I remember you (Philomena)

[Wrenmae]

And in her voice was steel, born of spilled inkpots and painting on the walls, brandished when he brought an injured bird to care for some nameless summer afternoon, and did not tell her. It was fire and ice, comfort and pain. Every strict curfew to lay down his head of brown down, every rule not to snatch at the jingling purses of oblivious merchants…every lesson learned, every scolding earned, all packed into a tone of voice he never expected to hear again.

So it should have come as no surprise when his shoulders tensed, tensed, tensed till they were oak, made of wood, oh the sycamore, the chestnut, the birch. Till his blood was honey-thick and his heart was slow with resistance. For he had to, had to boil himself to free himself. All that he had been to that moment, beholden to none, of none, shattered in a single voice that rose with such incredible tenderness, such gentle ferocity.

And then his shoulder surrendered the stress, surrendered his misgiving, his fears, all the shards of doubt that pierced his heart with indecision. It all fell away from him. It only took a moment, but he turned back to her, an oddly penitent look on his face…the edgy eyes of a child who has done some wrong. He looked anywhere but her face, shuffling to her side and kneeling, hands folding in his lap…fingers twitching nervously. He was an adult Gypa, too young for his too-tall body and completely in the thrall of memory and learned custom. Once upon a time…did he not kill? Did he not rise against the gods themselves?

And yet this woman hold some dominion over him. Vayt help him, but she was stronger…even weak and haggered, even skeletal with slack skin and soft bones, she had disarmed him with a sentence, and with two had commanded him.

He looked at his hands now, clear and free of injury or the pallor of sickness. “Yes, mom,” the words came automatically, tumbling from some memory of bygone times tied with red twine and left in the shadow of sunlight…some corner of his memory, “I’m sorry.”

Although Wren did not look up, he did speak again, but his voice found no perch but soft and passive tones. He could muster none of his bravado, none of his edge or menace…in the eyes of this woman, he was a child, aged nine years and thirty six seasons, and she was his mother…the only one he’d ever had.

“I don’t want to hurt you…” he breathed, “My presence is poison.”

[Philomena]

Minnie stood, as she spoke to her boy, and when he turned, her good hand gripped the back of her chair white-knuckle tight. She looked hard at Gypa, now, her brow wrinkled, and her lips just parted. Then, she stumped, slowly, painfully across the room, past Wren and shut the door, her bloodied hand hanging at her side. The door latched shut, and she sent the wooden bolt shut as well. Then she turned and looked at the man, her eyes open and sad, and hungry all at once. His words, when they came made her eyes fall and her brows wrinkle. She began, slowly, to stump back across the room to her chair, her eyes on the floor as she went, her breath a little short.

What does one say, now?

A different woman would be effusive, or would give long speeches, would find great things to say, things that her son would remember, when he looked back. Many of these things entered Minnie's head - she thought to tell him how all who loved her died, too. How they were the same in this. She meant to whisper to him about forgiveness, about how she always tried to believe he might still live. She thought to murmur to him about the prayers she had offered up to Qalaya for him every night, every empty, hollow night, for years uncounted between then an now, she thought to tell him how her heart did not break in one go, but slowly cracked and splintered for the months and months of the year he left, how she held hope past the falling of the last tulip blossom, how she stood in the wain-markets everyday watching, how she spoke captains of the northern trade routes to hear word, how she studied and pored over the maps, such as they were, that led to Alvadas. How she pleaded with the road to rise the flag of Gypa's father over one of the wains as it poured down from the pass.

But Minnie was not the woman to say those things. She listened. And then, she went, slowly, and pushed her chair forward to where Wren was, and sat in it, huffing weakly, searching for the bottom of her lungs. And then, she opened her owlish eyes wide, pulling the wrinkles back as far they would go. And very slowly gently, she reached out both hands, the black in it hanging, blodoy bandages, the white with a shake in its finger tips, and stroked, with a shaking troupe of fingertips, the man's cheeks. She pulled the fingertips around the boys neck, and pulled him down towards her tired, soft shoulder, without saying a word, then, only the brimming volumes in her eyes.

And the, she did not speak, but sang, very softly, not very well - she had never sung well - but through the creak of illness and age, the same humming, alto she had sung to him with many years before.

