Strangers - Actor Thoughts 1

“I am unsure exactly when I woke up. To be honest, it wasn’t much like waking up at all. No bright sun to fill the hazy windows of my mind. No moment of clarity that contrasted with the previous second, when I lay dormant. Those days, weeks, months, years even? I do not know how many eons passed with me blissfully unaware of my own existence. Or did I even exist before this time?

No, I was not so much thrust into consciousness, as it was bestowed upon me. It crept up on me without warning, and perhaps it will leave me in the same way. My memories of the beginning exist in my head much like a fellow who suffered a bad night’s sleep recalls turning from side to side in his bed. It might have been a dream even, were it not for the soreness of muscle, the tiredness of mind that accompanies me even now. Yes, this was my glorious birth into the world. I was unwanted, but I came in unnoticed, and so nobody could stop me.

And what did I awaken to? According to normal, rational people, I arrived at a strange world. But I did not know this. For one to establish a sense of the exotic, one needs a stable mooring in memories, previous experiences to serve as a foundation for the usual. I do not recall anything before my existence, and so I have no such normalcy to live off of. The only thing that is normal now, is that I exist.

The thing I recall the most is the change in the weather. Autumn. The hazy feeling I had back then mirrored the humid air that oppressed my physical body during the day. But as I gained a stronger hold of consciousness, so to was my body quick to feel the sharp cold wind that became commonplace to my commute around the countryside.

Living beings do what they need to do in the summer, but the mind, that special and unique human mind, it is most alert when the brutish body is preoccupied with maintaining survival. The mind is quickest in the cold, not dulled by the stifling summer heat. When matter is exposed to extreme cold, it contracts, becomes tighter and more compact. I imagine this to be efficiency. When the temperatures drop, I can see my brain shrink in the cavity of my skull. It loses the excess weight it used to have to carry around, and becomes the ultimate thinking machine.

And that is what I have become for myself, the great pragmatist; I rationalize, and consider every possibility for every action, every event. I think up things that no person in their right mind would consider. I give equal credence to the possibility that the sun revolves around the earth, that I alone exist in this world, and all the people around me exist solely for my life experience. I do not discount the possibility that just maybe, black is white, that love exists only because there is no such thing as it at all, that I can never know my dearest friends, that tomorrow can be a better day.

Nothing is impossible, but I have no control over it.”

Strangers - Cassidy Rivers - 1

The Actors: Cassidy

Cassidy Rivers was once considered not ugly, almost attractive even, back in his days in secondary school. He didn’t take life seriously back then, and life didn’t take him seriously either. That was fine for the both of them. Like most disaffected youth his age, he rarely thought of the future, and when he did, it was that he never wanted to live past 40, and be a washed out sick old man. No, he wanted to have the physical ability to control his drugged up, useless life.

Back then he was a lithe character. His deep addiction to cigarettes did for him what it does for super-models, and raspy, wrinkly, skinny trailer trash alike. It killed his appetite most of the time. When he did have an appetite, there usually wasn’t enough food in the house anyway. But the body of a boy is strong, especially at that age. It is at that pristine time of puberty, when a boy is in between the stages of youth and man, that he is most resistant, most immortal. However he taxed his body, Cassidy would not feel the effects of it until much later in life. Ah youth, if only they never got old, they would never die.

As a result, he was skinny, but sturdy. His time away from the other world of friends, marijuana, and loitering consisted of work as a farm-hand, which kept his young muscles strong enough to make him worthy of the occasional hook-up by a girl whose self-esteem was lacking at the time. He was not the most powerful or most able boy in the school, but he possessed what it took to get the job done. Who cares, girls don’t like men with too many muscles anyway.

He was naturally tall, even for a boy of 16, and in spite of his otherwise lackadaisical lifestyle, he never slouched. It was not that he possessed any sort of self respecting form of pride that would make him loathe to diminish his presence in front of others. His motives for an up-right posture were purely for pleasure. He liked being able to see the tops of other people’s heads.

While not as difficult as other regions of the body, for most people it is fairly difficult to get a good picture of what one looks like from the top of their head. Most people aren’t even concerned enough to wonder what is occurring where hair follicles begin to swirl around the head unless they have lice or are lacking said follicles. It is quite possibly, one of the least paid attention to parts on the human body.

