#sarangerel khotgor
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Death of the Author
His fingers brushed gently, reverently against the leather spines of the volumes arranged beside his desk. Each cover was brand new and artfully designed, crafted to fit aesthetically with the rest of the personal collection. In his bookshelf he held the works of nations. Life's work upon life's work, sorted by era and author, and every page untouched by anything but the writer's hand.
The most recent arrivals were something he was especially proud of. On the Nature of Voidkin, bound in supple, black leather with gold accents, warmed beneath his touch. The Principles of Void Gates followed. Darkness Made Light: A Study of Mhachi Manipulations, and its companion journal, Unconventional Resources. Six slimmer, untitled journals, filled with pages upon pages of theory and spellcraft. A treatise on stellar currents. The incantations and arcane geometry necessary to pull a star from the vastness of the Void and alter its trajectory. His touch lingered over the final work in this series: a collection of designs, both rudimentary and refined, of an anti-memetic cognitive failsafe device.
A single claw grazed tenderly across the author's name, rendered carefully in silver thread: Sarangerel Khotgor.
It pained him that he could not retrieve the gift he had given to her in her early years. The stone would make its way back into his collection eventually, he was sure, but the encyclopedic knowledge on display was diminished without its author to tie it all together. No matter. She remained one of his most prolific and productive contributors to date.
His chair creaked beneath him as he leaned back to savor the comfort ingrained into the cushions over a century's time. The furniture would need replacing, soon; wood and leather were fragile components, but he appreciated the craftsmanship of this chair so much that he'd ordered four of them made. This was his third in as many eras. All this reflection on the passing of his latest field agent and researcher was unearthing the bittersweet flavor of nostalgia within him.
Perhaps he needed a new one.
Yes, he thought to himself, a new contributor was just the thing for his mood. In knowledge lay power, and he prided himself on the amassed knowledge in his library. On what subjects was he still lacking? The chair groaned one final time as he rose to his feet. There were magics he still lacked an accounting of, of course. Smaller schools and forbidden techniques that were trampled out by zealots and competitors alike. His gaze fell on another stone in the sturdy glass display that formed the centerpiece of his desk: a deep, dark red, nearly black at the surface, and threaded with veins that pulsed a wispy orange light. There was an idea. His claws plucked the gem from between its multicolored brethren, and the lone, empty space where his last contributor's crystal would someday return.
The gem hummed gently between his fingers as he folded it into a handkerchief and tucked it into his breast pocket. Leaving his study behind, he drifted out into the library proper as he began to consider his next step. Malms of bookshelves surrounded him on either side as he began his trip to the exit, every one of them filled with ancient texts, recovered journals, and an ocean's weight of the names of his dearest contributors.
It was time that he scouted the next.
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Sega (Results, #13) (Makeup Day Entry)
Draining and cleaning the reflection pool was the most difficult project Sega undertook while renovating the Desrosers’ estate courtyard. She had to carry heavy buckets of water--two at a time, with one weighing down each arm until they felt like they’d pop right out of her shoulder--down the winding path through the front gate. She dumped the stinking green water into the marsh, praying all the while that there weren’t any morbol seeds germinating in the stagnant pond that she may have just flushed back into the ecosystem.
Her shoulders ached every day for weeks, a dull pain that was everywhere but also nowhere in specific. Sega hadn’t done this type of physical labor since leaving the Steppe, and there were plenty of good godsdamned reasons why Sega had left the Steppe! Sucking dick for a living had been far easier on the joints than this type of work.
After draining the pool, she had to scrub it clean of all the fetid algae, spending long afternoons bent over on all fours and tending to the masonwork with a large bristle brush while the sun twinkled merrily through the trees and dappled her pale arms and legs. After several days of letting it dry out, she then had to pull up bucket after bucket from the well to refill it, using her whole body’s weight to heave each load up from the depths. Her weary bones creaked in tandem with the creaking of the rope as they worked together to pull crystal clear water out of the darkness beneath the forest.
