tatianawrites

[tatianawrites]

séverine 006

Sunday, September 29th

Friday, she leaves work late. Again. Painfully late, she’s champing at the metaphorical bit, more than ready to leave. Things have gone poorly this week for her employers. That means opportunity for her, though, a likely chance to move up within the organisation, and this is the primary impetus behind the late, late nights she pulls for a week.  Any meeting she can edge in on, she does. Any report she can help file, she does. The more she knows, the more dangerous she is. 

The more danger she’s in.

And so she likes it.

But then there’s Diego, saying they need to work together, soon, always something off the radar with him these days, unofficial, so she finds time and it is Thursday night when they end up on the roof, by the couch. I used to be a degenerate here. She reads this situation like he’d flat out said it -- let’s -- but they don’t; as ever, it’s the tension as much as anything else that keeps them gravitating towards each other.

On Saturday, she’s out of office, she’s at a cabin on the beach. She is letting herself simmer in need, wondering what might have happened had she taken a single step towards that filthy couch, when her phone gives that special chime and her heart drops into her stomach. This is supposed to be a retreat from work, but, then, this is not a summons she can ignore.

Tʜᴇʏ ɢᴏᴛ ᴀɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴏɴᴇ. Aʟʟ ʜᴀɴᴅs, Mᴏɴᴅᴀʏ.

That night, looking over the waves, drinking wine, she knows:

Change is coming.

They will absolutely have need of her, and she will absolutely be available for them.

Which means Sunday, then, is her last chance for some time. She sends Boo the message shortly after sunrise: This is reckless of me, but…

But.

If not now, when?

… I’ve rented a little beach cabin for the weekend. Would you like to come out for the day, or dinner?

When it seems he’ll take her up on it, she knows he knows what she’s offering. No ratty couch you’ve fucked meaningless faces on. I demand better.

She thinks, overthinks, what she’ll wear. How she’ll greet him.  Whether to play at being demure. How gently to encourage him. Whether she ought to abandon pretense at all -- he surely will -- and the thought is enough that she allows herself a moment to fantasize. His rough hands, his tense body, his quiet lips, how they could share not a word of conversation all day but if he said her name, once, she’d fall apart.

An oversized button-down. Lazy, loose, over her bikini top -- the one that fastens in the front. Linen shorts, breezy and airy and light, with the waist that ties. Easy, all of it. He’ll see that.

She is almost embarrassed by herself.

But this is her last chance, for awhile, and they’ve toed this line for so long she’s half mad with it.

She will be fine so long as she does not think of Emma.

Because, she understands, this is a victory for the other woman: Emma remains in the picture, she has not faded away at all but only tightened her grip on Boo. Séverine reaching out like this is a weakness, and she harbours only a few illusions that Emma will not find out.  For all she knows, Emma might well be standing alongside Diego as he browses wines, or indeed might have been the person responding to her DMs; it has happened before. 

Séverine will pretend not to care.

And she continues to pretend not to care as the hours tick by, the sun crests in the sky, begins its lazy descent, and she makes lunch for one, and tries not to look at her phone but tries also not to look at the pathway descending to her little cabin, so when he has neither shown up nor said a goddamned word by sunset, she is trembling, incandescent with rage.

Surely he wouldn’t do this. Surely he wouldn’t ghost her. Surely he must be dead in an alley somewhere.

She polishes off the half-bottle of wine she has left. She has made barely a dent in the dinner she prepared.  Potatoes wilt, butter congeals in the creases of corn. She wraps herself in a cardigan and reaches for a book, starts tea, reminds herself that none of this, with him, has ever mattered.

Her work matters. Cutting the head off the snake matters. This lust? It does not matter.

She is in the cabin’s immense, luxuriant bed when Diego finally reaches out: I’m sorry. I am safe. Something came up.

And while she ought not to reply, while she ought to throw her goddamn phone across the room, she can’t help herself: a single word, as careless as she can manage: Ah.

For months now, when he has called for her, she has come to him. For months, when he is in need she drops her work and finds her way to his side. Time and time again they say to one another, I trust you, and perhaps this is her fault, showing a vulnerability to him, needing him not for work, but for selfish indulgence.

She turns her phone off entirely.  So it goes.  This is not the first time she has been let down; this is not even the first time she has been let down by someone in the bloody DAF.

Tonight, she will sleep; tomorrow, she will return to work.

And she will let that be her escalation.

[tatianawrites]

spire 02 (18+)

**

It’s smutty, y’all. Proceed with caution and also knowledge that you’re going to read some impolite words.

