16 - 3

[Magus]

Crows In The Songbird’s Belly

The Lone Sparrow III - 1st of Evening Star, 1125 A.E.

Barry awoke, for the second time this day, in a strange place.

Hope this doesn’t become a habit of mine, he complained blearily as a throbbing, dull ache penetrated deep into his brow and out the other side. His stomach felt thoroughly abused like he had imbibed in far too much lard and strong spirits to boot. And his heart beat out of its natural rhythm, skipping a few throbs ‘ere and there in dissonance.

Slowly, all but the axe-to-temple headache had withdrawn from the fore and fold.

First, I need me bearings, the Lone Sparrow thought with his wits returned to him.

Ain’t seem like a dungeon, at least. So… mayhaps… I am not waist deep in zeugma shite.

By the light of candle-flame, stoneworked walls peaked through painted plaster, scenes of godlings and saints rotting away to the turning o’ the Wheel—still in the temple, then.

With a push of arms no longer there, Barry tried to get up from his sprawl, only to fall deeper into a sea of soft, cloud-like stuff.

Throw me down Hell’s well…

He lay atop not a cot but a godsdamned goose-feather bed, pillows of myriad make suffocating him in Xingese silk and Cyroshi sendal alike. Stuff not meant for his lowborn ilk, what with the thread possessing more color than a bloody rainbow. Wooden bed posts of Valencian-bound mahogany bode no well for him either, theirs more like the iron bars of a bailiff's jail.

Curtain-veil parted halfway on his right side, leaving the rest to the privacy of shadow. He festered in that dark as he imagined all sorts of dark tidings in turn.

Bastards o’ Mont Callum, I did not get meself into a nobleman’s bed.

No. A dream, a swefen, it’s gotta be. I don’t remember bedding a bluebood; man, woman, or moon-touched.

With thoughts running the gamut from impending execution to ‘did I eat an old lady’s soul?’, Barry almost didn’t hear the creak of unoiled hinges older than the Seven.

Almost; his well-honed reflexes had yet to rust, no matter how harrowing the last moon-span be.

A woman, no older than the Lone Sparrow’s nineteen winters, entered the room. Her garb was the cloister kind, sporting blue and white with accents and scrollwork of trees with wizened fowls perched atop them. A berry-stain-dyed vestal shawl, the kind worn by the nunnery below priesthood proper, laid atop her pate.

Said woman currently had a scowl fit for an angry god on her face.

With purposeful—the kind that only restrained fury produced—steps, she made her way towards Barry and laid the pewter she carried atop the table-plinth at the bed’s side with an audible clink.

She turned and bore twin holes into the Lone Sparrow by the sight of those baleful-bright green eyes; being the only eyes he had seen in the last day or so, he knew of them nigh intimately.

Oh… fuck.

“Mother Emilia wasn’t too forthcoming about your situation, but by her clammy and shaking hands and the fact that her chin can touch the ground any time now by the hunch she’s carryin’, you did something.

“She may be the forgiving kind, but I—most certainly—am not.

“Threaten her or spook her or do whatever it is you did, again, and I will poison your teh such so that the outhouse becomes your coffin.”

Barry did not doubt her for a blink; there was enough spite and malice in that haggle o’ hers to poison Berrowden twice over and still have some left afterwards.

“Good night.”

With that, she did a tight spin on her heels, the movement sinuous as a serpent ready to pounce, and left the room, latching the door closed on the way out.

Barry thanked Dyeus, god of sea and sky and storm, for attempting to drown him in all those pillows; though he had no canvas and much less arms with which to set camp, one of his members had pitched a tent by itself.

He was close to worrying it would start a fire, too.

Gods, it’s Rodrick all over again. Show me a person—man, woman, or Lumenari aerendghast—with any amount of fire in them and I go rabid as a lech.

With all the confused consternation of being of “two minds”, Barry called upon him’s spirit, wringing out the essence within with but a single, sorcerous command.

Form.

They unfurled like a butterfly’s wings after having breached its cocoon, shadowstuff spilling out into the world.

The Sorcerer hacked out a cough that turned into a wheeze, the feeling of his ethos depleting like a punch in the gut and the worst of migraines were with child.

It felt like the dying of his soul all over again, spasms wreaking havoc about his spine and arched back. Distantly, the taste of blood thickened at the place where the throat and mouth met.

Seemed he would not have access to any spells for a good time now, the instinctive knowing that came with his sorcery telling him so. His ethos, the authority by which he commanded mana, was but an ember smoldering in the trough of his soul; it would return, he felt, but would take its merry time in doing so.

