Unsettling. (Ardent Cashail)
-
“The strings run through me and connect me to the others like the child was connected to her sister. The others make small motions and I twitch, move, and feel.”
Ardent mused wearily as she watched the red cloaked guardsmen bandage her arms after her latest attempt to get at the tendons. The man was nervous, despite her seemingly exhausted nature after they had tackled her down. She briefly doubted he looked this nervous at the thoughts of the whole of the goblin nations battering down the gates. There was something uniquely unnerving about crazy. The man made no response to her.She didn’t expect him to, they rarely spoke to her. She was crazy.
Days and weeks ran together in the tiny cell made of stones that had absorbed the anger and misery of endless convicts. The rats had prowled for her food until she had sewed one into a doll, then they prowled no more. She could hear them in the other cells, their scuffling and their squeaking, but they gave her a wide berth. Her mind focused to the way their small clawed limbs would connect to their furry torso, the way the joint came together so neatly. One quick snap and it could be severed, the hard part was tearing at the fur and the skin. She shook her head violently to dispel that thought and the guard popped his head up, she had spooked him.
She turned her head away then and let him finish his work. They were tired of her, she knew this. Her friends were tired of her too. Arlan, Allen, Cecil, Sirion. The strings connected her to each of them and she could sense their weariness with her state. Better to be sick than crazy, better to be stricken by disease than rotted in the brain. She was useless to them and to Norwick. No matter how hard they tugged, she could not dance and she could not perform. Her teeth grit as she tried to remember the feel of her short bow in her hand. The brush of arrow fletching. The satisfying thunk of a creature dispatched along an unarmored flank. It was dim beneath the overwhelming imagery of flesh sewn into puppetry. The wondrous beauty of graceful strung limbs.
She shook her head again to push back the mental perversion but now she was being guided back to her cell. She never fought that, she never fought imprisonment because deep down she knew the other option was much worse. Were they to free her, she would be a damned soul within hours, even devoid of her weapons. She would run breathless to Peltarch to break into the morgue or strangle a goblin with her bare hands. She would use wild grasses or the fiber of cat tails to string them roughly together. She would no doubt die in the wastes, transfixed with her creation until the hobgoblins dragged her off to be eaten or worse. This was safety, this was a chance to crawl along that dark tunnel to the light.
As the gates slid closed, she slumped to the straw and looked at the clean white bandages that graced her forearms and smiled. He had done a good job. She picked at them with injured fingers until one of the strips of light white fabric began to shred, bringing forth surprisingly long strings to her careful tugging. She had a light quick touch, it allowed her to handle old parchments and stroke gingerly along tripwires, and now it was allowing her to bring forth strings from her bandages. A smile broke her tanned face, lips parting like that girl who hung on the wall. Who hunt there desecrated utterly and yet so beautiful. Family bonds replaced by strings, a mockery of familial love and affection. The father’s feet had been replaced by toys, the father who labored and worked on tired feet. A mockery of his efforts, replaced by frivolous things. A mother murdered in her kitchen, destroyed by the toys she bought her children out of love. A mockery, so many mockeries. The anger that boiled up from within her stopped her picking and she tore the threads into pieces to destroy them.
“How I hate you, whoever you are. I hate you and all your kind, I hate your family and your friends, all the things you love. I wish to find you and hurt you and stuff you into a dark hole for people to come and feel sorry for! Killing you is not enough. No, death is a solace.” She muttered bitterly and lay against the back wall of her tiny cell, eyes focused on the door at the top of the stairs.
“I wonder if it is raining…”
-
Today had been a bad day. They were all bad days really but when one had nothing but bad days, a new way of charting bad had to be developed. Under this new system, this had been a bad one. It had started normally with a quiet breakfast and running in place. Ardent was no fool, she knew one day she would have to run like hell from monsters. Like her father told her, on those rare occasions when she saw him, that it was not the monster one had to outrun, but your allies running in a similar fashion. Thus, she ran in place until the air burned in her lungs and the sweat stung her dark eyes. Then she would lay on the straw and rest.
She did not make it to her next portion of the day.
They came out of the walls.
