A day in the life of planars

The Priest's Prayer

The eyes of a cow set in a tanned, beautiful face. The face of one who endures, and whose beauty is refined rather than withered by the burdens She bears. It was this, more than the silver corona that served as halo, that assured him this was a goddess. Her bovine gaze is unreadable now, but it was not always like this.

When his flesh was not that of a clam's, when he walked among men rather than the prawns and salamanders of Ossa's shoreline caves...back then Her eyes held love, love and a mother's compassion. He remember the night of his initiation into Hera's priesthood and mystery cult, when after fasting for seven days sipping only on honey he had seen Her while blindfolded. She had come to him just as he felt the warmth of the fire he was led to, just when he smelled the burning dung.

It was an image that pranced before his mind's eye but for a moment. She was young then, a maiden with calf's eyes and untanned skin, Hera the Virigin whose innocence was forever renewable. This magic was not available to beings less than gods, as he would come to learn.

Back then he and the others had celebrated their accomplishment, getting drunk on wine made from the pomegranates given to the temple as offerings. They were sacred to Hera, and ivory sculptures of the fruits had been set by artisans to appear to grow directly from the marble that served to hold her idols and their caretakers.

That day, and those that followed, had been among the happiest of his life. He had been married among the living and carved fruits mere weeks following his initiation, for his new station had made him worthy of his love's hand. Her father, a shepherd of cows, would never deny his daughter to a priest of the very Mistress of Cattle. Hera had come to him on his wedding night, a proud mother who blessed him because he had saved himself for this moment. He had watched, in dreaming, as the goddess's light made her surroundings into silhouettes, as she had touched the womb of his wife.

Two strong children, twins of different genders, had followed. Following this sign of favor, he had risen quickly in the ranks of his brothers, an idol himself to the incoming initiates. Yet those initiates also brought their wives onto the grounds.

The story he had told himself; that his adulterous love was somehow beautiful, that his initial denial was proof enough of his commitment, that love beyond the boundaries of his vow was something more pure. But then he recalled the derision of his children, his fellows, and the stricken disappointment on the face of his mistress's idealistic young husband. He had used excuses to defend his selfishness, his pathetic immaturity, his inability to let go of youth.

But realizing one's guilt does not preclude one from justice. Fury, fire, burning through eyes of a maddened bull. He hadn't just betrayed his wife, he had betrayed his Lord. Hera, the guardian of love's oaths. He was thrown into the wildest currents of Oceanus, bones broken then simply removed, head melting into the stalk of his neck, skin turning a wet and putrid white.

And now here he was, placing shards of oyster upon an altar, offering up mother-of-pearl to the goddess in a cave serving as temple. Rotten octopi pantomimed the place of pomegranates, and the only texts available were the scriptures he clumsily yet continuously scrawls onto the wet stone.

He could have railed against Her, attempting to assail the temples - he was monstrous enough to be a threat. Or he could have simply abandoned his faith and possibly his life. But sin, and its punishment, could not gainsay his belief in right and wrong. He had preached the goddess as Just, had condemned the adulterers he knew were hidden in his flock - that he had given into temptation was not the fault of the goddess. What She had done to him was Right, he had not been wronged at all.

What can he do but continue his role as priest?

They are still connected. He knows because he still sees Her, even if those seemingly wide and open eyes are unreadable. But as he looks upon his crudely crafted idol with its barest suggestion of hips and breasts, he knows his own gaze is far more easily sounded out. He knows what She sees:

Someone who endures.

The Invisible Museum

You would pass through it without a second thought, perhaps in pursuit of some solid item, perhaps pursued by predators in flight from their own bellies'...emptiness. You might catch - without truly taking note - the feeling of dry gasps upon your skin, the hint of rosewater's scent, or perhaps a far echo of music.

But I doubt it, because the Invisible Museum is not meant for your solidity. There are sounds and scents, rumors and maps, all serving as distraction from our shelter. All meant to lead you all - from lowest insect to most ancient wyrm - to other, more fitting, pastimes for your kind. We let the promise of material things persist, so long as it keeps you away from our bastion of privacy. And should your somehow reach it, the Invisible Museum barely breaks your inattention. Even then, if you are awarded a brush with our art, it undoubtedly holds little value in your search for Earth and Mineral derived currencies.

I do not think any of you, save for the slightest few capable of appreciating Art itself, could truly appreciate how we have so stealthily given substance to subtlety.

The Invisible Museum is all the majesty of air distilled into light perfumes, samples of climates, and a collection of harmonizing whispers. It is a whirlwind of a hundred zephyrs that are continuously woven and rewoven into halls, wings, floors and galleries. It is ever changing and ever inspiring, its evolving echoes of exhibits meant only for those who are risen wholly from the Place of Infinite Breath.

It is not meant for your ears, nor your nose or tongue, nor for your skin, and certainly not for your eyes.

ps. this is touching on a line in an old Dragon magazine talking about the art of air elementals

Natural Diplomacy [based on a long ago discussion about the alignment of the 4 seasons]

"Winter freezes off what's left of mad Summer's balls after Autumn rot, but then the cold bitch recedes and in Spring rutting all misery's forgot..."

Ilshae smiled to herself as she hummed the raunchy old bar tune. It had been several weeks since the dwarf maiden had left the nearest village, charges in tow, but unlike those greener druids she'd kept her good humor. Not that she faulted them for their misery. All their kind, when first initiated, longed not just for villages but the walled enclosure of city life - it was the only time they felt secure enough to rest. It was not easy to be hunted and hated in every passed wood, every waded river, every hiked mountain trail - to know that just beyond the campfire lay temptation and threat. The flowery perfume of merciless nymphs. The promise of murder read clear in the howling of wolves reborn from the Frost.

As one became less of a target and more of a power unto one's own Self, fear was less of a distraction and thus the wilderness could be tolerated and eventually once more Loved. That was the real reason she found it to be as hard as she must be. Each of her eight disciples had come to her to defend the natural world, as well as their families and neighbors. Their love for the world is why they had broken from their clans and their comforts - because they knew that only the druids kept the Seasons' missionaries from overrunning the world. Ilshae winced inside even as her oaken staff smacked a once serving girl from her distracted reverie.

But here, where the leaves were caught in the preternaturally bright colors of flame - forever decaying but never falling - the need for vigilance could not be denied. And Ilshae, smiling with full lips and corn-flower blue eyes, tracked their unseen escort even as she hummed and swayed her hips and made pendulums of her rich brown tresses. Unlike her pupils, who frowned as they worked not to gag on the stench of rot that was dampening the air, the elder druid knew that confidence brokered passage in the Land of Spirits.

Which, sadly enough, was rapidly becoming all lands. Not that humans didn't tear down more forests, build more cities, over-fish more seas. This unnatural abundance of humanity was, as far as she was concerned, a curse from Spring. But even if such was not the case, all the druidic orders' Numberers had calculated that from the poles Winter reached out with Her glacial claws - that another War of Seasons would occur in little more than a century. Sirrine, the serving girl she just struck, likely had enough elf-blood inside her to witness the opening salvos. Even the relatively pure blooded humans with her - Kara, Justin, Mael had a chance to live long enough to watch the world end.

Unless, impossibly, the druids found a way to broker peace between the four monstrous forces that believed Time should be held, forever pinned down while they were ascendant.

That's what made Ilshae such a harsh mother, even as she sang her ribald tunes and flirted with the deaths on the other side of the trees. The Hounds of Rot, they had brought down megasloths and mammoths as she had watched helplessly as a mere initiate. A mere spy invisibly recording their crimes. What had sickened her was not that they killed, but rather the drawn out delight they took in doing so. Wolves - real wolves, not those eaten then spat out by the Frost - would bite prey on the nose to induce euphoria, but the Hounds of Rot danced around the great mammals until the poor creatures bled out. And even wolves born-again in Frost devoured - the Hounds of Rot merely left the carcasses to spoil in honor of their Lord.

Beneath the mask of bravado, Ilshae waited and even hoped for the Hounds to lunge out from behind the brush, but none came. Of course they would not, for though they were hated by the Seasons' spawn in ancient days the Heirophants had extracted oaths from all the Spirit Courts. As this was a diplomatic mission, so long as the necessary obeisance and libations were given, this path into Autumn's rotten heart would be clear of any conflict. If this had been one of Spring's blossom-harems, she'd be more worried about her brood straying, but the stench clearly wafting in from the deeper darkness ensured all her charges would keep to the trail.

They were far enough into Fall's territory that the canopy above blocked the noon-day sun they'd come from. Or rather as they had walked, the canopy had thickened above them. The light of the ever-dying, never to fall leaves cast all below them in strange shadows. Caricatures of their own forms. Sirrine glances around nervously, but her waif form stretches up from its hunching. It seems to add a foot to her height, and her dark brown eyes begin to ease into the gold of lions' irises. She has suffered personally at Fall's hands, her and the strong black Mael whose iron cleavers are already in hand. The girl's mother left to the slow-rot, the boy's whole village scourged by the Order of the Maggot. Without the pouch of herbs Ilshae had placed around his neck, he would constantly wake up screaming.

Mael, the only initiate not caught off guard by the curtaining of the sun, snorted and gestured with his chin for the others to look forward. Two Hounds, almost certainly to have been pig-wallowing in excrement today, had taken up posts several strides in front of them, eyes bright with yellow flame. They seemed like burgundy mastiffs misbred for their overly large skulls housing jagged, misshapen teeth. Between them a horse carcass stood upright as black beetle hordes made a tunneled city over and through it's remaining flesh. Astride its back there was a figure, hooded in dirty rags, eyes burning in the same manner as its canine companions.

Upon the rider's own back was the burden of a massive scythe shedding flakes of rust with every gust of wind.

"Wait." the rider said so softly a necessary zephyr carried the fiend's whisper over the intervening distance. As it passed against their ears, each of them caught a hint of the sweet cloying smell of overripe fruit.

"For what?" asked a rough, loud, voice behind Ilshae. Horganth, the great one-eyed half-orc. Of course he would think to challenge a spirit - not because he believed he could defeat one, but because he would not let death stand between him and respect. A fabled warrior whose own shamans had brought him to the Heirophants, he was Ilshae's most difficult charge precisely because his own accomplishments rivaled her own. She whipped her head back to glare at him, but it hardly mattered. The fiend waited patiently, and would not leave the path. They would not dare to fight it, as even if they defeated the autumnal being the woods would pour out packs of Hounds.

With nothing else, to do, they made camp, knowing their rations would begin to hint of mold and rancidity. With nothing much to share save their own witness to the horrors of Spirit, Ilshae figures they might as well talk of war. Beginning with their immediate mission.

"If the fiend attacked, it would have killed us all." Horganth, of course, does not lower his gaze as the others would. He glares with his mossy green eye into his mistress's blues.

"Honored One", these words he intones without sarcasm, "I thought my careless courage should match your own." Those latter words, however, are dripping with it. His tone, his leaning forward - he almost wants battle. Not here, not in this place, but elsewhere and soon. Not because he believes he is her better in wielding the blessing given by the World's desperate need for stewards, but because he knows she was at the overrun of Summer's forces seven years past. The war in which the orcs drove back the cold blooded hordes and their solar dragon masters. The war in which he, a "lowly" half-breed, had led a rag-tag company of goblinoids and wild men deep into the heart of the slaughter.

He would be a great warlord someday, and so the orc shamans whose blessing he sought had brought him to the druids, the world keepers. To lead was to serve - and in truth only the blessing of the World was respected across the races he hoped to draw warriors from. Ilshae looked at him with mild annoyance, but said nothing, choosing instead to pass out the tiny, black dried mushroom heads each of them was to sup on. Horganth took his humbly, this fungi of Communion reminding him of his place.

Sirrine licked at hers as would a cat, Mael simply swallowed his for he did not like the tangy flavors the fungi put on the tongue. Horganth chewed his dramatically, a gesture accentuated by his point-filed teeth. Kara, whose tanned skinned matched Sirrine's and Justin's, bit off half and began to breathe rhythmically. For whatever reason, the short (for a human, but a half-a-foot taller that Ishlae) woman with gentle brown eyes matching her short locks took to the visionary power of the plant spirits with greater ease. A farmer's daughter who had no need for suitors despite her pretty freckled face, she'd jumped at the chance to escape chastisement about her lifestyle amongst the provincials she'd thought she suffer for a lifetime.

Kara was close behind Ilshae to see the tragedy of the world, and at times given the young human's tears the dwarf wondered if the girl saw deeper than her mistress. But Kara knew not to shed any in this place, so close to Fall's putrid heart.

...The woods around them explode into all the senses as Truth rushes past the veil of the mind | The trees weep, the earth dry heaves through constant gagging, its shuddering untraceable to unaided perception. A constant buzzing underlies the air | Spirit overlays material, diaphanous and ethereal | Foxes, wolves, deer, even rodents and birds - ghosts of all that were gather around them once they know their suffering is witnessed | All those whose souls fled as their bodies were given over to the fiends of decay | To see them, to take in the knowledge of the trespass against them, for this the animal souls are thankful allies | The druids are surrounded by the forest's restless dead | Yet even as friends are found, so too are enemies increased | Here in the invisible, Rot has festered freely, and with skin of warped wood serving as thin sheet over long gnarled bones, the forest's wraiths turn their fire-eyed attention to the gathering of eight on the road...

Sirrine's breath quickens, but she composes herself enough to growl. Her face has become quite leonal. Mael raises his cleavers, though he knows there is little in their enchantments that would effective against the incorporeal. Ilshae raises up her hands and the spirits, along with Kara, see their soft white haloes. A quiet majesty like that of distant yet powerful stars. It is not enough to stop the approach of Autumn's fell servants. The wraiths between the trees, walking upright as men but stepping somehow in a manner reminiscent of spiders, the swamp-lights of their eyes boring into the dwarf kneeling to lay hands upon the soil. Hundreds, pressing against the angry animal mass matching their own translucence. Watching as Ilshae reminds them that there is a greater, deeper power than that of their cancerous Lord.

Soon enough, as the mushrooms take effect, all her disciples can See her magic.

Horganth watches all this with grudging respect, realizing Ilshae made a mockery of their enemy precisely to draw their attention her - the one strongest against the Rot in the invisible. He could snap open the jaws of a wrymling but all his muscled might would do nothing against the spectral hosts of Fall. What is of equal interest to him, and the other disciples, is that Justin's hands hold a similar glow. The boy himself, with a still cracking voice at fourteen and still very pimply and gangly, seems just as surprised. With soft sepia eyes he looks down through long bangs of red, staring in wonder at his hands. His father, a woodcutter, was lost to the nymphs of Spring, and this death by infidelity had broken his beautiful mother. He too had been relieved when Ilshae had come to collect him, saying she had spied him out in dream.

"Put them in your pockets." Ilshae says guardedly, even as she notes the wraiths turning their attention to the lad. Justin complies instantly. Morna, another initiate and a stocky female dwarf that doted on Ilshae's every word, pushed the much taller boy closer to the fire. Hammer in hand, the younger dwarf glanced around with eyes only a shade darker than her mistress's. In fact Morna was a distant cousin, though both had not let clan loyalty come before the necessary harshness of the younger's training. How could any harshness be spared when in every avenue of Life their enemy waited - in the cold, in the heat, in the seed, and in the rot. Still, Morna looked saddened she had not been trusted with the truth about Justin.

