Scene Archives

wanders into his shared bedroom, stretching his arms, doing a little tip toe walk to stretch his calves, all-in-all trading speed for multitasking. Without much thought he idly removes his outer coat and drapes it on the back of one of the chairs. Similarly without thought, he’s staring through the lightly-frosted pane that has a partial view of Ripple, and also the vast sea. ‘The waves, the waves, they roll, and roll,’ he idly hums in his mind, and finding his sea legs, he lazily moves and sits on the bed. ⁂

: “Mmm…” He shouldn’t be that tired, but, he kind of is. ‘Maybe it’s just humid in here,’ he thinks, pulling at his sleeves to loose them, before grabbing at the neckline and sending the garment up and over his torso. Maybe that helped. Maybe it’s the time of day? What time even is it? Pulling all-nighters sure puts a weird spin on the concept of time. What IS time, anyway! He fights the heavy questions that threaten to send him horizontal with sheer will. But it would be really easy to just lie down… but he doesn’t give up that easily. 🙧

slips in through the door after him. “Tired, Sininen?” she says, a little playful, a little gentle. She picks up his shirt and folds it, setting it on the seat of the chair where he draped his coat.

straightens up from a humped slouch as Salme walks in. “Lil’ bit. Maybe. Too early to sleep though, isn’t it? Still a lot more daylight to use! Everyone’s up and buzzin’.”

: “Hm.” She rolls her shoulders in a shrug, tilts and stretches her neck muscles. “Nothing wrong with a midday rest, you know.” She does something complicated with the buttons of her paneled skirt and shrugs out of her own jacket, folding them and setting them on the chair along with his clothing. Then she reaches up and unfurls the complex system of ribbon across her chest, leaving her in nothing but the loose, translucent blouse that brushes against the tops her of thighs.

: “A ‘rest’, huh…?” There should be a playful edge to that, but instead it’s a considering one. “…yeah, it does.”

runs a hand through his hair. “Fishing, now midday naps? Samudra sure has a way of aging a man!”

laughs brightly. “A rest. I trust you’re strong enough to resist the temptation of my modest endowments,” she says, crawling onto the bed. “Though, first, there are a couple things I wanted to do, if you’d do me the honor of joining me?” She pats the bed next to her.

nods and scrunches his face, wordlessly saying ‘yeah that’s a good idea,’ before hopping backwards onto the bed a few times to meet her.

turns to kiss him on the mouth, firmly and thoroughly, but without any demand for more than a kiss. “You are an unparalleled genius,” she says, reaching up to cup his jaw. “Your lantern was magnificent.”

meets her with a kiss, one arm up and around one of hers, the other relaxing upon the slightly-rumpled comforter.

: “Why, thank you. You’ll be even more impressed once we accomplish the next impossible feat.”

: “I’m looking forward to it. I always am, with you.”

reaches up and starts carding her fingers through his hair. “Put your head in my lap? Let me take care of you. You’ve taken such good care of me.”

wordlessly shuffles about, complying with this very direct and welcome request. He stretches again as he lays his head on her lap, and there’s no grace to it, just full limbs extended, pointed toes (the boots came off before hopping backwards on the bed, it was magic), convex palms, the slight cracking of knuckles. He rests from the stretch, placing his hands one over another, on his chest.

runs her fingers through his hair slowly, and then with more purpose. “Did you know that I love you?” she tells him fondly. “Not even in large world-altering ways. In small, infinitesimal ones. The way your hands move. The touches of gnosis you use to make your presence more theatrical. Your clear sight. The poetry you speak with. The way your eyes crinkle at the edges.” She taps one of the crow’s feet there. “Did you know it’s such a wonder being able to love you like that? Not just like the expanse of the stars I’ve only just discovered, but like the hearthflame you keep alight at home?”

smiles, eyes twinkling even as they squint, giving her more opportunity to know the crow’s feet. “I know, but I love even more hearing it. Such that I know your way of words, of stories, and that I love hearing those, too.”

: “Well,” she parts some of his hair, and begins braiding it. “Would you like a story? I enjoy telling those, and I’ve not had as many opportunities as I’d like.”

: “Yes. Please, tell me one, Salme.” He snuggles his head a bit closer, his torso more into the bed.

: “I like being your sweet sparrow, but I also like it when you call me by my name,” she says, undoing the braid, and then doing it again. “Would you like a story about us, a story about me, a story about Almachadta, or something else? A comedy or a tragedy?”

: “I think, a… caring story. Does that narrow it down?”

laughs. “Yes. That narrows it down.”

