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cupoftrembling · 2 years

Text

Awoke

There are many secret enclaves in the Eastern Kingdoms.

Deep in the oceanic forests, there are hidden places where the light of truth so rarely touches. Amongst the titanic fauna and skyscraper trees, outside the enclaves of civility and civilization, outside the prying eyes of queens and tyrants, people move west, clamoring for a new chance at life. Many became exiles of the reclusive Eastern Kingdoms. Whether it be from the paladins of Isosa, casting them into the Wastes at the edge of the world, or from the cities built atop the trees who no longer belong there. Or from private things that might remain in their past. For centuries, much to the chagrin of the social scholars of the Eastern Kingdoms, the west has been perceived as a place where freedom can be found. So much so that it became the basis for multiple turns of phrase. Blinded by the future? Spent too much time staring west. Stumbled on the first step of a new beginning? Tripped over the western horizon. Don’t know where to start? You buried your dreams in the west. Even the fae lived over the horizon, stuck in diaspora after the Celestial Civil War consumed even their home. They writhe in the west, forever mourning their Elfame turned to soot and to ash and to gnashing teeth. The west was a home for these myths, things of non-existence that had no bearing on the lives of those toiling in the Eastern Kingdoms.

But the west was also home to Mariposa.

A queendom of lies, of pure deceit. A city built on the guile of Queen Mariposa the Litigious at the dawn of time. It was a haven of mortal treachery, built on a smile and miles of wishes. It symbolized everything the west was for the people of the Eastern Kingdoms. A dangerous sort of wealth, a chance to be the boot instead of the neck, and a changing world. The Os’ Group, Vujčić Corporation, Tyra Logistics, these were the corporate lords of Mariposa and they were a force of constant change, of perfect rebelion, cycling in and out wealth from the world. These were the corporate lords who invaded the Eastern Kingdoms and even that could not stem the tide of those clamoring for such a life. If the east was stasis, the west was entropy, if the east was frost, the west was sweltering, if the east was the winter, then, in this metaphor and only in this metaphor, the west was summer. It was a place for the craven fools, clamoring for a better world.

This is what Saorise heard about the caravan traveling in the deep underbrush just outside Miro. She was sitting in some dusty little tavern at the ‘asses edge’ of the city, a tavern so un-important that the only record of its name remains within the pages of this book, a tavern called the Perilous Grift, named after the thief who helped the current owner swindle the deed from the previous one. The tavern was, as it always had been, almost empty. Saorise stumped across it in the cruelness of the morning, after a night of difficult drinking had brought her to the hazy, laden air of summertime that surrounded the Perilous Grift. This section of the city was held aloft by a titanic birch tree, where the roots of it were planted at the dawn of time by the Verdant Singer and Isosa. The air was thin up here, some few miles from off the forest floor. Overhead, streaking clouds caught the twilight sky, with flickering lightning bugs co-mingling with the stars above.

Saorise stumbled, almost literally, through the fabric door of the tavern. Her tricorn hat hung gently on her belt, long having been discarded at the previous bar. And yet, maybe due to friendly circumstances, she had kept it. She had long ditched her traveling companions, who returned to the ship Primrose that was docked miles below, where the forest floor gave way to sandy, sunny beaches with scuttling crabs and dirges. She held the door frame with one spindly hand, her nails colored the same dusty amber as her hair. Her freckles melded with the blush of her sun-kissed and leathery skin, peering goldeyes spotting a discarded tankard of something nice and warm.

“We’re ‘bout closed, ma’am.” The tavernkeeper spoke in a soft, tired voice, without even looking up at whoever had entered. There were bags under his eyes, he slouched against the countertop now stained and sputtered with the revelries, or what else have you, of the night. There was nothing more appealing to the elf than sheltering into bed, closing the door and waiting for the cruel darling sun to rise the next morning in a hapless trance. What he first noticed was, upon her voice entering the bar, the candle flickering. Like a deluge of fresh air caught the flame. It burned brighter, almost warm enough to be felt from here.

He looked up at Saorise, half-slouched against the door frame and furrowed his brow. She was lanky, her face a little too long for her own good, too long to be around these parts. The thief what earned him this bar, he told me, lurched in the exact same manner. I know for a fact that Saorise, some seventy years ago when the tavernkeeper had come into possession of the Perilous Grift, was on the shores of the Alger’s Collective, drinking in the smoldering of a port town. But he swore, even if she looked nothing like that thief, there was something in how she stumbled, in how the fireflies avoided hallowing her hair, in how the tavern was just as empty as it was at that time, there was an echo there, a ripple across a dark pond. All else had been different, but this moment was frighteningly, almost too enticingly clear.

“Please, sir. Just a weary sailor, tired of a long campaign at sea. Spare one last drink?” She spoke with almost perfect clarity, her voice like nettles and warm grass. She was pittable, at least to him. And, like that day seventy years ago, he was nothing if not a kind man. He stood up, walked over to the other edge of the bar. A tacit invitation, but it was the best that she was getting. The floors were made from the same wood as the tree that supported them, originally supped from the grand Miro birch some three hundred and thirty six years ago, barring the occasional replaced board when the time had come.

In fact, no less than thirty six original boards of the Miro heartwood remained within the Perilous Grift. Some were replaced during the Vujčić Fuckup, which had just concluded the year prior if royal documents from the royal archives of Miro are to be believed. A wayward Os Corp shell had caught the grand Miro Birch alight, and that summer had been an unseasonably dry one for the city so close to the wetlands of the Orchish Nomads. The city was still rebuilding, and records of its reconstruction are, unfortunately, kept from me by the Miro Dictorate. Other pieces of the original building had been lost to a plague of Sapphire Beetles, which skeletonized large swaths of the tree some twenty years ago, allowing the common observer to see the ground for some of the first times since the end of the Celestial Civil War. Even with many of its original, constituent parts missing, it was still the Perilous Grift. That had not changed, nor would it.