At his height, Cassidy had the ability, no, he had the power, to see everyday what you or I could care less about. He could know a part of you better than you ever will know, unless you spend hours alone with yourself and a few mirrors. He was able to identify types of people by the tops of their heads, but more importantly, he was able to take away their faces from his mind. Everyone was a stupid drone, shuffling to class, being hustled around a loop in gym class. If he squinted his eyes his fellow classmates would just blur together as one, huge mass, as unimportant to him as the tops of their heads were to them.

One of his favorite pastimes was to loiter in an abandoned stable nearby the school with a couple of friends, slowly smoking pot, and letting the drug seep into his blood like the light of the sun seeped through the cracks of the boarded up building. The boys didn’t care that this stable was once the home of Darcy, a fine young stallion that once had the honor to have drunk from the same water trough as Phar Lap, winner of the 1930 Melbourne Cup. They didn’t consider the excitement, even, that surrounded the building of the stable back in the late 1800s. As the boys puffed away the last class of the day those afternoons in the disheveled piles of hay and straw, the only time the existence of the stable would even enter their consciousnesses was during the rare occasion that some of the dry rotted wood would finally give way to age and gravity,

They would then make their way to the doors of the school, and he would wait for the bell to ring. Back straight up against the school wall, he would marvel as the throngs of students, scalps blending in to form a find quilt of hair, would rush to leave the school, leave the insignificant farm of young minds, and return to their own personal prisons.

Cassidy never told his friends the truth about why he wanted to return to school after cutting the last class. He told them it was to get the thrill of the risk of being caught. None of his friends could appreciate the beauty of the faceless, pathetic masses. Oh how he loathed pathetic people who lived as sheep.

Oh how he loved to watch with steaming contempt as they trudged along, rain or shine. How boring they were, how low and unenlightened. They were foolish and childish because they thought things mattered. They thought about the future, they thought about careers, they thought about the husbands and wives, family and children, that they might have one day. How stupid. They didn’t understand nothingness. They didn’t understand that the only thing that mattered was the nothingness what would consume everyone in the end. They didn’t understand that nothing mattered more than anything else.

At the age of 14 in his family’s outback Australian ranch he had witnessed the final beating his mother would ever accept from his step-father. He was never to hear the tapping of her heals on the hard wood floor again, nor her desperate, pleading, yet completely romantically infatuated voice.

Until that point, every slap to her face was mixed with both pain, and the joy at finally reestablishing physical contact with her otherwise distant husband. His abusive attention to her was attention nonetheless.

She walked out that day, a freer woman than there has ever been. She cut her ties and she never returned.

Cassidy never found out why she chose that day to leave. Why that day, and not the day before, or the day after. If something snapped, if the final straw was drawn, it was unclear to all but Flora Rivers. It was said she moved to America, to Philadelphia, where she found another husband, an upright, Victorian man of Middle American, an HR manager by the name of Dewey. She popped out a couple of kids for him and forgot all about her life in Australia.

He also didn’t remember much about what else happened that night. It had to be a completely ordinary night. Finished with the day’s farm work, he would come home to that creaky old house. His step-father would be drunk by then, and sunk deep into the chair next to the TV that was brand new and fashionable in the 1950s.

His mother would have told him to wash up before dinner, hastily trying to prove that she could be a decent housewife, and prove that she had skill in the apparently complex science of cooking. More often than not potatoes were over-boiled, chicken was burnt black, and vegetables were soggy or far chewier than edible food was ever meant to be.

Within the half-hour Cassidy would have dedicated his body to a shower, his step-father would have migrated to the unkempt kitchen, and some type of argument would have occurred. For the most part, Mr. Rivers tried to keep the beatings of his wife an affair away from the children, but he wasn’t always successful. When he failed to hide his miserable out lashings, he simply covered this remorse with contempt for the brats that interrupted him.

That night was not the first night then Mrs. Rivers had left the house in tears. To Cassidy and his older half-sister, Jill, nothing indicated that it would be the last either. However, as days turned into weeks, three people who otherwise have little connection to each other came to the realization that the one person who held them together was gone.

