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 Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 4:49 pm
Solo ReclamationWord Count: 1427”I have a fair share of rings already, Mr. Sarcowicz. If you intend on pressing this deal, then I hope your rings have a captivating history. If they don’t come from an emperor’s hand with the finger still attached, then you’ll be in for a hard sell.” Isaiah leaned on the counter as he always did, the small of his back concave to reverse some of the pain caused by standing for long hours. Bony elbows clothed in a black button-up attempted to puncture the glass every time he met with a customer. Two fingers commonly pressed to his lower lip while he examined items of interest, but this time they traced lazy circles over the formerly smudge-free display case.
His wares might bore, but the man himself was interesting. He sported a handlebar mustache of almost all grey, flecked with some jets of black where his original color remained. No hair existed on his head - instead it shined like a floor waxer went the extra mile. Aquiline nose, strong features as what he would expect out of an eastern european man, with skin tanned enough to match his estimations. His eyes looked so brown, so sharp, that they hardly spoke a differentiation between pupil and iris. The rest of his attire looked intentionally unassuming, with a dirtied white tank top and equally beaten blue jeans, and a blue denim jacket thrown carelessly over reddened and mole-stricken shoulders. The man looked like he committed to a hard life of manual labor and saw little good of it. But perhaps his most interesting feature, the part of him that truly told a story, were the long gashes that crawled down from forehead to lower cheekbone - straight across one eye. That eye was gone, clearly, because in its place sat a painted acrylic eye that refused to move from its piercing forward gaze.
“I’ll take this s**t elsewhere then. Places like this are a dime a dozen.” He spoke gruffly, and his voice itself bespoke the dirt and gravel he must’ve worked upon. Isaiah recognized an accent present, though couldn’t place the region. A thin, wide box hung at his side, and he moved it around in jerks and twists like he hadn’t fully understood its weight.
Isaiah held up his hand, fingers splayed. “I’m interested in hearing your offer. I’m sure there’s something I could add to my personal collection.” His gaze shot straight toward the eye, perfectly painted to blend, save for the color. The lack of sharpness, of animosity. Isaiah’s fingers tented on the glass now, with only nails touching the surface - the swell of fingertips remained hidden beneath the free margin.
The man snorted. He offered no response. The box swung upward and would’ve landed on the shopkeeper’s hands had he not stepped back for viewing. The snaps - a wooden kind that looked near pristine in condition - snapped open and drew back to reveal the wares. The jeweler’s box easily held a dozen rings, with several empty spaces for more. At a glance, they looked high quality. Each ring looked of gold, etched with silver and crowned with varying jewels that occasionally corresponded with birth months. With a jeweler’s eye pinched between bony fingers, Isaiah deduced excellent clarity for the carat. Some imperfections in the color confirmed that they weren’t lab manufactured. None stood out particularly more than the last, and after a handful of minutes examining the wares, Isaiah set the jeweler’s eye aside.
He straightened up as he always did when making offers, and looked the man in the working eye as a means to show respect. “They’re aesthetic, made of real gold, and the gems have good clarity. I’m concerned about the color of some of them - they’re not up to standard for rings of these times - and the white gold designs are starting to tarnish. What can you tell me about these rings?”
“They’re 200 years old. From Turkey. They were my grandmother’s. These three. She stole them from Selim III’s dead body.” The man harbored no flinch in his words, no twitch in his stance to suggest a lie. He gestured to three rings, inlaid with turquoise and harboring elaborate design.
Isaiah smiled. He smiled like the man caught his eye, like his words were laced with the very gold and gems that he displayed to the shopkeeper. “How fascinating. And how much are you asking for these rings?”
“Four thousand.”
“Equally fascinating. In fact, I find it almost as fascinating as these rings. Can you confirm that these rings were not restored in any way, except by a professional, Mr. Sarcowicz?”
He nodded curtly.
“And can you confirm that these rings are, in fact, from the eighteen hundreds?”
He nodded again.
“Then I’m afraid someone has played you for a fool. Two things, Mr. Sarcowicz,” gestured a pair of fingers to the air to hold the man’s attention. “For one, white gold was not manufactured until about the nineteen-twenties when the Belais brothers were looking for a substitute for platinum. It didn’t gain popularity in jewelry until the nineteen-forties, which, judging by the style of these rings… I want to say they’re made around that era. See how the designs on these rings are highly geometric? It’s indicative of art deco style. Gemstones were also highly common insets during that period, which you’ll see in the garnet here and the sapphire there. Was your grandmother born in January, perchance? Or was that your grandfather?” He smiled carefully.
“Mr. Sarcowicz, I will not deny that these rings are of good quality. However, they need restoration in order to sell properly, and the story you provided for them was intriguing, but false. I’ll give you two hundred for the lot.”
Isaiah watched the man’s jaw set, dimpling the skin with the force of it. His nostrils flared, his knuckles tensed, and Isaiah witnessed his adam’s apple bobbing furiously with a single swallow. He looked desperate to compose himself and may lose that battle at any moment. “I’ll take four hundred. They’re all real gems. They are worth something good.” The man gestured to the largest ones with grubby fingers, and Isaiah noted that one nail broke through the middle and never healed properly - edges grew through the center and out to their more natural location.
But, more interestingly, the shopkeeper noticed one ring near the end of a row that lacked all ornate white gold inlays or precious stones. It looked of bone, curiously, much like a vertebra hollowed out and mostly shaved down. Only a slight ridge remained where one would find the transverse processes and spine. If that is, in fact, a vertebra, he reminded himself. It bore its own unique markings, inclusive of a peculiar planetary symbol - that of saturn.
How bizarre. And he never thought to mention that one. “I won’t offer higher than two-fifty.”
“Three hundred.”
“Three hundred if you throw in your glass eye.” His lids narrowed in seriousness.
“Fine, I will take two hundred fifty. Cash.” The man’s hand hit the glass with a thud that spoke of his expectations. Palm up, as usual.
“Splendid. I will have my clerk write up the sale. A pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Sarcowicz.” He offered no hand to shake. His attention was already arrested by the strange bone ring that remained among the rest. While unassuming, and lacking the airs of the other rings, it whispered to him with a peculiar drive and obsession that he found difficult to refuse. Isaiah suffered a compulsion to put it on, but disavowed the idea immediately. He’d need it tested first, if it was organic material. It might be part of a crime scene, regardless.
But a bizarre whisper of its otherworldliness kept tugging at his thoughts, demanding his attention and threatening to derail his focus on business. It pried incessantly, constantly driving him back to glance at the ring from his periphery, and never fully abated from his thoughts.
Now where have I seen that ring before? But Isaiah brushed the thought aside while he hailed his cashier. “Charles, write up his sale. Thirteen rings for the price of two hundred fifty dollars.”
His cashier glanced over, eyeing the gem-encrusted rings for a handful of seconds. “But Isaiah, there’s only twelve.”
The shopkeeper recounted the rings himself, noting a dozen of the gold rings and one of bone or ivory. “You’re right,” he said with a smile.
“My mistake.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 4:50 pm
Solo DeclamationWord Count: 1480TW: SuicideHe read all the labels, learned all the signs.
He read the CAUTIONs and the WARNINGs and the HAZARDs with every product. He kept a list with him at the grocery store. Aisle 13, he knew, and it was fitting enough. A chemist’s dream of household chemicals - from bleaches to borax to toilet bowl cleaner all conveniently located along both sides of the aisle. It felt like Christmas, almost, and for once Isaiah knew what it meant to be excited. For once, when he poked around on the back side of laundry detergents or rust removers or silver polish, he wasn’t looking at price tags and comparing costs. He wasn’t thinking about the cost code written in letters on the corner of the store labels. Instead Isaiah picked at each peeling label to look at all the hints of destruction written on the back, among the dusty shelves of the grocery store.
On the back of each read a special recipe, to be coordinated with online sources about what chemicals to avoid mixing and why bleach and ammonia makes a terrible combination for cleaning his kitchen floor. The Geneva Convention would balk at the chemical warfare he could wage in his own bathroom, the alkaline concoction of death water he could whip up in a swimming pool. The options were endless, and all at conveniently affordable prices.
Blindness and vomiting in a bottle of bleach.
Rashes and skin evulsion in tarnish remover.
Coughing and pleural irritation in every aerosol can of disinfectant.
Isaiah returned home with a chosen bottle of off-brand bleach, a gallon of roach pesticide, and a bottle of ammonia for good measure. He was excited; he felt like he made a well-educated choice among the wide world of corrosive cleaning agents. It crossed his mind that he shouldn’t be giddy with the proper purchases secured, that the nature of his intentions behooved a much more solemn and morose approach, but Isaiah grew so far beyond tired of life absent one Sidney James that he found only excitement in washing himself of the dolorous toil that was existence. If he could drown his tired old routine in chlorine gas and opt out of this forced subscription to living, what did it matter how he acted in the moments before departure?
While excitement welled, he made a second stop at a local sporting goods store to look at tarpaulins, and that quest evolved into industrial yardage of plastic wrap before he considered his search complete. Nails gave way to packing tape, then painter’s tape before he grew satisfied with the next step of the process. And after returning home with the purchases, Isaiah knew to start on the long and meticulous process of wrapping up and taping down his entire bathroom - from sink to ceiling.
First the excess articles had to be removed - shaving cream and razor, toothbrush, disposable bath cups, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, loofah, piercings, and other paraphernalia were organized into baskets and set aside in the hallway leading to the bathroom. He cleaned the entire room, then, starting with powder cleanser on the tub and bleach on the floors and only finishing with spraying down the mirrors until he could no longer see a single fleck of toothpaste-encrusted spittle on the surface. He took care to use all bleach-derived cleansers, despite his later plans for the evening. He used the toilet before cleaning it with that bright blue gel-based cleanser that he always found so fascinating in its hue. And with the bathroom clean enough to eat off of, that left one additional step to simplify the cleanup endeavor.
Initially it started as a simple process. He wrapped over the walls first, using a ladder to reach the corners where he could tape to the ceiling. Then the bathtub curtains came down, and the tub itself received plastic treatment flush against its basin, and Isaiah cut a set of holes around the drain itself to allow the runoff to drain. Next he wrapped the towel bars, covered the built-in shelving, wrapped over the vanity sink and added holes to support both faucet use and drain use. Then he changed his mind and taped over the spigot to prevent a hastened dose of water in the last minute. Afterward came a plastic flap, larger than the door, taped over the entry and then around the jambs to prevent unnecessary ventilation. The vent in the ceiling received similar treatment.