At the end of the project, Sega’s hands were gnarled and full of callouses where handles and ropes had chafed her palms bloody. She had once had such soft, delicate hands. Customers had sometimes commented on her light touch, but the correct word was pampered. Even with the Khotgor, she had chosen not to fight, not to hunt. She had always believed that her strength was people, not physical or magical prowess.
Being able to see the fruits of her labor in a real and tangible way was a novel reward. She stood back, retreating to the topiary to get a clear view of the abandoned mansion reflected in the renovated pond. The large stained glass windows flickered colorfully in the gently moving water, stirred by a light breeze that made the leaves on the hedge animals sway back and forth.
Sega beamed, delighted by the animating effect that the wind had on her custom topiary, bringing the green snurbles and puddings briefly to life. The designs for the topiary came straight out of Sarangerel’s bestiary, and Sega had tended carefully to the overgrown bushes until they sprung back to vibrancy in a new, only slightly creepy form in the shape of her sister’s life’s work. Ezenzakhialga had asked her to make a monument to Sarangerel, but he hadn’t known that she’d already planned to do exactly that, long before he’d asked. Perhaps because he’d never bothered to ask after her.
A darkness flashed over her face while the breeze still whipped her hair, but she quickly shoved her thoughts aside, pulling out a glass-blown pipe and settling down under a nearby snurble to light it up and take a few calming puffs. Better spirits immediately washed over her as the warmth filled her up and she looked around at the very real effect she’d had on this little corner of the world. Evette was going to be so pleased with this! Hopefully the children would be too, when the house was renovated and finally filled with orphans for Sega to care for. Cleaning diapers sounded like a far more palatable living to her than ever having to scrub out that nasty pond again, but it felt good to have done it once. It was nice to change things for the better, to turn chaos into order... just the once.
She leaned back, petting the branches of the whispering hedge snurble and blowing smoke rings up at the tree line. “Sister, you’d never believe this if you could see it,” she said out loud, to nobody.
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Whispers in Lilac
When the letter from the Sarangerel arrived it caught Khenbish off guard in the best of ways, the flowers and seeds that followed left him speechless. He was no gardener, but fortunately Dunrai was. Books were read, questions asked, the materials needed obtained while two stems from the bouquet languished in water on the window sill of Khen’s room at the Ward mansion.
The stems had immediate impact, conversations with others were more careful. Anger held in check in favor of kindness thanks to the message both in the letter and the promise of the blossoms carefully kept separate from the wilting bouquet.
Stems from the display were hung upside down in a quiet, dark corner before the flowers could turn brown and fall from the branches.
Life moved apace, words written instead of said taking root and slowly growing just like the roots that emerged from the stems floating in water. Life, fragile yet stubborn, seeking out new spaces, new people, new places to anchor and grow.
If the flowers could speak they could say much of the joy, sorrow, and love that swept through the room in the passing weeks. They’d whisper about the hours that the Khenbish spent watching the them while his mind was elsewhere, both man and plant basking in the sun through the windows. Conversations would be exposed spilling secrets and private moments to anyone who would listen.
Fortunately, flowers don’t talk so the secrets were kept. The barely controlled rage that caused his hands to shake ever so slightly as the delicate roots of the lilac stems were gently placed into pots would never be revealed to any but the man doing the work. The task gave him focus as he and two others planned the hunt to kill the one that cause the rage, and fear, to burn so brightly within.
Only the blossoms saw the bitter tears that were wept in the aftermath of that hunt, giving an outlet to the guilt and regret that he couldn’t give voice to in any other way. They saw the brightly colored cushions shredded in frustration as he struggled to find a way to resolve the conflict within and ultimately fail, leaving the room with no one but the flowers wiser for his pain.
Through it all the purple flowers fell from the stems, leaving only the green leaves behind. When the leaves drooped more questions were asked, books consulted as the neophyte gardener struggled to be patient despite the worry that he was doing it all wrong. Khenbish was convinced the plants would die under his care, only to settle when Dunrai assured him that this was normal as the roots adapted from water to soil.
Unseen the roots continued to slowly grow, gathering strength from the dirt, sun, and care given to the stems that meant so very much.
Dunrai belongs to @dunrai-ffxiv Sarangerel belongs to @ninth-threnody
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Lineage
(Many thanks to @ninth-threnody for giving me use of Sarangerel, and also to @attritionofrestraint for Ezen and also for cowriting the scene this is adapted from.)
