An insistent hand placed against the side of her face. Grasped at her arms and pushed at her leg... it was all she could do not to trip on the white sunlight of a cloudy morning. Everything fiery bright. Mind in pain, every line of tree shadow dragging across her cheek like rough cords of sand. Spiny legs, dipping into skin, crawling.
Just after dawn. The lightest breeze danced in from the West.
A gale to her.
Everything is skipping—her mind cannot hold on.
Struggling, reeling from the physical loudness. Fiery bright. Screaming in her eyes, peeling away hands, face. Smell of damp bark….faint, wet, clean, and a thousand memories of rainstorms… tumbling clouds swell up and then die away as the fabric tears and it all falls away again. The scent of pine trees grope like a drunk at her throat. Loud, loud….fuck…
Water scrambling across her feet like mice, shackling ankles again and again even as she pulled them free. Movement, so much movement. The water’s surface as a warped, rippling mirror never deeper than a puddle, never wider than the space between horizons. She is broken, and the world is pouring in through the cracks. Burn of tears.
Every movement creates a thousand more across the mirror. Loud. Screaming. Pots and pans, buildings breaking. Cold air sinking into the edges of her lungs in a forest barer than the wastelands in a biting fucking winter. She chokes. She is broken and does not work. The world streams in.
This will pass. Set jaw, muscles torn. Walking again, pulling in the silence like something starving.
In a place outside time she had curled up among the arms of shadows and water and wept like a child for hours. She could not remember the last time she had slept and could not tell a soul what was real right now.
Thin strings of muscle shift over scarred bones, as near to ripping away as the meat of some overcooked bird. A marionette dangles limply from a hand so long-clenched that she doubted she could pry it open now. She has a hard time remembering this is her body.
The hatred that had extracted her finally from the Aysea is now a churning, plodding apathy, sheathed in fragile-thin desperation. She had walked out of that city as a hopeless man might walk out into a desert or swim out into the sea, only praying her suicidal bravery would last until it was too late to turn back. Inside, somewhere, she thinks she is screaming.
You’re dying, some part of her mind keened. Pure desperation, will to live. A difficult feeling to ignore for a Retrograde.
I might die, she acknowledged. One of her teeth cracked from the force of her jaw. She vaguely wonders if that would heal. She doesn’t know. In a better time, better years, she would have found it vaguely humorous, would want to know. She would not have stopped until she did know. Right now, it was all she could do to walk forward. It was actually a long time ago that her resolve failed her. It had been fragile at best. If it had not been for the fact that she could no longer physically go back, she would have gone back; this was pathetic and true. But now she had walked too far.
You are dying, her mind chimed again, insistent.
An itch had settled into her throat, biting at the inside like a bloated, black-legged insect. Who knew how many sicknesses had settled into her faded frame these last few years. She had no strength to fight them. It is a miracle she can still draw breath. When she did, the insect bit, and the itch became a sharp burn, and she was coughing. There is no thought. She can suppress it, a little, but not completely. Not for long. Somewhere in her biology it is written that she simply has to cough when she is sick like this. It is written in the same place that tells her to eat, tells her to breathe.
And now, written somewhere beside it in a blazing red hand, there are ridiculous new instructions. Pathetic instructions that made her claw at a vial like a child at a scrap of bread. The lack of control destroyed her pride a long time ago.
She is so fucking weary. The drug had ravaged her mind so thoroughly that emotions swelled up from the wounds. None positive. Sobs intermingled with her coughing—her mind is broken, slurred, beyond drunk with injury. The drug that had once raised her to an almost human state could now only restore her to misery. Misery instead of agony. She had never felt this emotional pain in her life, nothing even close. Maybe other people had learned to deal with it, but she had never had to. She is not in her right mind and has not been for a long time.
You are dying. Turn back.
I am always dying.
You need this or you will die.
I always will need it.
If you have no hope, why are you fighting this at all?
I do not need hope.
