RE: Petty Squabble [ROUND 3] [Goldhenge]
06-25-2013, 08:53 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-11-2013, 07:36 PM by Elpie.)
Goldhenge was the sort of place where an awful lot of time has passed.
Throw a dart at a humanoid civilization anywhere in the multiverse and, on the mean, it’ll have developed agriculture about fourteen thousand harvests ago. Too much later and they’ll either have destroyed themselves or evolved into something fantastic and unrecognizable. Too much earlier and they’ll start worshipping the dart.
Outliers to this rule, of course, abound. There are, albeit rarely, societies that go on more-or-less interminably, usually having cheated their way out of the process of history altogether--which, some might argue, is just another definition of apocalypse. Somewhat more common are worlds in which a certain brand of well-meaning but paternalistic heroism serves as a cooling agent for process and gives an otherwise-transitory status quo the power to outrun history for eons.
Goldhenge resided in one of those worlds. The same mentality by which a mountain range is defined not by the vast troves of natural resources within but by how darned difficult it is to get over them allows history to clutter up like cobwebs in a basement. A couple hundred thousand years ago there may not have been a giant golden space relic squatting in the middle of Goldhenge, but there was still a Goldhenge under another name, and that name is probably still even written down in a library somewhere.
It’s an awfully boring place to be an immortal.
The Spooky Forest Coven, all three having millennia ago cast off their increasingly run-down and desecrated female bodies, gathered on the road into Goldhenge at the stroke of midnight. The edge of the forest wasn’t quite a crossroads, the proper crossroads being in the middle of town and therefore inaccessible to all but the most discrete forces of darkness, but it was a threshold, as was the hour, and that would suffice.
“When ---- meet --- again?” asked the first, her voice manifest as a chill yet flammable whisper. To clarify: the three “gathered” in a probability-distribution sense; no longer the ectoplasmic silhouettes of their former mortality-suits in which aspect they’d spent their unyouth, they had diffused into so much spellstuff, the haunt that hung over the forest itself. The scheduling of their next confluence, which formerly had served as the invocation of a literary tradition in order to draw upon its powers, was now necessary to remind them that time was still passing and that they were still three distinct consciousnesses.
The answer from the second witch came unexpected. “Never --- again ----- an End of Things --- that --- asleep ---- awaken.”
And the third, accusatory: “Liar ---- No end ---- have walked ----- a futurewalk … ----- all roads --- sleep eternal.”
“No lies ---- the future --- off the road. -------- ----- ------ --- ----- - Dream ---.“
“Truth or lie---“ suggested the first witch; “----- commonality; -- Summoning ---- Corpse-Duke”
“ ---- Plague-That-Walks ---“
“Meat-trash.” This last with a snide yawning of the earth and the breaking of an urn in a sand-covered tomb somewhere, spilling a heap of dried organs to the floor. The overall effect: contempt. “Nevertheless ---- will aid – preparations.”
Narrowing their omni-directional evil “eyes” in the direction of the sky, the three witches whipped up a thunderstorm, if for no other reason than to provide cover for their more traditionally wyrd activities. Unobserved, bodies began to fall from the sky.
First and centrally, the he-goat, pre-decapitated, its entrails spilling themselves into runic spirals. Then the human bodies, borrowed mostly from Goldhengian teenagers who had come to the woods seeking a little privacy May Day last. (The second-most-beautiful having been permitted to survive as per courtesy, and now living out her days ungratefully in the village). Around the goat the witches arranged those parts of the corpses which would be most pleasing to their flesh-inclined cousin—his arms, her legs, a buffet of genitals to choose from, none of their hearts.
A rumble of thunder to hide, from prying ears, the secret words that would bring him forth.
And when it was done he stood among them, new hairs bristling, new body quaking—naked, male yet female yet neither masculine nor yet feminine, now goat-headed yet now human albeit horned yet now handsome albeit pale. And yet now clad in all black yet naked all the same in its pride and lustfulness.
“He is come ----“ ~the second witch, ominous restatement of the obvious masking a spiteful assignation of sex.
The Corpse-Duke.
Plague-That-Walks.
Meat-Trash.
