Today I went to a restaurant, a newer place in town. It filled a building that had stood empty for three years, and before that, it was a Denny’s. The tables were clean and the accents were blue, and the waitress’ eyes were wide and edged with white.
I told my dad, sitting at the new table, that the aura of the Denny’s lingered. He asked when I had been to the Denny’s in town—never, I said, but all Dennys’ are the same place, you know? There are many doors, but they all open to the same strange otherworld, a place where another plane of existence opens at the right hours of the night.
The Denny’s was gone and has been for years, but it stuck to the walls and whispered from the speakers when the music paused. The bar was untended in the middle of Happy Hour. When we walked in, the hostess stand was empty. Our waitress had a sharp note in her voice, strained, and her lips moved strangely around her words, and her eyes were ringed white, like a startled animal. She was a pretty girl, just a few years older than me—I might have gone to school with her, but I didn’t recognize her, and she didn’t seem to know me. When she walked away, the faint shadow of a red-shirted figure seemed to cling to her back like mist. Hi, I’ll be your server tonight, she said with a perfect toothy smile, and I heard the rapid welcome-to-Denny’s-can-I-take-your-order in my mind before she kept talking, can I get you anything to drink to start.
I wonder what she’ll dream about tonight, our waitress with the white-ringed eyes and the unfamiliar face. If she dreams about her job, but decked out in another primary color and filled with the transient souls who end up there at odd hours. No one goes to Denny’s, someone told me once, you just end up there, usually at late hours and with a mild degree of confusion about what brought you to their door. If she dreams about the red-shirted shadow, and about how that stranger arrived for work one day—another day, another dollar, a waitstaff lackey of the boss but also a keeper of the door to an elsewhere—to find their job simply closed, the sign gone overnight like it had never been. We don’t know what happened to the Denny’s in town. It didn’t even go out of business, it just stopped, like a hand had flicked a light switch and taken the whole building with it.
I wonder if she’ll dream about doorways and dark lots.
The walls were decked with black and white photographs, of serious faces and beautiful landscapes, so neatly tiled that there was never more than a hand’s breadth of clear wall in some places. Their eyes didn’t follow you, and the water didn’t ripple out of the corner of the eye, but there was something…close about them, I told my mom. Like you might pass your hand over the front and then reach through, past the paper and ink to the otherplace just beyond. Not a trap, if you were clever, but a gateway, which is almost the same thing. Cut off from the other Denny’s doors, I told her with a smile, the restaurant had to find new ones.
Ginger ale and a burger. The food wasn’t a binding contract—the terms of the deal are set out at the beginning, at a restaurant, even at a Denny’s. You come and they serve you, you pay and they allow you to leave. Our waitress brought us the check without a fuss, not so much as a wheedling don’t you want dessert to keep us there. Deal observed. I looked out the window as my mom pulled out a credit card, overheard part of a conversation about checks. No, we don’t take checks, cash or credit. Checks aren’t signed in blood, I mused, but then neither is credit. Digital lifeblood, maybe, a new bond for a new age, modern contracts to match a modern elsewhere. Deal kept.
I don’t think I would want to dine and dash, at that restaurant, in those walls.
Two crows spent almost forty minutes on the grass outside, idly strutting through the all-day dew that still clung. They chattered at each other, and eyed the window where I watched them, black eyes like drops of intelligent ink. I looked outside every few minutes, and every time I expected to see another view, something new, something other than the shoe store and the vast expanse of pine trees. It was the feeling of lying on my back on the ground with my eyes closed and feeling the planet spin beneath me, but the stars being the same when I looked again.
When we walked outside, the pearly grey sunlight-behind-clouds had faded to a sulky, dull twilight, and there was fog wrapping thick around the restaurant. The parking lot was empty save for our car and two others, even though there had been several more families inside. We laughed about the old Denny’s in town, about how it had lost its hold on this reality, and didn’t talk about the empty bar or the wide-eyed waitress or the way the kitchen was so quiet, even though every staff member was supposed to be behind the swinging doors.
The Denny’s in town is gone, died quietly in the night without so much as a flatline. But I think it might be haunting its replacement.
aethersea asked: Could you do Brenneth for your ask meme maybe? I want to get to know her better.