Within months superficial ties disintegrated into nothingness. Jill moved to Melbourne with her boyfriend, a strapping young lad who was already beginning to show a penchant for abuse. She called on the obligatory Christmas and Easter, but otherwise left Cassidy’s life for good. And so Cassidy was left on his own with his step-father.

Both of them resigned themselves to an awkward co-existence of avoiding while being dependant on each other. Cassidy was unable to support himself at that age, even if he had been born a more responsible person. There was no escape from that dreary, musky house, and no refuge in either his mother or his sister. Even if there had been, at that age Cassidy lacked the will to change his circumstances. With his step-father or on his own, it didn’t really matter. After he was introduced to his new best friend, Marijuana, his life fit snuggly into that “whatever, fuck everything” mentality that so many young men and women around the world have come to enjoy. So long as he could remain high most of his life, who cared if the old drunk bat was flapping around, crashing into walls. It mattered just about as much as everything else did.

The esteemed Mr. Rivers, on the other hand, did more than lack any similar biology with the young man who inhabited his ranch. He also had a severely different personality. Perhaps even that day, as his sobbing wife click-clacked her way out of his life, and into the great beyond, he did not know it. Most likely even in the first few days that followed, he still did not know it. Maybe he was simply used to her presence. Maybe the ritual beatings had calmed some primordial fear of rejection. Perhaps they bolstered his confidence of his possession of the former Mrs. Rivers.

Regardless of what her presence meant in the past, her absence destroyed what was already in a man broken by alcohol, addiction, and life in general. He was consumed by loneliness that even the bottle couldn’t cure. As much as he loathed seeing the parasite Cassidy had become to him, he feared even more an empty house. When Cassidy did finally leave, not even 24 hours passed before Mr. Rivers relieved all of his miseries via a Smith and Wesson Model 36 revolver.

When he escaped Ranch Rivers, Cassidy was 23 and the world was changing in ways that wouldn’t hit rural Australia for years. The 1980s were in full swing and not since Marco Polo was the eastern hemisphere as commercially important to the world as it was becoming now. Japan and the Asian Tigers were leading the way in shifting the focus from the west, and Australia too was benefiting from increased trade and an easy supply of cheap goods. Increased mechanization of agriculture also meant that the young Mr. Rivers was not the only former farm boy leaving his life behind for the big city.

Cassidy moved into a new world when he rented that small, entirely over priced, shack of an apartment in Melbourne. Modern living may have meant he has hot water at his fingertips in a moment’s notice, but it also meant living like a sardine that managed to fit a toilet, bed and kitchen sink in one can. After finding work in construction in the rapidly growing business of building life-sized monopoly pieces, Cassidy took the lease with some self-goading.

“The world is my abode. My apartment is just my bedroom.” he once commented to a fellow countryside transplant turned laborer, with a grin. That coworker ultimately couldn’t put the spin on his life Cassidy did, and in longing for wide open pastures, and a house one can walk through in more than 5 steps, ultimately abandoned his new life.

Perhaps the years of maintaining a nearly consistent high off marijuana finally burned a hole in his head, (he still enjoyed a more than occasional toke) but Cassidy felt no discontent about his housing situation and his strenuous, grunt work. To ask him if he was a happy man (and have him respond in earnest) might have set him off balance, forcing him to reevaluate his life, his mother, his future, and all those mops of hair in-between. This was something he was completely uninterested in doing. Life is unpredictable, changes in a moment. What is the use in looking at the path that got you there? Far more important to take life as it comes.

As a side effect to the Asian Miracle, xenophobic Australia was subjected to a new threat for the first time since English prisoners made the continent their new home: foreigners who looked funny. They came mostly as businessmen, but familiar American and European tourist faces slowly but surely were being subsidized by the faces of the new Japanese rich. And with them came their strange language, and their strange food, and strange mannerisms.

Unlike many of his peers, particularly those in parliament, Cassidy rather liked these new comers. They mostly avoided eye contact with him, they didn’t wear those god-awful Hawaiian t-shirts, shorts and sandals, they didn’t find his “accent” cute and he didn’t find their “accent” obnoxious. Most importantly, they were short and had nice, uniform hair. It was mesmerizing to look at a tour group.

