These are the good times.
Stuff
Are there website lists for serialized fiction? There have to be.
Get some goals, self
I must go on a quest.
Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 27
Chapter 27
“Sleep first or food?” asked the Celestial orderly, getting immediately to the most important of matters.
“Food.” I decided.
We moved through corridors of some brown material that looked like polished stone. It didn’t seem to be in blocks. Praus, the orderly asking the good questions, was a small swarthy man. He smiled a lot, but I was a job for him. His friend had left without giving his name, and Praus had said he was taking me to a guest room.
I doubted leaving the guest room would be encouraged.
After several turns, he stopped in a hallway with a counter. I smelled frying meat and butter, heard sizzles and drips, and splashes and sloshing. Praus tapped the counter. Before anyone said anything, a burlap wrapped package appeared. He hung it from a hook by my head and pushed the bed off down the hallway.
That bag smelled of rice. I sniffed. Vegetables. I sniffed again. Butter. More vegetables. I needed that package inside me.
Within a few minutes, Praus wheeled me into a small room. It had no windows but did have a water house. The walls had stripes of pastel paints over the brown stone. Praus poured three cups of water and laid them on a table that pivoted over the bed. He moved the package there too before cranking a wheel below my head. The bed lifted me into a sitting position.
“Try to drink all three. If you need help making it to the water house, someone will be right outside. If you can handle things on your own, go ahead. Eat, sleep, eat again, and we’ll see how you are later. Anything else you need, Vincent?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll put a change by your bed. Sleep well.”
He left. I ate, drank all three glasses, dragged myself across walls, and hung on hand-rails to make it to the toilet. When I was done, I felt weaker than I ever had. But I could move.
Dr Thay had said whatever had left that injury on my side would kill me. Hoarfast had, and he was up here, somewhere, with me. Thus, after eating, contrary to doctor’s orders and my own desires, I did not go to sleep. Winching the bed into a more vertical sitting position took all my effort, but I was able to do a little thinking.
All right, self, what are we trying to do here? I thought.
No thoughts, no voices that sounded like thoughts, urged death and murder in my head.
That was terrifying, I admitted to myself. To suddenly find out the thoughts in your head weren’t yours, and they meant harm to others, meant to use you to do harm to others, it was mind-horror. That sword–
I was pretty sure the Drowning Breath of Ogden was dead. I’d stabbed it into the dragon’s head, and last I’d seen, fire had erupted around it. Could I kill a sword? I don’t know, but I was glad it was done.
And at least the sword died doing what it loved: killing.
What was I going to do about this side? What was I going to do here? Hoarfast had seen me. Would he talk?
I doubted it. I couldn’t imagine he’d say anything to Fate about our shared treason.
Someone knocked on the door and a moment later opened it.
The door opener was a big, meavily muscled man with extremely short hair, thick beard, and no neck. He went from shoulders to head with only a few rolls in between. He wore a white underlayer and gray armor: shoulder pads, elbow pads, knee pads, boots, a neck protector, tombstone chest piece, gloves that looked more like gauntlets, and an iron hanging from a carabiner by his shoulder. I didn’t recognize the gun type. He had a knife on his chest too, set up for a vertical draw. He even had shooting glasses: an amber, one piece lense that wrapped from temple to temple. He looked deeply, extremely bored, and his other hand held his place in a book with one finger.
“Vistor,” he said.
A woman walked in carrying a glass vase of lilies. She was a small person, fair-skinned, with her hair in a bun. She wore normal clothes: pants, laced shoes, and a formal sweater. The lilies were pink, yellow, and orange.
Smiling, she asked, “Good morning. Are you Vincent?”
“I am,” I replied.
“I’m Samsara. I’m with hospitality. These are for you.”
“Thank you.”
She put them on the table, fluffed the flowers, and breathed deeply a few times. “They’re nice.”
“Thank you,” I said again, slightly confused. “Who sent them?”
“Hospitality. We try to give everyone flowers, but we made you a special bouquet.” She wiggled her eyebrows and leaned close to whisper. “It’s because you don’t have a window.”
“Oh.” I was on full alert. She might be an enemy. I was prepared to falcon-dive in an instant, and with all the strength in me I’d… flail uselessly. She could beat me to death with her clipboard right now.