: “The village of Kesset has two names, you know,” she begins. ⁂

: “It’s also called Irric’s Rest, but only by those who hail from Kesset, and only sometimes.” ⁂

: “There was, once, long ago a monster named Irric. He had eyes like luminous yellow moons, and long sensitive whiskers, and an intellect sharp enough to cut a fact from the heart of the world. He was a giant cat, actually. Monsters come in that shape on Almachadta, even though I’ve never met one before.” ⁂

laughs a little. “I also never questioned what a moon was; I just knew. Amazing what you take for granted when you aren’t looking directly at it, isn’t it?” ⁂

lightly chuckles, but doesn’t interrupt.

: “But. Irric was a monster, beautiful and strong, the swiftest hunter anyone had ever seen. And on Almachadta a monster is not a thing to be feared, but also to be loved. To be seen. To be understood. Or at least it always seemed that way to me.” ⁂

re-braids the section of hair, and then starts on another, enjoying the flow of it through her fingers, soft and sleek and lovely. Like silk, but better because it is a part of him. “Kesset lived within his territory, and he did not live within Kesset but he did exist beside it. And the villagers of Kesset loved him for it, even if they did not always understand him. They granted him first pick of their hunt, songs and stories in his honor, rock polished to a rainbow sheen to reflect his moonbeam eyes.” ⁂

: “And in turn Irric protected them from other monsters who found humans rather more delectable, and helped them keep the Centrelight close to their hearts during the dim seasons. To see a streak of his dark fur was to receive—not a blessing, but a reassurance.” ⁂

pauses halfway through her second braid. “I love this story, Awoken, but it is about death as much as it is about care. Is that okay?”

🙧

reaches up with a hand to rub the back of one of hers. “A story can contain multitudes. Please, go on.”

turns her hand to squeeze his in thanks, and then continues. “One season—not one day, because it took so long to notice, but one season—Irric ceased his watch. And the people of Kesset felt that keenly. Other monsters who found humans rather more delectable started moving in, and some who did not find humans delectable but liked the taste of chickens and deer also began to nibble at the edge of the territory. Things became lean, but the people of Kesset did not forget Irric. They still gave tribute. They sang even more brightly. They carved the stone quarried near their village into polished images of him, and carried him next to their hearts.” ⁂

: “And that dim season, Irric came back. But his fur was not sleek and his eyes were dimmed with pain, because he was dying.” She swiftly brushes a tear away, before continuing. “And he entered the walls of Kesset for the first time, and laid down in a place where it was green and grassy, and a decision had to be made. They could care for him—bring him the tenderest cuts of meat, brush his thin fur, file the callouses from his once-soft paw-pads—or they could protect themselves in the dim, keep their resources. Because even on Almachadta, the dim time is a hard time.” ⁂

finishes her second braid and begins the third. “I don’t know how long they deliberated. Sometimes, I like to imagine it was a hard-made decision, long debates, logistics, that sort of thing. Sometimes I like to imagine they never even thought it could be otherwise. The story has some flexibility there. What matters is that they cared for him, in the end. To the end. They sat with him, and sang to him, and brought him dried flowers and millet porridge when the meat ran out and his sharp fangs had rotted away.” ⁂

: “And when he died—for he did die, that’s the only way this story can end—he died warm and he died safe and he died loved and he whispered, on a gnosis-breath flourishing-radiant, a secret to the one who sat with him, and they told the others. It was the path to his den, you see—a cave system, filled with treasures, some of them valuable, some of them not, all of them bright and shining. It was enough to see Kesset through the dim for a decade. It was a cave system veined with the stone they now call irrica.” ⁂

: “And so. The village is called Kesset. But it is also called Irric’s Rest, and when people who are born say, ‘I’m going to Irric’s Rest’ what they mean is ‘I’m going home, where I can be cared for even if I can’t give anything back’.” 🙧

blinks, and does not bother to wipe the tear that comes from both eyes. Still, he smiles.

: “That’s.” He sniffs a little. “It’s a beautiful story. With a happy ending.”

: “Isn’t it?” she smiles down at him, and then wipes away his tear herself.

: “May I tell you another story?”

nods slightly, not wanting to displace himself. “Yes… please.”

