Comfort

by thewovenwheel

Summary:

What do you need?
Who do you need to become?
How can I help you become it?
Or,
A study of Sheogorath and its people.

Notes:

part of my woven wheel, a collection of my longer, more self-contained pieces.
content warnings: allusions to self-harm and suicidal ideation, violence, general heaviness of tone

It asks you: What do you need?

…

There is a child, small and statuesque, sitting at the foot of a long table.

The table is spread with a silk tablecloth, embroidered with delicate swirls and sprays of blossom; it is laden with food and drink. The child may have any of the food she likes – provided she doesn’t take more than is polite, or (may the gods forbid it) spill any on the napery. She may not have the drink, because it is an ale and she is too young, but her mother gave her pear juice in the same finely decorated chalice as the adults drink from, and she sips it as she listens to their talk. It is best not to talk, in adult company, unless one can be sure they will say the right thing.

Her parents, tall and stately, are seated side-by-side at the table’s head. They are, the child thinks, like mirror images of one another, smiling each to the guests on one side of the table, her mother’s chalice held in her right hand and her father’s fork held in his left. Both long-sleeved and long-haired and long-limbed, they look like a perfect couple.

That’s what all the guests say – and even though adults can be strange and slippery with their words she can tell they mean it. They look at her parents with more admiration than they held for them when they entered.

The child quietly eats her baked salmon.

The conversation turns from politics to trouble across the seas to a tour two of the guests had taken of mainland Tamriel; not just, they say, the safely occupied territories of the south but the more contentious lands further north. The child listens, bright-eyed, and files what they say into a part of her mind reserved for things to remember. Information is always good to have; what if she needs it later? The rest of the adults listen, and then talk of travels they have taken or would like to take, all the places in the wide world that it might be interesting or illuminating to visit.

One woman – delicate and pert-nosed, dressed in a floaty gown threaded through with the shimmering colours of peacock feathers – turns to the child and asks, ever so politely, what she thinks.

The child places her fork on her napkin and runs through the answers in her head.

(Everyone knows the truce with the Empire won’t last, so Cyrodiil and its territories aren’t viable. Morrowind, she knows, is still exploding every few years, perpetually falling apart and piecing itself together, so she doesn’t think she would like to go there. Hammerfell and Black Marsh she knows little about – they are too strange and alien to be a safe bet. And to say Valenwood or Elsweyr would be unoriginal and uncreative, even if it might be true. She has heard interesting things about the astronomy traditions in the land of the Khajiit – not as refined as in the Isle, they say, but interesting.)

The child draws her back straight and lifts her pointed chin. In the high, carefully modulated voice Mother has her practice, she says, “I don’t think I need to travel. I am very happy here.”

They all ooh and ahh, and she ducks her head shyly, giving a dimpled smile without opening her mouth. “What a precious child,” one says, and another, looking to her parents, says, “She is a credit to you.”

Their eyes sparkle. Her father sips from his chalice, looking fondly at her over the rim. He sets it down. “She’s our perfect little girl,” he tells them, and the pride in his voice makes the child straighten her shoulders, satisfied.

The veiled lady behind her places a jewelled hand on her shoulder.

…

They’re tearing the house apart.

They’re tearing the whole city apart, screams echoing through the stone and the ancient gutters running red. The cellar has always been a quiet place (quiet, private, it’s supposed to be safe in the cellar) but now it feels as though the printer’s daughter can hear everything from her place tucked away behind the stacks of uncarved blocks. She isn’t sure which sounds she’s imagining and which she’s not.

She’s not imagining the raucous stamping around upstairs, she’s well sure of that. They’re not gone. She has to hide until they’re gone. (She promised.)

Heavy boots. Soldier boots. Faint bangs and crashes. It must have been hours, at least, why aren’t they gone? The printer’s daughter lies, curled up behind the wood blocks, the shadows pressing around her, holding her still. She can hear her own breath, feel it on her cheek, the hot uneven gasping – she keeps trying to slow it down, because what if they hear her, what if they hear her?

Her papa said he was going to reason with them. Or try. But the printer’s daughter isn’t a child, nor is she a fool. She knows exactly how that ended – knew it was going to end this way since he unbarred the doors and let Aunt Saerla in, tracking blood on the rugs and knocking their mugs off the table. Of course he let her in – he is, he was, a good man, family minded, told his daughter to get her down to the cellar right away –

She’s breathing too loud. The shadows crowd around her and press the air back into her throat, packed tight into her lungs. She can’t breathe. It’s better to asphyxiate than to be found.

Of course he’d let his sister in when the imprint of a Nord soldier’s axe was buried in her ribcage, what else could he do? And of course he told his daughter (in the old tongue, the words she didn’t understand half as well as he did and the words he always defaulted to when he was upset) to hide, and not risk being seen – for what else could he do?

She can almost feel the blood dripping through the floorboards. The soldiers keep on stomping around, footfalls mingling with more sounds – something distant smashes, and the printer’s daughter chokes on a sob she can’t afford to let out –

And then chokes fully, swallowing her breath in a panicked, airy bubble, the shadows digging thumbs into her throat, because there are footfalls on the stairs.

The door bangs open, and it’s as though every fibre of her being turns to bone. To stone. Maybe if she’s still enough, she’ll blend in with the cobbles. The shadows coil around her, an empty embrace, shielding her as best they can – and what happens after she remembers only in snatches.

Torchlight on the wall. Voices. A bottle smashing (Papa’s aged cider). Voices and voices and voices, fear so potent it fills her mouth and nose with its stagnant taste, enveloping her in it. She can’t breathe. She doesn’t. She is as still as nothing, curled up behind the uncut printing blocks.

A scuffing sound – a kick, she thinks afterwards – and she has time only to fling her arms over her head before the neatly piled blocks come crumbling down. It hurts, to be battered so by the heavy sides and sharp corners (and it feels almost like a betrayal, that the unfinished printing blocks would ever hurt her, who grew up with the trade and learned it since she was a babe), and her nose and mouth are filled with blooming wood dust, and she needs to cough, she can’t breathe –

She doesn’t cough, pressed in on all sides by shadow.

She doesn’t move a muscle.

She just has to hide.

The shadows hold her tight.

…

Guar-herding is a solitary job, if you don’t count the guar for company.

It isn’t always, of course. Used to be it was always two to a herd. But things haven’t been going well lately, and most everyone stays back at camp. Other things to attend to.

The guar-herder doesn’t mind, of course. Why would he? It would be unreasonable. Not anyone’s fault there’s been a string of bad luck – and it’s winter, when they move away from the coast and can’t rely on the fish so much, makes it harder to get food. Nobody likes the winters. The net-weavers are already spinning in preparation for the nets and traps they’ll need when the weather warms.

No, he doesn’t mind. He likes the guar. Good company. Quiet. They look like deep thinkers.

He mentions this to his friend, and she laughs – a sound like wind-chimes, like a leaf-tune, like the strains of a song-prayer sung around the fire.

That’s the other good company – his friend.

She seldom comes to the campsite, but she follows them everywhere they go, never leaves his side. Out in the Grazeland plains, with the guar and the plants and the mountain in the distance, she is much more vivid.

Vivid isn’t the right word for it. There’s no word for it, the way she shines like she drank the sun, in all the impossibly lurid colours of the rainbow. When she’s around the world looks cracked and faded as old pottery, the boundaries of things blurring together into dreary sludge; she stands out against it like a forest fire, or a rainbow, or a dream. Next to her, everything is dull – but being with her makes everything brighter, bigger, wonderful.

No. He doesn’t mind the solitude at all. How could he?

…

It asks you: Who do you need to become?

…

The third of Hist-Tsoko is the anniversary.

He knows this, though he doesn’t know why he knows. It hardly seems worth remembering. Harder to forget – there are some still that like to celebrate, though it’s really more of a day of remembrance now, after so much time. There are some, still, that remember personally, though he does not count himself one of them.

He was four years old, after all, when it happened. When it stopped happening. Young. A sprout. Not old enough to remember.

(He’s never been one to celebrate, or remember, or anything, on the third of Hist-Tsoko; he doesn’t know why he’s thinking of it now.)

It’s just a day like any other. His wife watching him with too much sympathy. His daughter getting her kite snagged in the trees. An emptiness, cold and devouring, in the pit of his stomach.

From somewhere behind his eyes, he watches his red-scaled hands close over his daughter’s, beginning to manoeuvre the handle, pulling the kite out of the tree. She curls her little tail around his ankle.

(She’s four, now. Closer to five.)

He watches as he places the handle back into her small hands and tugs the string to get the kite free and flying again.

…

The sconces on the walls are lit with magefire that never goes out.

The child doesn’t yet understand the machinations of the enchantments. She will not begin to learn enchanting until she is older, until she has a firmer grip on more basic spellcraft. Enchantments are different to casting spells, she’s told; fiddly, focused.

She loves the flames in the sconces, even though she doesn’t understand them. They seem brighter and more beautiful than any fire she’s ever cast, and they bathe the halls in gold.

Everything in her house seems gold, sometimes. Golden eyes, watching. Gold-edged furniture. Golden child, to match.

It’s perfect.

…

 

The sailor loves the sea, except when they don’t.

Which is most of the time, frankly. They thought they loved the sea a lot more’n they did before they started sailing. It’s a bit of a shit, really, the sea. So empty and endless and all around in every direction. And boats aren’t much better. No privacy. Some of the worst people they’ve ever known. And the fucking thing clings to them all day like a limpet, like one of the sharp-edged barnacles that makes up half the bottom of the boat.