Chapter 5 - Part II

Lady Genevieve dismissed the boys carting the wagon with an effortless swipe of a gloved hand, to the relief of many of her weak stomached guests. The wagon lumbered to the massive wooden doors that served as the only public exit from the chamber.

"Let all who enter the Archne District know that we shall not suffer injustice. Any who enter, or pass by our gates in Center City will know this truth, as you all know it today. " she promised as the bodies disappeared from the room to be dismembered and displayed on pikes at the edge of Center City.

Satisfied, Ruby glanced at Lord Lot, adorned in soft yellow silks, a gift she had bestowed on him only days before. His clearly visible blue rein tattoo seemed to be jumping from the high necked garment to rest on the cartilage lobe of his left ear.

Her lover was seated before the dais, along with some of her friendlier partners in the Dance of Roses. The hard, elegant woman was clothed in an open backed, sleeveless and shoulder-less dress of light blue silk and satin. She wore a thinly quilted green corset of roughly woven silk threads and golden faux buttons. With all the confidence and aesthetics of a true born noble, she assumed the guilded seat in the middle of the dais. This was the seat upon which she was born to sit.

A spindly but youthful man of servant stock awaited the Lady Genvieve with an array of fearsome tools and vials of rick, dark blue. After a few more cursory opening remarks by the Lady, he set to his craft.

Ruby had spent days training, that this day she might not flinch, that no cry would escape her lips as the needle penetrated her flesh and the pores of her left ear bloomed ink in shades of blue. In and out the needle plunged and while the atmosphere had since melted into a sea of casual spectators, only a fool would think that the nobles did not keep a keen eye towards their new sister. She would dance, and she would dance well if they were to suffer her among their number.

