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/


caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

The choking dark of the miasma enfolds Eislyn, and she presses on, elbow crooked around her face in a vain attempt to shield herself from breathing the foulness. Her steps are constantly faltering, now, as her lungs heave in short, laboured pants.

Inside the black cloud, the pale ground gives way to greasy dark stone, cut slabs; and, wearily, she struggles up the face of a brooding ziggurat. This architecture she knows of old, though that was ruined by time, sand-swallowed. The entrance is at the top, for her to be swallowed by it in her turn.

This is the house and machine of the sorceror-king. This is the house and machine of his evil, his undying. Within the desert complex, there was a device, an altar, a focus; and at the heart and convergence-point of it, a human heart of solid gold. A human heart transmuted to solid gold, she now believes, possibly still within the chest of some unknown victim. He requires the same again; whatever other damage they did to his apparatus in the desert, that is key.

He requires a victim, and so a heart. And Eislyn walks into the seat of his exile from the material world, the place she unwittingly trapped him, the first living thing to come within his reach since she did so.

If she had the means to take a deep, steadying breath, no doubt she would. She makes do by hacking out a rough curse at the state of her, hauling herself up step after step, enduring. If faerie tests her still, let it test; she has sparred with her own weakness a lifetime, and cannot be surprised.

The structure's peak is sunless, smoke-blotted; she feels it falling on her skin, her hair, all around, soft as powder. It's not black after all, she discovers, watching it puff in her ragged exhalations. Of course; it's gold.

The entrance yawns; steps descend.


The entrance, when the changeling's winding way finally come across it, looks both anciently eroded and unsettlingly as if it did not become ancient here; as though it has nosed out of the burst earth of the forest, toppling and crushing trees, to open a stony way into the sorceror-king's terrible temple of self-regard.

Annen looks on it with memory's eyes, shivers, and tries to believe that it's another buried ziggurat, not the very same one they entered so long ago beneath the desert sands, somehow transposed here.

The changeling leans on a fallen stick, likewise gazing at it, and gently says, "Annen, we are going to die."

"What?" Annen says, roughened by dismays old and new. "No."

"We are three," it says, patient and clear-faced. Unsly, for once. "We two here, and Eislyn yond. And she is broken in body, I am only a small thing of faerie, and you are — brave, I'll grant you." It shakes its head. "We are three, and small, against a thing which does not die."

"No," Annen says stubbornly, sick and raw.

"It nearly killed her last time, and you never even saw it, it wasn't here. It was there — where she is now." It looks at her, clear and unruffled and unfeeling. "It waits, Annen, with power and malice and specific grudge. Do you think you are equal an immortal sorceror-king?"

Annen stares at the changeling, clenching and unclenching her hands. "I do not think I am," she says eventually, low.

"There," it says, almost kindly. "You are not. She is not. I am not. We are doomed."

"No," Annen says, in a voice that's small and hurts on its way out of her throat.

It watches her, very still. "Did she tell you she doesn't mean to die?" it says. "People tell kind lies to children."

She stares at it, and it stares at her, and finally Annen lets out a wheezing noise, and another, and then she realises she's laughing, bends and puts her hands on her knees and lets it happen, shaking until tears come to her eyes.

"You can't see me!" she says, half crowing with it. "You can't — you only know me through her, and she doesn't know me, either — no more than I know her. I was a child, aye, and so was she, and I left her. I would know her now, if she'll have it, if we have the chance, but we have lived entire lives apart! Think you I've had no adventures of my own? I've done things, I've had no paladin, I've been hero enough for myself by necessity." She strikes her chest with the heel of her fist. "Your taunts are chaff! They are nothing! You are ridiculous—" and she trails off, gradually stops laughing, and stares a little more. "These small fears of mine are ridiculous," she says softly. "And they are a child's."

The changeling smiles, alien. "We may die anyway," it says, and holds a hand out, open, in invitation. "I will never have you," it says. "But if I might beseech one kiss of your lips, to know you by? Though I cannot even promise to trade back a fair knight's lady-love from dreams, for it."

"Well, I'm no knight," Annen says, takes its hand, and presses a soft, slow, chaste kiss to its faerie lips.

"You have a sword, a lady-love stolen away, and a wicked, wicked fae," the changeling says against her mouth, smiling. "Of course you are."

Annen pulls back, takes a deep breath, and raises her chin. "Time to go die for it, then, aye?" she says, hand settled on her sword's hilt, and they walk side by side into the sorceror-king's buried manse.


In the cold stone gullet of the temple-machine, Eislyn finds slight relief from the oppressive air. The darkness twists around her, in the way dream-darkness does; even a sorceror-king cannot bend a corner of faerie entirely to his will, and darkness is an older, purer, more insidious nightmare than any man can construct. The descent wavers between cold stone stairs and crawling arcane carvings, and the primal terrors of small things: the mazelike burrow of something larger and hungry, unseen but present in the depths. Smells of soil and damp and predator musk.

This, thinks Eislyn. This is the impetus for his war on them; he has held this scrap of dreamland for all this time, but as a continuous resident, not a visitor stepping back and forth, his grip is slipping. In the way of flagstones levered apart by the persistence of green shoots, his terrors are being cracked apart by the underlying, generic and malleable forms of faerie, and dissolving into them like foam. He is losing — losing himself — slowly, and has made a gamble to instead escape that dissolution, that rendering-down to faerie-stuff.

If he fears being ended, then Eislyn can end him.

Bolstered, she steps from the bottom of the staircase into a gloom-cloaked chamber. Its extent is a dream-sketch; what's clear is only that it has a flagstone floor, a ceiling that's near and dripping damp, and that there's a dim ghost of a light ahead, a shimmer of phosphorescent water pooled underfoot.

Once again, Eislyn thinks, unsubtle; the rebellion of this realm against his presence, screaming to her the way to him, that she might do what they cannot and excise him quickly; the very geography in revolt, her way made straight and clear. She walks forward, armed with her reed flute in her hand, gleaming in her white sea-gifted armour, a paladin and a warrior, the warmth of confidence kindled in her heart.

There is a pool of softly gleaming moon-pale water in the floor, rippled by a current streaming across it, as though it were a river. It is of a clarity and speed that renders water deceptive and treacherous; perhaps waist-deep, she reckons.

On the flagstoned floor of it, surrounded by current-tugged water weed and cushioned atop a soft drift of glittering metallic sand, a body lies, pale and dead and gently smiling, brutally rent open at the breast. Gold gleams from the terrible bloodless cavity.

"No," Eislyn says, looking down at unseeing eyes that stare forever beyond the ceiling; "no!" and half-falls into the water, wading desperately, chest newly contricting with panic and pain, huff-huff-huffing barely-sustaining sips of air. Her shining armour bubbles and melts into the water; her flute is no longer at hand, forgotten.

Distance telescopes; Annen's cold dead form unreachably far away, and ever more impossibly so the further Eislyn struggles toward her. And the twin sense of the sorceror-king's evil and the terrible small-animal dread of the Eater collide abruptly in sure knowledge.

"Annen!" the paladin says, barely aspirated, lungs panic-barred; water ever-colder and deepening, footing turned sharp and treacherous and impossible to clearly see beneath millrace roil.

The sorceror-king is here.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @caffeinatedOtter's post: