build a brave new foundry close to home. [WT]

[Lyn𝛿is]

Caitlin Samuels

🐦
lay your head where they hold
hide the demarcations of your soul
and play your silent scream role
harmonize your own worth to what you're shown
🐦

I've visited this cloister with my family before, once, years back.

It had been around the time Dmitri was taking his entrance exams - he was the one who'd led us to the College's Ripredist temple, when Mother insisted that he take a break from holing himself up in his room to study, because it was a beautiful day and we ought to spend some family time together outside.

Dmitri knew everything about the College long before he entered it, eagerly reading through their brochures and research magazines and practically waiting anxiously since his freshman year for his chance to apply. That day, he'd showed us a statue at the center of the grass inside the cloister, a bronze statue of a little girl surrounded by a bunch of animals, all writing on narrow strips of paper in front of them.

The plaque in front of me has lots of vocabulary words from the last couple weeks' spelling tests, words like quest and warrior and even the extra credit word resilience, which Mother says I need to learn how to have and not just how to spell. There's only one word on the plaque that I don't know yet - Martyr. I press my thumb between the two legs of the M and lean forward, staring at the whiskers of the bronze rat and figuring from the rest of the description that it probably means something like hero.

Jackson says something, giving a gentle tug at one of my pigtails, and I offer a hmm? in response as I turn toward him, taking my gaze away from the rat martyr. She looks like you, he repeats with a chuckle, gesturing at the statue in the middle of the quad next to Dmitri; Dmitri is rubbing the shiny spot on the bronze girl's head kinda like the way Jackson would ruffle my hair, if the bronze girl had had any real hair. It's a College superstition, Dmitri had explained afterwards. People say if you touch Lizzie's head before exam week, you'll ace all your exams.

That was all around ten years ago, and the only time I'd been to the cloisters. We'd stopped going out anywhere, when Jackson died and there was just two of us kids left in the house; in fact, I'd forgotten the statue garden completely - until this morning.

I'd been unpacking, in the new apartment. There were still cardboard boxes, piled off to the side against the wall, even though I'd moved the last of them out from home - no, not home anymore, I'd tried to remind myself after breakfast, as I nestled myself down cross-legged on the carpet between two of the boxes - several weeks ago. They were still filled with so many things, from the cases of sentimental childhood memories, to objects that I still haven't quite found a place for in the shelfless and mostly-empty room, to the stuff I simply hadn't had time to use.

I wanted to. I kept meaning to finish the picture of the meadow I had been working on a few months ago, but there was always so much to get squared away - a landlord to negotiate with, bills to remember, dinner to prepare - that after I got home from work and finished all the errands, even the task of finding exactly which of the several identical-looking boxes I'd stuffed the colored pencils in, followed by finding the sketchbook itself, felt like too much effort.

I knew that other adults - that was another new thought - often spent their time complaining about these sort of errands, from bits of overheard conversation around the office, or among other customers of Quest's bar when Kai and I had eaten there. But I didn't dare complain about mine, because you were supposed to just Deal With It when it came to stuff that had to be done anyways, and not force other people to listen to a bunch of whining - and because putting that tired, heavy feeling into words would make it more true, and if it was true then people could reason I should quit the job and go back to living with Mother and letting her pick out my clothing, and drag me to her events, and chastise me for fumbled words and missed 'opportunities' and for not being the kind of daughter she expected or wanted, after having to give birth to four older brothers before she finally had me.

As it turned out, the case of pencils - a gift from Bryan, for my nineteenth birthday - wound up being in one of the bottom boxes, shoved haphazardly underneath stacks of stationery, old notebooks, and manila folders. It had been so long, I thought this morning, sipping at a cup of coffee on the windowsill and staring out at the streets of District Six - so long since I'd managed to turn that deep want to pick up pencil and sketchbook into anything besides stray doodles on sticky notes, during those idle moments in the office -

I used to ask Mother, if there was anything she loved as much as I love drawing or Dmitri loves science; she'd frown for a bit and give a little pause, and say something like how she loves us kids. That never seemed like the real answer, since you could have hobbies and also still love your family, but after the one time she got angry at me for the question I'd stopped asking.