My brain refuses to tick over appropriately in order to ACTUALLY work on Alleirat, so here are some short li’l headcanons in the hope that it will kick something into gear. They’re not super detailed because it’s 1 AM and I’m trying not to think about the MCAT too much.
Oh, also, while I’m at this, I’m listening to Hopeless by Halsey and it’s just. The Most Brenneth and Crispin. “Cause you know the good die young, but so did this, so it must be better than I think it is.”
A: what I think realistically
Brenneth likes to sing. She picked it up while she was being trained as a blacksmith, because she doesn’t really care for quiet, and it just sort of became a thing. Crispin has real actual-facts voice training, so he used to bring her songs that he’d learned and they would sing them together while he lurked in the corner of her forge. It continues to be a thing to this day. Her voice isn’t anything special—low end of alto range, fairly limited range—but she can project and she has the feel for folk songs, you know what I’m saying. It used to be kind of Known that you could bring the singing smith a new song she’d never heard, and she would charge you a little less than usual for your job.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
On Earth, once they’re—you know, once they’re speaking again, Brenneth calls Crispin Darth when she wants to get on his nerves. Most of their teachers and (later) their coworkers think it’s an inside joke. It kind of is. But an inside joke with a body count.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Torei, Brenneth’s right hand woman that first time around and her devoted amdri, wears Brenneth’s name like a brand on her soul and says that love should make you feel invincible.
Brenneth, who multiple times a week wakes up choking from a nightmare about the last time she told someone that she loved them—you’re my best friend, Cris, of course I love you, and then he says you understand, right and she doesn’t, and that’s usually where the choking starts, a scream that doesn’t make it past her throat—doesn’t agree. All love has ever done for her is open gaping holes in her armor, over vital organs.
Fourteen years and four centuries later, standing between that same person—of course I love you and then the choking—and a death sentence, Brenneth still doesn’t agree. This isn’t invincible. This is utterly, unfathomably, unspeakably breakable.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway
Listen the book will never progress this far because I Do Not Like Writing Children and also this is highly unlikely because Crispin and also because Plot Reasons, but I like to think there’s a happy future for these poor kids where Brenneth owns a forge again and spends her time quietly making weapons and trinkets and whatever else she likes, and Crispin is basically her house husband. Given the opportunity, he would 100% like nothing more than to bring Brenneth meals and play with the kids who loiter in her forge and walk to the market while he tries to figure out how to keep the plants Krei gave them alive. Brenneth spars for fun, rather than because she needs to keep her skills up, and Crispin grows his hair out long again because he can stand to look at himself in the mirror. They sit on their roof at ungodly hours of the night—they have a deal with the local Lai Dase population, to the tune of try us, we dare you, so no one hassles them—and drink wine straight from the bottle and look at the stars and sing off-key and fall asleep in uncomfortable positions, with Crispin’s head in Brenneth’s lap.
Basically what I’m saying is that, despite whatever else they might be into, both Crispin and Brenneth have gotten to the point in their lives where their absolute top kink is domesticity. Like, once you’ve literally tried to murder each other, falling asleep on the couch together becomes Some Weird Shit. And as much as I’m enjoying putting them through hell sometimes I like to pretend that they will literally ever get to indulge in it.
On the one hand, I want Brenneth to have a horse with an appropriately impressive name, something suitably legendary.
On the other hand…I feel like she might just call him Asta (’Horse’) and leave it at that because she would know that it drove Crispin to distraction.
Be impressed with me, Internet, Alleirat just cracked 50K.
@c-foley tagged me in this meme - share a line/paragraph/excerpt from your current WIP (fic or otherwise), so here’s a chunk of stuff from Alleirat out of context.
One was a girl, younger than I’d been when I first came to Alleirat, and she caught my hand fearlessly as I passed.
“Sena,” she said in a clear voice, and I looked down in surprise, meeting her dark eyes. She stared back, her skin darkening with a flush, until finally sweat broke out on her forehead beneath her curls and I shifted my gaze to her cheek.
“What can I do for you, meilali?” I asked, crouching down to be on a level with her.
