hellonspectacles | Once more into the breach, dear friends

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Once more into the breach, dear friends

It is nighttime, or what passes for nighttime in space, and the ship Mount Ida is quiet.

It isn’t a particularly large vessel. There are berths for a dozen crew members and private rooms for the ship’s two officers, a mess hall, a med bay, an armory, a brig. Nothing about it is particularly luxurious—Blood of Eden doesn’t go in for luxury, and the members of Troia Cell are no different—but everything is functional and well maintained. The ship hums faintly with the sound of engines and life support and electric lights, a but most of the crew don’t notice it anymore.

Near the officer’s cabins is another berth, occupied (or so it seems) by a single person. It contains a bed, and a sink, and a table on which, strangely, sits the perfectly formed skeleton of a human hand. The door is locked from the outside and a crew member stands guard. Are these precautions to keep the person inside from escaping, or to protect them from coming to harm? No one is sure anymore.

The crew member, Sergeant Hot Coals of Vengeance, is bored. Their shift is almost over, they need a piss, and they’re not even sure what the point of this assignment is anyway. Sure, the room’s occupant might be a zombie lover, and she might be a little weird. And sure, she did dislocate Lieutenant Pash’s arm when they tried to take that gross little bag of bones from her, but that was months ago. These days, she’s polite, and she spends long hours in secret meetings with the Commander, and she always asks for an escort when she needs to leave the room.

Coals really needs to piss. They peek through the little window in the door.

Inside, Camilla Hect is curled up on a narrow bed, breathing steadily. She’s asleep, and anyway, the door is locked. What’s the worst that could happen if they stepped away for a few minutes?

Coals leaves their post, and Camilla sleeps on—or so it seems.

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It's neither a rapier nor a big, heavy blade. It's not a new-made weapon; the grip is worn and shows signs of use and even suggests old stains, but the rest is absolutely pristine, without so much as a scratch to be seen. It gleams dully, not being something polished mirror-bright.

Normally when Camilla - anyone, really - picks up an unknown sword they have to take a moment to gauge the feel of it, the weight, the balance. Not this. Its balance is perfect. It weighs three pounds. It feels 'alive' in the poised way that a good sword does in the hand of someone who can evaluate that. Alive, and steady, somehow.

Need doesn't comment or react but studies what she can get through the young woman's senses and reactions. She's conscious, so she doesn't have to reveal her inscription or anything like that, and she is cautious by nature. There's... something about this girl, this Camilla. Something is off about her soul - yes, something is riding it. Someone, rather.

If a mind can be compared to a house then there is someone else in this one, tucked up in a closet or a chest while its occupant goes about her business of living. Need, creeping soundlessly into that house like a mist, takes an instant, automatic dislike. Of course long-dead bodiless things like her are tempted, always tempted, to quash or consume living souls and take their flesh, their life. She's trained herself out of acting on that desire but oh there have been those that did not and killing them can be a real task.

She wants to take it apart, this compartmentalized sub-soul nestled and dormant in intricately designed spellwork. Need holds back. She hasn't lived for as long as she has by being impulsive when she's in situations she doesn't understand, and there doesn't seem to be a time crunch. First, study, as she decides whether and how to make contact.

If Camilla were more like her necromancer, upon picking up the sword she might have said fascinating. The metaphor is imperfect, since Palamedes would never realize just how carefully balanced this sword is, how powerful it feels in its wielder’s hand, but it conveys the girl’s wonder as she lifts it.

“Huh,” Cam says.

Camilla Hect could never be called sentimental, but oh, how good it feels to grip a pommel! Before she does anything further, though, she first checks the window in the door to ensure that no one is about. Assured that no one is coming to find her, she takes the sword in her hand again, and begins to move through exercises she had once completed every morning, but has not been able to do for nearly a year.

If one looks closely, one might even see that she is smiling.

Many swords are more attractive or even feel more dangerous in the hand. This one is practical rather than flashy, one that wouldn't stand out in an armory, but it was made with intensive care and skill.

