SUMMER

Angkar: Wet season. Precipitation is common during the late afternoon and evening hours. Vegetation grows significantly during the summer, but flooding is a danger due to the monsoons that ravage the country. The rainforest sees evenly distributed rainfall throughout the season.

Ashoka: Desert: Extremely hot and dry. Violent, heavy downpours following long dryspells. Jungle: Hot and humid with frequent, violent rainstorms.

Morrim: Relatively hot and dry, but with a chance of thunderstorms from time to time. The heat may cause forest fires.

Soto: Hot and humid, tree cover is dense while ground growth is restricted. Thunderstorms see the most amount of rainfall during the season, and it can be very windy. On occasion, there are flash floods that can destroy homes and farms built on flood plains.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

March 30th, 2018 As you might have noticed, Elenlond has changed hands and is now under new management! If you have any questions, please direct them to DaringRaven! As for the rest of the announcements, including a season change, you can find them over here at the following link!

January 16, 2018 As you might have noticed, Elenlond has a new skin, all thanks to Mel! Don't forget to check out the new OTMs as well!

December 2, 2017 Winter has settled on Elenlond, bringing sleep for some and new life for others.

September 26, 2017 With the belated arrival of autumn come some interesting developments: new OTMs, a Town Crier and the release of the Elly Awards winners!

July 14, 2017 After a bit of forum clean-up, Elly Awards season has arrived! Head on over to make your nominations!

May 31, 2017 Summer has arrived and so has activity check! That's not all though – we also have some new OTMs for you and some staff changes!


WHAT IS ELENLOND?

Elenlond is an original free-form medieval fantasy RPG set on the continent of Soare and the Scattered Isles, which are located to the south in the Sea of Diverging Waters. The four chief nations of the western side of the world—Ashoka in northern Soare, Soto in western Soare, Morrim in eastern Soare, and Angkar, the largest of the Scattered Isles—continue to experience growth and prosperity since the fall of the Mianorite gods, although power struggles within the countries—or outside of them—continue to ensue.


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  • We accept any member who wants to RP here;
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  • CURRENT EVENTS

    Angkar: To honour the reinvigoration of the ancient city of Mondrágon, the majestic Queen Eulalia has permitted the opening of a Coliseum where people from around the world and all walks of life can test their combat skills against one another. Many have already done battle in search of honour, glory, prizes and money.

    Ashoka: In an otherwise peaceful times, Ashokans are beset with the relatively minor inconveniences of wandering undead and occasionally-aggressive giant rock worms. There has also been some controversy over the recent re-legalisation of human sacrifice.

    Morrim: Rumour has it that Emperor Leofric de Hollemark is mustering forces for a war. Though the threat from Soto’s forests has passed, the forces previously employed in watching the forest now linger at the border. Rumours also circulate of a small group that has been dispatched to make contact with the tribes of the Do’suul Mountains.

    Soto: The Sotoans have defeated the fey and liberated themselves from Méadaigh’s oppression! Preliminary efforts have been made at rebuilding the city of Madrid, which had been captured at the beginning of the war. However, the Sotoans are hindered from recovery famine. Méadaigh’s magic caused summer to persist in the Erth’netora Forest through the winter. Her power has been withdrawn and the plants die as if preparing for winter – even though it is now summer. The Sotoans must sustain off what food they can get, what creatures they can kill and what can be imported into the city from Morrim and Angkar.

    For a fuller description of our most recent events, check out our most recent edition of The Town Crier!

    daringraven
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    Qayin Graves
    SHADOW
    Supporting Admin.

    Kestrel Sumner (Shadow)
    Kindle Blackheath
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    Welcome to our home, a world in which anything can happen. From sprawling deserts and vast forests to massive volcanoes and luscious hot springs, Soare and the Scattered Isles are beautiful places just waiting to be explored. For the brave and the bold or the cautious and the wary, creatures of all kinds roam the earth, looking for adventure or for a place to call their own. Species of all kinds - the well-known and the unknown - thrive here, though not always in harmony.

    Elenlond is an original medieval fantasy RPG with a world that's as broad as it is unique. Calling on characters of all kinds, the sky's the limit in a world where boundaries are blurred and the imagination runs rampant. Restrictions are limited and members are encouraged to embrace their creativity, to see where they can go and what they can do. It's no longer just text on a page - it becomes real.

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    Seeking Some Guidance; Phaedrus!
    Topic Started: Dec 29 2014, 02:27 PM (853 Views)
    Glede
    Member Avatar
    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    Phaedrus, I have need of – something.

    We have not spoken in some time.


    He'd practiced on the less-traveled roads, voice thrumming out even in the presence of disconcerted folk whose paths happened to intersect with his – “Phaedrus, ah... I have... it has been too long since our ordeal in the desert! I have come to know many things!” Practicing, practicing, like a noble child before a mirror!

    The road south had stretched long, sometimes in dirt and sometimes in cobble. The Sotoan main roads were impressive, perhaps owing to the history of the empire, but the typical traffic of traders and families was often made uncomfortable by the bulky, armored man, more like an Ashokan mercenary than anything (and when political ties had become constricting and uncomfortable). His path had wound beneath the low-hanging boughs of strange southern trees, fallen leaves tangled in his mail and impaled on the horns of his helm; he had marveled at vines with strange berries, and blessed rivers that cut straight through the backwoods dirt paths, like little miracles of Enki's magic.

    And not everyone was offput by his great, ugly shell, as it happened. He had stumbled by a farm once – growing a crop he'd never seen before, one which certainly did not grow in Ashoka – and been serenaded by a troop of children, out of the concerned watch of parents who likely would have swept them away from the tall stranger as quickly as possible; he'd left again along the road with a crown of flowers and a pinky-promise with a little girl, her little finger barely brushing the cold metal of his gauntlet. Find your friend for me, okay? Protect lots of people!

    There were marigolds and violets strung around his horns when he entered Madrid finally, ogling the urban sprawl at the foot of the mountain from afar. People here were even more wary of him, unaccustomed, unlike Eldaharians, to desert mercenaries and devil inquisitors; doubtless he might've been stopped, if not for his strange adornments and propensity to give a quiet, cheery hello to the pasty southerners about him.

    By all the gods, he'd thought perhaps a hundred times today, they all look a bit like the necromancer – how shall I ever tell them apart?

    In truth, none of them had his leanness of face, or the narrowed yellow eyes.

    “The house near the marketplace with the red door and the hideous knocker – it cannot possibly be missed.” He had remembered the sorcerer's instructions all this time, but the labyrinth of streets, fountains, and hanging plants demolished his concentration; he had stopped to snatch a gauntlet through the water a stone cherub spat in one of many squares, earning him some odd glances, then got lost down a network of back allies that seemed to him much more like Eldahar than his first impression of the city. Nevertheless, when he had rescued himself from there, finding the house was a small matter: He'd broken immediately out into a market, full of rich-looking bakeries, and the door was quite red, and the knocker was doubtless the ugliest thing Glede had ever seen in his short life.

    The colors still stunned him, and he reached up every moment or so to make sure that his mask was still in place. Nearly as ugly as the knocker, but less shocking than nothingness; the djinni had proven that, screaming at the eldritch sight. He felt too large, too spiked, moving up the pleasant little footpath to the front door. And far too Ashokan for this lush, water-fat place.

    He saw the curtains beyond the window of a house nearby stir, a pair of eyes peeking out with some suspicion. When he let his glance fix on it, it was gone.

    Glede felt some sort of a crisis well up in him at the door, unwont to grab the knocker or call. What shall I say? What shall I do? He felt himself tremble there, metal body rattling. Is he home? Has he gone to a tavern of some sort? Will he recognize me – remember me – or see a Dead thing standing outside of his door? And so now he quaked, the sickness in his chest becoming a sort of spiritual pain. He had come to discuss these matters with the necromancer, among other things; now, they stopped him from making himself known.

    He reached up and touched the knocker with a scrape of his claws; then, he grasped it firmly and gave it a solid bang!

    “Phaedrus,” came the hollow, rasping baritone. “Phaedrus.”

    He could not seem to make himself say anything else. How ghastly! he thought, frozen to his spot.
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    Phaedrus
    Member Avatar
    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    He'd not meant to have a nap.

    It'd happened rather of a sudden, with a noseful of book and too much afternoon wine and a cat that had declared him an armchair. The Dead Hand he'd summoned to mind the roast had gone awry without his waking mind to guide it; the shadowy thing twitched and jumped, basting the wall with butter instead of the mutton. Already a greasy patch had seeped into the whitewash in paint strokes of a madman; one side of the roast had achieved a fine golden-brown color while the other looked upon the kitchen with a pallor.

    The kettle he'd put on began an imploring whine. Still the necromancer was deaf to it, snoring lightly under a blanket of parchment. Strange dreams weaved through his mind -- to be half-forgotten but not unpleasant, chased like will-o-wisps; he dreamt of a fiery girl that broke and swirled into motes, chased the dying embers through a black world until grass grew soft beneath him and clouds like behemoths roamed the sky. A strange sun broke over rolling plains, lush, verdant -- wind shivered over a meadow and a thousand poppies nodded under his feet. They parted at the footsteps of a man in white, his robes like a prow in that grass sea, but as he turned his face shimmered to nothing. When the wind came again it brought heat and dust, a dry hunger that sipped at the fields and laid them with salt; but still the poppies bloomed, petals of blood on that white plain. Clouds rolled in the blanching sky, moved under his feet in a hazy reflection. On the plain, the man clenched a handful of poppies in his trembling black hands, lifted them above his head -- and petals fled on the wind, floating up in blood.

    He started awake.

    The kettle shrieked, firing out a whistle of steam. Paws dug into his belly, and Phaedrus snorted away a rustling of pages, one hand trickling up to snatch at the book. He felt strange, displaced into a new world -- his mouth tasted gummy, his breath sour with wine, breathing still slow and deep. His living room blinked blearily into focus, swam in threads of red and gold before it resolved itself into Ashokan curtains and tapestries. A yawn cracked his mouth, chest lifting the black shadow curled over him with some difficulty.

    "Mmn… Daisy?" Phaedrus' fingers searched for the enormous cat's ears, settled on languidly scratching her neck. His head lolled back into a halo of fiery hair, mouth turned into a dribble of a frown, eyes squinting at the ceiling. The kettle continued to scream, niggling at his sleepy mind, and the necromancer shut his eyes, lifting an arm with some effort. Oh, bother. He made a limp hand motion, and the Dead Hand dropped the basting brush into a pot of herbs, seizing the kettle. It wrenched it off the flames and promptly began pouring it into a houseplant, steam boiling off its wilting leaves.

    Phaedrus blew out a long sigh, half-resolving to go back to sleep-- scratched his exposed side before shifting upon the cushions, sniffing to rid an itch about his nose. Accursed kettle… He tried to search for that comfort of rest again, blanket himself in it and slip into that strange dream, but it had dissipated like smoke in his fingers, lost to the world between sleep and waking. Just a few minutes, and then I shall attend to the roast…

    BANG.

    The necromancer started with a snort, craning his head with some difficulty to look upon the door. Who the de-- Unmistakably that wretched knocker! Who was calling upon him now? Irritated, Phaedrus rubbed at one eye with his palm, quite indisposed with Daisy atop him; he did not wish to stir the cat, and moreover, he did not wish to get up and answer the door. It is probably Modeste Bellamy, knocking for tea or some other… but devils, he would not savage my door like an animal! Grunting, the necromancer sat upright with great effort, dumping the cat unceremoniously into his lap. One hand stayed on her back to appease her, running down the length of her spine.

    "Coming," he called thickly, with no real conviction. The waspishness of being freshly awakened prickled in those words, inflamed by the utter belligerence of whoever wielded the knocker. Perhaps it was that fetid woman the house over -- in which case he'd sooner roll over to sleep. But now he was up, and consciousness flooded into him, spoiling any hope of drifting off again. Now he could smell a distinctly burning roast, and a delicate nostril flared, twitched; he set aside the book with an stirring urgency, foot searching for his house slippers. The sooner done, the better. Still he struggled with the dilemma upon his lap -- the cat would not budge, and the ferocity of one emerald eye advised him against displacing her. As his hand stilled, a low, menacing yowl rumbled in Daisy's throat, and he felt claws dig into his pants.

    "Ach--no, my sweet, hush, now--" Phaedrus cooed at the enormous cat, wincing. "Come, my sweet girl. There you are…" His last word ended in a grunt, for the necromancer had hoisted her up like a furry child, struggling to his feet. Daisy's neck disappeared into a cloud of fur, tail swinging like a pendulum. She hung easily down to his hip, ears flicked upwards, head swiveled at the door. Another displeased yowl vibrated in her throat, and Phaedrus bounced her, mumbling sweet nothings. As he shuffled towards the entrance, every muscle in her went taut, chest quivering -- the necromancer held on tighter, biting his lip with sudden suspicion. Who is on my porch? Breathing deeply, he paused to disperse the Dead Hand in the kitchen -- a hollow clang sounded as the teapot fell onto the counter, sparing another plant the same fate. …Well. Here we are.

    The necromancer shifted the weight of his cat to one hip, swinging the door open.

    He scarcely had time to gasp before Daisy exploded out of his arms in a flurry of fangs and claws -- a hellish yowl pierced the air, a metallic shriek and scrape; Phaedrus yelped and grabbed for her, fumbled, clutched at nothing; the cat writhed, flipped, landed solidly on stone before bolting back into the house in a black blur. A cry died in the necromancer's throat; he slumped against the doorframe, mouth agape, apologies crumbling to ash in his mouth. His eyes widened at the sight before him. Disbelieving.

    ...How?

    "Gl-- Gle--" the noise sounded guttural, meaningless in his throat. For a moment he fancied himself still dreaming, snoring upon his couch. His mouth worked ahead of his mind, lips flapping uselessly. He stared, and the dull hollows of the healer's mask stared back, bronze and unforgiving. It could not be. It had to be a dream, certainly. Towering iron men did not walk the streets of Madrid. They did not walk them -- they did not walk them in --

    His lips pressed; his chest quivered. And then of a sudden, a loud laugh exploded from his lips, the sort that follows pale disbelief, the only response to seeing an armored beast crowned with flowers. His entire body shook with the force of it, shoulder digging into the doorjamb, one hand clutching his belly. It reached a high, womanly shriek, a grating staccato where he flung back his head, tousled hair shivering about his plumpened face.

    At length, one eye shivered open -- the sight of a petunia delicately nested about his horns very nearly bowled him into a fresh gale of laughter. Instead the necromancer's lips jumped and twitched beneath dancing eyes, an ugly snort erupting from his delicate features. Phaedrus fanned a lily-white hand over his mouth, stomach still shaking with silent laughter.

    "Glede," he finally giggled, rather breathlessly. A strange buzzing warmth filled his cheeks, spread from his belly and suffused into his limbs. He hadn't laughed so hard in -- well, devils, never. Once the daze of it passed, the necromancer straightened, lounging against the door with a flickering amusement in his eyes. One side of his lip curled dangerously, cutting a dimple into his cheek.

    "Forgive me. I cannot believe my eyes. How the devil…" He was quite forgetting himself. Glede's black carapace seemed to absorb everything around it, blocking out the thought of neighbors or a minced apology. For a moment everything swirled away at the feet of this surreal construct, bristling and utterly out of place in his garden. His appearance -- once fearsome in that harrowing desert -- had been stripped of tooth and nail by a crown of daisies and leaves shivering in his joints, absurd against the backdrop of lush trees and cobblestones. Sorer than five thumbs, I should say. An amused cluck left Phaedrus' mouth.

    Then his eyes danced away, caught sight of a flash of nose and whisking curtains. Ah, spectators already? This would be the talk amongst the neighbors for days, he'd no doubt -- and he wanted no prying eyes or ears. He doubted Glede had simply been gallivanting through Soare on holiday. Something of import brought him here, and now curiosity burned in his breast along with a private gladness at seeing his most improbable friend again. Mirth fading, the necromancer planted his hands on his hips, pushing away from the doorjamb. "Come, come inside. No sense speaking on the porch. What wind has brought you all the way to Madrid?" Bustling, the necromancer snapped the door behind Glede, shooing him eagerly into the house and out of sight.

    "You are changed, since last I saw you." A cat's lazy grin curled his features, soon punctuated by a yawn. Phaedrus stretched luxuriously, smoothing the front of his tunic with a whisk of the hand. His slippers shuffed lightly against the floors as he sauntered indoors, head craned to examine Glede. "A fine… face, you have." That is the most horrific mask I have ever seen. You look like a brass nun. "Did you just come from a bacchanal? Petunias suit you." A tinkle of a laugh escaped from between his fingers, but his eyes were sharp, made lurid by a burning curiosity.




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    Glede
    Member Avatar
    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    He stood a few moments on the porch, grown ever more aware of the stirring drapes and the multiplying eyes; a shrill noise had also come to a crescendo, wavering and screaming somewhere beyond the blood-red door. At first, Glede had thought it the scream of someone – perhaps Phaedrus, but more likely a woman; he had not considered that the sorcerer might have a wife or a consort, as was common, at least, for Ashokan men – but now he heard the distinct hiss of a tea-kettle, and on that cue relaxed his shoulders and took his gauntlet from Arukah's hilt. There was tea down here, at least, though he had doubted that it would be otherwise, given the necromancer's propensity for it.

    The construct found it difficult to relax. His joints were meant to move in quick, deliberate snatches, unlike a man's, and had trouble disengaging from an action once they had begun it. He was certain that it was in his best interests not to look as if he were about to draw his sword, however: The watchful neighbors could do him naught but evil, doubtless.

    When the door opened, he was at first relieved at the sight of loose, waving red hair; then he shouted and tried to kick himself into motion, to no avail. The great thing that had somehow wrangled itself loose from the sorcerer's arms and filled the air, a demon in flight with eyes like gates to the underworld, now shot inside, scrambling its great body out of sight. For a moment, Glede was too shocked to move, save raising one hand as if in a terrified offering of peace –

    Then the necromancer began to laugh.

    The construct winced, shoulders drawn up at the shrill quality of it. Immediately, it reminded him of the darker, stranger sides of his friend from the desert, not the softness of his demeanor and his gentle explaining, but the powerful thing that had revealed itself when they fought the skin-stealer. Of a sudden, even the familiar face felt unfamiliar. More than anything he had lost his mooring to this place, feeling abashed, a fish out of water – what in the name of Kahlid is he laughing at? what is so funny?

    “Yes,” he insisted with a twang of confusion, nodding deeply, “it is I, Glede.”

    But the movement of the yellow eyes revealed all in an instant, as did the voice, choked through girlish, chattering laughter. He reached to fiddle with the crown of marigolds; his wicked claws came away with a petunia that soon fluttered to the dirt.

    He laughed then himself, a husky sound that dribbled away to a contented rumble, disoriented as Phaedrus ushered him in. “How – I, ah --” His rehearsed responses had come to nothing; he stumbled for a moment with himself. “I came along the Kaadian, from Ashoka – my adornments were gifts from children along the way, not far from here...”

    Glancing about, the construct found himself hesitant, unsure: In such comfort, the practice was to take off one's boots, but Glede was naturally unable to do this. He fretted for a moment about tracking mud in, and found himself unwilling to go much past the mat at the door.

    Were he possessed of a nose that could smell, he might have commented on the strange smell – a strange mix of smells, in fact, from the roast – but, relying on his rather limited perception, he only noticed a few kitchen utensils in disarray, along with a roast half-brown and half-pitifully-raw. I cooked in a past life. I am sure of it. The scrap of a thought disappeared, replaced by burning curiosity, though still he found himself unwilling to leave his spot.

    He wondered, for a moment, why Phaedrus had ushered him in so quickly in the first place. His mind chugged to catch up: The neighbors, perhaps? Yes; it must be the neighbors! What a mess he might have caused.

    “There is little room for physical change in one like me,” came the wry response, “but if you can call it a face... yes, I believe I have found one. As fearsome and hideous as the rest of me, thus – a good fit. It helps me walk among people unquestioned.” He let a wrist rest, with a clink, on the pommel of his scimitar, ducking his head to glance about him (and perhaps attain a better view of whatever had passed in the kitchen). “I do not wish to track on your lovely carpet, Phaedrus, but I find myself unable to, ah --”

    He let the sentence finish itself.

    “I thank you greatly for having me.” What happened in the kitchen? What happened? “It is a warm and wonderful home, and I have many serious things to – ask you, if you would submit to friendly conversation. What... lovely cushions.”

    Glede had never been skilled with subtlety, but he hoped that the piercing, clever amber eyes would not mind.
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    Phaedrus
    Member Avatar
    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    A pair of eyes followed Glede from atop a bookshelf. Over the Empirical History by Uldmann the III and the Alchimia swung a black tail, bristled to its tip. Another yowl menaced the air.

    "Oh, hush," Phaedrus clucked dismissively in Daisy's direction, rather abashed by her behavior. Then, echoed absently: "Adornments from children, you say?" He tried to imagine a frolic of them draping flowers across the black giant, mustered only a snort. How absurd. Quite the devilish smile curled his lip.

    Now he itched to attend to his roast, the smell curling alarmingly in his nose -- but when he turned, the construct had not budged an inch, fidgeting as if tar had glued his heels to the mat. Oh, but he had forgotten how very literal the healer was. Phaedrus scratched at his chin, regarding him through half-slitted eyes. His languid stare weaved up to that wretched thing -- it was as if the sculptor could not choose between a cherub or a withered priest, and simply combined the lot into a perpetual glower. At points it looked blank, then angry, then blank again, and he could see his stretched reflection in Glede's bronze cheek.

    "Hmmm." A pallid finger curled under his lip. One brow arched. "You had not considered anything… happier? There are a great multitude of masks by the theater-house. Many are painted with flowers." He regarded Glede through a lowering dusting of lashes, a smirk suffusing his features. Watched the great metal man fidget, claws scraping his scimitar -- wondered what gnawed at him so. Does he think I shall hex him? Devils, it is not as if I…

    …The carpet? Is that what he worries on?


    A tinkling laugh left him, a dismissive flick of the wrist. "The carpet has seen worse." Least of which are the whores and wine. "Wipe your feet on the mat, if it troubles you so. Come in! I must check on the roast, and it won't do to shout across the living room. Now…" At the man's bumbling attempt at pleasantries, Phaedrus gave a short hum, waving off the construct's stumbling humility with a wry smirk.

    "But for you, Glede, I'd have been shat across Soare from the bellies of vultures. It is-- no trouble, my friend." Memory of that horrific night cracked through the warmth of his house and blithe demeanor, escaping in his parted lips and brief pause. For a moment he faltered, frightened by the honesty between them, the trembling assumption of friendship. His fingertips connected, sought each other; Phaedrus tangled his hands before him, regarding the construct with a fixed, leveling stare. Serious things… "Of course--of course." I owe you this much, at least. "Sit, please, I--"

    He'd begun to lead the construct into the kitchen and stopped as if he hit a wall, aghast.

    "What the devil?" Now he knew why it smelled so -- looked in horror from the half-cooked meat to the mysterious stain upon the wall to a houseplant dripping water and smoldering faintly. He hissed a curse in Ashokan and swept over to the roast, guts sinking as he took in the damage. It was salvageable, but… Blowing out an aggrieved huff, the necromancer turned it upon its pallid side, mystified by the stain and disappearance of his basting brush. It seemed to be poking out of a sprig of rosemary, and he plucked it out of the pot, staring at it dumbfoundedly.

    "Idiotic creatures," he muttered, mostly to himself -- then raised a clawed hand, eyes rolling to the whites above his curled, jumping lip.

    A shadow writhed out of the woodwork, licked up into a long, rippling arm. A chill rolled over the kitchen, but Phaedrus ignored it, promptly shoving the brush into the Dead Hand's materializing fingers.

    "The wall is not a roast, you daft thing," he snapped, fist planted on his hip. It shivered away, joints rippling, and began brushing the mutton, jerking with inhuman motions. Next the necromancer turned his fury upon the stain, and with a bull of a snort, snapped his fingers.

    Another slithered reluctantly out of the nether to begin wiping the wall.

    Thus done, Phaedrus spun on his heel, whisking up the kettle sadly neglected on his counter, and began pouring the billowing water into a teapot, shaking out the last drops. Why was it half-empty…? Ah, bollocks, hell take it.

    He set it down with a sharp clang and brought the pot and two cups over to the table, astoundingly aware that the construct could not drink tea. But it seemed ill of manner to not offer him any at all, even if it was mere affectation. He was a man, still, in that strange suit.

    "My apologies," the necromancer remarked smoothly, sliding into a seat. His long fingers knitted before him, leg crossed primly over his knee. Phaedrus' eyes seemed luminous, fixed sharply on Glede's mask, earlier mirth swapped with a more curious incisiveness. "Tea makes serious topics more palatable, I think. Now… tell me. What has troubled you enough to bring you to Madrid?" That is not a journey that is made lightly.
    Edited by Phaedrus, Dec 30 2014, 01:07 PM.
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    Glede
    Member Avatar
    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    With a sort of delicate, troubled insistence, Glede wiped his boots off on the mat, then trailed off after Phaedrus. As he passed the shelf, his gaze clung to the shadow and met its glistening, radiant eyes; glancing down, he took note of the embossed titles over which the fuzzy tail swayed. He dared not step closer -- the bitter shadow would as surely strike him down in a fit of tempestuous anger as lightning struck a nomad who dared contest the might of the gods -- but, from this distance, the volumes seemed to contain a mixture of the scientific and the eldritch. Names like Barsal-nuna and Uldmann III leapt out at him, academic and vaguely menacing.

    There were other scripts as well -- scripts which Glede could not even begin to read. Common had become easy over the past few years, for one did not travel in southern lands without the aid of signposts and bulletins, and Sotoan lettering was only marginally more difficult. Nevertheless, a few titles on the shelf swam and smeared in gold: names like ΑΡΣΕΝΙΟΣ were a series of whispering question marks.

    "A visage of happiness does not befit a servant of the gods," he grated absently, and it was clear that his heart and mind were elsewhere. Painted with flowers...? No, no. That would look silly, even more frightening for its surreality. Now he took on the face of an automaton, a desert spectre, unfitting but at least consistent -- what eerie impression would the disparity between burnished darkness and grinning flowers create? That would certainly send the children running. "And perhaps you should grow a beard." Equally jarring. The mutter was barely audible, a breathy husk that nearly died before it escaped the slats of his 'mouth'.

    Could the necromancer grow a beard? Glede had ever seen Phaedrus' status as blurred, a strange unearthly thing that wielded the powers of Death and walked beyond it -- yet laughed, laughed like a hyena, like a silly and lascivious young man, girthy and fond of wine. Dead things, if indeed Phaedrus was 'Dead' as one typically classed it, could not... grow beards. I wonder if I had a beard. The thought occurred and then left in a flash. Glede could not picture Phaedrus with a beard, much less himself, whoever he had been.

    The man-construct had nearly replied to Phaedrus' dismissal, abashed at the gratitude, when the necromancer cut off and the state of the kitchen became apparent. "Nailah," he muttered, the claws of his gauntlet clinking delicately against his breastplate. "I hope I did not-- interrupt--" But he was struck silent -- idiotic creatures, said the necromancer, and then --

    Foul magic!

    Glede could not hide that he was somewhat shaken, frozen as he watched the Dead things slither from the walls, hands and arms and wriggling fingers. Wielding the instruments of cooking, Glede saw, drawing the sight in with a sort of abhorring numbness. The moments passed, the hideous creatures going about their assigned chores like some grotesque mummers' play, faceless and wretched. A mockery of something mundane, domestic. Like the bustling wife of some Ashokan lord turning to reveal rotting flesh under her floral shawls.