“Is it true? My mama says that the Fireheart died in battle against the White Wolf,” she said with all the self-import of a young child assured of her own knowledge, “but Merra’s mama says that she heard from her wife’s amiasa that you’re really her.”
“I, ah.” I looked up at Krei, helpless, and she held out a hand, as if to say it was up to me. I turned back to the little girl, who reached out to touch a lock of my hair where it had tumbled over my shoulder. “Yeah, meimare,” I said quietly. I hoped that meimare was still an endearment people used—little fish, uncommon in inland areas but popular in Dase in my time. “It’s true.”
“Wow,” she said, eyes wide, and she looked up into my eyes again, the flush rising on her beaming cheeks again. “I’m Lillet, sena.”
I grinned a little. “Ilna nai, Lillet,” I said, offering a hand, and she bounced on her toes as she clasped my wrist, excited to be treated like a grown up. “I’m Brenneth.”
I’ll tag @littlestartopaz, @wildehacked, @aethersea, @skymurdock, and anyone else who wants to do it.
Anonymous asked: please, tell me more about death and the gay barista. where does death get her hair done? why does death like iced chocolate? has death ever considered a netflix subscription?
oh, and one more: has death read the princess bride? does death like the princess bride?
Here are five headcanons about Death and Sephie the gay barista! (…are they headcanons if it’s my own stuff?)
ONE
Sephie has never seen someone with hair like Death’s. It’s as thick as sheep’s wool, but perfectly obedient, sleek curls that pile up around her shoulders like snowfall. Hours of styling, even in a salon, could never reproduce it. They’re sitting in one of Death’s gardens–phosphorestent blossoms cast an eerie blue-white light over the sleek black walls and the cataract of precious gems pouring into a false river of opal and lapis lazuli and sapphire–and Death’s head is in Sephie’s lap as she plays with the curls. Sephie stretches one white lock out and it springs back, and Death opens an eye, smiling when she sees Sephie grinning.
“Is it so amusing?”
“Yes,” Sephie says, delighted. She pulls out another curl and cocks her head as Death opens her other eye. “Why don’t you dye it anymore?”
“Dye it?” Death repeats, blinking. Sephie nods, and it takes a moment before her question seems to click in Death’s mind. “Oh!” Death laughs a little. “No, I didn’t dye it. What color did you like best?”
“The red was nice,” Sephie says, bemused. Death smiles at her and closes her eyes, and Sephie watches as each hair begins to change, deep venous scarlet seeping through each strand from the scalp until her lap is full of riotous red. Death opens her eyes again as Sephie huffs out a breath of surprise and rakes her fingers through the newly colored mass.
“Do you like it better like this? I can appear however I choose, this is simply,” Death gestures down at herself, “my preference.”
“I love it,” Sephie says, bending down to kiss Death’s hairline and reveling in the electrical shock of the contact. “However you want to wear it. Surprise me.”
TWO
“Where does the food come from?” Sephie asks, evaluating an apple. It’s crisp and red and perfect, and she knows that when she bites into it, it will be sweet and delicious. “Why do you even keep food here?”
“The fruit comes from my orchard,” Death says from her throne. A bowl of pomegranate seeds like drops of blood frozen in crystal rests in her lap, and her fingertips are stained with their juice as she pops one at a time into her mouth. “And I keep food here because I like it. And because you like it.”
“You mean those trees actually grow fruit?” Sephie asks, startled.
“Of course. The rest of the food, I do what I can. My sister brings me gifts sometimes. She knows I love Earth food.”
“You mean she knows you have a terrible sweet tooth,” Sephie says, pointing at Death with her apple, and Death smiles, holding out the shallow bowl of pomegranate seeds toward her. Sephie returns the apple to a dish that she suspects might be solid diamond and walks forward, until Death can neatly pull her into her lap in place of the bowl. “You can’t fool me,” Sephie says, reeling in the pomegranate seeds to pop a few into her mouth. They burst cool and sparkling over her tongue. “I served you iced chocolate every day for years.”
“I do love chocolate,” Death confirms, and stretches up to peck a kiss on Sephie’s lips. It tastes like pomegranates.
