Facing your Inner Demons (Open)

[Wrenmae]

83, Summer 511 AV

He had been here before.

It wasn't the first thought, but it certainly resonated the strongest, echoing along the hard cut mountain pass and vanishing into an abyss of black and white. Jagged teeth shattered the earth around him and pierced the horizon, wet with sky's blood. He was alone here, for the moment, and knee deep in snow. Surprisingly, they did not cling to his legs. Instead the flakes clustered around his feet like expectant kittens, mewling for attention. Pushing through them he walked. He was shorter, he could feel it, in a body much smaller than the one he was used to having.

He was ten again, a gangly creature of bony limbs and pale skin. The discovery, strangely, did not startle him...not then. The mountain pass was forbidding, the Kalea ranges themselves seeming to hover over him like spears, waiting for him to slip or fall, to die here as so many others had.

Each breath

Echoed

Each footfall

Resounded

Something crawled through his blood, some sinister feeling of danger beyond the snow and daunting peaks. There was great peril here, some stalking predator following him from drift to drift. Without questioning the logic, Wrenmae sprinted forward, running anywhere but there as his ears strained for the sound of blades or claws biting against cold earth.

Heart clattering in his chest, breath caught in the transition between throat and mouth, he burst around the corner of the pass and fell, twisting and spinning for an impossible amount of time, before hitting the ground. Buried. Failed. Quiet. Dead.

Above him the wind started to howl, a screaming gibberish of half words and anger. It called him to rise, to see, to look with eyes averted and shut. It did not speak with words, only the unspoken urging nature oft spoke through. Beating, his heart played a stacatto rhythm to compliment the wailing northwind gripping at his underarms and back. Forced, pulling away at the dreamstuff around him, the Cheva roiling out of his control, Wrenmae was forced to look upon the sight ahead...a lonely wagon drawn by two dead horses.

Covered in ice it waited for him, the fabric drawn across the entrance seductively, a whispering sort of tranquility. Child as he was, Wrenmae could not help but stand and trudge to the scene of his singular most abominable and damning act. With trembling hands he wrapped his fingers around the edge of the flap. The material was coarse, slippery and frozen. The wagon had been left here a long time, always in the coldest part of his memories, shoved into silence. He began to pull it open.

"Stop,"the voice was young, a reed of thin piping noise against the savagery of the storm. Turning, Wrenmae looked upon himself, the child of ten that stood shivering in the snow. He was sick, obviously so and the paleness of his skin and the frosty kiss of blue around his lips did not disguise the fevered glare of his eyes or the red around his cheeks. What little color was left only heralded a rosy death, blossoming in the cheeks. "Don't open it Gyptus, turn around and go back."

"Why?" he asked, now himself again and suddenly awkward in his older body, "Why can't I open this flap? Are you telling me I don't know what's inside?"

"Nothing is certain here," the child answered, chewing on the bottom of his lip, "You know what happened, why revisit this place?"

"He wants the story." The new voice startled both Wrenmae and the child, and they stared at the figure sitting atop the wagon. Clad in the finest of Wrenmae's clothes, including his cape and wide brimmed hat, the Storyteller clicked his heels together and grinned, his eyes obscured beneath the shadow of his hat. As hard as the wind blew, it did not blow it off. "Boy, oh Boy, I was wondering when you'd get the curiosity to roll on down to the memory vault, got bored waiting for you boyo!"

"Who are you?"

"The Storyteller, Tale Weaver, Gift of Gabber, the Recorder, Listener, or whatever you have the guts to pin onto my shirt of titles...I am all stories you know, and all desire to know more. So let's play it like it is, what's in the magic wagon?"

"Don't!" The child yelled, strafing forward with incredible speed and placing his frail body between Wrenmae and the opening. "You don't want what's inside."

"But I..." he looked at the opening, knowing what lay beyond. His brother, his sister, still frozen in the positions he'd left them. His sister would have died first, his brother soon to follow, both at his curse, at Vayt's request. He knew what was inside. Why then was it so hard to open the flap?

He knew, that was why. He knew that they were not the only things behind the flap. There was something else. Someone else.

"Please," the child warned, shivering beneath his skin as his very skeleton seemed to dance, "Just turn around, do not seek what you do not want."

"Knowledge is power lil guy," the Storyteller chuckled, gazing down at the two with a grin spread across his face, "How does anyone move forward without knowing the shit they stepped in, ages past?"