Pathetic, because if it was here in front of her, she would simply use it. As natural as coughing.
It isn’t too late. Search! Yell! Someone’s going to hear. Someone will help.
No one is out here.
Another bout of scraping coughs racked her, and the water quickly stilled when she stopped walking. She would have ripped her throat out if she could. When had she ever needed her voice?
If you die, this could be over. You could be fixed.
If I die, nothing will change.
There is hope. Just rest a moment. Death will cure all of this. You can find your way back to the city then…
The issue with lying to oneself is not the deception. She was aware of how false her own promises were. The strength of her need to believe in them was what was injuring.
I will never return to that city. I am not strong enough.
You are stronger. You can go back now.
I will never be strong enough. There is always more to grow.
It was not always painful.
I will not accept heaven itself from the hands of another... Simple… simple fact..
At seventeen years of age, she allowed the limp Iron Slave to slip out of her hands. There was no office besides this alleyway, and she felt nothing about the loss of the person. She might have been more frustrated if there had been a better chance for him, but this time it was not her lack of skill.
“Too far gone,” she noted, for his master’s benefit. The person grumbled and left, leaving nothing behind but a promise of help in the future. It wouldn’t feed her today but…she often collected in favors when she felt it would be unwise to collect in credits. Some of them even kept their word¸ if they frequented her area. A fair trade for the practice she received from their bleeding objects. In return they remembered a semi-skilled medic who didn’t ask too many questions and what might take a job here and there. She had received most of her employers that way.
Somewhere, coughing shook her. She was just remembering this.
“Hellfire! You are blasted! Bloody! Burnt!” A voice like a rifle, like a performer. A grungy man with a cross burned onto his face. She stared impassively, curiosity turning her head. It was a gesture which had a way of disarming people, she found. Like the turn of a rag, it squeezed out just a little more. Not this man, though. She opened her mouth instead.
“What is Hell?” A question she had asked before. They rarely answered, and those who did only served to broaden her knowledge of insults. This one, however, must have considered himself a teacher. He sat down beside where she stood, anger now turning into fervor.
“Hell is a terrible place.” She had gathered this. “It is where you will end, if you do not leave the embrace of demons.” Doubtful, but new information. “What you call the light of Darwin is corrupting your flesh and spirit.” True. “All are given a second chance!” Debatable. “The—”
“Why is Hell terrible?” Best to keep him on track. She had no love for Darwin but didn’t have a pressing hatred for sanity either. She didn’t see any reason to waste time.
“It is the worst you could ever experience, the opposite of Heaven. You feel agony, everlasting torture!” Ah. Bad. “The Gravemind itself is flayed every day by The Lord’s wra—”
“What is Heaven?”
He glanced at her askance, torn between his enthusiasm for a rapt audience and his annoyance at her interruption every time he started to gather steam. He paused rather meaningfully, as if hoping to convey that displeasure, but his eagerness to continue overwhelmed him.
“It is the most wonderful place.” Mm. “If we serve the Lord, we are sent there when we die our final deaths.” How did he know? He actually paused for questions this time. She supposed she appreciated it.
“Why is it wonderful?” What did wonderful mean to her any more than terrible?
“Everything there is perfect. All of the dead who served him go there. It lovely beyond all im—”
“Who is it perfect for?” Well, it could not last forever. He still glared at the interruption, though. He should realize one bout of good luck did not mean the end of bad times.
“For you, if you ser—.”
“But not you?”
He twitched and forced some hooting laughter.
“My girl, for everyone.”
She shook her head, he nodded with fierce annoyance, and they locked gazes. Next to her, the Iron Slave started to rot as the infection wanted to drain back to its center. She slid it to the ground clinically, watching as the dirt grew hungry. Like fire, motion without explanation.
“Is my perfect yours?” she asked emotionlessly.
“You do not serve the Lord,” he said, regaining some calm himself. She didn’t have much to say to that, and the silence stretched.
“It’s perfect for everyone,” he insists finally, stubbornly.