"Lullay, my sweet Lully,
See how close the sky has come,
Lullay, my sweet Lully,
And won't it fall on us soon?
And you and I
Shall softly lie
Beneath its awful weight,
Lullay, my sweet Lully,
But I shall hold you to my breast,
And raise my little arms,
And hold the sky from off you
So that I may sing a lullaby,
Before you go to sleep."

[Wrenmae]

As if the words were keys, and his mind a lock, tumblers clacked their dusty progress through the hitched breathing, the sweaty palms, the pressure building behind his eyes, in his throat.

And he sobbed.


Once upon a time there was a boy who swore to never cry. He watched his father vanish, watched his brother and sister wither, and walked, alone to the gates of a strange city. On that day before the gate which spoke with a face a man should have, he swore he would never cry again. No little Gypa, no tears. Wrenmae never cried, never turned away from danger, from adventure. Little Gypa would have sobbed, would have birthed another Suvan from his eyes had they not been so frozen in the hoarfrost. That little boy made true his word. He did not cry. When agony lashed his body, when his new adopted parents died of sickness. He stood there, tired, exhausted, mortified, but never crying. And slowly did that water build, an ocean of unspent tears for friends lost, dreams shattered, goals burned, and hopes tattered. He did not pray to Qualaya anymore, nor Priskil of hope. He prayed to no one but the darkness and, in its wisdom, it had answered him with cold expectation, abuse, and pain.

And now that foolish boy who held back his tears for years and years let them out into the shoulder of a dying woman who was not and was his mother.

And it all seemed very surreal.

But he let it leave him, the damage, the sorrow, the agony of it all...because he had been raised better. Once he was a boy who said "Please" and "Thank you" Once upon a time he took that lost purse all the way across town, even through the scary dock district with the big, mean people and their loud, surly mouths to return it to the man who dropped it. He laughed, told stories in the dappled light beneath the Yew tree outside the University. He was crooned to sleep in Harbor mommy's lap when he was young enough to add 'y's to the end of words to make them cute.

Once he was what he wasn't now, compelled to darker deeds and darker futures. And did he falter? Did he miss a step? No. Even as he sobbed he knew he would be back into the street in eveningtime...maybe the next. He would orchestrate his plans, he would terrorize Zeltiva a little longer...because a god told him to and he wanted to impress.

Because no other god ever found him good for anything.

Zan, wisely perhaps, chose to remain silent through the whole exchange, leaving the hypnotist blissfully without his verbal jousting. He clutched the woman he had abandoned, clutched her like the spar of driftwood he held fast to when his ship was sunk by monsters, clung to her like he had clung to consciousnesses when Breaker tore his skin into rivers of jagged red lines. Held to her because if he didn't, she might turn to dust or dream-mist and sink into the walls.

He was alone and reunited in horrifying irony.

And she didn't understand.


Then he'd have to make her. Make her know. Damn the consequences of that horrible truth but he had to make her know, had to make her realize.

He pulled away from her, gently, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. His red eyes were a wary, bleary smear on his otherwise vibrant face. Somehow, he had even made sobbing beautiful.

"Once upon a time," he said quietly, "There was a boy who did not want to die. The cold winds of Kalea followed him from Taldera. They whispered "come, come, throw down your life and sleep with us." Now in that time he traveled with three others, a merchant and his two half siblings. One was beautiful, the other strong, but they treat him as an equal...even though he was not."

He took a breath, sighed it out, continued.

"The winds were jealous, they conspired atop the highest peaks of plans to claim the brave souls who dared defy their wishes. One suggested avalanche, to bury them all in stone and cold. But that was too violent, and the earth would claim them first. Another suggested some wild thing, send while they sleep to eat the horse and then them. But the others disagreed. The merchant was strong, and his son was stronger. If they killed this wild thing they would make clothes from its fur and stave off their grasp still longer. Well...it was the craftiest of the winds that spoke last. Here, it says, I have a plan. We will send a storm of winter that will never cease. Freeze them all to death and take their spirits when they tire."

Wren remembered this part, the howl of the winds before the snow came. It did not descend softly, but all at once, a gale of fury.

"So they gathered all the snow they could and charged from their mountain seat, came down upon the family with their hatred and their greed. The father, a brave man, he told them to wait while he fought the winds alone. he would return, he said, but the winds claimed him...and they made him their own."

