Tatterdemalion

Return to Thellamie

Yuki!

You stand before the small, diminished figure of Aria Thendragon, a dead woman hollowed out and filled with spite, and you can see the glimmers of the woman she once was. Her eyes are full of pain. Her hands shake. The flowers filling up her chest are still and wilting. Even the revelry is something she remembers from when she was a queen. A queen who meant to end the world, true, but a queen nonetheless.

Then the Dark Dragon roars, and the music dies, and the lights go out, and you feel the disorientation in your ear of slipping deeper into the Outside, of coming unmoored, of risking being lost. And you hear Aria's long, deep inhale as that which held her transfixed vanishes. And if you do not do something, right here and right now, then you will hear snapping, and creaking, and tearing, and you will feel the sickly-sweet breath of a dragon wash over your face. She will be as vast as the Dark Dragon, if not vaster, trees clinging to her form, an entire forest becoming her armor.

But you are in what some might call a superior position. You are holding your heartaxe, and there is still music pumping through your veins, and you brought down Walking Elm who might have been able to stop you. You can put her to sleep, here and now, if you strike a blow against her. And even I do not know if the Rot Star would be able to wake her again.

All you must do is be brave, Yuki Edogawa, and step forward with a swing.

---

Sayanastia!

The world peels away. The stars are still shining above, but you could almost, if you closed your eyes, if you held this boy to you, if you drowned him in your coils, if you closed your eyes as hard as you could, you might be able to sink into slumber for a little while again. To pretend that you do not exist. To deliberately ignore the light of the stars and their insufferable strings.

You could pull him down, down, down deep. Down where there is no dreaming. Down where the world is only a weight being held up by the coils of your countless sisters. Down to where you first woke. And you would drag all the rest of the Handmaidens down, and likely even the little Hero facing down Aria Thendragon, and that would be that.

If you could ignore his starlight, you could do this. If you could make him give up his starlight, you could do this. He must surrender or you must let the moment pass.

---

Hazel!

Oh, Little Hazel

---

Eclair Espoir!

Timtam catches your sword between her palms, clutching her fingers tight around it. As long as she holds, as long as she can hold you, she has a moment of reprieve, consumed entirely by you. She lies there, on the ground, her curls spilling out around her head like a halo. There is a wildness in her eyes. All around, you have the advantage, your many selves have the momentum, and her eyes dart about, take it in, realize what you have done.

She looks back at you, and she puts on a mask under her face. She smiles wanly and leans in, rests the sword's tip underneath her chin, holding her hands as if in prayer to the goddess. "Eclair, you've won," she says, like she's throwing up her hands and giving up at chess, pretending that her pride's not wounded by the loss. "You got me fair and square. I suppose it's time for you to take me back to the Mansion. Though, I suppose," she breathes, and her eyes don't leave yours, "you could do whatever you wanted to me first."

(A first thought: she's trying to trick you. The classic "oh no don't lock me up in the harem" ploy. Whatever she's doing, going back to the Mansion is playing right into her hands.)

(A second thought, from deep down your spine: she knows you would assume a trick.)

(A third thought: she knows how to fluster you and what you are like when you are trying not to show it.)

(A fourth thought: the element of surprise will not last forever.)

Return to Thellamie

Godspeed You! Golden Fawn and My Draconic Romance!

The lights wink out as Eclair Espoir makes for an exit. For a moment, it is easier to remember where you are: in the depths of a castle dedicated to the end of all things, surrounded by the dancing dead and flickering shadows of lightless foxfire, clutched tight by a forest where the roots drink hate and the flowers sing surrender. For a moment, the magic threatens to fall apart, for all the good intentions of Eclair Espoir. The music of Keli and Seli falters, and surely they will be seen as the dance ends.

And then neo-Thellamiepunk starts playing off a tablet.

In one hand, Alcideo of the Chrysanthemum has a lotus shining with the light of his heart. In the other, he holds the pole that once held up a banner now long rotted away. He wraps his legs around it and throws back his head, his teeth shining, his eyes shut as his shirt flutters to the cobblestones.

