After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The first to go is always time.
How much of it has passed, since he was caught and chained down with enough iron to equip a cavalry? The comparison, barely hyperbolic, drags a feverish smile from Caine's lips. How rich Solterra still is in its ore! Enough for an army twice the current one's size, filled with the puppets of ruined men they fed just enough to worship the benevolence of Loyalty.
Focusing his eyes, Caine lolls his head towards the slivered window, staked evenly through with iron bars, high above the damp stone walls of his cell. The blades of his withers ache from bearing the weight of his nailed down wings through the night(s). He flexes them every hour, or so, to keep them from stiffening. (If the guards had kindly granted his demands for a clock, "Can't you take one down from the kitchens when you bring my meals?" [a joke within a joke; they never brought him meals] "Saints knows the cook never heeds it," he could've kept to a precise schedule.)
Ah, he thinks, with wry affection. My wings.
His dear, double devil wings have, since their nailing, settled into a needly numbness after trembling themselves mad under the spikes of pain emanating from the sections of crushed hollow bone. He finds their numbness deplorable. It leaves him with nothing to fight off. Sighing, he rests his head against the cool stone and gives himself back to the kingdom of sleep.
When he wakes, slouched against the bars of the cell with his left wing soaked in fresh blood from tearing open his wound, Raum is there. And his bloodless mouth is moving.
"Did you think I wouldn't find out?" Eventually, we are all found out. Time is always the enemy, King Crow. But Caine's lips remain contemptuously, laconically sealed.
"I have eyes, Caine." With the proof staring back at him, Caine simply nods.
And as Raum speaks, and speaks, he fixates his eyes on the bridge of the man's muzzle, to make him believe he is listening. Then, when the facade is secured, Caine dives soundlessly into the depths of memory.
Agenor had used chains in the beginning, when Caine—or simply, Boy, as the silver eyed child hadn't yet encountered the book he'd use to choose a name that tasted right upon his tongue—hadn't yet nulled his reactions to pain. For his master's safety, as he maintained the web of interlocking spells around the Boy, his limbs were bound to prevent sudden movements that would undoubtedly wreck the warlock's concentration. As the Boy grew older and his bones lengthened as well as toughened, the chains were no longer necessary. Like all living creatures learned to do since the dawn of time, he acclimated.
"Pain, as with all emotions, is merely a creation of the brain," stated a wrinkled journal he'd found stuffed beneath a floorboard in Agenor's study. "And as with all creations, it can be controlled. Over the years, the most effective method I have found is so simple it seems a farce. Here it is: take your brain away. (I do not mean physically, but perhaps it would help for you to think of it that way. Curiously, imagined actions often elicit the same effects as real ones.) Take it away, to the night you first bedded your beautiful wife. Focus on her face, how it morphs. Focus on your breath, how it catches. Inhale the scent of the roses she'd picked that morning, glazed with dew, and placed in a crystal vase by the silk canopy... For the more innocent among us, grasp upon another memory equally potent. Equally visceral. Distraction is a channel the Saints have blessed our minds with for precisely this use..."
The Boy hadn't had a lover, so the description didn't move him and his cheeks remained bloodless. He didn't have memories he considered quite visceral enough, either, so after some experimentation, he made do with an alteration.
He imagined himself shut inside a metal box just big enough for all his limbs—and his two pairs of wings, later on—to fold up into, like a telescope. There was nothing around the box. No sound, no light, no life. But there was padding inside of it, black as cinders and softer than goosedown. He didn't need to breathe in the box, nor to eat or drink or relieve himself. Nothing outside knew of him inside, so nothing, you see, could hurt him. One by one, he discarded his sense of: Time (the first to go, always), Memory, and Self. The world had forgotten him; tucked inside the box, he would never be bothered. Inscribed into the side of the box was a single word, manifesting in steadily improving handwriting every time it was summoned: Mortem. Death.