    Flesh bent and wriggled and morphed into faces of cruel giddiness. Sand whirled. In some distant cave, warped bones held up twitching, papyrus-colored skin. Death loomed close behind, more frightening than any flesh-construct, morphing and bleeding out of reality and into nightmare.

    The wall is not a roast, you daft thing.

    It was almost comical, if he could still his screaming soul long enough to see the humor in it. He had nearly reached for his blade, realized how foolish that would be -- we are friends, Phaedrus and I. The Hands, though he had no doubt that they could, would not hurt him, for they were under Phaedrus' command, not a skin-changer's. This was the whispering darkness of the Xeric bent into servitude. Technically harmless, if not altogether practically.

    "There... There is no need for an apology, but I accept it nonetheless." The healer stirred himself into some semblance of motion, at first stumbling but then in mechanical submission. He pressed himself into a seat -- much too small, he thought, aware with sudden discomfort of the nasty creaking produced by the chair -- with a pitiful attempt to mask his trembling. But the sounds of metal rustling dribbled away, eventually, the clawed gauntlets pressed together in the chain of his lap. "If it would be possible to warn me the next time you put your servants to some task," he sighed, "such a... such a thing would be greatly appreciated. I am somewhat new to these things."

    The sound of tea soothed him, steam rolling from the cups and pot, and he leaned with a rustle-and-hiss of mail to peer over at the two cups. The gesture confused him at first -- who else...? -- but, as he began to understand, caused a sense of comfort to bloom inside him. It was... respect, perhaps. I am a man. The tea would grow cold, yes, but to have it there, the dark liquid stirred in its little porcelain cup by a draft, was worth a thousand impossible sips.

    "Thank you. Tea is always welcome, Phaedrus. I... will remember this kindness." His gaze rose, drifted to meet the chill yellow lights of his friend's eyes. Familiar, yet... unfamiliar. Old. Once again that sensation. "The journey south was long, but I will spare you the details. I have met many men since our paths separated, and come to many conclusions about -- life, and my purpose. These conclusions have brought more questions than answers, I think. Indeed, I was naive, but I would nearly rather have that ignorance."

    He reached to take a teacup, careful not to spill it; the thing was tiny in his great dark gauntlets, porcelain clicking against wicked metal. As he brought it under his helm, he caught sight of the reflection: bronze, expressionless. Is that me? The flowers do look ridiculous. The tea swirled, little bits of leaf flecking the menacing image.

    "Phaedrus," he began, insistent, without looking up, perhaps for fear of what he might see in that powerfully curious gold, "my body was no doubt burned on a pyre. A necromancer did... heinous things with my soul. Does this make me a Dead thing? Are -- are you Dead, my friend? In the true meaning of the word?"
    Edited by Glede, Feb 19 2015, 08:28 PM.
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    Phaedrus
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    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    A visage of happiness does not befit a servant of the gods.

    How true, pitilessly so, positively rib-cracking in its mirthlessness. Then why do you follow them? begged the obvious question, but he bit his tongue. Ah, but he’d never understood self-flagellants, the priests that eagerly put their flesh to the rod or wasted it in starvation. The body was meant to eat and fuck and drink, at points the only form of comfort to be had. Was not life hellish enough without devising new ways to torture oneself? But then, man had an infinite capacity for inventing new masters.

    Absurd.

    The thought rose like bile, promptly swallowed. When he turned, it was to the sight of clinking metal — behind him the Hands swayed, pushing a belated abashment into his mind. Ah. The chair protested what Glede did not. Shivering chains replaced the whites of eyes and broken sweat, but fear crouched in the hill of his shoulders and twitching fingers, betrayed by every clink.

    For a moment he considered dispersing the Hands once more, fingertips hovering in an aborted gesture — his mouth drizzled open, eyebrows arching over his languid stare. How rude, Phaedrus. Conducting necromancy in front of guests. Few took well to it, much less when the last they’d seen of it had been the carnage in the desert; to his credit, the construct had not drawn his sword. The words broke from him in startled self-awareness; a pale hand fluttered over his breast, fingers splayed like a noblewoman’s. “Ah, how dreadful of me. I—did not think.”

    The term servants rankled him, stuck like a burr. Phaedrus’ nails met porcelain in an aggressive staccatto, and he coughed. Defenses leapt to his mouth, quivering with the arrowheads and halberds of academic explanation. “These are no souls, merely aether. See?” With a lofted wrist, the Hands quivered, reshaping in a breezeless wind. Still the roast turned, attended by an ethereal smear. “Akin to bending air or fire in… this realm, I suppose. But if they trouble you…” His fingers danced, indicating what? Hollow words, convincing whom?

    Skeptical he’d soothed the construct, the necromancer lowered his hand with the slowness reserved for a nervous dog, fingers snaking around his teacup. For a moment he busied himself with a spoon, dropping a lump of sugar into the black mirror and stirring. A merry tinkle punctuated Glede’s words, the stumbling, creaking way in which they left, curious in their vagueness. Their veils only enticed him to rip them asunder. Conclusions about life? Purpose? How philosophical. A hunger opened in his eyes; the spoon tapped the rim of his cup, quivering over a black whorl.

    A pregnant pause waddled in as they both took their tea, a quiet stalemate of porcelain. The construct looked troubled — well, as troubled as one could be with a bronze face — and spoke to his ceylon, spoke words none should ever have to utter, words that had no right to be true outside of old nan’s tales and outlandish fantasy.

    Does this make me a Dead thing? Are — are you Dead, my friend?

    The words struck like a viper. For a moment the air punched from him, fingers digging into his chair — his stare became hunted, briefly, golden eyes widening a fraction. Then it hardened, sharpened to the edge of a knife. He—knew? Since when? Had he suspected, in all that time— but— Phaedrus sat still, staring, staring, mouth opened in the fraction of an answer, fingers hunting for the handle of his cup.

    He took a sip of tea.

    “…Fah,” the necromancer scowled, grimacing visibly. “Needs cream.”

    A few moments passed in clinking and studiously deliberate silence, lips pursed. A faint crinkle marred his brow, and he stirred perhaps too long, watching the milk slither away into the corners of porcelain. Breathing deeply, the necromancer leaned back in his chair, wood creaking — his manner suggested he’d just tramped up flights of stairs instead of pouring dairy, and he took a long, contemplative sip, eyes suddenly weary.

    When he lowered the cup into its saucer, a sigh tapered off his lips.

    “Ah, devils.” But of course, the man would want to know. And he’d—come all this way, for this? The weight of phrasing suddenly caved the room, settled on his shoulders. The construct’s fears were palpable, buzzing like a panicked animal. What must he think of Dead? That they are all heinous things like the Changer? “…What a question. I have often asked myself such,” the necromancer intoned slowly, tasting each word. His tone was carefully excised of feeling, tepid, even as the horror coiled his guts, oozed through his mind. All the while he watched the construct, one finger tapping the cup. “It all rather depends on what you consider the true meaning to be.” His eyes did not leave Glede’s mask. Sandpaper made a foul mockery of his tongue, dried his mouth. Husks of words escaped him, quiet and edged with brutal control. “Did my body die? Yes. Did my soul enter Death? Yes. Did it leave once more? Well, I am sitting here, so I am wont to say so.”

    A rim of paisley eclipsed his mouth. The necromancer set the tea down again, face grossly still. For a moment he weighed the priest, the shame of his turned face, the absurd image of a deathly knight grappling with a teacup. He looked like a scared child, one who’d learned the meaning of death for the first time—realized the inevitable in his mother’s clutch and his father’s kiss; the helpless realization of what living was, powerless, powerless. Except some mad god had laughed himself silly, and made a mummer’s play of undeath. Phaedrus clicked his tongue, fingers curling.

    “There are Dead of many kinds, just as there are people of many kinds. Some are good, and others are wretched indeed. There are some that were never human at all —strange creatures that feed on Life as cats eat mice. There are Dead who were born as men and died, and whose souls remain the same through eternity. Among those, some are fettered to earth, rattle a few pots, frighten tenants… others walk Death until they find oblivion, and can no longer remember who or what they were. There are Dead who were born as men and tampered with necromancy, transmuting their own souls into… heinous things. And there are thralls, souls that belonged to innocent men but were reshaped by necromancy.” A delicate nostril flared. For a moment something hideous crossed his face. Tap, tap, sung the porcelain. A fleck of ceylon wobbled in the brown pond.

    Phaedrus sighed. The tension bled out of him, left in a twitching finger.

    “Perhaps what I mean to say is… you are not bad or evil by virtue of what you are. When you die, you do not cease to be a man. Your body is different now, perhaps… but the inhabitant is the same.” A languid slurp interrupted his sentence. Eyelids hooded his lurid eyes, dulling them. He wasn’t sure he believed the own words leaving his mouth—they dug a cold, familiar pit, left a dull ache. One brow arched. “In truth, it is miraculous that you remember so much. The… mark of sorcery on you is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

    Memory of the blade—fingers brushing against an ancient leviathan, the decaying breaths of a Master—the pulse of runes, cold, in his veins…

    He fought a shudder. A chill had crept in, curled itself uninvited around the dining room. It tied up his guts, left him tense, pared away the comfort of Madrid and the miles of safety. Something of the desert had slithered in, baring its fangs and begging questions.

    How does he remember anything? By all rights, those runes should have obliterated his entire soul. But they were — incomplete, somehow — was he unfinished? And yet… Phaedrus plucked at the lace of a doily, lips pursed in a troubled stare. Again he felt the discomfort of being next to such a relic — the very same he felt when he descended to his study and unchained his master’s books, hands trembling, breathing in the vellum like poison. Whisked to another time locked deep in the abscess of his skull, waking some primitive fear without memories to inform it. Always on the cusp of remembering a nightmare.

    “Well.” Phaedrus smoothed an imperceptible wrinkle from the lace, asking as much to focus himself. “Does that make things clearer? I am afraid in this, there are no simple answers.” Indeed, perhaps there are none. Man scarcely knows what to do with himself in life. Undeath is a tragedy to his psyche. Now it was his turn to stare into the teacup, pale thumbs circling the porcelain.
    Edited by Phaedrus, Mar 10 2015, 11:04 PM.
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    “Indeed... well – it is... all right. They do not trouble me. They do not trouble me at all,” he repeated, voice stronger. Without tremors seizing his limbs, he found it somewhat easier to believe his own words. As he sat and nursed his tea, he tried to avoid looking toward the wisps that minded the roast. Instead, he fixed his gaze on Phaedrus – on the table between them, with the tea-things, so delicate and small in the sorcerer’s taste – on the tea itself, though what he saw in the reflection was displeasing.

    These are no souls, the necromancer-banisher had retorted; he wondered for a moment at the divide, the complex system of relations that lay in the misty area between life and death, sentience and insentience. He struggled to grasp it, in truth. It was not something that could be heard, seen, or touched. Phaedrus’ explanation was almost scientific – absurdly academic, wretchedly mundane. For the paladin who had long stalked desert and scrubland hunting for entities that stretched long fingers across the border between Life and Death, there were few distinctions to be made. About fewer even of these did he care.

    Of course, this was what made the whole dilemma – the one that he had trekked all the way down from his native Ashoka to discuss – rankle. What left Phaedrus’ mouth immediately did not please him. One could sense the mincing of the words and the careful avoidance, the stalling of time that took the form of swirling cream. Once or twice during the explanation Glede lifted his cup of tea halfway to the lips of his mask, then (with infinite care) let it drop back to its saucer with a tinkle and a slurp, ceylon licking the porcelain sides and washing them with sand-colored paint.

    So he is Dead. That settled it. He imagined what Baqi would say to an explanation that simple – the street-rat djinni, who had been so startled to learn that a priest had worked so closely with a necromancer! But the soft, red-haired southerner before him was not just a necromancer: he was one of the Dead himself. It was not as if Glede had not expected this, but nonetheless it seemed surreal. The pale, womanly face belied the thing that lurked in the gold of his eyes, prying.

    He leaned forward, setting the saucer and cup back upon the table with as much tentativeness as he could manage. Then he leaned back and gave a great, rumbling sigh.

    “I suppose it is the same for you,” he said, removing his mask and clasping his black gauntlets over it in his lap. There was no need for covering – this was more personal than polite company, and certainly the undead necromancer did not seem to appreciate the grim brass decoration. He did not look at Phaedrus for a moment, his head turned down. “It is – living with the knowledge that your make is profane, but hoping that the gods judge based on action alone. Ah... Nailah give me strength! It is good to know, my friend, that whatever forms our souls have fled into, we remain men.”

    He recalled the rasping voice the sorcerer had used on the night they’d met, akin to the gales that howled through the wicked branches of shrubs outside, and shuddered. Did he, like other Dead, have a ‘true form’?

    The construct tilted his head and looked at Phaedrus, the space beneath his helm gaping with darkness. The petal of another petunia fell from the crown about his horns, drifting down to catch in the wrinkles of his hood. “That mark of sorcery,” replied Glede, “which was familiar to you – indeed. The one which seethed within my scimitar before you worked your own magic upon it. I have thought a great deal about – that, too. I remember what you told me. That the blade required the blood of a man. And now, I think... it required the blood of many men, and what a nightmare that is! What a terrible dream to be stuck in, waiting to wake in some beautiful house while all this” – he gestured to himself, the room, perhaps unwisely even to his friend – “is... banished to wherever memories of bad dreams go.”

    Nailah give me strength, he wanted to say, Nailah, Nailah... He felt he had said too much. He had rambled, caught up on the words – enchantment, worst, worst... And the familiarity of those luminescent eyes, shaded with eyelids like shadows on crescent moons.

    He rustled, bending to lean his mask against an immobile calf-piece and reaching again for his chilly cup of ceylon. A comfort – and a collateral for the payment of respect between men. “Yes. You have been most clear. Thank you. I do not know whom else I could have trusted to explain this so clearly and honestly.” And yet those two things niggled at him, the familiarity and the sudden discomfort – that of sitting across the table from a Dead thing, the word itself revolting to his ear. Revolting to Nailah. But like himself, all the same, and he could not flee his own Dead soul. “Yes. Yes --”

    It was as if he could sense that the discomfort between them was of the same type. He knew some of Phaedrus’ story, though it had been muddled by the previous months. They were both old beyond knowledge – perhaps even ancient, though Glede thought that a strange word to describe himself, given how very young his consciousness felt, only a foot out of the womb – and tainted by a dark art. They were familiar with each other. They had both served dark masters.

    He felt the voice echo through his mind again – “Glede! More quickly, thrall!” And those yellow eyes, like lanterns in a darkness full of snarling, slinking chains – once again the crunch of bone beneath the edge of a blade, jelly and then twigs –

    “-- ah!”

    His metal bones rattled again. Leafy water soaked his skirts, ran like a like a little river in the grooves of his chainmail. It pooled in the saucer against the bottom of the teacup.

    “Ah – useless. I am useless,” he grumbled, setting the teacup-and-saucer back on the table and peering about for something to wipe the spilled tea away with. Ceylon would be slithering in the grooves of his framework for weeks, he was certain. He would have to stand under a waterfall and hope his master had possessed the wherewithal to protect him against rust. “Forgive me. Something struck me.

    “Phaedrus, I cannot remember – if you told me that your master was Ashokan, or from some other place. Or rather, if you escaped him in Ashoka. I think it may be important.” While he spoke, he searched for something – some cloth – to dab at his lap. His growling tones were tinged with a sort of whining, irrelevant frustration. “I came to you because I think you are a good man, and I... did miss you, and I thought you could explain things in such a way that I could understand them. This you have done – I am grateful.” He gave up his search for the moment, folding his hands in his lap with resignation. Tea dribbled in out-of-reach places. “But I also came to you because you seem familiar to me, where nothing else does.

    “These are private matters, but I would be grateful if you told me – as much as you know about your master. Who he was, where he went about his foul labors, and other... servants... that he may have had. I have often wondered if it is naive to suggest that we two had the same master. I know your eyes; I have seen them in waking dreams, I think. Kahlil often arranges that two men who hunt the same game cross paths in the Xeric, where the land is most holy.”

    He paused, suddenly stricken.

    “It is all right if you need – time. I am sorry. If you do not wish to discuss this, you need not have to. I have already troubled you enough...”
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    Phaedrus
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    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    I wonder. What must he think of me, now?

    The silence stretched. Somewhere a clock swung, twitched, interrupted the pause in its singleminded pursuit of Time. The roast spit. A plaintive meow drifted from someplace in the house, far off, vague.

    At last the metal man spoke, breaking the spell. The necromancer loosed a breath he did not recall holding, tearing his eyes from the wobbling ceylon.

    Profane. At that he looked up, a muscle flickering in his jaw; his lips popped open for rebuttal, petulant, stung. It was awful. Awful, to spring up in a world where every eye and every hand was turned against you for your make, not your person. To be of a nature that compelled men to hiss and throw stones, throw crosses, throw fire…

    “We did not ask to be made,” Phaedrus retorted, flicking the side of his teacup. “Men do not ask to be born. Yet here we are, all of us. The circumstances of our being are quite beyond us. How we continue to live isn’t.”

    For a moment his mouth ironed to a white line. “I am hardly afraid of the gods. If they have an eye between them, they’d see our Masters were the proper cunts.” A scowl. A slurp of tea disappeared between his pursed lips; he whisked out a fan of white fingers as if to bat away the thought. “No, no. It is… people, that trouble me.” The admission troubled him in turn, tapered to a mutter. “Perhaps you know. To have—memory of being a man, to wish to live like one, and yet…” What? The mill of his throat ground to a close; his hand spun like a failing contraption.

    “…Ah. To hide… to always fear they will come with their torches and their—“ he almost said priests; stopped himself with a hesitant sip of tea, shaking his head and swallowing the rest of his words.

    That was not the true horror of it for him. Far worse than the physical threat was the look in people’s eyes, the disgust, to crave human closeness and yet be petrified of it. But that he felt too embarrassed to admit to Glede, mortified at the thought of uttering it aloud.

    The duality of his existence strangled him, at points — to live and yet not be living, to adorn himself with all the trinkets of humanity and still know he’d never be among them, hearing that small voice: it does not matter how many forks you own, Phaedrus. You are still Dead.

    His eyes flickered to the horror of the mask in Glede’s lap — shining like a discarded face, its blind stare cast to the heavens. A cruder metaphor for what he was. But they were the same. Rattled, the necromancer reached for his teacup again, ignoring the twisting kite of his guts, the vertiginous dysphoria.

    What a terrible dream to be stuck in.

    He saw Glede in minute detail and yet not at all — the slow flutter of the petunia, pressed in his mind as if between the pages of a book; the rusted circles of mail, the twitching, scraping joints, the horns, horns! Who devised the horns? — and took a deep breath, anchoring himself with a sip of tea.

    “I see,” the sorcerer murmured, troubled — a healer nodding to an account of maladies. “I see…” A flicker of his eye marked the construct’s gesture — to me, indeed? — but he ignored it like a wrinkle in the carpet, leaning back into his chair. A deep sigh stirred the hair around his face. “Well. I can examine it in greater detail here, if you should like. It…” an awkward pause, the words ugly in his mouth, at loss of how to console him. There was no comfort to be had in any of this, no assurances. Academic vindication crumbled beneath the visceral weight of guilt, of being the one to swing the blade, no matter who ordered it.

    “Glede. You… are not responsible for what you did. Your soul was displaced, turned into — gears for a machine. You, as you are, you were dormant. There is nothing you could have done. The blood is on your Master. Remember this, re—”

    Clink.

    Metal rattled, jumped — and of a sudden tea splashed his table and lace like brown blood, dribbling into the wood. Wincing, the necromancer scraped back his chair and stood. A pulse of guilt shot through him, hot, burning in his cheeks — as if his own words had been responsible, shooting the last of Glede’s nerves.

    “Ah. It’s alright—“ and at the construct’s frantic searching, his frame lumbering for a napkin and threatening to knock the table over — “don’t trouble yourself, I’ll get it. Where is that towel…” Mumbled, lost. His golden eyes scoured the kitchen, sweeping the countertops, the twitching aether of the Hands. Where is—? He was grateful he turned to the kitchen to look, else the construct would have seen the spasm of his face, his eyes widening like prey animal’s.

    Your Master. From Ashoka. Escaped. Devils—how much did he say? How much had he told him? The tent had been a sickbed of confession, fear and guilt his bedfellows, his words feverish vomit. Choking in twisted sheets, his body useless. Desperation. A drunken tirade without the wine, a bearing of the soul he remembered only in snatches, livid with the thought of revenge. Phaedrus’ hand twitched; absently, he snatched it to his chest, grateful to have an excuse to rove around.

    A good man? Him? He almost whipped his head around, eyebrow launching into his hair — stopped to compose himself, fingers gnarling on the countertop. I did miss you. The confession disarmed him, dismantled some of his rising fear. They had found comfort in each other then, solidarity in the bleak cruelty of the Xeric — if not for Glede, he… could not think on such a thing, could not think on the clammy grasp of the First Gate and the accusing stares of the villagers. Theirs had been a friendship sown in blood, grown fast by circumstances, wild and painful — nothing like the careful mince of Madrid, acquaintances built with tea-time and fine dress. They could… speak, openly. But still, the casual mention of his Master was a sudden backhand, a breaking string in an orchestra.

    “Familiar?” A hoarse echo. The necromancer attempted what he hoped to be a casual lean, calm and unhurried, but instead he felt every muscle wind like clockwork, poised to spring like a cornered cat. Again his eyes swept the construct, burrowing into every chink in the armor, trying to mark the style of his breastplate and greaves, the demon’s helm. The request tightened his chest, sealed his lips — and dread pounded behind those doors, sending him to turn with an abrupt whisk. His pale hand fisted around a pink towel.

    Who he was… where he went about his foul labors…

    A thousand memories skittered, rats from torchlight, their swollen forms glimpsed in horrible snatches, yellow teeth, a bulbous tail, making the mind fearful of the rest of it. Blood, blood, always blood. The slippery offal of it on his hands; the soaring halls, prisons, the reek of vomit, the sandstone echo of screaming, screaming — shouting at the door, sealed, hideous, the ornaments like scabs, the stench of Death beyond. Efendi? Screeched to the darkness, lost. Efendi?

    The tea sloshed unpleasantly in his stomach. Phaedrus wiped his brow, startled at the sudden tickle of fabric — forgot he’d fetched the dish towel at all, suddenly snapped back into purpose. For a stretch he could not speak at all, his eyes luminous, fixed on Glede. He knows me? Unpleasant possibilities spun, reeled — since the Xeric, since… meeting her, it had loosed some memories from their coffins, left them gnarled and half-realized in his dreams. Nightmares, rather. And that blasted verse — that hellish line on Khalid… perhaps he’d know something on it. Perhaps they could assist each other.

    For a long moment he said nothing, looking to his hands, debating.

    The silence broke with a deep sigh.

    “…If I am to speak about my master, I’ll need something stronger than tea,” he jested, and not at all. The necromancer snapped his head up, a brittle smile crammed into his lips. Deep breaths. Come now. Phaedrus handed the towel to the construct and swept on, wrenching open a cabinet. The soothing sight of bottles greeted him — all shapes, all sizes, all of potent odor — and he snatched one, uncorking it with his teeth and pouring a glass. The slosh of liquid immediately calmed him, bitter in his mouth; he drained half the glass before turning to Glede, wiping his lips and stifling a cough.

    Hm. Well. It is… difficult, at points, to know what is true. There are… great gaps in my memory. But I shall tell you what I know.” He cradled the glass, uninclined to sit just yet — pacing by the table instead, unsure how to put any of it to words. He’d never had to — in some ways it was impossible to describe, only to experience. The facts. Start with the facts.

    “You are right, on both counts. To my knowledge, my master was Ashokan, yes. He… went by many names, but the one I knew him by was—“ he’d had the strength to say it once, to her. He could say it again. Still it burned, caustic, in his chest, in his lungs — as if uttering it would bring him back, make it real again. “—Alloces. In some tongues, Allukar, Alocles, Arcalas.” Once more his stare dropped to his glass. The minutiae of his fingers sprung out to him; an unkempt cuticle, a ring of dirt under his thumb. A muscle worked in his jaw, lips twisting.

    “Perhaps those are familiar to you. Regardless… he was an alchemist. A veritable miracle worker. That’s how he fetched his disciples. Gold, I wager.” A vicious sneer ripped up his face. One finger bone popped as he clenched it, picking at his thumbnail. “When he tired of changing metals, he turned to souls. He was — a transmuter, a…” Bastard. A devil. There are no words to describe the level of scum.

    “…The things he did—” Pacing. The liquid sloshed in his glass, nearly slopped onto his hand. White anger pulsed, made it hard to think, to form words. He could not convey that unfairness, the loss of self, of control — the impotent anger, locked and clipped, preferring to die than spend another minute in a cage. “Playing god — always in my head, — he was a psion, you know that?” The facts jumped out at random, wild and unpolished, somewhere in that twisted road of anger. “A psion— a drow — Dead; he’d been dead for a long time, ripped out his own soul to preserve it, left his body walking… a lich. He was a lich.”

    Phaedrus stopped, taking an abrupt sip from his glass. His thoughts boiled, swarmed him as he stood in the middle of the kitchen. The necromancer forced himself to look up — up, up, at the ceiling beams darkened with cooking-smoke, the familiar bushels of rosemary, the crockery in their careful places.

    “He… dwelled in the northern desert. In a palace, past the Ikoi. But it… doesn’t have a true place, not really. It… shifts, yet the way there remains the same.” Quiet, strained. Another bout of silence followed, crackling with the spit and fire. Phaedrus watched the flames awhile, his appetite quashed — suddenly sickened by the dribble and hiss of fat, the browning flesh of the roast.

    “That is— where I was enslaved, and where I escaped. It was a vast place, certainly not for one man. He took endless apprentices, this I know — he kept correspondence, colleagues…” For years he’d tried to hunt them down; had scourged every letter and possible link with howling fury, wandered strange places until he finally conceded that they were all dead. Gulfs of a hundreds years, trails leading to absurd antiquity, some lost completely — it seemed the devil had been a recluse in the end.

    The same Master. Was he also a victim of Alloces? Could they share that same solidarity, the memory of that same pain, someone who knew, someone who…

    The necromancer watched Glede sidelong, fingers tightening around his glass.

    “It is not… impossible that we dwelt in the same place,” Phaedrus answered softly, regarding the construct anew. “Nor that we answered to the same bastard.” His eyes slithered down Glede’s armor, past the skirt and to Arukah’s hilt. Something in his face hardened, erased the girlish youth from it. Deliberately the necromancer strode forward, the shuff of his slippers following him. Now he was closer, nearly eye-level with the sitting construct; marked the flicker of the soul in the empty helm, diaphanous but there, trapped and skittering in a cage of runes. Eyes narrowing, the necromancer reached out a tentative hand — and lightly prodded at the construct’s pauldrons, fingers trailing around the wicked spikes, the magic crackling where it had been forged with the black metal. Dark. Old.

    Again, that sensation. Phaedrus shuddered and withdrew his hand, shaking his head.

