Post by boosette on Mar 13, 2009 9:26:56 GMT 10
Title: Fine Nighttime Logicians.
Author: boosette
Summary: The thing Rikash hates most about being dead is being bored, so he decides to do something to remedy the situation. The bored part, rather than the dead part.
Rating: G
Genre: Snark
Series: Tortall, Immortals.
Warnings: After-deathfic?
Author's Notes: Originally written for Senri at Yuletide, 12/24/08.
They say immortals were born from the dreams of men. That they came into existence with the right roll from the Hag's dice-cup, three painted knucklebones turning up with the power of man's belief, gods' folly and world's need to create creatures like himself.
That transmundane they also say the dead shall stay aground, because that always works out so beautifully.
He's seen a few Kudarung in the peaceful realms of late, seemings of bodies riddled with arrow-holes before they flicker back to wholeness at the dark god's hand. Rikash never did put much stock in the words or belief of a crowd. Humans being too bound by their short lives and gods too constrained by their eternal existence and distance from the realities they govern. There's a thin border between death and dream, though, and Rikash thinks there might be something to the old stories - thinks there might be, and takes the Black God's given opportunity, his cowled back turned, to sneak a little fun. He didn't wait four hundred years locked away to be relegated to the mandatory rest of elysian vacation half a breath after getting out.
Nobody, after all, misses a Stormwing.
Rikash has never been to the Realm of Chaos, and he would just as soon never visit. Having his physical being broken apart is one thing, the pain of death passing; having his spirit being dismantled and reassembled into something resembling a flickering puddle of oil (one moment) or a pile of self-molding, color-shifting clay (the next one), makes his human-skinned parts crawl in the manner of the mortals who feared Stormwings into existence. Gainel's realm is as close to Chaos as anyone from this side of the divide can get without succumbing to Uuosoae's hypnotism, and it's about as simple to navigate.
His last visit, Rikash remembers with a shudder, he was discovered and returned to his proper residence in the peaceful realm.
The thing they never talk about is how thoroughly boredom is wedded to peace.
Soldiers' dreams are easy, but banal. They go to battle and fall, while he circles above, or they don't and their friends do. Here Rikash sparkles clean as a cat and he shakes his hair back, bones clacking hollowly against one another. Finger bones and knucklebones, the flesh long ago rotted and dropped off of them. Soldiers' dreams bore him as much as his rest does. Despite or because of this he has a roll in aftermath of the not-battles, sups on the smell and the taste of soldiers' nightmares and moves on, a little grimier and a little more comfortable in his own dream-skin. Who ever heard of a clean Stormwing? He could have run his fingers through his hair, root to tip, and had his hands come out smelling of soap and spices.
If he'd had fingers instead of wings. His magic is still red-and-gold, the fire born of battle terror, wrought in a haze and tempered in grief. Rikash cracks a smile and wheels up, through a layer of clouds, through a flash of volcanic heat that washes off the last dream's work and leaves him hungry again.
He flies through the dreams of the King's Own. Others' dreams mean others' dream-logic; Rikash plays by his own rules or not at all.
Takes him half the night to find the place, but Rikash does. Maybe his presence helped build it, but he isn't one of Gainel's minions and wouldn't take that job for all the life in the world. The perch outside Weiryn's cottage is as he left it, save deserted, the world around it painted gray and soft where it fades to black instead of forest. He can smell the badger god on the air, no wind around to carry it away, but fading nonetheless.
Rikash alights and waits, calls out, "I know you're around somewhere! Or have you regained your rightful fear of Stormwings like a proper human?"
It's not even his dream and Veralidaine still manages to look like smoke, wafting into his frame of vision as if she lacks feet. Rikash shifts from foot to foot, ruffles steel feathers to shing against one another like knives in a honing steel. He'd have been born a butcher, if Rikash had to choose a mortal life over the one he has been given - the one he used to have.
"You," he says as the girl circles him and takes her seat atop a rough oak table that wasn't there before. She's barefoot, dressed in a cream gown shot through with copper threads, eyes bright blue and hair wild. Filled out since the last time Rikash saw her. "Have hardened rather a lot around the edges," he finishes.
Veralidaine smiles, small and soft, a child's grin or a mother's. She replies, "And you've taken up bathing, I see. Didn't know you had it in you."
The Stormwing ruffles again, and he can see the shiver it draws out in his human companion. He draws his lips back in a steel-toothed mockery of a friendly greeting. He has some dignity left, after all.