It's a lot like an oyster, actually, in a lot of ways. Slimy and irritating. And it bites. Their left hand is bandaged up right now but underneath it looks like they slashed it open on a jagged shell. Can’t work until it heals, except cleaning things, and they’re not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Sailing was great at first. The creature was scared shitless of water, back in those days, and spent ages hiding out in the bunk, growling. It stayed there long enough that in a perverse way they almost missed it. It was the first time the sailor had been without it in years, and they took full advantage – got on great with everyone, learned the trade quick as the crack of a whip. They were good at it. But it didn’t last – stupid thing came crawling out the cabin, started clawing its way back up their legs, weighing them down. Makes it harder to get on with people, or learn, or anything. It’s such a slog to get through the days dragging it around that half the time they can’t be arsed to get out of bed til their bunkmate tips a jug of water over their head. Bastard.

They’d really thought, around the time they joined up with the ship, that they were rid of it. Its grip was looser, then, and they hadn’t heard its voice for yonks. Should’ve known better, honestly. They’ve never been able to shake it before, no matter what they did.

That’s the thing, really.

The sailor knows they don’t hate the sea. They don’t hate boats. They don’t hate everyone else on this boat, even though it fucking feels like they do – even though they’re thinking of getting off and vanishing next time they make port. Most of them are their friends, much as they don’t deserve to have them.

It’s just. Hard to give a shit, sometimes. Probably for the best they’re not allowed to work til the hand’s better. In this state they’d start yelling at the bosun or the cook and get themself sacked. At least they’ve got time to get their shit together.

(Like they’ve always had it together before, they think derisively.)

“You’re a shit,” the sailor tells the thing, tucked away in a quiet shadowed corner of the deck. “You know that?”

Shark-toothed, the creature smiles.

…

“Stop moving so much,” the performer complains, knocking a tube of greasepaint onto its side.

Her reflection rolls its eyes, but obeys, pulling at the skin around the left eye and mimicking how she lines her eyelid with black. “How are we feeling today?” it asks, as they each knock another tube of cosmetic paint over on their respective mirrored counters.

It’s a question they ask each other often. “Good,” the performer says fiercely, as though insisting it will make it more true. She is feeling good. She’ll be damned if she lets anything ruin it. She pulls down her cheek and smears the skin under her eye with white. (It’s stage makeup, makes her eyes look bigger and more vivid. She’s probably meant to wait until she gets to the theatre, but she doesn’t like to use mirrors outside the house)

“Good,” the reflection imitates. An oil-slick of a smile spreads across its face. “Your person will be at the show, won’t they?”

Even thinking about it fills the performer with the sort of pre-show jitters she hasn’t had in years, makes her feel like her insides are made of fizzing champagne. “They said they will,” she says, and then, less dreamily, “and I’ve told you to stop calling them that.”

Her reflection swipes a white streak over the dull bag under its eye and shrugs, pursing its lips. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

It’s what the reflection always calls people she – likes, she supposes.

And it’s a fair point. That’s always how it feels – my person. Like they’re the only person in the world. Definitely only the one that matters.

It’s true.

“Shut up,” the performer says instead; her reflection cackles, teeth pearly white and greasepaint immaculately done.

“Tell me how it goes,” it croons, as if it won’t know, as if it isn’t always there.

The performer laughs with it. “You know I’ll be incredible,” she says.

She always is.

 

…

A narrow smile in the dark.

It asks you: How can I help you become it?

…

It must be hours at least before the printer’s daughter pushes the wood blocks off her body and stands.

It could be days. It feels like days, hiding stone-still in the slippery shadow, so frightened she forgot she was there.

She shoves the blocks off of her head first, and the relief of that crushing pressure makes her suck in what feels like the first breath in years. (It stinks of wood and spilled cider.) She starts coughing.

Her throat’s irritated by the wood dust. All her body is bruised. The wood blocks – so neatly cut,  so unfinished, waiting to be carved and stamped on empty pages – dig their sharp corners into her joints and snag on her skirt. She clambers out of the press of them, her bare shins mottled wine-red and scraped by the unsanded edges, and stands there, in the dark, waiting.

Her father’s corpse is in the room above – she can’t deny it, she knows it for a fact. Her aunt’s, definitely, she was on her way out when she came in. Outside, though –

Outside could be anything. She doesn’t know. She could die if she goes outside, but she won’t live if she stays in the cellar. The strange angular shapes of the wood-block shadows cling to her in the dark.

Get out. The printer’s daughter is scared out of her mind but she is buzzing with careful energy and there is only one thing to do and that thing is to get out. Get out of the house, get out of Markarth, and get out of whatever horrible thing has gone so very, very wrong.

She’ll be safe if she just gets out.

…

It is nighttime, the golden flames in the sconces snuffed out, and the child is being rocked in the dark.

Her breath comes fast and shallow – she gasps again, and again, and again. Her hands might be shaking, but it’s hard to tell because she can’t control them – can’t disentangle them from where they clutch at the woman’s veils.

But the woman holds her tight, swaying back and forth, long-nailed fingers digging into the sleeves of the child’s nightgown.

“There, there,” the veiled lady says, “there, there,” and it should be comforting, how the child is being rocked like a baby in her arms; but she moves with such lurching haste that the child feels nauseous, and the tapping of the veiled lady’s foot is in time with the frantic pace of her own heartbeat.

“I can’t,” the child gasps. Gauzy fabric floats into her mouth and she spits it out. “I can’t – I did it wrong –”

In her voice deep and caramel-smooth, the veiled lady tells her, “You can fix it. It’s not too late to make it right.”

“If I –”

“It’s not too late to make it right,” says the veiled lady, her voice harder. The child hears the yet implied.

There’s still time to make it right.

What was the mistake, the child asks herself, and when the veiled lady echoes the thought, she answers through the heaving. “I was distracted and careless, and my spell went wrong.” She could have damaged the walls. Could have hurt her tutor, even, if she’d been practising Destruction. It seems unpardonable – but almost anything can be pardoned, she knows, as long as she takes the steps to fix it.

How can the mistake be fixed? With a sinking feeling, she says, “I was thinking about my new doll.” It was a gift from her mother. She was planning on calling it Carille.

But thinking about it distracted her, caused a wrong.

Without a word, she wriggles still breathless from the lady’s arms and goes to the neat shelf of toys. She takes the beautiful doll, with its carved wood face and silky gown; she crams it deep into the recesses of her wardrobe, under the cloaks it’s never cold enough to use. She’ll never touch it again. The pressure in her chest eases.

“Good,” says the veiled lady.

Now all that’s left to do is to make sure she doesn’t mess up the spell tomorrow.

The child gets into a casting stance and begins to practice.

…

The sailor wakes up to the thing curled up on their chest.

“Fuck you,” they say, and start to sit up anyway –

It hisses and scrabbles, digging its claws into their stomach and then the thin bunk mattress. The sailor curses at it as they try to wrangle it, get it clinging to their shoulders or hanging off their leg like usual, but it won’t bloody go; after half a minute the sheets are shredded and there’s blood seeping through their shirt, and they’re lying back down where they started.

“Fuck you,” they say again, weary, and wait for the others in the cabin to bodily pull them out of bed.

…

The clouds hang heavy over the mountain, roiling like a shell cut into a spinning top.

The guar don’t seem bothered, but their keeper definitely is; “It’s making me nervous,” he says, and his friend shields her eyes with her hand and squints up at it.

The way the clouds churn – like a stormy ocean, or a stew being stirred. It’s distracting; he can’t look away. The guar keep shuffling around the field.

“There’s worry about the Blight,” he says. “Has been for a long time, but more than ever. Getting worse, they think.”

“You think the cloud’s Blighted?” his friend asks, and he shrugs. She shrugs back. “They say the Blight drives the animals mad. People, too.”

“Yeah.”

She giggles, turning her head away so all he can see is the blurry gleam of her cold white curls. “Semantics, I guess,” she says, and pulls her knees up to her chest. “Think the clouds will come closer?”

“They think it’s getting worse,” the guar-herder repeats, his eyes fixed on it.

His friend gives him a red-eyed look out the corner of her eye, then nods so hard her curls shake.

…

The printer’s daughter escapes the cellar, but she does not escape the shadows.

…

It’s a bit like being underwater, he thinks. Or heartless. Or dead.

Sometimes he sits on the kitchen floor for hours and doesn’t realise he’s started it until his wife nudges his knee with her toe. Sometimes he watches his daughter play and no matter how much he wants to want to, he won’t join in. Sometimes, especially at night, he falls so deep inside himself that he can’t move his body – it doesn’t even feel like his body, really, just a shell. He’s the small thing that lives somewhere far below, pulling strings.

When that happens the emptiness talks to him. He’s not sure if it’s separate or part of him; he lives in it. It lives in him.

His wife asks about it more and more. She worries his daughter is picking up on it. What is there to pick up on, he asks, it’s just how he is. She chose to marry him. Why is this only a problem now?

Those arguments end with her crying and him pulling the strings that shift his body into the bed. Left leg pulled up to his chest. Tail curled around his ankle like a nervous child. Eyes closed.

Sleep is good. It’s normal to be nothing then. He doesn’t have to wonder if anything’s wrong.