“Enjoy,” she said. “And try to get some sleep.”
‘Samsara,’ if that was her real name, left. She knocked on the door before going out.
Self, you’re being a little paranoid, I thought.
Was I going to kill Hoarfast?
The thought frightened me. Hoarfast frightened me. Thinking about killing someone frightened me. What if this was another impostor thought, the echoes of the sword in my head? It wasn’t. The thought felt like me.
But the decision exceeded me. What was I going to do now? Fight him? When I’d just admitted to myself the nice lady who delivered flowers could beat me up?
The flowers smelled wonderful, and the room felt warm.
What was I going to do if Hoarfast tried to kill me?
I staggered out of bed, shuffled into the change of clothes, and hauled myself to the door. I knocked twice and pulled it open.
The human boulder watched me from above his book.
On the other side of the door, another equally prodigious human boulder was filling out paperwork on a clip board. I glanced at the form. How Much House Can You Afford? it said.
“Are, ah, you guys going to be here for a while?” I asked.
“Yup,” said Boulder Number 1.
“Need something?” asked Boulder Numer 2.
“Just wanted to see if anyone was out here,” I said.
“We are,” said Numer 1.
“And if your concern is medical in nature, we can assist with that. We’re both medics.” said the other.
“Really?” I sounded way more skeptical than I meant to.
“Yep,” said Number 1.
“Fate has a surprisingly good education plan,” said Number 2. “Free ride to medical school if you meet time-in-service requirements.”
“What’s worrying you?” asked Number 1. He lowered the book to his lap, holding his place with a finger. I glanced at the title. He was reading Sweeps From Guard
With enough truth to hide my evasions, I said, “Everything, in general. I’m worried something is coming after me.”
“Is this a precognition, and if so, do you often have visions of the future?” asked Number 1. He did not sound like he was joking.
“I can find the worst possible girl to be interested in with precognitive accuracy,” I replied somewhat bitterly.
Number 1 went back to his book. “Yeah, join the club, buddy.”
“Get some sleep. We’ll be here,” said Number 2.
He was still watching me, but our conversation had ended. I shut the door and shuffled back to bed.
Weird as it was, I felt a lot better.
I gave myself permission to sleep and began to drift. I felt like a toy soldier in a leaf boat, floating over a deep pond. Through a patch of lilies, a stream emptied into the dim water. Ripples pushed my little leaf boat around, but I stayed above water, thinking of worries, enemies, and things that could go wrong. But a few drops made it over the railing at a time, the little boat settled deeper, and the ripples of the small stream kept building until the boat was gone. I sank from awake and worried to dead-to-the-world unconscious in half a blink.
Looloopa
I never know how silly to get in fiction. I want it to be dramatic, but I got jokes.
Eat and Sleep
It’s stressful to stop doing something unhealthy. If you go from eating garbage to healthy stuff, that transition hurts. Same for sleeping. When you’re exhausted all day, every day, you get into a rhythm. A few days of sleeping well and being rested really throw you off.
Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 26
Chapter 26
The Bureau of Fate building is an ugly, bumpy thing in the mountains. It can’t even pick a shape. Seven-sided towers rise tall and wide, around central pillars of stairs and hoists. There are seven such towers, each forty nine stories tall, and you, gentle reader, might think that, Oh, we have a thing going here. Same number of sides and floors, so it’s probably a numerology theme. Pragmatically, seven-sided towers make for a lot of windows, and the bureau is on the firmaments, so the scenery of space itself, Pallas and its neighbors, and all the other stars are worthy of a lot of windows.
The problem is the middle.
All of the interior space between the seven towers is filled with one giant hanger, completely ruining all of views to the inside, and the hanger isn’t even seven sided. It’s square-ish. Why -ish? Because the seven towers are in a vague circle, and the hanger is just sort of shoved in there. Some of the towers stick out of it, some of the hanger walls have to bend to touch the others, It’s mostly shorter than the towers, except where the mountains rise it’s taller, and completely ruins the view.
Finally, well not finally because I’m going to mention the worst thing last but almost-finally, the ceiling leaks because the walls were clearly joined by idiot masons. Competent masons would have made things fit better. The damp gets into the walls, runs down through the stairs, and the basement is basically a dark swamp. Obviously, the dark swamp is where they keep all the paperwork, because only when you truly internalize that thought have you begun to comprehend Fate. My office was in the basement. It smelled of feet.
