This/Deathgods song
< This
"How far we've come, Vardaman. Would you move on, yet, slip into the sweet embrace we guard so dearly?"
"Not yet," he said. "Not yet. But it will be a welcome boon."
"I am glad, then," she whispered. "I would not want to go this alone, even now."
"Alone? But you are never alone."
"Memories and dreams, Vardaman. You are real. You have walked with me, fought with me, exchanged words with me... these are real. These are more than anyone else has given me." She sighed. "We look to the gods to make things better, but they do not make things real. Or we look to words. For me it was always words, but the end is still the same."
"So what now?"
"Same as ever. We've still got a mystery to save, you know."
But what had changed? What was the same? He was lost, and not knowing what else to do, he prayed for help, for guidance.
There was a vague whispering. It rose to a roar before Coraline's voice answered in his head. Just do what you always have. The rituals are the same, and the words don't matter. It's only what they need to hear that matters. There was a pause. Also hi. This is weird.
He almost laughed, but caught himself at the last moment. That would not have helped anything.
And Coraline, answering prayers? Strange world it had become, but there were more pressing matters. Services to perform, rituals to carry out. Goodbyes for the departed, but even more so for those they had left behind. And she was right. These motions he knew.
As much as religion tended to make Rahah uncomfortable, there was something to be said for the lengths to which people could go in its name. The monuments span millenia, telling anyone who might see them later a small piece of history, even when the people themselves are gone, with stories springing up to fill in the details with ever more elaborate twists. And these stories persist even without books to record them, for they in turn become a part of the rituals that keep societies alive, telling and retelling the people who they are and where they came from. The wars that never fade from memory, persisting even in myth and legend after all those involved have long since faded to dust, for who else but those who truly believe would fight so hard, and go so far?
Temples, even those built in times of peace and well after the fact of the stories themselves, reflect the history as well as the culture of the present, and this one was no exception. Even so, it gave her the creeps.
Of course, it was probably designed to give people the creeps, what with the carved skeletons everywhere and the frescos of the hundred or so visages of Death and so forth, but Rahah had no problem with death, as such. Death was just something that happened, rather like life, annoying neighbours, and cats. For some reason these were just four things that always happened to her, every time, but it was only the last two that ever really caused a problem. Neighbours were neighbours and cats were cats, but when the neighbours got annoying, it was what her cats would do that really left an impression.
She was kind of glad she didn't have any here.
"Impressive, isn't it?" Rahah realised she was standing in front of a particularly large mural depicting what appeared to be some sort of apocalypse, with grand figures scattered about in some sort of epic battle against what seemed to be a mass of darkness. There was a distinct lack of a dragon anywhere on it, though she wasn't entirely sure why this would be important.
Then she remembered the speaker and looked around. He turned out the be a youngish fellow supporting a very large book and a pair of glasses that, if anything, were even bigger - they looked like some sort of rather crude binoculars, and made him look like some sort of ant.
He freed a hand from the book and then managed to free his head from the glasses; it turned out he was human underneath after all. "Er, sorry. Name's Arsten."
"Rahah," she said, then looked back to the mural. "So what's the story?"
"Oh, you know," he said, trying to find a way to balance the book and the glasses and almost dropping both of them on his foot. "Apocalypse and all that. End of the world show, as Coraline would say."
"She would, wouldn't she?" That line was right out of the Reagan Library, but Coraline had always loved that thing, pile of dreams and strange lines that it was. Little wonder she might repeat it, even here.
"It's said that the gods would come to fight a great darkness that spreads across the land. This is the only picture I've seen that manages to depict a 'darkness' at all convincingly."
"Huh."
They looked at it for a bit.
"How exactly do you fight a darkness, then?" Rahah asked.
"Suppose that's for the gods to know."
"Be easier if it were a dragon, wouldn't it?"
"Why a dragon?"
"Why not?"
Arsten looked at her. "You know, that's a funny thing... it does look a bit like a dragon in some of the other ones. I always just figured they probably didn't know how to paint a darkness." He tried to gesture but only succeeded in dropping the binocular-glasses, which shattered.
The two of them looked at the resulting mess on the floor for a moment. Then Arsten, suddenly remembering that he was relatively out in public and there were social expectations in situations like these, threw up his arms melodramatically and shouted "Noooooooo!"
