I remember you (Philomena)

[Wrenmae]

Winter 54, 512 AV

It was unnecessary to disguise himself.

But as he stepped through the University halls, hesitant step by step, his face rippled with unleashed Djed, shifting towards sharper features, an older face, cold blue eyes. Although he had registered in the University, he had avoided the hallowed halls as if they alone could point a finger at the marks he bore. The reason was simplicity in itself….Professor Lefting, HIS Harbor mother, she still taught here…and he thought to spare her the fate he did not spare the city.

Long moments of quiet introspection had revealed the raw sorrow at the heart of him, that sense of loss from the bygone years of shifting Alvadas, and his inability to return to the only other home he knew. Now he was grown, the bringer of pestilence, and although he carried the nearly complete stories of Wrenmae, the namesake he chose, it did not make him the child who had left her at the age of nine those many years ago. Much as Zeltiva had changed, so had he. There was little of that child-like innocence in him now, that simplistic joy that infected most of that tender age. Most of it had been stripped from him in a trail of tragedy, and carved from him beneath Sunberth. Were he a less cautious man, he would have assumed Minnie would never recognize him. After all, the difference between nine and twenty-two is the child and the man. Even so, it was not his intention to reveal himself, now, here, and dredge up a death she had long since mourned and moved beyond.

He only wanted to know if she was happy, a strange quest, especially for him. Wren rarely concerned himself with the happiness of others. Most often it was the absence of his own presence in their lives. So to concern himself with it was to live a life of hermitage, to give up his grand ambitions…and though some of them had felt hollow in the past weeks this season, he maintained his worship of Vayt and his will, supporting Rhysol as well.

When was the last time he prayed to Qualya?

He paused in the hallway, laying a hand against his chest to still the yammering of his heart. There was purpose in all things, including the fellowship of dark deities. Worse men and women had no doubt taken his own mantle before, and did any dream the dreams he had?

Perhaps.

His steps slowed outside her office, passed it, and then returned again. His agonizing pacing trapped him in an eternal ellipses, pausing before the dialogue of introduction could ever begin. Did he dare this? Did he tempt the fates by cursing her his presence? Without even reflecting, he knew the answer…he could not leave this city for what he assumed would be the last time without knowing his Harbor mother, knowing what became of her.

Taking a breath, and then another, holding both in his lungs for a moment too long he knocked with an explosive breath and coughed over his words. Winged insects fluttered in his stomach, crawled up his throat, but none made their escape, content only to remind him that the singular enemy of Zeltiva was more than capable of apprehension.

“P-Professor Lefting?” He asked the door, hesitantly, “My name is…” he paused. “My name is Murdock, I’m a student here at the University. I was wondering if I could solicit a little of your time for a paper I’m writing.”

All the halls held their breath.

And it was a few moments before Wrenmae realized he was doing the same.

[Philomena]

To say that Doctor Lefting's room was still would be, perhaps, to speak truth literally, and a great falsehood connotatively. A still room denotes a certain peace - in this chamber there was none of this. A heavy slate was laid against one of the book-shelves, a rough map of Zeltiva scrawled across by a hand with a clear eye for correctness, but without the corresponding artistic talent to render the imagined vision. It was marked with a series of obscure dots, streaky lines connecting them together in mad, indecipherable patterns. Great circles were scrawled heavily into the black stone - the Wright Library, the Fountain, the peristyle in the center of the Cemetery. A final circle, more tentatively drawn, in a neighborhood of less universal importance - near the Saville. One well acquainted with Minnie might, perhaps, divine it as the location of her own flat. Chalk lay scattered on the floor, beneath, and a square of dusty grey flannel beside.

The desk was like a Zeltivan bonesnapper suddenly grown so cold as to be frozen in time, the ferocity of it visible, but somehow contained and stilled. To one who knows Minnie, it is this surface that will be most immediately upsetting in appearance - for here, papers are scattered willy-nilly, an ink pot left open, and worst of all, a book, one of her own note books is laid open on its face, its spine stretched into an unnatural wrinkle of inexpensive leather. Another volume - theology - lays upon the floor. Minnie, in her right mind would break down at this sight, would fly through it with a religious fervor. In an ironic touch, in the center sits Minnie's greatest treasure - her prayer doll of Qalaya, set very precisely, very gently, atop a little wooden platform.