**

Spire wonders if he ever thinks about it.  There are moments, over breakfast, when Malcolm pours coffee into her mug and she murmurs a thank you, and their eyes meet for a heartbeat too long; she thinks, maybe, he does.

It was a long time ago, though.

The first memory she has after the Yawning Portal is collapsing against Captain Ramsay.  She remembers thinking he smelled familiar, all sweat and brine and ale, and she remembers her arms burning from the climb out, and then the world going black.

It took months before she felt fit to leave the Tiderunner. Even then, it was only at Ramsay’s insistence - ye can’t stay here forever, lass - but the simple act of striding down the pier filled her with a sense of vertigo: she knew the sound of boots on wood and the lick of waves against the pylons, but something about it felt inherently bizarre.

The first time she met Malcolm, he ripped her off.  Not that he admitted it, not that she did, either, but when she passed her captain the coin purse from their exchange, Ramsay’s eyes bugged half-out of his head and his nose went red and she knew: she had gotten absolutely bent over by the Zhentarim fence.

The second time, she almost made a profit.

By the third time she met Malcolm, she had regained enough of a grasp of herself to barter and bargain and charm, and when he scoffed at one of her offers, shot back some devastating rejoinder, Spire realised she couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed someone this much.  So as the coin exchanged hands, she wrapped her fingers around his wrist, she tilted her head to the shadows, and she said, Take me somewhere private.

He led the way. A barebones garret over, she pointedly recalls, a cheese shop; the air hung dank and thick around them and she had thrown open one of the windows just to get a breeze coming in from the harbour.  He trapped her against the sill, his lean frame taut along her back, and rumbled, “Here?”

“Here,” she agreed, and began gathering her skirts above her waist.  She heard the rattling of his belts, the whisper of leather peeling away from his skin, the thunk of sheathed blades hitting the floor, and felt a rush of gratitude: he didn’t want to talk. 

Business, always, with Malcolm.

She turned her face against the bubbled glass, let her eyes slide shut; it wasn’t him she wanted so much as this, the fervent surge of heat as he tugged at her clothing, undergarments puddling at her ankles, how his fingers skimmed up along the back of her thigh and, as if hesitant, only ghosted over the apex. 

“Yes,” she said.

Freeing one of her hands, she reached back, took his cock into her grasp; he wasn’t hard, not yet, but with every stroke she felt him respond. It erased his hesitance. He cupped her cunt against his palm, deft fingers slipping between her wet lips and gods above and below she whimpered to be touched like that.  Her body had felt so foreign for so long but this shot her right back into it, nerves trembling and skin awakened.

She slumped a little against the window, heedless of the streets below, thrust her hips back at him in pleading surrender. He said something but she wasn’t listening, not really, only feeling: his touch on her clit heavy and slick, glass hard and cool on her cheek, his length hot and firm in her palm, and then, then, his feet planting outside of hers, forcing her ankles together, his hand withdrawing from her cunt to curl, instead, around hers, as together they guided the blunt head of his cock to nudge at all that wet heat.

Her eyes opened, sought him from behind the spill of her hair. He was only a shape there in the half-lit garret, chin dipped to focus on their bodies as he pressed forward, sinking into her. She heard his breath catch in his throat in the same instant hers gasped out, and maybe she’d wanted to savour this but when he shoved roughly and she slapped a hand against the windowsill to steady herself she thought, no, this was what she needed right now.

Again: “Yes,” half plea and half command. 

He heard the permission in her voice.  He grabbed her hip harshly enough that the next day, she’d find bruises, and his other hand cupped her throat, curled about the heavy line of her jaw.  Thusly held they fucked, lips never touching, her back to him, her eyes shut and his tongue silent, til she reached down to touch herself and he grunted, “Good,” and that was enough, soon, to push her over the edge of release.

She was still gasping for breath when he pulled out. She tried to look back but his grip strengthened on her jaw and he kept her face forward, his exhales quick and rough, til she felt heat spill messily upon the curve of her ass.

He gave himself a moment, curled forward over her to rest his face against the back of her shoulders, twitched his fingers against her face. Below them, Waterdeep continued; no one looked up, no one called out, as the sea salt breeze exhaled cool against their fevered skin. Eventually Malcolm cleared his throat, stepped away.

“You may stay here as long as you need,” he said and in time, she did exactly that, buzzing and messy in the afterglow when she settled onto a cot in the corner.