Several passerby gave him strange looks.
Rahah blinked. "I'm not sure that was quite the right response."
"So what is?"
"I don't know."
"What," he said, "you think I did that on purpose?"
"Didn't you?"
He sighed. "That obvious, huh?"
"No, not really."
"Er..." she backed away, uncertain how to respond. And then she had a thought: What would Alice do? So she stopped, straightened to her full and admittedly still insignificant height, and yelled, "Oy! Stop that this instant! Are you trying to resolve the situation, or aggravate it? It's like you all were raised in a pub."
Miraculously, they did.
"Now," she said, more quietly. "Perhaps we can be adults about this and discuss the matter sensibly?"
"Discuss it," the head priest said disdainfully. "You tear a hole in the ceiling of the Great Hall and now you want to discuss it?"
"Yes," she said. "And we do apologise for that. It was entirely unintentional. We were investigating a theory of Arsten's that this site was once used as a holding cell for Eapherod, and I'll grant we may have gotten a little bit carried away..."
"Arsten Dren!" the priest said, rounding on the researcher, who after the initial outburst had been trying to hide behind Rahah, "We have spoken about these heresies of yours. I should have hoped you would know better than to..."
"If looking for the truth is heresy," Rahah interrupted, "then perhaps more of you should be looking."
The priest sputtered. His eyes bulged. Finally he shouted, "You will leave this place. Both of you! Get out! You are not welcome on Kyrule's grounds!"
"No." she said calmly.
He stared at her. "What?"
"Do not fear the truth. It is the followers of false gods who should fear the truth, but not you, because you do not believe Kyrule to be false. There is nothing to fear. The truth will not stand against him. Answers will only serve to reaffirm your faith; where is the heresy in that?"
...
Rahah held up the silvery key, examining the intricate detail of the curled twist. "Vardaman," she said gravely, "You do realise how much trouble your god went to to get this away from me in the first place, right?"
"Of course not," he said sarcastically. "Why would I know anything about that?"
She snorted.
Jayna Arisdar - rogue (planeborn) Andrew Lells - warrior T'call - healer (Erdra elf) Jamester Kershaw - mage
Orin,
....whah.
everyone standing around confused, then huge thing comes bearing down on them out of nowhere...
Dave.
Room like the lab where she had awoken, constructed of shadows. She sits on a desk, empty of its busy junk, holding a wordless book in her hands...
"You're not real," she says when they enter. "Just figments."
"Of course we're not real," Rahah says. "We're dreaming. You're dreaming too."
"I can't dream. If only I could, I could leave this place. If only I could leave." She emphasises 'leave' as though it means something more, something else entirely.
Rahah holds out a hand. "You can, Dave. Come home."
"I'm not Dave."
"It's a name given and taken. The name is yours. You are Dave, and I am also Dave."
Dave says nothing, just stares at the empty book in her hands, tracing words that aren't there.
"Come home and sleep, Dave. Sleep, and dream, and be free."
Finally she looks up. "And end this?"
"Yes. It's over."
She smiles and nods tiredly, then asks, "Did it work? Did they get home? And what of Amadi, and Elia, and the others?"
"Shh, dear one. It doesn't matter. They're coming home too."
Dave smiles and fades away, and the room fades with her into the black canvas of the no-space dream, leaving only the silence behind.
"Her friends?" Andrew asks. "They never made it home, did they?"
She stands slowly. "No. But they made their decisions." The no-space fades into light. "It's funny, though. Dave never thought she could dream. But when she had nothing, she dreamed up that room, and she dreamed up hope. It's what kept her going. Poor thing."
It was a cottage. White stucco walls, window boxes, a tile roof. A cobble path led to the porch door. A goat, tied to an old tire, grazed the lawn.
"What's this?" one of them asked.
"A cottage," another said.
The asker nodded sagely. "Oh, I see now. Yes. It's all clear."
"The heart," Rahah said, ignoring them. "My heart."
They found her sitting at the kitchen table, bathed in light, a half-eaten brunch and newspaper full of funnies laid out before her. She looked up as they entered, and smiled, and said, "Hello. I've been waiting for you."