Saorise stumbled her way convincingly towards an empty stool. There were few people who ever made it to the Perilous Grift, especially tonight. Last night was the one year anniversary of the Winter Accords and, as such, all celebrations had long gone. The bartender long thought of closing up shop tonight, if only to restock his larder for the next week. An orc was sharing a nice glass of Fremens White with a portly human and an elf was humming gently to herself in the corner. “Whatcha drinking, miss?” The bartender asked, his back turned towards the sailor, reaching up upon the shelf.

“Chaambry Licentious 38.” She asked, punctuating the year with a hiccup. “If not that, what swill do you stock?”

“Last of the Chaambry got drunk last night.” The bartender sighed, grabbing a bottle of rice wine from the shelf. “Try not to keep nothing Mariposian in here.”

“Bad memories?” Saorise placed her hands on the countertop, clumsily hoisting herself on the wobbly barstool.

“Not keen on their booze. Got a fine Daysend Stout, if that entices you.”

“Aye, got your eyes hung west I take it?” She chuckled, thumbing the edge of the counter. “Yes, that’ll do.”

“Been to the breweries out there. Something special they do with the copper in their pipes.” The elf reached his hand for a mostly clean glass, brought it under the tap, and emptied the contents of his larder into it. “Stout as smooth as chocolate, hint of oil along the top makes a delineation in the ethanol and the flavor. ‘Least, on the tongue it does.”

Saorise glanced around the Perilous Grift. It was, for a small bar, sparsely decorated. No bric-a-brac or tchotchkes, no photos of grand adventures or places, not even any artwork. It was grandly utilitarian. “Yea, the machinery of Daysend certainly has that effect.” She smiled, taking the glass from his hands. The head consisted of almost half the volume of the liquid, and it would take some time for the hoppy fizzing to subside enough for our sailor to drink it. It was the type of pour that would be given by someone who hates you, someone who’s very presence makes you sick. In certain, craven places along the Cambian Coast or deep in the Alger’s Collective, it was an instigation for conflict, a call to respond to. “Stranger are ya?” Saorise asked, bringing the fizzing glass to her lips, tickling the back of her throat.

“To you?” The bartender chided, nodding to the elf and the orc now leaving the bar. Regulars, one can assume. It was late, and all people of good sense would have gone home long ago. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

“To the region. You don’t pour your drinks like someone from the Kingdoms.”

“Can tell a lot about a person in how they pour their liquor?”

Saorise leaned backwards, pulling the front two legs of the table off the floor, digging the back into the soft wood below. Her foot balanced against the counter in such a way that made the brow of the bartender furrow. He would have to clean it later, that he was sure. This sailor, who knew where her boots had tread. What she might track in from the muck of the forest floor. “Can tell when someone who ought to know better clearly refuses to.” She muttered, placing the glass on the countertop.

The bartender sighed. “Miss, it is late. Drink’s on me, but you have to go.” He motioned towards the door with his free hand.

“Go where?” She smiled, hand still wrapped around the frosty glass.

“Somewhere that isn’t here. I know there’s a bar down the road that’s open all hours. Great for folks like you.”

“Folks like me?”

“Folks in the employ of Large Marge, that is.” The bartender squinted. He eyes her spindly fingers, the flickering wick of the candle that had burnt down at least half its length in her short stay. His eyes hung low against the assumed bruiser. “Of the same ken. I’m sure you’d be a bit more comfortable at the Red Cap.”

“You take me for a wintered soul?”

The bartender chuffed. She was a pill, that was for sure. His eyes glazed over with disappointment. Another busybody here to collect, here to flex some muscle. If it were earlier in the night, if there were not dishes to clean or floors to mop, maybe he’d be scared. But spending the night in the local clinic would spare him from the responsibility, and from whatever contract bound him. “It is February, isn’t it?”

“You must know,” Saorise placed the glass down on the counter. It sweat with condensation in the cold night air, and the sailor’s hands were fully dry. “Awfully rude to turn away a good neighbor. Especially when I darken your door at such a late hour.”

The bartender glanced towards the clock hung on the wall. It was of fine Imperial make, a gift when he received this establishment. This woman was clearly from over the horizon, yet he could not find it in himself to truly care. “I’m tired, miss. And I need to get this shop closed up. However rude you perceive me to-”

“Perceive?” Saorise interrupts him, the candle besides him flickers again. “Well, now that’s rich.”

“Tell your boss I have what she needs.” The bartender continued, bringing the glass in his hand down to punctuate his sentence. “She can still spend it tomorrow. It will still be here tomorrow.”

Saorise placed all four legs of her stool on the ground. She paused for a second, breath caught in her lungs, a small smile caught her face. “The person I answer to. She is searching for, well, something else.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow, leaning over the counter. She looked fit, of course. Sinewy muscle laid beneath her skin. But, he was a soldier once, even practiced a bit of magic when it was necessary. He could have taken her, and if he didn’t, then he was sure she would not get far. She was not armed, like Large Marge or any of her associates usually were. He knew the stories of the winter fae, unseelie in the old tongue. Could break a man with a glance, leave him gibbering and mad. If it was her boss, or the man who came to him with his original offer it would be a different story. But she looked young, new to this whole thing. It would take more than some busybody to keep him troubled.“I’ve gone to great lengths to get your employer what was asked of me. Now, you walk in at three in the morning and ask for something else at short notice?”

