One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 7: The Lords of the Sky

It truly was an extraordinary quality, Lan al’Ver had to admit.  Orphelia had vexed him now, twice in a matter of weeks.  This was, of course, exceedingly rare: His last vexation had occurred nearly two millennia ago, and while there remained sparks of interest in the portent of his duties–his debt to the Alchemist, for example–this was different.  It was a ghost, haunting him.  He had a notion, actually, that it might be the same ghost as back then.

Orphelia was now part of this “Gyre”, that much was clear, and whatever she was doing–wittingly or no–was prompting resurgences.  Daniel Patch.  Sand-Masked Fox.  Lan was familiar with their circumstances, with the arrangement that held them in its sway.  It all went back to Harmony.  To Arman LaSein.  To Lan’s sin.  But Orphelia’s stuffed animal–the plain cause of all this business–was not a connection to Harmony, to Patch or Fox or any of them.  It was a connection to Romesse of Khet, war historian and…the man who killed Daniel Patch.  Pointedly, a man who should not remain in the fold after his death–but here he was, in stuffed animals and books, teaching Orphelia to use magic in ways a teenager really ought not consider.  His influence over the girl was worrying.  But that was not what now vexed Lan.

When Orphelia emerged from the inn last night, there was a presence beside her, and that presence was not Rom.  In the brief moment Lan had been able to converse with his spectre at the Chateau de Marquains, Rom had mentioned a “Smile”, a sobriquet which was to Lan a void, a strange and alarming lapse in memory.

He knew he had places to be.  He had already informed Bleeding Wolf that he would be accompanying the Crossroads’ caravan to Holme, but that rendezvous would have to be delayed.  He needed to know how to alter the course.  He needed to know what truly afflicted the poor girl.  He needed a brief detour.

Amusingly, the trail started with Naples, though the scholar likely did not realize it.  His magical training was also more sophisticated than mere Grayskin talent, though the resemblance of both to the power Orphelia wielded–or which wielded her–suggested a source worth investigating.  Naples, an orphan, had been raised by a commune in the Bloodwood, outside but ever at the fringe of Lan’s domain.  Once again, he found himself bound for the marches of his kingdom, but unlike the incident with Bilgames, this was not merely business–it was very well his right to get to the bottom of these games.  He had a region and a name: “Master Jabez Faisal”.  For a lesser navigator, this would of course be insufficient, especially in an environment as hostile as the Bloodwood.  But Lan was, as ever, up for a challenge.

The journey so far had been, if not a challenge, at least interesting.  On the river, the notion of asking for directions was laughable.  There were denizens of the waterways there for over a generation who did not know their home as well as Lan–but here, between the towering oaks, upon paths barely visible amid the brush, his intuition was merely very good.  It kept him on the path, or at least equivocated functionally between things that were like paths, steering not upon any Grayskin commune but at least toward the wood’s conception of places of import.

The first of those was a camp of beastmen, where he politely asked after his quarry.  They responded with bared fangs and a lunge for the throat, which Lan found terribly uncivilized, but when in Kol…

A few broken noses and teeth later, the pack was marginally more helpful, bidding him scornfully in a vague, 30-degree bearing toward a “burning grove”, the mention of which filled Lan with a strange dread, in turn dulling his desire to admonish their etiquette further.  Instead, he set off to the northwest, within the boundaries of the beastmen’s suggestion, to a span of deep forest in which he was beginning to suspect he would find no commune.  Accustomed as well to the Riverlands’ access to the sky, Lan was also put off by the way the canopy here choked out the light, lending an almost candlelit ambience to the broad daylight of early afternoon.

Ultimately, he felt a notion of what he was looking for before he saw it, though conventional sensory recognition would not be far behind.  There was a spray from the stream, a burning behind the eyes, a twinge of nausea as the world folded wrong upon itself.  And then a twig snapped behind him, intentionally, he presumed.  The one responsible was perfectly capable of traversing this space silently.

“Perhaps you can tell me where I might find Jabez Faisal, then,” Lan declared, turning to face the towering figure behind him.

The visage that stared from the gloam was eyeless, impassive, a blank, pallid mask that seemed to loom in the air with a salience that rendered the colossal, graphite-black body behind it almost invisible.  All around them, the birds and insects had gone quiet.

“What are you doing here?”  The Masked Alpha’s question rumbled with such force as to make the air buzz, though no part of his face seemed to move.

“Hmph,” Lan scoffed.  “What makes you think–”

As Lan formed his rebuke, he felt the stream warp again and instinctively jerked to the left to avoid the projectile of teeth and claws that had integrated into reality behind him.  As those implements instead caught upon the bark of a tree before him, Lan recognized a certain boy without a name, flesh rippling with the mutations of bestial magic.  Face contorted into a canine snarl, he leapt from the tree, hurtling toward Lan once again.

Lan swatted the child out of the air with his umbrella, eliciting a yelp of pain and sending the ephebic projectile skidding to the forest floor.  Gently but firmly, the Alpha placed a hand over the boy, both shielding him and holding him in place.

“It is our domain,” the Alpha rumbled, stifling the boy’s attempt to squirm from his grip, “and we both sense your guilt, though the boy’s sense of doom has become uncoupled from his own death.  Why are you here?”

“Did my first question not suffice?” Lan snapped.  “I’m looking for Jabez Faisal, you brute!”

There was a protracted hush, punctuated by the boy’s struggles, as the Alpha slowly cocked his head.  Then he looked down and released the boy, nudging him away from Lan.  The child glared at Lan, face wet with fury and terror, but he did not lunge again.  Returning his attention to Lan, the Alpha spoke:

“Do you imagine you will find absolution in the ways the old man’s gift has been used?”

“This isn’t about me,” Lan replied dismissively.  “I am fulfilling an oath.”  Was that true?  Was Orphelia material to the service he’d sworn the Alchemist?  Or was this a different drive?

“Do you realize it will cost you?”

Lan stared into the mask, very nearly rolling his eyes.

“You would extract a toll from me?”

The Masked Alpha did not reply.  Instead he turned, his bulk seeming to undulate through the brush such that he barely touched the trees and undergrowth, and his steps–which should have been thunderous, were all but silent.  With a slight gesture, his forefinger morphing smoothly into a wicked claw, he bid the child turn with him.

“The toll is not mine,” the Alpha said, beginning to walk as Lan moved at a brisk stride to catch up.  “The grove where Jabez Faisal resides is the very place we disbanded the Greencircle, centuries ago, and it bears the mark of our final rite.  I believe you may find horror in that mark.  She did.”

Lan contemplated the prospect silently, declining to respond to the insult that the great Lan al’Ver should experience the indignity of fear–the Alpha did not seem to notice his persona, and Lan was not oblivious to that.  But the notion was as fascinating as it was concerning: He was intimately familiar with the Way of the Green–the Greencircle’s garbled downstream philosophy–which had dominated Revián culture for centuries, but he was only dimly aware of the actual Greencircle’s particulars, removed as they were from his sphere of influence.  He knew in passing its seminal figures: Bilgames, the Hunter of Beasts; the Masked Alpha; the Arborist and the Botanist; and the Strange Bird, of whom he banished thoughts to his subconscious.  And he knew with a sort of distant remove that the Greencircle’s purpose had not been solely cultural, that the Hunter of Beasts had a particular beast that needed hunting once upon a time.  But the thought of such a beast even now prompted a feeling of deep unease that left Lan to wonder if the horror the Alpha alluded to might be better founded than he thought possible.

“I have a question for you, if you will permit,” the Alpha said after nearly twenty minutes in silence.  Lan noticed that at some point the buzzing of insects had returned, as if it was the Alpha’s intent rather than his presence that set the forest on edge.

“Hmm?” Lan murmured, feigning disinterest.

“You were an observer for a very, very long time,” the Alpha said, his neck extending eerily to angle the mask over his shoulder at Lan.  “What brought you to act once again?”

Lan wondered whether he should feel shame at the truth, but he relayed it nonetheless:

“Being seen.”

***

Deep within the Bloodwood, it seemed, there was a place surrounded by great rocks and growth so thick that no animal larger than a rodent could navigate it, where the canopy seemed solid, and even birds would not or could not reach it from above.  The coordinates of this place were frustratingly indeterminate, for though Lan al’Ver’s sense of space was very good, he was not a master of that domain.  And something was not right.  It was as if not merely this place, but the very concept of place was warped here.

The Alpha and the boy without a name led him to the base of a boulder where an unobtrusive burrow widened to a cave beneath, which in turn led to a passage, unornamented but nonetheless built and maintained by clear intention.  Unsurprisingly, Lan felt their presence wane at the mouth of that passage, and by the time he reached its end, it was as if they had never been in the stream beside him at all.  But they had, of course, and Lan considered what he might gather from the implication that Harmony’s cabal wanted him to find this place.

What a place it was, though.

The Alpha and the beastmen had described it as a “grove”, but it was closer to a large clearing, save for the two colossal trees at its center, the species of which Lan could not identify, as both were engulfed entirely in flames.  For both obvious and more subtle reasons, he immediately recognized the burning as magical.  There were signs he could see with his eyes, the uniformity of the blaze from root to branch; the way that patches of the trees split and smoldered, seeming to regrow swiftly where they disintegrated into ash; and then there were signs evident to his magical sense, though most of them hardly demanded those sense be trained.

The whole clearing was awash in mana, almost effervescent, rising up in waves as heat rolled off the trees.  It did not require much additional precision to note the tightly bounded but voluminous flux of mana about the blaze itself: The fire was not merely set magically–it was being magically maintained even now.  The prospect was confusing, though, because though Lan could sense the mana coming from these anomalous, regenerating trees, it was as if all the magic came from somewhere just outside of them.  The trees did not glow as mages and magical objects generally did.  They did not resonate.  They seemed inert.  But they…couldn’t be.  

The fire, of course…the fire had to be coming from somewhere, and there was something else.  Like a voice: the sibilants of whispers between the crackling of disintegrating wood.  Lan approached.  He approached the twin blazes that were beginning more and more to resemble obelisks of pitch black, the darkness which came before the Night wrapped it in stars and dreams, a joyful, horrible gibbering in the distance, sunken eyes and distended jaws, strings of flesh tearing between teeth–

“I would keep distance.”  The voice was muffled and mercifully jarring.  Lan was then, again–still–in a great clearing surrounded by rocks and undergrowth in which stood the tall, burning trees.  At one end Lan now saw the uneven walls of what must once have been a grand building in an architectural style that fell into disuse over eight centuries ago, now dilapidated by age and the forest’s overgrowth.  And behind him there was a human in a dark habit, face obscured by a mask comprised of leather and silver, with two medallions of glass for eyeholes.

“I have little doubt it would harm even you, even in this state,” the figure added.  Their voice lacked any discernible identifier of masculinity or femininity, and Lan sensed the obfuscation thereof was intentional, an ambiguity similar to Brill’s in the Crossroads, though arising from darker, older roots.

“Are you Jabez Faisal, then?” Lan asked, finding it strangely difficult to maintain his bluster here.

“Yes.  I suspect you’ve been looking for me.  There are safer places close by to confer, if you will follow?”

Beckoning politely, the figure Lan now recognized from the vision Naples had conjured–back in the Crossroads, when he drank the dragonling’s flames outside Brill’s shop–led him toward the anomalously Kolai building at the clearing’s edge, up what once had certainly been a grand staircase, into a cavernous room that had been downsized–only slightly inconveniently, it seemed–by a caving in of the ceiling at one corner.  Inside were a number of furnishings: bedrolls, chairs, several tables, and even a desk, in total sufficient to support ten people, perhaps more.  At present, Jabez was the only other denizen Lan could perceive, though he was finding his perception strangely unreliable.

Jabez made their way with small, constant steps toward the ceilingless corner, where a cooking fire had been set up, and hung a kettle over the flames.

“My apologies for the humble state of our abode,” they intoned.  “This place was perhaps fit for gods once, but no more.”  Lan did not miss the apology’s dangling implication, but he put it aside.

“You are far older than even a mage should be.  But I do not believe you have any pact with Harmony.”

“Yes.”  The response was blank.  Matter of fact.  “A consolation granted to a handful of my companions as well, though I know not by what.  A residual trace of the Cloudman’s salvation, a part of the Smile’s curse.  Perhaps something older from Khet that never quite let go of us.

“An odd introduction, though, Great Turtle.  Surely you haven’t come all this way to interrogate this poor creature’s age?”

Never quite let go…

The words were cold and hideous and demanded attention that Lan was not inclined to grant.  He shut them out, fixating distastefully upon the present.

“I have become acquainted of late with a traveler called Naples,” he said, noting the attentive tilt of Jabez’ mask.

“Is the boy well?”

“He is hardly a boy anymore, but yes, as well as one might be, approaching a time of true unrest.”

“Of course not,” Jabez replied. “But we raised him, and I don’t intend to shed the particulars of that connection.  True unrest, then?”

Lan frowned, taking care to translate the wavering of the stream for an audience who might actually appreciate the detail.

“Something is coming over the Riverlands,” Lan began.  “Shortly after we met, Naples wove a vision–somewhat unintentionally–which I believe may be instrumental to this cataclysm.  Perhaps we may begin at the periphery: What can you tell me of the Lords of the Sky?”

Jabez’ chuckle was faint through the mask, though Lan caught the mirth and pain of it all the same.

“Naples and the other children did so enjoy that name for our little club,” they said.  “Romesse originally took the phrase from one of the Cloudman’s speeches.  I think at the time his feelings were innocent, much like the pride the children felt at being ‘Lords of the Sky’.  All the more remarkable considering that unlike young Naples, Romesse–like most of us really–had already had his heart wrung out by the war.”

“The Wars Fought Under Shadow,” Lan confirmed.

“A conflict I can only imagine you felt to be Spar’s just deserts.”

Again he was seen.  Lan could not help but grin, though the torrent of emotion Jabez’ comment beckoned was far more complex–and far more painful–than simple vindication.

“As if the great Lan al’Ver would stoop to such pettiness.”

Jabez met his gaze impassively, lenses glinting as they rubbed with a cloth at a smudge on the table where they sat.  They rose, walked back to the kettle, and poured a cup of tea, setting it in front of Lan.

“When we found ourselves back on earth,” they continued, “Khepri and Utari found a grim humor in the name.  Every century or so, one of us brings home a stray or two, and for a time our cursed tribe becomes an orphanage.  Those two will then let their little ironic title slip out in front of the children, and of course the kids don’t let it go.”  They chuckled again.  “I suspect I will never escape it.”

“You say, ‘when you found yourselves back on earth’,” Lan prodded, confusion rolling unnaturally over his thoughts.  Jabez fell abruptly still.  Then, after a moment:

“You mean to say you do not know?  You do not know of the Heaven’s Fondest Smile?”

“I…do not,” Lan admitted, an eerie guilt beginning to bleed through him.

“Naples has found himself within the Gyre, then.”  Lan shook his head, taking the cup Jabez had placed before him.  He did not drink.

“Not Naples,” he said.  “There is a girl in the Crossroads.  Romesse has appeared to her.  And to me.”

“Romesse?” Jabez asked, leaning toward Lan, worry now plain in their voice.  “But not the Smile?”

Lan tilted the cub, considering the way the ripples caught against its sides.  He felt as if he stood on a precipice, a jetty thrust amid mists concealing something grim indeed.

“Who is this Smile?” he asked.  Jabez’ reflective visage gazed into him a moment before the reply came:

“Are you ready to learn what your gift has wrought?”

An Additional Problem With the Ubisoft Model

Discussion of worldbuilding principles, referencing Nioh, Elden Ring, and Ender Lilies. A lazy review of Nioh 3 included.

I recently dipped my toe into Nioh 3, and I’m sad to report that perhaps the nicest thing I have to say about it is that it is better than the previous two games in the series.  The writing and narrative might fairly be described as the My Immortal of Shogunate-era historical fanfic (“Fanfic of what?  You can’t write fanfic of history!”  The faux-fantasy Sengoku/Shogunate genre is so saturated it may as well be fanfic of all of them), the goddamned loot piñatas ensure you spend at least half your playtime managing your inventory instead of playing the game (having done my time in the ARPG casinos, I think I can say that randomized equipment stats don’t belong in any game, though Nioh is still one of the worst implementations out there), and the dialogue is cringe: poorly written, poorly localized, and overacted with an incomprehensible array of British Isles accents (NB: these characters are definitely Japanese).

The point of contention is obviously the combat, which one reviewer describes as “the best combat of any soulslike, past or present, end of story”.  To be clear, this is false, and the take is dumb and hypey.  Still, I’ll admit the combat is good.  At the end of the end of the day, this is an action RPG, and action RPGs do benefit from toolkits of flashy toys.  But after a point it starts to feel like a roadside family restaurant: 

This place has everything!  Burgers, breakfast, pasta, steak, sushi (huh?), parries, i-frames, magic on an ammo system, two sets of magic on a mana system, summon spells, fighting game combos, stance breaking, enemy stamina management (with bonus BAD zones!), and invincible devil trigger transformations!  After a couple of visits you get wise.  You realize that most of this shit is best left unordered, must have been dropped onto the menu by a chef with low standards after a weekend fixation–or by a tone-deaf manager hoping to project the appearance of repertoire.  Most of it isn’t all that good.  It probably shouldn’t be there.  But just like there’s a market of hooligans who think that the latest Call of Duty is the bleeding edge of FPS, there is apparently a conclave of plebeians who want their Dark Souls to be more like God of War or Diablo (or both, I guess).  Oh well.  There’s no accounting for taste.

What I really want to discuss, though, is the map.  I think Nioh 3 took the wrong lesson from Elden Ring.  But unlike the rest of my feedback (I think Nioh’s aesthetics are bad, but you don’t have to listen to me yucking your yum), I think there is actually a lesson to be learned here.

After Elden Ring’s release, there was much discourse on the contrast between its UI and the “Ubisoft model”.  The latter might reasonably be called the previous paradigm of open world game design, and though it goes way beyond Ubisoft, it was a Ubisoft dev that jumped on Twitter and called Elden Ring’s UI “bad”.  The memeing was accordingly relentless:

The larger story unfolded from there.  Since the mid-00’s, the argument goes, “readability” in games has come to be interpreted as “making sure the reviewer who gets assigned your game finishes it with no distractions and never, ever gets lost”.  This began as clear notations of an open world game’s “main path”, but over time, more and more studios began to take the MMO strategy (marking quests on the map) to its logical extreme, leading to a sort of implied guarantee in the UI in general–and the map in particular: If there is something to do in a location, it will be marked on your map.  This will help you not waste time.

Elden Ring’s insight, thus, was that people don’t actually like being force fed information on how they should be playing the game, and also they like exploring!  If everything they could find on the map is already marked, then they aren’t exploring–they’re navigating, which is much less fun.

Well, seems like Nioh 3 has proved this only half-right.  Putting aside that its map segmentation system is kind of a miss (exploring and doing stuff in region X, Y, or Z gives you stats and stuff; this is good in that it partially supplants worrying about the horrible loot system, but it’s bad in that it’s essentially still a sign that says GO HERE FOR REWARDS), it did make an attempt to move closer to not bombarding the player with information.

Ah, but it turns out there was another, worse thing the Ubisoft model was doing the whole time!  Calling it copypasting would be inaccurate–what it actually is is drawing a boundary around a particularly minute play pattern (say, killing a group of enemies in a location), calling that pattern a “system”, then littering the map with low-effort quests that trivially use that system.  Shoot the ferret balloons!  Chase the spherical cats!  Kill the 10 enemies in the “base”!  Kill the 10 enemies in staggered waves in the “crucible”!  I’m not saying Elden Ring didn’t have these play patterns, but it didn’t act like you were supposed to care.  In that game, if you kill a group of enemies, you get one of your refillable potions back.  Nice job not dying to that, kid.  Keep looking, maybe you’ll find something interesting around here.  What it definitely doesn’t do is track each of these stupid encounters you have and present you a checklist so that you can make sure to find and complete every single one.

But for Nioh 3, that’s the name of the game.  You go to the place, you kill the guys, you get a fucking loot piñata.  Unlike the Ubisoft model, I guess you don’t then open your map and find the next one, since the map is hidden until you complete enough checklist items.  I guess that’s better?  But it’s not much better, because while you get some of the fun of exploring, you’re still just trying to find all of the items on your scavenger hunt in each region, and none of the items are actually interesting.

The only “quests” Nioh gives you that don’t feel lazy are the field bosses (which start to feel lazy again when you encounter them as regular enemies, not in the late game, but literally the next zone over) and the “ghosts with unfinished business”, which aren’t lazy in the templating (it’s nice to have some unique experiences in the soup of what is otherwise the same shit over and over) but are lazy in the execution.  “Find out what happened here!”  Was…everyone killed by yokai?  Again?  Damn, that’s crazy.

So consider some advice in the affirmative.  If you are a game designer looking to fill out a map players may actually want to explore, consider having a map full of stories.  I don’t mean cutscenes or quests, I definitely don’t mean “lore tidbits” (to writers/designers: reading chunks of your unrelated prose is almost never the reward you want it to be–in order for that stuff to be interesting, it has to actually answer a question), and I’m not even particularly referring to the Dark Souls-esque fragmentary lore-in-item-descriptions.  I get that those have grown divisive, I know that some don’t want to deal with the sleuthing and reading in order to have an idea of what’s going on.  To be clear, what I’m saying has nothing to do with that argument–the merits and flaws of conventional exposition are orthogonal to the worldbuilding I’m getting at–but also: If you’re having trouble with context clues, Nioh 3 isn’t gonna make sense to you anyway, not because it relies on them overly so much as it doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the first place, and that isn’t gonna be kind to someone playing with less than a full deck.

Rather, what I’m referring to is stuff like Elden Ring’s first accessible cave dungeon, so early you’re liable to wander in before even meeting Melina.  It’s a little cave off the path, full of wolves, and in the boss room is a beastman of Farum Azula.  Farum Azula is notably an endgame area, but from a less gameist point of view, it is a shattered, floating tomb city suspended at the edge of a vortex in the middle of the sea.  What is the beastman doing here, far from home, with no clear method of transit between there and here?  You’ll never know.  The game doesn’t tell you, doesn’t even really hint at it.  But the situation is highly salient, there is a notably out of place enemy here, definite lore implications (even if what is implied is unclear), and I’d bet even money there exists at least a draft of this beastman’s story somewhere on a From Software hard drive.

That is the “system” you should be establishing across your map.  Every place of interest should have a story that explains how it got to be how it is.  If that story boring, change details until it isn’t, then change the place in-game to match.

And then throw the story away.  Don’t show the player any more than a dangling fragment, feel free to not even show that.  There are, of course, players who will gravitate to the fuzzy edges, interested in the mystery, but this isn’t only for them.  Even the most lore-disinterested player is going to notice when your world turns into a checklist, because while checklists are helpful, it’s no fun to play them.  The purpose of writing a story for all the unique pieces of your world is to create a world with actually unique pieces.  Players can engage with the underlying implications if they want, but whether or not it all feels same-y comes upstream of that engagement, and, unfortunately, Nioh 3, is a great example of how to do it wrong.

Of course, the problem for Nioh 3 specifically is more foundational than just that they didn’t do the writing homework.  Where Elden Ring and other games have robust vocabulary of enemy types as symbols for lore and factions, all interrelated and furtively gesturing, Nioh’s set pieces are way too neatly quadrifurcated into material (people, soldiers, historical Japan) and spiritual (kodama, yokai, guardian spirits, Buddhist…stuff) elements, each in turn divided clearly into the good guys and bad guys.  Since the setup is that the bad humans have summoned the bad demons everywhere to kill everyone, constructing a factional anomaly is close to impossible.  And since the yokai appear to have the agenda sophistication of the Hulk, their presence anywhere in particular says nothing.  It’s almost amazing how a game with this level of enemy variety manages to make them all feel narratively identical.  If this point is confusing, consider a comparison point other than Elden Ring.  Look at Ender Lilies, admittedly a game that is almost as Dark Souls as Dark Souls in its narrative setup–but if you want to see how you can do more with less, it’s your girl.

