Tatterdemalion

Breathless Dead

There’s a woman who walks upon the last road
who asks for no silver and asks for no gold
she’s there for the child and there for the nurse
for those who were better and those who were worse

She’s there for the servant and there for the king,
for those who are lost and don’t have a thing,
and sometimes it’s short and sometimes it’s long,
but the road’s not as dreadful when full of her song:

I know a place where it’s easy to stay
where the wind always makes the asphodel sway
where the air is cold but the queen is kind
And a finer place I’ve yet to find

I know a place where you’ll lay to rest
all of those burdens trapped in your chest
The Final Home, the Fiddler’s Green
and the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen

There’s nowhere she is, but nowhere she’s not
she’ll be there beside you as quick as a thought
with stories from distant planets unseen
and many a tale of her lovely queen

She’ll ask how you lived and ask how you died,
and how you spent time between either side
she’ll ask of the beauty and ask of the pain
and when you ask her, she’ll sing this refrain:

I know a place where it’s easy to stay
where the wind always makes the asphodel sway
where the air is cold but the queen is kind
And a finer place I’ve yet to find

I know a place where you’ll lay to rest
all of those burdens trapped in your chest
The Final Home, the Fiddler’s Green
and the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen

She walks on the road for half of the year
finding new ways to go there from here
sometimes with companions and sometimes alone
but never a place does she ever call home

Until the spring comes and the flowers do call
inviting her down to her dread queen’s hall
she races the sunshine and races the rain
and as she comes, she sings without pain:

I know a place where it’s easy to stay
where the wind always makes the asphodel sway
where the air is cold but the queen is kind
And a finer place I’ve yet to find

I know a place where you’ll lay to rest
all of those burdens trapped in your chest
The Final Home, the Fiddler’s Green
and the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen

In glorious summer, the land of the blessed
embraces the stories all clutched to her chest
and right at the end of her constant race
is found her wife’s warm and loving embrace

And there amid flowers they have fresh-brewed tea
and there she spins tales of all that she’s seen
there in their cottage among ghostly hills
the Shepherdess cares for her flock, and she trills:

I know a place where it’s easy to stay
where the wind always makes the asphodel sway
where the air is cold but the queen is kind
And a finer place I’ve yet to find

I know a place where you’ll lay to rest
all of those burdens trapped in your chest
The Final Home, the Fiddler’s Green
and the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen

Return to Thellamie

It's taking longer to set up the fireworks than I'd expected. You're so troublesome, you heroes - it's as if you don't want to bring things to a boil! But if this isn't handled soon, then it's down with Civelia and up with the Khatun, and then I'll have to tell a story about a revolution led by Yuki of Yukisearth to save the Golden Fawn, and we'll be here for ages! Not to mention things might spin completely out of control.

Help a fallen star out here, would you?

Tell me what you fight for.

Let my claws peel back your memories. Show us all why you are preparing to be at the main event. And let your wishing heart sing. <3

Return to Thellamie

Stacks Crew!

There is - I have been told - a jagged lake within the Stacks, and deep within the lake lies the Invincible Flame Armor that Heron the Hero once wore, before, you know. The Catastrophe Of Which We Shall Not Speak. And that in a band around the lake, there is a zone where the water is the right kind of hot, and there the successions of Handmaidens that Heron has had have built a shrine.

The bath is a holy place, at least to Heron of the Many Romances, Heron who said each bathhouse was a Collectible place, though the items she carried away from them were always different each time. And it is here - if anywhere - that Eclair Espoir, worn out utterly, must rest.

Must have warm compresses applied to her back. Must have healing potions mixed into her tea. Must rest, despite the world demanding that a hero step up to save it once again, despite the weight of need that threatens to thrust the Violet Flash into the role of Heron - because there is one small, demanding woman who would snap in half if the world did not stop here. And Eclair Espoir would fold herself into eight pieces if that happened.

So here you must be. Who else is here, I wonder?

---

Outside Crew!

