Flashback Death Had the Same Design

[Philomena]

Spring the 3rd, 498 AV
Watctower House, Zeltiva
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"It is not a good time, Miss Lefting, you must believe me."

"She... she left me a note, she said it was important, that... time... was important. She said to tell you to announce me. Is Dr. Watchtower alright? Please, I won't stay long, please let me see if she's alright."

"She is very ill, and it is not safe for her to have visitors, ma'am."

"Doc?" the voice was familiar to Minnie, who had spent so many long hours, now, sitting with Hannah Watchtower. But the rasp in it, the grate of the fever-boiled tongue, was horrible and foreign, "Doc? Is that Minnie? Minnie, get in here!"

"Dr. Watchtower?" Minnie ventured weakly. Hannah Watchtower, with her fluid hands and strong boned face was hunched over at the foot of the stairs, in a battered, vomit stained night-dress, her eyes wincing painfully.

The doctor turned quickly to grab her, "Ms Watchtower! Really! You must lie down!"

A medical student came tumble-running down the stairwell behind, "Doctor Operands! We only left her a minute! I was getting her water!"

"Hush! All of you!" shivering, feverish Doctor Watchtower demanded, "Do you know I lived through the White Fever? Do you know I sailed around the farthest corners of this land? Do you think these last God-blasted moments where I'm a vomiting, shivering wretch matter to me, that I need you to preserve them for me? I told you that my guests were to be admitted if I invited them. I invited Minnie! Now! Dr. Operands, you will lie me on my couch, and you will leave my chamber. Minnie is fully capable of caring for a sick woman for fifteen minutes."

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Settled on her bed, again, a few minutes later, with only Minnie there to witness, Hannah Watchtower fought through a painful stretch of vomiting into a wide, white bowl, that Minnie, with shaking, inexperienced hands, held beneath her the old doctor's pale, shrivelled lips. When she had lain Dr. Watchtower back, unsure of what to do with the bowl, she set it gently on the floor.

"Dr. Watchtower, what's happened?!"

"Blood poisoning. The silliest thing, really. When you get my age, I think death likes to laugh at you by showing you what can kill you - do you know what this was? A boy in the fish market dropped his scaler, and it bit into my calf on the way to the ground. Do you know, during he Circumnavigation, I rubbed half the flesh of my hands on those damn hempen ropes, and all I got was a nasty case of psoriasis. And here I am, Hannah Watchtower, hero of Zeltiva, killed by a damned fish-scaler."

"You need medicine! You don't need me, you need --"

"--oh hush, Minnie. I'll be dead in two days."

AT this, with a shaking hand she pulled at her coverlet, and then drew up her night dress to show her calf. The side, now, was a mass of purple and deep, deep black, and the smell, before only a part of the cocktail of the room's sick-odors, was suddenly quite overpowering. Minnie gasped audibly. IT was the look and scent of rot. Of death.

"The doctor, he is pretending otherwise -- to himself as much as me, more than likely -- but you and I, we've always worked on facts, haven't we? So, let's not stop now. In your book - I want you to write that whole bit out. I want it to be at the end of your little biography of me. 'Hannah Watchtower, hero of Zeltiva, was killed by a fish scaler to the calf.' She laughed at this, hard and ugly, and it sent her into a doubled over fit of grips in her stomach. Minnie bent over her, helpless to do anything useful, instead simply moving her clumsy hand in slow, soft circles on the old woman's back, as she gulped painfully. As the old doctor finally reached an equilibrium, and leaned back, Minnie took the opportunity to quietly, gently, but with a repulsion in her shaky hands cover the rotting leg.

"You should not have called me, you... you need a priest, perhaps. Or at least your friends?"

The woman, through her pain, managed a tiny smile, "Minnie Lefting, do you think, all these years I would have sat through your damned pedantic questions about the weight of our jar glass and the gut we used in our sail-thread, if we weren't friends by now? Most of the friends my own age are gone. Charm, she's gone sailing, you know, and so is Stephie Brooks. Never make your friends sailors, Minnie! They always have other business at hand when you need them."

