It had been two standard years since her brother ran away. She’d followed him as far as she dared – further from her city than she had ever been. Straps and buckles jangled about her – the remnants of her travel packs that she had discarded and traded along her wilderness journey between the civilized outposts of Ghyran. Her brother had become almost an obsession for her – not entirely because he disappeared, but also because he did what she could not. He got away from the grueling city, got away from their awful, malfunctioning family. He got away from it all.
Meanwhile, she toiled. She worked and slaved and broke her back for both family and the Greywater Fastness, serving the needs of tribe and state. She hadn’t the strength to leave – fear and love together bound her to her life. But now? Well, she’d done it. Accumulated enough supplies and money to travel in her brother’s footsteps, and she set out on her course long ago.
Here is where she hesitated, finally. Before the yawing, warbling maw of that realmgate. She’d seen Realmgates before, but this one seemed… different somehow. Like it was both more and less than it should be. Now and again, the swirling miasma within the confines of the stone ring would seem to resolve an image into focus… a dark sky above darker towers, a boiling, shimmering purple fog. In glimpses, it even seemed like a featureless porcelain mask stared out at her as though through a window. Shuddering, she crouched and began to watch it, intending to see what – if anything – came out before deciding whether to go onward.
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Aethelwyn ascended the black, glossy, obsidian-like staircase with elven grace, her entire being attuned to awareness of its surroundings. The alleyways of the Black City were notorious for the number of disappearances that occurred there, but so far she slipped forwards unmolested. She struggled to remember why she had come here, to the dim city behind the ominous gateway. Running her thoughts through her memories felt like running her open fingers through dry sand – she came away with nothing but a few grains. Aethelwyn was her name, but why was she here? Where did she come from? She scratched at her long, graceful, pointed ear, and wondered.
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I have been here for five days. Or was it… six months? I can’t remember. My cell had shifted again overnight – or… over time, while I was unconscious. I can tell, partly because it always did, and partly because I am now on the hard floor rather than the soft straw I’d retired to. What time was it? Morning? What is morning in this place? I don’t know any more. Six months. Five days. One year? Five months, six years, one day… I can’t recall, so I give up.
I look up, opening my eyes. The window, this time, is right above me, and barless. Barless! That had never happened before – the black, obsidian marble of my cell had never permitted an unbarred opening before. I look down, then, for the door… totally gone. That was more typical. Then, a scratching sound – whiteness against blackness – another is here!
A gaunt figure huddles in the far corner of the cell, trembling. “What is your name?” I call, briefly annoyed that I can’t remember my own. “H-H-Hildred C-Castaigne, I think…” came the reply, masculine but fearful. I rise then, taking a deep breath. “Hildred.” I say. It came out more like Hil-dread and I became startled at my inability to control my lilt. “What are you in for?” A reflexive greeting.
“I… can’t remember.” He offers, genuinely. I sigh. “That’s how it is with the Repairers of Reputations. They come for you, but never say why.” The word echoes in my mind, like one spoken so many times that it loses all meaning. Why why why why why why why why why why wy wy wy wy wy wy wy wy y y y y y y y y. My musing is abruptly interrupted by Hildred standing. “What kind of trick is this?” he asks, staring daggers at me. I shrug at him. “What do you mean? We’re prisoners together. I’m….” I begin. I grow confused and angry. “I’m…” My memory fails me; I am overwhelmed with sensations. Black stone, black stars, black doings. Yellow, too. Decadence, revelry… sickness. Beauty? A pale mask. My anger fades.
“I’m the sound of scalloped tatters flapping against black stone.” I conclude, interrupting whatever Mr. Castaigne was about to say. He pales, but I can’t stop myself from elaborating. “I’m the sound of tearing fabric and the moans of … passion.” I try to mimic the noises, but it is pathetic. He collapses back to a curled up ball, staring at me with wide eyes. The irises are black. Always black. Everything is black, except the sky, which is only dark.
“S-stay away from me.” Hildred intones. I laugh, though there is no sound, which briefly strikes me with its oddness before I am again overwhelmed. “I just want to work together.” I say. “I need a Mask.” I add. Hildred’s eyes widen further, as if they’re about to burst from his skull. He points at my face, offensively.
“It’s rude to point!” I say, even as my hands come up to feel my face. Smooth porcelain… I remember. It all comes back. My name is – and I – and the Repairers – but the Queen – and the Mantle – she… OH GODS!
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Her brother was dead, she knew it in her heart. Something beyond the gateway had happened, and it was like a thread was cut. She had always felt that tug, that pull, that obsession within her. It was gone now, though, and she felt a profound emptiness. She’d left everything behind, and now everything forwards was gone as well. The sensation felt like a hollow inside of her, an emptiness, a vacuous space. She sank to her knees before the great gateway, and wept.
