i am just a picture frame | june catch-all

[terriblepurpose]

Who: Paul Atreides, Ortus Nigenad, and friends
What: Memory share + other
When: June
Where: Various

Content Warnings: corpses, torture, death, gun violence, eugenics

Comments

early june | gaze: heresy hut | palamedes sextus

[noniad]

cw: death, corpses, gun violence, grief

[The bodies in the mortuary are grey-clad, their faces shattered inward in nightmarish obliteration, and the eyes that alight on them are blurred with slow, heavy tears. They do not cease as the bodies are gathered (such terrible weight) and conveyed gently to be lain out at the very much animate Lady Pent's direction, arrayed with careful hands to preserve what dignity can be given to them.

It is as if he is there, down to the slightest detail of the senses, and yet he cannot alter its course, trapped in the unfolding of the memory like a nightmare. It proceeds as it did in unlife, and from the instant that Ortus hears purposeful footsteps paired to the soft whir of spinning wheels, he wonders in desperate pointlessness which he would spare the young Warden if he only could - the witnessing of one's body so defiled, or the delicate Duchess of Rhodes in attendance upon it.

There is scant tenderness in death, and no solace, and yet she makes a reverence of the brute art of a flesh magician, her skeletal fingers assured and adoring wherever they touch upon the hollow shells of the Sixth.

He had not realized how often his eyes had slid back to her as they debated their next steps in a horror of perplexity, or how often hers drifted towards the living dead in state on a rubberized tarp, until the unsettled conclusion of their futile planning, until Ortus once more joined the other cavaliers in gathering up the compact body of their fallen fellow. They set her back on the table they first bore her from, and Ortus folds her hands on her chest, feathers out her dark, short-shorn hair as gently as he could.

Then there is only the return to collect the young Warden, and the woeful little sigh that heralds a finality that he could hardly bear then, can still hardly bear now.

"Oh, goodbye!" She calls out, in her sweet, breathy voice, leavened with the impossible grief of the dead for the living. "Goodbye, Palamedes, my first strand - goodbye, Camilla, my second...One cord was overpowered, two cords could defend themselves, but three were not broken by the living or the dead."

The world resolves back into the shadowed interior of his tiny shed, where he still sits across from the young Warden Palamedes Sextus, much-loved and much-mourned, his face whole and entire.

This is far from an auspicious beginning to their literary discussion, he thinks, in absurd and awful shock, his own face slack with dismay. He does not know what to say, and he does not know how to say it.]

if this posts twice i'm rioting against dw

[megatheorem]

[A strange thing, to look at himself lying dead on a slab. To look, even, through another pair of eyes, present and outside himself at once, manifold grief for a thing that has never happened. Palamedes looks through Ortus' blur of tears at his own ruined skull, the eerie stillness of his own corpse, the incredibly obvious and suspect cleanliness of the rest of him that surely someone else will bring up?— and he thinks, Oh, someone should tell him.

Camilla is harder to look at, despite the fiction of it; Palamedes wishes he could turn Ortus' gaze himself, but that isn't how these things go, he knows. He thinks of Camilla's face whole and hale and entire, and he feels a small mercy that Ortus' tears cannot possibly merge and mix with more of his own.

But Dulcinea Septimus he would know anywhere. With bone-deep certainty he knows her, without the aid of Ortus' recognition. The Empire and everything in it could experience a much deserved awful heat death and the soul of Palamedes Sextus would know that of Dulcinea Septimus without needing to be told.

(He knows this with extra certainty, because of the way Cytherea had not been her, the way Cytherea's presence had confused and tormented him for weeks on end, a question to which he could not find a satisfying answer. He can see the way Dulcinea's delicate fingers touch the un-corpses of himself and Camilla with the exact amount of affection Cytherea had lacked in her carelessness.

He does not need to be told.)

Strange, then, to watch the Lady Septimus touch the bodies that are not theirs, to hear her bid farewell and to know again without being told that she is not a figment, like the corpses on the wheeled slabs. Strange to hear her voice in echo through memory and death and to gain a measure of peace from it, as if she had been there properly to bid them farewell.

Palamedes knows it is coincidence, the miraculous odds that Dulcinea's soul would be spun up in this, this thing, and that Ortus would have been there (Harrow, he assumes, because who else), and that he and Ortus would have both been here, brought together at the time the magic of this world bends to make this single moment possible. It's a coincidence by every stretch of the imagination, but Palamedes chooses sentiment; chooses instead to take Dulcinea's words to the bodies that are not his nor Camilla's and take them for himself, to wrap them up in delicate cloth like fragile mementos and put them away somewhere private, in case he ever needs the reminder.

And then he is back in Ortus' drafty little shack, blinking back the faintest inkling of a tear, and then he smiles.]

You know, that's precisely how she sounded in all of her letters, give or take a little mourning. [The drama of it all... He wonders if she figured out the obvious problem, and simply leaned into the dramatics anyway.

He doubts he'll ever know, but to know even this much looses a knot in his chest that's sat there since Cytherea told him she hardly suffered.]

Was she alright, do you think? And I saw Abigail, would you say— as much as anyone could be alright after death, you know— ah, wait.

[Wait, right:] You know, that isn't what happened to me. Or Cam. Cam is fine, actually, if otherwise occupied in the sea.