After a long dinner of lamb chops, mediterranean salad and a rich port, Isaiah dressed himself very particularly in a pair of black leather pants, a black mesh shirt with solid cloth strips up the front, and a black hooded half-jacket that sported a number of D-rings and straps. He considered whether to leave the hood up or down, whether he should use leather strapped boots or the fold-down work boot type that paired so well with the eyelet-studded sides of his pants. Another hour went into the careful process of applying makeup in the other bathroom, where a mix of primer, foundation, eyeliner and shadow were devoted to the iconic EBm smeared bruising look that appeared so fashionable on its most popular rockers. Once Isaiah was satisfied with blackened lips and the streaking, mottled mess that curved down one side of his eye, he returned to the bathroom for the last of the deed.
It seemed too simple, really, to opt out in this age of convenience. He considered the purchase cost and implied instructions while he worked with the mixing bowl sitting in his lap. Measurements weren’t even a worry. Hell, his mind was more focused on the eternal crinkling beneath his a** every time he breathed. The method was so simple, so easy, that it left him with three empty bottles and startlingly potent effects in under twenty minutes.
First he tried lying back and found it incredibly uncomfortable in a hard porcelain tub. Sitting up felt no better with the bones of his a** slowly chipping holes in the bottom. Next came attempted Facebook browsing, but as he scrolled through posts and posts of dinner photos, play by plays of bank visits, and excited ramblings about a nephew’s first birthday, the crisp black-on-white text soon blurred into a grey mulch next to the muted blue background. He placed the cell phone on the side of the tub and tried to steady himself against the burgeoning swimming in his head, and as he breathed the rank scent of pesticide and chemicals, the coughing started in force.
The D-rings on his half-jacket jingled faintly with every racking cough, and the intensity grew until he stared back at the liquid porridge that was once his dinner, watching as it now swirled atop the deathly mixture that precipitated the harsh stench. His guts churned painfully and threatened to claw their way through his throat if he remained in the room much longer. His eyes burned and watered desperately. Each breath worked into his lungs like shattered glass. Consciousness swam and threatened to ebb, and he egged it on, but his beleaguered body would not give in so quickly. Panic set in, stark black panic, and he scrambled to scrape himself out of the tub. It didn’t matter that his guts wanted to spill with every shift of his body, or that the room swam at a pace that put olympic swimmers to shame. He slipped on the plastic sheeting and his cell phone slipped into the mixture of chemicals and vomit. Desperately he blinked to clear his vision for a few seconds of clarity, and the curiosity that he found staring back at him proved so obviously out of place that he temporarily forgot his panic.
His mouth welled with the bitter spit that urged further retching, but he ignored it. The oppressive silence that came with the verge of passing out mattered little while he stared at the strange bone ring that now sat at the edge of the tub. But that moment’s pause vanished in an instant, and as he reached to throw the wretched little intrusion against the nearest wall, a peculiar power flooded into his very bones and chased away some of his suffering with a single word:
Scholomance.
It puzzled him greatly, much like the new wardrobe that replaced his carefully picked death outfit, and the sheer oddity of the occurrence was enough impetus to chase him from determined suicide. After surmounting the lip of the tub and crossing the length of the bathroom unnaturally quickly, he peeled away the packing tape too easily and wrenched open the door to the hallway.
Collapsing, the unwitting page coughed up the last of his dinner into the facial mask before collapsing in the bitter pool. Consciousness stole away the rest.
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Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 4:51 pm
Solo AcclimationWord Count: 794Milkshakes weren’t a part of his meticulously crafted diet. Neither was ice cream, or Sprite, and he could only eat so much chicken, rice, bananas or tapioca pudding before he wanted to vomit himself. The calorie counts were off, and the close approximation of some of his food intake to liquid form meant he absorbed his calories too quickly.
Isaiah didn’t have a formula for that.
It meant, while he sat around in cotton pajama pants on his couch, that he couldn’t continue to manage his weight. his handpicked number, his ideal BMI size escaped him while he dipped beneath the number.
While he ate soft serve.
While he drank chicken broth.
The doctors highly advised a stayover in the mental ward. He thought it peculiar that no member of their care team forced him into it. Not the RN, or the LPN or the CRN or whichever N was written on the board that day. Not the doctors, not the hospitality workers that stopped by to mop the floor and leave him to his misery (though she only got about a quarter of the way through the tile before the bleach irritant triggered another attack). In fact, most of his troubles subsided when Isaiah promised, customer service smile and all, that he learned his lesson through pain and suffering that suicide is not the answer.
He made a good case of it too, he liked to think. It was easy to detach himself from his own situation and explain away that he had some kind of revelation in his last moments of consciousness. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely false, either - he still quite clearly remembered the white gloves on his hands coupled with black and blue jacket sleeves. He knew full well that he owned nothing of the sort. He remembered the ease in which he left the bathroom, crippled as he was, before he collapsed on the floor.
Before Enrique found the crumpled mess of Isaiah Zähne just beyond an open door leaking rank chemicals. And in turn, they explained that if his GM hadn’t found him, that life would still be his woeful wakeup call. That the combination of chemicals he used, corrosive as they were, wouldn’t have ended him in that hallway. Brain damage, permanent erosions in his intestinal walls, lung pain for weeks were accounted into the laundry list of pains to carry for the days to come if Enrique did not drag him from the condo. Chlorine gas, they called it. It creeps along the floor because it’s heavier than oxygen, they explained.
While he ate jello.
While he drank ice water.
There were times, before and after discharge, that he seethed about his weight. That the nurses and doctors and health practitioners cautioned him that he ranked underweight, that it was slight, and that he could reverse it easily by eating the proper calorie amount per day. A grand total of two thousand, he knew, but his goals left him at a max of 1400 most of the time. Occasionally he angled for less due to drinking habits. Sometimes, in the hospital bed, he ran the math mentally. Using the supplied notepad with the Flonase or the Paxil or the miraLAX brand written at the bottom, he penned it out. He estimated the caloric content of sugar-free jello, guessed the fat content of hospital-style salisbury steak. Macaroni and cheese, sauteed mushrooms, mashed potatoes all went into their own caloric breakdowns. He tried to keep busy.
But his mind still questioned the presence of that bone ring on the ledge of the tub. he knew it belonged in the shop. Self-assurance warned him against second-guessing what he remembered - the ring was undeniably present, and he knew at no time did he ever bring it home from the shop. But if he never brought it home, and no one placed it on the ledge while he lay in the tub, then how did it manifest at such a location?
And how could he explain what happened afterward?
He couldn’t even begin to explain it. The whole of it felt so fantastical and absurd that he wanted to doubt his memory. Isaiah wished that the lot of it happened to a customer, a client, so that he could cite careful explanations to file it all away as bullshit, as another story meant to grab his money and attention in exchange for trash. The proof beyond that ventured into fantasyland - claims that he was dead, that it materialized, that some religious calling prevented his death. So, finally, with the long hours of the day fully dedicated to recovery, he started to consider all of it.
While he ate crackers.
While he drank Gatorade.
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Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2015 6:06 am
Solo What the ******** is Wrong With YouWord Count: 619His muscles ached, and he knew it because he dreamed of it.
He hurt because he took home a man named Damian who told Isaiah that he saw a unicorn. He took this man home because Isaiah called himself Nicki Minaj. He did this to himself because he was only slightly drunk, when self-destruction sounded a sweet and pretty lie to brighten his evenings. And he enjoyed it, certainly - he always did. Damian was easy, receptive, clear on what he liked and disliked. He seemed somewhat unsure of himself sometimes, and Isaiah could not puzzle out why, but it ultimately didn't seem to matter. His clothes, he knew, lay in a rumpled heap downstairs. And perhaps most comfortingly, the stretch of bed next to him remained cold.
Isaiah laid against his tangled sheets for a great length of time once he recognized the time for swing shift hours. 3AM bled into his peripherals from his blue LED alarm display. He stared at those numbers for half a minute, watching as their indelible image seared into his retinas. It hurt, but he didn’t care. The rest of him hurt just the same.
He was… What, number three since moving here? It hasn’t even been a month. Rutile, Cinnabar, Damian… I don’t know any of them. I never bothered asking them to be tested. Protection seemed a token consequence at the time. So much for self-control, Isaiah. Your life isn’t spiralling on its own. The scrawny man drew an arm over his eyes, crushing out the oppressive blue glow from the display. He could still see shadow paintings of the ceiling’s architecture in a vanishing sensory memory. No, this is as self-imposed as anything. Giving into urges to fight other urges. Digging another hole to fill that last. Bang her and you might find happiness at her cervix.
Hah, what a joke.
Sidney James came to mind, as did Scholomance and all of his new acquaintances. Aegir, Tantalus, Ida, Methone… None of them sounded remotely fazed in regards to the existence of magic and how it affects their daily lives. While he laid against the twisted sheets, he wondered if they were stupid. He wondered if he was stupid. He wondered if the lot of this second life and all its senseless nuances were based in insanity or previous expiration. Isaiah reminded himself that he could accept its existence at face value - that he was, now, a knight and he had a Wonder that lent him power. That he had allies who he barely met, and enemies that he hadn’t discovered. That space travel was both possible and stupidly convenient, and that there were forces at work he never bothered to understand.
And while lying there, bathed in that cold blue light, he realized that Scholomance formed the precedent to his reckless promiscuity. His increased drinking. His change in weight despite careful caloric control.
Scholomance persisted even as he threw that cursed bone ring into the river.
Scholomance pervaded his thoughts at work despite his inability to discern clear goals while dressed as the Page. He busied himself with exploring skills, and it provided no real satisfaction to his escapades. Meeting with other members of different alignments offered some abstract information but nothing he felt he could utilize. Ida brought him to a planet, but what good did that do? Why did he bother listening to explanations of magic and intimations of war?
Because, he thought, it gives you a reason to chase that tail, to chase the bottle. To chase the dragon if you ever fell far enough for that. And you might if Scholomance is still around.
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Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2015 7:09 am
Solo We Carry On AnywayWord Count: 871Directly succeeds xShe whisked him away before protest, and Isaiah came back to himself with barely a breath to his lungs. The world whirled, jarred and skewed while he struggled to acquaint himself beyond the pervasive nausea that gripped him. Teleportation, Cinnabar called it. One her her abilities. One of her physics-bending activities.
She had a tail, he remembered. Claws. Horns. Scales. The world still spun, but it felt a little more real. Thick bile hadn’t clogged his throat so thoroughly. He spat, and he realized that he stood on tar paper. Something soft and pliable felt clasped in hand. The dry heaves slowed with the rotating parapet. Clouds finished their rush into a vortex that only he perceived. The sky felt stable, the sun no longer a blazing halo high in the sky. Lurid colors muted to normalcy and the shapes they coated found solidification while he caught his breath, rested his eyes. And when the world finally reformed himself, when he believed he stood in a state of reality now, he noticed one peculiar fact about the state in which Cinnabar left him.
Isaiah Zähne - or Brian Steele or any number of pseudonyms issued before - stood atop an office building while stark ******** naked.