Shuddering, Wren almost bent away from Philomena, started, grew weak, fell back. "So there were only three, and the youngest, the sickly boy, wind found a home in his lungs. They stole his breath, bitter creatures, and they left him to die."

He looked up at her then, a fierce hatred burning for a moment, than dissipating, as if all the fire within him could only warm her placid face. "The god came to him then, when he was weakest...when blood stained his lips and he breathed pain. For the god had been watching, waiting, and he promised the boy he could live if he but hugged his siblings goodbye." His eyes were dead. Two pieces of rough-carved wood, lightless.

"So he did. He did not want to die. He hugged them both and loved them to death and Vayt, for that is what he called himself...this god, led the boy to safety in a distant city."

Air ran out of him and he stared, glassy eyed, at some distant place...perhaps the memory, a location beyond Minnie's eyes or comforts. "And those who grew close to him died. They grew sick and withered...all of them. So the boy did not return home to harbor, he did not break, and he did not die...he did what he had to do because no one told him differently, no one could."

His eyes focused on her now with a dreadful stillness, wavering, of course, but with a deadpan finality someone with far more years should have.

"He became a monster," he said at last, standing up and away from her, mechanically, clumsily, like a badly puppeted doll "He embraced what he was."

He did not turn from her, he would not disrespect her like that. But it had been said, he had revealed it...to her and only her.

"You're going to die if you cling to me...everyone does...everyone will. I don't want you to die, mom, I don't want you to perish like the rest. Curse me. Revile me. Cast me out. Renounce me...but for the sake of the gods don't hold me close...I cannot say no to you, but I don't want you to die."

[Philomena]

Minnie held the boy - for again, in her mind, for just that moment, he was a boy again - perhaps even she was a young mother again. She crooned on gently, very soft, while he cried. It was the sort of lullaby that mothers reform every time they sing it, half familiar lyrics, half the exigencies of the moment. Minnie starts to cry too. Joy is in her tears, something that has grown wild and unfamiliar and dangerous to her, and she closes her eyes as she hums gently on.

When Gypa speaks, Minnie grows silent. When he pulls back to look at her, she does not resist. He tells a story, after all, and a story… that is something, in the midst of the chaotic turbulence of the past half an hour, that Minnie can understand, can cling to.

There is a certain way that Minnie has with stories, unconscious, but very much a part of her: it is a matter of listening, just so. The truly great storyteller does not simply expound a story into the void to wait for it to be heard. The great know that the harp the pluck is not their voice, but their audience - the voice is the finger that does the plucking. Talent and practice grants one the ability to slowly tune a faulty harp, to play around the weak points, to adjust the tune to match the instrument. But in the end, the very power of a story is composed in the fact that it is an interchange, rather than simple declaration. Minnie is no great storyteller - she studies stories, but she studies them the way a supplicant studies their God, with the distant reflection of the adoring.

And so, as Wren tells his tale, she reacts, she interplays with it, in the subtle subconscious ways that make a story a dance - he tells of the winds, her eyes grow wild and breezy, he talks of the cold, and her arms grasp around her belly absently, he tells of the Gods, and the horror of the mortal enters her face. They whirl together through the tale - she needs i to be this way. She needs it to be a story, not a bald set of facts, for facts must be simply known. The story, it can be understood.

And the story stops. It does not end, it simply stops. It cannot end, of course, not yet, for if it had ended, then… then Wren would not be here. Only Gypa. Or perhaps only a book. Minnie understood that, she knew, now, with the firm knowledge of instinct why her child had taken a new name - it was not that he was no longer Gypa, whatever he might believe. It was that he had to become a tale. That certain passages of our life, we must distill, from fact to narrative.

And then, he turned to her, and asked her, in his own small way, to end the story - or to write herself out of it. To end it for herself.

She sat, and was silent, then. The threads of the tale wrapped round her now, tattered and unfinished at their ends, the woof of a fabric that was taken from the loom unfinished.

