Tatterdemalion

Breathless Dead

Redana, simply Redana, holds the God of the Underworld in her arms. Here, she feels the echo of old wounds, impossible blows, feats of strength - she feels all the things that could have kept her there forever, in the house of her mother, in the dominion of Hades. But she holds her uncle still.

Is it any surprise that she weeps with him?

There's not even anything she can really pin it on. Yue would tell her that sometimes you've just got to cry to get all the tears out, and that's as solid a theory as anything she could construct with her old library at her beck and call, with tutors to explain the mysteries of the world - the underworld - to her, and with Bella there to ask for explanations.

Not that the explanations were ever for Bella's sake.

She had been so young when she began this voyage. So foolish. And only a fool would ever have agreed to cross the Rift, to dare the unknown, to find their way here to where everything is so different, so vibrant, so...

So hopeful.

That maybe here, at last, is an answer to her yearning heart.

---

The prayers die on her lips. It seems useless to continue to offer them here, where there are goodbyes.

What she will offer, however, are hugs.

Let no relative think that they can escape! Not even Poseidon, who makes her teeth itch and throbs strange colors into the back of her eyes - she has been through the mirror-madness of Dionysus, she has been in the labyrinth of Aphrodite, and her wild uncle thinks that he can get away? After so many years of being observed by humanity? On a world like this, they look up at the sky's myriad of colors and see wonder, beauty, and an unknown that should be experienced on its own terms.

Everyone gets a thank you. Everyone. Even Dionysus, who was there for her at her worst, who refused to give up on her when her world broke and ran like quicksilver. Thank fortune that Aphrodite isn't here, because then there would have been a scene... but they all would have stood behind her then, wouldn't they?

She thanks Artemis with a hug that threatens to lift the huntress off her toes, and says thank you: not just for Bella, but for her sisters. After all, she never would have made it here if not for the huntresses. All of them. And she stands up on her very tippiest of toes to whisper into her father's ear. What they say... well, only they know, and neither will be telling anytime soon.

But there's someone else missing. An empty space where there should be someone, with wand and sheepskin and winged sandals.

On the hillsides, sheep bask in the sunlight. Far beyond, there are towering columns leading up to the wild void, and the prisons of unmaking, and the universe made orderly, and an underworld beyond, and there are no paths that lead to this place yet, no road that can follow in the wake of the Plousios.

She is not here, because this is one end of the skein, and because there is so much left to do.

But one day she will have been here, in the shadow of her father, golden hair lit by her torch, orange wrap marking her as someone who has walked the path of the Hermetic. A captain, a void-rider, a messenger and a message. Someone who walks back along her own path to ensure that everyone's heart meets its desire.

She is not here yet. So there is something that still remains to be done.

On the hillsides, sheep bask in the sunlight, and a shepherdess walks among them checking her harvest.

Return to Thellamie

The Ceveline!

It is a truism of storytelling: when you are at your wit's end, have a woman come through the door with a sword.

This is particularly true of detective stories.

The door opens. The door closes. Injimo has followed starlight and purpose straight to the loud, vibrant heart of Eclair Espoir, her hands in the sink, her companion applying sacred bandages to the wound of a Paladin. It is a cramped space, the sort of space that is made for martial arts, for fights where victory is found in inches.

I declaim knowledge of what is to come.

---

The Outside!

There are cards half-hidden in the grass. Stones lie on each other like links in a chain. There are cherry blossoms on the high and mournful winds. This is a reflection of Card and Captor and Sakura, yes? This is the half-awake, the dreaming of the world, a place where heroines find what they are looking for (except, apparently, how to undo a knot!!).

We're all in the Outside, a place of Random Encounters, a place of Quests, a place of Dragon Dreaming, after all. In such a place, maybe even I seem small. The stars aren't out - the marvelous artifice of the Sun is blocking the view - but they must seem awfully small all the way up there, wouldn't they?

There's something about this world that gets into you, for all that I am its counter-goddess, which means for all that it's a fanciful story. Because it's still real to all the people in Vespergift, and in Crevas, and out here in the plains of the Serigalamu. There's more reality in a goddess being bullied in the back of a wagon than there is in all the whirling dances up there, even if starlight is what makes things solid and real and more than the passing fancy of the sleeping dragons far down below.

You have to keep traveling. The Ossuary is farther still.

Breathless Dead

It is not that Redana is stubborn, per se. Not in the way that Bella is. Or, rather, not in the specific way that Bella is. She just gets lost in the runs, looking for the way through. What is memory? That's been jumbled enough for her: lost and exploited and found again and leading back to Bella each time.