Ender Lilies is a game where every single enemy is a deranged zombie thrashing at everything around.  All of them were made this way by the same eldritch force, so with no agendas or intents, you’d think it would be just as homogenized as Nioh.  And yet, every single area prompts different questions that the game conveys (outside of lore tidbits) through enemy visuals, the architecture, the surrounding state of disrepair.  “Something happened here” is obvious, but it slowly becomes clear that “something” was much more delightfully twisted than “the bad stuff showed up and killed everyone”.  The problem with Nioh 3, thus, isn’t just that they opted for the dumbest possible backstory but also that they obliterated any of the language they might have used to convey that it was anything more.

I point all of this out not simply to rag on Team Ninja.  For their missteps here, I do feel they’ve exposed a lesson they and others can learn.  And to be clear, you don’t need to be on an open world game design team to make use of it.  Consider it if you’re a fiction writer, a tabletop GM, any other narrative architect.  Similar to Mark Rosewater’s venerable themed party planning advice (Rule 1: Have a theme), building an interesting world matters.  Whether you built it from interesting bones will be noticeable, regardless of whether your audience ever has access to the backstory, history, and planning that went into those bones.

Top image: Nioh 3 splash, from Team Ninja

Selected Chimera Footnote: Mulholland Drive

Rough but fun. I am intending for the Chimera to be a weird piece, combining fiction and nonfiction. I’m discovering how to write it as I write it, so bear with me, and don’t worry about what this is a footnote to.

Wow, what a coincidence, wonder what it means.  A plausible answer is forthcoming; perhaps there is no meaning at all, but I would direct the amateur critics on X/Twitter/Insta/methamphetamine/TikTok toward the age-old discourse on the connections between Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s experiences as a soldier, full of wrinkled noses and invectives usually employing the term “blunt allegory”.  

Alternatively, David Lynch has a zinger: “It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted, or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening.”

Alt-alternatively: Eat shit.  You want to know what Mulholland Drive means?  Tell me what your breakfast means.  I’d chance it means little to you, but that doesn’t seem to stop you swallowing it.

But fine, here you go: Betty is a delusion confabulated by Rita after she survives the hit Diane paid for, and otherwise (aided by the wild unreliability of the film’s primary camera angle) you can probably just consider the chronology of events to be scrambled.  I wouldn’t bother trying to put them in the right order–you have a concussion, and some of the puzzle pieces are now from the next box over.

“No, obviously Rita is being imagined by Betty!”  Kind of a weird take, considering Betty doesn’t exist.  “But Rita doesn’t exist either!”  ‘Rita’, again, has a concussion.  She may have access to her–Camilla’s–distorted memories, she may be a hypothetical imagined by Diane–but in that case Betty is neither an image of Diane nor her memory but a fantasy, brought forward in time, that Diane imagines working with Camilla to solve her attempted murder and Diane’s suicide.  And the vision of that Ourobouros is so revolting that upon beholding it, all Diane can do is flail for the exit, which takes the convenient form of the pistol in her bedside table.  You know what?  Nevermind, that slaps.

“Wait, so you don’t know what it means?”

Why would I know what it means to you?  There you go, querying Legion again, as you breeze past at least three examples of what Mulholland Drive is really about.

It’s actually almost magical how effectively Sadly, Porn’s opening question repels readers despite being excellently written and frankly fascinating.  “Who decides what porn is?”  Note that this is a separate question from what it is.  You use it to not act, yes, but why not throw in another interrogative: Why does it work?

If the fantasies you’re masturbating to were your own, that would prompt action or change, hence all the Freudian repression hoodoo.  They aren’t.  They are someone else’s dream, and dreams as wish fulfillment doesn’t really work if neither is yours.  Changing your dream is a matter of changing your wish–of changing your self.  Not easy by any means, for some that’s a line of life and death, perhaps that is the case for Diane.  But changing someone else’s dream is impossible.  It is there in the world, and however you came upon it, you have no power over it.  Consider how many times the film depicts this lesson being taught: Adam learns it, Diane learns it twice over, and in the end/beginning, Camilla learns it too.

In some ways it’s obvious–it’s a movie about movies and moviestars, both of which are dreams wholly unowned by their participants–but since you don’t have dreams of your own, you disavow the inevitable conclusion.  Inevitable for Camilla, inevitable for Adam (count the cowboys), and of course, inevitable for Diane.

It’s precisely for this disavowal that everyone’s pick for most inscrutable scene in the film is the one at the beginning at Winkie’s diner, where a man recounts his dream of sitting in the diner (NB: where Diane later sits to pay for her lover’s assassination), only to step outside and find a fucking orc, which he then finds in real life too.

“So is he in Diane’s dream, or is she in his?”  What’s your encounter rate on phantasmal orcs behind dumpsters?  Mine’s pretty low, and the diner guy does seem rather surprised as well.  “So he’s in hers?”  ‘He’ being ‘Dan’?  The guy who doesn’t appear in the film after that scene?  If I were trying to help you, I’d ask you what that would imply–the void has a way of focusing the flailing–but you don’t have the time, and I don’t believe in it.  The answer is neither.  They’re both in someone else’s dream, and while I’m sure you’re curious as to whose, I want you to know it really, really doesn’t matter.  Hollywood is a slurry of nameless aspirations, and the rest of your society isn’t much different.  The only way out is to wake up.  

Alternatively, Deleuze has a zinger: “If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”

The Chimera, Chapter 2: The Fortress

A continuation from the Maze in the Mists.

It is yet ambiguous whether your course is chosen or not, but you proceed.  I leave you and your companions to finish your broth and wine, and you waste little time.  The lure of opportunity feels akin to the hanging sword.  It drives you out into the mists again and, for the first time in a long time, off the road.  It is not clear to you whether the frenzy smothers your fear or if they are one feeling, the stag’s panicked flight and its hunger overlaid upon a single annulus, an undivided will to survive.

The first step into the mist immerses you in chill breath.  The second is like being swallowed, and from there, your path is painstaking, carefully chosen from my map between the rocks, shrubs, untrodden muck, and, eventually, trees, themselves a concept which you had all but forgotten.  The continuity of the road before had offered you a predictable notion of your location, not with respect to the places the road connects but simply that you were on the road.  My map offers you no such assurances, for it does not truly identify the path–merely the unimportant landmarks that suggest it.  The mist offers scarcely more than ten feet of visibility in any direction, and the way it wavers is unsettlingly regular.  Like lungs.  Corridors of shapeless, breathing bodies, opening esophageal as you venture forward.  I do not mislead you, though, and you execute admirably.

After hours or days, you and your companions arrive at a set of ruined gates, dilapidated and sunk into the forest floor, giving the impression of a cave, comprised uncannily of uneven masonry and shielded by great doors of rotting wood.  You stand before it in a sort of prescient horror, though you cannot say what about the fortress so moves you.  One of your companions, though, undaunted, jaunts to the doors and heaves one up and open.  The irreverence shocks you, even more so as you spot the shape of his smirk through the gloam, but you have to relent: He is right.  You have found your quarry.  Now you must find your prize.

You approach the doors, pushing against the deep foreboding you feel in spite of your companion’s nonchalance, resisting the urge to pause again as you notice something truly strange: At the darkened boundary of the fortress gates, the mist ends.  There is no reason that should be impossible, of course, but you do not recall a time or place that the mist ever did end.  It shrouded the road, every rest stop, every inn, stable, tavern, or village, indoors or out.  The mist was the whole world, and here, somehow, the world ends.  There is no reason that should matter, you tell yourself, no reason it should stop you.  Encouraging.  And so, as the door slams shut behind you–you are unsure whether your companion closed it or if the presence of this place is reacting to you–you find yourself out of the mists and in a pitch black tunnel of hard stone.

The scrape of flint against steel behind you makes you shiver, even as you draw comfort from the distant familiarity of the sound.  You turn, witnessing the orange bloom as another companion presses a torch into your hand.  It occurs to you that you have grown used to being unable to clearly discern your companions’ faces, and this one’s–obscured by a cloth mask and heavy goggles in spite of the darkness–nearly takes you by surprise.  You know them, of course.  This one has been loathe to abandon their supplies and effects despite their limited use in the mists, but you must admit that now seems fortunate.  That reluctance now means you can see.

All of you can see, in fact, waiting there in the umbra, taking stock of the stone hallway, hesitating, momentarily dazed–all except for your insolent companion who previously opened the door, though he has always been…unique.  With a grating chuckle, he takes the lead, refusing the torch your companion offers him.

An old place–but it should have plenty of secrets, I’d told you.  It is as if the questions seep from between the stones:  How old?  What was this place?  How did it come to ruin?  Why is the mist gone?  Need I continue to iterate the obvious?  The lethargy of your mental cogs allows you to vacillate, and eventually you will have to realize that is on purpose.

Walk.

The hallway continues onward for an improbable distance without any doors, branches, or turns–save for a rightward bend where it is clear the stonework has become warped, as if some landslide managed to torque the entire structure.

After five minutes and change, your companion in the lead saunters past a damp, wooden doorframe that smells like a forest after rain, and you cautiously follow onto a landing with a half-broken balcony overlooking a flat, open room with a bar tucked into one corner.  Both the landing and the room below are scattered with planks of wood and shattered furniture, all similarly fragrant, some even with visible fungal growth.  And while you are struck with bewilderment as to why this darkened fortress would have a tavern in any state of repair, your concerns are preempted by the bodies strewn about the place.

They look withered.  Perhaps mummified.  But despite the disorder of the scene, the bodies’ postures do not reflect any obviously violent end.  One lies alone on the floor.  Others are slumped over the bar or against the walls.  One sits, head down at the only unbroken table and chair combination remaining.  In all, there are five.  The same as your number.  

You freeze, but your companions hurry down the stairs from the landing for–you have little doubt–a variety of reasons, ranging from moral concern (though these corpses ought be long dead) to alarm at this sign of danger (though any violent threat ought be long gone) to bald-face greed, a drive which rises within you as well, even as recognition of it stings with guilt.

You are not sure what gives you pause, though it is not as if you feel any need to preempt your companions’ instinctual investigations.  Perhaps it is the sense that the scene before you is uncanny (it is) or that you feel you are being observed (you are, though that is hardly hidden–this is all in the second person, after all).  Whatever the reason, your inaction does allow you a strange observation: The construction of this room is different from the hallway which led you to it.

Everything you had seen of the fortress up to now had been stone.  This “tavern” appeared to be a kind of mud brick, and the subtleties of the architecture–in which you of course have no particular expertise–nonetheless evoke a removal of great physical and cultural distance.

Whatever the reason for this sudden change in decor, you find yourself with little time to contemplate it, as your masked companion below lets out a muffled yelp of surprise.  You rush down the stairs to find that the desiccated figure slouched at the lone table–which you had thought a corpse–had lurched from his seat and grabbed your companion by the shoulders.

“Why did we do it?” the figure’s guttural rasp fills the space, distorted by coughed dust from mummified lungs but somehow both perfectly audible and completely comprehensible.  “WHY?!”

Your companion, dependably present as the rest of you stand paralyzed, wondering at how you all are allowed to respond, places their hands on the figure’s arms and calmly responds:

“What did you do?  Who are you?”

The figure breathes, his grip loosening on your companion.

“What…I…” he begins.  “I was…we were called Taamir Ra…”

And that, of course, is when you begin to remember.

Journey to the Center of Society, Chapter 2: Diplomatic Immunity

First drafts exist for a reason, I suppose. Pic only symbolically related.

Looking back on it, Lamont Sterling had had a fucking week.  He’d infiltrated the offices of the Britannian government’s cut-loose-but-top-secret “Project Fallenstar”, he’d stared down Death itself–largely ineffectually, it turned out, necessitating a heroic self-sacrifice by their guide to get them out alive–and he’d finally come face-to-face with the alien mastermind behind their late kidnapper-turned-guide’s machinations.  Understanding of the situation still eluded him.  Best he could tell, the country–no…more than the country–was entangled in a three-way fight over the privilege to interpret the end of the world.  On one side, L’rac–the mastermind–and by extension him, Charlotte, Pierre, Fontaine, maybe everyone else he could still trust.  Opposite them were the Architects, part Illuminati, part primordial incarnations of Life and Death and the ocean and that kind of shit, who had helped to create the world, which seemed absurd, but Lamont had heard no informed, differing opinion other than that this whole thing was stupid as hell.  And unfortunately, it all being stupid as hell did not mean it wasn’t true.