THREE
Sephie doesn’t actually know how many rooms are in Death’s citadel, but then again, Sephie is dead, and has thus reached a state of Zen acceptance about all things. So when she opens a door one morning and finds a library with shelves twenty feet high, she doesn’t ask a lot of questions.
Death finds her quite some time later, comfortably stretched on a reclining couch upholstered in emerald green with a small tower of books climbing beside her. Slinking onto the couch beside her, Death coils catlike into the empty spaces left on the surface and insinuates her head onto Sephie’s belly, curls–amber gold today–spilling over them both. Sephie giggles and laces one hand into Death’s curls, lowering her book.
“What are you reading?”
“I have no idea. It’s called Resenting the Hero, it’s great.” Sephie gestures around her at the library. “What is this place?”
“My library,” Death says. “I’ve only just added it.”
“Only just?”
Death shrugs against Sephie’s side. “I never thought to add something purely for the sake of leisure before. Sometimes spirits spend time in my gardens, or my orchards, but this…” She looks up at Sephie through her lashes, almost shy. “This is my own space. And yours, of course.”
Sephie spends a few moments working very hard not to melt through the couch at that, then clears her throat and says, “Have you ever considered a theater room?”
“A…theater room?” Death says musingly. “Would you like one?”
Sephie laughs. “Well, it might be nice to watch a movie together. You would like The Princess Bride–it’s a classic.”
“I shall look into it at once.”
FOUR
Sephie’s favorite room in the citadel is a cave–or rather, it seems like a cave. The walls drip with rubies and topaz, garnet and carnelian and amber, the ceiling laden with stalactites, and the floor stacked with pillows in a deep bowl shape. Bringing a light inside turns the jewels into leaping, frozen fire, and casts fractured glints and glitters across the pillows.
Death doesn’t begrudge her a thing, is more than willing to give Sephie anything she asks for, and when she learns of Sephie’s affection for the place, it begins to mysteriously fill itself with gifts. Bouquets of glowing flowers from the gardens, blankets and cushions of a fineness that Sephie never saw in life, sweets and books and bowls of pomegranate seeds and apples and cherries. Death is always shy, when she comes to the fire-crystal room, and insists firmly that it is vital that Sephie have her own space.
Death shouldn’t be so endearing.
But stretched on the floor of Sephie’s fire-crystal room, turning her hair different colors as Sephie feeds her pomegranate seeds, it’s quite undeniable.
FIVE
Death doesn’t sleep. Sephie doesn’t need sleep, anymore, but Death doesn’t seem to be capable of it. So Sephie is a little startled to find that Death keeps a bed chamber, well, if palely, lit and ornamented with the same pristine jewels as the rest of the citadel. The bed is soft and comfortable, a canopied thing with blue and green jewels inlaid in the black stone corner posts, and piled deep with pillows, and the bedside table is stacked with books and one of the shallow bowls of fruit. Sephie doesn’t need sleep anymore, but more than once she has taken a nap in Death’s bed, purely because it’s so pleasant, and she often wakes up to find Death curled up beside her, eyes open but breath steady and calm.
This is not one of those times. Death, after a long series of hearings and judgments in her audience chamber, comes to find Sephie in a garden with her usual unerring efficiency.
“Come with me,” Death says, and Sephie–oh, of course Sephie does.
Curled up with her head on Death’s chest, Sephie feels the low crackle of lightning through her nerves, the unmistakable feeling of power from being close to Death. Death’s hand is tracing Sephie’s jaw as she sorts through the books on the table with the other, and Sephie hums, a pleasant sound vibrating deep through her chest.
“Read to me,” Sephie commands, and Death laughs, the sound even more inhuman at close range, before pulling her hand back with a book. It’s a plain paperback, with a black and red cover embossed with gold lettering.
“Have you read Sunshine yet?” Death asks, amused, and Sephie smiles. “I did recommend it to you.”
“You did,” Sephie agrees, and nestles deeper into the pile of cushions as she tucks an arm around Death’s waist. Even skin-to-skin, Death has no heartbeat, and her chest only rises and falls so that she can speak, but Sephie has gotten past finding it strange–it is calm, soothing, a level of peace that Earth never offered.