"Shut up!" the child snarled with surprising volume, his face twisting hatefully, "Help me stop him, you know what's frozen here, beyond. Not even you will be immune if its freed."

"Petch, kiddo, Petch and another Petch...Dunno if I want to play party to denial, we're cutting out an important player don'tcha think? Story's hardly as compellin without our antagonist to liven up the play. Live a little pipsqueak, sit back and enjoy plot twists once in awhile."

"It isn't just my brother and sister, is it?"


The child thought a moment before answering, averting his eyes and nervously wringing bone white hands together, "No, it was never just them. If it was just about them we wouldn't be here now."

"So what, what is it that I don't understand?"

"Someone's scritch scratching at your doors boyo," the Storyteller crooned, falling back along the wagon top and rolling down. He was a flurry of cape and hat, still obscuring his eyes. His smile though, it was unnaturally long, a cut of white and glee below a shadowed nothingness. The space between the hat brim and the mouth...it was the Void. The Void Seidaku had taught him about so long ago. "Ole egg's a mite scrambled wouldn't you say?" Rapping his knuckles on Wrenmae's head the garishly dressed phantom chuckled. Surprisingly, it hurt...the knuckles made contact and hurt, and only in that moment did Wrenmae realize he hadn't felt anything else so far, not his clothes nor the wind or even the texture of the tent flap. He'd imagined it, imagined it all.

The Storyteller's grin stretched wider yet. "Someone give the boy a sweet. Well played Wrenmae ole chap, straight on the miza there. This isn't real, not by a long shot, and all this razzmatazz with your inner voices? We're only dancing a jig to save time on qualifying details. You aren't repressing memory boyo, not anything so delightfully droll."

Standing up atop the wagon again, he spread his arms wide, cape falling out like the wings of some satin bat. "We only tell the best stories in the down-under-the-Cheva, mate...and a forgotten day in the mountains isn't near enough call for these kinda performances." It was the lack of eyes that was most disturbing. Wrenmae knew the Storyteller could see him just fine...even without them. "Not what, but..." without finishing, the ghoul chuckled to himself and fell back along the wagon top.

The Storyteller, he spoke like Vayt, the charm and lackadaisical phrasing almost grating despite the jocular joy in which the words were spoken. Madness, the Storyteller was utter madness.

"Please," the child said again, taking Wrenmae by the hand, "You don't want to know what you're holding back. Be as you are now, return with me." He glanced at the storyteller, small eyes almost comically furious at the grinning jester. "I can handle him. We can handle him. That part of you is not hard to control."

"So what about him?" Wrenmae pointed to the wagon, the flap, what lay beyond, all of it "I can't control him?"

The boy's face fell. The Storyteller laughed.

"Who is he?" Wrenmae asked, first to the child who would not meet his eyes, snow and ice lancing his brown hair like invasive beetles.

"Who?" Wrenmae asked again, turning to the Storyteller.

The jester only offered him a wider smile, impossibly wide, frighteningly wide, indicating the flap with an outstretched hand. "Well you know my answer boyo," he crooned, tipping his hat-void lower on his face, "If you want to know the true story, best to start at the source."

Neither of them touched the opening, Wrenmae doubted they could. What lay behind that flap was a part of him he kept away from even himself. But what could possess his own subconcious to hide a shard of his own nature? What was behind that curtain? His fingers twitched, begged to touch the material.

Above him, the world continued to howl.

It roared for answers.

[Ulric]

Dully, he drifted on the brink of paradigm. Everywhere, the wine-dark sea of ghosts. Everywhere, the horrid, leathery kelp. The warped, faded timbers of the raft warm under his cheek, though rough, even against the hedge of his beard. He could hear breakers, but there was no shore. Just the jade sky, the purple sun, the ochre clouds veined through with garnets and amber. And, of course, the grotesque, decaying condor that perched on his shoulder, making his already unsteady gut churn from the reek of putrefying, skeletal flesh. The whirling gannets sent up a rigid cacophony, their wings bent of pewter, clicking and creaking as cogs ground against gears, the sporadic drip of a greasy, viscous something from the edges of feathered machinery, tumbling to bead on the turgid waters. And then blossom, spreading ever outward, in a vague swirl of sickly color.

They stank, too.

But not as bad as the condor.