But now she did not move, and the still Minnie has the same sickening sense of frozen frenetic energy. She sat in an overstuffed armchair, sleeping fitfully. Her eyes were shut, but her body had none of sleep's torpor, each muscle tensed in a frozen strain, as if she fought movelessly against some invisible bindings. Her breast rose and fell, but too quickly, with too much of a heave. Her face was still, but her cheeks burned with a mixture of exhaustion, and perhaps the edges of a fever. Her left hand was bound in white linen, but her right clutched with shaking knuckles at the chair arm.

Sleep, with all of its vulnerability, and none of its kindness.

The sleep was fitful, indeed, and perhaps that is what triggered the next. Perhaps. Perhaps, she slept so shallowly that the mumbling words of the man outside her door startled the last of sleep from her mind. It is what a scholar would say. But Minnie, in the time she most needed the comfort, the regularity of that title, had somehow lost it. The rigor of the researcher had transformed into the scrawling wild force of the conspiracy theorist. The wisdom and knowledge of the experienced reader had devolved into the undisciplined tangentialism of the autodidact. And that sense of the impossible, of the tragically fertile over-connectedness of the world, would for the rest of the life she had convince her that the story she told herself as she woke was true - that she had, in her deep, and powerful need, wound her fingers so deeply into the smoky tendrils of the plague's slithering reach, that now even in her sleep, she felt it draw at her, felt it yank her like a fish from the depths.

And that is, after all, how she moved, flying to her feet with the sudden springing force of her tense muscles, her dress flying askew and wild, choking at one side of her neck, and tearing a button to show just too much flesh on the opposite breast. Her hair, unbraided and wildly coarse, flew about her like the halo of an angel of death.

//She is here. She is here. She must be here.//

Her glasses, flew from her face, and she hardly noticed, stumbling over her own skirt, with a strangled cry, and pulling the door open, to look, with the nearly blind wall-eye of her unaided sight out into the halls. Before she would even recognize someone in the hall, her heart so full of her own surety of the story, of how things are, of how her story would now end, her voice, tense and trapped behind a choked throat burst forth in a sibilant cry of a name.

"Lanie! I knew…"

And she breathed in quickly.

[Wrenmae]

If calamity had a name, it would be Philomena Lefting. He heard her before he saw her, the storm that was her frantic scrabbling, her rapid heartbeats...murmur, murmur, murmur, murmur, and worse, the sound of papers that took flight from precarious edges, folded parchments crunching underfoot or under hand, sounds MInnie would have never tolerated at home.

Each noise behind that door, a simple wooden thing, rough-hewn plank-wood with an iron handle and lock, was a separate cry of warning and disarray. Long before the door opened, the portal had transformed into a forbidding gateway thrice the height of Wren and twice his width. He felt young again, nine years old with chattering bones and oh so weak whistle breath, the kind that whispered through throats like the suggestion of life.

When she flung open the door, Wrenmae respectively looked away, at first for her nudity and then for the horror in which he found her state. Minnie could be called many things, but unorganized was not chief among them. But the gesture of his head and eyes were only temporary. He was drawn back to her as a familiar landmark, the prow of a sobbing ship he'd known so well from childhood to a point.

There was much of the harbor mother in her, and yet so much lost. Time had roughened her edges, drawn more lines into her skin. Stress played a game from the edges of her eyes and she almost gave the impression of a terribly delicate doll with fabric skin, perhaps too bunched in certain places.

Shock was what undid him, he wasn't quite prepared for the state she was in.

The blue eyes he had forced on himself adopted colorsplashes of brown, shock giving way to the loss of feeble concentration. That color thickened until it was Wren's eyes, not an imposter's looking at her. Luckily, he kept the rest of his changes in check.

Save for the ripple of skin and muscle across his face, but in her frenzied state, she might not have noticed.

Lanie.

He know that name...or did he? It sounded familiar, as if spoken down a long corridor of memory.

She was staring at him and he suddenly came into awareness of his state. He was looking at her with the most confusing assortment of melting emotions. Shock, fear, abject pity, longing, a shy sort of joy, guilt. All roiled like unsteady seas across his face and he dashed them all, forcing it into a calm repose.

"Professor Lefting," Wrenmae said to her, reaffirming his presence, "My name is Murdock, a student here at the University, I...I'm working on a project involving the histories of various staff in the University and your studies on Kennabelle Wright came up as an item of interest. I was...wondering if I might take up a little of your time to ask a few questions."

In his belt beneath the cloak, the book of Wrenmae's tales felt heavy. He had been given the book before he left with his father for the last time as something to read and learn. He had it since then...chose his name from its pages.

