//------------------------------// // Please, help us... // Story: The Nothing in the Not-Quite House // by Broken Phalanx //------------------------------// It happens by inches, a quiet sort of execution as ‘Proedria’, perhaps, or something else in the darkness descends upon St_r_i_ht’s mind and- *** Piece by piece a ship disassembles, until nothing else remains but its abundant spirit. Yet even this is contested, and around this frame too narrow do two do battle; isolation is far too precious a commodity to spare, and friends and foes may yet join the skirmish, but benighted eyes see not and benighted minds know not. *** The boat sat upon the waters, drifting up and down with the quiet irrepressibility of the gentle waves. Two look to the battered wood, the splintered oars, the long strips of tortured canvas that hang like bodies from a gallow; such is the state of disrepair and the nature of an ocean storm. “How long until it’s ship-shape?” asks the First, always, always the First, the magnificent locks of her (he continues with nary a pause at this momentary mental hiccup, for what need is there? Beings like him are chosen by higher powers; they do not falter) his hair swaying in the sea-breeze. The Second looks to the First, the narrowing of his eyes being the only outward betrayal of what he truly feels; there is nothing ‘sculpted’ on the Second, nothing to mark him apart from the masses that dot the harbor, just an ugly squashed nose and a distinctly chubby build common to hard laborers. There will be no poets to tell his story, the Second knows, but then again that’s the perpetual fate of the eternal shipwright. He also knows his eldest died during a voyage with the fool before him, but wisely leaves this unsaid; rough seas should not follow the rest of his progeny from a single moment of honesty. “Ship’s toast. You’re looking at several months,” the Second finally says, his nose rankled and expression set in stone. Something crunches in the First’s grasp, and she pours a pebble’s worth of dust from it upon the beach beneath. They shall sing no songs of the Second, for dismal and damned are this world’s ballads, and it’s champions only those who possess that great and terrible destroying might. But valor is not a poisoned well, fit only for them. “‘No’ means it isn’t happening; if you want a crew, you need a boat, so unless those folks of yours can cross the ocean on flotsam or breathe water, well, you should find yourself a nice family to get cosy with while me and my folks fix this thing up,” the Second adds flatly, the noon sun giving his fresh wash of sweat the damp camouflage necessary to hide from the First. The First simply glares at the Second for a minute before shrugging and walking away; knowing this to be the closest thing to an assent he is likely to get, the aged shipwright nods to his crew, and a moment later work commences even as the Second stumbles off in search of something to soothe his scorching throat. Gods, but he hated heroes. The ship comes and goes, lumps twisted lumber being refitted where they can, replaced where they cannot. Unfortunately for all involved, there is a great deal more of the latter than the former, and the months crawl by like the twitching blade of an eager guillotine. Yet what can be done? All but the harvest trees are lumber, refitting takes time, and- And when the First is suddenly gone, having stolen the king’s daughter and killed his pet, when the guards follow a trail of bodies and money and find only a Shipwright, the meager remains of a hobbled family, and a half-finished boat, something breaks and one story bleeds into another. Noble intemperance coupled with royal madness break and mutilate, cut, skin, peel, until, in the end, another dwells within that forsaken not-house Labyrinth. If you do not have a monster, make one. *** SHe lands, blade already aloft and held before him, ready to lash out and smite anything fool enough to present a challenge long before pupils attempt to adjust and reveal that there is nothing to reveal. There is a moment of consideration before teeth are bared and a throaty laugh echoes through the not-house; the particulars of the situation are hardly of import. There was a quarry. There is a hunt. There will be meat. Everything else is details, and those solve themselves quite regularly with a bit of name-dropping; after all, even in a foreign land, no one would be fool enough to reject service to Starlight Glim- A pause; perhaps this Detail is of greater import than once thought. Perhaps even an Issue, or maybe even, gods forbid, a Problem. He didn’t quite care for those, Problems, that is; usually he had underlings, bodies to throw at Problems that couldn’t just be stabbed into nonexistence. Yet here he is, all alone, in the dark. No, no, not quite alone, not alone at all; They were watching from beyond the black, from beyond the transient symbols that chain this place in ephemeral bars. They were always there, even before the symbols when he danced his first upon the world, when all that bound this place was wind. But They weren’t the only things with him in the dark this time; something else, a bleak rage that hangs in the air like a weighted shawl, shuffles through the mire as a heavy poltergeist. That unseen something looses an animalistic snort. A grim joy curls Star- his lips upward, the familiarity of it all finally coming back to him; the dark, the stench, the feeling of entrapment and vague claustrophobia as comforting as a well-worn shirt. A glance downwards, and the grin grows wider, more feral as the ancient drums play in his ears; black goes red as his field of vision first narrows, then mists over. This body is wrong and too round by far, the blade rigid and unmoving from her his agonized head, the rolicking of the ocean too dim, too somber to be quite the same, but none of that matters; she is a Hero, it is a Monster, and the where the details change, the story never does. *** When separated from the unessential, they really aren’t the same at all. What a silly mistake. “Hello,” says the head on the mantelpiece to the newest tenant, milky, glossy eyes unblinking. “Hello,” it says again, to something unseen flitting from beyond the black, too strong to be bound. “Hello,” it says once more, this to itself, the only affirmation it can know in the stagnant dark; the distant roar of animalistic rage sings a duet with a distorted word screamed in fury, and the final salutation goes unanswered. “Hello,” she says to the head, the more trepidatious one by far. “Are you-?” “Yes, I am.” “Ah.” “But not the ones you know. Not an ‘a’ but a ‘The’. More a title than a form, but the form I am.” “I… see.” “I know you do.” There is an uncomfortable pause before the head continues, “You seem much nicer when you’re unable to kill me.” Silence continues for a while longer, swallowed by the darkness. “What will happen now?” She asks. “They fight. I die. He leaves. In time, you do too.” “Not happening,” she replies, the first bit of certainty coloring her voice since this ordeal began. “Nopony-” “Nobody.” “Nobody, thank you, evicts me from my-” “Body.” “I know the word! The point is, that’s not happening! I need to get my body back and you, uh, you need to, umm… help me out here?” “Die?” “Yeah, di- no! Why is that your first thought?!” “That is how it always goes; the hero enters and smites the m-” “Okay, enough about, um, that sorta stuff! Is there anything else you know about? Family, friends, something?” “...I… remember the scent of salt and lemons.” “Something useful!” The irritation is growing, but there is little to be feared. “You are a ghost not yet dead and I am alive but died a thousand times over. We can do nothing, nothing but speak.” Again there is silence, inter-spaced only by nervous giggling, before she replies. “So, that’s it?” she says, the words bitter and sharp. The reply she receives is a slow nod, little more than the smallest of pivots up and down, and for a moment she sees red, before loosing a litany of decidedly un-mare-like curses; a few minutes later, panting mostly from the memory of breathing than any true necessity, she grumbles, “So, what, we molder in this place until some stupid eventuality?” “Well, no,” the head replies, even as its body rises and shambles over, grasping the head by the horns and carefully lowering it on a severed neck. “I could always show you around?” From beyond the black, the Proedria spectate. And from beyond the black, faint mutterings can already be heard.