This/Reapers song
Some stories end badly. Nobody goes home in the end, there are no happily ever afters, and the matter is not settled. There are loose ends everywhere, but over time people simply forget and the entire thing fades away. These stories are buried. Nobody wants to tell them. They don't seem worth remembering.
The problem is, sometimes such stories are the only ones that are worth remembering.
This is the place to be for the end of the world show.
Coraline knows it, in her heart of hearts. The throne there, the vast hall before it, the Voice speaking the interminable verdicts upon all the souls that pass through this place...
Except they are not truly his verdicts. He is, after all, only the voice of the god...
"It was like walking into someone else's story well after the fact, after everyone had failed and those who survived had already gone home, lived out their lives, and died of old age.
"It felt like trespassing on a cave-in."
Worst god in ages. So bad she got kicked out of the God Impersonation Guild. Died too much.
We are not who we were. In every moment we live, we die, and from every death we are reborn. Our existence deforms the universe, through action and response, choice and consequence. Thus is the evolution of presense, and thus we live and change.
It is believed that souls are rather akin to stars - that they are simply patterns of dust that have over time emerged to form configurations of impossible brightness, repeating themselves throughout the universe.
"Be glad it's not like the Forgotten Realms. In their version of the Underworld, there's this wall around it that's built of the tormented souls of the damned. It's pretty awful.
"At some point I told this old friend on Kanata about it and of course he had to go and build one of his own - not a real one, obviously, but a scaled-down fence contraption of ordinary wall and holographic technology. Thought it was a right lovely idea to have this screaming, writhing mass of hopeless horror around his house, apparently.
"Neighbours thought otherwise, of course, but all the city ordinances in the system couldn't convince him to take the thing down, since technically it wasn't illegal. Classified as a 'standard annoyance' and that was it. Efforts to sabotage it didn't go anywhere either."
"So what happened?"
"Three months later a horse appeared out of nowhere in his bathroom. Wouldn't move. Resisted all efforts to remove it. Animal control agreed to take a look if he turned his wall off, found it didn't seem to be a normal horse. They called in a mage, found it didn't seem to be magic, so he brought in some priests from one of the local religions, who called the God Impersonation Guild, who called me, and I told them, 'yeah? So what? Who do you think looked at it in the first place and called animal control?'
"I hadn't actually, but you should have seen the looks on their faces.
"Anyway, turned out it was just some god who'd absolutely had it with godding so for some reason he'd decided to be a horse and not move any more than the planet did. And he decided to do it in this guy's bathroom.
"We wound up just moving the entire house out from under the god, since it didn't budge even with the floor gone. Seemed like a good enough idea at the time, and the neighbours loved it since it meant Gellin would be moving too, and since we left the wall there as a sort of creepy 'don't ask' sign... well, I dunno. Entire thing certainly looks strange in the middle of the night, though, that's for sure. Floating horse, eerily glowing wall of souls...
"Mind, it was muted at this point. No more moans and pleas and screams and crap. So it wasn't even a standard annoyance anymore, just an eyesore.
"No lack of those in any modern city. 'Art.' Pfft."
People often forget that the God of Death began his divine career as the God of Practical Jokes. They especially tend to forget that he never stopped.
Sherandris, of course, remembered. He remembered most everything, at least so long as he deemed it worth remembering, and since he wasn't really sure about the bulk of it and erred on the side of caution, that really did mean everything. For the most part. There had, after all, been that time he had spent dead - he didn't really remember that, of course. But he had been dead. Perfectly excusable, and as for the Duty, the Dark Sister would surely have seen to that.
Because Sherandris was the God of Death. He was not what most people expected, of course, but by the time it mattered, it really didn't matter anymore anyway. They entered his realm, what he called his Room, in the space outside of space in the time outside of time, and everything faded away. The dead were laid out according to the customs of the soul, and he passed them on into whatever next life was appropriate. And that was that, as far as he was concerned.
This left plenty of time for meat.
Sherandris rather liked meat.
Her name was Coraline Henderson. She was the dreamer behind the masks, madwoman behind the dreams, a wanderer and tale-spinner collecting baubles of shiny words. She was, all in all, quite utterly bonkers.
And she was a librarian - in training, as well as practice.