Saorise glanced around the bar. The human had left when neither were paying attention, stumbled across the square towards some other excitement. They were, for a moment, alone. Even the wind stilled, if to give them some privacy. The candle had burnt down to its base, now just a pile of oil and fat. Yet it still burnt, smoldering a wick now turning to ash. “Something tells me that you already have what I was sent to receive.”

“Ominous.” The bartender said to no one in particular, keen to get her out of his establishment. The thief who earned him this bar always looked for something else whenever she could. He always thought it was a power play, to prove that one could eke out something that was not promised. “And the original arrangement, does that still stand?”

Saorise placed her left hand to her chest, holding her right in a solemn vow. “I promise, I will leave this place with what I have came for and nothing more. To ask any more of you, when I am so clearly intruding, would just be…” She let the pause sit on her tongue, swirling it around like a fine wine. It had a bouquet of death, like many things did in this world. The pause would seal fates and end stories, as all good pauses did. “Impolite.” A toothy grin crept across her face. It was warm like a fire, sapping the heat from the candle that, at long last, went out. It was an old expression, older than time itself. Borrowed from Queen Mariposa the Litigious, who is depicted only ever with a wide, brilliant smirk across her face. Every depiction of her shows her trickery, how she bound even the gods into deceit and contract. The Litigation’s Grin, it was forever known. A huckster’s friend, it betrayed Saorise’s regal tendencies.

“Very well.” The bartender muttered to himself, the facial expression’s history lost upon him. “What is it that I can do for you, miss?” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A week later, deep in the most western parts of the Miro Dictorate, Saorise sat alone in a large birch branch, some hundreds of feet above the ground. Her legs dangled above the abyss, the ground beneath seeming both too far and too close all at once. It was winter in the Eastern Kingdoms, but the snowfall barely ever pierced the canopy vista of the grand oceanic trees. The lower branches, starved for light and densely woven together as they were, were covered in a slick coating of mid-morning frost. It dripped from the trees in little pearls, catching whatever strands of light pierce through the tree cover in fractal diffusion. The forest floor, on the other hand, was shadowed by the swaths of canopy. The only light brightening up the dark, shadowed places of the Miro Dictorate was from a single, smokeless fire.

Around it, six huddled forms, too far for Saorise to make out any distinguishing marks. The fire cut through the mid-morning darkness, peering its light around branches and foliage. She could see the long, stretching shadows of the figures, flickering and dancing among the frost-laiden floor. It was almost blinding, it was a searchlight through a troublesome sea. No one traveled on foot through the forests of the Eastern Kingdoms. Not bandits, not thieves, not rebels. Even during Mariposa’s incursion into the hermit kingdoms, the Grand Butterfly’s mercenary army traveled upon the backs of the grand oryx that towered even above the birches of the Miro Dictorate. Only the truly desperate would walk among the forest floor. To do so is to invite all sorts of visitors, for it was their home you walked through. It was the home of the creeping things, the crawling things that were left behind in the flotsam of the Celestial Civil War.

The frost on the branch beneath Saorise had long faded away, the ambient temperature around her rose some twenty some degrees just by her idleness. Her head was quirked at the travelers. Desperate, yes. But without that bartender’s information, she would never have found them. An old smugglers’ route, partially underground, partially following certain warded sections of the forest floor. On the tree branch beside her, one of the old wards blew gently in the wind. Frost had long sapped into its paper, thickening the strands, loosening their bonds with one another. It no longer held any true power, as evident by Saorise’s proximity. But those who lurked in the forest were held by tradition. And this place had long been taboo. It is safer here, in no man's land.

Saorise looked at the ancient sigil as it gracelessly faded away, finally giving way to the elements. It was safer here, once. But time had crept in to this place, as it did with all things. Soured it, perverted the sentimentality and the warmth. The wind blew cold. Saorise stood up from her position, wobbled a bit in the wind. She quickly steadied herself, but that memory remained. In a moment, and only for a moment, she was unmoored, she had the potential to fall. But that moment, as all do, passed. And she was still.

Besides her, the branch hefted in weight. It was a familiar sound, as she had heard that same weight hit the decks of a ship in boarding and she had heard it stomping above her as she sat in the hull. “Lucius.” She said in flat affect, not turning around.

The first mate, Lucius, placed a gloved hand on her shoulder. His hair was a golden yellow, even in the dull chill of the mid-morning forest air. His face was angular and gaunt, chiseled lightly and gently with an artist’s kindness. On his head, weaved in his hair, were red primrose. On his belt was a spyglass and a cutlass, both tools that Capitan Saorise had seen him use many times. The blade of the cutlass was jagged obsidian, forged, like its wielder, from a single piece. A gift he kept on him at all times. “You seem cold, Capitan.” He muttered, placing his hand on the spyglass. “Shall I fetch your red coat?”

Saorise smiled at her first mate like one would a street cat, belly turned towards the sun in a contented bliss. “You are such a careful sort, Lulu.” She snickers. “I’m quite alright, but thank you.”

Lucius bristled, only slightly, at that rather twee nickname. “The rest of the Primrose is on the floor, waiting for your mark.” He remarked, glancing down at the traveling caravan below them. “Goshawk is on rear-guard, making sure no beasties keep up behind us.”

Saorise was silent, letting the wind whip around the two of them. Her legs dangled in the twisting, harmonic breeze. “Woulda rather had him here, with us.”