Death kisses Sephie’s hair and opens the book. “Part One,” she begins. “It was a dumb thing to do, but it wasn’t that dumb. There hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake in years…”
Today I went to a restaurant, a newer place in town. It filled a building that had stood empty for three years, and before that, it was a Denny’s. The tables were clean and the accents were blue, and the waitress’ eyes were wide and edged with white.
I told my dad, sitting at the new table, that the aura of the Denny’s lingered. He asked when I had been to the Denny’s in town—never, I said, but all Dennys’ are the same place, you know? There are many doors, but they all open to the same strange otherworld, a place where another plane of existence opens at the right hours of the night.
The Denny’s was gone and has been for years, but it stuck to the walls and whispered from the speakers when the music paused. The bar was untended in the middle of Happy Hour. When we walked in, the hostess stand was empty. Our waitress had a sharp note in her voice, strained, and her lips moved strangely around her words, and her eyes were ringed white, like a startled animal. She was a pretty girl, just a few years older than me—I might have gone to school with her, but I didn’t recognize her, and she didn’t seem to know me. When she walked away, the faint shadow of a red-shirted figure seemed to cling to her back like mist. Hi, I’ll be your server tonight, she said with a perfect toothy smile, and I heard the rapid welcome-to-Denny’s-can-I-take-your-order in my mind before she kept talking, can I get you anything to drink to start.
I wonder what she’ll dream about tonight, our waitress with the white-ringed eyes and the unfamiliar face. If she dreams about her job, but decked out in another primary color and filled with the transient souls who end up there at odd hours. No one goes to Denny’s, someone told me once, you just end up there, usually at late hours and with a mild degree of confusion about what brought you to their door. If she dreams about the red-shirted shadow, and about how that stranger arrived for work one day—another day, another dollar, a waitstaff lackey of the boss but also a keeper of the door to an elsewhere—to find their job simply closed, the sign gone overnight like it had never been. We don’t know what happened to the Denny’s in town. It didn’t even go out of business, it just stopped, like a hand had flicked a light switch and taken the whole building with it.
I wonder if she’ll dream about doorways and dark lots.
The walls were decked with black and white photographs, of serious faces and beautiful landscapes, so neatly tiled that there was never more than a hand’s breadth of clear wall in some places. Their eyes didn’t follow you, and the water didn’t ripple out of the corner of the eye, but there was something…close about them, I told my mom. Like you might pass your hand over the front and then reach through, past the paper and ink to the otherplace just beyond. Not a trap, if you were clever, but a gateway, which is almost the same thing. Cut off from the other Denny’s doors, I told her with a smile, the restaurant had to find new ones.
Ginger ale and a burger. The food wasn’t a binding contract—the terms of the deal are set out at the beginning, at a restaurant, even at a Denny’s. You come and they serve you, you pay and they allow you to leave. Our waitress brought us the check without a fuss, not so much as a wheedling don’t you want dessert to keep us there. Deal observed. I looked out the window as my mom pulled out a credit card, overheard part of a conversation about checks. No, we don’t take checks, cash or credit. Checks aren’t signed in blood, I mused, but then neither is credit. Digital lifeblood, maybe, a new bond for a new age, modern contracts to match a modern elsewhere. Deal kept.
I don’t think I would want to dine and dash, at that restaurant, in those walls.
Two crows spent almost forty minutes on the grass outside, idly strutting through the all-day dew that still clung. They chattered at each other, and eyed the window where I watched them, black eyes like drops of intelligent ink. I looked outside every few minutes, and every time I expected to see another view, something new, something other than the shoe store and the vast expanse of pine trees. It was the feeling of lying on my back on the ground with my eyes closed and feeling the planet spin beneath me, but the stars being the same when I looked again.
When we walked outside, the pearly grey sunlight-behind-clouds had faded to a sulky, dull twilight, and there was fog wrapping thick around the restaurant. The parking lot was empty save for our car and two others, even though there had been several more families inside. We laughed about the old Denny’s in town, about how it had lost its hold on this reality, and didn’t talk about the empty bar or the wide-eyed waitress or the way the kitchen was so quiet, even though every staff member was supposed to be behind the swinging doors.