“You’re shitting me,” he hissed to himself. Hastily - and unsteadily - he dressed in the clothes from the night before until he stood in a minimum of briefs and pants. Afterward he sat for a moment to assuage his nausea, and waited for the whimsical breeze to chase away the sweltering July heat temporarily. No one, so far as he could assume, had noticed him up there. Not the office workers in the building adjacent to this, nor the maintenance workers that might be working in the floors beneath him. Initially he thought himself lucky to be placed in this position versus a quick dump onto a busy street, but he soon wondered if this was the boon he considered it as.
There stood but one door that barred passage to the lower levels - to escape toward his normal condo and normal life and normal after-work activities. That door possessed both a deadbolt and a handset lock. It displayed so prominently on its flaking tan surface a sign that read ‘AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY’. After several minutes of preparing himself for the long trek across tar paper and alongside air conditioning units, Isaiah started toward this door with the intent and meager hope to open it. He thought, in that moment, that he just might run a chance of returning home without having to explain his presence on a rooftop to anyone - security guard or police officer or EMT. He hoped and prayed and promised to any deity above and beyond, even to Scholomance itself, that he would believe and behave if he could slip out without question.
And as his hand came to rest on that handset, he found that it wouldn’t budge.
A string of colorful and imaginative curse words soon left Isaiah with a peculiar fury and flair. His head thumped solidly against the metal door while he sighed with collected exasperation. After sifting through his pockets without bothering to spare a glance, he procured his cell phone. Unlocking the screen, punching the numbers, pressing the call button all took a meager measure of seconds. Soon he heard the telltale garbled ring of a connected call from distant towers. It only rang once, much to his delight.
“911, what’s your emergency?” The voice over the phone sounded determinedly feminine and authoritative.
“I’m stuck on a roof. I don’t really… Know where this is.” Isaiah squinted about, searching the endless windows from the next skyscraper to seek out any kind of reflections. “Eh… Uh, Echo Ban… Echo Bank? I’m on the Echo Bank.”
“Have you been injured, sir?”
Isaiah pressed fingers to his sore neck. “I have some bruises and bite marks. It hurts to walk.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Yes, absolutely. I am ******** plastered and I have no idea how I got on top of a twenty-floor building. Or where this even is. I could be in Manhattan for all I know.” While sense finally filtered back to him, he realized he could’ve deduced the name of the building earlier and used his GPS locator to determine which building to call, and then asked them to send their maintenance man to unlock the door. Afterward he could’ve pleaded kindly to avoid trespassing charges since he was clearly too drunk the night prior to do much harm beyond winding up there.
“Actually, nevermind. I think I know how to get down from here-”
“Don’t try to climb down, sir. You’ll get yourself hu-” The voice cut off without pomp when Isaiah pressed the ‘end call’ button. Explaining his whereabouts to a 911 dispatcher sounded like an expensive hassle, and Isaiah much preferred the ‘kindly refrain from suing me’ route with the bank.
Between GPS and Google, Isaiah ascertained the number to the customer service desk for the particular building that he crowned. After a pair of rings, a kindly male receptionist answered him with a practiced greeting.
Immediately Isaiah knew that he faced a long, arduous day.
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Posted: Sun Aug 09, 2015 7:28 am
Solo Then we will writhe in the shadeWord Count: 644"It's not like I can jump to it." The sarcastic comment met no ears from where he stood. Scholomance remained with arms folded over chest and chin raised defiantly to the sky, which gave no answer. The vast clarion blues offered no rocket ship for his perusal, no spectral staircase to climb, no teleporter, not a single indication of how he might reach another planet. It only mocked him in silence while he stood at the height of his condominium complex, expecting that added height might bear some kind of advantage.
Recollection informed him that Ida used a phone, but his phone so often disappeared once he gained Scholomance's power. The only time it remained in use was when he left it atop a table, or forgot it on his nightstand before departing for a few rounds of fun. But even when he perused the app store for some indication about planetary travel, he found nothing more than some kind of astronomical almanac with information on every planet, comet, and asteroid he could ever hope to name. Nothing on his phone departure to Saturn. But how could it be so simple for Ida? Wracking his brain, he came up with no answer. His only determination was that his phone offered no venue to another planet.
Scholomance loosed a sigh through his teeth and sat down among the carefully manicured grass patches. His back rested against a stocky tree that provided meager shade under the noonday sun. Half of him wanted to pick at the bark, but in remembering what transpired on Ida, he felt altogether repulsed by the plant. Scooting away somewhat, Scholomance rested arms over knees and laid his chin atop his bony forearms. He wondered if the rest of the knighthood, whoever they were, found great difficulty in reaching their planet for the first time. He wondered if half of them even bothered to try. Certainly there was some incredulity in the matter, but from how the rest of his recent acquaintances acted, he proved the more stubborn of the lot. Surely, then, these other pages (of whom he never heard) had to reach their wonders somehow. Ida mentioned something about a signet ring, and how would she know of that if no one traveled offworld?
Aegir hadn’t mentioned anything of it. Neither did Methone. Tantalus offered no explanations for wonders or their visitation either, but he hadn’t asked any of them. Was he supposed to? He still possessed Methone’s number - he could use wonder visitation as a reason to flirt with her.
And what of that peculiar, extemporaneous phrase that accosted him when Cor Caroli came about? A pledge, he remembered, to Scholomance and Saturn, but nothing about it particularly screamed visitation. It sounded more of a pact, an agreement for more power. Was that the phrase needed to become a Squire, according to Aegir’s hierarchy? That sounded likely. Say the magic words, earn more power, and continue life without purported allies trying to beat him into a stain.
Worst case scenario, he embarrassed himself in front of an audience of trees for citing something so stuffy and serious. But what other options did he have in the moment? Nothing obvious stood out for exploration.
Drawing a breath, Scholomance straightened up and spared a final look toward the sky. It felt asinine to even bother with the phrase, but intuition proved the stronger force over logic and he gave up his reticence. The citation sounded odd when he spoke it, almost as if the words came in a voice other than his own.
“I pledge my life and loyalty to Saturn, and to Scholomance.
I humbly request your aid, so that in return I may give you mine.”
Scholomance received not a second to react before the page disappeared entirely, leaving the rooftop bereft of life.
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Posted: Sun Aug 09, 2015 7:56 am
Solo Land of Broken PromisesWord Count: 892The silence deafened him. It weighed so heavily on his ears that he felt himself straining for the slightest sound to lift the crushing oppression. He strained for any noise beyond his own heartbeat and found none in this new and foreign land - not even the insect song that so often pervaded similar areas. It struck him so keenly that Scholomance was forced to realize that he never endured true silence - not when modern life comforted with radiator hums, the rush of traffic, and electronic whirrs peppered throughout the day.
And real silence proved almost impossible to bear.
Secondly, Scholomance took stock of his surroundings. No longer did he remain on the rooftop, obviously, for a surfeit of old, established trees sprung up all about him. The lot of them looked dead and bore no leaves to obscure his view through the area. He imagined this might’ve been the dead of winter for Saturn, though looking up toward the great bands spanning the sky gave him no answers. He noted moons at vastly juxtaposed positions and thought little of it beyond admiring their beauty against such a blackened sky. The dead of night left him only these moons to shine down a meager pall over the land, yet the gnarling branches from the maples and willows threatened to blot his way regardless.
He attempted to take his first steps on this foreign land, but something clung so eagerly to his boot that he could not lift it for fear of wrenching his foot from it entirely. Glancing down, he noted a quagmire of mud where no grass remained to immobilize the mass. Groaning faintly, Scholomance twisted his foot and pulled, eliciting a squelching suck from the mud that left thick cakes of it on his boot. Paused, he looked for some potentially solid ground and found none nearby, so he plodded through the thick soup while he tried to find a better path.
Any path, really.
To Scholomance, the marsh looked so overgrown and so absent life that parts of the area simply grew too convoluted with dead twigs and roots to proceed further. Foresight only granted him a first aid kit, flashlight, journal and a traveling lunch to sate any foreseen complications; he wished he took Ida’s explanation of her own planet’s coming to life as a suggestion to bring a machete too. But with no obvious direction to proceed in, Scholomance soon realized there was no point in hacking down parts of the marsh for easier access. It eased the burden on his impulsivity but yielded no obvious advantage. For as far as he saw through the interlocking branches, this stretch of Saturn had no obvious landmarks or destinations.
Mud clung and sloshed and stretched from his shoes while he progressed, and left such a lengthy and mottled trail that he had no fear of backtracking accidentally. The flashlight brought revealed no abnormalities about the dead trees on his path. No insects, birds, or other animals approached him, either. By his determinations, the marshland must’ve died out years ago and he inherited the corpse of a land for safe keeping.
Finally he stopped amidst a thicket so dense that it proved a dead end. “And why the hell would I pledge my loyalty to this?” He asked of the trees, with arms spanned wide. “You can’t give me some dumpy shitpile and expect me to play gardener! s**t…” He pressed palm to one eye with a sigh. “Terrible idea to come here. Never listen to a sociopath. It can only end badly.”
Scholomance took no break in the wet hollow; instead, he turned about and tried to round its surprisingly vast presence. All the while he reminded himself that he came specifically for exploration, and to find this ‘signet ring’ mentioned previously. How he intended to find a single ring among the muck and grime and sucking sludge in the marsh, he didn’t know, but he hoped intuition would guide him all the same. no particular section of the marsh offered clues of where to proceed next, and all his wandering felt aimless and bereft of any particular hunches on progression. He wandered and stooped and occasionally crawled through the wetlands for what felt like hours, and only relented when his muscles shook with exhaustion and his legs demanded rest before they collapsed beneath him.
Scholomance settled at the base of a tree, where the roots pulled up from the ground and writhed into a circular shape that looked much like a seat. It fit his bony a** rather well, despite the hard discomforts. And once his legs felt no burden, relief rushed through his muscles. The page leaned heavily against the trunk, remembered the tentacle that erupted on Ida, and found himself much too tired to do much about it. Exhaustion tempted him toward sleep - Isaiah lacked the active lifestyle required to brave such conditions, and his inclinations toward starvation offered no condolences - but he fought the urges as best he could. Shortly before fading out, Scholomance spotted the telltale shine of a still lake through the thin gap between two gnarled trunks. Its sight proved too underwhelming to stave off sleep, though, and the page soon slept against the trunk of one of the old, wide elms.
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Posted: Sun Aug 09, 2015 8:20 am
Solo Its roots must hold the skyWord Count: 795When he woke, night still reigned. The position of the moons in the sky gave Scholomance no indication of time passed. Groggily, he fought to rub sleep from his eyes using the backs of gloved hands. The nap offered greater energy, but with the sudden wake came a hunger that beckoned him to eat. He remembered setting aside light fare for the journey, as he was uncertain of what might befall him there. Slices of apple in a baggie, peanut butter, cheese wedges and crackers rested within a sizable tupperware container, complete with a napkin in case he found need of it. But in the midst of a muddy marsh, and with clothes already mired in the wet muck that pervaded the place, Scholomance doubted figured that cleanliness here was much like recycling cans when the ozone layer died out from pollution.
