slapdash

102. (Crossposting, more crossposting.)

2009-10-08T10:53:00.002-05:00

Harbingers, parts One and Two
A Kill

101. (An Incredible Likeness.)

2009-04-24T16:01:00.000-05:00

Posted here.

100. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter Six, Part One)

2009-03-25T12:00:00.012-05:00

The snow was barely coming down, and the wind had let off so the tiny flakes fell slowly around them, catching on their furs, melting on the lenses of their goggles. "They came from over there," Marcus said, pointing off to the west. "I imagine your heralds saw them coming, and were unsure how to react. They were setting up their camp, getting ready to set in for the night. The 'greenskins' probably just walked up casually, and cut down the first one to meet them.... here," he said, standing just outside the smoldering camp. There was a corpse half-buried in the snow, gore frozen around it. He could see it in his head: the corpse, probably the leader, had walked casually out of the central camp and raised his hand in greeting; he had stood there for a moment, before the greenskins were within striking distance, and then he'd been struck with a heavy weapon with a ragged blade.

"Hurm," someone muttered. Other than Fergy, who was slimmer than the locals, Marcus couldn't tell them apart under their heavy protective gear. "They probably thought it was a delegation from Hobber. They must have been dressed in furs, to have survived this deep into Vastness."

Someone else said, "If the greenskins don't know where Hobber is, where were they going?"

Isa's voice answered, "A better question is, where have they gone? I personally find it hard to care where they came from--it's a place that's better off without them."

Marcus spoke up again: "They went back the way they came. There's blood on the snow leading back along the tracks that brought them here. They must have retraced their steps." He paused for a moment, thinking. "They're lost," he added eventually, "And they don't know where they're going. They're just wandering Vastness at random. But somewhere back along their tracks they found shelter or something, a cave of outcropping of rock, and they've holed up there to recuperate."

"How hard would it be to track them back to it?" Fergy asked. She lacked the know-how to cut it in the wild on her own--skills Marcus had picked up in his soldiering days, she'd assumed. She'd never had to "rough it" before she'd met him, sneaking and lying her way into and out of whatever bed was conveniently vacant.

"Not hard," Marcus replied. "Even if the snow fills up the tracks, there's plenty of blood--and even if that gets covered up, it's just a matter of uncovering it."

Isa interjected: "You're planning on tracking them? Why?" He exchanged glances with one of the other albinos, though their expressions were hidden behind the masks. "The plan, um, was to hide Hobber, yes? A practical, peaceful solution to this issue. Enough blood has been shed as it is."

Marcus shrugged nonchalantly. "Better to know what you're hiding from, I'd think. There might only be a couple of them left."

"Um, you're on your own, then, Marcus," Isa said. "The rest of us will return to Hobber and assist the mage in any way we can. Is this satisfactory?"

Marcus and Fergy together replied, "Yes."

At the same time, Pri spoke up: "No." Marcus hadn't realized that she was there until she'd raised her voice.

Isa fidgeted. "Pri?"

"I'm going with them," she continued. "I have a few ideas as to where the greenskins would have gone."

Isa's head cocked to the side slightly. "Do you think they found one of the Walker's Marks?"

"Perhaps," the portly woman responded. "Though to be fair, if they've found shelter at all, that'll be it. There's not exactly a lot else out there."

The trio set off from the carnage, heading west. The snowfall had been light enough that the sloppy, disorganized group of ogres was easy to follow. They trekked in silence for quite some time before Pri spoke up.

"Did you enjoy it?"

Marcus replied, "The Boar?"

"Mm."

"It was an interesting experience. I look forward to taking Fergy down there. I think it would do us both some good."

Fergy let out a small chuckle. She'd found her husband's clothing piled up outside the Boar's chamber, along with Tater's, and their borrowed furs. She had been waiting, arms crossed, when they finally came upstairs. "Well," she'd said.

Marcus had been unable to stop blushing. "It's not--" he'd started, then, "We weren't--"

Fergy had just smiled and held up a hand. "It's okay, baby. I know. You must be bored of me," she'd said, laying on the melodrama. "Just remember--under all that sexy magic, she's probably ninety-seven."

Tater, who hadn't skipped a beat when she'd come up, was already half-way dressed. She'd spun around, glaring at Fergy; "Conducting tunic blasphemy!" she'd shouted angrily.

Marcus had moved to stand between them. "Look," he had said quickly, his voice low, "We don't have time for this. There's something we've--" But he'd stopped: Pri had opened the front door. Whatever he'd been trying to tell her, he didn't want to do so in front of their guide.

Out on the snow, Fergy had a question of her own: "If those were your ominous heralds," she asked, "Where's this so-called Walker?"

Pri shrugged. "It could be anywhere. I suspect Isa will send out an expedition to find it, or at the very least set out more sentries on the wall. Whoever sends out the heralds won't even know anything has happened to them until the Walker passes near whichever coastal city they embark from."

"Something that big," Fergy continued, "You'd think you'd be able to see it from just about anywhere in Vastness, as flat as this place is."

"You can only see it from up close," the albino replied. "Within... oh, maybe two-hundred yards?"

"That doesn't make any sense," Marcus interrupted.

"We have some theories," Pri said, looking back at him. "The most popular one is that the Walker is just so big, your brain can't comprehend it. It simply, um, ignores it--you could be looking straight at it on the horizon and you wouldn't even know."

Fergy laughed. "That was supposed to be an explanation? 'Your brain switches off'? That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard, and let me tell you lady, I've heard a lot of silly shit in my time."

Behind his goggles, Marcus scowled a bit at the edge in his wife's voice. "It sounds more like magic, to me," he said.

Pri replied, "There are a few who agree with you, but that begs the question--where would magic of that scale even come from? There are a few minor magicians here and there along the coast--but no one who could pull off something so, um, grandeur."

"That's curious too," Fergy said. She sounded more perplexed than facetious then. "If anyone could cross the Yawning Sea and get here, it would be a mage--surely the Magister's League could send someone across. Yet I've never even heard of anything on this side..."

Pri shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

99. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter Five)

2009-02-05T12:11:00.009-06:00

In Fergy's dream she was sitting on a stone floor, her back against a stone wall. The room she was in was square and small, and one side was made up of a series of metal rods--the bars of a cell. She was in a dungeon of some kind. Can't quite put my finger on it, she thought. Where am I?

A voice, echoing down the hall beyond her cell's bars, said: "Look, um, I'm really sorry I screwed up your heist," it said, sounding legitimately apologetic. "If I'd known someone else was going to make a grab for the statue at the same time I did--"

"It's not a problem," she heard herself reply; "It's not your fault, big guy." Big guy? I can't even--Oh. Oh! She realized where she was in a flash: Terrana. The hidden voice was Marcus', oddly distorted by the stone walls and the fact that she was, in truth, dreaming. "You strong enough to kick your cell open?"

"I'm pretty strong," Marcus replied, "But I'm not that strong."

Fergy frowned thoughtfully. "If you get me a knife, I can get us out of here."

There was a moment of silence from the other cell. "I'll handle it." Then, nothing.

Fergy rubbed the back of her neck, thinking. Most of the time people missed one or two of her daggers when disarming her; the Duke of Terrana's guards had been overly thorough. Judging by the looks of them, they didn't get many chances to paw at a woman. This was the first time in a long time that Fergy hadn't been able to just pull out one of her concealed daggers, pick the lock, and walk out. It made her uncomfortable. She stood up and paced the cell, ran her hands through her hair and tousled it a bit, fidgeting awkwardly.

Eventually, Marcus started talking to her again; "That was a pretty impressive, uh, rig, you had going back there."

"Thank you," she'd replied, smiling to herself.

"How long did it take you to get that set up?"

"Couple hours," Fergy replied. "Conveniently, your guard friends aren't allowed to actually enter the vault. Gave me plenty of time."

"You must have jumped rooftops to get up there," she heard him mutter. "And then cut a hole in the roof, somehow. I'm surprised no one noticed that."

"It's layered," she replied. "A dome within a dome. I crawled in at the bottom and shimmied up to the top."

"Oh, of course--" She heard what sounded like Marcus clapping his hands once. "Sturdy material on the outside, pretty material on the inside. It's very well made, I wouldn't have thought that just from looking at it. Must have been a tight fit."

"That it was." At some point, she fell asleep. It was a surreal feeling, because she was already asleep. The sound of a scuffle woke her up, or at least it did in the dream. For a moment she became disoriented. She could hear two bodies struggling, and someone shouting, "Ah, ah, shit, ow! Let go--damn it, you bast--", then something slamming heavily against the steel bars of a cell several times, then silence again. "Big fella?" she called out, after a moment of hesitation.

"Hang on," Marcus replied. "I think this idiot came down here unarmed."

"... What?"

"Wait, no, okay, here we go--" There was the sound of a body falling, a heartbeat of more silence, then the clatter of metal on stone, and a rusted, poorly-maintained dagger bounced to a stop in front of her cell. She scrambled over to grab it through the bars. "Will that work?"

"Oh, absolutely," she called back, then muttered to the blade, "You poor thing, look at the condition you're in! What a waste of good steel." A moment later she had picked the lock and was standing in front of Marcus' cell, grinning, the knife tucked into her belt. "You know," she said to the big man, "That worked out pretty well. I'm Fergy. You're a lot smarter than you look."

She watched herself meeting her husband for the first time and remembered, I really wasn't that impressed with him, at first, was I? Except for those arms--he looked like he could've taken down an ox with his bare hands.

"I'm Marcus," he said, extending a hand once the door was open, "And I'll take that as a compliment. Pleased to meow you."

"What?" What? Here memory wasn't matching up with the dream anymore.

Fergy's eyes opened hesitatingly to a bright glare coming in through the window. She was laying in a large bed, tucked in comfortably. Judging by how much sunlight was coming in the window, it was morning, just after dawn. The light was awfully white, she thought. She tried to sit up but a weight was on her chest--a warm weight, not heavy enough to pin her down, but foreign nonetheless. "Meow," said the weight.

She was eye-to-eye with the mage's cat, which had curled up on her chest. "Good morning to you too," she muttered, frowning.

Other than the cat and herself, the room was empty. Fergy sat up, moving the feline aside, and frowned. Unfamiliar room, unfamiliar bed--at least she was still wearing her clothing. "Marcus?" she called out, rising out of the bed.

The only response she got was voices in another room, two of them, speaking in turn to each other. Fergy frowned again and made her way towards the only door in the room. The room itself looked like your average, though underused, tavern room. Nervous, she reached down to her belt.

When it didn't find what she was looking for, the hand moved to her sleeve. Then she bent over and checked her boot, and reached around to check her back. It was when she was bent over, one hand on her calf, the other twisted around behind her awkwardly, that the door opened and she found herself face-to-chest with a stout figure. Her hair fell over her face annoyingly and she took a pair of quick steps back, before--"Oi, lass, s'good that ye'r awake, but what the bloody hell are ye doin'?"

She looked at the dwarf quizzically, standing to her full height. "Where are my knives?"

Brasskicker shrugged. "Some'ere safe?"

"That's not good enough," she said, her voice low.

"S'all we got fer now, though," he replied, pushing the door closed behind him. "Yer lad Marcus made sure with the big boss here that yer... effects're in good hands, before him an' Tater took off for th' library're whatever. 'Bout six hours ago, now, I figure."

"Tater?" She looked at him like he was speaking in a foreign language. "Oh, god," she muttered, losing her train of thought. "I really need to piss."

"Ye've been asleep for nigh on a day now, 'er most o' one. S'not a surprise. Pot's unner th' bed, there," he replied, turning his back to her. While Fergy relieved herself, he explained what had happened since they'd come through the portal in the mage's tower. "After the mage an' yer lad left, s'been quiet. That Isa fella's cookin' up some breakfast fer me, prolly wouldn' be too much t' ask 'im t' make ye some too."

"Do you know how to get to where Marcus and Tater went?" She'd picked up on the mage's new nickname pretty quickly.

The dwarf shrugged. "En't got a clue, lass. Been stuck here babysittin' a certain sleepin' lass and a cat, en't had a chance to go lookin' fer 'em. Not that that albino bloke would'a let me leave in th' first place."

Fergy frowned, and pulled the strap of her bag over her head and let it hang across her chest. With one arm she scooped up the cat and stuck it in the bag, then closed it; the feline poked its head out and let out an annoyed meow, but it didn't struggle to get free. She pressed past Brasskicker and out into the hall, then into the common room.

"Oh, you're awake," the oddly-proportioned man said, when he saw them. He was just as Brasskicker has described: pale and pear-shaped, with red eyes and absolutely no hair on his head. Fergy wondered how much different the female had looked. "I was making your short friend a meal--my understanding is that you've been asleep quite some time, would you like one yourself?"

Fergy eyed him warily before sliding onto a barstool. "Famished," she replied, leaning over the bar a bit. "Where are my knives?"

Isa slid a plate of eggs and sausage across to her, smiling. "Someplace, um, safe."

"Not a good enough answer. I'd like them back."

"Um, I'm afraid that's just not possible, miss. Hobber is a sanctuary--no one, not even our own residents, is allowed to carry weapons on pain of expulsion. As I understand it, you missed the trip in--expulsion into Vastness is not a fate you want to tempt." The odd man smiled awkwardly, then nodded over Fergy's shoulder. "I hope you don't mind, sir, I gave the lady your helping."

"Not a prob'em, lad," Brasskicker replied, climbing onto the neighboring barstool. "Now--let's talk about meetin' up wit' our compan'ons, now'at we're all up an' about, aye?"

Fergy added, "No reason to stay split up, as it is, what with me up and on my feet again."

Isa cleared his throat. "I thought you might have such an idea, so, um, I brought a pair of extra suits for you." He gestured to one of the far tables, where a pile of furs was laid out. "Whatever... magic brought you here without letting your limbs freeze off is out of the question, so you'll have to suit up to stay warm. The suits will also, um, conceal your identities. I don't want your presence to, um, cause a panic among the townsfolk, you see."

Fergy frowned. "Wah woo--" she paused, swallowed her mouthful of food, "Why would we cause a panic?"

"Ah," Isa replied, "It's less nefarious than it sounds, trust me. Pri took the map with her, so it's not here for your benefit--but imagine a broad, empty plain, covered entirely in snow, bitingly, bitterly cold. Smack, um, in the middle of this plain--of Vastness--is Hobber. There's nothing else. Just Hobber. There are a few cities just outside Vastness, along the coast, but no one else has moved inland. You can imagine, um, why."

Brasskicker asked, "I reckon ye don't get a lot o' travelers?"

"Less than one group a year, most of the time." Isa fidgeted slightly. "The same group, um, in fact. A group consisting of a dozen or so men and women in roughly their middle years--different people, mind you, but the same organization. Nomads, of a sort. They come from the outlying villages--Snowport and the like."

"That's great," Fergy interrupted. "Can you get to the point? I'm getting antsy sitting here."

Isa watched her for a moment; she thought she could see the gears clicking around in his head. "They come before the Walker," he finally replied, as if measuring their reaction to each word individually. "Heralds, if you will, of its path."

Fergy stopped, forkful of food half-way between her mouth and the plate. "The Walker?--no, wait," she interrupted herself, dropping the utensil. "Walk and talk, we're getting out of here."

Isa looked at her, non-plussed, and nodded at the pile of furs by the door. Fergy strode across to them and started rifling through them. "The Walker?" she repeated, her back to the albino. The clothing was simple enough--a thick, heavy fur coat and pants, thick leather boots and gloves, and a heavy hood and scarf. Each item was matched with a twin--two suits, one for Fergy and one for Brasskicker. Atop both piles were tinted goggles on leather straps. As Isa explained, the pair suited up.

"The Walker is... it's hard to describe," he said, speaking slowly. "It's... well, it's exactly, um, what it sounds like. It walks Vastness, blind, aimless, wandering from edge to edge on a seemingly random path."

"And it has heralds... why?" Fergy asked, adjusting the coat. She watched the dwarf for a moment, trying to figure out how the hood attached.

"Simply put, it's, um," Isa paused, watching them. "Imagine a tower, a castle. Now, imagine them as a child's toys at your feet, barely ankle-high. You step over them, or knock them aside. They're tiny beside you."

"Ye're pullin' our chains," Brasskicker muttered, adjusting his goggles uncomfortably. "Or ye'r crazy."

"If only, sir." Isa was pulling his own furs on again now, far more efficiently than his guests. "The Walker is large--so large, a wrong step would topple our walls, smash our roofs, end Hobber." He chuckled. "The Heralds let us know when to be ready."

"You don't run?" Fergy asked from within her bundling. Wearing the outfit, her hair and skin completely hidden, she looked like a smaller, slimmer version of Isa.

The albino regarded her for a moment; "Like a tall child, um, not bad. Kind of an odd fit. Where would we go?" he asked, opening the door to the street beyond. "Shall we?" he said, gesturing for the woman and the dwarf to precede him outside.

The road beyond was paved in grey cobblestone. It was a little less than straight; the town itself seemed compact within its walls, the road built to follow the spaces between buildings placed apparently at random--at least, that was the impression the left on Fergy. "So we know why we have to wear the suits," she asked, walking beside their host. "But it's not that cold out here. Unpleasant, yes, but--I mean, it's cold, but I'm not exactly at fear for my life."

"We have a certain sensitivity to the cold. It's part of our affliction--the skin, the eyes, and so on."

"So then," Brasskicker asked, "Why bother livin' out 'ere in the wastes? I figger ye lot could do a lot better fer yerselves."

"Hobber is a sanctuary for our kind," Isa replied. "We came here, we built it ourself, because we were called to do so. It is here that we found and find peace, and so it is here that we stay."

The streets seemed almost deserted. Since they'd left the tavarn, they'd only seen a handful of other people outside. Most of the buildings they walked past were dark, seemingly empty. The place put Fergy ill at ease. "I don't understand," she said. "What kind of peace requires you to stay in any place?"

"You really aren't from around here, are you?" Isa asked rhetorically. "The peace offered by the Boar. The Boar is here, and it is the Boar's presence that soothes the savage in each of us--travel to the coasts and you'll find hodge-podge villages of men and women like us, but in their red eyes you'll find not compassion, but bloodlust, rage, death. The people of Snowport and the like call us... call them ogres--and fight them tooth and nail. My people--the people of Hobber, left this behind and followed the call of the Boar, and came here, and built a town around it. It is here that we can be human--" He stopped, and let out a sigh. "Or at least humane."

"Ogres," Brasskicker muttered. "Like in the stories, aye? Monster's ye tell yer kids aboot t' get 'em to behave."

"I assume my kind has died out across the Yawning Sea," Isa replied, "Relegated to the annals of history and children's stories. Yet here in the south, we live and thrive. And here in Hobber, we live and thrive, and, um, don't eat babies."

A few moments later the trio found themselves standing in front of a stone-walled building, where the albino stopped. "Here we are then, um, if you'll give me a moment." Isa dug around in the pockets of his furs briefly, eventually finding a heavy steel ring with a series of keys on it. These he used to open the large wooden door, which he pushed and held open for Fergy and Brasskicker; "After you," he said.

Fergy furrowed her brows behind the tinted goggles, watching Isa; the artificial darkness made it impossible to see beyond the threshold into the building, but she was doing her best to hide her lack of trust. "Is my husband in there?"

"We will, um, get to that momentarily, but first, come in," the strange ogre replied, waving towards the open door. "I understand your lack of trust. Consider this, um, a peace offering of sorts."

"Eh," Brasskicker muttered, "We're far 'nough up shit creek as it be, lass." The short man strode past her and into the building. Fergy, still scowling, followed.

Beyond the door her eyes quickly adjusted, and Fergy found herself standing in a large room lined with cabinets and shelves. Closing the door behind them, Isa walked around her and gestured for her to follow. Eventually he stopped in front of one of the smaller cabinets and, using the same ring of keys, unlocked it and opened it.

Fergy let out a little gasp; without even thinking she pulled her hood off and slid her goggles up on top of her head. Inside the cabinet, resting delicately on soft cloth, was a collection of knives and daggers, each in its own space, carefully arranged. Her knives and daggers--most of them, at least. But before she could question the presence of the rest of her things Isa opened the neighboring cabinet, where they rested, as carefully-handled as the others.

"In Hobber," the albino said, his tone that of a teacher, "Our key tenant is respect: respect for the Boar, respect for each other, respect for each other's belongings. You'll find everything you're lacking from your personal effects here, cleaned and shined by myself, personally."

"Th--" Fergy paused, unsure exactly what to say. She was at once grateful and annoyed.

Isa held up a hand. "There is no need. All I ask is that you trust me, and trust that we bear no ill will towards you."

"I'm sorry for doubting you."

"It's an understandable thing," he continued. "You're knocked unconscious and when you awake you're in a strange place, separated from he who is most important to you. Speaking of--our next stop is the lib--"

He stopped, having been interrupted by the sound of the door opening again, then slamming closed. Fergy quickly pulled her hood and goggles back on, and then turned to see the newcomer--another local, panting and hunched over from having run to find them.

"Erna," Isa said, his voice low. How he could recognize the person under all of his or her fur was beyond Fergy. "What's wrong?"

Erna held up a hand, catching his or her breath, then spoke between gasps: "Smoke-- horizon-- Th'heralds--" The voice was decidedly feminine, though deep.

Isa visibly tensed up. "Are they coming?"

Erna shook her head. "No--not camp fire. Sent party to check--all dead, camp burned."

"Who?"

"They put up a fight," Erna replied. "Left a few dead. Greenskins."

Isa spat out a word that wasn't part of any language Fergy had ever heard. "Close the gates," he muttered, fidgeting uncomfortably. "Close the gates, and sound the bells."

Nodding, Erna ran out again.

"Ye cannae fight, can ye?" the dwarf asked.

"We cannot even hold them back," Isa replied, pacing now. "The greenskins--the ogres, the ones we're descended from--they've never ventured far into Vastness. Not until now, that is. If they come here--"

"We can help you," Fergy interrupted. "The girl--Tater, she's a mage."

"If they've come in strong enough force to wipe out the Heralds, it will take more than a single mage, but--"

"But she can hide you. This place--if they've never seen it, never ventured this far, how would they know it was here? How would they even know to expect it?"

Isa clapped his gloved hands together. "Yes--yes. We need to get to the library."

With that, he shuffled past the pair and out the door. Fergy and Brasskicker followed.

"Ye sure about this, lass?" the dwarf asked.

"Not even a little."

***

"Sauerkraut shipping lanes bottled water," Tater muttered, letting her head fall onto the book she was scanning.

"I know the feeling, kid," Marcus replied, flipping the tome he'd chosen closed with a thump. The pair sat across from each other, separated by a large pile of books, none of which had had anything to do with anything that would get them home. "Look, there have got to be... hundreds of books here," he continued. "Somewhere in this incredibly dry, dusty, boring room has to be something that we can use."

The mage looked up at him, frowning. She stood up and held a book up; "Cousins? Utility!" she shouted. The book burst into flame in her hands. She picked up another for a repeat performance. Before she could destroy a third book in frustration Marcus had scrambled across the table and grabbed her wrists, restraining the girl.

"That was completely uncalled for," he snapped. She just glared at him and struggled free, dropping back into her soft-backed chair with a sigh, muttering nonsense under her breath.

"Your pretty young friend has a bit of an attitude, doesn't she?" Pri called from the other side of the room. She was the only other person in the library; when they'd arrived, she'd ushered out the building's caretaker so that Marcus and Tater could remove their hoods and goggles.

"Young and impetuous," Marcus replied, watching the mage. "I think young, at least. Hard to tell with her kind."

Tater glared daggers at him.

"Not finding anything?" the albino woman asked, walking over to them.

"Yellow errant hugs," the girl muttered under her breath.

"I have another idea, if you two are willing to listen and not, you know, set me on fire."

Marcus said, "I'm open to whatever. It's not like we're making any progress here."

"I'll take you to see the Boar. It'll calm down your hotheaded friend, if anything, and maybe you'll be able to get something out of it. Who knows." She had given them a similar explanation as had been given to Brasskicker and Fergy en route to the library.

"Couldn't hurt," he rumbled, standing and stretching his arms out.

It was a shorter walk than Marcus had expected: the structure housing the Boar was next door to the library. Pri explained that they were the first buildings the townspeople had erected, after they'd arrived and discovered the Boar. At least, that was how the story went. They waited outside until she had sent the small group of worshipers and caretakers home, then made their way into the drab, average-looking building.

The first room they entered was empty--an antechamber, with a door on one end. Pri immediately led them through this door and into a second antechamber, this one circular. In the center was a wide staircase, spiraling down into a basement of some kind. The entrance was curtained, and they could not see down into the room or rooms below. Pri stood between them and the stairs, and immediately began to remove her furs.

"Your clothes," she said, "You'll have to take them off. Not just what we've given you."

"You're kidding, right?" Marcus replied, awkwardly. "Tater, she's gotta be kidd--"

But when he turned to face the mage, she was already disrobing. She looked at him and blinked. "Peanut?" she said, and shrugged nonchalantly, casting off her long robe.

Marcus turned away before he could see how little she was wearing under it.

"Halibut oranges deskchair," she continued. Without being able to look at her, he had no idea what she was talking about.

"Fine, fine," Marcus muttered. "This is just the kind of dumb crap I knew this trip would turn into," he continued, shucking his own furs off, "And just wait, we're going to get naked, and then my wife is going to burst in. And with my luck, she'll find us right after I trip over my own damn feet and fall on top of you." He stood there, exposed, keeping his back to the mage, and his eyes locked on a point several feet above Pri's head. "Can we get this over with?"

"Of course," the woman replied. She started down the staircase, holding the curtain open for the trailing pair.

The basement was fairly bare, albeit spacious, stone walls and a stone floor. It was also poorly lit, so at first Marcus didn't know what it was he was looking at. Once his eyes adjusted, it became clear that the Boar was exactly what Pri had described, visually at least: a huge porcine beast. It slept leaning against the far wall, its massive snout blowing swirls through the dust. Even laying down the crest of its spine was higher than Marcus was tall.

But while it looked like any other wild pig blown to massive proportions, looking at it did something strange to Marcus' head: the longer he watched the Boar breathe, the calmer, the more at peace he felt. He turned and looked at Pri--no longer concerned with the albino woman's nudity--and said, "It's amazing. I've never felt so... so..."

"At ease?" she finished for him.

"Yeah," Marcus replied. "It's like... I could just sit here, and--"

"Pri!" someone above them was calling. "Pri, are you in here?"

The albino woman frowned. "Yes," she shouted up, walking over to the stairs. "What is it?"

"They're ringing the bells!" came the reply.

Pri's brow furrowed. "Why in the--..." she drifted off, confused. "Wait here. Sit. Rest. Enjoy the Boar's presence. I'll be back as soon as I know what's going on." Without waiting for a response, she hurried up the stairs and vanished through the curtain.

Marcus couldn't help but smile. He turned back to the Boar, and then to Tater. Her nudity didn't affect him either, in the Boar's presence. "Isn't it great?" he said, taking a deep breath.

The mage was blinking, a vaguely confused look on her face. While Marcus watched, she rubbed her temples with the ends of her fingers, watching the Boar--and then snapped, and let out a short laugh, as if she'd just figured something out.

"What is it?" Marcus asked.

"Cucumber grass root barely red," she said, grinning.

"I don't... I have no idea what you're trying to tell me, Tater," the big man replied warily.

The girl rolled her eyes, then held up one finger, thinking. After a moment, she pointed at the Boar, then held her hands far apart.

Marcus watched her, perplexed. "Yes, it's a very large Boar, I can see that."

Tater shook her head rapidly. She pointed at the Boar again, then held her hands close together, and then spread them far apart again. While she did this she watched Marcus expectantly.

"You don't know that," he replied, frowning. "For all you know it's always been that big."

The girl let out a groan, rubbing her temples with the heels of her hands. "Perfumed strays," she muttered. Resolutely, she pointed at the herself, then wiggled the fingers on both her hands at Marcus. When it seemed like he understood what she was implying, she pointed at the Boar, and held her hands close together. Again, she waited for comprehension from her companion; once she felt he had it, she wiggled the fingers at the Boar, then quickly held them close together--and then spread them far apart. A look of quiet, annoyed desperation had entered her eyes by this point.

"Magic..." Marcus said, slowly, "Made it... this way?"

Tater let out another little laugh and clapped her hands together, gleeful. "Hairstyles!"

"But wait, so it's just--"

She nodded eagerly.

"But what about--"

Again, the girl held up a finger, silencing him. She pointed at the boar, then wiggled her fingers at the top of the stairs, at the curtain that hid the Boar's room--at the people of Hobber, Marcus assumed.

"But what about me?"

Tater just cocked her head to the side--then realized he meant that the Boar had affected him. She just shrugged, pointed at the Boar, and wiggled her fingers at Marcus.

"That's a great theory, Tater, but Pri told us herself--there's no magic here."

The girl rolled her eyes, then beckoned for Marcus to stand closer to her. He hesitated, but eventually did as requested. She put a hand on his shoulder and pushed down, indicating that his much taller frame would need to kneel or squat. He did the former, dropping to one knee in front of her. Tater closed her eyes and put a hand on either side of Marcus' head.

"This is going to look reall--OW!" She interrupted him by snapping her fingers close to his skull, then stepped back, rubbing her hands together. Marcus felt like a bolt of lightning had flown directly into his brain. "That freakin' hurt, you little--Oh." Marcus stood back up, his brows furrowing, and turned to look at the Boar. It was suddenly very clear what was going on. "Well, damn. You're right," he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "But why in the world would anyone make a really big pig, and... and then enchant it to hypnotize a bunch of albino ogres?"

Tater just shrugged, pressing her lips together. "Alphabet cohesion willowy ducks."

He glanced up at the curtain above them, frowning. "Well, I think it goes without saying, we should act like we're not in on it, okay?"

The mage nodded quickly. She made a cutting motion across her neck.

"My point exactly. I mean... I don't get the impression that they would, but, we're unarmed and outnumbered. Better safe than sorry."

95. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter Four)

2008-09-29T12:32:00.015-05:00

The cold on the other side of the portal was so intense it took Marcus' breath away; a chill wind hit him and knocked him to his knees, his eyes watering from the sharp blast of air. "Ah, damn it!" he yelled, stumbling to get to his feet and failing, falling into--snow? Snow. He sucked in a deep breath, burning his lungs, and tried to get a look at where he was, but his tear-blurred vision showed only white, white from all angles, white above, white below, white all around. His hand brushed against something warm and he looked down, and could barely make out the blurred shape of his wife laying in the snow, not moving. "Fergy? Fergy! Shit!" he yelled, quickly checking for a pulse--she had one, and was breathing.

Someone grabbed his shoulder from behind, and Marcus spun around, grabbing whoever it was by the shirt. "Aye, lad, relax, 'tis jes' me, ye daffy bassard!" Brasskicker squirmed out of his grip. Somewhere behind the dwarf he could hear a feminine voice--spouting non-sequiturs rapidly. The mage, of course. They had all made it through the portal, but where were they? And what had happened to Fergy?

Another sharp wind tore across the snow and Brasskicker spat out a curse. Marcus buckled under the chill, but the dwarf just stood there, grumbling. "Gonna need t' find shelter," he said under his breath, scratching his beard.

The mage patted Brasskicker on the shoulder to get his attention, shaking her head. "Geophysics altitude feline," she said, before holding a single finger up. She clapped her hands together twice, and the wind stopped as suddenly as it had arisen, and the quartet was bathed in a cold violet light.

Marcus looked up, wiping the moisture out of his eyes again. They were surrounded by some sort of glowing purple bubble, which was shielding them from the wind. It wasn't, however, protecting them from the cold. Marcus was a big man, and was usually pretty tolerant of extreme temperatures, but this was too much even for him. He scooped up his wife from the ground and brushed the snow off of her clothing, holding her against his body to keep them both warm. His eyes went to the mage. "Where are we?"

She shrugged. The cold didn't seem to be affecting her, or the cat under her clothing, much at all--of course it wouldn't, Marcus thought, she's a mage. Probably auto-heated robes or some kind of personal ward. You could almost feel the air tingling around her, there was so much magic coming off her body. He wondered what she looked like without whatever spell she'd cast on herself.

"How can you not know?" he asked, frustrated. "Your tower, your portal."

Again, she shrugged. "Yew branch azure cornbread taters." She reached over to the edge of the violet bubble and touched it; her finger left behind a gold glow, like phosphorescent paint, on the smooth, clear surface. With it, she drew a small circle, then pointed at it, looking at Marcus meaningfully.

"The portal?"

The mage nodded then drew a second ring about a hand's-length away from the first. When she looked at Marcus again he nodded to show he understood. Then, she drew an arrow leading from the first portal to the second portal.

"That's great, hurry up and get on with it," he said impatiently.

The mage looked at him and rolled her eyes. Maybe she was as young as she looked--she certainly had the attitude to match. She re-traced the shaft of the arrow with her finger, but about half-way through the length she suddenly dragged the finger to the left a foot, then drew another arrow-point, and another ring. Then she looked back at Marcus again.

"Okay. But can you tell where we are at all? Use some kind of magic tracer? I dunno, you're the one with the magic here, do something."

She shrugged once more and drew a big X over the first portal; only then did Marcus realize that the disc of light they had arrived through had vanished--he'd been too distracted to notice, at first. It was probably for the best; the last thing they needed was to be assaulted by an insane plant. The mage started drawing more and more lines coming off the first arrow, each ending at their own newly-drawn circle, until there were dozens of lines and rings branching off from that first drawing.

"So we could be anywhere. Damn. Well, why did this happen?"

Once more, she shrugged; then, the mage pointed at the first off-shoot on her diagram, tapping it twice. Turning to Marcus, she pointed at the woman in his arms, and pointed at him, frowning. Before he could respond to her, she stepped quickly across the small space separating them and started rifling through Fergy's bags and clothes quickly.

"Hey hey--stop that!" he shouted, shoving her away.

Looking impatient, the mage reached into her own robe and brought out what looked like some kind of prism shard. She held it up to her breastbone and it glowed a pastel green. Without taking her eyes off of Marcus, she held it up to Brasskicker's--who had been listening impatiently--face, and the glow faded.

"Izzat a magic detec'or, lass?" the dwarf asked warily.

The girl just inclined her head once more, growing even more irritable. Again looking to Marcus, she held the prism up to Fergy's face; no glow presented itself. The girl moved the shard around a few inches from Fergy's body, careful not to touch her--and it lit up, pale at first, then brighter as it got closer to her waist, until next to one of her bags it glowed as bright as it had when placed against the mage's chest. The girl reached into the bag without asking permission and rifled around for a moment, eventually pulling out an amulet on a gold chain. The prism glowed brightest when held up against it.

She furrowed her brow and looked at Marcus expectantly; "Follow run run fireball?"

"It's a delivery--we're couriers, of sorts, and that's our package."

She glared at him, then brushed the amulet against the protective bubble, being very careful to only come into contact with the chain--almost instantly, the bubble vanished, and the cold wind bit him again. The mage tossed the amulet onto Fergy and clapped her hands again, re-forming the barrier.

"It's a nullifier of some kind, isn't it?"

The mage nodded, exasperated.

"Well we didn't know that's what it was!" he shouted, stuffing the amulet back into Fergy's bags. "Though in hindsight that sorta explains a lot." Duke Thieren's anti-magic field, Fergy's protection from the queen of the forest--and the portal going wonky when Fergy and the amulet went through it. "You're a lot smarter than you look," he muttered. "Sorry for snapping at you and possibly getting us all killed."

The mage shrugged for the umpteenth time. "Chocolate."

"So if'n ye two're done bickerin', even wit' th' crazy girl's magic bubble, we still need t' figg'r out where we are, an' try an' find some shelter." Brasskicker turned and looked at the mage, frowning. "This thing mobile?"

She pursed her lips for a moment, then nodded--Marcus wondered if she was going to get sore in the neck from it all. She leaned against the side of the bubble with her shoulder and it started to rock gently, crunching the snow around the base. She pointed at herself and pantomimed having trouble breathing--weakness. Then she pointed at the big man and pantomimed flexing her biceps. "Vortex mushroom hydration."