But Ruby's sweat and pain never turned into a single complaint and as she rose to greet the audience as the new Lady of House Archne, holder of fortune and favor of the Red, she might as well have been taking a protracted bow at music's end. The sacrifices, one and all, had been made. Reward was well paid.
~~~~

The doppleganger corpses of Onion and Cedric, for their parts, would travel to just outside the Archne district, to Center City. At the once marsh delta that met at the gates of the thirteen garden kingdoms of ancient Eirdred plains lie Center City. In the old days, it had been leveled and filled in practically every generation, and washed away again before the children of that generation had a chance to lie in their graves.

But the engineering prowess of Heilth changed that. The dams, bridges and tunnels they had built upon the marsh turned the land that belonged to no district into permanent dwellings for the Eirdren. Then, as now, travel between districts had always been feasible since the unification and the signing of the Red. Though now Center City was a town in its own right, the Heilthians never altered the bisecting highway that traversed the old marsh. No soul could exit the city, encapsulated by shear sandstone outer walls as it was, without leaving through Center City. From any district, a traveler would have to traverse the broad brick laden streets to the main gates that lined Center City.

Once there they would have to navigate a confusing maze of shops, stalls and apartments that had grown organically as the district populations exploded beyond their enclosures. By the time he reached the plains facing River Road or the coastal South Shore Highway, a naive traveler could expect to have become the proud owner of numerous baubles and trinkets he never knew he needed. Today, Center City was a place of administration, the hand of Heilthian law, but most importantly, Center City was the main commercial hub of all thirteen districts of Eirdred City.

Chapter 5 - Part I

"I don't pretend, lords and ladies of the Red, to insult your intelligence and claim birthright to this house. I don't pretend that I spent my childhood with you, learning the ways of the coin at port, or you Lady Dirna, overseeing the cornlands of Eirfeld. I was not primed and trained to be among your number. My path has been a different one, my playmates and allies lived under the dirt of Eirdred.

"And it is during this time of crisis for House Archne, my dear lords and ladies, esteemed guests, it shall be these experiences that guide my hands now. Blood for blood, as the greater Keeper's host compels, I strike out for justice for the slain and dishonored. It has been the trials of a precarious childhood that has left me bare of the softness of woman, that I might serve the memory of my husband the way he deserves.

"House Archne is under a sickness, during these times. This sickness has deprived me of a husband, deprived our district of just and prosperous governance, and deprived you all of a colleague, ally and friend." Lady Genvieve bellowed to the attentive, packed ballroom hall, knowing fully that far more nobles present felt nothing less than serendipitous joy at the news of Lord Archne's untimely demise. He had made too many enemies in such a short time as a young lord, many were surprised it took so long.

"It was my eyes in places treason cannot hide, that brought the coward murderers, the conspirators, to the ever judging eyes of the great Thal'Rel, and his vengeful host.

"Furthermore, I will not pretend that Rel's hand upon the fiends was not great. What befits their crime is no less that sheer destruction and torment. Lord Henri Archne's death is not lightly taken. The retribution deserving the slayers of my lord husband has not been lightly delivered. I gave them no less than their crime deserved. But for you gentle folk, the work of Rel is best done in the dark. The path of his host leaves no room for sympathy and mercy.

The Lady Archne looked upon her captive audience like a cat to fish in a bowl. "The wrath of House Archne is tremendous, and those who do harm to even the least of us shall be punished! To those who would do harm to our House most dear would be caught in the very maelstrom of Thal'Rel 's terrible host!

"Witness the consequences that await fools who do not respect House Archne!"

As if on queue, for it was, the dining hall's twin oak doors creaked open and two teenaged servant boys tugged on a wallless wagon with visible effort. Upon the oak slab on iron and wood wheels layed the desecrated corpses of a diminuitive Outer Crestan girl and a pale, flax haired Eirdren male. The wagon was wheeled to the center of the ballroom, in clear view of every noble, lady and lord, as they sat at table.

Both bodies boasted an uncountable number of bruises and lacerations while the flesh had already begun to bloat in a stink of post-mortem decay. Melting pinkish purple innards hung loosely from the side of the wagon while rope burns on their wrists and ankles gave tribute to the evidence disjointed bones and torn muscle of the bodies.

Gasps and groans of disgust reverberated throughout the hall, but none turned away. A violent dance is art in and of itself, and though breakfast now sat poorly in many of Lady Archne's guests, she had done them no wrong in her actions. Sounds of vomitting and frail ladies' fainting spells, contrived or genuine, told Ruby that her presentation had gone smoothly and the dance had been done well. The abject horror on her guests' faces were the bow at the end of a symphony well orchestrated and Ruby could not help but allow herself a sip of the draught called success.

She had initially been taken back, having to discard the elegant mask of a wife besought by evil unjustly inflicted in exchange for the twisted helm of a tyrant. But her words had been effective.

Chapter 4 - Part X

As Onion breathed softly while the fire coals became crusted with a fine grey ash, Gregor pondered what to do with the information about the girl's "talents". He had hoped to keep her out of the world of the bei'thal, but when Vaughn received Anita's report the Nü would not be safe from the pnum bei'thal and it was far too likely that the Silent Scholar would also take an interest. He did not want to see this girl become the plaything of his superiors, and yet his choice had been made. Even given the circumstances, he was not entirely sure he would have chosen differently. His fingers worried at his straw hair. Regardless of whether or not his choice saved her life, he did not want to see this girl become Yiren.