He did not mean to manipulate her, never that, but her state, her torture, he reached out with his hypnotism, through his eyes, weaving a simple tapestry of calm, peace, even strands of heightened focus on colors, shapes, or conversations rather than any pain she might be feeling. Directing it into her own aura, he 'introduced' his own mental anesthesia.

What had happened to her? Why was she like this?

Worst of all and something he dare not say aloud or even repeat within the vaults of his mind.

Was it him?

[Philomena]

The man in the doorway, was hardly a man - a smear of flesh and cloth-color against the stone-color of the opposite of the wall. But the voice was wrong. Her chest, rising and falling in a sort of ecstatic panic seizes, with an audible, grating tone. The fingers of external life, of the man's gentle penetration, probed gently at a mind swollen and tender with an infection, perhaps more acute and deadly than the edges of physical illness evident in her flushed face, in her pale, cold fingers, in her just-sallow eyes, indirectly in the bandaged hand. She cringes softly, at them, subconsciously, her mind holding its breath, as it were, waiting for the needle to do its work, but the open frankness of the recently dreaming makes her not so much less resistant of the numbing force as outright hungry for it. The mind speaks cowardices that the voice never can, and this is one: I hurt, it says, please, please make me silent, make me silent.

And then there are fingers that come up from the unconscious as well, to intertwine with the strange external ones - fingers of the kind banality of habit, of the comforts of the mask. These two hands interlock, and the fingers of propriety squeeze those of obscurity, with a gently, understanding, grateful pressure. //Yes,// the dark voice of obliteration murmurs, //Yes, come, enter, strange fingers, come with me, for this child needs you, come...//

And Minnie's face detaches, with a pathological suddenness, from the thread of the genuine, and takes on the Mask of the Professor, its smooth, planed surfaces and carved monstrosities of wrinkles and defenses visible, the rough hewn, splintered interior known only to the quivering-soft skin of her heart. Her hands with a sort of hypnotic efficiency move up to adjust her dress. Her back straightens, her eyes close, and then reopen, the clouded horror and desire in them drawn back on itself into pale shadows, thrust into the violet rings around her eye-flesh with a sickly plumpness of sleep-swollen flesh. The hands, after the dress is made decent, go to her hair, begin to smooth it, to pull it down.

Her face is the most bland and horrible, though, the lips set into a grim relaxation of emotionless absentitude. Her poor eyes try to focus, the sudden sharpening of the world not so much granting clarity s granting intensity of experience. Her nose snuffles with a disinterested keen-ness, picking up the smell of the man, to whom she stands, still, perhaps, one step closer than one ought to, until he backs away.

"Yes, I… I'm sorry, you will forgive me, I hope. You startled me. You were… looking for some reading suggestions, then? Or did you have some specific…" Her mind, clearly, fought hard for the spark in each of its cylinders, and she stared, face unmoving and bland for a moment, just a moment longer than is comfortable for the listener, before she found the word, "Some… specific question, I mean?"

The hands, perhaps giving up on the hair, go first, one to her face to push up the spectacles that are not there - they lie now on the floor, just behind the woman, dangerously close to her clumsy-booted feet. The hand then wanders vaguely around her waist, her breast, looking for the feel of blown glass, of bent wire. The other hand with a gesture familiar to all who've watched her tics long enough, slips to the neckline of her dress, fussing with the hem of it in slow, thoughtful pinches.

[Wrenmae]

His words choked him with their own barbed, guilty, tails. Like worms they crawled beneath this skin, escaping the powers of his ordinarily easy speech. They were birds on the wind, the last breeze of summer snatching into the bitter cold of later fall and winter. So instead of speaking he simply moved, the glint of twisted brown wire catching his eye with characteristic glint. He moved before she was finished focusing on him, at once too close and too personal brushing against her body as he knelt around her and plucked the glasses from their hidden place behind her boot.

"Professor," he said, offering them to her, dangling off a finger, "Careful, you wouldn't want to step on these."

He left them hanging there till she took them, respectively standing clear of her immediately after and giving a short bow. "You mistake me, Professor Lefting, I'm here to ask you a few questions concerning your own life. You see, I've been working on a compilation of information about the professor's in Zeltiva, a historical project for the library, and I was hoping you had a little time to speak."

He smiled at her, suddenly catching his words again and offering them on the end of a poisoned tongue like sweets. Almost lost, he simply avoided her eyes and he could find his voice, his charm, the natural way of seduction about him that made things so easy to glean, know, exploit.

Not that he wanted to.

He could not look at his Harbor mother directly, not anymore. She was too bright against his eyes, silohuetted in memory and too painful to see completely. So instead he looked anywhere but her face, hoping she would not notice his deceit.