“Floating, floating, floating… where?” Rasped those dry, crackling lips. More kelp lapped around the raft, furling into the mockery of a crown. The man cast it aside, a scornful chuckle erupting. “Blasphemers, away with you.” This was his raft. Indefinitely, interminably, inexorably. But he couldn’t sail, though. There was a sail, a bleached, frayed thing, hanging lankly from a decrepit spar that was, in turn, lashed to the debris of timbers. There was rope, too. Not much, since he’d taken to gnawing at the tarry strands, savoring the acridity of his own disgusted fervor, the dirty hemp, salty brine. And if you chocked, you could always yank it from your gut.

Nasty, pukey slut of a coil, he grimaced, Not even fit to grace the jib. The jib, too, was woeful, for it was speckled with feces, and guano. Not that there’d been any bats. There were always mysteries at sea, the dire threnody of a jigsaw, a compulsion to conjoin this fragment with that shard, to emerge with a sort of wisdom of what something was, regardless of whether the knowing even warranted the finding. That’s why there was wine, so you didn’t have to care, didn’t have to feel the monotony of just existing under a heap of shyke, or caught up in the whorled, labyrinthine skeins of a spider’s web. Even if there wasn’t was, mugs of ale weren’t too plebeian to quench the furnace of jealousy, despair, and raging doubt, and if there was mead, who’d refuse a single, honeyed drop?

Drifting, drifting, that was the key. Never halting, never fleeing, just drifting, or swinging as might a pendulum. Back, forth. Back, forth.

Back, forth.

There was a hum, set to the rattle of a water pipe. He beat at his leg, crushed and gnat and sucked it from the char of his palm, feasting on the cloying nectar of pilfered crimson. And the wings.

Then the raft broke away.

Firm, gray shingle under his toes, harsh and cruel, and near around his ears, his spiky hair, were milky serpents of fog. The wreck of canvas became a toga, or at least a clout for his loins. The shreds weren’t much of a bulwark from the piercing cold, for grit yielded to stark, heavy menhirs, rising bleakly from the undulating ridges, the frozen, snowy crags, and then, at last, tundra. They had faces, at least to him, noble features, sinister features, unremarkable features. Every cast has its guises, every hound an engorged cock, every bear a cloak of soft, tender down, for the irascible swan is more simply cleft, and hurled into a blackened kettle.

Cough, cough.

Is that smoke?

And slowly, the gaunt thing that was man shambled to the fire, drawn to the luster, the fading embers, leaving a wake of cinders. “Ha, warm,” he grunted, then knelt, splaying his fingers, reaching for hanging of furs. My cloak? He frowned. Why’s it in this dismal camp?

Jealously, he clasped it over his chest, regarding the pair of men with anger, and the pale boy with brutal neglect. “They’re probably dead,” he rasped, “They’re always dead, yet those fiends of pipers won’t relent, and drums keep banging, and dancer get ever more furious, so that the sky rends open, the ground sunders, and we’re left with a myriad chaos, and maybe a loaf.”

Coughing, he glanced at the condor. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Slut.

And then, chuckling with a reckless, yet forlorn pithy, at the young man, “Go on, find the key, flap your wings.”

[Wrenmae]

Interrupt.

Waves colliding, Lives coinciding, the thrice-twist threads of Cheva splintered. Frothed with sudden willingness and bore a fourth. The wind changed course, a mantle on the scene and dusty antiquity was hurled from the top of snow like a discarded table-cloth. They were strange company, figments and dreamers all, and yet the distinction could be no more muddled. Ulric knelt, a squatting dog of bear fur and cryptic encouragements. The Tale Weaver hung, barely off the lip of the frost-hugged wagon and grinned an unspoken approval. They all were silent thereafter, a respectful solemnity as expectation shattered and shoots of new direction burned hot beneath their scalps.

And did they burn?

But burn brightly...as tinder did when caught in murdering blaze.

Wrenmae held out his arms, wings suddenly, ungainly and black like the condor staring balefully above the grimy human. He wore his dirt like skin, a mole in bloody bear fur, a human naked and bleeding from the eyes, an axe and shield shoved haphazardly in the snow, and then the man again...flickering fires.

He turned away, his arms were arms again and clasped against his chest.

No story could be told from ends so frayed.

Not even poems would grasp the meaning of his query. It spoke with words neither uttered nor begun, a river that turned in upon itself without knowing the beginning.

He parted at the shape of a boulder, a boulder just beneath his depths.

"Who is he?" He nodded at Ulric, the fire spit and spattered.