No doubt the gegleth would be at the rendezvous point as well. The mere thought made Gregor feel the onset of vomit.

Damn them to the very center of the core. May the hosts of all keepers run that forsaken race into the fires of the center of the earth. His heart flew to his throat. I must find some way to protect her from the creatures. I doubt this girl is wise to the ways of such filth. Yiren wasn't.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was another half hour before Onion finally came to her senses, and another hour she lay sill, as if asleep, meditating, completing the final touches of her web from this side of consciousness. Lately, this mental reconstruction was becoming far too common an occurrence, but never had she experienced such devastation as she did over this night.

Onion was aware of Gregor's presence while she worked, sitting in silent watch of her every breath. He had long since abandoned the fire which was now merely a pile of sifting grey ash. His head rested awkwardly against the back of the chair, tired in his vigil, but he still maintained a semblance of consciousness.

"You have been here long?" she finally ventured, startling the half-asleep Lithenese man. Gregor wiped his obstinately heavy eyes with a forceful swipe of his middle finger.

"You are up. Excellent. We must depart as soon as you are able." he commanded, focused on his duty under Vaughn bei'thal. He caught himself in a moment of self-consciousness, suddenly ashamed of his callousness. He quickly attempted to amend his words. "That is, if you are well enough. Are you okay? Do you need anything?"

"I am well. You have freed me as promised, not by death, but by life. I am grateful. Direct me where you will."

Gregor handed Onion the satchel Vaughn had brought in hours ago. Glad to be free of the scratching twine of the prison clothed, Onion excused herself to change behind the thick paper and wood room dividers. As she appraised her new Eirdred garb, Gregor spoke from the other side.

"I never asked you before," he started, silent and twinged with a hint of remorse, "because names can be dangerous. There was too much risk at the time, and too little reward in simple pleasantries." he cleared his throat and injected a measure of confidence into his speech. "Let me recover this rudeness, my mother gave me the name Gregor, under the auspices of the joyous shepherd. Will you do me the pleasure of telling me the name by which you are known?"

She smiled, but it went unnoticed to Gregor. "Of course, my brother gave me my birth name and to all now I am known as Vren..."

"Hah!" Gregor chuckled, the name was nothing more than a common, culinary Eirdren noun, "Nice to meet you Miss Onion. So you know, my true name is Tomato."

Onion stopped dead in her tracks, shirt sleeves half on, her bottom still exposed to the stale inn air. She froze as long as her lungs would allow before bursting into laughter. Deep in her core she laughed the entire contents of her lungs pushed up from her belly. Eyes misting pure mirth, she realized for the first time since seeing the forsaken eyes of Rejnev on the field of battle for the last time, that she in fact was not dead. She had not shared his fate. She might even still be alive.

"I am glad to see your sense of humor intact in spite of all that you have been through." he remarked from his wicker chair.

"But you must know I am serious. It is the name my brother chose for me during my third grixi flood season, and I am known by no other name. My parents had already gone to the Master of the Mountain, so by then the choice was his, as the eldest of us all." she told her story to Gregor and the wall.

"Do you know what the word vren means? It is a word of the tongues of my people. It is speech of the continent."

"Rejnev once told me. It is some kind of plant is it not? He told me that after that cold white stuff-"

"snow"

"Yes, that. Like the cap of the mountain. After it disappears it is one of the first plants to burst from the earth with life. That is why he named me so. After the winter of our parents leaving us, I yet sprouted."

"Yes, there is that, but an onion is something we eat here too. Have you ever tasted an one? It makes you cry when you cut it."

"You cry? Why would you want to eat such a thing? No I haven't." she looked confused and a little robbed about her namesake. An onion sounds a much finer thing struggling against the elements than garnishing a dinner plate. As she she stepped our from the dividers, she gauged herself helplessly. What a strange contraption, this continental garb. she thought, this dress. "How do you walk around in this without tripping all over your self?" she asked to no one in particular.

Gregor laughed, "You will learn, as I did in robes. If it makes you feel any better, it suits you. You look quite good in it."

Onion tried to push the comment past her, but offered a smirk. Preferring the language of action and escape, she insisted, "Let's go."

Chapter 4 - Part IX

"The task is done, Davin and I were successful. The ritual was performed without error, and the little I could derive from my surroundings in the dungeon while I molded the dead flesh to the souls of the prisoners suggests that the Lady suspects nothing. She saw them in those bodies, not the bodies of her slain guardsmen.

"As it is that her thoughts are that the two have perished, no doubt she will change her strategy, but as to what that move shall be, we are uncertain at this time. We would be wise to keep other bei close at hand." Anita sat on the floor and began to stretch; her limber arm easily grasping the flats of her soles. With her other hand she mindlessly touched the bridge of her nose, still covered in its entirety by the blindfold.

Gregor wondered about what lay underneath the thin, exotic looking fabric. Her eyes were rumored to have been beautiful once. Tales from beyond the Teeth lived in Heilithian legend that claimed her people were a folk constructed of porcelain, sapphire and obsidian, but to him she had never seemed more than cut of broken glass. He wondered if she ever considered herself beautiful. He wondered what she saw when she looked into the mirror of her mind.

