Wench & Quean

Document 1

1.

Pine needles crunched beneath her feet, their delicate scent joining a tapestry of fragrances which together constructed the essence of home. This old forest, planted epochs ago when the Engineers first seeded this world, had claimed Naël’s heart from the first time she’d visited. Tall pines, lush underbrush, clean mountain air, these were the fairest mistresses she could ever desire—though the odd park ranger or daring backpacker crossing her path were never an additional delight found unwelcome.

Even in her elder years, Naël had lost little of an Orkidean's desires. Connection, deep, immersive, totalising connection, drowning in the beautiful intimacy of moments burning white hot, the foremost of these more base desires she ached for in the stretches between crossings. Though she knew where always she could go to sate her hunger, the orchestration of a moment lacked the magnetism of the chance encounter, and its long satiating effect. A day or two of company was so much sweeter a feast when stumbled upon as she drifted into the chance orbit of another.

Those she encountered left her company changed. It was the way of such interactions, minds melding together, memories and experiences shared in the most exquisite detail. Her heart, an archive of such things, blended tapestries of thought across entangled neurons. Whole worlds could be exchanged in the hours entwined with another, each seeing each other through the eyes of the other and the myriad who had come before.

Even those who sought her out to sate their own selfish desires left tempered and irrevocably altered by the experience Naël obliged them. In spite of their purpose she knew well hers; body a conduit to bridge the chasm between personal experiences. She was to be the death knell of the inextricable knot of hard solipsism. Those who came would leave knowing too well they were not alone. They would leave knowing the full weight of the experiences of Naël and countless others.

In a world darkened by the heavy hand of myopic clerics and their suffocating grip on what may or may not be understood, this enlightenment had made her known. Too well, her kinfolk had warned her. Notoriety for being a cheap whore on a world with no love for free-spirits nor the blessings they imparted was a dangerous thing. Changed ones departing better informed than the greater number of their peers would, in time, challenge the established order in like manner to the slave in the cave given a glance at daylight and the shape of things struck by it.

No tolerance had the powers that were for impudent voices questioning the way of the world. It would be her undoing, her kinfolk had warned. They would kill her for this.

This, Naël already knew. Her very existence spat in the face of so many entrenched ideas of the way things were and the way those within such paradigms thought they ought be that the need to repeat the lesson learned while still forming in the dreams of the Goddess existed only for the comfort of the sisterhood. It served her no benefit.

Time came for all things. To survive was not to live. Though the Anthousai who claimed these woods as much their own as she had withdrawn from the world they inhabited, Naël knew her purpose was not theirs.

To uplift and enlighten those who sought her out or crossed her path was an Orkidean’s mandate, a mantle of responsibility she wore without fear of the day when it would undo her. When the reaper came, she would look him in the face as not a hated enemy, but a dear friend to be embraced. Nothing lasts forever. Everything had its day.

Wood nymphs could hide in their sacred groves, behind shield walls of Valkyries and their drakeswarmed changelings, but Naël would not cower beside them. Her sisters could depart, leaving her the last of her kin on a world with no love of the misshapen puzzle-piece. Though she wished them well on their way, she would not join them.

This was her home. It was the place she loved more dearly than life itself. Only in the ozone afterburn of hybrid engines and offroad tires churning undergrowth and earth, chasing the Fell Wench of Jeibo Wuri Nature Preserve would she say goodbye.

Document 2

2.

Naël raised her hand to block the glare of floodlights. Several large offroad trucks slid to a halt downslope of her, the roar of their engines cutting to a delicate, electric hum. Doors opened, guns were drawn, men shouted commands, demanded each their own specific thing, all in contradiction to each other.

Kneeling down on the ground, she folded her hands in her lap. This enraged the men. She could not understand the reasons why, but thunder struck her in the chest just the same.

Killing an Orkidean was not so simple a task as could be bought with empty magazines and hollow point rifle rounds. Bullets perforated her torso and she remained expressionless, allowing her mind to be subsumed and immersed in the livid, white hot cauldrons opening like corpse flowers in her body.

This, too, was her purpose.

Experiences, sensations, both pleasant and excruciating, the sum total of all humanity’s many worlds had to offer. All and everything to understand on the deepest levels what it meant to be truly human, and then to share it in its unfettered, unabridged, unfiltered wonder.

This was the reason she existed.

