Koe Tidraq (discant) wrote in caeleste, @ 2010-09-11 23:19:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | koe tidraq, onainat sjorl, vedette uthral |
the becoming (vedette, onainat)
The dreams were fitful.
Long after Onainat had gone to her own room, long after he'd exhausted his words, and long after Iluq's breathing had grown steady Koe had finally managed to find sleep. What he found while he was sleeping were images and memories he would just as soon forget. The road, after Taereme died. One lost soul after another. Ilyien's face, streaked with blood, weeping those drops of red onto the cracked earth. A child being eaten by some ravenous cannibal. Minaht's face taunting him with memories of what had been, and what would be once again. They were the dreams that always came with a glass of wine. Some drank to forget. Some drank for pure enjoyment. Koe did not think a day would come for the rest of his life when spirits would be enjoyable to him, for the images they conjured. For the damage they could do.
Dreams too often felt a weapon against the infirm mind.
He sat up in darkness. Iluq was still sleeping next to him. She did not seem disturbed by the shifting of the covers. And there was nothing in her manner to suggest that her dreams were anywhere near as troubled as his own. Koe's feet slipped out of the bed to lead him, and only when he'd found his feet did he look toward the window. There was not a soul stirring outside of it. No torches, no movement, no sound. No fine music playing in the night. The streets of Agethlea were owned by something else now. And not something that he wanted to consider. Fear. Darkness, of the soul and not the light. But the sound that brought his attention back to the room was a whisper of fabric against fabric.
Koe found himself eye to eye with a shifting, restless face. From dark skin to white to brown to blue and back again. Faces of living things which he had never encountered. The eyes. Almonds, pears, cherries, shapes that he did not recognize and never seeming to match the face with which they were associated. Those too-full lips. It was not a face he wanted to see again. Yet it was precisely the face that he expected. There it sat, atop the shoulders of a body whose limbs shifted in race and size as quickly as the face. Orb. Without saying a word, without even a threat, the creature had appeared.
"Koe, Koe, Koe," the creature at least had one voice. "You must know by now what I am."
"A creature," the bard the replied. "An abomination."
"You shouldn't say that," Orb did not stir from his seat. "I occupied this world long before you and your kind, dear dragon. I am descended directly from Ao. Creator of the stars you so longingly visited. I taught your precious dragon-king everything that he knows."
"More lies?" Koe moved around the bed slowly, very slowly. "To what end? You cannot think to fool me."
"I've always maintained," Orb drummed his fingers on the arm of his cushioned chair. "That the only difference between a lie and a truth is the perception of the other person. You are all alike, Koe, dragon and drow and elf. You hear only what you want to hear. If the truth is preferable to a lie, then you accept it. If the lie is preferable, you accept the lie, even if you are given the truth. So many of you scream when you see my face, my true face, but you must ask yourself honestly, Koe. Am I a monster for showing you what you see in your dreams? What you see in the mirror?"
"I know who I am," Koe retorted angrily. "I know what I am."
"You want to compare numbers, then?" Orb stood up from the chair; those awful shifting hands rubbed together. "Or perhaps stories? My best kill for one of yours, Koe. Very well - I met a bard in Agethlea. The sort of fellow that you couldn't seem to fix upon, at first glance. He had hate in his heart, but he denied it, thinking he'd purged himself of it."
Now Orb was walking. Koe stood frozen to the spot; the ocarina was only a few feet away and lay exposed upon a stand, yet he did not reach for it. Magic of some kind? No, Koe felt his fingers dance at the mere suggestion. It was not some eldritch power which rooted him here. It was Orb's words, the ... crushing feeling that they brought to his chest. This story was one all too familiar to Koe, and one he did not want to hear. Yet Orb was pacing now, away from Iluq and toward the window, passing close enough that Koe could have reached out and seized his throat. it would have done no good.
"And with him was a girl," Orb stopped at the window, going on after the long silence. "She was a beautiful one, I suppose. It wasn't her beauty or even her voice that attracted this bard. He needed something, always, to take care of. Something that he could nurse back to health. Almost as though he thought he was paying a debt, I think; he never seemed to realize that debt is an imagined word of fragile beings. That debt is purely a physical transaction. Coin for flesh, flesh for coin, coin for coin. Flesh for flesh. They occur between sleeping peoples. The ones who ignore the realm outside of blood and bone. He lived only in the physical world, not seeing the truth before his very eyes. And I took upon myself to wake him up. Only when he found the truth could he be a true adversary, after all."
Now Orb turned away from the window, with a casual flick of his fingers stirring the curtain. Almost as if he did not believe that the curtain was real. When it moved, he smiled, and then those terrible eyes found Koe again in the darkness.
"So I took away that which he needed," there was finality in the words, but also a threat. "I killed his raven beauty, silenced her voice. She was begging him at the end, Koe. With her eyes. Pleading with him to save her from the curse he'd brought down upon her head. It wasn't what I was instructed to do, of course. This world will never die so long as the tree is still even half-alive. He had potential to sing the song that would awaken it, restore it, but he fell short. Because even after she was dead, and even after I told him why I'd come, he couldn't make himself strike. Not to save her and not to save the world."
There was something deadly in his voice, now, but Koe was still watching. And waiting.
"I told you," and Orb's voice became that many-sounding thing, hundreds of voices talking atop one another. "That I could not be anything, except what I was created to be. Yet I have begun. I was created to be a mirror, Koe, to be a teacher of one's self. I have already exceeded my creator's limited vision. I killed the girl to show you how to grow beyond yourself, to stop denying your gift, and you failed. So now I've come back to see your weakness anew, Koe, but this time I will take pleasure in killing one of them. I will take pleasure, just as you have in the past. For myself. I am becoming my own soul, Koe, and I must say I'm enjoying it. No impossible choices, Koe. Perhaps I'll pick one by looks. Or, by the color of their hair? It doesn't matter. This is happening because you are weak. It always happens because you are weak. And if you cannot grow, then I will destroy you utterly, Koe. It begins now."
The ocarina, Koe snatched from the table. It was against his lips in the blink of an eye; that first note even escaped the instrument. Yet Orb had gone as suddenly as he'd appeared, with as little trace of him. Somehow or another Koe was standing there in his trousers and boots. Too quickly he'd moved to dress himself at least partially. And now, with ocarina in hand, he was shaking Iluq by the shoulders.
"Wake up," he said urgently. "Wake up! Follow me!"
And then, just as she'd lifted her head from the pillow, Koe was off as a shot. Through the door, and into the hallway, to pound on his daughter's door.