"I'll try," Marcus replied. He adjusted Fergy in his arms and then put one of his booted feet against the slope of the sphere, pushing forward and downwards--beneath his other foot, he could feel the bubble moving and nearly lost his balance. Brasskicker leaned against the bubble as well, helping him push it, and the stumpy man almost fell too. After a few minutes of false starts the two men managed to get the ball rolling easily, and soon they were rolling along the vast plain of snow at a good clip, their own body heat from all the exertion staving off the cold and warming up the inside of the bubble. It held in the warmth nicely.

"How's yer lass doin'?" the dwarf asked after a few minutes.

Marcus looked down at his wife, adjusted her so that her head would rest more comfortable against his chest. "Heartbeat, breathing's all fine, as far as I can tell. I'm no expert, but I think she's just asleep."

"Really, really deep sleepin', if'n that's th' case."

"Magic," Marcus replied, rolling his eyes. "If--if we find a village of some kind, or anything, I'd like to lay her down and let her wake up on her own, if she will. Maybe find a doctor, or a mage who can communicate easier than, than..." He stopped, looking back over his shoulder at the girl while still pushing the bubble forward with his feet. "You have a name, kid?"

She was walking along casually behind them, as if rolling around in a bubble was the most natural thing in the world, feeding the little cat morsels she'd procured somehow; the feline was nuzzled against her bosom, only its head peeking out of her robe's neckline. The mage frowned at his question, and seemed to be thinking hard. Then, she opened her mouth: "Tater."

Brasskicker let out a guffaw, and Marcus couldn't help but laugh, despite his concern for Fergy. "Tater?" the asked in unison.

The mage looked upset, though mostly at herself. "Fizzy flow rapscallion elephants!" she shouted, glaring at them. "Root diggers!"

Marcus chuckled. "Root diggers, huh? Well, Tater, I don't know if my wife introduced herself, but I'm Marcus, and this is Fergy."

"Tater" let out a little hmph, rolling her eyes at him.

"I'm Brasskicker," the dwarf added, grinning through his beard at her.

"Peanut avocado?!" It didn't take much thought to figure out what she'd meant.

"Yes," the dwarf replied, his grin fading, "Tha's me real name."

The girl laughed, unable to keep herself from grinning. After a moment Marcus--and then, Brasskicker--joined in.

They rolled across the snowy plain this until the blindingly white glare faded to a more tolerable intensity, then faded again to a dismal gray. With the sun starting to go down, it became a lot easier to discern the horizon, as the clouds overhead shifted to a hue somewhat darker than the pure-white snow. Judging from the new powder still falling outside of the bubble, the wind had let up--thick, puffy snowflakes were drifting down gracefully. Wherever they landed on the bubble they slid off, like water on a duck; the snow underfoot did not stick to the shield either.

The most important change, however, was the result of the encroaching nightfall: on the distant horizon, Marcus could just make out a faint glimmer of light. An instant after he saw it, the mage started yammering in her usual gibberish-filled way, pointing at the light insistently.

"Aye, we'll head o'er thataways," Brasskicker muttered, "We en't got much o' a choice, do we?" He chuckled, half-heartedly. "Hopef'lly thassa fire, an hopef'lly--" The dwarfs stomach let out a timely rumble; "Well, ye get what I'm sayin'."

"I didn't think to take the time to grab that magic barrel," Marcus replied, grinning ruefully. "Might've been a bit big, though. Hey Tater, does that thing come in a smaller size?"

"Gazebo."

"I didn't think so. Okay. Look. We head for the light, and hopefully it's... a tavern, or at least a watchtower, or something and not, like... hell, I don't know. Let's not think about what we don't want it to be." Marcus scratched the back of his head.

"Aye, lad."

"I just wish there were landmarks or... something." The big man shifted his wife around in his arms a bit, trying to keep her comfortable. "I've been all over, and I've never seen a place like this. This cold, this much snow, we've got to be pretty far north, yeah? Farther north than Aeros, farther north than... than whatever's north of Aeros, I have no idea. The Great Northern Wastes, I guess."

"Not a lot, lemme tell ye," Brasskicker said. "There's a dwarven mining camp, Midr, just inside the edge o' the Wastes. But this en't the Wastes, s'too flat. Cold 'nough, snowy 'nough, but nae nearly as jagged. If'n we're north o' Aeros, we're north o' the Wastes."

"So what you're saying, my friend, is that we may be well and truly out luck."

"Lad, ye en't had any luck since I met ye. Not tha' I've known ye all tha' long."

Marcus laughed at that. The conversation was keeping him distracted from the labor as the light slowly drew closer--and the night grew darker, and colder. "We haven't had any luck since we picked up that damn amulet. Not much before that, either. I blame our clients."

"Oh, aye? Well, tell me 'bout it--an' cut this courier bullplop. En't ne'er met a courier who didn' travel 'lone, for speed. Ye stole it, didn' ye?"

Marcus just nodded. "Margus and Fergy, thieves for hire." Behind him, Tater snorted back a laugh. "The best damn thieves, she is wont to say. I am not exaggerating when I say I'm yet to meet anyone better--and that's not me being full of myself, it's a fact. Though to be fair--thieves don't exactly run into other thieves very often."

"Were th' two o' ye... eh... straight? Before ye got yerselves hitched?"

Marcus grinned. "No, actually, our meeting was one of those random, unlikely coincidences that I just said don't happen. It's kind of a long story."

"Lad, that light yonder en't gettin' closer very quickly."

The big man shrugged. "I met Fergy... wait, no, let me go a little farther back than that. Before I met Fergy, I was little more than a hired thug, muscle for money. I was working in a hamlet called... hell, what was it--Terrana. I think. The local duke, the aptly-titled Duke of Terrana hired me and some others to guard his vault--which, honestly, was more of a private museum, a gallery--just for him to look at his own wealth. Big room, high-domed ceiling, walls lined with art and treasure and whatnot, and right smack dab in the middle of it all was a statue. Not just any statue--a relic, an obsidian carving that was at one angle a cat, the picture of feline grace, and from a different angle, a nude goddess, the picture of feminine beauty.

"And this obsidian statue was estimated to cost more than the Duke of Terrana's land, house, airships, horses, and serving staff combined. I'm talking--astronomically valuable. So of course some ne'er-do-wells tried to hire me to steal it."

"Tried?"

Marcus chuckled. "Okay, maybe that's the wrong word. Let's just say they made me an offer I couldn't refuse, because it would keep me from having to put any effort into finding food and lodging for the rest of my life."

"Well, lad, nowadays ye're a thief, an' not a wealthy ponce, so I'd say it didn' go off t' plan?"

"Not even remotely. The plan was to bust in using my... physical superiority and prowess to overpower the other guards, smash the door open, and rush out, powering through anything that got in the way. Masked, of course, not that it mattered--I mean, I'm a really big guy, I sorta stand out, yeah? Anyways, someone tipped the Duke off, so I arrive at the vault and find triple the usual guards waiting for me.

"Which honestly wasn't that big of a deal. Despite the Duke's wealth, Terrana's kinda... backwater. These guys he hired, they weren't exactly the creme of the crop, if you catch my drift. They just slowed me down significantly. Anyways, I'm fighting my way through a bunch of hired muscle, and I get to the vault door, kick that bastard open and knock the last of the guys aside--and what do I see? Hanging from a freshly-carved hole in the dome, dangling from a series of ropes and hooks way too complicated to describe out loud, is this woman, this... gorgeous redhead, the most beautiful woman I've ever laid eyes on. She's upside down, her hair hanging down loose over the platform where the carving used to be--the carving already half-way into her bag, and she's got this look on her face like her parents just caught her getting friendly with the neighbor boy."

At that point, Marcus had a huge grin on his face. "I'm standing there gawking like an idiot. And I say--out loud, swear on my life, without even thinking--I say, 'I'm gonna marry that woman.' And before the words are out of my mouth, some jerk clocks me in the back of the head with a blackjack. The last thing I hear before I'm out out is her voice, and all she has to say is, 'Holy crap, that guy's arms are huge!'"

Brasskicker laughed. "An' th' statue?"

"That's the best part," Marcus replied. "My break-in ruined her plans too, and the guards caught her, and in the process of cutting her down from her rigging she dropped the statue on the marble floor--and the damn thing shattered. Immeasurable amounts of money, broken into a million little bits on the Duke of Terrana's floor."

"Applesauce running fire plain." The mage's tone was sarcastic; Marcus chose to ignore her.

After that they traveled in silence for a while. The air grew colder, but their mutual body-heat staved off the chill to a degree; it was very cold, but not so cold that they were risking frostbite. Slowly, the distant light grew closer, until it loomed over them, at the top of a gate, in a wall cobbled together out of large stones. It was a signal fire, both calling in lost travelers and lighting the road to expose shadier elements. Said road almost immediately vanished into the snow.

"Nobody's watching," Marcus murmured, "Probably a gatehouse up there, whatever poor sod is in charge of this gate must be getting out of the cold in there. Better to not make a scene. Tater, drop the shield."

The mage protested: "Stonework lamplight damnation."

"Jes' trust 'im on this, lass," Brasskicker, "It'll be easier t' get in if'n we don' look like a bunch o' loonies in a ball."

"Mud boots cat grass." The girl snapped her fingers, and the bubble vanished--and with it, their built up heat. Immediately Marcus started shivering.

"Hail! Hail!" he shouted up at the top of the gate. "Travelers at the gate! May we seek sanctuary here?"

They waited there a long moment, but no one responded.

Marcus tried again: "Hail! Travelers at the gate! We seek shelter and sanctuary, and bring coin for food and lodging!" He turned to the dwarf and muttered, "That last bit usually helps."

A moment later, a voice called down: "By the Boar's teats, what the hell are you people doing outside this late at night? You're looking to lost an extremity or two that way--and in such flimsy garb!"

"We're lost," Marcus called in reply; he couldn't see the source of the voice, but it sounded masculine, and maybe a little drunk. "Travelers, we lost our way and followed your firelight. Will you let us in?"

"Are you armed?"

Marcus turned to Brasskicker again; the dwarf shrugged, holding up his empty hands. "Left me gun behind."

The mage, too, admitted to being unarmed. Marcus shouted up, "The only person here with any weapons is unconscious; we'll gladly remove the weapons from her if you'll let us in."

There was a long pause. Marcus thought he heard talking above them, but it was hard to tell. Then, "Open the gate!" the voice shouted. The wooden barrier let out a crack, then a low rumble as it was dragged off to the side; beyond it was a steel portcullis of some kind, lit by torches set in the archway; the travelers quickly moved under the wall, and the gate rumbled shut behind them, effectively pinning them in to a cell some ten feet across formed by the portcullis and the gate. Above them, Marcus noted warily, was a small hole, probably for dumping hot oil or some such on intruders. He made it a point not to stand directly under it.

They stood there, Marcus standing near one of the torches to keep warm, for several minutes before anyone came down to greet them. Two slightly-hunched figures, both heavily bundled in dirty white furs, stepped in front of the portcullis and observed them. Their faces were hidden behind masks, with glass discs over their eyes, tinted black, with leather straps holding them in place. Not a bit of skin was visible. "The woman's armed, and not the rest of you?"

"Aye," the dwarf replied.

"That's most curious. Well, big man, remove her weapons and we'll let you into Hobber."

Marcus nodded, carefully laying Fergy down on the hard-packed--but snow-free--ground. He carefully removed two long, curved daggers from her belt, sticking them into the dirt point-first.

One of the figures started to speak: "Alright, raise the ga--" But Marcus held up a hand, looking up at the speaker from his kneeling position over Fergy.

"Look, I really want to do this right, without any snags or crazy crap happening," he said. "Let me finish what I'm doing, and I'll tell you when I'm actually done."

The figure looked puzzled. "O... kay. As you wish."

"Thank you," Marcus replied. He set about completely disarming Fergy, placing each of her daggers point-first into the dirt like the first two: two daggers concealed in each boot, one on both of her thighs, one hidden on the small of her back, a pair up each sleeve, and three more hidden in the lining of her jacket.

"Lass likes t' be prepared," Brasskicker muttered, eying the fourteen total daggers.

"She just likes knives," Marcus retorted, looking back up at the two figures on the other side of the portcullis. "Makes her a bitch to carry around, all that steel weighs a ton. Okay, that's all of them."

The fur-clad pair looked slightly alarmed. "Um. Well. In that case, welcome to Hobber. Thank you for your... um.. honesty." The figure waved at someone above him, and the portcullis slid out of the way. The more outspoken of the two figures motioned for the travelers to follow; "This way, if you will. I believe you requested shelter and sanctuary, food and lodgings?"

"Indeed, and we're most grateful for anything you can provide, sir," Marcus said, scooping his wife up once more and cradling her gently. A third fur-clad figure had hobbled up to them and was gingerly gathering up Fergy's weapons. Marcus said to him, "Make sure those all stay together, and are well-treated. She's going to be really pissed off at me when she wakes up as it is." He grinned ruefully, but couldn't discern any response from the heavily-garbed figure.

The hodge-podge trio followed the first two figures deeper into the walled village. "It's not much to look at, but Hobber's home," one of them said; Marcus couldn't tell which one was speaking. "We'll put you up at the old tavern. Oh--incidentally. I'm Isa, my companion is Pri." It was unclear which one had which name. "We'll put you up for the night, free of charge--couldn't leave you out in the cold, now could we, eh?" One of the figures--Isa--looked back at Marcus and, the big man could only assume, grinned. "If you don't mind, we'll be locking you in."

"That's... well, not what I expected," Marcus replied.

Turning forwards again, Isa continued: "Unfortunately, it's a fact you'll have to get used to. We don't get a lot of travelers this far out, and until we've had a better chance of checking you out for the safety of the village we'll keep you confined. You're more than welcome to leave the town, mind you--you're not prisoners--you just can't go anywhere in the village."

"I understand. All I want is a place to lay my wife down, and food for the rest of us. I know we aren't exactly the most... usual group of people to find at your gate. As such, your restrictions are understandable."

Isa chuckled. "That's good. The tavern is well-kept, but sadly underused. We should be able to get you separate rooms--"

"Ac'shully, we'd prefer if'n ye'd put us all up inna single, if'n ye don' mind," Brasskicker interrupted. The mage immediately protested with gibberish, but the dwarf leveled a glare at her that shut up her.

"What did she say? I can't have heard that correctly," the less-spoken of the figures--Pri--said, and Marcus realized for the first time that the body under all those furs was female.

"Nothin'," the dwarf explained. "The lass's... touched inna head. A 'ffliction o' th' speech."

"Poor thing," Pri murmured.

Isa clapped his hands once. "Well, here we are. If you would rather a single, that can easily--more easily, even--be arranged." He pushed the door of the building they'd stopped before open, spilling out the firelight from inside. "After you."

The travelers slipped into the tavern, and Marcus immediately moved before the fire in the hearth, warming himself and his wife. Behind him, he could hear Isa speaking to his female companion. He turned and saw that Pri was removing her furs from the top down. What he saw was surprising: under all that bundling was a hearty woman in her middle years, completely devoid of hair on her head--including her eyebrows--who stood with a slight hunch; her skin was as white as the snow they'd trekked across, her neck was thick, and her ears were set low on her head. She left her eye protectors on; under her furs she wore a thick tunic and jacket, and heavy trousers and boots. Her figure was vaguely pear-shaped, with wide hips and waist. She bowed to Isa from the middle, and he left the tavern, nodding in Marcus' direction as he slipped out. Once he was gone Pri locked the door behind him, but didn't bar it--they weren't trying to keep people out, after all.

"Your room is this way," she said, addressing the dwarf now. "There's only one bed, but it's large and should fit at least a couple of you. If you want you can drag some chairs in there with you, but they're not padded, so it's up to you."

"Th floor'll be fine, lass, but thank ye." The dwarf smiled, doing his best to be genial. "An' vittles?"

"I'll be cooking them up myself. You can stay in the common room until after you've been fed; I'll start working in the kitchen now." She nodded, and vanished into an adjoining room.

They chose to dine in the room that had been selected for them; the meal consisted of what looked like potatoes mashed into a paste, covered in some kind of brown sauce, along with thick slices of what tasted like roast elk. "You ever see anyone like that?" Marcus asked Brasskicker once Pri had locked them in, keeping his voice low. He sat on the wide bed next to Fergy's inert form; she continued to sleep away peacefully, unchanged from the condition he'd found her in.

"Nay, lad. Wherever we be, it en't within th' borders o' the ol' Kingdom. Not even close." The dwarf tore into his food ravenously, his eyes crossing the room to stare at their youngest companion. "Tell ye who 'as seen 'em, though," he continued, nodding at the mage, "that 'un."

Marcus turned his own gaze on the girl, frowning around a mouthful of potatoes. "That true, Tater?" he asked.

She just glared at him, then at Brasskicker, before turning her chair around and facing the wall, sulking. The men exchanged glances, and shrugged. They ate in silence for a while then, when they realized that the mage had fallen asleep sitting up, the two men split up the watch--Brasskicker went first, letting Marcus get some much needed rest; he fell asleep with his face in his wife's hair.

When he woke up, it was dawn; the sky outside the window was once again a uniform, eye-aching grey. Brasskicker was still awake, his back against the wall opposite the door; the mage had moved down to the floor in the corner, her tailless cat curled up in the crook of her arm.

"You let me sleep?" he muttered, sitting up; he made sure Fergy was comfortable (or at least as best as he could tell), then slid off the bed and stretched. The room was cold, but not uncomfortably so.

"Ye got me outta that godsfersaken forest, figure it was the least I could do, lad." He grinned through his beard. "I hope breakfas' in this dive is as good as th' dinner. Whatsername came by 'bout an hour 'go an' unlocked th' door, said t' wait for an escort 'fore we left the buildin'. Was waitin' on ye to get up."

"Oh yeah?" Marcus faced the door, reaching back to scratch between his shoulders. "Watch the ladies, would you? I'll be back, just gonna try and find a map."

The big man wandered out to the tavern's common room, where he found Pri leaning against the bar; the exceptionally white woman hadn't changed clothes as far as he could tell--she had probably been watching the door to the room they'd slept in all night. "Coffee?" she asked, gesturing towards the hearth, where a pot was hanging over the fire. Her eye-protectors dangled from their strap around her neck; they eyes previously behind them were a vivid, clear shade of red.

"You read my mind." He smiled and grabbed a mug from the bar, and set about preparing himself a serving. "So."

Pri smiled half-heartedly. "So."

"Where are we, exactly?" Marcus asked, leaning up against the bar next to her.

"Hobber."

"This is good coffee."

Her smile went a little more earnest. "Um. Thank you."

"And where's Hobber?"

"About a hundred miles from Snowport, in Vastness."

"Snowport? Vastness?"

"You get curiouser and curiouser. How, tell me, could a person get this far into Vastness--lost--and not know what Vastness is?"

Marcus chuckled. "Magic."

Pri raised a hairless eyebrow. "Intentional?"

"Accidental. Do you have a map?"

"Of Vastness? No--there's nothing to map, to be honest, just a big blank whiteness with Hobber a little off the center. I can get you a wider map, though."

"Could you, please? We're trying to figure out how to get home."

Pri nodded, and slipped behind the bar, rummaging around under its surface. She talked while she searched. "So is the girl with the funny speech impediment your mage?"

"Well, not my mage. We sorta got thrown in together in a crisis."

She laid a length of parchment out on the bar, unfolding it carefully. On it Marcus could clearly see a moderate-sized continent in the upper-left quadrant, the majority of which was covered in empty whiteness. The upper-right quadrant was peppered with smaller landmasses, and the bottom half of the map was dominated by a vast sea and, at the edge, one large continent, fading away into obscurity only a small distance inland and stretching across the entire width of the map. Nothing on the parchment looked familiar to Marcus in the slightest.

Pri pointed at the continent in the upper-left quadrant. "This... big empty space in the middle here, is Vastness, and here--" she pointed at the lower edge of the land mass, "--is Snowport." Various other marks on the mass were named Rorr, Yanil, Whitecourt, and so on, none of them anywhere Marcus had heard of. The smaller masses in the upper-right quadrant were given names too, but they were even more strange: R'hilla, Zon-yi, and so forth.

"This doesn't make any sense," the big man muttered to himself, looking the map over. "None of this looks familiar."

A noise behind him got Marcus' attention, and an instant later the mage was standing next to him, eying the map. She looked at at Marcus and rolled her eyes, exasperated.

"What?" he asked.

She shook her head and put her palm on the map--and rotated it one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, moving Vastness and Snowport to the bottom, and the massive, blank continent to the top. Without a word, she looked up at Marcus expectantly.

"Oh," he said, after a moment of re-examining the parchment. "Oh." He ran his finger along the coast of the great unmarked continent. "Of course. It looked totally different upside down," he muttered. "Look, here--this is where Porsin Harbor is, and here's the Bilox shipyards... and..." Then the realization hit him--"Oh, shit, we've crossed the Yawning Sea. Somehow."

The mage just nodded. Pri watched the two of them, frowning. "Then you're from the Northlands, from the Greater Unknown?"

Marcus nodded, overwhelmed. He plopped down on a barstool, rubbing the back of his head. "Across a vast sea with no wind and no current, from which no explorer has returned." He frowned. "It sounds melodramatic--but honestly, it's as bad as it sounds. When I was younger I crewed on a merchant ship, and we were set on by pirates. We fled, until the wind and the sea died, and we coasted on pure momentum out into the Yawning Sea. The pirates didn't follow us."

Pri was regarding Marcus cooly, her thumb resting on her pale lips. "Snowport is full of similar stories."

"We ended up rowing our way back out, but the whole place just felt... empty. No fish in the water, no birds in the air, no wind, no movement in the water other than that of our ship; it was spooky, and I'm not and haven't ever been easily spooked. In theory, one could simply row across it--but I mean, look at it. It would take months of non-stop progress to get across, and when the sun's in the sky it's swelteringly hot, year round."

The mage was trying to get his attention again; she was motioning with her hands like a pair of flapping wings, moving from one end of the map to the other, across the sea.

"In what, an airship?" Marcus asked. She nodded. "Wouldn't make it across. The mineral that powers the lift and propulsion devices is powered by its proximity to Aeros and, more specifically, the Aeros Crater. I don't even begin to understand it--I don't think anyone does, really, but it's generally known that about... here--" he pointed to a spot an inch or two off the coast of the northern continent "--airships lose power completely. Closer to the Aeros Crater means more power, and the closer you get to the coast the squirrellier your ship's lift and propulsion get--and then at this point, zilch, you drop out of the sky. Ker-sploosh."

"It sounds fairly fantastic," Pri murmured. "Flying boats? There's nothing of the sort here."

Marcus nodded. "It's not a surprise, really, given how the devices work. If it wasn't so... well, then we wouldn't be in this pickle, now would we?" He finished off his coffee and poured another mug's worth. "Well now we have a point of origin and a point of destination--Tater, could you magic us up a portal back to the north?"

The mage shook her head.

"Why not? You made the one in the tower, didn't you?"

She shook her head again. "Verisimilitude ejecta pasta-sauce."

"Well," Marcus muttered. "I guess that makes sense. If you could just make it yourself you wouldn't leave it sitting open in your tower, would you? Someone else must have made it for you."

She nodded.

"Before you ask," Pri interjected, "We have no magic here. Not in Hobber, not in Snowport or even Whitecourt in all its grandeur. We know about it, sure--but there's no dedicated organization, and magic-users are a rare find. Much less a magic user who could transport you over such a vast distance."

"Figures." Marcus regarded the woman's red eyes for a moment, thoughtful.

"Tell you what," she continued, matching his gaze. "Let's say I took you two outside--just you two. We'll go to the repository, and the two of you can, um, dig around in the books. I don't know what you'll find, but maybe you'll find something. Stay here, I'll fetch you some clothes a little more appropriate and a little less eye-catching--even out of sight, your presence is causing something of an hubbub in the town, so let's bundle you up so you look local. Does that sound alright to you?"

Marcus and the mage exchanged looks. "Sure," he said. "Whatever gets us home."

92. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter Three)

2008-08-18T11:31:00.009-05:00

Marcus and Fergy had just finished failing to dust each other off when an explosive crack tore through the air, and something smashed into one of the closer tree-branches on the other side of the fire, shattering it. The pair immediately ducked reflexively, quickly looking around--and towards the tower's entrance, where a stubby figure was standing on the front steps, pointing a long instrument of some kind at them.

"Oy, ye lot," the figure shouted, its mouth hidden in a thick, white beard. "Hands in th' air, step 'way from each other, ye hear? That was jest a warnin' shot, next one en't gonna be."

Fergy raised her hands, taking a step away from her husband, but Marcus just stood there, glaring incredulously at their attacker. "Is that a musket?!" he asked, a huge grin growing on his face. "Are you threatening us with a musket?"

"Bloody 'ell lad, ye got some cheek, don' ye?"

Marcus laughed, walking calmly towards the short man. "Can you blame me, mate? That thing's about as dangerous as a kitten."

"Oh aye?!"

"Oh, aye," Marcus repeated. He stopped walking, crossing his hands over his chest. "Go on then, shoot me."

Fergy took half a step towards him; "Marcus, baby--"

"Just trust me, love."

"Fine lad, ye asked for it!" The short man--a dwarf, Marcus could see by then--took aim down the shaft of his musket. "Ye sure?"

"I'm sure."

"This is a stupid plan," Fergy muttered.

A heavy silence fell over the ashy clearing, and all Fergy could hear was her own heart beating. She could just imagine in in her head--the musket ball striking Marcus in the head with the force it had shattered that branch with, splattering his brains all over the place. She closed her eyes, unable to watch.

"Baaaaaaagh!" the dwarf shouted, shouldering his weapon. "C'mon then, Ah'll get ye some vittles." And with that, he turned and stomped back into the tower, grumbling.

Fergy opened his eyes, dropping her hands to her sides. "What the hell?"

Marcus grinned at her. "He hadn't loaded in a second shot, and that takes bloody forever. Hungry?"

She let out a little half-hearted laugh. "Quite." Together, the two closed the distance between themselves and the entrance to the tower, and slipped inside.

Once they were inside, both of them were so distracted by the structure's interior that the apple the dwarf tossed at Marcus caught him in the chest. He clumsily caught it and relayed it back to Fergy, then caught the dwarf's second throw and took a big bite. The room they were standing in was fairly barren, save a few barrels and crates on the far side, and clearly spanned the entire base of the tower. The ceiling, some thirty feet up, only covered half of the room; the other half was open, apparently, all the way to the top of the tower. From where Fergy was standing, she could see the different floors of the tower above her, as if she were looking at a cross-section of the structure. The third and fifth floors were lit, while the one directly above them and the fourth were darkened. There were no stairs leading up from the ground floor, and none connecting the other floors that Fergy could see.

"What... exactly is this place?" she asked, munching idly on her apple and turning her eyes to the dwarf. "And... why does this apple taste like stale bread?"

"'Ell if I know, lass," the stumpy man replied, shrugging his broad shoulders. "Sorc'ress lives up there, flits aboot some'ow without stairs, I reckon. Don' ask me 'ow it works, I en't got th' slightest." he crunched on his own apple, grimacing at the taste of it. "Conjured food--reach int' the barrel an' ye can pull out jest aboot whatever ye want, but no matter what ye pull out it all tastes like last week's bread."

"That's... very strange," Marcus muttered.

"Oh, en't jest strange, 'tis barkin' mad!" The dwarf threw his arms in the air and stomped over to Fergy so he could see up the empty half of the tower. "Ye hear that, ye daft bitch! Ye'r barkin' mad!" He hurled his apple upwards, but missed his angle and it fell back to the ground a few feet away, splattering.

A head, with long black hair, poked out from the top floor, and a moment later, words floated down in response: "Excelsior! Panda tunic rocking sky!" The head vanished and silence fell over the trio at the bottom.

"Baagh!" the dwarf groaned. "Don' pay that useless thing a fig o' attention. She's always like that--utter gibberish. Been tryin' t' get 'er t' help me get the hell out o' this damn wood, but she won' even come down here."

While he was talking, Fergy was eying the wall, and without a word to interrupt him she walked across the room and started shoving a crate across the stone floor.

Marcus watched her nonchalantly. "Going climbing?"

His wife just grunted, then said, "If I can get a little higher up, yeah, the stonework looks climbable. Just gotta push this really heavy, bulky crate over there and it shouldn't be hard. Really heavy. Pushing it all on my own."

Her husband grinned. "You want some help?"

"A little late now, you think?" Fergy shot back, rolling her eyes; a second later the crate thunked dully against the wall, and the woman climbed on top of it. A second later she was clinging to the wall like a spider, working her way towards the level directly above them.

Down below, the two men watched her; the dwarf let out an impressed whistle. "Nimble lass, en't she?"

"That's my wife," the other muttered. "I'm Marcus, by the way. She's Fergy."

The dwarf shook his hand eagerly. "Brasskicker."

Marcus nearly spit out his bite of stale-bread apple, choking back a laugh. "Seriously?"

"Cross me heart."

"You pick that name yourself?" Fergy called down, laughing.

Brasskicker chuckled, walking over to try and get a look at the floor above. "Me pa... he had high hopes fer me. If'n it weren' for me ma, I'd pro'lly jes' be 'Asskicker'. She didn' think it was a proper dwarf name without the metal in it, so the two o' em came t' a compromise, or so they tell me. I do me best t' live up to the name."

"I'll bet you do." Marcus patted him on the shoulder, watching his wife climb. A moment later, Fergy vanished into the level above, and Marcus and Brasskicker craned their necks in vain to try and get a look. "So," the big man said, "Does that sorceress have an airship or something we can ride out of here on?"

"Hell if I know, lad." The dwarf scratched his beard thoughtfully. "En't ever seen anythin' but this room, never seen 'er flyin' in or out on one, that's fer sure. Mebbe she's got one tucked away up there, that lass o' yers'll be the first t' know. Ye lot come in on one?"

Marcus nodded, taking another visual survey of the room. "Forced landing a few miles from here. It's wasted, though, torn apart by the woods, so even if we stood a chance of getting through the trees, it wouldn't matter."

"Queen o' th' fores'?"

"The lackey, actually--"

"Aye, the creepy bugger. Gave me the willies, that 'un did."

"Yeah, I sorta figured you'd say something like that. What the hell are you doing out here, anyways?"

"Jus' passin' through." Brasskicker shrugged and waddled over to the food bucket, pulling out what looked like a leg of mutton. As he munched on it, he continued, "Makin' me way north o' here. Was runnin' a'hind schedule, so I figured I'd cut through these woods. Pah, that came back an' bit me in the ass, didn' it?" He let out a loud guffaw and tossed the conjured food over his shoulder. "Ran into that woody bassard, then hoofed it here when 'e tried t'... ugh, I don' even wanna talk aboot it. Ye?"

"Queen tried to possess my wife. It didn't take." Marcus frowned, thinking about that.

"It didn' take? Why not?"

"Search me, I've got no idea. Neither does she. Neither did the queen."

Up above, the woman in question squatted on floor, stretching her arms over her head languidly. She was in pretty good shape, and scaling the wall hadn't been that difficult, but her muscles burned from the strain nonetheless. She stood up and surveyed the room around her, stretching her legs as she did so. It was mostly dark, but she could see well enough from the torchlight below. She appeared to be in a library of sorts--there were a lot of books, but they seemed to lack any kind of organization. Some were on shelves, other were stacked on top of tables, and still others were just scattered on the floor. On the far side of the room, a spiraling metal staircase led up to the level above; Fergy headed for it, careful not to step on any of the tomes.

She was about to mount the steps when a shadow across them moved, and immediately the woman dropped into a crouch and slipped a pair of daggers out of her belt; in the same motion she slipped silently backwards and behind a table, hiding, ready, holding her breath.

She crouched there for a minute or two before peeking back over the pile of books on top of her hiding place, brows furrowed. Sitting a few steps from the bottom of the spiral, at about eye level, was a small black cat. It regarded her coolly, its head tilted just slightly one side.

"Well," Fergy said, standing up, "I guess the sorceress isn't the only one hiding up here--or maybe she is." She slipped the daggers back into her belt and curtsied quickly, keeping a fair distance from the animal. "A pleasure to meet you, m'lady sorceress. That is one hell of a shape-shift."

The cat just stared at her, and let out a little "Mew."

"I hope you don't mind me climbing up here. We're kind of in a bit of a snafu down below--I'll bet you've met the queen of the forest, right? Well, her little goon tore our airship to bits, and we're looking for a way out of these woods--and, since she's taken a liking to me, sanctuary until we can skidaddle."

The cat continued to stare at her.

"You're just a cat, aren't you?"

"Mew." The cat padded silently down the stairs and closed the short distance separating them, then rubbed against Fergy's legs amiably.

"Just a cat... without a tail. Poor thing, what happened to it?" She reached down to scratch it between its ears, then picked it up and held it against her chest. The cat curled up into a ball and rubbed its head against her chin. "Sweet thing. Let's go find your lady mistress, yeah?"

Holding the cat with one hand, Fergy mounted the spiral staircase, her other hand on the curving banister. The second story up was much like the first, in that it was messy and disorganized; instead of books, however, its shelves, tables, and floor were lined with glass jars, each full of some kind of clear fluid, floating in which were various bits and pieces of--well, for the most part, Fergy wasn't sure what they were bits and pieces of. As she walked idly through the room, which like the two rooms below it took up the entire half-level of the tower, she saw claws, plants, scales, rocks, crystals--and, seeming to stick out to her specifically, what looked like a long, black worm, curled into a spiral in the clear solution.

"Well, I guess now we know what happened to your tail, fella," she muttered, scratching behind the cat's neck, her lips twisting into a little frown. The cat just purred against her breasts, pleased with the attention she was giving it.

The entire room was softly lit with a bright, natural light. At first, Fergy thought it was coming from the jars themselves, as there were no windows, but soon she realized it was coming from another source, a flat-looking disc of light just off the center of the room, hanging vertically in mid-air. Looking at it made her head hurt; Fergy dismissed it as some random magical do-dad, something she probably wouldn't be able to wrap her mind around even were it explained to her, and continued up the stairs.

The floor above was utterly empty, and covered in dust, which was marked with lines of paw prints.

The top floor was also empty--or nearly so. In the center of the room stood another strange light source, this one a lantern hanging from a curved pole. The lantern was emitting a soft glow that shifted from blue to green, and back again, as she watched it.

"Hello?" she called out. "M'lady sorceress? The hell did she go?" There hadn't exactly been a lot of places to hide that Fergy had seen on her way up the tower--she would have seen someone under any of the tables, and all of the bookshelves and cabinets had been flush against the wall. She set the cat down and walked around the edge of the room, towards the empty space on the other side, keeping a fair distance away from the odd lantern. She leaned out over the ledge carefully, and spotted Marcus and Brasskicker on the ground level.

"Any news from down below?" she called out, waving a hand to get their attention.

Marcus looked up and grinned; a moment later, his voice floated up to her: "We pulled a keg out of the barrel of tasteless food, but--surprise!--it tastes like bread. Worse, it's not getting us drunk."

"A crime, if'n I ever heard o' one!" the dwarf shouted. "Oughtta string th' daffy lass up fer it."

There was a noise behind Fergy, but when she turned around, the room was still empty, save for the black cat, which looked like it might be having a spasm or a seizure of some kind. She frowned and leaned back over the drop; "Have to find her first, I haven't seen her anywhere. Hang out down there, I'll get back to you. See if I can find some rope or something."

"Aye."

Turning back to the cat, Fergy walked across the semicircular room and kneeled down next to it, watching its odd movements. "What's gotten into you, friend?" she whispered; then, reached out and grabbed a fistful of air; the air attempted to pull away, but Fergy held on tight, then pressed it up against the wall before taking two quick steps back and raising her empty hands. "Drop the invisibility, m'lady sorceress, I'm not here to hurt you. You know I know you're there now--can we talk?"

The space of nothing next to the cat shimmered, and suddenly a young woman with long black hair was standing there; the cat was rubbing up against her legs, purring. "Treebranch moonlily," the sorceress muttered, glaring at the animal.

Fergy just stared at her. "I have no idea what that means." She dug around in her bag, then held out small pouch of cloth, which was tied shut with a bit of purple ribbon. "Here, you can have this, as a sort of peace offering, I guess."