After sating his hunger, Scholomance stood on uncertain legs and aimed to proceed with plodding through the marshlands. He hadn’t yet found any animals, no living flora, no actual signs of life other than his own and that solitude bore down on him now in a primal fear. Much like on Ida, if anything happened to him here, no one would know of it. And even if he could not deduce any immediate threats, his mind always churned out what-if scenarios that converted the most benign features of the soggy place into gut-wrenching horror stories that demanded a wide berth.
After a time, the ground sloped downward almost imperceptibly. Scholomance’s steps devolved into stunted shuffles that kicked up more mud onto the front of his boots. He nearly tripped over tree roots twice in his journey but finally found the trees fading to a sparseness. Pools of water grew fewer and fewer still until he reached a clearing that explained the sudden thinning of the marsh. A vast lake sprawled far through the reaches of fog, spanning a great distance on either side of him in an astonishing panoramic view. Initially he made no move toward it, for the surface looked still enough to constitute a mirror, and his rattled senses conjured more horror stories of creatures from its murky depths. There looked to be no particular color to the lake beyond the reflected blackness of the sky. A perfect replica of the moons hanging far above looked outward toward him from the middle portion of the lake. He wondered, then, if his wonder constituted this great body of water.
As he strode closer, half-expecting to find zombie fish stirring beneath the surface, Scholomance crouched to observe small knobs buried into the lake bed. They looked strangely shaped and irregular, with some sporting two bumps so close together that he realized they were connected by a sloping bridge. Sometimes he found simple ridges sticking out of the muddy depths, while other times he found ridged plates of unknown material. Not more than a foot into the lake itself, Scholomance set his sights on a curious curling ridge that housed indentations all along its length - like someone carved into it at somewhat regular intervals.
He cast off a glove to the mud at his feet and reached for the strange protrusion. His hand passed into the cold lake in a set of ripples, and he seized the strange ridge where it sat. The stiffness of it surprised him, but he wrenched it from the depths nonetheless, which sent up a thick cloud of brown murk. Once removed from the lake bed, he realized with a sudden stark disquiet what he now held.
A human lower jaw, held by the teeth alone, rested in his hand. And in those frightful moments, Scholomance felt a pervasive, foreboding realization dawn over him without explanation. He felt it as surely as the pledge that brought him here, and it startled him all the more that the sudden knowledge imparted felt so correct. As he crouched, looking at the mandible in hand, he realized that the wonder came awake for him. Once his hand touched the surface, Scholomance stirred.
And it did not yield a warm welcome. No, this sudden stirring felt almost sinister, like the land itself held a grudge against the one who woke it after such a timeless sleep. In those moments, the page felt that the very chunk of earth he strode upon detested him so thoroughly that it might swallow him whole for simply existing there. Suddenly the ‘signet ring’ sounded much too frivolous a reason to continue his journey through the dark lands of Scholomance, and he straightened immediately. Thoughts of earth came so quickly and urgently that his presence departed without a hint, leaving the oppressive wonder to stew in its own ancient derision.
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Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2015 9:57 am
Solo you will heed my whimWord Count: 4025Quote: I don’t know when I made the decision that I should write any of this down, but at the time, I thought it might give me closure.
To write this, to write anything at all, demands a measure of sheer stupidity for the belief that your words can capture a thought, a feeling, an actuality. Writing represents both arrogance and inexperience. But, conversely, writing is the only medium I have to convey recent events with the palest shade of truth. As you read this, keep in mind that it’s easy to lose perspective to words. Keep in mind that the human brain collects, in its infinite capacity, only the slightest reflection of a fragment of one perspective of the reality we endure. Keep in mind that I can’t say with certainty that these events are accurate. Keep in mind that, maybe, it doesn’t matter if they are.
It’s easy to call this place forgotten. That’s the most accurate fact I can convey through the course of this writing. This place remained forgotten for a thousand years, existing beyond the thought of every single human mind belonging to the planet from day one to day three hundred sixty-five thousand. A thousand years. Put that into perspective. Just try to swallow it whole. A lifespan a hundred times that of a decade. Take a moment, think about all your experiences in a span of a decade. You can’t, can you? That’s exactly my point.
A thousand years is incomprehensible, just like Scholomance.
I started out thinking I could expect nothing dangerous from Scholomance, in the same way that you expect something that’s yours shouldn’t surprise you anymore. I thought that, by owning it, I somehow held a knowledgeable dominion of the place, or that by coming there I might feel welcomed, or at ease, or even that I somehow deserved its ownership. I thought it couldn’t be different than visiting a new apartment with a signed lease, and learning every part of the place. That, even while I explored undiscovered areas, I still held dominion over this place.
I expected too much.
Being a knight of Scholomance provides no dominions, no lands, no knowledge furnished free of charge. I learned that my knighthood differed very little from servitude - and not in a knight’s manner, but a slave’s. It had no voice to command me then, but it never needed one. I didn’t realize it until recently, but I had been playing slave to these ancient lands the moment my ring appeared on the side of the bathtub. I expect the wonder demanded eternal servitude in exchange for my continued life. I can’t say if I’m right, or if I’m personifying the wonder’s motivations in order to understand them. But no amount of life spent in its favor will tell me. It was never for humans to know.
I did learn that Scholomance is sentient, but in a manner that we cannot comprehend. It exists, I think, beyond time, although time ravaged it and left the broken, wretched pit that I now know. It is hungry, and it speaks with an agelessness that these ears cannot hear. It imposes its demands by manipulating the fundamental parts of yourself that you thought were, somehow, safeguarded from the rest of the world. Untouchable. Incorruptible.
But by visiting Scholomance, I learned that no part of me is beyond tamper. I learned that I’m changing in ways I can’t control. And these infinitesimal changes, these square roots of negative powers of imaginary numbers, they steal away all my meticulously conceived denials and truths and compositions and, collectively, these pale shifts broke the foundation that I stood upon. And despite this, I know there’s more yet to come.
It’s easy to think that I wrote this to remember myself, but it isn’t so. This will never be a memoir, or a journal, or those fleeting scraps of thoughts written on napkins and envelopes and the backs of grocery lists.
I wrote this to bury myself.
I wrote this to hide myself.
I wrote this to calm myself, but it haunted me instead.
I should first admit that visiting Scholomance has never been an easy affair. I cannot adequately explain its aversion to me, but the wonder itself is so loathsome and derisive of all life which traverses it that the active animosity is palpable.
Imagine: a mother’s hatred for a child she never wanted to carry to term.
Imagine: a child’s hatred for overbearing parents in his teenage years.
Imagine: a widow’s absolute abhorrence for the murderer of her lover.
None of these examples adequately compare. They feel much too relatable, and soft, and comprehensible when stood next to Scholomance. We can digest them, find purpose for them. Scholomance lacks this understanding because it isn’t mortal - its reasons for contempt stretch far beyond what we might relate to. We expect wrongs committed on its needs, but Scholomance has no needs that I can discern. And even if it did…
I expect I might be attacking this at the wrong angle, for even these prior descriptors sound incorrect. It may be easier to understand Scholomance’s hateful ambience as the embodiment of it, the actualization of hatred more than ascribing it to the wonder with an implied reasoning. I think the assumption that there must be a reason lingers too far in the realm of mortal humanity. But my point still stands - the choking hatred felt on Scholomance cannot adequately be conveyed in my writing, or in the writing of anyone who has lived within the human lifetime. I think, perhaps, we cannot even fully process the scope of that derision when visiting the wonder itself.
I don’t know if it’s the loathing that seeped into me, or if the wonder holds sway over my very soul. Bear in mind that I was a different person before I started this journey - I was once a man with aspirations, interests, and livelihood even within the wake of a lost engagement. I had friends, I attended my workplace dutifully, I had wants and inclinations.
Now, I haven’t left the house in six days.
Scholomance does not allow me to reach it in the same area as my previous point of origin. My first visit placed me in the swamp, my second (whereupon I had companionship) left us on the cusp of the great lake, and this most recent visit transported me before the Observatory itself. I started to wonder, on day two, if this rearrangement was purposeful - if Scholomance intended to draw me into the core of itself on a gradual basis. But, perhaps, that too is overt personification for a place that exists beyond my comprehension.
The Observatory is one of five buildings, and one of two that I have now visited at the date of this memoir. It is, markedly, the tallest and most ornately decorated in (from what I can discern) a unique vein of traditional gothic architecture. It holds traditional importance by both being the center of the five buildings and the tallest, thus it loomes into the perspective of anyone traversing the (for lack of more accurate understanding) campus. I do not know if Scholomance intended for me to enter it again, as I have done once, but Blaine met me at its steps to guide me from the building entirely. I thought it curious, but I never advanced beyond quiet wonder during the time of my visit. That was, I expect, my first and most critical mistake.
Blaine is a man of curious and obscure intention. I cannot read him as I can most men, and as I have learned in my line of work. He is, as he claims, the previous knight of Scholomance, and I believe him when I see the uniform he wears consistently. It is quite like mine, but carries minor differences in that his clothes hold an unfaltering glow in specific designs (it reminded me, I realized, much of Babylon). However, his trustworthiness extends about as far as his shoes - there are times where he claims he cannot remember key information about Scholomance and I believe him, while other times leave me wondering if he’s been lying to me throughout my visits to the campus. He has, regardless, expressed consistent interest in leading me through Scholomance and explaining what he knows of the area, or recounting experiences he had within its walls. Mostly I listen, though I take his claims with a healthy suspicion. I ask, and usually, he answers.
But Blaine did, in all honesty, lack recognition of a single aspect of Scholomance that I pointed out to him, which I find unduly strange - he could not, in any capacity, feel the derision permeating the wonder.
While I would not say that Blaine is a cheery man, he appears generally content with my company and does not object to me actively. He endures questions with stride, and is forthcoming in his lack of memory over certain subjects. His demeanor reminds me mostly of trained customer service, or of someone trying to appease another for personal gain. If the latter proves true, I imagine that personal gain stems from living alone at this harrowing wonder for a thousand years. One would think that, bearing this in mind, my company would prove often desired. however, there are times when Blaine ignores me altogether or brushes me off while implying that I should see myself out. He is a mercurial man, and perhaps most strangely, this perplexes him.
And that, I find, is impossibly unnerving. Under what circumstances could a man who lived on his own for one thousand years encounter personality facets that he didn’t know he had?
Or: did he, too, endure this subtle shifting that Scholomance procured in me?
Or: was some portion of him eroding by my assuming the mantle of Scholomance?
