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cupoftrembling · 3 months

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Among the continent of the Shattered Planes, as has been increasingly obvious in my correspondence, the most abundant religious force is the Pantheon of Isosa. This is because, for a multitude of reasons, it is an objective fact. There is no mystery in its worship, no interrogation of why people believe it to be true. They simply have to open their eyes, see the shattered moon that hangs like a watchful eye over their homes. They simply have to look at the tears in the firmament, the stars and constellations that entropy has wrought. They simply have to speak to one of the many spirits or angels that were there at the dawn of time, who fought on either side of the Celestial Civil War. They have to just look at the smile on an old man’s face, or eat a warm meal, or share a laugh to know, somewhere, of the impermanence that The Wolf crept into reality.

The days pass, and it is all her fault. There is no need to wonder if it is true.

However, this is where I disagree with my contemporaries. Dr. Sutioni or Dr. Mya argues that this blatant fact has led to the dominance of the Isosian religion among the various, pious nations of the Askaven Continent. From the Western Wastes, where Wolf Apostates roam under their godhunter’s watchful eyes, to the forests of the Coalition of the Eastern Kingdoms. Even the Empire of Night, with their Adherence to the Everyman, is a form of Isosian anti-theism. They both argue in a cohesive faith, shared by each of these groups.

But look at the worshipers of the Eastern Kingdoms, who’s faith is so commingled with the state that even their kings claim a divine right to rule. Look even further, to the sects and mystery cults of the different divines within the forests of the kingdoms. The Friends of the Lady of Hounds, the Handmaidens of the Winter Queen, Qoonla’s Lovers. The Wolf Apostates border on atavism, more akin to relic-worship of whatever shards left over from the Celestial Civil War they can find buried among the snow of the Western Wastes. The nomadic orcs of the hinterlands have no structured religion, aside from whatever paladin covens they host, instead focusing on a stronger sort of familiar Lare. Even the strongest sense of a state religion focusing solely on the Isosian pantheon places itself as its opposite, the Adherence to the Everyman. More a philosophical guideline in the Empire of Night, the Adherence is a set of strictures and rules to tradition. To list them all would bore even me, but a common throughline throughout all of them is a form of disgust so obsessive that it borders on reverence. A preoccupation with the wrongs of the gods and their followers that were committed on the ‘every man.’ Humanity becomes divine and perfect, and the tools made by them become even moreso.

These are not the hallmarks of an organized religious force. Each of them are about Isosa and her coven in one way or another, but few are informed by her. The dedicated Isosian faithful are demonstrably fewer than the combined adherents of the other doctrines or philosophies. They keep to the wilds or to select, divided neighborhoods. The cities and outposts that Isosa has dominion over tend to be smaller, isolated affairs, who strive to be self-sufficient in all things. It is demonstrably harder to have the same sort of order and communal understanding that these adherents claim in larger settings.

There were few, if any, Isosian enclaves in the lawless monarchy that is Mariposa. Records indicate that a few neighborhoods banded together under the goddess of order during the reign of Queen Mariposa the Maddened. However, due to citysickness and general apathy towards growth by the faithful, those dissipated within one generation. Their temple, nestled deep within the Upper Wards, still stands.

The House of Swinging Trees was a tall, granite building, with a relief of alms being given by Isosa to humanity. It was all harsh edges and awkward lines, each converging towards the sky at slants. Made from holy geometry and mathematical precision. It sat in the center of a large and meticulous garden, with stones lining the center of a massive Babylon Willow. The grass that lay between the stones was some of the only for miles, an enclave of natural beauty in the iron and stone city of Mariposa. As if someone had raised the building from the ground, as if someone had hewn this place from the world itself.

This was what Remiel had been looking for.

He stood in front of the House of Swinging Trees for what felt like too long. It was just before night time, at the edge of winter. On his back, his loaned greatsword rubbed against a heavy bookbag. A gift, stuffed with knowledge, all of it leading him here. It dug into his shoulders, made his neck strain and hurt. If he wore one or the other, perhaps the awkward pain would not be here. But Remiel felt unsure whether he’d need knowledge or the blade and, one to loath uncertainty, brought both.

At the gate, made of pyrite shined to look like gold, stood an ashen orc. He was wearing no clothes of the scholar or theologian, no bag or book of hours. Under his arm on a single point sling was a shotgun. Remiel could hear its bullet singing to him, feel its call on the back of his neck. The orc was young, then. And the blade looked so large in the child’s eyes. The man in front of him wore a bruise under his eye, and several scratches across his face. From his neck, a single, silver broken fang. He glared at the paladin, rolling his eyes in displeasure.

“Need something, sir?” The orc grunted, words escaping from beyond his silver capped tusks. Between his lips and between his teeth, a cigarette. It smelt of sawdust and datura. “Temple’s closed, if that’s what you’re looking for. Healer is out sick, if you can believe it.”

“Oh um,” Remiel grips the strap of his book bag a bit tighter, as if that might protect him. “Are they alright?”

“Huh?” The orc raised an eyebrow. “How would I know?”

“You work, um, here, right?”

The orc narrows his eyes a bit. “Aye.”

“Well-” Remiel pauses for a second, and then thinks better of pressing the matter. “I guess, yeah, I guess it really doesn't matter. I just heard that you guys have a really good library.”

“We aren’t a charity case, kid. You want books, go to Sans Bernadine University.”

Remiel raised an eyebrow in shock. “Didn’t you hear about it?”

The orc chuckles to himself, shaking his head and crossing his arms. “Yeah, I did. Smelt it too.”

“Yeah, real pity about it.” Remiel frowned, knuckles white on his bookbag.

“Real pity.” The orc states dryly. “So, sorry, guess you’ll have to come back some other day.”

The paladin took a step forward, puffing out his chest in a show of strength. “No, I don’t think I will.”

He was face to face with the orc now, each standing heads taller than an average man. The orc scowled and took his cigarette from out of his mouth. “Yea? And why’s that, tough guy?”

“I am a paladin of Isosa.” Remiel continued, hand moving towards his sword like his rector had taught him. Words fail you, Remiel hears on the shivers of his neck, sense fail you, faith in steel. Remiel bites back the thoughts and hopes, beyond hope, that they are wrong. He speaks again. “And I need to know everything you know.”

The orc looks back at the sword on his back, and then back at the almost soft face in front of him. “Huh, real paladin.” This is all the orc can say.

“Can you please just let me in.” Remiel narrows his eyes. “Please.”

The orc smiles, drops the cigarette from his lips, and snuffs the flame out with his heel. “Sorrow is going to want to hear from you.”

The inside of the House of Swinging Trees was just as cold as the exterior. Granite floors and more pyrite light fixtures. It was lit entirely by candle and by wick, none of the halogen lights of most of the Mariposian homes of the day. Most of the electricity in the city came from large, crystalline bullets in power-factories along the coast. The bullet technology, the trapping of emotions and memories into physical, powerful forms, were considered anathema by the most militant of Isosian followers. They did, however, make an exception for weaponry. There were few arms more effective than the bullet powered firearm, and there were always causes for their use.

On the table next to Remiel were at least half a dozen of these firearms. Their handles and stocks were made from pure alder wood. Harvested in the depth of summer, the season supposedly closest to what the Fractal Fields of Isosa were. These weapons, they are true. They seem more real than the table around them, more situated in their place. Shotguns, pistols, small arms adept in the city style close quarters fighting that one would be familiar with here in Mariposa. There were no long rifles, no things of distance. Remiel had, at one point or another, thought of trading in his long, curving blade for such weapons. He had gotten into a scrape or two here in Mariposa, and while his sword is an effective mark of his station within the paladin’s of Isosa, it did not suit itself for the alleyways that Mariposian combat, often getting caught on the walls and bars that made up the city. He would rely on his words and, when those failed, the gifts his faith and birth had given him. And, throughout this, he felt loath to give up the sword.

The pistol besides his hand did seem all that more alluring, however.

On the table, next to these weapons of war, were books. The very thing that Remiel had been seeking. The dust covers were still on them, and it had been clear that they had never been opened by the inhabitants of the House of Swinging Trees. The room he was sat in had a window on the far side of it. Through it, he could see the courtyard with the Babylon Willow. He saw a small cambion man, blue with tall, straight horns, pruning a hibiscus bush. His clothing was a white skirt, with the little laces on the edge of it. On his head, tucking in his braided, brown hair, was a large sun hat, keeping the dusk sun from his eyes. The area of the city they were in was not as tall and grand as some of the others, as ambassadors and other men of power tended to like this neighborhood for its simplicity and safety. In the distance, one could see the whole of Queen’s Court, with its titanic skyscrapers covered in equally as mighty rose petals. One could see the sun setting behind the Concordat of Miracles, see the feral angel straining in vain against the iron nails driven through its wings. Out there, that is Mariposa. Towering and true. Above it, Imperial Warballoons cover the city like a dense haze, with little mechanized men flying between them. Green and gold banners hang from the edge of the balloons, each denoting a crescent moon with a sword driven through them, lest Mariposa forget who now rules it.

But here, in this temple, this could not be Mariposa, not really. The House of Swinging Trees was grand, certainly, but did not extend as far as the buildings around it. The gardens were manicured and delightful, each fit to burst with fruit that did not taste like sickly sweet perfume. Each of the blades of grass are the same length. Each of the doors are the same size, just a bit too short for Remiel to comfortably fit in. Each of the people housed here are all the same amount of driven, keen and sharp in their direction.

They’re all so like his home growing up. A little cabin in the fields somewhere in the Eastern Kingdoms. Always with three logs burning in the fireplace and small bushes in front of the windows. There was a scent of aspen on the breeze, despite there being no such forest near by the rolling fields of barley and grain. His father had described it as paradise after the hell of the Ibi-Vujčić Conflict. Where that was fire, this was calm, where that was storm, this was peace. He would sit in the dirt for hours, marveling at the sapphire beatles sitting on the leaves. Remiel once, and only once, saw Ferdinand, his father, reach his hand towards one of them, as to join them in their commiseration before his mother placed her hand on his shoulder. The beatles flew away, the moment over. They even had a babylon willow shadowing the house. Remiel would sit under its branches, trace his hands along its weeping branchlets like parting water. The leaves were always dryer, like it was a land of always autumn. A secret, private little enclave, just before the winter made them hunker in. Remiel never remembered the winter ever arriving, or the sweltering heat of summer. It was always in that secret liminal space, incapable of moving beyond or backwards.

Remiel placed his hand on the cold stone of the windowsill. There was no insulation between the walls and the outside, as it was made entirely out of stone and faith. The building was drafty and inhospitable to any of those not touched by Isosa’s constant contentment. Remiel felt a shiver fall down his spine. There was a biting, and blood in the mouth, and a shattering. And then it was over.

“It is quite a view.” A voice came from behind him. It was not a cold voice, but distant. Authoritative. It sounded, for only a moment, like his mother’s. He spun around, half convinced it was her. It was not, dear reader. She was shorter, first of all. Her skin was green and from her this infernal heat arose. Her tail curled around her right leg like a snake, a sign of piety and respect. Her horns were backswept and her hair was in a bun with a silver spear through the back of it. She smiled plainly, leaving dimples in her cheeks and no creases in her eyes. A cambion. Remiel fought the urge to look disappointed, a battle he did not win.

The woman winced in a sort of ego-pain at the paladin’s face, quickly dropping the smile. Remiel noticed her discomfort and brought his hands in front of him, fingers splayed in some sort of deference. “Oh my god, I am so sorry, miss. I j- I just thought you were someone. Someone I knew, someone else.”

“Ah,” The woman regained her smile, placing her hands behind her back. “No offense taken, paladin. I would, too, be disappointed if I thought I knew someone in this city, only for the truth to rip such comfort away from me.”

Remiel let out a sigh of relief, clearly believing whatever this woman was saying. She stood tall, with an impeccably straight back. Her hooves clopped against the floor, her gait was measured and disarming in its grace. “Your doorman, Clovis. He said you were the Abbess.”

The cambion nodded. “Mother Superior Brightwind, but please, Sorrow will suffice.”

“Brightwind?” Remiel repeats. “I know of a Vera Brightwind in Varak, I met pilgrims traveling to her abbey.”

Sorrow sucks air in between her teeth. They are sharp and the air tastes like holding onto a rosebush so hard you bleed. She exhales such violence and looks towards the floor. “My half sister. When my father remarried, he moved to the hinterlands.”

“Is religious leadership in your family then?” Remiel asked with a genuine curiosity.

Sorrow blinked once, and then twice. She was not used to personal, prying questions. It was not in the nature of her order to truly care. “My mother ran a paladin school in Karnata, before it's fall.”

Remiel smiled. “I see, you come by it honestly, then.”

“Truthfully,” Sorrow responds in a moment of un-vigilance, looking out towards the city. She stares at the space where the Sans Bernadine tower once stood, now a smoldering ruin. “This is a relatively new position.”

“I heard stories of the House of Swinging Trees from my rector. I thought it was abandoned years ago.” Remiel follows her eyeline, looking at the Concordat of Miracles. Both think they are looking at the same thing. “I’m really impressed by how you rebuilt it.”

“I’m.” Sorrow’s breath caught in her mouth. “Thank you, Ser Fey.”

Remiel looks back at her. “Remiel.” He pauses again. “Please.”

“I’m not too used to a paladin complimenting me, is all.”

“Yeah,” Remiel looks back out the window, this time looking at the now setting sun. “I don’t think a lot of people get compliments from us."

“That is my experience too.”Sorrow looks back at him with a face unreadable to me. “Why are you here, Ser Fey?” Sorrow asks what should be a question, but the words in her mouth can’t help but form a demand.

Remiel looks at her and frowns. He paces back towards the table and begins to flip through a book awkwardly. “Have, um, you heard from Isosa. At all, in the last couple years?”

Sorrow looks at the pages he is flipping through, unable to tell what he is looking at, if anything at all. Her fists ball in absent flame for just a moment. Is it a challenge? Is this an inquisition? Has someone questioned her faith? The air lionized with truth, she can feel Remiel’s magic begin to worm it's way into her mouth. It tastes like apricots and, somewhere distant, Remiel’s eyes glow.

“No.” Is all Sorrow ever could have said. She is not strong enough to lie.

The aura of truth fades, and so does the light in Remiel’s eyes. “None of the leadership I’ve talked to. It's been about twelve years since anyone mortal has heard from her. Same for the angels.” Remiel lets out a sigh. He hates using that. It is like holding a breath in his stomach, in his veins. To force a compulsion, it is like having air in your blood, or a dagger at your neck. “That's why I’m here, in Mariposa. It’s like she’s just gone.”