Camilla is young and healthy and also stoic, but Need can read the indications of months of grief, strain, and altogether upset in her. They make changes in the body and beyond it. She's been holding up under a lot - unsurprising, if she's locked in a cell in one of these awful void-boats or whatever they're called - and Need always feels more favorably towards people who've suffered too much heartache, though she tries to keep it from turning her metaphorical head.

She is something that can handle doing and thinking about several things at once, even if they're complicated. It's part of the tradeoff of becoming what she is. She starts looking into Camilla's memories and stretching a bit to touch the minds of the crew of the boat and try to figure them out. At the same time, she regards that sub-soul.

Hm. Looks like it's not aware of the input of the girl's senses. Camilla has a line to it... all right, she should make contact. Need closes her wings around the buried spirit and asks it, :What are you?:

Edited 2023-05-29 03:29 (UTC)

Palamedes is suddenly aware.

It isn’t like usual. Cam hasn’t gone under, and Pal isn’t in control of her limbs or her senses. He can’t see, or taste, or touch, or hear. He continues to exist in the same nothingness as before—only, someone is here in the nothingness with him.

:that’s not supposed to happen:

Did he say that aloud? What does ‘aloud’ even mean in this context?

That’s a puzzle for later. Palamedes doesn’t ask this presence questions, and he doesn’t answer them, either. Too much is at stake to waste time on this. He knows what carrying one soul is doing to Cam; he shudders to think what carrying two could do to her.

:get out of here before you hurt her:

Need is a big, enveloping presence, a sense of great power carefully controlled, as careful as a mastiff closing a newborn chick in its mouth and moving it without causing any pain would have to be. There isn't pain, and Palamedes is smart enough that he could work out some way to retaliate, but also that might be unwise from this position.

:You've set up so you're running off of her brain,: she says in a kind of fascinated disgust. :She knows the risks and still wants you there. No, don't fret, I'm not in on that. I run off this.:

An image - her sword, both as the metal and enamel and stone and the less-important wrap of the wood and leather hilt, and as a ludicrously complicated lattice of ancient spellwork. Not theorems the Houses use, but not completely unfamiliar either. Soul magic. Thanergy in some form, too. A long time ago, someone died to make this.

Edited 2023-06-24 20:38 (UTC)

The conversation isn’t like consciousness—they aren’t talking to each other, and Palamedes does not see the sword with his eyes or sense its power with his necromantic blood. It’s as though the information this being wishes to convey appear in his mind without conduit. He feels the horror and, quick on its heels, the effort to assuage him.

Palamedes doesn’t think this being is lying, but he also doesn’t like the way it noses about his own mind, and Camilla’s too.

:I am hers.: He is Camilla’s. Her necromancer, her friend, her burden. :Now, what are you?:

:All right. I'll show you.:

Suddenly there's a world again. Light, air, gravity, a body with which to feel it all. Not a world he knows. Not only are the surroundings primarily made of wood and textiles with towering redwoods in the background, but the feel is strange. Oddly patchwork. Some things are impossibly crisp, others are floaty and indistinct. This is a memory, and as Need's memory isn't eidetic and the flow of time has eroded things, it's been remade and reinforced, subtly changed countless times, by frequent revisits. Not a body he knows, either. It's big and heavy, and it aches, and he's not in control of it.

:This is who I was,: she says, and there's the memory of the woman Need had been, the sense of an old warrior turned mage-smith, lay sister of a remote religious enclave, beneficiary of a fulfilling work, a peace, a community, and a slow, gentle fading towards natural death that she had never deserved. The old woman's thoughts and feelings have a different texture from the sound of the voice she projects.

She was human. She's not, now. Death and time have made her strange in a way not entirely unlike the way Cytherea was strange, when she wasn't pretending.

Again, the images tumble into Palamedes consciousness strangely, without the need for words or other conduits of information. She wants him to see what she sees, and know what he knows, and so he does. It's a strange kind of knowing--puzzling, incomplete. But it gives him context for her power. She isn't hurting Camilla. She doesn't need to.

Is it possible to relax when one exists in this precarious space between conscious and unconscious? If it is, then Palamedes does. Just a little.

But he still has questions.

:That does not explain what you are doing here.:

The old scene stays, playing out, an aged woman packing her short crescent-marked swords up to be taken to market. A weight of retroactive grief is on the memory, of the last time she saw her home and so many of her loved ones alive.