It only happened once more, and they were different people by then. They could never have suspected fate would bring them to here, to now, sharing a space with others (and also a ghost), with half the gentry of Waterdeep squaring off against them and the remainder unlikely to interfere with that. It seemed to Spire to be almost laughable, Malcolm of all people pouring her coffee in the kitchen they shared, but she trusted him. 

And if he never said a word about it, neither would she. 

[tatianawrites]

séverine 005

Tuesday, August 20th

She hated him a little, today.  She hated him in the morning when the message pinged her phone and instead of him it was her, Emma, blonde and beautiful, bare beneath a luxurious bathrobe, mocking her: Hello from Diego’s phone, Ms Steele. The poor guy is all tuckered out. She hated him for the fact that jealousy raced icy and cold through her chest, wrapped its filthy tendrils about her lungs; he was not supposed to mean a goddamned thing to her, and, yet.  She thought of him languid and unguarded in that woman’s house, sprawled in her bed, as Emma thumbed through their messages to one another, and her nails cut crescents in her palm.

She hated him at lunch when Felicity sat with her: I need to know your intentions with him. If those intentions are yours at all, or those of the people you work for.  She can never go back to that diner, now that the woman knows to find her there; it was hard enough to look into that single cool gray eye once and pretend all that laid between them was Diego. She will not do it again. The next time she and Felicity Bane encounter one another, it will be on Séverine’s terms. 

She hated him in the evening when he carved time out for her, for coming when she called, for leaning so casually against the wall of the 8 Ball when she strides in, sharp and prickling.  She is important to him, yes, but she is only part of a group of important women, each needing something different; he fragments himself, perhaps unwittingly, to satiate each of them.

Still, she does not hate him for long.  They order drinks, they speak, and he is apologetic, and she is as frustrated by herself as by him. He says perhaps Emma is threatened by her, and Séverine wants to snap that of course she is, but she catches herself: he seems so utterly enraptured that speaking ill of Emma will accomplish nothing.  I am not a threat, she tells him, more than once.

She can almost believe it.

She needs him to.

They are no good at parting ways, and although the night draws towards an inevitable close, she finds reason to linger.  Side-by-side they stand at the bar, and she touches him as she ever does: her hand upon his arm, only.  His body is taut, poised on the brink of either fleeing or overwhelming her; she isn’t certain which, not tonight.

In another world, she tells him to walk her home. There, they hardly make it out of the neon glow of the pool hall marquee before his hand curls about her wrist and she savours the moment of tension before she turns to look at him, the breath in which they can still carry forward along the same razor-sharp edge they have for months. The breath into which she could say ‘goodnight’. 

In that world, when she turns to him, and they gaze at one another, she doesn’t care about the other women. Not the cop, not the boss, not the girlfriend -- for once, finally, they vacate the space they occupy in her mind. Desire is free to blossom there instead, hot and thick and demanding, and whether he jerks her close or she steps in first is irrelevant, because they’ve both been waiting. Waiting for this, his fingers on her jaw, hers on his chest, how she grabs tight to lift herself to him, how he guides her, how hungrily their mouths meet, finally, finally. 

In another world.

In this world, Séverine and Boo look at the bottles of alcohol lined neatly against the wall, not at one another, and his hands are firm upon the bar, and her feet are turned to the exit even as the electricity between them hums with tension.  “Goodnight, then.” 

“Goodnight, Séverine,” and every time he says her name, heat twinges in her belly, “We will talk again soon.”

“Au revoir.” The words fall breathy from her traitorous tongue.

Outside, she covers her face with her hands, exhales slow and trembling; her fingers slip to press to her lips, a memory of his cool skin against them.

This is ridiculous. He is only a man. 

But sometimes, she is only a woman.

[tatianawrites]

séverine 004

We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

Friday, August 2nd

Lust too often leaves her feeling like this, tumbling out of control, filthy and mewling and needy; it isn't her way, to want and not to have, to feel as if her body is winning out over her mind. She is reminded of a quote about seven secret lives, and for herself, she could add this as an eighth: baring herself to someone, no space between them, she spreads herself wide and if sex is going to satisfy her, if sex is going to satiate her, she has to let them breach the walls she has built. 

This distance in her had been a problem, for the last man.  He had been a problem, altogether, and that they lasted as long as they did seems utterly ridiculous in retrospect: they were incompatible from start to finish. He'd been stable and normal and had nothing, at all, to do with the things that occupy her mind and thoughts and working hours. He had pulled her away from those things.  He taught her to breathe. He instructed her, quite literally, how to cleanse herself through sweat and heat and resistance.  She should have kept him as a teacher, but, well.  Lesson learned. Late, but, learned.

