[Deaths] the Morrigan
Title: coincidences
'Verse/characters: Deaths; the Morrigan
Notes: This is an expansion of perhaps that was a bad plan and tell me something dangerous and true, sparked in part of coastal_physics requesting something early in the storyline.
Word Count: 2436
Agathe spent half the morning itchy and out of sorts, sure that there was something wrong, somewhere in the street just out of her sight, no matter how often she turned her head. Flashes of light, like hanging-crystal reflections, sounds that weren't quite sounds, and it wasn't until she saw someone turn a corner into her line of sight that everything coalesced into understanding.
The woman was small, dressed neatly in grey and dusty rose, dark curls held away from her face with enameled pins, the boots peeking from beneath her rosy petticoat hems embroidered with Oriental lizards.
She looked soft, interacting with the humans around her as if she saw each and every one, smiling when they looked at her, dodging out of the way of hurrying messengers with neat quick steps. She was no independent hunter, come to the city to tangle with the council, not dressed like that, moving like that. Someone's widow, perhaps, come into town to set a web for the next one? She wasn't even armed, which was almost like issuing an invitation in a city like this.
Agathe wouldn't have looked twice at the widow if she'd been human still, except perhaps to envy the obvious care the woman was able to take with her appearance, and God, everything was so much sharper, brighter now. Power hung around her prey in a near-visible haze, nothing at all like those who carried council marks.
She'd have to move quickly, before the prize was snatched from her by a bigger predator, so she stepped out of humans' sight, maybe even out of sight of her prey. The master-of-students had said that some natural-deaths didn't even know what they were, wouldn't know they were being stalked until the blades appeared. She had felt so privileged to be trusted with a blade, with the knowledge, with the trust placed in her, to be allowed a section of the city for her own.
So she waited invisible in the alley, listening intently for the not-quite-there hum of the widow's power.
Waited, then took a deep breath and drew the blade, let herself resonate with the energy in it, then lunged, aiming for the widow's chest as the woman passed the alley's mouth.
Nothing happened for a long moment, no explosion of threads to wind up around her hand or her blade--and even if the widow had been human, there should have been something--
Agathe opened her eyes, wondering what had gone wrong, froze when she saw the shark-white smile above the knife pinned perfectly, effortlessly still between two fingers.
Oh, God, no one's widow, this. "I--" she tried desperately, but the lady in the gray skirts held a finger against her lip, shaking her head and still smiling.
"Oh, you did just do that."
The blade shattered in her hand as white threads blossomed from the fingers holding it still, looping through the remains of the steel and reaching out, pulling at the blue threads of her own life, her still-new power.
She let herself fall to her knees, chose not to scream.
The last thing she felt was warm lips on her forehead, then everything dissolved into blue and white.
---
For a moment, everything was perfectly still in the alley, even the dust stirred up by the small explosion of threads hanging in late-morning sunbeams instead of settling. Then the Morrigan reached up to her mouth, pulled a robin's egg blue thread from between her lips, wrapped it around the remaining shard of the child's Venetian dagger in her other hand.
Transferring the mess of string to her hand, she licked delicately at her lips for a moment, trying to figure out if she should have known the original owner of the blade this poor idiot apprentice had died holding, before giving up and letting the metal drop towards the ground.
"Who taught you so badly, child?" she asked softly as she flicked her improvised lodestone. The thread trembled, metal spinning madly, before it settled, pointing resolutely at one of the walls of the alley.
She snorted to herself--stubborn child, this one, even after dying--and stepped out into the street again, turning in the direction the remains of the apprentice had indicated.
After several wrong turns that led her into blind alleys and kitchen gardens, she found herself at the bottom of the steps leading up towards the local council's complex, the apprentice's thread pulling at her hand like a badly-trained pup straining at a leash, aimed directly at the door. She spooled it in over her fingers, winding up sky-coloured thread until she was holding the sharp shard of metal in her palm, too.
She folded her skirt neatly over that hand, climbed the steps, and knocked, at the particular cadence that differentiated a death from a human--almost no human knocked to the beat of their heart, or someone else's, as she was doing now.
Another apprentice opened the door, stared at her with wide eyes until she remembered to stop smiling. Too young to hold a blade, yet, not much taller than she was, but getting there. They'd give him a blade within the next five years, once he hit full growth if not adult broadness. She hoped, anyway. If her attacker was a good indication of this council's practices this boy might be given a blade tomorrow, fully expecting him to die without ever realising the height implied in his wrists.
"Where might I find your master-of-students?" she inquired, deliberately picking up the other edge of her skirt and making as if to cross the threshold.