The huntswomen of the Serigalamu ride goblins. This is known! The strange creatures of dream, wrestled into tameness, each mount unique in its own way. They hang handcrafted saddles upon their backs, and place their lunches beneath the saddle, and hang blankets and yurts and ropes wherever purchase can be found.

There's typically a ring in the horn on the front of the saddle, and that's for the sluzhanka, Hazel. The rope around your wrists loops through the ring, keeping you prim and proper and squished between horn and rider. Khan Mikela's mount is a golden leopard, spotted with rosettes, with the long neck and head of a serpent, which might bring to mind one of the princesses still vying for your hand.

Off in the distance, there are thunderstorms. The stars overhead hang low near the edges of the horizon, as if attempting to get a closer look at my world. The air is charged with little lightnings. These are not good omens, let me be clear.

"So, little hero," Mikela says to Yuki (who has been granted the honor of riding one of the smaller goblin-beasts, though this did involve wrestling it into submission). "Do you have a plan for standing up against the Khatun herself? She's the next ruler of all Thellamie, unless I beat her and take her crown and her victory - and even I wouldn't give good odds on that. The maids? Off the board. The goddess? Somehow, off the board. From what you've said, you've cleared the Rot Star, too. So how the hell are we going to win this, hero?"

It's an actual question. She believes that you, the hero who defeated the Mirror Star, will have some ace up your sleeve that will bring her victory and make her ruler of all Thellamie with a cute deerboy as a consort.

Breathless Dead

Once, this was an important place. Once, this was a place that the universe pivoted around. Once, this was a place touched by the gods.

Only, isn’t every place like that, given enough time?

Sunshards glitter like diamonds in the sky, like the stars scattered deliberately across the wine-dark void. Below, the waves crash together against the shore, a mirror. The breeze is cool and brings with it the rustle of cypress branches, the songs of morning birds, the prickle of goosebumps on skin. There will never be another breeze that is exactly the same. A butterfly, shockingly blue, rests with its wings spread on her knee.

She expands. She lets the experience of the butterfly pass through her, the shape of it, the meaning of it, the birth in pain and the death in chill and the beauty in between. The soft cypress needles rest on her tongue. The sunshards pass through her heart with a song. A string unspools and she hooks it with her little finger.

She sits down grinning next to herself, and when the butterfly shoots up, she breathes out and it finds a place to land in Dolce’s kitchen, resting on the back of his hand, where it will receive a plate of sugar water and sun to bask in, and when Vasilia comes in for breakfast, she’ll see it and, knowing Vasilly, knowing their love, she’ll find a way to describe its shade of blue that he’s never heard before.

“Here?”
“Here, in just a moment.” She beams. They’re wearing the same practical outfit, the kind of clothes that you don’t mind getting grass stains on when you’re chasing after sheep. She has a rod in her lap which looked at one way is a crook and another is a wand.
“Do I need to…?”
“I don’t think so? Sorry, I’m still, we’re still— we’ll figure it out as we go, I think. I’ve got a lot to do backwards, because…”
“Because this is impossible.” She lets it hang in the air like a shard. She nods in agreement. “We couldn’t have gotten here. We should have failed so many times. I should have failed.”
“But it’s right that we got here. Like a eur… a… um. Like the happy ending that you don’t see coming? Like the end of Batrachomyomachia VII.”
“Would the Nemean have gotten us here?”
“Why are you asking me? I haven’t figured it out in the past five minutes!”
“It’s five minutes from now?”
“I wasn’t counting…”
The urge to pout is strong. Instead, Redana closes her mismatched eyes and reaches out more until she can almost feel the strings vibrating.
“I think, with my wisdom of approximately five minutes and divine ascension, that she would have gotten here alone and then been crushed by Aphrodite like a bug. And then he would have tied her up as a trophy and dangled her from a comet to watch entropy.”
“And the only reason I beat her is because you were there.”
“I hope I’m ready for it by then.”
“You will be. Otherwise there’s no happily ever after, and that’s the world which has to exist: one where Bella is waiting for me with her sisters, where Dolce has his izakaya, where Dyssia and Alexa and everyone get to live in a universe which will never be perfect and blue and— oh.”

Dawn breaks. She reaches out and wraps her heart around it.