“If two people like different things?” Her mouth is getting dry. She doesn’t usually talk this much, but this is the best way to learn right now. Interesting.
“Look, young lady, Heaven will be perfect for you because the Lord can make it that way. He can give you anything. Hell is absolute pain. It is the darkest of places.” She knew he didn’t mean dark literally. A habit from when she was young, but she always took a second to mentally note differences between literal and figurative language. “But Heaven is happiness. There is no place better. It will be tailored to you, but everyone else too, and it will work. I understand your confusion, young lady, but true happiness requires trust.” Her brows furrow slightly, but he could not see it behind her mask.
Interesting theory. She had never really wanted happiness (or maybe she was always happy?), but she never really looked for it either. Trust was not wise. Interesting theory, but she was more inclined to believe that he had absolutely no proof for any of what he said. It was useful to know ‘hell’ and ‘heaven’, though. They were used a lot in conversation, figuratively. She did not acknowledge his presence again, and he eventually left, unsure of how his sermon went.
The next customer arrived, giving her new purpose for the time being. A challenge but winnable. She might be able to save the foot this time.
Besides, anything that could give heaven could take it away at any time. An overthought bribe.
Then I wouldn’t accept heaven itself from the hands of another. If I achieved something like that, it would have to be me and entirely me. To accept anything like that from someone else… No. Very unwise. What would be the point?
But Heaven is absolute happiness. People seem to enjoy happiness? Maybe it’ll just make you happy, or make you so you can be happy? Hm... but...
But I’d prefer not to be changed…
… but you’re dying.
And suddenly she was walking again, half a decade older and perhaps wiser, if her brain was not in pieces. But not the cocksure girl who thought she was invincible just because she did not feel.
You’re dying! You need this!
I will always be dying. I will always need this.
This was not an argument she could win any more than she could convince away the weakness in her muscles. They would continue to protest unhearing. But the act of arguing in itself kept her at bay enough to keep her legs moving. She had no plan. That required a working mind. She had nothing of value. They had all been sold. Coughing racked her, and she was crying. Half a person, no pride. So much of her thoughts had been burned away; drunks had more coherency. If she remembered she had to keep walking, that would have to be enough.
But what had always (always?) frustrated her about this place was that she could never tell how much of it was real. Water, the broken mirror. The bent columns of trees, tied up with cloth like the sails of a ship. The other things that hung from trees, those with eyes that couldn’t see.
The water is likely, she almost thought. She is broken and does not work. Water had followed her entire life, chasing her childhood in rising swamps and bordering her adulthood in seamless salt lines. How likely was this forest flood plain to exist?
The cloth... Strange. Threatening... it... could... Long, slow folds weighed the branches and turned the bare woods into a suffocating laundry line, a tattered tomb. Faded patterns, shifting like hair in the eastward breeze. Gale. Screaming movement.
Absolute silence. Creak of branch. Shuffle of cloth. Silence again. No birds. No other sounds. Silence.
The wind gusted sharply, an explosion to her. Worn sheets were tossed up into the air while the heavier burdens of the tree swung dumbly. Just a glimpse, as if from lightning, of hundreds of slowly spinning feet before the cloth settled again.
Most likely to be real... People don’t need to be encouraged to kill… so many bodies, though... But it brought no questions to her mind. She was not working, had not been, would not be, for a long time.
Hit the hanging corpse like a confused bird, tumbling to the wet sheen of the earth. What? When? Contact jarred her mind into a state of action, an instant readiness to repel the intrusion by any means necessary, but the reaction died as she glanced upward.
Templeton…
Everything was connected like ripples in a pond. Something she knew, but he of course had special words for it. Complete with a simile. Uses like or as. She so rarely had to communicate her thoughts, they existed without form and without needing form. But he had a pretty phrase for everything. Part of being a professor. Now his gaze was utterly blank. Peaceful, really. Preferable to the idiot stare of a hungry dead man, but it also held none of his usual irritating charm.
