This/Survivors song
Space, of course, is very vast. Most folks know nothing of it; only on the larger worlds, where there has been more time, and more science, and more madness and depression, is anything indeed known of space.
And that is really not very much, generally speaking.
Coraline knew a bit. A thing or two. Enough to say with a fair amount of certainty that a star is indeed a star and a world is indeed a world. But that really wasn't her field of expertise. Books were.
They called her the Librarian, and librarian she was. Degree in information technologies, truck full of books, and seven cats rendered her very much a librarian of lore, and she knew exactly what was where and where was what. It was her job, and it was who she was.
At least part of who she was.
There was, of course, a good deal more to it.
Coraline awoke face-down in the dirt. Not sure where she was, what was real, or even, for that matter, what had happened, she rolled over and peered into the early-dawn light.
It looked like winter probably looked in a much more moderate climate, namely pretty much anywhere on her world further south than where she was from. But this wasn't her world, was it? If it were, why would she be further south?
Even so, the dreary light looked dreadfully normal, and the pain in her head and general whinging of her sore muscles seemed pretty insistent that there was absolutely nothing supernatural going on here - probably just a particularly bad hangover or something? And the whole conversation, the whole night before that you remember, why, that was probably just a dream...
Probably? So where the hell was she, then?
She sat up and looked around more carefully. She was sitting by a small creek, almost frozen over, with leafless trees lining the banks and brown grass and curled leaves all around. A light frost glittered on the edges. Her staff - the staff Sheradris had given her - was a couple meters away in some dead-looking shrubs, so clearly that much wasn't a dream. And dead-looking... the proliferation of twiggage suggested that it was definitely not actually dead, just waiting. Winter. Probably.
So it was real. This wasn't her world. She didn't know what it was, or if it even had winters, but supposing it did, this would probably be it. Right? Maybe. Sure. Why not.
She got up, despite the protestations of her back and legs, and picked up the staff. Here she was, then, wherever here was. Time to see what there is to see...
It began as a whispering. Something almost, but not entirely, out of sight, out of sound, and out of mind. A shadow of a shadow, except heard, not seen. Whispers at the edge of hearing, and even, as it were, the edge of thought.
She did not even notice them at first. Occasionally they would sneak in even without her noticing, but then as the hours and days went on, they became more insistent, more pressing, until there was nothing to do but listen.
Then they came as an onslaught. When she noticed, she noticed, and then there was simply nothing to do but notice. The voices poured in, beckoning, begging, screaming, asking, crying, shouting, an endless roar of a whisper, the torment of a thousand waves all crashing at once. And she heard them all so clearly, so plainly,
There was no escape, no solace from the torment, simply more, and more, and more. She lost herself in it, lost track of her surroundings, her intent, and everything she was after and was. There was only room for voices, voices, voices. Speaking out of the shadows, never-ending.
She stumbled and continued, lost in the depths of her mind, realing in the voices never-ending.
If only there were silence amidst the madness. But there was none; there was only madness and more madness, voices, and no silence.
Only voices, and shouting, and clamouring, and no silence amidst the voices, only more shouting and crying and pleading.
There was only the din, the overbearing loudness, the reverberation and roar and the place, the place that was all the same, the place that was all sound and no silence.
If there were sound and also silence, a respite, a sanctuary against the sound.
If there were the silence only distance, alone, without the sound, the sound of the voices, thousands, tens of thousands, never stopping, never ending...
But there was no silence.
Coraline wandered on, lost amidst the madness of the roar within her mind.
She knew nothing. She was no-one. The wind. A whisper and a shadow.
The world was not real.
Others passed her by, but they paid no head. They were not real, and nor was she. Only the voices stood out, in their shout and their roar and their reverberation against the shadowy, flimsy backdrop of the world she saw with eyes. It was nothing.
Only the rock and the shadow, washed by the whirl of voices, so many souls that passed through, so many voices, shouting, shouting, always shouting and never heard. They were meaningless, and still they shouted, because they did not know, they could never know, but they were only the cicada, they were only the whisper, and yet they whispered on.
Whisper and whisper, shout and shout, question and question. The cacophany was never-ending, and yet all were lost within. No single soul stood out, no single voice was heard, only the masses, the unending masses, coming and coming. It was all. It was everything. Voices.
Only voices. No end to the voices, just voices shouting, voices pleading, voices lost without even hope to carry them on, but still echoing even now, for there was no hope here, only nothing, only echos, always echoes. This was the place of echos, where echoes were only all. Only echos. Nelanor. Echos.