(CN: Blood, wounding)
If this was death, it wasn’t at all like she’d imagined it; it was neither cold nor alien, but rather warm and effervescent, positively electric with potential. The blood at her front anointed her fragile body as the hunter tried but could not manage to pull his weapon from where it remained buried in her soft belly. His keen eyes snapped to where the end of his blade ought to have been protruding on her back side, and yet there was nothing there. A new path unfolded before him in an instant, the motions intuitive in light of this new information. He changed course, swallowing his horror, and chose instead to plunge the blade further in, up to the guard until he heard the sharp pull of her inhale in response. The metallic tang of her pure essence had the wicked beasts around them licking their jaws with anticipation, and yet none moved to feast, captivated by the unfolding scene.
Her hands fumbled out and covered the hunter’s broad grip, shuddering nauseously as her lips animated wordlessly of their own accord, her head rolling forward limply. They remained locked in their deathly embrace, not one figure moving to so much as breathe until all at once an eruption ricocheted outward from her epicenter, sending a shockwave of blinding light in a bubble around them that briefly illuminated the world in all manners of white in the blink of an eye. The acrid stench of burning pitch momentarily overwhelmed the senses as the deafening thunder echoed away as quickly as it had sounded.
When the afterburn of the sudden flash faded in the hunter’s eyes, what was left around him was a ring of familiar, dark-scaled faces looking on, each with their own telling expression. Some inspected their restored limbs or gazed on at each other in wonder, and some stared silently and stoically at the duo in the center of their ring without a hint at their thoughts. The picture came together when his sight panned immediately to his right and spotted one face in particular that held an expectant smile that stood out among the sober, weathered faces, her blue limbal rings burning bright. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Sarangerel drawled, tipping her head to look him over. “You didn’t really think we’d leave the last Khotgor hunter without a token of love, did you?”
Before he could answer, the priestess pushed his hands and eased backward off the blade with renewed life, leaving its deadly edge smoothly coated in a brilliant shade of red. The gruesome veneer breaks apart into thin webs, dances along its well-honed edge with a tremble that threatens to fall into the river, and all at once soaks into the metal without a trace. With detached intuition, Miya laid hands over her own impalement, a blank stare aimed at something beyond all present, and when they moved again the stain and wound alike were as though they’d never been.
“Take it and don't disappoint us. Blood like that isn’t exactly easy to come by around here, you know." Laughter like a broken piano chord echoed impossibly in the expansive space. “We’ve been waiting for ages. Some of us more literally than others, though I wouldn’t mention it too loudly...some of us are a bit sensitive,” she confided darkly with a conspiratorial smile.
The hunter was on edge in spite of, or perhaps precisely for the crowd of familiar faces. The discordant laugh sends a shiver down his spine as an unwelcome reminder of exactly where and what they’re in the midst of. His mouth pulls into a dire frown. "You're all lost here...?"
"Oh, not all of us. A few just got unlucky, and...well...you know what happened to me. I think we're missing a few generations, the luckier ones..." She gazed over her nails as though they were meeting in the middle of the markets or sharing news over coffee. "Come to think of it, I don't think I'd exactly call this 'lost', either. Let's give it a more romantic title and call it something more exciting like fate in light of this little spectacle. I’d hate to think all of this was just groping in the dark."
A barking cough interrupted the conversation and all eyes turned to the priestess. Ezen rushed to her side and for a moment it seems as though she might vomit as she bows her head and presses her hands to her chest. Before any can intervene, something tumbles from her mouth and plinks cleanly into the water. She thrusts her hand in to capture it before the current can sweep it away and holds it up to examine. A peculiar stone catches what little light can be gleaned, a faint verdant shade winking back. The little trinket emanates a comforting warmth, but no further explanation is offered.