But these questions are nothing more than tangents in my reticence to write the bulk of this affair. When Blaine led me from the steps, he acted no differently than what I learned was usual for him - he smiled, exchanged pleasantries, and invited me to walk alongside him while he headed toward the location of interest. He seemed animated at the time, and explained to me that he thought I was ready to see a part of Scholomance that might invoke some understanding for the wonder. At this time, I still hadn’t learned the purpose of Scholomance, so I agreed to it readily. He explained that this object of interest was locked in a closet that he only recently obtained access to, and that we would visit a storage room.
He led me to an ossuary.
I should first explain the purpose of an ossuary, so that you might understand how entirely strange it was to discover one on the campus of Scholomance. To my knowledge, or more accurately according to earth customs, ossuaries are used when burial space grows limited. They entomb the remains without the amount of real estate consumed by graves and their necessary spacing. It saves an area from piling corpses on top of each other, as was the case at Highgate Cemetery in London. Now, Scholomance doesn’t feature vast tracts of land, but since there is a marked dearth of grave markers throughout both the swamp and the island, I believe that there wasn’t a single body buried on the property. For comparison, Mont Blonc’s wonder entombs some bodies, though they are buried beneath several inches of volcanic ash and form a swollen lump where the body rests. There is no such evidence on Scholomance - not even that the ground had ever been dug into.
So when Blaine showed me an ossuary, naturally I grew suspicious. I knew of only one other location on Scholomance that featured human remains, and that was the bottom of the lake. Was I to assume that bodies could only find burial in water? Possibly, but that hardly seemed the case - I imagine that Scholomance’s prior occupants would have stacked bones on top of each other until they nearly touched the surface, but they didn’t. Therefore, the ossuary marks the only location beyond water where bodies are kept.
Then I started to wonder if that ossuary wasn’t a storage unit for reagents.
Before we entered the ossuary, I was too preoccupied with my thoughts to study the building. From what I remember, it was quite small and nondescript - a pale building with a few walls and a gable roof. It bore the eye symbol much like any other building on the Scholomance campus, and there was writing etched into the double doors that I personally couldn’t translate. If Blaine were able to read it, he offered me no translation. And while I don’t remember there being a lock, I do recall that he lingered there for nearly a full minute before the pair of us walked inside.
When we first entered, I couldn’t see anything more than what was caught in the cold light of night - and even that amounted to little. Blaine left me momentarily, and a clicking sound echoed through the place like tinder striking flint in a modern lighter. Suddenly a cold blue light burst through the area, coming from Blaine’s palm. I didn’t ask much about the light orb as I’d seen them in various locations around Scholomance (though most looked busted or damaged with age).
Immediately I noticed the great conglomeration of bones that suspended from the sloped ceiling - it looked much like a dragon made of human skulls, spines, ribs, pelvises, ulnae, femurs. At least, I assumed it was a serpent of some kind. The more I looked at it, however, the more I noticed that it lacked key features to a dragon, beyond the serpentine shape. And as I studied it, I realized that the figure looked far more like a man with entirely warped characteristics - arms that spanned the length of his would-be body, a small ribcage in contrast to the largely decorated and framed skull, and then a great length of spine that grew sinewy with how it curved and curled around the whole of the ossuary. Regardless of where Blaine and I proceeded in the small space, we felt the shadowed holes of the effigy’s head baring down on us. I can still feel my skin prickling with fear as I write of it.
I tried to strike up conversation down there. Something about the oppressive silence unnerved me, and I started to think that my eardrums might burst from listening for even the faintest signs of life. After a time, you start to wonder if you’re listening to the universe itself. Nothing moves out there, and there’s no baseline of insect activity to prevent you from hearing the core of the wonder. There’s a distinct wrongness to it - and you realize, then, that you’re listening to a silence far older than you, a silence that doesn’t want to be heard by mortal ears. So you try to avoid it, you try to cover it back up with all the paltry phrases that your brain can drum up in the face of bald fear, but that glass has broken and you can’t stop the cracks. It feels pointless to try, but you have to, because your mind doesn’t want to consider what happens if you don’t.
But Blaine didn’t respond like I expected him to. And it wasn’t as if I searched for any particular answer to my questions, either - he simply didn’t understand them somehow. I’m not certain if that’s an accurate assumption either, but… When he did choose to respond, he sounded like he was quoting something far older than modern sentence structure. He answered in riddle and rhyme, and neither related to my inquiries. Interestingly, he looked just as confused as I was. Eventually I stopped trying to ask him anything, but that didn’t stop the recitals.
The ossuary housed some kind of a filing cabinet system that spanned each wall and reached the ceiling, and each cabinet structure housed drawers overloaded with bones. They had no particular order to them, either - like someone simply dumped the skeletal remains into a box and shut it with no reverence whatsoever. This filing system became more erratic as we descended the dusty steps into the basement floor, where we then found trunks stacked haphazardly and equally overfilled with bones. Blaine offered no explanations anymore; his speech descended entirely into madness.
We still continued our search, though I started to suspect that he was much more a threat than the desiccated ossuary. His eyes darted about with that same naked panic that I felt, and every time we looked upon each other, the tension cut to the quick. I separated from him then, and darted through some of the narrow corridors that led deeper into the ossuary. As I progressed, I noticed that the attendants gave up entirely on boxing remains and left them in piles. Chairs, tables, even corners of rooms were loaded with bones that began crumbling into a fine dust. I started to realize that this ossuary wasn’t originally designed for such a purpose - I couldn’t speak of its original use, but I wondered if it wasn’t an older version of the Observatory. When I could forget the silence for a time, I felt emboldened to explore this place - I wondered if I could find some record depicting its original purpose. But that bravery seldom lasted, as I heard my erstwhile companion’s mutterings escalate to wails.
Once it started, I lost all interest in exploring the place. I no longer cared what Blaine intended to show me there, as it became obvious that he didn’t rightly know himself. I raced for the stairs then, and found myself so utterly turned around in the labyrinth of rooms and hallways that I only stumbled further into the ossuary’s bowels. The bones grew so thick that I needed to climb them to reach opposing doorways.
And only by falling through a thin netting of brittle bones did I discover the very core of that place.
Even after becoming an ossuary, the room’s purpose looked obvious. The space felt entirely confined, and the ceiling had rotted through (presumably from corpse decomposition), but the built-in shelving remained, as did a primitive water hookup. The space resembled a storage room and was treated as such, judging by the array of boxes and bones collected into the corners. The shelving looked similarly loaded with nondescript paraphernalia and boxes designed to fit the narrow spaces. On one shelf I found a meticulous arrangement of phalanges, in descending order organized by size.
Blaine’s wailing faded to a dull moan that haunted the halls. He knew where I was, I suspected. He must’ve been trying to navigate his way there, for he often faded out entirely before cropping up with dull, rasping groans. While it unnerved me still, I found myself preoccupied with the oppressive atmosphere. Perhaps it was due to the stagnant air, but I found it nearly impossible to breathe in that claustrophobic storage closet. Something pressed against my chest with such vengeful abandon that I eked out little more than shallow breaths to comfort my pounding heart. I thought, then, that my living in those close quarters must’ve offended a lingering entity there, and it intended to force me into a similar fate.
And yet, I couldn’t leave - there was no way out. The lone exit I found collapsed upon itself some time ago, and beyond the splintered doors lay still more bones. They compressed together so furiously by that point that I was reminded of the London subway fiasco when the city was forced to blast its way through countless skeletons in a mass burial. My next thought was to leave the wonder altogether, to return home and take a hot shower and nurse whiskey for the rest of the night. In all honesty, I have no reason for why I abandoned that idea, for nothing about the ossuary invited my curiosity further. Perhaps it was instinct, or a latent drive that came from being a knight of Scholomance, or some further need that I haven’t begun to consider in this telling. But regardless of the reason, I stayed in that room where I should’ve left long before.
I chanced a last pass over the contents of the room. Again, very little stood out to me. All that remained for discovery was a single nondescript box sitting on the built-in counter, and even that looked distinctly disappointing. The box was composed of red maple, much like the majority of the swamp trees, and fostered amateur craftsmanship that fit together poorly. Two crooked hinges promised a functioning lid, and the fastener at the front had been broken off some time ago, exposing a rusted stump where a clasp once was. I had no reason to open it. Given its size, I anticipated a find of teeth or fingers at best. Nothing felt particularly promising about the box. In fact, I felt an undeniable trepidation for approaching it, which grew stronger still when I reached to touch the poorly sanded wood.
I noticed my hands were shaking long before I opened the lid. Inside I found a fine white dust - a powder, almost. I froze when I discovered it. I can’t say why. I still don’t understand it, even with so many days spent reflecting over the matter.
I felt a crack over the back of my head and stumbled forward, then a strong force pressed my face into the dust. I breathed, coughed, and choked on every fleck when I felt a distinct and visceral siege of dread. I don’t remember anything more of it - I expect that I blacked out soon afterward, for my next memories were of stirring on the floor of the storage area. My mouth tasted of dry bitterness, and I remember picking off flakes of vomit from my cheek. I still felt as though I couldn’t breathe. I made no attempt to call for Blaine’s attention.
He stood with his back to me while he poured over the box. His shoulders tensed with concentration, and his foot tapped impatiently on the dust-ridden floor. I wanted to cough then, but something felt so principally off about the man that I couldn’t chance it. I closed my eyes, remembered the rooftop of my apartment complex, and abandoned Saturn entirely.
When I returned, I didn’t look quite the same. Bones adorned my shoulders and arms where they hadn’t before. I wondered if my explorations caused a few to lodge into my uniform, but that didn’t explain the length gained on my coat. I realized, then, that I must’ve received an upgrade at some time during the visit to Scholomance, but I can’t remember how it came about… Perhaps I might never know.
But it is clear that I have gained no further ground on the mystery of Scholomance. if anything, I’m left with more questions. Will I ever find answers? I’m not certain, but I expect that Blaine knows more than he lets on. I expect some answers lie with that box full of dust, but I can’t say why I suspect it. Maybe there’s no reason to. But… Whether due to the taste, or how Blaine cuffed me beforehand, I can’t stop thinking that the box holds a far greater significance to the place than its shoddy craftsmanship suggests. That might also constitute wishful thinking. So much of Scholomance is beyond my scope of expertise that I feel much like the rat lost in an ever-changing maze. Is it fool of me to pursue these threads so doggedly when it’s certain that I lack perspective for Scholomance? Absolutely. But why should that deter me from trying to puzzle out its mysteries from the sanctity of my home?
Perhaps one day I’ll muster the nerve to return. Until then, Scholomance will bear down on me from its seat in the soulless sky, ever waiting for the day that I solve its riddles.
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Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2015 10:08 am
Solo CaturnWord Count: 1051Cats everywhere.