It's a remix of one of Civelia's hymns: a pean to order, to cooperation, to all the things that can be achieved when the people of this world work together. But the true music is in the cuts, the loops, the thumping beat underneath it all. As Alcideo hangs upside down from one ankle, his body taut and his hair hanging loose, it's hard to ignore that this is a song about selfishness. About taking what you want and letting it make your radiance shine all the brighter.

All around you, there is clapping to the beat as the Cult of Inara keeps a ritual spinning, frantically, improvisationally, sexily. All things in which we excel down in Aestival. There is cheering, there is "tweaking" (I am sure this is correct Yukisearth slang) and there is still an irresistible beat.

---

Yuki of Yukisearth!

The heartblade of Walking Elm is (you might remember) wickedly thin and black as rot, and corrosive sap runs down the groove in the blade. Except the sap is sluggish, barely flowing, and the blade is crooked like the branch of a sickly tree, and instead of fighting like a proper fencer, she is whipping it at you, hacking at the air itself, and she staggers like she has no fine control of her sword arm. Underneath her honeyed sweetness, underneath her promises of bliss, this is the tree that was grown in this garden: flailing about in an attempt to hurt you.

When she catches you on your cheek, when she whips the tip through your mouth and black sap follows in an arc like blood, it stings like wasps. It burns like demon pepper curry. Something trickles down your throat and you are useless and unnecessary and Thellamie would be better if you'd never come back. Her smile is the bared rictus of an animal as she tries to catch you on the backswing, and a dancer bumps your shoulder, and that thin sword sails just over your head.

She's trying to drive you back to Alcideo. Maybe she'll just skewer you both in one thrust. But that's as far as her spite can get her, as far as a strategy goes, and you have an advantage:

You can dance.

[Mark a Condition. If you dance-fight, add +1 to your next Fight roll.]

---

Eclair Espoir!

Mayzie catches at your sleeve at the worst possible moment: right as you dive through the window and fall forever through shadows and the coils of sleeping dragons and you don't even have a candle to keep you safe, but the wings of the Hero's Shadow are around you, and I thank it for taking an interest here. It takes you no time at all, on wings like those, to crash through the stained glass on the far side.

It is an impossibility, what you have just done, only possible because you have attracted the attention of multiple... well, calling us Players might distract you from the case at hand. Powers. Principalities. A Fallen Star and a Hero's reflection. Which means, even as Mayzie tumbles onto the amethyst-and-phosphophyllite floor of the transit station of Hero's Haven, one of the holiest cities of Kel; even as false-maids with beads in their hair and kumis on their breath look to you in astonishment; even as the fool struggles and tries to get up to keep fighting with a wound in her side; even then, even in that moment, you have something over Timtam which you have long sought:

You have the advantage.

A multiplicity of shining Eclairs will, at least for a moment, keep your enemies at bay as you close with the traitor maid. And the acoustics in here are, I promise you, simply extraordinary.

Breathless Dead

Redana's thoughts trail after her like a banner snapping in the wind, unable to keep up with her. Her sword flashes in the moonlight.

Most of these thoughts, the faster ones, are screaming about Bella and how thorough, how calculated, how ruthless the dismembering strikes were, peeling Bella apart with the same horrifically casual grace with which she bisected the Plousios and how could you, Yue, how could you offer hospitality and have a house with windchimes and sheep blissfully gathering sunlight out on the fields and still strike Bella down with all the placidity of a, of a lake, of a fish, of a third placid thing, she'll make what happened when she was ridden by Dionysus on the Plousios look like a funny little temper tantrum compared to what she's going to do here to avenge her wife and

Some of the slower thoughts make a desperate jump onto Redana's back and start screaming that Bella does not look dismembered actually and also that they're chatting and Yue is laughing in a way that is deeply similar to how Redana laughs and Bella's lifting her head and oh Olympians on high she's mid-swing at an unarmed opponent and

Redana makes a wild swing which comes nowhere near Yue, as a result of swinging herself off balance at the last second, and her sword leaves her hands (yes, even with the bandage) at the apex of the arc and goes swinging off into the water with a splash as she tumbles down onto her knees and pulls Bella's upper half into her arms and sobs in a way that is not particularly dignified at all. She should have good words, words worthy to the moment, but it's honestly mostly blubbering.