And while they’d been rummaging through the Architects’ dirty laundry in Panama, New York City had evidently turned into a battlefield between the Architects and the last side of the triangle: the King in Yellow, a cult–or perhaps its leader–whose motives were as yet unknown but whose influence was apparently fucking international, who had fucked with Lamont’s own life, who had murdered one of his closest friends scarcely hours before their journey out of the country.  That same day, the King’s agents assassinated New York’s mayor, and by aerial inspection upon Lamont’s return, it seemed the situation had escalated since.

The streets were swarming with cops, buildings of all manner–he had lost count of how many somewhere over Queens–had been reduced to hollowed, smoldering ruins.  But it wasn’t as if someone had simply set fire to them: They looked like they had been bombed.  Lamont assumed it was the same thing that had taken out the bridge between Brooklyn and Queens, itself probably the most unnerving development they saw on the flyover.  One of the two sides of the bridge had appeared scorched, its metal partially melted and twisted out of shape, and the middle was just gone, as if a great hand had grasped it and just ripped it down into the river.

If he had less on his plate, he might have landed immediately and gotten involved, looked for answers, tried to figure out just what kind of shit had gone down in his absence.  But as it stood, the practical considerations of all of this were much simpler: They would not be landing in Manhattan.  Rather, the most logical destination turned out to be their starting point: the bay behind Lamont’s family getaway in Long Island.

The landing was smooth, May and Fontaine assisted in mooring the plane without incident, and then…then Lamont’s body flushed the very last of its adrenaline, and he all but collapsed on the stairs up to the house.  It was Beau Pierre, evidently having a spell of dizziness himself, who noticed and braced him the rest of the way up.  His head was swimming.  New York was burning, the world was run by colossi whose presence could disintegrate buildings, his companions were space aliens with the memories of people, Charlotte had kissed him, Kneecap was dead–Charlotte had kissed him while they were over Brooklyn and then just vanished back into the cabin.  Everything was upside-down, spinning faster and faster.  He hadn’t felt this out of his depth in a long time.

Upon making it inside, they were greeted by Mark Luski, former Secret Service operative turned fixer, who asked, harried, uncharacteristically cagey, for the news from Panama.

“It’s all fucked,” was the best reply Lamont could manage.

“Fucked?” Luski muttered, less bewildered than exasperated.  “Got any more for me than that?”

Lamont raised a hand, gesturing vaguely at things shoulder-height and below as he trudged up the stairs from the back entrance to the main level.  At this point, his companions had largely stopped and dropped, collapsing on the lower level’s sofa, armchairs, or–in Fontaine’s case–the floor, with only Pierre following him and Luski up.

“Sterling.”

Lamont sighed, pausing at the top of the stairs.

“Okay,” he said.  “This is all a lot bigger than the Secret Service.  And Kneecap is dead.”

“Orange?” Luski asked, stepping into the foyer behind him.  “Orange is–”  

All three of them froze at the sound of a key in the front door lock.  Lamont glanced at Luski.  At once, they both drew their pistols as the door opened, revealing two young men: one in a blazer and khakis, with slicked-down hair and spectacles, carrying a briefcase; the other in a dark red suit and matching fedora, shifty, the kind of guy you’d expect to see behind a mafia don’s left shoulder.  Neither was holding a weapon, neither seemed like a government spook, but…wait.  Lamont had seen the spectacled man before.  Recently.

“You,” he growled.

“Mr. Sterling,” Spectacles said.  “Hello again!”  The greeting, however friendly, failed to put Lamont’s nerves at ease.  He had not yet encountered a context where friendliness actually precluded ill intent.

“Didn’t you work for Hawberk?” Pierre asked, evidently too tired to share Lamont’s violent level of alarm.

But the Frenchman was right: Spectacles had been Hawberk’s announcer at the poker game aboard the Prince’s Emblazoned.  They had last seen him shortly before Kneecap rammed the ocean liner and sunk it.  

“Why yes, I did,” the man replied.  “I know we met all too briefly at sea.  My name is Jonathan Banks.”  He extended a hand.  No one crossed the room to shake it, though Luski did lower his weapon.

“What do you want?” Lamont asked, pistol still aimed at Banks’ face.

“Of course, Mr. Sterling.  I”m here with a proposal on behalf of my employer.  It’s…” Banks glanced over his shoulder at the open front door, “…a matter of some urgency regarding your recent contact with the Architects.  May we come in?”

“How do you–”

“Yeah, shut the door,” Pierre interrupted.  “Let’s talk.”

Lamont whirled, ready to pistol whip the little shit, but he caught himself.  Banks and his companion were already complying with no emergent sign of hostility.  Pierre had shrunk back slightly, but his response to Lamont’s wrathful glare was just a shrug.  Unfortunately, it was looking more and more like he was right: If they had something to say worth listening to, Lamont’s posturing was just a waste of time and energy.

“Before we get to the meat of it,” Banks said, ignoring the confrontation and proceeding to the dining room, “I would like to introduce my associate, Vincent McFlinn.  Mr. McFlinn, this is Lamont Sterling, Beau Pierre, and Mark Luski.”  He opened his briefcase and began spreading a variety of papers across the table.

“Pleasure,” the man in the red suit said from the side of his mouth.

“Mr. McFlinn,” Banks continued, “is a Fallenstar entity, like you, Mr. Pierre.”

“What?” McFlinn spat, seemingly less out of shock than profound annoyance, as if this was the umpteenth bewilderment Banks had inflicted upon him this afternoon.

“How many…” Luski muttered, blinking in disbelief.  Then, more composed: “Are you here on behalf of M&M then?”  Banks sighed, deflating momentarily over his array of documents.

“You are ahead of the class, Mr. Luski,” he intoned, glancing at the dining room’s other doorways.  “Since I will likely need to explain this multiple times as the rest of the guests trickle in, I’ll try to preface: You all are presently fugitives.  M&M–my employer–would like to make an agreement with you to guarantee you a sort of…’diplomatic immunity’, if you will.”

“M&M, like the company?” Lamont asked.  His head was spinning.  The fucking industrialists were getting involved now?  What sort of diplomacy did they think they were going to do with god-monsters?

“Precisely, Mr. Sterling.”

“How is the M&M Corporation supposed to protect us from–”

“There’s an Architect named ‘Em’, isn’t there?” Pierre interrupted.

A silence stretched across the room as stares moved slowly from Pierre to Banks.

“Arrghh!” Lamont roared.  This was bullshit.  Unbelievable bullshit.

“So, yes,” Banks said, regaining his composure.  “There is–”

“Why are they letters?!” Lamont shouted.  “Why are they all fucking letters?”

“English names for Latin letters, yes,” Pierre added.

“Why?!”

Banks scanned the room, taking a deep, guarded breath.

“This is getting a little off-topic,” he said.  “To fully level with you, I don’t know.  But I’m going to have to insist that it is not especially relevant to the business at hand–and the business at hand really is quite urgent.”

“It’s also a bit late to be asking that question, isn’t it, Sterling?”  The sound of Charlotte’s voice from the stairwell turned heads around the table.

Charlotte Glossington-Clarke, heiress to the fortune of the now-defunct Glossington Industries, baggy-eyed, barefoot, every bit as disheveled as Lamont and Pierre, crossed the threshold to the dining room, not quite staggering, but scurrying in a way her normally polished persona would never have allowed.

“I’m interested in diplomatic immunity, Mr. Banks,” she said, placing her hands on the table.  Lamont felt it was impressive she was still able to project confidence despite her visible fatigue giving the impression of recent food poisoning.  “What are the terms?”

“That depends on negotiations, Miss Glossington-Clarke, but our initial proposal is a cessation of law enforcement hostilities and detainment and all of that for you and–” Banks glanced at Luski, “–your associates, in exchange for your ongoing engagement and employment with M&M, itself a de facto if contentious branch of the Architects’ collective.”

“Contentious,” Charlotte asked.  Banks shrugged, arranging a small stack of papers and sliding them toward her.

“Em and Vee have not always seen eye to eye, hence the negotiation.  But also: hence the internal disagreements of which you all presently find yourselves beneficiaries.”

Charlotte pursed her lips as she flipped through the pages.

“Good point,” she muttered.  Lamont, never much one for paperwork, found himself consciously thankful that she seemed to still have the stamina for the bare bones of due diligence.

“Hold on.  Hold the fuck on!” the newcomer–McFlinn or whatever–spouted, taking a step backward.  “Banks, what the fuck is this?  What is a falling star?  Who the fuck are Em and Vee?”  He turned to the rest of the table.  “And no fuckin’ offense or anything, but who the fuck are you?”

“He hasn’t had the existential crisis yet?” Pierre replied.

“No,” Banks said, arranging the next packet for Charlotte’s review.  “Been busy.  And it didn’t want to break it to him while driving.”

“Break what to me?!”

“Alien lifeform, fabricated memories,” Charlotte muttered.

“You have magic powers, right?” Lamont added.

“He talks to animals,” Banks added.

“Lotsa people talk to animals!” McFlinn retorted.

“I bet you listen, though,” Pierre sniped.

“That supposed to mean somethin’, wiseass?!”  McFlinn crossed the room, reaching into his jacket as he approached Pierre, who abruptly raised his hands, shouting:

“Hold on–no knives please!”

McFlinn paused mid-step at the oddly prescient objection, long enough for Charlotte to add:

“Mr. Pierre sees the future.  There are several of us here.  My sympathies as to the shock of it, but we have had a very long flight, and I simply do not have the patience to cushion the news right now.”

“You need a corner to scream in, I recommend the billiards room,” Lamont said, still weighing whether he would need to intervene on Pierre’s behalf, though the murderous glare McFlinn shot him prompted the question of whether he would need to defend himself first.  Charlotte yawned.

“Anyway,” she slurred.  “Mr. McFlinn, do you have any concerns with certifying your association with Mr. Banks’ organization?”

McFlinn stepped away from Pierre and turned to her, rage melting to confusion.

“Certif…I already fuckin’ work for him.”

“Indeed, Mr. McFlinn,” Banks interrupted.  “This next step is not dependent on your consent, so if we can table the imminent fact-grappling, I promise you will not regret the removal of the Secret Service from the list of organizations who would see you dead.”

McFlinn took another look around the room, clawing at his lip as if to adjust an invisible cigarette, and finally thrust his hands into his pockets with a muted snarl:

“Whatever.”

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the shuffling of papers and the scratching of Charlotte’s pen.  Eventually, making one last mark, she set her stack down and inclined her head over her shoulder.

“Pierre, would you go grab Fontaine?” she said.  “He’ll need to sign.”  As Pierre scuttled back to the stairs, she turned to Banks.  “I think I’m alright with this, pending these alterations.  Sterling, you can read it over if you like, but the terms are essentially that we remain ‘employed’ as long as we pursue M&M’s assignments to the best of our ability.”

Lamont grabbed a sheet of paper.  He hoped he could trust Charlotte’s judgment, but not verifying the print with his own eyes didn’t sit well.

“So…we do what your boss tells us…” he said, blinking.  He was parsing Charlotte’s summary rather than the inscrutable legalese on the page, realizing with a sinking feeling that he would have to trust her on this one.  He looked up.  “In exchange for what?”

“A modest contractor’s salary,” Banks replied.  “And the considerations detailed in this exhibit.”  He slid over another page, this one unfortunately quite easy to read.

“It’s fucking blank,” Lamont observed.

“That’s because it is yet to be negotiated,” Banks said, smiling in a way Lamont found smackable if not punchable.  “Vee needs to agree.”

“There’s a sample framework here,” Charlotte added, sliding another page to Lamont which he did not bother to pick up.  “But Mr. Banks, how will the negotiation take place?  Do you intend to send Vee a telegram?”