The sorceress eyed her warily, her brows forming a sharp V shape. She looked twenty, twenty-one, and exceptionally pretty--but being a magic-user, that didn't exactly come as a surprise. Her robes were thick and well-decorated, with a golden insignia attached above one of the girl's breasts. "Corsair grass plains..."

"I don't know what that means, just take the bloody chocolate!"

"... Crackers?" The sorceress' eyes went wide and she snatched the little pouch up, slim fingers yanking it open viciously. Inside were several small squares of the sweet, brown substance. The sorceress immediately popped several in her mouth, and leaned up against the wall, eyes closed, savoring it.

"I figured you might be a little tired of the stale bread downstairs. Do you have a name?"

"Evergreen rats plank sky."

Fergy just let out a sigh. "I officially hate this job. Okay. Fine. No words."

"Juniper midni--"

"Just stop!" Fergy threw her arms in the air. "Don't talk. Yes or no--just nod, or shake your head. Don't speak. Okay?"

The girl nodded.

"Okay, good, you can understand me."

She nodded again.

"Are you the mistress of this tower?"

And again, a nod. She was chewing on another square of chocolate.

"Have you met the wood nymphs outside?"

Another nod, this time more vigorously.

"Have they trapped you here?"

This time, the sorceress shook her head.

Fergy frowned, confused at that. "Then why are you here, in this god-forsaken place? No--wait! Don't answer that--"

But the girl only held up a hand, her pointer finger extended. She quickly slipped over to the spiral staircase and beckoned Fergy to follow, before vanishing down it. Fergy found the sorceress on the floor full of books, shoving several around, searching, until she found the volume she was looking for. Grinning, she held it up for Fergy to read the title:

On Behavior of and interaction with Magical Creatures; vol. Seven: Nymphs of the Wood, Water, and Sky.

Fergy put a hand over her own mouth and let out a sigh. "You have got to be kidding me. You're here to study them?!" She noticed, then, that several of the tomes scattered about the room were marked with the same insignia as the mage's robes.

The younger girl nodded vigorously.

"How did you get out here, then?"

The sorceress held up a hand, forming a circle with her pointer finger and her thumb. She stuck the opposite pointer through the ring and wiggled it around.

"I don't understand."

The sorceress repeated the gesture, a frustrated look on her face. "Compound eloquence!" she shouted, clearly annoyed.

"Okay, new subject--what the hell happened to your... to you?"

The sorceress let out a little huff, dropping her arms to her sides. She glared at Fergy for a moment, then walked past her to a bookshelf against the wall. Regarding it for a moment, she selected a tome from one of the middle shelves and laid it out on a relatively-clear table. She opened it up to the middle and pointed at it, looking at Fergy.

Fergy looked at the page in question, but, "I can't understand any of that--I've never even seen that language written down before."

The girl nodded repeatedly. Then, she pointed at the page again and shrugged melodramatically and pointed at herself. After that, she wiggled her fingers at the book--and then slapped the page with her palm, formed a fist, and thrust the fist in her own face, opening it up and wiggling her fingers again. With this last motion, she made a little "pssssh" sound with her mouth.

"Oh, wow, that is unfortunate," Fergy replied. "Your translation spell backfired and hit you in the face--so, if what little I know about magic is true, the only person who can... fix it is... you. So... why haven't you fixed it?"

Looking impatient, the sorceress pointed at her mouth and rolled her eyes.

"The... fix is a verbal spell. Amazing--someone with worse luck than ours!" Fergy couldn't help but grin. "So are you just screwed for life, or what?"

The sorceress pointed at her mouth again and wiggled her fingers, then spread her palms apart; then, she pointed at herself, and placed her palms much closer together. "Apricot snowfall..."

"You need a more skilled magic-user."

The girl nodded.

"Have you tried writing? This pantomime garbage is going to get tiring fast."

The girl nodded again, and found a third book to show Fergy; this ones pages were blank for the most part, but at the front of the book was what looked like utter gibberish--random words with no apparent relation, written in lines as if they were actual sentences.

"Okay, look. I think I can help you out here, would you like that?"

The girl nodded.

"Do you have a way to leave the tower other than going through the forest?"

Another nod--and at almost the same instant, a thunderous impact rocked the tower; Fergy and the sorceress leaned against tables to steady themselves, and were suddenly bathed in a shaft of sunlight. Down below, they could hear Marcus and Brasskicker shouting and cursing. The far wall of the tower now had a massive hole in it. Peering down over the ledge, Fergy could see a large boulder down below.

Marcus looked up at her; she could just barely make out a redness on the side of his face. Blood, probably. "I think your green lady-friend outside is tired of waiting on us to come out," he called up. "And she smashed our keg."

The sorceress was suddenly beside her, looking down at the men below; then, a look of confusion came across her face and she turned her gaze to Fergy and said, "Thesis horseback arrogant grasslands?" Her tone was as bewildered as her expression, but it was pretty clear what she was asking.

"I may have set the queen nymph on fire before we came here."

"Quantum philandry?!"

"I had a good reason!"

Down below, Marcus examined the boulder, and the hole it had made. He blinked and wiped the side of his face against his shoulder, staining his jacket with blood. Best he could tell, a bit of shrapnel from the shattered wall--the same kind of shrapnel that was all over the floor now--had caught him in the temple. It wasn't a serious wound, but like most head wounds, it was bleeding profusely. The big man was already feeling a little light-headed, and was trying to keep himself focused.

He managed to catch a glimpse of the second boulder through the hole the first one left, and just barely had enough time to shout "Incoming!" before it hit the side of the structure. The impact shook the tower again, but the wall held somehow, and outside he heard the muffled thud of the boulder landing in the ashes.

Brasskicker was at the doorway, shouting madly; "Ye'll 'ave to do better'n that, ye old bag!"

"Brasskicker," Marcus said calmly, "Come take a look at this. There's something up with this rock." There were several odd depressions in the boulder, almost like scraping, and strange cracks scored the surface. The dwarf hobbled over, and as he examined the boulder Marcus could hear Fergy and the sorceress upstairs, arguing. Or at least, that's what Fergy's half of the conversation sounded like--the other woman's words didn't make any sense to him. It sounded like, somehow, she and his wife had come to some sort of verbal understanding.

"Ye hear that?" Brasskicker murmured.

"What, them?"

The dwarf shook his head, leaning down close to the boulder. "Ne'er been in a dwarven city, have ye? No fire, no light, gotta have good hearin'."

Marcus just stared at him. "Why no fire?"

"T'dangerous--something goes up, fire sucks all the air out--jes' trust me on this, lad, en't really got time t'explain, ye know?" he interrupted himself inpatiently, "I got pretty damn good hearin', and there's somethin' movin' 'round in there."

"I think we should probably move away from it."

"Ye think we should prolly move away from it?!" Brasskicker shouted. "Ye think so, do ye?! Well screw that!" The dwarf leaned down and threw his shoulder against the boulder, rolling it towards the door; as he did so bits of the rock started to break out and fall to the floor. It looked like an egg hatching.

"Shit," Marcus muttered, moving to help Brasskicker. "Queen's more devious than I figured."

"No kiddin', lad," the dwarf replied, giving the boulder one last shove out the door; as he slammed it shut, Marcus caught a glimpse of whatever was stored inside as it "hatched"--long, sinewy vines, which seemed to be growing larger by the second.

"We might just be well and truly screwed," he muttered, vaguely amazed.

"Best I can tell, lad, that wall o' fire out there en't just yer normal fire," the dwarf said, looking upwards into the higher areas of the tower. "'Tis a magic shield o' some kind. Queen's not gonna have a lot o' power in here, and we know she cannae cross it 'erself."

"She's throwing over those things, whatever they are," Marcus said, continuing the dwarf's line of thinking, "Hoping to hit us, maybe?"

"Mebbe." Brasskicker brushed himself off. "Thing had plenty o' time to grab me, didn' do snot." He tried to peek through a crack in the door, probably split open by the impact of the attack. "Jes' sittin' there now," he said after a moment. "But gettin' bigger. Weird. Y'ougthta tell yer lass t' get a move on with wha'ever plan they got goin' on up there, aye?"

"Aye." Marcus looked up into the tower again, trying to figure out which floor Fergy was on now. He started to shout for her when a third impact rocked the tower, this one higher up. He could hear the boulder tumbling down the side of the structure--then nothing, the noise stopped. The tell-tale sound of the boulder hitting bottom never came.

"Oy, lad." Brasskicker was still peeking out the door. "Bloody thing's lookin' at me. Friggin' eyeballs on it."

"Oh, well, that's just fantastic, isn't it? Queen of the forest's taking a peek. Oy! Fergy, love! We need to get a move on!"

Fergy's head appeared two floors above the bottom. "Look," she called down, "I think we've got a thing figured out. There's this thing up here--I think it's some kind of magic transport, a portal. We're working on a way to get the two of you up here to it. How're things down there, baby?"

Marcus' voice floated up to her. "Decidedly distressing. We're running out of time."

Fergy frowned. "Just a little longer." She turned back to the flat disk of light--the portal, or at least that's what she thought the sorceress was trying to tell her. It certainly felt like one; standing in front of it, if she got close enough, she could feel a warm, muggy, tropical breeze. Whatever was on the other side, it was overwhelmingly pleasant.

The sorceress was busy rummaging around the room of jars, clearly looking for something. What it was, Fergy had no idea. The younger girl had her tailless cat stuffed into the neckline of her robes, its little head poking out under the girl's chin.

Fergy watched her for a moment, then asked, "Look, don't you have some rope? Nothing fancy, just a length of rope. Maybe half as long as the ground floor is tall would be enough."

The sorceress just looked at her, and muttered, "Taters." She started searching again, then stopped suddenly, her eyes staring across the empty space at the far wall. Fergy followed her line of sight and took a small step backwards: hanging there in the hole in the wall, about level with the floor above them, was a plant. It wasn't moving, just hanging there and slowly getting bigger. And looking at them.

"That's... eerie." It took Fergy a moment, but it dawned on her that the plant thing wasn't looking at just them, but in lots of places, above and below them.

She could hear the sorceress murmuring, more gibberish words, but now she sounded legitimately scared.

And suddenly it dawned on Fergy what it was the plant was looking for. "That thing--" she snapped out at the sorceress, "That lantern thing upstairs, at the very top--that's what's making the wall of fire, isn't it?"

The sorceress just nodded once.

"The nymph is aiming," Fergy hissed, then let out a string of profanities. And then she could hear it, the wind-like sound of something flying through the air; a shadow passed over the hole in the wall, and Fergy had just enough time to throw her arm over the sorceress' head and yank her down to the floor before a fourth boulder smashed through the tower, much higher than the previous three. She caught a brief glimpse of it as it sailed into the top floor above them, and heard it smashing through the floor into the empty room between the lantern and the portal. The sound was immediately interrupted by a metallic impact as the boulder hit the spiraling stairs, a long chunk of which immediately came crashing through the ceiling and landed, horizontal, on the floor only a hand's breadth away.

Fergy stood up and looked out the hole--the wall of fire was still up. "You missed!" she shouted.

They wouldn't get that lucky again, and Fergy knew it. Without a word, she threw herself into shoving the stairs towards the ledge, the hard metal screeching in protest as it scraped against the stonework. She hardly noticed when the sorceress, panic still in her eyes, started shoving with her. A moment later the stairs toppled over and fell to the ground level with a clang.

Marcus had to dive out of the way, but as soon as he saw what Fergy had thrown down to them he knew what her plan was. It was simple, the kind of simplicity that only came from accidental boons. With a look to Brasskicker, he lifted the stairs up and leaned them against the wall, then held them steady as the dwarf scrambled up them, cursing. It wasn't quite to the second level above them, but he could jump. The dwarf hit the ledge with his stomach and grunted--his gun slipped off his shoulder and fell to the floor with a clatter. After a moment of stumpy legs dangling over the ledge, Brasskicker vanished, only to reappear a moment later to help Marcus once the big man had made it to the top of the makeshift stairway; it fell away below him.

"Dropped me gun," Brasskicker muttered,

Marcus replied curtly: "Not worth it."

Another impact rocked the tower, another boulder smashed its way onto the top floor, and all four pair of eyes turned to look out the ravaged wall--just in time to see the wall of fire go out.

"We are so bloody screwed," Brasskicker shouted. It only took a few seconds for Marcus and Brasskicker to reach the next level up, the room with the portal in it. There, they found Fergy and the sorceress waiting before the flat disk.

Marcus gave his wife a kiss, muttered, "I love you," and before she could protest he shoved her bodily through into the light, following immediately after.

Fergy squeezed her eyes shut and let out a shout as she hit the portal--a shock passed through her, and for an instant before she blacked out she was very, very cold.

As the woman passed through the portal, the duo still behind her watched as the warm, golden light shifted suddenly to white, followed by a blast of cold air and a biting, freezing wind; the round portal began to waver, destabilizing. Brasskicker turned and glared at the sorceress, whose eyes were as wide as saucers.

"Weren' s'posed t' do that, were it?" the dwarf snapped.

She took two steps back and shook her head--and Brasskicker grabbed her by the wrist and dove through the portal, taking her light frame with him.

89. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter Two)

2008-06-13T12:35:00.016-05:00

Marcus found piloting the silver craft easy; it handled significantly smoother than their previous vehicle. Below them, the clouds were thinning out with the dawn as the sun just barely peeked over the horizon. The big man leaned over carefully--Fergy had fallen asleep with her head on her arms, her arms crossed on his lap--and below the ship he could see a dense, thick forest.

He put his free hand on his wife's head and stroked her hair absent-mindedly, letting his thoughts wander. They had been on this job a long time, and some days he could feel it taking its toll. Three months back they had been contacted through rather unusual means by Lady Elizabetta of Merriam to the north, and Dame Rose Thieren of Bilox. Marcus and Fergy's presence, the letter informed them, was requested, to discuss a matter of employment. The letter, which had appeared on the bed of the room they had rented for the night, while they were still sleeping on it, crumbled and turned to dust only seconds after they had finished reading it.

"Magic," he'd muttered disdainfully.

It wasn't much of a surprise, then, when they met in person, to find the Lady Thieren garbed in heavy red robes lined with glowing white slashes; the woman, who looked to be roughly in her fifties, had shoulder-length white hair that flowed in loose ringlets and never seemed to be still. What was a surprise was how old she looked--her skin and facial features didn't seem enhanced at all, an oddity among magic users. It was a rare thing to meet one who didn't look fresh out of her teen years. "You must be Marcus," she'd said as they'd disembarked from their airship, "And Fergesdottir."

"'Fergy' will suffice, thank you," Marcus' wife had replied, smiling coolly; she hated her full given name. "And you must be the ladies Thieren, or rather, the lady and the dame."

"Indeed," Lady Thieren said, bowing. "The proper titles are important--they'll keep us from getting each other confused." She'd winked, smiling with an oddly crooked mouth.

Behind her, Dame Thieren inclined her head slightly in greeting. It was easy to tell she wasn't a magic user, once you got a good look at her: she was a woman in her middle years, her bare arms showing an unusual degree of musculature for what was essentially a lady of the court. She was at least two hand-breadths taller than Marcus. A bastard sword hung across her back, and she wore what looked like a strange cross between an elegant dress and a suit of leather padding and chain mail. Despite her size, garb, and choice in armament, there was oddly very little masculine about her.

"Welp," Fergy had interjected, clapping her hands once, "Enough of the pleasantries. You wanted us here, might I ask what the hell for?" She grinned, and placed her hands on her hips.

The job, as explained by Lady Elizabetta, was simple enough: fly to Pikely, break into her son's keep, and acquire from his person an amulet of some worth. "You're probably wondering," she'd said at the time, "Why I just don't spirit the amulet away with magic or some such, yes?"

"The idea had crossed our minds," Fergy replied. "After all, you planted a letter on us, without ever entering the room. You could say it piqued my curiosity."

"The explanation is simpler than you'd expect," Dame Thieren elaborated. "You're both people of the world, I'm sure you're aware of my brother's reputation. Suffice to say, it's well-earned. He is, in so many words, a very bad man, with the aforementioned very bad reputation, which he himself is aware of. In recent years, he's grown somewhat paranoid that the League of Magisters wants him taken out."

Lady Elizabetta grinned at this, unable to stifle a chuckle. "The League couldn't give a fig, of this I'm sure. They do their best to avoid becoming as meddlesome as they were before the king died."

Fergy asked, "He put up an anti-magic field, didn't he?"

"Indeed," the sorceress replied. "We don't know how, exactly, he's done so--like Rose he takes after his father more than me--but it's there, and I can't get through it, even to verify his location; I only know he's there because I can't find him anywhere else. I imagine the amulet is at the heart of it. Incidentally--if you find he's no longer at Pikely, your contract extends to finding him and finishing the job, regardless of location, at double the pay."

Marcus had spoken up then, "The place is pretty fortified, if what I've heard is true. How do you expect us to get in, much less get an object that... you say he keeps it on his person?" Already a plan had been beginning to come together in his mind.

"My understanding is that you're the best there is at what you do." Lady Elizabetta had smiled. "Besides, I can already see the gears turning in that rugged head of yours. Once you've acquired the amulet, you are to meet Rose in Aeros, where she will be waiting for you. Now," she had extended a hand, which Fergy and Marcus had both shaken, sealing the deal, "Come inside, dears, I've had our cook throw together a bit of a spread. Come eat and relax, and we can discuss the details of your payment."

At the "spread", which was more like a feast than anything he had had in the past, Marcus had gotten to know Dame Thieren a little better while Fergy dealt with the dame's mother.

"You know," he'd said, "A female knight such as yourself isn't exactly... rare, these days, but you're something of an oddity--unless I'm mistaken about your actual title."

Dame Thieren had looked at him over her wine-glass, bemused. "Mother did make it a point to emphasize it, didn't she?"

"She did," Marcus replied. "You're Dame Rose Thieren of Bilox, right?"

"You're correct, yes."

"Bilox, as in the Bilox Shipyards?"

"You know your geography." She'd leaned against the table and regarded him, more curious now. "Have you been there yourself?"

Marcus grinned. "I have. My point is--it's very far from here, on the coast. What's a knight of Bilox doing all this way north?"

"I was born, like my brother, in Pikely. Mother brought me here to Merriam, and I married my way into the Bilox court." The Dame poured herself another glass of wine and drank it down quickly. "My husband was the Lord of Bilox, master of the shipyards. Sadly, we lacked much in military might--"

Marcus held up a hand; "Which is why your mother sent down the might of Merriam and her allies to aid you when Gotha invaded."

"Geography and history," she'd said, amused now. "You're a box of surprises, aren't you?"

"Not so much. Do you know who, exactly, the Duke of Gotha formed his armies with?"

"Rabble, basically," Dame Thieren had replied. "Hired muscle, mostly, cutthroats and corsairs, thieves and mercenari--" She stopped, realization hitting her. "Oh."

Marcus just crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, watching her face.

"Well, I hope you don't harbor some kind of personal grudge," the dame continued, recovering from the shock.

"Of course not," Marcus replied, grinning. "The best part of hired thugs is that we don't have a personal stake in what we get into, for the most part--as long as we get paid."

"If only we could all be so lucky," Dame Thieren murmured.

"Allow me to be frank, Dame Thi--"

"Rose, please. We're in my home, there's no need for formalities, despite what mother may say."

"Allow me to be frank, then, Rose," Marcus repeated, pouring himself a glass of wine. "What the hell happened? Everything was going along fairly dully--skirmishes here and there, both sides grabbing this chunk of land and losing that piece of the coast. And then one day you came sweeping down on your horse, your forces behind you, and you just... smashed us. I'd never seen anything like it."

"It got personal," Rose replied. "My husband fell--and not in battle. Cutthroats in the night. The two of us led the Biloxan forces together, side by side; we treated our men fairly and well. We ran a clean war, pushing your forces back as cleanly as we could--no torture, no rape, and so on. The men my mother sent down to help us were all good men, clean men."

"And in the night," Marcus continued for her, "Dirty men snuck into your camp and put a knife in your husband's ribs."

Rose nodded, lost in thought for the moment. Without a smile, Marcus reached across the table and put a hand on her wrist. "I understand," he said, nodding towards the other end of the room, where Fergy and the Lady Thieren were conversing animatedly.

Rose followed his gaze, frowning. "In any case," she said, "It was a long time ago. Lordship of Bilox was handed over to me, but I turned it down, handing it over to the local nobles, and returned home. I was young still, and it was too much for me. Before I left, they granted me a knighthood for my valor in the final days of the battle."

"You were terrifying," Marcus admitted. "In all that black armor. We called you the Iron Widow. Gothans still tremble at the name."

She furrowed her brows at that. "You knew the moniker? Then why ask me what happened?"

"Getting to know a client," Marcus replied, "And I was curious if the rumors were true. We do dirty deeds for people, Dame. It's good to know how badly it's going to come back and bite us in the ass."

She seemed entertained by the notion. "Well, let me say now that I think you have nothing to worry about on that front. We waged a clean war then, and we'll run this thing clean too. You have my word on that, on my honor as a knight."

"I'm sorry if I've opened up old wounds," Marcus said, smiling.

"No, no. Like I said, it was a long time ago. Now--tell me of your past. If we're going to hire a couple of thieves, I'd like to know they're not going to rob us blind." She grinned, pouring another glass of wine.

They'd talked for a while after that, until Fergy had dragged him off to their room to get some rest. "I like her," he'd said, as they lay in the large bed the Thierens had provided. "It's nice to get a job from someone who isn't a complete terror to be around. We need a better client list."

"Do I need to be jealous?" his wife had murmured, half-asleep.

"You know better."

"Her mom's a hoot." Fergy chuckled, and they drifted off to sleep.

It had taken them two months to properly gather the information needed to set their plan into motion--they'd had to figure out exactly where in the keep Duke Thieren slept, where he kept his spoils, how many soldiers he employed--and that was when they'd realized they were dealing with Rickards, who was almost as notorious as his master. His presence added another level of complexity to the plan--they not only had to catch the Duke off his guard, in a small room with the fewest possible number of guards, but they had to do it without the majordomo there to defend him.

"You scared of one little henchman?" Fergy had chided.

Marcus only response had been a curt, "Yes."

The silver airship they had stolen from him ran so quietly that, lost in his thoughts, it took Marcus a few minutes to realize that the propulsion device had cut off. He frowned, pulling a few levers and hitting a few switches, but none seemed to have any effect on the craft's performance. They were, once again, traveling by momentum alone, and slowly descending towards the forest. "You've got to be pulling my leg," he muttered to himself. He leaned on the control shaft, trying to steer the silver ship towards the edge of the woods--but while he could hear the rudders in the rear turning, the ship itself continued on its course.

"You have got to be pulling my leg," he exclaimed. Leaning back in the pilot's chair, he put a hand on his wife's shoulder and shook her gently. "Ferg. Hey, Fergy love, wake up."

"Did we make it to Aeros already?" she muttered groggily.

"Not quite," Marcus responded. He explained the situation to her.

Fergy's lips twisted into a crooked frown. "We're being pulled down there," she said eventually. "This is going to end stupidly. I've just got a feeling. That's the kind of luck we've been dragging around with us this whole job. First the letter, then that nut in Sully, then my airship..."

"I don't doubt it," her husband replied. "Well, we're about to hit the treetops, better tie yourself down. I'm sure it's going to get bumpy."

A few minutes later they touched down on the forest floor after a short, strangely smooth descent. Marcus stood on the deck, staring up at the canopy, a confused look on his face. "There's no way we just flew straight down through that without either zigging and zagging, or hitting something."

"That's great and dandy. Can you fly us out of here, baby?" Fergy hopped over the guardrail and landed on the thick grass, stumbling forward slightly with the impact.

"Just give me time and I'll get it working again." He jumped down beside her and moved around to the back of the ship, muttering to himself.

"Just do your thing. I'm gonna see if I can find... I dunno, some berries or something. I'm starving and we left all our food on the other ship." Fergy picked her way across the thick underbrush. When she was what she figured was a suitable distance away, she dug around in her pack for a moment and produced two objects: a brown cylinder a little bigger around than her thumb, and a gold cube, open on one side. She held the cylinder between her teeth by one end and placed the other end inside the cube; a moment later the cube produced a flash and a faint hissing noise. When she moved the cube away, the end of the cylinder not in her mouth was glowing bright orange with a smoldering flame. The cube disappeared into her pouch and she stood there, puffing idly at the cigar, surveying the area around her.

The forest was just as dense and thick as it had looked from the sky, and Marcus was right: there was no way the airship had just slipped through the canopy as easily as it had without some kind of outside influence. She had just started going through a checklist of possibilities when a voice behind her piped up: "Lass, if'n ye don' mind, could ye put that abominable thing out?"

Fergy spun around, her hand moving to her dagger instinctively--but the weapon stayed in its sheath. The speaker was a good distance away, its hands held in the air--if they could be called hands. It appeared to be a stocky, stumpy approximation of a man, made entirely of brown, knotty branches intertwined into a roughly human shape. Its arms and legs terminated in round clubs. Its face was a single sheet of wood, blank and expressionless--ambiguous--with a horizontal slit approximating a mouth. There was something off about it, though--the proportions were all wrong: the head was too small for the shoulders, the arms too long for the torso, and the legs too short for the whole thing.

Fergy took the cigar out of her mouth and examined it, then smelled the shaft, frowning, before looking back at the tree-person. No, it wasn't one of the "special" cigars she'd acquired in Sully, so she was definitely seeing the stumpy figure and not hallucinating. "And..." she stopped, unsure of how exactly to react, "And if I don't?" She puffed at the cigar defiantly.

The tree-man hobbled towards her, making a noise that could almost be called a sigh. Then, it made a sort of wet rattling sound, drew back its head, and spat--with uncanny accuracy--a glob of something directly onto the burning end of the cigar, dousing the fire. A bit of it splattered on Fergy's cheek and into her hair; she reached up and touched it, flabbergasted: it was sticky sap.

The tree-man let out a dry chuckle, crossing its arms. "C'mon then, let's go get ye compan'in." It hobbled past Fergy in the direction she'd come from. "Th' pair o' ye got business wit' me queen." She walked behind it sullenly, trying to scrape the sap off of her cigar. She slipped it back into her pouch before they reached the airship.

Hearing them approach, Marcus peeked out from behind the silver craft. He stared at the tree-man for a moment. "What the bloody hell is that?"

Fergy shrugged, walking past the stumpy figure to her husband. "It says we have business with its queen."

"Aye, lass, t'was me queen wot brought ye down here. She be in need o' ye."

The couple exchanged a look, and Fergy took the lead: "Well, we refuse to get involved. We were just passing through--over, even, we've got urgent business elsewhere."

"Oh aye? I don' remem'er given' ye a choice, lass."

"What are you going to do?" she asked, grinning, "Spit sap on us 'til we submit?"

Again, the tree-man made a sound like a sigh, a dry rattling like leaves in what was meant to be his throat. There was a creaking noise, like a great tree blowing in a heavy wind--and then it was like the forest had come to life around them, as vines and other plants shot up from the undergrowth to intertwine their way into the airships inner workings, pulling and tearing at it. And at the same time, two massive, club-like tree-branches swung down from above them, battering the silver craft around like it was a toy. As Fergy and Marcus scrambled away from the attack, the combined might of the plants of the forest bent the ship in two, and then tore it apart, scattering gears and bits of metal everywhere. It only took a matter of seconds, and then silence fell over the woods again.

The tree-man made a noise like it was clearing its throat. "Did tha' get the pi'ture across, ye two?"

Marcus eyed the remains of their stolen craft. "I don't... think we really have a choice, do we?"

"Tha's a good lad. Let's mosey." It turned and hobbled deeper into the woods, Fergy and Marcus trailing behind it.

"You know," Fergy said, after about an hour of difficult hiking through the forest, "He was just asking a question. He wasn't refusing, so much as finding out what would happen if we did."

The tree-man chuckled. "An' I showed ye."

"Which is true, yes," the woman continued. "But think about it. We could've just flown the airship to your queen, saved us a lot of time."

"Would ye 'ave?"

Fergy pursed her lips and looked thoughtful for a moment. "Probably not," she answered.

Behind them, lagging a few steps, Marcus slipped his hand into his jacket and produced a silver flask, which he took a sip from; he never took his eyes off his wife while he drank, and as she started to glance back, he slipped it silently back into his pocket.

"How long has it been since we got any real sleep?" she asked him, walking backwards for a moment.

Marcus shrugged. "Couple days, I reckon. We were up all night last night, at the Duke's soirée, and the night before, we--well, we were awake. So yeah, a couple days."

Fergy turned around and resumed speaking to their escort. "See, it's just that we're bloody tired. I mean--I dunno, do you even get tired? Do tree-people... er... what the hell are you, anyways?"

"A nymph o' th' wood," it replied.

"Wait," Marcus interrupted, "Wait, whoa-whoa-whoa--you're a wood nymph?"

"Aye, what'd ye expect? A bloomin' faerie or summat?"

"Well, yes."

It let out another dry chuckle. "Well, ye're only 'alf wrong, lad. See, I am a bit mo' faerie-like than I'm lettin' on--but ye cannae see me, flittin' aboot th' forest. Ye' mortal eyes jes' en't built for it."

Marcus lit up, understanding; "Then this is a representation--a form you've taken to communicate with us, built out of branches to represent something like us. But if you'll pardon my criticism, that's a pretty shoddily formed human-look--you look like an overweight kid more than a grown male."

"En't 'ooman. S'posed t' be a dorf."

Fergy piped up then: "But how do you know what a dwarf even looks like? They don't ever come out of their caves."

"En't true, one o' em passed t'ruough 'ere couple weeks back. Took a fancy t' 'im, but 'e wouldn' 'ave any o' it and fled t' tha' damnedable tower."

"Took a... fancy?"

"Aye, but 'e wouldn' let me in. Took up a fight an' ran offt, like I say."

Marcus' brows furrowed. "Wouldn't... wait, what does your queen want us for?"

"En't for me t' say." After that, the nymph's stumpy form went silent, and the couple couldn't get an answer out of him. Eventually, they reached a clearing, in the middle of which was a large stump, formed almost like a chair, with a large green plant apparently growing out of it. "'Ere we are now, ye two, th' queen o' th' for'st."

At first, they weren't sure what it was, exactly, they were looking at. Then, like a blooming flower, the plant--the queen of the forest--rose from its throne and stood to its full height, a good head taller than Marcus. Green vines and leaves, brown branches and twigs, twisted and wound into a willowy human-like shape. Looking at it, it was clear that a more skilled hand had created the lanky body than the one that had created their stumpy escort, but even then, it wasn't quite right. The figure's hips and breasts were too wide and round, its waist too narrow and its neck too long; it looked almost like a caricature of a human being, like a child's drawing. From behind the flat wooden face, identical to its servants, long green vines streamed out, each "hair" spouting tiny pink flowers.

Marcus bowed and Fergy curtsied, lowering her eyes, and when they both rose, the queen stood before them, oddly majestic. "Well, aren't you lovelies something nice to look upon?" it said, the voice coming at once from behind the wooden face and from all around them. "Yes, yes, darlings, you will do nicely."

Fergy took a step towards the green creature, and curtsied again. "Your grace--you've plucked us from the sky and destroyed our means of conveyance. Is there some job you'd like us to perform, some task?"

The queen gave out a musical little laugh, sounding almost human. "To the west of this spot, deep in my woods, magicians built a tower of stone, wherein lives a sorceress. Around it, she has created a ring of fire and scorched ground, chopping down and burning my trees, my plants, to keep me out." The queen reached up one green arm and stroked Fergy's cheek with the end of it--the arm lacked hands and simply came to a point. "You can imagine how frustrating that might be? This place is more than my home, it is me. Can you imagine it? A creature, say, setting your shoulder on fire and living in the burn?"

Fergy tilted her head to the side. "The circle keeps you out--you can't handle fire. Would you have us cross this ring and fetch something for you? That's sort of our specialty."

Again, musical laughter echoed from the forest queen. "Aren't you a funny thing? I'm the queen of the forest, darling--why would I send a common... a thief, you say? Why would I send a common thief when I could just do it myself, dear?"

Marcus interjected, "But you just said you couldn't do it yourself, you can't reach the tower."

"Indeed no," the queen replied, now idly stroking Fergy's hair. "Not in this body, at least. Why do you think I dragged your magic boat out of the sky?"

Realization hit the couple. Fergy tried to take a step backwards but the queen's arms were behind her neck and back, holding her in place. Marcus tried to grab for her, but the stumpy tree-man threw itself between them and shoved him violently back with its club hands; he was oddly strong, and the much-larger Marcus lost his balance and fell. Fergy stammered out, "No no wait wait wait, whoa, no no no!" and squirmed to get free as the queen brought its wooden face close up against Fergy's. The tree-man held Marcus down, aided by the undergrowth of the forest itself.

A heavy silence fell over the clearing, an utter stillness as Marcus watched helplessly from the ground. He struggled again to get free, but was held too tight.

And then Fergy cocked her head to the side and asked, "Wait, what? Was something supposed to happen there?"

The queen pulled her face back, and almost seemed to frown. "Quite."

"Didn't work, did it?" the woman continued.

"No. Hang on, lovely, let me try again." And again, the queen brought her face close against Fergy's, but again, nothing happened. "Well," she said, "That is really frustrating. How are you doing that, darling?"

Fergy just smiled.

"Well you're doing it somehow, anyways." The queen stroked at what would have been her chin, were she human. "Well, I suppose you want to make it more difficult. A very human trait, I love you for it, dear. Well then, we'll just torture that handsome mate of yours until you let me in."

Fergy held up her hands; "Wait wait wait, I'll cooperate, under one condition."

"Speak your terms."

"Let my husband go."

Marcus struggled more fervently to free himself--and suddenly he was free, though the tree-man interposed itself between him and Fergy.

"Done," said the queen. "Now now, let me in, dear."

Fergy was still smiling. "Can I at least kiss him good-bye?"

"Of course, darling. However, any sign of duplicity and he'll be dead before you know it, and I'll torture you until you let me in. I only want your body in top form, I don't need it that way."

Fergy curtsied; "Wouldn't think of it. Hell, I'll even show you why you failed." Still smiling, she walked around the tree-man her husband, standing close against him. "Trust me," she whispered, winking, before leaning in to kiss him, her hands slipping into his jacket to brush against his chest. "Love you."

Marcus had a confused look on his face. "Love you too."

"Right then," Fergy said, turning back and walking to the queen, "First things first, this is how I screwed you over." She grinned hugely, reaching into her pouch and pulling out the golden cube. She held it in front of her eyes, the open side facing off to the left. "This is how I got away. It's called a lighter, it makes a tiny bit of fire."

The queen leaned in close, her mask-face tilting slightly. "Just a bit, darling? That would hardly keep me out of your brain."

"I know. Wait, I'm sorry, I cocked that up. I said it's how I got away--it is, in fact, how I am going to get away."

"Duplicitous darling! But a tiny bit of fire isn't going to save you."

Fergy laughed. "Of course not! That's why I have this--" With her other hand, she held up a silver flask, unable to keep back a huge, mad grin. "This, your grace, is liquor. Whiskey, I think." She took a long drink from the flask, and spat it out in a stream at the queen, and at the same time activated the lighter, turning the spray of alcohol into a blast of fire. The queen lurched back, and burst into flame. "Hoof it!" Fergy yelled, sprinting away in the confusion. Marcus shoved past the tree-man and followed quickly after her.

Behind them, the queen let out a horrid howl, a howl that was echoed by the forest itself, and soon all the vines and trees and undergrowth they ran through was reaching for them, trying to stop them, trying to smash them. They didn't look back.

"You know you only pissed it off!" Marcus shouted over the noise, leaping over a tree-limb as it swung down to trip him up. "That wasn't its real body!"

Fergy threw herself to the ground and rolled, barely missing a second branch. As she sprung back to her feet at a run, she called back, "I know! But it bought us time, didn't it?!"

"We need to go west, towards this tower it mentioned," Marcus said, running beside his wife now. "This is west, right? I think we're going west."

"We're going west, baby."

"Was that my flask?!" he asked, laughing and dodging a bush as it leaped out at him.

"Yes."

"How did you even know I had it?"

Fergy grinned at him. "We've been married for over a decade, Marcus, it's a bit hard to keep secrets from each other!"

