(no subject)

[othellovonryan]

Noise.

It starts as just irritation. A metaphorical crawling under your skin. Things are too noisy, too bright, there is too much happening all the time and you can't take it all in-

Then silence it, make it yours, make it you, take control and destroy what will not submit

It sounds so inviting, a freedom from the noise, but its wrong, its wrong, its wrong and the noise is getting louder, mechanical and foreboding as it sees you, it knows you are there, and it wants to make you apart of it.

Anatawa hitorijanai

For a moment, there is quiet.

You breathe.

And fall through water.

Comments

Re: The Lab

[allevilthings]

[she can feel the tug, then. she almost refuses, snarling. a memory is no small price.]

[but saving Donnie - yeah, she's not leaving without it. and so a memory rises in answer, half-called, half-unbidden.]

[“I thought it could be fixed,” I said. “I thought a lot of things could be fixed, back in those days.”

“Some still can be.”

I leaned back into my seat, sipping at the last of my drink.

“I can’t answer unless you ask, Pickler,” I said.

She shook with something that might have been laughter, had there been amusement in it.

“I don’t have anything to offer you, Catherine,” she said. “I am not a High Lady or the Council of Matrons. The gold I have you have paid me, and my allies are your allies. I couldn’t threaten to leave if refused even if I wanted to – where I would I go? The Army of Callow is my home.”

“It doesn’t always have to be hard coin and favours, Pickler,” I quietly told her. “We can talk.”

“Talk doesn’t move the needle with you,” Pickler said, and before I could reply raised her hand. “It’s not scorn I speak. You are a queen, Catherine. You cannot act like other women.”

“And yet,” I said, “I’d like to hear you out anyway.”

She drank of her cup, squared her shoulders.

“They’re plagues,” Pickler of the High Ride tribe said. “Both of them. The Matrons just want a hidden kingdom in the mountains with Foramen as a trade city and no imperial leash. The shit they’ll get up to in the Eyries, Catherine, would make a devil shiver.”

“The way I hear it, it’s already no handful of roses,” I said.

“You don’t get let in on the real secrets unless you’re a Matron,” Pickler said, “but I… know things. The Tribes hold back on projects out of fear the Empire will notice and intervene. Wipe them out, even. Even now there’s a lot of Matrons who think munitions should never have been revealed. And the Council is made up of monsters, but my mother’s worse.”

“She likes knives and backs,” I conceded.

“She’s a Matron,” Pickler shrugged, as if that settled it. “But she thinks differently, Catherine. She wants to be the queen of our kind or ensure one of her daughters will be. It’s why she wants Foramen: it’s the lifeline of the Tribes. The ways my people are rich, ore and goods, they’re not worth anything if they can’t be sold to someone. So long as she has Foramen, she has them in the palm of her hand. And to get her way she wouldn’t mind starving half our people to death from behind the walls of her city.”

“I deal with terrible people all the time,” I admitted. “I even backed Helike to prominence in the Free Cities because it’d put down Malicia’s allies.”

“They are tyrants, Catherine,” Pickler said. “Leeches who drink the lifeblood of goblinkind to maintain their power and influence. And I know it is not like me to speak of them, of all they do, but I…”

She swallowed.

“I owe it,” she said. “To him. Because he was right, when you spoke to us in Marchford. When I balked at your banner rising against the Tower.”

Pickler met my eyes, the pale yellow unblinking.

“They kill us for sport.”

She bared her teeth.

“Robber spoke true when he said they’ve gotten soft,” Pickler said. “Look at them, darkening your doorsteps with deals they would have once sneered at. They’ve spent so many of us they can’t even get their own dirty work done anymore. They ate each other’s tails until there was nothing left but open maws and anger.”

“I can’t topple them, Pickler,” I said. “Not without a war I can’t afford to fight.”

“You don’t need to,” my Sapper-General said. “They did it to themselves. Do you think my people are happy they’re being used like this? The Matrons, my mother, they only own us so long as there’s nowhere else to go. And that’s something you can change.”

I blinked at her in surprise.

“You allowed the Snake Eater tribe into Callow,” Pickler said. “Let more in. Let us build without Matrons to hollow us out, without Preservers to open our throats the moment we reveal of ourselves. And they will come, I promise you that. Already the Legions and the Army are a home to flee to, but if you open Callow? Entire tribes will leave their tyrant behind.”

“If I grant lands to tribes, I’ll have a rebellion on my hand,” I frankly told her.

“Don’t,” Pickler fervently said. “Don’t let us forge another closed kingdom within the kingdom. Let us into your cities, your countryside, your wilderness. Let us be part of something that does not want to eat us.”

I flinched away from the intensity of her gaze.

“They’ll hate you for it, the Matrons,” she said. “For showing them they don’t own what it means to be a goblin, that just buried every other way and called it guidance. And I know it’s not what you want, not what Vivienne wants, that you have to think in kingdoms and favours and hard coin.”

She finished her drink, set it down.

“But we’ve stood behind you, Catherine,” Pickler said. “Not them, us. From the start, we’ve been with you. Sappers and soldiers and scouts, we’ve bled for you. And I won’t say it’s owed, because my people don’t believe in debt, but I need you to understand that I loved Robber – more than I thought, more than I knew – but there are fifty thousand like him the Eyries that never managed to flee. That are stuck and lost and will never see the light of day, know what the sun and the stars look like or even feel the wind on their face. Not unless you offer your hand to them.”

She left her chair, stood before me.

“I don’t have anything to offer you,” she said. “Nothing to bargain with. All I can say is please-”

I pushed back my chair, half-risen even as my leg ached, but I was not quick enough to stop her getting on her knees.

“- help us,” Pickler said. “Save us from ourselves, from each other.”

“I-” I choked out, at a loss for words.

“I think you might just be the only powerful person in the world who cares, Catherine,” she quietly said. “And I know you’re a queen, that you can’t afford to bend, but still I ask.”

She smiled, heartbreakingly.

“Please,” Pickler asked. “If not you, then who?”

I closed my eyes, almost short of breath. The stars were there, out in the black, but they felt… distant. Fading.

I had goblin troubles.]

[and Catherine Foundling bares her teeth at the door and dares it to tell her she can't pass.]

Re: The Lab

[othellovonryan]

[She passes, but is it really a good thing]