Ilshae ignores that hurt, turning her back on the wraiths - who do not dare to trespass onto the trail - to move toward the center of the campfire being tended by Lorelai. The sylvan girl stared intently at the diminutive humanoid figure watching them from the center of the flames, an indistinct figure akin to shadow save it was made of white hot Light instead of darkness.

A spirit, like those of the extinguished animals, whose allegiance was to the World rather than the Seasons. Lorelai warmed her hands, for the elf was a pale and wane thing clearly touched and thus cursed by the Frost. White hair, pink albino eyes, a bone-thin maiden afflicted by continual shivering. But even the wraiths watched warily for her palms were clearly being kissed by flame as pale skin remained unburnt. Taking care to move slowly so as not to startle the spirit, the elven woman reached into the campfire to adjust the burning wood.

"This delay is a show of power." she said quietly to the approaching Ilshae and Keird, the beardless gnome who sat transfixed by the sounds of the spirits. Lorelai and Keird were both from wealthy families that understood the way courts -both mortal and spirit - functioned. Lorelai had been fetched from her father's mountain demense - she'd been attacked by a frost-wight in the woods. This had caused such a deep hatred for the cold that the Fire had immediately taken to her during her initiation.

Keird nodded glumly at Lorelai's comment. A merchant's son, he had never expected to retreat into the forest, nor had he expected to Awaken to the hatred of so many spirits upon being initiated. A gnome of seas and cities, a handsome adventurer with the black hair and storm-grey irises of a pirate, whose shipwrecked family had bartered one of their boys in return for assistance from the druids of the seas. Keird, surprisingly, had volunteered. Older than Justin but capable of acting far more childish, he seemed to regard the nightmarish borderland as personal insult to his station.

The mushroom seemed to be acting as a partial balm to his misery, as despite his frown he bobbed his head in time with the psychedelic cadence of the world's secret rhythm. His eyes watched a trail of termites devouring a fallen tree with concern. Though Keird had proved to be an irritating aristocrat, Ilshae had come to learn of his charity work with veterans who had fought the encroaching Seasons. The young gnome had a hero's heart, it was just buried in the flotsam of his spoiled existence.

"My father would make men wait a time inverse to their worth. That way they knew his favor, or lack of it, could be measured by the length of their delay."

The gnome smiles, remembering the taste of his father's commercial prowess. Ilshae looked at him askance, but then shrugged. After all, many of the druids reveled in their station. Even she, in truth, took a certain pleasure in the command of her eight. To teach, to shape lives, to judge - there was an intoxicant to this. Of course, this same intoxicant had corrupted the Seasons and was why their world was threatened with dissolution.

"Will the Courtier accept the terms?" Keird turned to ask Ilshae. Even though none of them understood exactly what they were bargaining for, the merchant's son was eager to understand the -business- of the druids' relationship with the spirit world.

Ilshae sighed. "For the surrounding villages, I hope so. But this is just an agreement to parley with Spring, and giving that the region is seeing Summer's end in truth - Autumn will ask much for peace." She still remembered the brief renaissance when the druids had found the texts of ancient binders. Printing presses had run dry, blood had become ink, clans and kingdoms giving their lives to ensure that the world might know power over the Seasons.

For over a century it had worked. Spring might be known without thoughts of seducing fey. Summer brought no reptilian hordes with its heat. Winter did not seek to make all sterile and static, yoked to the Frost. And Autumn kept to its place in the Cycle, rather than pursue the ever-decay of all things. One might think to tap maple trees for their sap rather than prepare to flee before the coming of the Hounds of Rot.

Then somehow the four groups of cultists had come together and found a way to tear at the runes carved into the ancient sequoias that powered the chains of arcana, releasing many of the monstrous forces of the Seasons. Over two hundred years gone, and they still weren't sure what had happened, or how many of the missing members of their orders had gone over from the World to serve blight and Seasons.

In the long years since while serving as diplomat, Ilshae had worried she'd see former friends, respected teachers, even one of her lovers of those forgone centuries in one of the Courts. In the shadows, or behind the flowers and light, she had felt recognition, but never had any traitor revealed themselves.

She thought of those lost ones as they supped on the simple stew and dried meat that was somehow still susceptible to the Fall Court's proximity. They ate hurriedly to prevent their environment from corrupting the food further, then waited in stifled conversation for the invitation of the court.

"Any news from the western border?" Kara asks Keird, as his father continually had servants checking in on his son. Druids may have taken him, but his family would not abandon him to what they perceived as the orders' dour asceticism. Given the amount of planning done by druids in cities (and orchards within them), this image was only accurate for situations such as this one.

Keird waits, savoring the attention Kara paid to him even though he knew it had little to do with his looks. Though she had no desire to return to life under her village's scrutiny, she did worry about her village left in Spring's path. Keird glances up at the fiend blocking their path (~ever rotting, never dying~) and quickly turns back to the pretty human.

"They haven't crossed it, they're still drawing in humans and elf-blooded villages bordering the sylvan protected forests. Even the cities are losing population as the blossom-scent is borne on the wind."

Lorelai looks up, though her people are miles away fighting the wights and wolves of the Frost. But it hurts to think of fair-touched falling to Spring's temptation, even if that was essentially what Spring was. Sirrine, one of those elf-blooded, nervously pets one of the ghost-foxes - the mushrooms have pulled them in between the worlds of matter and spirit.

"Any word from Nagayo?" Mael asked, curious about his homeland and its savannas threatened by arriving tundras and deserts.

Keird nodded, but looked away. "The House of Ibe has become very popular." Mael scowled. The Ibeans were elemental worshipers, corrupt nobility more than willing to bargain with the Seasons for power. They had ruled his country when the Order of the Maggot had come through his village. They had marched in at night, killing with blade and Rot. The latter they took a special pleasure in, for like the Hounds they believed it holy to leave cursed victims wasting away. It was not a time Mael ever chose to talk about.

As her pupils speak of the lands beyond this wood, Ilshae, her belly full and her high coming to its apex, finally feels strong enough to do what they have all been avoiding - lock gazes with the fiend. To not do so is to confess a weakness not only in herself but in the power of the World over its recalcitrant spirit children. Her eyes run up the legs of the horse, over its beetle bored torso, and even here the insight of the fungi in her blood is terrifying. The spirit of the horse is still there, still tied to its body, still screaming silently as it tries to run into a true afterlife.

- the eyes of the fiend | burning yellow | corrupting flame | entropy with no purpose save sadism | kill Time and keep all caught in forever-decay | shut the doors | let nothing escape into Death | no release | ever rotting | never dying -

Ilshae feels fear thunder through her voluptuous body, bowels threatening to loosen completely. But her nails dig into her palms, her eyes hardening at the summoned memories of all those lost when the sequoias fell, thundering to the ground even as the conflagration of spirits rose up screaming in triumph and release. When once more the Balance became the fool's gold left to druids' dreaming...

The dwarf, the druid, the woman refuses to look away even as the fiend, true child of Autumn, shows her all the world immortal, ridden with maggots and chased by Hounds, begging for death that does not come. Ilshae raises her hands before her, their haloes pushing back with a vision of a different future - four obelisks carved from the red wood of elder trees, each humming the power of forever-bound courts. The spirits chained by arcana of innovation and ancient wisdom, whipped by the druids into obeisance, caught in the rotating Dance of the Cycle.

Seasons enslaved, the way the World had meant Them to be.

The disciples begin to turn away from their talk, witnessing that battle of wills between the fiend and their mistress. Glancing back and forth between the two proxies, the burdened souls of animals matching the turn of their heads. The Eight of Ilshae huddle together as Time seems to swing between two destinies, two prophecies. The promise of peace, of druids' victory, and the hope of Autumn that the dead will rise to Rot and the living will envy the temporary release from the world known by those once-corpses.

Justin the World Healer comes to stand with his mistress, arms parallel to hers, his own starlight palms defiantly facing the fiend. The wraiths stare at him, his power, with recognition and hatred.

And fear, Kara the Seer notes. They fear him.

"Come." the fiend whispers into their ears, the promise of future violence made clear. But for now it turns its horse and with the Hounds beside its flanks they lead the way toward the Court.

Ilshae, her Eight, and the cadre of animal ghosts follow suit. As the Rot deepens, the Hounds that had followed them behind the brush and trees emerge to border the path.

The World forgets Itself as they pass through an arch of intertwined trees, air shimmering as they enter the Court.

Without the pacifying nature of the mushrooms, they would retch so much they couldn't stand, their hearts threatening to collapse with weight of the spiritual anathema concentrated here. It was too dark to properly see, so Lorelai the Cleansing Flame raised up her arm even as torchlight ran down it's length.

-The world was never meant to be like this-

The path is pulped with rotten fruit fallen from trees leaved with the ember glow of restrained cruelty. Everything they dimly illuminate in autumnal colors, even the druids, seems to be cast somehow in the shades of meat far past its prime. The wind, gentle though it may be, carries the feeling of grubs pushing against skin.

Seeking orifices.

Trees on either side serve to form this macabre hall, where bodies of what might have been druids, even friends of Ilshae, are pinned to trees by rusting nails. Their faces have become a mask of sludge, features softened in the way of vegetables forgotten in dark cupboards. Gathered on the branches around them are iron-clawed buzzards that dip their hard beaks into the buttery flesh, pulling out organs that regenerate. For a moment it seems they might forget themselves and the Pacts, preparing to take flight against the Ilshae and her Eight, but a growl from Sirrine (Lioness) and a glare from Mael (Maggot's Bane) quickly put them back in their place as wretched carrion crawlers.

Real animals, their bodies scattered and torn, mewled in pain from the darkness beyond the high bordering oaks themselves gouged by termite swarms. The restless spirits of tortured fauna gathered around Justin and Ilshae as children would run to parents after a bad dream.

This was the eternal life Autumn hoped to grant to all living things. Spring sought to breed bodies to stock its harems, Summer sought to exalt Life into its prime and then madden it in glaring sunlight, Winter wished for the quiet of Frost to bring the calm, patient stillness of undeath. All those fates seemed to pale before the perdition arrayed before them.

Yet the guarding veil of ingested psychedelics offered them a Truth they might lean on. Tempted or bred or changed, the creatures here were mere corruptions of the World's dream. The trees, the vermin, even the nearing forms of cultists cloaked in hooded rags and knights armored in ever-rust emblazoned with their order's maggot standard - all this was born of the World. And with light akin to that gloving the hands' of Justin and Ilshae, sketching the borders of mutated forms in the manner of a cloud's silver lining, the World still laid Its claim. Strengthened by their connection to a Higher Power, knowing that even something as terrible as the Rot is merely a wayward rebel of Nature, they enter the throne meadow of the Courtier.

-where should be grass | strange little flesh-pink mushrooms | of the World corrupted stand | distorted facsimiles of genitals | poking through the piles of compost treasures | carcasses born of flora and fauna | still twitching | nothing dies here-

Keird, the City's Speaker, takes in everything that might count for currency in this twisted reflection of life in the World. He wants to understand what might entice the Seasons to sue for peace.

-naked men and women | sway as if drunk | animal heads | eyes | if there are no longer turgid | slow imploding grapes clinging to stalks behind lids | many empty sockets | flesh is canvas | chew holes | gangrene | bones showing and marked with scavenger teeth | fur capes | no modesty-

Kara keeps her eyes to ground save for guarded glances, her Sight too strong to take in all this wrongness.

Morna, Unbroken Guardian, stands before the thing on the throne and the group. Hammer raised, with the symbol of Secrets Kept marking the power of the World's heretofore innocent bones. Under the Mountain the Seasons had little sway, though in the cavern lands Summer's saurian armies warred on dwarf and goblinoid alike.

-throne is carved from flesh of giant apple | inside is wet and brown and sunken into slush of the half-eaten | half-alive | it sits upon roughly hewn fruit | scarecrow body in short metal cloak | tarnished silver chain-links | bat-wing foreskin flesh stretched sheer over jagged yellow bones | smell of marrow left to air | head of a butterfly like blister swollen to burst | buzzard claws for hands and feet | proboscis slurping at own slime-skin | whip-licking around at blue-white mold webbing body to throne | above insect head is apple's core | of course only cavities where seeds might once have sat -

The heaps break and bubble with the Thing's voice, its words coming through the still living piles surrounding them. The voice it has is soft and kind, calm and congenial, as though this place was not the climax to a hall of horrors.

~Summer falls with the Cycle here, Fall rises, Spring comes in defiance of World's decree, Join us, Rout the nymphs and purge out their blossoms~

Ilshae glances around at the compost, the voice's mouths, then turns to the figurehead on the throne. In those butterfly eyes she sees herself though the reflection is small and distant in those dark compound orbs.

She sighs, not daring to weep.

"Spring will be taught once more the Way of things in Balance. Rest assured. But your Lord -"

The Hounds and several of the courts' heads growl but the dwarven veteran continues. The wraiths press forward but stop and the growling, hissing, cawing sounds of the animal spirits who protectively surround the company.

"-your Lord Autumn has also forgotten the Path. The decay of Fall is vanguard to Winter - it should not swallow the villages around these woods."

~Autumn is God. world is honored mother. But mother must remember her place before Him~

The haloes around her own but especially Justin's hands begin to flare. Ilshae looks at the boy in concern as she feels the weight of the Courtier's mind run over him. He stares serenely back at the Thing, the light from his hands bright enough to lend an aura of silver substance to the animal ghosts.

Yet the arcana of the Pacts still keeps both sides from striking. It is only after they are beyond these woods will he need to worry.

"Winter is short here, by the World's decree. Fall is shorter. You'll have to hold these lands from Winter, then Spring will come in mere months for She will be in ascendance in these lands. You will be hard pressed to keep these woods, let alone any lands you might temporarily conquer."

Even the Courtier's proboscis calms its vigorous licking at that. Driven by a hunger to make flesh into receptacles of His word, the mind of the autumnal spirit struggled against this fanatic need so as to grab hold of Intellect. The druids offered defense, knowing that Autumn would devour the surrounding area but would then be open to attack from Spring. Rot had taken hold in these woods, the World's dream turning over to the Lord.

But it would have to gamble that it could hold against the nymphs and their legions of pollen-caged harems. Better to parley with Spring and the druids, yet at the same time demand much for the promise, and Pacts, of peace.

~What do you place at our Lord's altar?~

Ilshae hesitated, trying to clear her thoughts. Images of those faceless damned crucified to trees did not leave her. She reached into one of her pouches and produced a collection of gems, their faceted darkness lit internally by twinkling lights.

"For the parley I offer the souls of those servants who sought to betray the orders, the Fianna of our Orders who lost heart and broke their oaths to the Heirophants."

She drops these on the ground, where they are quickly drawn under the congealing waste. She stops, looks back at Justin, and exhales.

"My brood, my Eight, must reach the city of Caraedin. Many of your Lord's woods lie between this place and their destination. For safe passage from all Seasons I offer myself."