They were not the little girls anymore but they were her friends. They were dolls and she had not saved them. Each to his own ways, each to his own form. She swung fists at the air to keep them away, pressed tight against the cold stone of the cell to attempt to keep them from grasping her clothing, touching her hair. Cecil was armored and even his armor was separated into portions with his limbs and his corpse was strung with chains to connect it. He was a large man, a powerful man. Now he was parted, disjointed, and decorated, and she felt that up welling of emotion at his beauty.
In turn, she was tormented by a cadre of allies each mutilated in their turn. Each to remind her of the depths of her new found depravity because she knew these phantom lived only in her head. She was doing this to them, there was no demon or magic to blame. Sirion had tried, he had tried with such a desperation and insistence that it ached her heart to see him fail. There was no one to blame but herself.
Victoria was next. Beautiful flaxen haired Victoria with her white clothing stained with blood. Victoria who was too gentle to harm, to cause pain. It was then the figure spoke out of a cut open mouth and the words startled her.
"Remember, you need to get your house."
It was like a stage rushing toward her, like a scene out of a book thrusting itself at amazing speed. The images were gone, the horrific figures, and this was a true memory. Light lanced through a brilliantly green canopy like the pillars of the sky. It alighted on abandoned spider webs and fallen leaves, off the bird's nests with their crop of pleading young. This was the gypsy cliffs, her lovely little home. The pass beyond where she slept in the hollow of a tree near the stream. She felt so happy, she could remember every detail.
She had fished a crawfish from the stream. With a length of string and a bit of kebab, she had pulled the small morsel forth, claws and shell dripping water on the moss laden bank. She set it on a bed of leaves and turned to find a rock to crush it with. Then she heard and startling crunch and turned to see the beauteous white stage standing on what remained of her crawfish. She wanted to cry out in complaint but it looked at her with a kind of mischievous knowing and wandered off. Within moments, a badger stole the remains.
She laughed gently in her cell, remembering how indignant she felt at the time. She blessed Victoria inwardly, even not here she was aiding someone in healing. The puppets were gone, if just for a moment. She dwelled in that happy memory, in resting there with Sirion and Victoria and talking about the house she would have here. Under green trees and next to sparkling streams, where the badger and the deer conspired to steal her crawfish.
-
She awoke blearily and for a long time, she was convinced he was nothing more than the illusions that lived inside her head. The puppets that were people at one time, perfected by being torn apart with careful hands and strung on wire. But his shoulders, they drew her eye. She watched them as they spoke as the upward and downward as he breathed. Clumsy. So clumsy. He was real.
She rubbed at her eyes and her hair and nodded to him.
"Sirion, we agreed my name is Ardent. I have not been girl to you for months. I'm crazy, true. I'm not one of the others to you. But good planning on restraining me, I would run." She laughed, a strange barking laugh as she crawled to her feet, graceless as him at this moment.
"In a heartbeat, in an instant. So it is good you have planned for that. But if you think you can cure me, have you considered for a moment that you could in fact harm me irreparably?" She leaned her forehead on the bars and closed her eyes again briefly to banished the dancing puppets around him only she can see.
Because she knew she was crazy.
"I agree, I agree. I have to be useful again or I have to be done. Bought the farm." She nodded to this and looked at him through the bars, dark eyes catching his. The thoughts swirled in her head, her focusing moving to that shoulder. A quick jerk and it would be dislocated. Then it was a matter of cutting at the muscle and the tendon to sever the….STOP. She ordered herself to stop that line of thinking and it showed in her face.
"Thank you Sirion, for what it is worth. Thank you."
-
_Sirion comes in during the night, while she is sleeping. He sits outside her cell door, silent as the grave. When she wakes, he speaks.
"I want you to agree to be let out for a period less than one hour. I have planned it well. You will be chained, restrained to a large weight and surrounded by several who can stop you single-handedly, without harming you. Notably myself. I will prepare spells to bolster your mind and your self-control. At least during my examination you will have the opportunity to confront your own psyche."
"I do not know if I can break it. Trying comes first. But know this: The mind is my domain. I have mastery over it the way others seek mastery over the blade. As I offer to help you, woe unto those who would stand in my way. Even you, girl."_