“Good question.”  Banks glanced about the room, lingering on a trove of houseplants in the corner.  “I have another method, courtesy of my father.  I’ll prepare it while we wait for Mr. Fontaine.  Now Mr. Sterling, would you mind terribly if I temporarily relocated your ficus?”

One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 6: The Circus

Ka the Mudfish was known to the people of Mudhull to be a revolting creature.  Indeed, this was reflected in his wider reputation: Fishmongers, merchants, tax collectors visiting his marshy domain found him rude.  Lords and soldiers of neighboring fiefs harbored deep skepticism as to his administrative competence.  Emissaries of the Verdant Tower found him simpering, obsequious, and prone to empty promises.  Highlord Michel IV gave him the same attention as the handful of other unsavory strongmen who tended to the periphery of his domain: He did not think about Ka at all.  

The fishers of Mudhull, long broken by the Mudfish’s crushing taxes and his enforcers’ brazen thievery, found him a brutal tyrant.  And his servants, not permitted residence in his manor and thus compelled to walk between it and their squalid hovels each morning and evening, on roads invariably capped by four inches of oozing muck, somehow found him the most grotesque of all the indignities their serfdom imposed upon them.

Those who respected him were vanishingly few, and there may not have been a single individual alive who liked him.

In this void of regard, then, it was the talk of the village–conducted, of course, in frightened muttering with only the thinnest capacity for interest–when a strange dignitary arrived at the mud-slick steps of Ka’s manor.  Some said he was a great general, though perhaps this was rationalized after the fact.  Some assumed he was a merchant, though his retinue of stalking, black-clad guards bore no goods.  Those who noticed such inconsistencies speculated that he was a traveling scholar, which might not have been wrong, but it was useless, like all the other gossip.

What was clear enough was the man himself: He was tall and thin.  His gait was regal and disconcertingly quick.  The pall cast by his attention, by his blue-eyed gaze, was frigid, the sort that prompted, as he turned away, the realization that one had been holding their breath the entire time that eye had been upon them.  And most salient of all: his other eye, missing, socket uncovered and scarred by a multitude of tiny gouges.  Not one of the villagers ever learned his name, so that missing eye served to construct a moniker.

The One-Eyed man entered Lord Ka’s manor that day and spoke with him for hours.  Then he and his retinue left.  They returned the next day and the day after.  That third day, Ka, not given in any sense to generosity, made arrangements that the One-Eyed man, his guards, and the hobbled old woman who traveled with them should stay at the manor.  The fifth day, a servant was called into the room where they carried out their mysterious deliberations.  The other servants did not see him again, and from then on, turnover at the manor grew unsettlingly high.

The villagers watched Mudhull’s quiet transformation.  Fishers were called from their nets to construct thick wooden ramparts around the village–and long buildings within, laid out like slaughterhouses, though with space far in excess of that demanded by the livestock the villagers kept.  Mudhull’s guards donned black armor like that worn by the One-Eyed man’s retinue, now festooned with pewter catfish iconography.  The guards’ ranks tripled, with new recruits coming apparently from outlying villages and traveling mercenary companies.  And as the quiet transformation swelled into a frantic churn, it was secondary to the villagers when the fishers’ huts began to go empty.  In the eyes of history, it is not entirely clear whether their concern even mattered.  At that point, it was likely already too late.

It was one day in this rush, this brief window between when Mudhull became inescapable and when the horrors–the roaches and the teeth and the tongues–became clear, that a servant boy was pushed aside in the hall of Lord Ka’s manor by a laughing guard.  The boy stumbled, striking his head against the wall as the guard guffawed and continued on his way.  The boy remained on the floor a moment, trying to regain his senses, dimly aware that he was bleeding.  He wanted to cry out from the shooting pain, but he didn’t dare, for fear the guard would turn around and find his pain interesting.

The boy was ten years old.  He had just joined the manor staff, but the few senior servants had exhorted him in no uncertain terms: Keep your head down.

Slowly, the boy became aware of someone looming over him.  Shrinking, he peered upward to see a surprisingly short figure, clad in rags.

“Are you scared, child?”

It was an old woman, the one–the boy assumed–the other servants had said arrived with the One-Eyed man.  She reached out a gnarled, four-fingered hand and helped the boy to his feet.  Her fingernails dug painfully into his skin.

“The fear is a gift,” she said.  Half of her face was obscured by her cowl, made darker by the long shadows of Ka’s manor, dim even at midday.  Her one visible eye was the color of ice.  “Build wings of it and fly away from here.”

She smiled as she spoke, but there was something missing from her tone.  Hollowed.  Severed.

“Else,” she added, “what else have you to do but abandon hope?”

***

Cirque d’Baton’s attention flickered back to the present as the sun rose over the Crossroads.  He saw pale pink creep over the horizon from where he squatted beside a haybale in the alley off Market Street.  He heard the telltale birdsong on the other side of the inn’s leaky roof from where he reclined precariously on a shadowed rafter in the storeroom.  He heard and saw the town’s complacent denizens greet the dawn across miles, though hundreds of eyes and ears, the more remote accounts–and those he could not be bothered to collate personally–regaled to him in the chittering whispers of the underground.  Most of it was uninteresting.  Some of it–the townsfolk’s reactionarily privileged obliviousness to their crumbling way of life, for instance–was uninteresting and insulting.  But such was reconnaissance.  Salience buried in the banal, tactical context within a trash heap of the day-to-day–it was his to sort, and based on the fight Atra had picked, they were going to need any advantage he could pull from it all.

The night had been full of deep breaths and massaged temples.  He was irritated with the snags in Atra’s plan, though not so much with her as with the state of the Riverlands.  With the fact that there really wasn’t any lower hanging fruit on offer.

The two of them had long since surrendered to the pull of the mana they channeled–him during Mudhull’s grisly transformation before the War, her much earlier–perhaps centuries ago–though Cirque was no historical detective, and Atra never shared that detail.  It was magic’s dirty secret, that at some point, inevitably, one would transcend reliance on the power mana conferred: the ability to project death upon the world.  Eventually, the profusion of death, the need for mana would become an end in itself.  Amateur mages tended to notice the effect, the way that simply being a magical conduit carried a euphoria akin to an owlweed addict getting their fix; but it wasn’t until a mage attempted to really warp the world that the yen of it changed flavor from an easily-resisted chemical suggestion to a gnawing, omnipresent sense of imminent starvation.

And neither Cirque nor Atra had been sated in over a decade.  The way that mana became accessible varied for each mage according to their training, their predilections, their memories and traumas–to the ways in which they perceived death.  Sometimes, the way Atra explained it, this manifestation was quite straightforward.  The fire mage saw death, predictably, in burning.  The beastman found it in predation.  The sandstalkers of Hazan found it in burial.  Other disciplines drew strength from more complex abstractions, like the Grayskins, Khettite diaspora who saw death in the mental unmooring of insanity.  Cirque and Atra were both in this latter category.

Cirque was a swarmcaller, a vermin mage, a specialty Atra said had been historically common, though exclusively as self-taught hedge magic–which meant that powerful practitioners were exceedingly rare.  In a pinch, Cirque could draw mana in acceptable quantities by simply eating people like a beastman, but it was easier for him to derive death from the slower, more widespread, instinctual depredations of the rats to which he was connected.

Atra, meanwhile, professed to be able to perceive death in war, a theoretically unremarkable claim–except that she said it with respect to the aspects of war distinct from violence: the rage, the distrust, the breakdown of social structure, whatever that meant.  The way she told it, this practice was unique in the whole of magical history, which he wasn’t sure he believed, even if he’d seen no counterexample in the fifty odd years they had been traveling together.

In terms of feeding their respective addictions, their partnership had been very effective.  Atra’s plans tended to be artful, much more so than the bog-standard False God routine of Show Up, Extort, Slaughter, and Cirque had to admit that he ate better as a town was slowly tearing itself apart than he did in the brief period of gorging after it might counterfactually have been violently pillaged.  In return and in service to her social engineering, he lent his capacity as a verminous panopticon.  Much easier to play on a place’s internal frictions if you knew what they were saying, everywhere, all the time.

But to that point, the Crossroads was proving an infuriatingly difficult lock to crack.  Putting aside the variety of False Gods in its orbit and the three–three!–true gods who were very possibly there too, the town’s cadre of personalities was itself far more capable of resistance than most.  It wasn’t the most hostile setup they’d seen: Their run-in with the Hunter of Beasts years ago had handed them their first failure–and Atra her first stinging defeat in combat.  But if they pulled this off, it would still be the most impressive feat they had ever accomplished. 

The mayor, the actual least of their problems, was far more politically savvy, far more perceptive to intrigue than any of the the yokels they’d had to puppeteer in the past, but if it were just him, Cirque would be sitting back and letting Atra flex her social prowess.  However good he was, she was better.  But then there were Gene and Brill, old, venerable, level headed and trustworthy, and frustratingly aware of his and Atra’s movements–though their means were not entirely their own merit.  Brill in particular was clever, very nearly as savvy as the mayor and much less willing to play their game.  Recognized–correctly, Cirque had to admit–that no good would come of it.

And, of course, Marko, fresh off the muttered communications last night about “plans”.  His intuition regarding Cirque’s surveillance was, Cirque gathered, most likely a lucky guess.  Cirque had been trying to listen in on that theater for over a week now.  Sometimes he got snippets, sometimes all the rats could hear through the walls was incoherent murmuring.  It wasn’t great, and Marko’s notice was probably just the coincidental accuracy of a broken clock.  But the man was a piece of work.

He had cobbled together an admittedly impressive operation on a foundation of paranoia and an altogether bizarre sort of greed that left Cirque puzzled as to why and how the loon had failed to become a False God in his own right.  By all accounts, he had the arsenal and the access for it, but he seemed to have a love of money–or of some more abstract form of capital wealth–that held short of maturation into a lust for material power.  The result was frustrating.  The paranoia made him difficult to assassinate.  The absence of menace and the mercantile largesse he brought to town made it difficult to impeach him in the public’s opinion.  And his hoard of artifacts then served to undermine Cirque and Atra’s progress, forcing their communication to take place covertly or out of town, tracking him–the Crossroads was the first town to ever notice Cirque’s role in its undoing–and cordoning off spaces like the theater that neither he nor Atra could access.

Those three–Gene, Brill, and Marko–were good sentinels, though with a glaring weakness in their magical know-how that Marko’s wares couldn’t quite make up for, which was what made it feel like such a cruel joke that they were now temporarily accompanied by this bizarre clique of mages.  Bleeding Wolf.  Naples.  Ty Ehsam.  And the two god-infected children.

Ty smelled suspicious in a way that likely had nothing to do with his Grayskin-traditional garb.  Foul, sickly, bloodsickly, specifically.  Cirque had only been to the Westwood once since the Battle of the Ouroboros, but it was a scent that stuck with you.  He didn’t like it, even if he wasn’t sure what it implied.

Meanwhile, Naples and Orphelia both seemed practiced in that Grayskin magic that made you unable to trust your senses, though thankfully, Naples seemed to use it more judiciously than the girl, who just last night seemed to plunge the whole tavern into a bout of phantasmagoria by accident.  

Bleeding Wolf was probably the most magically attuned of the bunch, and by the way Atra was slavering, he was probably real dangerous in a fight, which made their first-line option for dealing with problematic factors in town that much more fraught.

And Devlin…just…fuck.  The smell brought nauseous shivers up from Cirque’s gut.  He almost wanted to cut and run, leave Atra to it and just starve or go insane.  Hell, part of him was considering suicide before facing the One-Eyed Crow again.

But–deep breath–in truth, every single one of them was a damned problem, and most, if not all of them, understood that they were in some existentially threatening shit, though maybe they didn’t yet recognize that Atra’s plan was existentially threatening itself.  For problems like this, the usual solution was pruning, getting rid of individual issues in order to make the rest of the town suitably manipulable.  Bluntly: murder.  