Justin the World Healer's serenity breaks, and the light of his hands flickers with his uncertainty. Lorelai the Cleansing Flame gasps, but then fires are born in the deep recesses of her albino eyes. Mael Maggot's Bane seems unsurprised but grimly stares with open hatred at the Thing on the throne. Kara the Seer looks as if someone has punched the breathe from her lungs. Sirrine the Lioness watches impassively with feline eyes - her human form will bawl with the Seer once beyond the Rot. Keird City Speaker seems more lost child than merchant prince of gnomish kind. He will cry more than any other. Morna, Unbroken Guardian, *bends* deep. She turns, hammer suddenly heavy enough to weigh down her muscled arm, one hand reaching out toward her cousin. But then the hand curls into a fist placed between her armored breasts. She lowers her head in honor of the sacrifice.

~Let it be so. Praise be to the God of all Rot~

Somehow this place seems to -lean- toward the druids. The wraiths are becoming more solid. The buzzards are flying in from the passed trees, settling on surrounding branches in anticipation.

"Go." the mistress says to her dumbfounded disciples. There is so much to tell them, so much more wisdom to give. Little more than a paltry year of training and now nest's departure. But the World had carved their lives for Its purpose long before Ilshae, Skald of the World's Dream, had come for them. With Justin at their helm they would be a spear against the spiritual cancer that threatened all nations and peoples.

"There's nothing left to be said. Go. You'll find horses waiting. Fall's wraiths will keep you safe."

It is Morna, eyes wet, who begins dragging them away, pulling them to where the Path's continues beyond the throne and beyond this grinding moment. She herds her grief-stricken siblings in faith, even has Fall's branches descend downward toward His prize. Ilshae is now His new toy. Upon the apple throne the Courtier's proboscis flagellates its body in delight.

"Horganth" the Skald speaks. The half-orc, the last to turn from her, turns once again to look at her. The descending branches are already touching her hair, her shoulders, softly as a shy lover might. The gentleness will not last.

-Ever Rotting | Never Dying-

"Come back for me." she begs in whisper. The half-orc looks hard at her, the stream of lunar-glowing animal forms flowing past his feet. He is disturbed, not because her courage has broken, but because of the compassion that wells up and catches his voice in his throat.

Finally Horganth, who will come to be known as Ilshae's Vengeance, nods.

=-=-=

They entered Nine while the sun was high and emerge from the Rot and its woods with daylight squandered but still some to spare. In less than half-a-day they are Eight. The animal souls, alight with Justin's magic, fade to rest as truly natural twilight strikes them.

Invisible outside the Rot, still they can feel their entourage of Pact-bound wraiths gloating.

The setting sun sits on the edge of the World's stage. It could almost be Autumn's baleful eye, His colors spilling out from the horizon to herald His coming.

The mushrooms they ingested have dissolved almost completely into their blood, but the plant spirits still retain a waning hold on their minds' attention. This is enough for the sound of Ilshae's voice to reach them.

Her desperate scream cuts through the distance of spirit and matter, those last wordless pleas mercilessly reaching their ears.

~end for now~

Kalna

In the city of Kalna, the adults do not understand exactly why but they feel quite estranged from their childhoods. That is because what they believe to be their childhood selves are really sylvan angels that slide out of their reality around the time of puberty, which the gods deal with by creating a replacement. That is why the city's citizens have so much trouble remembering those childhood memories and the contentment they found in them.

They only have origami approximations of what those original pilgrims felt in their temporary time in Kalna. So connecting themselves to those fey beings in memory, that's like trying to decipher the origami steps of the paper animal in your skull by staring at its completed form. Those folds don't give up their secrets so easily. But the people of Kalna are blessed by celestial kindness, because those coure-eladrin who are their child-selves (precisely because they are their child-selves) mercifully sneak out at night to whisper to them about who they "were" as they dream.

If they are brave they can be the children they never were but always reach back to.

"can you hear that children's song? can you take me to that place? high above the lamentation up on the desert plane" - 'Face and Ghost', Live

Flash Before Your Eyes

Chern Wei looked through the wisps of cloud thinly veiling a full but distant moon, disturbed by the distance his body was from the clouds. For most the blood soaked soil of the battlefield was no more than a horse's torso away as best, but for a dragon knight such as himself to feel the moistened soil was both dishonor and boon. Dishonor that his people should be forced to concede both sky and ground, boon that he should survive the fall. Charred and broken, legs trapped under the weight of his dead master, but alive.

His sons would not be made bastards, his daughters would not have to be whored off in lesser marriages to *merchants*. His wife would not have to fear the machinations of conniving rivals who sought to twist his land and title away before any of his children could lay claim to it. His eldest, his daughter was barely a teen for all her fierceness - she could still inherent the gauntlets from what would be his own age spotted hands. Just as he had inherited them from his mother, her bravery and his father's skill in numbers allowing their family to become invaluable to the Emperor. He remembered her, weathered like wood bleached in sun but standing straight, strong enough to aid his ailing father, her dragon in attendance but masked as a woman herself.

Yes, most of all he remembered the dragon.

THUNDER-> bodies of horses and men thrown into the air -> colored comets exploding into blazing stars -> this close even echo is deafening

Even as his lower body numbed, he clung to the dream that his daughter could inherit the artificed glory enclosing his hands. All he had to do was survive the fireworks raining down in the night. Above him the dragons roped their long wingless bodies through a staccato darkness punctuated by explosive interruptions. The golden scaled body of his own dead companion had breathed out such death upon the field of battle as well, a young-for-its-kind but fierce warrior he had been proud to serve and learn under. He recalled the day he had first sat astride the dragon's back, happy to have been paired with a young male - he could not find love in his heart for any female dragon. His mother's gauntlets, almost thin gloves made of papery metal sheets and wire, thrumming in their own anticipation and closeness to a draconic mind. He breathed deeply, inhaling, exhaling, emptying himself of all thought but Purpose. Of servitude. Fingers stop their shaking - their bones still vibrating with the heirlooms' ecstasy - and grasp the dragon's oryx-like horns.

THUNDER -> young for dragon is lifetimes for human -> so many years so many thoughts -> so many senses -> so much Life

Chern Wei felt himself slipping into this reverie, despite the explosions around him. How he had taken on the mantle of dragon rider, learning at the clawed feet of his master. Dragons were an old, ancient race, who had nearly destroyed their own population long ago in bygone eras. Dwindled as they were, they knew they could no longer dominate the world as a species. They required children such as men to ally with draconic families, the intermingling of their blood conferring the right of lesser mortals to rule over others only granted the Short Life. And they required the riders, men such as himself, who could serve as aqueducts to the vast oceans of their own minds.

THUNDER -> broken skull of his second father revealed in fluorescent red then green then orange -> scattered bits of body and metal pour over him -> had he and his lord not played this same game in the aftermath of victory?

Dragons were cruel, capricious beings when it came to their lessers. The younger ones thankfully lacked the natural resentment of their elders, some of whom had lived long enough to recall the days when men were but rodents scattering before the great armies - armies! - of dragons and their draconian samurai. Their first children of whom all the others given only Short Life were mere substitutes. To know this, to overcome this prejudice, this disdain - that was the first duty of any who would be rider, any who would share the thoughts of such a vaster mind. How he had spent days shuddering, retching, losing himself in the terror of both the overwhelming memory of the senses of a higher being and the terror of being separated from that great reptilian body. That separation from organs was like having eyes plucked, nose shattered, tongue loped off and eardrums popped all at once. He had only taken thirty days to recover. Not the fastest, not even in his own time, but still quite respectable. Enough that when he came back to meet his lord for a second time there was pride in the dragon's eyes. Pride for their intertwined families. Son paired with son, though Chern Wei could never make himself love or even truly respect his master's mother.

THUNDER -> lights flash far above -> the dragons' breath becoming patterns -> already they glorify their kingdom -> the story of this battle is written across the sky in fire -> the story of his people's defeat -> the story of his master's death

Grief, anger, dishonor. The need for revenge rooted within his code. This would keep his own death at bay. Somewhere above him, dancing even now, were the pair that had snatched away his companion's life. Why had his master turned the bulk of his great flesh to save Chern Wei, a lowly rider? An honor, one of the highest, but nothing compared to the least of those gifted with the Longest Life. Chern Wei recalls those early days of training, learning to bear the intrusion of that vaster consciousness into the papyrus shell of his own skull, and then finally, like a ray of light through the thunderhead, sharing his own thought and worth with the being that would become his second father. The moment where he could finally not just know but *believe* there was something his lowly race could offer such magnificent beings.

THUNDER -> the rodent quickness of his thoughts -> the sanctuary of his small heart -> the books in his bones and memories held in the beating of his heart -> the worthiness of the Son come before the Father

Just a few hundred feet away someone playing possum broke into a loping, stumbling terror, and a dragon swooped down and cleaved his body in twain with a playful snap of its great wyrm jaws. Great Wyrm. Just like the mother of his second father, the dragon who watched him in a human form. The youthful courtesan with ancient eyes for whom time passed as a glacial thing, for if that seductress was ravaged by age it was the way a river cuts a canyon through stone. When she blinked, the action itself mere affectation, only then her beauty took even his hateful breath away. And what was that childhood of his spent under her gaze but a mere blink to one such as her? Those eyes locked with his own were guarded, wary, the viper watching him through the eyes of a porcelain doll. The secret shared between them, the secret he could never speak lest all his family's efforts turn to dust. Honor is silence, the knowledge of that sin passing from human son to dragon father yet never given voice to.

THUNDER -> first lesson in shame -> his mother's unclothed back with a light trail of scratches -> her own muscled body blanketing another, lither female form -> eyes look up as her mother's face is hungrily kissing this stranger's neck -> slitted eyes his child-self will flee from that night and recognize in the morning-> years after his own mind-marriage to a dragon he almost understands but cannot ever forgive -> but come morning if he lives it is that reptile that shall bear him home

A rider is the vessel of arcane power. A dragon can work magic without a spell book, much of Short Life arcana requires nothing more the gesture of claw and push of will. But the arcana of the dragons, and those few other races granted the true Long Life, this required great ritual and great sacrifice. Somehow, through the tinkering of alchemy and the salvation granted to his ancestors, the dragons had changed their Short Life species so that they might be worthy servants to the first children of the gods. Chern Wei had learned to make himself both an instrument of record and calculation, a sorcerer-wizard, a magus who himself was a book of spells. Through Short Lived sons and daughters, the dragons could work true draconic arcana not within their cavernous rune-caves and nation-trees, but upon the field of battle. Each rider was a channeler, an abacus, and a sacrifice. Chern Wei knew he had given himself not just to the field of battle, but also made of himself a candle whose life melted out faster than others of his kind. He was honored yes, just as his mother was, but he would sacrifice decades to taste the sight of light on a dragonfly's wing miles away, the creaking sounds trees make underneath their bark, the heart leaping triumph of scattering whole companies of men the way down pouring rain breaks lines of ants.

THUNDER -> sheets of eldritch fire arc downward -> cracking earth and bone and teeth -> once armor running off of flesh and burning in its descent -> men become even less than they are -> break ranks -> lightning chains out and catches even the fastest coward

Only now he lies among them, an ant among ants, as dragons above make mockery of the preceding massacre. Without riders, the dragons would never have allied with any of the Short Lived. Only with these useful insects astride their necks gloved in gauntlets forged in rune-caves and nation-trees did they come to respect men at all. And even then the swarming morass of little forms meant almost nothing. Only the greatest workers of arcana, the rulers of nations, the few proxies striding the world in the name of the gods, and the riders - only these, among all the Short Lived, could be golden nuggets within the murky currents of meaningless lives arriving and leaving the world. But only the riders could make the dragons understand, and only the riders could catch a glimmer of what dragons were. Only the families of riders might hold onto echoes of such experiences when the dragons were no more. And only the riders allowed dragons to break each others necks in their jaws, to rend each others scales, to kill another dragon the way a mortal soldier could kill another man. Dragons needed power, needed territory, needed to hoard coffers of Short Lived that men thought of as their own kingdoms. But to take part in their own race's extinction, to know that as another one of their own fell from the sky that something as beautiful as they were was tumbling from air to death, only human callousness could allow them to accept such a thing.

quiet -> the dragons above have tired of their game -> they are leaving -> but he is dying -> his hopes are pinned on the adulteress coming for her son's body -> what remains of night will be occupied with the question that haunts him:

how?

how could a dragon dishonor itself and take something so weak, so low, so base as a human for a lover?

-double post-

might as well put something here:

"every nervous system makes its own model of the event: alien abduction, satanic abuse, shamanic trial, temporal lobe epilepsy...whatever. i don't know if they're aliens or time travelers or neural spasms. what i know is this:

a new relationship with time, the Self, and death."
-invisible kingdom

Half-Peak

Enterprising fiends, heartbroken murderers, and heretic thieves slink into darker alleys, annoyed by the arrival of Sigil's morning. Those who have lived upon worlds where dawn emerges from its horizon tomb, a hound chasing away night, find it all the more irritating. In those worlds shadows are lengthened and deepened by the position of the Sun upon its daily arc. In the City of Doors, the seedier elements found in almost every city, as well as those who are found in almost none, are forced to contend with a suffused glow brightening the air around them.

(One wonders if peak and antipeak are the Cage's crude approximation of those Suns, or rather Suns are the best approximation to the Lady's work the gods could manage.)

Retreating with night's recession, besides the fiends and their disciples, are twin ad hoc orders that often cross in unwitting or unwilling osmosis.

Sigil's darkness calls out to the aasimars as one pulls out a candle when the sun is down and the moon has waned too far. Angel blood has alchemically conjoined with baser flesh, and with this gnostic understanding of the tribulation awaiting the good-but-weak-hearted this 'race' emerges to wage a whispered war against the temptations of their sires' enemies. Whores are paid for naught but their company, assassins thwarted, children led back to their worrying guardians.

The other congregation is that of the repentant or recalcitrant tieflings, those who seek to become candles so as to enjoy the light of the Sun. Fiendish blood has alchemically conjoined with hopeful flesh, and with this struggle of the soul to be its own Philosopher's Stone this 'race' emerges to wage a wanton war against their sires. The corrupt are coupled with to learn their secrets, soul harvesters entrapped in their own gems, rapists gutted.

But enough about these bastards and inheritors, these children whose street level mystery plays enact microcosmic models of their parents' more infinite wars! Do you not see they have snuck away from our descriptions, vanishing even as we named their lineages and professions?

Do you not see we are in the nascent pearly brightness of half-peak, and do you not wonder about those hungry who braved the night with children or elders in tow to greet this sunless dawn? Do you not marvel that despite the dangers we have just discussed, the line for the Bleaker's soup kitchens already extend across blocks and blocks, almost daring to spill into Wards for whom such dismal sights would be like the perfumed fair maiden awakening to a horsefly leaving erratic footprints across the heavily applied rouge that to logic's contrary does not mask but accentuate the noble beauty of the rich?

The Day after all Others' Tomorrows

"The beginning is a shipwreck. Such was the unspoken premise of the seers."

In the Tower of Arcana, it was all too easy to look out at the corpses of merfolk and marine life bubbling to the surface and judge the Wasteland that would exist after the Final Battle. All the gods might die, but the archmage Aquela knew that this prophesied demise of the Powers would open up the mortal world to new wars. These battles would be fought in an Age bereft of the healing and hope the deities' clerics could provide. It was that Age, the one after prophecy, that she now waited for like one grown bored with a play one is forced to attend at another's behest.