They pleaded, the echos. They called. They whispered secrets and shouted legends, for it was all they knew, and amongst the echos there was nothing, only nothing. If only there were something amidst the nothing, no abyss, no great shadow, no deep darkess that loiters below, only something, a shadow of the world, but something, then. Something to support the voices, the echos the shadows.
But there is only nothing.
She realised she was in a place. She didn't know how she had gotten there, or what she was doing there, or even, for that matter, much of anything at all, but this was a place. Some of the whispers had mentioned places, but as they whispered on, the places faded.
Everything faded. Everything was lost in the whispers, in the shouting, in the din.
There was a cup in front of her. Someone said, quieter and yet somehow louder than all of the others, "You look like you could use some shalott."
She looked at it. Rock, part of her though, staring at it, and then, before she knew what she was doing, that part of her drank it. Amidst the voices she didn't really notice. There was nothing to notice.
It was later. It was clearly later.
And there was only silence.
Nelanor looked up. "It is what the thunder said," she said.
"Sorry?" the barkeep asked.
She was in a bar. It was clearly a bar, though like none she had ever seen before. There were no taps and no vast assortment of myriad bottles such as marked the bars she knew, but there was the bar itself. It was very clearly a bar, long and wodden and polished, and the barman behind with apron and bottles and barrels, ready to pour whatever, so long as he had it, to whoever, so long as he could pay for it.
There was also no lighting in the rest of the room, as far as she could tell, The patrons drank in smoke and gloom, coming forth, perhaps, only as often as they had to. And here, at the bar, there were only the three lanterns. Kerosene, if she had to guess, and no apperture for anything better. This was all they had. They made do, though. People did, when it was as far as they had come, and indeed they were proud of it. They had come this far, after all. They had achieved real lanterns, right?
Or something along those lines. She wasn't sure what was going on, or how she had gotten here. There was, however, another mug in front of her. Had she already had one? It was hard to say.
For lack of a better idea she drank it.
For the first time in she didn't know how long, Coraline Henderson was thinking clearly. At least relatively so. She was also, from the feel of it, pretty decently drunk.
Even so, she had to make sure. "I think," Coraline said, preventing the barkeep from refilling her drink, "we should hold off for the time being. There's something I want to try."
The barkeep eyed her suspiciously.
"How long does this tend to take to wear off?"
"Hour or two, I suppose, amount you had."
"Then we'll wait an hour or two," she said. "Then, if I'm right, I'll need you to refill this." It was a gamble. Problem was, if she was right, the voices would come back. She could remember them vaguely, not like something real, but like something horrible. She was good at horrible. Sometimes she was better at horrible than she was at real.
And if she was wrong, then... what? She really had no idea.
Uh.
There seemed to be nothing for it but to wait, and to hope that if worst came to worst, that she would actually drink whatever the barkeep provided...
Coraline woke up one morning, walked into her pub, and was immediately surprised to find that it was indeed a pub and not a library, though really the only significant difference in practice is that libraries tend to be more dangerous. Even without wheels.
So it was going to be one of those days, was it? Fine, then.
This was, after all, very much her pub. The counter gleamed because she made it gleam; the busboy scurried because she made him scurry; the shelves were full because she kept them full. So she didn't know all the mixes by heart; if someone wanted something special, they could either tell her what to do or suffer. She knew enough. The basics, at any rate. The usuals.
And she knew breakfast. Breakfast was what she had for lunch, and it usually involved an egg, some toast, a whop of coffee, and more brandy than she was likely to admit, and this she made now, munching her toast as one of the overnights came down burdened with a hangover. Wordlessly she passed him a coffee and moved onto a vague cleaning of a random glass. Barkeeps were always cleaning a random glass when someone else was around, so she did this too.
The overnight stared glumly at his coffee, disinclined to move.
"Drink it," she said. "It'll help." Not that she'd know. She had never had a hangover in her life. The odd headache waking up, yes, but when it was solved so simply as by drinking a glass of water, that hardly counted as a hangover, so far as Coraline was concerned. Hangovers were something else, something more mysterious, involving the aftereffects of alcohol killing various parts of the body, most assuredly. But these were the remedies, and so she administered them, good barkeep and innkeep that she was. Shuffled those too drunk into rooms for the night, administered to the hangovers in the morning, and wandered off into the day that was the afternoon.