Personally, that’s the worst thing, but I’ve got to mention the official worst.
The hanger is empty. There’s no reason for it at all.
One of the other interns said he got drunk with his team, and while they were playing That’s My Butt his boss mentioned that while the world was being built, the hanger was a warehouse. The Clockwork Gods stored a lot of the cabling that held the world together before they’d finished the frames. After they’d build the frames, they took the ropes down and threw them back here in a huge jumble. The ropes got so tangled they formed two heaps, and the Clockwork Gods threw them out into space where they got caught on the feet of Canopus. That’s why you can, occasionally, find bits of thread or string if you look in the corners.
So why don’t they take it down? Its roof hangs from the seven towers, and it pulls them together so the towers leak. No one’s used it since the world was made. Just take it down!
There is actual paperwork to get that done, and it’s moving through the Bureau at the speed of bureaucracy.
I’m mortal. I’ve got at most eighty years, and my theoretical children’s children’s children will not see this useless building get removed. And that’s a best case scenario, because if I’m honest, the odds are I’ll die within a week, sans children, and I’ll die knowing this worthless building will still be here.
Forgive me. I have a lot to say about that stupid hanger.
Anyway, the dragons of lightning landed outside the hanger, the giant great-for-dragons hanger which the dragons did not use, and let everyone disembark. The dragons flew off.
I’d lapsed into near catatonia, dreaming of bad architecture, and they carried me off in a stretcher. I’m only peripherally aware of what happened next. It’s like finding out what you did when you were drunk. I might have been there, but that person wasn’t me.
My stretcher was carried to a place, where four people rolled me out of the stretcher into a bed. They must have been Celestials because they held me like I weighed nothing. After that several people cut me out of my clothes. Things were pretty foggy. Someone’s face appeared with lights like extra eyes, and a mask. The Celestials held me still. The doctor checked me over with long, thin fingers. Another doctor appeared, and the two conferred. They departed.
A woman appeared without the headgear, and she poked me too. Her hands felt normal and soft.
“My feet, my feet,” I remember saying and may have been saying for a while.
“No, not yet,” she said.
And she drew a sliver of metal like a bent needle from my body.
I sighed. I had felt nothing.
She pulled another and another. Someone placed a metal basin by her side, and one by one she laid dozens of those arced needles in it. They were coated in blood and dirt, and seemed to come from my hips. Into another basin she tossed wadded up bits of black stuff, and often rinsed her hands with a fluid someone provided.
I felt nothing when she began, but when she finished, I felt better.
She moved toward my feet. She didn’t attend the burns that throbbed and ached. Instead, she started on something else, something like little threads, and pulled black streamers from my body. It was a strange, splotchy network of threads, something like tangled hair, and while she tried to get it in one piece, it often broken in her hands. The tangled hair seemed to go from my ankles to my right arm, and she collected it all to discard it into the basin with the bits of black stuff from before.
After that she addressed my stomach and took out what I only saw as a green light. She tsked and blew on the green light like a soap bubble. It vanished, and several of her assistants smirked.
“That didn’t happen,” said the surgeon, and then, finally, she turned to my feet.
The burns…I cannot describe it. Words like ‘they hurt’ aren’t meaningful.
She reached down and began doing something around my right foot. I had to see. I sat up just a little, and a man didn’t quite stop me as much as immobilized me with my head just above my stomach. The attendants said meaningless reassuring things. My feet were ruins. They were black and gray. They were gone.
The surgeon got her fingers under the ruinous burns as if she was putting her fingers under a tight glove and slowly, carefully, meticulously pealed the burn off. It came loose in one floppy chunk like a gruesome sock. She tossed it in the discard basin.
I could see my unharmed foot. I could see my toes, toenails, the little hairs on my toes, and the tiny wrinkles in my toe-knuckles. My foot was completely fine. She had pulled the whole injury off, and it had come away like paint dried into a crust. I went from one kind of shock to another and watched her do it again. She just pealed the wound off. My foot had been burned to a nub, and she just removed the wound away like it was a mark on unbothered skin.