Solars and planetars mounted on silver scaled ki'rin leading angels illumined with all the colors of a Sun's daily traversal of the sky did battle with nation-swarms composed of a gamut of winged devil ranks led by legions of pit fiends themselves astride the largest of nightmares. The reality bending nature of cumulative wish spells had left space and time rippling, blurry things. Beyond the borders of this reality the larger existence that circumscribed the Prime shone through ghost-like, the way moonlight passes through diaphanous cloth. Outside the world, on the other side of the sky and revealed as Vision in every blink of an eye, the gods of Good and Evil have reached the culmination of their contest. Revolting Beauty contests with enraptured Ugliness.

The White-Silver Witch of the Western Hemisphere ignores it all - the light and the dark, the cleansing fire and tsunamis of shadow, those titanic forms armored in their constellations - each impact of an opposing divinity's comet forged weapon dousing stars the way her breath extinguishes the candles of her ritual. She'll see how dark the night is after they've finished the final act of their childish game. An endgame that distracted so many of her fellow immortals that the Tower of Arcana, whose foundations lay at the bottom of the continent-tall, oceanic Unarian Trench, had been emptied of archmagi and apprentice alike. Fools joining Faithful in a last stand against the Amethyst Hearted, the prophesied children turned death knights who commanded the armies of Bleeding Nightfall. A disappointing squandering of power, but one she had long calculated for. Her own apprentices remained in the levels below as well as in other secured locations. Alongside them were mathematicians, engineers, alchemists, doctors, teachers, druids, merchants, manufacturers - she'd spent centuries building the cities that could be shunted into para-dimensional locations for extinction level events.

Something banged against the curtains of prismatic force shielding her location, something that could see through her wards. Her eyes flicked away from ritual, taking stock of the potential intruder through her own wasted reflection.

Kerzed the Black looked back at her with eyes of red hatred cut through with black slits of desperation. Atop his back a girl, no older than twelve, leered with intentions beyond those a prepubescent would entertain. Her eyes exuded rays of indigo that darkened her face, though in the conflagration of high arcana outside the Tower her once brown skin glistened with an oily, coppery sheen. Her white petticoat was stained by blood and angel feathers, making the child's garment akin to a butcher's apron.

With this Amethyst Hearted's aid the fiends had won the surrounding sky and ocean. And now the death knight believed they could win this Tower as well. The girl touched one of Kerzed's horns, and in what seemed more spasm that willful action, the great wyrm's tail slammed against the abjurations Aquela and the others had raised. It was the last act she had required of the mages before they could be released from their oaths to the orders to "fight for their souls" or "defend the Light" as they had put it. Fools.

Soft rainbow light flashes out at Kerzed's strike, making the Tower a momentary lighthouse in the encroaching dark of the angels' retreat. Kerzed screeches, the flapping of his wings as he pulls away churning up the currents below into waves striking then running down the invisible walls of Aquela's abjuration. But even as the black dragon pulls back, the child - whose inky glow now shines not just through eyes but exudes faintly from all orifices - touches her palm to the dragons forehead. Serpentine orbs roll back until ocular veins are starkly visible, standing out in lightning yellow contrast to the scarlet of the dragon's blazing sclera. Exhalation as involuntary gagging splatters gallons upon gallons of acid against the warding magics, but beyond producing another light show for the encircling fiends nothing occurs. Those infernals dare not approach, nor do they dare to even test their diabolic spells against the Tower's defenses. None, not even the pit fiend generals, wish to risk banishment to Elemental Void promised by the runes carved in Unseen Light.

They know the White-Silver Tower is a gateway to that Nothing that even their kind must surrender to. In this they are wiser than the dragon riding harbinger that continues to use a reptile as ineffective siege engine to batter against the barrier. Kerzed screams in pain, and the girl's flesh seems to ooze a pitch shade of frustrated violet from every pore. Still the Tower defenses hold, more steadfast than iron though they appear as nothing more than faint iridescent sheets. In another place, one might think them woven of rain drops in drizzle playing prism to reemerging sunlight. Aquela can see hints of bone in the ruined flesh of Kerzed's tail. The dragon grits its jagged teeth, its pupils begging for assistance, all the more pathetic for being framed by burning red.

The dead little girl on his back continues to leer disrespectfully at the archmage. The Amethyst Hearted knew it might fall to the Light in the name of the Dark, but the harbinger could not comprehend that here was one who denied the Day of Judgment itself.

Aquela sighs. There is a part of her thinking that whatever is inside that corpse, its costume of meat could easily be one of her daughters by descendants. That part of her - Compassion - was tamed long ago, however, and does not drive her to hasty action. Her lineage, all of it save for a hundred or so god-slaves, are nested safely in the cradles of her created dimensional pockets. They wait to inherit the world, one they will conquer with potions and purse strings, livestock and grain.

Messages come to her mind from the great wizards below who sadly remain neophyte archmagi. They are still nascent in their understanding of seed craft, the paints and notes from which the Art of High Arcana ensues. Her ancient and surprisingly religious fellows, she suspected, had awaited the Armageddon with the anticipation of cowards needing Someone Else to bring them to their desired conclusions. They'd all taken the gods as bed mates, but there was no reason to show so much attachment to such alien beings. New symbols could be drawn from the blood of old in time. One of the many things she'd learn in preparation for this chapter's ending.

She had not expected Kerzed to come to her door - in fact she was surprised the dragon had answered the Call of Darkness, the enchanted echo of those trumpeting horns - each once belonging to a now extinct mountainous mastadon - resounding across the world. Not that she thought he would fly south, guided by the Sapphire Polestar to where the Light had gathered. It was just that in the long millennia of their relationship, beginning when he had demanded sacrifices from the long forgotten empire she'd been born to, Kerzed had never seemed so much Evil as driven by pride and greed. He was not one to believe in things, not even the Dark which claimed to have sired him and his kind.

Seeing him here, despite their last meeting which had left both of them scarred and in need of deep regeneration, she felt a strange kinship with the monstrous great wyrm. They were practical creatures drowning in a war of fanatics - the silhouettes of these very Powers shattering the climates of the world into thunderheads and blizzards. Even below, in the inky blackness surrounding the Tower's base, bioluminescent civilizations sacrificed themselves to religious fervor.

She was old, as her immortal flesh had crossed from its youthful tawny gold into dry jaundiced papyrus. Each almond eye now rested on a bed of bordering wrinkles. And so much of that exhausting life had been spent readying the world to outlive its gods both self-righteous and psychotic. How many times had she sought to bring Kerzed into her confidence, recognizing his amorality and its mercantile intelligence as an asset? Yet each time he had hounded her, breaking her secret portals to arable land beyond the fields of their shared planet. Scattering the armies she'd manipulated into wars. Forcing her to raise her own hand in violence when he succumbed to the bribery of the Dark and directly threatened her own long-sighted designs.

Yet here, in the last days of known divinity, she could not help but feel pity for him. Was it the promise of ruling in the Dark's earthly perdition that enticed him? Was that why he had made the pilgrimage to the obsidian studded wastelands where the Dark incarnated itself into seventy times seven sacrificed children? What was his reaction when his bridle was given over to one of their number, a lunatic dead thing whose only dreams were wet ones of spirits bent and then forever broken?

Yet it was not pity for a fellow Old One that drew her out into battle. Even as she stepped through the argent walls of her Tower, she thought of Kerzed's knowledge of the seed craft, of that magic written and illumined by lesser beings in the versed epics of varied songs and Scriptures.

The dragon could be made useful. Jaws clamped around the invisible globe that kept her as center as she stepped across a floor of air with a fearless, measured gait. She locked gazes with the Amethyst Hearted and calmly spoke a word of power.

'Release.'

A cloud of shadow-light as dark as vein's blood exploded out of the girl's body, wisps hooking desperately to the corpses skin. With a toss of his cabled neck Kerzed sent the corpse tumbling downward toward depths where its white petticoat would more than adequately serve as shroud. The shadow-light became the tail of this falling star of Dark. Even as Aquela and the dragon followed the thing's descent with volleys of force, lightning, and fire It suspended herself just above the water. Deep violet light billowed around the girl's body as an aura of demonic miasma, and the youthful puppet of flesh raised a grasping hand toward the ancient black dragon.

Kerzed dove with a howl of despair, and when he regained the sky the Amethyst Hearted, though charred with ensorcelled cloth melted to skin, once more straddled the space between his horns. Even as Aquela watched the child's body healed. The pit fiends that remained in the surrounding sky encircled the trio as mere witnesses, even their nightmares doing little else but pawing the air with burning hooves.

On the other side of the sky, the gods seemed like shadow puppets engaged in slaughter with the conviction of Geometry's students approaching well studied proofs. In this great battle lay the promise of Answers.

Answers that will end where the fruition of the White-Silver Witch's epoch-spanning conspiring begins. But first, the harbinger and the rather valuable asset the death knight continued to keep from the archmage's grasp.

Conjured meteors intersect and shatter into tumbling embers around them even as a hail of jagged diamonds is dispersed by Aquela's abjuring hurricane. The moon wraps the harbinger in unseen chains of gravitational pull but the dominated Kerzed counterspells before the constriction of force can turn corpse-flesh to pulp.

The child, beautiful in life, shines out Dark like an inverted star. Aquela can feel the malignant force leaving cracks on skin stretched over joints, widening age spots into cancerous splotches. The girl is a carrier of another reality's fragment - her presence is now pollution to this world and anathema to Heaven.

The witch, apparently, was not the only one who had prepared well for this war where destiny would be decided, where both sides might finally know the rest of victory and defeat.

And I am what comes after. Hundreds of her bloodline cut their throats with knives of jade, offering their life force to her necromantic contingencies. Renewed, she catches her enemies in a cyclone as thick as the Tower behind her. The intermission gained in Kerzed's dispelling of the wind allows her a needed moment of regeneration against the continuing assault of Dark's aura of enervation.

And then fire is traded for ice, and acid is traded for lightning. Lances of sound are met with shields of silence. Barrages of elements and force exchanged with thunderous abandon. Visions of horror traded, but even as the girl huddles against dragon flesh when faced with the spectre of Dark's defeat, Aquela laughs a froth of blood onto her lips. Everything the Dark shows her she has planned for - all that and more besides. It is not Good but the meticulous hand that defeats Evil and brings it to heel.

The scent of myrrh perfumes a wind from Heaven, a zephyr that causes the witnessing pit fiends and their mounts to widen the circle even as their scales flake off and their fangs crack. The Amethyst Hearted stumbles down onto her mounts muscled back, but retains her hold on the wyrm so he is unable to throw her off again. As the harbinger regains her footing upon the black scales she is met with a storm of silver-white hawks. The Storm of Raptors, the conjuration the White-Silver Witch has used against armies. Even as the magical beasts surround the Dark's champion in cloud of violence, Aquela's gaze pierces between claw, beak, and feather. Concentrating upon the body of the girl, she begins hunting the threads that tie Evil to mortal remains. Finding them, she raises up her arms and with the gestures of a composer performs her ethereal surgery.

The Dark seeks to retract its gaze but finds itself unable, its awareness locked as the ancient crone raises up the mirror of the Void. The slavery, the torture, the rapine and slaughter - even the echo of their victims' creaming does not find the border of the elemental absence. The depths of its hate, its malice, its sadistic lusting for cruelty - mere heartbeats unheard in a cage of bone. The long and ancient war it has fought with its twin, the Light - even the Time before Time seems to fit in the emptiness that brings utility to the beggar's bowl. Its battle cry of defiance, the roar of the lion that stalks the souls of mortal and angel alike - naught but the reverberation of a bumblebee's wing.

If the Void is Its mirror, then where did this storm cloud of hawks come from?

When the last hawk spirals down dead toward the waves, Aquela turns her head back to the Tower and whispers almost imperceptibly to the edifice. Gouged and now cyclopean, the harbinger swoops Kerzed toward the witch. In the same moment the primastic barrier that protects the fabled home bubbles with the birth of an appendage - an arm that reaches up and outward to grab both dragon and master in the tightening ball of a fist. Primastic sheets of lightning flash out as abjuration makes contact with scale and skin.

Ribs older than the the Atzaquatl Mountains crack, punctured lungs denying Kerzed the honor of a dramatic death roar. Following that, a hissing sound almost congruent to wheezing laughter fills the air - Kerzed's internal organs are awash with acid. The Harbinger screams - in rage and perhaps in prayer to the Dark - but it avails the death knight little. The tattered child's gaze, its remaining eye's shadow-light emitting wordless (and also worthless) promises of vengeance, remain locked on the crone's weathered face.

Then, a moment later, its skull is crushed. The hand of force flings them violently downward. Both bodies break the surface of the water, but only Kerzed is given the life force of a hundred or so of Aquela's followers, their souls kept safe from Judgment by her creation of a temporary afterlife in the Void. Thanks to their deaths, the black will be kept on the edge of life. The dragon is too injured to heal itself, and the disjunctions being spent by her subordinates will exhaust all the wyrm's contingencies.

When she finally kills him, he will rise again as a dracolich. Safe from the Dark's displeasure, his bones woven together by the honoring of his debt to Her in the world to come.

Child flesh is wrapped in the suckered arms of a nautilus mega fauna owing allegiance to no one, this meal dragged into the craggy depths of the Unarian Trench. The Dark once contained by the sacrificed girl pours out unseen, its oblivion a diffusion into those clouds that billow out from tectonic vents scattered across an ocean's lightless depths.

Raised with Demon

There's something called a glabrezu in my basement. I know it's not from here - here being our entire Universe - but I don't actually know where it's from. I think it lived in that house, or at least that patch of land, long before I was born. I remember seeing it as a child, it being as familiar to me as my own parents. Fixtures at those early days of actual memory, when you just know Mom and Dad and Kathleen and the Thing in the Basement.

Even now, decades past with grandchildren of our own, Kathy tries to talk to me about the Thing in the Basement. About what happened, about how it started me on a long road that took AA to tow me off of. A whole decade of seeing my face but looking at a stranger's. I always look away, make a joke, or go grab something from her kitchen - we never meet at our parents' place (where I of course live) - and she always stops her question when sees I've jumped over (evaded) the moment. She'll make sure to catch my gaze, though, and with Mom's sea greens she'll express her desire to be let in.

I think one day I will tell her, one day when Bill's lids are heavier than ours and the early night can cushion my long story. I take comfort in the idea, in its likelihood - I see my sister often enough. She's only one exit away after all. And admittedly I visit often enough, maybe more than Bill likes, taking breaks from the not-quite-lonely-enough place I've become guardian to. It isn't that bad, living with the demon, but that constant wanting me to want things gets tiring. Haunting my dreams, trying to turn regret toward rash action. But the temptations are now less than half-hearted. It knows that if I was going to damn myself, I would have done so before the start of my empty, alcoholic decade.

God knows life threw me enough opportunities to throw my soul into damnation. Or whatever the glabrezu's catch really is.

The first time was around the time I was learning that I wasn't just scrawny - I was slow, clumsy, and easily tired too. I couldn't sleep, having cost my soccer team yet another game. The flush of humiliation had been warming my cheeks the whole car ride home. My father, stalwart comforter that he wasn't, let the disappointed silence speak for him. I lay in bed, knowing I couldn't quit halfway through the season but still wishing I could just do something as simple as not trip over my own shoelaces. I wasn't startled when I heard the almost-sensical whisper - I knew who it was and where it was coming from.