She gets up and spins and laughs and dances, and everything, every wonderful little mystery, every desire not to be alone, every wishing heart turns with her.

She sits down, beaming.

“Here?”
“Here, in just a moment.”

Return to Thellamie

The Stacks!

"And you are going to find the Blessed Waters of Civelia, or the Pan-Lunar Panacea, or, or whatever you have in here for first aid," Mayzie demands. It is a fierce demand from a fierce little cat, angry at the sort of nonsense her maid flings herself into over and over and over again.

Between her fingers, she spins out and spools Cair. What's the way to restore a woman who's lost her shape? Make her a new one. Making fine quicksilver thread establishes an order, and new order can be built from it. No - woven from it.

She spins like a woman possessed, and like a woman who would really like to have the confidence and chutzpah to be able to steal it directly from the Hero of Ages. Visions of impossible dresses crowd around her irritable head, and it's all she can do to ignore them and keep restoring the Quicksilver Golem to fix things around here.

After all, that's more likely to be of use to Eclair than running around this impossible place, rubbing shoulders with a dragon and a madwoman who fights alongside dragons, trying to find a first aid crystal worth its weight in power.

---

Hazel!

You're a challenge. And some women can't back down from a challenge.

You're brave enough to kiss her. She cannot let you walk away singing that you stole a kiss from her and escaped.

You're cute and squeaking and teasable in a way that no girl of a certain temperament can resist. I mean, as you are right now, half your Suitors would be drooling all over themselves.

What. A tasty. Treat.

---

Yuki!

There's a moment of silence, punctuated only by the furious squeaks of Seli (got too close to wolfgirls). From the back, someone yells: "I thought she was taller?"

"The Hero of Thellamie, huh?" Mikela gives you a savage grin. "Well, you'll have to get in line, Little Miss Heroine. I can help you take a nap after I get a collar on this brat~"

(Not that you have time properly right now; for all you know, the Khan might be on her way. The fastest way to get them all moving is to either establish dominance right out the gate or to take a dive and make Mikela think running's her idea.)

Breathless Dead

From a distance… it is harder to focus. The peripheral opens up. Bodies are scattered here. Fire snaps. And when Redana raises her head, she sees it all.

Her strength is gone. Her strength is dead, tossed aside by a hateful god. Her sword is broken, and her secret sword has shattered. And no. No no no. It should have been her. She’s already done it. Not Bella. Not Bella. Not Bella.

The gods are absent. Dionysus does not ride her like a horse. Her sight refuses to leave her.

The scream is all she is. Eyes to see and a throat which reflects the scene. And the Shepherdess does not come. And her father does not cradle her mother’s bloody head. And Bella does not get back up and spit blood and tell her that she’s insulted that her Dany thinks she’d give up like that. And madness does not take her away from herself.

She howls and tears at herself with her fingers until she bleeds and her face twists in anguish at being the last one, the last alive, the last to see the failure of hopes and dreams.

But she does not run. And when she is coughing blood, unable to keep screaming, there is nothing more but the caress of Aphrodite’s bloody talons and the tinkling of a memory.

“I’m sorry,” she rasps, and her eyes will not allow her to look away from what is now inevitable.

Breathless Dead

avaunt: begone. depart. used in contempt or abhorrence.

All her weaknesses are behind her. That’s the great, awful paradox of Redana Claudius standing up to a monster again: she can fight him without the desire to kill, but only because all her desire is here, is Bella, is Yue fighting an army, is little sheeps soaking up sunlight on the Terraced Lakes. Red strings like plover cables hooked into her back.

Her sword is more than a sword. It’s the sort of sword you could call a secret.

She ducks, weaves, dances with each step a cut. And each cut is: the rain slowly filling the empty lake back in. The little mountainside shrines. Vegetable dumplings that have a little bit of crunch to them.

avaunt!