:Good question. I appeared in a cell with your soul-sib there,: Need muses. Here's something about the mind to mind communication that Need uses: a stream of emotion, sensation, thought, imagery comes with each word. More information than is conveyed with a voice and a face even if it's mostly too fast to make much sense of. She's not inclined to outright lie and if she tried no one paying the slightest attention would fall for it, and it's not actually difficult to determine how she feels. Which is not that much, considering. She doesn't like whatever Palamedes is but is keeping in mind that he's not what his closest equivalent in Velgarth would be. :I know a spell for projecting myself into other realities. Usually if I use it it's because I'm called, but she didn't call me.:

She spends quite a lot of time and effort answering calls for help. Need's soul is warped. Mangled, flattened, parts of it missing, altogether in an unnatural configuration. Like knowing plants and how their roots spread, and finding one that's been in a pot for so long that those roots have formed a solid mass completely filling the container. Need is a sword. A tool, a weapon, a symbol and something to hold against danger.

:Why are you here, boy? What can be so important that you've both committed to such a terrible idea?:

:It wasn’t Cam who called for help. It was me. But I do not believe I intended to bring you here, and for that I apologize.:

In this state of semi-reality between conscious and nothingness, Palamedes cannot contain his emotions the way he usually would. He is sorry to have disrupted the trajectory of Need’s life, but he is also desperate. He is the greatest necromancer of his generation, and yet he fears that he is not good enough to save the people matter most to him. He is the leader of his people, and a boy dead at age twenty who would very much like to hug his mother. He is very, very tired.

Need, whatever else she is, is tired, too. But she is powerful. Even through Pal’s suspicions, he feels a glimmer of hope. Maybe there is a reason this is the being that answered his call.

:Because I died, and I did not have the luxury of resting peacefully. There are people that need us, Camilla and me both.: A pause. :Did you see the skeletal remains of a human hand resting on the desk in the corner?:

:Huh. Usually men don't reach me, but it's happened before.: When she's 'asleep' and can't act on her own at all she doesn't have a choice about this. She picks up on the particular flavors of desperation that in Velgarth count as a prayer made without hope of deliverance, and compels her living bearers to come and act. Awake, she does have a choice and frankly this has the sense of a large, complicated problem.

But that desperation's still there, and for all the refinement and precision of this buried ghost, he is young and as raw as if he was still living.

Tired is a good word. Pared down works too. All kinds of things - boredom, loneliness, grief, regret - have atrophied or been cut away, leaving stubs that are felt only faintly and can be tucked away out of sight. A righteous anger is still strong, if well-controlled. Compassion, too, even love, though Need doesn't like those to show too easily.

:I'd say you should let your unfinished business be, but evidently you've put a lot of effort into not moving on. It's hypocritical advice from me anyway.: The lagniappe that comes with her Mindvoice is pretty easy to interpret - despair and desperation, pain, sensory deprivation, resolve, though apart from the last it's all a bit abstracted by time. The remains of a powerful old memory. :No, I can't see anything living people aren't looking at. I assume that was yours?:

:Really? Interesting.: And there is, for the first time since their conversation began, a glimmer of excited curiosity in Pal’s ‘voice.’ Now he has about a dozen questions about this being and the people she usually helps, and it probably says something about the urgency of the current situation that he doesn’t dive into them immediately. :I think I’m honored, then.:

:Yes, the hand was mine. Sort of. A friend reconstructed them out of a piece of my skull. She could have grown me an entire skeleton, really, but Cam needed something she could hide a little more easily.

Yet communication remained difficult, so we devised this solution.: He seems to speak more rapidly. :Understand, I’ve done careful calculations. As long as I limit the amount of time I remain sentient in Camilla’s body, and we carefully monitor her vitals, I can mitigate any harm done to her.:

:Don't get too excited. I'm sure I can help, but I can't just fix things.: Normally when she visits another canon it's for something simple, like that time with the dragon. :I've limits and I wouldn't want to act rashly and make the situation worse.:

Need can split her focus and do several things at once - she's with Camilla, she's with Palamedes, she's more distantly with Hot Coals of Vengeance and the other humans on the ship, she's in the River gliding past carnage as a fluid, winged shape. In Velgarth, she sometimes talks to people whose bodies are hundreds of miles away, too far to contact otherwise, on the Moonpaths, where distance doesn't matter. This River might serve similarly. Maybe. Oh, but it is a terrible place.