He would not hypnotize her for that sort of gain. Never her.

And there was relief in that.

He had his standards...so he still had his soul.

For now.

[Philomena]

The fogged eyes heard the voice, and saw the movement of the hand. Minnie's eyesight was growing worse. It always did when she was ill - her eyes had first gone awry years ago, years ago, in the first plague she had survived, the fever drawing too much from the blood and sinew there. She had thought since, perhaps, it was a sort of sympathetic magic, had thought perhaps it was because the fevers made her eyes try to focus on someone who was not there.

Her good hand, though, found the hand of the student, her lye-roughened skin and ink-stained fingertips, the same as they had ever been, and yet… even they, even her fingers, the strongest part of her body, the cleverest part, felt slower, stiffer. These were the fingers that had pinched delicately at quills and written letters the size of grains of rice, to save paper, the finger that had learned to twine her braids with one hand, while walking, and holding a book in the other. These were fingers that had delicately stroked long lines up and down the nape of a little boys neck, long ago, in long candle-lit evenings, while she read stories to him from great, fat, well-kept books. These were fingers that had picked lice from his hair through a typhus bloom, fingers that had drawn rags across his forehead through the occasional fevers of childhood.

Now… it was not that they had failed. They were the bravest guards she had, in fact, against the decay overtaking her. But there was a certain a plumpness to them, a certain clumsy wrongness, a swelling. The struggling fluids of her body, run low on the resources of inhibition, expulsion, instead collected turgidly beneath her skin. Even so… even so. There is little grace in Minnie Lefting. But to one who can look at her charitably, there is still the delicacy of touch, the gentle lightness of a bird's feathers, in the her fingers brush the man's skin, blindly gather up just the corners of the glasses, ever cautious not to touch the glass, and pull them to her face. She would revile from an unknown human touch normally, at least her, at least in her safe-place. But, she doesn't, not now. It would be romantic to say there was some instinctual feeling, some familiarity there that she does not quite recognize in her conscious mind. The truth is, she's just plain lonely, and the revulsion fights with a desire for human contact at once both contradictory and powerfully instinctual, to produce… just a sort of hollow acceptance, that leaves her needier, but not any happier for the brush. There is, only subconscious, mind you, just the slightest rise of her flesh at the contact, just the vague hint of flesh seeking flesh, of that desire for touch, for contact. For the comfort of a kind hand. It does not reach her face, which remains still, and hollow and professorial.

The glasses, though, now, over her eyes let her focus - or at least enter a better focus. Clearly a near-sightedness still makes her lean just slightly forward, like a woman in a dark room trying to make out the outlines of the furniture so she doesn't trip over it. She looks at the man, now, and then, his words crawl through her mindspace, to weigh at the corners of her mouth, to pull them into a mild, suspicious frown.

//Petch the students, all of them. Even when I'm sick, they send petchers to play these little jokes on me. I thought it was at least different now. They have all heard. That rumor has flown: Unpetchable Philomena Lefting has gotten the plague! Stay away, you little shykes, I'll shrivel your... Why won't they just leave an old woman alone, to die?//

But she closed her eyes a moment after being asked, and felt the little voice in her mind, the one that was growing stronger, crisp and strong-willed, and precise and cold. She had painstakingly constructed this voice, over the past days, since she had spoken to Charm, since she had realized that, however long she lived, that this was the only role that wanted her anymore: to be silent. To record.

//Minnie, child. What if he is telling the truth? Our story, it is a very dull one. But even dull stories must be written. Our story, it is a a very ugly and shameful one. But even ugly and shameful stories must be written.//

And her own little voice, growing meaner and smaller, more infantile and hopeless and wild each day, as the cold Qalayan comfort-voice grew stronger, spoke back now, in her mind, //No… I can't. I can't. I… please, Mother Qalaya, please. I have given over, I have let it all go, all of it. I've given the story up. Don't make me tell it, please...//

And if a mind could stroke itself, it did, //Confession, little Mins. Confession. But not too fast. Just listen and answer questions. What can they do? You are not human anymore. We are beyond humiliation, now, we are.//

This whole exchange, it happened with the quickness of thought, rather than the slowness of speech. But then, her defenses were low now, and perhaps, to the close observer, it was visible, the slight flickering of her eyes, the composition of the muscles around them into a mask of guarded openness, the lips moving just slightly, as if speaking to herself. Then, she met the man's eyes a moment, then turned away, to stump slowly, weakly to her desk. She would need a cane, soon, her body's strength diverted to her pulsing, sick hand. The movement stirred the air around her, and from that bandaged hand wafted just the hint of the horrible smell of death. Of putrefaction. The smell of Vayt's playgrounds.