    “…No. I knew my master’s magic. Awful as it was — this is different. I have seen it, I am sure of it. But it is not his. This is the make of another hand.” He felt it with surprising conviction, one that crystallized as he stepped back, unsettled by Glede’s horns — how the light bled through his curtains and left them red, red as dunes, rippling behind the construct like a poor backdrop. A mummer’s impression of a dream, the fragments there but made crude by the stage. I feel I have seen this before. The necromancer bit his lip, nails picking nervously against each other.

    “Tell me, Glede… in what dreams have you seen me? What, if anything, do you remember?”
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    And yet to be not one. That went unspoken, for Glede did not wish to say it; he did not wish to voice the sting that he sometimes nurtured, musing alone, convincing himself of the virtue and grace of being a thing that sent other men reeling in fear. How can I reply to that? He is southern and impious. To him, a trial of Nailah – the ‘curse’ that we both suffer – is a pointless persecution. He does not understand that it is a test... to see whether we are capable of goodness even when others think we are not.

    Once again he found himself wondering – frightened to wonder; mortified! – what lay beneath the gentle face of his friend, what lived in his fox-like eyes. What persecution was there, when one could drink and sleep and mingle as one wished? Most men would not see what Glede had seen of him in the desert; the circumstances under which the construct had suspected that Phaedrus was Dead were, surely extraordinary. What fear did he have of walking among people?

    “Ah... people... are not...” But he could not finish.

    He remembered what he had told the street-rat Baqi in a hammer of passionate, ill-thought-out words: Truth is the way to salvation. In the past, regardless of consequence, he had taken off his mask for anyone who wished to know what lay beneath. Was the Thing that sat across the table from Glede an elaborate mask? He had reason to think so, though he desperately wished for ignorance of it.

    And it was impossible not to detect the moderation of tone, the careful placement of each breath and pause and exercise of voice, the delicacy with which Phaedrus tiptoed about the broken glass of his situation. He spoke of blood and responsibility. Oh, the things that he wished those words could mean!

    He took the towel in his great gauntlet, torn from his reverie. Though he had begun to regret asking his last question in the first place, the weight of the towel in his hand, at least, made him feel better; some of the irritation spurred by the spill drained away. Now he could see that his foolish slip had doused the table-cloth, left lace stained with something that looked not unlike the watery auburn paint of a fresco-maker. Was it ruined? The construct could not judge, though he was wont to sit and try. Could he replace the frilly bit of cloth? The southerner did not expect him to do so, but it hardly seemed polite to let it sit thus.

    “I am grateful,” replied Glede, but it was unclear whether he meant this with regard to the towel or Phaedrus’ wry, exhausted admission. As the sound of clinking and the burble of a drink being poured filled the air, he added, “Please – only what you can. I know... ah, trust me – I know how wretched it is to remember.” He bent to apply the dishtowel in the swabbing of his greaves, pointedly attentive to each nook and cranny. He thought that perhaps with his listener occupied in another pursuit, it would be easier for Phaedrus to speak of such a private, uncomfortable subject-matter.

    The change in Phaedrus’ demeanor soon drew his full attention, however. The chair creaked heavily as Glede shifted to sink back; the dish-towel flopped to lie in limp, damp disarray in his lap.

    The voice went on and the shuffle of slippers was like accompanying percussion. There was something unnerving in the way he paced, giving the cozy kitchen the air of being too small – or not real at all; it was as if you could have peeled away the warm wash of stove and spit and hanging spices like wallpaper, scratched off each endearing image to reveal the blinding brightness of blue sky over stirring sand. Tension – preparation for flight, for violence, like the strung silence after a nightmare – tinkled in his trembling glass.

    On, on went the voice!

    He was – he was Ashokan! Allukar! “The alchemist,” murmured Glede, voice transfused with wonder – “the famous alchemist. Yes. Yes, I know.” He could not recall how he knew the name, much like his prior knowledge of the Scriptures; the knowledge was there, but not the memory of absorbing it. But he was certain those names were common knowledge in some parts of Ashoka, albeit hamstrung by the dryness of a history book and the drone of a schoolmaster. “A... lich?” And a psion. The history books did not say those things, he recalled – though he understood the latter, and it fit in his mind with the memories of his own master. How terrible, to have a voice lingering in one’s mind, compelling one! The fear that such a voice would return paralyzed him. He nodded quickly, sympathetically, flexing his hands against his knees with a series of nervous clicks.

    The anger teemed, now, in the rigid lines of Phaedrus’ form, in the way he threw back the drink, light from the window and from the cook-fire echoing in the confines of the glass like a trapped soul. He could not fathom that anger; he felt hurt and frightened – of himself as much as his master – but he could not imagine the tongues of flame in the necromancer’s mind, all the vengeance of the gods without their forgiveness. Glede leaned forward, inclined now to silence, listening. Struck mute.

    He… dwelled in the northern desert. In a palace, past the Ikoi.

    He heard something about apprentices – colleagues and correspondence – but his mind had wandered elsewhere, stalking off among the dunes in search of his new quarry. Shifts, but the way remains the same... The Golem’s Eye! The fear that bubbled up within him was tempered by its familiarity; he had felt the same sensation when Baqi had told him of the Bayt Ifrit, and he had recalled the Golem’s Eye from his first memories. Now, anticipation was its bedfellow. If this was where Phaedrus had escaped from his master, then it was doubtless. Sorcerer and construct must have served the same master, the wicked alchemist Allukar. It was doubtless now!

    Purpose filled him. Phaedrus’ voice burbled away, no longer intelligible – the construct’s mind worked and worked, piecing together details. At the word ‘bastard’ he looked up again to find the pale southerner approaching, eyes set upon him, sweeping him like a...

    ...master might examine a servant? No, no.

    Once again the familiarity struck him and made the air ring with wrongness. As Phaedrus’ fingers brushed his pauldrons, he felt the urge to lash out, his talons clenching and wringing the towel in his lap instead. At length, he calmed himself, waiting for the outcome of this appraisal, hoping. He imagined he might hear a soft aha! of recognition – a gentle ‘yes, I know your make’ – and in the next moment felt betrayal like the twist of a knife.

    All the anticipation bled from him, replaced with a disappointment like a heavy stone at the bottom of his carapace. He moved when Phaedrus withdrew – he continued dabbing himself with the towel, sluggish, and for awhile he did not look at the sorcerer’s face. Finally he folded the towel and set it upon the table, just atop the mahogany-colored stain.

    The evidence with regard to the Bayt still stood, nonetheless. This gave him cheer enough, and when Phaedrus’ next question came, he was prepared.

    “I... I do not remember – much, as I have said. I...”

    He seemed restless of a sudden; he knit his fingers in his lap absurdly, let the claws come to a contemplative steeple, but when he made to rearrange his sitting position, the loud protest of the chair stopped him. The embarrassing image of the chair breaking assaulted him. He froze. At once he did and did not wish to raise the question of the House of the Ifrit, frightened of what Phaedrus might say, what things it might stir between them.

    For a moment he listened to the boil-and-chew of the roast, nothing but silence issuing from the gape beneath his helm. Then: “It is strange, but I do not associate those eyes – my memories of you – with... the killing field.” The last three words dripped acid, but were somehow wry; they were morbidly accepting. He paused for a moment as if surprised he had emitted that set of sounds, but realized he must press onward. “I cannot even recall for what purpose I was employed. I know it must have been in the desert, because I recall the sand. These are the few memories of light that I possess; all else is entrenched in darkness. I know the sight of the blood upon the sands, the sight of troops rippling in the heat like a mirage. A great amount of blood ran in the desert, in this sand – my legs sunk in the sand and I had difficulty moving, and... th-they were like – gnats all around, elusive but easily-swatted --”

    He stopped, rumbling with something like a gasp. Easily-swatted? The memory jarred him, but put him in mind of something. Blood, blood – blood running in the sand... blood... He felt of a sudden that he had to move. Reaching down to recover and set his mask upon the table, just beside the towel, he rose from the seat in a screeching moment, looming – turned his great frame to face the red hanging behind, gaze drawn, drinking in the color.

    It put him in mind not of rivers of blood – something similar – trickling strands of blood in rich cloth –

    “Blue,” he said, shaking his head, seeming to sigh. “The color blue. Red. I do not know. It is pointless.” Glede moved round to the back of the chair, facing Phaedrus, conscious of the roof-beams not far above the tips of his helmet’s horns. His posture seemed to slacken, curl in on itself. Careful. He did not like the strange places that his thoughts took him; he was frightened of the words that he spoke, that wrapped themselves round the legs of the table and nested in the teacups. The Bayt Ifrit niggled at his mind. “I do not know if that is – important. I try to call these dreams into my mind and all that comes is... an endless montage of murder. I know that there was a dark place otherwise, a place with slithering chains, a place where...”

    He stared at Phaedrus’ feet. Such pretty slippers. How absurd.

    “...things moved, and they may have been like me. But – those eyes – were not among those things that were like me. That... I... it is a useless pursuit to try and...” It was as if his body could not contain the apprehension, the excitement; he leaned forward at once, the back of the small chair creaking beneath his gauntlet; then he straightened his shoulders, raised his head, drew himself up. There was a dull wooden noise as his horns collided with a roof-beam. “Ah--” He made an effort to make himself smaller, to almost no avail. “Ah –

    “Phaedrus. Do you know the name Bayt Ifrit?” The question was sharp, intense – but the words, ghoulish and harsh, slurred with such excitement as to make them nigh unintelligible. “The place where the path is the Golem’s Eye,” he continued, more slowly. “I know of it. I did not know the name of it, but I woke near it, and in Eldahar, he – a djinn, familiar with the desert – he told me of it.” He ought not to have so freely revealed the nature of his young street-rat friend, but the words were tumbling out all too quickly to be thought-about, to be reined in. It was pleasant to be drawn away from the memories he did not wish to relive and into a purpose he had long suspected was his. “Memory or no, the place you have described sounds like the Bayt Ifrit. In fact, I am certain that is where it is.” He forced himself again to slow down, to enunciate. “My suspicions are confirmed. I know in my heart that this is the place of my origin. This may be the place that you describe. I have thought about going there, about --”

    He eyed the front door through the doorway to the entry-room, as if he debated charging out into Madrid in a fury and sprinting to Ashoka that very instant. His claws sunk into the wood of the poor chair; when he realized this, he slackened them, looking about in a manner that seemed to communicate helplessness.

    “-- about... rallying some defenses and... seeing what is to be found there. Phaedrus...” Why have I stood up? The thought flung itself against the cliffs of his motivation, softened them. He winced visibly. “My, ah... my apologies. For this. Nailah. How silly. We are in Soto.” Still, he seemed unwont to sit. “I feel that I might be able to remember more, but not as things are. And not in a place where I could... where I risk...”

    Reflexes, he thought about saying, but let the word trail into nothingness. Hurting someone?

    “If the memories will not come,” he said, again hopeful, looking to Phaedrus, “then I wish to go to the House of the Ifrit. It is a noble pursuit and I might recall more there. And I can come back – to the south – and tell you what I have found. About my master. About the link between us. Yes?”
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    Phaedrus
    Member Avatar
    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    The famous alchemist. His lip curled, nail finding the grooves of his glass. It was all the worse that he was — springing up unbidden in tomes, in dusty shelves where he thought he’d be safe from the name. Always high praise, whispered in the same tongues of greatness and legacy, a vanguard in the pursuit of the Unknown. But then, then — how could the world have known? It never made his anger any less, seething at the kindness of history.

    Hm.” A rumble in his throat, not unlike that of a growling animal. It did not surprise him that Glede knew that particular name, though which he knew was quite telling of his antiquity. It was hard — no, nearly impossible — to wedge the construct into that span of history. His soul seemed so… young. The perennial optimism, the childlike belief in the goodness of the gods. Again, he wondered — how old? How young, rather, snatched and beaten and melded into that coffin?

    “A lich,” the necromancer repeated tersely, with the briskness of an academic skirting a particularly foul buboe of history, “is a person who has divorced their soul from their bodies, and placed it into a — phylactery, an object or place of importance. Sometimes… a person.” What quivered in his throat was harsh, acrid, smoke boiling from the furnace of his anger. Some things were too awful to think of, to consider in all its vastness and ramifications. “Their immortal soul is no longer chained to their mortal body. Many become fetid, walking corpses. But even when they crumble to dust, they are still bound to Life.”

    A brutish, barbaric practice.

    For a long time there was silence. His answer had disappointed the construct, somehow — he knew it all-too-well, those false rabbit-holes and trails, a thousand tricks of light that guttered in his palms. Spider’s threads. But he felt there was something else there yet, felt it deeply and immutably, in some recess of his mind. The necromancer craned his head up, trying not to stare overmuch. He gave the paladin some space, physically and otherwise, fiddling with the tea-things like an agitated housewife. One look at the doily sent his eyes skirting elsewhere — away from the wretched stain, made worse by the clumsy blotting.

    It does not matter, shh…

    He looked up when the construct began speaking, his words tangled like a beast caught in a trap, writhing, writhing — growing only more pained with its attempt at escape. The chair creaked alarmingly. Phaedrus bated his breath, drink wavering at his lips.

    The killing field. The violence in the construct’s tone sent his eyes skittering to the hole of Glede’s face, somehow solidified the purpose of his make, the reality of it. He didn’t dare look at the blade — kept his gaze fixed on the man within, strung by runes as a spider rolls a fly. Sand, sand. The description of the desert disturbed him, sent his guts to clenching; a sick fear surfaced, crested from the miasma of a bad dream. The inn in Eldahar, the fit he’d suffered there. Blood in the desert. A flash of claws; red, red, his palms slick with it, a scream of a thousand anguished things shattering in the dunes. Corpses… corpses, in a line, a great fetid Thing…

    Easily swatted.

    His golden eyes shot up. There was a brief moment, a horrifying one, where he was not sure if Glede was still Glede. A breath died in his constricting throat, held. He did not move but for his fingers, subtle, curling in the preparatory sign for a ward; when the construct lurched to his feet, the necromancer tensed — but then he turned, turned and rumbled about colors. At once his shoulders slumped, chest crumpling in a release of breath.

    Fool. He is your friend. But still — still, as there was still a seed in him, that black, withered voice that whispered to his conscience, surely there lay one in Glede. Dormant. Waiting for the water of blood, just as the one in him, the thing that delighted perhaps too much in rare meat — the itching pangs of hunger, of something missing, the dark hiss of his soul that gloated when the cannibal’s eyes bubbled black under his magics, when it inhaled the warmth of his house and readied to light that peasant afire — the thing that relished the scurrying fear on Bast’s face when he had drawn from her life.

    For, in those fleeting moments — he was not pretending. He was not playing at something other than what he was or what he was capable of. There was a hideous release, an alignment of his nature with the things people whispered, the release of a long-suffering lock at last giving way. Harmonious…

    No.


    No, damn you!

    The construct was cowering, curled in on himself like a whipped dog. A petunia shivered absurdly off his horns, just a bare flush from gouging the wood of his ceiling. And the drink shook, jumped in his crabbed white hands.

    “It is not pointless,” Phaedrus managed hoarsely, to convince himself — to have the assurance of airing such a thing aloud. He stared into the whisky, watched it quiver. “It is important to you and… to me.” His voice had the far-off quality of answering another thread of conversation, one not altogether in the kitchen. The necromancer’s lips twisted as the construct went on — he rubbed the bridge of his nose, pinched it, would have reshaped it for all the solace it gave him.

    A dark place. Where things moved… slithering chains…

    For a moment he had a vision of a shapeless thing, crawling on butchered knees. Dark ichor bubbled from it, from the rudiment of its hands, if such grotesquerie could be called that. The desert air was cold, bracing — chains jumped, slithered, pulled back the occupants that lunged with murderous force, hurling their shrieking bodies. Hunched. Cold. Afraid. Hiding, had to hide, had to get away from—

    No. No, no…

    The rest of the whisky disappeared.

    Swallowing the acrid burn, Phaedrus wiped his lips and looked up, the barest trace of a wince easing from his face.

    “Glede. Your story… it has made me recall. I had a — well, it is — a nightmare, a waking dream… a memory, perhaps. They are not so different, anymore.” His voice had taken on a different quality, removed and cold. The boyish ease of before had been swapped with something else, unreadable. Eyes narrowed. “It was—as you describe. The deserts. The… killing-field. The sand was… whipping, the dunes hideous — a storm the manner of thing only the djinni could conjure, so thick. Choking.” It surprised him how much he recalled. It had recurred since Eldahar, stealing his sleep and embellished with new detail, leaving him choking and gasping in his sheets.

    “There were…” he closed his eyes, focusing. A wrinkle twitched in his brow. “Armies, vast… of Dead, of — things not unlike you, great, rumbling shapes, and I was… afraid; not for myself, but for… the world, if such a force succeeded.” He faltered, hesitated. Could not describe that loathsome thing — the centre of his nightmare, the putrid core from which all else had emanated. The voice, slathering, filling him, screeching even in its demise.

    “I followed— lines of bodies, crucifixes, devils, all twisted in the wood — and, at the end, there was…”

    slAvE To tHe MaSTeR, wEAK, PITEouS cREAtuRE…

    The voice thundered through him as if bellowed in his very kitchen, tearing through his mind. For a moment his breath ripped away — all memory around the voice had obliterated, sunken to a hole, a pit, a thing felt and feared in nightmares and yet forgotten in waking. Perhaps it was the mind’s mercy. Ink spreading over pages — nothing, nothing; and then his screech, raising his bloodied hands.

    “A horror — impossible to call a man — a — I don’t know. It knew me, whatever it was, and I hated it — the last I remember is — blood, its blood all over my hands. And then the armies fell.” Did they? He had seen broken things in the sand — but perhaps it had been the convergence of another memory. The thing’s screech lingered in his mind, fell and chill — its proclamation too awful to flinch from.

    slAvE.

    He reopened his eyes. Perhaps… perhaps that had been the Thing the construct served, his master — a rebellion, he’d thought, a revolt of apprentices. His show of loyalty that had meant nothing in the end to Alloces. And still, devils! That awful, awful verse, singing in his mind!

    An awful silence followed him.

    “There was one other thing,” the necromancer muttered. He turned the empty glass round and round, hoping it would magically refill itself. “The first time I recalled this, I — it was in waking. I had a fit, you see. And when I came to… the woman I was with, she said I would not stop saying… ’The mouth of Kahlid delights in the hubris of man.’” Even now it chilled him in some strange, fragmentary way, unsure if it was profound or utterly nonsensical. “Does that—mean anything to you? It was a line from the Book of Marduk, but… I don’t know. I am not a man of Scripture, nor do I know its intricacies. Why would I say such a thing?”

    The construct’s mention of chains — eyes, eyes, his eyes; Bast had said they were familiar, too — slithering, that foetid darkness perhaps they had both awakened in … and his name, burning like a coal in his chest, a secret too heavy to force from his mouth. It all swirled before him, sent up little eddies in his mind that hinted at the choked offal beneath. The corpses bobbing. All their parts, waiting to be strung up together.

    Malakar.

    Unconsciously his hand crept to his breast, to the twisted scar he still felt deep in his flesh, a ghostlike river down his collarbone. There was a wooden schupp like a dagger thrown into a table — starting, the necromancer looked up to see Glede bobbing just beneath the roof.

    No comment, none. His lips curled and faltered. For a moment he almost turned to mind the roast, occupy himself and his stringing nerves. But—

    For a moment he wondered if he’d dreamt it, if recalling the nightmare had played a trick on his mind, turned the slurring syllables to the name of that hell. His breath caught, pinned to his lungs. Ice threaded his veins, bit deep, bit till it reached some primal fear.

    “What did—“ scarcely a breath, a rasp, air puffed between corpse’s lips. “Did you s—“

    The necromancer’s face drained to a white mask. Fear fled naked across it, a pinned deer’s; genuine, unbridled, for that was not a name he had ever expected to hear again, not from the lips of living men. Like a nightmare, grinding, clanking, Glede went on — an impossible thing, a rip in the space-time of his carefully built life, a bull tearing all his china asunder, shredding the tapestries, glass breaking, flung to powder in the force of—

    Those horns!

    The voice, gloating, nightmarish — tatters of black cloth, a voice like a drowned man’s — devils, hells, hells — Golem’s Eye, the construct grated, and he felt its red presence with a jolt of panic, the eye that looked from the north, bearing down, down, down, as real as it’d been those years ago — rats, in his teeth, crushed in the wreckage of his jaw, screaming, where had all the screaming come from, under there, those dark places, those grates he did not —

    Bayt Ifrit.

    He’d spent so long, running, running so it could never find him — not here, not amongst the magnolias and the flower-gardens, the soft men with their paisley teacups, a life so far removed and unimaginable from that twisted Carcosa that he’d, in some foolish part of himself, shakily placed it in the realm of nightmares, not Life, not anything — anything that could harm him again, not — here, here, in his kitchen, fuck, gods, not here —

    Who told him of it? Who — how did he —

    The construct made awful noises, unintelligible else for the name that seeped its poison, obliterating all else around it. Pure terror filled his skull, buzzed like a kicked hive, his eyes unseeing, uncomprehending, as if his very mind rejected Glede as some loathsome apparition. All of him screamed to expel him from the house, to bar the doors, spit in his helm and flee from that nameThought about going there— The fear swelled till he could not breathe — reversed on itself, swallowing its own tail; became red waters, a tide of rage that lashed at the construct’s idiocy. His white hands crabbed, twitched, tendons jumping like a piano’s nerves. Cold bled through his palms, chilled it to ice. It is a noble pursuit…

    The glass exploded in his hand.

    No.

    All of him hurled its rejection, sibilant with an other-world, at once feral and hideous. When he turned there was something of the desert in him again, his eyes burning like oil-lamps, jaw flickering in the threads of wrath. His hand was still crabbed in a claw, icy-white, nails reamed with hoarfrost. Glass had sprayed to the heel of the construct’s boot, blasted to powder-fine pieces.

    Breath flickered from his nostrils, drawn, tight — for a moment there was nothing of the pudgy necromancer, eyes frigid as he regarded the construct.

    “By the gods of the under— Hara, ya sharmouta,* do not speak that name again!” His shout filled the kitchen. Malo had begun to creep in through the entryway, but reeled back, startled, one ear flicking nervously. There was a long, pregnant moment while the necromancer stared across the room, eyes boring into the construct’s empty face, rigid like an animal about to strike.

    Get out, he almost shrieked. Quit this place.

    Instead, a thunderous silence bloomed between them. Belatedly he realized his hands were shaking; the breath was tight in his chest, too tight, too hard to breathe, nerves all wound to snapping. A plaintive meow broke his suspicious stare — brought his eyes flickering to the little cat, the glass sparkling on the floor. His head hurt. Everything felt technicolor, wrong, a parody of itself; the black knight at his table, the paisley teacups, the little bushels of herbs that twitched in a breeze from the open window. The curtains shivered ever so. He felt like he was in another man’s kitchen, in another man’s slippers and house shirt, lost and bewildered.

    Phaedrus put a hand to his face and rubbed his chin as if to feel the springing flesh beneath, ensure he was still there — he continued to ignore Glede, shuffling further into the kitchen, his free hand jerking in barely controlled rage. The Hands attending the roast slithered away from their posts, streaking across the floor like black serpents. Only when he heard a cabinet open and the crinkling sound of glass being swept did he stop his mad conduction, lowering his arm.

    He stared intensely at a flower pot. Better, better to look at it than that horned helm, a thing he could not abide in that moment.

    “Names like that have power,” Phaedrus began in a low voice, with the good intent of explanation. Each word crawled over the other, through the grinding trenches of his teeth. “And you toss it around like the name of some mummer’s horror-show, some half-penny kicker, is it? Do you know what that place was? What it continues to be? The sands have swallowed it, and damn it, let them!” Somehow he had begun shouting again. It sort of happened, mounted in every word until it snowballed into a harsh vomit of Ashokan, flying with spittle.

    What do you think you will find there?” He could no longer abide the flower-pot. It did not respond to him; it did not gather his meaning. When he swung around to face Glede it was with a hideous expression, all pressed lips and flaming eyes. “Do you think your defenses will help you? That you can march to those gates with your paper sword and rallied knights and walk away alive?” Something parodying a grin ripped his face. It lacked all mirth, a bared-tooth smile like an animal showing its fangs in fear. “I’ll tell you what you’ll find there, you stupid man. If the ifrit do not incinerate your party. If the ghuls do not rip you limb-from-limb. If by some stroke of hell the Gates open, and I pray, I pray to your gods, and the gods of Soto, and the god of every thrice-damned village that they don’t. You will never find your way out again. The halls of that hell are not earthly. Nailah cannot hear you there.”

    By the end his voice had cooled, though that magmatic anger still glowed below, a sullen red between the hardening cracks. For a moment he stood fuming, surrounded by stretched black limbs that flickered in an unearthly procession, sweeping glass into a dustpan.

    A cord in his jaw flickered. For a moment their gazes held, tightened, taut enough to snap — and then the necromancer looked away, his eyes nowhere, arms crossed over his chest.

    “Forget that madness,” he cut, matter-of-fact. “Do not ever consider it again.” The notion tasted poisonous in his mouth. He had no desire to discuss it, to prod at its carcass — would rather forget it as one dismisses a bad dream, banished to the realm of impossibility. Slippers shuffled against the wood as he walked away, minding the roast by himself. The fat spit and crackled as he turned it, feeling the gust of heat against his legs. Somehow it felt warm, comforting — the dance of embers turned his mind away from its immediate wrath; the roast spun on and on, the motion rhythmic, a mindless outlet for his singing nerves. It looked about ready — perhaps another half hour or so, if he didn’t fancy gnawing on a shoe. Perhaps less. A nice bloody piece would ease him some.

    For some moments he simply lapsed into silence, broken only by the clatter of serving-dishes and cutlery, fixed on the tongs and long, gleaming carving knife. He hardly saw what he was doing — merely moved it about, arranged it senselessly. At last he took a deep breath, latching to some shreds of calmness and civility.

    “…There are other ways to remember,” Phaedrus said colorlessly, straightening the knife on the wooden cutting-board. A pale man stared back at him, eyes warped and gleaming in that mirror-world of metal. “To dredge up old memories as one fishes. It is not precise, but it is something.” His lips pressed. Again his fingers sought the knife, turned it a fraction to the right,so it did not reflect his eyes any longer.


    * Shit. You bitch.
    Edited by Phaedrus, Jul 20 2015, 08:18 PM.
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    In the Scriptures, Kahlid took on many forms. In some, He was peripheral to other gods and goddesses; in some, the “jaws of Kahlid” were merely a punishment reserved for those wicked and sinful persons who were weighed by Ma’at and found wanting. When Ma’at shook Her head, when Teremun and His betrothed frowned and turned Their faces away, one fate remained to the wandering soul.

    A horror – impossible to call a man...

    In the waking dreams of Glede, Kahlid took on a different aspect. Flesh and voice bled into darkness, one with the clanking chains and mottled shapes that lapped at the edges of nightmares. Sometimes spectators appeared, sometimes busy and sometimes amused; sometimes they had yellow eyes and long fingernails that clicked. Something stirred in the dark, far beneath, separate from all of those things. Impressions, when pressed, yielded nothing more than feelings of profanity. Something far underneath the sands, bloated with mankind’s sickness from where it had glutted itself for centuries under Justice’s watchful eye.

    Hubris, hubris.