To die a million deaths to experience the bitter ends of mortal men and bear them on beyond the limits of flesh and blood was an Orkidean’s burden. Naël’s hearthcore had burned back time to reconstitute the corporeal form she called her own too many times to count in the Aions she’d wandered the small corner of the cosmos humanity called its own. Love and hatred followed wherever an Orkidean’s steps led her, each in equal measure. One needed not seek it out to find the violence and brutality of mankind. One needed only live long enough for its inevitability to impress itself in all its inglorious ignominy.

Opening her eyes to men and their rifles standing over her was nothing new. Neither that nor their mockery, their triumphant giddiness at having shot to pieces a creature who could offer no resistance, nor the coming violence were new.

Naël made no attempt to move, to adjust herself, to find a more comfortable position. There was no such thing, and there was no point in it either.

As they had their way, they saw themselves through her eyes, felt every excruciating detail of their malice, and she felt their painted armour begin to crack. The dissonant chords within them rose, the inconvenient questions breaking through the curtain walls once fortified against the thought of how wrong all this was. There was no pushing it back, no stopping what they had started either.

This, also, was Nael's purpose. She could no more fight them than could the trees. All she could do was receive their violence and, in so doing, show them the monstrosity of it in a way they could no more ignore than abide.

Once caught in the binding of minds, she dug in, forced them to finish what they started. No half-measures. No escaping the flood of ten thousand memories clearer than crystal glass flowing across their entangled synapses like a mimetic poison. Their violence reflected back at them a ten thousand times over and their atrophied mirror neurons screamed louder than a crowd of billions. She made them feel it. All of it. Every unbearable detail.

And when it was over, the pillars of their worlds had been shaken loose. Shell shocked and stumbling backward, they collapsed in shambles against trees and nearby boulders, overloaded from the neuroshock they’d brought on themselves. Sand and cloud, the foundations of hubris, had crumbled their once illustrious palaces and shattered them to pieces.

There was a cruelty to this Naël had never reconciled. To be made defenceless against the worst sorts of violations but for the shadow price of violence echoing back like a neutronium bomb against the perpetrator. Even so many Aions on, she still cursed The Goddess for this.

Curling up into herself, Naël dug her fingers into pine needles and soil, gripping the earth, teeth gritted, eyes squeezed shut. Tears flowed down her cheeks, the weight of the moment piled onto all those other memories crushing her head like tungsten jackboots. Bloðsap gushed out of her, her hearthcore burned in her chest, trying to repair the damage—body and soul. Silent cries knotted in a fury and inflamed hatred reverberated with each throbbing pulse.

This want for blood and retribution. It was as pure and potent as midday sun on her skin. It was a distilled, intoxicating, blazing human rage. The want, the need, for revenge, to take back some small measure of what was robbed from her and she hated herself for its presence in the harbour of her spirit.

Entwined feelings reverberated in the violent afterburn ricocheting around the gathered dozen still entangled in the knotworx they had forced themselves into, forced Naël into. They would not be forgiven for this. They knew this as intimately as they knew the experience that had just inflicted upon her and she felt it break them to pieces.

The sun would not rise on half of them. Naël knew this, and it broke her heart.

Document 3

3.

Rough, synthetic fibres and cold steel still damp with sweat and oil chafed her skin. The bindings of fabric were more distressing than the chair she had been locked into. Whatever the Elders had found in the fashion of mortal men, Naël had yet to uncover. Cloth and fabric were as close as anything as what might pass for anathema to an Orkidean. They would sooner drape themselves of layers of soothe and glamour to trick the eyes or make the memory of their form slide like superfluid out of the minds of all but the most discerning—though Naël even found this practise to be personally distasteful.

The chair itself wasn’t anything Naël hadn’t experienced before. Many who’d crossed her paths had been so confined. Their petty indiscretions extracted in the coffin seat would be televised as penance—a modern stock and pillory. Bars and straps bound her into place, even her waist and neck had been fastened by solid steel bars bolted onto mounts all over the strange device.

Its shape is not what confounded her. Naël knew well its design. Breaking the psyches of the accused was made so much easier by the distress born of such creations. Trapped, unable to move, discomfort rising with the ticking clock and the inevitable need to relieve one’s bladder or bowels would compel the tearful, self-flagellating humiliation the authorities demanded.

This device remained strange despite that knowledge. Cruelty, malice, and hatred condensed into acts and implements devised to exact the designer’s desires with greatest efficiency; as much as she understood these things as concepts more intimately than she had any desire to, they had never lost their strangeness.

Nature’s cruelty was not in her nature. Violence was its offspring, and the thought of committing such an act viscerally disgusted her. Necessary though it sometimes was among humans, she did not know if it was possible for her to be pushed to that point. Thinking too much on it terrified her, as she knew on whom such violence would be inflicted.