So much puff, so much fluff, and for some cats, so much stuff! Isaiah couldn’t believe his eyes. How could so many cats fit so comfortably in such a small room? And how could it possibly look so inviting? Pillow lay all about the place, each selectively laden with cat hair, and a surfeit of blankets and rugs propped atop cat shelves offered a space of both comfort and play. Chairs sat about for human use, but cats often laid in those too. However, all of them were occupied by cat butts, and his current predicament allowed him no room for sitting crosslegged. Instead he stood frozen with his back to the shut door for a few moments as he looked over the featured felines.
Finally his gaze slid toward a particularly fat orange tabby that lounged on the nearest chair. “Shoo,” he tried, and the cat only regarded him boredly. He tried again, with more emphasis. “Shoo.” Nothing came of it. The cat hadn’t budged a fraction, and Isaiah was told earlier by Marinus that touching the cats was against policy. He didn’t want to flag down the blonde just to have him move a cat, either - it seemed a waste somehow.
He bent at the waist, both bony hands clasped on knobby knees, and his sideburns hung down in long tendrils that touched the arm of the chair. “What the hell, cat?” But the feline looked disinclined to answer. “You’re supposed to move when I say ‘shoo’, yes? Isn’t that how this goes?” Again, no answer. Somewhere behind him, a cat approached and rubbed on the back of his leg. He turned his head, only for the large orange tabby to come to life and swat at the excess hair hanging down. All at once he felt assaulted by felines and their uniqueness, and his paltry background in catting left him questioning how to proceed. He was at a loss in this ocean of fur, stranded at sea with no lighthouse or buoy to light his way across feline bliss. Marinus, for all the ‘marine’ implied in his family name, proved a shitty skipper in this situation.
He felt cheated, almost. And delighted. And still very, very pained.
Isaiah stooped a little further for nailed fingers to brush one of the cats, and delighted in the silkiness. All the while, the orange tabby batted and tugged at his hair which resulted in painful fits and starts, but no amount of withdrawal from the large beast quelled its onslaught. Once the cat went so far as to dismount to chair to chase its latest conquest, Isaiah took it as his cue to steal away the seat for his own comfort. Carefully he parted from the white fluff that assaulted his leg and he came to rest on the chair.
But his comfort lasted mere seconds. The orange one leapt up in a fury, using claws to climb his slippery stick legs and gouge his most painful problem yet, causing the man to grit teeth and stifle a groan. Suddenly weathering the claws digging into his chest felt a much easier feat than dealing with the pressure of one fat feline foot digging directly into his crotch. “Okay, okay, ******** the rules, you have to go, kitten.” Carefully Isaiah hooked his thumbs around the armpits of the cat and lifted him off with overwhelming success. The cat hung like flotsam in his arms, and received a perch on solid ground. Afterward the cat simply retired with a thud and laid about like a beached whale.
Isaiah took up one of the feather chasers and examined the beleaguered, tattered remains of the toy itself. The elastic looked recently replaced, and the rod suffered only minor damage at the perils of cat teeth, but the toy certainly looked the worst for wear. It still jingled, though, which drew the attention of a small handful of cats. The three gathered around and seated themselves with eyes as wide as the gibbous moon at sea, so he tempted them with the tattered morsel. Uncertain of how to proceed, he darted it to and fro over their heads to test their interest. Surely enough, heads moved in near unison while those great saucer eyes watched expectantly. A few more darts and suddenly paws started to shoot up, and one of the cats darted off to ready itself for a leaping strike at a later time.
He lost many minutes to playing with the furry death machines as each of them tried their unique hunting styles on capturing and ending the life of this broken, maimed toy. He delighted just as much as they did in the catch and kill while feline teeth buried into the remains of their victim. Sometimes they held it between paws and kangaroo kicked while he tried to tug it away, and other times the cats engaged each other for a shot at the captive.
Finally he hid the toy away to resume petting one of the lounging fluffs on a shelf to his right. The cat offered no outward signs of acknowledgement given how heavily it slept, and Isaiah found the feline impossibly soft. Its fur felt different to the first cat petted - somehow less silken yet even more pleasing to the touch. This one looked long haired and often shed into his palm - and wiping it on his leg proved a terrible idea. Soon, he found, all fur shed while in his presence stuck to him easily and reduced his blacks to some mottled grey. It sucked, but he wouldn’t lament it.
At last his phone went off, and Isaiah felt the half hour was much too short for enjoying the boisterous felines. After unearthing himself from the chair, Isaiah dusted off what cat fur he could. The phone returned to pocket and he started for the door, only chancing a last look back at the furry faces. Finally, when he opened the door to leave, one of the furbags escaped in an all-out sprint through the door, at seemingly liquid status, and into the rest of the cat café.
“s**t,” he cussed lowly. The door shut behind him in a quick snap. Time to pester the barista again…
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Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2015 10:30 am
Solo ProclamationWord Count: 1160”Mr. Sarcowicz, are you planning to sell me that eye?” Isaiah leaned tiredly against the counter and tapped his right temple with his forefinger. A mischievous smile crossed his lips. “I told you I’d make it worth your while. Something like that doesn’t come walking into my shop too often.”
“I’m not selling my eye.” The words came curt and finalized, expressing his permanent opinion over the matter. Isaiah looked unphased; the older man found it difficult to determine if Isaiah Zähne took him seriously. He considered it easier to assume flippancy of the shopkeeper, as he so often touted himself in whimsical mannerisms. That hardly mattered for the moment; Sarcowicz returned to the shop for one express reason, and that reason would not transpire by him allowing Isaiah to steer the conversation as he wished. Inwardly Sarcowicz knew that he may have to gamble his eye in the transaction of this deal.
He didn’t like such a notion.
“So be it.” Isaiah straightened up, locked his elbows to stretch, and then smoothed hands along the framing for one of his many display cases. This particular housing featured watches of many kinds, from wristwatches to pocket watches and even some of the latest Apple watches. “Did you come with more rings, then? Or did you have other wares to show me?”The man so often drove a hard bargain that Isaiah felt uncomfortable looking over items that he lacked a deep familiarity for. Firearms were less his specialty than jewelry, and Isaiah took a loss on the last set he bought from the man. What might he bring for barter now?
The bald man shook his head. “No rings.” He scratched his face idly, right over the scar that likely rent his right eye. Isaiah found this curious, for it wasn’t often that scars itched - and significantly less often did anyone bring attention to their scars. He wondered, then, if it wasn’t a sleight of hand trick. “Today I have pottery. Old pottery. From my grandmother’s age. I bring you pictures first.”
“Pottery? Are we talking china, regular dish ware, artisan pieces, archaeological discoveries…” Isaiah trailed off in his listings when the man pulled a set of five-by-seven photos developed at a DestinyRx. Bony fingers redistributed the photos across the display counter until each occupied its own space. Concerned and scrutinizing eyes combed each photo for what details he could ascertain of them; the graininess left the pieces lacking in Isaiah’s eyes, but he wagered that Mr. Sarcowicz brought at least one for show-and-tell purposes. “These look fairly professional, but they’re certainly unlike any modern dishware I’ve seen. And they’re not quite a china set, either. What can you tell me about these? Where did you get them?” He looked toward his customer with interest, expecting a story that required a great dissection of facts from fiction. Perhaps he assumed much about the man, but Sarcowicz’s quiet demeanor and gruffness when questioned left him with a suspicion that the man often looked for a fence. And while Isaiah fostered no qualms about that position for himself, he wondered just how careful Sarcowicz was when moving merchandise.
“I got them from grandmother.” Sarcowicz touched the pictures tenderly while he parsed through them. Fat, calloused fingers landed on one photo in particular, showcasing a serving platter. “They were, as you call, family heirlooms. Grandmother inherited them from her mother, and so on, and so on. I got them next. Normally they go to first daughter of the family. We did not have one before grandmother died. She gave them to me.”
Isaiah tapped a pair of fingers against his cheekbone while he listened. The story sounded too nondescript for his suspicions to find dismissal; he wondered whether he fabricated the entirety of it, or if he relied on known occurrences within his culture to cover up some sordid details. Regardless, the shopkeeper couldn’t assume easily. “They’re very different,” he offered at last. “Quite different. Different enough that I’m not certain I’ll be able to move these very quickly.” Straightening once more, Isaiah’s hands framed the counter. “Mr. Sarcowicz, you understand that I need to choose my bargains based on what I know I can sell, and part of that gamble is determined by my target demographic. I can’t say any of these pieces come close to my preferred consumer base. Knowing this, how much were you looking to get for this set?”
Mr. Sarcowicz never hesitated. “Two hundred for the set. I can do ten a piece separately.” He nodded to confirm the solidarity of his deal.
Isaiah hummed to himself. His gaze grew distant while he reviewed the pricing. Already he came to a decision, but Isaiah allowed his thoughts to wander for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, until he felt certain that Sarcowicz’s confidence in his bargain grew shaken. He watched the gleam of fluorescent light over gunmetal grey, he peered toward the mounted TVs that covered one wall, and he caught sight of some of the brilliant baubles, lures, and sinkers adorning the hunting and fishing section. Each point remained near to Sarcowicz’s visage, yet distant enough that the man would not mistake Isaiah for checking him out.
“I don’t think so. Any given person that walks through those doors is going to either want a china set for a wedding or they’ll walk down to Target for their twenty-dollar Farberware set. They aren’t going to look for family heirlooms to plate up Sunday dinner, you see. Something like this…” He paused, sighed, then laced his fingers into a lattice that supported his chin. His gaze swapped from his customer’s glass eye to the array of photos. “I can give you twenty dollars for the set. Unless, of course, you wanted to sweeten the deal with that glass eye.” The smile returned, unabashed.
The man seemed to consider it for a long moment. His remaining eye fixated on a time and place far beyond the shop and lingered there for nearly a full minute. Sarcowicz was displaced, then, a temporal anomaly in the midst of a bustling pawn shop, before the distance between them ceased in the blink of an eye. afterward, the time felt no longer than a second after Isaiah’s response. “I’ll take my business elsewhere. Good day to you, Zähne.”
“You too, Mr. Sarcowicz. Sorry I couldn’t be of more service.” Isaiah responded in similarly bored tones, as his distaste for the day returned to him. The excitement he nursed over the prospect of that glass eye soon crumpled with the bald man’s leaving. The shopkeeper sighed through his nose.
“Melanie, I’m going for a walk. Mind the store while I’m gone, and don’t offer anyone more than fifty dollars.” Isaiah didn’t wait for a response before he stole his pinstripe coat from the rack and left the store entirely, with nothing but the metallic chime to punctuate his departure.
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Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2015 8:47 am
Solo [1 of 5] I said, "Lord, Lord, Lord, it's a long dark road."Word Count: 772He played the message over speakerphone and angled the bottom toward his ear as he always did. She spoke softly, so he held the device closer. Smiling, he snorted softly. Boiled and fried aren't the same thing. But I imagine you'd scoff, or push me, or play it off like you did when you didn't want anyone to know you cared.
