unsoundedask

[unsoundedask]

Dear Lord Winalils,

Some associates of mine have gotten into a bit of a debate recently, and I would be interested to hear your opinion on the matter: what would you put your odds at in a fight with Duane Adelier? It's true that your birthright gives you no advantages, and his background affords him plenty, but I maintain the tricks you'd no doubt have up your sleeve would cause someone as book-brained as him some serious trouble. Perhaps a good 4 out of 10 wins in your favor, depending on the environment?

My two centuries are only theoretical; they'll not be realised if I accept the challenge of every bestial soud that decides my clock needs cleaning, so to speak. Martial pymary is not my specialty. I am an artificer and theorist. A fleshcrafter and spellwriter.

Diagnose me with a eunuch's storied equanimity, but I find the whole topic a bore. I don't bottle my own wine, nor sew my own clothing, nor fight my own men. Hired professionals exist for such low pursuits, and I am nothing if not a stimulator of local economies.

[unsoundedask]

What's next for Bastion Winalils after conquering death?

Do you have a sister?

[unsoundedask]

How do you have twice the lifespan of an uncursed man and yet don't have the time to put milk in your cereal?

Conformity is the hallmark of a weak will and a soft mind. Have you never sampled any of the Beadman's cereals dry? They're a delight! My nephew also introduced me to the brilliance of crushing a palmful and using them to dress a jacket potato. A dollop of creme fraiche and ah, the heavens sing!

[unsoundedask]

Does it daunt you? To know that you will live well over another century unless you fuck up badly enough? I'm fed-up with this life and I'm not even half-way through my third decade.

Put yourself to some use, you ridiculous cunt. The suffering of this world cry out for aid in a thousand ways: a strong arm to mend a fence, a brilliant mind to solve a problem, a warm hole to comfort a cock.

I sometimes grow restless because I am too large and brilliant for either my place in this world or my place in this epoch; but the likelihood that you in any way compare to me, is vanishingly slim. Go and make something better, or go and climb into a box.

[unsoundedask]

Lord Winalils-

I come asking of your thoughts on the great Khert- if you were Creator, if you had free reign of the great arbiter, how would you change it? Of course, as you’ve opined, you would undo the gods greatest crime, but what else would you task your accomplished hands to?

Such a task is for greater beings. The conceit that a man or men could remake it belongs to those rotters, the Ssaelit. Any man or men that attempted reform would succumb to personal biases, attempting to twist the result to their benefit and crown themselves a king. Some detached being must sort it, one with no stake in the result, one that will cut its own throat afterwards and dissolve into mists and be forgotten.

And they can begin by retooling the great old man so that it stops coughing blood whenever I pass it a polynomial beyond two terms. I have been at this formula for two days, and even throwing knives through Timofey's face has begun to do little to redirect my spleen.

[unsoundedask]

Dear Lord Winalils.

While the taking of human life may, on occasion, be a necessary evil, it is nonetheless a terrible act that can make even hardened men give pause. If You will permit a bold question, when did you first kill a man, and did it affect You in any way?

The first human I killed was a young woman in my Master's employ. He had broken her. She was gibbering and simple, some clear liquid running from her right ear. He bade me end her misery with a spell. Instead I fetched water for her, a blanket, an analgesic, all the while the wee two-toes calling questions at me from their cages.

Master's heavy treads shook the entire workshop as he closed the distance between us. I remember the sound of the phials and flasks rattling on the shelves. I turned my face away, watching his shadow streaked across the floor. I braced for a fist to explode from it.

Laughter exploded instead, like a burst of black flies. He said he was going to another compeer's for a drink, and to have everything tidied for his return.

And so it was. The blanket was folded again in the cupboard, the bottles were dusted, the two-toes were fed, and the woman was dead beneath a sheet in the rearmost laboratory. It was not hard to do, once I was made afraid enough of not doing it.

[unsoundedask]

Last time I checked, the human body doesn't much appreciate having foreign objects inside of it, even if it depends on them to survive (one of our many stupid design flaws), and it's particularly annoyed about silver. Can't even have a body piercing made out of the stuff. So how exactly do you manage to be so healthy when you've basically got a first silver weed spreading its roots into your organs?

"The human body doesn't much appreciate foreign objects inside of it?" Clearly you've never been to Winalils.

[unsoundedask]

Dear Lord Bastion Winalils, When I got my balls removed, it was only after years of taking testosterone blockers (a kind of pymaric; don't worry about it) and some minor facial feminization surgery. May I ask what seemingly made you undergo the process in reverse?

They were too large. I was having some trouble fitting through doorways.

[unsoundedask]

Pray tell good lord, what is the nature of the of the relationship between the Black Tongues and the Temple of Song? How do you dine with the Shawde while his templars slaughter your brothers?

There is no relationship. Shadwe Grandvin came to me specifically with a white flag and a request, thanks to my work in Fachlyne. The Order would not be pleased to know of it, nor are most of his faction pleased to see me slinking in their marble halls. I do like to slink slowly, and touch them, and hold their eye...

In any event it is none of your bloody affair. At'gwe, I am beset here in my home by a premature autumn! All these pale leaves piling through my mail slot bearing the most impertinent examples of doggerel and dipshittery. Go and eat a knife!

[unsoundedask]

Did you ever think of setting your brobdingnagian intellect towards the task of preventing the premature aging of the hethlott and renghul? or do you share the opinion of the late master Ballanstern, that plats and silvers have their biologically alotted time the same as hounds and two toes have theirs?

