Chapter 005
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5
Le Maçon remained kneeling in the shallows, one with the nocturnal stillness and lack of life. Airgid, ‘Silver Fruit’ in the elven tongue, was full in the sky, but her light barely penetrated the lake. He looked for Corcra, the second moon the Elder Race said existed for those with eyes to see it, small and violet.
Nothing.
He set aside whether that meant Corcra was merely legend, or whether he still lacked the gifts required.
The Council had doubted that Venge could truly die. Perhaps with great investiture of magic, they had said, but even then, more chance than not that the individual returns, though perhaps years later. The Council were certainly not all-knowing, but Le Maçon had discovered in his short time in his former home that they were among the most knowledgeable about this new existence he and some of his former countrymen now lived.
If they were correct, there was nothing here to fear. He was just one more dead thing in a dead landscape.
Rising, he waded into the water.
He felt nothing different when the water covered his face. No panic, no straining of organs from lack of air. He stood submerged and waited to see if anything would change. Nothing did.
Le Maçon kept an eye on the silken hair. It moved with the eerie, ghost-like motion that hair takes underwater, but no more. He had noticed cliff faces in the lake, the bed plunging down into an inky void made darker by night. The hair followed, impossibly long, diving off the underwater wall into the unknowns beyond.
Without the light of the moon, and with his newfound Veil Sight finding naught, Le Maçon knew his path lay forward here in the water, to see what aberration lay in its heart. To approach with no ability to see was still foolish, even if he might lack the ability to die again.
Le Maçon proceeded to the edge of the underwater wall, and waited for daylight, standing there. Hours passed uneventfully. It was peaceful.
The sun rose, the depths giving nothing back to her rays. Le Maçon determined that the light was still enough to proceed. He seemed to still be bound by the familiar concepts such as eyes adjusting to the dark, and felt confident that he would not be completely blind at the depth of even a deep lake. He moved forward.
The hair was a potential handhold, a rope to lower himself by, but Le Maçon was immediately averse to the very idea. The hair belonged to something, and whatever produced it was certainly the reason the whole lake stood devoid of life.
He stepped off the edge and descended without falling, no lurch in the stomach, no instinct to grasp. Just the slow translation downward, water displacing around his form in terms he processed as pressure differentials rather than sensation.
The light from above did not so much fail as become a shrinking quantity. He could indeed still see. He cataloged the fact without relief.
The walls were glacially polished granite, smooth enough to look quarried, but crossed with parallel striations left by ice that had gone eons before. Iron staining striped the rock in rust-orange; calcite had crusted white at the seams. No moss. No weed. The lake bed was pale gray silt, fine as ash, and the boulders that rested on it were the wrong rock entirely, granite erratics set down by the glacier and left there, mismatched and inert.
He landed silently on the bed of the lake. His ghostly form kicked up no silt. He merely arrived.
The world had reduced to gradients of black and gray, the faint geometry of the lake bed assembling itself below him out of sheer proximity. No fish. No vegetation clinging to the rock. No current. The absence of anything other than the hair pressed in as its own kind of knowledge. He had surveyed ruins before. This felt similar.
The hair was the only detail to note.
Near the surface, the silky black fibers had been no thicker than human hair. Here they were thicker than a wrist, corded together the way Traveler’s Joy roped itself around old stonework, occupying every gap. What manner of strange beast might have produced it? Le Maçon traced with his eyes, trying to see if there was a locus point they converged on, and that was when he felt it, a pulse of energy. Something stirred.
Something alive.
Voices deep inside him stilled with the tension of anticipation.
His alertness sharpened, and he began to detect movement in the hairs, more than just the way they were carried by the water. There was intent in their movement now, and Le Maçon did not think it his imagination that the intent was violent. He readied himself, opening himself to his senses as he still used his eyes to take survey of his surroundings.
From behind him came a coil of the hairs, lashing towards him like a whip. Easily predicted, not hard to sidestep. Le Maçon felt a response of pure hatred and frustration ripple through the water as the coil passed him by. Le Maçon saw that more of the hair was becoming increasingly animate, and knew that he would not be able to keep himself from the path of all of them. He considered his options as he watched some of the larger braids shift into movement.