The basement smelled like overripe apples and a woman's sex. The latter I didn't recognize at the time, but I might be the only person who dreams of dead dogs after their first foray into third base. Of course, before that post-soccer game night, in my dreams I would see something vaguely canine in the dark, hear a grating sound of chitin ill-fitted into bone. I would draw nearer and see insectile claws make spastic gestures in the dark that hides what I know is its massive, muscular form.

When I tug a bulb's string and the light goes on, what I see is somehow more terrifying for its far more pitiful nature.

Corpse of a brindle lab with a light case of mange across its rib protruding flank, a skinny thing that died on its side. It's eyes aren't even looking at me, they are staring off into the corner where the canned goods are stacked. There are crab claws, spotted with tiny white bumps that are obviously some kind of disease. They have too many joints, and are tangled in with its unmoving forelegs - left one coming out from high on the shoulder, the other so low it could be another leg.

It doesn't dally in explaining its offer - a swift image of me resting on my teammates' shoulders, followed by Dad's face beaming. I pause, staring at it, waiting for the terms of the exchange but it just lays there. Sometimes when I blink its gone, then suddenly my brain or the world corrects itself and the dead dog returns.

I pause, pretending to think it over, and then ten minutes later I'm back in bed. A few months later, I place first at the local science fair and get to see that look on my Dad's face. Funny, more than love or pride I remember a childish smugness, feeling I had gotten one over on the demon in the basement. As for the last laugh, given our history, what's happened between us, I don't think either of us is gonna take that prize. Before that first night, it had always been this ghost Kathy and I sort of accepted and my parents refused to talk about. When I was four (maybe five?) I had asked an eight-year-old Kathy if the house was haunted, and she'd looked me with faux maturity, made an attempt at ruffling my pseudo crew-cut, and said, "Yeah." It was scary but in a low key kinda way, no more so than the wasps that always got at least one of us in the summer or sixth-grader Simon Daniels who would throw rocks at us on the walk back from the bus stop but always seemed on the verge of doing something worse. In a weird way, I was always thankful toward him for that, for controlling whatever it was inside him until he moved away.

My Dad would snort - his signal for terminating dinner table conversations - if one of us brought up the "ghost", and I knew he couldn't stomach the idea. Not because he needed a rational universe or anything like that - he just couldn't stand the thought that he'd been tricked into a bad investment by taking the place. That he hadn't, as he liked to tell his poker buddies, gotten the house at a "steal". Mom, on the other hand, accepted it in the way she'd later accept a post-Darmouth-graduate Kathy living with a guy she wasn't married to. Something you dealt with by barreling past the implications.

Still, as far as I knew, I was the only one that it had "talked" to. The only one who could see it. I also thought I was the only one who knew about my unique position in the family, but I found out differently the second time the demon made an offer it thought I couldn't refuse.

I'd come home from Model UN and found the note on my pillow. Kathy had taken what amounted to a leave-of-absence from her extracurriculars, so had had plenty of time to leave the fragment of paper with its hasty scribble in my room before returning to her closed door mourning.

Ask it to make him love me again.

I read it several times, putting it down and pacing between the readings. Glancing at her door with its KEEP OUT sign, like she could see my face through the wood. She knew. All this time she somehow knew that I could talk to it. Naturally, there seemed only one way this was possible.

Walking to her door, I crouched down and slipped my message into her room:

Why don't you ask it yourself?

I stood there for less than a minute before I had my answer:

It doesn't talk to me. Not really. Only you. Please Jaimie.

Todd had been a great guy, the protective jock every nerd hopes for. And even after the end of their 7 month relationship, he still kept me from suffering the greater predations of his fellows. He even sat next to me one lunch period (that wasn't his) and said, "Your sister is pretty bummed." to which I'd simply responded, with faux macho-ness, "Yeah. You know how girls are."

Kinda of a back stab there, me not wanting Todd to feel guilty. Not that he'd done anything more than breakup with my sister - he'd even been very nice about it. It had still seemed out of the blue, and to my eighteen year old sister it probably was. Maybe it would have been better if he had immediately started dating some other girl, a bimbo cheerleader or something. Instead he simply lost interest in the girl who had fallen madly in love with him.

And while we all have friends who somewhat fit into the "You know girls" stereotype, Kathy wasn't one of them. Bright, beautiful, great at theater and crusader for the environment, pre-breakup she'd been the nice pretty girl that everyone knew would end up the dark horse candidate for homecoming queen. Then somehow the star "smart jock" had decided to try his hand at acting in a school play, apparently more to piss off our school's lacrosse coach than anything else, and suddenly Kathy had her first real date and first real boyfriend and ultimately her first love. Not to mention, unfortunately, 7 months later her first heartbreak.

I tried to cheer her up, but since even I had managed to find love with the delegate from Syria I was both busy and made a poor commiserating buddy. Perhaps more importantly the idea of confiding her sorrows to her 14 year old brother would be so unbelievably awkward it was simply beyond the pale. Like freezing something to absolute zero. While I felt guilty for being friendly with Todd and self-absorbed in my own life, I took comfort in knowing that my parents were managing to fuck up another pivotal, TV episode worthy, time in one of their children's lives. My Dad, somehow dense to the reality of events, had tried to get Kathy to fix things with Todd, mostly so there'd be a boy he could talk to about sports in the house. My mom was more sympathetic, but she'd married her first love. She, being the only real Catholic in the household, also needled Kathy with "clever" questions, trying to find ways to "subtly" figure out if my sister was still a virgin. Admittedly there was room for doubt in my mind as well - I mean, why else would she be so upset right?

And she was upset. At first it seemed to be a case of what even my Mom thought of as teenage girl syndrome. But slowly, as Kathy became more of a shut in, our family became altogether more quiet. Nobody said anything, but we were all worried and we knew Kathy was getting more, not less, depressed. My Mom continually asked me if Todd had started seeing someone else, in the same way one might ask about the latest hurricane warning. If Kathy was bad now, seeing him with another girl...

Against my better judgment I found myself in the basement, watching in my mind as the glabrezu - somehow I just knew that was what it was - showed me images of Todd and Kathy holding hands at school. The dead dog stared at the canned goods as it showed me the old Kathy coming back to life, her and Todd homecoming king and queen, the relief everyone would feel to see the school's star bright again. I asked for the terms, in my head, and again only heard silence. I studied the crab legs, wondering what those white spots were - a fungus? - when the demon decided to up the ante. A flood of images - Todd and Kathy getting married, having children, their last breath passing simultaneously as they lay old and gray in each others arms.

I started laughing. Admittedly I was fourteen, and no expert on love, but the demon's offer was just so over-the-top ridiculous. For our world at least. Even my mom, as old fashioned as they come, hadn't married her first boyfriend. The dead dog with crab hands stared at the canned goods, showing no sign of annoyance, even when - still smirking - I turned off the light and headed upstairs. Ripping out another fragment of paper from my chemistry notebook (all the paper in the world couldn't help me there) I slipped the results of my non-Faustian non-bargain under her door:

I asked it to make you stop loving him

A month later, and Kathy was almost her old self again. Her smile a little less innocent, her eyes a little more world weary, but these things somehow made her more beautiful to everyone. Even Todd was happy to see her getting over him. Years later, during one of our winter breaks, she asked after our mutual friends had left for the night, "The thing with Todd, my senior year, did you really..."

"No."

She smiled, kissed my forehead, and headed off to bed. So round two went to me as well. Of course, a lack of athleticism and a broken heart wasn't much for a demon to work with. After Simon Daniels got caught killing stray cats at his new school, I actually and honestly prayed in church one Sunday. I thanked God that the demon had come to our relatively normal nuclear family, our for the most part happy home, rather than been allowed to work its magic on someone like Simon Daniels.

As years went by, the glabrezu made other offers. The chance to fuck cheerleaders, the chance to make sure my high school tormentors (Todd was a senior when I was a freshman) either suffered horrible ends or at least left me alone. The former seemed way too skeezy and pathetic, but I might have taken it up on its latter offer if had been willing to name its price. But it only offered the images of its promised results, nothing more. I don't know why it expected me to agree - didn't it realize we had horror movies like Wish Master 1 through 3 (4?) to warn us that things can always get worse?

Once I got to college, it seemed like it had something new to offer me every two months at minimum: Fixing my own relationship disasters, giving me the ability to not be beaten bloody by multivariable calculus, ending my long post-graduate stint of unemployment where my Dad eyed me like a man who'd caught a three eyed fish in a stream. "You should've gone for the internships like I told you. Nobody wants an econ major who spent college helping out at an elementary school."

Each time it was easy to refuse. At least looking back on it those times were easy, when compared to the Big One. I do remember times when I'd stay up late, trying to get it to tell me what the actual terms of our deal would be. My first adult breakup, the end of my engagement at 24, and I did wonder if the saying "I'd give my right arm to be with her" was something I'd be willing to go along with if the glabrezu put the offer on the table. But the desperation would cool, I'd come to my senses, and that would be that.

Until the Big One, the dead dog never said anything, only showing me images of what its handy-working of reality would bring. While the demon still stalked the darkness of my dreams, a behemoth breathing heavily, its every exhale carrying the smell of soured cider laced with the musk of feminine arousal, in the basement it was the corpse of a brindle lab with diseased crab claws protruding from its body. Honestly, it looked like nothing more than another poor victim of a missionary cancer that wanted to convert all that was canine into something more suitable for aquatic existence. Something more crustacean.

The older I got, the more I wondered if I was simply imagining it. If it wasn't for Kathy, who would look at me whenever it suddenly felt like the demon was more *here*, I might have convinced myself the whole thing was a childhood game my brain had forgotten to unload before puberty overtook me.

If I had, it would have made the Big One easier. I wasted so much time trying to bargain with it, when I should been at Sophia's bedside. Of course once the diagnosis was in I got a call from my sister. She was bawling - Sophia had been family for years after all.

"Jaimie - mom called me. I'm so sorry." A sob, then a pause, then an intake of breathe. Then she said what I knew she'd say the moment she called.

"But you know you can't right? You can't ask it for help. It's...there's something wrong with It. You can't."

I feel sadness and anger all at once. I want to tell her how it felt when Sophia called me while I was at work, saying the doctors double checked and realized it wasn't benign. It wasn't benign. That was her way, Sophia, trying to make sure people didn't worry about her, didn't want me or anyone else to fuss over her. We'd just begun discussing the idea of having children.

And before I can even take all this in, absorb the nightmare I can feel me and my wife hurtling toward, my big sister is calling me about the Thing in the Basement and what I, the only one It wants, can or cannot do to help the love of my life.

I only get one word out passed the rage in my chest and the lump in the throat.

"Todd..."

Kathy exhales. We both knew, before this conversation started, where it was going to go.

"It was a mistake. A stupid teenage mistake. I thought it was something else, a ghost or maybe some Native American spirit...I know better. Okay? I know better - I have dreams Jaimie..." She struggles to lower her voice, not wanting her husband or my wife to overhear. Some things stay in the bloodline, because unless you grew up in that house you couldn't ever really believe. It's like how even if your wife tells you she saw a UFO, you yourself will only know that "she thought she saw a UFO" and that "maybe she did see an extraterrestrial vehicle that night before we met."

"I have to ask." I say with a tone of finality, and on the other side of the line I feel Kathy restraining herself from hysterics. My sister is a corporate lawyer, so this losing of cool does make me at least consider her words. At least until ten minutes from now when I check in on my wife who's "resting" upstairs.

"Jaimie, please...there's something wrong with It. It's Evil."

=-=-=

At the time, Sophia and I were three states away from my parent's house. Also, you can't leave your wife as she fights cancer to take a jaunt to your parents. Originally I had thought that we might go there "for some R&R" but Sophia wanted to stay home in between chemo visits. Being weak wasn't something she enjoyed sharing with anyone, not her parents and definitely not in-laws. I barely caught a break, finding myself on the receiving end of her anger - understandable seeing as I kept looking for excuses to get us to my humble family estate. My wife, for all the right reasons, felt as if I was looking at what *I* needed while she fought her own body to stay alive.

It was six months later, post surgery, that we found ourselves celebrating the winter holidays at my folks' house. I had become a Church going man again, figuring I needed all the help of the angels if I was going to wrestle any kind of healing from the Thing in the Basement. My sister called me almost daily, often rudely rushing through pleasantries with my wife in order to deliver her admonition. Once I was home again, though, she'd said little more than "Merry Christmas" to me and worked to make up for lost time talking to my wife. Kathy and Bill were at his folks, something my mother was rather miffed about, but she had more than enough sense to bring up the words "last Christmas" with Sophia at the dinner table.

Surprisingly, it was Dad who carried the evening. I found myself discussing politics, movies, and even sports with the man. He brought out old stories about me and Kathy as kids that I had thought I got tired of - that I was tired of hearing until I saw Sophia smiling, laughing, shaking her head at my youthful follies.

I don't think I loved the man more. We didn't have the words for it, so as he and I "gave the women a break" and cleaned up, I shook his hand firmly and looked into his eyes. He nodded, his thin lips a hard straight line, and squeezed my own hand as he clasped my shoulder.

With the blessing of my Father and the Holy Spirit, I descended into the basement to beg the demon for my beloved's life.

Before I made it down the stairs my mind was filled with images. Sophia wasting away to almost nothing, a skeleton, before the glabrezu interceded. Sophia waking up tomorrow, completely healed, the carved out part replaced with true flesh. Me at a funeral, weeping as I fall to kneel before the casket. Sophia giving birth. The demon doing nothing to halt the cancer as it returns in full force, simply denying my wife the nausea and the agony - giving her a peaceful few months before the end.

The demon had learned me, during all the years I'd come to think of it as a non-threatening joke. I was a market sample, a focus group of one. As I stepped off the last stair I was hit by the thick scents of apples and sex. Before the scent had always been faint, riding a bike through an orchard and waking up a few hours after making love. Now it was cloying, and hot. Before I got to the light I knew my glasses would be foggy. I wiped them off with my night-shirt and pulled the string as I had so many times before.

There was nothing there. No dead dog with crab claw cancer. At first I waited, knowing that it seemed to slide in and out of visual range if not existence itself. Then I glanced behind me, then I looked at every corner of the basement. I began to move old boxes around, and that's when the bulb shattered and the light died.

I heard the panting that was laughter, smelled wet fur and dog fart. The sound of scorpion pincer arms scraping bone under thick back muscles. Pulling at the tether of my need it had come.

"Save...her."

It sounded as alien, as strangely cruel, as you might expect. Imagine a dog's throat imposed upon by linguistic surgeons, forced into human speech. The obvious pain it felt when speaking to me answered a lot of my questions. Why it had never tried to be something friendlier, gentler, when I was a kid. That it had come here, or been forced to remain here, against its will. That it was weak, not dying perhaps but not healing either.

"What do you want?"

Wheezed out laughter. For the first time it occurred to me the thing might be insane. A different, just as plausible answer, to the myriad questions I'd accumulated over the years. Still, I asked again, trying to keep the anger, terror, and volume out of my voice.

"What do you want?"

I felt a furred but otherwise human-seeming hand place itself on back of my neck. I shivered, felt my bowels twist, and tasted blood before I realized I'd bitten the inside of my right cheek. Panting against my ear, a drop of otherworldly saliva on my collar bone. My thoughts went to the crucifix and the taste of communion wafer I'd taken that morning. Maybe I should have left Sophia's life in God's hands, but if there was even a chance...