But he found her, yet again, in the bowels of a grungy bathroom after he finished with a quick introduction to one Stella Artois, a beer-turned-burlesque babe. He knew her only as a ghost then, and still did, for how she haunted her way through his life. Even now, a glass in hand half empty of a tequila sunrise, she laced through him the spectral fingers that pulled him back to those times. He knew how easy it was to breathe the smoke of the dragon, to burn her breath through his lungs and lose time to a stolen heaven. But thieving the way through the pearly gates, he learned, was nothing more than a moonshine sham wrought over hell's channels.
But they both changed. What hadn't?
He passed through New York as a drifting vapor, remaining no longer than a breath in someone's life. He expected the same of Destiny City when he moved. What was he to the people here but a last trawl of breath before hardship reigned? He bore with him the saccharine scent of antifreeze, his own poorly guised infernal circle. He expected that trend to continue, wished it so, and yet with one visit from one Mr. Sarcowicz even the caustic air froze about him and Isaiah found himself anchored - no longer a breeze split by grasping fingers. Then he found himself caught by Aegir and Methone initially, though Scholomance wasn't the only facet of his life to know interaction beyond meek vapors. Kam, Colin, Nadia, Lorne, and Auguste formed notable relationships in his life. Rob hung around, and Babylon and Hvergelmir lent their knowledge.
But they weren't the only few to catch the ice on the winds. Ashanite for his intoxicating charisma took note of him, as did the shattered doll, the demoness. He felt the lot of them as hooks in his skin, anchoring him to the earth. Holding him to Destiny City in contempt.
Isaiah loosed a slow, throttled sigh. The voicemail continued.
He shut his eyes through the recital of a nerving song that haunted him since the first mention of his nickname. The bass line left his heart still when spoken by the light timbre of her voice. She laughed, and he paused. The silence held as long as his breath.
...Sorry, Ice.
Isaiah loosed a sigh unceremoniously. He pressed the top of the phone to his lips while he thought, while he listened to the tone deaf whir of digitized stillness. It's been so long now. It feels like years, and I saw her just last week. I don't think I meant what I said, then. I was just speaking air, hoping she wouldn't drag me down. I could smell the smoke off her in hot seconds. I wonder, where would I be if she said yes?
The cell phone issued gibbering fits and starts of half-recorded voice. Its words were soft, clipped, and barely recognizable for how she sang some distance from her phone.
And, you know, we're on each other's team played toward his throat.
And you know, and you know, and you kn
A toneless beep ended the message.
His eyes closed slowly. His world shrank to fits and starts of thoughts across a cityscape backdrop, all grunge and tremors and horns chasing away the silence.
To replay this message, press one.
To delete this message, press seven.
To save this message, press nine.
The digitized quietude resumed. When Isaiah opened his eyes, he saw the carefully furnished loft condominium that cost less than the cheapest postage stamp he could find in the Bronx. He saw an exposed brick wall, a highly sought after feature in the real estate world, embellished with framed successes from his college career. He saw glass fronted bookshelves displaying his collections, half read and half left shut their entire lives. And perhaps most notably, he saw his silhouette reflected in the frame of a piece displaying black shadow with nothing but half an eye and gritted teeth. For a moment, a distinct accent reminded him that it was hard to scream with a throat full of glass. He smiled wistfully.
"Sorry, Sid."
Message deleted.
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Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2015 2:07 am
Solo Preparatory MeasuresWord Count: 659"That's everything." He spoke only to himself.
"Three five-gallon jugs of water, enough Gatorade to make me sick, twenty freeze-dried MREs, twenty cans of soup, five pounds of sugar, a canister of salt, one pepper grinder, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, two boxes of cereal, five boxes of granola bars, two pounds of trail mix, powdered milk, enough vitamin supplements that I don't have to care about nutrition, some juice boxes,and one bag of York peppermint patties. One mess kit, plastic bags of variable sizes, garbage bags, aluminum foil, bleach, paper towels, can opener, matches, Sterno, oven mitts, dish soap, one sponge. One survival health kit, one first aid manual, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, one jug of isporpyl alcohol, water purification tablets out the a**, Ipecac, laxative, safety goggles, soap, razors, wax strips, one comb, one stick of deodorant, all the toilet paper I never wanted to see. One flashlight, twenty AA batteries, one lantern and its batteries, compass, flares, candles, assorted tools, rope, plastic sheeting, and work gloves." With a long sigh, he looked at the assortment of bins.
"And that's only going by the recommended items for earth-based survival." Isaiah crouched in front of one of the bins, a clear plastic one clearly labeled for the intended supply purpose. GENERAL SUPPLIES it read, in fastidious block handwriting. "I might find that I need some kind of a gym based on gravity needs and the body, I suppose." Bony fingers traced the rounded edges of the lid. He tested its sturdiness by pushing up on it, and found that the lid held fast. There wouldn't be a risk of transporting lids only.
"I can go back at any time," he reminded himself. Unless I can't. It's easy to say that, but if I fall down a hole and crack my skull, I can't count on EMS or Blaine to put me back together. I might not even remember how to get back.
He accounted for virtually every need beyond clothing, but he anticipated washing clothes in purified water for space saving purposes. In truth, he didn't expect to stay at the wonder for the prep length of two weeks - the campus only housed a few buildings, and those that were there didn't look terribly large. He'd already been to the Ossuary, too, for a start on those explorations. Even if he loathed to think of the bizarreness of that entire adventure.
“Right. The visit date will be…” He trailed the world along, hesitating while he considered convenient dates. His business commanded more worth to him than the wonder visit, so exploring on a workday was out of the question. Business still boomed on the weekends, but he could easily take a weekend off as per arrangements with Vargas. And with their rotation, this weekend involved no work schedule. He would have to tell Vargas that he was going on a retreat, and the nature of it necessitated silencing his cell phone for 48 hours. Perhaps that wasn’t enough to cover all of Scholomance, and it certainly wasn’t enough to put a dent in the supplies, but he hoped it could help him uncover the nature of the place.
It’ll come clear if you just look around enough, Babylon said. Ultimately, the purpose of your wonder is yours to decide. There’s no rule that says you can’t make your name as Scholomance, the great reformer.
Isaiah loosed a long sigh. He hated considering this, he hated spending as much as he did on survival supplies, and he hated the thought of returning to an old, stark wonder that constantly reminded him of his shortcomings. Even now, he felt that vague, senseless urgency that the wonder often inscribed upon him. Maybe it wants to be torn down, he thought with a smirk.
But for now, the supplies were obtained, and he could spend the next work week dreading the departure day.
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Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2015 7:14 am
Solo [3 of 5] In my deep down soul, I am flies and blood.Word Count: 1594Scholomance expected a hard trek. It wasn’t.
The bins, all labeled, plus one small addition added no further taxation to the journey between Earth and Saturn. Perhaps the wonder shouldered the burden for him. The compensation felt like a mockery compared to its constant treatment of him. Why now, he wanted to ask, but he knew the answer wouldn’t matter.
He found himself in a blessedly amenable space, surrounded by the bins he transported to Scholomance, and took the nearest seat without hesitation. Choking back fresh blood that started from his nose, Scholomance tilted his head back and pinched the bridge in hopes of stymying the flow. It helped somewhat, but his nose still stung badly, and the rest of him complained with equal fervor. Standing for longer than a half hour proved impossible. Sometimes he felt as though his spine was misaligned. It wouldn’t surprise him, regardless.
Once he learned to give up on the nosebleed, Scholomance stared about the room with little interest. It lacked the usual flairs he found in the main tower of the campus, yet it housed far more bookshelves full to the brim. It looked like a community library, if he had to liken it to anything. Ratty scraps of tapestries hung on the walls, long rotted out from disuse and deferred maintenance. Much of the books suffered a similar fate, leaving their spines eaten away by moths. There were no desks, truly, but a series of tables spaced between the bookshelves with few chairs beneath them. A long conference table divided the room in half and seated as many as thirty occupants from what he could discern, and the far end sat just beneath the upward-turned eye emblem.
He considered looking through the books for information on Scholomance and its origins, but quickly discarded the idea. Instead, he rest his head on his arms and hoped that he might either fall asleep first or his head might finally burst itself open.
But Scholomance received neither comfort - instead, he was assailed by a voice.
“This is the Repository.” It was Blaine’s voice, he knew. The voice sounded closer as it continued. “I remember hearing about it in my orientation. My predecessor built it. I remember sitting right where you were, actually, when I was interviewing with one of the officials that worked here. Her name escapes me, but I thought she had the kindest smile. I was thinking she wasn’t suited for her work, but I can’t remember why, or what her work was.” By the time the voice closed its explanation, it came from directly before him.
Scholomance peeked out over his arms to catch sight of Blaine’s face. He wasn’t unattractive, and he wore his age well for the crow’s feet spanned kindly with every smile, but he kept a constant slight upturn of lips that put Scholomance off severely. Blaine seemed like the worst kind of snake - the kind with no fangs. Scholomance detested them far more than those with the courage to backstab. And yet, it wasn’t the most troublesome aspect of Blaine either. The reason behind it demanded several moments of Scholomance fighting through the seething ache in his body, but he realized that Blaine’s uniform fostered several intrinsic differences to his own. No bones, but in its place were brilliant glowing designs and orbs that featured a whorling blue mist. It confounded him.
“Are you okay?” He never truly sounded concerned, either - Blaine’s voice constantly maintained that lilting, friendly tone (except when it didn’t).
“No,” Scholomance answered brusquely. Finally he wrenched himself upright. He looked to blaine through one petechial hemorrhage. “You were saying?”
Blaine frowned, looked taken aback, then mildly offended, and then an undercurrent of concern laced his features. It never quite looked sincere. “I was expecting you to be more excited about visiting our first ancillary building together.”
“I thought the Ossuary was the first.” Scholomance rubbed around his eye tenderly. Sitting up caused his back to protest terribly, and he soon scooted forward in his chair for better support.
“The Ossuary?” Blaine frowned again. “That can’t be right.”
“Why not.”
“Because it’s not possible to enter the Ossuary. It’s been locked for as long as I’ve been a knight of Scholomance. It was locked when I was first sending correspondences… To… Someone. I can’t remember who. But students have both tried to break in. No one’s ever been successful. At least, not to my knowledge.”
Scholomance eyed him with impatience. “Then where were we before? Some kind of secondary morgue? It looked like an Ossuary to me.”
“What? We’ve never been anywhere before. Besides, I don’t recall any location in Scholomance that looks like a ‘secondary morgue’. The only place that could look like that is the Ossuary, and that’s only in theory, since no one has been in there since my predecessor’s time.” Blaine was honestly adamant in this, both in the way his fists curled when he was challenged on the point and in the level of fervor in his voice. He leaned forward, too, with his eyes alight in conviction. “Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“You opened it, Blaine. It’s how I became a squire.”