Not real. None of this is real. This… this is wrong.
Her eyes dried in sheer surprise. The pain left her like a dream; she was steady again. Her face reappeared, painted in perfect lines under a sturdy hat she would commandeer from a dead man two years later. She was no longer the stumbling pieces of woman groping for a chemical.
This was not what happened. Am I asleep?
He had begun to rot, to look more the Retrograde and less the corpse as death crawled onward. Ironic. Thousands of preventative actions fluttered useless in her hands and feet, days late by look of him. It was difficult to really tell with his usual state.
The breeze had stilled. The sun had gone back into its hole. All the trees were gone except for his, the cloth still fluttering in funeral black and white. She stood on the plane of water. Stared up at him. Dark, bile-like blood had seeped into his shirt and blackened, and the feather in his hat (a gift from a hardy, unkillable idiot) was bent sharply, broken. Her mind urged her for an action. Decide. Something like emotion welled up like blood from a cut artery, thick and fast despite the wrappings, and she felt it as a person without feeling would, a numb pressure building. She couldn’t describe it as pain. It pushed though. The force was there. She started walking again.
Smiles woke up very slowly to the thin whisper of early morning sunlight next to her face. Not much could reach her from her narrow slot under Doctor Vladimir’s bed. A girl who had been born Frances Waters felt the pressure drain away. A crust of blood lined her eyes, and she blinked it away stoically. After dawn, hm. These dreams were rare anymore, but they still appeared more often than a season. Usually without guests. That was new. Why? As she prepared for the day, her mind ticked forward deliberately. No emotion, but a clicking pressure. The usual speech.
You were wrong. You were helpless. You were weak.
Breathe. Continue. She is already near calm. Her feelings are subtle things at best.
Everything is broken in this world. That knowledge can never be taken away. Everyone is broken in this world. There is an advantage in you knowing your own faults.
Continue. Breathe.
It could happen again. No one will help you. No one can. You are alone.
This was calming.
But I will work against it.
The silence of the cabin, of this early morning earth, filled her—a perfect mirror— and inside she became perfectly still. It was past time she got to work. Autumn sunlight streams like a golden liquid through the windows and she almost realizes somethi
Frances Heel blinks again and she is staring at a dripping Spring forest on a cloudy day. She can almost feel a snap as she pries open her fist. Unfortunate… Her face registers the girl in front of her in a second that feels like another century over. Dark blue eyes, bright red hair, a freckly boyish young thing. Those dark eyes flicker downward now, heavy with the need to avoid contact, entire body twitching. Somewhere between locking into place and bolting.
Every person said it would be easy. A force of will, a force of focus, of self-knowledge…
“It keeps people in their minds…” the girl whispers, glancing around nervously. No one was around except for their scrounging party, not far. They did not know about the redhead’s disability, but the reluctant psion had been perfectly willing to murmur the truth to her. Why are they always (always.) so quick to trust me? “I didn’t mean for the attack to actually…Usually people can stop it by now…” Ah. Well, that is the problem. “I mean, I mean…once they practice enough.” You don’t have to try to make this pretty for me, girl. Being angry at you would just prove weakness in me. I asked you to do it... The psion’s smile is fragile with hope for her. “You just need more practice… or maybe you’re just tired…” No. But when has that ever stopped me.
She has never been hit with something like this before. Would she have realized if she had been attacked during that? Dangerous…
“Thank you,” Smiles clips shortly. It is the appropriate response for the situation. The psionic echoes of emotion— bitterness, injury—blink out one by one and nothingness envelopes her again. Disappointment is not an emotion, however. It persists in her thoughts. To a problem, a solution. To an observation, a change.
She had been paralyzed and puppeted, erased of memory and had her ambition drained from her to the point where she was little more than a content ghost. Every time struggling, every time putting her entire being, all of her will, into halting it. Xen, Easy, Harvey, Illest, Bruce… Every time failing.