//This is my child.//

//Lanie is not here, Lanie was never here.//

//This. This is my child.//

//They have taken him as well.//

//He spoke to them all, he lied to them all.//

//He does not know, anymore, he does not know how to be human.//

//This, Minnie-Wren Lefting. This. This is my child.//

And she closed her eyes, taking a deep, slow breath. She left the eyes closed as she spoke. IT was an old habit, one that her child had seen before - a part of her, some small semi-conscious part, took on the affectation for this very reason. Another part, though, a larger part, was simply frightened, and that fear, that was what made the effect powerful. It was the moment when a mother turns to her child, and tells him she is only human, like he. And then, very softly, she spoke. She did not have the thrilling resonance, the mastery of the dance that her child had - that her child had learned so well in his long exile! she felt a pride in that! - but she spoke her story simply, quietly, less like a storyteller, and more like a mother soothing a child to sleep.

"Once… once… once upon a time, there was a little girl. Do you know that, my beloved? That your harbor-mother, she once, too, was a little girl, just as you once were a little boy. We have both grown so old, now… so terribly old. But once, once, long ago, there was a little girl, who had a friend - and her friend took a poison-mark on her breast, just like one day… many… many years late" her voice shook and broke, but she rose her good hand in a warning gesture - 'do not touch me, yet' said the hand, 'not yet'. But her eyes, she kept locked on Wren's, quiet and vulnerable.

"Just like, many years later, her own son would be marked with. You took yours to live, you say. Your mother took hers to save me. Only your… your God, he is a liar, and a cheat, in the end. And he would have killed me, if she had stayed - and then he would have killed us both, when you were born. I don't … I don't know what deals your mother made then. I do not know how she saved us. But she left me here, to be alone, because she did not want me to die."

She looked imploringly at him, begging him to understand, "Do you know what that is, my beloved? Your mother… I… I have not ever been in love, I do not think, I have only been… your mother is the closest I have come to falling in love. I have loved… only a few people in my life, truly loved, I mean. There is your mother, and she had to leave. There is your Great-Aunt Hannah, and you know how she died a… poison, in a wound… just like…" she stares at her hand, then, the black and poisoned limb, but does not finish the thought, turning back to Wren, "I loved Kenabelle Wright, I love her, but she was gone before I was ever born. I loved her sister, Charm, but Charm, she leaves before Winter's end, and she will never return. I loved, Mara, at the library, and she is dying now - the Nuit, he broke her mind with his tricks, and now this plague will take her in the end. And then… and then I love Qalaya, but… but she is far away, and I am too small, eternally too small, too unimportant to be needed by her."

She reaches a hand out and touches Wren's face then, then smiles, a sad, broken little smile, and leans forward and kisses her forehead, "And, then, I love my little Gypa. My little Wrenmae, even. And he comes to me now, and what does he say? He says 'Mother, live, live and cast me out.' Live what, my son? Life is two things, my beloved: it is stories, and it is love. You would tell me, then, I who have one love left, now - for your mother, I have betrayed now, and if she is not here, if all of this… was you, and not her, she will…" her voice shakes, and barks unattractively through the words, "…she will not come back for me, now. I have one love left. And you tell me, to stop loving him, and to draw away from his story. Oh, my son! My son! I hope you never know what sort of request that is. And I hope you will never truly understand why I must refuse."

She smiles, a smile far sadder and more painful than any frown, her gave puffy and wet with tears. Minnie has never been beautiful, and crying has always made her uglier. She laughs, a tiny, cough of a laugh, "Do you know, my beloved? You look like your mother when you cry."

[Wrenmae]

Wren slumped against Minnie’s desk chair, drained from the tears and the explanation. Her following words only added weights atop his shoulders, driving, terrible weights that pushed him ever closer to the ground…till he lay there and only looked longingly at the ceiling, as if by merely thinking it, the wood would swallow him whole and leave nothing of this twisted fate, this predestined ordeal.
His skin felt a size too small for him and everything was cold. His mother, his birth mother, Lanie…she was marked as he was, manipulated by the Dark god to follow in his poisoned footsteps in ordeals almost orchestrated. Like his mother, he had played willingly into Vayt’s hands. For what purpose? What significance did his bloodline have to attract the god of disease so persistently?