It was just the training that was getting to her.
Coraline looked up from her books. As fascinating as the history of organisational systems was, she just couldn't keep at it any longer. She needed a breath of fresh air, but the bread was still baking.
There was a smell of something burning. It lingered and dissipated and then lingered some more until Coraline simply couldn't ignore it any longer.
She checked the oven.
Damn, she thought. So much for that plan. Add an extra teaspoon of baking powder, and apparently the pumpkin bread just overflows. A bit disappointing, really, but at least that explains what the baking powder is there for in the first place...
She closed the oven. No way were the loaves actually done at this point; that the overflow would burn is expected, but the loaves themselves still need to cook through. She glanced back at the clock - probably another 15 or so minutes - almost to the middle of the night. Doable, though. It was a holiday; no need to be up by any particular time.
And that left plenty of time to wander off task.
The burning smell was gone. The timer went off. Coraline sighed, unsure if she even wanted to know what she would find, and went to check the pumpkin bread.
Strangely enough, it was done. Toothpick came out clean, edges slightly blacked, hand mildly burned from running into the shelf when trying to get the toothpick in in the first place, and no doubt about it. Done.
She took out the loaves, considered the overflow, and then scraped it off the bottom of the oven with a pancake turner. Some of it even appeared edible, so she tried it.
Not bad, really. Now if only her fingers would quit hurting.
Still needed to get it out of the pans, but they were much too hot to handle. A perfect excuse to keep reading.
Life is not always what it seems. Seen through the eyes of sobriety, seen through the bottom of a bottle, or seen through a particularly nice batch of weed, it will seem whatever it seems. We see it as we see it, and in due time, it passes us by.
Coraline was, as was her way, entirely sober. The words which faced her were another matter; they came as if from a dream, facing the world of the living and wakeful through a haze of something indistinct, something small but monolithic, like history itself... they were, indeed, the words depicting a great and massive battle, though most would never know it from the form they took. The were the words of the Angler, the Lady of Serpents, and those all who would stand against each other amidst the world known only as the Internet.
They were, of course, only words - words to take her heart away, words of a Ravenous Thing, words of a Dark Lord, and words that, no matter what she did, would stick with her all her life. And though they were only words, they had power - so that even now she returned to them, skimming through the comments that remained, even now.
"You weren't here," he said. "But I talked to you. Isn't it wonderful to have friends? They stave off the voices that come with the solitude."
"My agreeing isn't requisite to compliance."
"There will be expectations."
"There are always expectations."
She ran her fingers across the spines, glancing over the titles on those few with labels. None stood out, in their myriad scripts, as anything worth reading, though in this place she could undoubtedly have read them all. Biographies, manuals, catalogues, legends... where was a one that had it all? Where was a one she could lose herself, with simply a few words to speak to her heart? A book with a story, a book that would be very useful...
Her fingers stopped on a spine that read simply, in flowing letters, 'A Very Useful Book'. She looked at it for a moment, then pulled it out. It was bigger than she would have expected, rather like a large textbook, but it was worth a try.
The first page was not an index. Instead it had a picture of a cat, curled up as though asleep, but with one eye open.
"Hello kitten," she said. The cat's eye closed.
She flipped through to a random page. It said:
- This is what you were looking for.
She looked around. She was essentially alone with the books. Two Keepers were in the vault as well, but they never paid her any heed but to move out of the way if she got too close. But even so, it felt claustrophobic, as though the other books were watching, waiting to see what she would do...
"Alright," she said, "then I want steel-toed fanged bunny slippers, with thick leather soles and soft interiors that I can just lose my toes in. And I want matching wrist cuff thingies with claws, because they have to have claws. And a big fuzzy hat. With fangs. And I want it all in plushy black.
"And I want a really big sword, but not too big or heavy. I need to be able to lift it and such."
The shade bowed its head and retreated into the vault. The door thudded shut before Coraline could follow.
So she waited, shuffled her feet, and then walked around the vault. There was nothing interesting there, just a few odd rubbles and a dusty dog.
A few minutes later, it returned with a large bundle and a sword and held them out to her.
"Er, thanks," Coraline said, taking them.
took these with uncertain thanks, and then shuffled off into an alley.
hefted, an
