Donatello "the air bud of war crimes" Hamato (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
othellovonryan) wrote2023-02-13 04:09 pm
othellovonryan) wrote2023-02-13 04:09 pm
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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-
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.
For a moment, there is quiet.
You breathe.
And fall through water.
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.
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[she makes a small humming thoughtful noise.]
Are you disconnected from anywhere else, still? I seem to remember taking a wrong turn on my way to Selfishness, that landed me here ...
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Anything else? I'm not gonna leave Donnie a wreck if there's still actual problems in here I shouldn't just leave him to fix by himself. [a beat.] Even if there's a lot more of him able to fix those than I thought.
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[Sacrifice looks to the Core, who considers.]
Its difficult to say. We need therapy, but...
Talk to others. [And he's going to pull away, but offer Cat a hand.]
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[she turns to look Sacrifice in the eye, and rest her hands briefly on his shoulders.] ... you're not going through this alone, kid. Never alone, not again.
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We can give him a fight worth remembering about it, though. [she grins.] I certainly intend to, whatever else I might be planning on that front. And you had better believe I'm always planning something about it.
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But maybe not something to talk about when there's another one in my head.
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.. and I've got to meet this "Eldest" Donnie, awhile, anyway.
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The Core doesn't talk so much with words. [The child Donnie shrugs.]
We do have experience with make floor safe lava.
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... then let's go wherever it is we're going, hey? [and she reaches over to squeeze the child Donnie's hand.] I still need to get that robot you out of his chains, now that the worst of it's passed. He needs room to dream free on his own damn terms.
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Family memory.
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she thought of green eyes unsmiling over a smile like a knife's edge: the first family she'd ever had.
she thought of the Woe, gathered 'round the fire, the five of them that were sometimes six but always five. steady hands carving trinkets to keep busy, between hunts for the only prey worth taking. eyes that could and would see forever, turned towards a precious few. a callow crown for a girl that stole all their hearts before she stole a kingdom of her own. a stalwart steady port in every storm, dead of hand but full of such living integrity it could refuel an entire people with its implacable drive. a golden-eyed interloper in the affairs of others, bound inextricably to all their fates and one. and herself, who dragged them into it all and who found herself dragged into even more because they'd refused to let her be merely their leader.
she thought ... no. let it be a memory of Masego.]
[and so it was - and she could feel the snowfall again like it was yesterday ...]
[The Flowing Gardens would never be called that again.
The old enchantments here had unravelled, unmade by the greater powers that had run wild across islets and canals. What had been left behind was beautiful in the eeriest of ways. Moren’s final winter lingered, the luminescent trees and flowers trapped in ice – forever perfect, forever blooming. A pale carpet of snow that no footsteps could mar remained, sparing only the frozen canals. There the last echo of the ancient songs of the Garden remained, for under a layer of cracked ice water flowed and so the canals groaned out strange hymns that made the heart shiver. And at the heart of it all stood a broken throne, before which we had killed a god by raising another.
Loc Ynan’s corpse, scoured clean of the Dead King’s soul shard, remained there with a spear of yew through the heart.
It was a hallowed placed, for good or ill, and its beauty was not unlike that of the Firstborn: strange and terrible and keening like a broken heart. I stood among the paleness with an old friend at my side, his eyes – one mortal, one anything but – alight with wonder as he watched the wind thread through his fingers.
“It will snow,” Masego said, “every time the moon is full. I can see the echo.”
I hummed in agreement. I could feel it too, how tonight would return to this place again and again.
And it was not yet over, for all that we were all bone-tired, keep on our feet only by the strange febrile energy that came of victory and feeling it all coming together. That tonic would fade before long, but we still had a little while in us still. So the two of us, together, watched as Sve Noc embraced the divinity that the Hierophant had forged for them. The night thrummed, as if defiant of the dawn yet to come, and wind like a warm breath rippled across Serolen. I couldn’t see it the way Masego could, his eye laying bare the truths of the world, but I trailed down my finger down the string of the story and smiled. The Sisters, at long last, were slipping the noose.
“Light and Night, huh,” I murmured. “Symmetry in all things.”
“Their godhead was flawed,” Hierophant mused. “Split from the start. What they received they gave out, keeping part for themselves, but that was making a single broken god and a million godlings. The godhead is a trick of perspective, Catherine – it can be shared, but it cannot be divided.”
