O, Red Night

[Seven Xu]

Fall 90, 511
Twenty bells

Winter’s shadows had risen early, sending their grey fingers across a scanty rug. The room’s single light burned on a table beside an unmade bed where a diminutive white frame was crumpled over itself, chest-bare and still. Seven’s fingertips pored over the lined and yellowed pages of an absurdly thick tome that sat between his knees.

She was beautiful, he had to admit; dressed in sable and slashed cloth-of-silver and adorned with the darkest of onyx to compliment Her deeply hued skin. The painter had embellished Her raven locks with a swath of stars that formed a crown above Her head. In one hand, She held the new moon in its entirety, plunged into blackness of its monthly transition; in the other, a set of midnight fingers wrapped the thin stalk of a vildani. The significance was not lost on its audience. Seven laughed through his nose, tracing the prop that would seem out of place had the book once sat in the library of any other city.

“Look at you. He’s made you into a bloody coat rack for spiritual symbols.” His head tilted. “I suppose he could not have people confusing you with all of the other blue-skinned Goddesses in the pantheon.”

The halfblood dipped to gather a glass of red from the floor. It was sour, but he swallowed it all the same and smacked the warm tingle across his lips. Alongside a bottle of house wine was a sprawl of cheese, stale bread, and grapes, fresh from some merchant ship from one of the Eastern ports that morning—or so the pig-nosed fruit monger informed him. Seven bent further to rip apart the crusty loaf of bread. He chased the wine with musky wheat until the glass was empty, and so were his hands.

Why now? Why after so many years being disenchanted by the intangibilities and disappointments faith offered did he go crawling back to suckle on some divine teat like a coddled child? It was different. But was it really? Of course; this teat was blue. Seven laughed again, refilled his glass, and settled back into the warmth of his feather mattress.

“I’m once a kinslayer and twice a murderer,” he began, as if expecting a pair of ears to be listening and documenting his sins, “In vengeance and in mercy I took the lives of others. I donnot regret killing my father, but the Kelvic died before her time. Even if she died at someone else’s hands an hour, a day, a year from then—I robbed her of her life; the very reason I saw fit to end another. I am no better than him.

“So I’m also a hypocrite, in a backward and convoluted sort of way.” He huffed, drew more of the sour to his pale lips, and shook his head. “No, I am what I am; no need to fuck around with words when I’m by myself.”

Seven turned a rumpled page. The book’s spine protested, having been ravished by countless hands before his, but he smoothed the leaf and it rolled over in relative silence. “I feel I should thank you. Nightfall has been one of the only constants in my short life. I could always depend on you to give me a few hours to think and stare at the sky. The sky is hardly interesting during the day. A rainbow, an oddly shaped cloud;” his brows quirked in concession, “but under night’s mantle I learned so much more than I could have during the day.”

His chin dropped to regard the book, falling into silence. The halfblood listened for the shuffling of feet, or the iron slip of an unlocking door, but after a short assessment it seemed he still had the second floor to himself. If Seven wasn’t careful, Victor would never let him forget the time he’d caught him getting introspective with a book. The Ethaefal was apt to better understand the blind comfort that came in talking to ears that would never hear him, and though he feared his intrusion less, he had no stomach to talk to the man after their curt exchange a few days prior.

“So I’m not the type of person to throw my hands into the air and bend the knee for faith,” Seven argued no one in particular, “my faith was tarnished a long time ago, when I was a stupid child, and expected Zintila to whisk me away from my shyke life to—live some fantasy, I guess. I wanted to guard Her. ‘No Widow’s bastard will ever be a Shinya acolyte’.” Seven rolled his eyes. “He was right, of course. I was as repugnant to them as a Zith. A Zith! Can you imagine that?”

He turned the page.

“I should not have blamed Her.”

[Seven Xu]

The volume was set aside. Seven rose and threw back the shabby curtains that formed a sheer barrier between an oncoming season and the lingering warmth of a quiet room. Eyes narrowed and focused past the black-capped reflection—that at first had inwardly startled him—to examine the street below. Lanterns lined it on both sides, and the City had sought to place the Cubacious Inn parallel to the Sun and Stars; it made the halfblood snort in amusement.