She thought she was done with this, see. Done with seeing Bella be torn apart. Murdered. Butchered. She clings to Bella like a blanket. This is likely not doing Bella's wounded pride any favors, but surely she must feel the tension in Redana's arms, the way she holds Bella like something, someone, more precious than diamonds, and the big sniffling shakes of her shoulders.

There's really no coming back from making your wife cry, is there?

Return to Thellamie

Eclair, Who Watches

...Eclair Espoir dances in tassels and ribbons and scarves and bangles, all unorthodox additions to her maid's uniform. She is calico and patchwork and it is difficult to see the precision in how she dances, but it is there. She moves like an eel, each undulation drawing the eye to the next, and the flash of her, the brightness of her, the movement of her is hard to look away from. You look away from her.

...Eclair Espoir dances in a shimmering dress of individual scales. Is she wearing anything underneath? She dances holding her tablet as a partner, her eyes behind the mask intent on the screen, on the messages from home, on the reassurances from her mistresses. Maybe they aren't troubled, those versions of your mutual lovers; maybe they're free and happy and dreaming contentedly. Maybe she's taking whirling, incomprehensible smear-pictures with her tablet to try and convey to them the experience that she is having. Her smile is desperate for approval. You look away from her.

...Eclair Espoir dances with Timtam. They are fighting with each step, each dip, each twirl - who gets to rule? And the cruel part is that she is looking at the hollows of Timtam - her throat, her wrists, her stomach - but Timtam, in her dragon-crested mask, is looking elsewhere, is performing for an audience, for some other observer, and each victory that Eclair achieves in being a better maid and making Timtam look like she's a miserable excuse for a maid so there is being levied at someone who isn't even really paying attention. They have the same raw desperation in how perfectly they move, the same fervor that maybe, maybe, if they do everything right and more on top of that, they will receive notice, receive praise. Did either of them ask before they started? Eclair looks at you, hollow herself. You look away from her.

...Eclair Espoir plays hopscotch with all the seriousness of youth. This isn't a clue. I just have to be honest and tell you that one of the Eclairs here tonight is playing hopscotch, somehow managing to evade being in the way of anyone else, her detective's journal stuck into a back pocket of hand-me-down trousers, not looking up, counting under her breath, doing the hop and half-spin between seven and eight, bouncing back to three, doing the high hacky-sack knee between four and five. All right, perhaps I lied. Perhaps the way she doesn't look up at any of the others is a clue. Or maybe the clue is to remember when you were young, and what changed between now and then. You, eventually, look away from her.

...Eclair Espoir strides through with medals on her chest: broken crystals, stylized flames, a fleur-de-lis of three familiar heads. Her lace beret is cocked to one side and has a brightly-painted rosette pinned to the side which droops over one ear. Buttons from the habits of Civil nuns stud the face of the shield resting on her shoulder, and are incorporated into her earrings. She is troubled; something has gone wrong, but she has not decided the correct course to take, or if she has the strength to correct it. Her eyes are dim. Her flame has almost gone out. You look away from her.

...Eclair Espoir is stuck in her seat. Mayzie has fallen asleep on her arm, and is murmuring something in her sleep. Eclair cannot get up. She is torn between shaking her partner awake and letting her sleep and miss out on the party. The choice is tearing her open, and you can see the cycle on her face as she argues first for one side, and then the other, trying to decide which one is more loving. It is Timtam, instead, who stoops low and kisses Mayzie awake. Would Eclair have eventually come to the same conclusion? You look away from her.