She’s crying wordlessly as she tries, over and over again, to interpose herself, to interpose her sword, between the monster at the end of the road and her friends, her compatriots, the Coherent who joined her in the bowels of the Plousios, the assassins who are her sisters-in-law and trainers and sword-companions, Alexa whose heart could always be trusted, and she does not think about her mother — tyrant, monster, goddess, heroine — because to do this would be to sink to her knees and weep as her world is torn apart, and she has been there before, and now she is a flickering sword which is too slow, over and over, but she bites deep and cold and without thought for every strike.

avaunt!

But the cables of her heart are severed, one by one, until all that’s left are the promise of Gaia and Bella’s beating heart. And she slows.

She is, in the end, insufficient.

Her heart throbs with the desire to cradle Alexa, to attend to Taurus and Gemini and Mynx, to help her mother up to her feet. She cannot think about any of them as dead. Not yet. So she cuts everything in front of her and tries desperately to make space for Bella.

Bella, who will know what to do.

Bella, who she loves so, so much.

Bella, who she has died for before.

avaunt!

Breathless Dead

Redana...

...is Redana! It would be quite ridiculous if here, striving against Aphrodite himself, she was making her former bodyguard sub in for her! How rude, how unchivalrous, and how spoiled princess of her! Besides, that's Mynx right over there. Which means that this Dany, who is wrapping her legs around Alexa and trying to get at that blindfold with her feet must be the one and only, the original, the... well, no, she's not the original any more, is she? She's changed like Theseus's ship; the brat who ran away with Alexa and ran into the Eater of Worlds is nothing like the Ceronian warrior-princess who is smothering her old friend with affection, quite distracting from the fight itself.

"I suppose! It's hard! To recognize me!" Should she slide the boot off completely and go for a toesies-based attack? "So! I forgive you! For the tail-yanking! Which is a serious insult in Ceronian culture!"

Even here, cheeks squished up as she pushes herself into Alexa's grasp, as she writhes like a helpless damosel, she can't help herself from grinning, because it's Alexa. And once Alexa gives in, and sees that it's Dany but grown, Dany who's been through her fair share of scrapes on this side of the Lethe?

Ohohohoho. Then it's everyone who'll be by Bella's side, and Dany will get that son of a bitch in a wrestling hold, just like she learned from Alexa, just like she learned from the Silver Divers, and then she'll something something something daughter of Zeus and the day is saved!

If you'd just? Set her down, Alexa? Bella's making some awful noises standing up to a god alone, and she's never going to win that way. Not alone.

She needs her Dany by her side, after all.

Return to Thellamie

Eclair Espoir!

Mayzie's ears go up. Uppies! Her eyes go wide as she fixates on... a spindle. The kind that you'd use for old-fashioned carding, with a distaff you stick between your legs. (This wonderful world being what it is, that's a very ordinary thing and not something worth making innuendos over, generally.)

"That! There! Do you know what that is, Eclair?! That's Civelia's Spindle! Here?! You can spin anything on that, including--"

She dives back and clings to you as a plane of jagged glass the size of a wagon crashes into the mercury sea right where she had been standing. You were, of course, already in motion, so the two of you entangle.

"I can spin anything on that," she says, staring into your eyes. "Anything."

---

Injimo!

Morning is the light that plays on swirling, eddying quicksilver. She is the motion of globules detaching, bouncing, sinking back into the whole. She is the shattering of glass. She's all these things, but put them together, and she is also unmistakably a dragon. She is vast and joyful and getting in where she's not supposed to be.

Heron would be having a fit! Rurik would be having a double fit! But that doesn't really matter right now, because right now? Right now, you get to combo with someone. And that's nothing new. You were the set-up for a Heron combo all the damn time. Or you'd get in the second hit which unlocked the aerials.

But Morning is setting you up for combos.

[harder! you can do better!] she cheers, as she dives into mercury and explodes out, spinning, flinging half-formed limbs all about, setting you up for a 360 omnislash noscope. She's showy, but in a way that invites you to be showy back. And through draconic telepathy, she floods you with the delight of a puppy who has a very, very big stick and gets to run with the stick.

She'll be so disappointed when those two Avel manage to figure out how to bottle Cair back up. Unless that's not what they need to do? Unless they need someone to explain the mechanics of this fight to them.

---

Hazel!