Sorrow blinks again. She fights the rising feeling of relief in her. Her mother always told her of hearing their goddess’s voice, guiding her, showing her the Grand Weft. Sorrow had never heard such things, not even in her childhood. When Sorrow looked to the sky, pleaded for some sort of guidance, she heard nothing. Only sweet, mortal silence. How lonely, how dreadfully lonely, Sorrow thought. She felt the bile of anger, or maybe resentment, rise in the back of her throat. Remiel stood before her, gleaming and resplendent in Isosa’s light, locs braided so tightly that it must have been divine. There must not have been a moment in his life that he had ever felt so alone, where the comfort of Isosa’s voice was not there to guide him.

Sorrow clenched her fingers a bit tighter, the room got just a bit hotter, and a bead of sweat began to roll down Remiel’s brow. He was everything she had ought to be. Servile and guided, never left in the abyss of having to make his own choices, or live with his own mistakes. To choose between a daughter and husband would have been no choice to him, even as the flames of The Wolf licked the back of his neck. He would not look at his daughter's eyes and wonder if he made the right choice. He would simply know, and that would be all he could ever need.

And then, she remembered.

He was just as lost as she was. He heard no divine choir or voice. Isosa had condemned them all, the powers of the church, to that cruel silence. His hands gripped the table, he had sought Sorrow out on his own, just as unsure as she was. There was no guidance here, no path to follow. A commiseration of grasping in the dark. A concordat of loneliness. And then her hands relaxed in un-vigilance. But the room still felt just as warm, burning in absent flame.

“Sorrow?” Remiel asks in genuine concern. He takes a step towards her, hands out in front of him like she was a wild animal. The room is spinning, the world is spinning. “Hey, hey, are- hey are you ok?”

“Huh?” Sorrow responds uncharmingly. She grasps the bookshelf next to her. “No, I'm ok.” She sucks in air. “Why?”

“You look like you just saw a ghost.” The paladin responds, stepping towards her again. And, on the back of his neck, he sees her for how she really is. Knees are bowed, the wind blows through her, her hands shake and try to find purchase. A cruel part of Remiel knows she is weak, and a voice that sounds like his mother almost commands him to excise the weakness from his church. These voices are ghosts, dear readers, shivers of a dying world. Remiel sucks air in through his teeth and forces these ghosts back into the past. “I just wanted. To make sure.” His voice is similarly shaky.

“Citysickness gets the best of us, I’m afraid.” Sorrow lies. Does he know? That she, for a moment, doubted him? Resented him? Had that moment of unvigilance disguised his aura of truth from probing her mind yet again? Did he feel her call on that absent flame? She sees the bead of sweat on Remiel’s brow. “Please, for my own sake, pay it no mind.”

Remiel nods, and the perspiration falls from his brow. “Then I will, Miss Brightwind.”

Sorrow lets her borrowed breath out, centers herself, and is relieved. “You mentioned Mariposa. Why here?”

Remiel takes the sword from off of his back, rolls his aching shoulders, and then places a heavy book on the table next to him. His bookbag swings lightly against his hip. It is a worn, orange covered text, with gold lettering just barely starting to fade. It is a worn copy of Contemporaneous Reports of the Celestial Civil War from its Veterans by Dr. Blair Allcott. “This text, it guided me here.”

Sorrow walks to the table, footfalls more sure now, and places her hand on the cover of the text. It was… academic. There were no other words that Sorrow knew on how to describe it. And she was equally unsure of why a Paladin of Isosa would care for it. “What… did you find in it?”

“Truthfully, not much. An interesting read, but most of the discussions were, um, really dry. And not at all really relevant to Isosa’s disappearance.” Remiel flips the book open, skimming through the well worn pages. A faint smile on his face, a wind from the west. His father has it open on one knee, Remiel on the other. Better times. “I couldn’t use any of the techniques in the book, but it led me to Dr. Mya.”

“The author?”

“Yes! I met her, she’s a delightful woman.” Remiel beamed this smile so warm it almost made Sorrow blush. He flipped through the pages again, until the book was back on its front. He frowns, and the room goes cold. “Unfortunately, her research has been destroyed.”

“The Sans Bernadine riots.” Sorrow blinks. “I’ve… heard about them.”

“Yea, she told me they were all in the spire when it went up in flames.” Remiel sighed. “All that knowledge lost, all that work destroyed. Centuries of books. It’s a shame.”

Sorrow stares blankly. Does he know? If he does, the only way to survive is to strike now. Strike true, Sorrow. Trust not your senses, trust not your eyes, faith in steel. These are the words her mother taught her. The maxim of the Paladin’s of Isosa. She could get one, maybe two shots in before he would be on her. But, ultimately, he would break her, dash her on his sword. And he would be right to. She was there, at the burning of the spire. She tasted his work turn to ash on her tongue. He smiles at her, and she did nothing to stop them. Kill him, he threatens Order. Past the window, she sees the feral angel, and thinks she hears her voice. Anathema, he is as lost as you are.

“It is a shame.” Sorrow responds blankly. Her hand trembles. Her fingers reach for her trigger. He knows.

“Yeah,” Remiel sighs, not even noticing his companion’s trembling, doesn’t even feel the knife at his throat. “But, it wasn’t all fruitless.” He looks up at her, beaming smile. It is radiant and scouring and even Sorrow could not interpret it as something it was not. “I spoke to her, I think I have an idea of what we need to do.” All Sorrow can do is look at him, her eyes squinting against his radiance. He hurt to look at but there was nothing else she could have done. He was resplendent, she knows this. Next to him, she is dim. Behind him, the sun halos his hair. In her mouth, all she can taste is apricots and pride.

She fights the urge to retch.

“What do you need of me, Ser Fey?”

“The first step is to get a relic of Isosa’s, something she personally touched.” Remiel produces a small journal from his bookbag. Green leather cover, with a small, segmented chrysanthemum embossed on the front in gold. It is new, there is no crease in the hardened leather from use. It cost thirty-six Imperial Thalers, from a small hawking stand somewhere in the Upper Wards of the city. Remiel produces a small pen from his pocket and flips the book open to one of the first pages. His speech becomes clear, his eyes dart between the illustrations on the pages. He is focus, assurity. “And something that had met her before. An angel, maybe. A construct from the war. Something sentient, but not mortal.” He looks down at his own hand, at the pores in his skin. His light fades, just a moment. “I’m, uh, not sure why, but it can’t be mortal.”

Sorrow narrows her eyes and takes a step closer to Remiel’s field notes. There are two sets of handwriting. One is in cursive, with long, connected continents that make the words flow together. It is nigh unreadable at its face, but Sorrow is sure of the contents of every stroke, almost as if the words are laced with some sort of acausal magicks. Meaning is imprinted on the lines of the text, imparting knowledge through observation, but not recognition. It could have been written in celestial script, and Sorrow would have always known what it had said. The other is in shorthand, with scratchy acronyms and unsure handwriting. It is shaky, and doesn’t follow the lining of the paper well. Despite being written, ostensibly, in print, it is much harder to interpret content or meaning. The two texts weave together, adding on and commenting on various different drawings, both equally made in each style. Dissections that look as if they were pulled right from the air, and cosmology that is so convoluted that even a religious woman like Sorrow can not understand them. They are, somehow, in synch at every moment.

Remiel brings his pen down to the page and adds more shorthand script, describing, what Sorrow can only imagine, is whatever content he will glean from this meeting. He dates the top of his notes, sixty-third day of the Third Year of Queen Mariposa the Negligent, and looks back up at Sorrow. It is an expectant look, a look of directionlessness. It is a look familiar to Sorrow, every time she looks in the mirror. He needs her guidance, her grace. Sorrow smiles a bit. It is a litigious grin. A grin made famous by the first queen of Mariposa. A grin dotted on every mural of Queen Mariposa the Litigious, right as she tricks Isosa into letting her guard down. It is the grin of the knife up your sleeve, it is ‘fucking the other guy before he fucks you,’ it is knowing beyond all knowing that the man in front of you must die.

Remiel looks up from his page and does not know. The smile in front of him is genuine, it is guiding. It is all teeth. He smiles back. He thinks of a joke his classmate had once told him, about the smiling abbess. It’s a common joke shared among the orders of paladins. About a ruler with fangs being the only thing that could make an abbess smile. “Everything ok?” He responds, half in jest

“You said it can’t be a mortal.” Sorrow leans forward, eyes shadowed and glowing. “What about a hound?”

And Remiel understands.

Autumn is the season of treachery.

It is the season of guile and of luck. A cantankerous superstition that is held by almost every society on the Shattered Planes. During the Celestial Civil War, the Autumn Court of the Wyld joined with the Wolf in rebellion against a court structure that had long reviled them. It was a simple choice, really. Before the Wolf’s Rebelion, there was only one option. Calm servility under the boot of the fey queens. When war broke out, there was something inviting in the flames of The Wolf. It is only fitting, then, that the element most associated with the Autumn Fey was the treacherous fire. The Summer Court had crackling lightning, the Winter Court’s ensnaring frost, and the Spring Court with their regressive amber. But the Autumn Court, they were hoisted the element of change, forced to mantle a raw, possessive magick even before it was associated with the Wolf.

This is why I balk when scholars attribute the hatred of the autumn season with its fey counterpart. Even before that rapturous flame consumed the Autumn Court, before the cruel hands of the clock had started to tick, the queens and regents of the Wyld had long reviled the autumn season. They were the tricksters in the fairy tales, hucksters and gamblers with stolen names and currency. Their Alder King was shrouded in mystery and in myth, with no face nor identity whatsoever. They were the boogeyman that scared the fey children who were never supposed to grow up. Their fall was predicated on that history, not the other way around.

This fear of the autumn, of the dying of the light, replicated itself across the survivors of the Celestial Civil War. In the Eastern Kingdoms, autumn was a time where no work was supposed to be conducted. Harvest is to be conducted late in the summer and then you are not to leave your doors until the first snowfall. To such an end, social philosophers skilled in accelerationist magicks spend countless days channeling power into the land. Either to keep them from falling or to hasten their fall. They do not allow them to change from green to orange and the sky is filled with stars or snow. And, in the autumn of the 89th year of Queen Mariposa the Licentious, the Economic District burned to the ground. I saw it light up the horizon, flames stretching far and wide into the pillaring skyscrapers that once dotted its land.

This is where Callan knew he could find her.

This is a place once kissed by the Alder King’s treacherous season; it is known that tricksters follow tricksters. The ruined buildings and burned out homes smelled familiar to the outrider knight. The moon hung low in the sky and the air was still, somehow after five years, laden with smoke. If a witch could not be found here, out of all places in Mariposa, then she could not be found anywhere. Callan ran his hand through his hair, shaking the soot from it. It was longer, now, than when his queen had shaped it for him. He had grown it out absentmindedly over the last few months. Let it run wild and fallow. It was a mistake, something that had simply slipped his mind. If he had cared to will it to not grow, he could have. He balled his fist in the flaming scarlet hair, fingers interwoven in his braid. He’d have to cut it before he saw his queen again. Make it more in line with what she wanted it to be. She had given him that hair, it was not Callan’s to change. But he wouldn’t have to change it yet. He could grow it longer. Or shave it all off. He grips the hair a bit tighter, as if his hand was engulfed in a heatless flame.

Besides him, squatters sit in a burned out building. The wall was broken behind them, revealing the rest of the home and, further, the alleyway. Their garb is long and flowing, with their limbs bound in tight fabrics. Their long cloaks were adorned in round bits and bangles that sounded like rumbling thunder when they moved. They made a small, smokeless fire in front of them. They cradled it in their hands like a child and, behind their masked faces, Callan can see an equal amount of glee. They chanted in woeful prayer, litanies against the cold. The flames responded in kind, crackling and breaking in tune. These were the apostates of the Wolf, this Callan is certain of. They were once relegated to the Western Wastes in exile and rarely left it in fear of sectarian reprisal. They are the tricksters of the Isosain, the boogeyman that lurks in the heart of every man. The fall that was the consequence of pride.

Callan looked at them with an unknown feeling in his chest. Pity? Pride? Recognition? He is not sure, and as a consequence neither am I. And both of us revile such uncertainty. If there is a mystery, it must be revealed. If there is a secret, it must be uncovered. We are both cowards in that way. Callan took a step towards them, his figure shadowed in the crumbling doorway. He placed his hand against the ashen wood, flames of autumn reigniting deep in the heartwood for but a brief moment. The apostates, shocked by the sudden intrusion of a stranger, clasped the fire closer to their hearts. Their clothes did not singe, but their skin began to blister and burn from the flame. There were no enemies here in Mariposa, but reflex is reflex.

“Ahoy.” Callan raised a hand in sympathy. A single, lick of flame darted between his fingers. “Friend, not foe.”

One of the apostates lowers his white mask, revealing a stubbly chin and toothy grin. He lowered his hood, his ringed fingers gliding across the fabric with the delicate grace of a dancer. He was, once, back in the Eastern Kingdoms, before one poisoned word drove him west. “You’re a part of no Da’as.” The man motioned to Callan’s clothing, to the large fur coat that hung off his back.

Callan nodded and took a step forward. “I am not.”

“I didn’t know fire was popular outside of our Da’as.” The man’s companion added, visibly relaxing somewhat. “Poor publicity, I suppose.”

“It can be popular in the east, if you look close enough.”

The man with the stubbly chin smiles. “If you go east far enough, you eventually find yourself west.”

Callan narrows his eyes somewhat. “I’ve never been one for the horizon.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“You ever thought about heading to the wastes?” The man’s companion responded, unaware of whatever innuendo was shared between those two. His teeth were blunt, as were his words. His hands were clumsy and unken to fire. But he had kind eyes, and that crease where his smile folds his brow. “I know Isosian’s are not too friendly to fire.”

“I fear only one, and that is not Isosa.” Callan smiles at the man with blunt teeth. “But I will say, I understand the sentiment.”

“Come, sit for a spell.” The man with the stubbly chin slaps the floor next to him, kicking up ash and dust. “I’m Jiro of Da’as Cerena, my forward friend is Martine, of the same.”

“Martine? Mariposian name, no?” Callan sat down across from the fire. “How does it feel to be home again?”

“Ah, I am not home, though.” Martine rubbed his palms together furtively. “I am an outcast even in this place.”

“And yet,” Callan adds his warmth to the fire. “Here you are.”

“You’ve yet to introduce yourself, stranger.” Jiro asks.

“Where are my manners!” Callan smiles. “You may call me Callan.”

Jiro nods. “Pleasure.”

“Charmed!” Martine beams. “What brings you to the Great Butterfly, my friend Callan?”