...Timtam, elsewhere, not in here but through a window, cleans blood off her solid sword. This is happening in a way everything else has not quite been. The stupid paladin is slumped against a bench, trying to hold that same blood inside of her body, which is where it rightfully belongs. Around them are maids but their uniforms are wrong. This one's knot is not right, that one is letting her skirt trail on the ground, that third one has ostentatious golden earrings. Timtam is humming the tune, and it strikes her, quite suddenly, that she is hearing the music, and she looks up and just as her eyes meet yours a dancer whirls between you and the window is dark. You cannot look away.

---

Yuki!

The doors open - you happen to notice. Who else would be able to notice? Only the maid swept off to the sides.

There are two figures there. One is tall and the other is not. One has thick vines of hair and the other has a bouquet where her chest should be. And one can enter and one will not. Walking Elm is stubborn, and she is supple enough to be able to walk into my clutches, and she is not stricken at the sight of this place filled with music and dancing again. Aria Thendragon sags against the doorframe and weeps dry, ashy tears and will not follow.

Walking Elm sways. Dandelions sprout up through the cobbles in her wake. Bees hum deep in her ribcage. She is looking for weak points here, for Hazel, for Seli and Keli, for Eclair. Someone needs to fight for your right to party, Yuki. And someone needs to pay her back for what happened between you at the ball.

Breathless Dead

Redana walks among swords.

On Tellus, she could have any sword she wanted! Say the word, o princess, and a sword shall be provided exactly to your specifications! In practice what this meant is that she tended towards a small selection of comfort swords that she knew she liked. Even the princess who yearned to see the stars could suffer choice paralysis, after all.

But here, in the moonlight, surrounded by the sounds of water flowing, crashing, roaring, she has exactly the right amount of choices. Pick out the perfect weapon for Yue the Sun Farmer.

She comes first to the familiar, the one she would pull out if she was fighting in this duel: a slender rapier with a labyrinth for a guard, long and sharp-tipped and perfect for zoning. Bella’s had experience fighting against rapiers, and Yue’s fluid style wouldn’t mesh well with the precision required… but that’s exactly why she shouldn’t pick it out. Bella wants a challenge. She’d know that her wife had tried to stack the deck in her favor and would be incensed about it.

So no rapier. And no to the beautiful flamberge. (Named after fire, but all she can think when she looks at the blade are waves crashing on the shore, rolling in onto her feet on the beaches of Ridenki. No to the twin pair of swords shaped like fishhooks— that looks like it would just be frustrating to fight. No to the giant iron club with a bunch of studs— does that really count as a sword?

Some she draws from the earth and swings with an appraising eye: the sabers, the scimitars, the cutlasses. She imagines herself whirling, whirling, in Ceronian silks and furs, before belatedly remembering that she’s supposed to be looking for a weapon for Yue. If Yue tried that, she’d get all tangled up and discombobulated, probably!

Then she comes to the sword.

The oversized hilt is bound in leather and still warm to the touch in the cool air. The pommel, tarnished gold, comparatively large, is intricately carved with… not dolphins. Toothed whales. Sharks. A narwhal. There is barely any crossguard. The blade is long and straight, wide-fullered, tapering to a wide point. Much heavier than it looks.

The blade has swirls where once there was color. Scratches on the metal which once had meaning.

She swings it to test the balance and tastes salt on her lips. Smoke on the air. A yearning for the fight. It’s not Ceronian in style, but the Silver Divers know a comrade-in-arms when they pick them up and manhandle them.

“It’s this one,” she says, her voice breaking a little. The hilt feels warmer. Just her body temperature, surely. She takes it by the blade to offer it to Yue—

And no matter how carefully Yue takes it, Redana will hiss and jerk her hand back, bleeding from the line scored down her palm.

Blood will drip from her fingers into the water.

Breathless Dead

Redana does not run. Not this time! But I'm sure that Yue knows (as well as everyone does) that there is a running-ness to her. Maybe that's why everyone kept trying to kidnap her when she was younger, just to get her to slow down a little. To get her to stop coming up with new ideas for adventures, new ways of getting into trouble, new places that she wanted to see one day.