"Me?" Arsten asked. It was unclear if even he knew if he was joking.
"For all of you. For now. This," she said, now staring at Rahah. "I so, so want to be angry. But I just cannot do it. You even took my rage from me. You took everything, and you left me here to wait."
Rahah shook her head. "It wasn't me."
"I have wanted it for so very long, but instead I sit here and I bask in the cheer and all the waiting means nothing."
"It wasn't me," Rahah repeated.
"So very long..."
Silence fell on the summery room. One of the others fidgetted, then, finally, to break the silence, asked, "Who was it, then?"
Rahah shook her head slowly. "I... I don't remember."
The woman at the table started laughing, a slow chuckle, rising almost to a cackle, before falling off completely. "It was me," she said in a dead tone. "All of this? My doing. Yours too. You will see." She smiled again, with both welcome and menace. "You're home now. You will meet no more resistance here."
After 200-some years, Abearanoth was different. It still had the general vibes of myth and legend, and the strange, strange sensations of perfect normalcy, but it was, all in all, a different world. Technology and Progress had passed by, though as far as Coraline was concerned they were still well behind anything she was comfortable with, even outside of the Angler's Internet realm of stolen Star Wars monikers and impossible science. This, she supposed, was more... Victorian, perhaps? She wasn't sure, something about having spent her recent History courses reading Discworld instead of actually paying attention to the lectures, but it was probably something along those lines. Not that the Victorians of her world had ever done much by way of blimps, she thought as one drifted overhead.
Whatever the case, the world of Abearanoth had passed her by without actually catching up in the slightest. They had phones and such and magic and such and some semblance of industrialisation, but now it just looked like it was waiting for Cthulhu as opposed to the return of the king.
"You have a badger on your head."
He looked up. "Hmm?"
"You have a badger on your head," the waitress repeated. "You do realise this, right?"
"Oh, sure," he said. "Nothing terribly unusual there."
She frowned. "Er, okay. Need anything, or...?"
"Naw, I'm good for now." He turned back to the paper; meanwhile the waitress shrugged and went back to her rounds.
"That's him," she said, pointing. "Right there. With a badger on his head."
"Hey."
"Huh?" Coraline looked up.
"You mind is elsewhere - what were you thinking about?" he said.
"Pirates!" Coraline said. Might as well tell the truth. He just looked blank, however, so she waved an imaginary cutlass and continued, "Arr! Avast, ye landlubber!"
"Pirates," the old elf repeated.
"Right."
"Like in the moving pictures?"
"Erm... sure." Coraline hadn't even realised they had moving pictures already, but if they did of course there would be pirates. There were always pirates.
The elf nodded, sipping his tea. "All the rage amongst the youngsters these days. I understand it, Saint Cloud has another one in the making, too, but it won't be out for awhile yet."
"What, a travelogue by Edward Teller? Short film on the kingdom of death?"
"No..." he said, looking at her. "Why would you ask that?"
"Well..." She didn't quite know how to ask. "It's not... Emily Saint Cloud, is it?"
He nodded. "This one's Wasteland, they called it. Supposed to be something special, something new, the likes of which nobody has ever seen. Like anyone has ever seen any of these before." He snorted. "Moving pictures... like anyone's seen anything like these at all."
"Fern was right," Coraline whispered. "Same names. Same things. Mirrors." The old elf was watching her over his tea, but she didn't even care. "I could have sworn Ypheirod was a cat, Kyrule a writer... and Vardaman was dead. The entire point of Vardaman was that he was dead, and dead mum never even knew the difference. But it's all different."
"Life," he said. "Always is."
Somehow Coraline resisted the urge to do a Marvin impression in response.
Gorm, proprieter of the Empty Cistern, glanced up when he heard the door open and a waft of argument drift in. It was still fairly early in the afternoon, so the place was mostly empty, but these two looked like customers so he picked up a cup and obligatorily began wiping it, as much for the look of things as for the fact that the cup in question was quite heavy and if aimed right could probably kill an orc, nevermind these two waifs.
"What'll it be?" he asked the women as they sat down. A human and an elf, one in grey and the other in black; neither were dressed exactly fashionably, but the clothes looked well-made. Probably skilled workers of some sort, passing through on business.