: “There was, once, a girl from the town of Oaretsch. You wouldn’t know it. It’s on the other side of Almachadta. From Kesset, if you look up, you could maybe see it on the distant side, but you wouldn’t know it from any other place. Her name was Salme, and she was a stranger to herself.” ⁂

: “She was loved by her grandparent, who was a weaver in Oaretsch. Everyone was a weaver in Oarestsch, or a dyer, or spinner. That’s where the best thread and fabric in Almachadta comes from. She was loved by her grandparent, who raised her until they couldn’t. There were many other people who should have loved her but didn’t. However, this is a story about care, not a lack of care, so they aren’t important here.” ⁂

: “And one day, after her grandparent was long-dead, and she was a bold, sharp thirteen, she’d had enough of Oaretsch. She’d never learned her grandparent’s trade, because they’d died before she could learn. She knew a little of dyeing, a little of spinning, much of embroidery, for that’s how she started. She knew a little of everything, and none of it was enough, so she snuck aboard a wagon convoy and lived like a wild thing in the Courtyard of Almachadta for years.” ⁂

snuggles up again. This is shaping up to be a good one.

: “And then one day she met the Sword-Saint of Almachadta, whose symbol was the Sunbeam-and-Dog then. She was sixteen, and he was bright like the dappled Centrelight at midday. And he walked through the streets of the Courtyard with an easy kindness, with a hug and a kind word for everyone. And she hated that, a little. She thought it had to be an act, at least a bit.” ⁂

: “And—well, this is the bit of darkness before the big joke—but she had gotten in the habit of taking. You see, in the Courtyard, there are many children from all over Almachadta who go there to figure themselves out. They are fed and sheltered and clothed. Most of them have families waiting for them back in their villages. She didn’t, and she wanted someone to notice. So she started taking. Rings, precious stones, old tomes. Things that mattered. She kept asking to be seen, and no one saw. She gave them back, of course. She could be cruel, but she didn’t mean to be then.” ⁂

: “And then there was the Sunbeam-and-Dog Sword-Saint and his kindness and his brightness and his very special, very precious Mask. Would you like to guess what she did?” 🙧

: “Oh no…” he laughs. “She went for the mask, didn’t she? Bold girl.”

: “Oh. She stole it right off him,” she finishes the third braid, and begins on a fourth, this one intricate and four-stranded. “Did you know that there’s a blind alley right near the Palimpsest-King’s throne, and it’s a great shortcut to get to Badri’s favorite meat pie stand? And did you know, this girl from Oaretsch was very clever and very quick-fingered and, by that point, the Sunbeam-and-Dog Sword-Saint was very, very tired?” ⁂

: “And, this girl from Oaretsch, much like a certain man she loves and—really, another man she loves—had a flair for the dramatic, so when, in that blind alley, the Sunbeam-and-Dog Sword-Saint spun around, frantically searching his pockets for the Mask, she was there with it in her hand, holding it up to her face, telling him a story.” ⁂

snorts in delight. The nerve!

pauses in her braiding to lift her hand into the hand-puppet gesture and says, “There was a Sword-Saint marked by the Sunbeam-and-Dog, and he wore the Mask and made people laugh and laugh and laugh, all the while carrying a terrible, terrible secret with him. And this secret was so unspeakably awful that he’d never told another soul. It was a secret held by each Sword-Saint, and whoever wore the Mask would learn it, and it would hurt them, but they’d do the job anyway and the secret was…” ⁂

: “And then she pulled the Mask away from her face—note carefully she hadn’t yet worn it—and she said then, ‘I’ve no fucking clue.’ See. She’d gathered all that just from the expression on his face. You know, how diamonds are made by the pressure exerted by the land over thousands, millions of years? In that moment, she had seen Badri exert enough pressure to shit clear, perfect diamonds. So she guessed about the secret, just like that.” She pauses, watching his face expectantly. 🙧

laughs delightely. “Lept right into the darkness without a single thought!”

: “Other than to be true, and right, and seen.”

: “Yes,” she laughs, and then more seriously, “yes. Exactly that. And in all that chaos and all that fear, she saw a keen concern not for the Mask, but for her. And that’s when Salme of Oaretsch first loved the Sunbeam-and-Dog Sword-Saint.” She finishes the fourth braid, and laughs a little. “Though I actually meant to tell a different story. I think I started too far back and got distracted by my own mythology.”

: “Would you say… there are rules for storytelling?”

: “Hmm. Not rules. Or at least none that can’t be broken. Conventions. Expectations. Why do you ask?”

: “Then… I think, that despite that you told your story, you can still tell the other one.” He pats her on the thigh. “But I liked that one too.”

: “No wonder you fancy yourself a liar.”

laughs a little. “The first stories I ever told were lies to make the day threading looms more exciting. But this next one isn’t a lie.” She bends down and kisses his forehead.