He stepped back automatically to make space, which she took full advantage of, coming in before he tried closing the door in her face and screaming for someone older to come deal with the crow at the gate.
"In his chambers, at this hour--history just finished and it's not yet time for practice," the boy told her as he closed the door behind her; she let the skirts drop from her empty hand, kept the other side up, in case he knew the local blades well enough to recognise remains.
"My thanks," she replied, smiling up at him, careful to make it human. He smiled back, not just politely, and she was able to get directions as to which sets of stairs and turns to take to find the master of students with neither an offer to just take her there nor a cool dismissal.
They favoured wax-sealed tiles in this complex, the sound under her soles muffled slightly from how they sounded crossing stone but harder than wood floors. The tiles were laid out in pretty designs, herringboned rectangles in a mix of oxblood and terra-cotta, but long acquaintance with humans and a certain old friend made her mentally tally the cost of such floors instead of just admiring, and the tally only grew higher at the changing inlays in the stair treads and the thresholds as she passed from relatively public spaces into relatively private.
The master's door was closed, fully showing the ebony and tigerwood inlays surrounding the figured walnut of the door itself.
She eyed it with distaste for a moment, then dropped her skirts along with the metal shard, leaning back to tap next to the doorknob with the toe of her shoe as she started spinning the metal by the rapidly lengthening, paling thread in her hand.
When the door opened, she put the shard into his left eye, yanking it free again with the last whisper of the apprentice's life as he screamed and dropped to his knees. She snatched the metal out of the air as it passed her hand, and leaned forward, the point directed at his uninjured eye. Kneeling, he was only just barely shorter than she was, but the metal seemed to be holding his attention very well indeed.
"This idiot-child tried to take me in the middle of a street!" she told him, her irritation let fully off leash as it hadn't been getting here.
The master wheezed a few times, his hand clamped firmly over his injured eye. "My apologies?" he managed eventually.
"I wasn't hunting, or poaching. She offered no words of greeting or threat before attacking me, and she didn't even know how to look for skeined power, let alone how to identify me." She kicked him sharply in the thigh closest to her. "Is this your idea of hospitality?"
He didn't answer.
She bared her teeth at him, pricking delicately at the skin beneath his whole eye with the remains of his student's blade. "Master-of-students, how badly are you teaching your apprentices?"
He rolled his eye down as far as he could, tried to focus on the shard. "I teach what the council bids me teach, lady."
"That doesn't answer my question," she told him, half-absently inscribing a series of dots, one much larger bead forming when he flinched.
It wasn't until she stopped that he said "They know better than to go after anyone with a council mark."
" . . and to go after anyone without one. Clever, if hard on the children. How many do you lose a year?"
He didn't answer, again, eye flicking between the shard and away from her, towards whatever weapons he had hidden in his rooms, some way of screaming for help.
She considered him, sketching a feather with the blood from the larger puncture with the point of the shard, then reached in, touched his neck with her free hand, and yanked.
He screamed, loudly enough that others heard, but by the time they got there he was dead, wrapped 'round her hand and glowing, body fading rapidly but not yet gone.
It was a mix of apprentices and lower council members who came running at the sound of the master-of-student's cut-off scream, not all with weapons, but enough.
Several apprentices shrieked when they saw her, saw the blue-white threads in one hand and the bloody pin of metal in her other, and if they ran she let them. If they fought she didn't even have to touch them, the curls of their teacher's power more than sufficient to reach past their blades and tear their still-new power free.
The elder deaths were better armed, proper swords or sickles and hold-out daggers. No scythes, and she mentally complimented them for it--it took an expert to use one indoors, in the confines of passageways, and even the experts usually chose different weapons if they had the chance. Edmund always had, anyway, and he was the one she judged all others by, even his daughter, even with him dead.
Not that it helped them, in the end, though one managed a very credible swipe across her torso with a pretty little blade that tasted of years and children and sorrow. She'd screamed, though the cut was very shallow, snatched it away and did her best to break it off in its current owner's body, and failed for lack of leverage.
A crow swooped through a shattered window, scratching and shrieking in someone's face, and she could feel the laughter start, deep in her belly, laughter and fury, everything that tied her to her namesake and her namesake to her.
She'd make it a proper rite, then, and let the next death come in close enough that when he died his blood splashed her skin and clothes. She saluted the cawing outside with a flourish of borrowed gladius, and went to find their armoury.
Properly armed--she left the gladius tacked through the locking mechanism for the armory doors--she went stalking through the corridors, listening for the shrieks as her namesake's eyes found other victims.
The last was, of course, behind the most elaborate door yet, cherrywood and softly-throbbing powered iron and inlaid polished copper, and she could hear crows yelling from behind whole glass before she shoved the door open and made for the second threshold.
The man was old--not as old as her, but older than any of his lower council--and was tapping out messages on a beautifully embellished system as a set of papers burned merrily in a grate nearby.
"I don't think I like you," she observed from the doorway, watching him pause between messages to toss another sheet of paper on the blaze.
"I must be doing something right," he said dryly, looking up. "Happy with your day's work?" He flicked a hand at the cawing mess outside his windows and the utter silence inside the building.
"Not really. I had plans for shoe-shopping." She shrugged, beckoned with the sickle she'd taken from his armory. "Shall we?"
He shot her in the chest with a gun he'd had in his hidden hand, pounced while she was still reeling.
Bent backwards, sickle locked to block the short sword from getting any closer to her neck, she decided aloud "Yes."
He growled an inquiry.
"I definitely don't like you," she elaborated, then tried to put the shard through his temple, which left them both bleeding all over the place but no longer locked close and her at the disadvantage.
He was good, she admitted grudgingly to herself as she lost another piece of her skirt to a perfect lunge. Fast, controlled, and fresher than she was, maybe even good enough to wear her down until he could get a grip on the stinging threads of her life.
It made her grin, stretched her out, let her take risks she didn't allow herself in normal circumstances, felt her namesake settling over her shoulders like feathery armour, and yanked his first thread from across the room.
Some time later, panting, bloody, caws ringing in her ears, she yanked the last thread out, stamped on his fallen sword for good measure.
His office was a disaster, papers still smouldering sullenly in the grate but far more sheets scattered across the breadth of the room, slippery sheaves made slipperier with not yet dry blood. She was picking her way delicately across them, catching words and phrases completely out of context, idly amused at the sheer numbers of things the council felt it needed to keep an eye on, when a particular string of words caught her eye and froze her mid-step.
Half-kneeling to pick up the sheet, shifting her tattered skirt out of the way, she started reading.
After she finished the sheet--innocuous in everything but implications and undertones--she carefully gathered up all the unburned papers, used the council's message system to send one of her own, and took her leave of the council, scattering coals through the room to hide the papers she was stealing.
She hadn't known she could still feel sick. Not like this. It was an unpleasant realisation.
She had a legend to roust.
'Verse/characters: Deaths; the Morrigan
Notes: This is an expansion of perhaps that was a bad plan and tell me something dangerous and true, sparked in part of coastal_physics requesting something early in the storyline.
Word Count: 2436
Agathe spent half the morning itchy and out of sorts, sure that there was something wrong, somewhere in the street just out of her sight, no matter how often she turned her head. Flashes of light, like hanging-crystal reflections, sounds that weren't quite sounds, and it wasn't until she saw someone turn a corner into her line of sight that everything coalesced into understanding.
The woman was small, dressed neatly in grey and dusty rose, dark curls held away from her face with enameled pins, the boots peeking from beneath her rosy petticoat hems embroidered with Oriental lizards.
She looked soft, interacting with the humans around her as if she saw each and every one, smiling when they looked at her, dodging out of the way of hurrying messengers with neat quick steps. She was no independent hunter, come to the city to tangle with the council, not dressed like that, moving like that. Someone's widow, perhaps, come into town to set a web for the next one? She wasn't even armed, which was almost like issuing an invitation in a city like this.
Agathe wouldn't have looked twice at the widow if she'd been human still, except perhaps to envy the obvious care the woman was able to take with her appearance, and God, everything was so much sharper, brighter now. Power hung around her prey in a near-visible haze, nothing at all like those who carried council marks.
She'd have to move quickly, before the prize was snatched from her by a bigger predator, so she stepped out of humans' sight, maybe even out of sight of her prey. The master-of-students had said that some natural-deaths didn't even know what they were, wouldn't know they were being stalked until the blades appeared. She had felt so privileged to be trusted with a blade, with the knowledge, with the trust placed in her, to be allowed a section of the city for her own.
So she waited invisible in the alley, listening intently for the not-quite-there hum of the widow's power.
Waited, then took a deep breath and drew the blade, let herself resonate with the energy in it, then lunged, aiming for the widow's chest as the woman passed the alley's mouth.
Nothing happened for a long moment, no explosion of threads to wind up around her hand or her blade--and even if the widow had been human, there should have been something--
Agathe opened her eyes, wondering what had gone wrong, froze when she saw the shark-white smile above the knife pinned perfectly, effortlessly still between two fingers.