Her breath leaves her slowly, and she shoulders up her pack as they move back toward town. Eyes up, weapon ready, providing silence to a loud earth. What was she going to do?
Just after dawn. The lightest breeze danced in from the West.
A gale to her.
Everything is skipping—her mind cannot hold on.
Struggling, reeling from the physical loudness. Fiery bright. Screaming in her eyes, peeling away hands, face. Smell of damp bark….faint, wet, clean, and a thousand memories of rainstorms… tumbling clouds swell up and then die away as the fabric tears and it all falls away again. The scent of pine trees grope like a drunk at her throat. Loud, loud….fuck…
Water scrambling across her feet like mice, shackling ankles again and again even as she pulled them free. Movement, so much movement. The water’s surface as a warped, rippling mirror never deeper than a puddle, never wider than the space between horizons. She is broken, and the world is pouring in through the cracks. Burn of tears.
Every movement creates a thousand more across the mirror. Loud. Screaming. Pots and pans, buildings breaking. Cold air sinking into the edges of her lungs in a forest barer than the wastelands in a biting fucking winter. She chokes. She is broken and does not work. The world streams in.
This will pass. Set jaw, muscles torn. Walking again, pulling in the silence like something starving.
In a place outside time she had curled up among the arms of shadows and water and wept like a child for hours. She could not remember the last time she had slept and could not tell a soul what was real right now.
Thin strings of muscle shift over scarred bones, as near to ripping away as the meat of some overcooked bird. A marionette dangles limply from a hand so long-clenched that she doubted she could pry it open now. She has a hard time remembering this is her body.
The hatred that had extracted her finally from the Aysea is now a churning, plodding apathy, sheathed in fragile-thin desperation. She had walked out of that city as a hopeless man might walk out into a desert or swim out into the sea, only praying her suicidal bravery would last until it was too late to turn back. Inside, somewhere, she thinks she is screaming.
You’re dying, some part of her mind keened. Pure desperation, will to live. A difficult feeling to ignore for a Retrograde.
I might die, she acknowledged. One of her teeth cracked from the force of her jaw. She vaguely wonders if that would heal. She doesn’t know. In a better time, better years, she would have found it vaguely humorous, would want to know. She would not have stopped until she did know. Right now, it was all she could do to walk forward. It was actually a long time ago that her resolve failed her. It had been fragile at best. If it had not been for the fact that she could no longer physically go back, she would have gone back; this was pathetic and true. But now she had walked too far.
You are dying, her mind chimed again, insistent.
An itch had settled into her throat, biting at the inside like a bloated, black-legged insect. Who knew how many sicknesses had settled into her faded frame these last few years. She had no strength to fight them. It is a miracle she can still draw breath. When she did, the insect bit, and the itch became a sharp burn, and she was coughing. There is no thought. She can suppress it, a little, but not completely. Not for long. Somewhere in her biology it is written that she simply has to cough when she is sick like this. It is written in the same place that tells her to eat, tells her to breathe.
And now, written somewhere beside it in a blazing red hand, there are ridiculous new instructions. Pathetic instructions that made her claw at a vial like a child at a scrap of bread. The lack of control destroyed her pride a long time ago.
She is so fucking weary. The drug had ravaged her mind so thoroughly that emotions swelled up from the wounds. None positive. Sobs intermingled with her coughing—her mind is broken, slurred, beyond drunk with injury. The drug that had once raised her to an almost human state could now only restore her to misery. Misery instead of agony. She had never felt this emotional pain in her life, nothing even close. Maybe other people had learned to deal with it, but she had never had to. She is not in her right mind and has not been for a long time.
You are dying. Turn back.
I am always dying.
You need this or you will die.
I always will need it.
If you have no hope, why are you fighting this at all?
I do not need hope.
Pathetic, because if it was here in front of her, she would simply use it. As natural as coughing.
It isn’t too late. Search! Yell! Someone’s going to hear. Someone will help.
No one is out here.