She began, with a dull blankness, to move papers about into piles, papers written in her normal hand, but shakier, the ink poorly blotted, some of the lines wavering up and down across their columns. Most of it is indecipherable at a glance.

"You… are recording information about the professorate? For the library? It is separate from the Faculty Marks? I am not, perhaps, worth too much of your time. My corpus is listed in the Marks, and then my history is more or less my history with the University, for your purposes, hmm? You should consult with the librarians, they can find these things for you, and not waste so much of your time chasing down old Doctors."

She did not turn as she spoke, not meeting the man's eyes.

[Wrenmae]

It was lucky that her back had turned to him, she would have peered closer at the flash of ravenous, frustrated, black anger that twisted Wren’s face, for a moment, into the visage of some Valterric monster. It was an alien feeling, something cold and unforgivable that had crawled up through his shattered conscience and into his mind. She was weak, sick, certainly, and before he had even gotten to her, Vayt had laid claim to her bones, perhaps her soul. The vehemence of it all took him by surprise, and there was an almost comical unbalance between fury and confusion few would find easy to match. It was an old anger now, a tired frustration cultivated in Alvadas when he was young and laid bare now. It had been years since he’d been with someone he cared about so strongly, he’d almost forgotten the agonizing and helpless feeling associated with Vayt’s mark. Back then, those who grew close to him withered…almost as if the act of reaching out to his emotions was a debilitating poison. He kept council with few, stayed with far less, and built a castle over his heart if only to keep it from shattering again…and again…and again.

But his Harbor mother was a mightier edifice still, some Pre-Valterrian tower that rose above his paltry emotional stopgap and crushed his shields to dust. Here was that paralyzing guilt he had assumed lost to him. He was killing someone he loved, and yet was inexorably drawn to them…for who understood him better?

Wrenmae had kept council with nuits and brigands before; in each case he rarely let the other party close enough to invade his heart of hearts, that lonely sanctuary. Minnie had callously pushed open the door and cracked his pews to tinder with but one dismissive glance.

The words “I am your Gypa, come at last home,” rose on his tongue but did not break between sneering lips. Instead he swallowed them, crushed them, settling on another lie entirely…but perhaps with more truth to it than before. She was obviously not doing well, although the University had, at last, responded to her talents. Were he stronger, he would have quitted himself her presence then, left her forever without a word.

But he was not strong.

He was weaker than anyone else and, in this moment, his resolve fractured.

“Minnie I…” he swallowed, purging the desperation from his words, “Professor Lefting, my apologies, admittedly I chose to pursue you personally for another reason.” He sighed, stepping into her office and pausing, instinctively reaching for the abused book, straightening it, laying it reverently back and picking up the theology book from the ground, returning it to her bookshelf. It was almost invasive the way he moved, without thought. In earlier days, when his name was Gypa, Minnie would scold him if he left a mess and since she rarely left any, he moved in the jerk-motion of old animated golems to straighten the room.

He gave her no explanation, sighing before sinking into his seat. His eyes still would not find hers, finding perch on the frozen chaos of her office.

“My name is Murdock, from Alvadas. Some time ago, when I was younger, I came upon a book in the marketplace. It was a story, but a story that had never finished. At the time, I didn’t know who had written it, but in my travels I came to Zeltiva and, by chance, recognized the hand writing in a classmate’s syllabus as your own…or at least a close match.” Reaching to his belt, he pulled the worn leather-covered book and put it on her desk. It sat there, a quiet accusation. The book was old, well-worn and read, undoubtedly the story of Wrenmae Minnie had left with Gypa while he crossed the mountains with his father.

He was quiet a moment, too estranged from Gypa’s original appearance, now morphed, to be of any use to her. “I thought to myself that I would deliver it to the writer, as no book should go without the love of its author…and it was such a grand story, I wanted to know how it would end.” His face was grave and now he wished he had torn out the pages he had gingerly wrote into the book as a child, of the Begger-King and how Wrenmae needed to steal his identity back from Ionu to get the wings for his flying ship…but much as he’d tried, there was nothing in him that could do it. He was as much a part of the story as she was, and his contribution had not stolen any meaning from the narrative. Her reactions were what he’d watch, quiet as she spoke or cried…but he expected tears.

“Are you happy?” He asked quietly, looking down at his hands, “With your life, I mean. Do you feel as though you lived your life well?”