I wonder how you can dispute it? It is not some barmy curse set upon them, some witch's spell. The blessed castes, as they are called, are born with bodies fashioned by the khert to provide them the years their kind are allotted. Their mortality is broadly as unjust as all of our mortality, but they must blame their parents for making them - not gods, not pymary, and certainly not we artificers and gruftgrammars who have more pressing concerns.

However I will tell this to you, who has but a thimbleful of brains: you are as like to convince the snake to worry over the welfare of the mouse as to convince a Jet or a Copper to care that the blessed castes live short lives.

[unsoundedask]

What are you wearing right now?

Only the body my mother made me.

What are you wearing? Where rested each of your hands before they rose to hold and read this missive? What is your tongue doing? Stroking the roof of your mouth? Or is it pressed against the wet ridges of the backs of your teeth? Or does it lie like a hound, awaiting it master? Are you warm? Have you a chill? Are you beset in your bones by any of the nagging aches of relentless mortality? Or have they let you alone on this day to feel young, unhampered, alive, and in want of one to touch your young, unhampered, living flesh and put it to good and rigorous use?

Hm?

[unsoundedask]

Willingfully associating with you should be considered a form of self harm. You ruin everything.

I've saved and bettered more lives than you ever will. The most useful kindness in this world is conditional; all other forms are for martyrs, manipulators, and fools.

[unsoundedask]

Lord Winalis, what is your opinion of the Shadwe Grandvin? I have heard he is considered a progressive amongst his people, but I daresay the Ssaelit idea of 'progress' may leave much to be desired.

I like him very much. He is far too good a man for his position which is why I open every morning's newspaper expecting to see in the headline that he has been assassinated. I dined with him the evening before I went off and sat on the back of his dying Motadwe to crush the breath out of him all the faster. Shadwe chose the most thoughtful wine pairing for our lamb cutlets: a fresh dark Storover from a newer winery in southern Tain called Black Birdsong. Ideal acidity, gentle finish, good tannins - and a wee joke in the name, I think. He is a naughty old grandmother of a man. I will send flowers.

[unsoundedask]

How can you call yourself a doctor when you haven't even gone to medical school? I hope your "friend" Cutter at least gave you a lecture on germ theory. You know, you could save your squiddy species a lot more years by inventing vaccines than by turning a guy into a freaky immortal.

Speak all the pretty words you like: I will never share your bed.

[unsoundedask]

If you wouldn't condemn a soldier for killing, what do you have against the Adeliers?

My darling, don't be stupid. A soldier is customarily conscripted by his government to murder for its sake. A fortunate bastard is sent to do so in defence of his home, but as often as not, it is to enrich his betters with more wealth, more land, more resources.

These creatures have little choice but to comply. If they don't, they'll be themselves executed or jailed. Aye, some take pleasure in the task, but on the main they are tools, and a clear-headed nail does not blame the hammer.

The Adeliers - Lemuel and his bloviating brother - are not soldiers. They are in the Temple's service by choice, and rejoiced in their roles. The smell of roasting heretics is pleasing to them. A dead Black Tongue is a net benefit to the world, as far as they are concerned. They enforce tiresome ideas by sword and spell, wrapping their tyrannous fists in the coat skirts of society and wrenching them back, back, to be kept stagnant in the mud. They pin our wings, they murder our brightest, they torment those who do not kiss the ring or acquiesce to the ravings of the character in their book.

And worst of all: they think are good and righteous for doing it!

A soldier has no choice because paladins like the Adeliers took the choice from him. Do not confuse the two.

[unsoundedask]

Whats the least useful thing you ever invented, Doctor?

A floating blue manservant too transparent to shield me from the sun, and too intangible to fold my laundry. Do not entice me to complain further lest he read it over my shoulder and begin to cry again.

[unsoundedask]

Dear Lord Winalils,

What makes a nobleman of Alderode a nobleman, other than wealth and a family tree on moth-eaten tapestry? Does VITS grant titles like the Gefendur priesthood and Queen do in Cresce? Or can one style themselves a noble and eventually make it 'official'

In the hoary old days of peasants and vaosa, kings and things, noble families owned and exploited the land. After the Council War, many of their holdings were seized or forcibly purchased and turned into the ginnals we know today - with some exceptions for the midland fields and kussenna, and a few small cities and towns still under the control of certain private families. You may recognise my name from that of the pleasure-town in southwest Durlyne. My father runs it still. Imagine, if you will, a stormy-browed man whose second century is quickly advancing, whose forelock is streaked with silver like bird droppings down dark glass, nodding along as a spry young renghul proprietor of a gambling den petitions for permission to convert his basement into a high-end Gefendur gastropub serving Younger Twin tartare and scandalous craft sodas made with waters and blood sustainably harvested from stormbringers he keeps in a shed out back.

...I've lost my trail of thought.

Where was I. Otherwise the old families no longer have any particular power. Still, the title looks good on a calling card, no? When taken abroad, it lends one a certain air of respectability. I introduce myself as Lord Doctor Bastion of Winalils in Sharteshane, and the blackguards genuflect like I've come proffering a chilled platter of that tartare.

Aye, I know nobility is for sale in Sharteshane, but that is proper in a country that values wealth more than absolutely anything else. It is admirable they admit it so freely by crowning their richest. The Beadmans paid for their title like a pymary license, and by the Dark Lady's Half Dozen, I say that makes them far nobler than I am.