TokyoPewPew

Pinhead Fetus (a story made by tealrootssss)

So is that a no?

Pinhead Fetus (a story made by tealrootssss)

@flat lovenote Are you starting this soon? 🙏

Book Quotes

Yes, you can eat your darling goldfish. He is most likely a form of ornamental carp, and he will taste as you expect: muddy and full of bones.

You can eat all your darlings, once you kill them. Although why you killed Prince Harry the goldfish I cannot understand. Was it all the staring, his bulging eyes? Was it his flashy orange scales, so out of place in your dark, dusty cabin full of your ancestors’ ghosts? Or was it that his beauty faded by the day, in your care, and you could not bear to watch it—how his scales grew dull and his swimming listless, until he mostly stayed put in the middle of the small, round, glass bowl that was his world since you brought him home from that Memorial Day carnival? His translucent fins fanned like the scarves of an old burlesque dancer still going through the motions.

You sure looked like you wanted him when you paid $3.00, six times in a row, tossing rings onto a pole. Prince Harry watched you from the table full of glass goldfish bowls and saw how you labored for him, how you fought against your own shortcomings to win him as a prize. But now it’s August, and you should have set him up with a proper tank by now, some plastic plants and aquarium gravel, at least.

Prince Harry was an $18.00 goldfish, which makes him as expensive as any other freshwater fish on the menu at your local upscale seafood place. But you should know that the diet you fed him of dehydrated fish flakes won’t please your palate, nor your conscience. (Maybe you could have treated him better?)

What’s done is done, I get it. I just hope you killed him with kindness.

Because, you know, Prince Harry the goldfish was miserable in that little glass bowl. He was never going to become the best fish he could be, trapped in there. In the wild—if you had released him, an invasive species—he could have grown far beyond your expectations. (Seriously, he could’ve grown to be a foot long!) But at what cost to the other fish in the lake that butts up to your cabin? Prince Harry would crowd out the others that belong there.

Your darlings can be eaten, and they should be, if they fail to thrive. If you fail them.

But Prince Harry the goldfish will leave a bad taste in your mouth. He watched you toss all those rings at the carnival. For him. He thought you loved him. He thought he was home.

— Susan Rukeyser, "Yes, You Can Eat Your Goldfish"

Post a random fact about yourself.

I am out of the country atm, but thankfully, @TokyoPewPew and @flat lovenote are tending to my Book Quotes thread. You guys are the real heroes.

🙇🏻‍♀️

@Mole

My pleasure, Mole! Since reading is how a writer gets better at writing, I get a lot of value out of your thread, and I hope others do too.

Hmm, a random fact...

Here is a list of (IMO) the most interesting jobs I've held through the years, in no particular order:

(currently) butcher
fine dining saucier
cellphone tower technician
limousine driver
special ed middle school english teacher
insurance broker

For a long time I prided myself on always lasting at least a year at every job I'd ever held. Unfortunately the insurance office broke that streak, as I lasted a measly two months there. There was at least something to like about each of the others but my god was that job a soul-destroyer.

Book Quotes

One humorous incident connected with the Hell's Angels insignia several years ago is still a source of amusement to the hard-riding cycle gang.

An Angel known as "the Mute" was stopped for speeding by a policeman near the beach in Santa Cruz one Sunday afternoon. The Mute was proudly displaying his colors on a ragged Levi jacket. "Take that off," the patrolman jotted down on a notepad politely offered by the Mute, who was deaf and dumb.

The Mute stripped off his Levi jacket, exposing another Angel decal on his leather jacket. "Take that off, too," the irate patrolman ordered, again using the Mute’s notepad and pencil. And under the leather jacket was a wool shirt — also emblazoned with the club colors. "Off with it," the officer scribbled angrily. Under the shirt was an undershirt. It too had been stenciled with the club insignia. "Okay, wise guy, take that off too," the nonplussed patrolman wrote.

With a smirk, the Mute removed his undershirt, and puffing out his chest, brought into full view the Hell's Angels' grinning death's-head, which had been tattooed on his body. The policeman threw up his hands in disgust, handed the Mute a ticket and sped off in his patrol car. But the Mute had the last laugh. He was prepared to go all the way. His trousers and shorts were also stenciled.

— Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Book Quotes

He must have fallen foul of yet other hands afterwards because when he woke in the hospital he had a broken finger, three broken ribs, a mouthful of loose teeth and one missing. He tried to move but the jagged ends of bone in his chest were like scissors. His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it. He raised his eyes and felt the dried blood crack across his forehead. Lights kept rising one by one and after a while he realized that they were bulbs in a corridor ceiling and that the periodic squeaking sound was a caster on the cart that was wheeling him. The emergency room was filled with people bleeding. Grumous battlers with misshapen heads. All watched over by hordes of police. They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.

Friends row by row watched his passing and waved at him with their fingers and whispered among themselves. Who’d spoke of disorders of the soul and news of night. When you asked for the shop of the heart’s apothecary we thought you mad. We saw you took down to the brainsurgeon’s keep, deep in the cellar, under the street. Where saws sang in stoven skulls and wet bonemeal blew from an airshaft in the alleyway. Out there in the blue moonlight a gray shecorpse being loaded into a truck. It pulled away into the night. Horned minstrels, small dancing dogs in harlequin garb hobbled after.

The night is cold and colder, a fog moves with menace in the streets. Malefic stirrings underfoot, a foul breath rising visibly from the pierced sewerlids. The watertruck goes by like a nightbeast, its drum-shaped brush clanking. Water wells inkblack in the streets repeating the polelamps in glozy rosettes that dish and slide in the wash like radiolarians pale with phosphorous on a midnight sea. The sweepers broom the trash along the flooded gutters, their yellow slickers bright with wet. They leap to the truck and ride with brooms aloft like figures done in lacquered wax, like hortatory gnomes. The hotel nightlights shine behind the drawn Venetian blinds and the slatted patterns on the curbside cars give them the look of anchored smallcraft with lapstrake hulls. Out there in the winter streets a few ashen anthroparians scuttling yet through the falling soot. Above them the shape of the city a colossal horde of retorts and alembics ranged against a starless sky. Uneasy sleeper you will live to see the city of your birth pulled down to the last stone.

— Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

Book Quotes

When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

My mother was one of them, a naiad, guardian of fountains and streams. She caught my father’s eye when he came to visit the halls of her own father, Oceanos. Helios and Oceanos were often at each other’s tables in those days. They were cousins, and equal in age, though they did not look it. My father glowed bright as just-forged bronze, while Oceanos had been born with rheumy eyes and a white beard to his lap. Yet they were both Titans, and preferred each other’s company to those new-squeaking gods upon Olympus who had not seen the making of the world.

Oceanos’ palace was a great wonder, set deep in the earth’s rock. Its high-arched halls were gilded, the stone floors smoothed by centuries of divine feet. Through every room ran the faint sound of Oceanos’ river, source of the world’s fresh waters, so dark you could not tell where it ended and the rock-bed began. On its banks grew grass and soft gray flowers, and also the unnumbered children of Oceanos, naiads and nymphs and river-gods. Otter-sleek, laughing, their faces bright against the dusky air, they passed golden goblets among themselves and wrestled, playing games of love. In their midst, outshining all that lily beauty, sat my mother.

Her hair was a warm brown, each strand so lustrous it seemed lit from within. She would have felt my father’s gaze, hot as gusts from a bonfire. I see her arrange her dress so it drapes just so over her shoulders. I see her dab her fingers, glinting, in the water. I have seen her do a thousand such tricks a thousand times. My father always fell for them. He believed the world’s natural order was to please him.

“Who is that?” my father said to Oceanos.

Oceanos had many golden-eyed grandchildren from my father already, and was glad to think of more. “My daughter Perse. She is yours if you want her.”

The next day, my father found her by her fountain-pool in the upper world. It was a beautiful place, crowded with fat-headed narcissus, woven over with oak branches. There was no muck, no slimy frogs, only clean, round stones giving way to grass. Even my father, who cared nothing for the subtleties of nymph arts, admired it.

My mother knew he was coming. Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed eel. She saw where the path to power lay for such as her, and it was not in bastards and riverbank tumbles. When he stood before her, arrayed in his glory, she laughed at him. Lie with you? Why should I?