The distraction gives an old lover the chance to be the first to turn and disappear back into the darkness without a word to Ezen. Even now the estranged couple have nothing to say to one another, and nobody motions to draw Sakagat back. Sarangerel, on the other hand, lingered undeterred. "Chin up, brother. I hate to see you looking so distraught.” He spares her a dull glance at the familial title and she offers an apologetic smile in return. “This was for the best. You could say something like—” she cops the voice of a mystic, her slender hands rising to add theatrical effect. “—the prophecy was fulfilled...if you wanted to be dramatic."
"You can be dramatic," he responds gruffly, a sense of security returning as the attention wanes and the unnerving circle of ancestry recedes into the darkness. "You're owed that."
The woman sidles closer, but does not make to touch either hunter or priestess. She speaks through a veil as though divulging a delicious secret. "I think our unfortunate states when we greeted you were dramatic enough, don’t you? Mm, it is positively dreadful down here. Terrible for my complexion."
A glint of emotion touches the hunter’s features, but vanishes as quickly as it had come. Before he has a chance to respond, Sara cuts him off in a low purr. "I'm proud of you, but I’m afraid I’ve got to go now. You'll know what to do with the weapon."
"I will," he concedes with a nod. "Thank you. Be well; this will all end soon. Peace is coming."
"Oh, it’s been granted, darling," she calls over her shoulder as she makes to saunter back into the unrelenting darkness. "Good luck out there. The war is neverending."
He closes his eyes and nods once. "I'm ready for the next skirmish."
(⏣ Ko-fi ⏣)
#ffxiv#ff14#writing#roleplay#rp#mateus#crystal rp#short story#ezen#miyasuke#sarangerel#death#horror#character blog#emetophobia#blood#wound#violence#bending lore up in this bitch#full steam ahead#one more post to go in this series#i don't want to edit anymore#what are tenses???#who can say????#commas? we've got 'em#i'm so tired#okay i'll stop now
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@kalaisgreen and my beautiful Khotgor babes, courtesy of @luhbrazart! Thank you SO MUCH for drawing them!
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look at this heartwarming friendship moment between two talls
i don’t recommend attempting to do the same to a small tho
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big goth, small goth
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I can't take pretty screenshots but if I could they'd be of her
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tantrum fallout
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you know i hate it when you call me sister
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The longer hair really just makes her look even more like an unrepentant little shit.
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Aetherochemistry
Ae•ther•o•chem•is•try noun
Definition:
The branch of science that deals with the identification of energies of which aether is composed; the investigation of their properties and the ways they interact, combine, and change
The composition and aspect of a substance or phenomenon
Plural noun: aetherochemistries
“The aetherochemistry of a thaumaturgical ignition”
Good afternoon, everyone.
I would like to thank all of you in attendance for this opportunity to present to you today. Several lifelong dreams of mine have been fulfilled just by my presence here atop this podium. I see quite a few familiar faces amongst the crowd tonight, faces attached to names I recognize from a not-insignificant number of my texts, primers, and the many, many theses that have formed the backbone of my own research. It is an honor.
Some of you may be confused; as thrilling as this is, I hold no delusions over my own fame. The reason that I was invited before you tonight involves perhaps the least-respected and most-reviled field of aetherochemical study: the Void, and what is wrong with it.
Ah-hah. Yes, I see you there, sir, already edging toward the door. Minister...Tadasu, was it? I quite enjoyed your theories on our star’s ‘astral vents’ and their purported effects upon the fauna of the Ruby Sea. No, no; go on. I simply wished to express my admiration for your contributions to the field of science before you scuttled away. Yes, goodbye.
Now that the cowards are gone. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sarangerel of the Kogane Khotgor, daughter of the Nameless Tribes. I see some of your looks from up here; please, spare me your empty apologies. I am well aware of what you think of me and my kind. Let us do something productive and fruitful in the time we have together, shall we? So, on the topic of my presentation:
The Void. The Dark Star. The world beyond the wall, from which -- if you listen closely -- you may just hear the faintest scratching. Our star, as we all know, is a warped and twisted thing, but it continues its hurtling path throughout the greater void of the cosmos in relative peace despite the scars we and those before us have inflicted upon it. Aetherochemically speaking, our star is remarkably well-balanced in aspect and intensity: barring some few gouges within the landscape, typically sites of previous calamities, all elemental aspects are reflected within the breath of our world. Passive and active, umbral and astral, all energies are accounted for and can be found, sensed, or channeled in nearly any environment. Constant transformation and adaptation help to maintain this balance, and by any measurable definition, our star’s aether has remained almost entirely unchanged throughout recorded history.