"Give what you will."

That voice. Human. Sonorous. But still the demon playing its games.

I decided to start small, explaining the cut away as getting up early and trying to make breakfast for everyone. My mother launched into a barrage of nagging even as she took over for me, trying her best to make me regret my lack of culinary preparation and satisfaction with microwavable food. Sophia smiled faintly as my Dad rolled his eyes as he drank his morning coffee.

She did look better. This both heartened and worried me. Its tongue lapping at the split skin of my finger. How much could I give? Before I cut myself again, I tried to give it raw meat from the store but it wasn't interested and I wasn't surprised by this. It would only take my descent as currency. Before we left I cut myself two more times, between my toes and on the high inside of my thigh. I felt like a heroin addict trying to pick out parts of me even my wife wouldn't see. For a week afterward my wife stayed at two-thirds of the way toward good as new.

"See," I said with hope she would in fact see, "a trip to my parent's did you good." I almost sighed with relief when she agreed, smiling. For a month we went back and forth, me finding new ways to give the glabrezu blood. With a friend who definitely suspected he was helping me hide an affair, I was able to donate blood, in a sense, to my wife.

One night she was healthy enough to make love. This was several months later, and it seemed the cancer was in total remission. The morning after I was actually thankful to the Thing in the Basement, I felt like we had made peace with each other after all these years. I even laughed to myself, thinking of the times I might have taken it up on its offers.

The whole time I was getting my life back, Kathy would find ways to let me know that Sophia wouldn't want this. That the glabrezu was evil. That she'd find herself next to Bill, waking up in a cold sweat, afraid not for herself but for me. I did my best to ignore my sister, even shut her out of my life - after all, Sophia and I had begun to think about kids again. As time went on, however, Kathy began to treat me like a loved one who you've resigned to being an addict or just a total fuck-up for life. This would a good preparation for her when I ended up becoming an alcoholic after my wife died.

Because of course that's what happened. Only a fool in love couldn't see it ending this way. So much hate still in me, the night the thing refuses the blood packets, that night when it just looks at me with amusement as I cut myself twice in the same spot, hoping that maybe if it the cut was deep enough that would satisfy it.

When Sophia asked about the wound on my thigh I remember turning violently away from her, yelling that I didn't want to talk about it. She looked so hurt I started crying, bawling in her arms in a way my Father would've hated me for (you're supposed to there for her) while she assumed I was a cutter. I made up some story about hiding this habit from my family for years, finally confessing the "truth" about scars I'd gotten from much more mundane experiences.

I don't think she believed me. But she had bigger things on her mind by then. As did I:

Internet searches, library visits, getting in touch with professors whose classes I'd taken to fulfill requirements I detested. Herbs, runes, veves, even rosary. My mother wondering why the basement smelled like sage. My father's brusque, "Jaimie, this New Age shit isn't gonna help her so knock it off." Sophia become more distant, more a goal than a woman almost. I began to think that if she was healthy again she would leave me, but I didn't care if she did so long as she was alive. That was how much I loved her, or maybe how much I fell into my martyr complex.

Either way, she died.

At the funeral I was a wreck. I didn't even get any words out. I just stood up at the podium for a moment thinking about the smell of apples in an orchard. About my wedding night, and the honeymoon days after when the Thing in the Basement was the furthest thing from my mind. My father helped me back to my seat after a few moments of awkward silence. I stayed at Kathy's for a few days, thinking about the things I might have done - that I had refused to do. I thought about strays I might have killed, even taking a lobster and ripping its claws off while it was alive in the basement. I thought about the idea that a long affair or just the taste of a hooker on my skin might be enough to lessen Sophia's pain. I thought about all the evils I might have done - all the things I refused to do out of respect for who my wife was and hopefully is somewhere outside the Universe.

I thought about how I had never asked it if it wanted my soul.

I cried into my hands, night after night, and I thought about all the ways I had killed my wife.

=-=-=

I had some drunken nights where my parents were afraid of me, I know that and I'm not proud of it. I wish my father had stuck around long enough to watch me get clean, but my mother assured me he looks down on me from Heaven. Those were long hard years for me, and I know the demon enjoyed them the most. The two times I went into the basement, drunk out of my mind, I remember how it had never seemed so happy.

I was lucky enough to adopt a girl, raise her with Kathy and Bill and my mom - never remarried though. I couldn't shake the thought that somehow It had gotten to Sophia, had somehow twisted something in her cells. Kathy always pointed out that my wife's family had a history, but I couldn't help but wonder about it.

After my mother moved on to her Heaven, or whatever place stands opposite the glabrezu's home (I feel like there is something like that, a place of Light) I took care of the house. More charms, more runes, more prayers. More burning sage. Made friends with some counter culture type people, and found out some of my old friends had been there all along. Some offered to help me with exorcisms for the "ghost problem" I'd mention off and on, but I always insisted on doing those things myself.

It's faded now, the demon in the basement. I don't how much harm I did it, but I know its weak - Kathy comes over sometimes to drop off food that isn't microwave dinners and assures me that in refusing it I did the right thing, that she feels like its barely there. I'm still trying to decide what to do with the house - I can still see a poor kid like Simon Daniels moving in, and the thing getting into his head. I can still see it trying to get free of its in-between state.

It might outlast me. I might have to let some my friends in on this. Might have to talk to the dioceses. Tonight, though, tonight I'm going to burn some sage and see if the corpse of a dog that isn't really there has gotten skinnier, if the smell of it is fainter than ever. We're both old and we're both dying.

I just wanna see it go out first.

Field guides are more than welcome.

Lichocracy

The points of yellow light in her lover's eyes died out, and as Keva watched she couldn't help but think of fading stars in the distant black of night. She cradled his charred skeletal form and raised her rictus grin to the sky, expelling a wordless, silent wail of grief. Even as she gently laid his lifeless form onto the gray bricks of the castle floor, she felt the life and unlife of their shared experiences welling up and flooding out onto her consciousness. Her living memories - the warmth of his body, the feeling of him insider her, the softness of his lips upon her neck - these seemed like mere prologue to the embrace of bones that they had counted as intimacy for the last seven centuries.

Keva reflected on this as she turned her attention back to the battle, the blue pin pricks in her own now blazing eyes widening to circumscribe the rage she felt toward their enemy. She looked up from her place in the now topless tower to see her brothers and sisters attempting to bring down the remaining great wyrms. Archmages clad in silks woven in gardens deep beneath the earth, ioun stones whirling about their heads as their enchanted wands, staves, and jewelry lent power to their spell craft.

She looked down at her lost lover, phantom lips in a hard line as she slipped off the platinum rings off his fingers. As she slipped them onto her own skinless digits, she noted with forced detachment that his silver chain had melted into the cloth of his blue robe. Even its gold embroidered runes were too burnt to hold any lingering enchantment.

A shadow descended as wind swept over her.

In a single motion she turned and rays of green tore through the young black who had thought to take her by surprise. The disintegration punched holes through its flesh, killing it even as it crashed onto and then through the floor behind her. Acid splattered onto the iridescent sphere of arcana that kept her at its center. With the memory of what a sigh felt like in the lungs, Keva returned to her self appointed place in the sky. Clouds of ash and whirling thunderheads awaited her, and within their depths she could hear the pestilence of dragons roaring.

Glancing below, she saw the fortress had been severely damaged by the falling of dead and wounded dragons. She felt little nostalgia for the place, given that she and her fellow liches had raised it from the plateau's surface only a year before. Once the protective illusions and counter divinations around it had unraveled, both the chromatic and metallic tyrants had come with the better part of their broods, once they had recognized what the long hidden archmagi were planning. Given that their empires were fraught with incited rebellions, that plagues unable to gestate in the flesh of mammals ravages the continents, and that the liches own armies had risen from the Underdark, the dragons knew that their only hope was to destroy all the Order of Izari before it could break the lines of ley upon which the Draconus Arcana hung.

Having drawn the ancient wrym-lords from their ziggaurats, the Order itself knew that they must end the long dominion of the great dragons with this battle. Even as she aided two of her sisters fighting a great silver invoker, she could feel the footsteps of the legions scouring the cavernous mazes of the subterranean world. They'd found her lover's phylactery, and though it was miles away it was only a matter of time before they found hers. Many liches destroyed here would not return. Perhaps none of them would, as the dragons had sent whatever forces they could into the Underdark.

Whole swaths of forest surrounding the plateau were aflame, and with a gesture Keva uprooted these burning missiles and flung them into the silver's flank. The great wyrm screeched, turning toward her and spewing out a wave of frost even as it cracked the globe of prismatic energy around her. The dragon's breath carried its true attack, and Keva felt the flakes of ice coating the husk of her animated corpse dragging her in a direction sideways to the world's reality. She could feel the paramental torturers grasping through space. Anchoring herself to the stone-shaped fortress below, her magic pulled her body out of the banishment even as the silver's tail slammed into her bony face.

She spun out, feeling the cracks attempt to seal themselves even as the lights of her eyes flickered. Younger dragons snapped at her form as she flailed through the air, but her contingencies flashed out and tidal waves of sound blasted them away. She touched one of her former lover's rings and in an explosion of sulfurous vapor twin balors appeared at her side. Righting her floating form and whipping at any who came near, they gave Keva a chance to teleport away from them even as a golden ancient plunged through the space she had a moment before occupied. From a distant she saw the clumps of tanar'ri flesh dissolving back into the Abyss as the pieces tumbled toward a ground they would never reach.

Even an archlich on its own would be short work for any of the truly immortal dragons that ruled over the world.

It had taken generations fleeing first into the elven forests and dwarven mountains, and then finally into the caverns winding around the core of the world, to even begin to understand seed craft. So many had been hunted down, even in the dark, and the threat of losing even a shred of knowledge or power had imposed lichdom on all of them - beginning with Queen Magus Izari. Shattering the ribcage of an elder white with a thunderous blast of explosive fire, Keva glanced toward the breastless skeleton robed in silks once robin egg blue - the lich queen was soaked in the dark wine colors of the reptilian dead. Blades of golden sunlight whirled around her august personage, the thin jade crown upon her head blazing a sickly green tinged white. Keva flew toward the great queen, desperate to reach her as she saw the great blue swooping toward Izari with three elders in tow.

She could not let Izari fall, not the woman who had gifted her and her lover the passing centuries. Flesh sublimated to smoke, skin calcified over bones, and still to have the simple pleasure of holding his hand through the planning and preparation, to share with him the final pleasure of damaging enough of the ley lines to give the mammalian rebels a chance...

Teleporting the intervening distance, Keva was at the queen's side even as the gargantuan blue dragon flew straight through Izari's sun sword barrier, the energy weapons shattering upon its skin. A column of jagged lightning turned the world white, though thanks to numerous enchantments both women retained their picture of the world in their respective minds' eyes. Its massive claws battered their protective spheres, its vermin children flailing at the globes from all sides. Keva conjured a living storm that wrenched the dragons off the barriers with its hurricane of tendrils even as the strangled dragons wasted lightning upon its thunderhead flesh. Izari sent a river of winding primastic rays into the great wyrm's maw, but still its serrated fangs broke through her defenses. Waves of molten silver were conjured out from the Queen Magus's fingers, flowing into the dragon's snout. Keva invoked the Starving Void, the tributary that held her unlife becoming a torrent. With the light of her eyes turned to miniature azure suns, she pulled at the great dragon's mountainous jaws with strength stolen from its own life force. Izari tore at the creature's defenses even as flocks of cornugons appeared to encircle them. Arcs of electricity scurried up and down the swords of its teeth, the amber pools of its eyes slitted through with gloating green-black pupils. Keva feels all the enchanted masterworks upon her body melting under its malevolent gaze.

Keva's living storm wrapped them in a cyclone, an umbical cord between the storm clouds the liches had called to aid them. Great shards of hail whipped around them, punching holes in wings of the panicked lesser dragons. Arcs of lightning blasted those foolish enough to attempt interference, and those who continued unheeded found the summoned baatezu clawing at their scaly hides. Even as the ancient blue's arcana washes her in positive energy, even as it saws at her link to the Negative Material Plane, Keva forces a space between its teeth - enough for Izari to fly free. With a roar the dragon whips its head and cleaves Keva's body in two. She sends a screeching vibration from the bones of her hand through one its incisors, and blood spills out of the ensuing crack. The blue bites her again, shattering bone and contingencies alike, and this time it is her skull that has turned to shards of pottery, each of them nothing without the others, lost as they find themselves tumbling toward the trees below.

=-=-=

Keva is nothing but thoughts in a rib cage when the spectre of her mind returns to self-awareness. She is in the ruins of the fortress, and sitting upon a humble chair of woven wooden is her immortal queen. Izari's eyes shine with the same soft lavender they did in life, save now they are but distant candle flames in the far-reaching darkness of her sockets. The queen had no visible damage to her frame - she looked as umarred and polished as the relics worshipped in the Underdark cathedrals. Yet she had no clothing covering her withered corpse, as though the dead skin could appreciate the warmth of the breeze. Though it would be some time before Keva could once more experience the faint sense of smell left to liches, she knew the wind must carry the smell of rot and ash.

She sense the corpses of the great wyrms all around them, but she cannot extend herself from ribs barely bound to a cracked sternum to count.

Only one question matters.

Victory?

Izari chuckles, her fossilized teeth making a staccato clacking noise.

Here? Yes. But it will take time for us to consolidate our hold.

Keva paused, unsure what to say. She had thought, for her long but admittedly sheltered underground life, that the end of the draconic empire was their ultimate quest. Her lover was gone, her vengeance was done. What was their to grasp, to hold, to consolidate?

Izari sensed the tension between them. The First Lich had long ago learned how to read her companions unliving souls.

We won the world from the dragons. We wedded Death himself to do it.

Keva, all the world is our dowry.

=-=-=

The incense smells of orange peels and cinnamon, carried into the humid hair by the occasional zephyr. A maidservant leans in to wipe the sweat from Keva's brow, and she remembers with a faint smile how she used to start at the closeness, the immediacy of her entourage. The early years had been hard, but Izari was not found wanting in her secret preparations. Or perhaps not so secret. My work had taken me far from over the last millennium of our struggle. Thankfully there was a place for me in her plans, that she was worthy of her empress's crown.

"Thanks be to Izari, Mother of the World. By her hand do you rise to grace." The priest is an old man, hunched over the kneeling woman to be knighted, the sound of his voice pushed through phantom gravel in his throat. Keva looks down from her throne of seeming mahogany, an uncomfortable but necessary edifice. A twisting horror smoothed into a nightmarish yet beautiful collection of artistic swirls, all the transmuted tissue and muscle of the great wyrm's hardened heart now barely recognizable. Yet all the people know - the reminder of what was paid by their unliving rulers.

As she stands she feels a relief - a vestigial bump of the aorta had been pressing into her back - an uncomfortable pressure between her sweating shoulders. Though her discomfort was expressed with little less than a slight stretch, a muscular manservant was immediately there to massage the soreness away. He followed her as she stepped down barefoot onto the kiln fired brick the steps, the entire palatial shrine a living tome where pictorial facets of the Great Struggle where carved into every edifice, reinforced with statuary and hanging scrolls of painted vellum. A glace upward would show the mural held by cathedral arches, a vibrant depiction of that the final battle.