My father, of course, might have taken what he wanted. But Helios flattered himself that all women went eager to his bed, slave girls and divinities alike. His altars smoked with the proof, offerings from big-bellied mothers and happy by-blows.

“It is marriage,” she said to him, “or nothing. And if it is marriage, be sure: you may have what girls you like in the field, but you will bring none home, for only I will hold sway in your halls.”

Conditions, constrainment. These were novelties to my father, and gods love nothing more than novelty. “A bargain,” he said, and gave her a necklace to seal it, one of his own making, strung with beads of rarest amber. Later, when I was born, he gave her a second strand, and another for each of my three siblings. I do not know which she treasured more: the luminous beads themselves or the envy of her sisters when she wore them. I think she would have gone right on collecting them into eternity until they hung from her neck like a yoke on an ox if the high gods had not stopped her. By then they had learned what the four of us were. You may have other children, they told her, only not with him. But other husbands did not give amber beads. It was the only time I ever saw her weep.

— Madeline Miller, Circe

♡♢ 𝚅𝙰𝙼𝙿𝙸𝚁𝙴: 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙼𝙰𝚂𝚀𝚄𝙴𝚁𝙰𝙳𝙴 — 𝕯𝖊𝖆𝖉 𝕸𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖞 ♤♧

<sup>Like owl chicks peering warily from a tree cavity—like feral cats crouched in a junkyard, dinnerplate eyes all aglow with unease—like skittish children clutched to their mothers' legs—all of MacDonald Highlands paused, and listened, and tensed as a solitary V-twin rumbled past. On any other road this would have been nothing unusual; every night they ran 93 and the Blue Diamond in packs, Hell's Angels and Sisters of Perdition, Mongols and Charons, whooping, carousing, patrolling, chasing each other across their "turfs." And every week, one or two brain-painted the Beltway, crayoned the asphalt with their back tattoos. And once or twice a month page ten of the Sun or the Optic or the Review-Journal regaled the sleepy suburbs with the legend of the latest knife brawl: denim-clad road cretins stomping into battle, smashing up some dive bar. Being dragged away by their feet from puddles of their own leakage and dying in the ambulance. And the people would scowl, and the people would shake their heads, tutting, and they would say they feel sorry for the mothers and the sisters but at least there's one less rabid animal in the world needs putting out of its misery. Then they would go back to their golfing.

Not tonight, however. Tonight the lone biker turned off the Horizon Ridge Parkway and into the neighborhood; their neighborhood. Past their combed pebble lawns and aloe vera hedges. Past their community clubhouse and their community swimming pool. Past their craft beer gastropubs with $21 dollar truffle aioli cheeseburgers (fries not included). Past their country club. And that would have been bad enough even if he was the tidy, respectable kind of outlaw: the kind who only rode to work and back and maybe on Sunday afternoons when the heat wasn't so bad, the kind who'd bought his Marlon Brando jacket and Kevlar jeans from the same dealership as where he'd got the bike, the kind named Harvey or Stan who owned a dental practice and went to brunch in boating shorts, the familiar kind, respectable, safe to gossip about over the phone. But he wasn't. This was one of those engine-oil-under-the-fingernails, dust-in-his-teeth kinds of brigands. His leathers chapped and his denim matted and the folds of his ears all black with road soot. A knotted, lousy, uniquely pungent freak-breed, streaking down their boulevards like a comet, his tail an oil slick of unwashed hair and hot exhaust. With the sort of indignation only the upper-middle-class can muster, they stirred from their queen-sized microfiber sheets, flicked on their porch lights, curdled behind their shuttered windows and deadbolted front doors; made sure the creature didn't stop for water on its way to anywhere else but there. They wondered, some of them aloud, whether it was even legal to have pipes that loud at hours this late; they wondered, some of them aloud, why they even paid their H.O.A. dues if it wasn't going to keep out "those sorts of people."