More than that, the evil necessary to bring her there was too great to fathom. Not even the men who had had their way with her the previous night could bring that out, and she had seen in the depth of their memories every last vile, unspeakable thing they had ever done. If the depth of such malice could not close her fist, she did not wish to know what could.

As the door banged open to her left, Naël wondered if the two officers entering would be the ones. She knew this empire well. One did not ascend in its ranks and hierarchies by any manner of decency, but by the number of throats cut and skulls stomped.

The two men sat down at their boring table with its boring monogrammed table cloth with their boring red binders and addressed her in a most boring way. They had assigned her a serial number like some inanimate object and referred to her as such.

The two boring men at their boring table asked her boring questions in boring tones. They did not care who she was or where she came from or why she was there or why she defied their backwards restrictions or what authority she claimed to do so. She was an object, after all. A thing, a serial number on a spreadsheet, and they, oblivious to the obvious conflict between ideal and action, interrogated her. As was the way of this world, never a moment was spared to interrogate how purposeless it was to interrogate a chair nor the mannequin they had propped up inside of it. To extract blood from stone was a paradox ill-recognised in this place.

Naël drifted off into thought, bored by the pointless ceremony of the situation. The outcome was fixed. To dignify the process was to assess it anything more than the sham it was.

Receding in though, she returned to the fields of the far-flung world where she’d visited her daughter once. Tall grass swished about her waist, their tassles tickling the insides of her thighs. She smiled, luxuriating in the sensation.

Two suns hung overhead, but the light was fair and their warmth pleasant—a late spring day. Ahead, in the near distance, Sjulu, her daughter, knelt in the grass, eyes closed, deep in meditation.

As Naël approached, she felt a rough hand across her face, snapping her back to the boring room and the strange chair and the very boring police officers and their expressions of perplexed vexation. It was obvious they had never experienced someone who could resist their chair. Expected confessions, self-flagellation, the humiliation, tears, nose running like olympians chasing records on the hundred metre sprint, a routine unbroken until this moment.

“Answer me!” Very Boring Officer 1 shouted, slapping her again.

Naël looked up at him, piercing his glare through. It did not take a very deep dive into his soul to know the substance of him. The depth of his character was so vanishingly shallow it was scarcely deeper than its surface. In his eyes, she saw reality dawn and rage rise like bile in the back of his throat. Naël broke gaze.

Enraged by her silent defiance, Very Boring Officer 1 slapped her again, this time splitting her lip. Bloðsap couldn’t even well around the wound before her body had repaired the damage.

“Stupid bitch!” Officer 1 shouted, spitting in her face. “You think you can ignore me!?”

Naël closed her eyes, returning to the fields in her memory. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the unfastening of a belt.

A spark against her cheek. A flash of bright starlight against her temple. Her daughter’s eyes blinked open. The spring day went dark.

Document 4

4.

A door groaned open, its noise echoing Naël’s unfulfillable desire. Her face was pulsar, a bubbling landscape of viscous, molten stone, dripping with clotted tears of earth. Jaw hanging limply in several parts, teeth loose or lost entirely, eye sockets raging for their crushed or missing denizens, she couldn’t taste the bloðsap, her tongue no longer in its place.

Very Boring Officer 1 and Very Boring Officer 2, their hands under her armpits, threw her into a room. Without strength to lift her arms to break her fall, she slammed, face-first into the floor. Her head detonated, the tenuous, strained crust of the pulsar cracking open with cosmic fury. The door slammed behind her, but she barely noticed.

Lying there, on her belly, head a blazar, Naël was nevertheless grateful. In their dispensations of impotent rage, the Very Boring Officers had spent the day beating her to very little effect, having unwittingly broken her spine, and then her neck so early in the process as to make the whole affair an exhaustingly fruitless endeavour. Rendered numb to their blows and residual impacts, all she could feel was her face, broken, bloðy, and raging.

By morning, she knew she would be whole again. Orkideans were built to take a harsher beating than the Rimworlds’ best and the Shrouded Vael’s most valiant. Even the sword arm of a Valkyrie would tire from cutting them down before the sting of death stuck. Before dawn broke, the pain in her face would be gone and she would be restored, all for the torture to begin again.