That is to say, she understands why someone ‘normal’ appeals to Boo.  She understands why he might have fallen so deeply for a woman that he can no longer be bothered to reach out to her in his quiet hours for conversation; she suspects he has a more aggressive relationship with his sexual needs than she does with hers, and they control him in an entirely different way than her own.  He urged her to indulge in her vices, and she took this as an invitation, hearing a nebulous but unmistakable I will help behind his words.

She did not leap at him; she bides her time, always, and she does not need him.

She does not need him, and yet she lingers on when last they spoke, how he said, I hope you can find escape, Séverine, something that takes you outside yourself, and she heard the finality of it, the firm punctuation: but not me. 

She thinks these things and she twists the length of silk in her hands and she paces the hotel room. She gnaws at her own mind, catches her impatient breath between gritted teeth, listens to the thunder of her heart with its anxious neediness, aches, aches, aches with every step, too aware of what she wants and aware, too, of how it weakens her to want it.

She’d been teased when she said that her own humanity humbles her, and yet how could it not? She is, in the end, merely human: she can be as clean and hard and sparkling as diamond, but still those secret lives mark their flaws within. 

He will be here, soon enough.  He’d texted her earlier -- it’s been awhile -- and she’d replied, stupidly, an indulgence she hadn’t allowed herself since the summer before, yes, it has, and he’d sent an address, and she’d replied with a surname, and ten minutes later he forwarded her the hotel confirmation.

Nothing is free.  Nothing is ever free.  No, but by now she is so far in his debt as to view ever paying it off laughable. From Alexandria to London to Richmond to Paragon City, he has cleared a path for her and she has laid the stones upon it.  She has been his agent, and he has made certain she lives in comfort.  She has been his voice.  He names her ‘consort’, and she labels herself ‘whore’, and neither claims the other as ‘lover’.

The door swings open.  

She catches the shape of him, backlit from the hallway sconces, red and orange kissing the ragged edges of his form, feels the sinuous press of his psychic presence surge into the room.  Her hands lift.  She wraps the silk around her eyes, knots it behind the messy curls of her hair, exhales.

He says, “Let me in,” and she whispers, “Come in,” and the guards she carries around her psyche crumble into nothingness.  

The door slams shut; the locks click into place.  

In the darkness he laughs, chilling her to her absolute core: “Oh, kitten. It’s not me at all, is it.”

[tatianawrites]

séverine 003

Sunday, July 21st

Séverine does not trust vapid people.  Or, rather, she doesn’t trust that such people are, indeed, as vacuous as they seem to be; a curious mind and an analytical one are close cousins, and it takes only the right questions, the wrong turn of phrase, for either to seize onto something and worry it into nothingness.

That is to say, as she sits across the table from Harmony, Séverine is entirely aware that the woman before her could be, must be treated as, sharper than she seems.  It is in Séverine’s nature to be reticent, and, fortunately, that works to her advantage in nearly every situation, but, still -- a razor can hide beneath any babbling tongue. 

And, at the very least, Harmony’s offers a tempting tidbit.

There's a guy we're working with … some kind of Army vet who did black ops stuff for some wild secret society deal on his world. He's a marksman, I heard he's got sniper training. Guns, always guns... dude has got a body count. Like. He's a soldier. His old taskmasters were, like, keeping a veil of secrecy, taking people out from the shadows. Whoever he worked for on his home Earth were a lot like them.

Them.

Malta.

Séverine feels the ground beneath her feet as the inconstant thing it is, knows the shuddering and trembling turf waits to open and swallow her. This is a test she’s faced a thousand times, and she will pass it with flying colours, but she is aware: she can fail. She can always fail.  

Harmony’s smile is childlike in its eagerness, her eyes bright as a puppy’s: do you like me you should like me please like me! Offering information on the man, on the Foundation, easily and earnestly, fetching every answer and dropping it at Séverine’s feet.  If she had a tail, it would be wagging.  And, despite herself, Séverine finds the other woman utterly charming; there is something so bright about Harmony’s spirit, an unburdened interest in what the world offers. Surely, Harmony must want for aught, must have something she cannot trust, but, as they talk, Séverine cannot find evidence of such.  

What is it like, to feel so idealistic?

Fuck, she wishes it were Boo across the table.