    Glede had jumped when the glass shattered, had stared with rapt attention at Phaedrus’ every movement. When the Shades began to move again, he felt an awful lurch within himself and his gauntlet flew halfway to his blade. But he knew better. He stood stock-still, not daring to murmur, watching the inflamed clench of Phaedrus’ face – and he hardly recognized his friend at all. Something had stolen Phaedrus’ skin and walked in it. A ghul danced between the sorcerer and his mortal flesh, making the play of light and darkness in the cozy kitchen a tempest more suited for the Bayt than for the banisher’s simple apartment.

    In those moments, anything could have happened. Glede was shame-faced – though he lacked a face to express it – and indignant and mortified all at once. Alone in enemy territory.

    En-sipad-zid-ana prayed sunup and sunset to Nailah,
    But She turned Her lovely face to the Tibira.


    The line swelled and quaked in Glede’s mind, then ebbed like a tide under the half-eaten moon. He is right, the healer thought, and the coals of bitterness rumbled deep within him. He was entirely unprepared. It was beyond unjust to herd a troupe of innocents to their deaths for the sake of a Mission into a world he could neither prepare for nor even comprehend. The House of the Ifrit was a reeking, seething crack in the plain of his awareness, a void from which all light and knowledge fled.

    It knew more of him than he knew of it.

    Phaedrus is right. He is right, and I am wrong.

    With a deep, creaking sound like a sigh – the echoes of words still bouncing in his mind, in the emptiness of his helm, threats of incineration and quartering, Nailah-cannot-hear-you-there – he pulled his chair back out and reclaimed his seat, wincing again at its sounds of protest. He was more shaky now, more aware of the other person in the room, the moving, wavering point of physicality and danger. Glede remembered the way he’d broken his gaze, shot daggers at the flower-pot, as if it had suggested the preposterous idea.

    Names like that have power.

    Once again shame clenched his shoulders, made them raise up round his chainmail hood. He clasped his hands tight in his lap, fingers interlocking like berated children’s. Now that Phaedrus was not looking at him, he could not bring himself to look at Phaedrus, and so he merely stared at those glistening, battered black fingers.

    The roast whispered in its awful squelching way, sweating sticky fat, as the necromancer began to tend it. In the silence that followed, Shades began to sweep up grains of shattered glass like crystallized sugar; Glede tried to ignore them, tried to push away the picture that those two sensations painted – the slavering shadows and the crackle of thick, caustic spittle – but he could not. Prompted thusly, his mind returned to the recollections that Phaedrus had shared before his outburst. He turned them over in his mind, surrounded by but the scattered trappings of deeper horrors.

    Then he looked up, speaking for the first time since the sorcerer turned away.

    “Behold all the lofty divines, fleeing from the bed of sin; be thou warned: only the mouth of Kahlid delights in the hubris of man.” His voice was dull and labored, as if he had roused himself from a waking dream. “I know the book of Marduk,” he said. “I know it as well as anyone who has studied the Scriptures. It is written in – one of the Old Tongues, from the endless days before the first Moghuls came to power. I know enough of this dialect to read... around half of the book, but I cannot pretend that it is simple. Or understandable. No one in the four nations can, and likely no one in the entire world.”

    The healer laid his hand on the table, sighing.

    “The book of Marduk tells, we think, of the patron deity of a very old settlement, and how his shrine was ransacked and his sacred statue stolen by an invading tribe. It tells of how the people had grown fat and foolish, and had not guarded their treasure or respected their god, grown even to the presumption of atheism... and they were punished for this. The gods all abandoned them. In Their holiness, they left the ill-favored tribe to Kahlid, who devoured them as they all fell to plague and murder and madness.”

    To the farmers no living crop;
    To the farmers no rain.
    To the weavers stiff hands;
    To the weavers no wool.
    To the builders bricks of water
    And plaster dry as sand.
    To the lawmen no ready ears;
    To the lawmen crowds of men,
    Eager for the gallows.


    Glede balled his right hand into a tight fist, creaking and straining against the parameters of his strength. It cast an ugly bludgeon of a shadow across the white tablecloth and the dainty pink towel, a chunk of necromantic metal looming in the midst of a civilized tea service. He had come for quiet conversation and now Hell struggled beneath the tile floor of Phaedrus’ kitchen, the dim light from the windows too lazy and docile to dispel the shadows that went skating across the floor like skinstealer-spawn. The weak southern sun had nothing of Aten.

    The fist flattened. He pressed his palm against the table.

    “Regarding the... place,” he grunted. “I shall do no such thing.” For the present time. His empty gaze wandered up and traced the lines of Phaedrus’ back, watched the way the light from the cookfire glinted against the edge of his carving-knife. “I shall not even mention the place. It hurts you, and so I shall not do it.” But there was an air of frustration – a childish reluctance to yield – that left his words strangely empty, a catty and petulant almost-submission. His head hung utterly still, tilted to one side, veil of darkness belying the ugly turmoil underneath.

    When the necromancer mentioned dredging up old memories, the construct’s fingers spasmed against the table. The porcelain rattled for just a moment before he mastered himself.

    “Phaedrus.” His voice was sharp and distant and bitter at once. “You speak to me of recurring nightmares – of the blurred border between dreams and waking horror – of memories of blood, lines of crucifixes, and... a monster too terrible to describe.” The priest sighed again, watching the delicate way in which Phaedrus turned the carving-knife away, the subtle – almost undetectable – motion of shame. Shame. That was what they were: monuments to shame, battered standards from the losing sides of a war that nobody had won. Or had they? He spoke of fear -- fear for the world -- what villain had been vanquished? Was it this villain whom Glede had served? Had Phaedrus done the same?

    He took his hand away from the table and tapped his chest lightly with a finger.

    “Every day I am frightened that my master will speak to me again. As I am now, I can praise Nailah and then in the next moment reject Her – and it would be my decision. No masters. But...” He paused, navigating the labyrinth of what he wished to convey. He felt ill-equipped to do so. “You must understand this fear – that with every revelation, every waking dream, some new detail will fall into place and paint a picture that will change you irrevocably. I have no overwhelming desire to explore forgotten memories of a time when I was a slave to slaughter. If all of me was dormant as this went on, then why do I remember it? – why did this body require a soul at all?”

    Glede found himself wondering what Phaedrus would look like when he turned back to face him – if his words would invoke wrath, or sympathy, or the patient explanations of an academic; he wondered which aspect he would take this time, fluid like the god of the easterners, the strangest man that Glede had ever met. If he is a Man. If Dead things like us are Men. It seemed strange to him that, in that instant, they seemed like a metaphor for something else: the man with a hundred faces and the man with no face at all. Like the meeting of two nameless spirits in a fragment of scripture older than Time.

    “I would rather blast that place from the face of the desert, Phaedrus,” he said quietly. “I would. Than go back there in my mind. I would rather risk being torn apart than question what I know.” Truth is salvation. Truth is salvation-- “It is selfish, in a way. Sometimes I believe that I would die for the life of another. But now I think that I would open all the Gates, as you say, simply to believe that I am a good man.”

    Chainmail burbled as he shifted in his seat.

    “If you have a method of awakening memories, then please tell me of it. But please be patient. My mind is not the swiftest-changing wind, and there is a great deal of sand where sand should not be.” He paused. “Have you used this method to delve within your own... recollections?”
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    Phaedrus
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    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    (sorry for the crappiness/disjointedness, blagh @___@ figure it was best to keep it rolling.)

    After his outburst the air felt dense, pregnant with resentment, a boiling thunderhead rolling into the midst of his kitchen. The sound of his shouting echoed back at him — echoed back through some pulsing hallway in his mind, snaking through bloody tunnels and nesting in his temper. All of his faces were the covers for a brimming pot, a powder-keg waiting patiently to explode. For sometimes that was all one could feel; it was anger or it was despair — it was anger or it was fear — it was anger or it was resignation, a man-shaped box to lie in.

    He did not dare look at Glede.

    He would have liked to be away from the kitchen in that moment — to quietly excuse himself, go rambling past the willow-trees and end up nowhere. It did not matter where. So long as it did not resemble his roof, or his wooden floors, or his doilies. An assemblage of things entirely unlike his own, entirely unlike any manifestation of the afternoon’s conversations. But that could not be. The floodgates had opened, and a brisk walk was no cure for drowning.

    Impossibly, the conversation began again. He thought the kitchen would remain a tomb, a sepulcher, each of their throats blocked by boulders. But ho, the miracle of it! Words clawed themselves out, rose, ascended like the Prophet Elaim, and the necromancer took a deep breath.

    Behold all the lofty divines, fleeing from the bed of sin; be thou warned: only the mouth of Kahlid delights in the hubris of man.

    Glede’s voice carried none of the brimstone zeal usually reserved for such verses — none of the red-faced calls to Ma’at, to justice, the vomit from the pulpit. Instead the voice was dead, labored; not the knife itself but the whetstone grind promising its sharpness. Again it chilled him, sent an uncomfortable prickle down his neck. The Old Tongues. Some went beyond his own understandings, lost in some dim, primordial history. Again it nagged him — where would he have heard such a thing? Why had it come to him, paired with…? Metal stung his tongue. Copper, salt. Running free, running red…

    On went the clanking voice, croaking its awful tale of divine wrath and wet bloodstone, the very same he could imagine being whispered amongst the nomads of the desert, passed along in the shadows of Colossi and crumbled kingdoms. It rankled and disturbed at once, sent the muscle twitching in his jaw — he felt the need to move, to pace as the verse twisted itself like a snake, coiling further into his mind.

    Regarding the… place. He smelled the lie, heard the hollowness echoing in the construct’s voice — knew questions still simmered in that wretched metal skull. Delusion was not dispelled so easily. His stomach gave a sickening lurch at the possibility the man might go lumbering off into that northern hell — that the flame might kindle into a conflagration, licking the flesh from their bones.

    “You must not mention it to anyone,” the necromancer croaked, finally. Words felt paltry, birdlike — their bones paper-thin, unable to carry the weight of his meaning. “Never by name. Names spread, Glede — they pique interest, they send men hunting. They find things in tomes, in archives best forgotten. And then… it is no longer a dead Order. It finds its new kings and their new subjects.” It was not just his master. It had been an institution, a dynasty of apprentices and legacy of horror — the palace had been too immense to fully know, shifting as the winds — passages sealed and gaped like maws, and above the sky spun sickeningly from dawn to night and back to lurid rose. There was no time, no sense in that place…

    “When a leviathan is too big to be slain, you steer people clear of it. You wait until it gets old. You let it die.” Hoarse. When had his voice gone reed-thin? It shamed him to hear it crack like a fledging boy’s, quailing before a headmaster. Coward, some part of him sneered. Coward, running south… but what other option was there? As much as he would have liked to burn it to the ground, the stones would not catch — as much as he wished to blast it from the earth, the melted hells simply would have reformed; destroying a wall meant releasing a prison — it was not so simple.

    “Forget its name. Let the sands do their job, and swallow it. There is nothing you or I can do.” His voice held a finality that could not be broached; he felt it with an unwavering conviction, as deep as himself — that overwhelming powerlessness, awash in a great sea. Horrors upon horrors…

    The only thing that could erode it was Time — it was slow but unceasing, gnawing at every Empire, every untouchable sultan and twisted lich, licking the marrow from Life’s bones. Even he would bow to it, one day. Perhaps millennia from now, but nonetheless there would come a time where the shores of Death sucked him back, the last of…

    He looked at the knife, saw his pallid cheek there. For a moment everything felt overwhelmingly futile — absurd, to even be here, to even be bothering with any of… this… and he would have easily sunken down then, let the roast blacken, let the flames leap up the spit and to the ceiling beams, bringing it all down in a fiery whorl.

    Recurring nightmares. They danced, mingled with truth — some were so vivid that he could not fathom them mere dreams. Not when he awoke feeling the grit of sand in his mouth, a phantom heart still pumping in terror. Sometimes he had dreams of bloodied palms and twisted faces, felt the thump-thump of nails driven into writhing flesh — dreams that kept him from falling asleep again, dreams he felt too frightened of to ever admit.

    Who knows what I have done in the name of that place.

    As Glede spoke he understood — it was a fear that never truly went away, because their deaths were without closure. Even if he had lowered Alloces to his grave, he still would have felt the same fear — that somehow those dark hands would reach for him again, and that voice would thunder in his skull, wrenching him like a marionette. In a manner, they were never truly free — they would bear that cross forever, the filth in places that nothing could reach; he could pray, he could drink, he could scrub his skin raw, and still his soul would not feel any lighter — flickering shadows would not cease to be the shambling horrors of the dark; a harmless butcher’s knife would continue to morph into the one that stuck from his chest — every drow carried Alloces within them, their coal skin causing his insides to lurch — it did not matter, because his slavery was with him, in him, coloring his mind and memory, ruining his joys and waiting for his sorrows. When he lashed out of sleep and, for that split second where dreams and waking mingle, did not know if he truly heard his Master’s voice…

    You must understand this fear.

    Phaedrus chewed his cheek, his muscles stiff — there was a chitinous click as he picked at his thumbnail, peeling a moonish sliver away. A thousand unanswered questions loomed around him, half-truths and wisps, frayed runes and torchlit mosaics, a great impasse. Often he had wrangled with the purpose of Truth — if its pursuit was worth anything at all, closed the stinking vellum and rolled up ancient parchment before he could read any further, fleeing to Madrid’s gardens. And there — there it was. The fear, crystallized into a single utterance.

    The fear that knowledge would change you irrevocably.

    The necromancer swallowed. His identity was a scant thing, ready to be blasted apart at the slightest hair — Bast’s whisper had done it, flung him apart, bubbling his true Name. Now that he had a key he felt too terrified to use it, suddenly raw and naked after living behind a carapace of aliases. Later, he’d told himself. Later, later — I have more pressing translations, books… He felt the roads narrowing, the avenues twisted to dim passages — he had wanted to unearth his name, and with it a family, a shred of heritage… — and still he felt no closer to any sense, only a great Dread rising like a black wall. I have no overwhelming desire to explore forgotten memories of a time when I was a slave to slaughter.

    What if that was all he had? All that could be had?

    “Yes,” the necromancer muttered, and there was pain in his voice. “Yes.” He understood. Still he did not turn, his eyes glazed past the roast, soaking the light and dance of flames. Someone hollow and distant spoke through him.“All too well.” His gaze strayed to the spit — his fingernail met soft flesh now, and he stopped, itching for wont of something to do. The necromancer passed a hand over the flames, sucking it to a low crackle; the energy hummed through his palms and then erupted in the candles on the table and in the Ashokan lamps across the house, sending patches of color to dance like fey tricksters. A precaution against the dark. The sun looked bloated outside his window, and in a few hours’ time would lay itself down to sleep behind the clouds. Wringing his hands, the necromancer carefully removed the roast from the spit, setting it squarely upon the carving board. To his agitation he remembered it had to set, and felt he could not wait so long without anything to do; instead he turned to the dirtied bowls, bringing them to the wash basin.

    Perhaps Glede’s questions had been rhetorical — perhaps not, a line flung for an answer. Either way the words felt like sour swill in his mouth, churning as he set to washing the bowls with a scattered agitation.

    “I cannot answer that,” he croaked. “I can only conjecture. Perhaps it was a mistake in your binding — and yet I should think not… the manner of magic I felt upon you wasn’t wielded by an inexperienced hand. Perhaps it was sabotage.” Scrub, scrub. He pressed his lips down at the delicate ceramic, fighting with the congealing rosemary and butter. “Or… devils… perhaps your master intended it, wholly and thoroughly. Cruel—bastards—abound—in the necromantic arts,” he grit between his teeth, fighting to free a fleck of rosemary from the side of the bowl. That option was perhaps the most difficult to swallow. There was no comprehending cruelty. It was maddening because it was senseless — because it had no purpose, no will, no karmic shred or misplaced vendetta, nothing to explain the ruin it left behind. The question why had no answer. It simply was, a fact, left the victim grappling.

    He scrubbed overmuch at the single spot — let the repetitious motion take him, eyes glazed and staring past the basin. Perhaps he owed a look at the construct. Perhaps he ought to turn around, face him — and yet his limbs sunk to lead, and a great weight in his chest chafed against his every movement. Releasing the bowl, he turned to the basting brush, running his fingers through the greasy bristles. A deep breath built in his lungs, swelled till he could not hold it any longer — then it hissed through his delicate nose, became a slump in his shoulders.

    “As would I, Glede.” He abandoned the brush — looked to a wine glass, its grainy striations of red. “If it could be done… I would not be here, idling. I would see it burn. But as it is — it is impossible to wipe that place from the desert. I lived in those halls. I know them. You are proposing that a single man storms the gates of Kaddesh.”* A wooden spoon clattered against the basin, disappearing into the soapy water with a splash. It is selfish, in a way? Now he turned, his lips white, his eyes narrowed to a deathly slant.

    “Selfish?” He swung around at the absurdity of that understatement — his eyes pinned the construct, fangs flinging derision. “It is suicide. You — very well, endanger yourself — hunt after errant Dead, chase phantoms all you wish. But if you propose to open those Gates— it isn’t yourself that you’re endangering. It is the nomads of the Ikoi — all the people of Eldahar, perhaps all of Ashoka.” How many times must he repeat himself to drive it into that wretched helm? For a moment his eyes flashed with lurid fire, burning an unnatural yellow. “You are no longer acting for a greater good then, Glede. If you march to those gates, you act solely for yourself. And Khalid has made their stance on hubris quite clear.”

    Indeed, they would have to write a second book of Marduk. Lips pressed, the necromancer let the moment stretch, his gaze unwavering — then finally broke with an abrupt swish of his tunic and slippers, whisking over to the roast. The carving knife flashed dangerously in his hand as he sliced off the end of the beef, angrily sticking it into his mouth.

    The warmth and ooze of blood eased him some, melting into savory velvet on his tongue — Phaedrus chewed for the sake of decorum, back turned to Glede once more. That done, he simply swallowed the massive chunk, feeling it slither down at the tug of thousands of little black barbs. Scowling, the necromancer cut several pieces, peeling the bloody medallions from their sisters — the red oozed across the cutting board, soaking into the wood.

    “It is imprecise,” he growled, somewhat muffled through another piece — a familiar meow followed his words as Malo came whisking into the kitchen, rubbing against his leg at the smell of food. He ignored the little cat for a moment, chewing. Reluctantly he began to cube up some of the smaller slices, scraping them aside with the flat of the knife. “It can be guided somewhat, with a leading thought… but I have no control over what else emerges.” A slight warning came into his voice. The knife flashed again, this time scraping the pieces into a small dish — the necromancer bent, placing the plate by his feet and running a hand over Malo’s arching back.

    Phaedrus worked at a bit of gristle in his molars, a sour twist to his face. He knifed several pieces onto another plate, a stark dinner of dribbling flesh — he was aware of how barbaric it must look, clearing his throat lightly as he turned with a fork and knife, walking over to the table. Pouring the construct tea was one thing, but carving up a roast… bollocks. Propriety had no way to proceed, and he sat down with stiff self-consciousness, pushing a strand of hair behind his ear.

    “Unfortunately… no.” The necromancer twirled his knife before slicing the piece into something manageable, frowning at the bleeding chunk. “The very nature of it doesn’t allow for… self-examination. Someone must be conscious at all times to guide the person experiencing it, and dispel the magics if they become… distressed.” The tone of his voice suggested a singular frustration with the matter. As far as he knew, he was the only one who still knew how to draw memories using the Second Gate — that knowledge was obliterated, or else in the hands of acolytes he’d shudder to trust. He didn’t know where to look, feeling unbearably awkward as he shoved another bite into his mouth, chewing to avoid speaking more on the matter. At last though, he had to swallow, chasing a red wedge across the plate.

    “If you wish to try it… we can do so tonight, come moonrise. I need time to prepare.” Phaedrus dabbed his lips delicately with a napkin, his gaze fixed on Glede above the frills. He pointed at the construct with the fork, yellow eyes narrowing. A flatness came to his tone. “And you need time to think on what, precisely, you wish to unearth.”




    * [insert impregnable ancient Ashokan kingdom here]
    Edited by Phaedrus, Aug 14 2015, 01:20 PM.
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    (tw: language, troubling concepts)

    ‘When a leviathan is too big to be slain, you steer people clear of it. You wait until it gets old. You let it die.’

    Let it die? Glede lowered his head, tilting it, turning the darkness where his face should have been away from Phaedrus as if in fear that it would betray the workings of his mind; he wanted of a sudden to replace his mask, itching for a privacy that meant nothing outside the realm of metaphor. In no way could Phaedrus read him. In no way, beyond perhaps the neatness and hollowness of his voice, could Phaedrus glimpse the awful indecision that chewed on something inside him. It was an invisible beast, a chameleon that darted out its knife whenever his eyes grew too weary to keep it in check. It whispered: Onward, onward, onward.

    I can promise you nothing.

    Before he had finished deciding what to say, he heard the necromancer stir; he heard the voice again, empty of reprimand and full of hurt. Glede winced. Of course the other man understood—how could he do aught but? They were as different as the sky and the earth, but they had walked the same road, for lack of a better metaphor; that ache, that facelessness, a past full of questions with tight lips and seas of nothing for answers—how could he do aught but understand? And for every year that Glede had struggled through that mire of helpless pleading, wrangling from life whatever was left to an empty soul, Phaedrus had spent at least two. It never ended. Nailah smiled a secret and turned her lovely face away and it never ended, no matter if you drank or prayed for solace. They were two sides of the same coin.

    Such uncharacteristically dismal thoughts stewed into the wordlessness that followed, the warm haze of the homely kitchen and the soapy clink of dishes. Phaedrus’ back moved, just barely perceptible, the planes of light on the rhythmically-shifting folds of his tunic oddly calming; however, the tension remained, thought Glede, lying like a growling panther across the kitchen counter. What had been said still stood, a commandment as flat and binding and terrible as a rule from the mouth of a god. Yet—yet…

    He dipped his head, glad for another subject. “A wretch who would so profane one of Nailah’s creatures would require some hardness of heart,” he murmured, flexing a gauntlet slowly over one jittering knee, “and it would not surprise me to know that… by chance, he reached out his hand and struck me, needing an outlet for his sickness.” By chance? He wondered sometimes if, in the murky reams of memory he glimpsed in his waking dreams, he had known the voice that haunted the edges of his nightmares. Khalid, Khalid—all men knew Khalid—but who had it truly been? Not a faceless villain, not a ghul, surely, not a random thrust of chaos among the dunes. The bindings had been done by an experienced hand, said Phaedrus. How long had such a hand been at its work? How many like Glede had it crafted, loving in its cruelty? The spittle-drip of the roast’s fat tempted him to curl in on himself again; he forced himself to sit more straightly. How had it chosen its target? A penalty for a life spent in sin?

    Kaddesh. Now he did straighten, tilting his head back. But it would not simply be one man, he wanted to protest, dully. It would be—there could be order, method. You do not think that I would charge in alone, Phaedrus, unattended, unarmed? Whatever is within those gates… He would have said all this, leaned over the table and argued with a special fervor across the tea service, had he not felt unsure in his own words, his own state of mind. He did not know what lay within those gates, some little part of him clipped, putting the rest in its place. It was a plain of blankness north of the Ikioi. What eldritch shapes did the red star illuminate, what bodies moving in the dark?

    Then he flinched and lowered his head as Phaedrus turned, clasping his hands tightly in his lap like a penitent child. He could not look the banisher in the eye; he could not bear the weight of that stare, a ghost of future guilt coming to sit heavily upon his shoulders.

    Selfish, selfish. More than selfishness. Hubris.

    The mouth of Khalid rejoices in the hubris of man.

    And then he’d whisked away once again, leaving Glede with that embarrassing tug of protest. He felt impotent, entirely without agency—and positively ridiculous, an addition that flavored the rest with a certain bitter resentment that he could not place. He avoided looking at Phaedrus, but, in what seemed to him the claustrophobic press of the kitchen, he could find nowhere else to rest his gaze but on that unreadable back. We shall agree to disagree, he thought petulantly, glancing down to the fold of his great hands in his great lap, the way the light inside—louder now as the sun grew dimmer—licked ghoulishly over the metal.

    It caused another kick of indignation. How could Phaedrus expect him to sit idle? It was all well, he thought, to live and to suffer and to wait, when one could sing prettily, smile… eat, drink, fuck--

    He jarred, suddenly nervous, suddenly aware. Where had--? The knife in Phaedrus’ hand glinted. His glance flicked round the kitchen, freed from its abashed stiffness. He had been clutching at his knees, leaning forward in his seat, and in his heart something ugly, something unfamiliar, something strange—oh, Nailah, it was not right to think such bitternesses, to think such carnal, silly jealousies. It was not right. It was not him, he thought, wilting in his seat, for all that was worth. It was not Glede, and Glede would not abide it, surely.

    And why not? Why should I not have such a feeling? He tells me to chase phantoms as if that is not my sole purpose now.

    Distracted, he watched Phaedrus shove a bite of the bloody roast into his mouth. It was barbaric, but somehow fitting; as delicate as were all the trappings the necromancer favored, there was a raw and pulsing Truth underneath, a second face like the snap of a broken limb or the howl of a widow. Glede watched him chew like a yellow-eyed wolf. It is imprecise. A clatter as he raked some morsels into a small dish, to an end Glede could not predict—and then—ah, there, he lowered it down to the delicate mewl of a cat.

    There was warning in those words.

    “These are not pleasing circumstances.” He let out a sound almost like a laugh, grim. Tilting his head this way and then that, he watched Phaedrus take a seat, seeming—embarrassed? That was well; it made sense, of course. There was something overwhelmingly grotesque about the plate of butchered meat before him, bleeding its last all over a dish that seemed surgical in its delicate whiteness. Glede forced himself to look away from the odd dinner, forced himself not to enquire. To what lengths was Phaedrus Dead? Did he require sustenance? Did this take the form of—blood?

    Rather belatedly, he realized that his exclusion from the meal might have been somewhat awkward for the necromancer. Well, now that I have thought of it, it is uncomfortable for me, too. Leaning back, he tried to affect leisure, knitting his fingers neatly with a grating hiss. The topic of conversation nevertheless gave him an air of stress.

    What frustration was in Phaedrus’ voice! How often he must have wanted to perform such a magic upon himself, thought Glede. Had he found no one else practiced enough in it to help him? – Ah, but Glede had only tentatively agreed to submit to it because of his trust for Phaedrus, a trust that he now felt growing tenuous and tight. To find and pay a stranger…

    Tonight.

    Glede stiffened. What had he expected? “O-Of course,” he replied. “Of course. I am—I am in no hurry, Phaedrus. I must prepare myself. Moonrise… yes. At moonrise.” Those words lurked like ghosts just at the edge of his thoughts: …whatever else emerges… He flexed his fingers, drummed their tips on his knees with a twofold flurry of ting-ting-tings. There was an awkwardness, a stillness filled by the chew and bleed of meat. Phaedrus’ fork was a careful, deliberate hunter. Glede was not sure what to say.

    Leaning forward with a creak: “I hope you know that I am grateful, Phaedrus, beyond all else. I am…”

    He dropped off. The emptiness stared at Phaedrus across the table, unmoving. If he planned on finishing, it was not immediately; he was silent, motionless, an empty leer. Eventually, the faceless darkness looked away.

    *

    Glede bent to examine a sunflower through his mask, losing himself for a moment in the bright, cheery color. Even in the shade of dusk, the weak light truly struggling to claw its way down from the branches of the oak, it was somehow heartening and bright. He wondered if that was why Phaedrus kept them. In the idle hours he had spent at Phaedrus’ home, he had realized that it was characterized by oxymoron: it was the garden of a necromancer, full of sunflowers; it was Sotoan, but strangely chaotic; it was messy, but the kitchen was a fine and well-kept space, and to see everything in its place on the walls pleased Glede’s heart to no end.