…

The new apprentice that came on board when they stopped at Woodhearth is small and bug-eyed, but she can climb the rigging faster than anyone else and is almost unnervingly good at the nose flute.

She’s also chatty, and as she was placed in the berth next to the sailor, she mostly directs her chattiness at them.

They don’t really mind. (Mostly. Sometimes it’s bloody annoying, but mostly, they don’t mind.) It’s probably good to talk to people sometimes, and it’s nice to listen to someone who doesn’t expect them to say anything in return. The rest of the crew know them to be more friendly than they’re being and they’re beginning to ask questions. The new apprentice babbles for ages at a time and doesn’t seem to need a response.

“It’s in my blood, I reckon,” she informs them as they’re showing her how to wash the windows. (Not many windowpanes in Woodhearth, apparently; something about Bosmeri architecture and the wood ash in glass.) “Always wanted to go to sea. Gram wouldn’t let me go until this birthday – think she hoped I’d change my mind. But I never did, not since I was little. Why’d you go to sea?”

The sailor shrugs. The apprentice rubs her soapy cloth against the glass, leaving energetic smears from each end of the frame. “How long you been on this ship? I like it. I hope I stay here for at least this ten years.”

“You’ll have to stay for a few,” the sailor says, shaking the thing off their arm enough to wash away her greasy smudges, “if you want to finish your apprenticeship.”

“I’m going to finish my apprenticeship, believe you me. I like it here. Water’s nice and the folk talk so plain. What do you like about it? I like the riggings too. The ropes feel nice. And the people are so nice. Did you know Kvinna has a drum? She said she’d show me how to play it. Do you miss anyone back home?”

“Sometimes.”

She looks up, wide-eyed with interest. “Who? I miss my gram already, even though she were a bit of a gripe. I want to write to her but she’s the only one in my family who keeps Pact so she’d start yelling if I sent her a paper letter and I don’t think we’ve any vellums here. Are we going to kill the pig on the deck? We could make vellums out of that. But who do you miss?”

“My sister,” the sailor replies, kicking the little beast away from them with their foot; the apprentice opens her mouth and they cut in before she starts yammering again. “No, I don’t write to her. We parted on bad terms.”

“Why? Can’t you make up?”

The thing is clawing up their damn leg again. It hasn’t left them alone for five minutes together these last two weeks. (So it’s probably not just a short thing, is it? Damn it.) They dab the damp windowpane dry and say frankly, “I don’t think we can. She was very upset with me for going to sea.” They kick the thing into the wall.

“Why? My gram was upset, but that’s because she wanted me to be a weaver like her, and because she doesn’t like ships ‘cause they’re dead wood. Which I always thought was a bit rich considering Woodhearth’s half dead wood too, and it’s where it all gets delivered to the port – but she reckons it’s different when it’s all there is around you. But I don’t care about dead wood –” she squints her big brown eyes at their tusks – “and I don’t think your sister would, neither, unless you’ve secretly got adopted into a Bosmer family. You don’t have a Pact to keep.”

“It’s not the wood,” the sailor says. “She’s protective of me is all. Didn’t like me going out where she can’t do nothing but worry.”

The new apprentice squints her eyes so hard they’re almost closed. “You don’t look like you need protecting.”

“Yeah, well –” the thing, gnawing at their calf through their trouser leg, bites down hard enough to break skin, and they suppress a wince. “You never can tell, can you.”

…

The child’s mother asks where the doll is.

The child lies – she could hardly tell the truth (that the doll had distracted her, that she’d allowed herself to be distracted) – and says she put it away to keep as a best toy for special occasions.

Lying is another wrong, even though she had to; she has to work to make that one right, too.

…

The roadside inns near Markarth are closed to all but the soldiers, but it doesn’t matter; the runaway wouldn’t try to stay in them anyway.

She sticks to the wilds, the straggly sprawl of the trees just off the roads, crawling over the rocks and hiding in the long grasses. She feels a little mad doing it, but it’s safer to hide, not to be seen; she can’t be seen until she’s at least on the very edges of the Reach. She can’t attract suspicion. She doesn’t know what would happen if she did.

So she washes her hands and feet and face in the streams, and soothes her blisters by stuffing her shoes with handkerchiefs. There’s naught to eat but what she stuffed into her market satchel before she stepped over her father’s body and out the gaping door – but she’s saving all that. She’s not hungry anyway. Her stomach feels tight as a drum.

She drinks from the streams. The water is muddy brown and tastes a bit gross. She wonders if this is what Papa meant when he talked about how her nan would take him and his siblings out as children to reconnect to the land; then she stops wondering, because wondering hurts.

Everything hurts a bit, her heart still beating out of time, her lungs wound up and bound tight. She can feel the home she left behind reaching for her with spindly fingers – but she can’t say whether it’s dragging her back or pushing her away.

There’s nothing behind her, so the runaway moves onward, parallel to the bends of the road.

…

It says: I can help you.

…

The guar-herder has not slept through the night in a while.

There are strange dreams, red and black and the stink of rot. The guar run away from him, in the dreams; the earth shifts under his feet, sticky and inconsistent until he doesn’t know where the boundary between earth and sky lies. When he wakes up, slippery-minded and sweaty, he pushes the heavy canvas flap and goes out into the cold dark of the grazelands, getting prickles in his feet. Under the bright stars, the winking moons, he feels soothed; sometimes his friend comes and sits with him while his thoughts run a labyrinth through his head, twisting and turning. He can’t get hold of them enough to identify them, but just sitting in the cold dark not alone is enough.

Some nights he forgets to go back to the yurt. There’s not much point; he can’t get back to sleep even if he does.

His mother asks him where he went, after one too many early mornings spent sitting in the dew and prickles of the Grazelands grass. “Funny dream,” he says, “couldn’t sleep.” His friend, leaning against the taut hide wall of the wise woman’s yurt, points out how her face crinkles at that, as though suspicious.

It becomes part of the routine. Another normal thing. The dreams come most nights, now; he has to wonder what they mean, golden blood and spider legs and stars and always the stench of something rotting.

One night, the dream is especially vivid, sending his waking thoughts into a scattered tailspin; when he slips out of the tent, the sky is obscured by the roiling red-black clouds, no stars in sight.

…

The performer has thought about quitting.

She’s thought about it every week for months. It’s not the job she thought it was when she took it, even if it is one of the best theatres in Cheydinhal; she’s working with some of the most hostile bastards this side of the province, and she’s never been one to thrive in unfriendly environments – though she’s proud of herself for how she’s coping, managing to cry about it only once a week or thereabouts these days. She’s always the picture of professionalism when she’s there, and in every other respect it’s great – good writing, great props, and the audiences love her.

They do.

So she’s thought about quitting, but she’s always stood her ground; she knows the others can’t act worth a damn compared to her. It’s her involvement that makes the current company what it is, because frankly it has been steadily declining since she joined. Besides, she won’t be bullied out. She has every right to be here.

…

The nothing talks to him, sometimes.

Never a good thing when it happens. It always means he’s so sucked into it he can’t feel for a way out, swaddled in the cold empty space. Its voice is an absence cutting through the sound – nullifying the crackle of the fire in the grate, the sound of the dishes being placed onto the counter to dry.

When it happens, it mostly just says shush.

…

It says: I can help you.

…

The sailor awakes, and the thing is perched on their chest, its spindly fingers spread wide and eyes bottomless as the sea.

“Hello,” it says.

The sailor would not want to greet it even if they could. Closing their eyes is too much bother; they stare up at the rocking ceiling past its shadow and wait for nothing.

…

Sometimes things are right, and sometimes things are wrong.

You want to keep things right as much as possible. That’s obvious, isn’t it? When things are wrong they’re wrong, and when they’re wrong –

Well. The child never leaves a wrong, so she’s never gotten that far.

She knows that when they’re wrong they’re wrong, and she can’t stop trying until they’re right again.

…

The runaway leaves Markarth, but Markarth doesn’t leave her.

She can feel its dust and grit under her nails, caking the soles of her feet. Her clothes – even the new ones, the ones that never spent a single day hung out to dry over its streets – stink of sweat and metal. Every rattle of the cart wheels sounds like clashing weapons. Every word she hears spoken is a barked order for all who failed to fight to line up at the block.

She hears that the people of the Reach have fled the city, gone into hiding among the craggy hills and valleys. She doesn’t try to find them.

What has the Reach to offer her except more blood and darkness? She can only hope that she can leave the clinging shadows behind with it.

…

The storms claim two guar before everyone realises how bad they are. Scarves wrapped around their noses and mouths, everyone pitches in, disassembling the yurts and loading everything into woven baskets and bags. The herder helps, loading the luggage onto the pack guar, soothing them as best he can. The storms make them irritable and anxious – just like the people, only more. The guar-herder wonders how much more Blight it takes to drive a person mad than an animal. He mentions it to his friend, and she laughs at him. She laughs a lot, maybe more these days. It’s nice. Buoys him up.

Though she’s not very helpful with organising things, jangling her jewellery and wandering around him in circles. Once he’s loaded up the biggest guar, the one with the spot on its head, she starts rifling through the bag and messes up the system.

“What are you looking for?” he asks.

She glances up, wide-eyed. “Nothing in particular,” she says, and leans over casually, elbow-deep in his aunty’s weaving things. Behind her, the small crowd flows, the ebbing and webbing of an unconscious tide. “It’s all so sudden.”