The thought thrums inside her, an undertone to the questions she asks Harmony. The woman bore injuries, and Séverine wondered if Boo did.  She wondered if he’d been there.  And when she learned he hadn’t, she wondered where he had been. 

They had reached an equilibrium with one another, an understanding: tip-toeing around what they wanted to know was pointless when a blunt question with a short answer would accomplish just as much. They recognised each other, in that way. They didn’t say anything more than was needed.

But she couldn’t ask about him directly.  It would be uncouth, and, frankly, too revelatory. 

He wasn’t with me. He met someone, I think.

Oh, Séverine thinks. Well, good. That’s good.  It would explain why he’d been quiet and why he’d quit social media; she knows how intense the first blush of infatuation can be -- the world disappears in so many ways, frivolities stripped away one by one.  What does idle conversation with virtual strangers mean, when you’ve met someone? What interest do their thoughts and problems hold? Such obsession hardly seemed like him, but, then, what did she know?

Not much at all, obviously.

If she’s being blunt, Boo has served his purpose, and the proof is here in the conversation: he has chauffeured her into the good graces of the Dark Astoria Foundation, and they know to turn to her for certain needs.  There is enough of interest about this refugee to leave her keen for a meeting; what does his world offer that hers does not? What does he know that she doesn’t?

She exchanges numbers with Harmony -- Harmonious Note who you know from twitter and had pizza wi -- and tells the woman to facilitate a meeting.  

And once she’s returned home, wine in hand and music on the stereo, she settles in to research him.

Frank Calhoun.

[tatianawrites]

séverine 002

Wednesday, July 10th

She’s drunk enough that her guard is down and when he offers to walk her home, she thinks about letting him in.  Her fingers flex against his arm and that faint supernatural coolness of his skin feels like a challenge, like something she could conquer by sheer force of lust; she could make him sweat.  You prefer subordinates to partners, then, he’d said, and sometimes -- at this very moment, in fact -- she did.

She wanted him, bent to her will, and the music’s thick beat pulsed hot in her blood, left her eyeing shadowed corners and quiet doorways, seeking a place they could step aside and she could whisper to him another gift, another intimacy I’ll never share.

It is in the cool corridor outside of the nightclub’s strobing lights and dancing lasers, where the bland gazes of Pocket D security regard them with all the lethargy of employees waiting to punch a clock, that Séverine reminds herself she does not want intimacy from him, absolutely cannot want it. He is a means to an end, and for all that she could use him and abandon him, he has suffered through so much and he is trying so hard to be better that she knows she would be evil if she left him in ruin, too.  She would like to keep the wreckage left in her wake to a minimum, as impossible as that seems: she would like to push the spire from the top of a tower, and leave the remainder standing, him safely inside.

So as soon as they step out into the cloying summer humidity of Paragon City, she pauses. Séverine indulges herself, looks up at him, and savours, for a breath, all the warmth the night has left in her -- the conversation, the drink, the dancing, the strength of his presence.  She could have him.  She is certain of it.  She could grip his belt and tell him he’s hers, she could lower her lashes and ask if he’d let her be his, and either way, he’d say yes. The possibility hums between them, low and dark and sweet.  

He waits. Quiet. Patient. Solid.

“I’ll see myself home from here,” she says. 

He looks to the sky, and now she waits -- less patiently, her nerves tingling -- until he gives her hand on his arm a light pat and disengages. “I hope it was a nice day.”

It was, she thinks, or maybe says, it is. Standing on her own, vertiginous from alcohol, feet tucked into stiletto boots, Séverine taps into her powers to hover weightlessly over the treacherous streets.  “À la prochaine, Diego. Until next time.”

“Nos vemos más tarde,” he answers, but she’s begun her retreat, lets the words fall into the space stretching between them.

Séverine sees herself home.

[tatianawrites]

séverine 001

Wednesday, July 3rd

It is 5am and Séverine hasn’t slept, not really; there have been stretches where she’s gazed at the artifact before her for so long, eyes so blurred and sight so faded, that she might as well have been asleep for all she was aware of her surroundings.  Despite what she’d tweeted, she’d known it wasn’t inert -- not with the way lightning flickered around it, how static tickled just under her skin when she held it -- but it hadn’t been responsive to anything, and she figured it was just another of those Rikti mysteries she’d never quite be able to unlock.

Plus, it kept her mind off the other mystery in her life, which was why she’d gotten so honest with a man whose name she still, despite gentle efforts to the contrary, didn’t know. I want to feel released, unlaced, she’d typed, in a frenzy of truth, sometimes I feel so horrifyingly tense, like I’m full to bursting with rage.