Oh, God, no one's widow, this. "I--" she tried desperately, but the lady in the gray skirts held a finger against her lip, shaking her head and still smiling.
"Oh, you did just do that."
The blade shattered in her hand as white threads blossomed from the fingers holding it still, looping through the remains of the steel and reaching out, pulling at the blue threads of her own life, her still-new power.
She let herself fall to her knees, chose not to scream.
The last thing she felt was warm lips on her forehead, then everything dissolved into blue and white.
---
For a moment, everything was perfectly still in the alley, even the dust stirred up by the small explosion of threads hanging in late-morning sunbeams instead of settling. Then the Morrigan reached up to her mouth, pulled a robin's egg blue thread from between her lips, wrapped it around the remaining shard of the child's Venetian dagger in her other hand.
Transferring the mess of string to her hand, she licked delicately at her lips for a moment, trying to figure out if she should have known the original owner of the blade this poor idiot apprentice had died holding, before giving up and letting the metal drop towards the ground.
"Who taught you so badly, child?" she asked softly as she flicked her improvised lodestone. The thread trembled, metal spinning madly, before it settled, pointing resolutely at one of the walls of the alley.
She snorted to herself--stubborn child, this one, even after dying--and stepped out into the street again, turning in the direction the remains of the apprentice had indicated.
After several wrong turns that led her into blind alleys and kitchen gardens, she found herself at the bottom of the steps leading up towards the local council's complex, the apprentice's thread pulling at her hand like a badly-trained pup straining at a leash, aimed directly at the door. She spooled it in over her fingers, winding up sky-coloured thread until she was holding the sharp shard of metal in her palm, too.
She folded her skirt neatly over that hand, climbed the steps, and knocked, at the particular cadence that differentiated a death from a human--almost no human knocked to the beat of their heart, or someone else's, as she was doing now.
Another apprentice opened the door, stared at her with wide eyes until she remembered to stop smiling. Too young to hold a blade, yet, not much taller than she was, but getting there. They'd give him a blade within the next five years, once he hit full growth if not adult broadness. She hoped, anyway. If her attacker was a good indication of this council's practices this boy might be given a blade tomorrow, fully expecting him to die without ever realising the height implied in his wrists.
"Where might I find your master-of-students?" she inquired, deliberately picking up the other edge of her skirt and making as if to cross the threshold.
He stepped back automatically to make space, which she took full advantage of, coming in before he tried closing the door in her face and screaming for someone older to come deal with the crow at the gate.
"In his chambers, at this hour--history just finished and it's not yet time for practice," the boy told her as he closed the door behind her; she let the skirts drop from her empty hand, kept the other side up, in case he knew the local blades well enough to recognise remains.
"My thanks," she replied, smiling up at him, careful to make it human. He smiled back, not just politely, and she was able to get directions as to which sets of stairs and turns to take to find the master of students with neither an offer to just take her there nor a cool dismissal.
They favoured wax-sealed tiles in this complex, the sound under her soles muffled slightly from how they sounded crossing stone but harder than wood floors. The tiles were laid out in pretty designs, herringboned rectangles in a mix of oxblood and terra-cotta, but long acquaintance with humans and a certain old friend made her mentally tally the cost of such floors instead of just admiring, and the tally only grew higher at the changing inlays in the stair treads and the thresholds as she passed from relatively public spaces into relatively private.
The master's door was closed, fully showing the ebony and tigerwood inlays surrounding the figured walnut of the door itself.
She eyed it with distaste for a moment, then dropped her skirts along with the metal shard, leaning back to tap next to the doorknob with the toe of her shoe as she started spinning the metal by the rapidly lengthening, paling thread in her hand.
When the door opened, she put the shard into his left eye, yanking it free again with the last whisper of the apprentice's life as he screamed and dropped to his knees. She snatched the metal out of the air as it passed her hand, and leaned forward, the point directed at his uninjured eye. Kneeling, he was only just barely shorter than she was, but the metal seemed to be holding his attention very well indeed.
"This idiot-child tried to take me in the middle of a street!" she told him, her irritation let fully off leash as it hadn't been getting here.
The master wheezed a few times, his hand clamped firmly over his injured eye. "My apologies?" he managed eventually.
"I wasn't hunting, or poaching. She offered no words of greeting or threat before attacking me, and she didn't even know how to look for skeined power, let alone how to identify me." She kicked him sharply in the thigh closest to her. "Is this your idea of hospitality?"
He didn't answer.
She bared her teeth at him, pricking delicately at the skin beneath his whole eye with the remains of his student's blade. "Master-of-students, how badly are you teaching your apprentices?"