“I think it’s been a long time coming.” The guar have been uneasy for a long time now. The air smells a little worse every day. (The guar herder should have started covering his face while out in the fields ages ago, in retrospect, but there’s little to be done about it now.)

His friend frowns. “What, getting pushed out toward the coast?”

“I’ve missed fishing,” he says. He ties a pack closed. “No. Maybe. The activity at Red Mountain, I mean. It’s been building. Growing.” It’s true. He could smell the change. It’s put him very much on edge.

“What do you think that means?” his friend asks.

The guar-herder shrugs, knots his hands in a spider-sign of prayer. His friend notices, and with a smile that folds her face in half, digs out and tosses him a skein of thread.

“Weave me a net,” she tells him, mouth obscured by her hair. “I’ll weave you a better one.”

…

A grip on your wrist.

Teeth at your neck.

Fingers in your hair.

It says: I can help you if you let me in.

…

Sometimes he goes away completely.

No. Not away – away implies there’s somewhere to go to, and when he’s gone he’s just gone.

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes – rarely – he blinks and he’s somewhere strange, unfamiliar, surrounded by unknown people (or no-one at all, and he never knows which is more frightening), with no mind how he’s there or how to get home, the nothing already sinking somewhere far inside him where he can’t reach it.

It’s happened three times before; this, the fifth of Hist-Tsoko, is the fourth.

He stands in the quiet gutter, getting his bearings. The silence is silent. The static space is nowhere to be found.

He starts walking.

…

The child does everything right.

She answers every question her tutors pose correctly. She goes where she is wanted and keeps away from where she is not. High society, her parents say, is like a complicated dance, and she knows the steps well; she waltzes through the halls of her own home so perfectly no-one even notices the performance. That’s how you know you’re doing it properly – the empty approval that comes of going through the motions so effectively that it looks effortless.

It isn’t, but she does it right, and that’s all that matters.

Every other Middas her parents’ friends hold a gathering so all their children might meet. Socialise. Play, the adults always call it, but there’s not often a lot of playing. There is talking, careful and restrained, all sitting around a small table like a strange imitation of her parents’ dinner parties. The child doesn’t know how to act, and with the exception of Estillir (who seems like he is just honestly that comfortable in every situation) none of the others seem to either.

She sees their cautious eyes and all the thinking going on behind them, their ready politeness and manners more suited to grown-up gatherings than what is supposed to be a handful of eight-year-olds having a tea party, and she wonders if they all have veiled ladies of their own, to guide their steps in the dance and make sure they never go wrong.

She doesn’t really like the Middas meetings. She doesn’t know the rules, which makes it all too easy to break them.

…

The runaway wakes to a weight on her chest.

Quiet, the shadows hiss, swirling around her, pressing her flat against the straw pallet, pressing the air out of her lungs, quiet!

She can’t breathe. She can’t move, not a muscle, if the bed-legs creak her heart will stop. The noise, the shouting crashing clanging, seeps into her ears, seizing damp handfuls of nerves in her neck. She feels like a kitten caught by the scruff. She feels too still. She feels like nothing at all.

Quiet, whisper the shadows, the shapes of their knuckles imprinting on her sternum.

The noise keeps going downstairs (upstairs) and she’s lying in the dark, the stink of the tavern’s mead barrels (aged cider in the cellar shelves) permeating the floorboards, and if she moves – (if she moves –)

She knows where she is. She knows where she is. She’s staying in a shitty inn, a bar fight crashing around below her, she knows that – only (her childhood home is being torn apart, blood in the gutters, Markarth’s shadows keeping her hidden) she can’t seem to convince herself. She knows, but her body isn’t getting the message. Her heart still thunders with the juddery pace of a galloping horse. Her lungs stay stiff. The muscles in her shoulders are so tight they could be cracked open like crab shells.

Shhh, the shadows say, too many hands splayed over her unmoving chest. I’m not letting anything happen to you.

The runaway lies still at the dead and lets nothing happen to her.

…

Every night, the performer loses herself.

She’s said before that she finds herself onstage, but that’s not strictly accurate – on that stage she finds everyone and everything else. She treads those boards an empty vessel ready to be filled with whatever they ask of her. And she does it well.

A princess one night, jilted lover the next. She rises to every occasion. She is an ocean that fills the bounds of every role and then breaks them.

The audience is enraptured; she sees her reflection in every silver spoon and glass flute, and she smiles.

…

Moving camp is always a big task, more when it isn’t expected.

The guar-herder walks ahead from most of the others, soothing and directing the pack guar. They’re still irritable. Hopefully they’ll get over it when the ashy winds are replaced by ocean air – that’s what everyone says will happen, or should happen.

The guar-herder doesn’t really understand it. Should they go back to normal? Will they? It feels like such a big thing to ignore. It feels like people aren’t giving it the gravity it deserves.

But they’re leaving, aren’t they, pushed out of the fields their ancestors walked for generations, so what more could he ask for?

He knots the thread as he walks, finger-weaving. He’s picked up a habit of chewing at the skin around his nails and Shinabi keeps threatening to dip them in bittergreens to make him stop – he needs something to do with his hands, and finger-weaving a hand-size net seems as good as any. Better, maybe. (He can’t always talk to his friend to distract him. She’s off the walk, for now, weaving around the landscape, forever just at the edge of his vision.)

He likes weaving. Used to help with the net-making when he was younger. It’s good for the mind and the soul.

Weaving is worship. Handicrafts always are. There’s a careful, mindful piety to the act of creation. His grandmother used to pray while she sewed, but she also told him he didn’t need to, because it’s a prayer in itself. Veneration of the Spider Mephala is in every twist of his fingers, every knot of the thread. Her mastery seeps into all the works in her domain. Some of her priests, the most dedicated, can find her will, her secrets, the shape of her web woven into their fabrics.

The guar-herder’s palm-sized net is delicate, its shape formed of careful stitches he never learned to do. When he holds it up to the sun, it gleams like gossamer.

…

The runaway doesn’t bother to make a rope out of bedsheets, like the ones in the storybooks her papa used to publish. She just jumps out the window, skidding down the splintery wood walls, wood chips digging into the pads of her fingers. It’s too loud inside for anyone to hear her crashing into the bushes. Then she runs.

She doesn’t even feel bad about cutting her tab. She couldn’t stay – it wasn’t safe. The shadow sticks to her like glue. It tells her safety is just a little bit further, in the dark, away.

…

Pacing around the armchair, it says: Don’t be afraid.

Watching you from the ceiling, it says: I’ll never let you down.

From the hollow in your chest that it has carved for itself – that perhaps you carved in preparation for it, once, long ago – its not-voice reverberating through your bones, it says: I’ll never leave you alone.

…

This is how it works.

There are things that are right things, and they’re good. There are things that are wrong things, and they’re bad. The child has learned the knack of telling the difference – because there’s not always logic to it, just decisions made by people taller and stronger and in charge, just decisions she has to abide by in order to stay their perfect little girl. Just rules – endless, firm, comforting, drawing all the hard boundaries, clear bars placed between the realms of the worthy and the unacceptable. She likes rules. She likes knowing what side of the line she’s on – what side of the line she should strive to be on.

So there are Rights and there are Wrongs, and when she Wrongs she makes it Right. There aren’t hard and fast rules to make it right, no matter how much she begs the veiled lady that shadows her and keeps her awake at night; but there are ways, and the child is a good learner. It’s easy to tell when a wrong hasn’t been righted because it gnaws at her insides like a monster and she begins to feel eyes in every corner, but sometimes it lingers even after she’s done all she could to right it, so then the only way to get it righted is to have someone else do it. Mother and Father are best, but her tutors will do as well. Of course she can’t ask them – that would negate the right - but if she just tries hard enough, does well enough, is enough, then they’ll say something, and it soothes her tummy and sets everything back perfect again. Good job. That’s my girl. She saves the words up, treasures them, wears them like a shield. The veiled lady ties them on like bracelets, the ribbons biting into her wrists, her golden fingers turning white.

The gold magefire flickers over the hallway as the child crosses it from end to end to end. (She stepped on the creaking floorboard that hasn’t been repaired yet. It could have disturbed someone. That’s a Wrong.) (Then she had to backtrack and begin again – and then she couldn’t leave it like that, could she? She had to burn the shape of the hallway into her muscle memory so she’d never do it again. That’s the most important thing about the system. Righting Wrongs doesn’t count for anything if you’re the sort who’ll make the same mistake twice.)

In the veiled lady’s shadow, her flaxen hands look sallow. The sconces on the walls look more gilt than golden these days.

…

Sometimes, the performer looks at her reflection and sees something she doesn’t recognise.

…

“This is a problem,” his wife says in the dark next to him, voice scratchy with sleep and with weeping.

He stares at the ceiling.

Even now he can’t feel her. Can’t feel much at all – can’t connect himself to the wrinkles of the blankets or the should-be-comforting weight of her tail curled protectively around his knee. The emptiness is an ocean in his mind and he is drowning in it. He always has been.

He thinks of his daughter, four years old, who they’re trying to teach to be a full person, to think and feel and live. He thinks of his parents. He tries, but he can’t seem to get out of the hollow space behind his own eyes.

“I know,” he says, and his body reaches out and takes her hand.

…

“You fucker,” says the sailor.

The creature – coiled snakelike around their neck, hands burrowed into the dip between their collarbones – smiles. They can feel its teeth against their skin.

They scrub at the railing with more energy than seems necessary. More than they have. Their legs still feel as heavy as anvils, weighing them down.