The body knows better. The body learns the bruises. The body learns what victory feels like.

This isn't the body she left Tellus in, after all. Even before she was initiated into the Silver Divers, given her silks and silvers, her body had changed. The body remembers fighting in the Eater of Worlds as vividly as it does battling the embodiment of Bella's desire, no matter what goes on in the silly head of the princess-alpha. And the body is electric with the need to match herself to Jessic.

Someone else, like one of the Pix, might grow frustrated, might walk away, might throw in the towel and sulk and require treats. But Redana isn't one of those charming little creatures. She's a puppy and she knows how to play. And eventually, she's even better with the shield than she would have guessed going in - this is the arena, this is the Olympics, this is the thrill of pushing herself which she's been missing.

Her laughter is bright as sunlight as she gets swatted halfway across the arena again, and her smile won't fade even when Bella has to pick her up off the floor by the end.

Return to Thellamie

Hazelikins and Yuki...!

A wagon winds through the borderlands of the Khaganate. Let us focus our attention up front, to where a handsome young man is guiding two goblin-stags along the windswept plains, and where a shining young fawn is sitting next to a former heroine, free to speak, to ask the wind what they will, to consider what ending this all shall come to soon enough.

Up front! Let's focus there, please! Not in the back where COMPLETELY NORMAL noises are happening! Keli's going to be coming up there to snuggle up by Hazel soon enough, mark my... just mark it!! It's going to happen!! There's only so much shibari they can demonstrate before they get bored, I swear!!

---

Handmaidens!

One by one you find yourselves in Kel.

It is cold there in the early morning, when the wind whips through the narrow streets, when the warmth of this mountainside nation is locked up tight indoors. The cobbles underfoot are all different shapes and sizes, but they fit together like a perfect puzzle - for this is Kel, where the mines run deep, where crystals shine, and where spires and towers jut out from cliffsides. Kel, where the Goddess first took a breath and looked up at the dancing stars. Kel, where mystics and decadents get drunk on stargazing, where architects hone their craft, where starglasses are worn even at night.

One by one you find yourselves in Kel, alone at first, but doubtlessly drawn together. Bereft of the dark dragon, you still find yourselves drawn - by chance, almost - towards the Ceveline, that labyrinthine monastery-of-monasteries, that sprawling complex spilled across two mountainsides. The starlight flickers eerie on the polished streets.

---

Eclair!

I'm sure the cleaning isn't a compulsion.

It's just that when the Idiot gave you gasping directions to a side-gate in the Ceveline, to a small apartment in the paladin's complex, well, I'm sure that you decided you had enough of a disguise to pass through. And you had Mayzie right there, too, slipping her shoulder underneath the Idiot's other arm.

But she hadn't even properly cleaned in the place before she left. She's still got bowls stacked up next to the sink (or, well, had). She's left bits of exercise equipment scattered across the floor. She let small items build up behind her couch. What else could any knight of the Aurora be doing, as Mayzie sits by the Idiot's bed and strokes the head of the small, sassy lost child?

Breathless Dead

Redana is not very good with shields, no matter who she happens to be.

Swords? Swords she can do. Wrestling? You'd best believe it. Sprinting, lunging, throwing? She's as much an Olympian athlete as her wife. She's trained in dueling, operations behind enemy lines, escaping the most dreadful of predicaments, and everyone here would be quite surprised how well she could keep up with Bella if she really, really tried.

But a shield? Eugh. Like, with a rim and a burnished face and all. Just your typical real shield. Yeesh.

At least this one's the kind the Princess of Tellus would carry. The Ceronians don't really "do" shields, you see - they're all about offense, hitting them hard, rendering the opponent unable to retaliate. But the gladiatorial games of Tellus would sport shields like this: an aspis worked around with prayers to the gods for victory, or at the very least for safety. One edge all the way around; a face emblazoned with the faces of serpent-maned Kerberos; a grip that fits just so in her hand.

As the great dragon surges forward, Redana lifts the shield high and lets the point of the lance race from one side of the rim to another; she keeps going, brings it in to smash against the knee of one of those powerful legs, and promptly gets her knees swept out from underneath her by that lashing tail. Across tiles worn in such interesting patterns by the click-clack of talons she rolls, keeps rolling, gets her legs under her in time to match her shield against that lance. Up! Up! She goes for the chin now, with a jump and a grunt that forces all the air of her lungs.

That's right, o Princess of the Sky Castle! She's trained in CQC[1]!

But with a sword she could flourish! With a sword she could command some small space between her and the lance! And with the shield, all she can do is get bodychecked across the tiles again, clinging to her shield, bouncing her way into a kneeling crouch, grinning with all the enthusiasm of a woman who will not learn her lesson until she's physically incapable of getting up again.

