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 Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 1:09 pm
The portal was narrow, simply a waver, and Alois very nearly missed it. He expected a gateway - a real, true passage denoting the difference between one place and the next - but the gap to Other Ashdown was little more than the distance between a pair of trees. He had to crawl, to his distaste, and on elbows and knees he crawled beneath the roof of the portal with great tracts of mud sticking to his clothes. When he straightened, it was in the gentle, continual rain of the Otherworld, the rain that often lulled him to sleep all too easily.
He started forward, his feet sinking deep into the sucking mud, but he fought against it with what strength he still had. Quickly it wore away his energy until his calves and thighs burned with the need to halt. He panted, his breath shortened from cigarettes and agony. He grasped at branches to pull himself along through the swampy status of the forest.
At last he paused, sinking into the mud itself, and leaned with all his weight against a great ash that rose up defiantly. He knew, then, that he couldn’t simply walk his way back to the Court of the Sorrowful One - not in his current shape. Not with skipping food, skipping self-care, and smoking cigarettes at the rate he was.
He wanted to rise again, but his knees remained lodged in the clinging, needy mud.
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Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2016 1:28 pm
"Alois," said Ezra, and there was no small note of disapproval in his tone. He held out a hand, but didn't kneel to put himself on his son's level. "What is it you think you're doing?"
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Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2016 1:47 pm
"Disappointing you, apparently," Alois greeted and took the arm. He hauled himself out of the grey muck with his father's assistance. "I had questions. Important ones." He looked into his father's eyes, searching.
"Tell me - did you mean for us to leaf' zat night? Are we banished now?"
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Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2016 10:27 pm
"You were meant to leave," said Ezra. "The answer to your other question is--both yes and no. You are no longer a member of my household. It's time that you go forward and make your own." Before Ezra, Alois couldn't see his way back to the house where he'd spent three months. Now it is only a few yards away. "I taught you better than this," he sighed. "Come."
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2016 12:57 am
The german wrinkled his nose at the thought. „I hate kids, and I’m certain a lover is out of ze question. Household of one until ze day I die.“ It left him to wonder, though - given Ezra’s penchant for tradition, had one before him demanded a household of the burning man? Was it, perhaps, more a tradition of kidnapping and conversion than any literal indactions of household? Alois imagined so; none of the court carried any kind of romance or courtship as expected from medieval times. What Ezra wanted was more victims.
„Zere’s more,“ he started, then paused with suspicion when the house obtained undeniable visibility. The ways of the otherworld left him puzzled still; he imagined years layered beyond that would leave him just as startled at times. „You took us in and made demands of us while zose fetches ruined our lives. Who gaf’e ze order for it? More importantly, why?“
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Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2016 4:26 am
"How you treat the tithes you take is your decision," said Ezra. "I believe that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. I know that kindness will not earn you any strength in the end--look at poor Adoelle. She attempted kindness and the man she tried to save broke himself on her attempts." He shook his head and placed his hand in the palm-lock of the door. He continued. "I chose who to take. The fetches make your life more difficult to return to because whichever way your life goes, whether you fail the trials or succeed in them, that is no longer where your life will be. To create a situation where your desire to survive must overcome all else, even despair." Ezra stopped in the minimally-decorated space that might have, in another house, been a foyer. "July misses you quite dearly," said Ezra. "But I'm sure you shan't wish to see her as she is now."
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Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2016 6:28 pm
“You make it sound like she caught ze plague,“ Alois replied dryly.
Alois followed Ezra as always, fingers absently brushing against doorjambs and walls and the few furnishings that lay within his path. It was habit, he found, and proved a measure of recompense for the untouchable lifestyle led in his Father’s stead. Inwardly he thought of one of his first revelations in Ezra’s presence - that he never found need of a candle or light so long as his father was near. He almost laughed.
„And you sink we’re prepared for zese roles now, just like zat?“ He finished, snapping his fingers. „I haf’ my reservations about it. Not what happened, but… What we’re intended to do. How we’re supposed to readjust. It’s a strange system, to me. But, I suppose zat might come from being a Westerner ascribed to Aristotle’s dichotomous logic.“ He paused, then reconsidered any further speech on it.
„Someone said Vale stabbed Melany and was killed for it by you. Haf’ you taken control of ze Court, zen? What is its state of affairs now?“
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 7:35 pm
"She didn't pass the test," said Ezra. "You passed by fiat. But July..." He fell silent for a moment. Ezra settled into the bare metal chair of his study. It lacked the usual accoutrements of a study: no books, no plush carpets, no heavy wooden desk. The entire place was spartan, stripped-down metal. It was a place to sit, not a place to work or a place to relax, a study only for technicalities. "Perhaps you ought to spend less time complaining and more time thinking," said Ezra. " Lady Melany yet lives, and thus the Court is still hers. None of us can find her, however, and so in her absence it does pass to me," said Ezra. "As the Sorrowful One is still Melany's to control until Melany is dead."