(Anvil – gods.)

(They left Anvil years ago, though not many of them. Still feels like forever. It was meant to be forever, only now the rocking of the boat makes them feel sick and they want to slam their head against the cabin door until they’re too dizzy to walk. Pitch over the side railing. They know it’s just the creature. They know they’d hate anywhere right now as long as it’s where they were – but all gods, they miss Anvil.)

The sailor has sat down, scrubber still clutched in their white-knuckled hand. Standing became too much effort.

(They miss their sister.)

“I really thought I might be rid of you,” they say, and to their horror they choke on it – the horror unnecessary, because it knows their weakness, it feeds on it or is made of it or something. It was supposed to be better at sea. The air should have chased it away.

“More fool you,” it says contentedly, its body constricting just that bit tighter.

 

…

It’s a bit like finding shapes in the clouds.

There’s all these mistaken marks woven into the guar-herder’s nets. The shape of a cloud, roiling – the shape of a guar, and a shell, and a tooth. They’re awful nets, says old Shanummu, when she sees them – irregular stitching, she says, and too small, you couldn’t catch shalk larvae with them much less a fish.

The guar-herder makes eye contact with his friend when she says this, and they share a suppressed smile. It isn’t old Shanummu’s fault she can’t see it – but to them it’s so obvious.

These nets aren’t for the fish.

…

Speaking through your bruised throat, it says: I will never leave you alone.

…

The shadows don’t settle.

They cling to the runaway’s hair, to her legs, to her hands, which are perpetually shaded, these days. They drag her away from the sun, and away from people, and brainstorm fake names on the lonely roads. Sonja sounds Nordic. Hjara. Fjori. Something with the J.

She knows she won’t pass for a Nord – especially not when she hasn’t eaten in the days since she ran from the inn, her face thinner and pointier than ever, the Reach she tried to leave behind written into the angles of her cheeks – but she has to try. Or at least to think about trying. And what else is there to do while she wanders?

She doesn’t even know, on a practical level, if she’d be in any danger out of the Reach, just because she’s of it. It might not be an issue. But she knows in her gut and her bones and in the shades playing over her skin that there’ll be in danger everywhere.

She has not slept a full night since Markarth. Being still in the dark doesn’t agree with her.

But there’s signposts pointing to a town not far along the road, and she’ll be able to get food there, maybe some work. And it will be okay. It will.

The shadows thread through her hair and hum. Geidir, they suggest. Atte. Lyri. They’re almost right, aren’t they?

…

Mother smiles indulgently. “Thank you, darling,” she says. “You’re very sweet.”

The tight pressure on the child’s chest eases a little, like a belt being let out a loop. She feels the soft, comforting curl of veiled lady’s lip without needing to look at her. Almost.

She’s not quite sure what she’s making up for, whether it’s being too short when she asked for the salt to be passed two days ago or taking out a board game she wasn’t supposed to touch. It’s important to keep track of wrongs, but it doesn’t really matter if she knows which one specifically she’s righting. She always manages to accrue a debt of them. There’s always something to repent.

Always something. She can never quite catch up.

“Mother,” she starts, and she means to ask if there’s anything else she could help her with, but she can never catch up, she can never do enough, she’s not good enough. The veiled lady’s presence presses down on the back of her neck. Her lungs feel frozen. She has that horrible hot feeling behind her eyes and slimy lump in her throat that indicates she’s going to cry, and she can’t cry, she can’t, because nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s

“ – wrong. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong,” says the veiled lady, but she doesn’t mean it, she never means it.

The child is just so tired. She can’t sleep because that’s when the veiled lady talks the most, at night with nothing else to do, and what rest she does snatch gets disturbed by nightmares she can’t ask her parents to comfort her for because waking them up would be unnecessary and disruptive and Wrong, and she’s trying all the time and it’s never ever enough.

There’s tears in her eyes. No, no, she can’t cry.

“Mother,” she says, throat aching, the veiled lady’s hands a vice grip on her arm, and she doesn’t know what to say – do you love me, are you proud of me, when will it stop hurting, when will it be enough, please, Mother, when can I just come home – “What can I do?”

Her mother tilts her head, golden hair spilling over golden shoulder. “Sweetheart! What’s wrong?”

I am, thinks the child, says the marks written in bruises on her arm. This is. Now she’s making her worry, and causing a fuss, and acting so childish and emotional completely unnecessarily. She’s causing more problems. Creating more wrongs.

This one will be a monster to set right.

“Nothing’s wrong,” the child says, gold-edged, gilted, the room in shadow behind her. “May I go to my room?”

…

It doesn’t last, of course. It never does.

It’s always the same old fucking song and dance, isn’t it – and isn’t the performer supposed to be good at those? The same old story; a new friend, a new lover, a new planet whose gravity pulls her in, a new star to shower her with aetherial light. She moulds herself around them like a pretty dress or a strangler fig. They become her centre. She thinks of them constantly. And then –

Then they don’t show up to a performance. An opening day, even. There’s one screaming fight too many. A few too many harsh words said.

Gone.

This time is worse, though, one of the worst, because it didn’t end with screaming – or, like that one time, a brawl in a tavern that almost landed the both of them in gaol for the night. This time is one of the times when there’s just nothing else for it, no other reasons, no smoke and mirrors. Just I like you. Just but –

(All the Divines and gods beyond them, the performer detests an I like you but. There’s nothing worse – the acknowledgement that she has good qualities, that they wanted parts of her – just not enough to stay.)

Just but I’m still learning to be a person on my own and I can’t carry you through it, too.

Just I’m sorry.

The gentle endings are the worst. There aren’t any bruises to nurse, and if she wants them, she has to make them herself. There’s nothing to convince her that actually they were awful – they never cared for her – weren’t worth caring for themselves. There’s no way to spin it. Just you loved them as soon as you saw them and they left.

You loved them and they left.

You loved them and it was too much. It will never be enough.

The performer lies on her kitchen floor, reflected in the puddle of rain she dripped in through the door, and thinks about bruising.

…

It takes two weeks to move and set up the new camp further from the mountain. The guar-herder’s fingers fly, tangling the thread, knotting it around his knuckles. His nails are white. The thread loops spools twists, a labyrinth in his hands, sky stretching blue grey black above him. Away from the mountain, it looks smooth as polished painted wood, pretty as the inside of a shell. At night they can see the stars, though, and they disrupt its balance with their brilliance. Not much more than flashy lights. Holes to peer through.

It takes two weeks, but by the end of them he’s almost a different person than he was when they started. The thread helps, the netting, the webbing, no matter how much he’s told to stop wasting good twine. (Old Shanummu took it away. His friend took it back again.) It helps, it really does, because without something to do with his hands he’ll fly into a million pieces. Up into the painted-over sky where he’ll scatter all over, become new stars, new lights, new holes. He hasn’t stopped netting in some days, finger-weaving in the sleep-sack under the stars. He doesn’t think he has, at least, though there have been a few strange times –

Just a few strange times where he’s been weaving as usual, eyes unfocused, a pattern tricky and inscrutable unfolding beneath his unskilled fingers, and then all of a sudden it isn’t, and he’s staring at still hands.

(There’s something to those patterns, if he’d just be allowed to keep them.)

He’s been knotting his nets all these last few days, and he’s placed far enough from the others that they don’t fight him on it. (He stays with the guar. Their snuffling drowns out the irritating noises of the night. It’s good because he hasn’t felt up to talking much lately – too much to say, and he can’t think how to begin, and he can’t think where to put the words. There’s too many of them, and he doesn’t know how to say them in a way people can understand. They wouldn’t see the pattern; the way it all fits together, whole and delicate as a smashed and mended pot.)

Of course he hasn’t slept while he’s been netting, but it doesn’t matter; leaning on her shoulder is as restful as anything, and these days he doesn’t need to sleep to dream.

…

It’s frowning, in its way, in the way it can.

It says: Don’t ask me to leave you alone.

…

It’s like quicksand. No matter how desperately she struggles, there is no way to escape it. Every fault and the disastrous consequences that could logically proceed from it – and several that couldn’t – weigh her down. No matter how perfect she tries to be, she ends her days gnawed by dread and swaddled like a baby in the veils.

…

They stop talking, stop trying, stop bothering to respond to anything. Lifting a hand is too much trouble. They begin to get seasick. They haven’t been seasick in over a year.

They just lie still as the dead and let it eat them alive.

…

She stares in the mirror and waits for it to blink first.

It never does.

…

He tries to find his way out of it, but he can’t. It’s been too long. He doesn’t know where to begin. He never learned how.

But even if he doesn’t know how to get out, just acknowledging it’s a problem makes it so much easier. Not better. Maybe worse. But when he looks at it straight on, he finds something.

A door, of sorts.

It doesn’t lead out. It leads deeper in. But isn’t that better than nothing?

…

No matter how far she gets from Markarth, its shadows stick to her.

They permeate her skin and hair, soaking her in the dark, in the stink of wood chips and cider and violence. They promise that they’ll get her out, but all they do is pull her back.

…

He’s so far from who he once was.

He’s so far from everyone around him, and spinning further every day. He realises now, all of it, in a way he wishes he could explain. If only everyone knew the truths he knows. They wouldn’t waste so much time on pointless things if they knew what was really important.

He understands, and the patterns shown him through the nets reveal more every day.

…

It says: Don’t you understand –

…

“What will it take to get rid of you?”