Thankfully, the Very Boring Officers had removed the rough, ugly, scratchy gown her original captors had put her in after collecting themselves enough to bring her to their inverted misconception of justice. Trapped likewise in backwards thinking and archaic worldviews, the Very Boring Officers thought it would serve as a humiliation to disrobe her whilst attempting to beat a confession from her. Even an Elder who had found the perfect adornments of her form would find the theft thereof only a petty irritation, like the absconding by an ignorant interloper of a lesser gesture of appreciation given to a stranger.

After exhausting themselves breaking her bones over and over again, the Very Boring Officers thought it would further amplify the projected distress of her nakedness to drag her limp and broken body through the prison for all to see like a walk of shame. Like their violence, Naël could not understand the shame and disgrace they thought she would experience. No Orkidean could.

There was no shame in what The Goddess blessed them with. It was perfect as it was. To add anything to it would be to improve upon perfection, and that was a paradox only Elders of the Sisterhood had disentangled.

Draped as they were in layers of their own desires, each Orkidean’s form was to each human as it needed to be. What could be seen of them was only what each desired for herself, shifting from moment to moment with her mood. And Naël’s moods were altogether too simple for her kin.

Wishing to be seen and understood, she walked as she was, unencumbered by layers of psychic obfuscation and obnubilation. Those who saw her saw the whole truth of her, unbound by politeness or courteous accommodation. An unpopular and disquieting set of ideals she held, but balanced by a deep abiding love of solitude and the wild places through which she had always drifted. There, far from civilised places replete with their expectations of dress, what humans came her way were drawn by the same primal call. Discomfort faded quickly in those ones. Recognition settled over the moment, and, between locked eyes, those who came found more than they were looking for.

To be seen and to be understood was to bare all, body, mind, and spirit, accepting all the pieces of oneself with the all the pieces of the other. Naël Inuþ. It was not simply her name. It was who she was. She was Naël Inuþ—the Mountain Nymph.

Document 5

5.

“Ugh.”

Naël opened her eyes to the disgusted grunt. One of the greasy, obese guards of the prison was standing at the door, peering through the barred window at her. In her beady, hazel eyes, Naël saw desire, repression, and the kite string tangle of all the things the guard denied herself compressed into the singular self-loathing inspired of dogmatism.

But this was a prison guard. Unlike her interrogators the day before, this woman had only so much perception as to know she was being studied, but nothing deeper than that. This, of course, made her angry, which made her stupid and impulsive. The door flung open to a cascade of epithets and expletives, none of which were new. Veins bulged in the guard’s forehead as if Naël’s silent recognition and acceptance of all the beauty and ugliness within her was a challenge to the guard’s womanhood that demanded swift and uncompromising reply.

There was peacocking and posturing, the brandishing of weapons and the self-indulgent speech insisting this guard was the alpha wolf, to whom Naël would submit, all preceded threats of absurd violence. It was obvious this one was quite used to desperate, obsequiousness. Other prisoners would fall over themselves attempting in vain to prevent a foregone conclusion. The baton hung from her hip had blood soaked through to its heartwood and when Naël refused to engage in grovelling and performative appeasement, she only amplified the guard’s rage.

Obese though the guard was, Naël was under no delusions as to this guard’s capacity to inflict pain. The stench of blood, bile, and the depths her baton had plumbed into the bowels of those who had come before stood taller in the doorway than the guard. Even so, as the beating dragged on, Naël was left astonished by the guard’s stamina. She laid into Naël with a black, lacquered baton, pounding her back with blow after blow until the lacquer had been stripped off the baton, bloðsap had splattered all over the cell, and the splinters of its broken shaft were embedded in her spine alongside the two jagged pieces jammed between her ribs, piercing through her chest.

Bent over, her back stripped down to the bones, the bones broken to pieces, Naël remained motionless and expressionless.

“Fuck you!” the prison guard swore, ripping one half of the broken baton out of her chest.

The guard threw it at her face. The wooden stick missed, ricocheting off into the hallway. In a rage, the guard tore the other half out and hurled it as well, this time splitting the back of Naël’s skull. Flopping down onto the steel bed mounted on the wall, panting from exhaustion, the guard spat between breaths every foul thing her mind could conjure at Naël.

As her back knitted itself back together again, and flesh, sinew, and skin reformed over her exposed spine, Naël remained folded over, face on the ground, eyes closed in deep meditation.

Pain could be shut down. This was something an Elder had taught her. Quieting nerves with the quieting of the mind, remembering her body had been built to receive love and hate in equal measure but that even in this, some experiences were unworthy a repeat, some still not even the first.