Still running, he threw an arm over her shoulder and shoved her head down protectively. "I knew you hadn't stopped smoking!"

"Did you?"

Marcus laughed. "No--look, there, fire, a wall of fire--the tower!"

"Told you we were going west!" Around them, the forest let out a roar of frustration. "Jump through it?" she asked.

"Jump through it!" Marcus yelled, and together, then sped ahead and jumped, hand in hand, towards--and through--the wall of fire.

On the other side, they landed in a soft bed of burnt plants and ash, rolling and slapping each other to put out the fires that had sprung up in their clothes. Extinguished, they lay there, still holding hands, laughing, covered in ash and soot.

"So how did you do it?" Marcus asked, standing up and attempting to dust himself off in vain.

"What, snatch your flask from your jacket?" Fergy stood up and did the same, and attempted (also in vain) to straighten her hair. "Easy enough."

"No no, how'd you keep that thing out of your brain?"

Fergy shrugged, her smile fading. "No idea. I was as surprised as it was."

86. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter One)

2008-05-31T16:39:00.015-05:00

Duke Thieren of Pikely was in a foul mood. He stormed through the halls of his keep, teeth clenched, muttering under his breath. He wore little more than his underthings and a thick robe, along with a thick gold chain with an amulet dangling from it. He had been dragged, figuratively, from his bed by what had sounded like a very large, heavy object crashing into his keep, coming it seemed from somewhere in the west wing of the structure. As he strode purposefully in that direction, his majordomo stepped from an intersecting passageway and fell into step beside him. "Report," snapped the Duke. He was a big man, broad of shoulder and thick of arm, and when he addressed you, it was always in such a way that made clear he demanded respect.

"A small airship," Rickards replied, "Piloted by a pair of... brigands, it seems, crashed into the western tower, near the ground level. We have them bound and awaiting you at the crash site." In a stark contract to the Duke's fury, Rickards remained cool, unphased by the large man. He was fully dressed, as if he had been awake already, despite the fact that it was well past midnight; his rich clothing reflected his position in the Duke's wealthy household.

Thieren's eyes narrowed slightly. "The brigands--"

"I believe that their trajectory must have been intentional--they crashed into your keep in just the right spot to gain access to your treasury. They were apprehended before they could so much as disembark from their craft. It appears the man's leg was pinned down somehow, and his female companion was interrupted while trying to free him."

"Then their little heist has been stillborn. Excellent. See that there is a pair of cells in the dungeon ready within half the hour. Within earshot of each other, but neither neighboring nor visible." It was not an unusual arrangement; Thieren had a penchant for torturing his captives. He had found that the sound of one's companions screaming in agony, out of sight, was nearly as effective as direct torture itself.

"As you wish, my lord." Rickards broke stride and vanished down another intersecting passageway. He knew the keep almost as intimately as the Duke did, as he had served Thieren's father in the elder duke's last years, after Thieren's mother had fled the country.

The Duke had always wondered about that--relations between his parents had always been tense; Thieren and his sister had grown accustomed to it. His father had been an old warhorse, a general in the late king's army before the kingdom had fallen apart. His mother was a sorceress. Their marriage had been arranged by Thieren's grandfather on his mother's side, and she had never been particularly pleased with the arrangement; but nine months had passed and a daughter, Rose, had been born, and Thieren himself not long after. It was because of the children that she had stayed.

Then, fifteen years back, the elder duke had hired Rickards, a fellow officer of lesser rank, to act as his right hand. The very next day, Thieren's mother had come to his bed-chambers, begging him to come with her and his sister when they fled--but Thieren took after his father, and refused. His mother had been furious. The next morning, she was gone, along with his sister and a sizable portion of the family treasury. Maddened, the elder Thieren pursued her, but she sought refuge in Merriam. Five years later, his father was dead. Thieren inherited the duchy, and Rickards as his right-hand man.

A matter of minutes brought Thieren to the western tower, and quickly down the central staircase to the ground-level chamber, where a blue-painted metal craft was wedged tightly in a hole in the wall. "Do you know who I am?!" he roared before even so much as sighting the so-called brigands; when his eyes finally fell upon them, he saw a slightly-built redhead of moderate looks and a tousle-haired man nearly as large as himself. They sat on the ground opposite the fallen craft, their hands tied behind their backs.

"Duke Augustial Thieren, of Pikely, son of the late Duke Marius Thieren, also of Pikely, and the Lady Elizabetta Thieren, of Merriam, estranged, and brother to one Dame Rose Thieren, of Bilox," the woman replied coolly, a smile on her lips as she recited his immediate family both living and dead. "I wish I could tell you it was a pleasure to meet you. I say--where's your man Rickards?"

Thieren ignored the oddly-phrased question. "Then my reputation precedes me, and I find myself at a loss as to why you would attempt such a hackneyed break-in." His own smile was cruel. "For sure, to crash such an... antique, personal craft into such a specific location is no accident. Clearly you're not intoxicated, nor idiots, nor incapable of flying it in the first place." Their blue ship looked old enough to be a first-generation flyer--built, probably, in the first decades after the Impact Cataclysm, a century ago.

"My wife asked you a question, mate," the bound man asked without a hint of humor in his voice. "I suggest you'd do right to answer her."

Thieren sneered. "Preparing your cells. Your average lord might turn you out with a beating, or simply kill you, but I believe I'll enjoy you more if I prolong your stay and your... punishment."

"So he's not hereabouts?" the woman asked.

"Indeed no," the Duke replied.

"Within earshot?"

"What kind of fool would I be if I placed the treasury within earshot of my holding cells?"

"The best kind." The woman seemed positively elated. "Now then--" she stood up, and in a single fluid motion brought her hands from behind her back and let fly a dagger directly into one of Thieren's men's forehead, "--we can get on to business, without anyone interrupting us." In almost the same motion, she produced a second dagger and cut the bonds on her companion, who quickly moved to defend her from the remaining guards--who did not last long. The man was clearly a skilled fighter, easily turning back and then vanquishing Thieren's men with his bare hands.

The Duke had little time to react before the woman had her weapon pressed to one side of his throat; on the other side rested one of his soldier's swords, held easily in the male brigand's hand. "Easy, big guy. Now, let's get down to business," the woman said, that damned cheerful smile still gracing her lips.

Thieren's teeth ground so hard in his jaw he thought they might be crushed to powder. "No," he replied. "I'll have your heads spiked on my front gate by dawn. I'll find out who sent you here and have your hands sent back. But I will take my time. You will rue this day, fools."

"That's unfortunate."

"That's the truth. Your deaths will be slow and excruciatingly pain--" He stopped, quivering with fury. The woman was opening and closing her hand, mimicking a talking mouth. "You dare not only rob me, but mock me?!"

"We're not actually here to rob you--or, well, kill you," the redhead said, turning to walk away from him casually; her large companion kept his blade trained at Thieren's throat. "We're here for one thing specifically, which, we've been told, isn't actually worth that much--which is a little weird for us, you understand, being thieves and all."

"Whatever you want I'd rather see you skewered," the Duke growled.

"Not really surprising," the woman continued. "All we want, really, is this pendant here--" she used her knife to lift the amulet from his chest, tugging slightly at the chain, "--and the only reason we haven't simply killed you and taken it is because we want to try and bargain with you."

"There will be no bargain."

"That's really a damn shame," the woman muttered. "Well then, I guess we'll just be taking it--" She lurched forward, pressing her dagger against his jugular once more--then stopped. "Wait, wait. I'm forgetting something--oh, right: your mother and sister send their regards."

The woman winked at him impishly, then shifted her blade around and smashed the hilt of the weapon into the side of his head.

An instant later, or so it seemed to the fallen duke, someone splashed cold water across his face. He opened his eyes to find Rickards standing over him, his mouth twisted with concern. "Your grace--"

"The brigands--"

"Made good their escape," the majordomo finished, "Complete with their craft, before I returned from the dungeons. Some half-dozen of your men are dead, but it appears they did not breach into the lower treasure chambers, or even lift anything from the neighboring chambers."

"No, you dolt," Thieren snapped, rising woozily to his feet. He did not need to feel about his neck to know the amulet was gone, stolen. "They were in a hurry--you. They feared you. Find them. Bring them back alive if you can, kill them if you must--but find them, and find the keepsake they have stolen. Whatever you do, cut off their hands; I wish to send a message to my loving mother."

"As you wish, your grace. Our ships should have no problem catching up to them, I will see to it personally." Rickards bowed and made his way to the Duke's own airship hangers, leaving Thieren standing alone, quaking once more with rage.

***

By the time the brigands' airship cleared the tops of the cloud-cover, it was starting to spew dark billowing smoke from the nose, where the propulsion mechanisms were housed. "What the hell did you do?!" Fergy yelled over the ruckus, trying in vain to keep her long red hair out of her face. The small ship lurched and decelerated sharply, and she steadied herself on one of the handrails running along the side.

Marcus slammed one of the levers on the control board forwards; the only response the ship gave him was a shudder; then it began to slowly rotate as it sped through the heavens. "Oh, that's not good," he muttered under his breath. He wrenched the steering column against the spin, but it was non-responsive. The noise from the propulsion device grew steadily louder.

"Baby, seriously, what did you do to my bluebird?" Fergy shouted at the top of her lungs; she could barely hear herself over the roar. As if the ship understood her difficulty, there was a sharp crack, and the mechanism went completely silent. They were drifting, spinning and sliding across the sky on momentum alone.

"At least the lift-stones aren't shattered or nonfunctional," Marcus murmured, mostly talking to himself. "I think we busted up the propulsion in the crash. Yeah, that was one of your better ideas."

"You said it could take the impact."

He looked across at Fergy and grinned. "I was wrong, love. Were you actually going to bargain with him?"

Fergy shrugged. "It seemed worth a shot. Depended on what he offered us."

"That clod wouldn't have made good on any deal we hashed out--and the last thing we want is his mother pissed off at us."

The woman smiled; "Is it the mother you're thinking about, or his ox of a sister? Rose, the Iron Widow? She was sweet on you, I could tell right off. I bet she doesn't see many men of her stature around Merriam."

Marcus chuckled. "I have to admit, it would be an... experience to be with a woman like that."

"What, I'm not tall enough for you? Or was it the muscles? Do you remember her arms?" Fergy laughed and stuck her tongue out at her husband. "She'd've torn you in half, baby."

"You gotta admit, though, this is sorta romantic--clear night, stars in the sky, just the two of us..." Marcus slipped out of the pilot's seat and moved across to her, sliding his arms around her stomach from behind.

Fergy rolled her eyes and leaned back against him. "And that Rickards fellow."

"Rickards?"

"His airship is awfully quiet," she continued.

"That must be useful," Marcus replied, with a sigh. "Your vision's always so much better than mine, why is that?" He could make out, just on the horizon, a shining silver aircraft cutting towards them rapidly, a single figure at the controls.

Fergy grinned and patted him on the cheek. "Fewer blows to the head on my part. I love you, you know. Think you can take him?"

"Love you too. No. But I have a plan. You're going to get a kick out of this." He kissed her on the back of the head and grinned.

"You going to tell me about it?"

"And ruin the surprise?"

They waited in silence as Rickards' airship drew closer. He brought his smaller craft up alongside the duo's and stood up on the deck, a rather large crossbow in hand. "Hands up, then," he called out across the gap, "I'm assuming that you know what I'm here for."

Fergy tilted her head to the side, arms raised; their airship was still slowly rotating, but it had stopped moving forward. "Payments for the property damage? Compensation for the men we killed?"

"No games. Just toss me the amulet and save me the effort of searching your bodies for it. I know you waited until I was away to attack the Duke, so I know my reputation precedes me as much as my employer's does him."

"I locked it in the hold, mate, gimme a sec, and I'll get it for you." Marcus started to bend over, to open a panel in the deck of their craft. Fergy raised an eyebrow at that--the ship didn't have a hold, the entire underbelly was used for the operation mechanisms.

"Ah, ah, no," Rickards said with a sneer. "Keep your hands up and step back, I'll come aboard." Holding the crossbow with one hand, he reached down and grabbed a pair of grappling hooks on ropes and tossed them across; then, using one hand, he pulled the thieves' craft close enough to jump aboard. The crossbow remained carefully aimed at Fergy.

She smiled. "It's locked, you know," she informed the majordomo as he boarded the craft. "He said so. Did you hear him?"

"Then you've bought yourself a few minutes to live. Tell me how to unlock it." Rickards squatted down over the hatch, his weapon still pointed at Fergy's face.

"If you're going to kill us anyways, why should we bother?"

"Common courtesy?"

Fergy tilted her head to one side. "But what difference does it make to us how convenient your time is--after all, Rickards, you're going to kill us."

"This is not a philosophical discussion," Rickards snapped.

Marcus moved to stand closer to Fergy, his hands till raised. He said, "Twist the handle 'round three times, then pull up, and twist it back the opposite direction. Three times again. No reason we can't be civil."

"Right-o." Still using only one hand, Rickards twisted the handle three times. Then he pulled up, and twisted three times in the opposite direction--and the lift-stones holding the ship airborne deactivated; Rickards had unwittingly shut them down. The blue craft dropped like a rock.

Fergy let out a little squeal as Marcus threw an arm around her waist and grabbed the handrail. The muscles in his arm went taught as the weight of both his own and Fergy's bodies hung there. "If you'd oblige--" he muttered between gritted teeth.

Fergy nodded and, kissing him briefly on the cheek, climbed around onto his back, her legs around his midsection. Below them, Rickards was dangling upside-down by one leg, having just barely caught himself on the opposite handrail with his foot. He hung over empty air; below, his crossbow fell and vanished into the grey murk, a tiny swirl of cloud marking its wake. Even as Fergy was shifting around to accommodate her husband's wishes--and allow him to grab on with both hands--the majordomo was gripping the rail and pulling himself on top of it.

One of the ropes snapped and Marcus let out a grunt as both airships shuddered, their own blue craft dangling end over end now, swinging with the momentum. The two ships began to slowly sink, spinning lazily through the air towards the clouds below. "Hey you know what?" Marcus shouted.

Fergy replied, "What's that?"

"As shiny as it is, I don't think his ship can carry ours." Marcus reached around behind him and grabbed Fergy's belt, then easily flung her upwards towards the silver craft above them. She hands slipped off that craft's hull but she snagged the remaining grappling rope. A moment later she was balanced precariously on Rickards' airship's deck.

"No shit?" she shouted down, grinning. She watched as Marcus pulled himself onto the rope; beyond him she could see Rickards scrambling up the blue ship's deck, reaching for the control panel he had unwittingly deactivated.

Fergy watched Marcus climb aboard as she fished a dagger from her belt. "Rickards, I really like my bluebird," she called out, looking down at him.

The majordomo didn't respond; he had reached the lift-stone control and repeated the deactivation process in reverse--Fergy's bluebird started to emit a low hum, but did not right itself.

"But, I'm betting this baby is a lot nicer," she continued. "Not as much sentimental value, but whatever! Probably doesn't take nearly as long to get started as our old one! Thanks for the shiny new toy." With a cheerful smile, she cut the grappling rope. For a brief instant, she could see an unspeakable fury on Rickards' face, and then he and the blue craft plummeted out of view. The silver airship they hung from shot up into the air, freed of its burden, and the motion sent Fergy and Marcus toppling to the deck.

For a moment they lay there, still, catching their breaths. "You were right," Fergy said after a moment.

"Oh yeah?"

She grinned and shakily got to her feet, then held out a hand to help him up. "I did get a kick out of that. You think he'll make it?"

The big man shrugged. "Probably. But he's off our asses for now--he knows he can't catch us in that old thing, so he'll have to report back to his boss and retrieve another one of these."

"It'd be better if we were leaving a corpse behind."

"Hard to kill a guy like that. I'm sure we'll get our chance down the road. Won't take much to figure out where we're going, after all. You did tell them who we're working for."

Fergy laughed at him, still holding onto his hand. "You think it was too much?"

Marcus tugged his wife over to him and kissed her, grinning. "Never."

84. (After the Dark Has Come.)

2007-11-26T09:50:00.000-06:00

(This story is still in draft form.)

It has been three weeks since the sun last rose over our horizon. This endless night continues, unabated. As I kneel before the king, he is troubled. "Reports," I tell him, "Have started to come in from our outlying farms. The crops are dying."

"Dying? They're dead, scholar, and you're trying to coddle me. Don't." He watches me, a gruff expression on his aged face.

"As you wish. There is... something else of note, my liege." I hesitate to impart the next bits of information to him. Already his burden is heavy, and what I have to say borders on unbelievable. But, as he says--it is not for me to soften the blow. "Strange creatures have been seen in the fields and in the northern forest. Descriptions are... uncertain, at best, but they appear as best we can tell to be something like rats the size of large dogs."

The king laughs, but it is a hollow noise. "I should be surprised," he says, smiling as empty as he laughs, "But I find that very little surprises me, as of late. Rats the size of dogs. Have you anything else, Elvic?"

"Nay, my liege."

"Very well." He gestures, and his Right Hand stands before him as I move aside. "Sir Aaron, take a sortie of soldiers out to the farmlands. Find me one of these... rats, and bring it back that Elvic might study it and learn of its nature."

Sir Aaron, First Knight, rises from his kneel and nods. "Alive?" The question is more for me than for the king. Sir Aaron is a good man, and I have known him since he was but a child. I nod at the king, deferring to his opinion.

"It matters not," our king replies. "But if it is possible..." His shoulders shrug.

"As you wish, my liege." Sir Aaron turns and strides out of the king's hall, his cape billowing in his wake, the coat of arms of his lord rippling with the motion.

"You can tell me little of this night, scholar," the king says to me as he rises from his throne. "For that I do not blame you--you are not an astronomer, the revolutions of the celestial bodies are not for you to know, nor are you a magician. If this is witchery--we may be well and truly helpless. But, perhaps you can tell me of the things that are coming out of this dark."

"Perhaps, my liege."

He takes the queen's arm, and together the two of them leave the hall, leaving me with only my thoughts. I make my way out into the courtyard, eyes on the empty sky above me. Not a single star shines, and no glowing disk of the moon. Since sunset three weeks ago--to the day? I cannot remember, with nothing to keep time but an hourglass--the sky has been utterly devoid of any form of illumination.

In my wanderings I find my way to the castle wall. From there I can watch Sir Aaron's sortie traveling along the torch-lit east road. By the king's command--and my suggestion--after a week without the sun we began to erect torches along every roadway, outside every shopfront and home, around every field, and along both the castle and town walls. If we cannot have the sun, we must make our own light.

The town wall is half a mile distant, but from here I can see the four huge signal fires burning above the gates, alerting travelers of our presence. Once every hour, an archer fires a burning arrow into the sky in each of the cardinal directions. It has been a week since these measures have proven fruitful, but we must not give up hope that there are still people out there, somewhere.

I give the sky one last baleful glare and begin the trek back to my quarters.

***

I wake to a fearful pounding on the door of my bedchamber. "I'm awake," I call out, none-too-polite. "I'm bloody awake, stop your racket and give me a moment, would you?" I don't know how long I have been asleep. I don't know, truly, if I ever was. "I'm coming, damn your eyes, I'm--Oh, my lord." It is the king's son, prince Obellas. I immediately bow, and begin to apologize, but he waves it off.

"Save it, Elvic, now is hardly the time," Obellas says. "After all, the old man has sent me--a prince!--to fetch his councilor. Truly these are mad times." He sneers as he turns away and, not for the first time, I am unable to draw a line from the sweet boy of his childhood to the man he has become. He has simply changed too much.

"Indeed. For what reason am I summoned?" We walk and talk, as it is evident from his tone and posture that there is no time to waste.

"Sir Aaron has returned with that which he was sent to procure."

The scene that greets us when we reach the king's hall is, to say the least, shocking. Sir Aaron stands before the king's throne, on which our liege rests, hunching forward, fingers criss-crossed before his mouth. The First Knight is covered in blood on one side. Two more knights, looking pale, stand behind him, fully armed.

"--tore his goddamn throat out," Sir Aaron is saying as we enter. "Like it was a wolf or a bear, but..." he gestures, at a loss for words, and I notice the corpse before him.

"The descriptions were accurate, then," I call out, to make my presence known. "Like a rat the size of a dog. A large dog. At least, in profile." The beast is solid black, but covered not in fur--instead, its body is skinned like that of a frog, in lumpy, soft, wet hide. "Strange that is has no eyes... You were unable to capture one alive?"

"Bloody thing killed two of my men," Sir Aaron snaps, clearly irritated. "We tried to capture it alive but I was left little choice. We found it eating its way through the farmer Mir's grain stores. It was docile until we tried to net it, at which point it went berserk, leapt upon Alrin and savaged his throat. It did much the same for Goil when he tried to stop it with his hands. When I stabbed it, it died easily enough, but it did not bleed."

"These looks like the burns of boiling water," I say, gesturing towards the creature's mortal wounds.

"Where my blade touched it, it burned and put forth a horrible odor. As well, a terrible sound. The metal seems to have hurt it more than the cut itself did."

"Your sword, sir knight," I request, once I have looked the body over externally. He draws it and hands it to me hilt first. I kneel down, and with clumsy hands I cut the beast from tip to tail. What I find is as troubling as the creature's existence. "You say it was eating from Mir's grain stores?"

"Aye," the knight replies. The king, silent so far, leans further forward to get a look at my work.

"I will not call you a liar to your face, Sir Aaron--I've known you since you were as high as my knee, and as such I know better." I hand him back his sword--hilt first--and look him straight in the eye. "Are you sure of what you saw? It was eating?"

"Aye," he replies, looking offended. "We stood and watched it for several moments."

"What was it doing? Down to the smallest detail, sir knight."

"Eating. It took the grain in its hands, brought it to the mouth, and placed it inside, where it was held while the beast chewed. After a moment, it swallowed. Is there anything I am leaving out? Does that define what 'eating' is enough for you, Elvic?" My name shoots from his mouth like a whip.

"Aye," I say, and with a booted foot I roll the corpse over so that Sir Aaron and the king can both see the cut I made. "My only question, then, is where the grain was going after the creature swallowed. Neither of you are animal experts, so I will point out--"

The king breaks his silence: "There is no need, Elvic. All present are familiar with the basic workings of the body. The creature has no..."

It is prince Obellas who finishes his father's sentence, a look of wide wonder in his eyes: "Innards. Guts. Organs. It's... it's..." He lets the word drift off; the rest of us look on in horror as he reaches out and touches the incision; his fingers come away sticky, and still he has no word for what the creature is made of: a sort of black ooze, like honey or molasses.

By now the substance has begun to puddle on the floor. Sir Aaron kneels down and examines it from a foot away. "But... I swear to you both, it was eating the grain. Where the grain went... Look not to me for answers. This is an impossibility."

The king sits back. "It is as empty as the night," he says to himself. "Sir Aaron, take a sortie of knights out into the farmlands and escort the farmers and any foodstuffs you can find behind the town wall. Elvic will accompany you, and keep a log. Should you come upon anything that is... like this thing, kill it. Without hesitation. Take no risks. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my liege," we both answer, bowing.

"Sir Aaron, get yourself cleaned up. Elvic, find a weapon and armor that suits you. You are not a fighter but I will not send you out helpless. You leave in an hour, make haste."

Prince Obellas speaks up again: "I will accomp--"

But the king silences him with a word: "No."

***

I pull my cloak tighter around my shoulders to protect myself from the cold, but all I succeed in doing is pressing my chain mail into my flesh where it is not padded with leather. "That's the last of the grain," I say to myself as I tally up the total of the final wagon, "With the salted meat and what little fruit we found, it's enough to last a while, at least." We are the last, as per the First Knight's wishes.

Sir Aaron stands with his back to me, staring east into the dark past the end of our torch-line. "There is something out there," he says, holding up an armored fist to silence me. "Listen."

I am an old man, and my hearing is not the best it ever was, but I cannot miss the sound Sir Aaron wishes me to hear: a shuffling, the sound of something being dragged along the road. I draw my sword--though I have no skills with which to swing it proper--and back towards the wagon. "Shall we depart?" I ask.

Sir Aaron shakes his head. "I want to see," he says.

"Sir knight, the king ordered us to not take any risks. By now the rest of his knights have reached the town with the farmers and their families. We are the last, as you yourself ordered. It is time to leave."

"Shortly," he replies, walking slowly towards the final torch along the road. With his free hand--for he, too, has drawn his blade--he yanks it out of the ground and holds it in front of him. Down the road he edges, nervous.

I wish to call him back. I wish to urge him to return that we may make our own ways home to relative safety. But I dare not raise my voice, for fear of whatever it is that made that noise. I climb onto the wagon and take the reins in my hands, ready to flee. I am an old man, and a coward--my place is beside the king, not in the thick of things; it takes all the little bravery I can muster to not abandon Sir Aaron and race home alone.

The knight's voice cuts through the night. "Who goes there?" There is no response. My eyes are not such that I can see far enough to make out to whom he speaks. "I am Sir Aaron, First Knight and Right Hand to the king of these lands. Make yourself known, that you may return with us to the safety behind the town wall."

Still, there is no response. Sir Aaron waves his torch in the air, left to right. The shuffling sound is gone; only the crackling of the torches remains. "Sir Knight!" I finally find myself calling out. "We must be off!"

Sir Aaron replaces the torch in its place and climbs aboard the wagon. "He is gone," is all he says. The knight takes the reins from me and the wagon lurches into motion. The noise is welcome to my ears.

"Sir Aaron, your skin is ashen--"

"It was a man," he says, before I can continue. "Of sorts. A man like the creature I brought before the king. Hairless, with black skin covering his whole body. I could make out no eyes."

I merely stare at him.

He continues: "A head taller than me. It was dragging a slain deer; bits of the animal's meat hung from its jaws. It... looked at me, I think, and then walked off the road and into a field, where I lost sight of it."

"We must inform the king," is all I can say.

"Indeed."

***

"We are being followed," Sir Aaron tells me when the town wall comes into view. He is riding in the rear of the wagon.

"How do you know?" I ask, giving the reins a little shake to hurry the horses. I hear Sir Aaron rummaging through the gear.

"Because the thing I saw did not walk off the road," he says. "I did not want you to panic. It pointed at me, then gestured to the darkness, and several more of its like stepped into view. Being a man alone I did not feel it prudent to try and fight them on my own, leaving you unprotected and unable to bring word to the king."

"How do you know they're still back there?" I query, panic mounting. I have not dared to so much as glance behind.

"The road was well lit," he says, and gestures back along it. I follow his gesture with my eyes. "As you can see now--"

"I can see it," I snap, returning my eyes to the road before me and urging the horses faster. The torches that had lined the road behind us are gone.

Sir Aaron lights the arrow on fire and let's fly. It strikes true--as true as it can in the dark--and we hear a horrid screech burst from the shadows. "My God," I whisper.

"With hope, that got the gate guards attention!" he yells over the sound of the wagon, which is now roaring down the road. "Blessed are we if they open the gate!" He lights another and fires, and again the horrible sound rends the air.

Indeed, we're blessed--or at least lucky. One of the other wagons arrived only just before us and the gate was already open. The knight in charge of it, Sir Penly, quickly leaps onto the bench and hurries the horses aside, clearing our path. He shouts something up at the gate guards; they do little. He flails at them angrily. They are frozen in their fear.

We race through the gate and Sir Aaron leaps from the back to the ground, shouting: "Close the gates! Close the bloody gates, you fools!" The guards finally snap into action and comply. The First Knight races up the stairs to the top of the wall, an arrow already on his bow string. I climb down from the wagon and stand before the gate as it closes; in that last second I can see out, I see the last torch as something grabs it and smashes it to the ground, snuffing the flame. A matter of instants later and something is pounding on the gate from the outside.

"Begone, damn you!" I hear Sir Aaron shouting as he launches arrow after arrow down from his vantage point. Sir Penly joins him, and soon the gate guards are firing down as well. The cacophony from the other side of the town walls is like to drive a man mad. I stand there, rooted in fear, heart thundering, and stare at the gate as something strikes it again and again, something tries desperately to get in. The world spins around me and I find the road is reaching up to smash me in the face, and I black out.

When I regain consciousness and wearily rise to my feet, the gate is still. "Scholar," a voice calls out. It is Sir Penly, from the top of the wall. "Come up here."

"What?" I ask dumbly.

"Come up here," Sir Aaron repeats him, without looking down at me. "As the king's scholar you need to see this."

The climb up the stairs is hard on my old bones, but I manage to mount the top. The stench is overwhelming; I press my cloak over my mouth and nose. "Look down," Sir Penly says, nodding over the wall.

I do as I'm asked. At the foot of the wall, sprawled out, are dozens--maybe a hundred--black corpses. At first, they appear vaguely man-shaped, but upon closer inspection the similarities fade: the arms are too long, the legs too short, the neck thrusts forward instead of upward and the head is too long, with a long jaw. Sir Aaron was right, there are no eyes. I shiver; not even the signal bonfire can keep me warm.

"Did you kill all of them?" I ask. Sir Aaron shakes his head.

"Eventually the rest wandered away," he tells me. "Like the first creature, they died very easily; it is their numbers I am concerned about. Their numbers, and this:" He lights an arrow on fire and lets fly; the shot sails through the dark, illuminating...

"Madness," I mutter. Moving slowly through the land on either side of the road are what look like large lumps of shadow. It isn't until the arrow falls to earth near one of them that I get a good look: black, amphibious skin on a round, humpbacked body, with a large eyeless head near the ground and six short, stumpy feet, which shuffle as the beasts move. "The world is madness." The creature starts and rears, revealing an underside as black as its top, and shuffles rapidly away from the flame.

"They arrived after the torches went out. I have already sent word to the other knights to man the wall," Sir Aaron says quietly. "You must return to the king, and tell him what you saw. The order needs to come from him--but we must pull our people behind the castle wall. If one of those things out there decides to push the gate... the town wall will not hold." He puts an armored hand on my shoulder. "Elvic. Convince him. We are already carting all of the food into the castle in preparation."

"I will," I say, trembling. "You must continue to fire the signal shots."

"Aye. They're our only way to see if anything is coming up the road now," Sir Penly replies, his voice bitter.

"If anyone is still out there," I continue as I mount the stairs and descend, "They need to know where to go for safety."

"If anyone is still out there," Sir Aaron says, looking me in the eye, "Let us hope they do not meet and of our new 'friends'."

***

"Would that you had brought us one of the corpses," the king says, "That we could see it ourselves." His voice shakes; he is a brave man, and was his father's First Knight before he was king. It pales me to hear such fear in his voice. "We will do as Sir Aaron suggests. Had I another messenger I would send him; I hope you do not mind relaying the word to him personally, Elvic?"

"I hesitate, but your word is law, my liege. Once the evacuation is underway I will stay with the First Knight until he falls back to the castle walls himself, acting as your voice." I bow low, chain mail clinking as I move.

"You will not travel alone, Elvic," a voice to my left says: Prince Obellas.

"My son, you will rem--"

The prince holds up a hand: "Nay, father, I would like to see this for myself. If it so displeases you, chastise me when we return." He sneers at the king, a look of bold defiance in his eyes not for the first time.

My liege pauses pauses; then: "As you will." He returns to his chambers without another word, visibly angered.

"You are not right to vex him so," I say as I turn to leave myself. Obellas falls into step beside me.

"It will not do to have the royal family holed up in the castle. Our people need us, and need hope. It has been a long night for them, as well." He smiles; it is an odd expression. "My father is not the man he was, and he forgets this."

"Perhaps."

At the castle wall, the two of us procure horses from the stable master and travel through the town streets, telling all we see of the king's orders. Half-way to the town wall we hear the great horn sounding from the castle's central tower, signaling the people to move within the castle's protection. The prince muses, wondering who the king found to blow the horn.

"Likely some upjumped bodyguard," he says, answering his own question. "He has never been one to follow with tradition."

"He is the king," I respond. "Tradition is what he makes of it."

Obellas snorts, choking back derisive laughter, and falls silent.

At the wall, Sir Aaron climbs down to greet us, leaving Sir Penly to watch the road. "The earth rumbles," he says, frowning. "I know not why. The road has been quiet; the lumpish beasts remain beyond the wall. We heard the horn--so the town is being evacuated behind the castle wall. And yet, the king's son finds himself so far from that safety." Sir Aaron bows, and smiles as the prince. The two were friends, once, but no longer.

"One need not be a knight to defend the realm," Obellas says coldly. "I would see these creatures. May I?" he continues, gesturing at the stairs leading up the wall.

"By all means, my lord."

As Obellas is climbing, I speak with Sir Aaron face to face. "His idea was that the people need to see a member of the royal family somewhere other than hiding in the castle. It is a good notion, I think."

"Perhaps," the First Knight replies, "But dangerous."

Atop the wall, I hear the prince speaking to Sir Penly. "Your bow, sir." With a salute, the knight hands over his weapon and stretches his tired hands. "In which direction should I fire?" the prince asks.

"East, along the road," is the reply. I can hear the bow's string, but cannot see its path. Obellas mutters an awed curse.

"You say they fear fire and metal?" he asks the lesser knight. I hear him pulling back another arrow and letting it fly.

Sir Penly replies, "Indeed, it's almost as i--Sir Aaron! Something on the road!"

"Something new?" he calls up.

"Something old," Sir Penly says. Sir Aaron scrambles up the stairs; I follow, significantly slower.

"Look there," the lesser of the two knights says, pointing east. "Where the prince's arrow fell, in the middle of the road. Do you see them?"

All the First Knight says in return is, "Aye." Where the arrow fell, still burning, we can see a cluster of the man-like creatures standing in the road, motionless. They are no more than fifty yards from the wall. One of them lets out a low hiss, it's arms raised, pointing at us.

I ask, "What are they doing? Preparing, perhaps? They seem capable of thought--of communication."

"Search me," Obellas mutters. "Damned hideous, though."

"That they are," Penly says. Before his words are finished, the arrow's flame is snuffed out, and we lose sight of the creatures. "Do you hear that?" he asks.

Obellas shrugs, and I am forced to comply. Sir Aaron simply holds a finger against his lips, listening. "Wings," he says.

The prince frowns. "Above us?" he asks. "Birds?"

Sir Aaron shakes his head. "I don't believe so." He slips an arrow onto his bowstring and sets the head alight, pulls back, "Don't let it hit you when it comes down," and fires the shot straight into the air.

It flies true in a very tight arc, and just as it begins to descend I catch a glimpse of something black, with wings like a bat--and then the light is snuffed out in mid-air.

"This does not bode well for us," Sir Penly whispers.

Sir Aaron simply nods. "We should leave now." The four of us remain rooted in place near the fire. It is only now that I realize the gate guards have fled--when they left, I do not know. There is a wet thump as something hits the ground behind us--all four whirl, facing back into the town; there, on the road, sprawls a what looks like one of the rat-creatures, with leathery wings sprouting from its shoulders. It is large enough to carry off a man, and it is between us and the horses.

"Let us be off," Prince Obellas whispers, starting for the stairs--but Sir Aaron restrains him.

"Wait," the knight says, nodding his head towards the winged creature. Less than a second later, another of them lands; the first moves its eyeless head from side to side, and lets out a high-pitched hoot. Then, with a clawed "hand", it grabs the nearest torch and thrusts the flame into the dirt, rubbing it there until it is extinguished. The second beast does the same with another torch, and in a matter of moments the area below the wall on the town side is drenched in shadow. The only light remaining is that of the signal bonfire, the torches that line the wall itself, and the new end of the road's torch-line, some fifty yards away. As we stand there, wondering what to do, we can hear more of the winged creatures landing at the base of the wall.

Sound comes from the outside the town wall itself: a shuffling sound, and low-pitched hisses. The man-like creatures, it seems, have come closer.

"Well," says the prince, "Will we fight our way through?"

Sir Aaron chuckles, but there is no humor in it. "Only if you wish death. The creature we brought in slew two men, easy as can be--I'll not go wading into the dark to fight who knows how many, even with all four of us fighting."

Obellas snorts at him, but keeps quiet. In his eyes, I can see the resentment clearly. I hear one of the horses give an uneasy whinny, but the sound seems cut off, interrupted.

Sir Penly offers a plan: "We should circumnavigate the wall until we find a road that is not darkened as such." As he speaks, we watch as the end of the torch-line grows more distant as torches are extinguished. None of us hold much hope of finding such a road.

