Tatterdemalion

Sunshards

"Tch... you damn brat!"

Impossibly, Rose from the River has lost her cool. The Conciliatory Ice-Star Blade flows through shapes like water, but its tip is driven into the crack between two tiles. One of Rose's tight vine-braids comes loose, the ties around it snapping, and her too-thick-to-be-hair curls like the leaves of a fern in the rain. When she looks up at Qiu, her serpent's slits throb with passion, reflecting the ice-and-fire war raging in her own heart.

"Where do you think you get off... hnngh!" Qiu's blade kisses her cheek, and her fingers fly there just a moment too slow. Another strip of orange flutters to the ground. (Orange she wasn't wearing this morning; blame the stylization. A conical hat lies askew on the tiles; her practical black top peeks through the long gashes in the robe, which is much more striking in its damage, and isn't that what matters right now?) "You think I'm going to roll over meekly for you?"

(No, her heart sings: she's going to take those strips and wrap them tight around you, bind those swordplaying wrists fast and pinch your nose shut so she can cram in...)

Rose from the River makes a sound like a thousand-year-old tree being uprooted, all groan of roots and scream of branches, and darts into a nameless style we'll call Move Like Armies Form. She moves so fast, stones shattering underneath her feet, that she leaves afterimages to surround Qiu in a ring of illusions, only to strike from behind. Qiu stands still and blocks the strike without so much as looking behind her. The wind roars through the pillars as the air catches up to their swords.

Rose jumps, leaping from pillar to pillar, stone crunching under her terrible fingers, and then descends like a broken space elevator, howling. Qiu calmly vacates the landing zone, riding the rippling current of Rose's impact on the buckling flagstones, and makes it look easy. When Rose flings herself after, taking her blade in both hands and swinging it like a claymore, Qiu has already moved out of the way of every swing before Rose so much as makes it, and each swing is punished: hiss, hiss, hiss! Like a wasp, Qiu's sword flickers in and out, stinging Rose's skin and reducing that robe of the twilight sun to nothing but tatters, tatters draped over her like a shroud.

There: Qiu makes to block, and Rose surges forward like a hungry sea to slam her weight, her strength, her throbbing lunar blade, all of herself against this waif of a girl who thinks herself better. And at the very moment it is too late to do anything but follow through with the blow meant to pin her fast against a pillar, to drive the Conciliatory Ice-Star Blade through her dress like a spike and crush the breath out of her pretty lips with shoulder and hip, Qiu melts away, ducking impossibly low, leg swinging wide to unbalance the monk. Rose hits the pillar and then the ground hard in quick succession, and before she can stand up, one high heel presses insistently on the back of her head, pushing her back down. The sun gleams mercilessly on the hilt of the Conciliatory Ice-Star Blade, sunken to the crossguard in the black stone of the pillar.

Her heart is racing. It hammers against ribs and lungs heedlessly, howling incomprehensibly about brats and how dangerous it is to be helpless and how no one is ever going to take her seriously again and how her body is a fire from the skin down to the very marrow, and when she tries to raise her head, Qiu exerts the slightest pressure and the head goes back down. If there is any mercy, let no one be watching.

Then the shoe is removed, and Rose traitorously feels disappointed.

"Well?" This time she stays down. "Please, don't let me interrupt your victory gloating, your most excellentness, your royal pain-in-the-ass!" (No self-reflection on her judgment of Qiu. Absolutely none.) "After all, if the Way meant for you to lose here, it..."

It would have sent someone who wasn't Rose. The realization of her own pride slams into her like a mountain falling on her back. She'd not just failed herself, she'd failed the Way-- unless this was exactly what she was meant to do, meant to learn, and the proper harmony of the universe required her to be...!! (No, surely not, that's her petals doing the thinking for her, wanting Qiu to conquer her properly, to be reassured that she didn't have to choose between her own lust and her duty to the good of all things.) Her thoughts run round and round in circles, barking at each other like dogs, and all the while Qiu looks down at her, face hidden by the light of the sun surrounding her head as a halo.

Breathless Dead

Redana stands, fingers interlaced with those of the King of Heaven. For a moment she stands, sways, does not fall. Then she pulls Zeus of the Outcasts into a tight and furious hug, the kind that would overwhelm anyone else.

“Thank you for not giving up on me,” she says. “I promise. I won’t give up on them. No matter what it takes. The Alcedi, Alexa, Dolce and Vasilly... I’ll stand up for them.”