But today was not one to ponder on Vayt’s aims, or attempt to call on the god for answers. Instead, Wren soaked in the emotion his harbor mother spun for him. Growing up, the only mother he’d had was Minnie. His birth mother had long abandoned him…and now it seemed, for a good reason, so he had never thought of Minnie as anything else but his real mother. Once upon a time she had instructed him to call her his harbor mother, a way to keep the title of mother perhaps, without stealing it from a beloved friend. But there had been no Lanie in young Gypa’s life, no comforting words, no lessons, no letters, and no love. All of it had come from Minnie, forging bond with him through common means. In a way, both of them had been abandoned by his mother…through necessity perhaps, but without communication thereafter. Like his father the merchant, had she perished in the wild? Minnie obviously didn’t seem to think so and even without knowing the woman, Wren doubted it as well.

He couldn’t leave her and she wouldn’t cast him out. He was damned the moment he’d made the decision to knock on her office door. Staying with her was death, and leaving was another death.

He was too exhausted to think, to reason, instead he simply slumped there on the floor, as if his entire body would turn to mud and sink through a thousand tiny holes, leaving him as nothing but residue.

“What are we to do?” he asked her flatly, his voice haggard, exhausted, “I won’t have you die, and no matter what my mother was to you…she was nothing to me. You are my mother, Philomena, and I am your son…in soul if not in flesh. I…can’t say, you know this, but…”

He trailed off, reached into a pocket and pulled out one of the rings he’d taken from the magecrafter professor…now incarcerated in the Sanatarium. “This ring will always tell you my direction and…when you near me, it will grow in heat.” Taking the other ring from his pocket he slipped it on one hand, placing the other on the ground beside her bended knees, “This one is yours, mother, for when the harbor grows too weary of waiting for her ship to come and comes for it herself.” He smiled, albeit weakly, “I can write to you, I can…but do not ask me to stay with you. I will not be the death of another loved one. My presence is already murdering you…do not ask me to stay.”

[Philomena]

Minnie looked hard at the ring, and went, as if to pick it up, but stopped. Only looking at it, flexing, slowly, the fingers of her white hand, one by one. Then she turned her face, upwards, to stare at her son.

She smiled, then, slowly, scanning him from head to toe. She stood, then, slowly, raising a hand to ward him off, and resettled her bones, painfully, then turned to face her desk, so as not to meet his eyes. She closed her own.

There are some battles that we fight within our hearts, that should be told. Like stories of great generals, our battles glorify the combatants, perhaps offer even some sort of forgiveness. The telling transforms the savagery to heroism, transforms the desperate clawing against the heart into a brave cavalry charge.

But then, there are some battles, quiet battles, that even Qalaya would not write down, some exchanges in the heart of things that, drawn out, would blaspheme the secret gods of our own souls, far holier than any God of the heavens.

Minnie fought one. There were many combatants: a woman with golden hair and poison touch, a son, fair and so-long-dead, a demon of the heart, that beats against the walls of possibility to try to strangle hope, a goddess even, regal and demure, with a quill in her hand, and the great, compassionate sadness of one who knows that stories always have to end.

The strokes of the swords are irrelevant, and again, sacred. It suffices to say that in the end, Minnie won her battle. She slipped from it, not uninjured, but sad, and sick-hearted and triumphant. HEr voice came, barely. Not a voice, but a whisper, the voicings of her throat lost now, somewhere in her.

"It hurts you, does it not? My son. My one and only beloved son. It hurts you so. Go. Go, my son. Write... write it down for me, won't you? Write it for me, before you leave the city. Give me that. I want to be your mother through the years that you were gone, as well. Don't lie to me, don't hide the things you would spare me, you... you know, still, though you have found your own Gods, what the truth of a story will mean to me. Write me the book of Wren-Mae-Gypa, and I promise I will keep it safe. Then, go. Go, and I will wait, until you ask for me, or until there is no other place to go."

[Wrenmae]

In such silences between them, nameless gods of dreams and creation blew shapes in dust motes. Worlds were born and died in the subtlety of a whisper. No resounding crash for reunion’s sake, sorrow had long since drowned. Wrenmae was quiet as he looked upon his mother, more pensive now than he had been when he came to the office. The horror of it, the tragedy, it had drained from him now. And in canyons carved by the rough passage of emotion, he found a solace and clarity he had not expected, a certain dispassionate state that he clung to now…like the eye in a storm.

And when she spoke he listened. He listened and he nodded.

And when she had finished, when her voice had murmured to and end. He did not, as once, lay his head down to sleep the day away. Instead he rose, put the book upon the table, took the ring and laid it atop the leather cover. He stood there a moment, still as a stone sculpture save for his hands, smoothing out the leather, fretting at the tiny imperfections and yet unable to change them. He straightened her papers, the disordered chaos she might have balked at before.

