"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He had not looked for them.
He had found his revenge in other ways.
He had crafted the water nymphs, swiftly shackled them to differing bodies of water across Beqanna. He had dragged the thing from hell, fashioning her after the Fates the white magician had taken from him. He had made her bleed, though she was a dead thing. He had set it loose on the world in the hopes that it might find those Fates, that it might tilt its ugly head and let them know that he had not forgotten.
The thing has reported no such findings, however.
And he is tired of waiting.
So, he finds the first one himself. He asks the ghosts, communing with the dead, and he looks for her first. The Fate who cut the tether. The Fate responsible for severing the lifeforce because certainly she is the most like him. (He does not look for the one crafted for love, though she is perhaps the only one who has looked for him. He does not look for the decider, though there is some great darkness in deciding when a life should be ended, too. No, he looks for Maurtia specifically, the Necromancer.)
It does not take long for them to find her. It does not take long for him to step through that portal of shadow and emerge mere yards from her. He has seen her only once before, when Beyza had birthed them in shadow and he had wept at the sight of them. Because they were so beautiful that he could not look at them. Certainly he could not touch them. But he knows that it is her, Maurtia, the darkest of the three daughters.
“Maurtia,” he exhales, the name clawing its way up out of his throat as if it takes some great effort to utter it. He looks plainly at her now, though she is still just as beautiful now as the day she’d been born. “My Maurtia,” he coos. “You’re all grown up, my girl.”
Truthfully, Maurtia had not thought of her father - not in any meaningful way. She knew, vaguely, that Deebee was a gift from him - and that their mother had whisked them away to a tropical island soon after their birth and he had never visited them there. She never understood what the big deal was, and so did not harbour any fear or hatred or any other maligned thoughts towards the shadowy idea of a father in her mind.
She was just usually too busy thinking of other things to really consider him.
If she had, she might have sought him out. If she had known that her abilities were an echo of his, her curiosity would have drawn her right to him like a fish caught on a lure.
She recognizes him instantly although she does not remember him, those memories from her youth faded and half-mixed with stories to the point where she does not know which actually happened and which has been fabricated or enhanced over time.
The voices of the nearby ghosts grow quiet when he appears through that portal of shadow - but she doesn’t think much of that. Deebee retreats, merging with the fog that billows around Maurtia’s hooves, though the shadow wolf is no longer tied to the magic that had created it.
Her companion remembers what Maurtia does not, though it does not choose to share any of that information with her here.
Whatever surprise or annoyance might have shown on her dark face at the arrival of someone so close to her personal space evaporates at the novelty of this moment, and then changes to a wry sort of humour at his words.
“Am I?” There’s humour in her tone, though where she inherited it from is anyone’s guess - a true, if entertained, smile is bright in her shining white eyes as she takes him in. “Yours, I mean. You’d think there’d be a limit on how long it can take to speak to your child before they’re considered fatherless.” There's no malice in her tone, no barb hinting at a hidden pain or fear - just an honest, if a little silly, thought. Like most of the ones that float through her mind.
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
Jamie had once been a thing meant for cowering. (And cower he had! How desperately he had stuffed himself into the darkness, how he had pulled the shadows around himself, how he had turned his face into the black!) But could he tell his daughter that? Could he tell this daughter that?
There is a levity to her that he himself had never possessed and he tilts his strange head at the humor in her tone.
“Your mother,” he murmurs, wincing, as if it pains him to speak of her. (And how much of that is real? How much of it is a charade?) “Your mother took you from me, all three of you, my darling girls.” He takes a half-step toward her, aware of the ghosts gone quiet, the wolf he’d fashioned for her lurking.
“And your mother,” he says it again and perhaps it brings him some thrill to call that white magician to mind. Perhaps the thought of her alone is enough to chase a chill down his spine. “Beyza, she was always a much better magician than I was.” He grins that razor-toothed grin now, ink-black teeth against an ink-black mouth, barely glinting in the precious little light here.
(Is this what passes for humor with the reaper?)
“But I missed you, the three of you.” There is an unnatural brightness to this, something sinister in the way those big yellow eyes flash. “I made you a sister.” Grinning still, he says, “oh, Maurtia, she looks just like you.”
Some hazy memory flickers in the back of her mind of a trip from canyons to tropics, and perhaps he is right - perhaps their mother took them away from him. Deebee seems to think so, some agreement thrumming down their bond from where he is hiding among her fog. She is not paying him much attention - her white eyes focused so intently on those eerie yellow ones of her father.
And she believes what he is telling her.
It is easy for her to believe that Beyza is the better magician - so simply ingrained in her from youth is the iron idolization of her mother. Even if the white mare had only done small tricks for her daughters, it had certainly been enough to inspire.
So she thinks nothing of that statement - and it is soon eclipsed anyway, and her smile blends with shock and delight that their family is bigger than she even knew.