Le Maçon knew he was no longer the human he once was. Even if he thought of his speech as something that originated from inside him and emanated from his mouth, he knew it was no longer so. If he could walk underwater without breathing, likely he could talk without speaking.
He did not know if whatever was here could hear him, or if the words were merely formed in his own mind. If it could hear, was the creature even intelligent enough for conversation? Whatever aquatic mammoth was responsible for this could be animal in nature. Conversely, if it was related to the Mageum experiments he pursued, there was much to be gained. Le Maçon reasoned that nothing was lost in an attempt to communicate.
“I would speak with you as one stranger to another.” The hair continued to ripple and furl.
A disturbance in the water behind him caused him to look back in time to see a whip of hair slashing through the water towards him. Le Maçon’s reaction happened at the speed of instinct. There was not enough time to remove himself from the path of the braid. Nor was he particularly interested in discovering if the hair was constructed of the kind of magic that the Council had thought might be able to kill he and his fellow Returned. Without knowing how, Le Maçon made himself less. There, but not. He felt his essence pull inwards towards itself, fading like a vague figure walking away in a rainstorm. The improvised whip passed through him without touching him, streaking forward into the gloom of the lake bed. He felt himself return, once again fully present.
He felt rage ripple through the water, but with another emotion underneath. Despair, perhaps? It was a feeling he associated with the sick and dying.
The hair flailed. Le Maçon readied himself for another attack, but none came. The movements from the hair slowed, less aggressive. Le Maçon considered. The creature was facing an interloper that they likely could not categorize. They were ill. How long could they direct the hair before they lost all stamina? Le Maçon felt the chorus inside him rise, smelling weakness. He quieted them before he could make out the words. He would not use violence unless no other option presented itself. He could already feel the creature’s uncertainty in the water.
The water seemed still as the hair calmed further. Le Maçon stood stationary. The hair began to unfurl slowly from the larger clusters ahead.
He could make out a child, a young girl. A far cry from the shambling, shaggy creatures he had expected. Puzzled if this was a vision, hallucination, or a sorcerer’s illusion, Le Maçon held his ground. Her words moved through the water without her mouth moving, much as Le Maçon imagined his own had before.
“We could try talking, then.” First spoken in another language, then in Amerelian. It took Le Maçon a moment to place the first, a dialect of Hannish, maybe Vatelet.
Le Maçon nodded slowly.
The hair rippled again, and while Le Maçon remained alert, he gave the girl the benefit of the doubt. Coils snaked around them, far slower than before, forming a cone-like structure. Le Maçon was aware that he was in a more vulnerable position now, surrounded as he was by what seemed to be her natural weapon as the light began to be choked out of the space.
He took a moment to study her in the low light, truly look and perceive her. He registered the most important fact first: the hair was hers, controlled. The hair that radiated from her scalp did not seem like it should be able to birth the multitude around them, looking little different from a regular person’s, tousled and shifting in the water. It was only further from her that it thickened and branched out.
She appeared to be a child of perhaps ten. He knew immediately she was not, knew it the way he had learned to know things since his death, without being able to source the knowing. Something in her stillness was wrong for ten years old. Patience was always acquired, never native.
He moved to details as she gently rose in the water, arms spread as she concentrated. Her eyes, wide open, had no visible distinction between iris and pupil, the whole surface shining with a uniform blueish-white glow, the color of Airgid’s reflection in water that was barely moving. Gathered at the outer corners of each eye, seven slits on each side, the skin between them dark and faintly raised. Her limbs were human in proportion but not in articulation. The joints permitted angles a human joint did not, and the way she settled into a coiled chair of hair that rose to meet her reminded him of harvestmen, the way they refolded their legs beneath them. Her hair now fanned outward like a dark corona as she directed the work.
What she wore was not clothing made for comfort or movement. Heavy canvas, the color of old bone, close-cut with reinforced seams at the shoulders and sides where the fabric would take the most strain. The closures ran up the front in tarnished iron buckles; several had worked loose, their straps drifting free in the current. At each wrist, a cuff designed to fasten to something. Both hung open.
She was ill. The thick canvas concealed her frame, moving slow and heavy in the current. Hollows or fullness, bone close to the surface or not, it gave nothing away. He fell back on what the cloth could not hide: the pallor at her hands and face where they emerged from the fabric, the deliberateness of her movements, the slight overcorrection of someone for whom motion carried a cost.