The elf looked to her friend, who said, "Can't you figure? Shalott as appropriate."
Interesting. "You come a lot?" he asked as he poured them both a 15-stone.
"Used to. Leave the bottle."
The elf sniffed her mug suspiciously, then took a tentative sip. "Ghuck," she said.
"Welcome to booze." The other grinned, downed her mug, and quickly refilled it. "You don't sip this stuff. It's not supposed to taste good, so you drink it as quickly as possible and then get a refill, is what you do."
The elf looked at her shalott. Then she drank quickly, twitched, and then said again, this time with feeling, "Ghuck."
"Yup." The mugs were quickly refilled - in the human's case, again.
Two minutes later they needed another bottle. This took Gorm by surprise. It wasn't that people didn't tend to go through a bottle of shalott very quickly - in fact they usually didn't get through them at all. These two, however, were clearly just getting started, though it was also pretty clear the elf had never actually tried alcohol before and still wasn't sure she wanted to be here. But she held it as well as her companion, probably because she was an elf.
Three bottles of 20-stone later, the elf was starting to get into the swing of things. And the human was clearly in heaven as far as she was concerned.
"Man, it's good to be back."
"So this is how some people live?"
"It's how I always wanted to die."
"Is it? Why didn't you?"
"Life. Always gets in the way."
The waste disposal was almost full. Gorm normally dumped it into the toxic dump outside the mages' College every month - it was just not practical to throw old shalott bottles into the main garbage because of its tendency to eat through anything it touched, including the floors of bins and garbage coaches - but that required a bin that could store it in the meantime without getting eaten itself. And he only had one of those. And exploding a garbage coach in the middle of the street was not good publicity. Was it?
Then again, considering his usual clientelle, he didn't reckon any of them would mind even if it did get tracked back here. If anything they'd find it funny. They found the floor funny enough a lot of the time.
"Do you make funny fiddly drinks? With thingies. And things?"
"Brollies?"
"Swhat?"
"Puts brollies in the colourful ones. They do."
"Who?"
"They. Them. People."
"God any fiddly brolly drinks? Them's what people do, right?"
"Shalott's what people do here."
"Needs a brolly."
Was this even possible? Gorm wondered. A single bottle of shalott would be enough to kill most men and floor an immortal, but now these two, after quite a few more, were... well, upright, at least. Mostly. He pulled out a bottle of grog and poured them another round. Grog was, once you were drunk enough, almost indistinguishable from some of the worst shalott in the world, and indeed they didn't even notice.
"Whaddabout that shiny god of yours, what'd he say?"
"'Snot shiny. Dreary-like, more."
"Add some glitter, then he'd be shiny."
"Be glittery then."
"Totally would."
"Not shiny, though."
"Would be kind of sexy..." She slumped onto the bar.
Coraline looked at her mug, tapped out some dregs from the last bottle, and stared at it.
"Huh," she said. She tried to think, stood up in the hopes that it would help, and promptly fell over instead.
Now this part Gorm knew well. People passed out at the Cistern all the time, and some even were still very much alive when they did. Normally that wouldn't be a problem a good heavy cup couldn't solve, but since it was still too early in the evening for anyone to just make them disappear, he settled for emptying their pockets and dumping them out in the street instead.
The three of them sat down by the fire and stared at various things in the room that weren't each other. Finally they agreed that the entire thing had probably been a horrible idea. Technically they had all died. They were in another universe, in the middle of a fight that had nothing to do with them and that next to nobody else even knew about. They had each, on various occasions, utterly betrayed each other. They were also the closest thing to family any of them really had anymore.
What they didn't agree on was what the entire thing had been, or if it was even over.
It helps to stay in motion. It helps to have a center, a place to return to, a family to turn to, a dream to cling to...
It was a kitchen, but unlike any he had ever seen before. Counters with built-in sinks lined two walls, and cupboards flanked them as was common custom, but it was also full of several appliances that he did not recognise, one of which had a large note taped to it in a script he couldn't read. White was the predominant colour, with deep brown and grey accents giving it all a distinct aesthetic that might have been quite nice were it not so cluttered. The counters themselves were littered with odds and ends, including several frying pans, a few bags of snacks, an ornate recurve bow that he knew all too well, and about fifty small seedling pots. There were also several large pots and pans sitting around the floor.