So here's the thing, Hazel? You cannot be allowed to win. The pride of the Khan will not settle for you having a win. So Mikela the Fierce grabs you and snogs you back, hot and impatient and oh goodness gracious me she's got her teeth on your lip and she tugs until you make a delicious little squeak.

And then she tosses you into the pawing hands of her hunting-pack. Who are making a circle. A circle around Mikela. Who is peeling her top off. And, wow. Muscles. Heaving muscles, because she's breathing heavy and wiping her lips.

"You want to play it this way, boy? Fine." She tosses her top aside, and hey, that's a cute pattern on her bra, lots of colors in between black angles. There are huntresses hooking their fingers under your top. "We wrestle until you beg to be my sluzhanka."

---

Yuki!

"Oh no. Mikela's going to flatten him," Juni frets, as the four of you peer out of the Ossuary and look down upon the Khan flexing. "And then... oh, Olesya will be in so much trouble! And Mikela has no idea what the Khatun will do to her if she gets in the way of the OTP!"

"That's a lot of Serigalamu," Seli says, tapping her teeth. "Guess Mama got away."
"She's going to punish us for that one."
"Oh no, she's going to punish us~?"
"Unpaid ten-hour shifts at the Diamond Deluxe~"
"So, what, like when we were apprenticing?"
"But meaner. Bossier. Skimpier outfits."
"Unless we bring her something worth the scheme."
"But look at all of them! How are we supposed to save him?"

"...we can't all go out there and get caught with him," Juni interrupts. (Poutily? Conflictedly? Even being tortured by the Khatun hasn't fully tempered the characteristic passion of the Aestivali.) "And... wait, Our Lady was the distraction?"

"Oh, very distracting."
"Very bouncy."
"Very indignant."
"Mmph, mmph, wiggle, wiggle~!"

They are going to deserve every bit of their punishment.

"Either way, we can't let him get pinned underneath Mikela! Feeling her full weight on him, the strain of her muscles, seeing her victorious smile, and, and, he'd melt, and, he wouldn't be safe, but that's because, oh, if only Mikela was the leader of her own tribe again, not being bossed around by that, that horrid woman, because then he'd be free to not be free..."

Breathless Dead

"What? I'm not Mynx," says Redana, in exactly the way that Mynx would say it if she were here pretending to be Redana who is also a Ceronian Redana in order to double-psych out Alexa. "Why would I be Mynx?" says Redana, not yet cognizant of the fact that this is exactly what Mynx would say if she were trying to figure out how to get Alexa to take off the blindfold for the EYE KNIVES. "It's me! Dany! I stole you and we had an adventure across the stars and we said goodbye at the Great Rift because you'd become you and dragging you along would have oof ow ow ow hey no fair."

The Princess Redana is tossed up into the air. Alexa jumps up after her to keep juggling her. This is called the Cloud Combo. (If you slam them back down into the ground with a spin, it's the Thunderbolt. If you toss them into someone else, it's the Boar.)

The world spins and opens its jaws. The sky swings its scythe from one horizon to the other. This is how Hercules killed Anateus: adrift, bereft of the ground, floating as if in the technicolor sea. She drifts like a fragment of a ruined ship until Alexa grabs her face and oh, we're doing the Thunderbolt after all.

She bounces.

It sinks in here, as Alexa strikes the earth like a mountain, that there is nothing she can say, nothing she can do, which can prove that she's not Mynx. Oh, Alexa, try taking off my arm! Mynx wouldn't let you do that! Except she'd have an arm like a lizard tail which just pops right off.

But giving up isn't a Redana thing to do, either.

She meets the mountain with her arms and hugs.

"...we all forgot ourselves on the other side," she says, even as she's put into a headlock. Her words are strained, but she offers them up anyway. O Hermes, who taught words to arrange themselves... "Beljani and Epistia took me in. Taurus and Gemini, and I was... ow... Ember! The Ember from the sea! And I found Bella again! And I fell for her again! And then later I got all my memories back at our wedding and Bella rode a whale into the ceremony and..."

Words are false. But maybe the heart behind them will shine through all the same.