She listens to Palamedes explain himself. Calculations made with regards to complex magic are something Need is familiar with, at least. Sealing her soul into her sword hadn't involved any of those, but she's had a long time since then.

:You anchored yourself to part of your body and you've transferred that anchor to her. But with the nature of consciousness being what it is here, you're working around a harsh limitation.: Need gives a kind of lungless sigh, poorly disguising her own interest. :Your soul-sib should should really be looped in on this. Right now I'm insulating you a bit and taking your soul on so we can have this little chat and no one's the worse for it. That's not a long term solution but I can keep it up a while while I think about options. Here's what your girl's doing right now, by the way.:

She has the memory-scene change to a first-person perspective, as if Palamedes had taken over, of Camilla doing a series of lunges with Need in hand. The smell of the room, the prickle of sweat, the glad ache of muscles that haven't been used quite like this in too long. Need doesn't convey thought and feeling. She has a particular perspective of ethics in that regard - it's fine if she knows things, but other people shouldn't without permission unless it's really necessary.

:Do you want to talk to her?: Need asks. It will go easier if he can help to explain her presence, but also, of course he wants to talk to her. They're basically the same as oath-sibs.

Palamedes has about a dozen questions, but they all flee his mind as, suddenly, he is in the room, watching Camilla. The sword isn’t like the knives she prefers, or even like a cavalier’s rapier, but she handles it with grace and power all the same. Pal remains transfixed, silent, awed.

:Isn’t she beautiful?: he says, barely realizing he has spoken aloud. Then, more carefully, he asks, :What do you mean by ‘talk to her’?: This spirit makes the idea sound so easy that he doesn’t dare trust that she means what he thinks she means.

The living are always beautiful, she doesn't say. In stillness or in motion, the flow and flicker of them, the thousands of intricate interlocking systems working and failing. The warmth they have, the emotion, the striving and the vulnerability. They're so easy to love. Need is always cold and hungry, always sitting at their hearths, sipping a thin broth collected from the drippings of their feasts, aware of the spread before her and denying herself until that denial too is something to chew on. Things like Need are often predators or parasites on the living. A human mind changes without a human brain to support it.

Of course Palamedes means more of a specific, individual beauty, a hunger more familiar and palatable to the living and to him as only recently dead. He loves Camilla, in much the same way he had when he drew breath.

:While I have you like this-: and Need makes a diagram of what she's doing; while her hilt is in Camilla's hand she can extend a lattice (or is it a wing?) of herself up, tracing the girl's nerves, all the way until it folds like a handkerchief (like a hand?) around Palamedes. While she's doing this he can be awake without running off Camilla's body. It isn't struggling to support his mind and soul. Need is feeding him sensory input that she is picking up herself, he's not directly connected. If Need withdraws or Camilla stops touching the sword, he'll slot right back into place.

:I don't think Mindspeech, or an equivalent, exists here outside of me. But I'm very good at it. I can be a bridge for you.:

:Oh.: The word is like a breath, even if Palamedes isn’t actually breathing. Every day, he thinks his lucky stars that he has both life and Camilla Hect, and every day, he mourns the things he has lost and might never get back. That includes seeing Camilla’s face, the way she quirks an eyebrow when he’s said something stupid, or rocks up on her toes when she’s thinking. Joined like this, they are always together and moments apart, and he hates it more than he has a right to.

:I would like that. I would like that very much. Creating this...bridge, it won't hurt you?:

He's still not going to be seeing that from the outside, Need doesn't point out. She knows how to stabilize and transfer and re-anchor a mind and soul, whether that's into flesh and blood that can support them or into something like a sword, but she's not going to just promise something like that in these circumstances.