In moments, my feet were fine, and she went between the toes, checking for athlete’s foot. Her fingers were cold.
And she just wiped my injuries away.
When someone gave her a sponge, she wiped burns off my arms, leaving pale, pink skin. She wiped cuts off my face and hands. With a gentle but business-like manner, she removed remnants of dozens of impalements to my hips and lower stomach, where she’d removed the little needles. She was kind, compassionate, and caring, but this was very clearly her job. The procedure didn’t take too long, but would have been half as long if she hadn’t washed her hands repeatedly in a blue and silver basin.
While poking my side, she said, “That one you’ve had for a while.”
I was lying still, a little embarrassed to be naked around a bunch of people. Her question gave me something to do, so I asked, “Which one?”
“The cold burn,” she answered. “Right here.”
She poked me where Hoarfast had struck me several days ago.
She glanced up to meet my gaze.
“What happened here?” she asked.
There was absolutely nothing I could say to explain that. I didn’t have anything prepared. I was way too far off my footing to make something up. I stared at her like a dog confronting a doorknob.
“Hurts,” I said. This was somewhat true. It ached a little, but I’d forgotten about it with all my other pains.
She looked away, back at my side.
“I can draw my own conclusions,” she said suddenly.
And they all went back to processing me.
The surgeon went over me again with fingers and eyes. She poked, prodded, and explored. Her attendants and nurses wiped, bathed, and washed me down to make her inspection easier. They lathed and dried me, but finally provided a modesty towel. When she completed her inspection again, she washed her hands for the twentieth or so time and waved a dry, slightly raisined finger in front of my nose.
“I left some of the bruising. Bruises are tricky, and where nothing is broken, it’s far better you heal on your own. Likewise, some of the non-serious cuts I left alone. I got most of your lichtenberg scars, but you invoked that. You will bear some remnant of it for all your life. Your feet are fine. Your hands are fine. You have lost a lot of blood, and the best remedy for that is sleep and food. Pasta, rice, beans, and vegetables.” She waved her finger at me. “Lots of colors in the vegetables. The more colors the better.”
“Regarding your burn–” she paused to think “—it’s called a bane. It’s like a curse. It will fade slowly, but it will fade. Within a month or two it will be gone. In the mean time, avoid anything cold. Don’t play in the snow, don’t go outside without a coat, don’t drink anything with ice in it.”
“Why?” I asked. Everything was getting a bit much, and I was feeling foggy again.
She thought again. There were a lot of other people in the room with us. Assistants took care of equipment. Nurses pulled a blanket to my chest. Several assistants filled out paperwork. None of them seemed to be paying attention.
Ha.
People were paying attention to me again, and my methods of becoming famous had not improved.
“You know how you got that,” said the doctor-lady. “You may not know what it was, but someone decided to kill you. I bet you know who.
“Cold banes are rare. Usually I see fire or lightning, but…” She obviously thought something and kept it to herself. “Cold will kill you, young man. Very quickly. Things that should never harm you, a brisk morning when you forget a coat, will make you injured or ill. True cold, like a snowball, a fall on ice, or whatever gave you that bruise in the first place, will bring you swiftly to a sure death.”
I asked, “And you can’t remove it?”
“Who cursed you?”
“Eh,” I stammered. “It’s foggy.”
“Ah.” She did not look convinced. “The bane will fade on its own. Every day, your body burns it away, and without a trigger, it poses you no harm. If we remove it suddenly, there is a chance it will activate. What’s your name, young man?”
“Vincent Rashak,” I replied. It was an Unnish name. I could pass for Unnish.
“Vincent, I’m Doctor Thay. I hope to see you again, just not like this. Get some sleep.” She patted my head like I was a dog, and two orderlies wheeled my bed out.
The Netherhells
Spinning instructor would be a great profession for a chaotic evil being who feeds on the suffering of others.
Some 100 pound lady in too much spandex with too much enthusiasm screaming, “Active rest! Get up on your toes!”
While I’m thinking, “I hate you, lady. I outweigh you by 150 lbs, and I despise you with all of them.”
This is why the villianesses in fantasy movies are always in bikinis.
Free Book
Mara is going to be free July 1st through 4th.
Also, pizza is not a good breakfast food.
Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 25
Part 3: Fate
Chapter 25
Those were bad hours, alone under the building, filled with with pain.
I had never done anything like that before. Not fighting the dragon, though I never had. I’d never had to endure when there was no technique to execute, no condition to find victory, no skill to use. I couldn’t beat anything, I couldn’t win, I couldn’t even try. I lay under broken walls and breathed.
And it was miserable. Once everything began to hurt, it was like my whole body was screaming for help, and there was nothing I could do.
And it went on, and on, and on until I realized I could die down here.
The dragon didn’t come for me, so I assumed it was dead. I had won. And I might bleed to death under a building anyway. Winning hadn’t saved me.
A pain in my hips grew, and I shimmied to satiate it. The rubble overhead shifted. I shimmied again. A beam lay across my chest, and it constricted me on the left. I wiggled right, but the whole beam settled. Now I still couldn’t breathe well, and there was a rock digging into my right. I wiggled again. Something began to slide. I pressed it away and down. I wiggled my head.
I began to crawl like a worm, the least of things. Even insects have legs. The worm is deprived of everything, yet it moves underground. So moved I, heading up.
Hours passed. I felt every one of them. Never did time speed up or pass in absence. They went on as I grew weaker. I began to rest between shakes. I thought constantly, ‘Self, we can’t do this.’ I fought the thought, slithered away from it, shouted at it, but it remained in the dark with me.
And yet the hours still passed. Sleep was down there with me. She caressed me in the dark. She loved me, and I refused her. I rested and shimmied, slithering upward.
I was just another figure in someone else’s rumor. ‘I hear the building fell on someone, and he was trapped down there for days before he died. Glad it wasn’t anyone we know.’
And a child would ask, ‘Could it happen to me?’
‘No, loved one. It happened to someone else.’
With those clouds over the sky, there was no dawn. I slithered and crawled around huge building stones up into bricks.
Bricks were easier than great stones. I could crawl through bricks. I did, to lay gasping in dirty, dusty air.
I lay in broken plates, sheets of parchment paper, and a roll of towels, impregnated with soup and then flash-dried when the building caught fire. The smell defied comprehension. The perfumed aromas of Hyperion were gone. The gardens of sycamore and roses, the smell of lavender and sage didn’t make it down here. The air smelled of forge smoke, glazed with dragonfire. I smelled sweat and mud, my blood, the lumber of Hasso’s yards, his building supplies, and his parking lots.
But underneath all those smells, the free air that carried them smelled beautiful. It wasn’t a smell itself, just air. Thick, free, moving air blew around rocks, between the rubble piles, and over the wreckage. I looked out and saw one chimney still venting smoke. I could smell the smoke where I’d cremated Hasso and his kin, his works, and nearly been cremated myself. The smoke turned in circles as the winds changed.
The lights found me there.
Four glowing men and three fluorescent women walked through the center of Hasso’s courtyard.
All of them were tall and luminal, glowing in a mix of lights that seemed to emerge from hands, hair, eyes, and feet. Each had a general aura, a complex but distinct mix of colors that tended toward one shade, but that seemed to be controlled by the individual intensities of their individual glowing parts. Eyes glowed blue, hands green, hair white, and feet yellow for all, but the mix varied.
A woman stepped forward wrapped in vermilion and ruby. Her hands were brighter than any of the others, too bright to make out fingers clearly, and she seemed to have balls of steam on the end of her wrists. The red seemed to come from everywhere at first, but as she talked, I realized that all of them had a redness about the body and brownness about the legs and arms.
“Who are you?” asked the red and green woman.
“Help me,” I begged.
“What happened here?” asked a man wrapped in light-trails of brown and blue. When he moved, he left after-images behind him like the kind you get if you glance at the Sun.
“Bad things. I’m terribly hurt. Can you help me?” I said.
They obviously didn’t want to, but they did. Two, a man mostly blue, and a woman grayish and yellow, came over and went to work, obviously medics of some kind. The rest dispersed, picking through the building and searching.
I got a look at my two carers up close, and while they looked vaguely androgynous and naked, they were actually wearing white and prismatic clothing. It seemed to be of two layers, a heavier skin-tight one, and a looser outer layer. The base-layer muted the red and brown light, leaving only exposed areas to brightly glitter.