“I am but a tourist, a visitor here.” Callan gesticulates with his free hand. With it the flames dance and flicker, as if following some sort of conductor. “I could ask the very same of you, my new friends. Mariposa is far from the wastes. I’m sure such a trek was perilous for you.”

“Our wayward brothers, the Isosian’s bothered us very little, actually.” Jiro stares into the fire. He leans against the half broken wall behind him in a show of relaxation. “We had more trouble with the terrain than we did with the lash.”

“Our Da’as moved with us.” Martine reaches inside his cloak and pulls out a smoked peach. He breaks off a piece with grubby fingers and hands it to Callan, across the fire. Callan, unaccustomed to gifts, does not take it. Martine shrugs and brings the dried fruit to his lips. After a moment, he continues. “Cerena values hospitality, if you care to stay with us for a spell.”

“I’ve heard all the wastrals keep such virtues.” Callan nods, closing his eyes slightly and taking in the sweet smoke. This wood had been burnt many times before, by many transients. Its bark was coated white with ash and soot. But yet, it still manages to light just the same. Its heartwood is a deep, burnt orange. Like autumn had seeps deep into its being. It looked like a sky on fire, like a birchwood in the throws of a fall. “If I am to stay with one, I am to stay with all.”

“There are no Isosians here, friend.” Martine sits up a bit tighter, eyes catching sparks like fireflies. “What is there to be afraid of in a hot meal?”

“It is not the heat I fear.” Callan chuffs. “I just do not need such comfort at the moment.”

“Perhaps that is what we seek in Mariposa proper.” Jiro traces his finger along the ashy dirt. The heat of the fire suffused them. Warded them from the cold. It was spring, now, in Mariposa. And yet, after the autumn fires, the Economic District was laden with that sodden chill. The air was thick with that dampness, as if the world itself was attempting to douse the absent flame with tears overflowing. The everburning wood was thick with wet. It was suffused with that lung sticking petrichor and the clouds hung low and dark in the sky.

And yet, even here, transients huddle. Mired in cold and wet rain, they congregate here. Callan looked at his companions, if not in name then in circumstance. Their shoulders were covered in dew, their cloaks were soaked through. But they had traveled miles towards Mariposa on sore feet and a dream. What was Mariposa to them? Callan could not know. To him, Mariposa was an iron cage. A task to be completed and then never thought of ever again. Overhead, the jackboots float their mechanized balloons across the air like lead dandelion seeds. Each with a gun and a will to kill. These facts prevented him from knowing.

“The people who rule this place hate your faith.” Callan grits his teeth. “Hate you. This is not comfort.”

“No.” Jiro smiles, his eyes cast low towards the flame. “But it might be one day.”

“No matter how many times the flames go out.” Martine smiles, too, looking at Callan bright and beaming. “We can always rekindle it.”

Callan brings his knees to his chest. If Lucius could see him, if anyone of the Primrose could see him, would they laugh? Would they chide him? Would they join in? He gritted his teeth, trying to grind the uncertainty out of his fangs. “Would it even be the same fire?” He asks, voice low under the crackle of the flames.

“That doesn’t matter.” Martine leans forward somewhat, as if to hear Callan all the more clearly. Like it was some secret the two needed to share. “As long as the fire burns.”

“Apostasy.” A voice comes from the warped doorway. “I will stand no more of it.”

All three whip their heads towards the voice. It was still, like a nail moving against glass. Each modulation made some deep part of Martine and Jiro flinch. Like a child from a nun’s ruler. They covered their hands, dowering the fire in a moment’s notice. The coals sputter and sizzle, keeping the flame deep in their hearts. The woman in the doorway with the voice that sounded like breaking glass held a gun in her hands. A revolver. A long, fanged barrel, mouth open and dripping with heat. Her finger was over the trigger, thumb on the hammer, both trembling. Her skin was this infernal green and her eyes glowed with a familiar, golden hue. She was an abbess, something about that gun made it eminently clear. It was more real than she was. It was the absence of flame, whereas fire is shifting and impermanent, that gun was sure and true. It was all hard edges and secant lines.

Behind her was a towering man. On his shoulders were a sheath and a bookbag, his hair woven tightly in locs, tight to his scalp and coming up around his shoulders. His dress is plain, for Mariposa at least. A white, billowing shirt. Skin like smooth, polished obsidian. Hair smells strongly of apricot and honey. He looked like he was pulled straight from a bodice ripper. He looked at the woman next to him almost like a lost dog. He looked like a paladin, of this they are all sure. It is in the way the sun seems to halo his head, in the way that the clouds part but the oppressive wet does not. He did not look at the men on the ground in front of him, as if they didn’t even register in his vision. Callan knew, however, that he was under this paladin’s intense scrutiny.

Callan stands up, dusts himself off. This is not his fight. For a moment, he thinks to give Martine a compassionate look. A thanks for the peach, if only in offer. He fights the desire, but it is still there. He continues to look at abbess and smiles a litigious smile. “I was unaware there was a contingent of Isosian’s here.”

“Would that have changed your behavior?” The paladin responds. “We’re a response to the Wolf, not a threat to keep good behavior.”

The abbess glares at the paladin. “Remiel.” Her voice is condescending, barely contained disgust at how wrong he is.

“Is that your name?” Callan interjects. “An odd one.”

“My mother picked it.” Remiel looked at the abbess again, almost bashfully, answering the question implied. “Beyond that, I’m not sure.”

“It's an old name, in an old language.” Callan shrugs. “I’m surprised a learned man does-”

“That is enough, Callan.” The abbess’ voice is steady, authoritative. She speaks and the world needs to listen. “That is enough.”

“Right,” Callan bristles. He motions to the men behind him. They are scared and in their hands are guns. “I take it you’re here for these two.”

“I am not.” The abbess responds. “But I am unsurprised that dogs congregate.”

Callan raises an eyebrow. His hand moves towards the hilt of his sword.

“You two.” Remiel raises a sword at the wastrals behind Callan. They raise their guns in kind, fingers trembling. Their feet are unsteady, the recoil from their shot would knock them to the ground. In another world, if they are to fire, they would certainly miss. “I need you to leave.”

“Remiel?” The abbess snaps her head towards the paladin. The wastrels back towards the broken down wall behind them. In a moment, they are gone.

“I don’t want to fight if I do not have to.” Remiel glares at the abbess but for a moment. Authority. It is pure and boring. For a moment, he is his mother. And order must be restored. Never questioned, never flinched. He has a ruling and he will be listened to. “Do I have to fight?”

“Only if I have to.” Callan responds. In that moment of distraction, of petty un-vigilance, he has drawn his sword. In his other hand, a curved staff topped with a carved, dragon’s head. The abbess curses under her breath. “Two on one doesn’t exactly seem a fair fight.”

“Isosa is not the goddess of fairness.” The abbess sneers. “I am not surprised you fail to grasp such a distinction.”

“Is- is this the one we’re looking for?” Remiel asks. His hands are gripping his twisted greatsword, one hand on the hilt, another choked up on the blade, just below the parrying hooks. A duelist's stance, to control the blade tighter in the close quarters. Callan knew Remiel was no amateur. It was instruction beat into him. “Sorrow, please tell me this is the right person.”

“He’s the hound you need.” Abbess Sorrow responds. “Trust not your eyes, trust not your senses.”

Remiel closes his eyes. He breathes in through his nose. Out through the mouth.“Faith in steel.”

It is Callan that strikes first, while Remiel is busy focusing himself. He brings his curved sword down against the flat of Remiel’s blade. Sparks fly as metal clashes, steel grinds against steel. There is an ear-raking sound and Remiel’s bladepoint heads down. Soot is kicked up in the air. The room grows warm in absent flame. Sorrow takes a step back from Remiel and smiles a litigious smile. Callan rears his other arm back, drawing the staff like a viper. His muscles contract, tighten like a piano wire.

His foot shifts underneath him, twisting backwards in a moment. Soot and ash and flame kick up in its wake, throwing that pyroclastic flow into the air. He thrusts the head of the staff at Remiel’s throat, an attempt to knock him off guard, disarm the paladin before he can retaliate. This is what Callan has on Remiel, surprise and guile. The tools of the autumn fey. Sorrow can not see through the obscuring smoke. She believes that Callan’s blade will find Remiel’s heart. And that would be just. Anathema.

Remiel can see.

His eyes do not follow Callan’s blade, it is not the deadly weapon in this circumstance. It is in how his muscles contract. Remiel can see the strands that make Callan, sees them tighten, sees the way energy flows in his body. He sees the nestle of flame in Callan’s heart, sees how it channels that fire. He knows the sword is to parry. The sword is the distraction, the rattler on the tale. That cane, that is where death is. That is the object that will unmoor him. It will open him up to what actual hatred this Callan has in his mind. The soot obscures his eyes, burns the edges of his retina. Trust not your eyes. The cane is moving faster now, it would be easy to bring his sword to Callan’s feet. This is what his rector would have done. Callan has left himself open to a brazen counter attack. He has no faith his opponent would be bold enough to go on the attack, let alone a paladin of Isosa. This is what would unmake him. Trust not your senses. This is what his mother would have done. Pressed the attack, take that giant greatsword and unmake Callan right now.

Faith in steel.

Remiel breaks his grip from his sword’s ricasso just as Callan’s cane passes it. He can feel the hot wind from the staff, feels it cut the air to ribbons. At the same moment, he twists his other shoulder, following the bladepoint into the ground. It brings Callan’s blade with it, locked in rapturous sound with the parrying hooks of his blade. His hand grabs Callan’s at the same point his blade’s edge hits the soot. He drops the greatsword, the one thing a paladin is never to do, his bookbag hitting his lower back. His hands divert Callan’s cane away from where it would strike. He thinks to throw the man, to continue his momentum and force this man to the ground. But something about how the energy flowed around the pirate, something about that ungodly heat and warmth that leaks from the edges of him, makes him reconsider.

Callan’s hair stands on edge. The trick his mentor had taught him, the trick that had forsaken many other bladesmen, had failed. His cane flies through the air, now shunned from the kill it so desperately needed. His blade knocked loose from his fingers. His eyes lock with Abbess Sorrow, smiling a familiar smile. It is the smile of Queen Mariposa the Litigious and it is a smile that Callan wears well. In her hand that baneful revolver. She is cycling the cylinder with her thumb. Waiting. Expectant. Like these two are carrion. Like these two are meat.

And Callan refuses to be meat.

He does not know it, but that is the only thought that writhes through his head. How much, at that moment, even beyond Remiel or even beyond Maeve or even beyond his target, he wishes to kill this woman smiling his smile back at him. He knows, for a moment, what it is like to hate the autumn The deception, the guile, the backhanded smile. That is all he has known the autumn to be. And, dear reader, he hates how good it makes him feel. It is a feeling that starts in his heart, a feeling that starts in his gut and in his muscles. It radiates to his fingers, to the tip of his nose, something coiled at the base of himself, desperate for release. Remiel’s back is turned towards his abbess and her hungry, hungry eyes. The air catches fire.

“I knew it.” The abbess smiles.

Arcs of flame smolder between Callan’s fingers, following odd lines and trajectories of travel. They are like birch leaves in fall. White spats of superheated air crackle and singe near the heads of his fingers. His hand lets the sword fall to the ground, knuckles white and fingers balled in flame. They are close now and Remiel can see Callan’s face now. The teeth barred, breath hot and heavy. He looks like he needed to bite Remiel, looks like his teeth grow long. His neck, now exposed from the long of his lapel, looked raw and worn, as if it was held by a cold iron choker. Like whoever held the leash held it tight. Callan is rabid, of this Remiel is sure. The paladin’s feet move backwards, kicking up the dusty ash of the floor.

Callan swipes to the left, the paladin slides to the right. Flame barely misses the tip of his nose. Licks of burning air fly off the edge of the fire, illuminating Remiel’s dark skin like starlight. Dusk and embers whorl around the two of them, caught in the updraft of their conflict. Remiel eyes his discarded sword. Callan eyes Sorrow’s gun. She has leveled it at Remiel’s back and at Callan’s heartflame. Her finger is off the trigger, for now.

“Tired paladin?” Callan asks through ragged breath. Fire takes its toll and the air was laden with ash.

“Maybe.” Remiel’s shoulders heave, the bookbag on his back feeling heavier than usual. His sword is next to Callan’s feet, if he goes for it, Callan can strike him. End him. “You don’t look perfect yourself.”

“The city, it chokes me.” He sneers. “Nothing more.”

Remiel raises an eyebrow. What did he mean by that? Nowhere, not in any scriptures, did Mariposa stand at odds with wolfkin. If anything, this leaden city would embolden agents of chaos. He thinks for a moment to look back at Sorrow, to look for guidance. An unseen fire cracks behind him, the cycling of Sorrow’s gun.

A round wizzes past Remiel’s ear, the air boiling in its wake. The paladin’s skin is warm, almost singing from the momentum of the round. It is like an absent flame, all the oppressive, destructive heat of fire with none of its warmth. None of its purpose. Somewhere, birds fly from their perch. Somewhere, a heart stops. It is the death of all things and it hits Callan square in the shoulder. His eyes grow wild and the force of the shot throws him to the dusty floor, feet tumbling over his torso. The fire, for a moment, dims. Remiel whips his head back towards Sorrow.

“What was that?” He shouts over the ringing in his ears. He stands from his half lurch. In a moment, and without Remiel noticing, his sword is back in his hand. “Sorrow, what did you just do?”

Sorrow canters her wrist, gun tilting at an odd angle. Air sublimates off of its barrel. It is shimmering with that dreadful, baleful heat. Remiel, for the first time, sees it. Sees that gun in her hand. Sees how it catches the light. It is a weapon made of broken glass, dripping with absent flame and refracted light. On the edges of it, rending jagged glass shards stick into the hands of the user. It is a weapon made from the shattering of hope and it is more real than she is. Her hand drips with blood. It is the only thing that is not burning.

“He would strike you again.” She replies. Her feet are shoulder’s width apart, her torso is tilted slightly. It is the stance of a killer. “I would not stand him to do so. Move.”

“You don’t have the authority to tell me that, Sorrow.” His voice is low, furtive. He tries not to sound like a petulant child.

“You waste your time, paladin.” She lilts at the end of her sentence, drawling his title into singsong mockery. She levels her gun towards him again. “Even now, he plots behind you.”

“That’s you, isn’t it.” He motions towards the gun in her hands. “That’s the real you. Whatever’s standing in front of me, that’s just the thing that shepherd's you from place to place.”

“Is it so bad to be something?” She places her free hand under the grip of the revolver. When he moves, that is when she will shoot. Her hands drip with absent flame. She can see it in his eyes, he is lost. He is what will make her lost again. This is just. Anathema. “Remiel, please. I need you to trust me.”

