deercountry | wolves in the middle of town

The revenant emerges from the study in the absence of God, padding on unshod feet to the display of weapons in the room adjacent. She stands before them for a time marked by the ticking of a distant, mistimed clock, her unbound hair falling across her face, all that moves of her the tiny lift and plunge of her chest with unwelcome breath.

She does not touch the rapier, or the net that hangs above it. She leaves them to the snake and the butterfly, whose voices she does not hear, and she goes walking through the halls of the last house in the world she ever would have chosen to haunt.

(But of course, she has a choice. There is always a choice. That is the most terrible thing.)

When she comes across another unquiet body, she stands in a doorway, or at the threshold of a hall, or frames herself, somehow, at odds with the house around her, a pallid parasitic orchid intruder from some other place, and she will not be the first to speak as she observes them with bruised rose-petal eyes flecked through with clotted green.

Once upon a time, a ship of fools crossed the Second Saint to serve the King Undying, and the lesson they learned about this mistake was, well, nasty, brutish, and short, to borrow a phrase from whichever long-dead pre-Resurrection author that had been. The ship itself survived, as did the Saint; the fools were... repurposed, to a higher calling.

Then, as now, the First Saint observes her in turn, for long and silent seconds, before he acts.

(But of course, he has also been observing her since the snake reported her ungainly attentions to his brother, from the other side of the house; she may have left the rapier and net to the care and attention of the Omens catching up with each other, but that doesn't mean her departure left them behind; Alfred has been utterly delighted to develop his capacities for quietly ~~spying on~~ observing the entirety of the house's internal dimensions, and even fully aware of his general presence in the house, people still don't ever seem to remember how many places in a given room a thin and flexible dark shadow can use to disappear.)

This time, the comb that rests in Augustine's outstretched fingers did not come from a convenient shard of bone, peeled away from a sailboard's cross-brace; it came from the top of his dresser, part of a matched set, for all that he tends far more often to use the brush.

"Your hair still looks appalling," he remarks, in exactly the same offensively-lighthearted tone he has reserved for his most aggressively annoying comments for at least the last three thousand years. "Don't tell me you haven't been able to finish detangling it once, in all this time?"

Another woman, whether lesser or greater than this one, might remark, after closing her exhausted eyes, so it was real, after all. She would, at the very least, consider the confirmation of reality in some light beyond a quiet folding away of the teeth of a comb and the taste of awful saltwater on the breeze. She had been a misery and a horror then; she is a misery and a horror now. She might have made something of that.

The Mercymorn of Augustine's last acquaintance would have bristled at the offer of any aid from him, especially in the reminder of her weakness and dishevelment. She would have slapped the comb away from him completely or launched into a tirade about his flippancy, either one of which would have fallen into their so familiar black waltz.

This Mercymorn, bleached and listless, straightens like a puppet compelled to hoist its own strings. She closes the gap between them, or seeks to, with the tight, controlled steps of someone in pain.

"Bend down," she instructs, calmly, "I wish to examine your brain."

Mercymorn hardly ever goes out.

There are no wards on the doors or the windows, no locks or bars. No terrible construct will uproot itself to chase her down if she steps across the threshold. God might even let her go, for a while, now that he's made his point, and it's the point that pins her still to the shoddy cardpaper illusion of this house.

So she curls up on it, numb, dumb thing that she is. She lines her nest with pilfered quilts atop a mattress she keeps hospital cornered by rote. She fusses, now and then, with the furniture she set aside when she claimed this dusty, secret place, all of it gone to ruin and wreck, now knit into an intricate geometric puzzle at one end of the attic. When base needs compel her, she descends the narrow dropping stairs and attends to them in the cloistered dark of the hours after midnight. She sleeps. She scratches paint from the blinded window and sets her eye at it, sometimes, when she cannot.

So when she find herself at the edge of the woods that creep up on the house like a sieging army, it is almost as strange as what drew her out to these trees, the pale and gleaming fey thing that had come to stand at the farthest lunar shadow of the house.

The fey thing wears a tattered sheet stained with the whole reeking rainbow of human biological function. She has fawn coloured curls sizzling close to her scalp, delicate cheekbones under skin so fine it might split open upon them, and blood all about her slack mouth. She has eyes so blue and luminous they hardly seem real, even clouded and sightless as they are, and from her sagging, nerveless fist she trails a rapier.

"Oh, my poor dead darling," Mercymorn says to Cytherea the First, traitor to God, killer of children, as she reaches forth to cradle her chill face in tender hands, "Look what they did to you."

It doesn't surprise her at all to find the sword in her belly. She would never have expected any less.

The fight is a quiet one. All their fights were always quiet ones. They could tear strips off each other in whispers, flense each other in near silence, all at their best, and Cytherea is far from her best. It could make Mercy weep, if she hadn't already wept more than enough over her dear little fool.

When they return to the house, Mercy's fingers tight laced to hers, Mercy is still knitting her fractured liver, and Cytherea wears a ghost ward of the most vicious rebuking kind on her wide, sensitive looking forehead. She wobbles and stumbles into Mercy more than once, her limbs all at odds, and they have to stop a while when she coughs. (She stabs Mercy again there, for her troubles. Mercy adds another ring to the ward.)

It's through the door and up the stairs, Cytherea wilted senselessly against her shoulder until Mercy may settle her on the edge of her mattress. She slips down to collect her supplies, hushed and quickened with purpose, and when she returns, setting her burden aside, she finds Cytherea has toppled over and back, breathing in a wet, agonal rasp.

Mercy hushes her solicitiously as she draws her back up, unwinding the ruin of her shroud to bare her wasted little frame. She dips a sponge into warm, soapy water and begins to clean her, with utmost meticulous care, this horror of a corpse she knows almost as well as her own.

"I never missed you when you were alive," she says, with a gentle ache, to the thing that is not her sister and her friend and her playmate, "However long we were apart, wherever you went...I never thought I'd miss you so horribly when you were dead."

Cytherea spits up a gobbet of mutant lung tissue. It's almost like being home.

Edited 2022-10-14 14:42 (UTC)

wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

Mercymorn the First

open

a butterfly beaten in a summer rainfall | open to gaze house residents

just normal family interactions

only the most normal

closed

narrative

you came over me like some holy rite | cytherea the first