"Your conscience." Tale Weaver whispered, cupping his hand conspiratorially over his mouth.

"An intruder," the child corrected, grimacing with frozen lips, "He does not belong."

"Petch, who does?" was the raucous response, "At least the gentleman in fur is kind enough to bring just himself..." a thought "Perhaps I should remind him of the dysfunctional dress code."

"Shut up." Both the child and Wrenmae spoke in unison. They were each other, half grown boy shivering in the snow he could not feel. They were not. And they were apart again.

"No one ever says anything entertaining," Weaver sighed, falling from the wagon to the snow. His clothes folded in all the wrong places, as if he was a face and clothes given form and nothing else...the guise of a storyteller, only as flesh and blood as the stories begged him be. "Can we ask our guest the importance of facing ourselves? He seems as together as an antagonist should be." He knelt before Ulric, the cloying scent of alcohol folding along the brim of his hat, noxious.

Toxic.

"No," he said at last, holding out a glove just beyond the fire, drawing it away swiftly and rolling across the snow. He stood and leaned against the side of the wagon, catching his chin in thought before snapping his fingers. "It's not enough to be an antagonist these days, you're an anti-hero with the rest of the Mizahar lot."

Clap. Clap. Clap. A sound as flat as toothless wind, complimenting un-reality with its sardonic expectation. The Tale Weaver, after all, was the only real one here. All else were figments, characters on the whim of some greater teller, puppets on filament strings of destiny. The gods as well, those petching bluebloods, playing at a higher seat only made them more subject to the tale. Reality was subjective, metaphysical, introspective. The Mountain was a desert, was a tundra, was a sea with lime green lily pads all spinning in languid tandem. Mountain again, Wrenmae's story...much as he'd like to think it was.

The Tale Weaver WAS Wrenmae, and Ulric, and any two-bit hero who waved a block of Djed or sword. Or maybe the only real one was Wrenmae, or Ulric, or even the nameless whelp.

Probably the condor.

Always the petcher no one would expect.

He tipped his hat to the bird, rapping against the side of the wagon. "If you have time for intermission, you have time to ask our friend what he's doing on the wrong stage."

The child glowered and the weaver shrugged, "Whatever gets him to procrastinate the end means."

"Am I ready?" Wrenmae asked but no one answered. He was second in this drama now.

"Spin me a ditty stranger," The Weaver asked, holding out his hand to the man, "What brings you to our festival of selves? Polite interest? Wrong turn perhaps? Or are you here to make the choice for him, pull the drawstrings and deny a plot arc he had the audacity to dream up in such a self-indulgent fashion?"

"Careful..." The child warned, "You-"

"-don't know who he is." they echoed it and there was only Wrenmae and Ulric then, the rest had gone in the collapsed understanding that both were one and seperate at once...a conundrum neither had the strength to solve together.

Only alone did they exist as separate ends, and not even that. Wrenmae was a man of beginnings and middles, ends never factored beyond the concept of their existence.

"What do you think?" he asked, hesitantly, leaning towards the opening with all the unease of child before a gift. There was darkness there, something of ends rather than what he was accustomed to. No matter how it continued, this dream would always surface with the presentation of the end.

The end at the beginning.

Weaver would have found it comical.

"I don't belong," he tried to explain, finding it hard to find the words when he wasn't even breathing "I don't belong to such indecision."

A beat. An Eternity. Backwards Moments.

"How did you decide?"

The choice was likely different but they all had paths to tread, and this man could walk no differently...even if his gait was crippled. They all staggered to common ends and only the gods knew what transpired after.

And after that?

The Cheva around him could only guess.

[Ulric]

Jadedly, he tangled a crude poker, flaring up ruddy tongues of flame, a whisper of cinders around his broken face, the squeal of char, like the spiny wings of a plight of locusts. Badly cloyed. Hardly a snarl of barbs, a hedge of whiskers. The gloved hand jutted turgidly, vagaries rushing to his breast, making his eyes sting. “Go away,” he growled, forcing an abysmal swipe, and hunched nearer the meager sprawl of embers as a quiver crept up his back. “I don’t care, so stay your tongue, you wretch.” Rage, a simmer in the cauldron, fading away. Not a clove of garlic, a touch of pepper. He was captive, though. He was here merely because he could, caught up in a fever, a snaking dread that was blindly, madly coruscating with the rage of a spurned lover. “Don’t chain me in your augury.”

