Tatterdemalion

Sunshards

“The Way is in all things and the Way is all things,” Rose from the River says, wrapping her fingers warningly around Qiu’s wrist. They both take a step: Rose back, Qiu forward, the world outside them drowned into stylization. Petals dance in the breeze, her flowers blooming. “Its voice is so quiet that we will often drown it out in the worlds we construct for ourselves. And because it is so quiet, we who devote our lives to following it, in practical terms, follow those who have the most experience listening.”

Neither one of them has drawn their sword yet. Neither one of them has to. The air between them is a Hell of Purgation. Woe to the bird that thinks to flit between them!

“So, really, it wasn’t anything personal, your radiant excellence. It was that my school’s sifu has declared you are... disharmonious. Mmm. Yes.”

When she cocks her head, one earring rests against her jaw. Qiu melts into her as they dance to the beat of their hearts— no. The wrong metaphor. Qiu makes a beachhead of her body as they display their footwork.

“And so I am here because someone else told me to chastise you. Because she knows how to move in time with the auspicious path of motion better than I do. Because I am, always and ever, following orders in one way or another. I made three choices myself, you know that? Ever. And the first two were both wrong. The third one... we’ll see.”

In and out, between the shadows of pillars so high that their tops cannot be seen. They’re speeding up now. Their swords are still sheathed. They are building inexorably to a drawing, neither willing to do so preemptively. The proper moment is not yet here.

“But I am also here because I have seen the ouroboros of power, Threeshard Princess. I have watched the leviathans of monopoly at their feeding. I know what happens to the market when one player gets too big to do anything but expand, and what happens when there is nothing left to eat but itself, company paying out to charge its own workers for what they make to record as profit to pay back out, over and over. I have seen the ruins of empire, little girl; I have shed myself of them to be a new thing.”

And Qiu lowers Rose into a deep dip, one smooth hand on that maddeningly ordinary face, the other’s fingers barely brushing the tiles. In that moment of tension they are the opposites that contain themselves, the yin and the yang, the mountain and the sea.

“Anything that threatens this world that has grown from that poisoned soil, pure and flourishing, will see me as its enemy, Qiu Threeshard; and even if you are wiser and better than we fear, and you very well may be, now that I have met you I know that you are still insufferable.”

Fingers tighten on hair. Whose? Does it matter? Artifice peels away, and what is left is a chariot pulled by three horses, one tempestuous, one staggering, one aspirational: the one that wants to start a cat fight right here, the one desperate to find someone strong enough and good enough to yield completely to, and the one that wants to do the right thing, even if it be so hard as groveling at Qiu’s foot. And here is the middle ground between the three:

“So are you going to submit to my judgement and relinquish your third shard to the care of the White Doe School, little girl, or will I have to chastise you first?”

Sunshards

It’s one thing to know that one day you will likely duel someone over their oppression of your monastic school, in the name of the Way, to bring all things to harmony and force them to surrender their unjustly hoarded power.

It is another thing entirely to watch your new friends fawn over her and act like she’s all that. After all, some people happen to be thriving, flourishing, valuing themselves for how adept they are at flustering and nettling and eliciting squeaks from cute girls, and then there’s this girl scrabbling up over the backs of others with nothing but power and overwhelming, hubristic self-confidence? Drinking in all the attention that Rose from the River shouldn’t be envying, shouldn’t be wanting so she can humbly deflect it elsewhere? As it is said,

I writhe underneath my blankets,
I groan both day and night.
While my enemy knows good fortune,
my torment will not cease.

“Rose from the River,” the monk interrupts, feigning good grace. “Champion of the White Doe School. I believe we owe one another a duel, one I am willing to see postponed so long as your behavior towards Yue the Sun Farmer is immaculate.” She offers Qiu her most aggressively weaponized head-tilt-and-closed-eyes-smile, the kind that would make a lesser woman than Qiu wilt on the spot.

Breathless Dead

Redana weeps. Redana weeps for cages. Redana weeps for the knife driven into her dreams. She weeps because the prison of humanity is not gravity. She weeps for the golden crown bloody on her brow. She weeps for the glory of Hermes, the messenger, for the injury of the message received. She weeps because the soldier next to her, holding her wrist, making soothing noises with a look of concern and incomprehension, is someone who will never love her again, who never did love her, who she could have lived with in innocence forever. Hermes strips away the lies. Hermes is revelation. Hermes is not the physician, no matter how many use her symbol in confusion.

The Imperial Princess of Tellus, Redana Claudius, born to dominion and power and authority forever and ever, born from a Director and a God, hero by the blood, chosen of her Father, delight of Polychromatikí, breaker of hearts, she who dared climb over the wall of thorns around the garden of paradise to escape into the wasteland of her own heart, reaches up, and up, and up. She seizes the solar crown, the Principality of Tellus, the birthright of command. She twists her fingers around it.

This thing that makes her important. This thing that makes her worth hating. This thing that is the collar on a chain that leads back to the wound in her mother’s heart. This mountain she never surmounted, this expectation she never met. It is hers, and it will not break.