: “Because Salme of Oaretsch because the Sparrow Sword-Saint and then she became something else entirely when she was stolen away from everything, and she met the people she’d been waiting for her entire life, and she entwined her life with all of them, but with two of them in particular, but before that. Before that. There was a wise fool who wouldn’t choose a name to go by.” ⁂

: “This was before, when she didn’t remember her own name and called herself Daina. This was before, when they had just arrived on Almachadta, and this wise fool, this waking-one, uncorked a bottle of something unimaginable and quickened a seed to life faster than it had any right to quicken.” ⁂

takes a deep breath. “This is before she loved him the way she loves him now, but when love was a possibility, a coin not yet flipped, a card not yet dealt. And she saw the seed he’d brought to life and thought—that deserves to be a whole person.” ⁂

: “And so she went to Irric’s Gove in Kesset, and spoke to Raskhendas, oak-strong Spoken-Wood, and told the story of this minor miracle, and asked for them to quicken it not just to life, but Speaking-Life, in honor of this wise fool she’d just met. And she knew Almachadta’s days were growing thin, and she hadn’t yet decided to try to stop it, but she still asked. Because even then hope beat in her heart.” ⁂

picks up his hand and kisses each knuckle carefully, thoughtfully. “I debated a long time about telling you. I didn’t want it to just be another tragedy if we failed. But.” She squeezes his hand. “But that was how you cared for me, even before you knew you were doing it.” 🙧

eyes widen in thought. “Huh… I hadn’t realized. Forgive me for not.”

: “I do hope the lil’ sprout is doing well.” He gently smiles. “I have a good feeling.”

laughs. “Why would you realize? I didn’t tell you.” She cards her fingers through his hair, undoing all the braids. “A question for you, though?”

: “I hadn’t realized how much it meant to you, in some way.”

: “Yes?”

: “I watched everything you do. I watched everyone at first, trying to fit the pieces of us all together. I liked what I saw very much.” She kisses his forehead again.⁂

: “Where, in all this mystical, liminal bullshit, does love fit in? A Sun That Loves, an all-breaker who loves us, Scholar-Professor Xie’s story about love. There is love, and there is Love. Where do you think the latter fits in?” 🙧

inhales deeply, gathering his thoughts. He taps a finger on his chest, organizing them.

slides from her sitting position, careful not to dislodge his head, to tangle her legs around his, to pillow his head on her arm, to look into his eyes and run her fingers up and down his back, to touch every part of she can with gentle, loving touch, trickling just a enough flourishing gnosis to ease any mild ache he might feel—but not to erase any mark she might have made.

: “The part from the story of Irric, towards the end, you said- ‘I don’t know how long they deliberated. Sometimes, I like to imagine it was a hard-made decision, long debates, logistics, that sort of thing. Sometimes I like to imagine they never even thought it could be otherwise.’ “

: “And this… isn’t exactly about the story, it’s about how you told it.”

: “You were telling a caring story. Both of us are pretty aware, I’d say, that if you told it as, ‘it was a hard choice, well into the dim several times over,’ it would still be a caring story, in the end.”

: “That a friction exists, but it makes no lesser of either side.”

: “That even if this story you tell would thrash and tear and scream about how horrible one aspect was, it would still be loved.”

: “It’s grace. It’s mercy. It contours, but doesn’t bend.”

: “An acceptance of joy and horror, to the person beyond.”

: “I hope that makes some kind of sense.”

: “It does.” She brushes his hair away from his face. “It makes perfect sense, actually.”

: “Accepting something, wholly and lovingly, even when a part of it might be horrible. Maybe even especially then, because if we don’t love the darkest parts of the world, who will?”

curls closer to him, pressing her forehead into the junction between his neck and shoulder, listening for his heartbeat, which she’s become adept at finding. “How else can I care for you right now, here, in this moment?”

leans into her, and his hand which caresses her moves slower, now. “Tell me… another one, about Almachadta…” His voice is lowered, faded from his usual striking tone.

pulls him closer to her, and, almost in a whisper, begins, “In Oaretsch we work cotton and flax and wool; we spin, we weave, we dye; but the reason why Oaretsch has the finest fiber-work in all of Almachadta is because there was once a clumsy weaver who asked a spider monster, rainbow-weaver, how her craft was done …”

thinks, visualizing the colors, his eyes slowly closing.

’s head slightly turns, it’s quite heavy to hold up on his own, so he’ll just… rest it against her…

’s voice rises and falls, describing green silks delicate enough to pull through two fingers held in a ring, and threads of gold like spun Centrelight, and a linen so light it floats on the air, and she keeps the descriptions going, beautiful, impossible feats of art that she only knows are real because she grew up around them, and when she hears his breathing even out into sleep, she brings her voice to a soft, low hum. She’ll tell him the rest later. And she presses herself even closer to him, so close that the distance between them might only be an illusion, and matches her breathing to his, and slowly falls asleep as well.