deltawitch

Meeting on the Stairs

Ser Glorie allows herself the indulgence of a brief fragment of her usual daily routine in the absence of plotters, rises early, winds all the long way up the staircase to the ruined ballroom, and has her morning shattered. The Fool is in the pre-dawn sea air of the chamber, feet planted in the middle of the floor as though she belongs there, head cocked at its entropic splendour as if performing haruspicy on Glorie's psyche.

"Not here," Glorie says, sharper than she means to; not because she cares to hold back her tongue, but because doing so is evidence of feeling. It is already too much for the Fool to be here, to invade her, to see this. To take her quiet from her.

The Fool follows her tense turned back, perhaps expecting her to halt outside; huffs and hurries when Glorie takes immediately to the stairs.

"What is enough?" she hisses at the knight. "Thou believest! Agree they scheme and plot and mean harm! Seen thou, and stand back and allow it! Why dost prolong this?"

And Glorie halts, and looks at her, and the Fool almost steps back at the sharpness of her, the sudden sense that she walks by a blade, has walked by a blade and casually handled a blade a thousand thousand times, taking for granted that she was not cut; and now she sees the bared edge.

"I say to thee again," Glorie says, "that my function is to kill, Fool, and that requires better reason than to lacerate a hundred times twixt sunrise and nightfall, day in and out, with words. But true, thinkst could lay charge before them now, and let reaction seal their fate. Why not? Why not indeed?" and she puts the pad of her thumb on the point of the Fool's chin, and drives her back a step or two, eyes wide, so she has the wall at her back.

"Ser," the Fool says, garbled, scandalised perhaps.

"Mayhap," Glorie says, quiet but not soft, the hunting rumble of a growling beast, "provision of a bodyguard for eternity was foolish, and a Fool wise; mayhap I enjoy a threat, small as it is. See I, mayhap, the last time in all of the world's long end that I will fulfil any purpose. Think me not insensible, Fool, while thou keepst our Highness's bed and confidence, engage her wit and faculties — that I. Do. Nothing."

"Ser—"

Ser Glorie angles her thumb, to push and hold the Fool's jaw irresistably shut.

"No more words on it," the knight warns, low and dangerous, and moves down the stairs like a silent falling shadow.

Chaos and Coteries

The princess sits beneath the crown, brain full of screams and the dancing wraiths of the tower's visualisations of the instability of the Terminus, drawing on gestalt lifetimes of experience at reading the weather of reality's edge and shaping the perimeter towers' response.

It is a little like attempting to constantly direct a butterfly to flap its wings, in order to drive changes in next week's weather, in order to combat and cancel out the actions of an opponent doing likewise, into whose operations you have no insight but your own experience and intuition; and in order to maximise both, the spire holds the complete mechanised psyches of all the princess's predecessors. Unfortunately, the qualities are inseparable from the person, and so the princess is filled with a judgemental and eternity-maddened chorus of familial erinyes.

There is nothing to do but work to exhaustion in the deafening bone temple behind her eyes, sleep, and rise to work at it again. Ideally, remain sane; this is the reason, as much as anything, for the provision of knight companions for the tower-keepers.

(The Fool is an enigma; some pre-spire precursor technology, test subject or blueprint for life-extension? But attached, for whatever reason, to the spire's court for time beyond record, and so to the princess in her turn.)

It has been a very long time since the princess cared about anything outside of the spire, the work, and her court of two. But here the visitors are, with their transparent lying and their silent agenda, and it seems that having additional things to think about wakes her ability to care; and no less, it seems, her Ser knight's joi de vivre, her endless watch finally interrupted by something to consider a threat.

She could never have predicted the formation of a second coterie under these conditions, her own two companions cleaved from her and unto each other, a pair of accomplices all their own. It itches, in ways that cannot be justified.

If anything, the Fool and the knight should seek common purpose, should have intimacy of their own, deserve joy of each other. She merely fears how little space there might prove to be in such a rearrangement of their dynamic, for either of them to care for her; and she has grown accustomed to the salvation of Ser Glorie's proxied affection via the Fool's own hands.

Sane, ideally; but she knows not how long she can persist, if they forget her for each other.

Strong desire to pin that "spend four hours proofreading a two-line comment" post, set my avatar to a screenshot of the post, reforge my gender around the post, and encase myself in a chrysalis only to emerge fully-formed as the post.

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A cloaked and hooded figure limped through the summer downpour. Its haggard breathing forced it to stop every dozen steps, but it kept pressing onwards. A painted sign, faded and cracked, swung over its head, bearing what was once a white heron struck through with a spear.

The figure struggled onwards, towards a large building in the distance. It stumbled, once. It took a long time to get back up.

The rain washed away a dark red stain from the place where it had fallen.