Lucius sighed, bristling at the capitan’s disappointment. “I’ll make your displeasure known, but he insisted on teaching the wild troops here some civility.”

“There are no wild troops here, Lulu.” Saorise remarked. She looked around the forest floor. There were no echoes of battle, no grand cacophony of might. This was not like when the violent shores lapped against the hull of the Primrose, this was not the sublimating water beneath the fellow Outrider Knights on a common battlefield. “We’re in hostile territory, if we were found-”

“We will not be found.” Lucius interrupts his capitan. He sees the same thing that Saorise does, the nightmares that lurk deep within the forests that these mortal Eastern Kingdoms lurk in. Squat in. He knows that, if they were so interested, the walls that these Kingdoms had built would not stand against the Winter wilds. Neither would they. The Primrose were guests here, in these woods. “Apologies sir, but I have the utmost faith in your crew.”

There is a breath of silence here. The fire below on the forest floor crackles. The figures look furtive, huddled around the last vestiges of warmth in this desolate place where not even sunlight could reach them. It could have been the middle of the night, it could have been three hours past noon. The forest swallowed all light and made it impossible to tell. And yet, this caravan was trying to carry it into its depths, in some sort of vain hope that this gift would protect them. Fire was the aspect of The Wolf, an end implied by its eventual burning out. It is the antithesis of the stasis of these forests.

Saorise spoke after that moment of quiet. “Do you know who these people are, below us?”

Lucius looked out towards what would have been the horizon, now blocked by miles and miles of tree cover. His eyes were keen and sure, not a moment of hesitation held in his chest. “Your quarry.”

Saorise laughed at his certainty. “Is that all you need to know?”

“Aye.” Lucius responded, grimacing at her prying questions.

“You would not question if I send you to your death, or them to theirs?”

The wind whistled around them again, unmooring Lucius from his position, feet slipping somewhat on the icy branch. He steadies himself, hand on his cutlass. “You’re my captain, sir. It is the only rationale I would want.”

“There could be a better life,” Saorise looked down at the flickering flame below them. She pulls away from Lucius’ hand on her shoulder, and he held it just above her in something that approximated pain. She was talking to herself now, not to Lucius, not to the branches, not to the forest, and almost certainly not to me. “One where our people, so few we are, wouldn’t kill each other, wouldn’t be locked in this endless war.”

Lucius paused for a moment, hearing the ragged breath coming from his capitan. “Is it a world you want?”

“It is a world I want to want.” She muttered. “But I am beholden to my queen. And these fae below us are not…” She trailed off, leaving the violence in her words only merely implied.

Lucius looks back down to the caravan below them, not even wondering who they were. His mind was arush with battle planning and tactics and victory far too much to consider what his capitan implied. “Then I am beholden to you.”

Saorise stood from her position on the branch, a disappointed grimace plastered on her face. Her arms were now crossed, watching the ever flickering flame like a candle, just so beyond her reach. Always beyond her reach. “You may wish for a blind death, Lulu, it is allowed.”

“I do not wish for a thing other than what you want for me, Saorise.”

She frowned at his statement and turned towards him. She raises a hand to his face and, for a moment, thinks to strike him. An echo of cruelty, she is certain, inflicted upon her people by The Wolf, and then by her queen. Lucius clearly shares the thought with her, as he flinches from her touch. Instead, she cups the edge of his face, the warmth of her hand almost burning the skin on his chin. It was so warm, dear reader, so cruelly warm. At first, like anyone starved for warmth, anyone who spent an eternity in the cold, the heat was invigorating. It sent the nerves in Lucius’ mind on edge, sent him reeling across the winds and lit him with the same fire he was sure burned within his dear capitan. It was the warmth that many fell for. Followers of The Wolf often spoke of her intoxicating presence, the aura of pure invictus that burned even to look at. When I saw her last, dirty in the muck of the burning Elfame, she shown with such brilliance. A stubborn sureness that could only be snuffed out one way.

It was sickening.

It was sickening because after you were warmed by it, after it had touched every part of who you are, infected your soul and crawled its way into your chest and tricked you into thinking that warmth is what made you a better person, that is when your senses would give way to flames. That is when you realized that it caught you, that it has spread itself to every inch of your skin, covering you in ash and soot. It burnt you out, it burnt her out, it burnt every one. The Wolf burned so brightly that even now, we can not escape her. I imagine that is how, in that moment, Lucius felt. The moment before Saorise had a chance to burn him, that knife’s edge where he would fall into her, he knew everything he was, it was hers.

For a moment, they were both tricked by the flame, Saorise had fallen for her own ruse. There was a moment, a moment that at that instant always existed, where they could be something other than this.

And then her touch began to burn. And Lucius pulled away from her gentle embrace in a reflex, cheek singed and primroses in his hair smoldering. He realized what came over him after a moment and nestled his head back in her hand, despite any good sense. Saorise saw him flinch at her fire and that illusion was shattered. Saorise would only burn him. And he would be happy to suffer such a fate. Her hand dropped and Lucius began to cry, tears sublimating on his cheek.

“Lucius…” She said, beginning an apology. She started to reach out again and then her words caught in her throat. She would only harm him, and he would welcome it, but she would not be the sword he would fall on. “We… we need to go. Our Queen waits for news.”

Lucius composes himself, but he stares intently at the hand that once burned him. “After -sniff- you, capitan.” The fire below the two of them now turned cruel, its orange and reds no longer echoing the setting of the sun of the west. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no need to describe the battle.