Maybe he understood that feeling -- she suspected he did -- but then again, how could he? He’d gotten his redemption, hadn’t he? He’d been given the chance to begin again, to stand in front of his own flaws and furies and step above them, and he’d seized it. She isn’t sure whether she’d do the same, or whether she’s backed herself into a corner by now, one she has to fight her way out of to maintain any sense of who she is, or what she wants. 

Lightning flickers over the sphere, verdant and rich.  Séverine blinks, her eyelids like sandpaper.  She has a sneaking suspicion about alien life that she can’t explain to anyone, can’t prove to them, and despite the fact that she knows the origin of this piece of technology, despite the fact that she pulled it out of a Rikti computer herself, she wonders if she could slot it into her hypothesis, neat and easy, click-click, unlocked.

Like a skeleton key.

She hasn’t been entirely open about the translation.  The Dark Astoria Foundation is paying her generously, of course, and she prides herself on her work, of course, but it irritates her, not knowing exactly what the script on the artifact says, when she damned well ought to. Séverine has studied the physical manifestation of this language for twelve years -- well, off and on -- and she knows there’s a component of it that simply cannot be translated.

But it can be psychically determined.

It’s how the Rikti communicate most efficiently, after all.  The problem lies, however, in psychic communications being volatile and ever-changing, often more short-hand than straightforward, and, at the end of the day, her brain is only human. 

Boo (she’d called him Bo, but that wasn’t how his coworkers referred to him, and she was one of those, now, so, Boo it was) suspected the artifact of being a key.  She did, too, but in the way one suspects the sun will shine tomorrow: there is evidence the Earth will rotate and the sun will rise over this hemisphere, there is a long history of it rising, and so long as it does those things, it presumably has not burnt out and will shine.  

That is to say, everything she can tell about the artifact implies it is a key, including the words etched into it, and thusly it must in some way open something, but she doesn’t know what that something is, and has no certainty it exists beyond this implication. That’s not much to work with, but it’s more than she had a week ago. 

Séverine leans back, tilts her face to the ceiling, closes her eyes.  She needs sleep. She knows this. She might wake up to the world ending -- it’s happened before -- or she might wake up to the alien artifact on her table blossomed into something different -- that’s happened before, too -- but she needs to take a break from the questions roiling in her mind.  

The edges of the world grow fuzzy, and the rough heaviness of her eyes begins to mellow.  She exhales a sleepy little sigh and slides into the pile of pillows kept here more for this exact purpose than decoration -- and it is then, of course, that her work phone chimes.  The bleating notification is resonant, insistent, and irritating by design.

The screen displays three simple words:

Gᴏᴛ ᴏɴᴇ. C'ᴍᴇʀᴇ.

And after a long moment of great stillness, Séverine rises to fetch her coat.

[tatianawrites]

spire: a moment of peace

They’re anchored a couple hundred yards off the coast because it’s dangerous nearer the shore -- some bullshit about adventurers and explosives and misunderstandings that make safe harbour extremely questionable -- and the crew is starting to get restless.  They’re doing that thing where they pretend to be busy, so the captain doesn’t saddle them with some super shit once-a-year maintenance task, but it’s all pretend.  Spire holds a net in her lap, one that’s fully repaired by now, but she keeps tracing the ragged lengths and sturdy corners.  There’s something entirely peaceful about this, the downtime; they don’t get a lot of it on-board, and when they’re working, they don’t get a lot of it on-shore.  They’re in the in-between, now.

Somewhere up on the fo’c’sle, a brawny voice takes up a song; it runs low and rich, and she begins to hum along.  Her fingers, strong and scarred, caress the rope; her eyes turn to the skies.  Warmly the song courses through her, the rumble of her crewmates’ voices comforting.  She knows these men, these few women, so well by now.  They have faced storms and sirens together, leviathans and lightning; she has never been frightened with them around, but filled to the brim with the thrill of life and the certainty of victory.

Without thinking, she lets the song escape her throat and find her lips, her tongue, carelessly, her gaze yet lifted to the stars above, her body lulled by the insistent, comforting beat of waves against the hull.  She knows this song -- generations have known it, its origins lost to time and rumour, as ancient at heart as sailors risking unknown seas.  Some part of her identifies with that, feels certain she, too, has lost her naissance and will come to be defined by what is remembered of her, little more than an echo of her name sung on some distant shore, someday.