“You burn, Sorrow.” Remiel levels his sword against her, point lining up with the barrel of the pistol. “You’re burning already and you don’t even know it.”

Sorrow sucks air in. Her eyes go wild. Her hands tremble.

The air catches fire.

She is faster than Remiel is. The crack of heat lighting shatters outwards from that gun, gold and amber aurora flashing from where the bullet meets the frame. The air is thick with fire and with heat. The bullet crawls its way into Remiel’s torso, tearing and rending away skin and muscle. Remiel does not feel it. Trust not your senses. He is movement, he is momentum. His sword is in both of his hands and Remiel has broken into a sprint. He will spear her, dash her against his blade. He does not feel it, he can not feel it. He does not feel the bullet rending him, does not feel his muscles separating from each other. His heart beats fast, faster than it has in years. His skin is no longer diseased and he can not feel whatever was clawing at him.

He can not feel it.

The round misses his heart by inches. The recoil of the shot throws Sorrow’s hand into the air, obscuring Remiel in the barrel of the gun. He is fast, but he has momentum. Inertia will kill him. She feints, jerking her body left but moving right. He will move past her, of this she is sure. As sure as the gun in her hand. She cycles the cylinder, rotating the bullet into a stronger position. Energy crackles in her hand. She will have killed a paladin and then a wolfkin. She is strong, and that is purpose enough.

True to her thought, Remiel shoots past her by inches. Her mouth twists and contorts into that litigious grin without her even knowing. She wears, now, the mask of Mariposa. Every bit of hatred and scorn that this city has ever had is in Sorrow. Sorrow wishes she hated this feeling, she wishes it did not feel so good. She levels her gun against Remiel. He is in her sights. He kicked off an errant piece of architecture, forcing his body back towards his murderer. He is fast, but he is not fast enough. Sorrow sees it, sees the glowing amber blood drip from his skin. Sees his heart beating fast in his chest. She knows where she needs to shoot. She moves her finger over the trigger. It cuts her. She bleeds. This is just.

And then, fire.

There is fire between the two of them. Remiel is lost in its conflagration. There is heat and purpose in this flame. It is orange and yellow like birch trees in autumn and Sorrow knows. She looks to her side, her grin leaking from her lips. It is Callan. He is on the ground, shoulder dripping soot from his wound. It leaks out of him like magma, like some great wound in the earth extolling fire as virtue. Hair is in his eyes, and she can see now. See past the soot and the ash, she can see him. His hair is not the color of autumn. It is the color of blood. His hands are wrapt in fire. His face a familiar, Mariposian, grin. An infectious thought crosses her mind. It is luminous. Like a lighthouse at sea. It forces any sense or sensation from her thoughts. It forces her to think how much better it looks on him than on her.

Remiel crests through the flames at a speed that could break bones. Flames dance from off of his skin and off of his clothing, desperate to grab hold of him and tear him down. He hits Sorrow at that speed, the heat of the flames clinging to his skin. She feels a rib crack under the pressure. His breath is hot and damp and smells like rotting fruit. His voice carries that sickly sweet smell of decay and putrefaction. A corruption of the divine. She knows, past the pain and past the violence, what he truly is. He is the death of all things. Of divinity, of peace, of order. In Remiel, she sees what would cause her ruin. Her head is thrown back as they make contact with the wall behind them, and they keep going. Crashing through decaying and burnt wood, the dust and char fills her lungs.

They hit the ground together, his sword run through her shirt and the edges of her stomach. A glancing wound. A goring wound. She looks up at him and sees the auburn hue in his eyes shift from gold to green. His teeth are long and sharp like rows of delicate knives. In him, Sorrow sees a wolf. She grimaces in pain and in disgust, hand grasping for her gun she dropped three feet back. It shakes and rattles, like it tries to return to her.

“Anathema!” She cries out, blood and spit mixing in the back of her throat. “I lay on you anathema!” She tries to spit in his face, but her lips are too dry.

“You can’t do anything to me Sorrow.” Remiel responds in a voice too sure to be his. “I just fucking hate you.”

His blade twists in the dirt, tearing at Sorrow’s skin and muscle. He thinks she is run through, that she will bleed her last out on that blade. That is why it is curved, that is why his blade mimics the stag’s horns. It is not to resemble his goddess, it is to rip and tear and bleed and break. Sorrow grimaces and winces. She feels his own ichor drip out onto her, staining her shirt and mixing his blood with hers. It feels like acid in the veins, like a cruel burning without heat or warmth. She fears, dear reader. In his eyes, Sorrow sees the same hatred she shown him. Revealed, now. He is sharp, razors keened and honed to an edge. Remiel is a blade now, and nothing else. No longer obscured or hidden behind some litigious grin. In his eyes, she sees oblivion, and she would deserve it. It would be her place.

Sorrow refuses to be that subservient ever again.

She rears back her head and strikes Remiel against the nose with her brow. Ichor and sickening bone-crack splatter from Remiel. It drips into his mouth, frothing with spit and rage already. The pain pulls him back, makes him understand that he is a body with meat and with sense, not a weapon. He reels back, hands dropping his sword and gripping his now broken nose. His bookbag slams against the back of his knees. This is when the pain in his shoulder returns to him. Remiel falls to the floor. Sorrow scrambles backwards, brow now covered in blood and gore. It runs into her eyes, staining her verdant green skin a dark, muddy brown. The blood looks duller now, less real, than it did flowing out of the paladin. Like whatever had imbued it with such purpose left it when it had left Remiel.

He glared at her, from his place on the floor. From behind his fingers. Dust and ash mixing with his blood, cascading onto his face like a death mask. That visceral disgust might be gone, but not its purpose. She had attacked a member of Isosa’s holy order with no due purpose. Sorrow Brightwind is a threat, as is her Order of Broken Fang. Remiel bites his lip to stifle his moans. A failure. No steps further. He reaches a hand towards her, towards the hilt of his blade.

“Get out of here.” A voice comes from behind Remiel. It is Callan. He is gripping his shoulder, still leaking magmatic blood. His wound is sizzling, steaming from the wound. As if whatever had shot him was still burning. In his other hand, limp at his side, is his sword.“Before I and my friend find it more fun to hunt you.”

“I will burn you all.” Sorrow scrambles backwards, lurching towards the burned out door behind her. “Anathema. I lay on you all Anathema.”

“It wouldn’t be the first.” Callan smiles. “I will be interested to see if, this time, you succeed.”

Somewhere, overhead. A lighting bolt crackles. For the first time in five years, it rains in the Economic District of Mariposa. Between the moment of lighting and thunder. Sorrow is gone. Squirreled away somewhere into the ash and dust. Remiel sighs and begins to sit up, his shoulder tense and swollen. He brings his free hand to the bridge of his nose, feels the pressure of blood coagulating just underneath the skin. It is building. He is himself again. His disgust smoldered out into mere, and infinitely more harmless, anger. Anger, dear reader, anger is actionable. You can understand what angers you. Change either yourself or the world. Disgust only allows you violence, senseless and all encompassing. In disgust, you must destroy what disgusts you.

Faith in steel.

“Ah, ah.” Callan coos. “Easy, now. Move the wrong way and you might rip something.”

Remiel sighs and keeps his hand pressed tight against his wound. “I’m uh, pretty sturdy.”

“Hells, I can see that.” Callan grins, this time with a genuine smile. His brogue is thick on the tongue. “With how fast you move, I’m quite surprised. Can’t knock you down, can I?”

“Are you going to try to?”

“No, no.” Callan shakes his head. “Something tells me I couldn’t. A gun like that would kill any regular man.”

“You’re, um. Not a wolfkin.” Remiel looks down at the floor, eyes glowered in dejection. “Are you?”

“You’ve been had, I’m afraid. Been the butt of the lark”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”

“Chin up, friend.” Callan sits down on the floor next to Remiel. He twists fire from his wound, drawing it deep from inside of him. Remiel wants to flinch, to run away from such a flame. But, to him, all it feels is warm. “She wore that grin almost as well as I do.”

“I’m uh. Sorry I tried to kill you.”

Callan tuts. “No you didn’t. If what you did to me was trying to kill me, you’d have looked like how you treated the good abbess there.”

“Yeah,” Remiel laughs shallowly, then sucks air in through his teeth. He holds his side tight, clenching some torn muscle used up in whatever magicks Remiel had used to keep himself alive. “Oh, uh. Ow. Don’t- Don’t make me laugh.”

“Noted.” Callan nods. “You did say you needed me for something.”

“I uh.” Remiel removes his hand from his shoulder. The bleeding shouldn’t have stopped yet, Callan thinks. And yet, when he draws his hand back, he is leaking no more. “It's personal business.”

“Far be it from me to pry.” Callan shrugs, reaching into his coat to draw some flask with his good hand. “A man has to keep his own secrets.

There are several moments of silence, as the rain pitters onto the burned out rooftop above them. The wind is not whipping, and the rain is light. A nuisance. Remiel looks over to his companion. “You haven’t talked to Isosa before? Have you?”

Callan blinks twice. “No.”

“Damn.” Remiel sighs as he moves to get up. He winces in pain. Callan looks at the paladin’s shoulder. Healed, already. No more of the sickly sweet ichor that filled Callan’s mind with thoughts of home. His thin, white shirt had been torn open with the bullet, damp with his blood and sticking to his skin. The wound looked closed. Tender, but closed. The flesh around it, however, looked diseased. Thick tendrils of black miasma warped and weaved like roots. Remiel notices Callan’s gaze and moves to cover it with his hand. The pirate looks down at the floor, bashfully.

“You looking for your goddess?” He responds after a slight moment. His own shoulder is not as lucky. The bleeding has stopped, but his arm hangs limp.

“You might not be my target, but that fire doesn’t mean I should trust you.” Remiel mutters. “Sorry.”

“Meant nothing by it, friend.” Callan shrugs with one of his shoulders.

“No, no, eugh.” Remiel pinches the bridge of his nose out of reflex, then flinches away when his hands make contact with the break. “Sorry, I’m just-”

“Worn out?”

“Tired, yeah.”

Callan sits on the floor next to Remiel and starts up his fire, for just a moment. It dances like a friend, flickering shadows cast against the now sodden walls. The fire crackles with moisture and air shimmers with heat, refracting all that is in front of them.

“I’m here, hunting for someone too.” Callan starts back up again. “A witch who’s stolen something from my lady.”

“Not much to go off of.” Remiel shies away from the fire for a moment, his torso turning slightly away, as if a child running from a large dog.

“I’m afraid not.” Callan sighs, his breath shaky. To keep this fire up drains him. But Remiel looks as if he needs the warmth, shuddering in the cold as he is. His grin grows wide, and Remiel does not see.

“I certainly will not stand in your way.”

Callan knows what to do.

“When I was younger,” Callan starts, hands held out in front of him, warm in its embrace. “I understood that was all fire was.”

“Hm?”

“Distortion. When fire, true fire, warms, it distorts the air around it. Refracts it in ways that are untrue.” He pauses for a moment. “Fire was guile, it was trickery.”

“Huh.” Remiel leans forward a bit. Was this the first time he’s been close enough to fire to truly see it? The rector was warmed by steam, his home never needed to keep out the cold. The fireplace had always sat empty and whatever food they needed, his mother had always provided. He had heard stories of it, been taught to fear it. But he had never seen it. He moves his hand to his shoulder again, feels the pulse of his heart in his reforming wound. “Fire was destruction. For- for us.”

“Is that right?”

“Fire marks decay, it marks entropy. The breaking of things down from what they were. A transformation.”

“Do you see that right now?”

Remiel pauses for a second. He knows, somewhere, that there is a transfusion here. Part of whoever Callan is was being destroyed in order to create this fire. He could see, if he looked hard enough, the channels of energy along Callan’s veins. He could see the fire burning in his stomach. Consuming him. A wretched thing. A thing of the abyss, of entropy. These are things he can see.

Trust not your eyes.

Callan can see the fire dancing within them, like a child looking at the stars for the very first time. Remiel’s face is lit up, the shadows grow longer. They are enrapturing, they are obliterating. Upon them, they are the death of all sense. Remiel moves his hands towards them, as if Prometheus grasping for its warmth. Callan’s grin grows just that bit wider, catching the rest of his face ablaze in its glory. A moment, Remiel thinks, a moment could not hurt.

“No.”

#creative writing #cup of trembling #fantasy #writing #dnd writing #dnd #mariposa #fantasy horror #Callan #Remiel Fey #Sorrow Brightwind #dnd 5e

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cupoftrembling · 11 months

Text

Provocateur

“It should have been you.”

These bitter, cruel words have been said an uncountable number of times. Trust me dear reader, I have tried. It was my first undertaking, before attempting to reconcile the history of the war in Mariposa: to catalog the things that wound, the words and events that drag us into the muck of vile emotion. A book of past indiscretions, both mine and everyone else's. The first time I heard them rang as cruel as the most recent, and they have been hurled at me more times than I could count.

There is something of an art to wishing harm on another, and there are certainly a lot of ways to do so. You could condemn them to justice, you can harm and injure with reckless abandon. The people of the Shattered Planes are adept in injury, and there are more than one way to kill. But to come to an event where you have to mutter such cruelties? To hate, deep and as true as sunlight, is common. Boring. Just as common is to weep for injustice dealt to the undeserving. An entire war was fought for these injustices, a war that shattered the sky and killed Gods, because a mother lost her children far too young. But the conflux of them? To hate so truly that you wish an injustice done that was committed towards someone innocent? To wish upon them a different type of pain, to injure them with a thought, because these words are not said to some stranger. Someone who slights you, large or small, does not conjure such hatred. This wish only takes root when there is some other pain to compare the suffering of your target towards.

I am sure these words are familiar to you, dear reader. That somewhere, someone who had trusted you, someone who had loved you had said these words to you. That the acidity of their voice, the venom of their words seared off the top layer of your mind. A lover, a child, a parent. I can not say whether or not you deserved it. I hope you didn’t. And if you didn’t, I am sorry, truly and sorrowfully. If you did, I can only hope that, somewhere, some sort of justice prevailed. That you understood enough of pain to change, to try and effect some difference on yourself.

Or maybe, and if this is the case I truly am sorry, you are stuck in a horrible juxtaposition. You both did and did not deserve it. That somewhere, deep in you, you knew that it was cruel to lob such vitriol towards you, even if in your heart of hearts knew that you hurt someone. Stuck in the liminal space of attempting to better yourself while also defending your ego. A superposition of injury, where one might not take fault but still feel the burn and sting of venom. Where the words echo across your mind, where even an image, a scent, a sound can conjure the memory of that pain.

Where, like Sorrow Brightwind, you catch your eye in your own reflection, and you hear those words in your own voice.