[Philomena]

Minnie stayed hovering over her desk. She heard the stranger speak, and... he said her name. There were very few people who did that, anymore. When she was a child, she had been a kennel-rat, with no last name. Now that she was grown, she had sacrificed that child, on the altar of the University, and made the thing she was now - the opposite monster. A creature with a surname, and a title, but no first name. Dr. Lefting.

She had grown used to it. Mara Capinsal at the library still called her Minnie, for they had been roommates, once, long ago. She could think of noone else, anymore, that really thought of her that way. The only time she heard her name now, it was an insult. Sometimes, the barbed dimnuitive of false intimacy thrown about by a professor or their wife, to put her in her place at a social function. Far, far more often, it was her own mind throwing it at her. She spit the the name at herself, hurled it at herself, now, in her older years, a way to slap herself down, to remind herself 'This is all false, this all nothing but veneer. You're noone. You're Minnie, just a little girl in a torn dress in a gutter."

So hearing it now, and hearing... that strange quiver to it, that intensity. Even Mara spoke with a sort of breezy, mathematician's efficiency when she said Minnie's name. This man, this stranger spoke her name like... like he meant it, somehow. It rose the gorge of her throat, it was intimate, she vacillated between feeling caressed and feeling violated. Her hands kept moving papers, but they trembled just a little bit, now. And a trained eye would see - they were no longer doing anything useful. She did not turn.

The hands stopped altogether when he said 'Alvadas.'

She stood. Very, very still.

The man spoke, but she stayed immobile, her face to the wall. She did not need to see the book, not now, she knew it. She knew just what it was. And she did not want it in her eyes, or... she did and she did not. In that terrible stillness, Minnie boiled, softened, broke apart. Dissolved. The book lay, still, on the table. The man finished, asking her a question, but her ears, were dissolved, her lips were dissolved, her heart was dissolved. She was gone, she was invisible, a shade in the room. There were only three parts of her flesh left: The eye, the white hand by the book, and the black hand, the spectre of a hand, visible in her mind's eye now, for her dress, her gauze, all these were dissolved as well. She stood, empty, and naked to the world.

Very quietly, very slowly, she reached across the desk. A pair of white gloves lay thrown casually there - too casually, the gloves had a smear of dust across them, something Minnie in her true mien woudl never have allowed. She took the right-hand glove and hung it between her teeth, and pulled her hand into it, a trick she had mastered by now with the left hand immobile. Then, the ghost of a right hand went slowly, slowly, ever slow, to carress the old and battered cover. She did not feel her lips, did not know that in some other-world, some world where other people still existed, that they moved, that they spoke, but they did.

"It is tired, this book... but it has lived. Oh... how he must have read it!"

Her voice was spectral, dry, raspy-whispered. The white hand opened up the cover, turned the pages gently, in sections, to the point where they became blank. Saw that the handwriting changed, that it shifted from her own, miniscule mechanical hand, to the young, but well-intentioned orthography she remembered. The letters were like fingertips, for looking at them she remembered taking the boys hand, once, years ago, in her own, and guiding it in long, smooth stroked across a wax tablet, remembered holding it as it dipped its first quill, remembered inkstains that ran from the page to smear their two hands together, so that if they set their hands just so, it was like reassembling black and lonely clouds in a broken flesh-tint sky.

"Gypa... Gypa... Gypa..." She spoke the name, each time, the hollowness in her voice drifted farther and farther from her. A rich, quivering shakiness bubbled up in its place, the raw, bubbling stew of a heart, not yet whole, not yet directed or decided. It was a noise that could turn to prayer, to tears, to mourning, to happiness, to... almost anything, only, whatever came, it must be strong, it must not be controlled. And still, she did not turn.

"Gypa... Gypa... oh, Gypa..." The voice trembled, filled, and burst so close to its breaking point it was like a sea swelling against a cracked dyke.

And then, it broke, into perhaps the emotion Minnie felt the most seldom. She darted the black hand forward with a sudden, hateful fury, and snatched the book up clumsily in it, raising it with a high keen in her voice of incomprehensible, garbled sound. She raised it, cocked her arm as if to throw it. And stopped, trembled, her legs failing, and clutched the book to her chest, and fell into a kneeling ardor of tense muscles, pulling as hard as they could to try to find some final reservoir of secret tears to draw up into her eyes, to give some semblance of relief.

And there were none. Nothing came.

And the tears were pulled so hard, the reservoirs squeezed so hard, her voice returned, and she had it now. She was no disembodied eye and two hands, not now, not anymore. She was, for once, far more than she had been in years, perhaps not since the Evalin, entirely, terribly, powerfully within her own skin.