Not so for her shadow, the Void. I need not regale you all with the tales of the creatures who, on occasion, tear their way through the fabric that separates us when it is made flimsy. You have heard plenty, I am sure. Ghost stories, tales of monsters and demons and wrathful, infectious phenomena that appear with little warning. Some of you may be wondering why a biologist is not speaking on these topics -- and why I bother to mention them at all -- but to answer the first question, that is because these creatures belong beneath the umbrella of aetherochemical stratification. Voidkin, as we know them, are almost entirely composed of the aether that saturates and swells their star. Very few of them have an observable physical form, and even those are simply the cloaks they wrap themselves in to walk our star and enact their dark works. A comfortable set of boots and gloves, if you will, spun from the raw energies of creation that they *bathe* in behind their wall.
The Void, you see, is a bloated tumor of umbral energies. It swells with power, condensed and chaotic, and it is always growing. Always...spreading. Metastasizing. Like an illness. Voidkin are the natural spawn of such an affliction, and they spread out from their point of origin on the hunt for greater sources of aether from which to feed. You have heard tales, I expect, of the voracity of the monsters from another world. They are drawn to places with riotous energy, cataclysmic events, horrible catastrophes, and when they emerge as wet and howling newborns into our world, their first instinct is to feed.
Why do they feed? No known Voidkin exhibits a digestive process, not such as we have seen. Most have no true physical or biological needs; they can survive almost indefinitely without air, water, or nourishment. They feed, you see, to steal the aether of another star and bring it back. Back to their own festering plane.
The most basic properties of aether manipulation dictate that aether can be neither created nor destroyed; it can only be changed. From one aspect to another, from one polarity to its opposite, aether is a constant and only its form is mutable. For this reason I posit that the monsters of the Void hunger merely to feed their star’s insatiable growth, and to further weaken our own.
Professors Bolkot and Itagaki, if you would be so kind as to escort your colleague out. Please, it is no trouble. I am certain that he is simply unwell; too long from that bracing Hannish air, no doubt. Thank you.
Our crowd thins and still we grow no closer to the solution to what is a growing problem. The threat posed by the Void is difficult to grasp, but its effects can be seen. Felt. Like a poison, it saps our world of its heart. That is a poor analogy, excuse me. It is like a disease. A parasite. As it feeds, it grows stronger, and its growth comes at the direct cost of our health. So, to the only solution we are afforded: how are we, those few proud souls who might aspire to act as our star’s immune system, supposed to protect this world from a threat so great and terrible?
Ask any chirurgeon in attendance, my friends. How best do you treat a cancer?
It must be cut out.
Recorded dictation of ‘Sarangerel Khotgor,’ guest of the Othard Aetherical Research Collective during their sixty-seventh annual summit.
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its so wild to me how sarangerel khotgor has such a mythos now, i love it
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What Dreams May Come 03
I awoke to darkness.
That in itself wasn’t terribly out of the ordinary - I have been known to keep strange hours - and I prefer my quarters, wherever they may be, to be sufficiently dim when I’m not busy in the lab or hunched over a half-filled journal page. Imagine my surprise, my disorientation, when I found myself doing just that. A truly massive text laid in my lap before me, barely lit by a nearby aether lamp and thick enough in the spine to swallow any other book among my collection. The letters squirmed and writhed in my vision; something about their wriggling movement up and down the pages burned deep into my eyes and forced my lashes shut. Yes, I recognized this book.
Testing again, naturally. This was the third time this week.
I shut the old, wretched party favor with a grunt and a sickly, muted sneeze. I really should have spent more time dusting. Time seemed to trickle away too quickly, adding up in some hourglass I could only sense by instinct and knew well enough by now to dread. The cursed book fell shut with a wet slap of leather, and I wondered not for the first time what I would have done if my little device had chosen this moment to fail. Presumably I would have been found within a few days, dehydrated, wheezing, trapped in a feverish nightmare. My saviors would find me hunched in the same position I am now, bent double over the pages, unable to stop reading each word with all the cold enthusiasm of an obituary, turning each page as I finished until I finally reached the back of the book… and read the tome’s final entry.