All the trendiest bars hadn't shuttered yet for the night so they were still out there—out on the balmy sidewalks—the ones slurping down smoked salmon pizza under fancy umbrellas; busking out two-bit Simon & Garfunkel renditions on buzzy instruments in front of lacy shop windows, for dollars pity-thrown into the propped-open guitar case. Some plugged their ears as he passed, the scoundrel, his tailpipes snarling, engine crooning. Some traced him with leery, narrowed gazes, wrung like dry sponges over their hazy citrus IPAs and spiced chai martinis. But for the crime of popping their little bubble—of reminding them that crime exists in the world and cruelty and bombs and most wretchedly of all, poor people—unanimously they recoiled, and glowered—the revs shivering in the waters of their spines. A few moments passed. Down the street, past the golf course, up into the hills until his clamor had drowned in the rest of the evening ambiance. And so grateful were the MacDonalds Highlanders to once more hear their companions' blithe, gormless chatter, and the mediocre cover bands, and even the other (ordinary) traffic, they didn't stop to wonder what kind of business could have brought one of the SCYTHIANS all the way out to the mansions. That's what the back of his jacket had said, all thick Tuscan lettering scrolled above the gang's center patch: a horse archer in profile, full nock, full draw, clenching a Harley instead of a stallion between his pajamaed thighs. He was still riding long after they'd forgotten about him. Still riding when adobe walls and decorative cacti gave way to lank roots clutched to tawny shards of rock; saltbush and globemallow and blots of swaying goldenheads. When he'd put Henderson so far behind him that it resembled a lichen more than a town, warm bioluminescence mottled across the ink-blue skin of the night. Frenchman Mountain, usually looming Acquiline noselike over the sagebrushed upper lip of the valley, now barely a freckle against the light-polluted sky.

Mercifully the dirt road congealed into one final stripe of asphalt, dying in the curl of a cul-de-sac. A single villa jutted there, moonlight glistening off the mission tiles, the aquamarine backglow of a swimming pool shimmering along its north wall. A small fleet of luxury towncars, black and silent and glinting like beetles. Mr. Keene already guarded the front step; had already heard the ascent; already affected in his demeanor that the lone rider was expected—though not exactly welcomed.

A gentleman never shouted so he waited until the biker had pawed the killswitch, until the engine had lumbered to a halt, hiss-ticking as it cooled. Until one boot had shoved the kickstand and the other had swayed up and over the saddle and there stood the intruder in all his ramshackle glory, leering up at him. "Yes. Can I help you?" dribbled the majordomo's question from mustachioed, sneering lip, wary and contemptuous. The biker took his first step.

"If you are not expected then you will have to wait," Keene continued, seeing that. "Mr. Pagani is a very busy man and there are proper channels for—and there are—look, you, all the doors are Warded. No one gets in without our wanting it—or without burning."

That warning—that word and that word alone—Warded—gave pause to the Scythian; who all the while had been approaching the granite-flagstoned stoop. Only with one boot already planted upon the very bottom step did he hesitate. Chuckling.

"Last I checked I don't need your permission, thrall," he rasped, more inconvenienced than angered, "not when your hand will open that door just fine. Still attached to the rest a you or no it makes no difference to me."

The Scythian smiled a coffee and cigarette-yellowed smile, gleaming with more than one black-tarnished silver tooth. Keene was beginning to squirm, the jellying of his bowels threatening to erode at his practiced, urbane exterior. Seemed the ghoul of a deadly and powerful ancillae was still only a ghoul. But with the night whiling, the visitor rolled his eyes, and feigned some newfound interest away in the hedgerows. Feigned something bored and nonchalant, entirely unconcerned with this little standoff in which they'd found themselves. Even as the manservant's scrawny neck tantalized him. Even as he made himself seem the juiciest little morsel, ripe for the plucking.

"Whatever. Just make sure he gets this and we're square." He reached into the Napoleon of his leather jacket; unrolled what looked like a magazine, its covers all glossed and anchovy-crammed with banners, with insets, with QR codes. With a toss it fluttered from his iron eagle-bedecked fingers to Keene's feet, clumsy as a half-burned moth escaping the candle, flapping stiff like a housefly drunk on bug spray. Keene, with his bad knees and bad lower back, struggled down into a crouch. It was one of those casino brochures: coupons and calendars, celeb sightings and stand-up comedy promos. Peeling through the contents, he noticed the first of several circlings made in permanent marker: the word "Blackjack," appearing in a full two-page spread for a high-stakes tournament two weeks away. Eight pages later, the name of Caligula's Hotel & Casino (running a variety of dinner specials at its Mediterranean-themed wine-bar-buffet). A $53,425 dollar slots jackpot not yet won at the El Dorado: of five digits, only one underlined (the first five). Finally, a cabaret schedule, wherein was circled one date of many: tonight's date.