But shields? Come on!

---

[1]: Cutie-Queen Combat. Goldie would not lie to her.

Return to Thellamie

Sayanastia!

I have been. Very patient. With you. I have given you battles to face, made room for your grand and marvelous sulking, and kept an eye on you and the other Handmaidens, since I can tell that there's still something interesting here that we're not quite done with. But spiting me, after all the hard work I have done not getting into fights? Bad girl! No treats for you!

But at the same time, I'm not going to hold your head under reality in order to gently persuade you to behave. Despite the chance that you might have tried to sink down with Hazel, I'm not about to let you leave on your own. Not when your presence still makes things so exciting! Imagine what we'd miss if we lost your insight into the coming war between the Church and the Khaganate.

No. I have a better fate in mind for you, as my light mingles with that of Hazel Valentine Fletcher.

YOU HAVE LOST YOUR ADULTING PRIVILEGES, LITTLE MISS.

---

Yuki!

You are witness to the shrinking, petulant dragon beside you: emptiness becoming compressed, compact, fun-sized, bullyable. I shine like the sun. I shine like the moon. My light envelops Hazel and he is lost in the radiance, that reality-making light which insists that we continue enjoying this strange little world.

I hope you have enjoyed it, by and by. You were such a lovely heroine last time, and you're up to more than even I expected. Well done with Aria - she would have been a dreadful threat, otherwise. But don't give me that look! Or, do, I suppose- oh. Oh no. What is this urge to be polite? What have you done, Hazelkins?

---

Hazel!

Er. Um. So I do need to let you know up front that while I have taken on some of the, well, metaphysical qualities of you, and I didn't mean to do that, and there's probably a way to undo it or just let it wear off after a while, and I promise I'm not going to transform into you or anything, that would be weird, right? But you're, well, I'm afraid that you've just taken on some of the metaphysical qualities of me.

I shrink down to the size of Keli and Seli. Not too far removed from them, in fact, but I'm less, um. See, you'd be really awkward about having curves, and I'm like you right now, so I'm all lanky and nervous and I'm sweating, Hazel, and if you don't mind me saying so, this is your fault? All of you are going to think I'm gross for sweating, when I've just been exerting myself magically and otherwise, and I do very much hope that this is reversible soon! Because! Otherwise, this would be very mean to me! Why do I feel the sudden sense that something being good is actually horribly underwhelming and it has to be Perfect?

But you, Hazel - you're now buoyed up and boyed up and, well, Aestivali'd up with the light of the False Fire, the Hidden Aunt, the Veiled Star. Me. A light of tricks and deceptions and lies and pranks and entertainment. Do you think you could, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, do something with that? Something useful, maybe? I only ask because all of us are right now in the midst of the Rot Star's forest beyond the proper edges of Thellamie and that is a very bad place to suddenly get lost until I remember myself properly again so if you really don't mind I'd appreciate it awfully if you could consider making use of it?

---

oh heck and beans it's Eclair Espoir

Um uh um I really should have started this by paying attention to you oh no

The thing is you're really cool and I'm your biggest fan and I've been cheering for you to somehow unravel the mystery this whole time and I knew this moment would require proper attention but then the thing with Hazel happened and now, gosh, okay, I can do this, right, so, you're here with Mayzie, and actually, as a treat, she takes your hand properly. In her eyes, caution wars with the same fire I feel whenever you do the thing with the skateboard and the air combos and you just knocked Timtam, who is blessed by me, out and I'm still cheering for you! Woo!

But yes Mayzie. "We need to get her help first," she says, practicality winning out over the desire to go and punch the Khatun in her face, which probably wouldn't end well for her, given that the Khatun is an acolyte of Demon Queen Miaou, and I think that's come up already in the story? I'm fairly sure this is information which you either have, by this point, or have suspected. I might be misdirection and tricks and japes but Miaou's just angy, angy, angy. She did not adjust anywhere as well to being down here as I did, thank you very much, if you don't mind the brag. "Then we can take this straight to the top!" It's a silly phrase, the sort of thing that's said by detective-heroines in thriller novels, but think about the top, think about the sorts of tops involved here: not just the top of the Mansion, your lovely half-sleeping dragons, but the top of the Church and the top of the Khaganate. Who might be willing to listen to you now? Who might best be able to stop a war?

The Mansion is on a defensive footing, and active maid deployment might flare things up in a way you're probably hoping to avoid right now. The Church is now missing their goddess and might be acting rather irrationally for them, if they don't mind me saying so - they're usually a lot more sober than this. And the Khaganate is all might-makes-right and if anyone could challenge the Khatun, they'd be in charge.