He rolled his eye down as far as he could, tried to focus on the shard. "I teach what the council bids me teach, lady."
"That doesn't answer my question," she told him, half-absently inscribing a series of dots, one much larger bead forming when he flinched.
It wasn't until she stopped that he said "They know better than to go after anyone with a council mark."
" . . and to go after anyone without one. Clever, if hard on the children. How many do you lose a year?"
He didn't answer, again, eye flicking between the shard and away from her, towards whatever weapons he had hidden in his rooms, some way of screaming for help.
She considered him, sketching a feather with the blood from the larger puncture with the point of the shard, then reached in, touched his neck with her free hand, and yanked.
He screamed, loudly enough that others heard, but by the time they got there he was dead, wrapped 'round her hand and glowing, body fading rapidly but not yet gone.
It was a mix of apprentices and lower council members who came running at the sound of the master-of-student's cut-off scream, not all with weapons, but enough.
Several apprentices shrieked when they saw her, saw the blue-white threads in one hand and the bloody pin of metal in her other, and if they ran she let them. If they fought she didn't even have to touch them, the curls of their teacher's power more than sufficient to reach past their blades and tear their still-new power free.
The elder deaths were better armed, proper swords or sickles and hold-out daggers. No scythes, and she mentally complimented them for it--it took an expert to use one indoors, in the confines of passageways, and even the experts usually chose different weapons if they had the chance. Edmund always had, anyway, and he was the one she judged all others by, even his daughter, even with him dead.
Not that it helped them, in the end, though one managed a very credible swipe across her torso with a pretty little blade that tasted of years and children and sorrow. She'd screamed, though the cut was very shallow, snatched it away and did her best to break it off in its current owner's body, and failed for lack of leverage.
A crow swooped through a shattered window, scratching and shrieking in someone's face, and she could feel the laughter start, deep in her belly, laughter and fury, everything that tied her to her namesake and her namesake to her.
She'd make it a proper rite, then, and let the next death come in close enough that when he died his blood splashed her skin and clothes. She saluted the cawing outside with a flourish of borrowed gladius, and went to find their armoury.
Properly armed--she left the gladius tacked through the locking mechanism for the armory doors--she went stalking through the corridors, listening for the shrieks as her namesake's eyes found other victims.
The last was, of course, behind the most elaborate door yet, cherrywood and softly-throbbing powered iron and inlaid polished copper, and she could hear crows yelling from behind whole glass before she shoved the door open and made for the second threshold.
The man was old--not as old as her, but older than any of his lower council--and was tapping out messages on a beautifully embellished system as a set of papers burned merrily in a grate nearby.
"I don't think I like you," she observed from the doorway, watching him pause between messages to toss another sheet of paper on the blaze.
"I must be doing something right," he said dryly, looking up. "Happy with your day's work?" He flicked a hand at the cawing mess outside his windows and the utter silence inside the building.
"Not really. I had plans for shoe-shopping." She shrugged, beckoned with the sickle she'd taken from his armory. "Shall we?"
He shot her in the chest with a gun he'd had in his hidden hand, pounced while she was still reeling.
Bent backwards, sickle locked to block the short sword from getting any closer to her neck, she decided aloud "Yes."
He growled an inquiry.
"I definitely don't like you," she elaborated, then tried to put the shard through his temple, which left them both bleeding all over the place but no longer locked close and her at the disadvantage.
He was good, she admitted grudgingly to herself as she lost another piece of her skirt to a perfect lunge. Fast, controlled, and fresher than she was, maybe even good enough to wear her down until he could get a grip on the stinging threads of her life.
It made her grin, stretched her out, let her take risks she didn't allow herself in normal circumstances, felt her namesake settling over her shoulders like feathery armour, and yanked his first thread from across the room.
Some time later, panting, bloody, caws ringing in her ears, she yanked the last thread out, stamped on his fallen sword for good measure.
His office was a disaster, papers still smouldering sullenly in the grate but far more sheets scattered across the breadth of the room, slippery sheaves made slipperier with not yet dry blood. She was picking her way delicately across them, catching words and phrases completely out of context, idly amused at the sheer numbers of things the council felt it needed to keep an eye on, when a particular string of words caught her eye and froze her mid-step.
Half-kneeling to pick up the sheet, shifting her tattered skirt out of the way, she started reading.
After she finished the sheet--innocuous in everything but implications and undertones--she carefully gathered up all the unburned papers, used the council's message system to send one of her own, and took her leave of the council, scattering coals through the room to hide the papers she was stealing.
She hadn't known she could still feel sick. Not like this. It was an unpleasant realisation.
She had a legend to roust.