Saorise was a seasoned veteran of many wars and one of the famed and deadly Outrider Knights of Ashosh Ai. She had twelve members of the Primrose at her side and, while not each of them fey in nature, had fought at their capitan’s side everywhere from the Siege of Tashi to the Cambian Coast. The six individuals who traveled a dangerous road through the forest floors of the Eastern Kingdoms were half-starved and cold. One was a poet, another a jeweler, three more of such little note that I have no indication or idea of who they actually were. At their defense, was a single soldier of Ashosh Ai who had fled with them. He held a shaking blade made of ironwood and threw bags of salt that burnt his hands to ward off any sort of fell beasts that resided in this forest. This was not a level competition, not a skilled bladelocking of two evenly matched opponents.

There is no thrill in slaughter, and I will not indulge your worst instincts, dear reader. The Primrose had brought a poet along to write of this battle in song, to be memorialized for all times their deeds. Listen to it, if you want. They sing it in the halls of Ashosh Ai at the feet of Queen Titania and the nobles clap at such victories for their court. That is their currency, fame and legend. Fiction. I am a historian, not a skald. They would want me to relish in the details. That is not my purpose.

But written or not, song sung or unsung, those six fey were dead. They bled their last on the forest floor of a foreign nation on a plane that was not their own. Their essence now mixing with the foul earth that kept them trapped here in diaspora, fated never to be in any sort of home ever again. Saorise stood over the corpse of the soldier from Ashosh Ai. She knew him, once. They shared a drink and more some years after the Peril Heist that shook the small island to its core.

She remembered his hair being lighter, almost metallic weaves of golden rod twisted into a brilliant Mariposian braid. She remembered how warm his cheeks were in the light of the mess hall where they gathered. But here, in the muck of the forest floor, his luster was gone. His braid had been shorn off in an attempt to distance himself from the person he once was. He was now covered head to toe in the licks of Saorise’s flames, a conflagration that only at the last moment he knew was familiar. He couldn’t even work up the courage to curse her with his dying breath. She knew his name then, but now he was someone different. And neither she nor I will call him by something he was not.

That fire that looked so large in the distance seemed smaller from down here. The twelve members of the Primrose barely stood around the entire thing shoulder to shoulder, heaving the belongings of the caravan into the fire’s waiting maw. It gulped them down greedily, feeding itself off the people that had originally brought it into being. Saorise gently tapped the soldier with her staff in some attempt to gauge whether or not he still lived, as if anyone could have lived from that tempestuous fire. She was bleeding, his sword errantly and weakly slashed across her chest. Barely enough to cause any sort of issue. Lucius eyed it with some concern, hovering just out of sight of his capitan.

“Leave them where they lay.” She muttered to her first mate. “Take their belongings but leave the corpses for the forest.”

Lucius was surprised for a moment. Queen Titania had tasked them with bringing these traitors back as a show of force, mounting their heads on spikes outside of Ashosh Ai. But Queen Titania was not here, in the outlands they are supposed to default to the orders of the captains. He bowed his head somewhat and turned towards the rest of the crew. The fire flickered as it rose, higher and higher, consuming the bones and clothing of those fey who wished for something more than this. The shadows of Saorise and her crew stretch long across the forest floor, dancing between the titanic trunks of with every wild lick of flame. Behind her, one of her crew was rummaging through the belongings of the slain party. An orc who joined up with Saorise during the Siege of Tashi. He was young, barely growing tusks. He found little trinkets and baubles, things touched by and stolen from Ashosh Ai. He looked up at his capitan, and saw her glancing down down at the fey now smoldering at her feet, wind whipping around the two of them, howling like laughter.

The fey was clutching something in his hand, skin carbonized around a piece of paper. It stuck out, bone white against the blackened flesh and charred wood of his armor. It caught Saorise’s eye, like gold glimmering through soot. She bent down and tugged on the edge. The hand resisted her ministrations for only a moment, desperately trying to keep his last secret. And yet, even it gave way to the fire, collapsing into tempered ash. The paper was, surprisingly, unscarred by the heat. It was the ambient temperature of the winter’s air that surrounded them, although some deep part of Saorise knew it was always that temperature, regardless of the day or weather. Her index and middle finger grabbed the edges, with the grace only one touched by a queen could accomplish. She knew Unseelie magicks intimately, and this paper was no exception. It has been touched by the Winter’s Queen, either directly or through proxy. One of those outcomes is unsettling, the other is death. But yet, the paper felt right between her fingers, like it had always belonged there. Her shadow stretched far, a pantomime of the fire burning behind her. It danced treacherously on the tree in front of her, taunting her with all sorts of injustice. In her mind, she pictured herself burning the paper right there, forever remaining incurious of its contents.

Saorise was too much of a coward for that.

If there is a secret it should be revealed, if there was a mystery it should be uncovered. She was never strong enough for uncertainty, she never allowed herself the blissfulness of peace and ignorance. Lucius was behind her, hefting a pouch of thirty Miro Stone in his hand, the silver minted with the icon of Fuyuki the Ignoble, pauper king of Miro’s third branch. For a moment, he wished to give it to his capitan, to add to their collective. But how the light caught it, how the shimmering fractline frost covered the face of Fuyuki the Ignoble made him pause. He glanced back up at his capitan and, for the first time, he pocketed the Stone, placing it deep within his coat.

Saorise brought the paper into the palm of her hand, cradling it like a broken bird needing pity. It was folded over on itself, the wind catching the edge, flickering and threatening to open on its own. She held it close to her breast, like fire in the palm of her hand, until its frost had burnt her, singed the edges of her fingers with its chill. She fought the urge to drop it, to pull away and recoil. She sat with the pain until her fingers were numb. And then, after her body and mind could take no more, she opened the letter, written by no one and with no recipient. Her eyes darted across its contents, filling them with the same frost singing her hands. It spoke of secret things, of a secret place to the west surrounded by stone and by iron. It filled her mind with furtive thoughts, of stealing away to a place where her flame could burn no one, hurt no one. Then, without thinking, she pocketed the letter and looked west for just a moment. She thought of a better world, dear reader. And for a moment, that better world was possible.