Thankfully they did not depict me cleaved in two, falling away from the queen. Keva feels a smirk threatening the mask of solemnity she wears, but she has remastered the art of the face. The woman before her is leanly muscled, everything from her eyes to the color of her hair bears an the aspect of the lion. Keva has seen the woman fight, and might even take her on as a sparring partner if not a consort. Yet there is an intensity, and a hurt that sits on the rim of those golden irises, that wars such thoughts away. They always expect too much of me, and I always come to think of them as children rather than lovers.

I cannot offer anything to their needs.

Keva places a manicured hand, pale with painted silver nails, upon the chestnut skinned woman's spilling curls. The woman looks upward, meeting Keva's sea green gaze. A single gasp escaped the almost-knight's lips, a single tear falls from her cheek. Then the lioness looks down once more, away from Eternity, at Keva's silver painted toes. Bells chime out as the priest of Izari begins to speak in a long chanting ramble, his trailing echo caught up by acolytes in the next refrain. They are all clad in red damask for the occasion, a contrast to Keva's own argent rune-silk.

Everything from the chanting to the incense to the feel of the woman's ringlet curls around her fingers falls away. There is only Keva's own bones and the soul of the woman kneeling. Only a lich and its waters. The woman does not gasp this time, accepting the inverse baptism as the undead demi-goddess standing above her takes Her tithe.

In a moment it is done, the unconscious lioness borne away on a litter, carried by acolytes to where the knighted woman will awaken. When she next opens her eyes the jade face of Izar's carved beauty will be staring down at her from the ceiling.

=-=-=

Though she is too high for the salt spray to find her, Keva tastes it in the air rushing over her. Her hair is a comet trailing behind her, the silks of her dress whirling around her. Goosebumps freckle her shivering flesh, but soon she knows the cold will be meaningless. She savors everything - the bright sun that hurts her eyes, the swallowing of saliva, the mere act of breathing.

She stands upon the palanquin fastened to the insides of the massive ribs scything down into a open air cavern, laughing as the oceans rush below her. A flash of island chains, the criss cross of towns and rice paddies. The world seems so small, as high as she is and as fast as she travels, carried across the world by the bones of dead dragons.

=-=-=

The dracolich lands gently upon the plateau, the lush forests below the raised stone filled with the chatter of animal life. She exits the passenger chamber its ribcage, ignoring the hateful glare behind her back. More than the monuments carved from dragon bones, more than the heart thrones the Magi sat upon as they crisscrossed the world as the Hands of Izari, even more than the lich lords themselves, it was the dracoliches that demonstrated the power of Izari and ensured the people remembered who had saved the world.

As she steps into the walls of the labyrinthine enclosure, the walls sparkling in the dark with glinting promises of ore and gemstone, she remembers how they had called this place out from the rock beneath her feet, how the structure had flowed upward and taken form. They had kept their knowledge of seed craft hidden for so long, buried within themselves as they too were hidden beneath miles of earthen crust. To release all that power, into the fortress and the unraveling of the ley knot, and then the explosive final battle. Even a century later, the dawn of Izari's Golden Age just cresting over the horizon, she still felt eclipsed by the wonder of it all.

The world. We had won the world. From this place, we untied the lines of ley. From the sky overhead, we threw down dragons.

From the parapets above she had sheen the approaching dragons. The metallic were a shining line against the massing thunderheads, the chromatic organized into fives legions, one each for the head of the monstrous hydra that presumably spawned them in the distant ages of soft time. She stilled remembered the terror, her and her lover clasping hangs, skeletal digits interlocked for the receipt and offering of strength. Her phantom heart beat a silent cadence against her ribcage. They had faced dragons before, even buried a great red wyrm in the Underdark, but...this was the Apocalypse, the closing of an Age.

Keva nods, a gentle acknowledgment of toward the knights that man the walls and the clerics that bow before. Izari had used the death of the dragons to raise the surviving to a collective divinity, and the few mortals who had not been obliterated by the dragons become their first Chosen heralds. They were legends in their own rights, having witnessed the end of the dragons - though for Keva they served more as a reminder. She recalled the scattered limbs of those who had manned the legion of ballistae, the patches of ash and melted flesh, the hundred splotches of blood that marked where there once stood knights and magi.

They had been fodder for the cause and fodder for Izari's arguments.

In this place my lover died his Second Death.

There had hardly been time to grieve. Izari had spoken of the long struggle, the rebellions fomented over centuries, the suffering they had witnessed under the draconic empires. She had reminded them of the petty squabbles mortals had engaged in, pathetic plays at power that had led to internal strife within the battle along with bitter betrayals. She had asked them who would be better suited to ruling than those who knew the price of malignant politics? Who better than the immortals who had coordinated the defeat of the dragons across the worlds, those would remember these early days of triumph in the centuries to come, when humans, dwarves, and elves looked upon each other as brothers and sisters?

Had they won the world simply to see the children squabble over the shards of shattered empires? Was it not time for true shepherds to take the place of the dragon slavers?

It took much debate, but in our hearts we knew what we had earned. We would not let the world be carved up as territory for the squabbling mortals seeking new kingdoms - to profit from our eons long suffering. It was avarice more than compassion that moved us. Had we not sacrificed the most - peaceful deaths and age spanning loves?.

Bound to her own cracked ribcage, less than a ghost, a century ago Keva watched as the Queen crowned herself Empress of the World. Even as the black marble doors before her were wenched apart, Keva looked toward the spiraling central tower, where Izari's aura shone out throne the windows as though their walls contained a flickering jade bonfire. Izari never seemed to tire of playing the role of goddess.

Unclasping the lock that allowed her neck to support her dress, she let the silver silk fall and heard the gasps of wonder that came from the viewing of her naked form in the green tinged light. Her nakedness was a vision akin to a bolt of lightning, for in the next moment Keva began her descent and was lost to her Queen's illumination. She ignored the wet foot prints she left, knowing the servants of the fortress would wash away the echoes of her descent before she next rose. The next few steps set the cartilage of her knees to jiggling, before the caps finally fall into gout like lumps under the skin of her feet. Another two steps and they burst underfoot, splitting skin and spilling blood and melted tissue across the jet marble tiles.

Her eyes run out like tears, every orifice of her face dribbling out the quickening grey sludge sloshing in her skull. She peels her hands off like the gloves they are and drops them behind her but pays no attention to their simultaneous splashes. Her scalp sloughs off as she leans her head back, reveling in the lightness offered by the plummet of her breasts. The sound of them, akin to the splatter of overripe mangos upon the tiles above, is muffled by the tumbling of her falling earlobes. They fall beside her melting nose.

Organs tumble out as walls of flesh collapse outward, her stomach acid splashing across her thighs a moment before they too fall away. By the time she reaches the sarcophagi, all that remains as her slick sun bleached bones. With all the strength of an ogre in her iron hard frame, she lifts the lid and gently places it upon the floor, admiring the paint of crushed gemstone that depicts the almost childlike forms of tangled lovers' limbs, one made from brushstrokes of powdered topaz and yellow quartz ; the other of sapphires and lapus lazuli.

Keva climbs into the chtonic bed frame, taking up her post with a wordless sigh. They could almost be two skeletons arranged in the manner the painting depicts, save that one of their skulls holds soft cerulean fires in the dark recesses of her sockets, distant candles lit in loving memory of the fallen.

thanks! definitely feel free to add your own!

Under the Cover of Light

Upon the Plane of Radiance, they sailed an ocean of blinding scarlet under a sky of blazing gold. The galleon is a green silver thing, its glow that of moss awash with the argent rays of moonlight.

The vessels around it are flickering deviations of an orange's orange, bright robust cheddars taken from cupboards by torchlight. To look upon them is to think of thieves, and hungry children, and guests with ill tidings arriving at midnight that you suddenly need to feed even as you fret over what they will have to tell you. Addict-plunderers man these smaller craft, pirates hunting for colors to add to the Infinite Rainbow. Each ruffian is clad in his own motley, picking and choosing hues which might slake their need for a day or an hour. One wears only grays of premature kittens and hurts-to-look-upon-whites of summer lightning. Another is armored head to toe in a chaste coating of cornflower blue, though from his visor leaks the mischievous amber of his fading youth. Others are not so discriminating, daring to match the brown of an overripe's kiwi's skin with the beige of sandstone barely moistened by the tide, clashing the purple-yellow of a lemon dropped in a wineglass with the morose tones that mark blood dried out over heaps of volcanic ash.

Scaling ropes of braided nebulas, the chromsumers crawled over and into the galleon like starving rats unexpectedly blessed by a carelessly unlocked larder. The Jet Couriers, so named by the onyx skin and raiment they maintain before, after, and between voyages, stand dumbfounded by their ill luck. Their company, which takes on jet-ness so that every employer might easily detect the presence of even pilfered scraps, had taken this very route due to the pirate's fears of the Teal Queen's navy. Sadly, her royal highness had seen fit to ally the better part of her warships to the defense of a lascivious paramour, a lowborn Topazite whose only claim of wealth were his mines of splintered-sunlight-through-indigo-thunderheads.

And so the pilferers pilfered, heedless of the likely swiftly plummeting reputation of the licorice shaded sailors. But then it was over in a matter of minutes, the only things taken a swath of frost-kissed blackberry shades and a sparkle of cerulean sun on stark-gray-but-silica-rich-silt.

The Jet Couriers were, as you can imagine, surprised that their supposedly precious cargo had so little to add to the Infinite Rainbow. Of course they were relieved, it would not be so difficult for their guild branch to pay over the loss - and their greatest fear, that of the company heads dissolving their membership's particular holdings, would now never be realized. Yet the sailors, who had traveled for so long in one color that they confused others for refracted versions of themselves at times, began to dream of the pirate's prismatic totem, began to wonder about colors they had never laid eyes on. In waking they tried to describe what they had seen to their fellows, but in truth you can't explain colors to a blind or sighted man. You can only point to things like the yellowed-alabaster-of-a sun-bleached-bone-that-once-belonged-to-a-dog-and-makes-you-feel-inexplicably-lonely and say, "that is the color I saw in my visions". But what if there were no such bones, an absence compounded by the utter lack of salt-falling-from-unscrewed-shaker-into-my-thick-chicken-mango-gravy and a dearth of guts-of-a-rain-forest-caterpillar-falling-from-the-beak-of-a-jungle-parrot-just-when-morning-shifts-to-midday?

What if no one knew what you were talking about when you said these things, and in turn their own descriptions called to mind what you knew to be meager approximations? And if you couldn't grip your mind around their dream colors, nor they yours...then perhaps there was something lacking in your heart, your mind, your soul? Perhaps even when all was said and done, surrounded by grandchildren, you would think back to the fleeing pirates and the variegated shades they must have beheld over the years, hues that might have steered you away from the lesser life that awaited you on whatever scheduled shore the goods were bound for...

Upon the Plane of Radiance, they sailed an ocean of blinding scarlet under a sky of blazing gold. The galleon is a green silver thing, its glow that of moss awash with the argent rays of moonlight. It is a great dire-wolf of a vessel, its ghostly lichen shaded sails unfurled and billowing, following pirates in cheddar-fire ships who cheer on their approach, all of them companions on a pilgrimage to the Infinite Rainbow.

Bonfire on the Shore

They came together for the funeral. From across the earthbergs they came to this great comet of a continent, a shard of blazing land large enough to hold an ocean inside its rough approximation of a beggar's cupped hands. Some forgotten god had cast this fragment of Ysgard into a perpetual starlit night, the sky honoring the dead with its myriad shades of indigo embroidered with twinkling constellations depicting the great lovers and fighters of the land.

The earthbergs above passed through the sidereal illuminations like charitable shooting stars, moving lazily enough so that all the dreamers underneath their paths might see them and make their wishes.

The ocean bore the scent and taste of white wine, though how long the Vintner's Season would last could never be predicted. Tonight, at least, the men and women toasted the dead dogs piled upon the pyre with sea water scooped into kiln forged cups and passed around wine skins.

Some came from the halls of Alfheim, some from the halls of Asgard and some had simply diverged from their fellow bauriar wanderers to do these canines homage. Not every dog could shepherd the great rams and live, many were crushed underfoot or broken by the curling horns. These great hounds they honored made the golden fleece trade possible.

The celebration of the brave fallen quieted as an avariel recounted the sight of the dogs from sky, driving the herds across the grasslands and undulating hills cresting into mountains, pushing the rams every year into a migration whose destination led to the waiting nets of the fleece shearers. For every ram caught and tamed, at least ten shearers left each year with naught but broken bones. Yet only from the sky could one see the trail of fallen dogs left behind, the fallen the avariel gather for the pyre pushing the darkness with a flickering orange brighter than daylight near its center.

One of those shearers now speaks, talking of the dogs that jump to put their weight upon the nets, tiring the golden fleeced rams into surrender. How they stubbornly grasp the ropes in their jaws even as the rams drag them across the ground. How even the older bruised and batter sheep dogs fight with a hunger for glory and pride equal to that of warriors on the battlefield.

A wonder then, a tailor points out, that save to sustain themselves in the migration, none of the dogs ever kills a sheep, never seeks to maim one or slow it down with a bite to the ankles. When did sheep and dogs come together, a lillendi asks, and draw up the rules of their annual game? Why only once a year do the sheep run from the dogs, while at all other times one can find the two races living in harmony of the far side of the traveled mountains, beyond the hills and grasslands of the chase?

Last one inspired by the new Camelot series, where they twist the Lancelot-Guinevere-Arthur triangle...great year for fantasy series, given Game of Thrones airs tonight...

Settlements

When men came across the frozen seas, baying their desires like dogs and breeding like rabbits - they did not find us unprepared. Our augurs had seen visions, had told us that our great empires would wane and we would live in the shadow of our former glory.

My mother was not one to put great stock in prophecies. I recall being a boy of fifty, running to her mailed skirts and begging her not to leave, weeping that the seers told me she would die were she to mount the sky on a back of gold. Her dragon Aristes looked at me askance after I blubbered out the warning, but mother merely laughed in mockery.

"Bowing to Fate is living life as a funeral. If we are meant to die I will have our glory live on in the annals of our short-life butchers and those elves who survive us. Perhaps in a time where less heed is paid to fortune tellers and their pigeon entrails our people will rise again."

I wish I had spread the seers' words to more ears that morning, as my mother returned missing an ear and a chunk of scalp but alive nonetheless. She and Aristes had left my childish company from one of the balconies on our wing of the great autumn palace, but had returned with her fellow dragon knights in the central courtyard - just past the edges of the hedge mazes.

First of the Empress's consorts, my mother had an entourage waiting for her when she returned with all of her subordinates. Despite the blood that had made a mask over much of her face she was laughing. The eye not stickily shut by blood caught all the seers in its mocking stare, and the other soon opened to do the same once the Empress extended her blessing.

Though I'd been nervously clutching my father's timid hand, my trepidation vanished as the healing touch of our ruler had instantly made my mother good as new - at least it appeared this way from where I had been standing. The Empress did not take kindly to my presence, regarding me as a product of infidelity though me and father had come before Her coronation and polygamous wedding...though even at the tender age of five and twenty I'd known my mother was bound to be picked.