"They will... they will be sorry to have been gone..."

"Of course they will. And do you know what you will do? You will write down, in ever so much detail, just what you saw when you were here, and you will tell them," the woman laughed seeing Minnie blanch, "Oh god, you old coward! Alright, you'll perhaps just WRITE to them. You can attach it to my gifts for them. But, we will get to that. You have all the time in the world to find some way to make my sweat-shrivelled teats, and puke-stained bed sound romantic and tear-jerking. But I! I am running out of time, and I've done enough in life, I don't fancy being a ghost just to come back and give you your damned present."

Minnie shifted uncomfortably, as much at the idea of an unprompted gift, as at the woman's sudden, uncharacteristic coarseness. She did not trust gifts, never had. Gifts were obligatory, or they were strategic. She hated the idea of both. "A... present?"

"That's what dying old women do. They give things away. Yours is in the corner. Its all wrapped. Do you see it? Do you know, I've known you this long, and... when I went to label it I didn't know how... how to spell your first name? Where did you get such a damned long first name, anyway? Oh, I'd forgotten the dayy! Did you pass your review, this morning?"

Minnie stood to go look in the corner, where there were indeed a pile of parcels. The old binnacle of the famous ship, she recognized the shape of. It was addressed to Charm Wright. Other packages were more mysterious. Some of the names, she didn't even know. But in the corner, there was one, for here: 'Fillomena Lefting'.

"Hmm? What?"

"Your review? Don't tell me you got the note beforehand and skipped it! I told the courier to wait until he saw you coming out, of a purpose!"

"Oh! Oh!" it flew back to her. IT was funny, she had met the courier on the way out of the review board for her doctoral dissertation, when she was trundling up the hill, anyway, because she was excited to tell Dr. Hightower - she had passed, and been offered a lecturer's place! eEr excitement hadn't faded until she'd seen the medical man open the door.

"Oh... I... I passed..."

"Oh lawks. I know that, of course you did. If you hadn't, I'd suspect you just stuttered all over them, and I think we have you trained better than that, now. The real question is, did they give you anything?"

"A... a lecturer's seat, ma'am. In literature."

Hannah Watchtower smiled at this, "A lecturer's seat. Yes, that's good. You will be a lecturer at the university, and you will publish your notes, and they will remember us, you and I, all this work we did. They'll remember one last little thing from old Hannah Watchtower. And you will write more than just this, won't you? You will keep writing?"

"Yes ma'am... yes, yes, all my life."

"Yes, yes you will. I know that." her voice, a mixture of strained playfulness and irritation, now melted into something more serious, "Yes. And that's why I gave you this present, open it. Open it, then."

The box was the size, perhaps, of two hands folded in prayer, "I will feel strange enjoying anything, with you... like this..."

"Oh, for the gods' sake! Open it, then, for me. Let me enjoy you opening it. You know it, don't deny it, I'm an arrogant old woman. I give presents the same way I do everything else - for my own benefit. I want to see you smile at it."

She pulled the string from the box, quietly, and opened it. Inside it was a prayer doll, the sort of idol one makes for a child one to whom one is teaching a faith. It was a narrow, pale, dark-haired woman. It held a plume in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the other, marking it clearly as an effigy of Qalaya. The stitches were very old and worn, and the workmanship was shoddy to begin with - crooked lines of embroidery gathered the dress, the hair was imperfectly attached, the scroll slightly crumpled.

"Qalaya?"

"When I was a girl, we had to take stitching class. Did you have to do that?"

"Yes... I was... not very good at it."

"I hated it. That was made by my own hand. You can tell, hm? Don't lie, its horrible. I didn't care, I wanted to throw it away, but then a family friend's birthday was coming up, so I found a plume and rolled a sloppy scroll for it, and gave it to her, as Qalaya."

Minnie felt the beginnings of a sick pit in her stomach, a mixture of fear and excitement.

"I figured it would be just a present she'd take and throw out, honestly. When you are a child, you don't care if they like your present, you care if they thank you for it. She did, very kindly - at the time I thought she was hamming it up a bit, for my benefit. Her and my father were great friends, after all."