Then she turned around.

She saw her first mate. Who her queen had hewn from a prized tree of her own garden, who had served as her helmsman for nigh on three hundred years, who was a symbol of the Primrose and their loyalty to each other. A symbol of the Primrose’s loyalty to their queen. She looked him deep in the eyes, hands trembling around the crushed paper in her fist, frost dripping from between her tight, cruel grip. His eyes flicked downwards and, in that moment, she knew beyond knowing.

She knew that better world would not be possible. At least, not now.

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The letter lay open on a marble column, now sapped of its chill. It was warm in the mid-spring sun, pages once warped by the thawing ice. The dawn had broken through the limited cloud-cover and the mournful song of Rose the Everpoet hung low in the sky of Ashosh Ai. Saorise sat in a regal garden, her hands on her knees and her eyes staring intently on a beetle eating a small blade of grass. Its shell was emerald and after every bite the greenery regrew, forever feeding the beetle. Its stomach was fat and gorged with eternity, forever living its life on that single piece of greenery.

She had seen that beetle every time she was summoned to this garden. Each time, she wished to extend a curled finger, pluck him from his eternal vigil. Have him wind himself down her arm, to sprout wings and take flight on the Ashosh Ai winds towards the west, melting into the pinprick stars that always permeated the sky above the reclusive island, no matter the time nor weather.

Her hand did not move, however. It remained clenched around her knee, foot tapping impatiently and in unsteady tempo. Despite her best efforts, and she really did try, it matched effortlessly with Rose’s dulcet song, footfalls syncopating between the long, drawn out lyrics wafting on the wind. The song eluded description, as its lyrics and melody adapted for whoever was listening. It was weaponized nostalgia, a psychosocial contagion tailor made to unsettle and discontent. It elicited deep, resounding sorrow in anyone who heard lacking a strong enough will, echoing the events of the listeners past with every note and word. What I heard, what Saorise heard, and what Rose the Everpoet was actually singing were three entirely different things, realities that could not be reconciled. It kept the fey of Ashosh Ai separate from one another, each within tailor made realities that only they could understand. There was no place on the archipelago where the Everpoet’s song could not be heard, the spirit trapped within Oberon’s Tower at the center of the largest island of Ashosh Ai drawing all in like a lighthouse, emotion churning like Charybdis around the Isle of Storms.

At yet here, at the center of the storm that is Queen Titania’s rule, that voice sounded so distant. She could be anywhere in this garden, and Saorise could never have met her. She had ideas of what the Everpoet could have looked like, each, like the song, tainted and colored by the captain's previous experiences. She pictured Rose with long, waist length hair and a kind, tear stained face. She pictured her with her harp, reclining against it during moments of fitful, brackish rest, eating glassgrapes and pining apples off of copper trays with tweezers and tongs, her hands stuck in an eternal bow-holding position. She pictured her in ways that she could not have existed in, as the memory of the Everpoet was the only place she could live. And the songs, themselves, are nothing but echoes of something that could not live on the Shattered Planes, their music too chemically pure for the tainted, warbled language of the mortal world.

“Are you enjoying the music, Bitterblossom?” A voice like glass bells cut through the music. The consonants were sharp like cracking lighting, the vowels deep like the churning sea, syllables too delicate to be anything but flinched at. Saorise did not look towards the speaker, the voice eminently familiar to the outrider knight. She caught a glimpse of the bare feet ghosting along the grass, crushing the beetle with her first step, the heel digging into the grass, snuffing out the life eternal of the gorged beast. Her feet came up with the next step and a second creature climbed the now bent stalk, taking its place.

“Always, my queen.” Saorise bowed her head further, eyes refusing to look at the subject but sense refusing to not keep her in sight. Some deep part of her knew that whatever was before her was some sort of primal threat, that she a prey animal at the mercy of the Queen’s predation, Saorise’s life now predicated on whatever strange mixture of mercy and curiosity that Titania’s contained. She settled on looking at the Queen’s gloved hand, wrapped in fine silk like a funerary garb. The gloves creep themselves up the arm, embossed in gold filigree, secant tracery climbing up the sleeves in perfect, natural mathematics. It shifted in the twilight air, catching errant rays of moonlight to further curl their gilded leaves across the delicate fabrics. Around her ring finger, a twisted and warped wooden band of matrimony, older than all things and always at the verge of breaking.

A glance of saccharine red lips twisting themselves into a smile. “She is something to behold.” The voice spoke to no one in particular, like an appraiser enjoying something of her collection. “A rare jewel from the War.”

Saroise knew better than to ask which war she was speaking of. Instead, she paused for a moment, trying to talk about anything other than why she was here. “Is this song from the war as well?”

The smile turned sour for a moment, a brief crack of lighting echos off from somewhere deep and far in the sea. Her hand places itself on her son, Durandal, on the silver of his hilt. She looks along his blade, all one mercurial piece of silvered starlight forged from a singular, precious moment. He hung at Titania’s side off of nothing, simply willing himself to always be at her side, ready for violence.“Unfortunately no. For all that I try, the Everpoet only sings to me of now and not then.”

“My apologies, my queen.”