She releases her father, wipes her face on the back of her hand with a very undignified sound, and then flashes her father a sheepish smile, all vulnerability and rippling will. “King of Kings,” she says, the words a well-worn groove. “Smile on me until the wreath is won.”

And with that, she runs for the door like it’s another finish line.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Constance might as well be a statue, hewn out of the white rock by one of Brutus's camp. Then a tremor runs through her, and she lets out an exhalation that is all too human: a sound, as if made by a squire putting down a heavy burden that had, several miles back, ceased to be regarded as burden or something that could be felt. The sudden rush of blood through limbs; the ache suddenly returning with a retinue and breaking down doors.

"I accept, Lady Sauvage," Constance says, and her voice is quiet and still, like the groaning of ice on the water. "But I fear her doom will claim her, and I will hold it against you if you compel me to witness what will befall her. But it is not for her sake, is it? I allowed the blow to fall; I let her loose and then failed to save a King of Britain from her heavy hand. What a kingdom this is! That even those who hope to save it see their hopes crumble dry beneath their fingers! As the farmer, so the knight; as the king, so the river-daughter."

When she reaches out and takes Tristan's hand in hers, her fingers are steady and strong, and her grip is desperate all the same. Desperate to be convinced that she is not being punished, here and now, for her own failures.

Fellowship: The Heart

Lucien!

"Yes, well," the Professor says, gazing with reverent eyes upon the battle between mouse and fox going on right before his eyes. "The House of Mirrors here is a repository of nexii ocularum, a convergence of possibilities. It's a very dangerous thing, and it's only by the will of the Carnival itself that the clowns, that is to say, my brothers in arms, they tolerate it, because they revere the Carnival as the guardian of the Grail. Now, having two Jackdaws running around is dangerous, even here, in the depths of the Heart, though from what I've been able to glean, it's less because of the ironclad laws of time-- which, here, are much more permeable-- but because it draws the attention of the Angels, who will do their best to resolve the situation according to their impossible whims; perhaps they will favor this iteration of the dear fox because she is more closely attuned to the Heart, but contrariwise they might favor the one we have been traveling with--"

And regret floods through the tent. You keep your head above it: you've already faced all of these, you've wined and dined and drowned your regrets. There's nothing left for these nasty whispers to hook into, not for you; but the Professor is another matter entirely. Quite suddenly, he bursts into ugly tears, smearing the greasepaint on his face.

"What am I doing, boy? Immortality, here, as some capering imp without any interest in the pursuits of the mind? The mind is not some ship made of planks; I am my memories and my legacy and when I drink that red, red sacrament, it will drown them both until there is nothing left but another clown! All because I could not stand the reaper standing at my shoulder, waiting to call me to my rest!" He takes your lapels in his trembling hands. "Don't let me-- don't let them-- I won't do it! I won't take the Grail!"

A terrible cacophony of honks sounds from outside the tent, and the Professor's face twists into a rictus of ridiculous horror. "They... they'll know... they won't let me go... not after I'm so close..."

***

Ailee!

Sobbing, furious, Surma the Bookhunter is there at your side, using her legs; she plants her hand on your shoulder and rears up into a kick, and knocks Evil Jackdaw right out of the tent. But you won't stop with that, will you? You can't. You have to keep going; you have to put her in the ground. That's the point of the sacrifices you have made.

You lunge outside and come to the conclusion that you have made a mistake. Sure, you bowl over Evil Jackdaw into the mud, hands around her throat like it's the mallet for the test of strength, and-- be honest-- is this fun? Is this fun? Or is it just more misery to be a part of?

Anyway, the wind nearly bowls you over, the rain is punching your back, and there is an entire fucking convocation of clowns arrayed around the tent. Evil Jackdaw writhes underneath you like a snake, and the Bookhunter's still there, but her words are ripped away by the storm.

***

Coleman!

Several things happen all at once. Jackdaw and Wolf are swallowed by the floor, which hardens into a cyst all around them. The Blemmyae lunges for you, and gets his huge hands around your throat. Black Coleman pulls the trigger, and the Blemmyae makes one more transformation from a fury straight from the depths of the pit, about to snap your neck like a twig, into something soft and wet and heavy. When Black Coleman hauls the Blemmyae off you, he kicks him to one side and lets the Blemmyae curl up whimpering into the mortal wound.

"No shit," Black Coleman murmurs as he spins the chamber of his pistol. "Tell me something I don't know. I finally run into you, and we're still too late; Wormwood's still gone. Maybe it won't let itself be fixed as a last bit of bad luck." He fixes you with an exhausted eye, even as a Very Angry Clown approaches to have a word with him about violence! in! the! aquarium!