The makeshift hut was complete, and Le Maçon noticed that the girl had included an incandescent light source into the wall hair, placed deeper in the bundles of hair so that the light seeped in through the outer strands, its hue eerily matching the glow of her unnatural eyes as the water began to drain. Sorcery, in addition to whatever the hair was. Working with the water did not seem to tire her as much as attacking him with the hair had.
Two braids coiled up slowly from the ground, breaking through the descending surface with a small splash, working themselves into the shape of a chair. Le Maçon considered refusing, but found acceptance a better option. Better to present himself as both trusting and confident. He could shift himself again to move through the hairs if he needed to. The girl herself remained suspended above him, wrapping thick tufts of hair around her like a hanging throne. Or cocoon.
The girl seemed puzzled by his ease as he settled down. Water dripped around them, reminding Le Maçon of the cave systems back in a home that no longer existed.
“What are you?” the girl asked in her accented Amerelian, this time using her mouth, clearly uneasy. She is unused to negotiation not from a position of power, he heard himself think, uneasy with the thought. His head had never provided such insight before he died, as his failures as an ambassador could attest. Le Maçon could almost hear the voices of Montclair, though the hammer was not in hand. Calling, lending their insight.
“You may call me Le Maçon.”
Her reaction was visceral. She hissed, recoiling. Le Maçon felt the shift without water to carry it, a change in the air itself. The way a room changed when a hand moved toward a weapon.
“The Cannibal of Heldeberg! Do you invoke the name of the monster to threaten me?”
Heldeberg. That was what the Vatelet called Montclair, Le Maçon recalled.
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yolo. @falconius @hexlor
Here are my current thoughts about the Spider Queen in this chapter, obviously any and all of this is soft canon at best, change whatever you want:
- She’s from Vatelet (obv), she had a great uncle who had been part of the invading force who never returned. No one knows where he served, the Vatelet draft had been chaotic; I like the uncertainty and doubt around whether he ended up in the stew much more than definitively answering if he did or didn’t.
- There’s a reference to seven raised slits next to each eye. Those are additional spider eyes. She’s wrapped herself in hair (silk?) as a defense mechanism, both practically and emotionally; she is, at the end of the day, a tortured, lonely young person. Albeit also an unstable overly successful Magikar experiment, too.
- She was a natural Witch, hence why she was interest to the Magikar. I assume that she has a heavy affinity to water in the chapter: moving the hair tires her and makes her sick, draining the hut does not, and she also seems to be living underwater?
- The sickly appearance is due to her severely overtaxing herself creating way too much hair. It’s completely sapping her, but she doesn’t want to let it go.
- One reason she tells herself that she can’t let it go, and why she made it in the first place, is that she perceives herself as being hunted by her peers. Maybe she is, maybe she’s paranoid. Retreating to the bottom of the lake, where she has the natural advantages of her affinity to water (if that’s a thing) and overproducing the hair was her Flight response.
- I have no idea what her name is. I assume she’s in her early twenties.
Le Maçon is fairly invested in talking to her. She is the first sign of the Mageum experiments he’s been sent to find. He’ll do what he can not to harm her, including committing to not telling others that he knows of her, if it comes up. He may even be willing to help her, depending on what that entails. Although he would also be willing to kill her, if given sufficient reason.
I’m down to try and do some kind of chat to continue this, though I’d probably want to go back over it once it’s done and try to write it properly. I do still see this as primarily a story, and I’d like the flow for being able to go back and read it.
Writing this has also made me had a rather pedantic realization about languages in this world, I’ll try to write it up soon (probably when I should be doing something else, just like now).
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Straight fire! Very cool.
Except that now im required to think…
I dont think either really knows what the other is except that Le Macon is assuming she is one of the spider queens he was sent to meet? Are they even queens at this point? It sounds like you are setting this much earlier in the timeliness than I had assumed (meaning the border patrols might not even be formed, the Maugeum might not even have split from the empire yet, and the White Council is just still newly formed and hasnt built anything yet). -
Straight fire! Very cool.