At least I got my arms back. Elsewise, I’d be stuck here, what with my prick harder than steel; can’t roll outta here without breaking it.

With an unbidden mental image of a livewood stick bent far enough to break the bark and a wincement like no other, Barry pulled himself out of the bed. His feet made the echoing smack of flesh hitting stone; someone had taken off his footwear, cloth and leather straps and sole and all.

And the stone was cold as the Pale River.

Barry, too, was cold outside of the bedding’s bosom.

Barry was cold.

“Ain’t that a welcome surprise.” He said aloud, the only mirth he had truly felt in what felt like a good long while. “Seems I’m back again as a man. For now.”

Ignoring the chills nipping at his soles, the Lone Sparrow made his way to the window, looking out to see the time proper. Made of glass bound by wires and bars of cold iron, Barry looked out from above Mahna’s temple.

The Twins looked back from high in the sunless sky. Using the digits of his sorcerous limbs, he got nowhere. The shadowstuff that made them up stretched readily and was never uniform enough to measure time.

Two hands and a half from midnight, so that’s tenth lash past noon,

the Lone Sparrow surmised as best he could by just sight.

“Best I get me some sleep then.”

A tired yawn stretched languidly from his throat.

“Best I get me some sleep.” He intoned mid-yawn, an agreeing echo of before.

He checked the door, latched it shut and locked it proper, and blew out all but one of the lights.

He laid down in the diluvian-like bed, silk and sendal alike attempting their damndest to strangle him.

Sleep did not come until the black sky started to shift awake to Sola’s Grace.

There are dreams one does not take with them to the waking world. Visions and prophecies and entire worlds forgotten to the night, never to be acknowledged by their creators for they knew not.

Such was a dream tonight, one not remembered but still there. A reflection imposed upon the greyen waters of the mind by the soul, it was a thing not wrought entirely of fantasy but of causality also.

Real and unreal met, mixing freely.

In the world within himself, in the Center of the one Awoken’s distilled being, cards long since played made themselves known. Cards played by a future self so far away and distant that they had come back upon the past; serpent suckling upon the tail.

Such was the state of the game:

A lake that was not a lake, The Welkin Web That Binds The Stars, but an echo of something greater still. A microcosm—a world made miniature—of the life cycle of the Anima Mundi; the Living Universe Itself.

White gave way to the Black and from nothingness of Black came the something of the White. The Rotunda turns forevermore, such was the life cycle of a world.

It was like that, in the last and all the other iterations of existence devoured by He Who Remains; a taxidermy, a trophy, a legacy, it was that and no more than that and so much more than that which dwelt now in the navel of a peasant hick. The embryonic remains of a dead world swallowed in a single gulp by a beast with a toothless maw that reeked of vinegar.

Two trees, one of black-made-into-false-light and the other of the purest of starstuff, siphoned their sustenance from this mooncalf; the deformed and partially-absorbed sibling to the world of now.

All Things must come to an End.

The Ash fell from below the depths of the lake-that-was-not-a-lake, alighting upon the underside of its surface like scum in reverse. The lake bubbled and turned to boiling tar, eating away at the twin trees, taking all that they had harvested back into itself. They fell, inch by inch, into the toothless maw and the tooth-filled gullet until only the luminous pinpricks were left.

And one by one, the tiny little lights atop its surface disappeared until all that remained were the vinegar waters of oblivion, of darkness-that-stares-back.

Of gnats; empty, eyeless, eaters of plaque.

The disparity of individuality—the differentiation of one from another, of light from dark, of you from me, of they from it—subsumed into the Abyss.

The Many returned to the One. All was dark and still and cold.

All was quiet.

Unbeggining and unending; dancer bent back unto themselves; rat-wheel spinning upon the axis of the tangled knot.

The cycle, the Wheel, of the Living Universe effectuated.

The hunger, abated and fulfilled.

The Lone Sparrow IV - 2nd of Evening Star, 1125 A.E.

Barry awoke to the pounding of fist on the door. He got up from the bed in a roll, catching himself with a whole-body spring from the edge of the bed.

Arms and surroundings, said Stregor’s teachings, the words all but etched into the stone of his very soul.

Chamber pot; questionable but he could fill it with some water from the pitcher and then throw it to make a man flinch. They wouldn’t know it wasn’t filled with Seifourath’s pickings.

Bed posts; thick and sturdy but weak at the place where they connected to the bed frame proper. Bludgeons at the ready.