And more recognizably Vampire or something phonetically close to that, lying amidst the thousands of names he had accrued in his eons of existence. The names sat uncomfortably upon him in situations such as this when he had not the power to name himself nor even to decide upon his own body, it being forced upon him by the tri-woman. “Yes sister,” he said coolly (and yet bleated shrilly!). “I ‘am come.’”
The alliance was an uneasy one. Two different philosophies of undeath were at play here—the witches increasingly ethereal, abstract, seeking to become one with fate and with the magic they once wielded; the hemo-hedonist taking death as a sort of hyper-life, re-experiencing the pleasures of the flesh unshackled by the concerns and limitations of his former aliveness.
“But why,” he asked, “Am I come now? Why this night?”
The common thread linking them was that old chestnut of the Curse of Immortality and the attendant utter boredom. The borders of the witches’ haunting grounds have been unchanged since the drawing of old maps that have since crumbled into dust. The heliophobe had for centuries merely been affecting his rapture at the predictable degradation and endlessly iterative wars and sufferings of the world. Each successive reincarnation was a begrudging necessity preferable only to the alternative, like crawling out of bed at breakfast time.
“-----portent---“ offered one of the witches, weakly.
“The hour--- release ----- is come –”
“A lot of that going around, I hear,” snapped the sanguiholic over the thunder, upset at his interlocutors' vagueness. As much as he trusted their senses—they felt what the forest felt, a sap-slow all-perception with a canopy branching out into the future as its roots drink deep from the past—he would have preferred something to have already happened, some concrete evidence he could sink his teeth into.
“Infinity ---- breaking forth --- future humming -------------- ----”
“-The town-“
“----The town--“
“The town, right.” Looking over in the direction of the monument. “Still the same town? Goldhenge?”
“Goldhenge---- a battlefield ----“
“ -------Cosmic crossroads -- third of fourth of third---“
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t function in this conversation as it stands. Pull yourselves together.”
A pulling back of the wind, as a sigh. The clouds lifted slightly, revealing a winking facet of a starlit midnight.
And eventually choked out, “---He-is-come-unto-them-and-they-are-come-unto-us------“
The vampire groaned. “I’ll go check it out,” he decreed, pulling a swath of darkness out of the obscurement and donning it, loosely enrobing (and yet!) lasciviously clinging. “Let me know if the future decides to sober up and explain itself.”
Somewhere on the way into town the night swallowed him, or vice versa, and even the witches could not locate him.
* * * * *
”Well, isn’t this your lucky day?” exclaimed the innkeep, digging through a shelf full of keys. Alison looked away hurriedly. “As it happens I have two rooms, adjacent, vacant, fully paid for.”
Dad breathed a sigh of relief. He was doing his best to keep the family together and not to mention the fact that Nansomeone else had died. The strain made him look old, which made Alison feel old.
“Queer story,” said the innkeep, leaning in conspiratorially. Alison had fallen asleep during the Lord of the Rings but understood that this guy was a walking cliché—fat, mustached, cheerful, gossipy. She didn’t like him. “We had a family living there, nice folks, foreign, like yourself (if you don’t mind my inference), but friendly, money good, took three rooms, paid for a month. Now, just before dawn last night, stranger comes by, young, suave type. Fella has both keys, says the family left unexpectedly and left him to return them, pays down a third room. Suspicious, you ask me, but it’s not my place to turn paid custom away, nor to ask about his business, nor, here’s where you come in, to charge twice for rooms been paid for the balance of the month.
“Now for safety’s sake I’d advise you not to let the little ones wander alone while that fella’s in, which he has been all day, in his room that is, which is that adjacent to yours, there.”
“They’ll be staying in their room,” said Mom threateningly, glancing in Alison’s direction. “Taking care of the baby. Thanks for the rooms. We’re new here, with no way to pay our way until Thomas here finds work.” The lie, and even the subtle adaptation to the local way of speaking, came to Mom effortlessly. Alison had to admit to herself that she was impressed. She knew that her parents lied to her constantly, but had never caught them out doing it to somebody else. Dad, who had never come ahead in a game of poker in his life, stayed silent.
“After that can we go to Wizard Castle?” demanded Ethan.
“By lord, you are new, aren’t you, child?” The innkeep leaned over the counter towards Ethan, the ends of his mustache dangling absurdly. “No one goes to Wizard Castle ‘less he wants to come out turned into a toad, or something uglier still—“
“Cool!”