But those bright areas did shine. The man’s eyes were blue as the sea, not just his irises. From the top of his cheekbones to the hairs of his eyebrows, his eyes radiated.
I’d seen something like this before. The lady with the dragon-sword had had red eyes that dribbled fire, but nothing on her had been this polychroma.
The others found the dead dragon under the rubble. It had burned and boiled, reduced itself to a foul-smelling heap of slag. It looked like rusty iron or old submerged wood, recognizable in shape but utterly transformed. One man in gold and green climbed onto the dead snout, wrapped his hands around something, and yanked a heap of misshapen, ruined iron free.
If you knew exactly what you were looking at, it looked like a broken sword.
The man tossed it aside.
The woman was checking my hip area and announced, “You have metal splinters through your pelvis. It is a miracle you aren’t dead.”
“Oh.” What do you say to that?
The man, who was also examining me, asked, “No, you should be dead. Who protects you?”
“Nice gods?”
“I don’t think anyone likes mortals that much,” said the woman. She peeled the wrappings off my feet and whispered, “Dear Maya.”
“Ho! Stranger! Come forward into the light!” yelled someone else, and for a moment I thought they meant me.
But I was already in the light. The two glowing figures tending me made sure of that.
And shortly thereafter another figure did come into the light. It was Hoarfast.
He looked exactly the same. He wore another bluish-gray suit with a subdued tie. The jacket wrapped his shoulders and chest like a bit of towel thrown over a statue. He was immense, quiet, and when he walked into the main area from a side pathway among Hasso’s buildings, he still seemed to be the center of all attention.
The moment I saw him, he saw me, and we both stared at each other with such surprise no one missed it.
My two medics looked at me. They looked at Hoarfast. The various illuminated figures looking at Hoarfast looked at me. Hoarfast tore his eyes away and looked at the glowing people, and I made myself look down.
Every single thing I’d done to make Koru’s group think I was dead was now ruined.
The glowing figures considered the two of us. They looked over the ruins of Hasso’s compound. The fires had died down, and where the radiance of the seven touched the sick burning, the dragon fire burned itself out. But the buildings stayed collapsed, and the charred earth remained violated.
“You are both invited to the Halls of Fate for discussion, medical assistance, and a friendly talk,” said the first glowing figure, smiling at me and Hoarfast in turn.
That’s a tricky matter for a Celestial. Hoarfast might decline. But Fate had a way of getting what it wanted.
None of that mattered for me.
“Please help me,” I whispered.
The two working on me bent their heads down, and lights began to arc between them. Long streamers of fire climbed their hands and heads, reaching from one to the other like the flares that dance on Horochron’s head.
The other five figures of light turned to Hoarfast, and the gears inside his head turned furiously. He smiled faintly.
He said, “I accept.”
The agents of Fate nodded and called down the lightning. It came in the form of quicksilver dragons, too bright to look at, saddled with leather and silk. They didn’t tie my hands or feet, but assisted me with mounting. A large, competent looking woman sat behind me, and I lay against her. An equally large, equally competent looked man sat in front. Had I an interest in throwing myself off, I doubted I would succeed.
Yet I might. There is usually only one way to escape Fate.
But from the beginning, I’d only known one thing, and that one thing kept me in the saddle. The quicksilver dragon flew upwards, through the clouds of Attarckus’s veil, and to the stars beyond the sky. It took a zigzag path faster than a hawk can dive, and soon we had slipped the bounds of Pallas and approached the dome of the sky. The glittering constellations rose from darkness, huge lanterns on the mountains of the Firmament. The flow of galaxies that are the sky’s rivers flowed between hills and and forests on the dark country.
I looked back. The lady behind me smiled firmly, but I wasn’t looking at her. In the center of the sphere, Pallas, Horochron the Sun, and Tiptites the Moon circled each other. They had been joined by a vast white disk that must be Tollos and another, silver and blue, that I guessed was her sister Lumina. The green and blue orb of Pallas drew my attention, though, as it dwindled and shrank.
I turned back around and faced the growing blackness of the onrushing sky.
We approached the massive, bulbous office-building of Fate’s headquarters in the Mask. It was such an ugly, useless building, and the basement leaked.