When Caine opens his eyes again, it is to a blinding brightness. Tears stream from his eyes, rewetting the dried blood and giving him the appearance of crying it. He must've drifted off in the middle of Raum's speech. Keep a man from his food for day(s), he thinks, and you cannot expect him to play the role of both A. Starving Man and B. Responsive Listener.
The sudden exposure to sunlight disorientates Caine so much that it is not until the guards throw him onto the jutting platform, a slab of bone-white marble (to better show the blood, he'd realize later) that he notices the crowd. Faces—jeering, snarling, drooling, faces—surround him like a swarm of Bacchants, mouths twisting into hornet's stingers.
Raum's voice once again cuts through the haze of his mind.
“Caine!” he caws. The crowd roars in answer. “You have committed a crime against Solterra’s king. You have worked against the Court you call home. You have endangered lives... You could have endangered my daughter.” Caine's brows knit, the only expression he has managed to conjure thus far, when the king bends down to his ear and murmurs of Sabine. The little fairy.
“The punishment I have deemed for this convict is to have his wings removed!” Silence, before a howl of approval, or disappointment, or a savage mix of both, erupts from the stands. Had they expected more? A head, perhaps?
Blinking, Caine looks to his wings. Looks down at the bloody pulp of black feathers and exposed bone and the invisible net of black magic tying it all together. Disgusting, he muses, with a shred of savagery. He feels the sudden urge to laugh, then, and he wonders: Why shouldn't I? What more do I have to lose? (Your life, he imagines Fia saying. Ah. But I have never cherished that, he answers her, sadly.) When Raum turns to leave, the convicted, bloodstained spy laughs.
He turns the curve of his dark throat to the sun, lets the weight of his oily hair drag his head an extra notch backwards. He laughs, and he laughs, red mouth slit wide and convulsing, until he pushes it all out of him like expelling a parasite.
He closes his mouth, spits blood onto the pristine white marble platform, and screams:
“Long live Seraphina!”
How much of it has passed, since he was caught and chained down with enough iron to equip a cavalry? The comparison, barely hyperbolic, drags a feverish smile from Caine's lips. How rich Solterra still is in its ore! Enough for an army twice the current one's size, filled with the puppets of ruined men they fed just enough to worship the benevolence of Loyalty.
Focusing his eyes, Caine lolls his head towards the slivered window, staked evenly through with iron bars, high above the damp stone walls of his cell. The blades of his withers ache from bearing the weight of his nailed down wings through the night(s). He flexes them every hour, or so, to keep them from stiffening. (If the guards had kindly granted his demands for a clock, "Can't you take one down from the kitchens when you bring my meals?" [a joke within a joke; they never brought him meals] "Saints knows the cook never heeds it," he could've kept to a precise schedule.)
Ah, he thinks, with wry affection. My wings.
His dear, double devil wings have, since their nailing, settled into a needly numbness after trembling themselves mad under the spikes of pain emanating from the sections of crushed hollow bone. He finds their numbness deplorable. It leaves him with nothing to fight off. Sighing, he rests his head against the cool stone and gives himself back to the kingdom of sleep.
When he wakes, slouched against the bars of the cell with his left wing soaked in fresh blood from tearing open his wound, Raum is there. And his bloodless mouth is moving.
"Did you think I wouldn't find out?" Eventually, we are all found out. Time is always the enemy, King Crow. But Caine's lips remain contemptuously, laconically sealed.
"I have eyes, Caine." With the proof staring back at him, Caine simply nods.
And as Raum speaks, and speaks, he fixates his eyes on the bridge of the man's muzzle, to make him believe he is listening. Then, when the facade is secured, Caine dives soundlessly into the depths of memory.