The innkeep realized his mistake and whispered apologetically to Mom and Dad, “Uglier along the lines of a corpse.”
“Like a zombie?” Ethan’s devilish hearing, which could demonstrably penetrate all the way down the hall to eavesdrop on Alison’s murmured conversations on the cordless phone, easily decoded the innkeep’s grumble. “Awesome!”
Alison slapped her brother just lightly enough on the back of the head that Dad would decline to reproach her for it in public. He stopped talking. Alison smiled for the first time since getting to this town, feeling that she had been helpful.
Mom and Dad took the room closer to the guy the innkeep had warned her about, and gathered the family in Alison and Ethan’s room. The room wasn’t as bad as she’d been imagining—no spiders, anyway. Dad put the key in her hand and closed it into a fist, as though the wind would blow it away. “This key is a big responsibility,” he told her. “And it is not an invitation to go outside. This place could be dangerous.”
“So why do you have to go?” asked Alison.
“I need to get a job,” said Dad, grinning a bit at the normalcy of that statement. “And find Parsley, if I can.”
“Why do you need a job?” She was somewhat self-aware that she was playing the why game here, an age-old tactic for deconstructing parental irrationality. It wasn’t what her parents needed right now, but she couldn’t be expected to play the good daughter forever, could she?
“Well, that’s the only way to make money,” answered Dad, pretending as if that had been the question. “And making money is the only way to feed this family.”
“We’ll find food,” assured Alison. “It’ll come to us. Things will work out without us having to go out there. It’s—“ Realizing how close she was coming to a confession, she changed the subject. “Anyway, someone will probably die again before you have time to get paid, and then we’ll go somewhere else.”
Dad soured, grabbing Alison’s arm. “Hey! You do not talk like that!” Seeing the alarm on Alison’s face, he softened, took a few deep breaths, and moved his hand up to her shoulder. “No one’s going to die,” he said, slowly, as if the weight of the intonation would add truth to the statement. “I promise. We’re staying here for now, and we’ll figure out a way to get home. I’m sure of it.”
Alison knew it was the last thing she ought to say, but she did anyway: “Why?”
Throw a dart at a humanoid civilization anywhere in the multiverse and, on the mean, it’ll have developed agriculture about fourteen thousand harvests ago. Too much later and they’ll either have destroyed themselves or evolved into something fantastic and unrecognizable. Too much earlier and they’ll start worshipping the dart.
Outliers to this rule, of course, abound. There are, albeit rarely, societies that go on more-or-less interminably, usually having cheated their way out of the process of history altogether--which, some might argue, is just another definition of apocalypse. Somewhat more common are worlds in which a certain brand of well-meaning but paternalistic heroism serves as a cooling agent for process and gives an otherwise-transitory status quo the power to outrun history for eons.
Goldhenge resided in one of those worlds. The same mentality by which a mountain range is defined not by the vast troves of natural resources within but by how darned difficult it is to get over them allows history to clutter up like cobwebs in a basement. A couple hundred thousand years ago there may not have been a giant golden space relic squatting in the middle of Goldhenge, but there was still a Goldhenge under another name, and that name is probably still even written down in a library somewhere.
It’s an awfully boring place to be an immortal.
The Spooky Forest Coven, all three having millennia ago cast off their increasingly run-down and desecrated female bodies, gathered on the road into Goldhenge at the stroke of midnight. The edge of the forest wasn’t quite a crossroads, the proper crossroads being in the middle of town and therefore inaccessible to all but the most discrete forces of darkness, but it was a threshold, as was the hour, and that would suffice.
“When ---- meet --- again?” asked the first, her voice manifest as a chill yet flammable whisper. To clarify: the three “gathered” in a probability-distribution sense; no longer the ectoplasmic silhouettes of their former mortality-suits in which aspect they’d spent their unyouth, they had diffused into so much spellstuff, the haunt that hung over the forest itself. The scheduling of their next confluence, which formerly had served as the invocation of a literary tradition in order to draw upon its powers, was now necessary to remind them that time was still passing and that they were still three distinct consciousnesses.