"What happens? Lucien and the Professor get clowned. Ailee burns herself out to kill King Dragon. Jackdaw goes down past the First Station even after we ask her not to go, and that's the last time we see her. And Sasha hatches into hell, so you go on some damn fool quest trying to travel back to before Wormwood Station was destroyed, just in case it's still connected to the Heart, because nothing's impossible down here. Now give me a hand with this clown."

The breath of the Blemmyae is ragged. Jackdaw could save him, but... well, on the one hand, Jackdaw's just been swallowed up by the Heart, and on the other hand, he was just trying to kill you. Is there any mercy left in you, Coleman?

***

Jackdaw!

The Heart swallows you up.

No, something else swallows you up.

You've been vored. By an Angel.

Wolf digs her claws into you in sudden panic, and then... slowly, she relaxes her painful grip, as nothing violently contracts or tries to kill you. It's dark, and wet, and warm, and... still. Like being held carefully in something's mouth.

The Heart itself has put you in time out. Probably? Definitely. Almost certainly. And it's dark, but the walls all around give off just enough light to see the silhouette of Wolf, and she's not very talkative, so it's completely up to you to fill the silence.

In fact, one might suggest that you almost feel compelled to speak; as if some vast spotlight had been dropped on the two of you, as if you were on a stage being listened to by an audience, as if you have lines that you're supposed to speak. As if your heart wants to be flushed clean.

Breathless Dead

“I’m not good enough,” Redana admits into the all-encompassing acceptance of her father, here and now. “I’m not clever, like Mom, and I’m not strong, like you.”

Her bloody fingers take Zeus’s hand in hers. She can’t look the king of the universe in the eye, and so her eyes linger on those scars, revealed to someone who does not deserve the revelation.

“How can I keep them safe?” The Alced. The Privateers. Her statue, her bodyguard, her friend. How can she keep them safe from a harsh universe and a furious cat and a gun that breaks time?

Whether she must is not in question. She only doubts if she can. The crown gleams like the eye of the Nemean on her head.

“I couldn’t protect Isty’s mother. I couldn’t stop Alexa from killing Molech. I couldn’t stop Bella...” The blood, sprayed on a rain-streaked wall. The hand, stopping her from spitting out the Paragon capsules. The hatred for someone who’d never been in Bella’s heart, after all.

And that was the worst part. Missing someone who’d never even existed. Falling for the mask, because she’d been so desperate for someone who thought she was good enough even when she failed, over and over again.

“So how? How can I be a king? Please?” Her voice cracks, and she leans her weight on the shoulder of Zeus, she who watches over the exile and the refugee.

Sunshards

”Down.”

The silk is very thin. There might as well be nothing between her knees and the floor. But she kneels anyway. She is very, very good at kneeling, given her previous occupation and its meditative exercises. Qiu’s fingernails dig into the back of her scalp, sending shivers down her spine, and Rose in Gold groans blissfully, the sound as legible as that of soft rain out beyond heavy curtains.

“Good girl~!”

It is very obvious that Rose from the River is going through her breathing exercises. Her nostrils flare and her hair flexes, making a sound like wind rushing through a grove. She plants one foot heavily, drawing her other in a semicircle. With exaggerated care, she takes up her staff but does not change its shape.

“Of course?” The corner of her lips twitches. It took every part of her self-control to keep those words even and faintly amused. “Yes, assuming that you will win; that, even if I cannot win here and now, that I will not slip through your fingers; that even if you claim me as a prize I cannot outwit you; that I would ever set aside my quest without the blessing of the Way. You narrow the wide world into a binary, and doing so, make it so that every option I pick is held in one of your hands. To run away, or to fight hopelessly, and in defeat, to submit completely. As if you are the most important thing in the world!”

She dances to the sound of Ysian flutes. Chen, sitting at Qiu’s feet, is beet red and peeking through her fingers at Rose in Gold, who leaves a trail of layers behind her. Her breath control; her incomparable precision; her body, closer to a full revelation with every shawl shrugged off and every veil undone; these are all her honors, her glories, and now she displays them for the glory of Qiu. She dances, and every eye on her is envious, and her heart races knowing that all of them want her, everyone wants her, but Qiu will decide who gets her as a prize tonight, and the thought frees her and lets her become the dance, the whirling eye of desire, her own mind a white-hot joy, and when she glances over her shoulder and lets the last shawl slip free, baring the rich, dark flesh of her own making, the sound that comes out from under Chen’s veil is indecent, incoherent, adoring; and Qiu leans down to whisper in her slave’s ear...