The Denny’s in town is gone, died quietly in the night without so much as a flatline. But I think it might be haunting its replacement.
things laid down
Hey y’all, for 600 followers here is some weird urban magic.
He blinked at the tiled ceiling, crossing into wakefulness from something…not. There was a clamor of noise buffeting him, just outside the half-drawn curtain hiding him—a tiny besieged encampment against a hurricane in the hall. The sheets crackled hard against his hands, more like paper than cloth, a sharp smell making the bone between his eyes ache, and it took a long moment before he could sort out the overload and look around. From where he sat, he could see two more beds, one in the room across the hall, curtain half-closed like his own, and one in his own room—a hospital, maybe. He didn’t entirely recall what the word entailed. Didn’t recall much of anything, now that he thought about it. He blinked away the concern and propped himself up on one hand to get a look around at the other residents. Kids, he noted. Very young. Younger than him? He wasn’t sure.
Across the hall was a boy, smooth-cheeked and round-eyed. He had one arm exposed to the shoulder, one sleeve cut away entirely, and halfway down his upper arm, the flesh turned abruptly into brass. The metal threaded itself into the higher tissue, and the boy clutched his arm across his chest in numb shock. The girl in the next bed over was sobbing, the blank sound of someone crying in an effort to soothe themselves, tears leaving glistening trails down the glossy porcelain of her cheeks. Her eyes, when she blinked, were bright and lively, her black hair tumbling in thin dreadlocks around her face, but there was a chink as a bracelet knocked against porcelain—her hand, rubbing across her eyes.
He raised his fingers to touch his own face, but there was no metal or porcelain there, only the warm give of skin. A touch of stubble on his jaw—older than these soft, scared children, then, but no lines, so still young enough—and chapped lips, but all living, perfectly human. He looked down at his arms, sweeping fingers up from the thin skin at his wrists to the curve of his shoulders where they met the paper of a hospital gown. He kicked away the sheet and performed a similar check, up the sinew-and-bone line of his legs, then tugged the hospital gown away from his neck and looked down. All skin over muscle, blood racing at the crease of his elbow and the hollow of his throat.
Far from simply being entirely human, there didn’t seem to be a mark on him. He wondered why he was here. Hospitals were places for the terribly ill or grievously injured, that much he was sure of, and he didn’t seem to be either one. If the noise outside was any indication, they hardly had the staff to spare for him.
replied to your
:
This was ….. Amazing! Can we have more? * holds up bowl ala Oliver Twist
Sephie opens her eyes and the woman is still standing over her, but the asphalt is…cold. And dry. It’s dark, no rosy dawn colors fingerpainted across the sky, and the woman is dressed all in white–different white, not, thick swathes of cloth like burial shrouds draping down her arms and falling to puddle at her feet like water. Sephie thinks something might be on fire to provide enough light to see, but the light is pale and wan rather than being warm and golden. The woman is leaning on her scythe, and her eyes glint like the blade when the light catches them, metallic and sharpened to a cutting edge.
“You’re awake,” the woman says without looking down, and it doesn’t sound like she’s asking.
Sephie sits up and it’s easy, blissfully easy, no pain or tacky blood sticking to her skin. She’s wearing something unfamiliar, a plain dress in the same white liquid cloth that the woman is wrapped in, leaving her arms bare, and when she presses a hand against the floor, she thinks it’s stone. Marble, maybe, with only a trace of gloss, stretching away in all directions until it meets the walls, where it seems to merge seamlessly into the vertical climb to the cave-like ceiling, dripping with stalactites. The throne at the far side of the room is plain, barely more than a chair with a table beside it, both apparently sculpted wholly out of the floor.
“I’m not, though,” Sephie says, and it’s only by speaking that she realizes her voice works. It’s strong and firm and not at all lifeless, and Sephie closes her mouth, gathers her will to stand.
“You know,” the woman muses as Sephie considers the matter. The stone is very hard–if she tries to stand and falls, she might hurt herself. Or, of course, she might not. She doesn’t know if it’s currently possible to hurt herself. “I expected a great many things when I went on my sabbatical, but you were not among them.”