The message was quickly revealing itself to the majordomo, still shrewd despite his years.

"And assuming this drivel even means anything," he called back to the Scythian, the latter already saddling up, straightening the handlebars, nudging the kickstand back up against the frame, "who is this 'we' to whom he should make out his reply?"

Just before a chirp from his starter button and the engine's ensuing grunt, the biker warned, "He knows who it's from." Then, squealing the bike into a tailspin, and speeding away back down the hill, he left the ghoul unscathed; to inhale the bitter smoke from his rear tire, and wonder, and clutch his heart as sheer relief flooded his arteries.</sup>

Book Quotes

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

— George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

ᛢ 𝕳𝖔𝖓𝖔𝖗𝖌𝖚𝖆𝖗𝖉, 𝔬𝔯, 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔓𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔇𝔲𝔱𝔶 ᛢ

────────────────────────────────•⋅⊰༻༒︎༺⊱⋅•──────────────────────────────────

"𝕲ods' bones!" cursed the third and final of Class E's she-students, who the others had already dubbed Mina—simply Mina—"I thought Death itself might fail to shut her up."

Agalind did not chastise the obscenity pouring from her new companion's mouth, nor cringe thereof; even in the presence of such unladylike conduct did she remain as nonchalant and courteous as always. Instead, feigning a momentary deafness, she put a fingertip between her teeth, and bit down, and thereby liberated that hand of its gauntlet, which she tucked into her sword belt. Reached she then for her pocket watch, reviewing the hands and dials coolly. "Do you suppose we might lunch at the canteen, if we hurried?" she said. "Three hours of walking and speeches and I am so terribly famished."

"We wouldn't even make it through the beer line," Mina bemoaned. "Not after that wretch Wiezlern tried to kill us of old age."

"Yes, most probably. What a shame."

"Tell me about it. I've been holding in a water for the better part of an hour."

"Mina, please," Agalind said—giggling, so as to sound less disquieted.

But along the barracks wall, broiling beneath the cloudless sky at its highest noontime glory, sat their own and several other students' luggage; still packed, and tossed into rows. Any porters were long gone, these valuables guarded only by a single residency assistant, clad from scalp to toes in civvies and sunburnt lethargy. Judging from the gaps, many students—entire classes of them, in fact—had come and gone and claimed their suitcases already in the time it had taken Schöst's charge to receive some semblance of a dénouement to Wiezlern's poetic Epic. They'd still been slogging from hall to hall while the rest of their grade claimed their bunks, aired out their belongings, sprawled, lunched, strolled. The ten, afforded none such luxuries, grumbled and murmured but hurried to their task.

For Hloþhilde it was no small envy, watching as several of the seven bickered to be the ones to relieve Agalind and Mina of their luggage—the first protesting and are-you-suring; hesitating, then, to the boys' relief, capitulating—and the latter readily discarding her effects into their awaiting clutches. Meanwhile there sat her own bags, all two of them (save for the gift box, which she had wearied of rucking around through the glare and the heat approximately an eon ago), untouched. Smaller than the others', simpler, and so forlorn-looking there creased and sagging against the wall like a pair of old, worn stovepipe boots. Disheartened but resolved not to show it, Hloþhilde swung Hellie's sword beneath one arm, and squatted, and after some struggle had stood upright again with both bags in tow. Their unassuming appearances had deceived her, however: within the bags clattered a great many articles, some of them large and cumbersome all their own; drawing from the girl an astounded groan as she labored to her feet. Wondering whether her sister had packed her off to military school with sacks of ingots from the tinsmith's, Hloþhilde waddled as best she could toward the barracks door, careful not to let her shako tilt clean off her head, wary too of swaying off course as she fought the heft of her cargo with every step. Ere long the bags' bottoms seemed about ready to rip in twain and spill all their embarrassing, girlish contents all over the foyer floor; so too as their handles threatened to rend clean through her quickly-purpling fingers. All the same, if any boys had noticed her plight then they made no gesture to rescue her thereof.