:It won't. There will be a price for my help, though. I don't imagine it's something you wouldn't agree to, or I wouldn't have come. She'll have to agree to it too and I don't feel like explaining it twice. You can talk to her first, even if you decide against my assistance afterwards and I go back to Velgarth.: I am such a soft heart, Need grumbles to herself.

-all right, one good thing about this situation. Palamedes and Camilla come from a culture that in most respects appalls Need's sensibilities but is not patriarchal. There's some remnants of that to the Blood of Eden people - she is snooping without fear or shame - but they're also almost Kaled'a'in-level egalitarian as far as gender and sexuality go. Huh.

There are still people that her mandate applies to. She's never visited a dimension or a world or whatever she cares to call it that has no systemic oppression, no one exploited and misused with impunity by someone who has power over them. They exist somewhere, she hopes.

:Now I want you to envision your left hand. Imagine I'm taking it and wrapping it around hers on my hilt. You can speak when that contact is there.:

Edited 2023-10-24 20:28 (UTC)

::I don’t have a left hand:: says Palamedes, narrowing avoiding making the joke that the closest thing to his hand sits, in skeleton form, on the desk. Despite his skepticism, he does his best to do as she says—he pictures the sword that Camilla is practicing with, he pictures his long-destroyed body, imagines Need’s hand holding his as together they reach out a cover Camilla’s hand with theirs.

He pictures it, and he swears he can almost feel Cam’s hand, warm and strong, under his own.

::Camilla Hect:: he says, and he waits to see what happens.

Edited 2023-10-29 01:36 (UTC)

:Tsh. Neither do I, still-warm, that doesn't make you special,: Need says, both caustic and amused. Imagine thinking less than a year is a long time. :Hands are a useful metaphor in my line of work. You still remember yours, be thankful for that.:

She doesn't remember hers in detail. That they were large and brown and had lost much of her old strength by the end, yes, with arthritis in her joints, and yes, that they were worn from her career as a fighter and then a mage-smith. Not which fingertip was missing and if that was actually on her right hand, not the way the loosened, less elastic skin set, not the number and placement of scars, not if her nails had been clean or stained.

Regardless the metaphor of her hand is cool and hard with calluses, and very sure. For the theatrics of it, Need exerts a mild influence on the nerves in the back of Camilla's hand, just a sunlight-touch of heat and pressure as if something really is there. She also ensures that as she passes Palamedes' voice along it seems to be coming more from the left.

She can handle it if the girl's response is to drop or throw the sword, but it's going to prolong things.

Camilla’s response is to go very, very still. For a long moment she stands unmoving, barely daring to breathe, ears strained for a voice or a sound to explain what she just heard—no, felt. But there is only the silence of the ship at night.

Maybe she’s going mad.

“Warden?” she says, words barely above a whisper.

::Cam! I’m here. Well, I’m always here, aren’t I? But I’ve found a way for us to communicate. No—I’ve found a friend who can help us communicate. That’s her sword, actually.::

“But how—“

::I think we may have asked her for help without meaning to. I don’t really understand it. Ah, she might be able to explain better than I can.::

These poor children. This limited contact she's allowed has shot fresh sensation into a raw wound. Whether that's useful pressure or just pushing into it, well. That all depends. The pain of that contact roils outwards either way.

It feels, in a way she would rather not let on, really good. Need can't hurt, can't be hurt like that anymore, and a bit of her covets the pain of a heart that can break, the pain that she was 'born' into when she caught her soul into the sword. She keeps an eye on that craving, doesn't let it get out of hand or express it.

:Yes, you're holding my focus. I can explain it, but I don't know what you know and how much I can make it sensible without taking three hours to make it about myself,: she says. Her voice has something in it of cracked gravel and banked heat, and a wry sense of humor. :But you might want to know, that person with the long literary name - oh, that doesn't narrow it down at all, does it? the one guarding you - is on their way back and about to peek in to make sure you haven't got up to anything while they were out.:

This is a test. Need wants to see how Camilla will respond - if she'll trust the voice in her head this little bit, what she'll do. She's pretty sure being seen will raise a lot of questions and can hide herself from view perfectly well in several different ways, if it comes to it.

Edited 2023-11-10 13:45 (UTC)

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Once more into the breach, dear friends

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