relia-robot

Trans married robot/doll

[Robot/doll/moth/slime/NHP]-girl. DGN-001. I like writing!

See post-cohost writing at https://reliarobot.dreamwidth.org/, on tumblr at https://www.tumblr.com/relia-robot-writes, or collected long-form pieces at https://reliarobot.itch.io/


Making-Up-Adventurers
@Making-Up-Adventurers

Slayer of the undead who treats it as simply putting restless children back to bed


caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

Eislyn rides her donkey into a small mountain town as dusk is falling.

It could be any of a thousand towns along the Great Road, lonely midway between the garrison towns. The Roads are the worldly arteries of the Throne-on-the-Water's radiant authority, the indulgent drag of a knifetip across the shivering world's skin, marking all that falls under the Throne's claiming hands — but only lightly. The killing comes before the Road does, usually; or after it.

Eislyn bows, as all must, before the Throne; but she serves another, and sets her steps to her own route.

The town shuts itself up tight, come dark. Eislyn knows fear when she sees it. Even the inn opens to her only reluctantly, eyes lingering on the signs of her servitude.

They perhaps don't see many god-touched, of her or any stripe, out here.

"You're a paladin?" the innkeeper ventures abruptly, hovering by the door after showing her to her room.

"Yes," Eislyn says, smiling softly.

"Are you here to help us?"

"The god sends my feet wandering to many places," Eislyn says. "I help where I can. What troubles you?"

She knows what. The vast immigrant labour force that digs and levels and lays the Road, shedding people at every town, mingling into the local population, their own small gods and traditions commingling with the local ones, or ground down and cast aside. The disenfranchised dead, bereft of the cultural traditions to ease them beyond, trapped, bewildered and lonely, out of reach of their appointed rest; and sure enough, the innkeeper goes paler, wider of eye, mutters reluctantly about graveyard and restless and flees.

So it goes.


Eislyn marks out a square in the dirt, under the stars, with the end of a stick, and lays out a smaller square rug within. She sets up her small brazier and kettle, lights a stick of incense, and settles herself cross-legged. She tugs the soft cone of her felt hat down a little firmer, draws the shawl tighter around her shoulders against the graveyard's chill; the cold settles into her chest quick and deep, ever since the lung-sickness.

She lets the familiar sad pang roll through her, breathes it out, and lifts her reed flute to her lips.


The one of the dead restless enough to walk is a sad, bloodless old woman. Eislyn lays down her flute and bows a little, pours cups of bark tea, kindly and firmly offers her hospitality in the name of the god.

The corpse kneels with her silently, cradling the tea, unable to remember enough to drink it.

"Show me where you should be resting," Eislyn says gently, when she finishes her own, and the woman silently, obligingly leads her across the graveyard and climbs back into the soft soil. Eislyn sets the tea and an oatcake out by the grave, plucks night-blooming flowers from around the markers and weaves a memory-knot. It's a jumble of fragments from her own people and some far afield, but it's the thought that counts.

"You're remembered, and honoured, and loved," she assures the woman. "Go, soft."

Sad, and all too common, now, for so much trouble over the want of so little.

Returning to her rug, she sits, lets her chin dip to her chest, breathes deliberately and quiets herself. If there's one walking, there's doubtless more, stirring unhappily in the ground.

Sleep comes easy. It always does, to the paladins of the Monarch of Dreams.

Beyond, the graveyard is lit by a rising spring sun, filled with butterflies. The ground is covered all over with clear, rippling water, to the depth of a finger-joint; the restless of its dead sit upon their meagre tombs, faces turned to the sky.

Eislyn finds she had dreamed a basket of oatcakes. She toes off her shoes and hikes her skirt a little, paddles through the cool of the water, giving oatcakes to each of the dead in turn, who silently take them and slink beneath the lapping wavelets.

Finally, as the water inches to ankle-deep — ever colder, and tinged dark, as if much deeper — she comes to a corner of the graveyard in which a young woman kneels on her own grave, arms stretched imploringly. Alongside, out of reach, is another — a small child, curled up, as if sleeping. Tears run endlessly from the woman's eyes, splashing into the flood around Eislyn's feet.

"Ah," Eislyn says softly. "You can't rest, and you've been sad so long, nobody else can settle. Here, now." She kneels in the water, gently lifts the still child, and presses it into the keening woman's arms. "I'm sorry there was nobody to help you sooner." She runs a hand down the cold, distinct knobs of the woman's sob-heaved spine, soothing, over and over until tears stop falling and her wailing stops, even if she shakes still, silent.

The paladin wakes, stiff and cold, in the pre-dawn light. She rolls her rug and tucks it under one arm, tips the ash from the brazier and stows the tea things inside it.

The hem of her skirt slaps against her ankles, sodden, as she walks back to the inn.


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