The creature, sprawled over the deck, is silent.

The sailor thunks their head back against the wall. They’re sitting in the too-narrow space between  the railings and the rising deck. It’s the only place people won’t look for them and try to drag them out.

“I don’t know what to do,” they say, and they wish their voice was strong, and they wish they sounded angry, and sometimes they are but right now they’re so fucking tired and all they want is to make it go away. They lift their head and drop it against the wood again. (Consider getting their knife. They’d like to. But it’s downstairs in the cabins in the underbelly of the ship, and gods they can’t manage the trek.) Drop their head again. The creature makes a noise deep in its throat like the scraping whetting of a blade and crawls close enough to rest its head on their knee, nestling its cheek into their palm.

They scratch it just behind the face. It rumbles. It says, “Don’t do anything.”

“I don’t know what to do,” the sailor repeats. There’s a sob buried somewhere in their throat. “How do I get you to leave me be for just a little bit? I’m not asking much. I don’t know what else to do.”

They tried everything. Even the things that do make it let up aren’t reliable, and nothing ever works for long.

They miss their sister.

“What do you want from me?” they demand. The wood slats dig into their back through their shirt. “Either I’m – either I do what I think you want and I’m weak for giving in, or I don’t do what I want to do and I’m a coward.” There’s no fucking winning with this thing. They’re so sick of losing. Throat almost too clogged with tears they can’t be bothered to shed to speak, they say, “I can’t even tell which one of us is talking anymore. What do I have to do? What will it take to please you?”

“Oh,” the creature breathes, brushing away non-existent tears with its scrabbly thumbs. It smiles. “You can’t.”

…

The performer stands before the mirror, bare-faced and centreless.

The countertop is a mess she won’t clean. Her whole house is a disaster. There’s a bottle of brandy shattered on the floor of the kitchen because she thought she wanted to drink it and then changed her mind when she got it out of the cupboard. She’s not sure why she dropped it instead of putting it back – she just wanted to, so she did.

She gets glass in her feet every time she goes in that room. The floor has gotten sticky.

Her reflection smiles at her, lips shiny red. It asks her, “What are we feeling today?”

What is she feeling? What is the performer when she’s not performing? And she really isn’t – she hasn’t gone in to practice at the theatre. Hasn’t felt like it. Hasn’t seen the point. Who is she performing for?

“Nothing,” she tells it, voice flat, slumped over with her elbows leaned on the counter. The reflection copies her, mocking.

She wants, very suddenly and very badly, to smash the glass.

(Why is she like this?)

Tiredly, she asks, “What are you?”

Its smile grows, splitting its – her – face from end to end. There’s something monstrous in that face. The performer doesn’t know which of them it comes from.

“Nothing,” it says in cheerful pitch. Its chin slips from its hands –

And it slams against the glass, palms flat, mirror bulging around its face. The performer stumbles backward. Its eyes glow. Voice bright, an odd note of sympathy creeping into its looks and tone, it finishes, “Just like you.”

The glass shatters.

…

“Why am I like this?” the man asks the emptiness. “Why are we like this?”

How else, the emptiness replies, would we be?

He is in that space that is not asleep and not awake but something else entirely. The space he might go when he disappears. The space he forgets.

He says, “Like everyone else.”

The emptiness is silent.

“I want to spend time with my family and feel like I’m there,” he tells it. He might be begging. He’s not sure. “I want to remember things. I want – to want the things I’m supposed to. But I don’t know how. You won’t let me.”

The emptiness is silent.

As ever. The space he is in is floating and staticky, surreal as a dream, more real than anything in his waking life.

“I want to fix it,” he says, pleads, begs on his hands and knees. “I don’t know how I can fix it.”

The emptiness does react, then, but only to grow colder by degrees.

There is nothing to fix, it tells him icily. Then softer, I’ve already fixed it.

“No you haven’t.” It’s so cold, and not even in a way he can feel.

It’s fixed, it says, and it shifts around him, a listless embrace.

It says, You can’t be hurt if you can’t get hurt.

It says, you can’t get hurt if the bad things can’t reach you.

“Nothing can reach me.” He can’t reach anything. The good things are forever out of his grasp.

But you’re safe, the emptiness tells him with great finality, and that is worth anything in the world.

…

It all comes to a head.

It’s nighttime, and dark, stars spangling the sky in unnerving patterns, like the places where thread bundles. His friend, vivid and lively on the shadowed-grey grass, is sitting with him. She is seldom away these days. She is the one thing that doesn’t chop and change and turn into something else.

It’s a nice night, and his mother finds him in the grass with the guar, and she asks him to go with her to the wise-woman’s yurt, and then his friend gets antsy. Bile rises in his throat. He tries to say he won’t go, but she won’t take no for an answer, so he has to give in.

He’s not sure why he doesn’t want to go. He knows there’s a reason but his head is all muddled and his friend’s nails are dragging at his wrists. He’s frightened, all of a sudden, because something is wrong, they’re acting strange and it’s strange in a different way –

When the guar-herder enters the yurt his friend is plastered to his back, her fingernails dug deep into his skin.

The wise woman asks him questions. He answers. Her brows tangle together on her forehead like worms as he speaks. His tongues tie in knots. His friend isn’t letting go.

She asks about Red Mountain, and the weaving. She asks for several minutes before he begins to tell her of the patterns. Sometimes they’re like the squiggly written words used by the house people – other times they’re pictures. Other times they’re other things, symbols and scribbles and shapes that just match. It takes a while sometimes to find what they mean but he always does.

She asks what they tell him and his friend buries her face into his neck.

Then there’s something with the fire. Something with the smoke. He’s getting very, very muddled by that time, and it’s hard to concentrate with his eyes stinging and his friend muttering into his neck, “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

He’s saying it, too. He might have said it first.

“Stop!” the guar-herder’s friend cries, raising her head, face hidden by her masses of hair, and her words come spoken through his mouth. “Leave him alone! I haven’t done anything wrong!”

In the twisted smoke, all of them – the wise woman, her apprentice, the guar-herder’s mother – look strange and sinister, faces shadowed, ghoulish and unholy.

“All we’ve done is look!” his friend cries, and the guar-herder is crying too. “All we’ve done is look!”

…

“Why won’t you let me leave?”

The runaway’s hands are dark, as though doused in dye. Her face is gaunt and hollow. The shadows are congregated at the foot of her little attic bed, staring her down.

“Why won’t you let me leave?” she demands again. “You say you want to help me get out –”

Of course I want to help you get out –

She throws her hands in the air. “I am out! I’ve been out for months!” The candle burns low on the floor by her pallet, and Divines, she can’t go on like this. Finally got a job and a place to stay and she’s spent all her pay on candles because something in her is convinced that being still in the dark means she’s going to die. They burn down overnight. It’s such a waste of good wax, but what else can she do?

Lie there in the dark, her breath sticking and scraping at the sides of her lungs, the shadows rustling her sheets and coiling around her and teaching her how to escape? How to run? How to never stop running?

There’s no need for running anymore, but the shadows stain her hands and somehow after all this time she’s still there.

(She’s heard that day called the Markarth Incident. She just calls it Markarth. It’s all she can associate with it now.)

She says, loud enough to get her point across but quiet enough to not wake anyone downstairs, “You’re all that’s keeping me there!”

She’s never stopped huddling in the cellar shadows. She’s never stopped smelling the wood and cider. She’s tried, but no matter how much she runs, the shadows keep their place in her pockets, in her hair, in the mud at her feet.

The shadows roil in the dark, in the space outside the dim candle’s light. It’s not safe yet, they say. You know it’s not.

“You’re the one making it not safe! You’re the one who keeps telling me to be afraid!”

I don’t tell you to be afraid, I tell you to be ready!

The runaway glares.

It could happen again, the shadows insist.

“No it couldn’t,” she says. “It happened. It’s over.”

It’s very difficult to take a position in an argument that you cannot believe.

The candle goes out.

There is violence in the world! the shadows cry. You don’t know what could happen! You can only be safe if you are ready!

They press against her. It’s smothering.

I want you to be safe. I make sure you are ready.

The runaway doesn’t relight her candle that night.

…

If you can’t do everything right, you may as well do it all wrong.

There’s banging on the door – shouting, too. But the armoire shoved in its way (with a truly hair-raising screech of legs on floorboards, its tracks gouged into the parquet) is too steady to be budged, and the child stays silent and still under every sheet and blanket she could find, lying on her mattress.

The mattress is in the middle of the floor. She dragged it off the bedframe, which she then disassembled, first meticulously and then when she lost patience with more gusto.

Her books are thrown about the room, pages torn and spines cracked down the centre. All her toys and knick-knacks that could be broken have been. The doll her mother gave her was fished out of the cupboard and thrown flaming out of the window.

And now she is quiet. She is tired.

The only thing to be done after ruining everything is to set about fixing it, and she can’t face that task.

Her mother is still hammering at the door.

The veiled lady is still hammering at her shoulders, trying to strip back her blankets. They’re stifling hot. They’re her own veils now.

“What have you done!” the lady is wailing, and the child can just picture her face as it was when she ripped the lace away – strange and warped, like a half-melted ice sculpture, eyes dripping down her cheeks and her lips prim and sharp enough to cut things. “What have you done! You’ve spoiled everything!”

“Get out.” Everything ugly she’s been too afraid to think is filling her up now, pouring out of her ears, the thoughts too terrifying to even really care about anymore. Everything leads to disaster. At least this way she has some agency in it. “You’re a monster. Leave me alone.”