No much space for kiting and loose footwork in the room; he’d best make use of the chokepoint of the room’s threshold. None would be able to get in from anywhere but there yet it also limited his escape drastically.

With his brains spitting out battle-tactics and the like, he did not hear the first time the voice that called him. It registered ragged and a bit choked but ultimately feminine.

He almost didn’t recognize her.

Barry stretched back up to his full height from his tackle-ready stance, and made his way to the carved wood door, unlatching its rusty locking mechanism, sparks flying all the while on the bare spots of metal.

The Blue Crone of Berrowden looked up at him from beneath her heavy vestments, their weight dragging her down in tandem with whatever he had done yesternight.

She saw the worried look on his face, and with a sad, unjudging smile said, “Don’t mind my state lad, I’m a bit… out of the weather is all.”

A blink passed before Barry forced the bound breath out.

“I didn’t… y’know… mayhaps… have taken a bite out of your soul?”

She let out a gruff laugh that quickly turned to hacking cough.

It was not phlegm that spattered red upon the whiten sleeves of her vestal robes.

“If you’re to court a lady, at least buy her dinner at the tavern first.” She chided in mock after coming to. “But no, Bare. You did not take anything from me. Directly.” Her tone left much to be wanted, the cadence signaling that she had more to say but was taking her time.

The words, they pained her.

“My fate as a priestess of the parish, specifically the pledge I have taken, is one tied to this temple in spirit… and flesh.

“You see, I’ve lived for one hundred and twenty cycles, Bare. Forty Solarians more than any mortal is to be given. I paid for it in service and the Seven have blessed me so…”

A breath passed, bated and breathless as Barry tried his damndest not to rush and hug the woman lest he make her crumble faster all the same with his strength.

Those Nine-Damned arms had done enough already.

“And as with any boon, so too is there a curse. The end is found in the source, afterall. Like the story of Shemeshniel: cut the hair, and the strength of twenty men follows after.

“With this holy place’s spirit turned into but a hollow shell, the same’ll happen to me.”

As Above, So Below, the Sorcerer thought as the dagger of guilt stabbed him right and center into his breast, heart and lungs and all. Oh how he hated—how he loathed—now, the sorcery in his veins. He wanted nothing more than to rip it from his chest and spit upon its pox-ridden name.

A power he did not want, one that did nothing to change his inability to protect those he cared about at best and that, at worst, brought about their death.

For every boon, there’s a curse…

He almost laughed then and there, at the absurdity of it all. At the pointlessness of his struggle against the hunger of his spirit.

How much had he fought, just for it to end in a similar manner?

How many of his past lives had he erased, root and stem from the tree of psykosis and Turn of the Wheel, to save a person doomed to die anyway?

Pointless, was the lament he repeated over and over, a mantra of nihilism and despair.

Barry had no jape nor jest, nothing to ease the cauldron of emotions that boiled inside himself, chest and head both. There was nothing that would make duller and less sharp this Nine-Damned situation.

He felt something inside himself crack.

Though not as raw as Roddy’s demise—head crushed as a mushy grape, came the image, etched in his worst nightmares, unbidden and like steel catching moonlight—it was enough to wring doubt from a core knowing of himself.

He was no hero of the bard’s tales, no miracle-worker, truly. Just a man with some fucked-up magick and a bout of luck that had finally turned sour. Nothing more and something less. The wine of his sorcery saving his hide went so quickly off, rendered vinegar.

Beneath the burning, oxen-yoked indignation lay something oh so very worse: cold self-damnation.

No tears came from his eyes; his face even as stillwater; his body made no move. He stood frozen, not knowing what to do.

Knowing full-well that he had killed the very same person that had saved his life. By voice and face, by stature and by the frog stuck in the throat, her days were numbered.

It was not the death bell of a town funeral that chimed prettily along with the jerky movement of her coughs, but it sure felt like it.

A dead woman walking, stilling drawing breath while White Gull did Her little siren song in the back of the choir.

The heavy weight on his shoulders; the knot in his throat thicker than rope thrice-wrought; and the hurt in his chest, became all too much, then.

He felt something inside himself crack.

But still, he did not shed brine. It didn’t feel right, crying over someone for whom he had a hand in bringing about the Knells. May Crow and Gull be thrown down Hell’s well, he spat to the floor of his mind, the common, heretic saying not leaving the confines of himself.

He heard them again, then. All those that he had thrown into the Pale and that, in the place of his soul made walkable, had condemned him in turn.

Murderer.

Killer.

Black-heart.

A new name joined the last three. A thing of castigation, soul-deep.

Matricide.