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Aethelwyn startled, nearly jumping out of her skin. She pirouetted aside just in time as a body slammed into the ground where she had been standing. She blanched with fear and scurried away, peering at it only when safe inside one of the Black City’s dark, carven nooks. A man. She knew at once who it was – Castaigne, he had said his name was. They’d met at the great camp just inside the Gateway but outside the City. Though his dress and tongue were foreign, it had been clear enough when he gestured to himself and said “Castaigne.” Such pathetic animals, humans seemed to her at times. Even as she fled the breaking of her world among the emptiness between the stars, she’d never thought she’d meet a human and learn its name…
She remembered, then. It was almost like she remembered because she wasn’t trying to, this time. A world breaking in the void, a shattering. Entering a different gateway – she knew it as ‘Webway’ from some slippery psychic ghost in her thoughts – she had escaped the breaking world. But how had she gotten to this place? How had she met this Castaigne? And why was he dead?
Such thoughts bid her return to the present, and she looked up. She spotted an unbarred window many stories up, and a second Castaigne peered out! He looked identical to the first, save the features that were as smooth and shiny as porcelain. She shuddered and looked back to the body, unwilling to even put her mind to understanding such things. “Goodbye, Castaigne.” she murmured, and backed away from the corpse as the black stone beneath it shone like obsidian.
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I saw her. The… creature. She looked like one of the Citadel dancers that I used to enjoy watching. Lithe, swift, with pointy ears and large eyes. This one was both more and less beautiful – not as intensely physically attractive as the dancers, but there was a certain gravity about her, as if my psyche were reaching for hers when our eyes briefly met.
Still, I turn away from the window, forgetting myself and her immediately. Window? I turn back, forgetting that too – and there’s no window. It’s a relief, as to forget something that only just happened would be disturbing indeed. But I can rest well, knowing that I am still sane despite my long incarceration…
… long indeed, I think, as I lay down for my first night in the cell. I dream of coiled moons, black stars, yellow tatters, dark revelries. I dream, too, of defenestration, annoyingly. I miss the earlier nights in the cell – the ones before my first – as my mind fades into a deep sleep.
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The emptiness only swelled, only grew, as she cried. Like a spurned supplicant, she buried her knees in the ground with each sobbing shudder before the shimmering portal. The void inside her expanded: not only did she have no way ahead and no way back, but she had nothing now, as well – the empty straps and buckles dangling from her told a silent testament to the deprivation that doomed her. Better, perhaps, to end it now, than to persist and let Ghyran take her through starvation or predation… but even as this thought struck her, it was followed by a familiar voice, singing an unfamiliar song:
Why do you cry, Little Sister?
Why do you come to this place,
Empty and Void?
Why do you weep, Little Sister?
In this strange liminal space,
That so many avoid?
Come here to me, Little Sister
Beyond the shimmering gate
Come here to me, Little Sister
To realms beyond the grip of fate
Come here to me, Little Sister
Where there is no cry of fear or hate
Come here to me, Little Sister
In here, every desire the world will sate
Come here to me, Little Sister
Where I, your brother, simply wait
Why do you sob, Little Sister?
Why do you not come hither?
To the place beyond.
That’s it, come now, Little Sister.
Come, to where none can whither,
To the demimonde.
And so, she stood. How could she not? What other courses were there? She had nothing but emptiness, but was filled. She thought she had lost her brother, but heard him now. Whatever broken threat, whatever cut tendril, whatever shattered hope – it had been a lie, a deception, surely an influx of unwanted feeling that held no meaning.
Her brother lived. She could hear his song, haunting and beautiful. It was unlike him, but he’d been gone for years… and she so desperately wanted to see him. One foot before the other, each step before the next, like the song insisted. Like her brother insisted.
It wasn’t true, but it was, too.
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Aethelwyn’s subsequent sprint through the black streets was a blur, even to her enhanced senses. Ever since leaving the corpse of Castaigne behind, she’d fled, as if something were pursuing her. Now, with her body’s exertions pounding in her ears and sweat coating its pale skin, she finally came to a halt to rest and examine her surroundings.
She was, as before, caged into the streets by tall, inscrutable buildings that rose like monuments to some forgotten thing into the shimmering, polychromatic heavens. Above those lofty black-stone heights, she saw moons flit by, some fast, some slow, but each of them coiling around themselves like spherical ouroboroi. The sight made her shudder with revulsion and more than a little desire. “Is it not the virtue of selflessness to obliterate the self?” she wondered aloud, watching the writhing worlds boil and squirm in their self-consumption.
Then, startling her, as if in answer, a softer, female voice spoke behind her. “Unless one is selfless simply because one derives pleasure from it.” The words made Aethelwyn spin on her heels, hands coming up in a defensive posture… but there was no one there. “What does that mean? Derive pleasure from selflessness?” came the thought in her mind, unbidden, as if the passing of the shock meant a reply was warranted.
“Some believe that good acts – selfless acts – are performed, ultimately, out of hedonism. Out of the pleasure one feels for doing good. No?” Came the reply, once again from behind Aethelwyn. She realized the voice now was a distorted form of her Warlock teacher – his old, stern, male tones warped into an almost sensual, feminine aspect by a weird effect, like an unsteady increase in pitch. Aethelwyn knew this foe (for what else could it be in such a place?) should be guarded against, and raised her psychic wards. “But if one is selfless, then what being is pleased by this selflessness? If the self does not exist, if the self is truly selfless, then it cannot feel pleasure.”