...are you thinking what I might be thinking? It's crazy, but it just might work...

Breathless Dead

“…and they had to be connected to the ship with cables,” Redana says, cheerfully. Around her, her clothes ripple with more than wind, accommodating for chill with the power of temperature-sensitive materials. Her silken sash ripples in the breeze, a trail for Chen’s sword. “Without that harnessed sun, they would be powerless. So half the trick was just getting behind someone to get them, you know?”

Dawn is turning the far horizon all the pastels that a Princess-of-Tellus-not-the-Earth-kind could imagine: pinks, purples, delicate blues. Rosy-fingered, they call her. But there’s just something more to it here, especially with how these colors fail to paint the elevators at all.

“So to have anything like this, we’d have to attach a separate cable onto the sword! Can you imagine anything like that?” She laughs, and the wind snatches it away. Her ears are low against her skull. But her tail can’t stop wagging as she clings to layers of the sorts of dresses that stayed in her closets forever, no matter how often Nero had them sent as presents.

Now there’s a thought. What if, working together, Gaia and Tellus could figure out how to make reprogrammable clothing? You’d need some way to interact with it, but instead of closets and closets and closets full of outfits to maintain, most of which were never even worn, Bella could have just maintained a library of outfits to navigate around and decide on. Like her spacer outfits, but even more radically capable of changing!

Why stop at the clothes? What if she could do the same with herself? No, down that road lies the nightmares about being lost inside Bella’s heart again. But would it be so bad for her to be able to decide, every now and again, to be the size of Bella? But then again, she wouldn’t get to bury herself in Bella anymore. A quandary.

Maybe that sort of back-and-forth fretting was really what blocked qi. Except, no, Bella hardly ever frets like this, and she can’t— well, no, she still does worry. She does fret. That’s a thought worth sinking her perfect princess teeth into.

“I used to be— I’m good at that. Plovers. I enjoyed the feeling of freedom. The body all around me, metal and fire. And always keeping my enemy away from my cable.”

A cable of sorts stretches from her finger, right now, to Yue’s sword. It’s just that it’s both invisible and red at the same time.

Return to Thellamie

Saynastia, the Dark Dragon!

I unfold from the breath of my daughters. My tails are a shining, luminous fan. I am as vast as a dragon, and my coat is dappled with mocking peacock eyes. I am light in the midst of darkness; I am the story that demands we keep going, keep laughing, keep finding new ways to challenge dragons and maids and heroines and silly boys. My teeth are white and sharp. I am ravenous for this entertainment.

If I am afraid, it is that I will not do right by my Thellamie. If I am afraid, it is a fear of the story ending wrong.

"Fighting me will not bring her back, you know," I purr, with a rustling of tails, with a shuddering wink of eyes. "Defeating me will not make you not a character any more. Lash out at me all you like - you're still a part of her story. The tamed nemesis. Do you want more illustrations? More of my attention?"

And I reach out and pin Hazel Valentine Fletcher under one paw as vast as a chariot, as gentle as the coils of Crevas.

---

Yuki!

I can spare a moment for you, my girl. You were such a joy last time. You still are. Some of my eyes are for you, too.

The Rot Star withdraws from this place. Thinking of ways to punish you, to crush around Vespergift all the tighter, to one day make everyone who idolizes you suffer. But all this does is make the dark forest mundane, ordinary, thick and pressing all around. Safer to travel through. You could take Hazel by the hand and walk with him through strange and unfamiliar woods until you come to the place he is seeking, whatever that might be.

At your feet is a heap of broken branches, dried flowers, and a mushroom as vast as a heart. Bits of white bone can be glimpsed under the leaves, the wood, and the petals.

You're at two for two for foiling Fallen Stars, my dear. You might even make it to four by the end of this, if I'm not careful in how I set you against Miaou's champion.

---

Eclair Espoir!

You are owed clues. You are owed many clues, but one shall have to suffice here, as shining-eyed Mayzie takes your hand, her fingers interlacing with yours. Because you can never turn that mind of yours off. Ah, if only I had thought to set you against someone who could set those thoughts of yours to fuzzy, confused buzzing, and then to peaceful bliss and purring. You have Mayzie, whose passion shines against yours, but she will never be able to be a thick blanket to drown out your thoughts.

Well. Not unless both of you learn how. It would be something to approach with intentionality, with intensity, with gentleness. But I digress.