"We've little choice," I say, speaking quietly. "We travel north, to the forest road. There is naught beyond the wall there but trees; perhaps these creatures have not pushed that way. Perhaps it was the farmland that drew them to this side of the town."

"Perhaps," says Obellas, eager for us to be on our way. "Let us be off." Without waiting for approval from the knights, the prince strides off along the wall.

***

"The eastern signal fire is gone," Sir Penly calls out, as we approach the northern gate. "The wall torches are following, but the darkness is not gaining on us."

"It seems you were correct, scholar," Obellas calls from two dozen feet ahead of me. He stops near this gate's bonfire and turns to face us as we catch up with him. "The other two bonfires still burn at the western and southern gates, as well. The creatures must have massed at the farmlands. Why, though, is beyond me."

I stare out over the town, comforted by the torchlight along the streets and buildings. "There is no citizenry here--the people have done as commanded and fled behind the wall."

"Or they've been taken by those things," Penly retorts.

"The fires still burn," Obellas says, standing beside me. "The creatures have not been in this part of the town. We should hurry, before that is no longer true."

Sir Penly nods. "Yes, we must warn the castle guard of the flying creatures--and the king. Likely he'll want to pull everyone inside the castle itself and bar the windows. Sir Aaron, what say you?"

"There is something out there," he says, looking out over the northern forest. Here, the ground slopes sharply down just past the wall, leading down into a depression in the earth that forms the valley the forest is nestled in. The wall looks out over the tops of the trees. "Can you see it?"

"Nay," I say. My eyes see nothing beyond the light of the signal bonfire beside me.

"Come over here," Aaron says, moving a few yards down the the wall. As he does so, he snuffs out several torches in line. "The glare is not helping. Now look, tell me what you see."

"Something... almost like a shadow," Obellas says. "Like the trees have grown taller."

Sir Penly adds, "It looks as if... it's impossible, but it looks as if we are looking at the bases of trees, as children might in the forest, but..." He drifts off.

Sir Aaron lights an arrow on fire and slips it onto his bow's string, then nods out over the forest. "Watch quick, now. I don't think doing this more than once is a wise move." He pulls back and lets the arrow fly out over the treetops in a high, smooth arc.

What we see affects each of us differently. Sir Penley's eyes widen and he takes two steps backwards, a hand over his mouth. I mutter a curse under my breath. Prince Obellas drops to his knees, a look of dark wonder on his face. Sir Aaron just watches as the arrow flies, frowning. "It's time to go," he says quietly.

What we see is this: the arrow flies through the air, lighting up the tops of the trees as it slips silently by, then illuminating what appears to be a huge, black tree covered in blisters, roughly as big around as a handful of houses all clustered together. In that bare instant of light, the tree moves, jerking back, as if burned--and lifts off the ground completely, showing us that at its base are not roots, but huge, talon-like claws. The foot at the end of the leg returns to the ground, crushing trees as if they were but blades of grass; above the foot is a bend--an ankle?--and father above that, another--perhaps a knee? As the wall beneath us rumbles with the impact, the arrow vanishes into some unknown darkness, and the unfathomably huge creature's leg vanishes, little more than a vague shadow in the distance.

A moment passes, and none of us move. "It's time to go," Sir Aaron repeats.

As the four of us run as fast as my old legs can carry me, Sir Penly asks, panting, "What was it doing? Simply standing there?!"

I take a deep breath, and respond, "We're little more than ants to something that massive! Blessed be that it has not the mind of a child--I wouldn't like to see our anthill crushed underfoot out of spite! But, nothing can be that large. Nothing can be that large!"

"Blessed be that it did not take offense to my arrow, then," Aaron says, as we round a corner; the streets on the northern side of the town are not as straight as the other quarters. "Then, nothing might have killed us." Then, "Stop!" All four of us skid to a halt in the middle of the road.

It is easy to see why: before us, the torches have been extinguished. Just on the edge of the light, one of the winged creatures is pulling itself down the road using claws at the ends of its wings.

"My prince, Elvic, stay back," Sir Aaron says quietly as he and Penly draw their swords. Despite the order, Obellas and I do the same.

"It's about time you did something other than run," the prince mutters under his breath. If Sir Aaron hears him, he ignores the insult.

The two knights spread out, approaching the creature slowly. It seems to be sniffing the air, waving its head from side to side and hooting softly. As the knights near it, I pull one of the torches out of the ground with my free hand and hold it in front of me. Beyond the creature, there is no light; I do not plan on wandering aimlessly through the dark, blind.

Sir Penly strikes first, leaping forward and swinging his blade low at the creature's head. The thing leaps back, though, and the swing goes wide, striking it in the wing. Immediately, the creature lets out a horrid screech, and the skin around the cut seems to bubble--and it lurches at Penly in a rage. The knight saves his own life by holding the sword before his neck: when the creature accidentally bites it, it screams again and stumbles backwards.

Sir Aaron moves in to take advantage of this, rushing forward in a flurry of blows. He strikes the creature twice, and it scrambles away from him--and towards the prince, who merely holds his ground, eyes wide. Penly throws himself in front of it, and the creature collapses on top of him, its teeth and claw clattering against the armor the knight wears.

Another horrid sound comes from the beast--and then from the man, for the claws have found purchase in his leg, and blood flows from beneath a joint in the armor. An instant later, Sir Aaron's sword takes the beast's head off at the neck, and his boot sends it tumbling off of Penly.

Sir Penly grinds his teeth in pain, holding his knee with both hands. Blood wells out between his fingers. "Can you walk, sir?" I ask him. The knight just glares at me.

"It feels like it's completely shattered. That thing was damnedably strong," he says, then spits, "All it had to do was squeeze."

"Come," Sir Aaron says, holding out a hand. "I'll help you walk." Clumsily, and repeatedly cursing through his pain, Sir Penly struggles to his feet, then balances on one leg and leans against Sir Aaron.

"Gentlemen," says Obellas' voice behind me, from where he's standing between me and the darkness, "We're not alone here." He draws his sword from its scabbard again, and bumps into me as he backs slowly away from the line of shadow.

I turn to face what he sees: a group of maybe a dozen of the man-like creatures. My own sword trembles in my hand. Sir Aaron, with his comrade still leaning on his shoulder, says, "Get behind me, both of you."

Sir Penly stumbles away from the First Knight, retrieving his sword from where it dropped. "Aaron, get them out of here," he says, face twisting in pain with each motion. "Take the scholar and the prince and run past me when I distract those things."

"Penly--"

"Don't you dare order me to do otherwise, Aaron. Get them out of here!"

Obellas moves past me, puts a hand on Penly's shoulder. "I'll stay with you. Once you've killed these things, you're going to need help walking to the castle."

The lesser of the two knights hisses out a laugh. Sir Aaron immediately protests, "My prince, I need to get you to--" But Obellas interrupts him.

"Get Elvic to my father. If there are more of these things between here and there, he'll need your sword. Our biggest responsibility right now is alerting the king and the guard to that thing beyond the wall, and to our winged 'friends'." He smiles ruefully at Aaron, a smile which turns into an odd grin. "That's an order, sir knight. Tell my father I'll be there shortly."

Aaron bites back a curse. "As you wish, my prince. Good luck to you both."

Penly simply nodds, takes a deep breath, and throws himself at the creatures, shouting wildly. Letting loose a similar cry, Obellas leaps into the fray himself, and before I can see anymore, Sir Aaron has tackled me up and slung my old body over his shoulder like so many sacks of potatoes. The impact of his shoulder knocks the consciousness out of me.

***

I wake to the sound of Sir Aaron pounding on the gate of the castle wall. The knight has left me on the grass beside the road, a torch propped up over me. I sit up, aching all over, and work my way to my feet. "How long have we been here?" I ask him.

"Not long," he replies. His voice is tense, his words are rushed. "Maybe five minutes. I can't tell. There's no one at the gate to let us in. And," he nods down the road we must have come down, "I can't say I blame them." In one hand, he holds our torch, in the other, his sword.

I turn to follow his gesture with my eyes. There are maybe forty yards of torchlight--then utter darkness. We have been followed. Even as I watch, another torch goes out, and the darkness grows closer.

"In the name of the king," Aaron shouts at the top of his lungs, "Open this thrice-damned gate and let us in!"

"There is no one to hear you--likely they've all moved inside." The knight has already come to this conclusion, I think. He is no longer pounding on the door to be let in--he is trying to open it. I watch him for a moment, then turn back to the approaching darkness. "You need not hurry for my part, my friend," I say, wearily. "I'm certainly ready to stop running."

"Someone," he says, "Must tell the king what is happening beyond his walls." He throws himself against the door, and I hear a creak as the hinge moves. "Slip through here," he says, waving his hand at the space between the gate as he leans against it, grunting. "I will follow."

I hesitate.

"Damn it, Elvic, get in there!"

"In the king's name," I mutter, and slip my old bones through the narrow gap--and behind me, I hear it snap shut loudly as Sir Aaron stops leaning on it. I spin around and throw my old bones against the heavy gate, but it doesn't even so much as budge. I try to lift the latch holding it closed, but it is too heavy. "Aaron!" I shout, pounding with my fists.

I hear his voice from the other side: "To the king, my friend," he shouts. Seconds later I can hear him fighting. Several minutes go by as I press against the gate, desperate for some tiny notion of hope--but then silence falls on the other side.

I take a step back, hands shaking; around me is utter darkness--there are no torches. "No," I whisper. "No no no, this cannot be..."

Something slams against the gate loudly, and I jump. Another tremendous slam. I think there are tears running down my eyes as I back slowly away from the gate and turn, running through the darkness towards the castle. Bits of torch-light peeking out from the windows and arrow-slits are my only guide.

Something moves near me, hisses. I stop in my tracks, nearly tripping over myself in the process. I hear the slithery sound of bat-like wings, and even my fear-scattered brain knows why the castle grounds have been abandoned. They must have come from the east and flown over the walls while we were running through the streets.

I let myself drift left, walking slowly, always facing the castle. I pray I am not noticed. A soft hoot to my left stops me in my tracks again; the hoot is followed by a wet crunching sound--the sound of bone being crushed and broken. A shudder passes through me, but I force myself to continue--someone must tell the king.

I lose track of time. The only sounds I hear are the pounding on the gate behind me, and the movements and vocalizations of the creatures around me. Somehow, I make my way to the drawbridge that spans the moat around the castle itself. I feel with my hands--the drawbridge is down, oddly, but once I've crossed it I find the portcullis and gate both closed and locked. I dare not pound on them, so I slide along the wall to my right, keeping my hands on the stonework.

Eventually, I reach my goal: the concealed door at the bottom of the western tower. I find it unlocked and slip inside, closing it securely behind me. Torchlight and warmth greets me, and as I lean back against the wall, I let my tears flow, unable to hold them back anymore.

***

"Where is my son?!" the king shouts at me. He sits on his throne in the audience chamber; around the edges of the room knights and soldiers and guards rest, some maybe eternally. "Where is my son?!" he shouts again, raging. It is a rage in him I have never seen.

"I am the last," I say. I relate the story of our journey down the wall and across the town, leaving out the presence of that thing in the forest. "Sir Penly and Prince Obellas gave their lives that Sir Aaron and I might reach you. Sir Aaron gave his to see me through the gate."

The king grinds his teeth. "Come with me," he says, turning on a heel and striding out the back of the chamber. I follow, accompanied by two guards. "My wife is dead," he says, opening and closing a fist repeatedly. "She took her own life. Would you like to know why, Elvic?"

"I am sorry, my liege--"

"It was not long after the flying beasts landed behind the wall. We pulled those we could into the keep, but many were lost--townspeople and my men both. We had no way to man the gates to the town, which were already closed and barred, and no way to reach them to open them again." He has calmed some, in the telling. "She gave herself over to mourning Obellas as lost. In that, perhaps she was right--perhaps we are all lost."

"My liege, there is one mo--"

"I found her in his room, sobbing. When I went to comfort her, she pushed me away--and I saw behind her, a passageway, hidden in the wall. I assume she had come across it accidentally, going through his things as mothers do. I left here there, in his chamber--a mistake, now, I think--and entered this passageway." His voice is tired, weary--and old beyond his years. As he talks, we enter the prince's chambers. There is a pool of blood beside Obellas' bed, and, as the king said, a passageway in the wall that I was not familiar with.

"My liege, whose--"

Again, I am interrupted. "I entered this passageway," he says again, as we do the same, "And found this." He gestures with a hand, which then falls to his side. Before me is a scene of horror: a flat table, across which is a corpse long-dead, with a dagger in its heart. The age and gender of the person is not known to me. On and around the table are strange carvings, filled with what looks like dried blood. The room reeks of death and decay, and other strange, unknown scents.

"Witchery," I breathe. "This is a place of dark magics."

The king heaves a great sigh, his shoulders slumping slightly. "How long would you say that body has been without life?" he asks me, though we both already know the answer.

"About three weeks," I reply. "Since the sun set."

My liege sobs, great tears rolling out of his eyes. "When I returned to my wife, she was dead--she had cut her own throat. She took her life--because of this. Because this night--this awful, endless night--somehow he brought it down upon us!" His grief turns so easily to rage, and he slams a fist against the stone walls. "Why?!" he screams. "Why?!"

"You know why," I say quietly. The king's sobs cease, and he looks at me with such rage and pain in his eyes--but it is not a rage and pain at me, but turned inwards, at himself. "You were right to do what you did. But now you see what your son has wrought, and you ask why--but you must not blame yourself."

"He is my son."

"He is a madman." I put a hand on his shoulder. "But you did not make him that way. This is his doing." We stand there in silence for some time. Then, from below us, we can hear shouting, and a pounding noise--then a crash. "The gate has fallen," I say to no one.

"So this is how it ends," says my liege, turning his back to me. "This is how it ends." Without another word, he strides out of the prince's chambers, his sword in his hand.

Ridiculously, I remove the dagger from the corpse on the alter, turn it over in my hands. The blade is wide and flat--it would not enter a man easily. Obellas must have fought with this poor soul before finishing him, forcing this horrid weapon through his sternum and into his heart. The wound is very exact: directly through the middle and into the organ, instead of between the man's ribs. His lungs are untouched--he must have screams. How is it that we did not hear him? Tasting bile in my mouth, I leave the dark chamber.

I move to sit on the bed, beside the pool of the queen's blood, and bury my face in my hands. Below me, in the halls of the castle, I can hear the fighting moving back and forth as the king and his men push and pull at creatures I dare not imagine. I hear the hisses and screams of the monsters, the shouts and cries of my people... but soon it is only the creatures I hear. A great sob wracks my body.

Eventually, silence.

Behind me, the door creaks open, then closes quietly. "Father seemed upset," the prince says. I don't look back at him. "I can't say I blame him."

"Then the king is dead?" I ask our betrayer.

"By my own hand, of course. Where is my mother?"

I nod my head at the puddle of blood on the floor.

"I see. Well, it was a cleaner death than what I had planned."

Only now to I turn to look at him. "A clean death?" I ask. He's closer than I realized, nearly standing over me, his eyes transfixed on the blood. "To die clean is to die defending those who cannot defend themselves. And you wonder why he made Aaron his Right Hand over you."

Obellas chuckles. "Sir Aaron the Brave, the Highhearted, the Right Hand. I'll give him this--when I found his body, he'd piled up many of my soldiers. I didn't expect anyone to put up such a fight unaided." He puts a hand on my shoulder, giving it a reassuring pat.

I stand up quickly, teeth grinding together, and turn to face him--and already the wide-bladed knife in my hand is between his ribs, through the chain mail like so much parchment, through his flesh as if it were nothing. I feel it puncture lung, push sideways. "There is no thing," I hiss, "That hurts a man more than hurting his children."

"Scholar--Wha--" He is interrupted by a spurt of blood between his lips; it runs down his chin.

"Your father loved you unconditionally. His only regret was not giving you Knighthood, not making you his Hand. He broke tradition because you were not worthy. And it killed him. Remember that, when you're rotting in whatever hell your monsters came from." And with a twist of my wrist and a shifting of my weight, I slide the blade into his heart. The prince falls bonelessly to the stone floor, into his mother's blood.

I stand over his body for several minutes, hands trembling. My eyes move to the door. Already the pounding has begun, as the princes servants try to reach their master, alerted somehow of his death. I spit on his corpse as the door gives way and black, eyeless shadows rush into the chamber. When they come for me, I close my eyes, and do not resist.

83. (In Space.)

2007-10-30T12:31:00.000-05:00

I woke up to the sound of arguing coming from the front of the passenger cabin. A woman's voice, in a heavy accent--I couldn't place where it was from exactly, but I've always been bad at that--was knifing through the general murmur of the other passengers. I blinked once, then again, and shifted around in my harness, trying to get comfortable. The other coach passengers were agitated by something. Bleary-eyed, I looked out the port-hole and into empty space; once, the nearness of that cold blackness might have alarmed me, but I'd been to and from the moon so many times at this point that it was just another day's work.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but there's nothing we can do," the steward handling the accented woman replied. At this point, I realized that the ship was not moving. "The captain has received a full-stop order, and we have to wait here until we are given permission to move again. To compensate, the crew has been authorized to offer free drinks from the bar to any passen--"

"I do not want your fucking drink!" the woman yelled, thrusting a finger in the steward's face. "I want to get to my destination on time! It is very important that I get to my destination on time!"

"I understand that, and again I apologize. There is nothing I or any of us can do. If you would, please return to your seat, or to one of the leisure cabins--to the bar, for those drinks, or the observatory deck." The steward bowed in the zero-gravity gracefully, one hand never leaving the support rail as he did so.

"I--" the woman started to shout at him again, but stopped, biting back her words. Seething, she spun around and floated along the length of the aisle using the handholds, and vanished into the rear passenger cabin.

The steward frowned, then retrieved the intercom mic from its holster on his waist. "Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize again for the delay, and assure you that we will be under way as soon as we receive the proper authorization. As you may have gathered," there was a twinkle of friendly mischief in his eyes, "We are now offering free drinks from the bar for the rest of the flight. Please place your order with the nearest attendant of make your way to the bar yourself. As we are inert in space at the moment, you are all free to move about the ship."

"What's a few extra hours," the guy next to me muttered, glancing back at the passage leading to the rear cabin. "It's a goddamn six-day flight. But hey," I don't know who he was talking to--me, I guess, "I'm startin' to feel a little crazy myself, being cooped up here for so long."

I mumbled a response as I unclasped my harness and let myself float out into the aisle. I wasn't about to take the crew up on those drinks--alcohol and space travel did not mix well in my system--but the observation deck sounded pleasant, and there were rarely people there; it was a little frightening.

I floated to the front of the cabin and worked my way towards the top of the ship, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Sure, we had colonized the moon and were building another colony on Mars, but damned if they couldn't keep the air in these ships warm. Soon I was seemingly floating in free space above the ship, drifting around the ovular bubble that formed the observation deck. It was a little disconcerting at first--it almost appeared as if you were outside the ship, as the glass was kept so clean it was almost invisible.

The ship stretched out beneath me, fifty yards long and thirty yards across, pale blue with dark blue lettering indicating the spaceline and model. The observation deck was situated near the front, near the pilots' cabin; from up here the moon was a massive disk of light dead ahead, seemingly motionless (we were, in fact, being pulled along in the gravitational pull between it and Earth, so technically the ship was not as still as the steward made it out to be). It was criss-crossed with industrial and military structures, as well as atmosphere domes and tunnels roofed with thick glass. To the rear, beyond the tail structures and still frighteningly large, was Earth. I was alone on the deck, so I floated towards the tail end and buckled myself to the metal surface; in a matter of moments, I was asleep.

The Lunar colony, in the beginning, was meant mostly as a storage area for one very specific kind of material--nuclear arms. When the great peace treaties were signed, and world-wide disarmament began, mankind was left with a large amount of highly-dangerous, highly-radioactive materials, mostly in the form of weapons. For years we struggled to find a way to completely remove the threat until one enterprising young scientist suggested storing them on the moon--a barren wasteland, where minimal damage would be done in the event of a cataclysmic equipment failure. There were no cities to be destroyed, no crops to be poisoned by fallout, no people to be wiped out, should a weapon of that magnitude be detonated.

Those storage facilities needed to be maintained, so at first they were staffed by a rotating skeleton crew. As years passed, that crew grew and multiplied and spread, soon forming the Lunar colony as we know it today.

I woke up again to voices, but this time they were quiet and subdued, but heated. Whoever it was sounded like they hadn't noticed me sleeping at the far end of the observatory, wrapped up in a dark blanket. There were several voices of both genders.

"Should we tell the passengers?"
"No more than they need to know."
"Are you sure the machine's working? It wouldn't be the first time they've gone on the fritz."
"They're working. We have contact with Earth, but we're getting nothing from Luna Tower."
"Nothing? Define nothing."
"No signal at all--not even silence. They're not broadcasting. At all. Anything."
"Then should we--.... What should we do?"
"Nothing, for now. Earth still hasn't given us authorization to move--we're stuck here."
"The passengers are getting restless."
"Let them, there's nothing we can do."
"Look, everyone get back to work--and get the word out to the rest of the crew, but discreetly. We don't want to start a panic."

There were several affirmatives, and the collection of crew members adjourned their impromptu meeting and went back down into the ship proper. I remained floating in my blanket for a few minutes, then made my way back to my seat and strapped in.

The general atmosphere in the passenger cabin was even more agitated than before; it didn't look like many of my fellows travelers had taken up the offer of alcohol either. I didn't blame them.

And then the woman was back, rocketing up the aisle at a rapid pace, with something clutched in her hand. I couldn't get a good look at it. The steward she had accosted previously made his way into the aisle and started towards her--and then a woman, a different woman, screamed, and there was a flash, and the steward's arm ripped clean off his body and went spinning through the cabin. Panic broke out, people started rushing around.

I lost sight of the woman, but her voice cut through the chaos like a sword. "Sit down and strap in! Sit the fuck down and strap the goddamnfuck in, or I swear I'll fucking shoot you!"

The steward wasn't screaming. I could see him floating towards the top of the chamber, trying desperately to stop the bleeding, surrounded by a cloud of his own blood. The woman's weapon flashed again--someone screamed, maybe someone died, but the crowd shut up instantly. She grabbed the steward by his collar and pulled him down, and shoved her weapon--it looked like a hodgepodge of various mundane items, but clearly it was deadly--into his mouth. "You," she said to the nearest crew member not missing a limb, "Tell the captain to get this ship underway or this bastard's gonna be missing more than an arm."

The crew member--I couldn't see him or her--apparently hesitated. "DO IT!" the woman screamed.

Silence, save for the steward's whimpering around the gun barrel (I was amazed he was even conscious), engulfed the ship. "I have to get to my destination," the woman muttered, "On time. Have to get there on time."

The captain made her way into the passenger cabin. "Miss," she said calmly, "Put down the gun."

"Fuck you. Get this ship moving."

She raised her gloved hands shoulder high, palms forward. "I can't. We don't have the authorization. The ship's computer won't let us move until we get authorization. There's nothing I can do."

"Bullshit!" she yelled, shaking the steward bodily. "Do it or he's dead!"

"Tom's already dead," the captain replied. From where I was sitting, I could see it was true. He'd bled to death. Disgusted, the woman with the gun tossed the body away and took aim at the captain.

"Fine," she said, "Do it or you're dead." Her arm moved, and she wasn't aiming at the captain anymore, she was aiming at one of the glass viewports. "Do it or you're all dead."

The attack came out of nowhere, or at least from where I was sitting I couldn't see it. A large man bulled out of his chair and slammed into the woman with the gun, grabbing at her arm. The weapon flashed once, twice, but the shots didn't hit the ship--the man winced in pain and I knew she'd shot him, but he pushed her hard against the bulkhead, knocking it out of her hand. The captain moved fast, grabbing the woman from behind and wrapping an arm around her neck. The wounded man let go, grimacing--the woman struggled, spinning through the open, zero-gee space with the captain--and struck her head hard against the hard floor.

There was a sickening crack, and the murderer went limp. The captain floated up and away from the body, bleeding from a broken lip. "A doctor!" she called out, immediately--professionally--turning her attention to the man who had helped her. "Is there a doctor on board?!"

I raised my hand.

I'm not a doctor, but I had medical experience from the military--a certified field medic. Twenty minutes later I had the good Samaritan bandaged up and resting on the observatory deck. He slept, drugged at one end; he'd only been shot in the leg, both shots hitting the same general area, and his life wasn't in any real danger but pain was intense. At the other end of the deck the three bodies--Tom the Steward, a passenger who had gotten in the way, and the woman--were lashed to the deck.

"Do you know what's happening yet?" I asked the captain after I had finished tending to her lip. "It's bigger than just this ship, isn't it? There's something happening at Luna Base, isn't there?"

"Jesus," she whispered. She wasn't listening to me, but looking forward at the moon and the structures that marred its surface. "Jesus, look at that."

I looked. It took a minute, and then I saw them--grey-white lines, hardly visible against the grey color of the moon itself, each led by a pin-prick of orange-yellow light.

"Jesus," she whispered again. "Jesus." And then she threw herself down the passage and back into the ship, presumably to get on the radio and warn Earth of what was coming: unprecedented nuclear holocaust.

It takes six days for a transport ship such as the one I rode on that day to pass from the Earth to the moon. This is because it is a leisurely passage slowed for the comfort and well being of the passengers. A missile--a group of missiles, even--could make the trip in a matter of hours, travelling at breakneck speeds through the gap the ship listed in.

I felt the ship vibrating beneath me--we'd been given authorization to move, I knew, to get the hell out of the way. "Whatever it was she was going there to do," the wounded man, awake now, mumbled, "Whatever her role was in... that... I think they pulled it off without her."

He went silent after that. I merely floated there and stared. Soon other passengers and crew members joined us on the deck, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. The missiles shot past us, hundreds if not thousands of them, shaking the ship--which jerked around and swung to avoid each one, narrowly doing so. Someone screamed.

We all stayed there, even when the crew told us to return to our seats. Hours later, when the first bright flashes of the missiles hitting home lit up the Earth, I was violently sick. They had no way to stop them--no one ever expected such an attack from our own moon. It was... inconceivable.

I look up at it now, sometimes. It's different. It's amazing how many people here on Luna simply stopped looking up, simply ignored it from that day on.

82. (Music.)

2007-10-29T07:44:00.000-05:00

81. (The Blind Bravery of Thieves)

2007-08-24T23:25:00.001-05:00

An oldy but a goody. I wrote this back in 2003, 2004, and it's still one of my best stories. There are two sequels, which I am also very happy with. They can be found on my deviantart account (reido.deviantart.com). The three stories are the three oldest stories in the gallery.

*******

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do—”

“Does it involve wacky hijinks in a desperate attempt to get us out of this situation?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

Phia just looked at me. “No. We’re gonna—”

“Does it involve weapons? Violence? Physical exertion?” I continued.

“Yes, no, and yes,” Phia replied, "In that order."

I frowned, rubbing my chin. “What kind of physical exertion are we talking here?”

“Um…” Phia rubbed his chin too. “Some running, some jumping, and some faster running.”

“Jumping?”

“Over the dragon.”

“Over the dragon?”

Phia rubbed his chin some more. It's what he does when he's thinking. I think that's why he can't grow a beard. “Well, really, it’s not so much jumping as it is launching ourselves into the air.”

I leaned around the corner into the treasure-chamber, where the aforementioned dragon was still sleeping noisily. “How is that any different than just jumping, Phia?”

“Wait here.” Without another word, he turned and scampered off around the corner.

Maybe I should explain what’s going on here, if I plan on keeping your attention. I’m Elly, a treasure-hunter and all-around decent girl. You’ll notice I didn’t insult Phia because of his ridiculous plan. So maybe you’re wondering why in the nineteen levels of the Underearth we’re hiding around the corner from a sleeping dragon?

Well, the thing is this: when we got here, the dragon was out. He sorta… um… "owned" my village. Stealing from him was supposed to be a subtle way of getting back at him without his noticing—I mean, he’s got more treasure than he could ever possibly keep track of. We’re—or rather, we were planning on just stealing a little bit at a time until we’d taken enough for him to notice, and then stop.

Well, that plan sorta involved the two of us being alive still.

Oh! I haven’t introduced Phia properly yet. Phia’s my… um… business partner. We’re not friends—hell, I don’t even like him that much. But he’s the best at what he does, and what he does is getting me out of tight spots. I mentioned earlier that his plan is ridiculous, right? Well, it is, but that doesn’t mean it won’t work. Phia’s plans always work.

Okay, well, now I’m just interrupting the flow of my narrative, so I’ll get back to the story.

Phia came back around the corner carrying two very long pikes. “We’ll use these,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I replied, dubious. “And when the hard, metal butts of those things hits the hard, stone floor, you expect them to not make enough noise to wake the great and powerful dragon?”

“Oh.”

Perhaps I should mention, here, that the reason Phia’s plans always work is because I’m always here to tell him what’s wrong with them. I honestly don’t know what he’d do without me. But, then, I don’t know what I’d do without him, either. Probably get eaten by the dragon.

Of course, I’d have been dead several times before this from various other adventures, so without Phia the whole try-not-to-get-eaten-by-large-beasts scenario is somewhat moot.

But I drift!

“Well, that’s where the whole ‘running faster’ aspect of the plan comes in,” Phia said. “Plus, once we’ve woken up his majesty—”

“Don’t call him that.”

“Right. Well, when we’ve woken up the pathetic dragon, we’ll have weapons to defend ourselves with. For once. See, that’s the beauty of my plan!”

I sighed. “So we run in, leap over the sleeping beast and, in turn, wake him from his peaceful slumber, run really fast, get caught, try to defend ourselves, get killed and-or eaten, recognized as citizens of the village, and are happily unaware as the beast burns our loved-ones to an ashy cloud of dust?”

“Well, when you put it that way—hey!” He exclaimed—whispering still—as I grabbed my pike and turned to sprint at the sleeping beast.

The dragon is massive, by the way. We had to jump over him—as opposed to something sensible like tip-toeing around his tail—because his neck and the aforementioned tail were both pressed against the walls of the chamber, effectively forming a big, green wall between us and our happy escape.

None of this was running through my head as I was sprinting towards him, though.

And none of anything else was really running through my head as one big, scaly, green eye-lid snapped open, the reptilian eye formerly hidden behind it staring straight at me. I skidded to a stop, pike in hand, and just stared back at it.

“Elly!” I heard Phia shout, just as he skidded to a stop next to me. “Shit!”

A thought struck me just then. I looked at the eye (which was at about shoulder-height, being just that damn big), and then I looked at my weapon. And then I looked at the eye again.

“No,” I heard Phia whisper next to me. “Don’t you even think—”

But by then, of course, it was too late. Before the word “you” had left his lips, I was already lurching forward, a battle-cry (which was less-than-impressive, I’ll admit) on my lips. At “even,” I was half-way to the eye, which was in the process of blinking in puzzlement as the small thing that was Elly, treasure-hunter came towards it. Right as Phia uttered the word “think,” I plunged the sharp end of the pike into said eye and pushed with the weight of my entire body.

I felt every aspect of that eye bend and shatter one at a time, “snap-snap-snap-snap”, and then a sickening “squish,” which of course translated in my mind as “push harder” and I did, then--I pushed harder, groaning.

All that took an instant, and with a screech of pain the dragon whipped his head around, spraying red blood and some kind of clear fluid all over my arms just before I was sent flying through the air right at the passageway we’d been trying to reach in the first place, and as I’m flying through the air all I can hear is screaming and thrashing about and I can think of two things: one, I hope I don’t break my neck when I land; two, I really hope Phia doesn't get crushed in all that writhing.

I got lucky on both counts, and as I lay there in pain, sore, covered in blood and eye-fluid (which smells awful, let me tell you), panting, groaning, wondering if I broke my arm, I couldn't hear anything but my own breathing.

Which, I suddenly realized, was a good thing. I sat up, winced, and looked around. Phia was suddenly standing over me. “Elly, the idea was to hit the ground with the pike and spring over him, not use his death-spasms to catapult yourself over here.” He was covered in smelly eye-goo and sticky blood too. Well, at least he hadn’t gotten squashed or something. He was laughing.

“I had to… um… sorta elaborate on your plan, Phia,” I mutter, standing up and, in vain, brushing myself off.

“So… what are we going to tell the townspeople now that they’re free?”

“Why,” I replied, “We’re going to tell them that we fought a terrible battle for hours and hours, and that some of this blood—we’re lucky it’s red—is ours--we're even more lucky it's not--and then we’ll be welcomed as heroes.”

“Your plans are terrible,” Phia replied, laughing harder.

80. (Bits and pieces.)

2007-08-02T13:43:00.000-05:00

Typing this on a laptop that isn't mine. A new experience. MacBook keyboard/mouse setups suck, but I'm making due because it's pretty, and because the front-desk computer at work is a pile of refuse. Normally I'd be writing this on my own desk's computer here at the library, but I'm using it as an excuse to test out the shiny new MacBooks we're going to be loaning out to people in the near future (for in-library use only). Suffice to say the lack of a [Home] or [End] key is going to drive me batty.

A bit of the previous story (which will likely never be finished, or worked on again in any kind of serious manner) that's been bouncing around in my head. An exercise, if you will.

The guy may come to take the pretty toy away at any second, so this might not even get completed.

The Creature
When he first comes to he's alone, naked, and weak. His suit is gone, bulky as it was, and he feels exceptionally exposed. Sitting up, Thomas Viancetti holds a hand out in front of himself--it's covered in blood, but more importantly, he's two-dimensional. Or at least it looks like it is. Wincing, he reaches up and touches his eyes--correction, eye: the left one is gone, a ravaged socket marking it's previous location.

He looks around. The room, perhaps cell, he finds himself in is round, shaped like half of a squashed sphere. To his left is what may or may not be a door. It's also round, a bump maybe ten feet tall. The room itself, he guesses, is about thirty feet in diameter and twenty feet in height, but it's hard to tell with no depth perception.

The "door" emits a soft humming noise behind him, and he quickly turns, still having not risen, to face the sound. The "door" itself seems to be completely gone, and in it stands his host, or who Thomas assumes is his host.

At first, wildly, he thinks he's looking at a centaur, but soon that image is washed from his mind--the only similarity with that ancient mythic beast that the creatures before him exhibits is a basic, general shape: four legs meeting in a barrel-shaped torso, from the front of which sprouts a more man-like torso. The creature has four arms, each sprouting from shoulders in a roughly human-like location, and four eyes, arranged in a square on the creature's face, just above what looks like a mouth--a straight cleavage in the flesh of the face apparent only from a thin line of darkness. The skin is a dark shade of olive-green and resembles, vaguely, that of a frog or other amphibian. On each of the four feet, which can be found at the end of long, muscular legs jointed in the middle like those of a human, are four toes, two in front and two to the rear, where a human heel would be. Each is devoid of nails. Each of the four arms joints not once but twice, and terminates in a four-fingered hand similar in design to the creature's feet, but to a more flexible degree.

Professor Viancetti tries to rise, and gets about halfway there before collapsing in pain. His leg, already hobbled by old age, cannot support him--the bone inside is shattered.

79. (Thomas Viancetti: The Gate at Raimos)

2007-07-11T08:36:00.000-05:00

The small, black spacecraft lands on the platform outside Viancetti's estate at three hours past mid-day, as the local sun is just passing its pinnacle in the sky. It's a sleek craft, solid in color both on its frame and in its views-shields, all of which have been darkened for the anonymity of the pilot. It lands gracefully, but with a quickness that seems to indicate that the pilot is in something of a hurry.

A hatch on the side opens and a man steps out; he's wearing a long brown jacket and Earth-style horn-rimmed glasses. His hair is short and brown, cut in a vaguely military style. "Is this the estate of Professor Thomas Viancetti?" he calls out as he approaches.

Viancetti stands up from his deck chair, painfully aware of the creaking in his joints. The man approaching him is certainly not young, but to even be his age again would be a blessing. The professor's hair is grey, the hairline receding, and his eyes are a pale blue; he's thin, almost worrisomely so, and leans on a cane as he rises. "I'm Thomas Viancetti, yes, and this is my home. Might I ask you what your business is here?"