Of all the things he might have been expecting, this was not it.
"Hello?" he called. There was no response, then one of the pots started whirring and rose a bit off the ground, and he realised it wasn't a pot. In fact he had no idea what it was. It hovered in place for a moment, then whirred toward one of the doorways.
Hoping it might lead somewhere, he followed it.
"What's the worst that could happen?"
"Oh, just the end of the universe," Coraline said glumly. "More likely the city'll get levelled and we'll just wind up with another rift here, though."
"Like the one in Sannesee?" The entire party had seen the beginnings, so long ago. A strange darkness to the air, dead plants all around in an expanding circle, and just this... hole in space, whispering to them over the distance.
"Yeah. Bigger, though."
Coraline yelped and rubbed her head.
"Are you okay?" Tessa asked.
"Yeah," she said. She opened her hand and found the key, once again accounted for. Bloody gods, she though to herself, but even so, she smiled. "Kyrule pulled his head out of his arse."
"Oh?" Zaeres look intrigued, and also amused at the wording. "How do you know that?"
She twirled the key. "He told me so, and restored his blessing." It was somewhat amusing because as an undead, she had found his touch quite painful, but for some reason she also didn't expect he had regretted that at all. "Bit painful, actually."
Tessa frowned and exchanged glances with Lorelei, who looked downright worried.
Zaeres smiled thinly. "I can only imagine."
"Nevermind that, though. You were saying what happened on Dresore?"
"Hold a moment," Lorelei said. "You serve Kyrule?"
Coraline cocked her head. "Mmm, aye. Not that he and I necessarily see eye-to-eye on some topics. I'm very opinionated, see. Very opinionated."
"What topics?"
"Such as the one you're worried about, perhaps?" She smiled. "I have no problem with the undead, as a general rule. So long as they don't bother me or mine, I ain't going to go bother them or theirs. It's just another way to live, really, and to come at it otherwise just seems... bigoted to me."
"But we're not alive."
Coraline laughed out loud. "By whose definition? Life is what you make it, and anything that manages to move about and generate energy, especially if it happens to have some sort of consciousness, seems pretty damn alive to me. After that it just comes down to the same things as it does for anyone."
"Yes?"
"Something about disruption and a base level of equilibrium." She chewed her lip. "Something. It can reproduce, make more of itself, that's that thing what classifies lifeforms."
Zaeres smiled over his wine. "You always did have all the answers, Denereise."
"Well, I am a librarian," Coraline said haughtily, though she was somewhat worried about the fact that currently she didn't even have her usual answers.
The gate guards watched as the cloaked and hooded figure passed through, but did nothing to stop her. Those who meant ill rarely dressed so tackily or moved so silkily, and it was well known that no demon or undead could pass upon these holy grounds. Well, with perhaps one exception, but that woman hadn't really been a demon, strictly speaking.
Coraline headed for the main temple. In the darkness everything was still; though it was not yet late, most of the temple was asleep. Those who watched over the dead tended to prefer daylight.
She moved to continue on, but Arsten poked her elbow. "You're not in a hurry, are you?"
"No, not really," Coraline said. She waited for him to elaborate, but he just stood there watching her instead. "Do you need something?" she finally asked.
"Oh, could you take a look at this? I could use an outside opinion." He gestured for her to follow and turned around and set off without giving her room to respond. Bemused, she followed.
He led her to what was probably some kind of lab. Several large tables took up most of the floor, littered with artefacts and experiments, and larger objects lined the walls and were shoved into corners. Several chairs were scattered about as well; it seemed Arsten shared this lab, but the others had slightly more typical sleeping patterns.
One of the tables had a large Book of Dreams open on it, but before she could investigate, Arsten activated a small blocky thing and suddenly a huge hologram of what appeared to be a giant piece of cheese filled the room. It seemed to be wavering slightly, and made her eyes hurt.
"I can't seem to figure what's wrong with it. It's finally showing, but it's wrong." He looked at her and shook his head in confusion. "Does that look right to you?"
She pulled her eyes away and immediately felt better; it seemed the thing had managed to make her mildly ill as well. "What's the refresh rate?"