“Do you have something to apologize for?” She seemingly responds before the words have finished finalizing themselves in the air. She was the true master of this domain, even linguistics, once freed from their original master’s lips, were hers to control. Only pauses in conversations were for violence and for thought.

Saorise swallows heavy, air feeling fallow on the lung. “I have been true to myself, and my self is yours.”

The clink of Durandal against the metal of Titania’s ring as her hand adjusts on his pommel, her lips curled into a smirk. Behind them, the ferns that lined this garden shuddered on the still wind. “You have given yourself to me, a gift as kind as I am.” Her words curdle on the ear, her breath gentle against the nape of Saorise’s neck. She dares not look away from the beetle in front of her, stepping over the crushed and broken body of his once eternal partner. With gentle mandible, he lifts the viscera stained grass to his mouth and bites down.

“You are my queen, true queen of all fae they call you. I do what you abide.”

“Do you call me that?” Her hand finds itself on Saorise’s shoulder, spindly fingers curling with the capitan’s braided hair. There is an echo when the sentence ends, a gap between a hypothetical comma and the question mark. A liminal space where a name might live. A threat, implied in the margins.

“I gave you my name,” Saorise gasps out, fighting every instinct to pull away or lean in. She stayed there, completely motionless. Behind the two of them, Rose the Everpoet’s song ended, leaving a sickening silence rarely felt on Ashosh Ai. “I have nothing else for you but to be your servant.”

“Do you know what your first mate gave me?” She responds, now far away. There is a ghost of sensation along Saorise’s shoulder, lighting cracking across the edge of who she is. Titania walks out of Saorise’s eyesight, leaving only a trail of summer flowers and fine silk in her wake. The grass sprouts with milkweeds that bloom, seed, and then die in the span of moments.

“He gives tithes to many, my queen.” Saorise rubs her elbow with her gloved hand. She is underdressed for such a meeting, still in her sea-fairing apparel. Her eyes break from the bits of Titania she will accept, looking back towards the letter on the marble besides her. “He is his own.”

“Well, I was hoping that you would give it to me.” She sighs, gloved fingers now crawling back into frame onto the marble column. They wind themselves across the discarded page, then crumble them in a moment of pure violence. “You ought to control him better.”

For a moment, Saorise bites her tongue. She bites it so hard, dear reader, that she draws blood. It leaks from her mouth like milk, staining her chin with rivulets. “I will do better, my queen.” The hand draws the paper out of sight, quickly, like a spider pulling its prey down its hole.

“It isn’t your fault, Bitterblossom.” Titania pulls away from behind Saorise’s ear. “It is so hard to control oneself sometimes. I can hardly think to blame him when I see him rutting like some sort of dog. It is what this place does to us.”

“What it has done to us.” Saorise mutters. She knows it isn’t to herself, even one’s breath here is owned. From behind her, the paper crumbles, the air is silent, then a crackle of thunder. On the tongue, on the edges of Saroise’s blood, she tastes lighting arcing in the air. Ozone burning and a moment split in two.

“The letter, it was interesting.” Titania continues, ignoring whatever her outrider knight had mentioned. Or rather, opting to ignore. “Do you know what it said?”

Saorise flinches. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Do you know what it says?” Titania asks again. Saorise tries to look at her queen out of the corner of her eye, to keep her in view at all times.

“I do not understand the question, my queen.” Her shoulders are tense in the not quite lie. She feels the ghost of Titania’s hands around her neck, pulling the answer from its home. Her words are drug out, her words are choked and forceful. There is a compulsion in three that Saorise needs to answer by her blood and by her kin. She knows what slight her queen commands of her. Her fingers dig into the fleshy palm of her hand, but blood does not draw. Even here, her body is not her own to destroy.

Saorise can hear the smirk behind her as her queen’s question precipitates itself. “Do you know what it says?”

Saorise drops to her knees, falling against the grasses. In front of her, the beetle has consumed its brethren whole. It is crying and its mandibles are stained green with blood. The world is spinning, Saorise is spinning, the grass is no cold comfort, no anchor to reality. She feels existence against the back of her eyes, an endless, ceaseless pressure of her very being. There is a quickening in her blood, in the very spirit that makes up Saorise that demands she answers. It gives her two options: She can either tell the truth or be unmade.

And Saorise always tells her the truth.

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“Brothers! Sisters! Fair Folk of Ashosh Ai! Fair Folk of the Eastern Kingdoms! There is a better world, unfettered by the yolk of time’s cruel oppression.”

Saorise’s eyes darted across its contents, filling them with the same frost singing her hands. It spoke of secret things, of a secret place to the west surrounded by stone and by iron.

“Brothers, Sisters! In Mariposa, a new world is forming! Deep beneath the iron and the stone of the Great Butterfly where every fae can live in brutal peace with one’s self!”

It filled her mind with furtive thoughts, of stealing away to a place where her flame could burn no one, hurt no one.

“Winter, Summer, Autumn, Spring, each court is welcome in this new world! A Nixed world where you can breathe new life, unshackled by our history!”

Then, without thinking, she pocketed the letter and looked west for just a moment.

“Come to Mariposa, seek out the Nix Court and her Queen. There, we can build this new world, together!”

Then she turned around.

“If you love yourself, if you ever loved the fae.

Find me. And you will drink honeywine like water”

And she knew that better world would never be possible.

“With love and adulation for our people,

Maeve of the Nix Court.”

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Saorise sat there, twitching out what she had read, sputtering it raw and fallow onto the grass below her mouth. The words fell from her lips and stained the greenery with their truth. Bile rose in the back of her throat, her whole body felt numb, like it was on distant shores. Her head was spinning, her mind was spinning, her chest was spinning. The truth that had been forced from her sat plain in front of Saorise, mixing with the vomit she had expelled during her ill-lucidity.