Later that day I would see the pink of too quickly healed flesh, the faint trace work of scars. A griffon, she told me as she supped with father and I. The humans had flocks of them, easily dispatched on their own but able to threaten our gold and silver allies when they attacked in their rabid masses. One had torn off her helm while another had sought to part her skull with its talons.

As my father was a healer himself, I knew that her wounds had been healed too quickly, a regenerative effort by a horrified child rushing to recover the face of the First Consort. The Empress's (shoddy) work would be fixed in time, mother assured me and my father though neither of us were overly concerned about the restoration of her beauty. I was happy that she lived despite the seers' words, and as for Father he was forbidden from touching her. As he was also forbidden from taking another wife - lest the First Consort be diminished as less than a perfect prize - he spent much of his free time perfecting his Craft with my nigh continual assistance - thus doling out my inheritance in a piecemeal fashion.

My parent's marriage was political, and so there was no love to be lost between them. They seemed more like congenial friends than anything, and my father had never been comfortable with his bride in the way he was with his son. At times I wondered if he preferred the company of men, though if this was so he was very secretive about it given that he wasn't allowed to marry males either and any relationship outside of marriage was considered sinful.

He fluttered like a hummingbird over my mother after we took our meal, beginning to repair the work the Empress through the use of salves and spells. It was strange to think he was prettying her up for the women who'd stolen her, but I was still too flushed with her defiance of prophecy to care. Father made me promise I would visit my mother in her quarters and apply the ointments daily, and after that came a hug and mother wishing us goodnight as she departed for the arms of the Empress.

Only as I lay in bed did I come to realize she would again fly over the armies of men soon enough, if not tomorrow. She hadn't defeated death, only cheated Him for one appointed hour.

=-=-=

I rushed to the courtyard, pushing passed the courtiers forced to tolerate my presence, pausing my charge only when the force of wind born of Aristes wings dispersed my momentum. I raised my arm to my eyes, squinting to close the gates of my lashes against the woken dust, even as the gold settled to the ground while the Empress and her entourage came up behind me.

I felt the nails of her Imperial Grace dig into my shoulder, another one of her messages that let me know I wasn't wanted here even though tradition demanded my attendance. Something else I wouldn't care about until later, my attention focused on my mother and the prisoner tied to her aureate companion.

Mother had caught a man!

Caught him and burned him. His waist was charred, and his leathers seemed to have melted into his meat. As my mother jumped of Aristes' back she was calling for me even as others came to untie the unconscious man and bear him on a litter.

"Tend to him" she commanded. Though her lips were stern her azure eyes were sparkling with pride, the sun's gold making silver fire out of her hair. Then she was gone, leaving me to my task, her and the Empress holding hands.

=-=-=

By the time father came I had prepared the initial salves and applied them. My arcana wasn't yet strong enough, for that I needed him, but I was determined to execute as much of my appointed task as I could without the aid of others.

My father is a quiet man, never one to question his lot in life, but this time he seemed rather disquieted that mother had left the care of a political prisoner to me. I pointed out the man's restraints, both magical and mundane, and the four guards posted around the man's bedside. The other beds for elven wounded had been pushed far away from the comatose human.

"It is not your safety that worries me." he said, even though it was clear that he was worried about me. He did not elaborate and I knew better than to ask, so I left him lay hands on the man's burns and then watched him depart.

"He'll live.", father called back as he exited. After several hours, the man did more than live.

He awoke, in terror of a conflict days over, begging for mercy from my mother and her dragon.

What startled us more was that he spoke in near flawless Elvish.

=-=-=

Brought out of savagery by elves beyond the frozen sea, the man called his people the Isildari. Generations of men raised by elves they had looked to as saviors. While we looked at the humans upon our continent as scavenging packs grubbing for sustenance, our brethren had taken it upon themselves to gift short-lifers with civilization.

The Isildari, in turn, had sought to do the same for the barbarian tribes around their shining acropolises - but then the Star Fall had come, gouging craters into the plans of men and elves alike. Worse, these sidereal fragments brought with them a sickness that twisted life into aberrations, most of them rendered incapable of surviving the environs of this world.

The elves across the ice had been wiped out...or changed.

Over the course of days I healed him, and over the course of days the story of his past caught up to my mother and Aristes and his burns. Their great exodus, a diaspora across the ice, their shepherding of the lesser tribes of men, this cresting tide made from the remnants of their world shattering against our mountainous walls.

"To you...even our elvish lords would be primitives." It was hard for him to say this, as if unable to keep a vomit of blasphemies from barreling through the corral of his teeth.

"They feared the dragons much as we did."

As his words approached the present, more and more they made my mother a stranger. I thought of her swagger, her mischievous smile when she asked after the charge she'd assigned me. Eating with her and father, I dug desperately into her gaze, searching for regret and horror. Something to assure me this woman had a soul, even as she and those under her command burned away whole nations while the Empire prayed daily for her safe return.

=-=-=

Father was not surprised, and told me to take the question up with my mother. I asked him if I should keep it a secret, that it might divide the Empire, and he snorted and said it was likely everybody knew.

I wasn't so sure, as among my fellows and elders I suspected many might protest such slaughter quite vocally. Councilman Gilithas and his husband Quirrele, who had first taught me my letters. The priestesses of our Silver Lady, the patron of the healing arts. The Empress's uncle Silithae, who had once called for the elimination of the ruler's consort-right.

But before I could go to any of them, I knew I had to confirm the man's tales with my mother. I followed her out of Father's quarters, back the wing of the palace where I was allowed to dwell in save when the Empress called on my mother. She has entire palaces, must she take my mother where I might live and sleep? I often thought bitterly. Love was a rare thing, and while I didn't know if my mother loved the girl on the throne I knew she bore the Empress greater affection than she ever had my father.

Still, I found my position as a legitimate bastard continually trying. I was the child of a hero and a healer, two honored personages, yet the courts in all the seasonal mansions treated me as if I should be ashamed for having been born, as if I should have miscarried myself in the womb so that the Empress might enjoy her pleasures without the distraction of my existence.

That my mother never rose to my defense had always hurt me, so perhaps I had seen the human's horror stories as a means of legitimizing my selfish anger. In any case, me grabbing my mother's arm and yanking her back as she rushed toward the arms of the Empress caught her unawares. She spoke before I even opened my mouth, suddenly shrouded by burdens that made her seem old despite our blood - burdens that made her seem almost human with the age they spilled onto her face.

"It's true. What he says. It's all true. We burn them to ash, to cooked meat, and still they come, stepping over the charred bodies of the fallen.

Fire has proven to be stronger than prophecy."

She might have slipped a dagger between my ribs, such was my shock.

"There must be -"

"Some other way?" Her eyes once more held their trickster's glint.

"The Empress thinks so too." With that she turned away.

=-=-=

When the lines were drawn, I was surprised who I found standing beside me and who stared with hard gazes across the boundary with their own reasons and convictions. Quirrele, the kind slow speaking man who'd patiently taught me how to write and read, ended up as a major advocate for continue the daily purge of the refugees. His husband Gilithas was kinder, giving credit to the humans for crossing the frozen seas before suggesting they now find a way to live upon the glacial expanses.

My father was not a vocal voice, but I did find him and many other healers standing by my side. The High Priestess of the Moon, herald of the Silver Lady who commanded the healer's worship, reluctantly took up our banner - though in private she was more concerned by the horrors humanity would visit upon the elvish should we be drowned by their tides. The warnings of the augurs was a concern for everyone though as we brought more humans to our prisons it was hard for the healers to stomach the smell the cooking fat and muscle, to look at more of what passed for faces among the screaming charred.

Silithae, alongside the Empress, was more concerned about the Star Fall and why the humans and not the elves had survived it. In fact, this seemed to have become the Empress's sole obsession. Did it confirm our fates, that our glory would pass on from this world? Or was it treachery by the Isildari the cause of the elvish downfall across the continental spanning stretches of ice? Many accused her of searching for some pretext to justify the slaughter, but none dared to do so to her face.

Always, her Imperial Grace looked to me, but now without jealousy or hatred. Or at least without either of those at the forefront. These had been replaced by...expectation?

In truth I had not expected to lead the naysayers of the Autumn Court. I had assumed those who agreed with me would take up the mantle and push me back to my boyish irrelevancy. I suppose I was both convenient scapegoat and the one with the least imperial favor to lose. Our moral argument was also a childish one, in the sense that the burning of nation spanning diaspora was not something to be rationalized on the basis of prophecy. Apparently in our Empire such clear cutting distinctions between Good and Evil were the province of those ignorant to the ways of the world.

My mother thought so, anyway, and told me as much each time I begged her not to go. To her, however, there was little difference between a conscientious objector and a coward. Each morning, her eyes compelling me, Aristes staring at me like a dullard too thick to reason out her puzzle, she asked me if I had thought of how the Empire might survive prophecy, how we might survive a Star Fall in our own lands.

Each morning I would always be struck glum and silent at her words, and she would fly off with a sigh of exasperation.

=-=-=

Dinners with my parents had become more than a chore - they were a struggle of epic proportions. That we bothered at all is perhaps more evidence to elvish slavery to habit, a disease we once called "tradition".

Father had gone from quiet to bitterly silent, staring at his once-wife turned instrument of genocide. I give credit to the woman that when questioned by the seasonal courtiers she never hid what she and her cadres of dragon knights were doing. She never tried to deny that each day she would fly out, disperse the remnants of human air power, then cook the hordes beneath her. When questioned by the clairvoyant diviners about the orphans and widows left on the shores of the frozens seas, my mother actually suggested they had underestimated the fatherless populations.

I harangued my mother in between mouthfuls, and she in turn merely looked at me either with an exhausted blankness or with the same expectation that I would save her from the daily dragon flights over the invading humans.

"How would you save the Empire?" she asked me, time and again. To this I would throw my own conversations about the humans - their cultures, their histories, the rise of the Isildari from caves to palaces. They were the children of our fallen elvish brethren - surely we owed them chance at life?

"How do you think they survived the Star Fall? Are they fated to live while we perish?"

The Empress's words, spoken through my mother's lips. The royal family had seemingly gone insane, spreading word of the Star Fall across the Empire - suggesting that a similar event could easily be imminent. The possibility began to loom large in the minds of many Imperial citizens - that some fell power amongst the stars might seek to gut the world of all elvish people. How else, they whispered, could the lowly humans have survived when their Elders fell? How else could human blood prove the stronger?

My mother had survived the augurs' prophesied death, had proven that with dragon fire the future glimpsed through windows in Time could be made into a compliant ash in which a new story could be written. One night I told her the Empire, even if it survived, would forever look upon sea of ash and burnt bone beyond which would lay a blanket of dead widows and children extending over the frozen seas. I told any price would be better than to see us become that Empire, that perhaps it was better we fall.

She looked at me, with eyes turned old again barely daring to meet mine own, and whispered, "The Empress thinks so too."

=-=-=

In times past my mother had become a hero, driving off monsters emerging from the Underdark or taking on the black and red dragons that troubled our borders with their petty fiefdoms. Yet now that she dealt with greatest threat to the Empire in thousands of years she was seen as little more than a butcher. Even those who supported her actions began to look upon the actual work with distaste - especially as word of the nobility of the Isildari spread. Of course it was their nigh worship of our fallen brethren that won the elves of the Empire over, and the thought that we might raise up humanity to the level of an actual civilization. What was really left of the human refugees anyway but peasants and scholars? Had not almost all of their warriors been consigned to the fires of our gold dragon allies?

Others, terrified of a second Star Fall occurring on our lands, began to feel that perhaps we should have some fragment of humanity capable of carrying on our legacy should we too fall to some sidereal misfortune.

Around this time, perhaps in eagerness to hasten the end of her reign, the Empress began to allow some of the Isildari at court. Naturally they pleaded for their people, both their own high race and those lesser tribes they had shepherded through the ice. At first they were greeted by many as well behaved curs whose pitiful aping of elvish custom was absolute proof of our moral duty to offer them succor. Over time, even as the burnings of humanity's ragged armies continued, many more elves became convinced that humanity was capable of a nobility that might make them worthy inheritors to our history -- assuming, of course, that the augurs were still correct in predicting the end our people's glory.

"Are they our dogs or our equals?" my mother asked me one morning before she rode off to enact her fiery pogroms.

"Equals." I said with a certainty I did not quite feel.

"You love them."

"Yes." These words I spoke fiercely, without doubt.

"Is their blood worth ours?" She asked, beginning to mount Aristes once more, preparing to turn thousands of them to ash. Again it seemed that if I could just decipher what she wanted of me I could stop her.

"It doesn't have to be that way." I said, believing in a destination, a future, one whose path continued to elude me...though I was beginning to understand even as my heart sank. The hysteria over the Star Fall, the introduction of the Isildari, the allowance of my own movement against my mother's work.

The Empress and my mother had made me their pawn, trained me to make the sacrifice I had to come to on my own.

Aristes was spreading his wings, his body a shining wonder in the sunlight, a miracle preparing to deliver us from our fate. I tried searching for my voice, seeing the future closing around me if I spoke, and found my words in the burning fields revealed to the Empire in the calm pools of our scrying.

"Mother!" I called out before the dragon could take to the skies. Aristes swiveled around, and my mother looked down on me from the heights of his glittering form.

"I will do what the Empress wants. I will become a husband among them."

=-=-=

There. Though it has taken an arc of the sun to finish the telling, that is the story of your people little one. That is how you came to be, living here with your half-brothers and -sisters. You are the first-born of my second wife, new to the world...and like my sons and daughters before you your mother's life will be measured by the blinks of your eye.

For me, your life will be an arc of the sun - through you I will live one beautiful day. Already I see the creeping of Time in your siblings, already it feels as if your mother is under the soil...ash in the pyre.

How many more, I wonder, will I see off to the edges of the expanding Empire? How many will I outlast? Which generation of my bloodline will finally bury me?

My future is like the frozen waste - something cold that stretches out, easily outpacing the horizon.

It will be easier for you, the death of one parent and the long youthfulness of the other. Your siblings will be there to support you, though they in turn are damaged for being the vanguard. Half their blood destroyed so many of their other half's ancestors, for the Empress knew her people could only train so many dogs...integration was made easier by the deaths of so many of humanity's warriors.

We murdered the wolves to better tend the sheep among you. If the Isildari were galled at their own forced betrayal...they are dead now. Though I remember the anger and bitterness that swallowed my first wife well enough.

My hope is that the human in you, in the others, will forgive such things as that part of your blood is want to do. Horrors become rationalized necessities become ink on the page...

How I envy the racial forgetfulness of the short-life peoples in this world.

I want you to understand, and to justify, all that we have done in your name. I want to see you grow up and laugh and marry...and yes, eventually die, surrounded by your own progeny that will stand at my side and weep for all that you were.

I want to see that something of my mother who took her own life survives, that whatever fire gave humanity the strength to cross the ice will burn across the generations.

On the subject of my hopes, the augurs say nothing, and in their silence I am free to imagine a future where the best of what we were lives on in you.

fourth?

Changed the "sahuagin matriarch" to deep king after looking up the races. Plus the locathah and their matriarch communities - where the matriarch is the primary egg layer - works better for the story.

last one sort of inspired by a great SF book i've been captured by - The Quantum Thief. and one I plan to get back to soon - Anathem