So she's like a moon, instead. She'll range ahead, and then she'll fall behind, and both she and her wife know that she'll always come back anyhow. Her top buttons are unbuttoned, and the "flannel" she wore on Portugal somehow fits right in here on Earth, even though she hasn't seen anyone else with clothes like it. Her hair is loosely tied back, loose bangs flopping into her face as she takes the world in, and she doesn't stop moving, and she doesn't stop looking, and she doesn't stop giving the impression that even though she'll never stop, this place could satisfy her for a long time. For a long, long time.

There are very few walls on Earth. And even the ones that are here, they aren't walls in the way that Tellus has walls. The stars are very bright, even at dusk, and the plants grow fierce and wild and joyful without choking the grass or the lakes or the view. Sometimes, inside her head, there's just... silence. Not the silence of not knowing anything, but the silence of experiencing everything.

She can't help but glance back (or forward) at Bella every now and then with a smile like a saint. Not a smile self-satisfied in the self, like the one that Apollo endlessly offered her, but a smile satisfied in the world around her, and particularly that Bella is also in this world, with her, without fear of loss, without fear of mothers, without fear of being alone. It is a wonderful thing for a moon to know that she will never be free of her orbit.

...for the record the fight had better not be over her, Yue. Just because she met Rosepetal doesn't mean that she's just like that sexy, sexy woman! For one thing: she's much shorter than Rosepetal. For another: she's blonde. For a third thing: Rosepetal is like a slinky panther, and Redana's more like a sheepdog. Irrefutable logic.

Return to Thellamie

TEAM RELAXATION!

A lotus is pressed into Eclair's hands as she is guided up into the center of the room. The lotus glows, too. An opalescent light which reflects off your lights, your heart, and the dancers, and their shadows. It does not reflect off the walls. Where are the walls? Not lit by Eclair's heartlights. Her arsenal of blades. Her intentions and her wards. Those just shine on the dance.

Someone has a fiddle. Someone else has a set of pipes. Someone else, presumably, has a tambourine. Maybe more than one someone. And there is clapping as the Shadow Ball begins. (My Shadow Ball.) The courtesans of the Chrysanthemum link arms and dance in circles, then split up and, doing jigs, grab more partners. The smell of perfume covers everything: soft, floral, veiling whatever else might be here.

Yuki is danced with, which is to say, she finds that the dancers are happy to take the lead, to take her hands in opera gloves (was anyone here wearing those?) and guiding her, twirling her, dipping her low--

--where she gets to look into the empty pits of a skull, with Eclair's lights playing over the yellowed bone, making it seem like something out of the Day of the Los Muertos--

--and spun back up, link arms, join the line, kick one two kick one two, faster now, faster, the fiddle screams like a goblin as the bow all but catches flame, and the partner on her left is covered in vines and manages, without eyes, to look absolutely befuddled, and across the way someone is dancing with a marble statue, and the perfume mist gathering all around your feet is nothing like the sweet venom of the Walking Elm, because you are dancing in my house, my home away from home, and wherever else you are, that's still true.

Eclair, inside the lotus is you. All of you. All the yous that could have been, insofar as a beautiful star could guess at them. And you can see them joining in the dance among the courtesans and the service workers and the dead being spun from partner to partner, until you could almost weep from seeing all the yous there could be.

And Yuki, you--

---

Hazel!

In through the doors you go, Hazel, between those shadowed figures, past Alcideo glancing up with sweat on his brow from his tablet and how is he doomscrolling at a time like this, you might think, as your foot catches on a root and you tumble into the dark, across the filthy cobblestones of a castle claimed by the forest, across cold things that you cannot think about because if you allow yourself to think about the fact that they are bones then you will lose your nerve to get untangled, even as you feel roots slowly slithering against your skin, even as the vast dark of Sayanastia floods everything behind you and this is it, you're finally caught, you've been tricked and bamboozled by the Aestivali one more time and soon, oh so very soon, the claws of the dragon will be on you and she will whisper as she wraps her coils around you and claims you as a prize.