“And besides,” she adds, with forced lightness, “what do you think this is, Roads in Autumn: The “Path” Cycles 2? That the horny monk is just looking for an opportunity to shuck her vows and be tied down, to be forced to stay? You’re no Aisling, o Your Graciousness, even if I do want— did want— happened to want what you’re dangling in front of me. If you’re insisting on making me decide between the two doors you’ve selected out of a hundred, at least sell them! Or are you hoping that I will be noble and walk away, leaving Yue the Sun Farmer defenseless in your grasp?”

”I’m never going to hurt you,” Qiu whispers, holding the helpless ex-monk in her arms. The moonlight plays over Rose in Gold’s skin: the pinch of the ropes, the golden chain draped down to her knees, the monogrammed scarves pulled snug over her face. “And I’m never going to make you hurt someone else.”

She cups a flower growing from her slave’s head as if the fate of the whole world is caught up in its petals. “You’re safe, little petal.”

One end of the Conciliatory Ice-Star Blade’s staff-form cracks furiously on the ground, a sudden provocation to see if Qiu so much as flinches. “Keep running that mouth,” Rose says, teetering on the edge of a precipice and daring Qiu to push her (metaphorically, which is necessary to point out, given the number of dramatic precipices around them). “See how deep you can dig!”

[Rose from the River is Smitten with Princess Qiu. Use the String wisely.]

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

”In Avalon the golden leaves will never fade;
in Avalon we’ll eat apples under the shade.
In Avalon there is no death and no decay;
in Avalon alone we will not lose our way.
In Avalon the giants still stand proud and tall;
in Avalon there is no Adam and no Fall.”

Constance’s voice is high and clear, like silver bells. And yet, for all that she sings of that impossible forever summer, her mien is frozen: she sings as someone standing without, in the snow and the dark, eyes straining as she looks out to sea and sees the glimmer on the horizon, impossibly far and yet close enough to hurt. As her voice fades away, Sir Liana stills her fingers on the strings of the lyre.

“Troy. Rome. London. What are the cities of man, my lady? They wither and fade, consumed even as they think themselves in their first flower. And still the way is shut; still there is no route to Avalon. So tell me, if you can,” she announces, suddenly, to the assembled room: “what hope is left to us?”

At least she’s talking. Isn’t that right, Tristan? And making pronouncements of doom— why, keep that up, and she’ll be back to her old self in no time, probably. She just needs to get all of the ominous declarations out of her humors.

Fellowship: The Heart

In the Tent!

Outside is a sudden squalling storm, almost loud enough to drown out the ominous honks of the slowly constricting cordon of clowns. Anyone who dares exit the tent will be overwhelmed by the fury of rain and wind, a thousand tiny darts of icy pain. Inside? Inside is a howling catfight.

The worst part is that the Professor is teetering on the edge of giving into Clown Madness, watching Ailee and Jackdaw fight; if that happens, the already small tent will not be small enough, and everyone will be part of the fight whether they like it or not.

“It’s an evil twin situation, isn’t it?” Surma asks, pulling out bolas from her belt and giving them a spin. The bola heads are shaped like mouse skulls. “You get a sense for these things, you know. Don’t go running, and follow my lead.”

Then she tosses the bolas at Jackdaw’s legs— how does Jackdaw react?

***

In the Aquarium!

“The reason I bodied the pod is because they were contracted to our enemies,” Black Coleman says.

He should have an eyepatch. Or something. Black scales? He shouldn’t look just like Coleman in a battered conductor’s hat and stained jacket.

“I remember this,” he adds, pistol pressed against the back of the Blemmyae’s head. “Funny how the Carnival works, right? Of course, this was just after the destruction of Wormwood. The beginning of the end. Anyway, younger me, the pod was contracting work to the Constitutional and her crew, they refused to break their contract, and in the Vermissian Wars there’s no room for sentimentality.”

He looks you in the eye, Coleman, ignoring Wolf hugging Jackdaw tight to her body. “This Blemmyae made a heartworm seed. It nearly killed Sasha when fired into her third car. His sisters and brothers gave Red Zammie seed-guns and phlegm-cannons and sheets of living armor, and— you haven’t met her yet. But you will. God, what was it like, being you? Before we went down into the Heart and hatched Sasha into all this shit?”

His words are regretful, but his scaled finger is steady on the trigger. The Blemmyae grinds slablike teeth together in rage, huge fingers working as if to strangle an invisible Coleman, and in a moment he will attempt to square the circle of the temporal paradox by tearing Coleman Prime’s head off.

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.