The stairs proved the day's greatest trial; but with some hobbling (rather Schöst-like in form, as it happened), and enough sweat soaked into her greyish wools to impress a farmhand, Hloþhilde managed it in a single trip, and at the top of the concourse allowed herself her first moment of respite. There, panting and heaving and glistening, she stared long and hard down the halls, each one flanked on both sides and down its entire breadth by identical white doors. And one of them was hers. She told herself that again and again as she foraged for the grit to keep going through the blood drumming in her head, the constriction in her fingers, the throttling heat of her parade uniform. One of those doors was hers. It was hers it was hers she'd earned it or if not yet then by the Champions she was going to.

Heading south from the central rotunda, it was closed when she arrived and so she saw it, writ in wood trim leafed in peeling gold: eighty seven. Her number. Her address for the next year. This she recognized for the names chalked just beneath, upon a slate board in a most tidy and elegant hand:

d. GUILLARMES, HLOÞHILDE

v. MÜßEL, LEUTGARDE

The latter gave Hloþhilde pause, but she thought that hardly strange. Any one of them would wonder about her newest companion-of-circumstance, that person in whose company (or, at the least, in whose proximity) she was to spend the lion's share of the next year, between classes and balls and platoon drills. In fact, likeliest they already did, all twoscore-and-a-half of the tender freshmen entering this building for the first and seeing their names etched beside the names of strangers on slate boards. Checking for the abbreviated preposition before the family name, to know they doffed their fineries and lowered their eyelids among fellow noblemen's-sons (von meaning a heartlander, de/des/du a Westmarcher or Low Countryman; di belonging to those families hailing from former Rhobardy—once a duchy, then independent—distrusted and despised). The lavishness of any personal effects strewn around the door, around the room; their tastes in art, in wine, in girls, in politics. And on and on. Surely they endeavored to learn, the fifty, what they could about each other ere even thinking to cross that fateful threshold. Searching for that common shore whereon to escape uncertain waters.

For her part, Hloþhilde knew her histories well enough. She knew Leutgarde—queen-consort to Raduwik the Black—and her own namesake to have fought on opposing sides of the same civil war, some eight centuries ago. She only prayed this did not bode ill for her relations with her bunkmate. She certainly didn't think herself susceptible to superstition; least of all the one which compelled Laachtalian parents to name their children after heroes and kings and conquerors, lest their lives should prove unfortunate, unfruitful, or worst of all—uneventful. Still. When that many people believe something, mustn't there be some germ of truth to it? And if this Leutgarde von Müßel was one such believer, why, she'd be determined to hate poor Tilly before she'd even met her proper, would she not? Prejudice informed behavior informed prejudice; prophecy fulfilled itself.

All at once eager, anxious, and acutely aware of her scant free time tapping down to nothing with every tick of the clock, she set down a bag and rapped her hand against their door—her door—once, then again—and when both times no answer came, she eased herself inside, dragging her luggage in behind her like an antlion. And she heaped her bags into the center of the room, and shut the door behind her, and suddenly Agalind and Mina's practiced aloofness seemed so very distant, as did the playful, teasing, yet categorically frustrated efforts of their suitors. Barely audible as a murmur from the far wall. For Hloþhilde arrived upon an empty room; her roommate having abandoned it already, but not before claiming the lower bunk, and staking what parts of the room she'd deemed the choicest (the nearer of two desks; a bedpost, seized on behalf of a heavy woolen greatcoat; most of the hooks by the door). There stood two display stands on a large night table: one empty, the other replete with full parade regalia, buffed and gleaming; helm and sash and gauntlets and aiguillettes. A few interesting advertisements and lithographs pinned to the walls. The reek of tobacco smoke, and the culprit's half-burnt evidence lain across her desk, spilled from the antler bowl when it had fallen over from its pipe rack. Lamps and matches. A small shelf filled with treatises on tactics, natural sciences, warrior-poetry; and, curiously, sewing.

Hloþhilde placed her new sword on the upper bunk; did not concern herself, for the time, with finding the best place nor the most regal way to mount it. For she had grown much too curious as to the contents of her suitcases. Given what toils and labors she had undergone already—and it was not lost on her that the day was scarcely half burnt—she hoped it was exactly what she suspected; and exactly as restorative. So she shed her fineries—helm, sash, and the rest—mimicked Leutgarde's arrangement as best she could while ordering them upon the second display stand—and hauled the heavier of the two bags up onto the empty desk.