She lowers it down into her lap, and the blood runs freely from her broken hands until the crown is red as copper. It remains inviolate, unbroken, and Redana breaks around it.

Bella takes those hands into hers and rests her forehead against Redana’s own, and their tears steam where they strike the crown, the hiss of evaporation like a depressurized plover. It is so hot. It scalds her. And even if she destroyed herself, throwing herself against it, it would remain inviolate and whole.

“I dreamed you were a shepherdess,” Bella sings softly. “And I a forest nymph. I dreamed myself a jeweler, and you my model dear. I dreamed you were a sailor, and I was all your sea...”

“I dreamed us both anything but what Olympus made us be.”

Breathless Dead

Then we bring them back.

“I won’t say it,” Redana bleeds out through a clenched jaw, even as the words suppurate all around her.

One world. One species. We can’t let humanity’s legacy be wasted.

“Shut up. That’s not me.” But she’s wrong. It’s her voice, or else impossible to distinguish. When the ship is repaired, plank by plank, is it still the same? When a girl is woven on a genetic loom, what flaw makes her less than her mother? Her mother, brilliant, decisive. The Director.

Until they learn empathy. Until they learn community. Until we remember we are mortal.

“Until they forget the stars!”

The die is cast.

Redana takes her head in both hands and squeezes. She mirrors, without knowing it, the pregnancy of her father: the terrible weight in her head, threatening to split open in her anguish. Her furious howl is drowned out by the steady, relentless logic of the Director’s last gambit, the authorization of her second galactic campaign.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Constance Nim has stopped listening to me. So I shall speak to you, instead.

Constance has turned with the seasons. Her skin is pale, her gown is the color of fresh snow, the fur of her stole is the pure white of miniver. This is new. This is worrying. She has become less human, after what happened; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she has chosen to be less human. She has removed herself from the rhythms and cycles of man except when, by some unspoken sign, she returns to Lostwithiel; and even then there is separation between her and the world.

When she chose to travel, with Tristan and with Mort, she simply told them that they would all be traveling, together. Three to go; three to return. Those were her exact words.

She bears the Cath Palug in her arms, and when she stands before the lady of the green dress, her cheeks are bloodless. She could be Lot’s wife, standing on the road to Sodom, save for the inclination of her head.

“Your hospitality is more than enough for us,” she says, and her breath does not steam. “We rode, and the days are short, and there is little enough to be seen. We passed unseen by wolves as hungry as men. You honor us by opening your home and seating us at your table, in this season, in these days.” Her eyes are dull and have no reflection.

And then there is a silence so grievous (as is becoming usual with Constance) that any young squire would certainly feel his honor prick at him to break it, to say something, anything.

Hider

Constance has taken the right to give someone the healing of her gods. I was tempted to give her an inhuman genealogy, but Robena might need saving before the end of this.

Sunshards

Rose from the River was, as always and ever, an anchor of calm in the vehicle, a mountain that set itself in opposition to the world and refused to move. It would be rude to say she “clung” to the frame of the car, or to point out the “holes” where her fingers “punched through.” “Dear life” should not even enter the picture. And she’s definitely not sore where Chen’s head kept bouncing off of her. The slow and very particular way she exited the vehicle, with the shear of metal following her, was deliberate grace and not a word more shall be said about it. As her companions groan and flop, Rose from the River stands straight and tall and makes a sound through tightly pursed lips that is something like a teakettle.

Then she scoops up the limp form of dearly departed Cyanis, who really did make a sparkly mess in the grass, and pats her with her best estimation of maternal care. There. There. You’re held. Please don’t— oh, that was just a dry heave. Okay. You’re okay.

Rose opens her mouth to speak. Sound doesn’t come out. She coughs and tries again. “Chen and I are going to have her attention the moment we set foot there. If you were trying to sneak in, it would be best for us to be a distraction, but as it is...”

As it is, she is being a fool. She is walking into Qiu’s jaws directly so that this ditz and this Princess can be silly and hopeful, and when Qiu demands their arrest en masse, Rose from the River knows that she will fight with the fury of three bears (and ten thousand rats) to allow these silly, silly girls the chance to run away. She’ll fling Chen away herself, if she has to. (It’s quite all right; the little thing will bounce.)

“Well,” she says, hoisting the quivering bundle of fox up higher on her shoulder. “After you, ladies.”

Breathless Dead

The words that scrape their way out of Redana’s throat aren’t hers. They belong to those old, aching bones. They belong to the woman who broke the Spear, who shattered it over her knee, and will always and forever remember the cost she paid for it.

“Don’t speak too loudly,” she says, with an exhausted attempt at wit. “The gods love to punish hubris when they hear it; they’ll upend plans generations in the making at a whim, just to defy our expectations.” She steps back, but her fingers linger on the railing. “The gods have no peers save themselves. I will not be baited into saying otherwise.”

The ruins drift before them, and there is something beautiful to the sight that makes Redana ache, a shiver in her flesh, and speak again, in a smaller voice, in her own voice, as she watches the light of stars sparkle on frozen jewels of blood, as she did before the Eater of Worlds.