A shadow flits over her vision, unnoticed at first but then more insistent, and after a moment, Spire blinks, shakes herself free of the song, and refocuses.  Captain Ramsay stands nearby with his hand waving over her, a frown tugging at his graying chin. “Captain,” she gasps, beginning to stand, but he makes a sharp gesture that as good as tells her to stay put.

“You’re doing it again, lass,” he says, voice dark with vague warning.

It strikes her suddenly that the curl of his lips doesn’t read as anger inasmuch as … uncertainty?  “Captain?”

He leans down, and in that movement she sees two of her crewmates standing frozen behind him, eyes narrowed. “Your tongue’s all twisted, singin’ a song no one knows.”

Cold tightens in her stomach, her chest, and she parts her lips, seeking some explanation.  This isn’t the first time she’s been caught out like this, speaking some language foreign even to an aged sailor’s ears, but she still doesn’t know why it happens, doesn’t even know it is happening until someone snaps her out of it.  “Aye, Captain,” she finally says.

“Watch yerself, Spire.” He straightens and extends a hand to help her up. “Best get back to work.”

[tatianawrites]

spire: the perfect weapon

He sits in the tavern, the man, laughing and laughing, grasping the barmaid’s forearm in his beefy hand so tightly that his knuckles are as white as her face. She’s still smiling, but it’s a tense, fragile thing - a butterfly on the brink of flitting away, a mouse frozen beneath a tomcat’s luminous stare.  Spire quickens her step towards them, slipping around patrons and between chairs.  The comforting, smooth weight of her marlinspike rests against her palm, and she fingers the tip, some part of her already knowing how this ends.

As Spire approaches, the man leans back in his chair.  He looks her over with a slow, crude leer that has almost certainly never gotten him what he wanted from a woman, unless he was spoiling for a fight.  “Ey pretty,” he sneers, “care to join?”  He gives the barmaid’s arm a good shake.

Spire makes eye contact with her over his head, and the way the girl’s forced smile wavers is enough to set electricity trembling through her; it triggers the distant, sonorant echo of a bell in her head. Her pale gaze lowers to meet the man’s. “Neither of us care to join you. Let her go.”

His burst of coarse laughter is expected. So is the way he tugs at the barmaid hard enough that she is unmoored, and stumbles against him.  She falls awkwardly, halfway into his lap but halfway onto the table, her startled grip knocking his tankard hard enough that ale splashes over the table.  This sets him to laughing harder, free hand slapping the table to punctuate his great bellowing amusement.

“I’m sorry,” the barmaid gasps, as if she’s somehow at fault here, and that is enough for Spire.  

Her wrist flicks, her fingers curl to catch the steel length of the marlinspike, and without a breath of hesitation, she slams it down into the meaty part of his hand upon the table.  She barely has to try to puncture his flesh; she feels the metal knock against wood, catch there for half a breath before she jerks it back, slick with blood. The barmaid’s yelp of fright as she skitters backwards and his pained roar draw attention, but even as eyes turn to them, Spire has her weapon tucked against her forearm.

She flashes a cruel little smile at the man, and, as the tide of concerned patrons surges towards him, sails away.

h/t to @aninventoryofthepossible for providing our DnD group with this prompt xoxo

[tatianawrites]

spire 01

Something tugs at her soul.  She is aware of it in the quiet, dark moments of the night, when it is only herself and the snores of sailors and the slap of waves against the Tiderunner. She lies in her hammock, she looks at the wood grain above her head, and she tries -- gods, but she tries -- to remember.

She is aware of it in Trollskull Manor, with her … companions? … when the room she sleeps in seems entirely too large, too empty; who could possibly need this much space, just to rest? The shadows of the city paint her walls, unwavering. The streets are quiet in this part of town. Her companions are quiet, too. It is all eerie and discomforting, and yet, she sleeps like the dead.  

She sleeps, and she dreams. Or, at least, she assumes she does. In the morning, her blankets are wrapped tight about her body and her pillows are flung off the bed and her jaw hurts, her teeth ache.  She doesn’t remember her dreams, not usually, but when she wakes up feeling like that, the absence of recollection seems like a mercy.

It’s not that she’s miserable. It’s just that something is … wrong. Sure, she made light of it with her companions, but it’s not amusing, not really, that she’s got some sort of fucked-up thing in her past that she can’t recall.  Half her life, or more, or less, is gone. Yeah, haha, I came out of the Yawning Portal, just no one remembers seeing me go in. I don’t remember, either. We can use that, eh? As if she wants to be in the public eye. As if she wants someone else telling her story, when she can’t even tell it, herself.  But Malcolm seemed interested, and Kiko went along with it, and Dei-- Aisling didn’t ask a lot of questions, and that was good enough for her.