The veiled lady’s nails snag at the thin, drifty weave of the top sheet.

“How dare you? I just want to make sure it’s all right!”

The child throws the sheets back. “Well, I’m wrong!” she shouts – voice unmodulated, the words ripping out of her throat. She sounds like someone else. “I’m all wrong, and I’m never going to do a right thing again, and I’ll be got rid of, and see if I care!” The lady’s veils are rent and her face is something very wrong. The child feels out of her own control. “You don’t even like me! You just like the things you make me do!”

“You do them so everything’s right!”

“Liar! That’s what you always say!” There is screaming at the door and seeping from her veils and all in the child’s head and she just wants it to stop. She pulls a blue slipper off her foot, its silver embroidery unravelling, and hurls it at the wall. “That’s what you always say, but it’s never right! Something’s wrong all the time! I’m wrong all the time! I’ve never felt right in my life! So I’m done! I’m not trying! I don’t care!”

The veiled lady’s hair crackles around her unshrouded face as though blown by a wind no-one else can feel. “You can’t stop trying,” she says, and there’s that condescension, that patronising tone, the fear she presses into every word. The child wants, very suddenly and very wrongly, to throw her out the window; light her veils on fire and claw her horrifying all-wrong eyes out. She can’t tell if she actually wants to or if it’s a bad thought; she can’t tell if it matters. The veiled lady says, “If you stop trying to make it right, it will all be wrong. That’s no way to live!”

But neither is this.

“Suppose I’ll die then,” the child says defiantly, and she lies back down, blankets over her head, one sad and sweaty sheet tugged between her teeth.

She pulls until it rips.

…

Hand on your heart, knife at your throat, it begs you: Just listen to me.

…

The no-longer-guar-herder is asked to leave the camp.

Not asked. It’s not a question.

It’s only natural, of course, for people to be afraid, to lash out, when they get a glimpse, even second-hand, of things they cannot understand. He can’t fault them. Especially not when he’s so clearly been painted as somehow in the wrong – smeared, conspired against, everyone keeping their distance and giving him these looks. Even his own mother doesn’t speak as she packs him a bag. (She will not let him do it himself.)

(When she is done, she tells him about a brother who left camp too. He went to one of the settled places. He can’t concentrate well enough to understand why she’s telling him, or to care.

It still hurts, even if he can’t fault them.)

He walks out halfway through the night, in the direction of the sea, his friend tucked hunched down under his arm. He feels like someone sleepwalking.

At least they let him take his nets.

…

The performer is on the floor.

She might be crying. It’s hard to tell; her breathing isn’t coming the way it should and she’s just too tired and confused to bother figuring it all out.

The reflection cradles her, soft and soothing, its fingers carding through her hair, shards of glass littering the floor around them. (She’ll have to clean that when she has the energy.)

“I’m here,” it promises, “I’m here,” and it is. It always has been.

It’s the only thing that stays.

…

He decides that being safe is not worth the world.

…

It’s a strange role reversal – the veiled lady weeping into her scarred and scabby hands under the blanket. The child holding her as best she can.

The veiled lady is rail-thin, but very tall, and it’s hard to give a proper cuddle to someone who’s that long. Harder when they’re both strung-out and sobbing. But it’s cosy under the blankets, dark, with an uncomfortable muffling heat; quiet and snug as though the world is being born. It’s as good a place as any to try to comfort the thing that shaped you, that’s been with you all your life.

(The child isn’t sure what the veiled lady is. She isn’t sure if it really matters.)

“It’s okay,” she keeps whispering, gauzy fabric tangling in the bedsheets. It’s not true, and they both know it, but it helps anyway. “It will be all right.”

The veiled lady doesn’t speak. There is a writhing anxiety in her skin, and she would be breathing much too fast if she breathed at all, but she doesn’t speak. The child holds her. They both hold each other.

After a long time – perhaps, probably, though the child can’t be sure when she’s lying under the blankets with no way of measuring – the veiled lady is still and quiet. Maybe asleep, or as close as she gets. The child pushes the sheets and blankets off of them both. There is still sound at the door, though less of it. Cool air is blowing in through the window. Her room is still a wreck.

It needs to be fixed – the need is scraping at her joints – but not now. Not now.

She rises from the mattress on the floor and shoves the armoire aside. She lets her parents in.

…

The candles cast funny shadows over the room, jumping with the motion of the ways.

The sailor lies on the floor, halfway to their bed, the creature coiled like a noose around their neck, watching the light dance. They say, “Are you a monster?”

The creature purrs. “No,” it replies, its voice vibrating at the hollow of their throat, and then it thinks. “Well. What is a monster?”

The sailor does not have the energy for philosophy.

“Then what are you?”

The creature thinks, wraps itself around tighter, says, “I just am.”

“Why do you hurt me?” the sailor asks.

The creature says, “Do I?”

They’re so tired.

The sailor lifts their head a little, enough for the creature to nudge its head into the underside of their jaw. The motion of the waves is just this side of sickening. They want, a bit, to go to sleep, but they can’t sleep on the splintery wood of the cabin floorboards and it’s just too much bother to go to the bed.

“What do I do with you?” they mumble, tracing a listless finger along its spines.

They can feel its hot breath on their neck.

“Cope,” it says.

They are quiet in the damp and rocking room.

The sailor says, “I’m going to write to my sister.”

The creature shifts a little. It doesn’t object.

The sailor lies still on the floor with a hand on its back. They breathe.

…

The runaway is early to work most days.

She’s used to rising early, and she’s living in the same building she works at, same as she used to. It’s a nice shop. Not too many customers to make her nervous (she’s never dealt with customers before, when she helped with the printing.) And the wares are nice.

She misses printing, sometimes, but she’s not sure if the shadows will ever let her go back. It doesn’t matter right now. The shop is enough for the moment – and she spends a lot of her time doing copyist work, which is quite similar to printing, really, only fancier and less efficient. But she only ever has to copy something once or twice, so cutting blocks to print it would be more trouble than it’s worth.

So she goes down to the storefront early, and tidies if there’s anything to tidy and if she’s feeling antsy, and then she makes some progress on whichever thing she’s working on and tries to coax the shadows into calmer shapes.

She gets them distracted by the fire once, before they go back to checking exit routes.

…

It tells you: I’m trying to help you.

…

The performer sweeps up the glass, both in her kitchen and her bedroom, but she leaves the empty mirror frame hanging on the wall.

Her reflection comes and goes as it pleases. They talk more – and they talk more honestly – without the glass always in between them.

(“I hate you,” she says once, and it smiles.

It corrects, “You hate you.”

It’s true, she knows, but can’t they both be?)

(They have to both be true. It only gets harder to find where one ends and the other begins.)

It’s odd, the reflection. She doesn’t like it a lot of the time, though they get on well when she does. But she feels like she’s maybe beginning to get a handle on it – not what it is, but perhaps how to live with it.

The performer goes back to the theatre, too. Apologises for disappearing, more or less. She’s almost kicked out of the company, but they give her one more chance. If she pulls something like that again she’s out on her ear.

She finds she doesn’t really care, even though she knows and they know that she will pull something like that again. She’s about fed up with Cheydinhal; what’s for her here? She’d rather like a fresh start. She’s heard good things about the theatres in the Imperial City.

For now she stays. She finds a nice little bakery within walking distance. Buys herself overpriced jewellery on a whim.

She doesn’t really know how to be a person – there’s a lot of truth to that – but she’s doing her best to figure it out.

…

The sailor writes to their sister.

It’s a shit letter, terrible handwriting and probably barely coherent, creature gnawing at their ears and trying to grab their fingers all the time they wrote, and more than once they realise that they’ve not been moving for the last several minutes and need to pick up the pen again, but it’s written and it’s done and they lock it and put it with the rest of the post to be sent off at the next port. Then they lie down.

Their hand’s better, so it’s back to work. They’re helping with repairs and with the sails again, instead of only doing the light cleaning jobs or standing lookout. Which is really for the best. There’s no way to zone out while you’re reefing a sail, and it’s not the sort of thing they’d just drop when they’re tired, either. Every time they got placed on lookout they stopped paying attention a minute in.

They’re still very tired. And still quite angry. And still pondering tipping themself over the rails a lot of the time. (Not seriously, just – it comes up in their head a lot. It’s a strong image.) But as frustrating as it is they know working is better than not doing anything. Helps that they know people will tip water on their head if they don’t do their part.

They join in a game night with most of the crew, which they haven’t done in a while. People seem glad to see them, which is nice. They lose all the games. It’s really noisy. But it’s good to be around people who are friendly, and to not have their hackles up trying to get everyone not to be friendly. They lose all the card games, and they don’t even lose their temper about it.

That night the creature digs into their chest as they lie unmoving on their rocking bunk. Its claws scrape against their ribs.

It’s just like that, sometimes.

“I don’t want to have to lug you around for the rest of my life,” they say one morning to the creature crouched on their berth, picking shreds of skin out from between its teeth.

It tips its head, pulling its claws out of its mouth. “Tough,” it says shortly, and holds out its arms.

The sailor swings it sack-like onto their back and goes to get breakfast.

…

It’s a beautiful day for fishing, only they’re not getting any done.