Another bout of scraping coughs racked her, and the water quickly stilled when she stopped walking. She would have ripped her throat out if she could. When had she ever needed her voice?
If you die, this could be over. You could be fixed.
If I die, nothing will change.
There is hope. Just rest a moment. Death will cure all of this. You can find your way back to the city then…
The issue with lying to oneself is not the deception. She was aware of how false her own promises were. The strength of her need to believe in them was what was injuring.
I will never return to that city. I am not strong enough.
You are stronger. You can go back now.
I will never be strong enough. There is always more to grow.
It was not always painful.
I will not accept heaven itself from the hands of another... Simple… simple fact..
At seventeen years of age, she allowed the limp Iron Slave to slip out of her hands. There was no office besides this alleyway, and she felt nothing about the loss of the person. She might have been more frustrated if there had been a better chance for him, but this time it was not her lack of skill.
“Too far gone,” she noted, for his master’s benefit. The person grumbled and left, leaving nothing behind but a promise of help in the future. It wouldn’t feed her today but…she often collected in favors when she felt it would be unwise to collect in credits. Some of them even kept their word¸ if they frequented her area. A fair trade for the practice she received from their bleeding objects. In return they remembered a semi-skilled medic who didn’t ask too many questions and what might take a job here and there. She had received most of her employers that way.
Somewhere, coughing shook her. She was just remembering this.
“Hellfire! You are blasted! Bloody! Burnt!” A voice like a rifle, like a performer. A grungy man with a cross burned onto his face. She stared impassively, curiosity turning her head. It was a gesture which had a way of disarming people, she found. Like the turn of a rag, it squeezed out just a little more. Not this man, though. She opened her mouth instead.
“What is Hell?” A question she had asked before. They rarely answered, and those who did only served to broaden her knowledge of insults. This one, however, must have considered himself a teacher. He sat down beside where she stood, anger now turning into fervor.
“Hell is a terrible place.” She had gathered this. “It is where you will end, if you do not leave the embrace of demons.” Doubtful, but new information. “What you call the light of Darwin is corrupting your flesh and spirit.” True. “All are given a second chance!” Debatable. “The—”
“Why is Hell terrible?” Best to keep him on track. She had no love for Darwin but didn’t have a pressing hatred for sanity either. She didn’t see any reason to waste time.
“It is the worst you could ever experience, the opposite of Heaven. You feel agony, everlasting torture!” Ah. Bad. “The Gravemind itself is flayed every day by The Lord’s wra—”
“What is Heaven?”
He glanced at her askance, torn between his enthusiasm for a rapt audience and his annoyance at her interruption every time he started to gather steam. He paused rather meaningfully, as if hoping to convey that displeasure, but his eagerness to continue overwhelmed him.
“It is the most wonderful place.” Mm. “If we serve the Lord, we are sent there when we die our final deaths.” How did he know? He actually paused for questions this time. She supposed she appreciated it.
“Why is it wonderful?” What did wonderful mean to her any more than terrible?
“Everything there is perfect. All of the dead who served him go there. It lovely beyond all im—”
“Who is it perfect for?” Well, it could not last forever. He still glared at the interruption, though. He should realize one bout of good luck did not mean the end of bad times.
“For you, if you ser—.”
“But not you?”
He twitched and forced some hooting laughter.
“My girl, for everyone.”
She shook her head, he nodded with fierce annoyance, and they locked gazes. Next to her, the Iron Slave started to rot as the infection wanted to drain back to its center. She slid it to the ground clinically, watching as the dirt grew hungry. Like fire, motion without explanation.
“Is my perfect yours?” she asked emotionlessly.
“You do not serve the Lord,” he said, regaining some calm himself. She didn’t have much to say to that, and the silence stretched.
“It’s perfect for everyone,” he insists finally, stubbornly.
“If two people like different things?” Her mouth is getting dry. She doesn’t usually talk this much, but this is the best way to learn right now. Interesting.