The first time she had heard her own mind tell her such awful cruelties was three weeks after the fire. She was in that little flower shop down Le Marc street, the one with the towering Vily with the soft hands. Above her, an imperial war balloon floated gently and she had thought, in that moment, she could feel the gun pointed at her. Feel the marksman adjusting his scope. Her verdant skin caught the sun, her horns were backswept and aerodynamic. She was the pinnacle of cambion beauty, in which she would have been revered and adored as a temple goddess some years prior on the coasts. However, she toyed idly with a pair of twisted stag horns, denoting a different kind of servility. The gold was cool to the skin, tamping down the infernal heat of Mrs. Brightwinds’ heritage.

She was, as well, dangerously thin. Her eyes were sunken and slightly bulged, her fingers shook with hunger, the crust of sick was crusted over on the edge of her mouth. Her hair, nestled beautifully in a bun between her horns, was greasy and covered in flyaways. She still moved in her traditional, graceful ways, as her feet more ghosted the cobblestones of the Lower Wards than they did traverse them. However, each step felt more and more unsure, not yet bordering on nervous or tedious. It seemed, as if for the first time in her life, that the composure was taking a considerable effort, kept only with a white knuckled grip.

To the more militant and faithful, this would be an unusual sight, a graceful gait the demarcation of a successful Rappeles Toi. The weakness in the body is the mark of the strength of spirit, that one was able to survive treachery and biological peril. However, to Mariposa and her citizens who feast on grief, Sorrow looked just like any number of debtors and renters that crowd the streets.. Starved, frail, she took to the streets like so many of her now kin, homeless and penniless in the wake of Imperial victory. The sun above caught the Concordat of Miracles, casting Sorrow in shadow. The wings, all six thousand and twelve of them, strained against the iron rivetsrivulets and silver nails that that a litigious grin placed. A halo, a purely Mariposian invention of servility, obscured a set of its eyes. Sorrow had heard the story of Queen Mariposa the Litigious and the First Miracle. The thing above the city was barely more than a feral angel, thousands of years of imprisonment and time had eroded any sense of mind or thought, obliterated the higher thinking and connection to the Grand Weft of Order.

And yet, why could she not shake the feeling that it was watching her? Why could she sense, even here on unhallowed ground, that her God was watching her every stumble and impetuous motion? She stopped in the center of Le Marc street to attempt to get a better look at the Concordat, but found her eyes unable to focus on it, found the sun behind it too blinding, too painful to completely stare into.

The street was busy, of course. The Lower Wards, through war or famine, were always packed. They were, naturally, the most populous parts of the city. Where all sorts of underthings and beastfolks congregate with those who powered and ran the city. Obviously, the Lower Wards were where the industry was conducted, where things that were manufactured from imported materials would be constructed, packaged, and shipped out. The air was heavy with industry, with song,with chants and signs. Above, much like Sorrow had intuited, three imperial sharpshooters surveilled the scene. From their vantage, above the city, the people flowed like water. They moved around obstacles, chanting in rushing waves, and, most importantly, they seemed almost organic, uncoordinated and yet synchronous in their movements. The torches and the signs they carried, things that denoted them as living and feeling individuals with autonomy and rationale, got lost in the scope of it all. They seemed almost like a natural force, like something to be overcome. Like the frost beaten away with shelter, like a river diverted with a dyke. Mariposa, the blood that flowed in the people and in her streets, was not fully to be understood, at least to those three sharpshooters, each cracking jokes about taking out a flower pot above the head of one of the rioters. They were inhuman -- beasts to be tamed, to be beaten and broken.

Sorrow saw the same flower pot that the imperial sharpshooters saw, saw a cambion man lifting a child onto his shoulders to steal a petal from it. And yet, she found that the distance did not change that thought in her mind. Mariposa, the people who lived in it, relied on that baser sense. They ate, they slept, they reacted, they marched. Reactionary was the Mariposa. The corporate lords didn’t fully understand the Grand Weft of Order, nor diddo the proletariat marching here. And yet, even with the same Imperial mindset, she glanced upwards, towards the snipers and scowled.

Sorrow walked these streets for hours. Her mother did not expect her back for some time. The young Oflay was enough to deal with, Sorrow was sure of that. After her Rappeles Toi ended, after she emerged from that room, covered in tears and scratches and faith, Madam Brightwind insisted she get some air, insisted that she get some of the city in her. Sorrow had hoped that it would clear her mind, which was like the keen blade of a razor after two weeks of careful, mournful contemplation. Rappeles Toi had that effect on the religious. It was a fasting of all sensations, from where a different person emerges, if they emerge at all. Isosa demands that her followers honor those who are lost by making those left behind think of nothing else. Not food, not sunlight, not sleep or water or warmth or family. For two weeks, your grief subsumes you, for which there can be no comfort.

Many did not survive their first Rappeles Toi. Even fewer survive their second. It was always described as an act of honor, a rapturous event where you flay off the skin of grief and emerge, renewed and reborn. Theologians of Isosa talk of the zeal of hunger, how contemplation and reverence allows the sadness to flow through you, allowing one access to truer, purer emotions that are otherwise denied to you by petty physical realities such as hunger or love. That the sorry ways of grief practiced by the other cultures left marks on the body and on the soul, whereas this purification, this castigation allowed for the sorrow to slough off of you. It was a better way to heal. Hearing them speak, I was almost convinced of it myself. The way they were so right, so sure of themselves made me doubt what little I knew of suffering. It was in the eyes, a brightening flame of devotion that even they did not realize was truly burning.

Sorrow had no such zeal about her. She ghosted the city streets of Mariposa with no reverence, with no renewal. Her shoulders were heavy, free of any absolution. Her arms were clutched around her waist, hands on either one of her elbows in an attempt to keep out the chill. Around her, the city bustled in its grief. The man she passed sitting on the gutter held a pink slip in his hand. A crescent and sword, symbols of the newly nationalized businesses by the Empire of Night, was stamped on his termination. A woman walked beside Sorrow, a rifle slung openly in front of her. It was her husband’s, once, and she had never fired it in her life. Sorrow looked her in the eyes and nodded, not a word exchanged between the two. A child, no older than Oflay, sat on the shoulders of what Sorrow could only assume was her grandfather. A stout man, missing an eye and half of his teeth. Her parents were nowhere to be seen.

Was this, too, a Rappeles Toi? A national mourning, felt by every single man in Mariposa?

Sorrow was not a grand theologian, nor philosopher. She did not idle herself with petty reasonings and arguing about the grand weft of Isosa. At least, she hadn’t before. But here, she found herself walking with them, unaware of where they were truly going. A procession through the streets of the Lower Wards, galvanized by something they were unaware of. And that thought could not leave her, could not escape the barbed wire of her mind, its limbs tangled and snagged by the razors keened by her hunger and sadness. That these people, a civilization often derided by adherents of Isosa, are themselves sloughing off something.

“Where are we going?” Sorrow finally found the presence to ask. The thought had clawed at her for nigh on an hour, although she never questioned that they were, in fact, going somewhere. The woman beside her, who carried her husband’s rifle, looked down at the frail woman with a mixture of surprise and confusion. The procession had, until this point, been roughly silent. A vigil, marching through the streets, only occasionally punctuated by a wail or a yawp.

“Are you lost, sweet thing?” The woman asks, forcing a smile. Sorrow looked young, delicate almost. The woman with the rifle knew what a Rappeles Toi looked like and placed a reassuring hand on her back.

“No, not lost.” Sorrow responded, still marching with the crowd. “Just unsure.”

The woman with the rifle smiled and rubbed her thumb against Sorrow’s shoulder reassuringly. The way that she imagined Sorrow’s mother did, once. The way Madam Brightwind never had. “There’s a demonstration at the university. Monsieur Georges will be speaking out against the Fleurs.”

Sorrow almost wanted to ask for whom the vigil was for, although I am not sure the woman with the rifle could have answered her. “San Bernadine?” Sorrow paused. “That’s.”

“About seven kilometers from here?” The woman laughs, but keeps her eyes on the horizon. A laugh of habit, taking the place of anything actually humorous. The type of laugh you make for others, to assuage their fears. Around them, many were laughing like that. They laughed at the snipers, they laughed with their children.

Sorrow shook her head, hair now falling in her face. The stones beneath her cloven hooves wore against her, grating into her mind with every drudging step. She could hear the thousands of souls clattering against them, walking closer and closer into the city’s heart. “Are we going to walk that whole way?”

The woman with the rifle shrugged. “What else can we do but walk together?”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Why haven’t they started shooting yet?”

The question did not have an obvious answer, else why would Sorrow Brightwind ask it? But, when she looked back at her companions, they all regarded her with confusion. She turned away from them, looking back towards the demonstration on the streets below. She had never seen the campus of the San Bernadine University, no less step foot upon its grounds. And yet, here Sorrow was, her feet dangling over the edge of one of the academic buildings, feeling the rough stone of the banister digging into her exposed thighs. Below her, on the cobble of the campus grounds, the occasional hoot or yawp from the series of demonstrators could be heard through the overwhelming din of chanting and crackling of flame.

Nearby, a fire was lit in an overturned trash can. It looked more like a squatters rally, a collection of the destitute and discarded of Mariposa congregating here for warmth, together. Further into the crowds, Stolynn Georges stood above the rest on a makeshift pulpit, his words amplified by nothing but Mariposa’s scorn. A haze hung in the air over him and the natural amplification of the Rae Courtyard made him a giant.

“How many of you worked for a corporate lord?” Stolynn asked, hands gesticulating over the crowd. “How many of you made your daily bread working for a Tyra, a Vujčić, a Fleur?” There was a sudden, desperate rush from the citizens that surrounded him. Even from this rooftop, from where Sorrow and her collective should not have been able to make out the tenor of his words, there is a sudden urge to nod from the unionboys. Each of them branded, in more ways than one, in corporate logos. The Tyra Knife, the Fleur Flower, the Vujčić Bullseye, they are a scar on the bodies of Mariposa. And above them all, nestled deeply in the breast of the city, is the Mariposian Crown. The grandest Corporate Lord of them all.

Stolynn takes a deep breath in, loud enough that the whole city might hear. “How many of these Lords went to work for the Empire after things went shit? Our Queen disappears and leaves us holding the bag?” He glances back towards the Imperial line forming behind him. Sorrow could not see anything beyond a formless, faceless mass of body armor and rifles, the things she had come to expect from the Empire of Night. Stolynn turns back towards the crowd in front of him. “And now, the magnanimous Fleur steps out of the shadows to lead us? To bring us to heel?”

She could not make out the particulars of Stolynn’s appearance from this distance. He was a cambion, much like herself. The infernal red skin and capricious tail gave as much away. Perhaps he was not from the Cambion Coast. His lack of a virtue name, like Sorrow’s, was some indication of that. Records of Mr. Georges’ legacy are spotty at best. Whatever few manifestos that survived the War of the Five Queens focus more on his theory and doctrine, less about the man who wrote them. Georges was a Mariposian name, at least. An old one, records from previous Queen’s show families of George’s paying a myriad of their corporate taxes. But it is not unheard of that people who venture to the city of the outcasts pick new names for themselves. Sometimes it is out of necessity, sometimes it is out of guilt. Sometimes, it is easier to leave such things behind. To reforge yourself fully and truly.

That thought weighed heavy on Sorrow’s mind. She looked back towards her companions, unsure what they were leaving behind. The long walk to the college was the first time she had met the armed woman. . She knew little of her, but enough to trust, I suppose. Beside her was a dwarf missing an eye, a red bandana tied tight around his shooting arm, as if to staunch bleeding. Around his neck, a small bullet glowed in zealous red. It sang, humming gently to the ambient radiation of the universe in a way that unnerved Sorrow to properly look at. And behind the two of them was a reforged mechanized man, Imperial serial number filed off and chassis repainted from night black to silver and red. His gears and circuits whirred, oscillating in time with the ambient machinery of his weapon. I don’t think Sorrow heard him speak during this whole encounter. None of this brigade looked even twice at him, even if his make was clearly imperial. A small, crescent moon is engraved onto his faceplate, right where his hair would have met his brow if he were to have either. Sixteen lights arranged in sequence were his eyes and his mouth glowed in the same silvery blue.

Sorrow’s face fell to a grimace, a frown. Was this how she was seen? As constituent parts of a past in decay? As the refuse left over from traumatic events? Maybe, it would be easier to become someone new. To amputate any part of her past, to slough off her husband. Like the mechanized man scoured himself of any imperial definition, how the dwarf leaned so heavily into his unionboy aesthetic.

And then, her eyes lay on the woman’s rifle. See the care in the wood, how splinters and seams were filled to seal any damage. How the gunmetal was polished and brushed. How gingerly she held that weapon of war. How death followed her, foreshadowed by her. And Sorrow thinks she understands. Her face lightens up, her hands grip the parapet a bit tighter.

Behind Stolynn, the men with rifles shifted somewhat. Maybe it was the way the wind adjusted, maybe it was the way they swayed somewhat in opposition to the wind. Maybe it was the way that, even at this distance, Sorrow could feel them tightening their grip. “Our new benefactors.” Stolynn continued, gesticulating both towards the tower and towards the soldiers behind him. “Seek a new Mariposa. One bereft of ‘unclean’ labor, one bereft of the people who had built this city for so many years.” Sorrow narrowed her eyes and turned back towards her companions, each of whom hadn’t responded to her.

“Why haven’t they started shooting yet?” Sorrow asks again, this time with more urgency. “He mocks them, openly. I can almost feel their rage from here.”

Each of them were armed and had opted to stay around the periphery of the rally. Lessons learned from a rough kettle some years ago. Sorrow was not with weapons, but something about them did not make her feel unsafe. A gut feeling, a note on the back of her tongue. Isosian doctrine teaches adherents to avoid such magics like sense and intuition. “Trust only your eyes, trust only your ears.” Matron Brightwind beat into her. “All else will deceive you. All else will ruin.” The Wolf trusted such synchronicity, the teachings say, and it led to rebellion. To the shattering of the planes.

And yet, in looking at them, all those thoughts slid to the back of her mind. The voices she heard were just her own. She looked to the dwarf standing on the parapet, towards the large gun in his hand. Cogs and machinery, not unlike the mechanized man behind them, thrumming and humming in time with the bullet around his neck. As if they were one part of one another, as if the gun and the man were one in the same. They each were dressed in the color of Stolynn and his brigadiers, Sorrow came to understand. Unionboys from the Lower Wards. A type of Mariposian lawyer, despite how much they despised the term. Hired by men and women of industry, those that worked the machines and the canneries, to serve their own interest. Even if they refuse to admit they practiced the Queen’s Law, Stolynn’s Brigade often fought on the courts of the public for the public. Enforcers for some sort of common right, against the will of the corporate lords.