The ship's pilot flashes a badge of some kind, federal identification. Viancetti don't get a chance to read it. "I'm Agent Sam Burns, with the Expansionist Regime. Professor, there's a situation up at the gate. I've been ordered to take you up to examine it."

The professor laughs and sits back down. "You're kidding, right? I haven't been to the gate--much less in space--in thirty years. I'm retired, son. Find one of the younger researchers to deal with it--"

"That's not an option, professor. Travel registries tell us that you're the only gate expert on Raimos. The rest have been gathering over the last few days at Mars, dealing with the discoveries there."

"Discoveries?" Burns just nods in response and does not elaborate. "So if they're already on Mars, just have them come through the gate--I don't seen the problem."

The agent clears his throat. "That is the problem, professor. The gate is not operating."

Viancetti stands up again, slowly. "Not operating?" Is that even possible? he thinks. We've been flying our ships through it for over a century, with no negative effects or accidents--our record is perfect, the gate is perfect. The gate is always open. We wouldn't know how to shut it off if we wanted to. "Do you know why?"

"We suspect that possibly a ship passing through it clipped against one of the edges, or a piece of debris from some vessel or other smashed into it. With the hubbub on Mars security on this end has been a little... lax. We need someone who knows the gate's surface intimately, and you are, as far as we know, the only person on this side who's seen it up close."

Behind him--inside the house--Viancetti can hear the warbling of his vidlink trying to get his attention. It's probably just a videomarketer, he assumes. "Very well."

Minutes later he's sitting in the co-pilot's seat of the sleek black ship, breaking atmosphere. The gate, from this distance, is little more than a speck. It grows into an octagonal ring as they quickly approach it; a hundred yards in diameter, made up of a three-sided framework with glyphs carved into all three faces of each eight sides. Each side of the octagon officially denoted with a letter of the English alphabet--A, B, C, and so on--and each face of each side is given a Roman numeral--AI, AII, BI, HII, and so forth.

The ship floats in silence for several minutes while the pair inside visually regard it. "Do you see anything that stands out, Professor?" Agent Burn asks.

"Nothing... large. I expect I'll have to space-walk along the whole thing and examine it. This kind of operation is why I retired."

"Trust me, professor, if there was another way we would be more than happy to oblige."

Viancetti climbs into an excessively thick space-suit--a single-man transport frame, as it's referred to in official channels. His hands and feet strap in to levers that control the hands and feet of the suit, keeping his extremities safe and warm under several inches of heated insulation. His head and face, however, are not as well protected; for the sake of visibility, only a layer of tinted glass protects his face, held in place by metal and plastic shielding the rest of his head. Strapped to the back is a self-propulsion system, a small cluster of propulsion engines pointed in different directions.

He uses this propulsion system to leave the ship and float out to the edge of the gate. It is a long and painstaking process of surface examination, looking for new scratches or blemishes on the grey surface.

"Have you found anything yet, Professor?" Burns' voice hisses electronically in Viancetti's ear, two hours later.

"Nothing so far." Off in the distance he can see a cluster of personal craft of various sizes--travellers, expecting to make their way to Mars and, likely after, Earth. Black ships matching the one he rode up in fly circles around them, no doubt keeping them detained. "Do you hear that, Burns? There's some kind of... radio interference now."

"I'm picking it up on the sensors, yes. No idea what it is. I thought it was coming from the other ER ships, but it's not a frequency we usually use."

"Do you have a bad feeling about it?" Viancetti asks. Burns answers but the professor is no longer listening--he's not even breathing, for a moment. And then he's breathing very fast. "Burns, are you seeing this? Look at the glyph on EIII--facing you, you can't miss it." Of course he can't miss it. It's glowing a light green color. Over a century of gate use and each glyph has only ever remained dark.

"Professor, come back to the ship."

"I'm going to have a closer look." Viancetti uses the propulsion system to make his way across the full diameter of the gate, to the glowing glyph.

"Viancetti, I really think this is a bad idea." The agent is starting to sound panicked.

"There's no lighting mechanism, Burns. It's just glowing, with some kind of... radiation, maybe. This suit is insulated for radiation, isn't it? Good, I'm going to--wait. Wait. More of them are lighting up now--AII, BIII, FI--now all of them. All twenty-four."

"Professor!"

"Quiet, Burns. You brought me here to do a job." He uses the propulsion system to float out and away from the gate, trying to get a better look at it from a distance. His scientific curiosity has gotten the best of him--deep down, he wants to know why this sudden and new glow is happening.

"Professor, something is happening. Something else. I really think you should come back to the ship."

"It's moving," Viancetti mutters under my breath. The sides of the gate are rotating slowly, silently--and then they stop. The glow on the glyphs intensifies--and there's a flash, and for a moment the professor is blinded.

I can hear Agent Burns shouting over the radio, no longer just to me: "This is Agent Sam Burns to Expansionist Regime command! We have a code beta--repeat, a code beta!" The poor man sounds even more panicked now.

Viancetti's vision clears and he can see why Burn's is yelling. A ship--a clearly alien ship--has come through the gate. It is roughly the same size as the agent's black ship. It's green, ovular, shaped almost like an egg with small round bumps on its surface. It floats there silently, motionlessly. After a moment it rotates around to face the gate, and emits four lights, beaming them directly on four sides of the gate. The lights vanish, then reappear, shining now on the four remaining sides.

"Professor, I think you should come back to the ship now," Burns yells in my ear. "This is a really bad time to be unprotected out there."

Viancetti starts floating back towards the black craft, never taking his eyes off the new ship or the gate. The latter is breaking apart, each of the eight sides separating from its neighbors and floating outwards, triangular rods forming a larger, incomplete framework. He's halfway back to Burns' ship when the gate pieces stop floating and start projecting a bright blue light from each end. The lights curve and connect with each other, and suddenly the hundred-yard wide frame of alien stone has grown to a five-hundred yard frame of glowing light.

"Move it professor, we need to get away from--" A high pitched noise interrupts him. Before Viancetti can react a shock wave tears through space and he's sent tumbling head-over-heels away from both the black ship of Agent Burns and the green ship that came through the gate. As he rights himself and stops his tumble, his breath lodges in his throat. Floating silently in the midst of the gate is a massive alien craft. Easily a thousand yards long and four hundred yards wide, it's shaped like a huge, elongated egg with bulbous lumps covering its surface, much like the smaller craft. On these lumps Viancetti can see what looks to him like propulsion units, weapons, portholes, and hatches.

The high pitched noise ceases. The professor can hear Burns shouting more official code mumbo-jumbo into the radio, desperate now to reach his superiors.

This is it, he thinks, this is first contact. This is alien life making contact with humans for the first time. We've always known they were out there--we had just never actually met them.

The first, smaller ship floats up and into the larger ship. Several seconds pass.

"Professor, I've been ordered to get you the hell out of here, this is--Oh." An object--a missile launches from the massive ship. In hits Burns' ship dead-center, and the sleek black craft crumples, folds, and explodes. There's a burst of static in Viancetti's ear, then nothing.

A piece of debris hits the propulsion suit and again the professor is sent tumbling, this time towards the massive ship. The glass protecting his face cracks, and the crack widens. He breathes out all the air in his lungs and squeezes his eyes shut just as it shatters. Basic space-walk training conditions you to react as such, just in case there is a ship to catch you, though chances of survival are still almost nil. The last thing he sees is the massive alien ship turning its attention on the cluster of black ships rapidly approaching it, weapons blazing. They don't stand a chance, but it buys time for the civilian travellers to get away.

An instant later Viancetti slams bodily into the alien craft. It's almost soft, and gives a little with the impact. He bounces off, spinning end over end. All of this takes less than a couple seconds, and then he's hit with a blast of heat and can see light through his clenched eyelids--and then, nothing.

78. (Days and Hours and Nothing.)

2007-07-06T13:50:00.001-05:00

September. It was unseasonably hot, and the air was thick with insects as we waded through the tall grass to our secret spot, our clubhouse without a house. We babbled on about everything and nothing and everything again. Girls. Sports. It's sorta all blurry now. I remember dropping into the couch, casually, and Sam throwing himself into the broken recliner.

Some time passed. I don't know how long. And then there was a light, just floating in the air in front of Sam, and immediately after that the light was gone, replaced with...

With what, I don't know. A floating shadow? An emptiness? It defies me to this day how to accurately describe it. Sam looked at it cross-eyed, and reached out and touched it. "It's cold," he said--and then his hand was gone. There was no blood, there was just screaming, screaming from all of us. He tried to pull away but it was like something was holding him in place--no, pulling him in. Soon his arm up to the elbow was gone, vanishing into that floating shadow, that... void. I'll never forget the look on his face, such pure, uninhibited fear, panic, pain.

I grabbed his other arm and pulled--we all pulled, but it was like he was set in stone. It had pulled him in up to his shoulder, and was pressing up against his chest. I could hear his ribs breaking, shattering, crumbling inside. Sam let out a wail of agony--and he died. We fell away, screaming, and his body vanished completely, sucked into that glimmer of nothingness.

Only it wasn't a glimmer anymore. As it had pulled him in it had grown: the size of a baseball by the time it reached his elbow, as big as a pumpkin when it killed him. It wasn't growing anymore, just... floating there.

I blacked out after that.

When I woke up I was on a stretcher in an ambulance. Our secret hiding place was gone--someone had erected a huge white tent over it. Several large men with rifles and gas-masks stood around it in a circle. Men and women in lab coats bustled around. I didn't know what was going on. As I lay there staring at the white fabric, a gust of wind blew one of the tent flaps open and I caught a glimpse inside--the nothingness was the size of a large horse.

Suddenly there was a scuffle--someone was shouting something, some kind of horrible howl was coming from inside the tent--and then the scientist types came running out, and a moment later the tent itself vanished, replaced by... nothing, even larger.

The more it took in, the more it grew. I imagine some poor schmuck tripped and brushed against it and got sucked in.

It's still growing now. We're driving South, towards Mexico. Oklahoma is gone--totally gone. It just keeps getting bigger--we can't run forever. We're not the only ones. Everyone is running--North or South or East or West, everyone running out. It's only a matter of time before there's nowhere to run to.

74. (Big Bad.)

2007-04-05T13:57:00.000-05:00

I love the woods. They're so full of leaves and animals and trees and plants, the scent of a human, sweating and bleeding and running for her life, stands out like a lighthouse in the fog. It's pretty foggy now, in fact, or I'd just be chasing her by sight. But she smells so sweet, so scared, I don't need my eyes.

You're not even a challenge, Red. But you will be delicious.

Even if I couldn't smell her, her scent tearing through these woods like wildfire, I could hear her. Red's not a forest person. Not a woodsman. Woodswoman. Whichever. Her footsteps are so loud in the underbrush, on fallen branches, on discarded leaves that I can't even hear her ragged breathing.

Ah, Red. You're so fun to hunt! I'm not exactly moving quietly myself here--hell, I want her to hear me coming. I want her to know where I am, just out of view, behind her, tearing through the woods hot on her heels. Young heels. Delicious heels.

Oh Red! I can taste you already. My mouth waters at the mere thought of devouring your flesh! My hands shake, tremble--ready to tear off your clothes before tearing you apart. To taste your sweat and tears and blood and flesh... oh, Red, it will be glorious. I really can already taste you.

If you taste at all like your grandmother, at least. Probably something similar, though less stringy. More tender.

Red, Red, Red. I'm close enough to see you now, or the fog is thinning out--oh, damnation. And again the sight of your blond locks is lost, the red of your hood, the white of your skin, the crimson of your blood. No matter, I can still hear you.

Animals scatter away from us as we rip through the fog, playing cat and mouse--hunter and hunted--wolf and girl. You can't escape me, Red, I'm not even really trying. I'm wearing you down. I'm softening you up. I want you worn out and exhausted, bones weakened, tired and panting and not strong enough to really fight, Red, but strong enough to struggle. Strong enough to squirm. Strong enough to wiggle.

But not strong enough to escape. Not again.

Oh, Red. I'm so close now. I hear you--I hear you fall, I hear that extra-loud crack. I'm sure you ran into a branch--your smell is so much stronger now! I'm getting closer, much closer. You're broken, exhausted. But don't you dare give in. Don't you dare. I didn't chase you across these damn woods for an easy kill. Oh no. Oh, no no no.

Your smell is all over the air now. All over! You're near. Very near. But where? You're not moving, now. Don't you dare think of giving up! Don't even let the thought cross your pretty little brain. I plan on eating that bit last, by the way. Not that you'll care.

You're not running. Where the hell are you, Red? You're close, but... that's all I can tell. No footfalls. No breathing. Did you kill yourself when you fell? Did that branch ruin my meal? That would be... most unfortunate.

Shoes. You abandoned your shoes! No wonder I can't hear you running--damn you, trying to outsmart me! You can't, Red. No way, no how. You're just a girl--I'm a wolf. A big wolf. A hungry wolf. A bad wolf. You should have kept running.

I jerk forward--pushed! Sharp pain pain pain in my chest. What? Blood smell--not Red's. Not yours. Mine! How how how?! This cannot be! My hands go to my heart, to the blood--but it's not skin and fur and flesh I find. It's wood. It's a branch. A broken broken branch. A good six inches protrude... from... my chest? No--you little bibibitch! You did outsmart me, you minx!

I hear you exhale, practically in my ear. You you you took off your shoes--and... and threw them? And got behind me, silent as the fog. Clever girl. Clever, Red. Clev... Held your... breath...

Little whore, you missed my heart! My my my my... heart... so... can't... I breathe in tearing gasps--lungs broken. You've killed me! You little trollop! You little witch! Red! I can't I can't breathe. Clever. I can't. You're. So hungry. Worked my self up. Nothing. For nothing.

Clever.

Girl.

73. (I've been trying to build on this image... but nothing will come.)

2007-04-04T13:04:00.000-05:00

The ship's intercoms are silent. We float through space, idling, almost frozen. Shocked. I imagine the expression is visible even outside, as crazy as that sounds. The communications tech lets his hand fall away from the control panel which, only minutes before, had opened the relays to receive the planetary identification signal of Earth, our home. This signal is sent out from all Colonial planets to aid crews in the clumsy act of gaining ones bearings post-hyperspatial travel. His hand had, after hitting the proper keystrokes, remained frozen over the panel.

Utter silence. Traditionally, the signal is broadcast over the ships intercoms to reassure the crew--blind on the interior of the ship--that they are, in fact, not lost in space, as hyperspatial travel often leads one to believe.

"Open the relays," the captain had barked at him, "and be quick about it." An edge of panic had slipped into his voice.

"They're open, sir," the tech had replied. "Double-checked. There... there's no signals coming through. Silence, sir."

Fear rippled across the bridge crew, cold sweats broke out, hands started to shake. Silence generally meant one thing: there was nothing out there to broadcast an ident. signal, therefore we were no where near a planet. Before the adoption of the planetary ident. signal this was how ships became lost in space.

"Open the viewshields," the captain whispered. "Open them, damn it!" Stronger this time. The tech responsible jumped to his duties, fingers flying across the control panel. The gunmetal grey shields that close over the thick glass viewport at the front of the bridge during hyperspatial travel folded down and vanished.

The captain fell back into his chair, a hand over his mouth, his eyes wide. A man screamed. It was far worse than we had imagined.

We were not lost in the endlessness of space. In fact, we were right where we had expected to come out. Earth itself was even there, floating in the middle of the viewport. It was the state of the planet that brought us such shock. The spherical body was shattered in two and twisted, its molten core leaking out and cooling near-instantly, like a constant volcanic eruption. Chunks of shattered earth the size of continents floated amidst the wreckage, still green and blue as they had been when we had last seen the planet.

For a moment I held out hope that life remained on those broken, jagged chunks of planet, that people still clung to life on what remained of our world. I soon corrected myself. The captain came to the same conclusion moments later: "There are no clouds. Not a single goddamn cloud."

He was right. There were no clouds--because there was no atmosphere. Earth had been reduced to little more than a massive, broken asteroid, circling 'round its sun at a limp, dragging pieces of it self in its wake. The planet was as dead as everything that still remained on it. Judging from the wrecks of our defensive fleet, from the burns that scored the metal hulls... it was not a catastrophe that had come about naturally.

72. (No, I don't have a Samuel L. Jackson obsession. Why do you ask?)

2007-03-08T13:35:00.000-06:00

One day, I'll actually post something in here, instead of just posting videos.

71. (Does he look like a bitch?)

2007-03-01T16:16:00.001-06:00

70. (Hey look, music?)

2007-01-25T09:19:00.001-06:00

Actually, I moved it to the left...

69. (Seeds of Eden.)

2006-12-07T08:11:00.000-06:00

THIS POST IS A DRAFT; a more recent version of this story can be found at reido.deviantart.com; this one will not be updated again.

I
A steel flower floats through the darkness of empty space, spinning slowly, it's metal petals pointing in all directions. It is empty, lifeless. It has floated thus for decades, but now its time has come. There is an inaudible vibration as processes start working internally--the petals fan out more evenly, and the flower discharges its seeds: synthetic metal pods, wrapped in heat-and-impact shielding. Carriers. Lifeboats. Hundreds of them, thrown in all directions. Barren now, the flower begins once more to spin, a monument to a scientific venture on a scale only partially comprehended by its creators.

II
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. Its sleek shielding protects it from the cold of space, and the errant radiation of the stars in the distant void. It is one of many. On its random path, it reaches a belt of frozen asteroids. At first, the seed is lucky, and slips through without harm. But this luck does not last, and the seed impacts a solid mass of roughly equal size to itself, crumpling on impact and splitting in two. The halves float, broken, and spill their electronic and bio-organic contents into the emptiness.

III
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It passes just close enough to a small planetoid to be pulled in by its weak gravity, but its velocity is too much and it slingshots around, speed increased exponentially. At this speed it reaches a planet--a lush paradise of water and plants, or air and life, a place perfect for for the seed to grow--and slips thunderously through the atmosphere. But the speed is too much: parachutes deploy in preperation for a landing that will end disasterously, but the high-tension cording that attaches it to the seed snaps. The seed strikes solid ground and is flattened, bits of synthetic steel flying in all directions as it shatters and crumbles into itself. The parachute descends into the crater like a token of mourning, covering the wreckage in its white cloth.

III
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It vanishes into a massive, burning star, and it, along with its contents, are vaporized instantly.

IV
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It never stops doing so.

V
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It reaches a lush planet of plants and water, air and life. It slips through the atmosphere with a boom as the air of the world parts before it. The parachute opens, slowing the flight, and the seed drifts slowly to the ground amidst a dense forest. There it rests for several hours, testing the air, tasting the soil, drinking the water. It finds the air toxic, the soil poisonous, and the water deadly. It incinerates its contents and shuts down, little more now than a piece of rubble on a forest floor.

VI
An artificial seed rests in the vastness of a desert. It tests the soil and the air, but finds no water--and it, too, destroys its contents.

VII
An artificial seed breaks atmosphere, deploys its parachute, and sinks into a planet-wide ocean. It is eventually crushed by millions of tons of pressure far exceeding anything its builders had expected it to face.

VIII
An artificial seed lands gently on a sloping plain. It tests the soil, air, and water nearby and finds them all satisfactory. With a click and a hum, it begins its next task. A pair of tiny, bio-organic cells are rapidly thawed and charged with electricity. Each, now living, resides in its own capsule within the metal seed, floating in a reddish fluid. The shielding on the cell protects the cells as it protected the seed before, shielding them from the alternating harsh heat and cold, from the shocks of seismic tremors, from the curiosity of the native fauna. Both tiny lifeforms within the seed's inner workings begin to grow and form. The seed conducts very specific electrical charges through them as they mature, shaping and molding them into its creators' form.

IX
Years pass after the seed lands. Eventually, the capsules hatch like eggs and two pink, fleshy creatures, a man and a woman, emerge from the seed, naked but fully formed. They are devoured by local animals before they know how to defend themselves.

X
Years pass after a different seed lands on a different planet. The man and woman of this seed awake and hatch to find themselves buried alive. They die without ever seeing the blue sun of their new home.

XI
Years pass after yet another seed lands on yet another planet. The man and the woman of this seed emerge on a small, isolated island in the middle of a vast lake of fresh water. A violet sun shines down on them, warming their bare skin. They stare at each other. The electrical charges of the seed that guided the forming of their bodies to these human forms also guided the forming of their brains, and they have a basic understanding of who they are. They are the forbearers of culture on a new world. There is a crack and a hiss from the remains of the seed, and it begins to fold in on itself, compressing and overlapping, until it is no longer the seed, but a small cube of leftover parts. It speaks a language whose name is lost across the vastness of the empty sky: "If you are hearing this than your creation and birth has been a success. This is the voice of your creator. There are great plans for you and it is I who will teach you how to survive that you may continue our great cul--" The man smashes the cube with a rock, on impulse. A hundred generations of knowledge is lost in an instant, and a society's dream of being born anew on a fresh world, undespoiled by their vast industry, vanishes. He smashes it again and again, until it has shattered into dozens of metal pieces. A man and a woman stand alone on a lush, habitable island in the middle of a huge, fresh lake.

XII
Years pass for the man and the woman, and eventually their number increases. By the time Orillan, the male, and Merrith, the female, are physically incapable of reproducing, there are twelve humans living on the island in the middle of the freshwater lake. Their skin is tanned a light shade of lilac. Their hair has been dyed by the radiation of the violet sun to a dark, watery blue. Each generation--the original, their four children, and their six living grandchildren--is lithe and fit, having lived on a diet of fish-like creatures, clam-like creatures, and small lizard-like creatures, as well as the local flora: leafy "greens" (they are actually more of a teal-blue color), small melons, and berries. Each of the children was born the same pinkish-white shade Orillan and Merrith bore upon exiting their seed, the color of their creators, but after time in the violet sun each in turn became the same lilac shade. They are strong swimmers, but still, after decades of time spent on the island, the far shore is still too distant to reach. But today is a monumentous day for the family: their simple raft is completed. Today, Gerif will paddle across to the far shore in search of new foods, new living habitats. In truth, he wants to escape the island. He is of the third generation, one of the six still living. There have been many more--but, as genes were mixed and brother mated with sister, these many others were born disfigured, monstrous, imperfect. They were drowned, as an act of mercy, and to keep the bloodline strong. Gerif is the only member of his generation aware of this fact. He steps onto the raft and pushes away from the bank. Old Orillan watches, slightly hunched over, grey-blue hair blowing in the breeze. Soon Gerif is but a speck nearing the horizon, but still the elderly grandfather watches. He watches, as a large ripple appears in the dark water near his grandchild's raft. He watches as this ripple moves, moving alongside the young man. He watches its maker nudge the raft, curiously. He hears Gerif shouting--and he watches the raft overturn, a horror of tentacles and teeth and claws gripping it and tearing it apart, tearing Gerif apart. He sighs, and turns away. The far shore remains too distant to reach.

XIII
Years pass. A fifth generation is born, and Old Orillan and Merrith pass away, replaced at the head of the family by Gerif's parents, Morath and Tew. Today is the day they buried their elders. Orillan and Merrith had arranged previously with their brood where, exactly, their bodies would be covered. It wasn't until the digging was finished that Morath realized why they had wished thus. He holds in his hand something hard and cold, something alien to him. He stares at it--a chunk of the seed of his parents' birth, which they'd buried after pulling it apart. He slides an edge across his palm--and draws blood. And Morath laughs, a deep, masculine bellow, as he realizes the gift he has inherited.

XIV
A year passes. By now, there are thirty men, women, boys and girls living on the island. And still, the bloodline has been kept pure, the malformed drowned on the beaches of their isolated home. Morath stands on one such beach, holding a tiny babe in his hands, beneath the water. The child was born with too few fingers, and a face pinched closed, with eyes that would never have opened, and legs too small to function properly. He can hear the child's mother, Geya, wailing in the distance; she is not as far as he believes her to be, however. When the tiny kicking stops, he lets the body drift away with the tide--and wraps his hands around the only other object on the beach: a weapon. A long stick, taken from one of the island's many trees, with a chunk of the seed attached to the end--a long, slashing blade tipped with a stabbing point. A primitive spear, a primitive poleaxe. Morath has made a dozen of these, and distributed them among the stronger males of his tribe-family. They have built a larger raft, a stronger raft. Today is the day they reach for the far shore, or die trying. Morath will lead them across, but in truth it was Tew, his mate, that made the need known to him: they were rapidly running out of space, and food. Today, they would sail across, all thirty of them, and claim the mainland that has been little more than a horizon their whole lives. Their choice is simple: die slowly of starvation and overpopulation, or die quickly to the monsters of the deep lakewater. The decision was unanimous. They pile onto the wide raft and the younger females begin paddling towards the far shore.

XV
A beast comes from the deep, gripping the side of the wide raft with its tentacles. A young woman is tugged over board and lost, devoured. Morath's only brother is crushed beneath a wide claw. But they fight--male and female both--stabbing and slashing and hacking at the beast as it kills them. And eventually, it sinks away. Twenty-five men and women, boys and girls reach the far shore, their new home. Their leader drops his weapon on the sand and falls to his knees. Morath grins, spreads his arms wide--and spits a gob of blood compulsively as the tip of his own spear bursts, bloody but shimmering, from his left lung. Geya, panting, screams in his ear, rips the spear out, and impales him again, this time hitting his heart and pinning him to the hot, unspoiled sand. Silence descends on the ragged band of lilac-colored survivors. Geya stands over the body of her father, and catches her breath. She turns to the others, and delivers her ultimatum.

XVI
The family splits. Years pass. Then decades. Then a century. Then two and three. Life on the island was lush--life on the mainland even more so. Theirs is a world with few land-based predators, and those that do exist learned quickly to fear the soft, lilac beings. The Geya tribe, having travelled far from the freshwater lake, lives in dugouts in the soft earth. They no longer kill their imperfect young. They have become a people so radically different than Orillan and Merrith that it is difficult to see any family resemblance. They have weathered the storm of their inbreeding and come out a stronger people, larger and broader, less human. They climb the great trees with ease, dig with their broad hands with little effort, and take advantage of everything the land gives them. They have become something close to native, embracing the planet and changing to live upon it. They are no longer what the seed's creators envisioned. Their distant cousins, however, cling unknowingly to the creators' dreams. The Morath tribe, remaining near the lake, have spread out along the beaches. They keep their bloodline pure, as their forebearers did. They are a thin, lithe people, but not physically strong. They do not live long; unknowingly, they have suppressed their own natural adaptations to their environments. They travel far to the distant mountains once a year to mine a material not unlike the metal of the origin seed. These alien metals they forge into new weapons, blades and cudgels of varying sizes and utilities. They are a people of tools, of weapons.

XVII
Genri lies, tied and gagged by vine-turned-rope, in the center of the largest Geya village. Strange men stand over him--huge-armed, small-eyed, small-legged. He is young, and has no idea that these people are his distant relatives. The largest of them--a female, with leaves and something-like-feathers in her hair, exits a deep dugout in the earth and stands over him. She asks him--in his own language!--who he is. Wide eyed, the thin man is unable to answer out of fear. One of the males kneels before the female and presents Genri's weapon--a long blade on a short handle, roughly as long as his forearm. A sword, of sorts. The female takes it by the handle and hefts it, and the blade whistles in the air; she runs it along her palm--it bleeds profusely, but she does not fear it. She says something in a bastardization of Genri's language, and he only understands two words: kill, steal. She kills him with his own weapon, cutting his throat; he feels no pain. That night, she returns to her dugout and uncovers that which makes her queen of the Geya: a spear, still caked with blood. It has been passed down from the tribe's namesake to each leader in turn. It is the spear that split them from the Morath, still marked with the blood of the man who bore that name originally. Every leader of the Geya has been told the tale of the split, though most of their people have forgotten it, forgotten the Morath even exist. The queen, Shicha, knows. And she smiles.

XVIII
The Geya descend on the unsuspecting Morath mining expedition like a fury of flesh and death. Despite their superior weapons, the Morath do not stand a chance. They die to the last man, woman, and child. The cries of the dying, and then of the celebration, can be heard from the Morath villages that line the shores of the lake. Children weep; women fear; men rage. War is coming.

XIX
The Morath strike first. An expedition, armed with the best of their weapons, strikes out into the jungle to find the Geya homelands; hundreds of thin, lithe men work their way through the jungle, and eventually come across a village of dugouts, of misshapen people, of Geya. They slaughter them in their sleep.

XX
The Morath retreat into the mountain from which their weapons come. The flee into the caves, the smell of their burning homes still fresh in their nostrils. The Geya come soon after, screaming for revenge in a language half-shared between brothers and sisters of such distant relation. The Morath reach a dead-end and are forced to turn and fight. Their numbers are equal, and in that cave, the remains of both tribes are snuffed out, blade and rock and fist smashing bone and skull and life. The progeny of Orrilan and Merrith bring about mutual genocide.

XXI
There is a crack and a hiss from the remains of the seed, and it begins to fold in on itself, compressing and overlapping, until it is no longer the seed, but a small cube of leftover parts. It speaks a language whose name is lost across the vastness of the empty sky: "If you are hearing this than your creation and birth has been a success. This is the voice of your creator. There are great plans for you and it is I who will teach you how to survive that you may continue our great culture." The man and the woman listen, laying on their backs on smooth green grass, under the light of a green-yellow sun.

68. (Brother and Sisters, Continued)

2006-10-11T15:40:00.000-05:00

Part Three: Deception (Mara)

They say, sometimes, that when your life is about to take a sudden and drastic turn for the better or worse, you have a feeling for it. In Mara Ado's case, this is simply not true. She sits in her room in front of a mirror, brushing her hair. Small in frame and stature, the 13-year-old looks like her only brother: black hair, black wings; but instead of blue eyes, Mara's are violet. This same violet can be found in (artificial) streaks in her hair, framing either side of her face.

Her room is everything a princess' room should be: baubles and jewels and everything she could ever wish for, a huge bath, a massive four-poster bed. Here and there hover or glow or hum or whistle various pieces of arcane miscellany: some toys, some tools, a few weapons.

The mirror she gazes into is an example of this: when a knock sounds at her door (which is carved of the richest, darkest, most exotic wood she could find), Mara waves a hand and the mirror ceases to exist--it had had no form in the first place, simply a bend in the light, a little thing that only a most powerful arcanist could master. It is her favorite trick.

The girl rises from the cushion she had been sitting on and approaches the door. "Who is it?" she asks.

"Subcommander Lorrin," comes the reply. With something like a sigh of relief, Mara waves her hand again, and the door swings open easily. The tall, blonde-haired and white-winged man on the other side bows slightly. "Your highness, there's been an attack on the palace. Your parents have ordered that you and your siblings be gathered up and brought to them for safekeeping. Commander Ado and the young princess are already in the throne room. They sent me to fetch you." He bows again, smoothly.

Mara cocks her head to the side slightly. "You realize I'm perfectly capable of getting there myself, yes?" she asks, haughtily.

"Of course, highness. I come only at the request of your parents."

"As you wish, then." The two set off through the long, twisting corridors that lead down from the tree branch Mara's room is located in to the heart of the palace, where the throne room is located. The halls are strangely empty. Mara can hear the clang of metal coming from the kitchen, but the noise is slightly off. She pays it little mind, assuming the chefs are just hard at work with some new delicacy.

"What was the nature of the attack?" Mara asks, tossing her hair back away from her face.

"A group of men from afar infiltrated the palace and attempted to assassinate the king. We killed several, but a few may have escaped; this is why the king and queen want you close by."

"I see. What city were these men from?"

"I do not know, princess. They appear to have been hired sellswords."

Mara frowns, misses a step. "How strange. Who would want to kill my father?"

"I have no idea, highness." They walk in silence after that. The path to the throne-room is long and twisted; it takes them some time to reach their goal. When they reach it, she pushes both massive doors open and strides confidently into the room, bathing in the light of the glorious sunset as it pours in the huge gallery windows that make up the back of the room, the view of the horizon framing the docking tree and its airships.

And Mara Ado misses her second step of the day. Her hands and lower lip tremble. She sucks in a breath. "Subcommander--" she stammers. "We're not--" and the pommel of his broadsword slams into the back of her head. The sky erupts into glorious, beautiful light, first orange, then blue-violet. Mara falls to the polished floor, slumping, "... safe... Erie's ship?" and in plain view of her dead parents, of her dead sister, of the bodies that little the floor of the throne room, she loses herself in unconsciousness.

"My lady," she hears, stirring. "My lady, wake up."

"Lorrin?" she mumbles, eyes half-closed, head throbbing. "What has happened? Have you found the attackers?"

"Found them?" The subcommander of the grins at her. Grins.

"Oh no," Mara whispers.

"Don't pass out, my lady. I want you to feel this. I'm going to cut out your eyes."

She screams. And, thankfully, the darkness goes deeper than her eyes.

Mara thinks she wakes. The polished floor is cold to the touch, and slick with blood--her blood. She cries, then stops herself. She's alive. She's alive. But she's not alone. She can hear noises throughout the palace. Fighting, coming closer. She can hear her heartbeat. She struggles to stand. The heartbeat speeds up, flutters in her chest. They're coming for her. Where's Lorrin? Why did he leave her alive? Her hands touch something. An arm? A leg? No, an arm. She feels up the length of it, finds a hand, feels the other direction. Female. Slim. Young. Sarah. Her little sister. The youngest of her family. She's cold.

The fighting is coming closer--then, suddenly, silence. Footsteps. They're coming for her now. Mara forces herself to her feet. She remembers where Sarah was when she came in. She rises and faces the door, trembling with the exhertion of it. Her face, sticky with blood, throbs. Her head throbs. Her heart throbs. But through it all, she prepares herself. A few words in the old tongue. A few hand-gestures. She's ready.

Footsteps coming closer. Voices. Familiar? Can't tell. Can't be. She's alone. Completely alone. Something thumps against the throne-room door. Mara whimpers, bites her lip. The door creaks open.

A last old word. A last flick of her wrist, and she feels the burst of heat on her face as the ball of flame leaves her fingertips, propelling her arm back. It only takes an instant. She hears the whoosh of the air being sucked out of the balls path, devoured by the fire. She hears someone--Reid!--shout her name--"Mara!"--the sound of a scuffle. A sick sort of knowledge enters her mind then, through the pain, through the fear, through the anger. Her hand falls to her side as she hears the fireball strike, hears a woman scream, smells the immediacy of burning flesh, hair, and feathers. And she lets the darkness take her again, and doens't even feel her head land softly in her dead sister's lap.

67. (Brother and Sisters, Continued)

2006-10-11T11:26:00.000-05:00

Part Two: Destruction (Eri)

Some half-an-hour beforehand, half-an-hour before Eri is to become heir to her brother’s newfound throne, the flagship of the Royal Air-Navy lumbers into the sky over the city, its boat-like form bulky and clumsy. It is both the largest ship in the fleet, and the largest ship at the docking tree, with twice as many blue-violet Arcan Drive blisters holding it in the air.

As the huge airship, the Ado’s Wing, slides slowly towards its docking branch, Sky Admiral Eri Ado stands at the stern, looking out over the cramped metropolis. The whole of Cal Aeros is located within the bowl of what was once a volcano so huge its eruptions had a global impact. Now it is simply an oddly-shaped mountain with a city on top of it. The city itself is made almost exclusively out of trees, grown with the magic of Eri’s people, each massive and twisted—but none so massive and twisted as the palace tree that sprouts from the center. The citizen’s of Cal Aeros, referred to as aeryyns, flit from one tree to another, wings carrying them through the air. They spend most of their time off the ground, rarely walking from place to place.

Looking at Eri, it is hard to see the family resemblance between herself and her brother Reid. Where he is lanky and awkward, she is lithe and graceful. Where his hair and wings are black, hers are a golden, lustrous brown. His eyes are blue, but hers are a dark shade of crimson. Reid dresses casually, and usually in black—Eri dresses formally to a fault, usually in her Sky Admiral’s uniform: a maroon jacket, open at the front to reveal a simple white shirt, with tails hanging down to a point at her knees, form-fitting black pants, and folded maroon boots and gloves. She is the picture of a seafarer, minus the sea itself, and the pointed hat.