    Of all the little juxtapositions that characterized the house, though, one stuck out, peculiar. It was a large house—a house meant for a family, the stock of a merchant-lord, complete with the spoils of Ashoka—and yet the necromancer lived here alone. Glede had been wrong. There was no long-term consort that he knew of; Phaedrus had no wife. Yet… here and there were signs of someone, little brushes of things that implied that Phaedrus was not always alone.

    With nothing else to do, he found himself wondering who that person was.

    He supposed that he was staying for the night, at least, if not longer. Armed with patience and caution, he had braved the little twist of stairs just behind Phaedrus, thanking Nailah’s mercy that his master had shaped him at least like a man. He found Phaedrus’ spare room somewhat gaudy and uncomfortable, not in the least because he did not sleep; it was a place proverbially to ‘catch his breath’, perhaps, to sit in silence among the baubles and foolishness, but it served little practical purpose. He might as well walk the streets at night—if a dream came, in all its brutal vividness, it would come regardless of place.

    He had not been shown about the other rooms upstairs, and from the glimpses of a dim, messy, and disreputable bedroom, he had no desire to explore. Certainly he burned with curiosity, but some small part of him was frightened of what he might see if he looked at this place in its fullness. He contented himself with wondering at the nooks and crannies of his friend’s home, so like a window into his unfathomable mind. Even from the oak tree he could see the balcony and imagine Phaedrus standing out upon it, looking down through the filtering sunlight of a chill spring morning.

    Out in the garden, though, Glede had turned his mind to the counsel of prayer. He had long procrastinated in deciding what depths exactly he wished to plumb; now he asked Kahlil to help him, winding his way among the sunflowers and the ivy—a disorganized contrast to the neat kitchen—and talking to the empty air. (He imagined it must be fragrant; he could not tell.)

    “O Lord of the Hunt, of Quarry and Prey, of the Hidden and the Seeking…”

    For perhaps an hour he chased the shadows of divinity in his ponderous walk around the oak. The gods seemed distant here, surrounded by swathes of greenery and the burble of laughter; Soto lacked the constricted silence of Ashoka, the muffle of sand and fear beneath Aten’s eye, fat on water and the free tongues of a Republic. But the gods were everywhere, if they were true. Even here, Nailah smiled from the waters and fluttered in the wings of birds.

    After a while, he came to a decision. Then it became waiting, dawdling among the plants to calm himself—until he saw a shadow stir behind the kitchen door, heard a click and a voice.

    *

    “Phaedrus, this is most--”

    The sentence cut off with a sharp, stern huff. The cellar was, on the surface, entirely normal; one’s eye fell upon all of the things it usually expected to find in a cellar—casks, other foodstuffs, patches of racks occupied by bottles. Glede could feel a queer tug in his soul, however. He had eyed the door at the set into the root cellar wall with discomfort, bowing his shoulders and slinking after the necromancer-banisher as propriety seemed to require, but he felt everything within him straining against it.

    Now, he could not imagine walking through the door at the far end of the little hallway beyond. It was a mystery whence the feeling had sprung—there seemed nothing ill about the place, at least insofar as nothing could be ill about the basement of a necromancer—but he was certain that it came from something upon or beyond that door. It seemed palpable. Foolishly he felt he simply could not go through it.

    “Are you certain we are safe?” he snipped, shifting from foot to foot. He rested the palm of his gauntlet on the pommel of his scimitar; the gentle crackle of magic there stood almost as a reminder of trust between the two of them, something that no words could have afforded. The construct sighed. “Could we not have done this—upstairs, my friend?”
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    Phaedrus
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    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    To say their dinner was awkward would be to remark that the Mulciber was a touch warm, or perhaps that Khalid was a bit of a nibbler.

    He could not be eager enough for it to be done. Moonrise. Really, it didn’t have to be — there was no such connection to the heavens or witching hour or any of that rubbish; he merely relegated his work to the twilit hours when fewer eyes would be out to pry and fewer mouths could purse into scandalized gasps. And besides that… well, he needed time to decompress. To think. Really, the preparation for the ritual would not take so long, but he needed a span of fresh air, a breath outside the coffin of his kitchen.

    With the business decided between them, it seemed all their words had dried up and withered, leaving nothing but a tundra of silence — broken only by the too-loud clink of his cutlery, the occasional mortifying screech of his knife like a pealing coyote. He gnawed more than chewed, wishing he had a cup of wine to wash the lot down with, but the spectacle of getting up and uncorking a bottle felt too much for him. Instead the necromancer looked to his fork, wishing the twisted metal man before him would simply go away, melt like an apparition — not out of any ill will, but rather from the gnawing desire to be alone with his own thoughts, be free of the pressures of decorum and keeping up a shambling conversation.

    Phaedrus looked up when the construct spoke again, his eyes fixed on the empty hole of Glede’s face. They danced, danced — beneath them his mouth slowed in chewing, all of him taut with a sudden discomfort. He waited for the construct to finish — his expectant stare became something else, something avoidant and fickle, fleeing like a hare in a bush. As the grating voice came to a halt, Phaedrus paused — then the helm turned away, fixed on the wall, the unsaid words ringing more loudly than the rest.

    Uncomfortable, Phaedrus dropped his gaze to his plate, not sure what to say.

    He could only nod stupidly, wordlessly — nod, and leave their conversation to drown in the weight of their thoughts.

    * * *


    Devils.

    He sucked in an ugly breath. The stone was cold where he leaned against it, biting through the thickness of his robe. A ward hummed unpleasantly underneath him, filling his elbow with a numb, vibrating energy, but he didn’t bloody well care, pinching the bridge of his nose and grinding his teeth.

    He could wipe the construct’s memory of the Bayt Ifrit. Make it so he never heard of the place. The hysterical thought had bubbled up in him, but even as it sprung up he crushed it for its futility. No, Phaedrus. You’ve no idea how he heard it in the first place — what memories are associated with it… the extent of the detail… And besides, his grasp on the Second Gate was tenuous, at best — his grip on the rites of memory was poorer than trout leaping though his fingers, there and then gone again. To attempt something so complex would be disastrous, difficult enough in a willing target, but to one so bull-minded?

    His stomach grumbled its opinion, which consisted primarily of indigestion.

    Annoyed, the necromancer pushed off the wall, running his hands through his springing hair. A great sigh ruffled his lips, sent a twist to his mouth. But when else will you get this chance? When else will he be prone and under complete cooperation? A fingernail disappeared into his mouth, gnawed thoughtlessly between his teeth.

    At every angle it seemed impossible. Even if he ignored the scruple of the thing, it simply, technically could not be done — not at his current level of prowess. And the alternatives, the alternatives… Dismantling him? Planting some kind of binding as he slept, a command to draw him away from the place? A harsh, spittling bark could have come from him, then — he was no Maker, either. He banished things, dismantled them, kept them locked in prisons. He did not carve instructions into their souls. A white hand clutched his robe like a disembodied phantom’s, twisted the black fabric back and forth.

    The most reasonable thing to do, some inhumanly calm voice suggested, so cold and alien he recoiled from it, is to lead his mind to the Second Gate, and obliterate it. He will never recall the Bayt again. He will not recall anything, in fact.

    Another queasy noise came from his gut.

    The thought sent a bolt of horror through him, came like a strike to the face — it was not him, it was not… such a thing would be the equivalent of murder — no sooner would he drown Bast, or string a cord around Bellamy’s neck and watch the life drain out of his eyes. To murder a man that trusted him with all his soul, slaughter him where he sought asylum… What part of him could suggest such an awful thing? What part of him could even weigh it as an option? And moreso— what did that make him? Rattled, the necromancer swallowed with difficulty — he felt putrid of a sudden, aware of the sluggish crawl under his flesh, the congealing brick of meat in his guts, the heavy buzz in his skull. An itch crawled down his back, his arms, as though the thought had scattered patches of nettles under his skin.

    But still… something had to be done. Some protective measure had to be taken. Even if the great idiot never blundered off to the northern deserts at all— he needed something for his own peace of mind. Some assurance, some control — he already felt lost enough about Bast, the devil knew where she roamed, if she was safe… he did not need another colossal worry to top his list. The afternoon’s events felt like a gaudy nightmare — a series of flashing impressions impossible to cobble together, impossible to even conceive.

    His first mistake was reacting so poorly to the name, he knew. But he could not help himself, no more than a man cleaved in two could help from screaming. All of him rejected the existence of that place — and over the years, coming to fruitless ends, bumping his nose against scholarly walls — he had told himself that it merely did not exist to the rest of the world. It had been forgotten, misplaced, perhaps burned with intent; humanity had let it crumble through their fingers, just as they had forgotten the mixture for Hoehemi wildfire and the medical surgeries of Mayat Shavaji, slithered over by the tongues of the No’Bu.

    And though at first it had filled him with a colossal loneliness, slamming a wall between him and the rest of the world, it was… a mercy. Yes. He had come to see it as a twisted blessing, because that meant he could lay down with the rest of Soare and close his eyes in ignorance of the thing. Nobody could find it. The wards would hold. He was the last of the Bayt Ifrit, and… so it would remain. No apprentices, he’d told himself. No understudies. No lectures. It was safer to be nothing. To be no one. To be a frivolous antiquarian, comfortably forgotten in Madrid’s underground.

    And now this — this fool had come hurtling catastrophically through his glass castle, too blind to even consider the consequences of his actions, a child playing pretend with a sword —

    For a moment he wished to strangle him. The fire pulsed hotly through his chest, into his shaking hands and curling fingers, as if the air before him was the paladin’s caving throat. Phaedrus’ fingers trembled, twitched — the bloody pulse of his mind abated, the violent imaginings… it all bled out, leaving him alone in the darkness of his basement, breath straining in his throat. A candle flame bobbed and flickered, hypnotizing in the gloom. He watched it awhile, feeling numb — suspended from his own body, a marionette dangling above the chaos of his feelings. A low, ugly grumble came from his midsection.

    He would convince him there was nothing there. Get him to abandon the whole quest. He would, with all the force of his will, bend that tin mind to swallow failure. He could… he could smooth this over, at least. If he did not try, then he invited the demons to come home himself.

    How could he feel so helpless again? It came to two things — to trust his friend, or to silence him. What manner of options were those? He could leap into a den of snakes and trust that they would not bite him, or he could throw his friend before him first, crawl over his poisoned body, and nurse the guilt till the end of his days.

    Was he so savage a monster? Was he his Master? His Master, that held him down, that drove the knife, and met his eyes the whole time?

    I trusted you.

    And that was what had crushed him — what had made the betrayal so cruel. For he had remembered, remembered a voice like a croon to a child —

    My Malakar. I will not let harm come to you.

    It was dim, primordial. A pop and crackle of light, formless black patches, an infant mind cusping on awakening, blind and mewling for a mother. And the voice was his Master’s. Not cold, not the deathly thing he knew — but warm, choking, cracking with the faultlines only a deep love could cause, like he held a child drawn from a still womb. And he felt hands cup his cheek, an unformed thing in that nether, felt their warmth and their elderly tremble, and like a child he had nuzzled into it, knowing nothing else.

    The memory hit him with astounding force — for a moment he was convinced an axe had cleaved his face in two. Brilliant black and white spots exploded before his eyes — he was not himself, not anything, just a pounding, shapeless void, fighting to expel that rancid tumor and all its gangrenous veins. It was not real. It was not real. Roils of nausea crashed through his body, surging like the tide — a ringing buzz filled his skull, pealed to a siren’s shriek, and he bent over, hot and cold all over. His breathing had turned to ragged chops — became a dry heave, and then a wet choking, and then he tasted the roast all over again.


    * * *

    By the time he’d cleaned himself up and sat on an empty barrel, dabbing his cold brow with a kerchief, he almost thought to call the whole lot of it off. Piss on it. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, and damn it all. But if he told Glede he felt ill and went to bed, the nightmares would be worse — best to occupy his mind. Best to stay awake. He had spent an hour simply sitting in the darkness, rubbing his forehead, keeping his head bowed to his knees. Up above he heard the vague sounds of prayer filtering down, dancing amidst the motes that hovered in the outline of the cellar door. It smelled calciferous, earthy, a scent that strangely helped his nausea, felt primordial and.. correct. He had thought about changing, but could not face the cloying sweetness of his house, not yet — he prayed the construct simply would not notice the black splash around his boots.

    “O Lord of the Hunt, of Quarry and Prey, of the Hidden and the Seeking…”

    Above he prayed for guidance, for luck in the hunt for Truth, clarity in memory and the soul…

    For a moment Phaedrus’ lips twisted — all of his face spasmed, contorted, one finger jumping on his knee. A burning came to his throat, the back of his eyes, and his throat closed, his swallow loud in his ears. He made a strangled noise, the bastard of a helpless laugh and the start of a sob. Then it passed, eased, left a tangled ball of guilt in his breast.

    The iron curtain fell over his face, leaving it slack and white. After a deep lungful of the tepid air, he rose, bracing his hands against his knees. Like an arthritic man he got up, hair stirring around his face, and by some miracle he climbed back up the stairs to his kitchen, moaning a little.

    * * *

    “This is most… what?

    He had coached himself to be nice to the construct, to be kind — but it was quite another thing when confronted with the reality of him, his sudden paranoia. Does he not trust me? For a moment he felt paranoid the man could see through his intentions — as if he smelled the coming deceit, or… or worse, would not allow the rites to be done at all.

    He felt the weight of his answers swiftly becoming a burden, saw the moment slipping away — a suspicious hare, at last lifting its tawny head, springing away from the bolt at the last second.

    “Yesssssssssss-uh,” the necromancer heaved in a sigh, planting a hand at his hip and rubbing his face with the other. He looked the picture of youthful exasperation, and did not deign to look at Glede at all, eyes squinted shut behind a net of white fingers. A deep sigh hissed between them.

    “I know,” and his voice came muffled, muggy. “I know, it feels awful. Ironically, that’s because it is safe. There are so many sodding wards behind that door… in a very small space. All the magics hum and interfere. It makes me ill at times. I feel ill now. So, please…” A testiness began to fill his voice, but he dropped it, sighing instead.

    Phaedrus dropped his hand, placing it at his middle. His expression was one of acute heartburn, squinting at Glede in the gloom.

    “No. I’m afraid not, Glede. These rooms ensure that none of these magics will come into contact with the outside world. And… I do not know what memories you wish to explore. No matter what happens — no matter how you react, you shall be safe down here.” No one will hear you screaming and bellowing, either, if it comes to that. The additional and you can’t harm anyone down here, either remained unspoken.

    He waited a beat to see if the construct would protest further — put his hands on his hips, eying the gauntlet rustling over Arukah’s hilt. A small hum built in his throat. Then, like a mother assuring her child there was no monster in the closet, he bustled over to the door.

    “Come on. I’ll show you.” The necromancer swung it wide open — queerly, there was no gust of air, no change except for the breeze caused by the door. Beyond it was lit entirely with candle flames and thick lanterns, licking with reddish glows. Old books were carefully chained to their shelves, packed in with scrolls of queer design and ancient penmanship. As Phaedrus walked in he grabbed a dark cowl from the rack, carelessly shrugging it on. It looked almost comical as he flapped an arm through a ballooning sleeve, a mummer’s depiction of how necromancers dressed. After a moment of standing stubbornly beyond the threshold, Phaedrus tied it around his ample belly, hoisting up the hood and snuggling into the warm fabric.

    This is my library,” the necromancer chattered, narrating to ease the great clanking catastrophe outside the door, keep his mind off the sensation. “Perhaps you saw the one upstairs… it’s all very well and good, but this is where I keep the important works. They’re all ancient… it needs to be cold and dry to preserve them properly.” He waggled the thick sleeve at Glede in demonstration, hand swallowed entirely by the dark folds.

    “It’s stupid, isn’t it? I always feel stupid, wearing these… ah, well… come along, there’s one more room to go.”

    His pallid hand closed on the doorknob. Wards crackled and lashed through his arm, responding to his touch — tolerating the great metal man in its midst. If the construct tried to come down without him, he’d find nothing at all — or else be unable to unlock the door, no matter the extent of force he visited upon it.

    “Here… take your time, it’s fine. Beyond here is where I conduct my research. You may feel a bit ill; that is the residue of the magics. Okay? Are you alright?” His voice was impossibly calm, full of the same mild concern as a man inquiring about a jammed elbow. Pressing his lips together, the necromancer drew a deep, short breath — then swung it open, walking briskly ahead.

    For the sake of Glede’s poor fluttering heart, he’d made it look… more presentable. There was nothing to be done about the grisly black stains, wild and arcing like the blood they’d spilt from the Skinchanger… nor the claw marks, made by no mortal or identifiable animal… but otherwise he’d locked up everything else, put his current endeavors away. The paladin did not need to see any of it, frankly. A few days ago he had been staring at an enormous scroll full of systematic drawings of vivisections, marked with the supposed formulae of the soul, and… well, bugger, he didn’t need to know.

    The space was large and empty — cavernous, impossible to imagine as something that could exist under a row of sunflowers. It was dead silent. Every sound they made was amplified a thousandfold, the chug of his ichor sounded like a rushing sink — his breathing sounded harsh and heavy, much too loud. To say nothing of Glede’s metal clatter, which sounded like every pot in his kitchen fell at once.

    White mist smoked from his open mouth.

    “Sit on the table, there.” The necromancer jerked his chin at the cold slab in the middle of the room. Somehow his attempts to cheer it looked profane, the rough woolen blanket looking worse than if he merely left it charred and stained. “Get comfortable.”

    He waddled over to the other side of the room, shuffling his hands together to warm them — of course, to no avail, because the cold was one even the construct could feel. Phaedrus picked up a thin, wide bowl, careful not to spill any of what was inside. He concentrated with no small amount of terror, dreading the escape of a single drop. No need to drench myself with the waters of the Second Gate and fall into a swoon.

    Laboriously, slowly, like a religious procession come to give a statue their libation, he finally made it to the side of the table, where a smaller table and stool rested. It looked more like a physician’s setup than any manner of pending necromantic horror. Indeed, as he perched uncomfortably on the stool and peered at Glede, he felt himself to be a vulpine little doctor more than anything else.

    “Don’t touch that yet,” Phaedrus said shortly, tucking his hands away into his robe. Another cloud of breath misted around his face, disappearing around his yellow eyes.

    “Firstly… I must know what memories you wish to unearth. But it is not enough to simply desire — we must have a pleasant starting point. I need details, specificity. Something grounding, real. Colors, smells, touch, taste — as much as you can recall. If it is relevant to what you wish to uncover, all the better. If not… it is fine.” He took a deep breath, leaning forward as if explaining a complex surgical procedure. He had not used these magics in… devils, how long? The yellow eyes fixed him luminously, glowing faintly in the darkness. He didn’t need to know that.

    “You will begin there in your mind, and you will depart from it as well. It will fill you. You must hold to what it feels like, smells like, tastes like. If you become lost in—other memories, unpleasant ones, always remember the first. Walk back to it. They will become the reality around you, understand? I will be here to guide you, but your body will react as if you are living in them again. I… am sorry, Glede, but… if you will…” his bow lips twisted. Something reluctant cast in his eyes. “I must take Arukah from you. Just for the length of the ritual. You shall have her back.” He arched his brows, pausing a moment. Then, carefully, slowly, he extended his open palms to take the sword, bating his breath at the metal giant.
    Edited by Phaedrus, Aug 20 2015, 03:58 AM.
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    He looks as if—

    Glede could not put a name to it; he had watched Phaedrus carefully, not without concern, but he could not imagine what rattled in the skull beneath all that bright red hair. It was not exactly his place, either. Perhaps, he had thought, it was what lay ahead—what Phaedrus had been preparing to do since their long and uncomfortable dinner, working unknown magic in dark corridors beneath the garden. Surely it was this. Seasoned though Phaedrus must have been, Glede had no doubt that a great deal of effort was spent in the business of plumbing someone else’s memories. Such a thing would exhaust and harrow any man…

    He shuffled, crossing his arms and glancing away from Phaedrus’ sore mien. Under that irritated squint, he felt suddenly self-conscious, silly. You asked him to do this, came a chiding voice in his mind; you knew of the difficulties. It is hardly fair if you quail at the first sign of discomfort.

    “Well,” murmured the cleric, dipping his head. “I certainly believe you.” Behind Phaedrus, the door seemed to loom, inexplicably frightening, like an article from a nightmare. Glede could not scratch the feeling that he was ‘seeing’ more than he had the will or the wits to process. “I trust your judgment.”

    …no matter how you react…

    His gaze snapped back to the necromancer; a terrible thing, true or not, slid together in his mind. He shuddered. Was that, then, the reason for Phaedrus’ discomfort--? Oh, but it was too awful to think of! Of course—he had said so himself earlier, that he had been avoiding such a thing—he had dreamt in the past of slipping into some trance, being possessed by some unfinished, hiding binding, some left-over instruction that had yet to be triggered… though he had never yet done it. To go back to those loathsome places in his memory—

    He kicked himself into motion, attempting to push the thought out of his mind. Now that he had his answer, he feared that it would nag at him without cease. He peered through the now-open door, his argumentativeness curbed sharply by the sudden worries that swirled faceless behind his breastplate.

    Books. Full shelves of them, chains and binding and ink, candlelight licking over the faded, cracked edges of spines. There had been pretty things in the library upstairs, though he had dared not look too closely; he had been surprised and pleased by that, as any guest of an eccentric, wealthy antiquarian would be. But this was not the library of a dabbler or a historian. A single jitter ran through Glede. He ducked his head and moved through the door.

    A little laugh, then: “Remarkable. These scrolls must be…” He let silence substitute estimation for a few moments, ellipses dripping out centuries. “Very old,” he finished lamely. In truth, the significance of the room was woefully out of reach; his layman’s eye could not grasp, as he figured it, even a tenth of what a more knowledgeable man’s might have, and besides that, he had an agitating awareness that some of these moth-eaten, carefully-preserved books were written long after he had ‘died’. Nevertheless, he felt an odd wonderment. “The medical knowledge here must be—quite extensive.” It cannot all be black magic, after all. He imagined that one would not find Allukar here—for obvious reasons—but perhaps Alaljar… or Baliih’s spiky handwriting—hand-writing!—on an ancient scroll, detailing the ingredients for one of his revolutionary poultices.

    Phaedrus did look a bit foolish in the robe, but Glede was disinclined to comment. He scarcely had time: preparation for the next room occupied both of them from that moment, an awful importance seeming to hang on Phaedrus’ careful explanation. The door came open.

    For a moment he could not see past Phaedrus. He was thankful of this, for he had many a queer soul-illness with which to contend; whatever horrors lay beyond the door might have overwhelmed him. In the candlelight of the library, he swayed. The ceiling bathed in shadow like pitch and Glede stared and stared, trying to put his finger on what precisely he felt.

    It was cold. He had not remembered what cold was like.

    “Am I--?” Shhhhh, shhhhk— Glede became aware of the noise; he became aware of the fact that he had been wringing his hands. He forced them to hang at his sides, but his extremities felt odd, out of place. “I am—I am all right, yes.” Drawing himself up, banishing the fear from himself, he went forward into the ‘cold’—if indeed that was the sensation that he felt, that drain of comfort, that sense of danger pressed tight against him like biting coyotes against numb flesh.

    Like a desert night…

    And that chamber was dark and vast and unlike anything in the cheery house above. Glede had been right: monsters did creak and moan just belowground, threatening to slink up through the kitchen floorboards and through the daisies in the garden. Claw marks, blood on the ground—a single table laid out with wool, utterly hideous to his eye—it all made him feel prone, naked and unprepared and useless. He hung in the doorway like a shadow. Take your time, Phaedrus had said, and he was taking his time, feeling the seconds scatter from him.

    On the table. Of course, he thought, numb. Where else?

    The construct was too loud. He tried to step carefully, to quiet the jerk and shuffle of his limbs, but to no avail. When he finally sat himself upon the table, he felt a relief wash over him that made even the chill and the churning distress within him less palpable; at least now he did not have to stand against it.

    A howl—rolling, rolling across the Xeric… The bite of blade in flesh, the splutter, the endless screams--

    He tried not to look at the scrabbles on the floor, those dark, long-dried arcs. He was certain he would need to focus; he could not panic, not now.

    When Phaedrus fetched the bowl, the construct perked somewhat; he watched him place it, ceremonial in his care, upon the smaller table, and in a moment of mystified curiosity reached out a claw to brush it. Don’t touch that yet. His hand flinched back. Glede looked from the bowl to Phaedrus, to the bowl again—his gauntlet fluttered to rest in his lap, demure and inanimate. Something like a nervous little laugh escaped through his breastplate, the burble of a distant brook.

    He listened to Phaedrus’ explanation in silence. A pleasant memory? In this place? Nailah help me. He might have commented, laughing—could do naught else for how preposterous this was, to think of some pleasant fragrance in the midst of a dungeon—had Phaedrus not spoken again. And the words that he spoke did not much please Glede.

    “Ah… yes.” Sheepish. Oh. The pallid hands lingered there in the dark, beckoning, a grotesque reminder. He could not even feel irritated, paranoid—you shall have her back, Phaedrus had said—as if Glede did not trust him enough to know that? He began to unhook Arukah from his belt, long jagged fingers struggling and stumbling over one another in the process. When he had done, he laid her on his lap and ran a hand over her scabbarded length once. “Of course – it was you who enchanted her, after all,” added the construct with a laugh, but there was genuine respect and affection in his voice. He gave the sheath a pat.

    Then he placed Arukah in Phaedrus’ hands.

    He had expected to feel even more vulnerable without her, but it was not so; if nothing else, in the midst of these bloody memories, it felt good to be disarmed. “In all seriousness, Phaedrus, I thought that you might make such a request.” There was a terribly loud shuff as he wiggled back in his seat, dragging a little of the wool covering with him. He winced visibly; it was yet another reminder of the ugly, stark enormity of his presence, the gravity that it carried, the wicked inertia. For a moment he struggled with himself. “Before we begin, I must broach this. I-It… it… hmm. I… how to say this…”

    He scanned the walls. Once again he felt the sick impression that he had been here before in dreams; there was a darkness unique to places tainted with necromantic magic and dangerous artefacts, a cold that only certain wards and bindings could produce. It felt like a warning for what was to come. It was a suitable place for dreams of death and terror, and he wondered if, on coming out of some yet unknown trance, he would understand that he no longer dreamt—he wondered if he would feel trapped forever in a dusty, chill tomb beneath the earth, where mourning spirits clanged and stretched their brittle metal limbs just beyond the cavernous parameters.

    “Arukah or not,” Glede began again with a passion, leaning forward and clasping his hands tightly, “this will be dangerous for you. I understand the implications of what you have just said, about… unpleasant memories that might… interfere with the process. I understand that—gods forbid, please—I could hurt you, and that is not right. Taking my scimitar will not wholly prevent that. There must be something else you plan to do before we begin.” He thought about the ‘seals’ upon the door, upon everything, and how they had made him feel; he thought about the power that eerie invisible symbols carried in necromancy, or seemed to. “Some… some binding, after your vocation,” he offered weakly. “Something.”