There's a pause, soundless, as Veralidaine's eyes travel the length and breadth of his body, as if she's trying to decide whether or not Rikash is real. A moment later she grins in earnest and not long after he follows into a laugh - the first real laugh Rikash has had since his unfortunate demise.
"Immortals may be next best to gods," he says humbly, "but this kind of cleanliness is nothing shy of a curse." He flexes each of his feet; this world is so much more real than his restful prison.
"Feeling naked without your protective shell of filth? It's good to see you again; Mithros, Mynoss and Shakith all help me, but I've actually missed you."
"Truly, I'm being punished," he replies. The girl huffs, her shoulders tensing before she relaxes. Not so much a girl anymore, and he's reminded how differently time passes in the mortal realms than in any of the others. In the blink of an Immortal's eye entire human empires rise and fall.
With the quirk of an eyebrow she assumes one of the mage's expressions, and it doesn't look at all out of place aligned as it is on her features. "Being punished with my company, or with soap?"
Rikash gives his best enigmatic look. Tt's not for mortals to know the intent behind his double-spoken words; he would not have come to visit if he didn't think he'd find entertainment. Of a kind.
True to form, Veralidaine ruins his perfectly constructed moment. "Don't you look like a Ozorne's puffiest cockatoo. There's enough smug about you for a dynasty of emperors."
"Among the individuals present at this time and place, only one has found a workaround for death itself."
"Smug," she replies almost dismissively. Then, with a lead-heavy tone, "If you had found a way back, I would have felt something."
"Something wrong?" Rikash suggests.
"Something strange. Noticible. Folk don't just walk out of the peaceful realms, and," with levity and a handwaved gesture at the cottage, now washed in a thin gold light and going soft 'round the edges with wakefulness, "my parents' home is scarcely a few minutes walk outside Corus, if you take my meaning, Lord Moonsword."
"Mortals," he scoffs, and feels a pull at the back of his neck, chances a glance back over his left shoulder. "So very narrow-minded."
Gainel stands in the doorway, looking entirely too petulant for a greater god. Veralidaine calls a greeting to him, and the dream god returns it with a pale-handed wave.
He takes off with a flip of his tail, hovers midair for a few extra seconds. Before he wings into the black of the door he calls back, "I didn't walk from the peaceful realms! I flew!"
Author: boosette
Summary: The thing Rikash hates most about being dead is being bored, so he decides to do something to remedy the situation. The bored part, rather than the dead part.
Rating: G
Genre: Snark
Series: Tortall, Immortals.
Warnings: After-deathfic?
Author's Notes: Originally written for Senri at Yuletide, 12/24/08.
*
They say immortals were born from the dreams of men. That they came into existence with the right roll from the Hag's dice-cup, three painted knucklebones turning up with the power of man's belief, gods' folly and world's need to create creatures like himself.
*
That transmundane they also say the dead shall stay aground, because that always works out so beautifully.
He's seen a few Kudarung in the peaceful realms of late, seemings of bodies riddled with arrow-holes before they flicker back to wholeness at the dark god's hand. Rikash never did put much stock in the words or belief of a crowd. Humans being too bound by their short lives and gods too constrained by their eternal existence and distance from the realities they govern. There's a thin border between death and dream, though, and Rikash thinks there might be something to the old stories - thinks there might be, and takes the Black God's given opportunity, his cowled back turned, to sneak a little fun. He didn't wait four hundred years locked away to be relegated to the mandatory rest of elysian vacation half a breath after getting out.
Nobody, after all, misses a Stormwing.
*
Rikash has never been to the Realm of Chaos, and he would just as soon never visit. Having his physical being broken apart is one thing, the pain of death passing; having his spirit being dismantled and reassembled into something resembling a flickering puddle of oil (one moment) or a pile of self-molding, color-shifting clay (the next one), makes his human-skinned parts crawl in the manner of the mortals who feared Stormwings into existence. Gainel's realm is as close to Chaos as anyone from this side of the divide can get without succumbing to Uuosoae's hypnotism, and it's about as simple to navigate.
His last visit, Rikash remembers with a shudder, he was discovered and returned to his proper residence in the peaceful realm.
The thing they never talk about is how thoroughly boredom is wedded to peace.