She is staring, blankly, out over the city when her first mate, Thohr, crosses the deck behind her and gets her attention: “We dock, cap’n. You go see family, Thohr get crew workin’. No worries, yeah?” Of all the crew of the Ado’s Wing, Thohr is the only one who still refers to Eri with her original title, that of captain of the ship; he is also the only one who has been with her since she was a captain. In addition to this, he is the only troll not only in the crew, but in the navy, and in the city itself. Ten feet tall, broad and rippling as one would expect a troll to be, and the dark green of pine needles, Thohr stands out in a crowd.

“Have us ready to leave in three hours,” says Eri. She doesn’t look at her first mate, but at the palace tree, at her home. She has a bad feeling. In fifteen minutes it will be a feeling that is resolved in violence and bloodshed; in fifteen minutes she will move up a rung in the ladder of inheritance; in fifteen minutes the number of her family will be cut in half.

Thohr salutes as Eri turns to walk down the gangway to the landing platform. “As you were, captain.” She gave him the rank herself; he still refuses to acknowledge it, but smiles hugely when she uses it verbally. They are as close friends as two people of such violently different backgrounds can be.

Eri grew up in the palace. At age 20, the age her parents had decreed would be the age the Ado children would be put to work (they refused to let them grow fat and lazy on palace living), she was given the training—and then the post—of Sky Captain of the Aeros Pride, a much smaller ship than her current vessel. Eri chose the Royal Air Navy; years later, when he turned 20, Reid chose to join the Royal Guard (his casual black dress is, in fact, their uniform), and not long after that, Mara chose to join the Royal Arcanist Brigade—nearly a decade earlier than she was required. Mara was, is, ambitious to a fault. Eri simply excelled at the task she chose for herself. She had no ambitions to become Sky Admiral, it was simply how things happened.

Thohr grew up in a forest somewhere. He didn’t know where, exactly, but it was far from here. He didn’t know how old he was. He didn’t know his parents. It wasn’t that Thohr was dumb; it was just that the information had never been presented to him. Not long after he had reached what trolls see as maturity, the village he lived in was raided, most of his people were wiped out, and Thohr was taken as a slave by a human. He served in the city of Derranan (he didn’t know this name, either, but Eri had managed to figure it out from the way it was described) under a lord who beat him. When he beat the lord back, he was jailed for what was probably a decade. Eventually, Thohr was placed on an airship in the Derranan Air Navy (a pale comparison to its aeryyn counterpart); when Derranan went to war with Cal Aeros, Eri and the Aeros Pride crippled Thohr’s ship and freed the slaves and prisoners. The troll has been beyond loyal to the princess-turned-officer ever since.

It is ten minutes later when Eri lands lightly on one of the upper platforms of the palace tree; she folds her wings against her back easily in one smooth motion. Without missing a step, she strides across the flat, level surface towards the door—and the two door guards. Her bad feeling persists. A cool breeze wafts across the platform, playing with her hair. The two guards salute, clicking their heels—then, unexpectedly, lower their spears and bar her path. “Make way, privates,” Eri commands, blinking but not losing her regal, commanding stance.

“I’m sorry, Sky Admiral, but I have to ask you to turn away,” says the taller of the two guards. Eri looks at him quizzically and asks, confused and tired,

“What’s the meaning of this?”

“The palace is on lockdown. Please return to your ship and wait there for further orders.”

“Orders?!” Eri inquires, growing more and more confused. “There are only two people who are of rank to give me orders, private. Now make way or I’ll have you arrested.” Her hands, idly, stray to the handles of the twin sabers that hang from her belt at either hip. “That is an order.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the private replies, nervously. Beads of sweat dot his brow. “I’m very sorry,” he says in a low voice. “If you leave now, you might make it out of the city.”

Eri perks an eyebrow at this.

And at that exact moment, the roar and rumble of an explosion rocks the city. Eri spins and faces the docking tree, which has blossomed into red fire—which is quickly and immediately replaced in a larger blast with blue-violet flames as Arcan Drives meet flame and explode. The explosion is far larger than should be possible—were it not for the presence of the massive Ado’s Wing with its Arcan Drive blisters much, much larger than any other ship present. The airship, Eri can barely make out amongst the flames, burns and sinks, broken in two, and crashes into the base of the docking tree, where a third, but smaller, explosion blooms. “By the Angelis!” she mumbles.

“I’m sorry,” the more vocal of the two privates whispers. “I have a family to think about. Most of us didn’t have any choice.”

To Sky Admiral Eri Ado’s credit, she does not kill them. Her blades flash in the light of the sun, and she leaves them bleeding and scarred, but she does not kill them. She has realized, too late, what is happening. She rushes inside, and the doors slam closed behind her in the same heartbeat that Reid becomes the king, and Eri becomes his heir.

In her trek from the entrance to the throne room, which takes twenty minutes, Eri is accosted no less than four times. Each time, multiple attackers come at her, and each time she tears through them like a golden-winged hurricane, barely missing a step. It is painfully clear to each adversary she comes across why she was meant to die in a fiery ball of arcane energy and wooden debris—in terms of blade work, there is not a single person in all Cal Aeros who can match her. While her promotion to Sky Admiral was something that simply happened, something she did not actively seek, her mastery of bladed weapons was her passion, her love, her life. A childhood and lifetime spent in practice, honing her skills for hours upon hours each and every day until her technique reached perfection, her speed became unmatchable, and her physical strength was that of someone in a much larger body than her own slender form.

Neither she nor Reid realize it, but more than once on their respective journeys through the palace in search of each other they are within a mere ten feet, separated by little more than walls and doors. It isn’t until two young servants with wings like seagulls sprint past her that she finds him, just around the corner, running away from her down the corridor. The hall is a bloody mess.

Eri calls out to him and Reid skids to a stop, spinning, drawing his blade—which goes limp in his wrist when he sees her; he drops to his knees, exhausted, relieved to have finally found one of his sisters.

The Sky Admiral addresses him formally: “Commander Ado, what’s the situation?” she asks, though she already has a good idea.

Reid, however, is too tired to hold his rank, too tired to stand and salute his older sister as he should. “Mom and Dad are dead, Sarah too. Someone in the guard has taken over, turned them against us. A friend warned me, but couldn’t help any more than that. They’re being coerced forcefully. The guards.” He does not try to hide his grief. He is barely more than a boy.

“And the Archmage?” The Archmage Ado, that is, the 13-year-old Mara. Once the second-youngest of the Ado children, now the youngest.

“I thought she’d be with you,” Reid mumbles.

Eri frowns and slips her sabers back into their scabbards. “They blew up my ship,” she says quietly. “They’re not fooling around here, Reid.”

“I know.”

“We need to find Mara. Now.”

Their sister is, however, in far more dire straights than either of them realize.

66. (Brothers and Sisters)

2006-10-10T13:07:00.000-05:00

Part One: Insurrection (Reid)

He runs, boots clunking clumsily against the polished-wood floor. A left, and a right, and another right, peeking his head into this room or that with as much quickness as he can muster. He is Reid Ado, and for the last ten minutes he has been the king of the sprawling city of Cal Aeros; eleven minutes or so ago he was only the heir. His skin is fair, his hair is black, and his eyes are a shade of blue that would make one think they’re artificially colored. He is of moderate height, but lanky in build, all arms and legs and awkward angles; from between his shoulder blades sprout two wings, black and feathered like a raven’s.

He runs, because he is now the king, and because somewhere behind him, somewhere above him in the tree-made-palace, men are hunting him. He can hear them shouting as they fight the guards--what few are still loyal--tooth and nail. Those guards told Reid to run, to flee, to find his sisters and get to safety. He knows they'll be dead soon, outnumbered and nearly caught unaware.

He runs, because he does not want his reign to end in his early demise. He is, after all, only twenty-two.

Someone behind him shouts his name—an unfamiliar voice—and Reid dives into the first door he comes across, narrowly avoiding the rain of arrows that shower the corridor behind him. He springs to his feet and kicks the door closed, bars it, turns—and realizes that he has trapped himself.

Reid curses under his breath. He also realizes that he is not alone: cowering in the corner of the room, clearly aware of the events of only a mere fifteen minutes ago, are two of his parents’ younger servants—a boy and a girl, no more than thirteen. Mara’s age. Their wings are like those of a sea-gull, white with grey tips.

There is a pounding on the door behind him. He scans the walls wordlessly, hoping beyond hope that somewhere there is a door that he did not see, but hope is lost as only smooth walls greet him.

“Prince Reid!” the male servant hisses, pointing. The door behind him is splintering now. Reid closes his eyes, forces himself to concentrate. Something slides across the floor to his feet—a sword! The servant children look at him hopefully. It’s an old blade—the Angelis know how long it’s been forgotten in this one-of-many rooms in the palace-tree—but Reid picks it up deftly and whips it out of its scabbard.

The child, as children often are, was wrong about Reid's title. In addition to no longer being the prince, but the king, his official title of Commander Ado, of the Royal Guard. Like his siblings, other than poor, poor Sarah, Reid was not allowed to simply languish in the royal riches. Instead, he was asked to choose his role. Like both Eri and Mara, he went military—and, as Ados typically do, excelled and rapidly climbed the ranks.

The attackers come, the door shattering with the force of their axes, and Reid runs—toward them now, blade held high. He’s outnumbered, but they don’t expect him to be armed. The first attacker goes down, spraying blood from where his head should be, and Reid slips his sword through the armor of the next, pushing him back into his compatriots, and everywhere is a mess of tangled wings, floating feathers, and splattered blood. The attackers—he doesn’t know how many, exactly, he’s up against—slip on the pooled blood and fall, and Reid stands over them, sword swinging. His attacks are clumsy—he is the Commander because of his leadership skills, not his prowess with a blade.

But in the end, Reid prevails. He stands over the bodies, panting. The children sprint past him and away, down the corridor. He pays them no mind now—it’s not them the usurpers are after, it’s him.

And his sisters.

Reid slips the sword into his belt and takes all of fifteen seconds to catch his breath. He’s only been the king for twenty minutes—there will be plenty of time to avenge his parents’ death, later, as well as Sarah's. He’s still got Mara and Eri to find.

And so, Reid runs.

65. (Writing Exercise #2 - I'll be doing this more often.)

2006-10-02T10:16:00.000-05:00

There's nothing I can do to convince you that what I'm about to tell you is true. In fact, you'll probably laugh at me and tell me I'm full of shit or that I've read too many comic books.

But it actually happened. I was there. You can see it on the security cameras if you're lucky enough to find a copy. Go to the First National Bank in L.A. and look at the floor if you don't believe me--under the rug, where barely you can see the palest of red splotches, resiliant even after hours and hours of scrubbing. You'd better do it soon, 'cause they're just gonna replace those tiles eventually.

It started out like any other bank robbery. There we all are, standing around in line, tired and bored and frustrated when these two fucks--let's call them Big Fuck and Little Fuck--no, wait, I'm going to get tired of dropping the F-bomb before I'm done writing this down, so let's call them Big Boy and Little Man--slam the doors closed and draw a couple of huge-ass handcannons from their pants, fire two off at the cieling, and start yelling. We all drop to the floor.

Except this one guy. This... man. Six foot two, African descent, broad-shouldered and smooth-domed. He just stands there staring at them. "Put the guns down and walk away," he says, his voice a kind of low rumble.

"I said get on the fuckin' floor," Little Man screams. Women scream. I can't remember, maybe I screamed too. "Or I'll blow your fuckin' brains out!" See what I mean about getting tired of the F-bomb?

The man just keeps standing there, hands at his side, staring at the smaller of the two idiots as he striders cockily over--and then it happens. Little Man shoots him nearly point-blank right in the chest. Right in the heart. I swear his blood splattered all over me when the bullet came tearing out his back. The man shakes from the impact, his right shoulder rolls back, he stumbles back a couple of steps, eyes squeezed closed--

And then he balances, and opens his eyes, and you can see on the camera all his muscles go real tense.

"The fuck?" I hear Big Boy mutter, his voice surprisingly high-pitched for such a large body.

Little Man's got these huge eyes now--they're all we can see with the ski-mask or whatever--and his hand's shaking. Then--BAM BAM BAM BAM--he's panicking and squeezing the trigger over and over and emptying his entire gun at the man, and each one hits with sickening accuracy, most hitting him in the chest and stomach, one clipping him in the forehead, all tearing out the back and spraying blood all over anyone behind him--and all this time the bloody man is striding quickly across what little space is left between him and the gunman, barely phased by the gunfire, muscles rippling--

He grabs Little Man by the throat--he's riddled with bullet holes and it doesn't even phase him--and hurls him across the room but by now I'm not even watching the crooks, I'm staring at this big man's back, soaked in blood, and I can see with my own disbelieving eyes the exit wounds closing themselves up. Little Man crumples in a heap against the wall.

"Fuck me!" Big Boy shouts, then roars as he sprints across the room at his partner's assailant--but the black man grabs both of Big Boy's wrists and pulls down and twists--and I can hear the bone snapping and crunching even over Big Boy's screams of agony--and now he's on his knees in front of the man, our defender, our hero, tearing flowing out of his big, stupid, ski-masked eyes--and the hero wraps one hand around his other fist and slams them, together, across Big Boy's face. The crook goes down without a sound.

Hero just stands there for a moment, panting, grinding his teeth. His wounds--even the one on his face, which tore half his head off--are already closed and he just looks like some big dude in a badly fake-bloodied Haloween costume. His muscles relax. He runs a a hand over his smooth dome of a head.

And he walks out the doors and away.

The rest of us just stare as he leaves. We don't get up off the floor, out of sheer shock and disbelief, for at least a whole minute.

Hero's blood is still all over the floor. The janitorial staff can't clean it up. There has been talk about destroying the surveilance tapes. I bet the Feds are involved. But it really happened. I know you won't--don't--can't believe me, but it really happened.

64. (Let's try again.)

2006-09-29T13:59:00.000-05:00

"Cold as hell out here," I mutter. She looks at me funny and smiles.

"It's not so bad. It's your own fault for picking such a snow-logged post."

I'm standing knee-deep in the white stuff, smoking one of my last cigars, bundled up on every inch of my body. "They'll be here soon?" I say over the roar of the wind as it whips more snow in my face.

"Probably." Her dress isn't moved by the wind at all, nor is her hair.

I squint and wipe my goggles. "Well, I'm sorry it had to happen this way. I miss you."

"I miss you too."

I shoulder my pulse rifle. Already I can see the lights of their flyers on the horizon. I key in the sequence necessary to heat up the internal workings of the weapon and turn away from her, towards the door leading into the bunker which I am the only guardian. "I'm doing the right thing."

"Your team was green." This isn't something she'd normally say, but it doesn't surprise me. She's not really here. "Young. They'll live another day thanks to you. All you have to do is give them time."

"It just means giving up on you." She's silent now. I don't look back. I say, "Good bye, Miranda. I love you."

A single line of footprints in the snow follow me to the door of the barracks. As I turn around to close and seal the hatch, giving those poor recruits a few extra seconds, I see no one standing in the snow where she'd been.

It only takes the beings in the flyers twenty minutes to find the bunker. I give them hell before I die.

63. (With a ring on my finger and joy in my heart.)

2006-09-25T08:31:00.000-05:00

Kinda a mushy title, yeah?

Well it's fitting, 'cause I'm married now. Nyah.

62. (I.)

2006-07-27T17:37:00.000-05:00

GOT.
A.
JOB.
MOTHERFUCKERS.

61. (59 days.)

2006-07-25T14:26:00.000-05:00

COFFEE ON A HOT DAY.
It's at least 95 out there and here I am, AC'd, working, typing, "working", and drinking a scalding-hot Starbucks (no, I don't prefer it over other coffees it's just what's available downstairs).

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME.

60. (My...)

2006-06-04T18:22:00.000-05:00

My kingdom for a soda. Or change for a ten.

Which...

Would only go to acquiring said soda.

Attention passengers, we've entered hour 6 of our 9 hour flight. Take refuge in the fact that your shift at the library is more than halfway done.

But that soda is still, like, totally 3 hours away.

God damn it.

59. (Fiction, life, and dreams.)

2006-05-25T19:24:00.000-05:00

So, I just compiled and sent a friend of mine (currently in Europe for the Summer) a copy of all the fiction I've written that I like enough to consider representative of my work. It's 57 pages long, single-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman with 14-point Georgia titles and 12-point Georgia section seperations in one of the stories. It spans three years worth of short stories, from January 2003 to May 2006. It contains:

Need (currently unpublished on the intarwebs)
City
Lost
House
Names
The Blind Bravery of Thieves

And then, on a whim, I printed myself out a copy, three-whole-punched the whole thing, and put it in a binder.

Holding it in my hands gave me chills.

Ω

-Jayson Marsh, writer extraordinaire

PS: if you'd like a copy, I have a digital back-up saved in my GMail that I could easily forward to you. Just let me know.

That is, if there's anyone who actually reads this thing.

58. (Neil Gaiman - From Anansi Boys.)

2006-05-09T20:32:00.000-05:00

"Er. You're bored with talking to me now, and you're going to let me pass unhindered," he told the dragon, with as much conviction as he could muster.

"Gosh. Good try. But I'm afraid not," said the dragon, enthusiastically. "Actually, I'm going to eat you."

"You aren't scared of limes, are you?" asked Charlie, before remembering that he'd given the lime to Daisy.

The creature laughed, scornfully. "I," it said, "am frightened of nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing," it said.

Charlie said, "Are you extremely frightened of nothing?"

"Absolutely terrified by it," admitted the Dragon.

"You know," said Charlie, "I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?"

"No," said the Dragon, uncomfortably, "I most definately would not."

There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. "That," he said, "was much to easy."

(pages 303 and 304)

57. (Blah.)

2006-04-10T08:27:00.000-05:00

Had Italian sausage in my dinner last night.
It's kicking me in the ass.
Or rather, the gut.

Haiku with a broken first line.

56. (Languages are funny things.)

2006-02-10T15:14:00.000-06:00

I was in the coffee shop just a few minutes ago, buying a soda with a borrowed dollar (which is two separate rants for another day, one on my addiction to soda, the other on borrowing money). Behind me, as I bought my Cherry Coke were two conversations: one, a trio of Japanese exchange students, one of which was speaking in rapid Japanese; two, a man, speaking in English, with a high-pitched voice.

I could hear them as I was buying my drink, but when I turned around, the man was speaking in a high-pitched language I had never heard before, and the Japanese girl was silent.

Only nothing had changed at all.

55. (Hey look, it's crap!)

2006-02-08T23:27:00.000-06:00

54. (Your Eyes are the Color Of)

2006-02-07T23:01:00.000-06:00

Posted a story in nonrevision. Updated things around here and there a little bit.

The story... it's kinda out there, and kinda contraversial. It's for my fiction-writing class. The issue addressed is a heavy one, but it's one that I think is of particular importance in America--and the world--today.

The basic thing that it is trying to say can all be boiled down to a few single theses, if you will:
1) Color-based racism only runs skin deep.
2) Given the proper influence, people are capable of hating anybody.
3) Racism defies logic; to believe that someone is inferior to you based not on actions, but on appearance and background, does not make any sense.

ANYways... It's there--and it's still a first draft, of course, which is due in class tomorrow. At the end of the semester it'll probably get tossed, in full-drafted form, into deviantart. If you read it: keep an open mind.

J out.

53. (Free and legal, I swear.)

2006-01-17T23:44:00.000-06:00

Okay, ten minutes. Go!

I'm sitting at work and I have absolutely nothing to do and all I want to do right now is go home and relax. School started up again today, joy of joys, but I think that most of my classes this semester will be okay. Nothing like the last two--nay, three--nay, four semesters, in which I had super-irregular attendance because--guess what--I just don't give a damn about school. I really don't, and nothing anyone has done has managed to change my mind. But, it doesn't matter, after this Summer when I pick up my last electives I'll be done and graduated and off to find a 'real' job in the 'real world' and marry my real fiancee. September 22. If you're reading this and I haven't told you, it's probably because we haven't spoken or whatever in a while, or that I just don't want to talk to you, or that I've (forgive me) forgotten that you're someone who would like to know. Well, now you do. I'm getting married to my girlfriend-cum-fiancee Candyce on (hopefully, if the date is still open in a couple weeks) September 22 of this year. A date chosen for several specific reasons, one of which being the season, the other of which being that it puts it safely beyond the reach of school. By that point, I'll be done, which is why I'm stressing and pushing to finish up by the end of the summer. Were I not getting married, I could laze away an extra semester or two and be fine (I'm not complaining, honey, just making a comparison) but on the downside I would feel even more indebted to my incredibly giving parents (I'm sorry we haven't paid rent in a while, Mom and Dad) and that, in the end, would be far worse than stressing out a semester.

Five minutes.

I consider myself something of a compulsive person. I stack books here at the library to a certain, measured height. I pick my nails without realizing it. I soap up in the shower in the same order (arms, chest, stomach, manlybits, back, legs) every time. I have routines. I have systems. And they work. And sometimes I slip out of them or whatever and it's okay, honestly it's no big deal. So I'm a little compulsive, but I'm not crazy. Even if I do seperate all my WoW (World of Warcraft) loot into seperate bags (vendor junk, quest items, food/pet food, leather/minerals, crafted goods) and move said items around while getting pwned (poned) by whatever I'm fighting. I'm picky. Can't help it.

Two minutes.

I'm off work soon, and then this writing will end. I'm writing, literally, for the sake of it. No purpose. Just whatever comes out of my brain and out my hands.

Less than a minute.

And soon this writing will end. Tomorrow I start my first real Fiction Writing class. I'll be sure that stuff gets put in a place where people not around me all the time can read it, either here or on DA or in NR.

And time's up.

52. (Where?)

2006-01-16T10:52:00.000-06:00

I need to start writing in here again. As it is, I really haven't had anything to say.

Um...

Just say 'no'?

51. (I'm not putting any text in this entry, I'm just filling up the title bar. Why? Because I can, and I want to see what it looks like.)

2005-12-20T09:40:00.000-06:00

50. (Fifty.)

2005-12-01T23:31:00.000-06:00

We're coming up on the bad times. Reports are due. People are getting stressed. The outflow of books is beginning to reverse itself. Finals Week is upon is. But no one gives a fuck about your final paper. We don't care if you've got to study. You've got books to sort, so get your ass in gear.

Finals Week! The end of a semester! The end of an era--an era of laziness, sloth, and ineptitude! We enter these last weeks of 2005 with the knowledge that not all of us will make it out the other side. You don't know fear until you've seen a man crushed to death under the weight of a cartload of bound periodicals of ridiculous size.

Finals Week seperates the wills from the can'ts. The men from the boys. Them women from the girls. Finals Week tells us who's going to make it here at the library, and let me tell you, it's not going to be pretty. Men will cry. Women will go into hysterics. Hands will bleed and wrists will ache from the sheer number of books brought in, magnetized, barcoded, discharged, stamped, sorted, and ordered.

Finals Week. The bad times. I'll see you on the other side, soldier.

49. (So what was I saying?)

2005-11-28T21:17:00.000-06:00

So anyways, like I was saying earlier I've started drinking coffee in larger quantities. I used to be satisfied with one of the usual coffee mugs we have at the house, or a Starbucks "tall" (small, to you non-corporate-shills), but now I've moved up to two or three house mugs or a Starbucks "grande" (medium). It's not that I need more coffee in order to be satisfied with the experience, it's that I've gotten a higher endurance for caffeine and can enjoy the java in higher volumes without getting all shaky from overcaffeination.

I used to freak girls (and my mother) out by bending my elbows backwards. I'm a little double-jointed, so they bend a little bit past where most people stop. If I put all my weight on my hands, it's really noticeable.

I have really big veins in my arms, and can make them stick out really far with a little effort.

I dyed my hair red once. I liked it better than the blonde, but it's such a hassle. I don't know if I could be bothered to do it again, and even if I did it would only be a semi-permanent job like the last one, so that after a while it would fade out instead of creating a red line in my hair where the dye stops as the hair grows longer. It's pretty long as it is: tied back in a pony-tail it reaches to about the horizontal apex of my shoulder-blades.

I'm wearing a sweater that I've only worn once before. It's very classy.

48. (IT GO'N RAIN.)

2005-11-24T21:56:00.000-06:00

At my parents', where we celebrate Christmas every year, the tree is silver with pink-and-white lights.

When my mom said they were going to use that one, I just stared at her and protested, "No."

It didn't phase her. So now, on Christmas morning, I get to open presents with a brightly shining metal monstrosity with vividly pink lights.

Lovely.

(Yes, I'm whining about it. Shush.)

47. (Shit-ton.)

2005-11-17T21:47:00.000-06:00

I've graduated from tall to grande.
I've moved up from medium to dark.
I've grown out of huge amounts of sugar.
I'm
Holy shit what the hell was that. The caffeine must be getting to me.

The story behind this: I was writing up a post about coffee and how I drink it in larger quanities with less in it than I used to, when my darling fiancee MSN'd me this image. Already hopped up on java, I immediately lost my train of thought and any caring I had towards the post. Which makes the whole thing true--yes, ladies and gentlemen who didn't already know, I'm Hulk Hogan. Sorry I've kept it hidden for so long.

Okay, so maybe that last part's not true. It's not exactly been hidden, after all, what with that show on VH1 and all. OH YEAH!!!

46. (Why?)

2005-11-16T23:41:00.000-06:00

My eyes are itchy as hell now.

I just spent three or so hours proofreading the critical work of my peers. It's something I quite enjoy, I just wish I hadn't allocated only this night to do it, and so late.

I'm so damn tired. So damn tired. So damn tired.

45. (Forsaking rules for fun and profit.)

2005-11-10T22:16:00.000-06:00

he reached up and grabbed the book off the top shelf straining on his toes to reach it

he smiled at me as i entered the aisle searching for a book on modern biblical study why they put these books in the oldest part of the library i don't know but what worries me more is the glass floor

why glass it's aesthetically pleasing yeah but it doesn't seem safe even if it is several inches thick

how are you doing he asked me smiling he reached up and grabbed hte book off the top shelf straining on his toes to reach it i said i'm fine how are you i asked

he told me he's had better days reached up grabbed strained on his toes i've never seen you around here before he said and i'm here all the time

i told him he couldn't be here all the time the library is not open all the time i felt really confused i kneeled down on the floor the book i wanted was on the bottom shelf and in the old parts of the library the bottom shelf is only half an inch off of the concrete

the concrete felt warm to the touch i felt confused

reached up strained on his toes fell

all the time he said reached up to get his book

you must get excellent grades i told him if you're here that much

he just grinned down at me strained on his toes why is the floor made of glass why is that panel of the tiling covered in re-enforced with wood planks

the concrete on the first floor felt warm to the touch i could see his shadow above me the glass floor of the second story is the glass roof of the bottom level i was on the bottom level kneeling to pick a book off the bottom shelf i could see him through the cloudy glass above me and am curious i could have sworn that there was no one up there when i came down through it to get here the concrete is warm to the touch here and i don't know why it doesn't make any sense

i went up the stairs and found him standing there reaching up straining on his toes to get his book standing on the panel of the glass floor cieling with the wooden planks supports

maybe you just didn't see me he says i say maybe but i come here a lot too

he just smiled reached strained grabbed his book

my name's michael i told him aaron he replied

i saw him from down below but he couldn't have been there couldn't have i came down through there the bottom two levels of the old wing of the library are underground i came in from the third floor walked right past where he was saw nothing came down to the warm to the touch concrete looked up saw his shadow

the glass cieling floor echoes creaks groans when you walk on it i walked on it myself and heard it

watch out for the cracks he tells me

how did he get up there i would have heard him i would have heard him walk i would have seen him standing there reaching straining to grab his book but he was not there when i came down he was not there i would have seen him

what i ask

the cracks he says sometimes they just open up beneath you reaching straining on his toes all his weight on a single piece of glass one foot by one foot with caulk holding it to the next eight tiles in a square making floor cieling out of glass why why would they do such a thing it doesn't make any sense it's not safe it doesn't make any sense he can't have slipped by i'm here all the time and i know what it sounds like when someone walks in here the old wing of the library is noisy even when you try to sneak around

i'm kneeling on the bottom level glass cieling above me no shadow the concrete floor is warm to the touch i'm standing on the second floor alone there is no one here there is no one here you're not here you're not here you can't be here

the cracks he says the cracks where this panel broke it's quite safe now they re-enforced better late than never huh

i'm alone here i'm alone here i'm alone here

they won't let me leave he continues not put-off by my ramblings by my shakings by the fact that i tripped i slipped and bumped into him passed through him he's not even really there i'm voiding my bladder in my pants i'm so afraid so afraid the cracks it's like a rope is holding me to them and i can't break free so afraid stuck here

felt so cold when i passed through him he's not real he's not real you're not real he's not real you're not real

re-enforced glass panel because it broke once newspaper says it broke just a rumor man killed aaron mitchelson library staff library dean says no one ever died here just a rumor just an urban legend you're not real not real not real not real

i'm alone on the second story cold space in the air over the cracks in the glass floor cieling over the warm to the touch concrete i'm alone on the bottom level with his shadow above me

now whenever i go down there i start shaking always see his shadow but he's never there he's never there air always cold concrete floor always warm where he died he's not there he's not there but his shadow is always is always

44. (One of my favorite authors.)

2005-11-07T20:16:00.000-06:00

"Why do you have to do this?" the girl asked me. "Why don't you just take the money and buy something you like? What's the good of thirty Big Macs?"

I shook my head.

My wife explained, "We're sorry, really. But there weren't any bakeries open. If there had been, we would have attacked a bakery."

That seemed to satisfy them. At least they didn't ask any more questions.Then my wife ordered two large Cokes from the girl and paid for them.

"We're stealing bread, nothing else," she said. The girl responded with a complicated head movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She was probably trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea how she felt.

My wife then pulled a ball of twine out of her pocket--she came equipped--and tied the three [employees] to a post as expertly as if she were sewing on buttons. She asked if the cord hurt, or if anyone wanted to go to the toilet, but no one said a word. I wrapped the gun in the blanket, she picked up the shopping bags, and out we went. The customers at the table were still asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep?

We drove for a half hour, found an empty parking lot by a building, and pulled in. There we ate hamburgers and drank our Cokes. I sent six Big Macs down to the cavern of my stomach, and she ate four. That left twenty Big Macs in the back seat. Our hunger--the hunger that had felt as if it could go on forever--vanished as the dawn was breaking. The first light of the sun dyed the building's filthy walls purple and made a giant SONY BETA ad tower glow with painful intensity. Soon the whine of highway truck tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The American Armed Forces radio was playing cowboy music. We shared a cigarette. Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder.

"Still, was it necessary for us to do this?" I asked.

"Of course it was!" With one deep sigh, she fell asleep against me. She felt as soft and as light as a kitten.

Haruki Murakami - "The Second Bakery Attack" (Translated by Jay Rubin in The Elephant Vanishes)

43. (Little.)

2005-11-03T21:09:00.000-06:00

It's the little things in life that really make my day worth it. I mean, I live a pretty good living right now, honestly. Sure, I'm exhausted and depressed (both because of damned damned damned school), but the coffee shop downstairs (at the library, in which I work) now accepts debit cards. No longer will I have to bum a buck-fifty off of one of my co-workers in order to get my tall Starbucks house with caramel syrup and three to four little cups of half-and-half. This makes working until midnight so much easier, it's not even funny.

Thank you, The Bookmark, for making my evening. You're the best ever. Except for my sweetheart, who's the best by default.

[This post brought to you by Perfect Spelling--make that spellchecker waste its time!]

42. (Naaaa, nanananananaaa, naaa, na na, na, na na, naaaaa.)

2005-11-02T23:32:00.000-06:00

My love of Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari is competely and totally motherfucking endless.

41. (Tired.)

2005-10-20T23:28:00.000-05:00

My asthma kicked back in recently. The meds I'm on for it now, the inhaler specifically, are like a kick of adrenaline in the downstairs bits. Seriously, my heart'll start pounding, and my hands'll start shaking, and it gets hard to concentrate.

It's an interesting experience, to say the least. What I find most curious about it is that when I get really sleepy, all those things happen. Well, not the heart pounding.

Okay, so maybe it's not so similar after all.

40. (Indication.)

2005-10-04T14:38:00.000-05:00

Nonrevision.

Go. (Or, if you'd rather, click the "Other Side" link on the right side of the page.)

39. (SomniaIn.)

2005-10-04T00:02:00.000-05:00

Insomnia's a funny thing. I'm not talking about the long-term kind, I'm talking about the pop-up-and-punch-you-in-the-face kind.

Seriously. I was sleepy and tired and yawny pretty much until I got into bed. And now I'm wide awake, playing Kingdom of Loathing past midnight, despite the fact that I have to get up tomorrow. Oh well, I did decently on my midterm today so I've earned a little stay-up-and-go-insane time.

I really wish I was sleepy again, though.

...

You're fighting a Quiet Healer

This is a quiet girl who is probably the last survivor of some ancient race of extremely quiet, extremely Magical people. After being improbably rescued from either the government or some evil empire by the Protagonist, she quietly stands by his side, quietly casting healing spells on him. He's not here to protect her now, though...

You get the jump on her.

You work up a Thrust-Smack. You hit for 90 damage. BOOF! WHAM! BARF! WHAMMO! ZAP! SMACK! ZAP! WHAM! WHAM! BIFF!You win the fight!

You gain 105 Meat.

You acquire an item: soft green echo eyedrop antidote

You gain 6 Fortitude.
You gain 6 Mysteriousness.
You gain 12 Roguishness.
You gain a Moxie point!

...

So yeah, I'm a little out of it now. That's KoL, by the way--one of the later adventures, in fact. One of my favorites.

Still not sleepy. I wish I was, really do, because I have to get up and go to class in the morning. Tomorrow is going to suck quite a bit.

Why am I even writing this in here? This is just random crap that pops out of my head. If you're looking for something relevant, don't bother reading any further in this entry. There's not going to be anything intelligent in it. Just my usual rambling bullshit.

Seriously.

Need to sleep.

This is getting ridiculous.

Seriously.

The thing is--as wide awake as I am, I'm totally tired at the same time. It's like two halves of my body are fighting each other for supremacy: the tired half, which has worked all day, and the awake half, which hasn't seen midnight out of bed in a while.

...I wonder if that's normal? Or am I just weird?

Blah blah blah. I'm seriously just spouting off random things that pop into my head now.

I want to buy and play We Love Katamari. Oh yeah.

I want a lot of things, though, and there are things that are more important than a videogame, no matter how insanely fun/funny/awesome said game is.

Hmm....

Still typing, aren't I? That means I'm not in bed.

Alright, got an image in my head. Hang on, kiddos, it's story time.

______________________________________________

The prince's concubine gave birth to a son today. The city was up and about in celebration. It's been too many months since something like this has happened, and the tension just seemed to... snap. In all the hubub not many people noticed the arrival of the Wanderer. He came in as he always does, materializing out of the desert, wearing those heavy, brown robes and black goggles. Average height, average build. The robes hide his skin-color, the goggles hide his eyes.

We don't really know anything about him. He comes in once a month and buys in bulk enough food to feed a family for a month, as well rolls and rolls of parchment. I wonder what he uses it for.

People tell stories about them--we're not sure how many are actually true. The only one I've actually confirmed--and it is my job, as the Royal Librarian--I saw with my own eyes. Three of the royal guards, fresh off of a drinking binge, tried to unmask the Wanderer. Before anyone could stop him, he broke the first guard's arm, slung his long rifle around and emptied a shell into the chest of the second, smashed in the head of the third with the butt, and buried a dagger in the neck of the first while he was clutching his freshly-broken arm.

He bought his things and vanished into the desert within the hour. The next month, when he returned, he was met by an armed contingent of guards, led by Magistrate Chin. We expected a fight. Instead, Chin simply fined the man and apologized on behalf of the late guards who attacked him. The tension between them that day could have smothered you.

They say he's untouchable. They say he's a ghost, a traveller from one of the long-dead nomadic tribes of the desert. They say he's a hero for standing up to the guards. They say he's a monster who hides his face to avoid scaring away women and children.

I say they're idiots. I say he's just a man who can't stand living around people. I say he's not alone out there.

But people like me say a lot of things.

______________________________________________

Still not ready for bed, though. I'm getting tired of sitting here, but there's not really anything else to do at the moment. Keep playing KoL, I guess. I'm going to stop writing now, though, so have a nice night.

38. (Hoo!)

2005-09-20T23:00:00.000-05:00

I haven't got anything to say today.