Weaver.

Bereft of a loom, of deft fingers, you’re just a sour shyke, a tongue spun to chafe our ears, lash a mockery.

But he didn’t say barbarian, nor crazed, the lamenting, brazen fallacy of reading only the scrawl of ebony type, and not beyond their juncture, so why not listen to what he has to say? Though he reeks of liquor, erroneity eludes his tongue, for reality and chimera rasp in leaden, spiteful juxtapose, neither forced as gospel, just acknowledged as stark travesty. To bide, in this clamor of ink, merely as a puppet is not enough, for though tale beckons, we are but cogs in the machinery, woeful servants of a greater, more culpable meaning, if the weavers are deft enough to grasp at shreds of a deeper, darker gray.

The fiery coals of discontent, perhaps.

Not that we care.

Sordidly, he fumbled at the sprawl of bones, found one to break on a spur of rock, and began to suck out the pink marrow with a regular, grotesquely hideous slurp. He was just an accessory. His was a revel in writhing apathy, an empty cloak of ambiguity. They kept arguing in circular lays. The cryptic weaver. The paltry boy. The young man, caught by the ragged seam of hyperbole and paradox, the web of a cantrip on the edge of his tongue. And then, the dingy warder of the cart, squatly ponderous, an upthrust wheel gyrating madly, squeaking fit to burst.

Ending, the fated blink, the surge of elucidating doubt, yielding to a pewter wash of revenants, the creak of the cart, the grinding of cogs, the somberly discordant drone of an empty hive.

“Linger.”

Idly, he clasped as the bony tube, tenderly brought it to his lips, and blew a few, mocking notes, like a mad piper. “You’d have to enter, y’know. You can’t deny, or even confuse, but you can delay.”

The elegy was jovial, a blankly whorling masquerade. The inlay of silver, ochre, and jade, vaguely coalescing in fragments, and then entwining, enveloping the fire and cart, beating back the encroaching fog. “Hark, d’you not hear? They clamor for tales, weighty under a burden of theft and deceit, the finest bolts of satin woven from tawdry husks of straw. They hunger, but not always for meaning.”

“Every man, even the most meager, is worthy.” Probably. “Venture back far enough, and I was a God.” He barked a laugh. “Does that frighten you? Probably not. For now, bound by the sag of flesh, caged by my bones, I merely ponder.”

“Have at it, then.” The blunt fingers danced over a char bone, face curling into the mocking, purple scar of a grin. “You’re weaving, aren’t you?”

[Wrenmae]

Weaving. The loom and thread, spinning hair to gold and gold to shyke. What was any dream but the abandon of memory, forced indenture to a lodged problem. He choked, his soul choked, and in its wretched vomit these scenes of repetition held eternal vigil. The wagon creaked, wind wailing through the warp and weft with eerie familiarity to gasping breath.

The barbarian watched in noisy silence, gristle and bone cracking against his dirty teeth. Blood-dark, word-wise, he was the strange of conscience Wrenmae had to deal with. Here, now, the snow did not cool and the sky offered no breath of wind, though the tatters of rough-spun canvas rose and whipped of its own accord, its own volition.

He took a step forward.

Once a God.

And then another.

Hark, dya hear?

His companions did not manifest, their council reserved for lonely dreams of pair-less moons and stars, of times he was alone in this scene, and not playing to an audience of some mismatched madman.

The curtain between him and answers was heavy with snow, hoarfrost crisp upon the wood like white mold, gnawing up the wagon with slow tenacity. Answers, like mizas, were free to take from purses pregnant with wealth. His heart must swell with unsaid words and curses, the wild abandon of Vayt's little gambit. Beyond the flap lay curses, the chained augury Ulric had spoken of.

Nothing to see but tortured sous and nameless dread, and was he not a master of his own domain? His own mind? His fingers gripped the frayed deerksin flap, whiteknuckled in the revelation, prepared for monsters of cigar smoke bodies to rise and strike him from the silence, from the darkness.

He yanked the flap aside.

No darkness had ever been so complete...and it was empty.

In dreams, one has the right to scream. The sound was grating, sudden, a shriek that pierced the din of storm and snow. Wrenmae looked down at the blade protruding from his chest, his blade, the cold iron sliding out and leaving him paralyzed. He fell to the ground with hardly a sound, the shuffle of snow, groan of the ground against his body was enough.