Except that now im required to think…
I dont think either really knows what the other is except that Le Macon is assuming she is one of the spider queens he was sent to meet? Are they even queens at this point? It sounds like you are setting this much earlier in the timeliness than I had assumed (meaning the border patrols might not even be formed, the Maugeum might not even have split from the empire yet, and the White Council is just still newly formed and hasnt built anything yet).@Falconius Splitting this into two categories: what the SQ and Le Maçon know about each other and timeline reconciliation.
The first part is simple, and we’re basically on the same page afaict. Neither knows what the other is, though Le Maçon believes that she’s related to the ‘Mageum experiments’ that he’s supposed to make contact with. The Council had been very vague in the Intro chapter I wrote (which can ofc be changed as we figure more out), all he knows is that there’s a cohort of some kind of Mageum experimentation survivors here who may or may not even be alive.
In terms of timeline, I am interested in setting this well and early, within a few years or so of the SQ escaping. Looking at the timeline, my first choice would be ~890. That would mean that the Mageum would still be part of the Imperium (the Council of Trevea abolishes them in 957), and that the Yellow Guard has not yet been established (961). It’s even well before the SQ announce themselves to the world (941).
I don’t think the patrol in ch 4 would need to be changed. If anything, they may be some kind of precursor. The SQ landing in the region likely carried a number of developments: I’d assume individuals near the borders started disappearing, reports of strange ongoings would abound, and communication with groups of humans and human-likes would probably get largely cut off (or carry even more reports of the above). It would stand to reason that some kind of guard got established very early. Locals to the border regions likely tried getting the attention of the Imperium or somebody/anybody, but were probably completely ignored. (“Ah yes, another bumpkin has come to ask for an army because of strange noises in the woods at night.”)
If we are setting then, there is the potential that the Council and Venge learn of the SQ long before the Imperium does. (I’m assuming that the 941 date can be interpreted as when the Imperium (and Dantris, the Free Cities, etc) recognizes their existence, at least.) That doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.
fwiw, I feel like getting Le Maçon into the thick of the SQ establishing themselves is a good opportunity. I assume that it’s the War of the Roses in there, if the War of the Roses hadn’t been Yorks and Lancasters and had instead been a bunch of insane lab-grown apex predators. (Not quite as bad as the War of the Roses, in other words.)
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Thoughts before bedtime.
Questions she would like to ask:
- “You are a man, but you died, why are you walking?”
- “You ate my brother. At the time I never could comprehend it. Now, I understand. Why did you seek me out? Do you seek to consume me too?”
- “Do you know the men of the lake? What is their purpose? Why did they man the castle? It was empty for years.”
What I want to know:
- Does she know what happened to Amerele? Or was she in captivity all that time? Does she know who captured her? Does she know who experimented on her?
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Thoughts before bedtime.
Questions she would like to ask:
- “You are a man, but you died, why are you walking?”
- “You ate my brother. At the time I never could comprehend it. Now, I understand. Why did you seek me out? Do you seek to consume me too?”
- “Do you know the men of the lake? What is their purpose? Why did they man the castle? It was empty for years.”
What I want to know:
- Does she know what happened to Amerele? Or was she in captivity all that time? Does she know who captured her? Does she know who experimented on her?
I’ll write brief answers to convey direction, as opposed to actual prose, just to make this easier to read.
Questions she would like to ask:
“You are a man, but you died, why are you walking?”
Brow furrows. “I’m not entirely sure yet.” Pause. “I think there is yet work for us to do.”
“You ate my brother. At the time I never could comprehend it. Now, I understand. Why did you seek me out? Do you seek to consume me too?”
“No.” Thinks for a moment. “And I doubt I ate your brother, unless you are far older than you appear. But if you lost family there, I am sorry for your loss.”
“Do you know the men of the lake? What is their purpose? Why did they man the castle? It was empty for years.”
“I saw them from a distance and avoided them. I do not know their purpose, and suspect you might know more than I. Would you share with me what happened to you, your story? We might reason about what the men are scared of.”
What I want to know:
Does she know what happened to Amerele? Or was she in captivity all that time? Does she know who captured her? Does she know who experimented on her?
If we’re in ~890, I find it unlikely that she doesn’t know that Amerele was destroyed - it was close to 100 years ago, and she’s from a neighboring locale. I think that also answers the captivity question - I’m assuming she’s in her early twenties or so.
