrels came and sang the grim Parable of the Painter. She had grown up tallest of her siblings, strong, fast, brave, but it had always been her who looked away first when dealing with a hair-faced fiberhead. Because they reminded her of the stories.

Five weeks it had taken her blood mother. The longest of anyhain in the City.

In the moonlight stood unfamiliar walls. That alone was unusual- Tauga could find her way anywhere. But she didn't stop running, not for anything, not to think where she was going. Not to realise that there was only one place in the City where she had never been. Only one House.

Tauga hid from a night breeze behind one of the building's high walls. An ink moth drifted past her, its movement completely opposite to that of the wind that should have blown it. Unthinking, unblinking, she felt her hand snatch out at it with all her usual strength, crushed it in her fist and brought the thin spike to her waist.

The cold air was interrupted by the sound of scratching metal on porcelain, then a yell. Tauga disappeared behind high walls.

Inside the House, it was very dark. In the splay of moonlight following her through the door she could see only a few shapes. None of the ubiquitous foreman's tools that littered the rest of the city. Tauga could see the outline of stretched fabric on a frame, and little else. The only thing she could determine with any certainty was the glint of another faery, eerily close to where she had found the last one.

Tauga leapt after it. The faery ducked lazily, as if expecting her to do better, and she found herself on her face for the second time. Chattering teeth followed her as she crawled after the ink moth, deeper into the blindness.

There was a soft [i]'tink'[/i] very close to her hand. Tauga snatched out and immediately returned the faery to her side, her eyes full of awful whorls. Within a minute she moaned, and tossed the insect into the dark.

Footsteps, heavy and slow, sounded from the void.

Tauga clamped her jaw, forcing her teeth to stop chattering, and felt her head dart around like the scared bird she was. Nowhere had enough light to see who she was alone with. The steps came intimately close. They found her in the darkness.

An enormous hand wrapped around her shoulder and lifted up her arm. Tauga froze, every muscle seizing in fear. Her very heart held its breath.

A faint pricking at her waist, and the sound of fae on hainbone.

No motion. No other sound, only Tauga's lungs, her now-pounding heart, and a far deeper rhythm of breathing nearby. She didn't understand, and she was cold, but the smooth, rapid scratching continued, working its way to the murky shapes she could see on her back before arching around to her other hip.

It was wrong- This stranger- Being held- Empty temple- Huge hands in the dark-

And yet the shapes were finally being filled, the fever breaking. Tauga's eyes closed, and she was still. For the first time in days, her breathing slowed. When the etching finally wound around her belly and linked up where it began, it found her in an exhausted doze.

The huge palm released her shoulder and Tauga drooped forwards, jolting awake. Before she had a chance to think, she reached out wildly for the needlepoint, and after a few seconds it drifted into her hand. Immediately she brought it to her elbow. Slow panic began to surge.

"I need light."

Footsteps, then a pause. Tauga heard the single, telltale snap of pyrite against flint, and a small blaze that sent cinders into the ceiling. As the glow spread from its bowl of tinder, the obscure shapes of objects discerned themselves one by one.

There were pebbles, mineral chunks, bones, all manner of solid detritus balanced into single-file towers higher than Tauga's eye level. Blocks of unbaked clay from the river in several shades of ochre and grey. Some of it was folded into the shapes of hands and lips, perfectly lined, holding trinkets too twisted to guess the origin of. Indents in a plank held dye powders, colours which were splayed onto framed fabric or sometimes directly over the wall, murals depicting... [url=http://www.enchgallery.com/fractals/fractal%20images/return-to-the-land-of-is.jpg]Things difficult to describe.[/url]

The light swelled on, and the brighter its glow, the more objects Tauga could make out, piled atop each other, stashed into bags and bowls, hanging from fishing lines attached to the roof, resting in hammocks that almost webbed the room. There were fae hiding everywhere, balanced on all kinds of things, an infestation. There was even one of the grotesque glass trees that Urtelem loved to eat, that they planted with simple prayer-signs to Spiral Palms. It grew from a crack in the wall.

The House of Life was a mess- A disaster, a wreck of things that filled Tauga's empty stomach with unease, that seemed balanced on all the wrong angles. And as the fire rose to a crackle, Tauga realised that this was just the beginning.

At last the flickering glare reached the table in the centre of the room. Upon it lay a fresh human corpse in maybe twenty pieces. Over the dismembered woman towered a being the size and shape of a Tedar, its hands delicately knapping a very small blackglass blade. [url=http://darkcloud013.deviantart.com/art/Ogre-419370956]But its hide was covered by a jagged shell far darker than her own, and it had no visible eyes.[/url]

Tauga's legs spasmed and kicked the floor so violently she nearly chipped her own heels as she screamed. In a single flowing movement, the monster picked up a plank and set it on the brazier, calling back the night.

More whorls. Even as she gasped for breath, Tauga was pressing the ink moth back onto her arm.

For a long while the silence returned. The calm had come back. Unable to see what must surely have stood before her, put its hands on her, Tauga's voice cracked into a hoarse whisper of City pidgin: [i]Who are you?[/i]

The voice that responded was high and gentle, like a young child's, and its tongue was clear.

[b]"My name is- Help."[/b] The impossible voice did not seem satisfied with its own answer. There was a pause. [b]"Yes. Help. That is who I am."[/b]

Tauga's knees were knocking. She had to grip the ink moth to stop herself throwing it away again. "Are you- Am I- Going to die?"

[b]"Not tonight."[/b]

"But [i]she's[/i] dead."

[b]"This one was killed by falling masonry."[/b] Help spoke evenly, soothingly. [b]"No one knew why. Yah Vuh told me to look, so I became curious. I think she bled out on the inside. Her rib splintered into sharp points, though her skin was only bruised."[/b]

With great precision, Help lifted the plank from the fire-bowl, allowing a slit of light that fell on a piece of split bone while keeping themself in the darkness. Haunted by spiralling visions, Tauga found herself unaffected by the sight of the sectioned human on its own. Blood didn't frighten her. She began to etch again in the half-light, staring at the shape of the corpse, talking to Help, talking to anyone just to distract herself from seeing the patterns of hatching. Even the monster with a child's voice.

"I thought... Yah Vuh was hated."

[b]"What God gives by the right hand, it takes away by the left. Yah Vuh cannot think as we do. I judge him no more harshly than I would judge an animal."[/b]

"What about the Énas?"

[b]"He has taken this woman's life with his ambition, and provided me with an excellent body. He has worked goblins to their death in the mines, and given me blackglass with which to take her apart. God kills and it nurtures. I mourn the killing. I am grateful for the nurturing."[/b]

"But that was an accident! He didn't mean to kill her!"

[b]"Of course not."[/b] Help closed the bowl. Footsteps, and the clack of pottery. A sudden wetness around her beak and Tauga yelped. [b]"Drink."[/b] Arms still locked in an awkward position, the hain sputtered, then quenched the thirst she had been ignoring since her sprint. The water was taken away. The fire bowl replaced it, open just a little.

Tauga tried to resume her scratching. The feel of cool water had broken her concentration, and now her heart was beating again, her fingers shuddering around the faery. Just enough light fell on her shell to show her the belt of curves around her waist and hip, and her head drooped again, eyes shut. Five weeks. Thirty-nine days to etch those bizarre shapes and pictograms.

"Help?"

[b]"Of course,"[/b] they answered, folding a blanket over Tauga's shoulders and gently guiding her hand. Help stayed at Tauga's side until the dawn came and illuminated the two shells, line by line, side by side, hand in hand.

[/hider]