Agenor had used chains in the beginning, when Caine—or simply, Boy, as the silver eyed child hadn't yet encountered the book he'd use to choose a name that tasted right upon his tongue—hadn't yet nulled his reactions to pain. For his master's safety, as he maintained the web of interlocking spells around the Boy, his limbs were bound to prevent sudden movements that would undoubtedly wreck the warlock's concentration. As the Boy grew older and his bones lengthened as well as toughened, the chains were no longer necessary. Like all living creatures learned to do since the dawn of time, he acclimated.
"Pain, as with all emotions, is merely a creation of the brain," stated a wrinkled journal he'd found stuffed beneath a floorboard in Agenor's study. "And as with all creations, it can be controlled. Over the years, the most effective method I have found is so simple it seems a farce. Here it is: take your brain away. (I do not mean physically, but perhaps it would help for you to think of it that way. Curiously, imagined actions often elicit the same effects as real ones.) Take it away, to the night you first bedded your beautiful wife. Focus on her face, how it morphs. Focus on your breath, how it catches. Inhale the scent of the roses she'd picked that morning, glazed with dew, and placed in a crystal vase by the silk canopy... For the more innocent among us, grasp upon another memory equally potent. Equally visceral. Distraction is a channel the Saints have blessed our minds with for precisely this use..."
The Boy hadn't had a lover, so the description didn't move him and his cheeks remained bloodless. He didn't have memories he considered quite visceral enough, either, so after some experimentation, he made do with an alteration.
He imagined himself shut inside a metal box just big enough for all his limbs—and his two pairs of wings, later on—to fold up into, like a telescope. There was nothing around the box. No sound, no light, no life. But there was padding inside of it, black as cinders and softer than goosedown. He didn't need to breathe in the box, nor to eat or drink or relieve himself. Nothing outside knew of him inside, so nothing, you see, could hurt him. One by one, he discarded his sense of: Time (the first to go, always), Memory, and Self. The world had forgotten him; tucked inside the box, he would never be bothered. Inscribed into the side of the box was a single word, manifesting in steadily improving handwriting every time it was summoned: Mortem. Death.
When Caine opens his eyes again, it is to a blinding brightness. Tears stream from his eyes, rewetting the dried blood and giving him the appearance of crying it. He must've drifted off in the middle of Raum's speech. Keep a man from his food for day(s), he thinks, and you cannot expect him to play the role of both A. Starving Man and B. Responsive Listener.
The sudden exposure to sunlight disorientates Caine so much that it is not until the guards throw him onto the jutting platform, a slab of bone-white marble (to better show the blood, he'd realize later) that he notices the crowd. Faces—jeering, snarling, drooling, faces—surround him like a swarm of Bacchants, mouths twisting into hornet's stingers.
Raum's voice once again cuts through the haze of his mind.
“Caine!” he caws. The crowd roars in answer. “You have committed a crime against Solterra’s king. You have worked against the Court you call home. You have endangered lives... You could have endangered my daughter.” Caine's brows knit, the only expression he has managed to conjure thus far, when the king bends down to his ear and murmurs of Sabine. The little fairy.
“The punishment I have deemed for this convict is to have his wings removed!” Silence, before a howl of approval, or disappointment, or a savage mix of both, erupts from the stands. Had they expected more? A head, perhaps?
Blinking, Caine looks to his wings. Looks down at the bloody pulp of black feathers and exposed bone and the invisible net of black magic tying it all together. Disgusting, he muses, with a shred of savagery. He feels the sudden urge to laugh, then, and he wonders: Why shouldn't I? What more do I have to lose? (Your life, he imagines Fia saying. Ah. But I have never cherished that, he answers her, sadly.) When Raum turns to leave, the convicted, bloodstained spy laughs.
He turns the curve of his dark throat to the sun, lets the weight of his oily hair drag his head an extra notch backwards. He laughs, and he laughs, red mouth slit wide and convulsing, until he pushes it all out of him like expelling a parasite.
He closes his mouth, spits blood onto the pristine white marble platform, and screams:
“Long live Seraphina!”
again, this is open for any character to reply to with their reactions!