"Petch you, Qalaya! Petch you!"

She spit the word 'petch', not in the casual sneer of the street child, used to spitting the word out at anything within reach, but with the powerful, almost divine force of true, hateful blasphemy.

"Petch you, Qalaya, you petching whore! You do this now? You do this to me, now? Petch you! Petch you! Petch you!"

She dropped the book, curled almost to where her forehead reached the floor now in grief. The black hand tore free from her breast, and she smashed it, hard, againts the sharp wooden corner of the roll-top desk, the gauze half tearing free, the flesh blooming a mix of pus and red-red blood into what remained, leaving smears across the old, rosy wood. She rose it to strike it again, and again, and again, and again, as long as she was allowed, punctuating her own blasphemies with a force of furious self-loathing that left her, for the moment, stronger with each blow. She spit the word each time, she spit it the way one would spit on the face of a child molester, the way one tore at the face of a murderer, her head and neck the only part of her curling back, to try to point at the heavens, the wracking tearless sobs leaving them pointed at the far wall.

"Petch you! Petch you! You hear me, slut of the heavens? Petch you! Petch you!"

[Wrenmae]

Time never stopped when it was requested. Skulking in an alley behind a mark or poised to gloat over a defeated foe...time was a fickle creature. She stepped in now, pulling away the curtains of motion and slowing to a crawl. Each word, each motion, it was punctuated with the weight of eternities. Wren almost felt he had time to write a story, a book, a saga in the time between each snarled word, in the space before her fist crashed into the end of the table.

This was a mistake.


How could he have ever thought Minnie would take it well? Her every action spoke of fragility, her skin and bones barely held her nervous terror in check. Now, faced with the reality of her beloved Gypa's death, something had shattered in her.

And he had thought she would have moved on by now.

Her hand only met the table twice before it stopped, caught in a strong and healthy hand by the wrist. There was almost a struggle there, almost a fight, but Wren's face was melting, shifting, changing. He adopted his eyes again, his face, the cocky way his grin upturned, the cold calculation of his brown eyes.

But all of that was overshadowed now. Only worry and fear touched those features in such subtle and profound strokes as to transform the plaguer into the child again...for a moment.

He took the book in his other hand and put it on her lap.

"Enough..." He sighed, the word breathing out of him and into her, "Enough. I can't let you speak such blasphemy anymore...I...made a mistake."

He ducked his head, trying to catch her eyes. "A long time ago I learned that those close to me die the swiftest. I wanted to spare you that fate, Mother, I wanted to spare you..." His voice broke, a snap he had not expected and so the emotion behind it, the tears, they all were as new experiences to him.

He drew away, wrestling with the emotion, twisting his face...confused, bereft...

"I've come to harbor," he said quietly, "But under a different sail. I did not want you to know...I wanted to spare you this, my...curse, my mission...but I see it found you anyways." The arrogance left him like blood from an artery, spurting into nothingness around him, leaving him huddled, small, weak.

"I'm so sorry, Mother, I thought to write...I thought to...but the courier wanted so many mizas for such a far place and I was young...and poor." He shook his head, "And there were so many I lost...I..."

"I.."

But nothing came out, no excuse, no words.

"I am Gyptus no longer, I took the name of Wrenmae...I always thought it would help me have adventures, travel far..." he smiled, mirthless, at the floor, "And finally I am home, but not for long...never for long."

He rose swiftly, away from her.

"You...need to get that hand looked at. Please do not seek me, I will only be poison to you...to everyone." He turned on his heel, pausing at the door, wavering there. Much of him wanted to hug her, hold her, cry eyes that had not released themselves in years.

But he could only stand there, back to her, paralyzed on the threshold. Would she know? Could she guess he was the infection in Zeltiva? Impossible...and yet...

And yet.

He almost wished she did and perhaps then...she could curse him, cast him out, revile him, renounce him.

And then he truly would be alone...and he could leave in peace.

[Philomena]

Minnie's hand, tiny and frail, and wasted with illness winced visibly as a strong hand wrapped around her wrist. The flesh of her was not wiry, it was not strong-in-the-face-of-adversity. Minnie's flesh, inside the man's hand felt like nothing so much as a battered flagpole wrapped in wet rags, her muscles loose, and yielding in unhealthy, damp patches of rot. The smell of decay is strong, now, so close, the scent of death, the death that begins in the wastrel hand and is creeping slowly up her arm on trails of fevered veins, red and wild through the skin.