They were no strangers to violence, and they looked the part. Perhaps, the woman with the rifle sought to include Sorrow in their ranks. To fold her into the brigade, to give her purpose and direction. A place to drive her Rappeles Toi. I don’t know. I wish I did, it would help me make sense of this.

The woman with the rifle stifled a grimace at Sorrow’s question, as if the talk of violence upset her, as if the use of that gun she swung around was disgusting. She wasn’t much older than her, realistically. Maybe five years, maybe ten. But she was born in Mariposa, and the woman with the rifle had seen her fair share of corporate violence. She glanced over towards the mechanized pillboys and their escorts that flank the arena, each with their own rifles drawn, but not leveled. If they were Os’ men, if they were in the pockets of the remaining corporate lords, this would have been nothing but a bloodbath. Tempers and heat igniting as soon as Stolynn opened his mouth.

“Because no one has told them to, dear.” The woman with the rifle said, her face falling back into its soft, matronly visage. Besides her, the dwarf with his face painted with a red hand print over a missing eye chuffed.

“At least not yet.” He remarked. The woman with the rifle reached over and flicked him in the back of his bald head. “Hey! Whatcha-”

Sorrow looked over to her riotous companions, at the group she had somehow found herself among. Madam Brightwind would have been disgusted by her group of friends, each twitching and frothing with something that approximated zeal. She would have discussed how such emotions are ruinous. And Sorrow oft would have listened. And yet, such teachings felt so far now, so distant.

The woman with the rifle crouched next to Sorrow, her hands now on the parapet that the cambion sat on. She eyed the soldiers that flanked Stolynn with distrust. She had seen him in the riots across Le Marc street some years ago, seen the old unionboy in the thick steam of riot. The soldiers stood differently than the corporate lawyer, more measured, more tactical with their hatred. And yet, each soldier she passes, each jackboot she sees in front of her, that facade of measured nature seems so fragile. On the streets below, the jackboots marched in formation through the riotous crowd, who themselves seem too timid to actually inflict any damage on them. No stones have been hurled, no shots fired. Just some broken glass, just some overturned benches. They clear their way through the crowd, who part around the jackboots like the sea around the bow of a boat. Their masks are polished to a mirror sheen, their footfalls are measured and in time, their shoulders are relaxed and their rifles are never level unless they are shooting. They are the facade of professionalism, betraying nothing, allowing nothing, forgiving nothing.

And yet, the woman with the rifle sees something familiar in them. It is in the way their chests rise and fall with breath, the way their hand never practices trigger discipline, the way they stare at you for just a second too long. The woman with the rifle looks down at the jackboots patrolling the streets, as if they are positioning themselves around the demonstration.

“That tower behind us? Dr. Mya’s pet project? How many stories of our ancestors are in there? How much has been stolen from us to pay for it? Stolen by people like Dr. Fleur?” Stolynn points an accusatory finger at the San Bernadine Tower, a tower that had stood as a sign of the private knowledge of the university, the tower that had long locked away knowledge of our world and of our past for just the learned and rich to access to. “The ideology that keeps those bricks from being used in our homes runs in this place, it keeps wealth and knowledge from those who produce it.” His finger curls inwards, pointing now towards the sky, towards the clouded out sun. Behind him, Sorrow could almost feel the soldiers smile.

And, in that moment, Sorrow understands as well. “They aren’t firing yet.” The woman with the rifle tells Sorrow. “Because they’re waiting for a better moment for our pain.”

Sorrow sighs and asks a more pointed question. “Why would they want to savor it?”

No one on that rooftop could answer her. They are not unfamiliar with cruelty. Not a one unfamiliar with sadism or enjoying being the boot. It is just this cruelty that escapes them, it is the cruelty of people who view you as lesser and themselves as greater. Even in the darkest hearts of the corpo lawyers, their glee was with persecution of their fellow Mariposian, having power over what could have been them.

“Whatever kindness General Rosengart may have portrayed in sicking the Butcher of Blackvien on us is up in smoke.” Stolynn continued, spittle flying, baptizing the crowd. “What few corporate lords remained sold their companies to the Empire. Instituted their so-called strictures and dictates here. The taxes of Daysend, the laws of Daysend. Not laws of Mariposa! Never laws of Mariposa!”

The crowd erupted, the whole of Mariposa seeming to come alive. Each hand gripping their pink slip a bit tighter, each man gripping his fellow just a bit harder. They screamed, they cried, they shouted and the air itself felt agitated. Sorrow saw her fellow Mariposian’s on the street below her, each inexplicably able to hear Stolynn despite the distance, began to turn towards the Imperial Jackboots patrolling the edge of the kettle. No violence, not yet. But even from this distance, even from the way that their backs are towards Sorrow, she could feel their snarls, their sneers. It was in the way their shoulders held them, it was in the way they leveled their rifles in unison, as if they had no need to communicate, as if they all knew what these people were.

To the Imperial Soldier, such displays of gross nationalism was why Mariposa needed to be brought to heel. To the Imperial Soldier, no Mariposian ever could have been them. No one had told them to start firing, but they knew the order would be coming soon -- and patience was a virtue. Silence falls over the rooftop as wind whistles between them. The Unionboys look towards Stolynn, towards the kill zone that their fellow Mariposians now sit in. They see the groups congregating on the rooftops of the various campus buildings, see the glint of scopes across the San Bernadine Spire. They do not know whether or not they were friend or foe, they do not know whether or not the noose was tightening. The warm brick of the campus seemed duller for a moment, even as the cloud breaks and the sun of an early spring day begins to peek out in the fingers of the gods themselves, the Jacob’s Ladders reaching down from the divine heavens themselves. They shine across the Concordat of Miracles, that feral angel that watches over the whole of Mariposa.

Sorrow thinks to utter a prayer, thinks to ask her god for forgiveness for this city. To ask that the noose might not tighten. Her eyes meet the thousands and thousands of eyes of the Concordat, and she can feel her watching Sorrow, so much and so truly that she now feels comfortable ascribing the angel gender and agency. The words die in her throat, her mind reeling with only one thought, unsure and uncertain of its source. Was it divine? Was it a word of obliteration, to end all things? Sorrow swore she heard it, swore she felt it crawl into her ears from her shoulder. It nested in the back of her eyes, making even looking at such a divinity hard.

“You all deserve this.” The thought whispered. “It should have been you.”

Sorrow’s eyes drop low, breaking contact with the Concordat of Miracles. And the thought escapes her, leaves her mind the same way it entered. Slithering from behind her eyes and dropping onto the ground through her ear, taking with her all sense and vitality. Eyes remain open, unable to shut out the world around her.

This is when, my dear reader, she sees them.

They are not imperial soldiers. Of this, Sorrow is sure. In this moment of despair, in this moment of un-vigilance, it is something to moor her, something to settle and nerve her. A truth she can cling to. Four individuals weave their way through the noxious crowd, who’s chanting and cheering began to reach a closer and closer fevered pitch. The imperial jackboots around them shuffle in their boots, still awaiting the order, still slavering with violence. As the crowds part around them, keenly aware of their intrusion, the four individuals do not provoke such a response. They weave through the crowd as if they are unseen, unnoticed. Sorrow first notices the speed at which they can move, how they can effortlessly brush past the citizens of Mariposa.

“We should warn Stolynn.” The woman with the rifle notes, seemingly unaware of Sorrow or her thoughts. She eyes the cambion man standing in the distance with a mixture of care and disdain. “Evacuate the protest.”

“Imperial protocol is not to fire unless fired upon.” The red and silver mechanized man stated. His voice was not as cold as Sorrow had thought it would be. It did not modulate in odd ways, it sounded almost too natural, even while parroting imperial code. “Unless otherwise threatened or potentially threatened.”

“Stu.” The dwarf chuffs. It almost sounds like a laugh, like some sort of deep, primal thing. His hand swept over the crowd like a farmer survailing his wheat and chaff. “They’re threatened by our very existence.” He sounds almost too proud of himself, too proud of his Mariposians.

“There’s someone down there.” Sorrow says meekly, the words more escaping than being stated. She eyes the four individuals dashing through the crowds, sees how they are dressed. Pressed, black suits with no room for tolerances. Each of them meticulously measured and cut as to fit only that individual and only at that time. If they were to grow a centimeter in any direction, the fit would be all off and fill the user with discomfort. Drawn from their breast holsters were E-99 oscillating revolvers, manufactured by Weyland Arms and Electronics, each with the same tolerances as their suits.

There were no safeties on the E models of pistols, and only seven shots before the bullet that powered the firearm must be cycled to cool. They were barely functioning, highly experimental firearms that held together more so out of sheer will than any sort of engineering marvel. None survived the war, unable to hold itself together under the sheer strain of repeated use and fire. Expensive to maintain and purchase, but they could output a higher volume of fire than any other conventional handgun on the market. They were a killer's weapon. Not to disarm, not to scare or protect. Easily concealable, easy to hide in the vest of your coat. They could put a hole in a quarter inch body armor at 60 yards.

“What, you want to fling ourselves into the meat grinder too?” The woman with the rifle asked, although it was more like she was begging to. Her hand had not been off the handle of her rifle this entire time. Her mouth dripped with violence, so steeled was she to war. “Don’t you want to practice some law?” She half joked, eyes remaining down towards the crowd, ignoring Stolynn in his entirety.

Among the group of four, there was a gruff, white haired veteran of many wars, a sharp and cruel looking Villy, a fellow cambion man with skin as verdant as Sorrow’s, and a halfling who seemingly struggled to keep pace. None of them were noticed, not by the soon to be rioters, not the unionboys on the roof, not even the imperial jackboots. Sorrow swears she sees one of them turn, the young Villy maybe, towards her. She swears she sees him wink.

“Guys!” Sorrow exclaims. The heads of her companions snap towards her, their bickering dying down for a moment. “There’s someone in the crowd!”

The unionboys rush over to the parapet, their speed almost threatening to push poor Sorrow from off the edge. In a moment, and without any particular thought, all three of their hands find Sorrow’s shoulders, keeping her from teetering over the edge. As if they knew she was in trouble, as if they knew she was to die without them. Sorrow’s shaky hand draws a line towards the suits, and then the spell is seemingly broken. Like an illusion that shifts when one draws attention to it, the unionboys knew what, now, to look for.

The woman with the rifle scowls and bares her teeth. “Fleur agents.” She mutters. Her breath is hot on Sorrow’s neck, wet almost. Her hand tenses for a moment before she finds herself again. Her eyes snap down towards her hand on Sorrow’s shoulder, and sees the green skin bruising under her rage. She pulls away and looks at her hand for a moment. Her fingers tremble, her knuckles are white. Her face is unreadable.

Sorrow wants to look back towards her companions, to look them in the eyes for some kind of bearing, some kind of direction. Although she knows when she does, when she looks at the people who could be friends, she might lose sight of these agents. And, somehow, that thought scares her much more than any perceived lack of direction, any unmooring, ever could. These Fleur Agents move like predators through the crowd, like wolves through the whistling reeds. The way they skulk, the way they duck through people without breaking a stride or formation, the way their chests rise and fall in perfect synchronicity. Sorrow knows, beyond knowing, that they thrive living in the space between mystery and fact.

“Fleur agents?” Sorrow asks, as if she could force them out of that superposition, force them into one or the other. “Like Fleur Pharmaceuticals?”

The dwarf chuffs again. His hand on her shoulder is more reassuring, more comforting somehow. There is none of the pain like there was with the woman with the rifle, none of the hurt. “Our new pit bosses, right.” He debates taking a shot at them right here and now. He’s heard the stories, he’s heard why you don’t walk down Le Marc street after dark. “Corporate Lawyers and Dr. Fleur’s pet projects.”

“Reclusive rogues who rely on subterfuge and advanced biotechnology.” Stu mentions off handedly. His grip was cold, somewhere between the dwarf’s reassurance and the woman with the rifle’s anger. He holds on to Sorrow for stability and stability alone. “Fleur Pharmaceuticals was bought out by Queen Mariposa the Kingbreaker some one-hundred and sixty three years ago. They’ve been operating under various different shell corporations ever since.”

“You’re awfully knowledgeable, Stu.” The woman with the rifle remarks.

“I was a student here, once.” He says, his voice more monotone than he was intending. “At the college.”

“Must make your oil burn to see the place like this, huh Stu?” The dwarf half jokes before a moment of realization dawns upon him. The dwarf turned towards him and squinted. “Is that where you got your name?”

“Fleur Agents.” Stu continued, ignoring the dwarf’s question. “Have largely been considered a myth. Considered a story fathers tell their children.”

“They’re real.” The woman with the rifle mutters, vile dripping from her words. Her eyes focus on the agents on the streets below with some familiarity. In fact, to each of them, these lawyers looked all too familiar. Too easy to dismiss them as an illusion or allusion. Too simple to keep them as myth. Their familiarity makes Sorrow tremble, her eyes want to avert, want to forget. “Their shadows swallow children and destitute, like they slipped down a drain into the heart of the city.

“Makes me wonder what my painkillers are made of.” The dwarf half-jokes, still keened on the halfling of the group. “Maybe I don’t wanna know.”

“They’re bad news.” The woman with the rifle stands from her position. She turns towards the rooftop door. “Let's be worse.”

Sorrow looks over to her companions. The dwarf grows a smile and racks his gun. Stu’s faceplate gives nothing away, but his lights flicker in contentment. She sees them walking towards the door, sees them walking into that ruinous death that waits below. Above them, a crow flies and disappears in a sunbeam. She turns back towards the crowd and is shocked to not be able to see them any more. Somehow, she feels as if all four of those agents are behind her, feels the ghost of their hands around her shoulders and around her neck. Not seeing them is worse than knowing where they are.

Sorrow stands up, the hem of her dress catching on the rough stone of the parapet. As if it is demanding, begging her to stay here. Stay where it is safe, do not go, it will miss you. She doesn’t notice, of course. And as she stands up, it rips the fabric, tears part of the dress that her husband bought. It even tears her skin slightly, so hastily did she move. As her hand reaches the door, as she hears the echoes of her companions down the metal stairway into the unknown and abyss, the first gunshot cracks from across the pavilion. From the sound of it, it is unknown who fired. Not even I know. The fabric still caught on the rough stone blows gently in the breeze. There is screaming, and more gunfire. She hesitates at the door frame.

Then another crack of lead, of the bullet singing across the air and the fire. She looks back towards the parapet she stood on and sees the fabric fluttering gently in the wind, beckoning one last time to return. To be safe here, with the entirety of the dress. To sow it back on and forget this place. To allow herself the whole of her grief, not to segment it into parts that might be more palatable.