As it happened, she knew her sister well. Beneath a doll from her girlhood, and a supply of womanly napkins, and a few nice pens and all other manner of essentials, Helgeða had stashed enough treasures to count as a small hoard. The bottles she'd wrapped in jute and straw to protect them during transit, but Hloþhilde recognized enough of them from the glass alone—the shapes, colors, and opacities—that she had little need for the concealed labels whatever. Château Moinmarcy: their house's personal label, crisp, off-dry, and strikingly citrusy, owing to shady terroir, early harvest, and ready use of the pomace in the fermentation. (Tall, skinny, and seaglass-green, the bottle.) Eaux d'Aubris, a dessert wine of matchless quality: apricot-sweet, and yet light-bodied, a little effervescent; hardly so stodgy and syrupy as a port or a cream sherry. As suitable with ripe cheese as with cake and one of Tilly's very favorites (no doubt why Helgeða had packed several bottles). A table red from the Vuererro region; the one father used to ship in by the hogshead right before a banquet. One or two more that Hloþhilde did not recognize. Ones her sister perhaps had meant for them to sample together during their upcoming lunch.

"Damn it, Hellie," she muttered, humiliated yet honored; feeling terribly ridiculous, and yet smiling ear to ear. For what would the others say when they found out the Marsènne girl, true to type, had arrived on campus with well over a gallon of fine wines stowed in her luggage?—and she had not yet even reached the bag's bottom. Would she next dredge up a fine Marsènnish pennyloaf, already buttered? A jar of olives? Saucissons? Twelve Hells, a whole picnic spread? The first pangs of homesickness were calcifying in her gut like gallstones, but with the hunger, the heat, the whiling of the hour also gnawing, Hloþhilde was not so anguished not to press on.

Another few moments and she'd discovered, inspected, and restored again the contents of the tins buried beneath her civilian clothes. Some homemade—wrapped in waxcloth and packed into older tins—others still sealed, fresh from the stalls and shops of the Vaillons-sur-Monvre. A loaf of pain d'épices, fragrant with honey and ginger. Dates and cherries and lime wheels glacéed in their syrups—their glassy shells cracked in transit but still glistening. Little apple and blackberry pâtés, powdered white as mothwings. Wedges of Souvrental and croûte-des-rubis, crammed piano-key-tight into the canister. A small wheel of Valagnan.

Valagnan...

This alone she did not place back in its tin; did not stash away again beneath the pile of chemises, with the rest of the treasure-hoard; her hands, possessed of a will all their own, refusing to part with the precious parcel lest it melt away like a morning dew once divested of her touch, returned to the memory whence it was conjured. Valagnan. She pressed the marinated grape leaves between her fingers, brittled by the journey, strewing a scant few crumbs across the desk, yet still holding. She raised the wheel to her nose. Sour and peppery. Creamy and herbed. Time and distance and the box had muted the aromas but not extinguished them—could not extinguish them—not those halcyon dreams which had perfumed Hloþhilde's every moment at the castle she had once called home.

"Had once" called home?

The thought petrified her, beastly in its sharpness. Was it already no longer hers? (Then was it she who'd forsaken it, or the inverse?) This she did not yet dare interrogate—not with class encroaching all the nearer, not when she had need of her composure—but when came time to first cut into the precious wheel and taste it, when the creaminess and the dried herbs of the garrigue and the soured rind all scented her throat, Hloþhilde suspected she would have her answer. So she placed the stuff into tin and tin inside her roomiest undershirt, squirreling it at the very bottom of her suitcase, even as she left the rest of her gifts unattended atop her desk. (Her bunkmate or any other thief could have at the rest if so possessed by boorishness but not the Valagnan, anything but that.) A desk barely staked as her own; a naked wall not yet so; a grandfather clock nibbling up the seconds and spittooning them into the past. Cluck. Cluck. Three years, it clucked to her, her only company for the next several minutes. Three years.

────────────────────────────────•⋅⊰༻༒︎༺⊱⋅•──────────────────────────────────