“I’m nothing if I’m not consistent,” he laughed, words rolling out on hot vapor as they hit the chilled glass, clouding and blinding him to another inevitable shift in the sleeping City, “Some may think that an endearing quality.”

The first sliver of a waning crescent moon broke through the thick cover of clouds; its display was no doubt being reciprocated on a mosaic beneath his feet. Lanterns and clouds alike bowed to the grace of the slim hoary moon, and only then did Seven realize that snow was falling thick and heavy on slick rooftops and grey cobblestone. It did not accumulate; the greedy earth devoured every flake as it finished its descent, but it did coax a chill and gooseprickles down a bare torso. Seven crossed his arms over his skinny chest; his focus drew back to his reflection, a gaunt white thing with smoldering red eyes, the hide of a wraith that belonged underground wrapped over the diminutive frame of a human barely a man grown.

“She did not deserve my anger.” The halfblood watched his own lips as they moved; it was curious to see his reflection speak his words; it wasn’t often something he witnessed, and it was enough to force him to show his back to the window. “It was misplaced, and it was resolved.”

He found his bed again, away from the cold bite of the window. The soft mattress accepted him, and swaddled him like the arms of a protective mother—not that he would know what that felt like. The book was hauled into his lap and opened somewhere near its middle. Insofar as he could see, there was nothing in the text regarding Makath; of course, there were allusions to the language, and it was named once or twice, but that did little to slake his desire to put sound to the supposed language of shadows.

“Even your language is a secret.” A halfhearted laugh accompanied a full-bodied sigh, and he turned the page. An Eypharian had told him to seek out Riverfall; the Mother of Akalaks would be easier to find, he said; Seven was not so sure he wanted to find Akajia’s manifestation. In fact, he wasn’t sure what he wanted from her, because what Seven wanted had been something he never had. Unfortunately, he was no Akalak.

Bastard fingertips traced a gilded triangle embossed across the entirety of one wrinkled page. When he turned his hand over, the dark scar that crossed his palm lined up with one of the etching’s three sides. He inhaled, exhaled. Right hand met left, tickling the mutilated palm with a shine of purple. “If I could become a shadow, maybe I could learn it.”

[Seven Xu]

As deep violet rippled across a stubborn scar, so did an inky blackness.

Light. Seven mouthed the word thrice over, narrowing thick-lashed eyes so far black cotton began to tug at his perception. A sudden start pulled him from half-consciousness and forced his concentration, and light continued to fail across the halfblood’s wrist, then his thin arm, over his shoulder. He repeated this for his right arm, using blackened fingertips as a guide for the thick weave.

Further, the shield spread slowly like a black-and-shimmering tide across his collarbone, down his chest, his back, lingering at his navel long enough for him to kick off the comforting wrap of linen trousers that were carefully replaced by a thin layer of shadow. Something bitter and metallic burned the back of his tongue as he pressed on, coloring his pale knees with blindness that streamed like a fine silk from the tips of ten fingers. The taste turned to a smell, vile, palpable, and thick in his throat, as if someone had filled the room with dirty copper as his lithe digits rounded two sets of toes.

It nearly lost him his concentration. His fingers convulsed and flexed.

“Fuck,” he murmured, nearly retching on the stench. He wouldn’t be able to handle coin any time soon. As soon as the scowl had twisted his face it had faded, drawing instead a crooked grin as a morose thought crossed the halfblood’s mind. “It’s always ghosts that want to change my life; that specter in the Bronze Woods gave me the gift of protection; the glare of my father on a wench’s beaten face whenever I closed my eyes gave me the gift of sight. They’re both gone now, and I’m left wondering what will happen when the next ghost passes through my life.”

The oil in the nearby lamp was running low on oil; light flickered and danced over the waxen skin that remained exposed. He stood, wobbled, and approached the window again. It was hard, no, near impossible for him to cultivate a weave without being able to see it, and he stared hard into his own eyes. Seven inhaled deeply, exhaled, and let his lids flutter beneath the weight of his concentration.

Fingers meticulously painted streaks of black over his neck, across his jaw, his ears. Both hands rifled through his hair and coated it, too, in darkness. “You’re a wizard—no, a shadowmaker,” Victor Lark’s endearing idiom tugged at his wits as shadows descended over his brow, up his pale cheeks, and extinguished two crimson fires in the time it took to blink.