For the last two questions, I’d assumed the answer is yes, but don’t have the most set opinion over there. Even if she wouldn’t know it’s the Mageum per se, I’m assuming she’d have some knowledge, such as she was one of many captive women, that the captors were a group of human magic users experimenting on them, etc. My assumption was that it wouldn’t be altogether hard to connect that to the Mageum anyway. Feel free to disagree.
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We can move the dates around if need be. If she was captured durring the war then she would also be 10 years older or there abouts. She might have been captured after, born in captivity, or stuck in a vat for much of that time.
We can move the dates around if need be. If she was captured durring the war then she would also be 10 years older or there abouts. She might have been captured after, born in captivity, or stuck in a vat for much of that time.
I’m fine either way. My headcanon had been that she was only recently (~10 years?) grabbed, which is why I defaulted to it being a great uncle who had served above. I’m also fine with her being ~100 and having been alive when Amerele fell, rounded up at the same time. She’d probably still know that Amerele had fallen from her fellow captives. I’d imagine more than a few were Amerilian.
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Well because you set her from Vatelet, I think it’s kind of interesting the idea that the Majikar use this protectorate as a procuring ground both before, during, and after the war until they just eventually ‘mine’ it dry and the country collapses into a wasteland. But I’m assuming that Vatelet did eventually collapse somewhat before the events that we are writing about occur, so she could be from there. I dont see why she would be particularly horrified by the Cannibal of Heldgburg (I have a different suffix for our world, and different toponyms, but I have to decipher what they are from the map, so I’ll return to this name in the future), if she was not in some way personally affected or at least present at the time when it occured. That is why I made the leap to a loved one dying there.
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yolo. @falconius @hexlor
Here are my current thoughts about the Spider Queen in this chapter, obviously any and all of this is soft canon at best, change whatever you want:
- She’s from Vatelet (obv), she had a great uncle who had been part of the invading force who never returned. No one knows where he served, the Vatelet draft had been chaotic; I like the uncertainty and doubt around whether he ended up in the stew much more than definitively answering if he did or didn’t.
- There’s a reference to seven raised slits next to each eye. Those are additional spider eyes. She’s wrapped herself in hair (silk?) as a defense mechanism, both practically and emotionally; she is, at the end of the day, a tortured, lonely young person. Albeit also an unstable overly successful Magikar experiment, too.
- She was a natural Witch, hence why she was interest to the Magikar. I assume that she has a heavy affinity to water in the chapter: moving the hair tires her and makes her sick, draining the hut does not, and she also seems to be living underwater?
- The sickly appearance is due to her severely overtaxing herself creating way too much hair. It’s completely sapping her, but she doesn’t want to let it go.
- One reason she tells herself that she can’t let it go, and why she made it in the first place, is that she perceives herself as being hunted by her peers. Maybe she is, maybe she’s paranoid. Retreating to the bottom of the lake, where she has the natural advantages of her affinity to water (if that’s a thing) and overproducing the hair was her Flight response.
- I have no idea what her name is. I assume she’s in her early twenties.
Le Maçon is fairly invested in talking to her. She is the first sign of the Mageum experiments he’s been sent to find. He’ll do what he can not to harm her, including committing to not telling others that he knows of her, if it comes up. He may even be willing to help her, depending on what that entails. Although he would also be willing to kill her, if given sufficient reason.
I’m down to try and do some kind of chat to continue this, though I’d probably want to go back over it once it’s done and try to write it properly. I do still see this as primarily a story, and I’d like the flow for being able to go back and read it.
Writing this has also made me had a rather pedantic realization about languages in this world, I’ll try to write it up soon (probably when I should be doing something else, just like now).
That is why I made the leap to a loved one dying there.
I’d made a similar leap:
Quint said:
she had a great uncle who had been part of the invading force who never returned. No one knows where he served, the Vatelet draft had been chaotic; I like the uncertainty and doubt around whether he ended up in the stew much more than definitively answering if he did or didn’t.
I know it’s hard to keep all the details straight, they can be living anywhere. Jacob’s needed to correct me on continuity issues a bunch, and this was kinda hiding in a footnote. I’m still open to her being older. Even with my younger framing, I’m beginning to think that I was putting her too young at early twenties - I think more reasonable would be that she was captured in her early teens to young twenties, and then escaped with the rest (circa 884). That would still keep her on the younger end; she’d probably be somewhere close to 30, potentially on either side of it, if we’re in the 890s.