But as much as Cirque wanted to settle his anxieties, wanted a clear path to the ultimate feast, Atra’s assessment–that the situation was too delicate–was correct.  There were too many powerful forces here, and while Cirque and Atra certainly posed no threat to them, escalating violence could very quickly bring the screaming consequences back home.  Lan al’Ver would certainly notice a hit on one of his current fixations.  This “Ben Gan Shui” had made a deal with the town, and Cirque had the impression she held her trading partners to an exacting standard.  He doubted that the Crow or whichever slithering influence had adhered itself to Ty Ehsam would react calmly to attacks against their hosts.  And if Atra was right and Orphelia was truly a locus of the Gyre, it was possible that killing her wouldn’t even cause her to die–but would invite retribution nonetheless.

It was maddening.  He was multitudes.  He was untouchable, inexorable, and omnipresent.  Cirque had transcended the humanity that imprisoned him in Mudhull to become what was practically a demigod to these insects, and he still felt helpless.
Atra thought she still had this, confident she could steer this happy, “rebuilding” hub of trade into a well-armed but ragged and duplicitous alliance with Holme, all in service to a last stand against the Blaze.  The Crossroads would be decimated, Holme would be destroyed.  The Blaze’s army of mutants would be slaughtered.  Atra still somehow saw the path this great conflagration, snatching the flocks of two False Gods right out from under them, and all Cirque could do was hope she was right–and continue to make sure she knew everything about the way these animals danced.

One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 5: Here’s the Plan

Realized it’s been 10 months since the last chapter of this story. Man, time really does fly, fun or no.

There was something that needed to be done.  Devlin felt it, powerfully, desperately.  Except for rescuing Orphelia, he was certain it was the most important task he had ever faced.  And yet, somehow, despite the burning sense of urgency practically holding his eyes open as he rolled fitfully on his bunk in Brill’s infirmary, he had no idea what it was he had to do.

At least he could see now.

Since the Chateau de Marquains, the birds had returned in force.  They were on and around him, rustling, flapping their dirty wings as he choked on the miasma that wafted off them.  They would perch on his bare skin, place their beaks against his eyes and utter a hollow, rattling croak.  It felt like encouragement.  It felt like a threat.  He wasn’t sure to what end.  Their presence still stifled, anxiety like heavy mist.  But unlike before, he could see.  The feathers from their wingbeats fell beside him rather than clouding his vision.  And unlike before, he could move.  Rather than harry and hinder him, it was as if the birds attempted to lift him when he walked.  He felt like he was floating, sometimes, each step not weightless but ineffably light.

He was still worried about Orphelia.  Always worried about Orphelia.  She came home concerned.  Not concerned.  Distressed.  Not home.  Brill’s infirmary–what was home, anymore?  What could home ever be?  None of that was important.  It would all be okay if he could just complete this last task.

Devlin clutched his temples as he felt a wave of pinpricks in a line down the side of his skull.  Slowly, the pain receded. […]  For a moment, the birds were quiet.

Orphelia was safe, though, right?  It wasn’t like Les Marquains could chase her all the way here.  It seemed absurd that he would even want to.

No, Devlin thought, strangely assured of the notion: Les Marquains had no reason to pursue Orphelia.  And the False God would have to be distracted: As they fled, the Saraa Sa’een had burst through the magically-reinforced walls of his chateau.  Was Les Marquains even still alive?  It was a useless question.  It had nothing to do with Orphelia, with determining what it was that found her here.  Whatever it was that scared her.  The birds quietly muttered their approval.  They knew he was right.  They would help him protect Orphelia.  But he would need to get up.  He would need to go out and see what lurked in the Crossroads’ alleys.  No, it was okay, he realized.  The thing that kept him awake, the thing he needed to do: This would be the first step.

The birds fluttered up around him, lifting him from the cot, holding him steady as he crept to the curtain, across the apothecary shop floor.  He lifted the deadbolt and slipped out the front door.

The birds hadn’t yet seen much of this Crossroads, Devlin thought, confined as he had been previously to Brill’s infirmary–and the alley across the street before that.  This little patch of squandered potential sprung up in the ruins of Ulrich’s Bend, itself barely an outpost of the arrogant, long-ruined Kol.  So close to what had once been the Blackwood–now open marsh at the outskirts of the Windwood.  Though one had to admit the Bloodwood was a better name for it.  A name befitting a substrate for the loathsome fungus of human tenacity, never bothered to pull its way upward, yet nigh unstoppable in its stubborn push forward.

Somewhere, secondarily, Devlin wondered how he knew these things, why he made these judgments.  He didn’t remember learning any of it, but it had been some time since he had felt awake.

The streets were empty now, of course.  The inn where Orphelia had been had locked its doors, all of the Crossroads’ late-night wanderers had settled for the night, at the inn, their homes, the posts at the thoroughfare intersections–in the case of the militia volunteers playing the role of night watchmen–and, for those vagrants too poor or too cheap for more sensible lodging, squirreled away in secluded alleys about the town, much as Devlin and Orphelia had been when they first came here.

But despite the quietude, the birds saw things, now that they were awake, now that they were helping.  They fluttered about Captain al’Ver’s boat-wagon, tied outside Brill’s shop.  They dared not land upon it.  It was not theirs.  But this place, this Crossroads, was no one’s.  Between their domains.  It was not her right to meddle here–which was why the birds merely watched–but it was not his either.  Captain al’Ver gave up long ago.  They all did.  Why this sudden regret?

A wave of dissonance washed over Devlin, and the pinpricks in his temples flared again.  Orphelia.  Captain al’Ver was watching Orphelia.  Because of his mistake.  His own poison gift.  The birds croaked menacingly, and somehow Devlin understood the implication: It was upon that observation that he became watched.  And because he understood that connection, he was not afraid when he turned and saw the watcher, seated in the shadows beside the door of the inn.  Beneath a wide-brimmed hat, eyes glinted orange in the light of the brazier down the street.

The old man rested a hand on the stock of a crossbow laid across his lap.  He sat, but he was not inert, the weathered lines on his face showing no trace of fatigue.  The scowl, the stare, the mechanical poise of his fingers–he saw through Devlin, and he judged.  Devlin did not know what to say, but the birds spoke through him:

“I was betrayed first.  What right do you have to intervene in my retribution?”

The corner of the old man’s mouth creased, and his knuckles whitened around the crossbow, but Devlin did not wait for his assent.  He turned and walked away, toward the north end of town.  The nature of Orphelia’s predicament was growing clearer, but there were other winds blowing about this place.  The merchant of bespoke blights–this Marko–he would shortly have designs upon the Homunculus abomination.  How could he not?  But the birds could not guess what those designs would be, so maybe Devlin could find out?

The story the silver man–the abomination, the Homunculus– had told in the infirmary was not alarming to Devlin.  It sounded foreboding, ominous.  The awakening of the Night Sky sounded like a Very Important Change.  Scary, in a far off sort of way–but also exciting?  Hopeful?  Like a promise of eventual relief.  It was a strange way to feel about what Captain al’Ver said would be the end of the world, but Devlin had been in this haze, so tired for so long.  He wanted it to end.  He wanted it all to be what it had been before.  But ending…the sickness, the transience, the sleeping through raspy coughs on boats, in alleys, on infirmary cots–ending that was the first step, right?

The birds’ startled croaks wrenched his thoughts away from that confusion, drawing his gaze upwards.  Devlin’s eye caught Ty Ehsam, perched on the roof of Gene’s smithy.

Rogue, the birds croaked.  Wayward child.  Did the crawling worm not grasp the opportunity before them?

For just a moment, Devlin wondered how it was that the birds’ tittering placed these thoughts into his mind.  As if they were his.

But he had a task he had to complete.  Time was of the essence.  He continued on toward Marko’s.

***

Ty shivered as Devlin looked up suddenly, directly at him, one eye obscured by his ragged hood, the other clearly–almost ethereally–illuminated, piercing, frozen grey in the faint torchlight.  It was by no means alarming that Devlin noticed him, of course.  They had come to town together.  To the extent that the boy had been paying attention, he would have known that Ty was keeping to the rooftops in this general area of town.  Still, the interaction had been uncanny.

“Well, I would say we’ve been clocked.”

The whisper came from Ty’s mouth, but the words were certainly not his, prompted instead by scarcely detectable pulses of mana running through the threads sewn into his head and neck.

“What do you mean?” Ty asked under his breath.  “The boy knew we were here.”

“The boy?” the Dragon replied in Ty’s voice.  “You gods forsaken idiot, you think that what just saw us–and I mean us–was a boy?”

Ty did not respond.  The Dragon’s abuse was more or less a constant when the False God spoke to him, and he saw little point in engaging with it.  He followed Devlin as the boy–or whatever the Dragon thought he was–continued up the street, stumbling and meandering in much the same way he had ever since leaving the Chateau de Marquains.

“I can forgive a simpleton like you for not sensing the mana.  It’s a subtle flavor, and his sister is much, much louder with her magical pollution.  But have you really not noticed the way he hides his hand from al’Ver?”

Ty had not.  He considered it for a moment.

“Is he hiding his ring?” he asked.

“A lovely guess.  It is better to be stupid than stupid and blind, I suppose.  What can you tell me about this ring?”  Ty shrugged.

“Cheap,” he said.  “Looks like dirty iron.  Grooves cut into the flat on one side.  Are those supposed to mean something?”

“It shocks me that you’re even intelligible, let alone literate,” the Dragon sneered.  “Grooves?  Mean ‘something’?  That is a bird’s footprint, you dunce.”

“You say that as if it’s a crest I should know.”

“Only because it is.  That is the crest of the Strange Bird.”

Ty glanced again at the street.  Devlin had disappeared into the shadows, and all was once again silent and empty.

“Never heard of them,” he said, leaning back against Gene’s chimney.  “Another new False God?”

“My disgust can scarcely be vocalized,” came the Dragon’s surprisingly calm reply.  “They’re almost childlike, your priors.  Raised in a world of bad replicas, you are unable to recognize the real thing.  Even when you run right into two of them.  But I suppose the Feathermen disbanded decades before you were born, and why would you have learned their master’s sobriquet?  It was buried on purpose, precisely so that fools like you would forget it.”

“Well, sorry for the foolishness, but I don’t follow,” Ty whispered.  “The ring is magic, I assume?  And it’s linked to this Strange Bird–so what?”

“So she saw us.  And you’re just going to let him dance off to his business in the dead of night?  Get up and follow him, you idiot!”

Ty sighed, carefully creeping to the edge of Gene’s roof.  He leaped over the small alley between the smithy and the potter’s workshop next door, proceeding to make his way after Devlin as stealthily as he could.

“She saw us?” he asked between measured exhalations.  “Who is she, exactly?”

“The Strange Bird,” the Dragon replied.  “The One-Eyed Crow, the Lark in the Burning Tree, et cetera.  And the kid’s been traveling with you all this time: She’s seen everything there is to see about you.  I am more vexed that she saw me.”

Ty frowned, annoyed as much by the Dragon’s vagaries as the thinning of available rooftop routes.  He carefully lowered himself to the street beside a vegetable garden wedged randomly amidst the tradesman’s corridor and took to the street, beginning to push out a field of mana, a subtle, vacuous delusion, the technique Naples called “shadow walking”.

“So what does it mean?” he muttered, quickening his pace as Devlin swayed toward the square up ahead.

“I shan’t waste any more pearls on you,” came the flat reply.  “Find a codex if you’re curious.  Suffice it to say that we should underestimate neither the number of parties interested in our Homunculus, nor their level of interest.  Now keep following the damn boy.  The more I can learn about her angle, the better.”

Ty’s motivation to carry out the Dragon’s reconnaissance was waning, but he really did not like the notion the False God seemed to be reading from the boy’s behavior.  A fourteen-year-old boy being controlled by a mage–let alone one that could intimidate a mass-murderer like the Dragon?  It was just…grim.  Both Devlin and his sister had had a truly rough go of it, and though Ty had his frustrations with Orphelia’s relentless troublemaking, he couldn’t help but pity them.  And he was left to wonder whether the boy’s ring was a problem he might be able to address.  The Dragon didn’t seem to think there was any such opportunity, but Ty was also fairly certain the Dragon didn’t give a damn about the boy’s welfare.