The nets are abandoned in the mud, and the father watches as his daughter painstakingly stacks handfuls of dripping, swampy earth dug out from the banks of the creek into a pile. “It’s our house,” she keeps insisting, twisting her head earnestly, though the only thing it has in common with their dwelling place is maybe the colour of the walls. “See? The roof.”

He stares at it, face grave. “I don’t think we will fit.”

“It’s an art,” his daughter says loftily. His wife leans over and squashes the point of the roof flat. She wrinkles up her nose. “You broke my roof!”

“Our house doesn’t have a pointed roof,” his wife replies.

The little girl kicks one of her legs, sending earth scattering into the creek. “It was creative license.” Then, apparently bored, she rolls down the bank and submerges herself in the mud-brown water. Her parents watch.

“She’s so clever,” her father says.

“I know.”

He digs a hand into the dirt, focusing on the way it feels on his fingers. Marshy. Wet. “I’m trying,” he says.

His wife nudges him with her shoulder. “I know.”

…

When the shadows say to leave, she leaves.

The runaway curls up in an alleyway, back against a dusty wooden wall, blood jangling in her veins. She can feel her pulse, the unsteady drumming of her heart. Hears snatches of talk and calls from the shopping square not far away.

Get out, they say, crushing her into the cobbles. Stay still and hide. Run run run. Not safe. It’s not safe.

She doesn’t even know what they’re het up about, this time.

She can’t move when they’re squashing her. And she’s on shift in the store so she can’t go far – Dotta will be only so understanding. So she stays still and stuck and breathes as large breaths as she can manage. Presses her knuckles hard against her thudding sternum, counts the frantic pace of her heartbeat. (She’s not sure what that accomplishes. Yes, your inexplicable terror has manifested physically. Congratulations!)

She can smell apple cider. She’s not sure if it’s real or not. She buries her face between her knees and breathes as deep as she can – counts the breaths in lots of five. In, out, one. In, out, two. In, out, three. It takes ten lots of five before it’s slowed enough to open her eyes. To speak.

The shadows pull weakly at her clothes, smudging where they touch. Time to go.

She clears her throat and gruffly asks, “Why?”

Not safe!

“Why?”

It’s not safe!

“So where do you think would be safer?”

Somewhere else.

“And how long do you think that would last?”

It’s hard to tell, but she’s pretty sure they’re glaring at her.

She’s still choking on the thick, nauseous feeling of imminent doom. She scrubs a hand down the side of her jaw and tries to ignore the taste of bile. “We’re going back.”

No!

“If you can’t –” she catches her breath, it’s speeding again, she very deliberately slows it down – “If you can’t give me a reason, we’re going back. I’m working.”

No, they repeat, pressing her more insistently into the dusty wall.

She wants, very badly, to snap at them.

“It will be fine,” she says instead. “We can take another breather if we need to. Dotta’s a good boss. She’ll understand.” To a point, at least.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The shadows are mulish. She squares her shoulders and shoves them off, gently as she can.

“We’re going back,” she tells them. “Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing happened to upset you. Today will be fine, just like yesterday. Okay?”

No.                                                                                                                    

Nine, it’s hard pleading a case she doesn’t quite believe. “It will be fine. I promise.”

I don’t know why you’d think you can promise that.

“Come on.” She’s standing, hands cupped, waiting. “Nothing’s dangerous. Nothing’s a threat. I’m not going to die copying a poem.”

I didn’t say you would die.

They both know it feels like it. She holds out her hands more insistently. “Come on.”

The shadows stand much, much taller than her, shoulders squared and smoky; there is a gust of wind like a sigh, and they pour into her palms, darkness eddying in the creases of her hands and dripping down between her fingers.

“We’re going,” she tells them, for reassurance. (Who she’s reassuring, she’s unsure.) “It will be okay.”

She returns to the shop. No customers in the time she was gone, to no-one’s surprise; she sits back at the desk with her book and her paper.

The shadows twist like briars around the legs of her chair, and with an ear tilted toward the open door and the mild sounds of the marketplace, she picks up her pen.

…

Family dinners are quiet affairs.

It’s just the three of them, clustered around the end of the dining table. Mother always used to take the head, but now they all insist the child sits there. It’s a little awkward, but nice, she thinks. She touches her fingertips to the embroidery on the tablecloth. Stares at her plate of steamed crab.

They’re trying, she thinks, all three of them. It isn’t easy for anyone. The rules changed when she tore up her room, and none of them know the steps to this new dance. It’s hard when trying to be better actually means trying to be worse – when the thing her parents want her to do is to start doing more things that they don’t want her to do. And they keep trying to be reassuring but they so clearly aren’t sure how. She’s not sure she’s taking it like they want her to when they do. But then she’s not sure if they want her to understand them like they want, either.

It isn’t easy for anyone, and the child so hates to be a burden.

But she already has been, throwing her furniture around and yelling and sobbing into their sleeves when she finally let them in, and they haven’t stopped trying yet. The nebulous Bad Thing, the looming consequence for all her imperfections – being punished, being ousted, ruining her parents’ business and reputation, having the entire house (no, island – no, world) swallowed up by nothingness in an act of divine retribution – has failed to occur. And now they’re just a child and her parents and trying and failing and receiving no consequence for that failure.

She doesn’t know what to do with it.

But she sleeps on her parents’ floor, nowadays, with her father’s arm hanging over the side of his bed so he can hold her hand, and her nightmares wake them up and they haven’t gotten angry about it. Not yet, at least. Even though they visibly don’t know what to say. So they’re trying. It’s a start.

The child snaps a crab leg in half and holds it up, behind her head.

Silently, the veiled lady takes it.

…

About as quickly as it began, it subsides.

There’s a good few days the no-longer-guar-herder can’t remember afterward, time mostly spent wandering the edges of Ahemmusa land in a roundabout path to the sea and talking. He can’t remember what he talked about, really, just that he wouldn’t shut up.

(He can guess what he talked about. All the things he knew. All his friends and family, too blind to see it. The favour bestowed upon him and the cruel consequences it wrought.)

He doesn’t understand. What happened? It feels like swimming up to the surface after being underwater for ages. It feels like waking up. It feels, in a weird way, like losing something, though he doesn’t know what.

(Well. He knows exactly what he lost. Everything. But he’s feeling a different loss, too.)

(He didn’t lose everything. His friend goes where he goes, faithful as a shadow.)

Something must have happened to change him like that. It feels like all the rules in his mind were torn away and he was left to make new ones. And now it’s back to the same again, and he just doesn’t understand.

The only reason he can think of is the mountain and its cursed winds, and they were well away from it by the time it started. They say the Blight drives the guar mad.

People, too.

The food in his pack only lasts him the time it takes to reorient, so by the time he’s properly able to think about it all he’s living off what he can get himself. Fishing in a stream is different to the ocean, but it’s not too different. And it’s nice. Quiet. Space to think. His friend left back with the bags.

The light flashes brightly off the surface of the river water. He catches exactly one fish. But it’s big, and he only needs enough for one person, anyway.

He carries it back to their camp. (A grand word for it – it’s a leather pack and some bedding in a clearing. But he’ll take what he can get. It’s not a bad setup for an exile.)

“Good catch?” his friend calls, and he looks up from the grass.

She’s sitting, cross-legged, on a rock above his sleep-sack. Her brightly darned skirt is stretched over her knees. She’s looking right at him across the clearing, head tilted, and in her hands she fidgets with one of his tiny nets, picking apart each carefully woven knot. The unravelled thread trails across her lap.

He holds up the fish without a word and kneels in the dust by the pit they dug, already filled with tinder.

“It’s nice,” she says, cheeks dimpled. “Pretty scales.”

He strikes a spark to light the dead leaves without a word.

When the lazy kindling is burning low and steady, he takes his knife from his pack and begins descaling his catch.

“What have you been doing?” he asks.

He can hear the shrug in his friend’s voice. “Not much. It’s no fun when you’re not around.”

He looks up, his hand stilling.

She sits there on the rock, vibrant and vivid, as though she is glowing from the inside. She blinks at him, eyes red and innocent, the little braid he wove into her hair months ago blowing gently in the breeze. She makes everything around her look grey.

“I know who you are,” he says, the half-cleaned fish held in steady hands.

She blinks again, and a smile slips onto her face. A proper grin like he’s never seen her wearing, with no demure hand or unruly curls to cover it up. The half-undone net strains in her hands. She tips her head.

Kindness written into the creases of her eyes, tongue pressed to vicious teeth, she replies, “I’m your friend.”

…

It tells you: I love you.

(As best as I can.)

 

Notes:

If you have read all the way through, I cannot thank you enough. this is the longest thing I've posted (also the only thing I've posted on this site) and perhaps one of the most experimental things I've written. It was really fascinating to think it all out and try to get it to come together the way I wanted it to; if you have an opinion on my success in that area, please let me know! I truly have no idea how well I fared.
A quick disclaimer: The characters in this story should not be taken as full or nuanced depictions of any given mental illnesses. I very deliberately went out of my way to focus on portraying symptoms rather than disorders – though I can’t say how well this has come through because obviously the line is blurred – because though I have grown attached to the characters, at its core the story is not about them, and I knew I could not give as thoughtful a portrayal of the complexities of mental illness as I would wish to within the parameters of this narrative. This does not necessarily have to change your interpretation; I just wanted to ensure that my intentions were clear.
I hope that you enjoyed the story. Should you have any thoughts you feel inclined to share, I would be delighted to hear them. I am glad to have shared this with you and hope that you are having a lovely day :)

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of the woven wheel