[noniad]

[There is a method of communication Ortus has learned of since he came here, in his readings about those who take to the sea. It is called a message in a bottle, a missive enclosed in stoppered glass and tossed into the waves, so their currents may carry it where they will. It is an act of desperate hope, a reaching out across space and time with no certainty that the message will ever be received, or when, or into whose hands it may fall.

He had drawn parallels with the haunted fragments his Lady had received in her Canaan House. He had never imagined he would become a bottle himself, the vessel of dead woman's final farewell. He looks at the young man who has received those impossible words, and Ortus thinks that he has rarely known such a privilege of service.]

She was vital and unburdened in death. Fiercely kind, and extraordinarily brave. She knew those were but your echoes, though it grieved her still to be so parted from you both. [His sorrow alters, transmuted to gentleness in his eulogizing.] We did not know what had befallen those not with us.

But we were well, so much as ghosts may be. Lady Pent, Seneschal Quinn, Duchess Septimus, Sir Ebdoma, Lieutenant Dyas, and myself. The Fourth, Lady Pent sent on to the River, to spare them the danger we faced. The Master Templar Octakiseron passed from that place of his own will.

I am eased to know that fate was not a true one, for you or your cavalier. She never believed that it could have been so. She spoke highly of you.

[He pauses, adjusting himself to sit straighter, near-black eyes slanted away for a passing moment of courtesy. There is more to this tale, and he is honorbound to tell it, so he does, in plain, measured calm.]

What you witnessed was a construct. One Lady Harrowhark sunk into the River, anchored to her own mind, and gathered the dead of Canaan House to in order to assist her in a great effort. We faced a haunting there, from a terrible enemy, and the Duchess Septimus was with us when that enemy fell. We all returned to the River, and whatever may lie beyond it, if Lady Pent was right - and I would not doubt her word.

[megatheorem]

[It's a lot to take in, and while Palamedes gets his elbows on the table and leans his chin in his hand, he takes in the most important notes of information. All of them well - such as ghosts may be, and he wonders if he should illuminate particular details about other ghosts; perhaps in a moment - and a bubble in the River, excellent job Harrow!, and it feels... strange, to hear. Comforting, but distantly, as if learning about the people he just saw with Ortus' own eyes through a fog.

It makes some degree of sense, he supposes, if he remembers where he himself was at the time; he chooses not to dwell on the months spent staring at the same peeling Canaan House wallpaper while things moved on in the world without him. The same way he chooses not to dwell on how this town marched steadily onward while he laid stupid and invertebrate in the sea for over a month. There's an anchoring point in all of them being well in Harrow's construct, and beyond, that centers him away from that persistent creep of isolation.

So! He clears his throat and whaps his other hand down on the table, as if to pop himself back into the conversation proper. Ahem! Well!]

Harrow made a bubble! I knew I should have written the papers on the theory sooner; hindsight. She gets it from me.

[xoxo Harrow, who is surely sneezing momentously right now from all of these very true words about who is the best necromancer of a generation, right here.]

I know it wasn't your choice, so you have my sincerest apologies that this place shoved all of that at me so suddenly, but— thank you, anyway. I'd never have known any of that otherwise; what happened to all of you.

[But not Deuteros, he notes idly, and takes a kind of grim satisfaction in that; they may not have been the best of pals, but to add another name to the list of people Canaan House couldn't claim is a point of victory, no matter how late.

He glances down, considering the tabletop rather than stare at Ortus and wonder if more memories will fall out between them. He wants, selfishly, a full account of the entire battle, so that he might nod along and interject with all of the appropriate dramatic responses, and he wants to remember Dulcinea's face without his and Camilla's own shattered beyond recognition beside her, but— hmm.]

If it should ease your mind at all, Camilla survived completely. Now, indulge me for a minute, because I'm- [don't say 'dying to know'] -curious about the nature of these flashes. Specifically, if a necromancer happened to have enough experience with Sixth psychometry, could they influence trace amounts of thanergy to produce a particular flash of choice?

[He picks his head up off his hand, extending that hand to Ortus like one might offer an arm wrestle, except with necromagic.]

I'm asking you to do something potentially upsetting and I'm off topic, so feel free to course correct me back to literature. But what do you say?

[noniad]

[The intellectual interest Palamedes shows in relation to the bubble combined with that particular necromantic briskness to assert his own competency in the work wrests an small, surprised smile from Ortus, if only for a moment. He clears his throat like one shaking bone dust from their robes, his hand coming up to politely cover it, and he finds that the expression lingers wonder than he expects, softening in the relief of knowing that Camilla Hect survived.

He has known too many brave young dead. Even if this one is a stranger to him, it does not change his sentiment.]

It does ease my mind. [But he notes the omission of the Warden, the specificity of completely; perhaps Palamedes will observe Ortus' observation in turn.] As it eases it to know that I have been able to assist in your understanding, Warden. The others spoke at length about the unusual nature of our circumstances, in terms of the necromantic theorems at work. Perhaps you may discuss them with my Lady.

[Translated from the circumnavigating reticence of the Ninth, what Ortus means might best be expressed as: it would be good for Harrow and Palamedes to talk about what happened, necromancer to necromancer, and perhaps friend to friend. That, perhaps further than that, he is set at greater ease to know that there is one less terrible, grief-wracked secret in the world that lies between people like the uneasy dead themselves.

This articulated, he extends his hand back towards Palamedes, soft fingers half-curled inward with only traces of his usual timidness.]

And I would say, in answer to your question, that I have no doubt of the prowess of a Sixth House Warden in their discipline.