For a moment, Devlin disappeared from view, rounding the corner onto the north square.  Ty lingered there, peering out at the surprisingly well-lit space.  To his surprise, Devlin had stopped scarcely fifteen feet beyond the turn, staring straight ahead.  The benches, fountain, and walkways at the center of the square fell well within the torchlight, but Ty couldn’t make out anything there that might have given Devlin pause.  He noticed it only because Devlin’s attention prompted him to keep looking, but there, under an awning at the opposite end of the square, Ty caught movement.  Smoke.  No–vapor.

The shadows behind the trail of steam stood and approached the boy.

“Devlin?” Bleeding Wolf rumbled, stepping into the light, pensively balancing a steaming wooden cup between his fingers.  “What are you doing out at this hour?”

“Uhm…”

Ty could not understand Devlin’s response, barely a murmur as the boy swayed, hands balled up inside his sleeves.  Apparently, Bleeding Wolf didn’t catch it either.  The concern on the beastman’s face deepened.

“Let’s get you back to Brill’s.  Maybe they’ll have somethin’ for the sleepwalkin’.”

Ty ducked quickly back around the corner, into an alley where he used a barrel as a makeshift step ladder back to the rooftops.  He waited there for the next few minutes as Bleeding Wolf ushered Devlin past, back to bed, seemingly oblivious to the eldritch presence Ty had seen behind the boy’s eyes only moments ago.

“Did you see it?” the Dragon whispered once the two were out of sight.  “He hid the ring from the beastman as well.  Al’Ver is obvious, but why would she consider your ‘Bleeding Wolf’ a threat?”  Ty paused.

“A threat to what?” he asked.

“Finally.  A pertinent question.  Alas, the boy retreated, so I don’t imagine we can be sure.  Still, he was approaching…Marko’s office, was he not?”

***

“Here’s the plan,” Marko announced to his empty theater, no-nonsense, motivational-like, the type of confidence that ought to inject some energy into his thinking.  Except he didn’t have the plan.  He sighed, grumbling a half-hearted string of curses.

The pieces, then.  Atra wanted to fight the Blaze, for whatever shell-forsaken reason.  The Blaze wanted the Keystone.  Unclear if he wanted the construct.  He would if he weren’t an idiot, but…  And the construct, this “Monk”, wants to…bring the Blaze to the site of the Night Sky’s awakening?  What?

Marko glanced out at the torchlit shadows beyond the stage where he stood.  He fiddled with his crossbow, concerned that he might not be alone but self aware enough to know that he was always thus concerned, that there was no signal whatsoever in his worry.  He jumped down from the stage, landing hard, his knees just no flexing with the impact the way they used to, and he checked his wards and traps:

The unobtrusive strip of strange metal at the doorway–the same metal as one of the seven rings he wore–which dissuaded anyone from entering without his approval, still in place and undamaged, unlike the rest of his doorframe; the elongated stone brazier at the edge of the stage–a creation of Holme’s Sculptor–which burned without fuel and grew much brighter in the presence of violent intent, still alight with its normal, orange hue; the windows, all completely ordinarily shuttered but affixed with small parchment tags fastening the shutters to the sill such that they would tear if a window were opened–and which would instantly reduce the temperature in the vicinity dangerously below freezing upon tearing; and, of course, the trap door beneath the rug on the stage, locked both conventionally and with a magical device operated by his pendant which would, by default, redirect any harm done to the device, the door, or the room beneath it back at whoever was attempting to smash their way in.  Everything was still in place, in working order, and crucially, only Marko knew how it all worked.

Back in the old days, it was once every couple years a scav would try him.  Now no one had bothered him in a decade, excepting the Ben Gan Shui’s centipedal envoy smashing through his door the other week.  But he tried not to let that affect his paranoia.  This was a dangerous fuckin’ line of work, and being on the backlines of the scav trade really wasn’t any safer.  His little stronghold wasn’t impregnable, though even the envoy probably wouldn’t have made it past the lock–and none of this shit seemed to work on Lan al’Ver, but it was still better protected than the vast majority of scav marks.

Marko heaved himself back onto the stage, his checks, his thrice-daily ritual completed.  The pieces again: 

If Monk wanted to get someplace else and bring the Blaze there, that gave Atra her stupid battlefield, right?  So she could get herself killed, the Blaze would get his Keystone, and the threat to the Crossroads would be gone.  With the threat–and Atra–gone, the militia would go, and Marko could find some means to wrench his mercantile autonomy back from the mayor.

What about that loose end, then?  Mayor Bergen probably wouldn’t care about Monk’s prophecy, and who knew how much he cared about Atra’s death wish?  He would probably want to ship Monk and Ehsam up north.  Marko had to admit the simplicity was appealing, but Atra would certainly meddle.  In the end, he neither trusted her, nor was he willing to put his neck on the line to give the mayor an unmitigated win–the mayor was his enemy too, after all.

“Here’s the plan,” he said again.  “We got the research angle, see if I can dig up any scraps of wisdom I might’ve picked up from the Alchemist’s fanboys over the last few decades.  Need to figure out where Monk needs to go.  Hell, maybe the clockwork piece of shit will help me.

“Then the action.  Gotta–”  He stopped cold as the stone brazier flared up.

It was for just an instant that the flames sputtered higher, just a quick flash of light that brushed the dark corners of the stage before dying back to dim candlelight.  Could’ve been a fluke.  Something outside, whatever malice woke it up either phantom or just gone now.  Or maybe Atra’s little spy tripped one of his wires.

“Don’t fuckin’ worry,” Marko muttered.  “You’ll be in on it.  Now fuck off.”

It was the truth, sort of.  If everything worked out, Atra would get what she wanted, far away from here, at maximal cost to the Bergen boy’s stupid militia.  But she couldn’t know in advance.  He needed her to react hastily, to be taken by surprise.  He needed to be driving this cart.

But whether or not his invective had been received, there was, of course, no response.

Living the Dream

In spite/because of my vaguely barren posting schedule, I did want to wish all of you a happy new year (and belated holidays, whichever you celebrate), with the exception of the decidedly persistent scammer who keeps emailing me from Nigeria with an AI-generated profile pic and email pitch. My holiday message for you is more complex:

  • I do not want to purchase access to your botnet, no matter how many fake reviews it will generate for me.
  • I am perfectly capable of Googling the various generically American names you have emailed me under (and finding thereof that no one with that name is in this line of work).
  • Your messages are now routing to my spam folder. Please move on. If you are given to self-reflection, please consider a career in which you commit less fraud.

For everyone else, despite appearances, my December has actually been rather productive, and once I figure out how to collate my output, it will start appearing here again (I had a professional engagement that ate up most of my October/November). I hope you all have been well, and I will see you soon, under a new calendrical quantum.

Ferrik’s Journal

Day 1

Starting a first officer’s log in case something goes wrong with our pay and this needs to go to a magistrate.  I’ve signed onto this contract with fourteen acquaintances and one confused vagabond for one Edward of Corino, known as “Edward the Pirate”, recently returned to Piraeus after a decade of exile.  His reputation is poor and well-known, hence this log, but the crew was paid an advance of 10 silver a head on total wages of two Verduan marks per man.  Frankly far more than a month of our time is worth.  The men believe Edward has a rich sponsor for the voyage, but if he does, he’s kept quiet about it.

Issues with his reputation–and his exile–stem from a smuggling deal gone bad.  He was carrying contraband to Verdua and failed to deliver payment back to the praetor who hired him.  He says Verdua confiscated the goods, but who knows.  Things with Verdua have been tense for years.  About as long as he was exiled.  The old timers doubt it’s a coincidence.

***

Day 7

One week in, no sign of this “god of the seas”, but the Captain isn’t agitated yet.  He keeps quiet, though.  No sense among the crew of whether this is according to plan or not.  The vagabond tagging along is an odd bird.  His name is also Edward, which is damned confusing.  Surprisingly competent sailor, but he says he’s never been to sea.  Apparently he’s been wandering the Riverlands teaching children arithmetic for soup.  Crew have taken to calling him “Teach” to keep the Edwards straight.

***

Day 10

There’s a growing sense of unease with our course.  Nothing of our quarry still, but I’m more concerned that we’ve been sailing due west, way off any route any of us have ever taken.  Captain ain’t showing us the charts, and the main worry now is we might be lost.  What’s more, at sunrise, it feels like we can see land on the eastern horizon, which is obviously impossible.

Teach’s interest in this job clearly has nothing to do with the pay.  He’s an amateur mage, which is divisive, since the old and new timers have their superstitions both ways about that, but he also has this almost childlike interest in stories about gods.  Says he has this friend in the Bloodwood with some harebrained historical theories he’s trying to learn more about , and the job is a lead, I guess.  

I assume the Captain knows.  I wouldn’t have allowed it, though.  Magic is whatever.  Ulterior motives are the real bad luck.

***

Day 17

The crew was already on edge finding nothing, but now we’ve found something, and it certainly isn’t a “god”.  We’ve come upon a drift of things that look a little like jellyfish, but they also seem to dart about intermittently in a way that jellyfish never would.  We can’t seem to touch them with oars or nets.  They just avoid them.  The sea is full of weird shit, though, so this wouldn’t be so notable if not for the air around this shoal.  It’s thick, like you’re breathing vapor, chilly even though the sun’s out, and it smells like rot, like a fish market abandoned for a week.

The men don’t like it.  Captain says put the sails down, we’re drifting with this stuff for the night.  I might need to talk someone out of a mutiny.

Teach seems excited.  Not sure whether that’s a good or bad sign.

***

Something is wrong with me.  I can’t be seeing this.

***

Day 18

When I awoke today the sea was different.  Fuck, the whole world was different.  The sky’s gone dark, but it isn’t just the clouds.  It’s like the light that makes it through them is shining through fluid, like that fish mist we’re breathing is actually the sea, and we’re submerged.  And above us, just hanging there–mostly in the distance, though one got close enough we could see it was at least three times the size of a warship–are these jellyfish.  They look kind of like jellyfish anyway–they aren’t.  Still not sure they are even really there.  They look like reflections on rippling water, but you can’t tell what they’re reflecting.  And the reflection unravels at the end and streams off into these branching string-tentacles.

One of the ones in the distance seemed to get sucked into the darkness before our eyes.  None of us realized what we were seeing until hours later.

The surface of the water has grown cloudy, almost silvery, and it’s become like slime.  The creatures from before are still there, but there are more of them, and they’re more varied.  A times, they seem to rise up above the surface and just swim in the air, but it might be a trick of the light.  When it’s quiet, it almost sounds like they’re humming.  We can touch them now, too.  One of the crew picked one up and just sort of lost track of where he was.  He just stared off as the thing slipped out of his fingers, and it was minutes before he came to again.

In the distance, it’s hard to distinguish where the horizon is, what’s sea and what’s sky.  At one point we saw the whole fucking sky move, a shadow the size of a city just slip down beneath the slime.  We were too afraid to speak for nearly an hour, everyone except the Captain and Teach fucking pissing themselves.

***

The lookout says a shadow just passed underneath us.

***

Day 21.  We’re back in the real world.  We met god, and there is an angel with us.

I cannot tell how much is true and how much is just Teach’s speculation, but he believes that we just sailed up against was the end of the world, where everything unravels into the void.  And the vast creature that surfaced beside us–that is a god, I now see.  Teach describes it as “glaucus”, a term I’m not familiar with, but it’s caught on with the crew.  Glaucus shall be the name of the god who reigns at the end of the world.

The angel who we call the Endling, the strange, eight-legged child we pulled from Glaucus’ flesh has its own mystique.  It does not speak, at least not in any way we can understand, but as Teach observed–and I am inclined to agree–it seems intelligent.  Far more intelligent than a creature of the sea ought to be.

Unfortunately, we lost one sailor in the process of recovering the Endling.  Anton touched the appendage where the Endling clung.  As soon as he did, we saw him reel back as if stung.  All we could do was watch as he mouthed words without sound, and his body grew translucent before decomposing into slime that just…wafted into the air.

A lesson for me as a not especially religious man: It is no small thing to touch a god and survive.

***

Day 24

We have made port in Piraeus nearly a week ahead of schedule.  To think that Teach’s supposed “end of the world” was so close to the city, and no one knew of it.  I wonder why it’s remained secret for so long?