I saw an owl on my way to school. As I started to cross the bike-bridge past Berry, it swooped past me. I slammed on my breaks and swore. Startled, it flew off.

I've been trying all day to attach some meaning to it, but I've decided not to. It doesn't need a meaning. It was simply a wonder.

37. (A preview.)

2005-09-11T21:17:00.000-05:00

The following text is raw--uneditted, unproofread, unspellchecked. Please forgive any spelling or grammar errors, as I honestly don't give a damn in this stage of the writing process.

...from "City" (working title), a short story currently in the works, by Jayson Marsh:

There are fires. The smoke rises up out of the rubble, blocking the view of the city below. A city destroyed, a city under siege by itself, a city in ruins. Behind me the blades of the rescue helicopter tear through the air, but my mind’s not on them. I’m looking down from the roof of the skyscraper I work–worked, probably–in, wind in my hair, tie flying to-and-fro, tears gathering in my eyes. Someone behind me is yelling at me to get on the copter.

The chopper takes off without me. The pilot is obviously in a hurry. I let it leave without protest. I have something I have to do first.

I take my last look at the blue sky, and I remember sandy-blonde hair. I remember crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. I remember her favorite blue dress. I remember how her skin felt against my fingers, how it smelt, how it tasted. It’s a long staircase down, so I’m given a lot of time to remember. And a lot of time to think.

The first quakes hit us at nine in the morning, just as the workday was starting. I’d watched Elise put her class plan together the night before, so I know she would have just been starting teaching her kids their math lessons. The initial shockwaves weren’t that bad, and they probably went into emergency-drill mode and ducked under their desks or unto doorframes. I can imagine them just peeking out after the all-clear when the second wave hit.

I don’t need to imagine the screams, or the sound of the ceiling falling in, or bodies and debris hitting the ground as people scurried for shelter. I heard all of that in my office. I remember shaking like some dumb kid who hasn’t lived in. I remember watching Caroline’s arm break when the monitor tipped off her desk and landed on it.

I remember putting her on the helicopter, alive. I have only a vague idea of how many days later that was. Five? Six? A whole week? We were trapped inside for so long that I didn’t see the blue sky for days. I don’t know when the next time I’ll see it is.

Ground-level. I was right: the black smoke from the fires has completely blotted out the sky above me. I squint, and rub my eyes. The city is deathly quiet around me. I can’t see anyone. The street is peppered with rubble large and small, the remains of cars without wheels or, I’m sure, stereos. Here and there bodies stand out amid the grey, mostly grey themselves with splashes of the blue or the yellow or the green of their clothing or, more often, the red of their blood. Five or six or however many days ago it was, I might have wretched. Now I’m too hollow to bring anything to the surface.

I head north, towards the school. It’s going to be a long walk, but if I’m going to find my wife that’s where I should start. The helicopter pilot told us that even the rescue services were having trouble getting into most buildings, and there weren’t any rendevous places for survivors to meet up. There was no real way on or off the island, really, so rescue crews had to fly in and out. The going was slow, but they were getting people out as quick as they could. We all heard the helicopter with the loudspeaker on the first day telling people to stay where they were, to avoid wandering around the ruins, to stay inside and barricade all doors and windows until someone could get there to help them.

I wonder if they heard that same helicopter at the school? I know the faculty has always had a back-up food store in the basement, in case something like this ever happened; teachers are smart–I’m sure Elise and her coworkers stayed there, waiting for help.
And yes, I realize how much of a fool I am for trying to do this myself, instead of letting the professionals take care of it. Damn my hero complex–I can’t help myself, honestly. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, even if she made it out safe and sound. I have to do something, even if it’s pointless.

I walk for hours. I hit sections of the city that are so collapsed in on themselves that I can’t tell what direction I’m facing. As the black cloud above me starts to grow darker, as the sun goes down against a blue sky I can’t see, I realize that I am totally, helplessly lost. It’s amazing how different a grid-like city-structure can seem so foreign when it’s half-buried under the buildings that used to form the grin. I hunker down for the night under a halfway-collapsed wall, sheltered from the winds that come rushing between the remaining high-rises. It’s late fall. The nights are very cold.

I only manage to sleep a couple of hours.

36. (Dream a little dream?)

2005-09-04T23:19:00.000-05:00

555-4635. No. 555-4626. No. 555-4646. No. Damn it, fingers, dial. Wait--no, damn, that's a pound sign. I hate this stupid fucking phone. Dial. Dial. C'mon, please. Heart's beating. Fast. Like, seriously beating--damn, damn, damn. Why are these buttons so small? Mom's number is so much easier to dial, for some reason. Dad's always gives me problems. Come on, come on--there, got it.

Dial-tone. Dial-tone. Dial-tone. Come on, old man, pick up.

"Hello?"

And everything comes rushing back to me. Dominique's plane arriving. Winning that car in the contest. Selling it when my mom made me. The storm. Hiding in the basement. My house getting torn to shreds. My aunt's shop being ripped apart. Giving the car money away to help my family. My mother's stupid fucking drama. I'm so tired of it. So I told Dom I'd fly to the UK with her. Just for a few days, to get away from it all. Just for a few days.

And here I am at the airport, desperately trying to get a hold of one of my parents so they don't think I'm dead or something. Why the hell wasn't Mom's phone on? Why the hell are the buttons to small on this stupid thing?

"Where are you?" he asks me, and I find I can't answer right away.

The airport, I tell him.

"Seeing that girlfriend of yours off?"

I tell him she's not my girlfriend. I tell him we're just good friends. He chuckles. And I tell him I'm going away.

"What?"

I tell him I'm getting on the plane with her and flying to Britain. Just for a few days. He asks me if my mother knows. I tell him I couldn't get a hold of her. I tell him I'm sorry I didn't tell them sooner. I tell him a lot of things.

"But just for a few days, right?"

I tell him, right, just for a few days. The plane's boarding now, I continue. I've really got to get going. He tells me he loves me. He tells me Mom feels the same. My hands are shaking. I tell him I love them both, too.

And I hang up the phone and start down the little retractable tunnel thing that leads to the plane. I'm aboard, but I'm still shaking and my heart's still pumping full-throttle. I look down the middle aisle and the plane seems to double, triple in length, twisting and turning.

I'm afraid of flying.

And then Dom's hand is in mine, and she's tugging me into a seat. Our hands end up in my lap. She smiles. I take a deep breath.

It'll just be a few days.

Right?

35. (And now.)

2005-09-01T21:37:00.000-05:00

What if clocks were set on a 25 hour iteration?
What if the years were two months longer?
What if the moon really was made of cheese?
What if concrete floated on water?
What if the sky was violet at mid-day?
What if clouds were made of wood?
What if the nudists were right all along?
What if we're all in Hell, and God's giving us a second chance?
What if God was one of us? Just a stranger on the bus?
What if he was trying to make his way home?
What if we all had photographic memory?
What if books flew on their pages like birds on their wings?
What if windows reflected both ways?
What if light was dark?
What if we didn't have shadows?
What if we are the shadows?
What if we are the reflections?
What if you could put your hand through bricks without harming them?
What if the dolphins rose up and took over?

34. (Changes.)

2005-08-31T23:42:00.000-05:00

As you can see, things have changed around a bit here. Just look to the right.

Things are changing all over. Times are a'changin', as I think the song goes. Life. Love. Everything.

And yeah, I'm being ambiguous on purpose.

Almost done with school. Almost done with other things. Movin' on up, as I think the song goes. Love. Life.

And yeah, I'm being ambiguous because this will start bordering on an 'emotional' post, the kind of post I usually avoid posting here. This isn't for emotion, it's for writing. I'm learning to separate the two.

33. (Someone Else's Text.)

2005-08-30T09:19:00.000-05:00

"In the university the base of the whole academic endeavor has traditionally been the Freshman Composition course, where the student learns to write. Not to write truths that count for him. Not to connect his experience to what he reads and hears about in the classroom, but to master an academic tongue and a manner of footnoting and snipping out other persons' words and rearranging them in a new introduction-body-conclusion form. 'Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em, and then tell 'em what you told 'em.' And that will finish them off. Make sure they will look at your paper to see how many pages it takes up rather than what it says.

"This dehydrated manner of producing writing that is never read is the contribution of the English teacher to the total university."

...from Uptaught, by Ken Macrorie.

32. (To whom it may concern, and may not read this.)

2005-07-28T10:45:00.000-05:00

It's a simple message:

You didn't trust me.
You didn't respect me.
You made me feel obligated into doing something I didn't want to do.

That's not how friendships work.

Between friends, there is trust.
Between friends, there is respect.
Between friends, there is no obligation.

31. (I dream of.)

2005-07-27T08:31:00.000-05:00

There's a film.

It's by a man named Falsburger. He's released several in a series, all short, experimental films, but all featuring the same motif. In fact, they could all be mistaken for one another. Short flashes of different images, some of them hard to identify. Like Dog Star Man, only more coherent. I'm watching one of them.

Dog, cat, spinning red glass thing, lake. The lake is the most identifiable--it's a flat water surface with light fog trailing along the top of it. Probably from England. Small children, fur, metal gears, clockwork, lake. More fog this time. Something ripples on the surface. A car, a highway, dog, cat, spinning red thing (somewhat less out of focus now, it looks like part of a wind-chime). Lake. Distinctive ripples.

By now, the film has taken over the whole of my vision. I'm not watching it, I'm experiencing it. It's everywhere and everything.

Red glass wind-chime (yes), hanging from a suburban porch. Lake. Something dark bobs on the surface. Clouds, stars, sky, dog, cat, small children. Lake, same dark bobbing thing, slightly taller. Car, clouds, cat, child, dog, fur, light, light, light, burning suburban house, shattered wind-chime. Lake.

Something is rising from the surface, a dark, mannish figure in dark rags. Maybe. The next flash of the lake is clear, ripple-free, but then the one after that is completely shrouded in thick fog except for the dark, slowly-approaching figure.

I've seen this film before. There never was a lake in it, much less a dark, sinister figure coming at me.

30. (I.)

2005-07-25T09:39:00.000-05:00

I should be making more of an effort to write in here. Honestly, though, I just don't feel like I can be knackered with it lately. It's summer vacation, after all. I'm lazy.

My mind should be sufficiently invigorated once school starts again in August. The problem then becomes time.

29. (Non-non-fiction.)

2005-07-22T15:06:00.000-05:00

He came barging into our house at precisely 7:00 pm. Dark blonde pony-tail, blue-grey eyes, short and slim and generally of small build. I was disturbed slightly by how worried, annoyed, angered, and slightly-crazy the young man seemed. I was slightly more disconcerted by the fact that he barged in via not a door or window or something functional like that, but through thin air itself. I was even more freaked out by the fact that he was me.

I looked myself over. I looked right back at me, and tried to catch my breath. We looked at ourselves for a while. We were both pretty confused about the whole situation I seemed to be in.

"What happened?" I asked myself.

"I don't really know," I replied.

"Am I real?" Obviously this was getting a little too confusing for my sleep-addled mind.

"Of course I am. The question is, am I real?"

"That's who I meant. Me."

"That's who I meant. Me."

This was all getting rather silly. "Hang on," I said to myself. And then I turned everything I said red.

"See, this is a lot more convenient," I said. "Thanks for making the change."

"Any time," I replied. "No, want to talk about why I'm here? The me who just appeared in thin air, I mean. Me."

"The convenience of the red lettering has its limits, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"A better question would be how I did the coloring thing in the first place. I mean, it seems a little odd to talk in red text."

I sighed and buried my face in my hands. Attaching such a color to my speech was only adding more complications to our ability to communicate. "Look, you've got to be here for a reason--oh, what the hell is this?" My text had turned blue spontaneously.

"I wanted to know if I could do it, too. I guess it makes sense that I can, since I can."

"This is really stupid."

"Yes it is."

"No, I mean--the color, me nancy."

I laughed at myself. "That doesn't even make any sense!" I said. "I sound like caveman!"

"See, this is much better." We were both getting distracted. "How is it that we can do this?"

"I don't really know."

"Oh, now you're just showing off," I snapped. And then, without thinking, I punched my own lights out. As I fell, I hit my head on the table and poofed out of existence in a shower of dark-red text.

"Oh," I muttered, returning things to their normal hue, "Now I've got a mess to clean up."

28. (Changes.)

2005-06-05T18:40:00.000-05:00

There's a train coming down the tracks, and we're on it.

In a matter of days--literally, a matter of days--my life is going to take a drastic turn. For the worse? For the better? Hopefully and most likely the latter.

In two days, on Wednesday (so maybe it's technically three days, but whatever) I'll be hopping on a plane to see my girlfriend in California. A matter of days later, we'll embark on a two-day road-trip back, bringing her to my house, where she will be living with me. Living with me.

It's a change, yes. And, as my parents and friends have yet to get tired of warning me, a big one. A big, huge, change.

And honestly? I'm not afraid. I'm nervous as all hell, but nerves and fear are different things. I'm nervous. But I'm not afraid.

So all you nay-sayers, who keep telling me all these things in a vain attempt to either dissuade me of brace me for the future: stow it. My girl's coming to live with me, and I know--I know I wouldn't have it any other way. There will be problems. There will be issues. There will be clashes.

And I don't care. That's life. That's living. Existence is change. We'll work through it.

Together.

27. (They.)

2005-05-01T21:07:00.000-05:00

1. She's sitting pretty as usual and while I can appreciate this, I no longer wonder what might have been, what could have happened, or what it might have been like. I no longer have a need. She tells me she's nervous, and I do my inexperienced best to tell her it's going to be okay. She should be confident. She's an intelligent woman. I want to tell her that she's a talented writer, but I don't know that because, while I have endless respect for this friend of mine, I have never read anything she's written. No matter what the results of the source of her worry, I would like to change that before the end of the summer.

2. Sitting on the other side of a huge crab dinner, relating a story that I already know to our third. His former shame, his fall, his failure that he looks back on with sadness but confidence that it won't happen again. I understand how he feels, yet I am unable to truly relate. I've been in a similar situation, but not exactly so. I feel awkward, because the third relates far better than I, though I have known the teller far longer than he has. It isn't jealousy on my part, just... Uncertainty. He is one of my best friends and I love him, but while I respect his beliefs I want to grab him and shake him and tell him what he's saying is ridiculous. Thankfully he is one of the good kind. He hasn't forced it on me, and won't.

3. His car is a prettier shape than mine, but I don't envy the color. Forest-green is a hue that should be reserved for living things. His arrogance so far today has slapped me time and again, but he's my brother and I love him, even if he can be a jackass to the people who care the most for him. If he weren't so stubborn, everyone would get along better; but that's not the case, and as such even his girl complains to me that he's got something up his ass. I sometimes wish that so many people didn't turn to me with information like this, especially people in my family. Maybe I should try to stop being so neutral, but I don't think that that would work out, as it's somewhat against my nature.

4. The one, the big one, saved for last because she's the most important. I have to reach back farther for this one. She's pressed and warm against my chest, my arms around her waist, and we watch the television. We laugh and make jokes and I am, suddenly, without doubt. In a matter of months this arrangement won't be temporary anymore. We'll lay around and watch TV whenever we want, instead of this limited time-span. A week is far too short for everything I want to give her. Thankfully, I've given her the rest of my life.

26. (Wigging.)

2005-04-24T21:46:00.000-05:00

As I write this (first typed: "drink this") I'm wigging out on coffee and my eyes feel like they're going to burst out of my skull (first typed: "school"). I'll be noting any large-scale typos (first typed: "typies") as a result, words that aren't supposed to be involved at all but, somehow, get pumped out as I ejaculate this entry into my blog.

Sexual references aside...

I've noticed over the last couple (first typed: "could") of years, since starting college, really, that my typing skills have improved greatly. I blame the internet, textual role-playing, and being a writer. Blame's not a right word for such a description, though.

I took a typing class in highschool, when I was a junior, taught by a man I know as Fish who happens to be a family friend. He has since attended the funerals of both of my father's parents, but that's beside the point. I'm just trying to point out his relation to me, in terms of family-friendliness.

Anyways, he always made it a point that I should type the traditional way: asdfjkl; and its derivatives, reaching up into the exact places where the letters are supposed to be. In a way, this is (first typed: "his") how I type now, four years later, a junior in college. It's hardly anything direct or (first typed: "of") concise.

As I was typing a web-address into (first typed: "inop") the address bar on the top of the IE window (IE at work; I use Firefox at home) I realized that with habit, my hands have started pumping out words that I type all the time. When I type (first typed: "typo") words (originally typed: "works") that my hands are accustomed to inputting--screen-names, passwords, web-addresses (I never--EVER--let the window type it for me)--my hands tend to become (first typed: "be come") very sloppy.

It feels, as I noted a bit ago, like I'm just slopping the words on there. My hands become floppy, random things that splat against the keyboard in no sense of order or plan, just jamming out words and letters as fast as is physically possible. Fish, they feel like. Big, wet fish, slamming against the black (or, at home, grey) plastic that is my keyboard.

I type damn fast. As you can tell from this entry alone, my (first typed: "byt") accuracy is hardly up to snuff. I'm a horribly ugly typer. One day, I'm going to wear out the 'backspace' button on my personal keyboard, and that'll be all she wrote. The day that happens, I'll give up computers forever and just write on a typewriter.

I honestly hope that that day never comes. Sad as it might often sound, the internet has become an integral part of my life.

And it will continue to be so, until June 9th, until she's here, until I don't need it for my own personally happiness and it reverts to being the thing I use to keep myself from getting bored.

And I didn't even note all the typos, just the (first typed: "hte") big ones.

25. (Sometimes.)

2005-04-22T14:55:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you can't make everybody happy.
Sometimes you can't make anybody happy.
Sometimes you make the people you want to be happy sad.
Sometimes you make mistakes.
Sometimes life isn't as smooth as you like.
Sometimes you work it out.
Sometimes you don't.
Sometimes you just go around.
Sometimes you should just shut up.
Sometimes everything isn't enough.
Sometimes good people die.
Sometimes you have to shovel a dead body into a trash can.
Sometimes it's not a dead squirrel.
Sometimes you just want everything to calm down.

And sometimes, you just want to sleep.

24. (I smell like dirt.)

2005-03-31T17:23:00.000-06:00

I skipped my Egyptian and Mesopotamia History class today, for the second (of two) times this week. Sounds kind like a liveJournal starting out, doesn't it?

Don't worry. I'm not here to tell you all about my day and give you a pointless play-by-play that only losers would really be interested in today. I am, however, going to tell you why I skipped the aforementioned class.

Early this month, my grandmother passed away. I inherited a large amount of liquor that probably was her late husband's. I've moved into her bedroom, and my brother has moved from our parents house and into my old room. We had a pool out back, above-ground, with a deck. Said pool cost, like, $1000+ to maintain each summer, and obviously we can't afford that.

So they tore it down. There's a big pile of aluminum and plastic by the curb.

But the deck's the important part. We're tearing it down. Notice how here I used 'we' and before I used 'they' when I used the 'tear down' verb-phrase.

I didn't help with the pool. I'm a lazy ass. But I'm helping with the deck. It involves a lot of swinging of a full-sized sledgehammer. Y'know, the kind you see used in movies when people are working on railroads. A good four feet of shaft, and a heavy steel head. You swing it overhead, or in a wide horizontal circle. Basically, we've been forcing the planks apart and breaking the deck into pieces, pulling up the supports, and smashing the concrete off of them. It's hard, back-breaking work, but it's ridiculously fun. Fun. Yes, physical labor, getting sore (my wrist still hurts) and tired out in the fresh air of a beautiful spring day. To sweat, to labor, to accomplish a goal.

We completely tore the upper deck apart and pulled up some of the supports, but we're not quite done yet. There's still a whole lower deck to smash up and haul off.

So, on top of that pile of aluminum and plastic is now a pile of timber and nails and concrete. I haven't felt this accomplished in months.

23.5. (Things.)

2005-03-30T20:04:00.000-06:00

Sorry for not writing in a while. I've just not had anything to say.

Go here. Rock out.

23. (Fiction.)

2005-02-22T11:16:00.000-06:00

He watches the gold-fish float along, the blue-green light of the aquarium casting its glow on their table. The small, graceful fish vanishes behind her head and his attention is on her now. Her hands move quick and easy--graceful--and bring the noodles to her mouth, but the chopsticks in his own hand are far more clumsy. The noodles slip and splatter, but not enough to mark his clothing or the white table-cloth.

She giggles, dark eyes narrowing slightly in mirth. "This was a good choice."

"I'd heard that it was the least Americanized in town; you were just complaining--"

She interrupts: "It's not as bad as some, but I approve." A smile. "Next week, sometime, I'll have my mom make you some of this. Show you how it's supposed to taste."

"I'd like that," he replies. They go silent again as he struggles to use the foreign utensils. A woman swings by and snatches up their glasses. His companion rises and strides off, then returns with a completely different selection of food. The woman drops off fresh glasses of soda.

He's up now, and away, examining potential meals through well-cleaned glass. Could he use the chopsticks on this? How about that? Rice was out of the question.

He goes back to the table, just as she rises for another helping. She comes back with a bowl of fried rice, with chunks of egg and chicken. She eats it with a fork. They smile.

Some god or beast glares at them as they leave, frozen in stone. She complains, verbally, that she hates this synthesized bullshit. In the car, in their shelter, she pops in a CD of music that she thinks would fit the establishment better.

He can't help but agree.

22. (Something I'd like to share.)

2005-02-20T22:05:00.000-06:00

"...if the story is about a man and a woman changing a tire on a remote highway... you've nonetheless got to convince me of the highway, the tire, the night, the margin, the shoulder, the gravel under their knees, the lug nuts, the difficulty getting the whole thing apart and back together, and the smells. You must do that. But that's not what you're there to deliver. That's the way you're going to seduce me... after you've got my shirt caught in the machine of the story and you've drawn me in, what you're really going to crush me with are these hearts and these people. Who are they?"
--Ron Carlson, in an interview with Susan McInnis (as transcribed in Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Janet Burroway)

I love his use of conflicting imagery. The use of seduction moving straight into an image of a machine, which is crushing him... it's lovely. It just goes to show that imagery doesn't have to be straightforward to reach you.

21. (We're All Looking for a Little Piece.)

2005-02-16T17:58:00.000-06:00

A moist, rotting room, full of thugs. Sam stands in the door, paused mid-stride as he enters. It's his room. What little goods he owns have been smashed--some still in the process. The urge to lash out wells up within him, but fear overtakes him and Sam turns to run. In seconds, the thugs are on him, beating him, mocking him. He lashes out when he can, but the beating continues until Sam can barely move. The thugs exit, jeering. Sam moans. His typewriter is destroyed, his work, his livelihood set alight and burning. He screams in anger.

Another moist room, less ramshackle than the previous. Eileen, getting on in years, pushes back a mop of gray hair and stares at Jessica, wide-eyed in shock. Her eyes are blue, blood-shot. The sounds of Sam's beating reverberate through the floor.

You call that music? You are a scary little thing, aren't you? It's no wonder they left--oh, don't make that face. Drink your tea, girl. He's better off if them finish him--you are, too. The two of you... quite a pair. He knew they'd be down there, you know. But he had to check. S'why he came up here with you. Wanted you to be safe. Must feel alien for you, huh? Your parents never felt like that, s'why they left, I bet. Stop looking at me like that, you little wretch. I didn't ask for you, I didn't want you. If he doesn't come back for you, it's off to social-services. I'm not like him--not a fool. S'probably why he's getting roughed up now, and I'm brat-sitting a lunatic like you. Oh yes, girl, I heard the stories. Gun must've felt mighty heavy in your hands, huh? Did you watch them bleed? Did he look scared, watching you kill them?

She pours another cup of tea, making sure to drop in an ice-cube so the tea is not too hot. The girl starts to look drowsy, and Eileen brings her to a ratty sofa and lays her down, letting the child rest. Chatting away the whole time, admonishing the girl, mocking the man downstairs. She pulls a blanket over Jessica to make sure she's warm, then sits in the recliner opposite, watching the exhausted child sleep. After a moment she rifles through the girl's belongings and retrieves the gun--right as it enters her rant--and with an uncommon comfortability she removes the clip, pops the bullets out one at a time, and replaces the now-empty clip in the gun. The weapon is then placed back where she found it, in the pocket of Jessica's large jacket. Eileen returns to the recliner, watching the child sleep.

20. (Of Omens and Ironies.)

2005-02-14T12:14:00.000-06:00

The first thing I laid eyes on as I left my house this morning was a dead bird. My puppy had gotten a hold of it. I don't know when.

Suffice to say the realization didn't dawn on me until I was on my way to school that that might have been a bad way to start my day. It being Valentine's day and all. An omen? I don't believe in anything about the future being set in any way. The last time I did, I found myself horribly mistaken, and now I'm not willing to place bets on the future at all.

But back to the subject at hand: a dead bird, first event of the day, Valentine's day.

Lovely, no?

And oddly enough, I was just having a conversation last night--technically this morning--with the person with whom today should be significant in regards to me.

Death is a funny thing. I'm a spiritual person. I believe in things we can't see. So maybe it was a warning of some kind? Warning me of what, though?

It's all very perplexing. Perplexing.

19. (Plugging.)

2005-02-04T23:06:00.000-06:00

If you're reading this, then you're probably aware that I'm a writer. Well, guess what? It's time to plug the living shit out of my work. Following are several links directly into my DeviantArt Account. Anything with more than one part will link internally to the later parts, so that things don't get repetitive in this post.

Feel free to read if you want. Or don't, if you don't want to.

Of course, this isn't everything. Just the things I'm proud of.

"Dejeme Adentro"
"The Blind Bravery of Thieves"
"Under"
"We Jedi"
"Lost"

If you only read one, read the last one, "Lost". It's my best.

18. (Stride.)

2005-01-26T08:30:00.000-06:00

If there is one thing that truly do well, it's walking.

Yes, you read that correctly: walking.

Now, I'll admit first off that I'm ridiculously clumsy and stumble often. My legs are too short for my torso, really, so I tend to unconsciously mis-step. Or maybe that's just me making bullshit excuses and wearing my pants low on my hips, which makes my torso look longer than it is be extending the length of what is perceived to be my stomach by a good handful of inches.

Or something.

But it isn't my actual ability to walk properly that I'm writing about here, it's my ability to walk confidently. I don't just walk, I stride, hunched just slightly forward, a slight bounce in my shoulders, each step thrown forward without a second thought or fear as to where it's going to hit the ground (this could, admittedly, be why I stumble often).

It's a challenge I'm issuing now. Walk with confidence. Walk like you've got a pair, as I've instructed the drumline at least twice when walking from place to place in a group.

'Cause once you start walking with confidence, nothing can stop you. And once nothing can stop you, you can let that confidence spread to other aspects of your life.

17. (Lessons.)

2005-01-23T20:04:00.000-06:00

As we go through years, and age, and become adults (to an extent, at least), there are lessons we learn.

Don't drink orange juice after brushing your teeth. Even though heroes say bad words, it's not okay for you to use them. Salt tastes good by itself, but it can hurt your tongue if you have too much of it. Don't spit into the wind. Girls have cooties. You can't turn left onto Main if you're coming from the south side of the street. The speedometer isn't always right. Everyone's afraid of cops. Liquor tastes bad only at first. Papercuts hurt. Stand on your own two feet. And while Love is blind, she's also a total bitch--and fickle, to boot.

The words 'never' and 'forever' don't mean a lot.

A broken heart mends with time--or with affection.

Absence makes the heart grow stronger.

She's beautiful, caring, understanding, and I've got a lot in common with her. Problem is, I'm doing something to myself that I promised myself I would do again (again).

And honestly? She's worth the fear.

I'm a coward. I've been hurt time and time again and time and time again I've set myself up for it. Some days I can't help but feel like I'm doing it again.

But I don't care. I love her, and if I can bring her some kind of happiness before we fall, then that's good enough for me.

I'm not a fatalist, though. I have hope--for the first time in months--that things will work out for the better this time. This time. What makes it different from the other times?

Not much. I'd be doing a disservice to the people I care about, though they've hurt me in their various ways, if I were to say that she's somehow better than them, more worthy in some manner. That is not, of course, to say that she's not amazing. I can't help but feel, right now, that I'm surrounded by absolutely outstanding people. I'm just lucky in that.

And she's fantastic. Fantastic! I want so bad to say how she's the most amazing person ever and that I'm infinitely happy now that I've found her.

But that... that would be a lie. Am I happy? Yes. She she amazing? Yes. Don't let my inability to shower you with large-scale compliments make you feel like I think badly of you in any way, sweetheart. Far from it. I think the world of you.

Yeah, I think the world of her! I love her! I said it, you read it, fucking deal with it. I don't care what anyone thinks about it, I don't care what anyone has to say, and I don't care about all the silly little inane questions that are sure to come up one day. I just don't care. I love her that much.

I love you, sweetheart. Please don't ever let my general craziness drive that fact from your mind.

16. (Like Las Vegas' water supply.)

2005-01-19T09:49:00.000-06:00

Today's tirade is about metaphors.

The metaphor above (specifically, like: "There's a toilet that won't stop flushing out, like, all of Las Vegas' water supply.") was actually used not more than a few minutes ago. Okay. If you're going to make a metaphor, that's fine. Really. Just be sure that it makes sense.

For one thing, what the hell does Las Vegas have to do with the library, the library located in Oklahoma, several states away from Nevada? Secondly, does Las Vegas even have a notable water supply? I mean, it's in the middle of the desert. Sure, they've got a supply, but it couldn't be that large, compared to, say, some of the places I'll use in a minute.

So, what would be a better metaphor for use with a constantly-flushing toilet? There are several options available to you.

There's the snobby Euro-traveler metaphor: "It's flushing out enough water to fill the canals in Venice."

Or the politically incorrect, attention-grabbing metaphor: "It's flushing out enough water to drain Thailand after that tsunami flooded it."

Or the perverted, (also) attention-grabbing metaphor: "It's flushing out water like a loose girl gushing after a great lay."

Or you could just dead-pan and say: "It's flushing out a lot of water."

My point is this: metaphoring isn't hard. At all. An idiot can do it. So why do people insist on using these utterly ridiculous examples? Because people are stupid, of course.

15. (And the rain came down.)

2005-01-17T15:35:00.000-06:00

There's a flood in the library.

Yeah. Read that again, take it in. There's a flood in the library.

Utter madness. Somewhere between the main floor and the floor below a pipeline broke and now the water is flowing up into the room to my right and down into pretty much everything below me, including the men's restroom (which is downright comical right now) and acquisitions.

They've found it, now, as I'm writing this. Off in the room to my right--and now it's stopped. I could hear it, when I wasn't typing, when there was no one around. Water flowing unhindered... not a sound you expect to hear in a place full of books, really.

Thankfully, it's away from the collection, as far as I'm aware. We're going to have to deal with the after-effects, I'm sure, even though Circulation has nothing to do with this end of the building other than the desk I'm sitting at now, which is mostly just a security post to keep people from sneaking out the back door with books and such.

Complete madness. As it today didn't need to get any stranger.

14. (And herein lies the truth.)

2005-01-15T11:13:00.000-06:00

You wanna know how much of a geek I am?

I love the smell of books. Old books, new books, dirty books, moldy books, books, books, books. I work in a library. I love just walking around and smelling the musty, slightly-rotten smell that many of the books give off.

It's glorious.

I want to buy a bunch of old books from the used books joint on Main just to leave them sitting in my room, stinking the place up. The book smell has character! If scent is the strongest scent tied to emotion, then I must really like books. Or something. I dunno. I'm rambling now, if you hadn't noticed.

In all seriousness, though, I'd much rather have an old book than a new book. It just feels better to hold an older, more fragile book in your hands. Hardbacks especially--they feel solid, they feel alive.

You hold an old book in your hands and you just know that sometime, somewhere, someone was reading that same book and likely taking a similar experience out of it. It's a sense of anonymous camaraderie. Untouching brotherhood. A connection with a person you never have nor never will come into contact with.

Character! Books have a character that nothing else will ever be able to grasp. I rue the day that books become obsolete and everyone turns to the internet or to television completely. We're not yet there, but we're close.

As for me, I'll never give up on books. Ever.

The book I'm reading now, The Pendragon by Catherine Christian, smells slightly of mold and, since a certain mishap with my friend Alan, Southern Comfort. It's got more character than most people I know.

13. (Fresh start.)

2005-01-12T11:41:00.000-06:00

Sometimes things just happen fast.

You can't exactly always make things work out the way you want, but sometimes you can attempt to get them to work out something similar. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We do what we can to be happy, and make the people we love happy. And sometimes, that means doing things you wouldn't normally imagine yourself doing.

This is not to say that I am unhappy with the decisions made in the last 24 hours. No, no, no, I'm happy. Pleased. Oddly content. Which...

Which is scary as a motherfucker. Every other time I've ever been happy or content, I've fallen, and I've fallen hard. Here's to hoping it doesn't happen this time. Here's to hoping something better comes out of it.

But something things just hit you fast and hard and you can't control them. So you roll with the punches. This one's just a punch on a fresh bruise. A punch in a scar. A punch in a wound.

But I'm rolling with it. Rolling like a rolling stone. I'm doing my best not to be scared and paranoid, which is natural. I miss being an optimist, I miss having true hope, I miss feeling like things are going to work out.

I think they will. But there's still that nagging sense of pessimism I can't just get past.

Maybe I'll roll with that, too. Hopefully.

12. (Left a brush; brought something better back.)

2005-01-06T21:20:00.000-06:00

Today, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to talk about people.

I just finished up a week-long excursion to the southern-ish tip of Florida, in order to watch the Orange Bowl (a horrifying defeat, which I will not discuss further here). Throughout this week, I spent pretty much all my time with members of the same 35 people (the drumline, that is, which I won't directly discuss further here).

It's nice when you meet someone you already know. The end of this week-long trip was spent spending 32 hours on a bus driving back to the Holy Land of Our Fathers that is Oklahoma. A good portion of this trip was spent talking to a group of people (who I shall refer to as The Rookies--that is, first-year members of the line--I'm a third-year myself), among them a certain young woman whom I had danced with on New Year's while riding the bus to Miami (in another 32 hour journey).

I won't use her name. In fact, I pretty much won't ever use anyone's names when I write in here.

Anyways, this girl has been around for about 5 months or so, since the beginning of the marching season. So, as such, I've spoken to her once or twice; but since she's in the pit (off the field) and I'm in the battery (on the field) there's been little more than that.

Well, on the way home from the beautiful hell that was Miami, we got to spend quite some time hanging out on the bus. Suffice to say, I really, really regret not making an effort to get to know her better, because today's bus-ride was officially the end of the 2004 marching season, and more-than-likely I won't get to see her much before the end of the summer.

This doesn't just go for the girl. It goes for several other members of The Rookies as well, as I got to sit near a bunch of them on the bus and to be honest I wish I had been closer to the lot of them throughout the season.

Oh well, it'll be better when the next season starts, most likely.

So I said I was going to talk about family...

These people, the members of the line, young and old, past and present, are, in so, so, so, so many ways, my family. Not the same as my family-family, but they're not just friends. They're like my brothers and sisters in so many ways.

Family doesn't need blood. Family doesn't even need closeness. There are people on the line of whom I could count the words spoken between us on my hands. And yet, those people are just as much family as the people who were Rookies when I was.

I really just don't know how to explain it, to be honest. And I just felt like getting that offa my chest.

I'm back from Miami, by the way.

11. (Wave.)

2004-12-25T20:43:00.000-06:00

Today, boys and girls, we're going to talk about music.

There are a few things that I will argue to my dying day should be considered universally beautifully. A low note on a cello. A perfect snare-roll. A four-mallet chord on a marimba. An impeccable French horn solo. An Italian female opera solo.

The list goes on. I won't bother listing all of the things that, aurally, I consider to be splendid. It would take me forever to properly formulate such a list.

But these things... these things specifically, will, when done properly, send chills down my spine the likes of which you would not believe. Absolutely beautiful.

I think this is why I'm a musician--or was, however you want to semantically break it down, really. It's not so much as I love making this beauty, I love hearing it. It is the epitome of my existence. It is everything that fills in the messily-torn holes in by being.

temporary solution? Of course. But sometimes, that's all a person needs.

Long love the music.