The false maids are quite evidently Serigalamu. Moreover, the tattoos worked onto their necks, peering out from over their lace collars, indicate that they are associated with the Khatun and her huntress-regime. The Civil Church is one of the most powerful organizations in Thellamie, but it is a loose and passive power, and the Khaganate would be well-equipped to exploit a Church in disarray.

Breathless Dead

"I have never met anyone who can fight like you can," Redana says, plopping down right on the stone in a tangle of limbs, watching as this Princess-like-a-cake cleans off every place where she had Bella dead to rights. "And we have been fighting for a very long time." In that sentence she bears the weight of the Eater-of-Worlds, of mad robots and marooned fleets, of assassins and their Mistress. Of being run through, poisoned, torn apart like Dionysus. Only the good fortune of her birth has stopped her from being a patchwork woman of scars and old wounds, and Bella...

Bella put herself through all that and more.

To get here.

Under this vast and beautiful sky.

Under these stars, diamond pinpricks in a thousand necklaces across the throat of Night. Under these shining clouds which dance on the hilltops. Under the shadow of these vast towers leading up into the docks, the prison of becoming, the mines, and beyond them, an empire of the living, and beyond them, an empire of the dead. All running from here, a place they could have stayed. A place we could have stayed.

In her heart, suddenly, she can see it. She can see a home shaped to run along a hillside, and everything in the house is beautiful for the sake of being beautiful. She can see paths and forests and fields to run through. She can see meeting a girl who still has her fur across her body and still has her claws. She can see what the two of them could have been if they had been born here, free to be themselves. Free to want in the mysterious way that Yue and Chen can, not in the broken way of Aphrodite.

And that Redana would have had all! the! feelings! She would have gotten herself into scrapes, and dragged a complaining Bella -- or whatever her name would have been, if she could have been given a true and good one by her parents, not a number -- halfway across this world. Maybe even further, if it wouldn't have made them both late for dinner.

But how do you scale that? How do you make that true of everyone? How do you take a world like Gaia and spread it across the stars without something being lost, something breaking, something coming undone? That's the work of a lifetime. And once you know how, how do you keep that desire while learning the ways of this desire?

(There's someone who knows. Who learned.)

She pushes herself up and off her palms, bounding up with a swish of her tail, and she offers her hands to Bella, and her blue eye shines like a star. "I think I understand, a little. May I show... you, and them, and the stars?" She reaches out, offering, not demanding, an invitation for the woman she loves.

Because this isn't even really a place to fight.

This is a place to dance.

There's no music except the song in their hearts and the song under the stars and the sunshards. Maybe it's instinct that causes Bella to follow, at least at first, as Redana interlaces their fingers and guides her into the center of that ring of swords. But by the time that she's guiding Bella's hands around her waist for the lift, it's not just instinct.

It's love.

Even here, no, perhaps especially here, it is not hard to see how Bella has made her body a knot of old wounds. Where she must step carefully, where she struggles to extend to her fullest but does so anyway, where Redana pulls her back and avoids causing her further harm. But there's something in the steps which Redana chooses which hint at where she might be able to build, in time, the strength to move like that again.

Eventually, the dance (at least the first one) comes to an end with Redana resting her head on Bella, in the sort of way that might drive helpless lesbians mad with envy at the softness of her resting place. And she listens as hard as she's ever done anything for the beat of her wife's heart.

Breathless Dead

For the record, what the cherry-cheeked princess of the dead and also a pack of wolf warriors was about to do, o most decorated and elegant of sword-riding princesses, was to say something important to Yue. But the gravitas of the moment was quite punctured by the arrival of one of the fabled Princesses of Gaia. She stares, and stares, and stares at a woman who reminds her of nothing so much as a birthday cake transformed by the power of her wishing heart into a person.

"I, um," she says, before bouncing up with a smile. "It is quite a pleasure to meet you," she says, with a hint of her oldest accent, that of Tellus and her mother, drawing on them for strength in the face of an unexpected new friend. "I am Princess Redana Claudius, formerly of Tellus, and I have journeyed across the universe with my wife, Bella Hostilius Mosaic, in order to deliver a message from the God of the Dead, Hades of the Thousand Vaults."

When she offers her hand, it's with some of the dashing of the runaway princess, and some of the sweetness of Bella's wife, and a wagging tail. Her eyes are still red and puffy, but her smile is real. "We'd love to join you, Chen, if Yue will have you - you're friends, aren't you? I can tell."

She'll remember the important thing she has to ask, but not now. Not later, either. When the moment's right, it will come back to her. But for now, it will be washed away in cake, and strawberries, and sake, and laughter under the moonlight, and stories of how Chen met her partner and stood up to her mommies. A Tale of the Sunshards, if you will...