The answer from the second witch came unexpected. “Never --- again ----- an End of Things --- that --- asleep ---- awaken.”
And the third, accusatory: “Liar ---- No end ---- have walked ----- a futurewalk … ----- all roads --- sleep eternal.”
“No lies ---- the future --- off the road. -------- ----- ------ --- ----- - Dream ---.“
“Truth or lie---“ suggested the first witch; “----- commonality; -- Summoning ---- Corpse-Duke”
“ ---- Plague-That-Walks ---“
“Meat-trash.” This last with a snide yawning of the earth and the breaking of an urn in a sand-covered tomb somewhere, spilling a heap of dried organs to the floor. The overall effect: contempt. “Nevertheless ---- will aid – preparations.”
Narrowing their omni-directional evil “eyes” in the direction of the sky, the three witches whipped up a thunderstorm, if for no other reason than to provide cover for their more traditionally wyrd activities. Unobserved, bodies began to fall from the sky.
First and centrally, the he-goat, pre-decapitated, its entrails spilling themselves into runic spirals. Then the human bodies, borrowed mostly from Goldhengian teenagers who had come to the woods seeking a little privacy May Day last. (The second-most-beautiful having been permitted to survive as per courtesy, and now living out her days ungratefully in the village). Around the goat the witches arranged those parts of the corpses which would be most pleasing to their flesh-inclined cousin—his arms, her legs, a buffet of genitals to choose from, none of their hearts.
A rumble of thunder to hide, from prying ears, the secret words that would bring him forth.
And when it was done he stood among them, new hairs bristling, new body quaking—naked, male yet female yet neither masculine nor yet feminine, now goat-headed yet now human albeit horned yet now handsome albeit pale. And yet now clad in all black yet naked all the same in its pride and lustfulness.
“He is come ----“ ~the second witch, ominous restatement of the obvious masking a spiteful assignation of sex.
The Corpse-Duke.
Plague-That-Walks.
Meat-Trash.
And more recognizably Vampire or something phonetically close to that, lying amidst the thousands of names he had accrued in his eons of existence. The names sat uncomfortably upon him in situations such as this when he had not the power to name himself nor even to decide upon his own body, it being forced upon him by the tri-woman. “Yes sister,” he said coolly (and yet bleated shrilly!). “I ‘am come.’”
The alliance was an uneasy one. Two different philosophies of undeath were at play here—the witches increasingly ethereal, abstract, seeking to become one with fate and with the magic they once wielded; the hemo-hedonist taking death as a sort of hyper-life, re-experiencing the pleasures of the flesh unshackled by the concerns and limitations of his former aliveness.
“But why,” he asked, “Am I come now? Why this night?”
The common thread linking them was that old chestnut of the Curse of Immortality and the attendant utter boredom. The borders of the witches’ haunting grounds have been unchanged since the drawing of old maps that have since crumbled into dust. The heliophobe had for centuries merely been affecting his rapture at the predictable degradation and endlessly iterative wars and sufferings of the world. Each successive reincarnation was a begrudging necessity preferable only to the alternative, like crawling out of bed at breakfast time.
“-----portent---“ offered one of the witches, weakly.
“The hour--- release ----- is come –”
“A lot of that going around, I hear,” snapped the sanguiholic over the thunder, upset at his interlocutors' vagueness. As much as he trusted their senses—they felt what the forest felt, a sap-slow all-perception with a canopy branching out into the future as its roots drink deep from the past—he would have preferred something to have already happened, some concrete evidence he could sink his teeth into.
“Infinity ---- breaking forth --- future humming -------------- ----”
“-The town-“
“----The town--“
“The town, right.” Looking over in the direction of the monument. “Still the same town? Goldhenge?”
“Goldhenge---- a battlefield ----“
“ -------Cosmic crossroads -- third of fourth of third---“
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t function in this conversation as it stands. Pull yourselves together.”
A pulling back of the wind, as a sigh. The clouds lifted slightly, revealing a winking facet of a starlit midnight.
And eventually choked out, “---He-is-come-unto-them-and-they-are-come-unto-us------“
The vampire groaned. “I’ll go check it out,” he decreed, pulling a swath of darkness out of the obscurement and donning it, loosely enrobing (and yet!) lasciviously clinging. “Let me know if the future decides to sober up and explain itself.”