“But I don’t think what she— what I— what we did was about forever,” she says. “It was about now. What we have to live with right now. Who makes choices about things right now. How we get to live.” The red sun shines through the ruin of a ship’s corpse. “Because right now is what really matters.”

When she touches her cheek, her fingers come away wet. Her shoulders shake, sudden and scary. Why does it hurt?

The stars offer no answer but themselves.

Fellowship: The Heart

Coleman! Jackdaw!

Wolf makes an annoyed snuffle. “Not mirror,” she points out. “Mirror was... it was... unique. Distinct. That’s it. Distinct.” She gives Coleman a flat glare and then awkwardly pats the bundle of quivering fox. “You’d tell,” she says, and then clams up again, having presumably used all of her words for now. But she keeps patting fox and being present. A skinny, traumatized rock for foxes to cling to.

“I must confess some curiosity,” the Blemmyae says, turning to look at Jackdaw (a movement of his entire torso). “What, precisely, brought this one down here? She’s not one of the Vermissian’s folk, and she seems constitutionally unfit for the environs of the Heart.” A gleam enters his dark nipple-eyes. “Now, if she has some pressing business... perhaps I could augment her, for a fair price.”

***

Ailee! Lucien!

“Surma,” the one-armed mouse says, by way of introduction. “And hopefully we won’t have to fight at all. It’s like, who’d come to a carnival just to get their hands on clown books?” But Ailee notices her tensing up, and she’s definitely sizing up Lucien and the Professor.

The sound of the rain on the canvas is becoming almost deafening. There must have been a sudden storm rolling in. The lanterns hanging from the top of the tent start swaying, casting shadows this way and that as Surma approaches the pile of books.

“Find anything interesting?” she asks, with a surprising amount of menace for how terribly small she is.

A crack of thunder almost drowns out the rain— and Jackdaw enters the tent. She’s had a carnival makeover and is under the influence of another name she’s picked up, thus the glowing spray-paint tattoos and the uncharacteristic confidence. Everybody say hi, Jackdaw. Come to watch Ailee’s crush beat up Lucien?

Sunshards

Rose from the River and Princess Chen of the Northern Wind end up joining the rest of their merry band of travelers for lunch. It’s easy enough to see them coming, as Chen sways up and down as Rose walks, perched on the monk’s broad shoulder like a colorful parrot. Rose has one arm up to keep her aloft, and another on her walking stick, and waves at Yue and Hyra (and Kat and Cyanis) with a third.

“Maybe you can help our dear, sweet little princess out,” Rose says, swinging down Chen neatly and putting her down in a seat. “She can’t seem to decide what she should get as a souvenir, and she’s having such trouble enunciating clearly. You’d think all those royal tutors would teach her how to speak, not squeak~” Condescending headpats, deployed! Pat pat pat!

But can you blame Chen, when she’s been shown off like a trophy on Rose’s shoulder all morning? When Rose has had girls come up to her oohing and aahing over her strength, taking her for a last marvel of the market, and asking if they can touch her muscles? When Rose has quietly reminded Chen that all she needs to do to be put down is ask like a good little girl? Anyone would be a flustered wreck under those circumstances, the poor darling— and still she’s got that ring in a death grip, not having figured out what to spend such a precious treasure on at all. (Why, surely, she doesn’t mean to keep it. But what if, hypothetically, she didn’t get anything? Would Rose demand it back, or would she get to keep it, or would Rose take her by the chin and tell her that she’d look beautiful wearing it? So many distracting thoughts to think about!)

Rose buying Chen noodles without asking her what she wanted is also a flex. A gambling flex— Rose might quietly be hoping she read the princess right— but a flex nonetheless. Rose from the River rides the hard edge of temptation, just so she can see Chen hide her face and make those incoherent little noises in front of everybody.

If only they could have continued all day, and into the night, when it comes to that! As it is said,

The pheasant calls his mating-song,
the water ripples in the rushes.
How pleasant is the wickedness of a lover
in the coolness of the patient dawn.

Breathless Dead

“Right, yes, the Sowers!” The Sowers? The Sowers. The Sowers? Redana needs to start visualizing something that’s not those little spherical constructs from that adventure serial. Nope. That’s all she’s getting: swarms of spheres descending on the skies of Ridenki. Auspex! Help her!

And while you’re at it: Mom, stop! You’re going to win! Redana has seen the wreck of that station with her own eye; this story has a happy...

No. Redana frowns, and it’s a serious enough expression that it sends every servitor in the room into an anguished hush. This wasn’t a happily ever after. This war might have been the right thing to do, to wage, to struggle through... but it’s going to lead back to Tellus. Back to a prison for humanity. Back to a little girl watching the clouds in the hope a star would pierce through.

“Was it the guilt?” She asks herself, fingers brushing on the map spread out upon the table. “Was it because you felt like this, that you needed to... make up for it? Why did you take us there?”

Athena only knows what conclusion her generals are going to jump to.