Only, the thing is--

Only, there, in the dark, in the deepest dark that there could ever be, in the darkness of absence and emptiness--

A bow scrapes across the strings, and a sweet breath whistles through the open holes, and light shines, not the insistent light of your antlers but beautiful opalescent light, surrounded by lights like those of your gift-giving Christymas day or luminous stained glass, and all around you, the dead of Aria Thendragon's court, knights and courtiers and damosels, are swept into the arms of the dancers which emerge from the shadows, and you are grabbed under your armpits and pulled back onto your feet and you can no more resist the dance than the dead can, and you catch a glimpse of Seli with the fiddle tucked under her chin and her eyes closed and her body more animated than you have ever seen her, feet moving furiously, and then you are spun about by a groaning skeleton with a ribcage cleft in two by maidly arms and then, oh, and then--

---

Handmaidens!

This is the sort of dance which is an expression of the power of a Fallen Star, my dears. Sayanastia could end it, if she liked, even as her puppets are swept up to join the dance with the shadows and the dead, only, only, you see, the thing is, there is light at the heart of it, and the light is broken and the light is beautiful, and the light says we play with the rules like this so that you're in your brilliant black gown from the time you tried to seduce Heron to the cause of the void, and it is vital that you both catch the Golden Fawn but also, but also, that you get to the center of the dance while playing by the dance's rules, that opalescent light and the music and the joy of it flooding into you, a false flickering that promises more.

(You were here, once, when the castle fell, with real swords and real shields, and the memory of that day is why our little Thellamie fears the swords of the Order of the Aurora. You were here, Sayanastia, as a queen who screamed and cursed and promised to crack the world open as the knights of Morning, Noon and Evening ran you full long on their spears. Here there was death. And here, now, there is a dance, for as long as I declare it so, which is for as long as Eclair Espoir holds her lotus and shows her lights.)

Around you, curses thaw. Around you, there is laughter and the sound of music and the void is full.

And at its heart, a woman so beautiful it hurts to see her shine.

---

Hazel! Yuki!

--you suddenly find yourselves swept up together by the dance, just like you never were at prom. Sweating palms, fingers interlocked, and all around you the mad ecstatic revelry of a world turned inside-out by Eclair Espoir's heart and the music of two very, very good ashiqs. And you have a breathing space, and are not torn away by the dance, and for the first time since Crevas you are together. In the castle of Aria Thendragon. In a cafe of the Chrysanthemum. Here.

Breathless Dead

Folks around the Terraced Lake will talk. Naturally! That's one of the simple pleasures of life on Gaia Earth. They share information. They provide their own opinions. The "phones" they have connect them across incredible distances - you can call someone on the other side of the planet, if you don't mind waking them up in the middle of the night. So perhaps it's not too much a stretch to imagine that one of these topics of conversation, besides the very big thing that dropped out of the sky (asteroid? bit of space elevator gantry? A Foxgirl Scheme?), is the people who have shown up and have made a campground.

Specifically, tongues might wag about Big Bella and Danny.

Because, right, hear me out: Big Bella's a lot of woman. She's got a mouth on her that could turn milk blue, but she's tall, curvy, and proud: exactly the right blend to give her fangirls. And not to put too fine a point on it, but her wife's tiny in comparison. Earth's not really the sort of place for this to get too out of hand, but folks might be wondering: what does a bombshell like Big Bella see in a pipsqueak like Danny?

Well. Eventually talk might start circulating. See, Danny likes taking runs in the mornings. She runs like she's trying to catch up with the sun as it rises. She runs like she doesn't know what grass is. She runs until she finds something worth pulling out her sketchbook for, and she'll wander around anywhere she finds interesting - doesn't matter if it's a little shrine or a Burrower ruin, she'll duck into either and look around with her green-and-blue and get this big smile on her face as she wanders about.