Minnie remembered the portrait of the elder Professor Hightower, Hannah Watchtower's, a linguistics master at the university. She felt her eyes start to burn.

"Then, years later - I have not told you this story, and it concerns the circumnavigation, so let it be the last one I tell you for your work. Years later, that same friend was on the Circumnavigation with me. In fact, do you know, it was her influence and her friendship with my family that even got me on the trip in the first place, bratty young student that I was! She was famous by then of course, known already through Zeltiva for her mastery of my father's field. But then, she was killed on the trip, and I had to clean her things out: the captain, she was too broken up. And do you know? She'd never thrown this stupid doll away. She'd gone so far as... to take it halfway around the world with her, to set it up in her cabin, and make her offerings, in front of this ugly little mess of stitch work."

"This was Bethany Edgetower's." she said the words with a sort of heartsick sorrow-joy.

"It was. I kept it for myself, I figured no one else would want it. I kept it, because I knew that would have to be me the rest of the trip, that I needed to grow up, then, to be more like Beth, that I needed to be a servant of Qalaya for a while, to be the great recorder of things. There were so few of us left from the university by then! And oh, god how I prayed! How hard I prayed in front of this ugly old doll! I prayed so hard that I think it made me hurt, and all that time, I was praying to Qalaya, yes. But I was praying to Bethany, too. Praying for some of what made her a hero, and what the lack of made me just a lucky loudmouth.

But, you know me. When we got home, I finished my work, and got back to the work I'm meant for - making much of myself. Telling stories. I'm not belittling it, I'm glad to have been a storyteller. It's a good life, a holy life.

But as I've grown older, it has gnawed at me, that Bethany - and Qalaya, after all - they did so much for me, and once I got home, I've done so little! So little... So, I've been glad, my dear, to find a woman to take on the end of Bethany's work, someone not simply the best Qalaya had at hand like I was on the trip, but rather, someone who has Qalaya down deep in her very bones."

"It is too much, ma'am."

She laughed, but gently enough that she didn't go into a fit, "Of course it is. Im flattering you a bit. But, then, all callings begin as too much, Minnie. Do you think I was enough for that trip? Oh I thought I was, but I wasn't. Do you think the Captain was enough? Noone is enough. That, Minnie, is why we have the gods. Take her, keep her. Sometimes in the memories you write after I'm gone, write a little bit of me, won't you?"

"Yes, Dr. Watchtower. I will."

"Minnie," she rolled painfully to her side, "Minnie, I'm dying. I don't have any more time to be Dr. Hightower. I was teasing you earlier, but I mean it - we are friends. I haven't always treated you as a friend, but I count you one. Please, call me Hannah. One time, now, before you go."

The words felt wrong in her mouth, sacrilegious in a way, but she said them, very softly, looking at the Qalaya in her other hand, "Hannah. Hannah Edgetower. I will. I will write of my friend, Hannah."

There was more conversations, after that - business, the wrapping up of loose ends, the requests to deliver gifts to those Minnie knew. There was, after Minnie left, even other visitors to Hannah Watchtower. But the rest was not the end. The end, for Minnie, was those words, whispered to Qalaya, the doll and the goddess. After that, in Minnie's mind, Hannah Watchtower was gone, gone from everywhere but the books she was written into.

[Arcane]

Rewards and Treasure! Experience Points +1 Medicine Lores Hannah Watchtower the Mentor Hannah Watchtower's Last Words Hannah Watchtower's Death Fatal Effects of Blood Poisoning The Life, History and Deeds of Hannah Watchtower Hannah Watchtower's Last Gift Hannah Watchtower, My Friend Miscellaneous +Inventory: Doll of Qayala (feel free to customize your history and description for this item as per your thread when you add this item into your CS) Comments Mlle Phil. Wow, just wow. This thread very nearly brought tears to my eyes; it made my nose a little stuffy and red for sure. This is really amazing work. Really, really amazing. I am honored to have the opportunity to grade and read this. Thank you for this work of art.