So they’d fixed it, he and Akua. Gathered it all together again, dissolving the nails that bound all Firstborn to the Night, and handed it back to Sve Noc to put together into a true godhead. And now Sve Noc, the Sisters and the Crows and a hundred names more, were giving their gift away once more – but not in the same way they once had, oh no. Firstborn no longer held Night, no more than humans held Light: it was outside them, borrowed. Granted by a higher power.
“They won’t like it,” I quietly said. “Not at first. But they’ll get used to it.”
The worthy would still take and rise. Night could no longer be taken the old way, because now to harvest it from drow or others grew the Night as a whole instead of a Mighty’s personal hoard, but there were still gains. No one had ever quite figured out what defined how much Light individuals were capable of wielding, answers varying from a birth talent to the depth of faith or strength of the body. There would be no such doubt over Night: the more one added to it, the more of it one could wield. As one’s power grew, their body would change along the same lines holding much Night had once caused: indifference to age and silver eyes.
Sve Noc would not shortchange those who had fought for them, their loyal Mighty not suddenly faced with decrepitude.
I knew exactly what those changes would feel like because I’d already gone through them. My eye was not silver – not yet – but the rest? There were none, save perhaps Radegast the Guest, who could come close to wielding as much Night as I could. And as for age… I’d once told the Dead King the years would kill me and the old monster had just smiled, before answering – ah, but how many years would it take? Many, I knew. Enough that spending eleven years of my life to snuff out the Saint of Swords had not left a visible mark. I was not sure how to feel about having been the precursor to what Night would now grant, the first draft of the work.
“It won’t matter,” Masego said, openly pleased. “The Sisters have faith, now.”
I almost smiled. Someone who did not know Hierophant might have taken that as a spurt of religiosity, but I knew better. He was being quite literal, because when he’d mended Night and guided Sve Noc into rebuilding it he’d done more than just smooth away a few hard edges. He’d fixed it, the flaw. Now it wasn’t just a shoddy mantle of power that the Sisters bore and that… changed things. I raised my hand, a mirror to his, but it was not the wind I was grasping. It was threads, millions of them blooming. Night had been born finite, parceled from its very first breath, but that had changed. It was no longer something that could be counted or measured.
I watched the faith, the earnest belief of millions of drow swelling the godhead of Sve Noc, and let out a convulsive laugh. After all these years, all the sacrifices and the despair and the darkness, the two sisters had found the end of their winding road: they’d slipped the noose. The debt of the Firstborn would be wiped clean, the destruction they’d staved off with a loan and then Winter’s flesh at last gone for food. They were no longer finite, their godhead a living and breathing truth, and so what did a few measly years mean for them to pay? Faith fed Night, fed its twin goddesses, and like a beacon in the dark their power filled the sky above us.
Sve Noc paid the old debt of the Twilight Sages, returned the years borrowed, and for them it was no different than a sigh. Time meant nothing to the immortal.
“How does it feel?” I asked.
Masego turned to look at me with his mortal eye.
“What does?”
“How does it feel,” I smiled, “to be first man in Creation to ever make a Choir?”
Because that was what he and Akua had done, when it came down to it. In Night instead of Light, but that was a shallow difference when it came down to it. Should I call my patronesses angels of thievery and murder instead of gods, what would it change? And that, more than the rest, made it plain the scope of what he’d achieved tonight. Because Choirs did not choose a single nation, and single people, and remain bound to them. They were not so… limited. And come morning, neither would Sve Noc be.
I gave it a month before the first goblin was blessed with Night.
Masego considered my words, face pensive.
“Do you remember,” he finally said, “what the Queen of Summer said to me, when I tried to throw off her binding in Arcadia?”
After the Battle of Five Armies and One, I recalled, and it took me but a moment to recall the words.
“If you’d had a few years, Masego,” I quoted. “You have not seen enough.”
He smiled, closing his fingers around the wind.
“If I met her tomorrow,” Hierophant simply said, “she would be wrong.”
Nothing more needed be said.
The two of us stood there, in companionable silence, until dawn came and pulled the final curtain over it all.]
[she doubted Donnie would understand in full. the significance of most of the exchange would be lost, probably. but the two of them in moonlit Serolen, eyes to the sky, grasping the future they'd created, the wonders they'd seen, together ... it had to be enough. Masego had to be enough; he was family enough to her.]
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[But a moment of a changed future, of something better-]
[He smiles and tugs her in to such a moment, if far smaller scale]