There was nothing left for Naël to share with this world. The echoes of her presence would live on in those she’d touched. They would carry the fire until its embers had receded into darkness, the heat dissipated in the distant recollections of myth and legend. All that was left for her to share now was silent defiance and civil disobedience to the bitter end.

Document 6

6.

Looking up from the cage she had been crammed into, Naël locked eyes with the judge. In them all she saw was cold contempt, a dispassionate hatred. To him she was as a cockroach, a rat, a pest to be crushed and swept aside without so much as a first thought.

Inconsequential.

That is what she was in his eyes, as she was in the eyes of the guards who had thought themselves equal parts brilliant and powerful by forcing her into a dog cage. Act like an animal, be brought before the court like one.

Oh, the hubris of man. To think himself apart from nature, not a part of it. Gaia’s most clever progeny, they thought themselves. Yet foolhardy enough to believe they had by their own self-congratulations outgrown their ancestry, man of the stars was no wiser in his millionth annum than man the wise the wise.

This delusion was not one she shared. Naël knew from what humble stock she came. She knew it with such clarity it brought discomforting revelations to all those with whom she’d shared the communion of Orkideans. She was as they were, as they all ever had been. The loathsome apes eternally in struggle against their nature and Naël was no angel perfected by the magic of The Goddess.

All she possessed over them were millennia more beneath the grindstones, with little more than scars to show for it—the glint and gleam of a gemstone a far flung vision her fingers had approached no closer to. She could fall from no higher a perch than the elevation other humans had reached by selfsame achievement. The Goddess would have it no other way.

What had made Aisling worthy in the cargo hold of legend was not perfection but the pursuit of the diamond refined, worked ever against the jeweller’s file, whose impurities, not perfections, made it shimmer held up to the light of the sun.

Perfection was unchanging, unmoving, a static state, the singularity of all forms, void of aspiration. Even photons decayed in the instantaneous reference frame they inhabited. What was perfect was a paradox, a naked singularity, a conceptual endpoint abhorrent to the universe, an abomination not unlike her presence beneath the imperious glare of a man who saw the execution of her as nothing more consequential than the smiting of a biting fly on his skin.

“Naël Inuþ,” the judge announced, “you are here today under charges of Vagrancy, Trespassing, Blasphemy, Defiance of Ecclesiastical Orders, Immodesty, Defilement of Holy Relics, Rape, Abominable Rape, Murder, Abomination, and Anathema, how do you plead?”

Naël closed her eyes, imagining herself in a faraway place. There where pine needles, fresh snow, and the delicate odour of the first spring crocuses mixed with clear mountain air. Cold wind rushed across her skin, and it was as refreshing as heat from a summer katabatic wind rushing down from the mountain steppes and deep into sandswept dunes of the range’s rain shadow. Beneath snowmelt cascading from overhanging rocks, she felt clean, clear water pour over her body. Scented lightly by moss, lichens, the previous autumn’s deadfall, and leached minerals, it cleansed her, soaked into her skin. On the heights, overlooking lush valleys, her hair blowing like a lavender banner in the wind, she felt the jabs and stings of the guards’ clubs and cattle prods as no more than vague and distant pinpricks.

Words fell from the lips of her captors like alphorns across the valley between. Demands and commands weighted with expectation blew on the wind. Ecclesiastic jurists who thought the wisdom of their scriptures sufficient to roar thunder from their sad dais ordered her answer, plea their mercy, as if any respect was owed their vainglory.

Priests who sat as kings and said of gods for whom they spoke how limited the ways of those whose winters had brought them beyond maturity might say I love you had provided no just cause to their case, but an abundance of reason to revile it. To call the beautiful union of two hearts bursting with passion, clinging to each other as though life itself was the flesh beneath their fingertips, anything but love was a perversion of the very idea. But the unwedded were not so free on a world where the authors of the law were draped in the raiment of infallibility.

Such sanctimonious prohibitions Naël would have expected to come first from the mouth of the deity who dictated it. The words of The Goddess were no mystery to any. If She wished to have Her will known, She made it so to all who sought it; Alaþilhinë, Asteri, Sisterian, or Coldblood alike. It mattered not whence the seeker came, what tribe they hailed from. Those who sought Her out would find Her. The Goddess had no need of hiddenness or lesser mouthpieces as did the Great Lord Adhirthi.

Naël had not been idle about the pursuit of this so-called revealed truth either. Having ardently sought the counsel of their beloved Adhirthi to hear from His mouth how He had thought these laws just and proper and failed despite this, she saw no reason to respect them. Whatever Naël thought of how The Goddess had formed her and her kin, she knew the reasons. A robust defence of the fortress had been given and not by apologists, clerics, Aisling, nor Atlmaþræn Eliyn. The Goddess had explained Herself.