He was aware, painfully, but could find no action in his limbs, no means to turn himself.

In front of Ulric, the prisoner stood and wiped the blood from the end of the blade. He was Wrenmae, another Wrenmae, clad only in a poorly spun cloak. The eyes were darker, though, more umbra pools than the gentle brown of the dreamer, and no query and unease rent his brow with wrinkles. He did not smile, did not even turn to see his victim. Instead he hurled the dagger down into the fire, scattering the burning logs and embers.

"I'm weary of you," the other said, plucking his dagger from the snow, "If there is any godliness in you, show it to me." He circled Ulric, the dagger in his hand tightening and relaxing in measured harmony. "I am not party to liars or braggarts, nor do I suffer fools to live...so speak your piece and be convincing."

He stared up at the sky, the clashing Cheva.

"There are more than our eyes watching."

[Ulric]

Ulric bided there, reveling in his debased squat. The creak of furled limbs. This crouching was inherent to men, from the sticky, sordid confines of the flesh pits, to the antiquity of those vestigial hunters daring desolately undulating tundra, carrying spears of chafed flint in their bundles of pelts, heavy brows spilling with coarse long hairs. There was veracity in this, at least.

That was enough.

Binding his fervent, violet-glazed eyes to the flames, he stared into the depths of coals. They were like fat worms, crinkling under the furnace. The bone flung away, sooty and crackling. Taking up another, he shattered that brittle cylinder over his thigh. Brought it to the pucker of his lips, began to play again. The blared intonation scuffed over crude surfaces, pitted by neglect. Their insinuation like a musket ball to the chest. This was his threnody, the peril of seeing. Though he judged, it was with reckless disregard. There were enough scales in this whorl of the myriad, sultry in their sway. Their levy wasn’t for his fingers, cinched by discs of lead. That, above any reason, was why he’d come bereft of the trappings of finery. Taken by the vagaries of this somber chimera, he defied the desire for power.

Sullenly, the crows began to braid around him, flaying his ears with their mockery. They clove to his shoulders like a vast shelf of granite, beady eyes regarding with starkest surrender. They were legion. “Didn’t think you’d do it,” he grunted. Harshly, he regarded the wraith before him. The callow boy was gone, sucked up by the frigid mud. That was how it always went.

Crack, hummed the flames. Crack, crack. Through it all, he felt the boiling venom of umbrage gurgling in the depths of his chest. They’d left only a dull imprint on his body, yet he couldn’t equal the profundity of their dogma. Though he’d raged with a flagellant’s zeal, he couldn’t manifest with such enormity. 

Empty words were.

Accusingly, the bone gave a jerk. The music died, poor that it’d been. The sulky rise of a jaw, like a lover spurned. Before him, those pale knuckles rose, hefting a blade that they flung not at his heart, but the searing ropes of flames. The squander of purpose. The vanity of vague gestures. “Don’t care,” he grated. “Don’t care for your divinity. Don’t care for your whims, or your convincing. Don’t care for your judging eye, with its vapid spate of possibility. That’s the rub, boy. Those things are trite, disloyal to a fault. They betray us for pride’s sake, won’t place food in our bellies. They’re the refuge of cunts.”

Like a gargoyle, he clung to this limelight in bitter menace. That was all the better to preen, to deliver his empty sermons. There was the shiver of dust incarnate, caged by a rattling cart. Not yet broken by his zeal. Not trembling, but allaying the forge of his doubts. “There’s but a shred of veracity left, bright with fever and empty in its purport” he intoned, latching his eyes on that pinched face. “The toll of bells, the clanking of anvils, they all speak of it. Take a look, and tell me what you pry from this visage.”

Those incisors bared in a feral grin.

Idly, the bony sliver crushed in his grasp, slid through his fingers like grit. “There’s only me.”

[Wrenmae]

The crows called the bell.

Snow and sleet were no more, not even the spindly fingers of hoarfrost spread veins across the ground. The wagon was gone, the mountains were gone, the sky and ground were gone, and they, Ulric and that pale thing released stood in start white nothingness.

Did not float, stood, as if the ground itself had left an echo of its security. Or maybe they simply fell too balanced. Ulric remained crouched over the whispers of a fire, smoke that was not even smoke any longer, more wisps of reality draining through his fingers and shrinking into nothing.