For more information, please see Chapter One.
Clever. Whoever wrote it was fiendishly clever, and every time I thought to rid myself of the little monster in leatherbound hardcover, I found myself admiring their handiwork just a little more. What better blade to bury between a scholar’s ribs than a book? My claws - all of them too long now, too sharp to hold anything but metal without protective gloves - tore deep grooves into the leather as I pushed it away. A first edition, ruined.
Well, I certainly wasn’t planning on gifting it to anyone else. I made a note to burn the little miscarriage of Eorzean script next chance I had. No more deaths on my hands, I’d decided. Not this close to the end. My gaze, better suited now for the near-total darkness of my room, slid off the spine of the book and back to my lap. A Motley Maleficarum. It even sounded like a joke. Laughter, none of it my own, rattled around inside of my skull as my attention turned to the device affixed to my wrist by a simple leather strap.
Instinct, a malformed sixth sense crafted through aether and intricate spellwork, told me that it held forty-two minutes of dwindling energy. I would have to pour a trickle of my power back into it when the spell ran its course. This close to the finish line, I couldn’t afford to let myself succumb to complacency. The dull brass of the device casing caught a fraction of lamplight, throwing a short beam of pain across my sensitive eyes as I drew it closer for inspection. It took me a few seconds to successfully catch the release hidden along its side - damnable claws - and with a hiss of escaping atmosphere, the clockwork and spellfire bloomed open for my perusal.
I stared, captivated, at the mechanisms of my mind. Tiny, hand-machined cogs clicked and turned in perfect synchrony. Dozens of carefully cut gemstones gleamed in the face of my final physical work, each of them glowing dully in a flickering staccato of spellwork bursts. A strange sense of deja vu slipped over my shoulders like an eerily familiar cloak; it was surreal, I thought, watching my thoughts tick by between the clicking, whirring mechanisms and pinpricks of light. The device was crude in its function, even as marvelous as it was in its design. My thoughts were not my own; my higher brain functions slept somewhere, locked in plodding, grave-cold stasis as my craft supplied me with a working simulacrum in their stead. A backup brain, in a manner of speaking. A failsafe. My digitigrade legs flexed and popped as I swung myself over the edge of my bed.
The four-ilm talons - I measured them with an odd, ambivalent sense of pride - at the tips of my feet clicked and scraped against the stone floor as soon as I left the fleeting warmth of my bedside rug. Even now I could feel my body completing its changes. My sense of self shifted almost imperceptibly on a daily basis. Mutations only came faster, and the grinding of bone and slithering of sinew as my body reshaped itself to accommodate its new host were loud enough to hear through the sound of blood pumping deep beneath my horns. My tail had gained something of a mind of its own; not for the first time I bound the barbed tip in my clenched fist, dragging it along with me step-by-step so that I wouldn’t be surprised by a fresh line of cuts and welts from the simple act of walking.
My vanity loomed in the utter darkness of the far corners of my room, yet I could see my reflection as flawlessly as if it were lit by torchlight. My face was changing. I knew I was tired, exhausted, worn to the bone by months of injury and sacrifice and crippling melancholy. As I leaned in to inspect myself, I picked out the barest shifts in my bone structure. My cheeks were sharper, more pronounced. My chin drew to a finer point, casting me in a somewhat devilish silhouette. My eyebrows appeared freshly plucked, razor-thin and immaculate beneath the polished gleam of my scales. I hadn’t tended them in days. My lips were full, plump with alluring promises and the succulent poisons I could taste drooling behind my teeth. To the casual observer I might look so similar the differences were negligible. But I knew.
Eyes stared back at me, but their gaze was vacant. Twenty-five minutes remaining on the spell, my brain stem informed me. I was safe for now. I was protected from any memetic influence, any cognitive monsters lurking south of my amygdala. I was cold, and still, and totally safe. My mental construct - the one recounting this as I think it - was secure in its control and flawless in its mimicry.