She, however, does not listen. And so, Sorrow begins her walk down.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Have you ever smelt burning, dear reader?

I mean true burning. Burning without purpose. Not a fire to warm, not a stove to heat, not even a hearth to commiserate over. In each of those cases, there is something else to obstruct the smell. Camaraderie, love, compassion. The fire becomes a vector for those things. but those emotions, those acts, dilute the power of fire. Make it something comfortable, something that you can keep as a pet. You can keep it in a hearth or in a pilot light, flickering gently forever

But strip that away, what do you have? Flames and tinder. Pure, primal entropy. The wood takes on certain smells when burnt, of course, but even the way the fire catches the air has a smell to it. It dances along the tongue, fills your head with heat. It is intoxicating and vicious. It fills the blood with carbon, turns your thoughts to sludge and to ruin. It is the smell of the desperation of fire, how it is so keen to injure, so keen to spread and to consume.

They say fire has no will of its own. That it is a chemical force, a rapid oxidation. It is a process, the act of transformation between states of being. That it doesn’t dance, that it doesn’t entrance or beckon. You can understand it, that it is a causal relationship. That fire starts when a flash point is hit, when coalescing forces act upon a fuel. The tinder of inequity, a long standing dryness of monarchist sentiment, and an abundance of rage being the oxidizer. And trust me, dear reader, there was plenty of rage to be had. All such a tinderbox would need is a spark, a flash where these things combine into conflagration, into inferno. A gunshot. A boot on the neck. A child screaming just a bit too loud. Any of these things could spark. Any of these things did spark before.

And yet, all of that ignores the temporality of fire. The moments before such a burning incur the penalty of the flames. The smell of sawdust on the air, the feeling of dry that hangs like a mist. The way the wind shifts, how it blows errant sparks. How the rifle looks in the hands of the man in front of you. How anger dries the grass. The area around something that is to be burnt is saturated with it. Fire is causal, this is what they tell you. Because causality is easy, because there is an event that follows a combination of sources. It allows for dissection, it allows for change. Move the oily rags away from the fireplace, caution against rage and against anger. Do these things next time, and fire will not happen.

It takes away any purpose, any drive from the tinder. It takes away agency from those who kept the tinder dry enough to begin with. It brings the issue with the fire itself, not with the things that precipitated it. It points a finger at flame and says “there, kill it. There, snuff it out.” Ignoring what fire wants to do, ignoring that fire is the will of fuel, the desire to process and to change forms. It denies that the things that burn may have needed to in the first place.

Fire wants to burn.

Given enough time, it will find any excuse to do so. It will creep into the walls, it will creep into the fields or into the forests. Because the things we do, the things necessary for such an improvement, are both antecedent and subsequent of fire. Progress invites it in, growth invites it in. We need to respect that, allow different outlets for such inferno. Allow the flames to burn into something productive. This lesson is one Mariposa did not learn.

One that Sorrow Brightwind refused to learn.

The streets she rushed out into were choked with that pre-fire. The air was thick with rage, so sickly sweet was it that you could taste it on your tongue. The sky had, as if it were ablaze itself, caught in streaks of bright orange and yellow, despite the fact it was perhaps no later than three in the afternoon. The clouds above churned in ways that made it clear no rain was in sight. They swirled like they were saturated with soot and with char, like they were caught in the updraft of some grand conflagration, some world burning flame.

The streets were arush with anger. The gunshots echoed throughout the brick buildings, although seemingly none of them were followed with any more loosening of lead. There was screaming, of course. There was yelling, both to and from the jackboots who were tightening the noose. Sorrow looked around the now frantic crowd, desperately searching for her companions who were not three steps ahead of her just a moment before. It looks as if the kettle that they were so concerned about twenty minutes prior had been more a premonition than paranoia. The people around her were a mix of anger, frustration, and fear. Nearby, a jackboot brings a rifle down against a man's head. He cries out as a tooth is cracked on the ground. He doesn’t even know who fired the first shot. Nearby, a child looks around, scared, for her mother. Nearby, a person is shouting expletives in Algeran as iron handcuffs are placed around their wrists. Nearby, thousands of different inequities happen all at once. Tinder, waiting to be sparked.

“Isosa, please.” Sorrow muttered, her own thoughts drowned out by the yelling. She could hear herself clear, though. Razor keened, through the noxious smell of the pre-ash around her. “Please, a safe place.” It is all she could choke out around the ash that soon is to fill her lungs.

She looks up, tries to see the Concordat of Miracles from here. Tries to see that feral angel which at any and all points in Mariposa could be seen. She fails, dear reader. All she can see is the screaming, eternal horizon. And so she runs, she pushes through the crowd, deeper and deeper into the kettle. She can hear less and less of the jackboots, a fact that should comfort her. Perhaps there is a place further on where they are not, perhaps there is a place where she could break through. One of the sandals from her foot falls away, either burning away or snapping under the immense strain, but she continues. Pushing past the wailing, churning mass of humanity before her. She feels their warmth, she feels the wetness of their sweat and their tears on her shoulders. And she grips her hand tighter in vigilance. There is a safe place, she is sure.

Across the courtyard, she hears it. The inchoate choir of Mariposa, the voice of kommos, the voice of scorn. “See how they hunt us?” The voice says, as if the city herself is speaking. The crowd grunts in agreement, even Sorrow feels an affirmation escape her lips as she walks, so caught in the zeal was she. “See how they starve and beat us? It is a cowardice, too scared to fight a foe at their strength. Too scared to act beyond laws and dictates, too scared to see Mariposa at it's proudest.”

It is as if the voice changes the movement of the people, as soon as those words escape the roiling, churning chaos everything has a purpose. The men with arms turn towards the spire, the women with weapons break into a sprint. People of all walks of life, all Mariposian’s now, turn towards the horizon and see just one thing. The spire of San Berandine University. The Spire where, for hundreds of years, knowledge and riches have coalesced from all corners of the world. The Spire where it had books on music and love and war that none of them would ever read. The Spire where the corporate lords who make up the board of the university would meet and be served little cakes on little trays where just six blocks down a woman starved to death six times over. The Spire where the suffering of war was arbitrary and hypothetical. The Spire where Dr. Fleur sat on the board of directors.

In a moment, every eye that could see that Spire knew what it was built upon. From the Jackboot to the Unionboys to Stolynn himself, every mind was a rush and burdened with that divine, horrible knowledge of suffering. That every person, if for a moment, is understanding of what has been hoarded there. Every mind knew for an instant the call of the void.

Then the air catches fire.

As if from nowhere, as if the old maxims of Mariposa were true, every rioter draws weapon. Pistols and rifles and knives and bits of wood and bats and clubs and swords and rifles. They were not armed at the start of the demonstration, not so much so that every man, woman, and child could produce such violence in a moment's notice. But I am sure, sure as anything dear reader, that those weapons appeared from nothing but pure might. That will mixed with metal so harsh and true that not even I could tell by the end which was there at the beginning of the day and which was not.

They shown in the light of the fire that now adorned their hands, and cracks of sickening violence rung out from the crowd. Pinging projectiles off the bricks and ricocheting chaos, a bat comes down onto the skull of an Imperial Jackboot. Hands erupt in flame as nearby windows and passersby get caught up in the cacophony of the movement. There are screams, there is blood to be spilled. To call it infectious is to downplay the severity of the transmission. It did not spread from person to person, it did not slowly trickle into the water and into the minds of the rioters.

It was a flashpoint, an instantaneous reaction of oxidizer, fuel, and pain. In a single moment, every mind was coalesced into one, sublimating rage. To move towards the San Bernadine Tower. To take up, hand in hand with the person next to you, and burn that tower to the ground. To lock arms and move forward.

Even Sorrow, frail in spirit, felt the call. Her hands tightening in rage, her teeth grinding so hard she feels dust in the back of her mouth. She feels the sweat and the heat of the flames lapping at the back of her mind. It is all she can do to not look at that tower, which was set against a dower, hateful sun. She knew if she did, if she were to lift her eyes towards the building, there would be no going back, there would be no stopping her fists from balling in absent flame. Her eyes were shut tight, pushing through the undulating, swarming crowd. Tears were sublimating on her cheek as she felt it. Felt the watch of that tower. Felt it's call. It sounded like the voice of angels, a plurality of sharpness and razors edge song. Come, Sorrow my child. Burn me. Burn me down. How many people had heard that call? How many saw rebirth in it? Saw the sun rising instead of setting?

How many, dear reader, saw dusk and thought of dawn?

The sky above was awash with streaks of lavender and rose, like the fingers of Mariposa were screaming against it, tearing into its sweet, supple flesh. The towering citadels of Mariposian progress stretched past the clouds, carving long streaks of shadowing into the sky. Each was basking in that rising sun, each a towering inferno waiting to happen. The voices around Sorrow were maddening, their chants and screams and pleas of no more each beckoning her into that open dawn, beckoning her into some kind of rebirth. A glass shatters next to her. A foot falls a little too hard. Empyrial voices yell some kind of slur. Sorrow is running, far and fast, from that rising, burning, terrible sun. She ran, ducking under arms and weaving between bodies with a sense that she had never felt before. The heat around her radiated so strongly that she could feel the edges of each person in the crowd. Even bereft of her sense, she knew just when to duck, when to move to the side, when to crawl to avoid its flames. She ran for what felt like hours. She ran as gunshots whizzed around her, as she heard a scream of wounded and as she felt the flames grow higher and higher. She ran so fast that, when she did come to a stop, when the bridge of her foot hit a brick lip, it sent her tumbling into cool, still water.

Sorrow gasped as the chill hit her skin, letting the stagnant water into her mouth. She quickly raised her head, opened her eyes, and breathed a sigh of relief. It was her reflection. Sorrow was staring back into herself, and that was a sight she could trust. And then, the blood trickled in. And she looked up to see where she was.

It is a small fountain that has since stopped running. Each of the rioters had their back turned, too preoccupied with their own movement, with their own heat and warmth. It was an eye, a stillness, a fountain dedicated to one of the deans of the past. Marble, sculpted with precision and grace. The water had stopped flowing from the statue, leaving only the pool in the basin to slowly be drained. The air was getting dryer, the water was steaming. Pushed against the statue was a jackboot. His helmet was shattered, his hand was clasped around an injury, his chest falling up and down, up and down, up and down in steady, belabored breath. His armor was at least a quarter of an inch thick, and yet it looked torn like paper, buckled in and mixing with his viscera. The fabric of the garment he wore was seared onto his skin at the point of impact, metal jutting out into flesh, tearing and rending it for every moment onwards. For a moment, it is just the two of them. It is the first time Sorrow has seen an Imperial without a helmet on.

She imagined them as beasts. As barbarians with painted faces and piercings, with slavering teeth and blood stained eyes. He was not that. He was a young man from Karnata, with sandy skin and scared, angry eyes. He grimaced through the pain and scowled at her. He wanted to spit, but found his mouth too dry, his lips cracked and flowing with blood.

“I can’t die here.” He mutters in Empyrial. “Not in. This fucking disgusting.” He coughs, slumping against the statue a bit harder for support. The marble cracks. Bits of stone fall into the basin, splashing the both of them with the mixture of ichor and water. “Not here, not in this. Place.”

“I don’t- I don’t know.” Sorrow says, her eyes drenched with compassion. “What are you saying? How can I help?”

And then, Sorrow blinks. Or maybe it was a bit of ash. Or maybe, for a moment, she was distracted by another gunshot. The crowd begins to move around the fountain, still not looking at the two of them inside. Towards the tower. The screaming has turned to yelling now. Somewhere, someone strikes a match to light a cigarette. It was a noise that keened Sorrow’s senses, allowing her to focus on only the surrounding thirty feet. And when she opens her eyes, when that brief moment of respite ends, there is another person.

He is standing in the basin with them, his black slacks rolled up around his shins and his standard issue black loafers, polished and unscuffed, are placed beside the fountain on the rim. In his hand, an E-99 oscillating revolver hums gently with his bioluminescence, as if the two of them are oscillating in time. His skin is a deep, violent purple. His hair, or what Sorrow thinks is his hair, is almost blue, that is how white it is. It almost absorbs light, refracts it into hues that were hitherto unseen by any Brightwind that has ever existed. He looks peaceful and his back is turned towards Sorrow. The barrel of his revolver emanates so much heat that the water a couple feet below it is sublimating almost, shimmering in mirage just above the waterline.

He was not standing here a moment before, and yet he looked as inanimate as the statue he stands in front of. A vily, dressed in a full black suit. Sorrow gasps, although whether it was from his sudden intrusion into this reality or from an understanding of who he was is not known. Heat creeps around him, stilling all movement from the air. It is both hot and cool, it is both still and active. He turns his head to look at her, his eyes peering over his shoulder. She remembers them being white, like he was blind. She remembers how starkly they contrasted with the violet of his skin, how it felt important to remember how they shifted slightly with his bioluminescence.

Then, she remembers how the light flittered back into them. How, he appeared as if he was flooding back into his own body. And then, she remembers how he opened his mouth to speak, how wide and full of teeth it was.

“Well.” The vily agent said in a voice that sounded too kind for him. He fully turned around, his short, cropped hair tousled slightly in the breeze. “Aren’t you a frail thing.” The words sounded more cruel than the man was capable of. Sorrow tried to take a step back, but her feet found the edge of the fountain. The vily agent looked down at the body behind him, at his straining feet attempting to find purchase.

“I um, really should go.” It was all Sorrow could muster. Behind her the crowd was churning, an impenetrable wall of fearful flesh. “My husband.” The words felt unfamiliar, unfortunate, in her mouth. “He’s waiting. For me.”

From across the courtyard, from towards the spire, a single, booming voice rings out. It is as if the crowd all turns at once towards it. The movement stops. The churning, miserable heat does not. “Mariposians!” It says, it's accent is laden with thick brogue. Sorrow was unable to pick out who was saying what. It took all her focus to keep the vily in front of her, it blocked out the rest of the world. Everything around her was churning, incoherent flames. The sky turned orange and even the tower, with all it's stained glass, shown in a brilliant, warm light. “How dare this tower be used for anything but the bricks in our house ever again?

The vily pocketed his gun in his vest and extended his unarmed hand, as if the person behind him did not just breath one last, ragged, sputtering breath. He looked over towards his shoes. He was calm. He was peaceful, even in the heat of this raging inferno. His face seemed almost sad, and just a bit too kind. The vily reminded Sorrow of a paladin she once knew, back on the coast. She was a little girl and she had not yet met her husband. Both were composed, both were wiry and both had that little hook in their noses.