They were abandoned, the both of them, and only the company of low flying crows kept vigil over their pitched palaver. Huge winged creatures, bloated with glossy feathers and thick beaks. Their eyes gleamed muted silver, opalescent shades of brilliance clashing with the shadow they wrapped around their body. Always screeching, always cawing, Petch their endless dirge.

Petch them.

"You lie," the boy spat at last, his murmur filling the void around them, imprinting on the air and flexing reality. Their two chevas lashed and aligned in rabid shapes too immense or beautiful to comprehend. Only nothing assaulted their consciousness, nothing.

Nothing but themselves.

"You are never alone, never yourself."

"Never"

"Only"

"You"

With each new word the others appeared, spread thin and stretched over the space around them, insubstantial, lacking bone and flesh but strong in shape and spirit.

"You are a character," Weaver spoke, a short bow and then a grin, the crows lusty cries. Ulric. Ulric. Ulric. "You play your roles and spread your wings, but cannot quite take flight...now can you boyo?" A beat. "I think you're more real than I am, and that takes some doing...especially for a scavenger thief like yourself, stealing into revelries and parties uninvited." He held out his hands, wide, his cape twisting, bending, striking out at nothing, "And now we've run aground of silence, dusty isle, lonely island, where sand and air are so pure of ignorance we cannot scarcely see them."

Kneeling, he picked up nothing, spread it through his fingers, "I doubt they believe in us."

"Daddy?" a piping mewl broke Weaver's voice and the child fidgeted nervously, "I'm sorry. I tried to protect them, I did, but I was so cold, so hungry...I don't want to die. Please don't be mad...I do not want to die."

"Shut up, Shut UP!" Wrenmae now, kneeling with hands to his head, trying to hold his mentality together, as if the force of strength alone could keep his mind from splintering. Djed spooled from his eyes and ears, drifting lines of luminescence, capricious as they dug into his skin and rent it from his skull, pulling and tearing, bird-hungry, swarm-thick, whispered words of hypnotism and rivers of blood that dripped from mouth and eyes. "Just let me think! Let me think!"

"Pathetic." Shroud this time, the cloaked pale specter, scowling, "A mind divided cannot stand. I'll have to take charge."

"No!" All three others spoke at once, and then they were gone.

Shroud was quiet, staring at the places they'd gone, and turning back to Ulric. "We die walking, and undecided we will remain." He turned to the wideness around him, the white silence.

"Do you hear me? Vayt? God of Plague? We are undecided! Take back your gift and take your petching claws from my throat!" When he turned again, the thin outlines of fingers spread across his throat, massaged it, held it tight, "I can stand without your help, your highborn petching gifts. I am the whelp with no father, the fratricidal wanderer. Give me a cause or strike me down, but don't send me here to LANGUISH!"

His voice echoed only a moment.

Nothing.

The Chevas tore at the top, claws of light piercing the nothing around them, Ulric's boat bucking gently in a nothing ocean. "Who are we, Ulric, if the crows speak aright...? Who are we? I'll gut them all to find my answer, I care not how many need to die for it. What are you? What brought you here?"

He looked back to the boat, a helpless grin on his pale face. "If I took your boat, would I wake up as you? Are you even real?"

[Ulric]

You are never alone, wormy lips curled, in the way of boys dumped glumly by lichen-choked gutters. Never. Hardly a toadying rebuttal, just gaunt and sulky. Maybe a fraction morose, though it plucked at veracity. Harshly, he felt it resonate in his toes, dash the ruddy crusts from his ghostly fetters and making them rattle and squeal. The wraiths looked around, began to mutter.

Ulric wasn’t, not while he caged this legion of souls. They were his guilt, braided by gnashing fury and bowel-churning dread, steeping in confusion, misery, and despair. The kneelers, the cursers, the weepers. They’d drained away the empty refuge of cavern, or just faded away.

Rending yet another fragment of bone, he slurped out the pink, pungent marrow. Mashed it with molars. Listened.

And there it was, laced by twisty cables of violet and jade. The gimlet slits looked over the enormity of a machine, all grinding cogs and gears, limned by discordant mesh wire. These baffled him, for they were but symbols. Like cuneiform glyphs and grim casings of marble, gold inlay and lacquer over statuary. The lunatic sees what he will. Those musket-balls might list madly, fused molten by fury, but their patina wasn’t deceitful. The zealot was always just in his accusing fury. But the man who had nothing, he was damned above all others, for his beckon was charnel. The fluting drone of a ferryman, mournful tremors whistling down a bone-dry pole. The moths like a cloak, their splay of ashen but for iron-crimson masques.