When he opened his eyes, he was blind.

[Seven Xu]

“Oh Gods, fuck,” Seven stumbled backward, sightless and choking on copper bile. An arm snapped out, fingers scrabbled across the familiarity of a desk’s disheveled surface and groped clumsily against something warm and weighted. The blinded black shape that was Seven shuddered to a halt, but the lantern that had been disturbed by dark fingers did not. Its casing exploded on impact with cruel hardwood, its wick drowned and a flame sputtered and died, coating the room in darkness and the floor in a treacherous puddle of slick warm oil and shards of broken glass.

He turned. Despite the privacy a shield that guarded sight held, it did little to protect him from the creeping cold of winter’s approach. Seven grasped at gooseflesh, rubbed his arms, hoping in vain it would disperse the weave as quickly as it would warm him. The journey back to the safety of bed was not without its perils; Seven drew in a breath, flexed his toes against the oil tide that had drifted as far as he stood, and took a blind leap over his best judgment of most broken glass.

Crunch.

The shriek of pain filled the small room and sent Seven stumbling forward to be stopped by the weight of his feather mattress. He reeled, hit the mattress hard, and drew his knees to his chest to grope frantically at his the source of his pain. Fingers met offending shards of glass; he let out a choking sob as he yanked the largest from the fleshy ball of his foot.

“Damn it,” he hissed, fumbling for another slick dagger in the bloodied mess. His fingertips went hot, then cold, sticky with his own blood and he shuddered. When he managed to pry his eyes open, he blinked once, twice, and could see. Barely, hazy black cotton and glittering violet teased the corners of his eyes, but dim moonlight poured in through the cold window and painted his uncovered limbs all shades of grey. In his distraction, the shadow had receded from his body, leaving him a heaving, naked, and bleeding mass half-wrapped and twisted in sheets that were dutifully wicking away red from his throbbing foot.

He pushed his hands against the mattress, forced himself to sit up and survey the damage to his right foot. Further, past the undulating and nagging waves of pain that had come with the careless leap; he took note of the carnage his stupidity had gained him. Ashen brows knit together, bleary reds wrought with fresh pain. His upper lip curled, revealing a line of too many teeth, two of which dipped further and grew sharper than the rest. He was light-headed, his stomach roiled with bile and the lingering aftertaste of overworking djed, and his foot and the remaining glass within it nagged at him.

“So that’s it,” Seven finally spoke, his voice a ragged memory of its distinctively Lhavitian and playfully lofty tenor, “An evening spent talking to one’s self and stepping on glass is never an evening wasted.”

Another shard of glass was pulled from his foot, and then yet another, and with every one came a fresh round of tears and a whimper through gritted teeth. He had no experience cleaning and dressing wounds, and plenty with blood. The gash across the ball of his foot was wrapped in the sleeve of his former shirt, after having been torn and cut with the edge of a dull dagger. Seven managed to dress himself in clean linens, hobble down a short hall and a collection of rickety stairs to retrieve a broom, only gaining an odd side-glance from his fallen cohort before ascending to his room again. A familiar mess was cleaned, the evidence was wrapped and tossed, and when all was said and done, nothing was a sweet as the hug of his bed against his back.

Sleep caught him almost instantly, pulling his eyelids and pinning his heavy limbs to the mattress. On the other side of a silvery pane of glass, fat-bellied clouds grey and thick with winter’s bounty moved in over night’s waning moon.

[Gossamer]

. Character: Seven Xu Experience: Shielding 3 XP, Philosophy 3 XP, Medicine 1 XP, Investigation 2 XP Lore: Arguing With No One, Practicing Introspection, Asking Oneself Retorical Questions Then Answering Them, Wanting Something You Can’t Have, Blinding Oneself With A Shield Of Darkness, Turning Oneself Into Darkness, Injuring Yourself Through Not Thinking Things Through, Not Thinking Things Through, Being Naturally Awkward, First Aid On Cuts, Religion: Akajia (Partial) Additional Note: Interesting thread. I like how Seven didn’t actually think things through and how uncomfortable sometimes he seems in his own skin when he’s experimenting with things in life, even with feeling certain emotions. .