“I’m sorry,” Sephie says as she pulls her legs beneath her and nudges the dress out of the way. “I think.”
The woman looks down at her at last, startled, almost distressed, and says, “Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. My sister may have some adjusting to do, but you wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t quite attached.”
“Your sister,” Sephie repeats as she rises cautiously to her feet. She doesn’t know if it’s that her mind still expects her body to be broken or simply that it’s been a very long day already, but she wavers dangerously, and the woman puts out a hand that Sephie catches hold of at once. The hand is long-fingered and delicately calloused and pale–unhealthily pale, deathly pale, Sephie had always thought, and she bites back a titter now. Deathly pale! The hand is also strong, and the arm attached to it equally so, and the smile on the woman’s face is warm enough to make up for the cold stone still chilling Sephie’s bare feet. “I’ve met your sister.”
“Yes,” the woman says. “We fought in your coffee shop. Or, rather, my sister came to yell at me in your coffee shop. She has some strong opinions about my sabbatical.”
Sephie nods, slowly, and realizes that she’s still clutching awkwardly at the woman’s free hand. The long, strong fingers hold her own in a grip as firm as stone, though, and so instead of trying to let go, she holds on tightly and asks the obvious question.
“Am I dead, then?”
“That’s correct, Persephone,” the woman says, apparently delighted.
“And this place is?”
“The audience chamber.”
Sephie nods again, even more slowly than before, and looks up at the woman. It was less noticeable with the counter between them, but the woman is a full head taller than she is, her masses of white curls storming down her back like a crashing wave. The scythe does not reflect light, for all its perfect polished shine, and the letters on it are in a language Sephie has never seen and yet seems to be a textual equivalent of a long-forgotten tune. She can read them anyway, for all that they try to skitter from under her eye, and thinks of a Latin phrase she heard once.
“And…” Sephie takes a deep breath with lungs that do not breath and listens for her heart that does not beat and thinks to herself–with neurons that do not fire–that she is hardly even surprised. “And who are you?”
The woman smiles at her, and gives a small twist of their hands so that the grip is less awkward, and raises the knuckles of Sephie’s hand to her lips. The touch is electric–quite literally. It kicks through Sephie’s chest like the time she let a finger rest on the prong of a plug as she touched it to the outlet, her vision flaring brightly for a moment until the woman’s lips leave her skin.
“I have many names,” the woman says as she lowers their hands again. “Many of them forgotten, some of them remembered. You can call me Death.”
Anonymous asked: tell me... the most loopholey bit of alleirai law
You, my dear anon, are a gift and a godsend.
Right, so, the absolute MOST loopholey bit of law in Alleirat is based on the ongoing detente between the two criminal organizations in most major cities and the lathan, the city guards. The way the major cities (there are four) and some of the smaller cities (to a lesser degree) operate is that there’s an undercity (Kal [city name], as in Kal Dase) in sewer tunnels or foundations and an overcity (Lai [city name], as in Lai Dase) on rooftops and abandoned balconies/etc. There’s generally a boss of Kal and Lai sub-cities, with ‘Below’ criminals specializing in more rough-and-tumble crimes and ‘Above’ criminals having a more cat burgler rep. Now, in order to prevent any gang-vs-law wars that might risk the Streets (the civilians between Kal and Lai), the lathan have a deal, and the deal goes something like this.
Any criminal from Above or Below is at jeopardy for the crimes they have committed for a given amount of time, and during that time capture by the lathan can result in trial and sentencing, which can range from labor to execution. However, the lathan cannot trespass onto Kal or Lai subcities without a writ for the arrest of a criminal and proof of their identity. If one of the lathan does enter the subcities without a writ, no crime committed against them in that location can be charged against any individual. On the other hand, the latha cannot be charged for any actions they take in self-defense.
The balance is extremely delicate and largely predicated on the fact that Kal and Lai operate on a certain code of honor. Other situations, like the ongoing bandit problem in the most rural areas and the White Touch, do not so much have that code, although the Touch has their own rules.