The crew has been paid, a development which moots the original purpose of this log–though I now believe myself to be chronicling something more important–but the way the payment was delivered has made me damned curious.  Upon disembarking, the crew was greeted by a man named Thrasymachus, representing the Blue Ring Cooperative, who handed each of us a purse with our full wage.  It seems there was something to the rumors of a sponsor after all.  

The Captain has asked Teach and me to accompany him to present the Endling to his benefactor.  I had no reason to refuse, but besides: How could I?  I believe I am now tied to the Endling.  I helped to bring this messenger of god to Piraeus.  It is my responsibility to ensure its message–whatever it may be–is delivered.

***

Edward’s sponsor, the head of this “Blue Ring Cooperative”, is no more than a child–a girl, barely of marriageable age!  I am unfamiliar with her persona–this “Halia of Thazan”–but she seems to be taking pains to disguise herself.  She wears a heavy cloak, darkened lenses over her eyes, speaks with this strange, affected accent that still sounds vaguely Verduan.  She’s hiding almost everything, and I don’t trust her.

She seemed happy with the Endling, though.  She and Edward are going to present it to the Council of Praetors.  The want the city’s support in investigating the opportunity on their borders.  I hid my rage well, but the fury has been difficult to suppress in the hours since the meeting.

Glaucus is no opportunity.  And the Endling is no sample to be dissected!

Their appointment is in three days.  I must rescue the Endling from their grasp before then.  I think Teach may be sympathetic.  Perhaps I can persuade him to help me.  We have found something sacred.  The last thing we should do is present it to the politicians for defilement.

***

I have spoken with several of the crew now, and it seems even having been in Glaucus’ presence is having a lingering effect.  All of them are dazed, have barely eaten since we last spoke.  Some are saying that they dream of floating through the sky as great Glaucus swims below them, and they awake to find their skin translucent like Anton’s.  They say it soon recongealed, but one showed me his foot.  It now appears more mollusc than human.

I seem to have been affected much less, though I am also finding my daydreams to have a stickiness to them, as if I am drifting into that inter-zone reality at the end of the world.  My thoughts linger on the god, and it is as if the whole world grows moist, but once I shake myself alert, moments pass before the slime dries from the walls, before the people around me cease to waver as wraiths.

Growing more concerned, as much for our wellbeing as for Halia’s plans for the Endling, I tracked Teach down at the tea house on the south side of the city.  He was having symptoms similar to mine, but he’d already put together an idea of what was going on, magically.  He told me the human body normally exudes mana, but whatever happened to us has caused that mana to start degrading into something less stable.  Unlike regular mana, he says, this “proto” mana seems to do some amount of magic by itself, changing bodies, warping reality, pulling us onto reality’s exterior, that inter-zone that exists everywhere, not merely at the end of the world.

Teach thinks that the reason my symptoms are milder than the crew’s is because I too have some latent magical ability, and I’m reflexively resisting the proto mana’s attempts to change me.  He shares my concern for the rest of the crew but also agrees that we must rescue the Endling immediately.  He thinks that the council is incapable of any decision but foolishness with respect to Glaucus.  I suspect he does not share my reverence.  I may ultimately need to save the Endling from him as well, but for now he is a much-needed ally.

***

The Endling is safe!  It was a poorly hidden operation, and I have certainly invited the Blue Ring girl’s wrath, but as I have seen no sign of cooperation from the city guard in their search for me, I can only conclude that Edward and Halia’s meeting was a failure.  The Captain’s efforts were noble–if misguided, I now understand–and it is a shame they must end in ignominy, but perhaps he too will soon share in the future I intend to build.

Teach, unfortunately, was wounded in our flight.  I had expected the Captain to be armed–I did not expect Halia to be carrying a crossbow under her cloak.  I think he made it to safety, but I cannot be sure as yet.  

After losing my pursuit in the Hospitality Quarter, I doubled all the way back south to the tea house where I had met with Edward.  It is dilapidated and undistricted and limited to the oddest and cheapest of clientele.  I rented a room there, and I doubt any but Teach will find me.  

Most fortunate, though, perhaps even divine recompense: The Endling has spoken to me.  He knows my name and desires that I gather the rest of the crew that brought him here.

***

Teach has found us, and alas, he could not be convinced of the providence fallen upon us and our city.  He was alarmed at the spirit that now animates me–as if I had any choice but to make myself an implement of the divine will before me.  He was frightened of the Endling, who has grown to the size of a man since Teach last saw him.  It is natural to quake before the miraculous, but Teach is slow to be persuaded.

I should have struck him down there as the Endling suggested.  I hesitated.  I still hope Teach will come around, but I admit that hope isn’t pragmatic.  No doubt he will defect now, and we will have to contend with Halia’s enforcers.  With any luck, though, we will be beyond any reasonable possibility of enforcement.

In the two weeks we have been hiding, the Endling has shared with me unthinkable secrets.  Most miraculous among them is that those of the crew who could not control Glaucus’ gifts have found themselves Sent into a state of strange apotheosis.  Their minds waver–if they remain at all–but the Blood of Glaucus runs through their veins in diluted form, seeping from their skin and mouths.  The Blood is new life.  Injected into one’s blood, it remakes them, strips away their shames, mistakes, failures, and ignoble predilections.  It builds them anew, as they were meant to be, supplanting their flaws with a new need for the Blood, for Glaucus’ blessing.  With the Endling’s guidance, I have been gathering it.  And I have been bringing it to those of Piraeus who need a star upon which to orient themselves.

We have a flock of almost twenty now.  Many are still sick, all are learning their new place in the world.  Amusingly, the two most dependable among them are children: two orphan boys named Alaric and Badger.  But we are growing.  Soon, all of Piraeus will understand what we are before Glaucus.

***

Badger has let me know that a “delegation” is on its way to our makeshift church.  Hali and her mercenarios, with two in tow who sound like they must be the Edwards.  Our congregation is still sickly.  It is unlikely that we could overpower them, but the Endling assures me I need not fear.  His Song, combined with our voices, will surely hold off any threat of force within our sanctum.  But he also intends to offer them something.

It is improbable that the Blood from the crew would appeal to Halia or her men–though perhaps Edward’s shame bears scouring at this juncture–but even she must have regrets.  

The Endling has shared with me that the Blood is, in fact, named poetically.  It is actually Glaucus’ venom, in this case a flawed and weakened copy, but even an image of the divine is potent, of course.  But while my fellow crew was touched merely with Glaucus’ presence, the Endling had attached himself to Glaucus’ flesh.  Within his body is a much purer form of the Blood, capable of dissolving even those regrets buttressed by privilege and ambition.  The allure is incredible, and I even I struggle to hold myself back from the serum the Endling has prepared.

***

The methods of divinity are…more twisted than I anticipated.  Our congregation is shattered, the Endling is injured, our blessed crew have been consumed.  I don’t understand how we did not foresee this.

As the Endling predicted, the Song effectively stalemated the confrontation, allowing us to make our peace offering of the Endling’s serum.  Edward accepted it reticently, and upon injection, he faded quickly into the inter-zone, where he remained, unresponsive.  I worried that this would be an unwelcome warning to Halia, but she all but seized the next syringe.

I do not know how, but it seems as if she understood its function even better than the Endling.  The serum transformed her into a horrific, billowing monster.  She turned upon us, engulfing our congregation, liquefying their flesh and drinking them.  Were it not for Teach, she might have swallowed all of us.

My memory of Teach’s reaction is the haziest.  I distinctly remember him accepting the serum and injecting it.  He was…dimly resigned.  As if this end was inevitable.  But my memory of him throwing the full syringe aside and leaping to Alaric’s and Badger’s defense is equally clear.  Ultimately, the handful of us who survived, including the Endling–who now bears multiple wounds from Halia’s molluscoid barbs–owe it to Teach’s sudden and fierce resistance.

Halia escaped into the harbor.  Teach left, seemingly disgusted.  The Endling is recuperating in the inter-zone, and he has advised that I take the faithful into hiding.  It seems that our nascent temple will need to remain a cult awhile longer, though the thought fills me with despair.

The Endling is vexed but not enraged.  He says it is fitting–though he says it reluctantly–that the compass rose should have more than one direction.  I wish I understood what he means.

Journey to the Center of Society, Possible Prologue: Trade Offer

“It’s weird how few people pay attention to how many religions are essentially contractual.”

-samzdat

It was an artfully complex transaction.

The opening was typical of the diplomatic speculation that pervaded China’s Warlord Era.  So many sides, so little to agree on–supremacy is an inherently zero-sum prize and all that.

The context: Cao Kun of the Zhili had beaten back the Fengtian and consolidated power over Beijing.  Wu Peifu, Cao’s right hand, was thus mired, from the administrative discomfort of his temporary office in the capital, in the effort of helping him keep it.  This meeting was one of many seeds cast, little investments with little expectation but–Wu hoped–incredible potential.  Cao had already secured the blessing of interests from the Western nations that would soon agglomerate into “Britannia”, but today’s talk promised a more bespoke advantage.  A private citizen with an interesting personal history.  Perhaps a charismatic figurehead, a cunning informant, a diplomatic shield if it came to it.  Wu had little idea of what this man wanted, but that was not unusual.  These meetings were, by their nature, exploratory.

At this point, the prospective exchange was simple: a little of my attention for a little of yours.

He entered Wu’s office with a small retinue: a manservant and a bodyguard, putatively, themselves flanked by eight of Wu’s own soldiers.  Wu gathered that the manservant would be interpreting when the unassuming man spoke first, in accented but otherwise inoffensive Mandarin:

“Thank you for meeting with us, General.”

This was in incorrect apprehension, but Wu did not yet have reason to realize it.

The man, Richard Sterling, a Western celebrity of whom even Wu was aware, had a surprisingly direct proposal: He and Wu had a mutual interest in the eradication of the Fengtian to the north, and he claimed to have the means to execute this goal bloodlessly.  But to do this, he needed two things: He needed men and materiél to bring him close to the enemy’s seat of power unscathed, and more peculiarly, he required that a more subtle operation be completed first.

There was a soldier, he explained, under the command of the Fengtian general Feng Zongchang, known as “Tianyi”.  Tianyi was to be captured, deprogrammed, and extracted from China without Sterling’s involvement.  Wu was, of course, aware of Tianyi–the name, along with numerous revolting accounts of his crimes–had spread through the provinces bordering Manchuria.  His capture would not be a trivial task, but that didn’t much matter.  Wu’s part in the transaction had ended nearly thirty minutes prior.

It was strange, in hindsight, that all of these negotiations had proceeded–between Sterling’s English and Wu’s Mandarin–without any further need for an interpreter.  Strange for Wu, that is, but not for the meeting’s singular outside observer.

For Em, Architect of Exchange, aware by nature of every passed coin, every promissory note, every clicking bead on even the most abstractly conceptual abacus, this context had become quite common of late among the planet’s most valuable transactions.  A little of my attention for a little of yours.  No one realized that all the King in Yellow needed was your attention.  After that, he had all of you.

What was beautiful about this transaction, though, was that what was nominally being asked of Wu Peifu by the King in Yellow was in fact being asked of the King in Yellow by Dick Sterling.  It was beautiful for its intricacy.  It was beautiful for its mystery: Why would one of the King’s agents ask another agent for a favor he cannot refuse?  Why would the King grant a personal request from his thrall so clearly at odds with his agenda?  And most delightfully maddening: Why would the King expend these resources to keep Tianyi–to keep Lamont Sterling–deliberately out of his control?

Em had learned a great deal of the gods of his existence, his own creators, gods that admittedly played dice but who made up for it with a command of mathematics that seemed impenetrable–even to the economy.  He had learned more of them even than the other Architects, he was sure, which would be an unpleasant surprise for See eventually.

But the devils–the Elder–were new.  Deities much more like the ones humans fantasized.  Deities who wanted worship, even in this petty, token sense, because that’s what this was, this bargain between Dick Sterling and the King in Yellow.  Because when a god exists, worship is a transaction.  

And so it was there, in that office in Beijing, that Em first caught a glimpse of that black mirror in which, he realized, he was the reflection.