I do also assume that Le Maçon as “The Cannibal” was a bit of a bogeyman, parents would scare kids into bed about ending up in his cauldron, etc.
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That is why I made the leap to a loved one dying there.
I’d made a similar leap:
Quint said:
she had a great uncle who had been part of the invading force who never returned. No one knows where he served, the Vatelet draft had been chaotic; I like the uncertainty and doubt around whether he ended up in the stew much more than definitively answering if he did or didn’t.
I know it’s hard to keep all the details straight, they can be living anywhere. Jacob’s needed to correct me on continuity issues a bunch, and this was kinda hiding in a footnote. I’m still open to her being older. Even with my younger framing, I’m beginning to think that I was putting her too young at early twenties - I think more reasonable would be that she was captured in her early teens to young twenties, and then escaped with the rest (circa 884). That would still keep her on the younger end; she’d probably be somewhere close to 30, potentially on either side of it, if we’re in the 890s.
I do also assume that Le Maçon as “The Cannibal” was a bit of a bogeyman, parents would scare kids into bed about ending up in his cauldron, etc.
she had a great uncle who had been part of the invading force who never returned. No one knows where he served, the Vatelet draft had been chaotic; I like the uncertainty and doubt around whether he ended up in the stew much more than definitively answering if he did or didn’t.
It’s not normal to be viscerally horrified by some great uncle you’ve never met dying before you were born. Whatever the nature of their death. It’s just too far removed. ie there needs to have been an actual relationship. Not just a theoretical one.
I do also assume that Le Maçon as “The Cannibal” was a bit of a bogeyman, parents would scare kids into bed about ending up in his cauldron, etc.
Maybe. But this is a world with actual non human monsters.
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I think I’ve got a plan of how to continue this!
ok cool. In terms of of the convo imho you could:
- You could just write it on your own
- We could mock out more of the conversation
- I could make a pass after you’ve written to do Le Maçon’s lines
Whatever you’d like
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5
Le Maçon remained kneeling in the shallows, one with the nocturnal stillness and lack of life. Airgid, ‘Silver Fruit’ in the elven tongue, was full in the sky, but her light barely penetrated the lake. He looked for Corcra, the second moon the Elder Race said existed for those with eyes to see it, small and violet.
Nothing.
He set aside whether that meant Corcra was merely legend, or whether he still lacked the gifts required.
The Council had doubted that Venge could truly die. Perhaps with great investiture of magic, they had said, but even then, more chance than not that the individual returns, though perhaps years later. The Council were certainly not all-knowing, but Le Maçon had discovered in his short time in his former home that they were among the most knowledgeable about this new existence he and some of his former countrymen now lived.
If they were correct, there was nothing here to fear. He was just one more dead thing in a dead landscape.
Rising, he waded into the water.
He felt nothing different when the water covered his face. No panic, no straining of organs from lack of air. He stood submerged and waited to see if anything would change. Nothing did.
Le Maçon kept an eye on the silken hair. It moved with the eerie, ghost-like motion that hair takes underwater, but no more. He had noticed cliff faces in the lake, the bed plunging down into an inky void made darker by night. The hair followed, impossibly long, diving off the underwater wall into the unknowns beyond.
Without the light of the moon, and with his newfound Veil Sight finding naught, Le Maçon knew his path lay forward here in the water, to see what aberration lay in its heart. To approach with no ability to see was still foolish, even if he might lack the ability to die again.
Le Maçon proceeded to the edge of the underwater wall, and waited for daylight, standing there. Hours passed uneventfully. It was peaceful.
The sun rose, the depths giving nothing back to her rays. Le Maçon determined that the light was still enough to proceed. He seemed to still be bound by the familiar concepts such as eyes adjusting to the dark, and felt confident that he would not be completely blind at the depth of even a deep lake. He moved forward.
The hair was a potential handhold, a rope to lower himself by, but Le Maçon was immediately averse to the very idea. The hair belonged to something, and whatever produced it was certainly the reason the whole lake stood devoid of life.