    He fell silent, watching the breath steam from Phaedrus’ mouth. He seemed small, swathed in black and perched on his stool, yellow eyes keen and catlike. Surely he had something up those voluminous sleeves.
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    Phaedrus
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    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    The moment hung, trembled. For a heartbeat there was absolute silence between them. Then the construct’s claws scraped over his belt, fumbling with the scimitar — he watched as the construct ran a hand over it, not unlike petting a cat, a long-loved companion.

    Of course. It was you who enchanted her, after all.

    The affection in his voice made his chest tighten — withered him, made him want to scream. Then, of a sudden, it was heavy and present in his hands, a symbol of all that had passed between them. He felt its weight in his elbows, in his shoulders — and for a moment the gloom of his basement swirled away, replaced by a different darkness.

    Night.

    The moon made the tent look translucent, a thin membrane of a womb insulating him from the horrors outside. Paltry comfort. No comfort at all, truly, if one simply reached out a trembling hand, and saw how flimsy the tent flap truly was. Nothing protected him from the desert. The roaming ghul and hateful djinni. Nothing protected him from…

    His teeth had grit. The firelight threw wild shapes on the wall, bent and twisted his shadow to a demon’s. Smoke gathered in the eaves of the tent, stung his watering eyes. On and on he worked, till he lost track of time, no longer feeling the crick in his neck or the numbness of his fingers. All of him hurt, like it had been beaten to a pulp — he ignored the hunger clawing his insides and the fogginess pressing in on all sides, carefully unwinding the bindings on the sword like a seamstress fighting to undo embroidery; it was still there, its shadow, its hellish instructions — and no necromancer alive could ever rid the metal wholly of it. But he needed it. They needed it.

    And so he had woven something else atop it, a barrier to the leviathan — slit a rabbit’s throat and let it bleed onto the blade as he chewed on its lifeless body. He had held it to the fire and watched the new runes disappearing, drank by the length of the blade, burnishing it to a high sheen. It cracked and seared with new energy, made him terribly nervous when the metal neared his flesh…

    And at last, after two nights, groggy and ill, he had presented it to Glede. It was not the chipped, dull thing it had been, but something alive and thrumming, crackling with invisible heat — even now he saw the enchantment shimmering through the shaft of the scabbard, plain to his eye.

    Arukah.

    A symbol of trust between them. Perhaps now even more so, now that the paladin knew of his nature. The necromancer was grateful the construct had kept it in its scabbard; he could feel his hands growing uncomfortably warm, not unlike gripping a blade left in the sun. A sad, tired smile crawled along his face.

    Phaedrus turned, robes fluttering at his heels — grateful that he did not have to look at the paladin in that moment. He crossed to another side of the room, carefully unlocking a trunk and placing Arukah within it with strained care. At soon as she was inside, he felt the cold seep into his arms again — the pain dissipated, and a little sigh of relief escaped him as the lid whumped solidly over it, bleeding into the rest of the trunk. The seam disappeared.

    He dreaded — absolutely dreaded — the necessity of his next request; bit his lip, bracing himself before he turned around. Thought on how best to word it — as if such a thing could even be done — and failed, momentarily at a loss. To his great surprise, it was the construct that broached the matter. As he turned, hands wringing, the necromancer looked at him anew, snapping from the reverie of his thoughts.

    Feeling greatly uncomfortable, he resumed his perch upon the stool, a vague grunt escaping him. “…Yes,” he sighed, finally. Agitated, Phaedrus tucked a wild strand of hair behind his ear, clasping his pale hands together. “There is always a risk with these magics. One I am prepared to take, but nonetheless…” he trailed off, his words a tepid stream, drying to a trickle between his lips. Another puff of mist disappeared around his cheeks. There must be something else you plan to do before we begin.

    Phaedrus nodded — it was the only response one could have, frank and to-the-point.

    “I’m glad you understand,” he sighed, a truthful admission. “Yes, yes, indeed… I prepared some — chains, for the occasion.” It hung in the air uncomfortably. Phaedrus slipped off his seat, and the sound of his boots hitting the floor seemed to fill the whole room, echoing nightmarishly. He felt a terrible malaise as he brushed the heavy wool from the sides of the table, clearing his throat lightly.

    “Lay down, if you will,” he instructed mildly, with all the sympathetic calm of a physician instructing a patient due to lose a limb.

    A slithering clinking streamed from the sides of the table — as he brushed the cloth aside it revealed it in its gruesome horror, the manner of thing reserved for torture-rooms and blood-bathed halls. Even so the chains felt paltry, too delicate when measured next to the hulking metal man. It galled him, felt intrinsically wrong to do such a thing; a full circle, his desperate thoughts pounded, his lips twisted to white.

    While the construct settled, he busied himself by sorting them — great bold ones for the body, smaller links for the wrists… they flashed with strange reflections, not unlike the sheen Arukah and other metals of her ilk possessed. And—like her—they seemed to hum of their own will, edging along Phaedrus’ hands like glistening snakes.

    “They will make you feel heavy and… calm, I should hope,” he bit his lip against his own strangled laughter, the utter absurdity of it — but it was true; they were imbued with the runes for sleep, and even now he felt his hands growing heavy and numb. Wordlessly he crossed the table, starting with Glede’s breastplate — the chains slithered over him like segmented pythons, tightening of their own accord; Phaedrus merely poked them into the right holes on the other side of the table, causing ruffles in the wool.

    Another.

    He felt tired, himself — blinked overmuch, rubbing his eyes, and stifled a yawn as he crossed to Glede’s abdomen, laying another track of them. Delicately, like he arranged a pot of flowers, he repositioned the construct’s legs to spread apart, snaking the thinner links between them; it brought uncomfortable thoughts, rushes of nightmares, the sounds of nails. Wood, thunking. The bodies in the desert, strung down a long road of crosses…

    No.

    He shook himself, kept working — stopped at Glede’s ankles, winding a chain there. It slithered under the ruffled fabric and into a series of slats in the middle of the table, pinning the man with a makeshift manacle.

    Devils, he hoped they’d be enough. He was used to binding daemons and things of necromantic flesh here, not… well. Giant metal men. The bindings would stay him, and the chains were strong enough to hold, but… who was to say his joints couldn’t act independently of his drowsing soul? Who knew what dark magics thrummed beneath the surface, their mechanisms alien and untouched by his enchantments?

    “Right…” taking a deep breath, Phaedrus wandered up the table, back to Glede’s unchained arms. “I need you to think of something. A recent memory or a distant one — it does not matter, so long as it is clear and true. It can be anything, really. A shop you found? Your favorite place? Ah, what about the children, earlier?”

    It seemed absurd that he had started the day with a crown of petunias on his head. Absently the necromancer wondered where they had gone, grunting as he lifted Glede’s arm above his helm (with difficulty, now that he had less help from the construct’s weary soul; devils below, it was heavy) and rolled up the cloth, laying down the iron arm with a huff.

    It clanged anyway, embarrassingly loud on the stone.

    Again he repeated the process, looping the smaller chains around his bicep and forearms, and one more into a makeshift manacle around the wrist. Quite tired, the man padded over to the construct’s other side, at last completing the binding — he stepped back to inspect his grim work, lips twisting.

    Glede was now spread-eagled in an X, looking rather like a prisoner of the Inquisition. Everything seemed to be holding well — he gave it a quick once around, but every chain was dangerously tight, leeching readily from the soul they ensnared.

    “Tell me all you can,” the necromancer repeated, pacing around the table. His footsteps pattered off the wall, the ceiling, dreamlike. “What did it look like? What did you hear? What did you feel, in that place?” Patter patter, patter. His robes bloomed in a diaphanous cloud around his ankles, a squid giving off ink. “All you can,” he intoned hypnotically, wondering how lucid Glede still felt. Undoubtedly it felt like a sedative now, closest to the sensation of drifting to sleep — not quite there, and yet not quite conscious either, floating in that strange limbo.

    “And when you are done… what is it that you wish to see? Where, in your mind, do you wish to go?”
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    One I am prepared to take…

    Oh, how he wanted to thank Phaedrus in that moment! And—all at once—felt Her bloom, Her kindness. He had long perceived the nervous temper that had animated his friend; now that he had gotten to the root of Phaedrus’ seeming misgivings, he could feel no distrust, no unkind, snooping curiosity. Looking on Arukah had stirred something in him, something which he could not altogether explain yet ran to the core of his soul. Whatever has passed between you and the banisher… whatever has happened… In retrospect, he was mortified at the splintering wedge of their ‘dinner’ together: the Bayt Ifrit aside (for every man had his or her own irrational biases), he could not imagine wiser counsel than Phaedrus’. What was he thinking? Though this place was dark and cold, though it reminded him of the banisher-cum-necromancer’s true occupation, he could not have asked for a more trustworthy friend. Friend.

    Of course, he could not banish all his trepidation—not like one could banish an insentient Dead. Sitting there upon the table, that voice kept whispering in the back of his mind, on and on. The fact that Phaedrus had reason to fear him at all rankled; the fact that it was justified rattled him to his iron bones. In polite company, he had grown accustomed to fencing around his condition, for (ugly and awkward and foreign as it may have been) his body was entirely under his control, and he himself was hardly a danger to anybody. But now…

    Glede shifted again, gripping the edges of the table, drumming his fingers. He watched Phaedrus expectantly. He had a solution, he said. Ever trustworthy, ever kind. A solution. What was it?

    Chains.

    The construct flinched and let out a low, strangled moan, echoing in the awkwardness that followed like the mournful baying of a knife on a whetstone. It was less an intentional sound that demanded a response and more an instinctive, kneejerk cry, a final noise of exasperation; his mind had gone dull and blank, the world narrowed down to that single word, that look of guilt and discomfort in Phaedrus’ narrow, pale face.

    Then suddenly he felt his thoughts had been kicked into motion thricefold, racing at speeds heretofore unknown. So then I am to be chained! Like a dumb beast! Lay down, Phaedrus was saying, lay down, lay down, lay down—if you will, if you will—I shan’t! I shan’t! He had been chained once and recalled the slither, the wrench and snake of his movements against links of metal, the sensation of being forgotten in an oubliette until he was needed once more… I cannot, he wanted to protest weakly, and indeed he nearly did. He raised his hands and clasped them together, oddly dainty. He leaned forward.

    And then he heaved a sigh, staring into Phaedrus’ calm, even features. He lowered his trembling hands and he did as he was told. There was no going back now. He had requested this; it was his responsibility, under the grace and kindness of his friend and of Nailah, to hold up his end of the bargain.

    He is not doing this merely to degrade you, he thought as he settled in, wincing again at the clang of his armor against the table. You asked him to help you. He is helping you. This ensures that you do no harm to him…--to anyone, for that matter. You cannot help what you are, and nor can he.

    It was a mantra. Glede forced his mind and limbs still as he heard the first ugly rattles of the chains. He became dimly aware of Phaedrus arranging them by size and length. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a hoarse question rang out: Are they enough? But they were enchanted, surely. Surely they would hold. Hold… me? In his mind, overactive and wild with visions of doom, he tried to imagine how strong they were. He could imagine what it would feel like to break the smaller ones—he wagered that all it would take for normal chains of that size was a particularly single-minded effort; he could imagine looping one several times round his fist and jerking, and the way that it would shatter—not easily, not at all—yet it cannot be impossible…

    His mind raced and raced. He could not stop it.

    “Calm?” he hissed. Is he mad? Oh, has he ever been sane? Immediately he felt ungrateful. More softly: “Calm? By Nailah. If you say so.” Yet in another moment he heard the delicate clink of them across his breastplate; he resisted the urge to lift an arm and scrabble at them, watching how they moved so, almost of their own accord (unless his mind played tricks on him). In the next few moments, a sensation altogether new joined his building frustration, tempering it; he’d had a question—a sharp one, no less—but now found that he could not remember what it was. Damn it—and to Kahlid with this… this… I cannot think. Where was I?

    “If—if you…”

    Where was the blessed peace of which Phaedrus had spoken? Glede felt drowsy and forgetful, barely aware of the new weights of chains, the lifting and moving of ‘his’ limbs. At first, he’d tried to follow Phaedrus’ movements; now the soft little man was a blur of fluttering black and brilliant red, his luminous eyes like lanterns smearing together in the haze of an evening festival. Lanterns… It reminded him of something. Some humid, warm breeze; some sand-colored kaftan swirling under the eaves of a shop window. Something hurt, deep inside him.

    I do not want to be here. I want—I want to go home—I wish to be in Ashoka, not here...

    A sharp voice tore him from his daze. He felt weightless and yet not—the voice went on, on and on and on, making demands that were difficult to follow. He struggled to think.

    “A memory…” It sounded like a distant rumble of thunder. Had he not felt so very strange, so pliable and oddly affable, he might have started at the sound of his own voice. His arms were moving, but he could do little about it. A shop you found? Your favorite place? Plumbing his awareness like this was somehow dismal: he could only reflect somberly that he could not think of a favorite place, not precisely, not concretely. Ashoka was beautiful in the late summer—the blossoms that would sometimes bloom in the desert, brilliant among the cacti—and yet he could think of no specific evening, no specific person… “Ah! The children you mention. Oh… yes. Let us use that. I remember it well enough… passably…”

    There was something charming about this sensation, he thought, drifting on the tides of whatever had enchanted Phaedrus’ chains. He had not felt anything like it in a very long time. Indeed, in the three or four years that he had wandered in his present form, he had not felt it at all. The fraying edges of sleep were more blissful than he had guessed. He could have lingered there between twilights forever.

    “…It was morning, yes—I had walked all night. I had diverged from the Kaadian, knowing that it would not take me all the way to Madrid. Yet on this new road I felt that perhaps I had lost myself; I came by a farm with a great field of corn, rows and rows, all swaying in the wind. There were children playing around the gate to the farm—they were not attended…”

    Glede droned on, words an even (if sluggish) fall, sometimes losing his place, sometimes repeating what he had just said. He described the laughter of the children, the stirring of the wind in the leaves; he pontificated on the manner in which the light seemed to climb down from the boughs of the trees, dappling the road and the grasses—“Nailah’s work,” he rumbled, “Nailah’s work”—and the way the sunrise limned the corn. He described the fright of the children until he had explained who he was, and then how they had vented their curiosity—how it was something that would have offended him, had it been from the mouths of anyone but children. “They wanted to know if I could, ah… breathe, dream, and so forth. Silly questions.

    “I remember a girl in particular, dancing—her dress was whirling, you can imagine—and it seemed to me that the light danced in her hair, all gold… I have seen bolts of silk like it, or gold leaf in some of the paintings that Alfarsi did of the Scriptures… ah—she was the one who crowned me with petunias, if you recall, Phaedrus! And she whirled and whirled while I sat in the grass and watched, content…” A pause. “I did not—feel—much, Phaedrus. I am sorry. I do not feel the breezes. Little Fulvia took my hand in both of hers once—I did not feel her touch, of course. But I recall that her hands were small and white... and my outspread fingers so jagged and dark…”

    The construct sensed the billowing darkness moving about him. He could not know how uncivilized they looked now. When his voice faltered, the whetstone scrape yielding to the silence between them, he thought on the foxlike necromancer’s new questions.

    “…those eyes, those yellow eyes… I wish to know where I have seen them… I wish to go to—that place, in pitch darkness. Not on the battlefield, but… between… I feel that I woke sometimes—bidden by a strange voice—I can remember no more, Phaedrus… I wish to know that place…”

    Glede struggled to fix his sight upon the figure above him, the face that wavered in the dark, arcing about him like a dangling paper moon in a theatre.

    “I remember such things as the stirring of blue cloth, a reprieve from the—thick, gurgling voice that ordered me to murder. But no more, no more… oh—guide me, then…”
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    Phaedrus
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    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    Well. He was good and properly drugged.

    The faintest twinge of guilt still gnawed at him. It disturbed him to chain his friend so — the slithering links sent a crawl through his flesh, balled up in his belly. For a moment he could not stand to look at the construct — that horrible, spread-eagled — devils, no — pinned on the stone like a monstrous metal insect…

    It brought back memories of his death. The knife he’d seen a thousand times in memory, the cold eyes drifting out of shadow. Begs for mercy lost to the eaves, drank by the stones.

    The necromancer collected himself, listening to the construct’s slow, creaking rambling — filed away the minutiae and committed them to his memory. Now that the time to perform the magic had dawned, he felt perfectly nervous; when he had unearthed it from a tome it seemed the simplest thing in the world — and perhaps at one point it had been for him. Now he teetered precariously over the construct, finding the world to be a great deal rockier than he’d imagined.

    But there was no going back.

    Those eyes. Those yellow eyes… Phaedrus bit his lip, feeling those words jolt him. In truth, he was just as curious. What eyes? Were they mine? Could we have met, so many eons ago? The coincidence would be staggering, indeed. But then — if it truly was him… then the construct could tell him a great deal about his nature, fill in the details he sorely lacked. It was both exhilarating and horrifying, and he told himself not to hinge on it overmuch. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps we are drawing conclusions too early.

    He lifted the bowl with great care, hovering over the construct.

    “Very well.” A sharp breath knifed into his lungs. “We shall begin.”

    The water lapped, its silver lips kissing the rims of the bowl. Phaedrus murmured the cant — as if he meant only for the waves to hear, his words lost to the sea; it did not matter what they were because they scattered into light, breaking the surface of the water into a thousand reflections. For a moment he was lit from below by an unearthly glow, washed of all color.

    “Drink,” the necromancer commanded, and his voice was a thousand leagues away. He tipped the bowl down, down — into the void of Glede’s helm, but it did not splash in a senseless waste. It was water, then smoke, then softest silk — glass that threw a mosaic of white color, a silently rushing river, a lake that rippled and fell off the earth; it poured into the construct’s phantom lips and knew the edges of his soul, rushing to meet it. Warmth. Sweet, lulling warmth.

    Light bathed the inside of his carapace — for a moment it banished all gloom, turning the shadows of his study into writhing silver snakes. Phaedrus loomed from above, his mouth opening into nothingness, lips flapping in an unheard wind — his visage broke apart and rippled as if seen from the bottom of a lake, and where the necromancer stood was absence.

    Most thought it looked white.

    ***

    Glede!

    A shrill giggle pierced that strange world. Magnolias stirred. New dapples of light appeared where the wind shook the sun through the trees — the patches seemed to shine on their own, twisting with motes. The grass breathed and so shook itself, peppered with blue shadows. It parted for the footsteps of a little girl, bowing politely out of the way.

    Glede!

    A crown of gold curled around her head. The sun followed her where she went, shining ever on her face, limning her hair — for the faintest moments she seemed to be made of parchment and ink, then gold-leaf and paint, then breathless laughter and ruddy cheeks; her dress flapped around her, a white sail in that cool, green world.

    You’ve come back!

    She looked up — and her eyes were a cat’s, flashing like gold coins. Her bow lips were a flick of red, a stroke of a paintbrush.

    Remember where you are.

    For a moment the trees seemed to advance — to straighten and shrink to yellow and spring’s green, brushing playfully against the construct. The stalks whispered as they marched past, all lined up like a kings guard — but nonsense, they had always been there, there! On the horizon, past the trees! The fields of corn were squares in the distance, a solemn nod from the plains.

    The girl smiled, lifting her hand. It was frail and lily-white, beautiful — and yet slashed wickedly through with black, a darkness that remained even in direct sunlight.

    Remember! It is very important that you remember! Can you breathe? I think you can. You must remember how to breathe.

    The trees stirred. The wind gave a long sigh, and the grass fluttered to attend to its distress.

    Look, everything here can do it.

    The girl was in silk — gold silk, and it twirled around her, moving even as she stood still. An unearthly smile alighted on her lips, her face swirling like water — rippling between glimpses and impressions, moving with her dress and without; for a moment her blushing cheek faced him, the plumpness of youth; her crown shivered and fell to curls, and they parted for her luminous eyes.

    Motes clambered down from the trees, gathering by her feet and his. They formed a circle, a dappling, tumbling mess of insubstantial limbs.

    I have something for you.

    A grave expression washed over her face, blurred it to the white of a river-stone. Her eyes were liquid pools, her lips a koi.

    When you take it, you will be alone. I cannot follow you there, understand? You must come back to me. Remember my crown. And she took it off, dazzling sunbeams and gold-leaf, and laid it in his hand — a man’s palm, springing with flesh and blood.

    Remember the shadows! And she pried them off one-by-one, laying them in strips across his fingers. And most of all, remember them! They will mark your way back. She nodded at the corn, the strange yellow fields — they nodded in turn, their stalks bent in the wind.

    Now I will give you this. Only take it if you are ready.

    She outstretched her hands. And from them spilt a garland of petunias — petunias of every shade of blue Glede had ever seen, and some that could only be imagined; the shifting hues of a sea contained in a simple crown, the colors roaring in the petals.

    Look carefully. You will find the right color. When you have… enter through there.

    The girl nodded at the fields — at the fork there where no sunlight touched; the end of this recollection and the beginning of another, an inscrutable darkness. She bit her lip, pausing as the construct took the garland. And as he did she changed — everything changed — everything was tinged a thousand tints of blue, so vast and multifaceted it was impossible to conceive that the world had ever been any other color; the sky became swollen with blue — the grass darkened with it — the sunbeams withered under it and the girl drowned in it, taking several steps back.

    Good-bye, Glede…

    Her voice called from very far away — impossibly far away, sucked out of her lungs. Her blue ghost wobbled, rippled in a strange current; her blue arm smeared in a wave.

    And good luck.

    She disappeared.

    The blues grew shadowy, lapsed into twilight — and then a starless darkness.

    ***


    Color lapped against stone.

    It bled down the walls, falling by Glede’s feet. Blue, blue, blue.

    The harsh desert sun lashed against the windows, forced itself through every ornate carving and lay on the floor, moulded by masons of shadow — stars, moons, lotuses! Holy words! Tessellation upon tessellation! Mosaics fled up and down the walls. The pillars of the room were delicate — fluted sandstone ribs that branched into the lofty ceiling, carved until they appeared as nothing but air. In one alcove a verse of Nailah’s mercy was inlaid with precious lapis-lazuli, the old Ashokan drifting over the stone like smoke.

    Do you admire it?

    The voice seemed to fill the entire chamber, vast and open as it was — and yet it was not a loud voice at all. In fact it could have scarcely risen past a whisper, soft and unearthly, neither male nor female. There was a private delight in that voice that carried so far, as clear as if its owner had been right beside the listener.

    Indeed, its owner was not.

    Its owner was seated at the far end of a long, rectangular pool — a mirror of water that reflected the beautiful ceilings, a strange world interrupted by floating water lilies. Sunlight sparked energetically off the surface, becoming a burnished white at the foot of the figure.

    It was tall.

    Even seated, it was too long and drawn out to be a man — it seemed rather like something from a dream, stretched and insubstantial, a shadow yawning down the dunes. But yet it spoke and did not waver, sitting with the posture reserved for a Moghul.

    The harsh sunlight made it difficult to see — but then, it didn’t matter. It was as though the room had shrunk, or some force had pulled Glede into the midst of the lily-pond. And yet the layout did not change. Water did not seep into the construct’s ankles, and distance seemed flickering, variable — as fickle and unfixed as the water itself.

    The thing in its chair smiled.

    That is — it kept its lips carefully closed. It was the composed, serene half-moon reserved for illustrations of Moghuls.

    This close, it could be seen. A waterfall of rich blue and gold tumbled down its chest, spilling into its lap and splashing down to the floor below — the sunlight struck fire off the embroidery and made liquid of the folds. Its hair seemed to be a fountain of blood, poked through with ears of an elven design. Two rivers of red washed down its shoulders, just grazing the chair. Atop its head its hair was piled and entwined into a crossroads of pleats, woven into the headpiece perched at its crown. A veil hung from it, just short enough to show the Thing’s mouth — and yet it did not flutter with so much as a breath, hanging still and slack.

    Rings glittered on its long fingers, sparkling maddeningly in the sunlight. For a moment it seemed they were skeletal, but it was a trick of light that turned its flesh to the washed ivory of bone. Its chin looked like a corpse’s, carved with black lips and a long, jagged scar. Another gaped across its neck, a flopping black wound. As it spoke the lips peeled apart grotesquely, sending a deep crack down its chin — it opened into a nest of thistle-like teeth, thin and gleaming.

    I admire it, myself. All of these carvings were done by the great artist il-Hadid. The man spoke to stone and it would crumble, so it was said. I asked him once — I asked him why a man would spend his entire life bent over a chisel when men have so short to live. He laughed at me. He said — ‘Efendi, you are backwards! It is this life that is short, and art that is eternal!’ And he was right, of course,” the Thing mused, raising its faceless head to the ceiling. Its spidery hands wove together, a strange organism of gold. “There, you cannot see it. But above, it says 'My eyes were opened by Nailah. My hands are guided by Her. Let these works be eternal where life is not. Let them show goodness and beauty when the world does not. Let them be a reminder of God in a godless place.'” The last line seemed to bring a strange delight to the creature — a resonate hum slithered in its voice.

    He went blind in his later years. And I would have healed him — I would have healed him and given him eternal life. But he refused me, and said he had already been promised such. So I let him die — and the world is poorer for it! But I admired him--I could not enslave him. He loved beauty even more than I.

    The Thing’s fingertips searched for their counterparts. It had the air of one who was used to speaking to thin air — to monologuing without end and expecting no answer or interruption. At length it remembered Glede was still there, and it turned its veil on the construct; two points of light shone luridly through it, the yellow of a swollen star.

    “Do you think I was wrong?” The Thing asked innocuously, with all the hidden venom of one expecting a flattering answer. “To let him die? I could bring him back. As we speak, I could. What is Death, to me?” The creature chuckled under its breath, unfolding itself from its chair.

    It loomed, a shadow that seemed to stretch impossibly up the wall, arching into the ceiling itself.

    “He forgets this. A certain insolent One. One who — I see — has hurt you. Oh, yes, I see.” The Thing’s hems slithered behind it, rasping against the sandstone. “Come. Come and look at what he has done.” There was little choice in the matter. The skeletal hands descended, fixing Glede quite firmly on the shoulders — they were freezing with Death, a splash of cold that lashed the soul. The Thing silently led the construct to the mouth of the pool, craning its long neck down sadly at their reflection. A great gnarled black thing stared back at them — a burr in the water, twisted and mangled and lumped with horns. Beside it was a pale Creature with stars for eyes, its flesh translucent as the water; its mouth rippled and the rest of it shifted like smoke.

    “Hh!” There was a sharp intake of breath beside him, as if the Thing gasped in pain. It cried out, malice coiling under every word.

    “That is not You; it cannot possibly be You. Poor thing — you are a statue trapped in marble — a man in stone! Come.” One hand clamped like a vice on Glede’s pauldron; the other wafted in strange gestures, runes etched in air with a nightmarish fingernail. At once the pool changed — imperceptibly, as if shadows had skittered backwards or run along the surface — and a new set of reflections stared back at them.

    One was an Ashokan man. The other remained almost the same, but it smiled now — a human’s smile in rosy lips, the teeth all blunt and even. The scars on its face had faded, leaving neither a man or woman in that strange mirror. The yellow of its eyes sparked and danced, wild in a fountain of red hair.

    “It is really quite tedious that we must go through this again every time we meet! Do you recall me, human?”
    Edited by Phaedrus, Sep 29 2015, 12:49 PM.
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    We shall begin.

    Glede hardly registered Phaedrus’ words; he saw smears of delicate light above him, joining together sometimes to form a face and sometimes a jumble of painterly shapes. It seemed that all would succumb to a velvety darkness soon. He felt taxed from his story, even though he could only barely remember what he had said; he wanted to sleep regardless.