“Clever girl, clever girl, little Aeldari.” Her Warlock’s distorted voice, but definitely not his demeanour. “But nonetheless, there is something there. Perhaps examine this ‘selflessness’ – this… obliteration of the self. But what is performing the obliteration? Try to understand, little elf, little Aeldari, little thing-created-outside-time.” Aethelwyn shuddered and rubbed her temple. “Listen, I don’t understand the game, but you need to get out of my head. Leave me alone. Be you daemon, Enslaver, or psychneuein, I cast you out!”
And out it was cast, giggling and laughing and pirouetting, a Harlequin in a mask – or at least, that was what it appeared to be. Aethelwyn was not so easily deceived, staring at the creature and its clownish, masked form tittering on the black stonework. “I’m out, I’m out, you little tiny thing. But before I can go, and leave you to your devices, you must understand one important thing:
The obliteration of the self is an act of supreme willpower. In realizing its own obliteration, the Self is affirmed and will not be denied. So too are the Coiled Moons above us, ever consuming themselves – but in the act of consuming, affirming. Don’t you think that’s…
weird?” Aethelwyn seemed to say in her own voice, before clasping her hands over her mouth in horror.
And then the creature was gone, and above her the Coiled Moons whirled in their masochistic revelry of self-denial.
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Ah, the festival. I love it. It feels good to be out and about, to float through the invisible miasma of sensation that eternally permeated this place. I struggle to remember its name, but that doesn’t matter – the streets are a shiny black with a reflective sheen, a model of colliding antitheses, simultaneously bright and absolutely black. It only adds to the anticipation I feel as the riot of sound and sensation wanders closer.
I find myself dancing to the music preemptively, as the initially discordant sounds eventually coalesce inside my waking mind into a beautiful melody. My eyes are still cast down to the dark street, but the aria sinks into my waking thoughts, and my body moves of its own accord. A pavane that demands compliance with its beats and timings and brooks no disobedience to its cacophonic beauty.
I look up as I hear the music intensify. The street is wide, the tall buildings on either side framing the polychromatic sky and its writhing spheres in blackness. I wonder, at times, if the music is for the spheres, by the spheres, of the spheres, or unrelated to those celestial bodies at all. Then, back down to the riot of color and bodies that is the festival procession.
I see them, the dancers from the temple. The ones I used to watch, with their physical beauty that commands arousal in an instant. I dance, still, but not like them. My dancing is clumsy, haphazard, compliance with directive rather than enmeshment with the fundamental truth of that gorgeous tune. My eyes burn with the beauty before me – not just the supernaturally lithe and beautiful dancers, but the tattoos that cross their body, the sigils that adorn the festival banners, the very contortions of their limbs… they make my senses cry out in an ecstatic agony.
I remember. I touch my face. It is cold. I am horrified. I need to get help. What was I thinking, coming to this place. My name is –
I forget.
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Passing through the gateway felt like being disassembled and laid bare before some great eye that knew every secret and scrutinized every desire of the poor little sister. One instant, she was passing into the shimmering void of the strange gate, and the next she was little more than a soul, a ball of energy searing and boiling and burning as it soared through an abyss it was never meant to know. She couldn’t ‘see’, not really, but she could perceive that something protected her, something ushered her. She knew not what it was, whether the gateway or some manifestation thereof simply sped her along, or whether something travelled with her, moving alongside in this hateful abyss to ward off any who would assail the bright soul.
She emerged, wide-eyed and trembling, into… somewhere. It wasn’t like Ghyran at all, or anywhere she’d ever been. The sky was almost bright with color; yellows, purples, blacks, reds, blues… they all seemed to collide into a sky that was as incomprehensible as it was beautiful. The ground, meanwhile, was dark by comparison – black, even. She stood upon dirt, or sand, but amongst the black grains was something that shone, as if tiny mirrors all stared up at her from amidst the ground itself.
Before her was a large encampment of some kind – fortunately seemingly occupied only by normal people. Humans – or members of other races, some she did and some she didn’t recognize – mingled in the midst of the tent-city, trading and singing and laughing and talking. Compared to the vistas about her, that seemed almost too normal.
Beyond the encampment was more blackness, though pink-purple light seemed to shine through rifts in the ground, as if the very fundament of this place were cracked and riven with some internal power. Like a clay ball squeezed and manipulated too tightly before firing, the cracks stretched and striated across the surface, weaving between strange trees and tall, black hills. Jagged features – whether rocky outcroppings or buildings she could not tell – stabbed into the sky from these rocky islets amidst the glow of the sundered ground.
Best of all, though, was the City. It looked like a jagged black mountain, with towers and spires that stabbed aggressively into the sky all collected around a single, massive central complex. This central spire was almost phallic, huge and grotesque as it penetrated the variegated sky. Impossible sky-bridges linked the terrible towers, and as she came to realize the full extent of the city before her, terror gripped her. It reminded her of the legends she’d heard a home, of things that preyed on your needs and desires, of things that dragged you into decadence and depravity and you begged them to do it-
“Welcome to Carcosa!” said a voice, gregariously.
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