“I will, mother,” he said to her softly, “I’ll write you my story and one day, when all of this is over and I am tired and weary of the road, I will return to you…and…” he was quiet, mulling over the words carefully, “Together we can go to see my mother, wherever she is…and perhaps depart together from this world.” He smiled, but there were tears in his eyes, damned things…they glittered like individual betrayals. “Wouldn’t that be an ending, Mother? A sweet one, like a lullaby. None to die but just to sleep, sleep and adventure…”

He looked down at the book, past it, to the years that lay behind it like the imprints on the spine. “I never wanted this…” he said, “But I won’t die, I refuse to die until I’ve told the whole story, all of it…and whatever I make of myself, monster, man, god, or hero…it will be my story and people will remember it. Tell it to their children, and they will have some lesson of it, I think…” He looked up sharply, took steps away from her and paused at the door.

“I want to be immortal,” he said at last, looking back at her, “But not as an excuse, as the nuits are, but as the kind of thing that excites, teaches, passes on.” He swallowed, swiping the tears from his eyes, “I want to be a story, Mother, and you will always be a part of it.”

And then he turned, and he walked out.

He left the door open behind him, leaning there like a suggestion into the gaunt hallway beyond.

[Philomena]

Oh, gods, how she wanted to turn. Oh gods, how she wanted to speak. But she did not turn, she did not let herself turn. She burned her eyes into the book and the ring. She ached to put it on, to feel that he was just outside the door, but couldn't bear it, couldn't bear to put it on her finger and feel him walking away.

And she knew she shouldn't. If she did, she would run out the door and follow it, and plead with him to come back. It would be like it had been with Lanie, how she was brave a moment, then rushed to the window and screamed out her name, begging her to come back. Minnie was not brave.

//I am a small soul, meant for small moments. Just stand, Minnie, just stand.//

She felt more than heard him step from the room, and tried to say good-bye, her throat was lost to her. Her soul ached, physically in her chest, so heavy it pressed on her diaphragm. The voice came through inaudibly, the echo of a controtion of the lips, the tongue, the vocal cord.

"My child. Qalaya, please. He's my child... please... please..."

A cruel monster sat behind her eyes, shoving needles through the flesh to pierce through the otherside as hot, painful tears. They did not fall in long attractive trails, but smeared across her lashes like a wet cat's fur. She screamed - still no sound came - only the wracking in her stomach.

//I will not turn... I will not turn... I will not do that to him... Petch you Minnie Lefting, don't you dare, you gutterslut, you stand right petching here and stare at your desk. Do... not... petching... turn.//

And then she went, slowly, shakily to her knees and gathered up the Qalaya doll.

"Oh, Mother Qalaya... oh, Mother Qalaya... send him away, send him away, no matter what I petching say later, send him away, send him away... harden his heart, and send him away safe... take me, now, I don't care. Kill me. Or keep me alive, and use me. I don't care. Only, I beg you, I beg you, don't let me hurt him... don't let me hurt him... Oh Gypa, oh Gypa... Gypa... Gypa..."

The name rung raspily through her office. The pain of the name itself was not enough, and she felt herself buckle farther and farther into the floor. She gasped, and struck herself hard on the breast.

"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Don't you do it, Minnie, don't you do it... don't you shout him back, you whore. You just stay here... petch, petch, petch... Gypa... Gypa... Gypa..."

[Delirium]

Experience Rewards

Dr. Lefting :

Experience

Intimidation	1xp
Singing	1xp
Story Telling	1xp

Lores: loneliness - desire of human contact
Reunion with Edyptus - Wernmae
The story of Wrenmae and god Vayt
Insight into storytelling

Other Items:
+book
+ring

Wrenmae :

Experience

Interrogation	1xp
Impersonation	1xp
Storytelling	1xp

Lores:
Harbour mother: Philomena Lefting
Philomena Lefting - ages and ill
Philomena's dominion over him

Notes: A wonderful thread you guys! A pleasure to read. Beautifully written and so very captivation in terms of content. I must admit, imagining wren cry was quite something

If you have any queries with the grading, pleas don't hesitate to PM me