He stepped off the edge and descended without falling, no lurch in the stomach, no instinct to grasp. Just the slow translation downward, water displacing around his form in terms he processed as pressure differentials rather than sensation.
The light from above did not so much fail as become a shrinking quantity. He could indeed still see. He cataloged the fact without relief.
The walls were glacially polished granite, smooth enough to look quarried, but crossed with parallel striations left by ice that had gone eons before. Iron staining striped the rock in rust-orange; calcite had crusted white at the seams. No moss. No weed. The lake bed was pale gray silt, fine as ash, and the boulders that rested on it were the wrong rock entirely, granite erratics set down by the glacier and left there, mismatched and inert.
He landed silently on the bed of the lake. His ghostly form kicked up no silt. He merely arrived.
The world had reduced to gradients of black and gray, the faint geometry of the lake bed assembling itself below him out of sheer proximity. No fish. No vegetation clinging to the rock. No current. The absence of anything other than the hair pressed in as its own kind of knowledge. He had surveyed ruins before. This felt similar.
The hair was the only detail to note.
Near the surface, the silky black fibers had been no thicker than human hair. Here they were thicker than a wrist, corded together the way Traveler’s Joy roped itself around old stonework, occupying every gap. What manner of strange beast might have produced it? Le Maçon traced with his eyes, trying to see if there was a locus point they converged on, and that was when he felt it, a pulse of energy. Something stirred.
Something alive.
Voices deep inside him stilled with the tension of anticipation.
His alertness sharpened, and he began to detect movement in the hairs, more than just the way they were carried by the water. There was intent in their movement now, and Le Maçon did not think it his imagination that the intent was violent. He readied himself, opening himself to his senses as he still used his eyes to take survey of his surroundings.
From behind him came a coil of the hairs, lashing towards him like a whip. Easily predicted, not hard to sidestep. Le Maçon felt a response of pure hatred and frustration ripple through the water as the coil passed him by. Le Maçon saw that more of the hair was becoming increasingly animate, and knew that he would not be able to keep himself from the path of all of them. He considered his options as he watched some of the larger braids shift into movement.
Le Maçon knew he was no longer the human he once was. Even if he thought of his speech as something that originated from inside him and emanated from his mouth, he knew it was no longer so. If he could walk underwater without breathing, likely he could talk without speaking.
He did not know if whatever was here could hear him, or if the words were merely formed in his own mind. If it could hear, was the creature even intelligent enough for conversation? Whatever aquatic mammoth was responsible for this could be animal in nature. Conversely, if it was related to the Mageum experiments he pursued, there was much to be gained. Le Maçon reasoned that nothing was lost in an attempt to communicate.
“I would speak with you as one stranger to another.” The hair continued to ripple and furl.
A disturbance in the water behind him caused him to look back in time to see a whip of hair slashing through the water towards him. Le Maçon’s reaction happened at the speed of instinct. There was not enough time to remove himself from the path of the braid. Nor was he particularly interested in discovering if the hair was constructed of the kind of magic that the Council had thought might be able to kill he and his fellow Returned. Without knowing how, Le Maçon made himself less. There, but not. He felt his essence pull inwards towards itself, fading like a vague figure walking away in a rainstorm. The improvised whip passed through him without touching him, streaking forward into the gloom of the lake bed. He felt himself return, once again fully present.
He felt rage ripple through the water, but with another emotion underneath. Despair, perhaps? It was a feeling he associated with the sick and dying.
The hair flailed. Le Maçon readied himself for another attack, but none came. The movements from the hair slowed, less aggressive. Le Maçon considered. The creature was facing an interloper that they likely could not categorize. They were ill. How long could they direct the hair before they lost all stamina? Le Maçon felt the chorus inside him rise, smelling weakness. He quieted them before he could make out the words. He would not use violence unless no other option presented itself. He could already feel the creature’s uncertainty in the water.
The water seemed still as the hair calmed further. Le Maçon stood stationary. The hair began to unfurl slowly from the larger clusters ahead.
He could make out a child, a young girl. A far cry from the shambling, shaggy creatures he had expected. Puzzled if this was a vision, hallucination, or a sorcerer’s illusion, Le Maçon held his ground. Her words moved through the water without her mouth moving, much as Le Maçon imagined his own had before.