[tatianawrites]

Darkest Dungeon [steam | web]

January 2nd, 2017:

I finally finished Darkest Dungeon. I love, love, LOVE the challenge this game presented me with, and will continue to present me with as I push forward into the New Game+ setting that opens upon your first completion at regular difficulty settings.

That said, Red Hook is implementing a ‘radiant’ mode, which will ease some of the more brutal failures that occur due to a minor error or bad luck with the RNG. So if you’re interested in Darkest Dungeon, but have been put off by how difficult it seems, this is a good time to leap in.

I won’t provide any spoilers about the ending, beyond the pictures above being part of the final dungeon in the game, but I will say that it fits perfectly. I was, as I tweeted afterwards, emotionally compromised by the way this game ended.

Get it, grind it, and let me know what you think!

[tatianawrites]

Woman vs Wilderness header by Nate Rowe

During the Steam summer sale, I sat agonising between The Long Dark and The Flame in the Flood. I wanted both, couldn’t fit both into my budget. In talking to a friend about the latter, he teased: “A girl and her dog against the world? I can’t imagine why that would appeal to you.”

That’s when it struck me – I love survival games because they’re lonely. Because it’s just me, my skills, my awareness, versus whatever tools and mechanics the developers have given me. My time, my creativity, my emotional labour: all are mine. Survival games are the polar opposite of MMOs ...

Read the rest @ Gaming Rebellion.

[tatianawrites]

Fell back into Torchlight 2 recently. ESPECIALLY BECAUSE I CAN HAVE A BULLDOG PET.

It’s currently on sale over at GOG.com for $3.99.  If you’re a little worn down by the grimdark aesthetic and voiceovers of Diablo 3, or looking for something with low system requirements but great reward for it, or just wanna slaughter monsters while wielding a cannon and fighting alongside a panda, this game is worth checking out!

[tatianawrites]

Darkest Dungeon [steam | web]

We all have those games we loved but, for one reason or another, never finished. If you’re me, you tell yourself, “I’ll revisit it,” as if dozens of other games won’t act as eternal distractions. That is to say: as much as I enjoy Darkest Dungeon, and even with having sunk something like 90 hours into it, I never did finish it. I never even came close.

Recently, in an act of procrastination, I decided to return to Darkest Dungeon and check out the updates since February, when I last wrote about it. In that time, the most noticeable changes are the release of the Antiquarian class and the implementation of Town Events...

Read the rest @ Gaming Rebellion.

[tatianawrites]

The Long Dark is a recent Steam purchase of mine, and one I must recommend.  I’m a huge fan of the survival genre, and so far this is the game that most accurately nails what I’m in search of, in terms of realism and atmosphere.

Alone in the northern Canadian wilderness, you must gather resources -- and they aren’t just layin around -- in order to survive. You must learn to build a fire, learn to repair your clothing. The world around you is beautiful, just as often peaceful as brutal, and absolutely engaging. Paying attention to where animals congregate and roam brings realistic rewards; so does knowledge of wilderness, whether in terms of plant life, reading the sky, interpreting the weather, or assessing the landscape.

I have found the sandbox mode of The Long Dark to create its own stories. I told a friend ‘the slooooow way you die in this game is fantastic’, and that’s a compliment. There is peace, silence, in death here; it feels elegant, not dramatic.

At $6.79 USD until July 4th, The Long Dark is more than worth checking out on the Summer Sale. 

[tatianawrites]

Seventeen Hills

I should use an eye cream, hold the whipped cream. Think about waxing my brows and my arms which should be thinner and carry more than paperbacks into coffee shops on crowded avenues. I should consider reading local news, science journals, other people’s poetry. Context clues. I should soak in tubs until I am soft again. Smile sweetly behind my hand. Shake less when my voice raises in public and when I am underneath you in a thin film of sweat. It is almost dawn and my fingers hover above your back. I draw constellations between your freckles. Aquarius. Cassiopeia. Thin ribbons of light snake through the blinds. I watch your chest rise and fall like a tide. I should but will not wake you.

[tatianawrites]

Every sailor and schoolchild is wary of sirens, the sweet singing women who lure their prey to watery graves - but far fewer know of the phoseids, the cruel temptresses who pose as stars and dare us to look to the heavens, foolishly dreaming of escape.

myths for the 21st century (via lapike)