*
Soldiers' dreams are easy, but banal. They go to battle and fall, while he circles above, or they don't and their friends do. Here Rikash sparkles clean as a cat and he shakes his hair back, bones clacking hollowly against one another. Finger bones and knucklebones, the flesh long ago rotted and dropped off of them. Soldiers' dreams bore him as much as his rest does. Despite or because of this he has a roll in aftermath of the not-battles, sups on the smell and the taste of soldiers' nightmares and moves on, a little grimier and a little more comfortable in his own dream-skin. Who ever heard of a clean Stormwing? He could have run his fingers through his hair, root to tip, and had his hands come out smelling of soap and spices.
If he'd had fingers instead of wings. His magic is still red-and-gold, the fire born of battle terror, wrought in a haze and tempered in grief. Rikash cracks a smile and wheels up, through a layer of clouds, through a flash of volcanic heat that washes off the last dream's work and leaves him hungry again.
*
He flies through the dreams of the King's Own. Others' dreams mean others' dream-logic; Rikash plays by his own rules or not at all.
*
Takes him half the night to find the place, but Rikash does. Maybe his presence helped build it, but he isn't one of Gainel's minions and wouldn't take that job for all the life in the world. The perch outside Weiryn's cottage is as he left it, save deserted, the world around it painted gray and soft where it fades to black instead of forest. He can smell the badger god on the air, no wind around to carry it away, but fading nonetheless.
Rikash alights and waits, calls out, "I know you're around somewhere! Or have you regained your rightful fear of Stormwings like a proper human?"
It's not even his dream and Veralidaine still manages to look like smoke, wafting into his frame of vision as if she lacks feet. Rikash shifts from foot to foot, ruffles steel feathers to shing against one another like knives in a honing steel. He'd have been born a butcher, if Rikash had to choose a mortal life over the one he has been given - the one he used to have.
"You," he says as the girl circles him and takes her seat atop a rough oak table that wasn't there before. She's barefoot, dressed in a cream gown shot through with copper threads, eyes bright blue and hair wild. Filled out since the last time Rikash saw her. "Have hardened rather a lot around the edges," he finishes.
Veralidaine smiles, small and soft, a child's grin or a mother's. She replies, "And you've taken up bathing, I see. Didn't know you had it in you."
The Stormwing ruffles again, and he can see the shiver it draws out in his human companion. He draws his lips back in a steel-toothed mockery of a friendly greeting. He has some dignity left, after all.
There's a pause, soundless, as Veralidaine's eyes travel the length and breadth of his body, as if she's trying to decide whether or not Rikash is real. A moment later she grins in earnest and not long after he follows into a laugh - the first real laugh Rikash has had since his unfortunate demise.
"Immortals may be next best to gods," he says humbly, "but this kind of cleanliness is nothing shy of a curse." He flexes each of his feet; this world is so much more real than his restful prison.
"Feeling naked without your protective shell of filth? It's good to see you again; Mithros, Mynoss and Shakith all help me, but I've actually missed you."
"Truly, I'm being punished," he replies. The girl huffs, her shoulders tensing before she relaxes. Not so much a girl anymore, and he's reminded how differently time passes in the mortal realms than in any of the others. In the blink of an Immortal's eye entire human empires rise and fall.
With the quirk of an eyebrow she assumes one of the mage's expressions, and it doesn't look at all out of place aligned as it is on her features. "Being punished with my company, or with soap?"
Rikash gives his best enigmatic look. Tt's not for mortals to know the intent behind his double-spoken words; he would not have come to visit if he didn't think he'd find entertainment. Of a kind.
True to form, Veralidaine ruins his perfectly constructed moment. "Don't you look like a Ozorne's puffiest cockatoo. There's enough smug about you for a dynasty of emperors."
"Among the individuals present at this time and place, only one has found a workaround for death itself."
"Smug," she replies almost dismissively. Then, with a lead-heavy tone, "If you had found a way back, I would have felt something."
"Something wrong?" Rikash suggests.
"Something strange. Noticible. Folk don't just walk out of the peaceful realms, and," with levity and a handwaved gesture at the cottage, now washed in a thin gold light and going soft 'round the edges with wakefulness, "my parents' home is scarcely a few minutes walk outside Corus, if you take my meaning, Lord Moonsword."
"Mortals," he scoffs, and feels a pull at the back of his neck, chances a glance back over his left shoulder. "So very narrow-minded."
Gainel stands in the doorway, looking entirely too petulant for a greater god. Veralidaine calls a greeting to him, and the dream god returns it with a pale-handed wave.
He takes off with a flip of his tail, hovers midair for a few extra seconds. Before he wings into the black of the door he calls back, "I didn't walk from the peaceful realms! I flew!"