The young Lithenese bei'thal however kept all such wandering notions caged in the recesses of abstract thought. He beckoned her to continue.

"A far stretch though it may have been, it was worth it, Gregor." she offered, almost contrite, as if a bei could ever feel humbled. "She will be useful for the Empress, and the pnum bei'thal, first in that order." The bei's words were projected from lips now loosely covered by elongated gloved fingers. In the glow of the fire, the angle of Anita's jawline cut cruelly against the smoothness of her neck. This was the weapon Gregor was here to command.

"That one guides her own dreams and turns thoughts into fortresses. She is the master of her domain and even for a true pnum bei, I do not think infiltrating her mind at full strength would be possible. More likely it would be lethal."

"Yet you managed the deed though you are not a compromised of the spirit? How?" Gregor knew little of the process of the compromising ritual, or how it formed different bei, but he did know Anita and Davin had given up their sight for ears more sensitive than those of dogs. Their's was not a sacrifice of the mind.

"All bei lose a portion of their souls, it is the cost of our sacrifice." she answered emotionlessly. So it is true, Gregor mused. He wondered just how true she was. "It makes us who we are." she continued.

"The ritual was easy. The girl is battered and malleable. I suspect she is still in a numb shock that she is likely not aware of herself. Pushing her soul into the carcass at the Archne Estate was simply a matter of good sheep herding. And sculpting the flesh around her spirit was pure art. Her force of will made the flesh no more than yak butter." A small smile curled in the corner of her mouth as she related the memories of her labors. Her pride in her work was perhaps all that remained in her shell.

"So you said. And the Lady was taken in by your craft. But why does she slumber still?" Impatient, the bei'thal tapped his left toe against the oaken wood floor.

"I thought to herd her into her own body, much as Davin had done for Cedric, but when I returned to her, she was nowhere to be found. You must understand this. Were I to force the blood burn ritual on you at this instant, I would come upon the cluttered mess of your every thought. I would walk the roads of Lithentown and Honeyport to arrive at the color of chivalry. The taste of the air of your mind would boast the bittersweet tinge of a brother here, but lost. I would see the face of your mother on the walls of University on High, I would feel your last erection and know if your belly had been filled recently. Humans imprint their stamp on every action, every thought they commit in a day, but most of what they do in a day they try to hide in the hidden strongbox of their minds.

"But when I got to the girl, there was nothing. No lampposts, no memories of indigestion. There were no fathers or brothers, no sky, no smell; nothing!" The memories of frustrations she had, searching, getting lost in the big empty blackness of the mind of another poured into her voice thickly. "Only the dead have nothing! If... were she not to have been found I would have been as trapped as she, and this body," she pointed to the sleeping Nü, "would have decayed in front of your eyes even as it yet drew breath."

"At first I thought her dead, that I had failed and her soul lost, but slowly I could hear the crescendo of thoughts, desires and experiences, hidden and obvious, rush past me, constructing a wall, a web to repel and forget the injuries done. It was nearly undetectable at first. Even as it became more obvious, I could never tell where anything was headed. I never found the corner of her mind where she had crawled.

"But I didn't need to. Whatever she has been through, it had maimed her before we got to her. She has been weak and in reaction her mind gave her a fever to kill the sickness she bore from her injury. It was along the conduit of fever dreams that her memories traveled to her.

"In a fever dream, the mind beckons and traps powerful memories and ideas which can no longer escape. This is the nature of humans I suppose. To dwell on the intense passions and obsessions of the past is your way sometimes. A fever is particularly adept at destroying any other distractions of lesser emotions and daily life. It was the seeds of a fever dream, the call to strong passions, where I found my escape. Her memories knew to whom they belonged. I need but ride them to her."

"You followed a memory?" he asked, not sure he understood how one might accomplish such a feat.

"Yes, a particularly strong one. And when I reached the walls she had begun building, or rebuilding, I had no choice but to become one with the memory. To speak through it. I would not have been able to permeate her defenses otherwise.

"Now she slumbers because she is rebuilding her defenses, she has risen from her shock. She will not hide again, but nor will she suffer another invasion."

"So you say that through her memory you could finally communicate, even lure her out of her shell. But do you not know what the memory was?"

"I can't be sure. It was simply the vessel of my message. Most likely it was the memory of a person. To her, my words probably came from kin. Perhaps her mother's lips delivered echoed my will. Though more likely it was a lover. The memory was quite strong."

Gregor was certain that this final information was not likely to help his cause, and now he simply felt intrusive. He blushed, a fact that was thankfully concealed by the light of the fire coals. Anita may have been blind and thus could not see the cool pink pigment splash upon his cheeks, but he did not want even the hint of weakness in front of her. As Anita prepared herself to leave, Gregor took a moment to absorb what she had told him, but his thoughts could not help but to delve into curiosity. "Before you go, Anita, tell me one thing."

"Yes my keeper?"

"What would I find if I performed the blood burn on you?"

"Two rows of five empty, granite houses." With that she exited the room.

Chapter 4 - Part VIII