Somewhere on the way into town the night swallowed him, or vice versa, and even the witches could not locate him.
* * * * *
”Well, isn’t this your lucky day?” exclaimed the innkeep, digging through a shelf full of keys. Alison looked away hurriedly. “As it happens I have two rooms, adjacent, vacant, fully paid for.”
Dad breathed a sigh of relief. He was doing his best to keep the family together and not to mention the fact that Nansomeone else had died. The strain made him look old, which made Alison feel old.
“Queer story,” said the innkeep, leaning in conspiratorially. Alison had fallen asleep during the Lord of the Rings but understood that this guy was a walking cliché—fat, mustached, cheerful, gossipy. She didn’t like him. “We had a family living there, nice folks, foreign, like yourself (if you don’t mind my inference), but friendly, money good, took three rooms, paid for a month. Now, just before dawn last night, stranger comes by, young, suave type. Fella has both keys, says the family left unexpectedly and left him to return them, pays down a third room. Suspicious, you ask me, but it’s not my place to turn paid custom away, nor to ask about his business, nor, here’s where you come in, to charge twice for rooms been paid for the balance of the month.
“Now for safety’s sake I’d advise you not to let the little ones wander alone while that fella’s in, which he has been all day, in his room that is, which is that adjacent to yours, there.”
“They’ll be staying in their room,” said Mom threateningly, glancing in Alison’s direction. “Taking care of the baby. Thanks for the rooms. We’re new here, with no way to pay our way until Thomas here finds work.” The lie, and even the subtle adaptation to the local way of speaking, came to Mom effortlessly. Alison had to admit to herself that she was impressed. She knew that her parents lied to her constantly, but had never caught them out doing it to somebody else. Dad, who had never come ahead in a game of poker in his life, stayed silent.
“After that can we go to Wizard Castle?” demanded Ethan.
“By lord, you are new, aren’t you, child?” The innkeep leaned over the counter towards Ethan, the ends of his mustache dangling absurdly. “No one goes to Wizard Castle ‘less he wants to come out turned into a toad, or something uglier still—“
“Cool!”
The innkeep realized his mistake and whispered apologetically to Mom and Dad, “Uglier along the lines of a corpse.”
“Like a zombie?” Ethan’s devilish hearing, which could demonstrably penetrate all the way down the hall to eavesdrop on Alison’s murmured conversations on the cordless phone, easily decoded the innkeep’s grumble. “Awesome!”
Alison slapped her brother just lightly enough on the back of the head that Dad would decline to reproach her for it in public. He stopped talking. Alison smiled for the first time since getting to this town, feeling that she had been helpful.
Mom and Dad took the room closer to the guy the innkeep had warned her about, and gathered the family in Alison and Ethan’s room. The room wasn’t as bad as she’d been imagining—no spiders, anyway. Dad put the key in her hand and closed it into a fist, as though the wind would blow it away. “This key is a big responsibility,” he told her. “And it is not an invitation to go outside. This place could be dangerous.”
“So why do you have to go?” asked Alison.
“I need to get a job,” said Dad, grinning a bit at the normalcy of that statement. “And find Parsley, if I can.”
“Why do you need a job?” She was somewhat self-aware that she was playing the why game here, an age-old tactic for deconstructing parental irrationality. It wasn’t what her parents needed right now, but she couldn’t be expected to play the good daughter forever, could she?
“Well, that’s the only way to make money,” answered Dad, pretending as if that had been the question. “And making money is the only way to feed this family.”
“We’ll find food,” assured Alison. “It’ll come to us. Things will work out without us having to go out there. It’s—“ Realizing how close she was coming to a confession, she changed the subject. “Anyway, someone will probably die again before you have time to get paid, and then we’ll go somewhere else.”
Dad soured, grabbing Alison’s arm. “Hey! You do not talk like that!” Seeing the alarm on Alison’s face, he softened, took a few deep breaths, and moved his hand up to her shoulder. “No one’s going to die,” he said, slowly, as if the weight of the intonation would add truth to the statement. “I promise. We’re staying here for now, and we’ll figure out a way to get home. I’m sure of it.”
Alison knew it was the last thing she ought to say, but she did anyway: “Why?”