Then she'll end up back at Yue's place for a late breakfast, and you might catch Big Bella watching out the window as her Danny trots up, all sweaty and beaming like the sun (though if you asked her, Big Bella would tell you, firmly, that Redana's smile is nothing like that fucking asshole, like the sun stole forty cakes from her or something), and then she grabs a bucket and trots right down to the river to dump it over her head and then shake shake shake like she's trying to make a swamp.

And if you saw Danny there, amber-yellow hair clinging to her forehead, eyes closed, top clinging to her delts, bag hucked over a branch, a hop and a skip away from true and proper peace, you might realize that Bella lucked out.

---

"...and this Handmaiden was just trying to talk this horror of the underworld into submission, and every time she blocked one of its new limbs, I could feel the blow in the ground. But she refused to hit it back, she just tried to hold it fast while it kept taking new shapes, like, like, um, that one king who could change shapes and was a seal originally? Procrustes[1]?" This is met with a serious nod from Yue, who is letting her breakfast get cold as she drinks this in with, well, seriousness.

"So I jumped in! All while it was wrapping her up in its tentacles! But she wouldn't let go, and I showed it how the Silver Divers fight things with too many tentacles!" It's not too hard to imagine her as an exorcist's assistant, is it? A two-fisted heroine who saves the damsel in distress. Yes, that's definitely the image she'd convey.

"But it turns out, when we eventually caught it, she called him her brother and said that he had caught and betrayed her a very long time ago, but she was just trying to stop him from carrying out his old duties, which were - well, you wouldn't believe it, but - he'd imprisoned a lot of people in that Burrower Den, and she had to hold him fast while someone set them all free. So that was me!" She brushes hair out of her face, and then memory strikes her.

"And she told me to tell you, Yue, that Rosepetal says hello, and that she's doing very well!" She grins, delighted to have made a friend of a friend's friend. "But afterwards, she talked with him - it was all growls and clicks and humming - and she let him go. What do you make of that? All that fighting, against a brother who was seriously trying to hurt her, who kidnapped that many people, and she let him crawl away? I would have expected her to, I don't know, have some way to stop him..."

---

[1]: Proteus. A swing and a miss, Dany.

Return to Thellamie

TEAM RELAXATION!

You'd think the party would be winding down now. Some of the staff have already said their good-mornings and slunk away to find their beds (or, as is often the case at the Chrysanthemum, a friend's bed, by invitation). But the keen mind of Eclair Espoir will start putting together a brief timeline, whirring in the back of her head:

• An Aestivali woman as soft as sin, almost ready to burst out of her corseted dress, gets a ping from her tablet. She checks it, and her face loses its jovial cast. She whispers to the friends on either side of her.
• They whisper to others. Those who are whispered to pass the whisper onwards; it ripples throughout the room.
• A beefy young Kel bartender whispers in Mayzie's ear.
• Two gangly twins start putting up thick black curtains over the windows. They continue over the door.
• Mayzie fishes a mask out of her bag and whispers to you: "Ecl-- Mystery, you still have your mask on you, don't you?"
• "And Yuki, there should be one in your apron pocket, put it on, put it on--"

And that's when the lights go out and there is a moment, just a moment, of the deep darkness that was before the world was formed.

---

TEAM QUEST

Alcideo has a piercing whistle. The kind that cuts through creepy dirges.

He's waving to you, Hazel. He's got a tablet bag slung over one shoulder, a cut on his forehead from running into some whip-thin branch, and he's pointing upwards.

Up the staircase of moldering stone.

Up into the branches, where there is a dragon-sized door.

Up to the two pale torches which are not any color you can put your finger on, and the figures in shadow who hold them.

There's your path for scampering, when the time comes.

Can you feel anyone's breath on the back of your throat yet?

Breathless Dead

Once upon a time there was a city which was also a planet, alone in the sky. So many people lived here that they crammed themselves into houses as big as this room, and stacked these houses on top of each other, and they still decided that they needed people who would take care of them. So they made Servitors, people woven into purpose from before they were even born. And the ruler of all these people was - is - a woman named Nero. She is their Empress.