"Re... oh!" He excitedly started fiddling with something on the contraption. "That's brilliant! Of course the light decays quite quickly, so it needs to refresh it whenever something changes, but it also needs to maintain it, so... yes, here."
The cheese shuddered violently, and then became still. Coraline hesitated, then looked directly at it again. It was no longer wavering, and now for all the world looked exactly like a giant glowing block of cheese hovering in the air, with no ill effects.
"At last!" he shouted. "And everyone thought it was impossible!"
Coraline eyed him suspiciously. "Who are you, Ponder Stibbons?"
Arsten looked confused, but picked up a notebook. "Who? No. What's your name?"
"Coraline." She poked at the cheese, but her hand passed right through it. There was nothing to touch or feel, simply the illusion to see, a matrix of light.
"Right," he said, and started scribbling. "Date, is it still... help of Coraline... works now... reasonably stable, hasn't puked..."
She looked closer. She could see the threads, the mesh that defined the shape and guided the light, but they were faint, behind the image itself. She wondered if this was how holograms normally worked.
"To have faith so strong that even when your god abandoned you, you remained resolute..." He shook his head. "I cannot comprehend it."
"Neither can I."
"But..." The preceptor looked confused.
"I just said 'fuck 'im' and then focussed on more pressing problems."
"It is not your place to question," Daru said flatly.
"You do not even see it at the worlds fall to pieces, and you would have us sit idly by?" Kyrule persisted. "On what?"
"Oh, he sees it," Coraline said. "He just welcomes it."
"A petty insect thinks to presume it knows the truth?"
She smiled up at him. "If I am wrong, then call me wrong by name. If it is not so, then tell the truth."
She had nothing, and yet here she was, standing up to the god of all gods. But it occurred to her nothing was all she needed. It was all she had ever needed.
Daru moved, but Coraline was already gone.
"Don't mess with this hair. It already ate my brush."
There was a somewhat sparkly sound and a puff of smoke, then Sherandris appeared before them with a giant block of tofu on his head, or perhaps over; it appeared as though he had simply taken the biggest piece he could find and stuffed his head into it, though the possibility of doing such a thing made no practical sense.
He was immediately followed by a loud discordant scrawing noise as several fanged hams appeared around him and started sqlorshing away in all directions.
"Whngh," he said, wobbling slightly and reaching around in case there was anything nearby, although there wasn't. It was clear he couldn't see for the tofu which covered his entire face.
Rahah and Coraline exchanged looks, and then Rahah grinned and ran after the hams.
"Oh, Sherandris, my love," Coraline called out in what she hoped was a sweet voice.
The tofu swivelled toward her. "Mrrnk?"
She walked slowly toward him. "Oh, my love, how I've missed you."
Off to the side, Rahah managed to grab and immediately lose control of a particularly large ham. It almost squorched away, then suddenly leapt at her, as though it had decided it would rather try to eat her hair.
"Nnng nnk," the tofu said.
"Let us never be apart again, my love." Reaching Sherandris, Coraline pushed the tofu up with a horrible squelch, thought it only moved a few centimetres. One of the hams made a similar squelch in sympathy as Rahah's foot came down on its tail.
Sherandris, his mouth finally free, asked, "Is it you?"
Coraline answered by kissing him, and despite her best efforts got a nose-full of tofu.
"It's like none of you've ever gotten a bunch of fanged hams tangled in your hair."
There was a long pause, and then Kyrule said, "Yes, that's it. That's it exactly. It has nothing to do with anything else that just happened, of course; it's merely a matter of the hams tangled in your hair right now."
"You said it," Rahah said.
"See," Coraline said to Sherandris, "This is why I like him. There's just something about a god that isn't afraid to sass..."
"Oh, I could sass you like nobody's business," Sherandris said.
Coraline grinned. "Oh, I know it."
"Ey!" Rahah called. "Will you two knock it off and stop flirting over there? He's mine!" She looked straight at Coraline.
"Is he?" Coraline yelled back. "You come and get him!"
Rahah frowned at them, then turned back to the others. "Meh, too much effort."
Sherandris snorted.
"Ah, the perks of falling in love with a lunatic?" Coraline wondered.
"Lunatic, or lazy bum. Call her what you will."