The struggle makes Minnie stumble catching the corner of her scarf beneath her knee, with a ripping sound, pulling it loose to reveal an angry, jagged red scar across the front of her neck - old, this scar, but not so old as to be familiar to the boy Gypa, for when he knew her, her neck she wore bare, bare for a child's face to nestle into. Her teeth, in her mouth are fading slowly into the grey of perpetually substandard care, one even missing, leaving a jagged gap in her molars.

And her eyes... the wrinkles around them look old, so terribly old. When her Gypa parted last, Minnie was... not young, but was a flushed and living middle age, heavy and dark with mourning for Great-Aunt Hannah, but still, fresh and filled and, if not attractive, at least healthy - her skin, it was smooth, even, for its age. In the right light, and in a dress that obscured the sag of her bust and the slight hollowness of her hands, she could pass almost for a child in those days.

That is gone now. Minnie is like a snake who has been unable to shed her old skin. The surface is dry, and thin, and poorly attached to her frame, the texture is rough and spotted with liver and age. Her eyes are worn heavy with worry, now, heavy with irreversible wrinkles and muscular tensions.

She looks up as her wrist is gripped, her face a potent cocktail of shame, sorrow, and anger at this strange man who comes to watch her in her lowest moment.

//How dare he,// her mind murmured, //How dare he speak of blasphemy? What does this wanderer know of the Gods? Blasphemy! Blasphemy is only a crime in a world where the Gods pay you heed. I am below their interest. Or I am become their plaything. This time, when I cut, I will go somewhere more lonely, and I will bite deeper. Petch the rest, petch Qalaya, The Evalin, petch the Murder Man, petch you Lanie, even you. I'm tired. I'm too tired for this.//

And that fatigue, it too filled her, filled her now, to the exclusion of other emotion, almost, the resentment just clinging to her cobwebbed eyes.

And then... and then.

What does one do? How does one describe the reaction to the incomprehensible but unavoidably true? For now, Minnie's mind flew into its order... Wrenmae, Wrenmae, Wrename. The bird-child in the silver-ship. She had heard the name, and forced herself to unheard it, she had dreamt the face, and forced herself to undreamt it. But there was Wrenmae. There was this strange Wrenmae, who had so many names, and why not one more? She breathed deep, and in the breath, her nostrils snuffled slightly, for a peculiar smell caught at them, the bitter-salt tang of a particular sweat, and she knew, then, or believed she did, the smell: this was the scent of her Gypa. This was the scent of him, wrapped in a quilt on a long autumn night that turned warm too soon and left him with the pleasant lethargic sweatiness of morning. This was the scent of him, pulled close to her as he wept over the mockery of some neighborhood bully. This was the scent of him as he snuggled under the soft nook of Minnie's arm, their two scents melded together over the soft and murmuring tone of Minnie reading the very stories to him from which, eventually, he took his own name.

And her face grew taut and still, and distant. Most people would not recognize it - Gypa... or Wren... or Murdock... he might, though perhaps it would have required more self-awareness then his brain would allow him - the moment of disconnection, in which an aspect of one's self is tucked away involuntarily by the mind that would defend itself, and another self is brought forward. Minnie's is not so drastic, she does not change identities, only...there is some kinship there, of the face seeking to reassemble itself, to put the unavoidable forward, and to take the painful and slip it into a box, and set it on the shelf, to be hidden from.

And what emerges is a face that has been missing from her repertoire for a very long time, a face that is only the thinnest of paper forms over her true self, but has grown caked and clumsy with dust and neglect - the face of a Mother.

But by the time it comes, Wren has spoken on, has turned, has gone to stand in the doorway.

And Minnie turns, then, to face him, and her voice comes out clear, and low, and very, very, very soft, but there is no quiver now. This is not the quiet of fear or loneliness, or timidity. This is the quiet, powerful voice of a mother, who as she murmurs softer, the child grows quieter and listens more intently. Even when she was a mother, this tone came very seldom, for Minnie never had much trust in her own power - even the timid mother, though, when her heart has love in it, occasionally is filled with that strange and thrilling force of will. The quiet voice, the quiet stilling voice.

"Egyptus Mae," the 'full name' - not even truly one, since Mae is a surname only in Minnie's own heart - carries the force of invocation, "If you will take that name, you must take with it all it carries. No Wrenmae I have told you stories of would leave, now, like a coward. I...." she breathes, her voice enters a slight quaver as she does, "I... I taught you... many things that maybe have not served you well. But never, ever, ever did I teach you to run from what you feel, to seek distance over knowledge, to seek relief over truth. You will turn, and come in here and sit."