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Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2016 12:44 am
“What a shame, what a pity.“ It sounds like those of us who passed have turned into fetch factories like him. Train people to pass, and if they don’t, they still feed the churning system. More bodies for the grinder. „I’ll haf’ to tease her about it next I see her.“
Alois found the study much to his disappointment; it embodied a lifestyle far opposite to one he wished to pursue. Nothing existed here with which he could form a dialectic - the room was bare, as Ezra intended it, and no words were left among the place with which to argue. Even the cold steel felt somehow lacking when he leaned his shoulder against the wall. He did not complain, however; he knew that, this time, he was invited into the room rather than grounded there for insolence. „If you call a girl a boy does zat make her so? No? Zen stop trying to label my soughts as complaints. Besides, it’s easier to sink wis’ ze company of a challenging book.“ He considered sonant unnecessary when given the emptiness of the room.
Finally he pushed from the wall, his palm flatted against it with elbow locked. The cold bit through his jacket far too easily. „I suppose I should say congratulations.“ Alois looked to Ezra pointedly, and watched the flames lick up his father’s face in his periphery. „But since Melany is not ze lynchpin to ze court, maybe you should work on getting ze Sorrowful One into your possession. Unless you want me to steal her first.“ He smirked wryly.
„If my continued existence is supposed to be for Court politics, zen I can play it easily enough.“ Within this space, with his father, he found it utterly simple to forget the woes of his normal life. Here, he faced not the issues that stirred his grief. Mental challenge awaited, crowding out its adversaries. Chess of the minds beckoned him. „Say I find her somehow. She’s in some part of Ozzer Ashdown you forgot to check. Or, if it’s even possible, she winds up in my world. How would one get rid of her? Obviously whatever Vale did wasn’t enough. Stake srough ze heart, zen? Fill her face wis’ garlic and cut off her head? Tell me ze trick, Father. I’m certain you know it.“
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Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2016 3:46 am
"But you won't see her, Alois," said Ezra, patiently. "You will never see July or September again." He waited through Alois's diatribe, through his suggestions, as expressionless as ever. The crackling of the fire, the smell of charred meat and charcoal, was Ezra's only response as it had ever been. Some teachers swore by the Socratic method: Ezra always seemed to swear by silence. Ezra examined his nails, or he pretended to. It raised the question of what exactly the man on fire saw as he observed the world. Whatever it was, it seemed enough to keep him sane in his rainy, dreary world. "You don't," he said. It was mild: a factual correction, not a response to Alois's thought. "If you cause harm to another noble, the consequences will be dire. The rest of us would be compelled to kill you, your fetches, and your tithes in her name." He pressed his fingertips together, leaned backwards into his uncomfortable chair. He waited.
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Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2016 8:53 am
“… Oh.“ Losses on both sides promised him the very pain and suffering that Ezra aimed for. Now July existed only as a memory, a promise of what lay in store for him again if he endures another three months in befriending someone. Like Schatzie, such a relationship forecasted more hurt if he ever reached its end. He wondered, then, howe Ezra endured it - for if he felt as close to his tithes as one does to a family, then weathering the pain by human standards would eventually prove intolerable. Unless, of course, he didn’t care much for his kids. „So how do you deal wis’ it? July is gone, September is gone, and you as much called zem your children. Doesn’t it hurt you to know zey didn’t… ‚Turn out‘?“
Ezra stole with wind from his sails, and his hand dropped off the metal siding. He didn’t ask for this, he knew, but one could never unspill water. He was marooned in the limitations of this new title, this new role in the court, and could never shirk it - it or its removal from ‚the cycle‘.
Perhaps he should not have asked, and learned the hard way.
„When you found me,“ he started, then cleared his throat. „Did you sink I would make a decent contribution to ze court, or were you just looking for someone to scapegoat?“
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 4:01 am
"They aren't gone," said Ezra. "None of them are truly gone. July and Sept will return to me when they're ready. When the cycle begins again." He looked at Alois, or at least his face was pointed in that direction. "Of course it hurts. Of course I wish things had gone differently, that they were here with me. That they'd..." His voice grew tight, and he cut himself off. He leaned towards Alois, and held out a hand. "I chose you because you reminded me of myself," he said. "When I was just beginning, you and I were much the same. I no more wish harm to you than I would have wished harm to your sisters, than I would wish harm to your brother." The hand was an offering: a truce. "You stand on your own now. But if you require my aid, know that I shall give it."
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Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 8:08 am
“You mean when everyone ******** up again for sitting on zeir sumbs and playing coward’s poker.“ Alois finished acerbically. How can relationships mean a damned thing to someone who watches them restart ad nauseum?
„Oh, I’m going to require your aid, Father.“ Alois accepted the hand with hesitation for the flames. „Zese people are married to complacency, and if zat is how zey want to pass off responsibility in zis endless loop, zen I’ll haf’ to chase it out of zem.“ They’ll wake or they’ll die. „But for now, I’ll see how far I can go on my own. I’m a fan of making my own achievements, you know.“ Of course he did - Alois was fairly certain that his distaste for teamwork still remained evident, even after having to work with Bennett.
„I suppose I’f got places to be zen, become I come back to zis place.“
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Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 6:00 pm
"Of course," said Ezra. If he was bothered, he didn't say anything about it. He blinked very slowly, so it could be seen. "Yes. There's much for you to do, Alois. Only do not go so far that you both begin and end as I do. It's not a pleasant life to live."
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