Ulric bit his lip, sucking in the powdery residue lifting off pinned wings. The dead always meander in mute, reproachful pattern, every rebuke like a cuff to the ear. There was a scratchy wrenching under his flesh, as if he’d consumed a trencher stuffed by desiccated leaves. They were a brittle, leaden burden, constipating his riddles with spite for the lichyard condor that’d forsaken his shoulder for inclement gusts. The make of it was like a skin-spy, and he forced a contrary glare. Those ridged planes could’ve been mortised, and flanged by so many tiny bars of metal, jointed and shrieking as they sheared over ungreased hinges.

Turbulence washed over him, like an uneasy deluge of black-horned beetles scurrying over spongy fibers. They sully us, he scowled. There was a jerk of an elbow, infused by cold, bereft fury. They profane our dust of dreams, for even then we aren’t alone, but shackled miserably in their thrall. 

Mockingly, he garbled over horsey jaw.

“Disdain the gods, would you?” That scruffy chin wagged around, as if scrying for an indiscernible shrine of skyglass. They intrude, he hissed. Blunt fingers clenched around an oddment of filed bone that somebody, wrapped by chafed, decaying leather. There wasn’t finality. The boneyards weren’t confined by gates and parapet, and beyond lofted vast cages of ribs, ivory tusks, the sundry decay of a bloated whale. The panoply corroded his guts, made him sputter up marrow and acid. the tug. There was something feral in his eyes, a ferverish thirst that he could only slake through an apostate’s devilry. “That’s awfully worthy of you, face-changer. But sadly, your curses are just empty wind, springing intemperately from pimply arse. There’s nary a plague curses will remedy. They won’t thwart the drowning of harvest, or keep the destrier’s hooves from grinding tender green shoots to a slurry of muck. That’s the rub, boy. That’s why we kill them all. The gods blaspheme, profane us with their voracity for power. They hunger.”

“And it ends,” he grunted, “Only when we piss on a basket of their boiled, severed skulls. Thrash them around like so many cabbages, and demolish the subjugation of divine tongues.”

Hurling away the bone, he discerned a vanishing clatter. Then he picked another up, prised in horny palms. “Wake as me, wake as you, does it really matter? The crows’ll inevitably feast.”

[Wrenmae]

Shroud scowled. The dream was ending. Pieces of wrought fantasy crumbled at the edges, the white seeping through with tepid splotches of mildew and rot. There was nothing and then there was them, and the two worlds were being shattered at their base. He could feel the shake, the rumbling of mountains as somewhere beyond, bodies moved in restful tumult. Would he remember when he woke? Who would he be? Face changer, Ulric had called him, changeling. What was he really? Taking a seat across from the man, he took a bone from the barbarian's pile and tested it with his fingers. It felt real, this all felt real. But the area around them, graying like fresh ash, splitting away from reality, there was nothing real here. Not anymore. "Petch your opinions," Shroud muttered, cracking the bone in his palm and holding the splintered end toward his mouth, the black of marrow staring back at him, "Kill the gods and more will arise. Humanity wants to be governed, craves hierarchy. Tear down the whole petching pantheon and in another eon they'll be back." He smiled, wryly, "Maybe with your face." Putting his lips around the bone gingerly, he sucked the marrow from inside, grimacing at the taste and spitting, hurling the cracked ruins into the fire. It crackled and growled without provocation, consuming the dreamstuff instantly. Somewhere behind them, the sound of a thundering crash tilted the world on an axis. Who knew waking up could be so catastrophic? "Morbid wretch," he chuckled, "Morbid, well spoken wretch...what gods have shaken your foundations?" Holding up a hand, Shroud shook his head. "Not necessary to say, you'd only mutter something vague anyways." His shape wavered, heaved and fell, dark and heavy with the throes of waking. "I think we're through here. Take your boat and be on your way and I'll be on mine." He stood, kicking at the fire as patches of the world ceased to be, his own side of the Cheva falling apart. It was time. "You and every other damn phantom...dream sages and pointless intervention, but thank you for your part in letting me out." He flexed his hand, "Truth is buried for only so long, right?" The crows shrieked. "Take care of those carrion crows eh?" He grinned as he vanished from the dreamscape, taking his ideas, mind and passion with him...in all the tattered shambles it had arrived in. "You'll give off the impression you're a walking corpse"