These prejudices and myopic ideological commitments were as clear as a cloudless, midnight sky blessed not by the icons of faith blamed for them, but had been bludgeoned into them by the sheer will of faith. Rape was not what it was to these small minded men of make-believe. No concept of consent existed within the framework of their unreality. Instead, the word had been contorted, boiled down to raw mechanical actions committed without the blessings of the clergy—to whom the nonprocreative act was abomination and women were to blame for whatever was done to them.

This twisting inversion of what was into what was convenient to those whose vision of utopia came like the lost metaphors of Lois. That what would not fit the mould so tightly binding would be cut from it.

Buried somewhere in the vaults and halls of the Ecclesiastical Archives, as if to replicate it unknowingly, would be those who remembered the world outside the cave they’d made for themselves. Within their memories, given on to those who would replace them, were not things to be valued by those who fashioned themselves as cheap imitations of Wordbearers. They were memories to be feared and loathed. Memories of a world outside a cave, their shapes abhorrently unfamiliared. Rattling their imagined chains, these rememberers cursed the bright sunlight and wept for the shadows, the monochromatic declension of language into only what parts precluded thoughts unclean to the mad gods of mankind’s imaginings.

Of what purpose would it be for Naël to dignify the blind with their want for lies and wishes? To let silver tongue spin cloth of gold that indeed they saw the world for what it truly was? That to have more than the skin of her face kissed by the sun, and to do so unaccompanied by a man, was indeed so immodest and abominable as to demand the court’s reply? To offer reply to the casting of her existence as anathema, a crime worthy of death, would be to dignify such an idea with response it neither deserved nor would receive, had she even the power within her throat to voice it.

These men were lost. They had been lost for so long the labyrinth had consumed them. What cracks the she might have made in the firmament of their reality she had already. In all the ways that mattered, she had made her dissent of the established order known.

What minimal influence her acts had would not one day break open this one-dimensional snowglobe of self-loathing to let in the free air. If there was, in the arc of this society’s story, a coming spring, it would be not by the actions of one so small as herself. She was but a drop in a very large bucket. The tide of change was made of many such drops, whose parts in the grand play each gave it the impetus required.

This was her part. She was not the chosen one, the leader of resistance, the oriflamme of the changing tide. Just another drop in an ocean made of other drops, waiting and weighting on the scales’ turning.

“You will enter a plea or I will hold you in contempt!” the judge exclaimed, drawing Naël from her meditation.

Looking up at the judge once more, she said nothing but what could be so clearly seen.

“So be it,” the judge grunted, “get it out of my sight!”

Naël felt a sharp pain in the back of her head, and the world went dark.

Document 7

7.

“Wake up!” a voice shouted, followed by a slap across Naël’s cheek.

She cracked open an eyelid and saw the guard from days before, the one who had stripped the flesh from her back. As more of her senses returned, Naël felt herself being dragged by her armpits by two guards on either side. In front of her, a new baton at her hip, was the guard who’d given her a whole days’ personal attention.

They came to a halt at the end of a dark, narrow corridor, somewhere deep underground, in front of a door whose hinges spoke of its make. Lifting her head, she saw a vault door whose tonnage sat on hinges whose pins were thick as trunks of century aspen.

The guard at the fore slipped a key into the door. As she twisted it around, Naël heard the clicking of gears and the grinding of tungsten carbide. Heavy deadbolts clunked open and the vault door squealed and ground open, revealing a dark, filthy oubliette, the bones of its previous occupant still lying on the floor, picked clean by whatever had burrowed through bedrock to gorge itself on them.

Without ceremony or a last taunt, Naël was thrown into the cell. Her head struck the back wall and she crumpled onto the floor, dazed. There was no attempt to fold her into the cramped space. This was an oubliette after all, and not the kind one sent a prisoner later to be paraded around in macabre displays of power.

The guards slammed the door on her legs, the weight of the door enough to cleave through muscle, sinew, and bone with no effort. Its momentum carried it through her limbs. This time, the ugly fractions of what remained of her thighs only sealed over. Naël’s hearthcore had been exhausted. They would not grow back this time.

Pushing herself upright, Naël took a seated position, and slowed her heart. The pulsing, vibrating crystal of inscrutable design cooled down. Its oscillations grew longer and longer until winter set in her bones and her mind dispersed into the Knotworx.

Document 8