    The shadows tipped. The wash of light shifted, swelling in blurry bliss. Drink, someone said. Then there was spreading, billowing smoke, and all was white—and ‘drink’ he did, though he knew not how. The coolness of it was cleansing. It was as if he had been thirsty for hundreds of years, only now permitted to know what being quenched was like.

    White, white. It made him think of Nailah, infinite and blessed.

    *

    Glede!

    He remembered how it had felt—how he had thought that Nailah could have painted it with Her brush, for everything thrived and moved in dizzying splendor.

    The giggles rattled like bells, fluttering up to join the twittering of the birds in the trees. Glede could not perceive the source of them; he turned in the tall grass, casting his glance this way and that, searching through the dappled light. A sea of blades moved and shivered. Then: a form, weaving through the fall of light and shadow, white like a fluttering curtain. “My dear!” he cried as she emerged. “There you are, my girl—are you--?”

    He’d been just on the edge of a worried question, surging forward to meet her, when she spoke again. You’ve come back! “Yes,” he sighed, breathless, voice caught with laughter. “Yes, I have. I remember—everything.”

    At once, heart fluttering, he knew that he did. This was what it meant to have Her blessing. Away with the cold numbness of half-living—he could feel the play of the breeze on his cheeks, the way it tugged through his hair. The pleasure of drawing in the sweet spring air nearly stole his breath with laughter. He wondered, eyes beginning to brim with tears, why he had so long walked in such sorrow. He could not bear another moment of that fleshless iron tomb, the funereal distance and somberness and humorlessness it begat.

    “Oh, Fulvia. I remember. I am sorry—I am so sorry.”

    Glede jarred as he saw the shadow in her hand, natural and surreal at once. It made him think of something he was sure he’d forgotten, a thought that was gone more quickly than it had come. Far in the distance, the stalks of corn bloomed in soft yellow. He wanted to shut his eyes, to feel the tickle of the plants against his skin; he wanted to lose himself in the embrace of a spring morning, the grass still dewy and slick where it poked up between his toes.

    But the little girl kept him attentive, polite—he was no longer certain if he could call her Fulvia; she seemed an amalgam of people he had met and remembered, people he might know, people he had known and forgotten. The ruffle of her golden dress and the bounce of her lovely curls drew him to kneel for her, offering her the sad half of a smile; and when her face grew grave, so too did his. He looked into the watery whorls of her irises and could have lost himself there.

    He nodded solemnly. He understood.

    One by one, he took her gifts. He marveled at the gold, so like Alfarsi’s labyrinthine illuminations, full of divinity; he held it close to his chest and felt the hum of life within the golden laurels. He held the shadows like snakes or reams of black silk, disturbed in a way that he could not explain yet wholly respectful. Then, when she gestured at the distant patches of corn, he inclined his head, committing that snapshot of space and color into his memory—and when Glede sought to remember something, he knew within his heart of hearts that he did not often forget it. Reams of Scripture festooned the tangle of his mind. He placed the corn with the Scripture for safekeeping, watching Nanûm’s (and Enlil’s! and Marduk’s!) words seal them so that they would not be easily forgotten.

    “Ah?” He heard his laughter distantly, so full was he now of warnings, instructions. “You have something else for me?”

    Then—blue, blue! He could not count the petunias; he stopped trying as they swelled. Suddenly they were no longer too much to count—they were purely uncountable, swallowing everything that moved or sought independence against them. The grass bent beneath them; the yellow of the cornfields was swallowed up by its stronger sibling; it dyed the sun itself a deep indigo…

    He heard the young girl cry out, saw her wave goodbye, but the moment slipped by: he was too overwhelmed to say anything at all. His eyes searched through the tints and shades and hues, and after a while he feared he might drown in them. They were all unfamiliar; they blended into one another, all the same—

    There! Singing like a hymn. The familiarity struck him to the heart. He reached out with his entire soul to grasp at it, and suddenly it encompassed him, grew dark as sleep...

    *

    Cobalt, cerulean… lapis.

    There was light.

    The physician floated in some dark grey gap between the physical world and the spiritual. At once he was bodiless—he could feel no extremities, at least not immediately—and fixed to his spot in a place not unlike the palace of Fukayna and Teremun described by the priests in Eldahar. He could not move, he had no tongue to speak, and in the wicked light of the sun he could see only snatches of mosaics and scriptural Old Ashokan scrawl in brilliant lapis-lazuli.

    Nailah, in Her grace—
    Nailah, wise, Great Mother & Originator of Movement and Life—
    Did stoop to attend the shepherd’s withered ankle—


    For a brief time, he wondered if he had gone to join the deathly couple after all. If so, the lethe had washed his mind and baptized him; it had made him new. His soul was inhabited, his mind surging, grasping at successions of blurry images and paragraphs of crucial text in crumbling books—but now he was clean. Sterile. He could truly know nothing but the seconds that stretched before him like the shadow of a man (but not the man himself).

    The time of his wondering was brief.

    Do you admire it?

    There sat Ma’at on Her throne, he saw, but he could not see Her scales. He had not yet gone to join the king and queen of the underworld; therefore his sins had been taken from him and now were to be weighed. Her hair was red like cherries or blood, Her lips a twist of blackened flesh. And he had never heard of the scar that split Her pointed chin which seemed to shift and pull with Her lips, puckering the tusk-white skin of Her face beneath Her veil. Her smile was stately, but Her body was too long and thin. He had never seen Ma’at depicted in such a way. But then, no man who lived had ever beheld Her.

    And then of course he felt he was in two places at once, distant and yet just before Her. But it makes sense: the artists these days are in the habit of painting the gods and goddesses out of perspective, as is only natural for divine creatures. Ma’at did not need to follow the rules of the southerners’ newly-figured linear perspective, which with their odd secular paganism was judged by the high priests of Kahlil to be perched upon the line between novelty and heresy. And so he felt as though he stood in one of these paintings, the world skewed and inconceivably holy.

    A foolish thought, came a voice from somewhere. You have never cared much for the gods.

    The more the thing at the end of the room spoke, the more frightened he grew. The long white hands, glittering with jewels, snaked about one another, the fingers twisted and long like tree-branches. Il-Hadid—yes, he faintly recalled the name. An old name, encased in seas of sand, known only to the pages of dusty old books in ancient dialects—or to the vast minds of gods. But he did not see what il-Hadid had to do with the weighing of his soul, or the judgment, or Kahlid. As a matter of fact the goddess seemed to have forgotten he was there.

    It spoke of healing. Healing? It was Nailah who healed, not Ma’at, thought the empty soul dully. And so—the scarred thing, the thing in the chair, could not be Ma’at. Could it? The voice was soft yet it echoed beyond reason; it, like a divine, did not follow the rules of natural science. But it was not Nailah. Could it be Kahlid, with those teeth like needles, those gaping scars like mouths? Why would Kahlid take up such a handsome place? Was this some foreign god, as it had implied that its own offers stood in opposition to Nailah’s Herself?

    …a reminder of God in a godless place.

    Its voice flushed with pleasure. This, he realized, was not a god.

    Immediately his creeping anxiety flourished, transformed itself into the raw, blunt energy of horror. He was a man on fire, but he could not move. Do you think I was wrong? Now, frozen: twin stars fixed him in place. If this was not a god, it had the rage of one; it was the watery beast stirring beneath a frozen lake, the promise of a hundred broken bodies at the bottom of a simple stream whose form belied its depth. His mind spun and spun, and for the first time he tried—really tried—to move.

    The room’s skewed perspective dizzied him. There was a clatter, a sound like hinges, plate, metal crunching against metal; he fought to keep his balance against the ringing in his head. I could bring him back. As we speak, I could. His vision fled, blinded and illuminated, wavering and spinning. His height was wrong, his body heavy, sluggish, numb—where was he? When parted with the body, the soul was meant to be free, a bird spreading its wings against the starry sky. This was nothing like freedom. What is Death, to me?

    The Thing stood like an outdated anatomical drawing peeling itself from the page of a medical lexicon. A flimsy strip of papyrus, a series of nerves and bones without flesh, it wavered against the sunlight. A sheut. A shadow stretching from a man’s feet, mutilated by the rise and fall of dunes, disproportionate and hideous beyond words.

    Instinctively the physician raised his hand against it, but found that the hand that he raised was not his own. Rather it was a hunk of black metal, the tip of each finger sharpened to a point that could pierce flesh and rift bone; glinting, almost silvery as the light struck each glyph, a script ran along the joints, crept in circles around the jagged edges.

    He began to cry out—but it was a sound like the roar of a beast, so he lapsed into a choked silence. One who—I see—has hurt you, the Thing was saying, full of compassion. Who was it, and who was that One? Come. Come and look at what he has done.

    The physician wanted to say, ‘I do not wish to look.’

    Shh, shh, came the hems of the Thing’s skirts. It was moving, but it seemed to step through time and dimension. He could not tell how long it had been since it had stood, but now it was behind him—now it put its long, cold fingers on his shoulders, it propelled him, it compelled him. Shh—it glided behind him, who clanged and shuffled, who struggled to keep his footing, whose body seemed unwilling to follow his commands. It brought him to the edge of the pool and gestured so that he might see the two figures there in the water. The hands were chill on his shoulders; they pierced the numbness of his shell like arrows.

    In the water, the Thing looked like a figure obscured in a bloom of shisha smoke. Once again, the eyes caught him and drove a pin into his heart. They looked like lanterns in the mist.

    The other figure…

    The Thing gasped, its voice all too delicate and rehearsed. Yet its words were sweet and soft. Something inside him lurched; he wanted to agree then, scramble together and force out a few affirmative words, but nothing in his empty, empty mind was worth the brute force of emotion that he was experiencing.

    A clash of thoughts—a mix of half-formed impressions—sprung from some impenetrable darkness across a curtain of time. An absent, distracted thought: he might never again play the çeng. His fingers would butcher the strings; he fumbled, too, lacked any sort of technical dexterity. A cold voice buried somewhere inside said, It is fine motor control that you lack. Now you are much like a man who's been cleft at the base of the neck, or struck hard in the head. What would Arsenios advise to do with a patient like you?

    He watched the Thing’s free hand whisk madly through the air, signaling to the pool. He dared not move. Something like a shadow passed over the skin of the water and the reflection changed.

    It was his turn to gasp, trembling under the great lean creature's bony hand.

    “No--!” He froze. His voice caught; the man in the reflection’s mouth had moved, but the voice on the other side scraped and ground like a demon’s. He leaned closer to the lapping lip of the water. The man—perfectly nondescript—leaned closer to him, squinting dark eyes as if he could just barely see the monster on the other side. But then he reeled back, staring fixedly at the other reflection, biting off his words with a venom. “No—no, I have never seen you! You say that we have met? Who are you? What are you? What am I?”

    The other being’s eyes danced; their hair was silken. It was as if the Thing that the physician had mistaken for Ma’at had been restored to its former glory, years and scars and illness taken away, replaced by the liveliness of youth.

    “What is this—madness? Which is the lie, the water, or—or--”

    He made a strangled noise.
    Edited by Glede, Oct 3 2015, 09:40 PM.
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    Phaedrus
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    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    No—!

    The man’s cry grated in the silence — low and harsh, like the braying of a bull; the wounded howl of an animal, a beast forced to relive the same realization with each glimpse of a mirror. And ah, ah — how familiar! How all-too-close.

    The Thing’s smile fell far from serene. Tension twisted it, left its papery lips to scrape together, a parchment whisper of two blackened sheafs. It did not move — stood with its hands clasped at its stretched waist, waiting with some impatience; as if the scene before him were a worn play, a recital to be suffered again and again, always with the same conclusion. The faintest sigh escaped it — sent the monster’s hair to flutter, a stray ripple of red by its chin. Its reflection was serene, infinitely patient, its eyes bright and wide.

    Both are true.

    Shff, shff.

    The Thing neared, hovered like a held breath— a phantom beside the great, twisted beast; their reflections mocked them, cruel in their smoothness, in the softness of skin and sculpted limbs, their appearance as men. So easy, to lean closer, to desire to touch — to be subsumed by the waters and drown in the pursuit of themselves. Was there not a southerner’s tale that went as such? Poor Narcissus — but his beauty was true, a thing that could be touched and seen; theirs were swallowed, buried in coffins of their own flesh.

    We have met,” the Thing chuckled quietly, one long finger tapping against another. “Between sleep, you have walked with me. We have shared many conversations, and broken bread. I am Malakar, the lord of this place.” He gestured, and the reflection followed — his arms spread to encompass the shimmering water and winking mosaics, the spindly columns reflected in that mirror-world. The lapis-lazuli shone like burnished serpent in the waters, the script twisting and alive. “Here you are safe from the One who did this to you. This is my palace, and mine alone. None may enter that I do not command…” The reflection gave a serene smile, its flesh a bleached white, fingers trailing like minnows through that realm. They alighted on the man’s shoulder, cool and flickering.

    “You are a man. A man called Rashid el-Amin.” He tasted it between his teeth — swilled it like wine, let it bloom in the air above their heads. The Thing could feel it, fluttering like a bird in his palm; a tepid heartbeat, a thrumming that longed to be free of its grisly bindings, chained and scarred and chafed by the twisted metal. That foul Master Binder had tried to erase it, but it was there, still — in the composition of the soul, the core of the Self, dormant but not obliterated. It had taken coaxing, oh, certainly — many walkings and alterations before the construct was more than a bellowing metal ox. But ah! How tedious — to awaken a man and settle him to sleep again, like drowning a babe in still waters only to breathe life into its tepid lungs. A great sigh left the creature.

    “Do you remember? Before… this was done to you.” The eyes glowed, glowed — twin lamps in the pool, stars winking through unfathomable leagues. For a moment they stood in duality — a iron monster entrapping a man, a soft face overlaid with decay. And just as soon it dispersed, a frail ripple chasing the surface of a pond.

    A chime interrupted the room, twinkled in that strange, lofty space; twiggish fingers brushed his lips. A grin bristled behind the black shreds.

    “Rashid el-Amin.” Said by the Thing it held power — not a senseless putter of syllables but a force that tugged at the senses, arresting in its every breath. The very name begged for remembrance — like a dog sensing its owner, its body taut with anticipation. “I ask again. Do you recall me?” Shff. Shff. Closer — closer, cold, hems slithering. He brought the chill with him, a cold that swallowed the Ashokan sun, watered its light to something dull and weak. Malakar loomed above the construct, hunched like a grotesque vulture.

    “Because I grow impatient.”
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    Both were true? Both?

    He felt as if he might fall into the pool; the world whirled, vertiginous, pressing in blue and gold. The man in the water looked ill. He put his hand over his heart, fingers snaking through white wool. His eyes rolled heavenward even as the construct’s did, rimmed in red. And then for the physician the world became a tapestry the color of the Tibira, shot through with veins of the gods’ grace.

    A long moan echoed across unfathomable chamber. The shuffling of the Thing’s robes accompanied it.

    “Malakar…” The name stirred up half-memories in him. His glance fled back toward the water, where the beautiful thing gazed at its visage as if to devour it. Panic welled up in him and receded like the tides: one moment he was numb, the next wild and furious. Nevertheless he stood still, trapped in a tomb of iron. The whetstone voice trembled. “M-Malakar. I am -- I fear I cannot --”

    I remember nothing! he wanted to scream. I cannot hold these opposing ideas in my mind! They will not go! Either we are the reflections, or the reflections are us --

    A man called… Rashid El-Amin?

    Just so: the creature pulled the final thread of the dark veil that had been flung over the physician’s mind. The man in the water blinked, eyelids fluttering. The face became familiar in the way of faces in mirrors; he felt that he’d looked upon its planes and corners, the sharp edges of its cheekbones and the greying at its temples, for many years. He recognized it -- it had a name, a name -- el-Amin the physician, el-Amin Effendi...

    He remembered!

    Oh, indeed. In that cool, rippling looking-glass he saw a hundred reflections. He saw himself in his sixteenth year, lanky and not yet grown into his robes; he saw himself as a young man, sitting on the edge of a pond with a woman in his arms, kissing her dispassionately, disappointed in a way only he could see out of the corner of his eye; he saw himself, a brief glimpse in a shop window, an old woman draped across his shoulders, lips dribbling and moving as fast as they could: Nebet, nebet… come along… you know it isn’t your time yet -- Nailah cannot will it. Come with me. We can do something for the pain, Esmail and I… you mustn’t simply give up... He saw all these things and more. He felt the dust beneath his feet and the weight of his age, piled slowly year after year.

    He saw his reflection in Etruria, a sad, sad old man.

    Now he became mortified. He cried out -- not as the physician, a nameless soul wandering between life and death, but as Rashid el-Amin Effendi, respected yet itinerant and destitute. But he hadn’t come here of his own accord, wherever it was, and it seemed it had been a journey of the soul rather than the aching feet. Now the dysmorphia struck him with twice its former power: he knew who he was -- he knew that he was the man he saw in the water, the man he had always been -- but he loomed and stumbled and his voice was not his own.

    He stopped to listen, frozen. He could not tear his eyes away from the beautiful face in the water, framed in red; beside it, he seemed lackluster. Beside it, all the finery about them, the lapis-lazuli, the words of the gods themselves chiseled into vaulted, billowing architecture, seemed to shrink to nothing. The hand was a pearl upon his shoulder.

    Then it all dispersed, a fog skittering over the mirror-clear surface. The thing loomed like a shadow. Once more Rashid was put in mind of the textbook diagram. It is frightening, Esmail had once laughed. I would not wish to see it before me. He had explained that such things do not exist. Men have meat upon them, bone -- even the worst of deformities has a man beneath it, a man of flesh and blood. If the dead walk, then what use is science? The world is barren, ruled only by the gods, and it is better to pray than pour one’s effort into the medical profession.

    A skeleton -- a dead man -- rose above him, veiled, its lips like a blackened gash in paper.

    Do you remember?

    “I know who I am,” he grated, some surreal dreamlike quality of their meeting allowing him to put aside the horror he felt at his own bellowing rasp, “but no -- I cannot remember you.” He tried to take a step back; a clang sounded and he shuffled, combative, a retreat rather than a simple sidestep. The entire chamber seemed to darken as the thing shuffled closer -- and indeed, shuff, shuff, its robes whispering and moaning like spirits. How Aten had been squashed! How the blue of the ceiling had been devoured by darkness! He began to tremble, an alien sound of chain and metal shivering and shuffling.

    But then el-Amin Effendi forced himself to straighten, to square his shoulders against it.

    “I am afraid of you, Malakar, lord of… this place. I have no recollection of you, but I am afraid. You have impressed me, if that is what you wished to do. But I will not beg like a beaten dog. Whatever I am now, I was a man of practicality. A physician. My name was Rashid el-Amin, as you say. What was in the water has gone, unless this is a dream. It cannot be real. I do not believe it.” The waver still remained in his voice. He raised a hand, struck by the awful truth of it: black metal flashed in the darkness, fingers sheared to points. “I have no more respect for a lord than I do a slave. I am already as good as dead, and so your impatience means nothing to me. What am I, what are you, and what… what…”

    The fear had begun to grasp him, to tear at him. He could not much longer keep up his ruse of strength; his spirits began to fall in that darkness, in the weight of expectation that shined behind the veil. He felt like a foreigner, trapped in a strange land, in a strange body, under the interrogation of a strange lord.

    His voice was weak:

    “...Please. Please, Lord Malakar. What am I? Who has done this to me, and why have… why have… why have you taken me here, only to show me what I was and then snatch it away from me? I cannot be… this… thing. Please. I will give you what you want. Send me from this dream -- either into the waking world, or to Ma’at…”
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    Phaedrus
    Member Avatar
    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    I cannot.

    Cannot.

    Cannot,
    he almost mocked back. Cannot! A high, grating whine — a venomous imitation of that drivel vomited from a whetstone throat.

    The construct clanked and flustered himself and fidgeted in all the stages of denial. Then, at last, the verdict: I cannot remember.

    Malakar watched him. The quivering spines, the empty hole of a face, shivering chain and all. Well, it could be fortuitous. There will be no evidence of my tampering—in memory, at least. His eyes remained unblinking, gory holes lit by an internal furnace.

    Of a sudden the man changed — the pauldrons squared, and the construct rose like a wall, a bristling impasse of iron and wicked spines. At once his temper flared, a sudden lick of flame in his breast; the Thing’s eyes shone with a hideous light that left his skin tallow, eating through the shroud of the veil. At once the character of the room changed — the windows blazed white, flashed a dying red. Outside a darkness bled across the sky and left it spinning, spinning, a vertiginous rush of stars; the pool fluttered and tore, their reflections obliterated.

    ”It is real.” Howled. Black, white, red. Bloody light poured into the room, lapped up by the stones. “Your belief does not change that, human.” The voice bled through the chamber, suffocating the lofty eaves.

    Your impatience means nothing to me.

    He was upon the other man in a blur — could not recall moving, twisting like a fleeing cobra; rearing up, up, the room vanishing behind him, effacing in his wrath. Through the darkness smears of light chased his eyes, left them double. “A man of practicality should know when to beg.” The howl filled the chambers, echoed, ricocheted—as if the palatial hall had shrunk to a coffin, claustrophobically intimate; the creature’s teeth could be seen in glimpses, a deep-water Thing shying from light — its presence smothered the room, filled the darkness.

    Strange stars dotted the landscape — distant, eerie spectators, scattered wantonly; they gave no sense of distance or direction, winking aimlessly in that void.

    I am not one of your human lords, with their rock crowns and false power — they cannot touch you after Death, true.” Hems slithered, rustling over the construct’s foot. A thousand echoes followed it, warped and tinny. A corpse’s hand laid on the monster’s pauldron, snuck into the cracks; a digit slid over the runes carved there, felt them hum and pulse at its fingertip.

    But here, you are mine.

    A clacking hiss erupted from his long throat, a snake’s rattle; he felt for the man’s soul, felt it, seized its humming borders in his mind, the supposition of a shoulder, the memory of a body— and tore.

    The runes dug back, fought to keep the human’s spirit in their barbed prisons, bars of cuneiform gouged in blood — but it scarcely mattered. He did not wish to divorce the man from his shell; only to rend it just so, to pry it from a bed of iron and into his own hands to twist. To hear the others screech! The sensation was not unlike the torture devices of the southern humans — shuffling in their stinking mountain furs as they turned a crank, pulling apart a man bound at each limb. But he did not need iron or wood or gristle — only will, only two great shining eyes and a chamber of teeth.

    So it was. He was magnanimous. All too forgiving, as it were — his was the weakest of the hearts in the Bayt, he knew; too soft and bloody, sodden at its seams, easily swayed from wrath. He did not ask for much, truly — and gave tenfold when so. To be treated like a dog in return! Nonsense, nonsense—he grew sick of it.

    You are nothing,” the Thing snarled. “A beast, now. A slave to the one who did this to you.” All the compassion vanished — the softness in the Thing’s voice, the quiet, dulcet manner. Every word pressed like a hot iron, bubbling through flesh and sinew.

    And you insult me in this way— the one who freed you? You are awake, beast. You do not dream. You are awake!

    The shriek blasted through the chamber, singing off the stones — the Thing swiped a hand and released the construct, casting him aside like a metal doll; whatever pain had coursed through the construct’s soul fled now, dissipating to the nether.

    Please. I will give you what you want.

    Malakar swept his robes about him and regarded the Maker’s creation with a disgusted look. The veil fluttered, clinging briefly to his desiccated mouth — then the Thing turned, temper dampening, extinguishing itself as quickly as it ignited. A dead finger twitched, trailing over silk and seeking a tendril of hair. The silence became stifling, as if the stonework in the chamber held the air in a collective breath.

    Finally, the Thing’s lips twisted.

    I cannot send you to Ma’at while the one who made you still lives.” Hair trickled over his fingers, wound and twisted in rivulets of blood; the faintest hum built in the creature’s throat. Soft, now — as if the outburst had been an aberrant shriek of a violin, the stumble of bow in an amateur hand. But the air still held its chill, a prickling reminder; the light did not return, snatched and crumpled into the dim spheres of stars.

    The one who did this to you…” His robes twisted at his feet as he turned, a winding rose of blue and gold. “His true name — the Name of Names, that much is lost to us all. At the temples he took the one Nasir al Din — protector of the faith.” A high, hideous laugh pierced the air, quivering in a vibrato. Teeth yawned. Malakar pulled his lips back together in a vice of a smile, long hands knitting. “But in his current practice he is Charon— after the southerner’s guide in Death.” A perfect fit of pretense for a man so foul. “Strange, for he is Ashokan. Well, so it is thought! One can hardly tell, now.

    His spidery fingers sought one another.

    You are not the first he has done this to, nor will you be the last. Legions — legions, I expect. I do not know what happens in those dark chambers. Therefore, Rashid el-Amin, I am in need of your eyes, your ears.” He regarded the construct, head tilted. “I have liberated your mind from his grasp. No matter his influence, a bit of Rashid el-Amin remains. Yes?” The twin voice whispered, perfectly reasonable again — the corpse subsumed in the waters, flattening to a glassy disc. “Information—that is all I ask for. Simple discourse. Serve me, and I will free you from your prison and deliver you to Ma’at. I am just, el-Amin Effendi.

    A black crescent sliced his face.

    'As the father who whips his son to keep him righteous, so my wrath is just. The bloodied back is a symbol of faith. Therefore let you not think the Judge cruel, for in all he does, he acts in the Mother’s love.’
    Edited by Phaedrus, Nov 9 2015, 09:52 PM.
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    Glede
    Member Avatar
    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    The world spun and screamed, engulfed in pitch.

    A man of practicality should know when to beg.

    El-Amin cried out as the figure loomed and collided with him. In an instant the thing had encased him in a sepulcher of itself – it had pinned him against the back wall of a tiny tomb and filled the rotting shade with itself, its breath, snatches of its anglerfish teeth. Of a sudden it was as if he could not remember there ever having been a room, could not seize upon that lovely image – the splendor of all the lapis money could buy – again; the Thing had swamped him in an endless sea of ink, a void with a vast and vacuous dearth of stars.

    To his credit, he nearly protested. He mustered all the strength within himself against the great wall of panic that had begun to build within him. Arresting, the closeness of the thing choked the words in his throat. They cannot touch you after Death, true… His mind, already muddled and bewildered, displaced into the strange land of dreams, struggled to comprehend. Then he felt – felt with his soul, not his iron flesh; felt the cold and the numbness to the depths of his heart in a way he had never felt before, did not think it medically possible to feel – a hand upon his shoulder.

    Rashid el-Amin began shrieking.

    It was an awful sound, all whetstone racket, echoes of grief trapped in rasping steel. But truly he had never felt such pain. He recalled an interval long ago, when he had been little more than a boy, confined to his bed after a brief journey through the No’bu: a team of nurses had attended him, sweating and tossing and moaning, and they had pressed an endless rotation of chill wet cloths against his forehead. It had not staved off the pain, like a flaming anvil thrust through his skull. For years afterwards he would fall to shaking, trembling, reduced to a babbling fool for hours at a time, weak for weeks. But how he had recovered, grown strong!

    This was worse. The pain of this was not in the head or in the chest; it was not like a broken bone, confined to the area of the fracture but echoing dully throughout the rest of the bones like a phantom. No – even worse. It tore at the core of him in paroxysms of violence. For splits of seconds, blinding in their virulence, he could not be sure where or who he was. Like a soul constantly reborn into the gnashing jaws of Khalid, he felt that his existence had begun and would end in pain. The pain was all he knew and all he would ever know.