“A sister?” She brightens at this, missing the sharpness of the grin with which it is delivered. Stepping eagerly into the crocodile’s mouth, oblivious to any potential for harm - so secure is her belief that Death is a beloved friend, no matter what form it may take. “What’s her name?”
There is no hiding this: the reaper has no heart, he never did. Where there should have been love, there has only ever been fog. But he goes on grinning, delighting in her excitement.
Perhaps he had been moved to softness by the birth of the Fates. Perhaps that was why he had fashioned for them those shadow-things. Because they were the most beautiful things he’d ever seen and he and the white magician had made them together.
And then?
When they had gone, he had made the nymphs and banished them simply for the satisfaction of it. They were beautiful, certainly, but they were not the Fates. How he had ached for those unnatural, otherworldly things! But why had he done it, really? Why had he ventured into the depths of hell to cobble that hideous creature together?
The answer is simple: he’d wanted to hurt them. All of them. The girls and their mother. He’d wanted to say, ‘look what I created, see how easy it is to destroy it’.
He wonders if she imagines the sister might be beautiful, as they are. He could summon her, he thinks, that abomination he’d dragged from hell. He could show Maurtia exactly what he’d done, but he doesn’t. Not yet.
“Her name is Miseria,” he tells the necromancer, head tilted. What would she think if he did summon the thing? Would she be repulsed or delighted by the blood that cut rivers down the thing’s cheeks? “She’s most like you,” he says. “She, too, is a thing of death.”
She is, indeed, imagining someone that looks like her sisters and her - there’s no other frame of reference for her when it comes to relatives that aren’t her parents. But there’s already a white, grey, and black one of them. So maybe… maybe this new sister is purple.
Maurtia would love to have a purple sister.
She’s about to tell her father this when he continues speaking instead. Some of her excitement deflates, but not much of it - there’s so much inside of her, after all. She could let a little bit go without missing a whole lot of it.
“Miseria.” Maurtia repeats, like she’s repeating the punchline to a particularly unfunny joke and her face sours at the taste of it. She doesn’t comment on the name audibly but the flat gaze of her white eyes lets her father know what she thinks of it all the same.
Still, that moment of being unimpressed doesn’t last for long. A purple sister, who is also a thing of death? There’s really only one other thing to ask and she does so with obvious excitement - “Can I meet her?”
It is all he needs, this request. All he needs to turn from the necromancer, to peer through the shadows to find the creature he’d cobbled together in the depths of hell and breathed life (or the approximation of life) into. He finds the thing wandering in the Chamber and calls to it, reaching through the shadows for it. There is a moment of intense concentration wherein the reaper sways, wheezes with the effort, grits his impossibly black teeth.
And then the thing is there, blinked into existence in the space beside the necromancer.
The thing blinks, breathes its death rattle, bleeds the kind of blood that has some unknown source. The skin sags, sorely lacking in that ethereal glow the Fates had been born with. The thing is wretched with its swollen ribcage, its bleeding knees, its hair falling out in great clumps.
The reaper nods to the thing and then to Maurtia.
“Miseria,” he tells the thing, “this is your sister, Maurtia.”
And the thing turns and reaches, reaches and groans, “sister.”
She has her assumptions and they spread warmth through her heart while she waits, wrapped in delightful fantasies of getting to steal away this sister just like Beyza had stolen them - to whisk her away to her mother and sisters and introduce her to the life she knew.
Reality appears, blinking into existence beside her.
Of course Maurtia sees it right away - the cobbled together pieces of what could have been her and her sisters. The white, grey, and black skin stretched over a skeleton, crafting a body so obviously falling apart. She feels like she has peered into an alternate universe - or perhaps the very far future, where she and her sisters had passed into the afterlife and their father had finally had his chance to spend time with them, so he pieced them together.
This thought, while horrific, actually settles her mind. Although she greatly enjoys being her own self, being wrapped up together with her sisters would not be so bad of a fate.
So she smiles at Miseria - reaching her pearlescent black nose towards a wretched, bloody black one. She doesn’t mind the smell, the aura of death that radiates outward in waves and screams (it is, after all - part of her too. A second family, that other-world that she has in common with this sister and that father and not with the others). Maurtia already absolutely loves her little sister with a certainty that matches the one that tells her Beyza, and perhaps the others too, would be horrified about this development. The glowing white skin, in particular being so close to Neuna, is haunting.
And this simple, effervescent necromancer doesn’t hesitate with her love for it. “Sister.” She coos out gently, white eyes dancing.
Her views on Jamie, however, continue to be muddled - she is both fascinated and disgusted by this display. The power needed to craft life from the shattered pieces of death, and not just the animations that Maurtia plays with, is incredible but there’s that uncomfortable current she doesn’t know quite what to do with. This is not a compliment, not a kindness, in any shape. Even as Maurtia clearly reacts positively towards this sister.
jamie