~~~~~~~~
Even after the heaviest of rains, a rose will open up once again to greet the surviving sun. Nought but the jewels of dew drops on her petals will indicate her troubles in the storm.

With the uncertainty of dawn at an end, Anita opened her burned out eyes and saw nothing. She heard the creaking of the floor boards from several rooms away. Over the conversations of two barmaids, dutifully cleaning the floors downstairs, he heard with perfect vividness the barkeep's backhand upon the kitchen keep. She had finally surfaced from Onion's mind, and while the loss of her vision was always a somber reminder to her life, compromised, the acute power of her ears was life. She had sorely missed the ability to see beyond any walls, of the mind or of stone.

Visibly drained from her exploits in the perilous backalleys of that convoluted Nüish mind, she nonetheless fared better than her charge. By pure stubbornness, or perhaps weakness, Onion remained motionless, sprawled as much as she could be on one third of the pallet. Thin, red blankets cascaded from her belly and upon her groin before twisting around her mahogany legs.

Gregor watched from a distance as Anita straightened herself out and resumed her stoic form. Before both feet even lay flat upon the ground, Gregor felt the curiosity of her experiences well up from within him. He was the master, he was the bei'thal and yet, there was still much he could not possibly know about the inner workings of a bei and such naivety he wore as a tunic amongst his peers; plain for all to see. He could suppress his queries no longer.

"What news ser'bei Anita?" he invoked the quality of her compromise, compromise of the senses. Fully erect now, Anita snatched the sheet from the pallet and utilized it to rid herself of the sweat coalescing upon her brow; the evidence of her labors.

"Bei'thal", she responded, using Gregor's formal title in kind, "You are a man wise beyond expectation." From under her blindfold, thin lips curled tightly and her jawline tightened, "You have found us a great source of new understanding. Skinny Selmont will have a dear time with this one. Oh and yes, Dagleth yes," she continued, squealing with glee, "much more to learn from this one than that monkey whelp Yiren."

Gregor felt the fires of rage kindle inside his heart but he used every muscle fiber to suppress it. He was bei'thal and she was bei. In any other organization she would be expected to keep her foul taunting mouth shut in front of her superior, Gregor reflected, but he knew any attempt at discipline would be fruitless. The bei he had heard by a friend in what seemed to be eons ago, lost the larger part of their soul when they became compromised. What remained was a one dimensional shell of their former self. Their personalities trudged on, copying the behavioral patterns of their former life with vigor, though it was questionable as to if they truly understood what they did.

Certainly nothing he said to cut her down or command her respect would make the slightest ripple on her future actions, so he knew he must bear her japes. While he had never met the woman before she became bei, it was well known that Anita had been a caustic woodswalker from the Teeth of the Benge wastelands. He doubted it was possible for the woman to even play at kindness.

To that end, a bei'thal was to be the leash on the bei. The only way to break the bei of the habits of their past life was to keep them in constant motion. To compel them to task was to turn the wolf into a dog. To set them upon prey was the only way to gain their respect. It was the duty of Gregor and Vaughn to unleash the power and skills of the bei when needed, and to muzzle them during the rare times of respite.

"Report your findings," Gregor enunciated once his palatable distaste for the bei's disrespect had subsided.

If the rumors of leeched souls serving as the fuel in the ritual of the compromise were true, Anita was a shining example of evidence to such. Her sneer quickly subsided as a monotone formality crept into her speech.