“Look, young lady, Heaven will be perfect for you because the Lord can make it that way. He can give you anything. Hell is absolute pain. It is the darkest of places.” She knew he didn’t mean dark literally. A habit from when she was young, but she always took a second to mentally note differences between literal and figurative language. “But Heaven is happiness. There is no place better. It will be tailored to you, but everyone else too, and it will work. I understand your confusion, young lady, but true happiness requires trust.” Her brows furrow slightly, but he could not see it behind her mask.
Interesting theory. She had never really wanted happiness (or maybe she was always happy?), but she never really looked for it either. Trust was not wise. Interesting theory, but she was more inclined to believe that he had absolutely no proof for any of what he said. It was useful to know ‘hell’ and ‘heaven’, though. They were used a lot in conversation, figuratively. She did not acknowledge his presence again, and he eventually left, unsure of how his sermon went.
The next customer arrived, giving her new purpose for the time being. A challenge but winnable. She might be able to save the foot this time.
Besides, anything that could give heaven could take it away at any time. An overthought bribe.
Then I wouldn’t accept heaven itself from the hands of another. If I achieved something like that, it would have to be me and entirely me. To accept anything like that from someone else… No. Very unwise. What would be the point?
But Heaven is absolute happiness. People seem to enjoy happiness? Maybe it’ll just make you happy, or make you so you can be happy? Hm... but...
But I’d prefer not to be changed…
… but you’re dying.
And suddenly she was walking again, half a decade older and perhaps wiser, if her brain was not in pieces. But not the cocksure girl who thought she was invincible just because she did not feel.
You’re dying! You need this!
I will always be dying. I will always need this.
This was not an argument she could win any more than she could convince away the weakness in her muscles. They would continue to protest unhearing. But the act of arguing in itself kept her at bay enough to keep her legs moving. She had no plan. That required a working mind. She had nothing of value. They had all been sold. Coughing racked her, and she was crying. Half a person, no pride. So much of her thoughts had been burned away; drunks had more coherency. If she remembered she had to keep walking, that would have to be enough.
But what had always (always?) frustrated her about this place was that she could never tell how much of it was real. Water, the broken mirror. The bent columns of trees, tied up with cloth like the sails of a ship. The other things that hung from trees, those with eyes that couldn’t see.
The water is likely, she almost thought. She is broken and does not work. Water had followed her entire life, chasing her childhood in rising swamps and bordering her adulthood in seamless salt lines. How likely was this forest flood plain to exist?
The cloth... Strange. Threatening... it... could... Long, slow folds weighed the branches and turned the bare woods into a suffocating laundry line, a tattered tomb. Faded patterns, shifting like hair in the eastward breeze. Gale. Screaming movement.
Absolute silence. Creak of branch. Shuffle of cloth. Silence again. No birds. No other sounds. Silence.
The wind gusted sharply, an explosion to her. Worn sheets were tossed up into the air while the heavier burdens of the tree swung dumbly. Just a glimpse, as if from lightning, of hundreds of slowly spinning feet before the cloth settled again.
Most likely to be real... People don’t need to be encouraged to kill… so many bodies, though... But it brought no questions to her mind. She was not working, had not been, would not be, for a long time.
Hit the hanging corpse like a confused bird, tumbling to the wet sheen of the earth. What? When? Contact jarred her mind into a state of action, an instant readiness to repel the intrusion by any means necessary, but the reaction died as she glanced upward.
Templeton…
Everything was connected like ripples in a pond. Something she knew, but he of course had special words for it. Complete with a simile. Uses like or as. She so rarely had to communicate her thoughts, they existed without form and without needing form. But he had a pretty phrase for everything. Part of being a professor. Now his gaze was utterly blank. Peaceful, really. Preferable to the idiot stare of a hungry dead man, but it also held none of his usual irritating charm.
Not real. None of this is real. This… this is wrong.