“We could try talking, then.” First spoken in another language, then in Amerelian. It took Le Maçon a moment to place the first, a dialect of Hannish, maybe Vatelet.
Le Maçon nodded slowly.
The hair rippled again, and while Le Maçon remained alert, he gave the girl the benefit of the doubt. Coils snaked around them, far slower than before, forming a cone-like structure. Le Maçon was aware that he was in a more vulnerable position now, surrounded as he was by what seemed to be her natural weapon as the light began to be choked out of the space.
He took a moment to study her in the low light, truly look and perceive her. He registered the most important fact first: the hair was hers, controlled. The hair that radiated from her scalp did not seem like it should be able to birth the multitude around them, looking little different from a regular person’s, tousled and shifting in the water. It was only further from her that it thickened and branched out.
She appeared to be a child of perhaps ten. He knew immediately she was not, knew it the way he had learned to know things since his death, without being able to source the knowing. Something in her stillness was wrong for ten years old. Patience was always acquired, never native.
He moved to details as she gently rose in the water, arms spread as she concentrated. Her eyes, wide open, had no visible distinction between iris and pupil, the whole surface shining with a uniform blueish-white glow, the color of Airgid’s reflection in water that was barely moving. Gathered at the outer corners of each eye, seven slits on each side, the skin between them dark and faintly raised. Her limbs were human in proportion but not in articulation. The joints permitted angles a human joint did not, and the way she settled into a coiled chair of hair that rose to meet her reminded him of harvestmen, the way they refolded their legs beneath them. Her hair now fanned outward like a dark corona as she directed the work.
What she wore was not clothing made for comfort or movement. Heavy canvas, the color of old bone, close-cut with reinforced seams at the shoulders and sides where the fabric would take the most strain. The closures ran up the front in tarnished iron buckles; several had worked loose, their straps drifting free in the current. At each wrist, a cuff designed to fasten to something. Both hung open.
She was ill. The thick canvas concealed her frame, moving slow and heavy in the current. Hollows or fullness, bone close to the surface or not, it gave nothing away. He fell back on what the cloth could not hide: the pallor at her hands and face where they emerged from the fabric, the deliberateness of her movements, the slight overcorrection of someone for whom motion carried a cost.
The makeshift hut was complete, and Le Maçon noticed that the girl had included an incandescent light source into the wall hair, placed deeper in the bundles of hair so that the light seeped in through the outer strands, its hue eerily matching the glow of her unnatural eyes as the water began to drain. Sorcery, in addition to whatever the hair was. Working with the water did not seem to tire her as much as attacking him with the hair had.
Two braids coiled up slowly from the ground, breaking through the descending surface with a small splash, working themselves into the shape of a chair. Le Maçon considered refusing, but found acceptance a better option. Better to present himself as both trusting and confident. He could shift himself again to move through the hairs if he needed to. The girl herself remained suspended above him, wrapping thick tufts of hair around her like a hanging throne. Or cocoon.
The girl seemed puzzled by his ease as he settled down. Water dripped around them, reminding Le Maçon of the cave systems back in a home that no longer existed.
“What are you?” the girl asked in her accented Amerelian, this time using her mouth, clearly uneasy. She is unused to negotiation not from a position of power, he heard himself think, uneasy with the thought. His head had never provided such insight before he died, as his failures as an ambassador could attest. Le Maçon could almost hear the voices of Montclair, though the hammer was not in hand. Calling, lending their insight.
“You may call me Le Maçon.”
Her reaction was visceral. She hissed, recoiling. Le Maçon felt the shift without water to carry it, a change in the air itself. The way a room changed when a hand moved toward a weapon.
“The Cannibal of Heldeberg! Do you invoke the name of the monster to threaten me?”
Heldeberg. That was what the Vatelet called Montclair, Le Maçon recalled.
@Quint I like the whole setting of Le Macon marching along and waiting around on the bottom of the lake. You made the hair thing a much more vital element than I was expecting!
In the notes you theorized why she’s hanging out in the lake, and that she’s afraid that people may still be looking for her. If a young witch had escaped the Magikar and made it to perceived safety, only to then be accused of witchcraft, tied to a stone and flung into a lake to see if she floats - I think if she floated she’d be guilty of witchcraft. So, suggesting that she’s been hiding out in the lake since her trial by water.
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