She is immortal, but she still decided she needed a child in case anything happened to her. She was the baby's mother, and the baby's father - or, well, other mother - was Zeus, King of the Gods, the Thunderer, beautiful and powerful. And to make sure her baby was safe, she had a palace built just for her. You could have had fifty houses instead of that palace! But she needed a space which was big, and secure, and allowed her baby to run around when she got big enough.

Her daughter - a princess - grew up studying military history and political theory and mathematics and applied theology and economics, and she wasn't good at it. At any of it, really, except for the theology. So to encourage her daughter, the Empress promised her a Servitor of her very own to be her maid, who was named Bella. And they grew up together, and even though they knew they weren't allowed to fall in love, they did anyway, and they both kept it a secret from the other.

The princess loved her maid, and she wanted to be free and find the stars, and she wanted people to be able to live in houses that weren't little boxes stacked on top of each other (because she'd snuck out with her maid to see how her people lived). So with the blessing of her father, she stole one of her guardians, a great big four-armed statue named Alexa, and she stole a ship, and she launched it into orbit. She had to leave her maid behind because Bella was frightened for her and threatened to tell her mommy- the Empress. That is.

And when she did this, Hades - the lord of the dead, the keeper of vaults, the last king - showed up on her ship and told her that if she took a message from him to Ancient Gaia, her wish would be granted.

Along the way, the princess ran into a crew of pirates, and Alexa threatened to beat them all up, but it turned out that two of them, Vasilia and Dolce, were so moved by her story that they decided to come along with her and Alexa. They traveled across the stars, pursued by Bella in her very own ship, and... well, lots of things happened. They found a city inside a giant turtle and a planet where Dionysus ruled robots in madness. They found a shipwrecked fleet and a kingdom full of snakes - but not this snake. She comes later. On the other side of the river.

On the desert world of Sahar they fought against Bella's evil stepmother, who was the Master of Assassins - who had trained Bella - and the princess and Bella, together again, managed to defeat her. It was very difficult. It was one of the scariest things to ever happen to the princess, fighting there. But they won. And after that they came to the very end of the world, the House of Hades - and they discovered that they had been in the underworld the whole time. The princess was just a princess of the dead. All her people, the last humans, their empire fell and was consumed and was damned, the whole time.

To get here, to the land of the living, they had to cross the Lethe, which is a river which eats memories. When the princess and Bella made it to the other side - and Alexa didn't come, she stayed behind, so many of their friends stayed behind, but Dolce and Vasilia refused to stay - they didn't remember each other. Not with their memories. But their hearts still remembered, and they fell in love again, not as princess and maid but as a knight and a demigoddess.

They continued on. And, eventually, they regained their memories. They got married. And they kept coming, with the Silver Divers who the princess led, with the brilliant Azura snake-woman Dyssia, with the people of Bitemark and Bella's assassin-sisters and the Tides of Poseidon who we could never get out of the flooded sectors of our ship.

And now they're here. Because Hades told the princess that if she brought a message to Ancient Gaia, she and her companions would be able to make a Wish.

"So let me introduce myself again. I'm Redana Honorius Claudius. I'm the daughter of the Empress Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Tellurian of Ecumenopolis, and I'm the alpha of the Ceronian hunting-clan known as the Silver Divers, who worship Poseidon, and most importantly, I'm Bella's wife. I can fight, but I can't fight like you can. I don't think anyone I've ever met can fight like you, though Bella comes really close. And we're here, all of us, here, because we're carrying a message, and because we've all got a Wish. Though the funny thing is, the really funny thing is, I think just being here is going to fulfill my most recent Wish. This whole time I was trying to make it so that I could go back home and save everyone, but I've figured out how I'm going to do that, and who I'm going to be when I do that, and now I think I know how I'm going to become her. But... I'm sorry, that's a lot, isn't it? You can call me Dany if you like. <3"