Her eyes dried in sheer surprise. The pain left her like a dream; she was steady again. Her face reappeared, painted in perfect lines under a sturdy hat she would commandeer from a dead man two years later. She was no longer the stumbling pieces of woman groping for a chemical.
This was not what happened. Am I asleep?
He had begun to rot, to look more the Retrograde and less the corpse as death crawled onward. Ironic. Thousands of preventative actions fluttered useless in her hands and feet, days late by look of him. It was difficult to really tell with his usual state.
The breeze had stilled. The sun had gone back into its hole. All the trees were gone except for his, the cloth still fluttering in funeral black and white. She stood on the plane of water. Stared up at him. Dark, bile-like blood had seeped into his shirt and blackened, and the feather in his hat (a gift from a hardy, unkillable idiot) was bent sharply, broken. Her mind urged her for an action. Decide. Something like emotion welled up like blood from a cut artery, thick and fast despite the wrappings, and she felt it as a person without feeling would, a numb pressure building. She couldn’t describe it as pain. It pushed though. The force was there. She started walking again.
Smiles woke up very slowly to the thin whisper of early morning sunlight next to her face. Not much could reach her from her narrow slot under Doctor Vladimir’s bed. A girl who had been born Frances Waters felt the pressure drain away. A crust of blood lined her eyes, and she blinked it away stoically. After dawn, hm. These dreams were rare anymore, but they still appeared more often than a season. Usually without guests. That was new. Why? As she prepared for the day, her mind ticked forward deliberately. No emotion, but a clicking pressure. The usual speech.
You were wrong. You were helpless. You were weak.
Breathe. Continue. She is already near calm. Her feelings are subtle things at best.
Everything is broken in this world. That knowledge can never be taken away. Everyone is broken in this world. There is an advantage in you knowing your own faults.
Continue. Breathe.
It could happen again. No one will help you. No one can. You are alone.
This was calming.
But I will work against it.
The silence of the cabin, of this early morning earth, filled her—a perfect mirror— and inside she became perfectly still. It was past time she got to work. Autumn sunlight streams like a golden liquid through the windows and she almost realizes somethi
Frances Heel blinks again and she is staring at a dripping Spring forest on a cloudy day. She can almost feel a snap as she pries open her fist. Unfortunate… Her face registers the girl in front of her in a second that feels like another century over. Dark blue eyes, bright red hair, a freckly boyish young thing. Those dark eyes flicker downward now, heavy with the need to avoid contact, entire body twitching. Somewhere between locking into place and bolting.
Every person said it would be easy. A force of will, a force of focus, of self-knowledge…
“It keeps people in their minds…” the girl whispers, glancing around nervously. No one was around except for their scrounging party, not far. They did not know about the redhead’s disability, but the reluctant psion had been perfectly willing to murmur the truth to her. Why are they always (always.) so quick to trust me? “I didn’t mean for the attack to actually…Usually people can stop it by now…” Ah. Well, that is the problem. “I mean, I mean…once they practice enough.” You don’t have to try to make this pretty for me, girl. Being angry at you would just prove weakness in me. I asked you to do it... The psion’s smile is fragile with hope for her. “You just need more practice… or maybe you’re just tired…” No. But when has that ever stopped me.
She has never been hit with something like this before. Would she have realized if she had been attacked during that? Dangerous…
“Thank you,” Smiles clips shortly. It is the appropriate response for the situation. The psionic echoes of emotion— bitterness, injury—blink out one by one and nothingness envelopes her again. Disappointment is not an emotion, however. It persists in her thoughts. To a problem, a solution. To an observation, a change.
She had been paralyzed and puppeted, erased of memory and had her ambition drained from her to the point where she was little more than a content ghost. Every time struggling, every time putting her entire being, all of her will, into halting it. Xen, Easy, Harvey, Illest, Bruce… Every time failing.
Her breath leaves her slowly, and she shoulders up her pack as they move back toward town. Eyes up, weapon ready, providing silence to a loud earth. What was she going to do?