A long silence lingered between them. Scholomance watched Blaine’s face carefully, searching it for those subtle hints of change that existed beneath the surface. He wondered if Blaine was fully aware of them. He wondered if it wasn’t Scholomance itself manipulating his visage, the despot to his slavery, giving orders that he followed without conscience. One lower lid twitched very subtly, but nothing more came of Scholomance’s scrutiny.
When he began again, his tone was hushed, as if the old walls themselves were listening in. “Do you remember what was in there?”
Scholomance shrugged. He saw no point in whispers here. “Bones, mostly. A lot of them. There were filing cabinets…” He paused, closed eyes, heaved a painful sigh. “I think they were labeled at one time, but any identification was long gone. The top of it wasn’t terribly disorganized, and it looked mostly intact, but there was… I don’t remember. Some kind of a trapdoor? All I know is we went down, and you didn’t sound like yourself. As we went, there were more and more bones. Drawers full to spilling out. Bones heaped on tables, pushed into corners. Piled up until they reshaped the wall. Piled up until the whole room was gone to them.”
“What else did you find?” Blaine stared, his rapt attention focused on Scholomance with an intensity that he remembered keenly.
He shuddered involuntarily. “Nothing,” Scholomance returned with measured care. “Nothing at all. Just bones. A sea of bones.”
Blaine looked dissatisfied, but pushed the subject no further. In fact, he showed no signs of thought at all. He moved not an inch, as if suddenly turned to stone. And when Scholomance leaned forward to check if he still had thought process, to see if some fleck of soul was still reflected in Blaine’s eyes, he found a peculiar reflection staring back at him. Scholomance thought he could make out his own visage, but behind that, or perhaps a part of that (for he couldn’t truly tell a difference), there was a harshly angled bone face with a similar garish smile to the one he wore on his half mask. A crown of splintering bone erupted from its hairline, though it was hard to discern from the curious fog surrounding the visage.. Scholomance squinted, blinked, and saw nothing more.
Afterward, Blaine came to life. “So would you like me to tell you about the Repository? You might not think it, but I remember quite a lot.”
“I want you to tell me about Scholomance.” He rubbed his eyes gently. “What is Scholomance? What’s its purpose?”
Blaine softened. “Scholomance is many things. Outwardly, it’s a research institution. Scholomance is for the development and implementation of weaponized magics. That’s what we’re all told during our orientations. It recruits anyone interested in magic research and contracts with… I can’t remember the names anymore. It used to be an observatory called Crugul Pamantului. That building has since been repurposed.”
Scholomance stared uncomprehendingly. Fighting through the miasma of pain, he worked to understand what Blaine explained. “So Scholomance was a weapons program. Why? Was it to fight against chaos of old? And what else was it?”
“I… Can’t remember. We had a reason for it, but it wasn’t… That…” Blaine’s brow furrowed. He waved a hand, dismissing the topic.
“And?” Scholomance gesticulated a rotary motion in hopes of scraping the rest of the truth from his ancestor.
“I think that’s quite enough for now. You could use some rest. You look very tired. Lie down for a while, and we can resume our discussions when you wake. The Sanctuary is closest - when you exit, it’s the building directly ahead of you. I would say to go to the Infirmary, but I’m afraid I can’t help with any of your injuries.”
I’m afraid, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t explain why. Afraid he would forget the question he asked, perhaps. Afraid of sleeping in a foreign place, perhaps. But the fear felt deeper than either supposition, one so innate that he hadn’t the proper descriptors for it.
“Okay,” he capitulated, for he needed the answers.
But Blaine cut in as a last attempt. "Scholomance," he started, and at first the knight thought he was calling him by name, "was my personal prison."
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Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 9:57 am
Solo I’m the one who pulls my strings.Word Count: 1515Takes place hours after In my deep down soul, I am flies and blood.Scholomance woke slowly, carefully, as if he could keep himself between dream and wake to avoid the pain of reality. Yet it crept through his careful guise and found him, unforgivingly, and thereby subjected him to the pains he didn't want to process. Suddenly he knew his hip hurt and exactly how much it hurt, which part of his body hurt the most, and which parts simply demanded some attention. Scholomance groaned as he stared at the spidering veins tracing the backs of his eyelids. Even his teeth pained him.
"You're awake, I see." The voice sounded nearby. Blaine's, he started to recognize.
Scholomance considered keeping quiet. He wanted to pretend he hadn't yet awoken, and wondered if he could get away with it. And yet, the squire imagined, Blaine might have some intrinsic bond to his person that allowed the sense of when Scholomance held consciousness. Begrudgingly and quite quietly, Scholomance started to speak. "How long was I asleep for?"
"I'd say a few hours. No more than five."
You'd say? Did you not look at the... s**t, they don't have clocks here. "So what were you saying about Scholomance?" He asked the disembodied voice. He heard a begrudged sigh.
"Scholomance is a hard place to describe. A lot of my friends inherited wonders like libraries, commerce cities or observatories, but Scholomance requires a lot more upkeep than those wonders. Scholomance has as much a political presence as it does a physical one - its knight is expected to maintain relations with different supporting locations and cater to their research needs on a smaller scale. That was our barter system, started by... I can't remember. But it's an imperfect system - you simply can't give everyone what they want. And since this had been going on for generations, the places that donated to Scholomance got restless. They pressured for immediate results, and I was forced to oblige.
"It didn't help that I was researching some of the most difficult magic conceived of, and I was far from developing an end result. Something else was at work too... But I can't remember what it was. I do remember that we reached a point where we were asking people to work twelve- to sixteen-hour shifts just to make progress on the promised research. That..." Scholomance heard the rubbing of skin. "Was a nightmare."
A nightmare, he thought. So he dug himself a hole, business-style. Or someone did. Perhaps Scholomance and its research was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme that finally fell on its side. Blows your gas station out of the water, doesn't it Hvergelmir?
Finally Scholomance chose to sit up against his body's protests. He opened his eyes slowly, expecting the blue dull ache of sun on the eyes, but found the room a pleasant den of shadows. "What happened then?" He tried to rub the bleariness away; his head pounded terribly and his arm protested the action and his eyes hadn't even cleared. Overall he found it a wasted action - results wanting.
“I gather that I died.” The man was unreadable - no sorrow evident, no sardonic smile like what he would’ve expected from the wonder. Instead he looked steeled perhaps, or resolute. Scholomance could not say for certain. “But now you’re alive. You are my protege. I will try to teach you the best that I can, but the training program I remember doesn’t… Quite apply anymore.” He tried to smile then. It was, at least, an effort - even if he found his position wanting, Blaine made attempts of it. “If you have any questions, ask away.”
For this, Scholomance found reason to learn to respect him. “Alright, we’ll start off our game of twenty-questions with something simple. When I first got into Scholomance, I had Ashanite with me - you remember seeing him. He unlocked the door, but I couldn’t. How is it that someone who isn’t a knight of Scholomance was able to gain access to it?”
“That’s simple.” Blaine smiled disarmingly, as if he tried to say that he wasn’t passing judgment on Scholomance for asking, or that he was afraid of projecting that assumption. “Knights have signet rings for communication. As far as I know, all knights get them - and since many knights have been invited to Scholomance in the past, or used the facility, it was easiest to just create a nonmagical locking mechanism. It’s ingenious, really - anyone with the exact shape of a signet ring can press it into the hole on the door, and that depresses the conductor for the magical source, and then the energy from that opens the door. Your friend must’ve had something that was the same size and shape of a signet ring. It wasn’t that uncommon - we used to make plain rings for the people who lived on campus. Maybe he found one on the ground?”
“He didn’t.” Scholomance looked to Blaine, perhaps sharply for how the man almost flinched under his gaze. He wondered if the pain hardened him. “Ashanite is a captain of the Negaverse, but he was once Ploutonion, a knight of Saturn. What he had was his signet ring. I don’t even know if it still works, but I suppose we can’t know by the fact that he opened the door to Scholomance. Do you remember, Blaine? Do you recognize the name?”
“I… I can’t say I do, no.”
“I guess that’s not surprising.”
“... Let’s talk about something else. Do you have another question?”
Yes - do I have to lead my own training? Scholomance thought bitterly. “Yes. What was Scholomance’s purpose for its knight if Scholomance itself no longer has a purpose? What I see here is a ruin, and yet it expects something of me. I don’t know what it is. Do you know?” He struggled to sit up more fully, but his hip protested. His entire leg throbbed with the continual pain of mending. He wondered how long it might be before he can walk as intended. Or if he ever could.
But those thoughts were dispersed by Blaine’s next words. “I think Scholomance’s purpose still stands. Even if you see ruin, the magic here is still alive. If it wasn’t, well… You wouldn’t be a knight at all. There’s… Been a lot of damage to Scholomance over the years, and a lot of changes. Each knight tweaked its purpose to suit their vision for Scholomance. It serves you, for as much as you serve it.”
That doesn’t answer my question, he wanted to say. He tired of pressing his ancestor for answers.
“I spoke to a knight named Hvergelmir. She offered a few interesting tidbits of her own knighthood that bring to mind questions of my own - why has my weapon been a ring? And why is it now a cane?”
“I don’t think I can answer that for you. All I can say is what I’ve said - Scholomance serves you, for as much as you serve it. If it gave you a ring, and then gave you a cane, then there’s a reason. I think only you can determine what that reason is.” Blaine bowed his head apologetically, as if somehow cowed by his own perceptions of how the squire might react.
Scholomance tired of it. “What about a piece of Code? Have you seen something like that around here? In here?”
“I… Don’t know. I can’t say.”
“What was in the box in the Ossuary?”
“I told you, I don’t remember ever being in-”
“What of my magic? Was it researched in Scholomance?”
“Without knowing what it is-”
“Can you give me any sort of direction on what Scholomance wants me to do?”
“I don’t kn-”
Scholomance’s voice escalated abruptly. “<********>, do you know anything at all?” He paused after, seethed, breathed through his teeth in a sucking burble of old blood. It ached him as much to be furious with Blaine, but all such regrets to it were born of his physical condition. Blaine himself regressed right back to earning no sympathy.
“I’m sorry. I’ll go look into it.” His ancestor stood at haste and simply vanished. No longer was Scholomance looking to the visage of Blaine - instead he looked across the room, to an old portrait of a woman in similar garb. A plaque existed under it that he could not read at such a distance. She looked beautiful in her determination.
His discussions with Blaine only yielded more questions. As he laid back against the bedding, desiccated as it was, he wondered about the implications of such answers. He wondered if, perhaps, he could discuss with Hvergelmir what he learned here, or if Babylon might be better suited to it. Perhaps the three of them should hold earnest discussions over their theories about wonders, or toward the purpose of knighthood.
Or, perhaps, he should return home and take a long bath to soothe his bones. For all he wanted to consider of these topics, the bath seemed most necessary.
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