He looked trustworthy. Like a web, enticing and mooring in the chaos of the winds. “I can take you to him, miss.” The vily says, extending a cool hand. His hair blows gently in the wind, an errant ash lands on his brow. He is a deep purple. The water is draining around his feet. “This place is not safe for you.”

She understood that as a threat, dear reader. How could she not? The way he moved betrayed his intention. Her eyes could not be taken off of them, like beasts that the body instinctively knows to be dangerous. Like wolves, circling the flock. Like in a moment, she could be whisked away to where her pain and misery would be a mystery to everyone, that she could be so thoroughly forgotten and expunged from history that not even I could write about it. It would be no great sacrifice, no great martyr. She would not even give Oflay the chance to perform the Rappelles Toi. If she were to vanish, all she would leave in her wakes were what ifs and might have beens, theories to be pondered, agonized over, but never solved.

Oflay would never tell herself “it should have been you” if Sorrow disappeared that way. There would be no knives of grief that the survivors could keen into some sort of direction. No weapons of sorrow to be forged. She fought the urge to take a step forward, into that oblivion. Something of this crowd, it forewarned her own death. She saw it everywhere. She saw it on the crows that perched above, she saw it in the muddy, sunken reflections in this fountain. Ever since she had emerged from that room, the room where her husband lay, all she could see was corpsed. And, by the grand weft of Isosa herself, she found herself at the feet of the San Bernadine Spire. She had been swept up in the zeal of movement, of direction, that she had found herself in perdition, in predation. If she is gunned down here, in the dirty violent streets of Mariposa, she leaves behind grief, she leaves behind purpose to be lived up to. She leaves behind more death in her name.

Without thought, Sorrow began to move, her body lurched forward towards, almost tumbling over itself in its attempt at forward. The vily smiled as her feet moved through the brackish water.

But, in oblivion, she leaves nothing behind. Not samsara, not memories, not grief. Sorrow would leave nothing behind and that is a gift she could never give her daughter otherwise. She could give her peace, in the wailing, gnashing siren song of the Fleurs. She could give Oflay peace. It called to Sorrow, urging her to take a step forward into those waiting teeth.

Peace.

Smoke builds around them, but Sorrow can not see it. The water was so, so cold. The rioters scream, unaware of who is in their midst. The fires rise, the wet, ashy heat surrounds them. The vily extended his non-dominant hand. The bioluminescence flickering under his skin seemed to call to her, seemed familiar. He opened his mouth to speak again, perhaps to summon her home. His other hand reached towards his gun.

At last, peace.

“Don’t you dare fucking touch her, freak!”

And, the moment is shattered.

The woman with the rifle breaks through the roiling crowd, her feet splashing the fountain’s water across the both of them. Her nose is broken. Her breath is shallow. Sorrow fell backwards from the sheer force of the woman with the rifle landing between the two of them. The hem of her dress is now soaked, the water more muddy than she had thought it was. The sun shown behind the woman with the rifle’s head, haloing her in a beautiful, deadly aurora. Corona’s of light shooting around and through her updone hair. The rifle was in her hand by its forearm, its barrel red and hot and blisteringly white. It bent slightly in the heat, making its operation impossible. Visera and dents now marked the stock.

Her mouth dripped with blood.

Sorrow looked upon her with reverence and with fear. “Stolynn?” She muttered, questioning who was in front of her. The haze of the air marred her sense, allowing her to see what she wanted to see. By the time Sorrow recognized the woman with the rifle, she was already moving again, swiveling the rifle down against the vily assassin.

The vily swept right, his bare feet knocking his loafers into the fountain. He looked down at them with a grimace. The rifle just barely misses him. The woman it was holding lets out a grunt, a growl, a choice expletive or two. The agent balanced on the fountain’s edge, revolver in his hand. “Now miss, was that exactly necessary?” He asked, as if more annoyed by the inconvenience of the wet shoes. “The leather wasn’t cheap, after all. And I didn’t take you for one to waste.”

The woman with the rifle grunted in response, dropping her shoulders low, her arms hanging limp. The rifle was still gripped tightly in her hands, the makeshift warhammer still ready for violence. She breaks into a sprint and lashes back out against the assassin. Water sprays between the two of them. Brackish, muddy, roiling. A bolt of heat lightning flashes for a moment against the water. The air on Sorrow’s tongue is thick. It is laden. It is leadened. Ash and bile mix in the back of her throat. She tries to get to her feet.

She fails.

The vily jumps back into the fountain, only dodging the rifle’s swing by inches. He levels his revolver at where he thinks the woman with the rifle will be. Sorrow can almost see the calculations in his head of barrel drift and velocity. It is in the way his eyes dart between beads of water, it is in the way his eyes shift in measurements of micrometers, it is in the way his body tilts to align perfectly with the barrel of his revolver. The woman with the rifle has no such grace, no such precision. So, when tactically it would have been smart to keep to his right as the vily predicts, she keeps on his left. She is on the same side as his revolver. If he were to pull the trigger at this moment, it would pierce her heart. It would stop her.

He continues turning right for a moment too long. And by the time his synapses realize she is not keeping out of his line of fire, by the time his mind realizes she is doing the opposite of what he expects, the action potential has been reached. His cells polarize. His muscles contract. His body moves in spite of him. His hand squeezes. The gun goes off. And it misses his target.

The woman with the rifle can barely hear the shot go off over the pounding of blood in her ears, nor does she have the wherewithal to properly understand that a gun has been shot in the first place. She can only focus on the reflection of herself and Sorrow in the vily’s pearlescent eyes. It is difficult to keep her focus on him, as if he is trying to slide from off of her eyes. Her mind reels, she sees pure movement. The edges of her body burn away. Her skin is alight with rage. Every sense she can feel at that moment razor keens onto a single, burning idea.

She needs to hurt this man.

Hurting him is all she can do at this moment. Hurting him gives Sorrow a chance to escape. Hurting him gives her a chance to survive. Hurting him will heal Mariposa. Hurting him will feel so good. She needs to hurt him in every way that him and his kind have hurt. Her feet hit the stone of the fountain, now almost completely having sublimated away. A shock of purpose surges through her muscles. They tear. They rend. They put every inch of power, every single thought and idea, into this single, perfect swing. The rifle arcs through the air. A building catches fire. Plasma arcs between the molecules of air. The air itself screams and singles in immolate, beautiful rage. This woman was made for this.

Hurting him will feel so good.

“Stop it!”

The voice is almost childlike. It cuts through the air, it cuts through the flames and through the blood and pierces the woman with the rifle’s mind itself. It reminds her of her daughter, the one she left behind in Rishi. It reminds her of smoldering. And of faint wind blowing and of hungry nights. The rifle continues its arc, there is no stopping that movement now. But without that focus, with the woman’s concentration shattered, she is no longer exactly sure of the agent’s place here. Doubt creeps in. And the rifle hits the stone lip of the fountain. The wood finally gives in and shatters. The water has now completely drained from the basin. She turns towards the voice in desperation and in concern and sees Sorrow sitting there, back against the fountain’s edge.

Her dress is dripping with the now drained water. Her face is pale, her mouth open in fear. The edges of Sorrow’s nails are stained with her own blood from how hard they dig into the stone. She is trembling, quivering even. She looks even more like her daughter than anytime before.

“Please, do not hurt him.” Sorrow manages to get out. “I… I think I know him.” Her mouth is dripping with fear. The woman with the rifle just stands there, agast. The rifle now broken, dashed against the stonework. Her face is unreadable to Sorrow. I know it is disgust, dear reader. Confusion and disgust. That is a secret I keep close. To ever know what that face looks like. Her hands drop the rifle into the now dry, burning fountain.

“What do you mean-” is all the woman can manage before the vily assassin sticks his boot knife between the T10 and T11 of the vertebral column. Her legs give out, the signals of her brain firing in all directions. The agent twists his knife, left instead of right this time. His arm wraps around her waist almost delicately, holding her upright as he shifts the knife up further into her diaphragm. He can hear the blood beginning to fill her thoracic cavity. He can feel her blood drip down the hilt of his knife and onto his wrist. Sorrow sees his eyes again. And they are devoid of light.

“You’re right, brother.” The vily says to no one in particular. “An unforeseen event indeed.”

The woman without the rifle grabs onto the vily’s arm like he is leading a dance. She tilts her head back towards his. He cradles her as her knees continue to fail her.

“Why?” She manages to get out between bloody gurgles. She looks back at Sorrow. “Why?”

“Shush shush shush.” He places his hand on her forearm. His fingers are stained with blood. “You’ll bleed out faster. And no one wants that.”

The woman without the rifle meets Sorrow’s eyes, her head falls down limply. It is all she can do to make sure Sorrow sees her one last time. And Sorrow does not see disgust this time. She does not see hatred or anger. Merely peace. Sorrow swears she almost sees a smile.

And then the air catches fire.

Sorrow begins to cry, but the tears evaporate upon meeting her verdant skin. Her blood begins to glow, her hair begins to fray and singe and light like dry tinder. Sorrow grips the stonework even tighter, clenched her teeth even harder. The adrenalin, the hatred, it fills her veins. Suffuses her with an absent flame. Her body begins to tremble. The vily agent begins to back away with the woman without the rifle’s limp body in his hands. He doesn’t even realize what she is doing. His first foot enters the crowd. She knows, dear reader. She knows if she does not act now he will disappear with her. He will take her with her and she will become myth.

And she can not allow that to happen.

Her eyes keen on the woman without the rifle’s chest. Her eyes keen past that, through her towards the center of the Fleur Agent himself. And she begins to draw her pistol from her belt. A pistol she did not have. A pistol that was made from absent flame and from will. A pistol she knows beyond knowing that she will own soon. She attempts to draw her pistol from the future. The space around her hands crack like a mirror. The world stands still. She is handing it to herself. Her hand almost finds purchase on its ivory. Just a bit more, she thinks. Her fingers ghost the cold metal of the trigger. She continues to draw it, her arms moving in spite of herself. She needs to save her, Sorrow lies to herself. This is all to save her.

Then she sees the woman without the rifle’s smile. She thinks herself a paladin. As high and as mighty as those who protect Isosa from the vile and the monstrous. She has saved Sorrow, even if Sorrow had killed her in doing so. It is in the way her eyes fall. It is the way her lips tremble. It is in the way her hands do not grab at stones, the way her legs do not kick. The flames lick at the back of Sorrow’s hand as the pistol now enters into her line of sight.

The woman without the rifle is a Mariposian. She is a rebellion against her goddess, who basks in the anathema of feral angels. She is a worker who toils and builds things. She is someone who hurts others, who betrays order for the sake of mercy.

Mercy.

The most vile of the vices.

Her face is wrapt in anger, the flames crowd the edges of her eyes. The Spire in the distance, begins to burn. A book turns to ash almost instantly. The woman without the rifle, what does she seek? To be the one who gives mercy? To take whatever place Sorrow might have? Sorrow’s finger finds the trigger and it cuts her. She bleeds flame. Her hands are shaking, threatening to pull the gun apart. It is fragile. It is fleeting. Who does she think she is, to bring herself as high as to protect her? To replace her in the arms of peace? The vily offers obliteration and the woman without the rifle would STEAL IT FROM HER!

Sorrow’s eyes find the woman’s heart. It is beating. Loud. True. It is alight with every vice that has been beaten into Sorrow. Mercy, sacrifice, obligation. Her veins are alight with the aspect of the Wolf, as this whole city is. The Miracle. It hangs low above the city. Sorrow can feel its eyes on her. Engulfing her. Urging her. Destroy her. It beckons. Burn her down. Anathema. I lay upon her anathema. Sorrow, it beckons, the trigger. You can feel it.

Her sights are upon the woman’s heart. The vily pulls her deeper into the crowd. The time is fleeting, Sorrow. Anathema. She curls her finger around the trigger. The blood flows. It is flame. Anathema. She stole what Sorrow needed, what Oflay needed. The end, it is quickening. She can hear the riotous drums. The roil of the crowd. They are moving away from her, towards something new. Sorrow is staying still. Sorrow is staying murderously still. She is dead already, Sorrow. This is just. Anathema.

Anathema.

ANATHEMA.

Weakness.

It is a moment of pure weakness that keeps Sorrow from pulling the trigger.

It is the moment between heartbeats, between seconds. Sorrow is back on the rooftop. Sorrow is back in the march. Sorrow feels the woman without the rifle’s hand on her back. Sorrow can hear Stolynn’s chants. It creeps in between the flames. It intersperses passion and fills her blood with sympathy. With sentimentality. Her eyes catch the fleeting smile. Her strong hands. Her laugh.

And her gun falls apart.

She tries to pull the trigger. It is not there. The rage is gone, leaving only bitter hollow on Sorrow’s tongue. Resentment, maybe. Disgust, certainly. But not rage. Not the furious anger needed to summon such a weapon. She tries to bring it back, to bear the absent flame once more. She bites her tongue, draws blood. She tries, dear reader. She tries to force her mind into that blade again, to keen herself as a weapon against someone who slights her. All she tastes is blood.

The woman without the rifle disappears into the crowd. Sorrow had but a moment to enact Isosa’s will, to become like the paladins she admired. And she faltered. She looks up towards the Concordat of Miracles. It has turned away from her, keeping its forced vigil on the city of Mariposa. The sky is ablaze. She smells burning knowledge. Her hands are slick with blood. It is cold. Anathema.

A voice is heard emerging from the crowd and Sorrow snaps towards it. She tries to draw the gun again, this time not even thinking about it. She fails, of course. But she levels it against the voice all the same. Her fingers do not hesitate this time, finding what would have been the trigger.

She would have killed whatever it pointed at.

She would have killed the man standing in front of her.

He is tall. His horns are sawn off and constantly bleeding. He is flanked on either side by a dwarf and a mechanized man. His own gun is pointing at the ground. He flinches when he hears her hammer click into place. He knows he is not safe.

It is Stolynn standing before her. He is a bastion of Mariposa. Large and furrowed brow. He looks down at her. She is still pulling the trigger, cycling the cylinder of a gun that has never existed. Her hands are dripping with blood. He extends a hand out towards her. She does not, she never does, take it.

The cylinder is still cycling. Click, click, click. They stand there for all too long. The wind howls between them, cut through by the cold, mechanical clicking of a gun that just isn't there.

“Are you alright, miss?” He asks. The gun is still firing dry. Sulfur and ash fill the air. The sky is still burning. His hand is trembling before her, flinching at every trigger pull.

She does not stop firing. Click. Her hands are dripping with cold blood. Click. Her voice is ragged with barely constrained rage.

Click.

“It should have been me.”

#creative writing #cup of trembling #fantasy #dnd writing #writing #fantasy story #dnd #fantasy horror #mariposa #Sorrow

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