    Gods, help me, he thought, full of a sudden, foreign humility: Nailah, if You have any love for Your children, do not let this one bear such pain!

    When had the gods ever come to his aid? But now he could not think.

    The words pressed against him, beating at that humility like a hammer in a forge. In that moment all he wanted was to beg. He had not known, he wanted to say. He did not know there were things that possessed such power. He knew of earthly lords and their violence, but he did not know of lords like this. He knew nothing of demons. He knew nothing of gods.

    Then all sensation drained away. He fell with a great clatter, trembling like so many metal leaves on a metal tree; he felt curiously empty, a racked husk.

    My name is Rashid el-Amin. I am a physician… It was almost no use to remind himself. Crumpled, head bowed and deference complete, he was forced to look at the glinting black shapes of his trembling hands. Not a dream? How? Why? No – my name is Rashid el-Amin… The name seemed to lose its meaning. It felt like a jumble of meaningless syllables.

    “You freed me. I am sorry. K-K-Kinder… than I d-deserve…”

    He could have babbled on, but he forced himself to stop and listen to Malakar’s words instead. The flinching expectation would not leave him; it was just as he had remembered, the fragility of expectation, every moment filled with the static of prescience: what if he were seized by the fever again just then, driven back to his bed in a wreck? Now he was at the mercy of a Thing that walked in dreams. Anything he said, any idle movement, anything that might offend…

    You are awake.

    He let out a tiny strangled noise before he could stop himself, clenching his fists tightly. Still he could not bear to look back up at the figure, impossibly tall and lithe, eyes burning like hellish coals through the wafting gauze of its veil.

    Nasir al Din. Charon.

    Now he looked up.

    “If he is killed, then I am free?” El-Amin’s voice cracked with a feral hope; he leaned closer, nearly rising with a great creak. Then he flinched. “But you wish me – you wish me to be… awake. You wish me to… no, no. No, Lord Malakar. There must be some mistake. You speak of legions, but I have… I have never held a weapon. I would dearly see Ma’at, but… there…”

    Malakar’s mien brooked no refusal. Rashid’s hands began shaking once more, this time with a great deal more strength. He sank again to the tile.

    “…‘in the Mother’s… love.’ Yes.” He watched the folds of fabric snake around the thing’s feet, infinitely complex. “I will – I will do whatever you ask. I will learn whatever you wish and then relate it to you. It is only… fair. I-It is only – pious.” You should have listened to Mother, Rashid. You should have listened to her when she spoke of Nailah. And Kahlid. You should not have been such a fool. There are gods in this world. “Then I… I shall never see – the world of light again? It is onward to the Scales, and then to Teremun and Fukayna? I am already a dead man. I am already…”

    But he had already been distracted by something else. He searched through the depths of his mind. I have never held a blade, he thought, utterly bewildered. This body is strange and wretched, but surely… he does not imply…

    It struck him with horrible force. He let out another strangled gasp and it bled into a moan; he could not be bothered to stop himself, of a sudden did not care if Malakar seized him again and engulfed him in pain. Why else would such a thing be created? If Malakar was tall, then he himself was formidable – and no doubt very strong, and capable of…

    “I never held a blade in my life. This is madness.” He began to look around in panic, to move, but then caught himself, amended hastily: “But I – I will do as you say. Please. I will do what you ask. And more. Whatever you wish.”

    The sight of his talons, black against the ground, put him in mind of something. Some blackness – something entirely separate. In the space of a moment, he forgot where he was; Malakar shifted before him like a mirage, real yet unreal. He heard a small, tinkling voice, distant, buffeted by the winds of spring. But another voice came to snarl over it, drowning it.

    Charon, Charon, Charon…

    The name spun madly in his mind. It invoked something within him that stirred its head like an old serpent just beneath still waters. The Maker! Charon! Ashokan, the Thing had said, though one could hardly tell – and Rashid could taste the tip of a memory, just on the verge of hearing the sound of something crawling and croaking, weeping blood through folds of pallor, hands clutching and cupping some foul necromantic material…

    “Lord Malakar—“

    Charon!

    The call caught in his throat, silent. Suddenly he knew. The voice in his mind roared, crushing him into dust.

    *

    The voice of the Master Binder snapped and surged across ladders of sigils, burning against the darkness of half-awareness. Like a fire at his heels the construct felt Necessity. The Master's scimitar had tasted blood in the last month, for it could sense the crackle of life around it like a cluster of moving beacons, shuffling and flopping and encased in flesh. The bindings Called the hand and the blade to them, like hummingbirds to flowers in springtime. The hand was willed to drive the blade home, the blade to strip the flesh of its life, and the body to take in the sustenance of the blood-cleansed Soul and please the master with more efficiency.

    So it was. And the Master Binder was ever present, singing in his throaty way through the bindings, holding the construct fast with his guidance.


    *

    On the table, Glede began to flinch and twitch. At first it was subtle indeed; his fingers jumped and clattered against one another, tapping the stone feverishly. Then there came the slithering giggles of chains, rippling and delicate but holding fast like loyal guardians.

    He let out a long, low moan.

    *

    In the darkness of the cave, the construct could no longer hear the boy's pulse. He could not see. But footsteps slunk and clattered, loud in the hollow silence, and the youngling no doubt fled from hiding-place to hiding-place. Where would he go in the hydra of passageways? It would be a simple thing to route him and then tear into him against a blunt cave wall. He had cut down the other men, though it had been difficult; the last had had a remarkable strength of will, and Glede had been required to butcher him without the aid of the Master’s fear bindings. Nonetheless he had done so and he could taste the Master’s exultation. Now only the youngling that had barely grown into his armor remained.

    But Glede felt a confusion of senses. The room was smaller than the cave; the cave had shrunk. Why could he not track the boy? The bindings screamed within him -- kill! Kill! Kill for the Master! -- but his senses felt dull, his movements sluggish.

    Then he saw a face, soft and white as the moon, framed in red.

    Malakar?
    How do I know this name?

    The face bled into another. Where there had been red, he saw only the choppy black curls and wide eyes of a boy. The flesh brimmed with Life, and the Master’s blade sought it. He advanced as the boy fell back, eyes fixed on him, croaking with constricted breath, his own blade discarded--

    No! There was the softer face again, the leaner face, the red hair—his blade was not in his hand, it was not--


    *

    "Where is the Master's blade?" The roar rung out in the silent dankness of the cellar study so as almost to shake the floor; the wooden bowl clattered across the floor in a jerky dance of panic, thrown aside from its place by a stray elbow. There was another snap as the weaker chains shattered against the brute strength of his arms. Broken tips sought each other like addled snakes, all to no avail. In a frenzy of limbs and roaring, he struggled against the thicker ones. “Where is it? Where?"

    This had nothing of the quiet control Glede usually exercised over his voice, tepid and mincing -- in volume and grating, bellowing rasp it was terrible.

    The final great chain broke over his breastplate.

    *

    It seemed he was free of whatever had ailed him, but he still could not find his blade. Surreal and pendulous, the face of the boy shifted before him, one moment an Ashokan no more than sixteen and the next a plump white southerner with bright red hair. He did not seem to be moving, did not seem to…

    The Master’s voice was in his mind once again. The bindings crackled madly with it, jerking his limbs into motion. His confusion was of no use. He could not wait like this while his Work, his Killing, was still to be done—

    But where was the Master’s blade? Who had taken the blade?


    *

    "No matter: I shall crush his throat with my hands!"

    Glede freed himself from the tangles of the table with one clumsy movement, staggering forward. Where is this? Where--? The Master’s bindings breathed within him. He saw the man across from him – no, the boy, the boy with the black eyes and the curly hair, the little skittering rat – and he saw a target, and he saw… – but he could not see Life, he sensed nothing within the flesh but darkness, a familiar darkness but one that went on forever –

    With an awful roar, slurring unintelligible Ashokan, he lunged, meaning to fix his great black gauntlets around the neck of the prey and secure its soul for the Master.
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    Phaedrus
    Member Avatar
    Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

    Theirs was a forbidden place. His kingdom—his sanctum, the temple that barred the unclean and uncouth.

    The alchemist and his spawn no longer ventured down here. It had been so long he almost blotted Alloces from his mind—a two-headed snake that feigned progress as he reproached it, moving nowhere; narrow-minded, parochial fool. Outside the world turned, stirred, rolled in senseless circles— he did not care for it, as it had never cared for him; the awareness of its existence dulled to an ember that even now faded on the brink of his consciousness. A necessary burden to consider for supplies, and nothing more.

    He had just received the newest crop. The ghul had dragged in a soul — still clinging to Life, its flesh badly mutilated. His long, probing hands had jabbed the bite marks, roamed the skin churned by the creature’s teeth as it dragged its prey down the tunnel. A few moments and he surmised they wouldn’t be immediately fatal—giving him enough time to work without the treachery of fetching a soul from Death.

    Something screamed in the darkness— followed by a susurrus, the manic patter of a thousand rats — and silence blanketed the labyrinth again. He did not need light to see by anymore; his hands were surer, able to sense a thousand things lost to vision— every nick, curve, bump, a breathing topography of flesh and iron, the quivering rasp of the soul; he knew every Creation as surely and intimately as a wife, had subjugated them, had wed them to his tools with blood.

    Softly, softly.

    The soul struggled — it always did. But it slipped easily into his practiced hands, sloughing from its flesh. The Binder shoved the corpse aside, and it hit the sloped ground with a dull thud. Several thunks peppered the air — slap, slap, slap as it rolled, gravel chasing it into a pit; a howl warped by yards of stone echoed into his workshop.

    The necromancer barely heard the sounds of eating below, absorbed by the task before him. The soul gleamed in his palms, bound temporarily to an orb, and he pondered what use it would have. He had probed the body before tossing it aside, determined it too soft and old for use, the muscles too weak for armature, its genitalia unsuited for relieving oneself. By the clothes and articles in its pockets, he had surmised it had been a healer; a healer!

    It hummed, warm in his broad palms, rolling between the banks of his thick fingers. After a moment’s consideration, he knew. It was a game of his to perfect irony; to visit on others the same humor the gods had shown him. A quest to understand their workings, he had once jested to the alchemist in a rare mood — the alchemist, whose face had twisted in a whorl of leather, dead eyes flashing, and condemned him.

    As though theirs was a kingdom of saints.

    No matter. The carcass of the Bayt Ifrit rotted above, dessicating in the sun, a testament to the drow’s hypocrisy — but he worked beyond Aten’s eye, amongst the dead and lowly creatures. Was it not them that inherited the earth—the worms and beetles? The words of his temple floated back to him, the mantra he had sung through grit teeth. Do not boast then, those who bear your gilded staffs and dyed cloths, for the kings of men become the serfs of maggots.

    His breathing—heavy in youth—was a rasping labor now, every lungful prized from Death’s fingers. A clack of excitement left his thick throat, a hum. His jellied lips twitched off of black gums.

    You will be a soldier,” the terrible voice rumbled. His hand slid over the orb, filthy with blood and refuse, ending in curling nails. They scraped the thing’s soul, tracing its promising hum. In Death that feeble body would be greater than anything it had been in Life; it would have the strength of ten men and the endurance of an immortal—a fate too kind for a soul bred so low.

    Slowly, on crabbed legs, the Maker rose — a slow, laborious scraping marked his step, a putrescent breathing. His robes slithered behind him, dragging over the wet stone. Humans obeyed best: humans were the dullest of creatures, bred in filth and made to gutter like moths, their consciousness wasted on a brutish existence— he always chose them for servants, as it was their natural state to obey. When man had no father he made a master; when he had no master he appointed a king; when he had no king he made God. And so he was all four, and all of his Creations thrummed with that knowledge, were risen and put to earth by his own hand.

    The suit of black metal gleamed, curved wickedly — a barbarous thing, all thorns and gristle, a mechanism that gorged on blood and propelled itself thus. The bindings had been the work of months, perhaps years — time had no place here; time was not relevant — but it was a beautiful script, a reorientation of the soul, diverted into banks and rivers across the plain of armor. There was still work to do on it yet, but he would not know what to fix until it stirred its iron limbs.

    ***

    Rise.

    And it rose—with a terrible shriek of metal, dozens of joints trembling to life.

    You are mine—I have forged you, bred you, I have given you Life.

    It bellowed. A scream, like a babe in arms — a scream of awakening, a scream to mark the passage from the fields of Ma’at to those of Aten; a scream like those he had heard so many times before, when he plunged the newly born into the waters of sanctification, and handed their squalling, writhing bodies to their mothers; a scream that belonged to him, a scream that marked the success of creation.

    To me you answer.

    It convulsed — as some Things did, their limbs swollen and unfamiliar to them; they would learn, in time, the marks of their new bodies.

    To me.

    Its limbs were not made for grace. It moved as if palsied, lumbering, shrieking — but gradually its step gave way to a militant propulsion, its frenzy of limbs hardening to clockwork precision—and it pleased him.

    They nearly stood eye-to-eye. His mouth fell agape, revealing a ruin of brown teeth. Black, stinking cloth rustled, following his arm as it rose; his scabbed hand rested on the thing’s helm.

    You will answer to the name Glede.

    Again it bellowed, like an animal. The decaying hand slipped from its face, disappeared into its priestly robes.

    Glede…


    ***

    “Glede?”

    He’d thought, for the trick of a moment, that the metal man had moved. But perhaps not — perhaps the dark had gotten to him, the pall of silence that engulfed them both.

    Phaedrus bit his lip. He did not know how long he sat there. In that chill silence, time became insensible; his breath became a metronome, smoking up before him in intervals.

    Devils.

    The necromancer rubbed his hands together, frowning. His leg felt numb, prickling —for what must have been the dozenth time he shifted, leaning forward with a sigh. Glede lay prone as a corpse, dark and inscrutable; again he wondered what shifted in those depths, what memories he walked — and what, what the devil did it have to do with him? The texts had hinted— once, once! — there were ways of scrying a man’s soul, of manipulating the waters so that their memories flit on the surfaces of bowls, their agonies became the viewer’s own… but time had eroded the glyphs, swallowed them with worm’s teeth and sand. If the rites existed elsewhere in his library, then it was unbeknownst to him.

    To sit without knowing felt senseless, tortuous. How long was he to wait here? Hours? Till morning? Ah, and he could not leave, lest something happen! Was this how Glede had felt in the desert, watching him as he writhed in his sleep? Well, a fine favor to repay, then.

    Curiosity built in him—mingled with ennui, stretched his nerves to brittle impatience. Then a palpating fear; what if the chains didn’t hold? What if the whole thing went awry?

    Of a sudden they looked so flimsy on his great bulk — the room too small, the stool too near, the whole of it a divine mockery of the art. His confidence deserted him, seemed rushed, reckless, ill-advised. If he had been great once, now… well, he lived on the scraps of his knowledge, lapped at drops of power. Enough to get by in the humdrum of the everyday, the hilarious conjectures of modern scholars, but—he no longer dealt with the sorceries of Madrid now. This was something else, something that—by all rights; and devils, why was it not so?—should have stayed dead in the sands north of the Ikoi.

    His attention wandered, eyes fixed on the wall. Absently his thumb came to his mouth, tasted bitter between his teeth.

    A noise startled him. Away the fingernail tore, leaving a well of ichor behind it — the necromancer bolted upright and stared at the construct, watching the hands tremble and skitter. The chains rattled but held—in the dark, stretched on the table, he felt he observed a great Beast stirring from sleep rather than his friend. The thought disturbed him, made him swallow.

    “Glede?” Should he stop the ritual, before he fell into greater distress? His hands hovered impotently over the construct, white, frail, and he held his breath in a moment of indecision. Or was it a passing fit? Should he—

    The moan filled the room.

    The walls echoed it a thousandfold, chilling him — Phaedrus sat frozen for a moment, then found himself; the chains rattled as if flung in a gale, flimsy toys, and he tried to dash the rising horror from his voice.

    Glede? Glede—do you hear me? Follow m—” His hands trembled over the construct’s breastplate, as if he could press down that darkness alone—

    Where is the Master's blade?

    The bellow deafened him — struck off stone, shook its mortar. Phaedrus recoiled, leaping from his stool; it flew to the ground with a clatter, rolling wildly— just as the bowl flew from its table, peppered by the nightmarish cc-crr-crrack of chains. He couldn’t breathe, reduced to stunned instinct. The voice roaring from the helm wasn’t Glede’s—it was deep, ancient, horrible, chilling him to his marrow. “No matter: I shall crush his throat with my hands!"

    The final chain snapped.

    Metal splintered the air—a breathless ward babbled off his lips, too late; he stepped on the hem of his robe, stumbling— metal connected with his face, freezing; the gauntlet split his nose, sent ichor running — of a sudden he felt the grit of the ground on his palms, impact shuddering through his elbows — a tinny shrieking started in his head, a dazzling crackle of stars; the world moved in blips and fits, his jaw buzzing —

    Glede!” Thick, syrupy — Blede? Bledd? — ichor coursing wildly over his lip, chilling his chin. The necromancer struggled to pick himself up, to run, run — but where was there to run? The room shrank to a tomb, too small to escape the construct’s wrath. Phaedrus’ lips moved to cast the ward in a desperate prayer — felt it crackle to life as he struggled on hands and knees, shedding his robe like an unwanted skin. His breath smoked madly, heaving lungfuls of panic; wrong, wrong, this had gone terribly wrong—had he awoken the bindings? Was this permanent? Devils— devils, let it not be—

    Do you hear me?Boo yoo hear meh, his voice mocked, a parody of itself; he saw Glede in parts— a fully realized horror and a grainy slit of armor past his swollen eye. The necromancer found himself unexpectedly against a wall, scrabbling at the stone with mounting horror.

    Glede!” He shed his broken, nasally voice — let the unearthly hiss fill his mouth, void of air. His thoughts swarmed in a buzz of panic. “Remember—remember that place — blue! The color blue! Blue, blue, remember?” He was shouting senseless things, whatever came to mind first; mad babble, suddenly absurd in the face of reality. If the target of the magics encounters a disturbance, lead them back with the initial memory…

    Petunias!” Phaedrus’ back scraped against the wall. He could hope — only hope the ward would hold; but then, the construct had torn through the chains like paper, like nothing — “Petunias! A crown of flowers— she gave you a crown of flowers— you were wearing a crown of flowers—

    If he’d a heart, it would have flung itself from his chest; the construct’s approach was thundering, inexorable—he could not fathom that just hours ago, Glede had been sitting at his dinner table, sipping tea; that he had spent the morning adorned with a flower-chain…

    Fulvia!” The name struck him of a sudden—he flung it out desperately, hoping the construct would latch to it. Almost pleading. “This morning—Fulvia, the little girl, the little girl with the golden hair—it was shining in the sun—golden hair, little girl—she gave you a crown of flowers…
    Edited by Phaedrus, Dec 5 2015, 09:35 PM.
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    Glede
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    And with his sword my breast he cleft, / My quaking heart thereout he reft, / And in the yawning of my breast / A coal of living fire he pressed.

    He was screaming. He could not stop screaming.

    A mad soul – a foreign, stupid body, clenching and swinging, lumbering. It had been wiped clean; it barely knew what it was, much less whom. Much less how it had come into being, or how it was to continue. Time was measured in instants, not in years. Each moment brought new sights and sounds, a whirl of chaos, a private, wordless prison somewhere in the gullet of Kahlid.

    But the Master's voice was comfort, and the bindings told the soul how it was to behave. The body was unfamiliar, but the bindings, orderly and helpful, told it how to move, informed its purpose. So long as he had the bindings, he knew what he was. Intuitively.

    The Master had made the bindings; the Master, velvety warm in the dark, was like unto a god.

    You will answer to the name Glede.

    A fall of words from dead-leaf teeth, sagging mask of a face. Beautiful in their own way, their familiarity imprinted in the kill-or-be-killed moments of conception: primal, animal, a mother's face. The dribble of pale cheeks all he had ever known.

    Glede.

    *

    Bleddh...? Bl-- What was the slogging, burbling voice saying? Blede? Glede?

    The Master's chosen name on a foreign tongue. This gave Glede pause.

    The pause was no longer than thirty seconds. During this time, the gaping hole where his face should have been swung this way and that, splitting the darkness of the chamber with its ponderous gaze. He oriented himself; his hands trembled, hung in the air, purposeless. Where had the prey gone? He had swatted it away: it had sunk like a stone in a river. The voice still sang, thick and wounded. He had given it a blow. He had torn out its tail-feathers and left it weaving, weaving – crashing, crashing.

    But how did it know the Master's name? Glede's mind, snared by the bindings such that it was clumsy and stupid, went through the only options it could. Was the voice the Master? No, it was not the Master – the bindings did not say it was the Master. Did it serve the Master? No – if it served the Master, his soul would have known – intuitive, bound – not to kill it.

    As it stood, he could not think much. The bindings would not let him. Kill, kill, kill, they said, and they were him, filling up his thoughts like a scream in an oubliette. He thought it, too, and with or without the blade, he had to find the flesh-thing – whether it was alive or dead – and make it stop moving.

    To do this, he needed the blade. The Master's bidding hinged upon the blade. To find the blade, he would no doubt have to kill the pale flesh-thing. But in order to do that, he needed to find the blade.

    Boo yoouh... heah... meh...?

    Another pause. The words meant nothing, but still the construct could not move; something rooted him to his spot, made him unable to find the wavering, moon-like face. Glede felt as though he was there – and elsewhere.

    *

    The boy's nose was bleeding. A little creek of darkness ran from one nostril and joined the shadow of his top lip. His mouth trembled open; his eyes were wide and dark, and had not blinked in some time. The blade was in Glede's hand and he was moving, an inexorable, thoughtless advance.

    The boy had begun to gibber.

    “Th-They tell u-us you are made of m-men – have m-m-mercy --”

    Clink. Shff. The gibbering rose to a high-pitched scream.

    “G-Gods have mercy! Mother! I don't want to die!”

    The blade sought its target. Once, twice, thrice. Through the bindings he could feel the life bleed out. The blade, glutted and exulting.


    *

    Missing time. Here-not-here. The pale face had been on the floor; now it was pressed back against the wall, trembling. He was closer to it than he had been. His hand was up, curled as if to hold a scimitar, the hinges of his joints fixed but fluid in their fighting stance.

    There was no blade in his hand. There had been a moment ago. A moment ago, he had run through a young soldier and he'd crumpled, just so; now, a white-faced, red-haired man stood before him unscathed. The bindings had no answers for these discrepancies. They simply were. It was unhelpful, but that did not stop the sound, the screaming, the frantic need: Kill, kill, kill!

    He advanced, letting out an ear-shattering bellow –

    – then stopped, roar burbling away into nothing.

    The name again, in a different voice – a terrible voice. A Dead voice, like the Master's, but not the Master. The face was not what it seemed. More words were spilling from the lips. Strange words; familiar words. The bindings had no answer for them. The Master was silent. The words hung in the air between them, magic. That strange, rasping voice buoyant and lingering like the scent of spring.

    Spring.

    He flinched and fell back, back. Blue. An ocean of it. The sky. He struggled, unable to grasp the word; the bindings would not allow him to understand what it meant. But the words were tumbling out of the target's mouth, ever more strange and hindering: Petunias... a crown of flowers... Fulvia...

    “Fulvia,” he said stupidly, frozen. “Fulvia?”

    The bindings could not explain that. They strangled his mind and told him to continue his work, but he felt of a sudden that he was falling, something like a dream rushing up to meet him.

    Blue!

    In a second, the construct crashed to the ground like so much scrap metal.

    *

    “Fulvia!”

    A golden crown, a field of corn, a black shadow against youthful skin. He found these memories tucked away with the Book of Enki, wreathed with scripture. He felt the grass between his toes and gasped in lungfuls of spring air, but the sweetness of the pollen did nothing to soften the cold scrape of the air against his throat; he was running, pounding between winding snarls of low-hanging tree-branches and ankle-twisting nests of the undergrowth.

    He had found them all, but now he had to return. It was imperative. Memories swarmed his mind, threatening to overtake it; he could not kill them, only outrun them. Some were enticingly relevant, if only he could spend a moment more in their company – most were too revolting to believe – but they all had one thing in common: if he let them, they would eat him whole and leave nothing to return to Aten's world.

    Though the smell of spring was pleasant and the wind and the grass brought tears to his eyes, he could not allow that to happen. He could barely remember what awaited him in the waking world, but he knew that it was important. He knew that he would not be himself without it. He would not be.

    “Fulvia! I have found those things! I have --”

    There was something white in the distance, lingering in a clearing between two wavering, shifting trees. A rippling banner. A queen crowned in gold and flush with Life itself.

    Fulvia? ...Nailah?

    “-- returned.”

    She could have turned round a thousand times, a cascade of motions, images, a mirror split a thousand ways. The world was silent.

    In that silence, he returned the things to her, one by one. Everything was in its place.

    *

    Moments passed, minutes creeping, laborious. The construct lay motionless where he had crumpled.

    “...returned,” he muttered, shifting.

    The sound of his own voice jarred him out of his dozing, otherworldly stupor. Not the man's voice he had used to speak to the girl only moments ago, near but a hundred years distant, more – a grating baritone that made him wince, the hinges of his framework clenching and tensing rigid. Nothing could have been more potent to bring him to awareness. That and the darkness around him, bleeding away and swelling with faint light...

    “Phaedrus?”

    A dull echo and a series of scrapes as he pushed himself up. He sunk into the familiar numbness: he felt the impact jarring against his joints, the scrape against his gauntlets, against the shell of his knees, irritating and comforting at once. It means there is ground beneath me. But – nothing like flesh. Nothing like a face, to grit teeth or grimace. There was emptiness, emptiness, nothing there at all, not like in the dream, no skin, no flesh, no breath...

    A noiseless, purely intellectual panic gripped him. Once again his hinges clinched involuntarily; he nearly fell back to the floor, but held his enormous body still. Nailah, Nailah forgive him – he had to remain calm. His glance landed on something scattered across the stone, glinting. Chains?

    Broken chains.

    “Phaedrus.” There was a note of panic in his voice. The past while – hour? Hours? More? – was beginning to seep back into his mind, a jumble of noises and images, dream and reality. He remembered rippling water, two forms rising up out of the mist, a voice, then...

    Horrified eyes. A boy screaming. Bindings – or bindings he'd believed to be there, guiding him. Phaedrus crammed against the wall, face battered, bleeding.

    Glede's head swung round; he glimpsed Phaedrus, a mortifying confirmation of his nightmare. He clawed impotently at the ground, letting out a noise between a gasp and a groan. Then he slumped, something blessed in forfeit – in lying back, letting all his drive to sit up fly away.

    The last time he saw his friend wounded was... was back in the Xeric – could he be seriously wounded? Was it possible? Until earlier that day, he had not known that Phaedrus was Dead. What sort of Dead was he, that he could bruise and bleed? He remembered the scratches on Phaedrus' neck, the light from the firepit reflecting off the rippling tent walls and spilling out over his tender flesh, as if they'd met for the first time just moments ago.

    As much as it disgusted him, he had to speak. In his mind he asked for strength from the gods and then swallowed his shame; it went down bitterly. “Phaedrus,” he rumbled again, “I... I think I know... what... but...”

    He was shaking all over. You have to stand up. You must. But he could not bring himself to. The world was shaking and spinning about him.

    “...if you... if you... do you need me... wish me...”

    Was it even coherent?

    “...to heal... you?”
    Edited by Glede, Jan 16 2016, 10:02 PM.
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