It was a life, of sorts, though not what she would ever have expected. Coraline was a librarian in her heart of hearts, and she had trained to be a librarian. She even had a piece of paper attesting to this, though it was in another world in another language, where everyone had probably assumed her missing, and then, as the months and years went by, probably assumed her dead. But this wasn't that world; here words were precious, and libraries were rare, and trucks were at best a distant dream, so here she did what had a market, and that was booze. It was really the same sort of thing, just liquids instead of words. Strange that either one could be so very effective at passing others into the worlds of dreams, but that suited her fine.
"Seriously, drink it," she said.
The guy, dressed in the typical rural attire of the area, stared at his coffee as though it were some strange and foreign potion, then downed it in three solid gulps.
Well, that'll do it, Coraline thought, absently wiping a random glass mug.
He stared at his own empty mug.
He seemed to stop.
Then he startled, twitched, stood up suddenly, and fell over.
Coraline peered over the counter, somewhat worried about what she'd find, but the guy was already getting up. He shrugged himself off, looked at her suspiciously, and then asked, quietly, "Er, how much will that be?"
"Eight cela, including room and board. Breakfast is also on, if you want it."
"Er," he said, passing her the coins, "What's breakfast?"
"I made toast." Coraline was not known for her culinary expertise, something about how she usually didn't bother since the ingredients on hand around here tended to be absolutely worthless anyway.
"Okay," he said.
Wordlessly she passed him a piece of toast. He wandered out, munching.
Some life, but it was a life, and a fairly stable one. Even the voices were passably quiet now, since so long as she kept at the booze they just faded to the general buzz of the background. And there was no lack of booze here. No lack at all.
She leaned on the counter. Some life, but she was alive, and that was what mattered. She had, after all, promised that.
Three hundred years ago, Coraline Henderson, then going by the name Anja Torn, had been a regular customer at the Empty Cistern, even then one of the oldest taverns in the city.
It wasn't that the place was close to where she was staying (because it wasn't), it wasn't because it had good service (because it really didn't), it wasn't because the clientelle were respectable (if anything they were the opposite), and it wasn't because the booze was good, although it actually was most of the time. The reason she went here because because nobody cared - eveyrone here was here because nobody cared; nobody cared about the law, or about propriety, or about anyone else's business. People came, they went, and they got, if not exactly discretion, a good heaping dose of apathy.
So Coraline got no trouble here walking in dressed like an acolyte of Kyrule and ordering a triple-dose of 20-stone shalott, even though it was well-known that the acolytes were not permitted alcohol. Indeed, it seemed some of the temple's higher-ups had a made a point of visiting all the bars in town to let them know, just to be clear, but they would have skipped this one.
She got the same trouble as everyone else, of course. The general suspicion, shifty-eyed watching as she passed, the curiosity of what might be wrong with her that was gone as soon as she was, but that was really it. All in all, the Cistern of the time was the sort of place where the more normal you looked, the better off you were - if you looked normal, people had to guess, and the imagination often filled in far worse nightmares than reality ever could. And aside from the robes, Coraline looked pretty normal.
The only real trouble had come the first night she was there, or might have had she responded differently.
She had been sitting at the bar minding her shalott, wondering vaguely how drunk she could safely get and still maintain her cover, when someone sat down next to her and said, "Hey, you going to stop that?"
Not even sure what she should be stopping, she looked around. Turned out someone had died, something which often happened there - a body was slumped over a table and it sounded like people were bidding.
She took this in and just said, "I don't want him."
Somehow that settled it. The guy grinned gappily at her, slapped her on the shoulder, and left. This was the nature of the place, lawless, godless, and ruled only by the order of commerce, of what people wanted. And if someone died, that was valuable.
Of course, had she really been an acolyte of Kyrule and not just posing as one, that could have presented something of a problem. The religion was very much against the mistreatement of the dead, and selling bodies very much qualified as mistreatment in their book. But she wasn't one, and in her somewhat more practical view of things, the dead were already dead. They weren't apt to care.
Nor was anyone else, there. And so, during her stay in the city of Soransie, she came to frequent the place.
"I have spoken and that is final. Shut up leave me alone I'm drinking."
Basic Necromancy was at four. It covered the general theories, and would begin practical studies in reanimation in the next few weeks. Coraline was good at theories, but the reanimation part worried her. It sounded suspiciously like magic, and she had no idea if she could actually do magic.
Not normal magic, at any rate.
"It's not that I'm incredibly drunk," she said. "It's just that I am incredibly drunk."
"It's not like I'm worried. If I could think straight about anything I'd be worried, though."