When the hour of my death came, I would be able to count the minutes.
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What Dreams May Come 02
I awoke to pain.
As far as my mornings go, it was a poor one. Thin, scratchy sheets - certainly not my own - stuck to my naked skin through the film of sweat that coated my body. A strangled scream, worn nearly silent by my painfully dry throat, crawled out of me between gasps for air and the ever-present itch. I tore the blankets aside in an ugly fit and nearly fell to my face as I tried to pitch myself towards the edge of the bed. As locomotion was clearly beyond me for the time being, I settled for grasping at the glass of water set near the edge… and the note beside it.
The water helped my disposition, though it could do nothing to lessen the agony that tore at me with every movement. With only a cursory glance down my body in the dim, early light, I could see that someone had been kind enough to help change some of my bandages. Whoever they were, bless their heart, they stopped at my waist. Praise Nhaama for little miracles. I choked down the rest of the glass, ignoring the maddening itch as best I could while I read over the short note. Yekegan, of course. No doubt she pitied the mess I made. My chest shuddered through a wracking laugh.
Yes, I suppose I did bleed altogether too much for polite company.
I grasped at the cabbage rolls while I tried to shift myself into a sitting position. They were cold, soggy, clearly left there too long beside a cold bowl of miso broth - how long had I been unconscious this time? The questions fled my mind as I tore into each roll, seeking out the stale, ground meat within them. My horrid teeth could barely shred the cabbage surrounding them, and a fresh blossom of pain bloomed in my upper jaw as I struggled to just swallow the things whole. Carefully, gingerly I brushed the flecks of mangled cabbage from my lips to touch at my gums. At least the new teeth were coming in quickly. I found myself wondering exactly how many I lost; it was at least two, judging by the gap and the pair of small, pinprick edges forcing their way into the empty space from the row behind them.
It was the teeth that reminded me of why I was here in the first place. My entire body was littered with lacerations, torn and cut in a hundred different places beneath the strain that I put on it, and my dazzling smile was what worried me.
I’m not without my faults.
The bed beyond the privacy curtain at my right was empty. Arden must have been moved elsewhere, or otherwise made his recovery alongside his sister. Briefly, I thought of my friends who had assisted me: Yekegan and Dunrai, throwing themselves in front of me to protect me from the Voidkin’s assault. Zareen, harrying and clawing and biting to keep Arden and the creature within him from tearing into me. Even Ravija, who stood her ground and fed herself to me, ilm by ilm, to fuel my spellwork and release her brother from his bonds. I hoped that they were all recovering well.
No doubt they were all recovering better than I was. I allowed myself an indulgent moment of self-pity as I set the note aside and inhaled another meat roll. Would that the manners matron of my childhood could have witnessed me at that moment, unable to chew the offensive vegetable matter and forced to swallow a child’s lunch whole. I relished the imagined look of horror on her face while I licked my lips, though the recurring itch of the horrible sheets brought with them a sobering reminder. The matron was dead with the rest of them, of course.
Feeling sorry for myself is as indulgent a vice as any drug in my veins or pleasure on my skin. I tried not to mire myself in it for too long. The phantom rod of the matron against my knuckles spurred me forward. Yes, Matron; you’re right. I mustn’t wallow. Chin up, chest forward, shoulders back, carry on. Stiff upper lip. My legs worked against me as I wiped my eyes with the heel of my palm and tried to shuffle them over the bed. They felt flimsy; I wondered if I wasn’t still struggling from blood loss or aether burnout. And the itch, the horrible itch of the scratchy woolen sheets was back.
But I had thrown the disgusting blanket aside, hadn’t I? My eyes followed the overlapping mess of bandages from my thighs down; every ilm was a bit more stained, a touch more wet and sticky with fresh blood. They would need to be changed soon. The itch remained even as I realized that the curve of my calves was all wrong. I would, offered the question, pride myself on the shapeliness of my legs, the well-toned slope of muscle and pale, artfully scarred skin.
I witnessed my pride in the morning light amid the bandages and the old, stale, coppery scent of blood spilled and forgotten. This time, my throat was wet enough to scream.
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