“Yes,” Queen Titania said, standing over her. Saorise raised her eyes too tired to look at her, but she was naught but shadows, the sun hanging low above the Queen of Storm’s head. “That is what I thought I read.”

Saorise did not respond, merely wiping the vomit from her lips. It was not the first time that she had experienced the compulsion of three. But a violation like that, it never got any easier.

“Do you know who that woman was? Who had written the letter?” Titania continued. She circled the supine Saorise like a buzzard, like a man, like an animal circling a wounded beast.

“The, ah.” Saorise chokes on her own words for a moment. She braces herself on an arm, the grass stinging like needles and like flies. “The queen-”

“The woman.” Titania interjects, her words as sharp as her sword.

“The woman who has been poaching our people.” Saorise continues.”

“Leading them to a death of inches in a foreign land.” Titania sighs and looks upward. From this vantage, the only thing Saorise can see is the point of Durandal. “I weep for those misguided souls, I even weep for this Maeve, who styles herself the Red Queen. They are of my flock and I can no longer reach them.”

“It is a shame, my queen.” Saorise says, unsure whether or not she could. If it were a lie, if there was no basis of truth, the words could not have escaped her lips. If it was fully the truth, well, why hide the note?

“It is a shame!” Titania extended a hand down towards her outrider knight. “It is a shame what grief does to these fae. I weep for them, for despair has tricked them, like it tries to trick you or me.”

Saorise looks at the hand in front of her. “I’m… I do not understand what you are getting at, my queen. Is this a threat? Am I in some sort of trouble?”

“Oh heavens no, no no no!” Titania held her hand even further down towards Saorise. And then, in a moment, the sun shifted from behind her. And Saorise’s eyes forced her to focus. The queen was beautiful, with limbs reaching like raucous Lichtenberg figures. Her teeth were rows and rows and rows of perfect, pristine marble and her fingers were many knives which caught the brilliance of the Queen of Storms. It was the last thing Saorise ever seen and she saw it in its entirety. No filter, no veil to be hidden behind.

There was no glamor between the two of them, each of their illusions having been blasted off in a single, brilliant light of remaking. Only their true, primal forms remained, their untruth’s shadowed against the grass behind them. It was the light of truth that Saorise saw and it was miserable.

“No, I wish to reward you. Now, we know where this Red Bitch is.” Titania paused, shaking her hand expectantly at Saorise. The outrider knight thought for a moment and then, without thinking, reached up towards her. “And you can kill her.”

“Yes my queen.” She says with nothing but pure devotion. It is a devotion truer and crueler than anything I’ve ever known. More than petty obligation or simple sycophancy, more than anything innate to who or what the fae are, more than any boring, simple reason that one might conjure. It was love. A love that could twist and pervert any sort of sentimentality, love born from pure desperation and unmooring winds. It was the kind of love that could snuff out any fire, no matter how bright. “Anything for you.”

“And I will need you, oh Callan mine. To do this for me. To break apart this Nix Court, to find the seat of its power and to snuff it out. And then we can be whole again.”

Callan looked up at his queen and did not understand. He looked down at his hands, now different than what he had entered this garden with. He clamored over, still on his knees, to a nearby pond. Its surface rippled and warped his visage. He had kept his red hair, but not its length. His skin now more golden, less sunkissed. The light of the twin moon and sun above Asosh Ai caught his hair, illuminating it like a forest on fire. They danced above him, haloing his head in delicate dance of ghostlight. His cheeks were more gaunt, besotted with freckles and marks. But all else was lost to Callan, as he could not draw his attention away from his grin. His toothy, Litigious grin. It crept from ear to ear, a smile far too wide and too saturated with history. He had been remade before, but never with such careful precision, never with such delicate intricacies. It felt more right than his other faces, yet still a stranger. He looked back towards where his queen was, who was now awash with tears at her outrider knight. Her eyes were swollen and her smile was genuine and surprised. Even this was not a form she could have foreseen, and her cheeks were forever stained with tears.

“I am to bring what this Maeve has stolen from you home?” His voice was snakelike and velvet, dripping with misdirection.

“Yes, my Callan.” She spoke, her grandeur almost succeeding in disguising a surprised lilt at the edges of her voice. If she were a smaller, crueler fae, as she once was in her youth, she would peel the skin from his face with curved bone, remake him into something more divine and pristine. The screams would echo off the towers of Ashosh Ai as she carved the raw marble of Callan into a pure sculpture. Something she could mold with her own six hands. But that was so many years ago, and she was not that fae. Not any more.

But that smile, the moment her eyes fell upon it. She could have sworn she was there again, at Castle Elphame, at the betrayal of the Autumn Fae and the awakening of her son. She swore she could see herself in that fire, within its mirror like aurora. She should have known what that smile had meant, how that fire had now engulfed her too. She would have crackled lighting, she would have left him a shadow against the wall.

But he was kneeling there, grinning up at her, soot and ash pooling at his feet and hands and knees. His hands intertwined with the grass, knuckles white and tight in what only could be devotion. His teeth clenched in fervor, his eyes squinted with adulation. He was a relic of an older, better world. And the edges of her skin felt that warmth, that delineation between sense and pain as the flames crackled between the two of them.

And they both stayed there, until that litigious grin began to burn.

#cup of trembling #creative writing #dnd writing #female writers #writing #dnd #dnd 5e #OC #Callan #Queen Titania #fantasy #fantasy writing #fantasy horror

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