Two of the filled-up notebooks tumbled from the box and crashed half-open out onto the floor, along with a three-hole punch, a mail organizer, and a mostly-empty box of staples as I dug my hand down against the side of the carton and yanked out the colored pencils. I'd missed that feeling, of losing myself in the rhythm of pencil against paper, in the colors slowly blending with one another; and there was - another thought, a sort of nagging worry that becoming an adult meant eventually turning into Mother, and always being snippy and irritable with no time or energy to draw or paint or do anything except for housework or sitting in front of the TV channel surfing through soap operas.

I tossed an empty sketchbook and the colored pencils into my backpack, and picked up the first notebook, the one with college-ruled paper, bright cartoon cover, and fraying edges where the paper met the spiral wire. The page it fell open to had a big rat, drawn out of proportion with the nose too long and paws at the wrong angles, sitting on top of a pedestal. Even with eraser marks smudging up half of their face, the rat still managed to look very sad. I'd written the date I drew it - 10/25/71 - in one corner of the pedestal; the block letters The Martyr were printed neatly along the top edge of the pedestal's plaque, with the rest of it filled up by squiggly lines of fake text.

Now I know what Martyr means, and now I know it doesn't mean the same as hero. And without a name for the rat either on the drawing or coming to my mind from what little scripture I could remember, all I could think of was that rat being a tribute in the arena, fighting some megamutt and dying the sort of suitably noble death that would have commentators talking for years on TV, or their silhouette showing up on posters around District Six.

Something about that rat had nagged at me, and stuck the idea in my mind that since today was a day off, it would be a good day to revisit the cloisters and get a good look at that statue along with the other one with the little girl and the animals. The temple wasn't far, at least - even closer to the new apartment, in fact, and it was a beautiful sunny day, not too bright but the kind of sunny that made me happy I could look out at it instead of at the gray wall of the abandoned welding plant outside the office window.

It still felt strange, that I could simply get up, leave the apartment, and walk over to the Ripredist temple. I didn't have to explain myself to Mother, or even tell anyone where I was going. I didn't need to have a purpose, or some sort of business there, or any reason at all except that it was a nice day outside and I'd been thinking about a rat on a statue I'd sketched ten years ago.

The cloisters are different than I remember them. Not so different I might think myself to be mistaken, and in the wrong temple - the main square is still the same, corridors enclosed in off-white stone walls with arched doorways every couple hundred feet leading into the inner quad. Here and there I can see lighter or darker patches scattered in the stone, signs of repair work done in sections around the temple. One section of corridor had been surrounded by orange traffic cones, the floor tiles torn away and big DETOUR signs propped up in the dust where the floor is missing.

It's the inside of the cloister that's changed the most, though. The quad used to be covered by one big lawn, stretching from wall to wall with only paved pathways and the statues to break up the expanse of grass. Most of that grass had disappeared now. In place of it sit patches of planters with pea vines, or basil, or tomato plants beginning to bloom; the little placard in front of me, tied to an empty metal trellis on the edge of the quad, reads Holy Temple of Ripred Community Garden.

The Lizzie statue is still in the center, taller than the rows of plants. Lavender, mint, and a dozen unidentified flowery smells waft heavily around the garden, and an old man looks up from his squash blossoms, offering me a nod of acknowledgement as I make my way to the statue.

Surrounding Lizzie, who is kneeling on the ground, pen positioned on top of a ribbon of code, are animals from each of the main species in the scripture. The only one of them I can recognize is Ripred, with his X-shaped scar across his eye and cheek, one paw resting on Lizzie's back and his face gazing outward like he's on lookout for any threats. Next to Ripred and Lizzie are an old mouse with glasses and patchy fur, a spider holding pens in six of their eight legs, a bat, and a cockroach with a bent antenna, carrying a laughing toddler on their back. All of them, save for Ripred and the cockroach, were studying slips of coded paper. I walk around the statue, until I get to the side right in front of Lizzie with the plaque that reads:

"The Codebreakers"

This memorial honors the contribution of the team of codebreakers in the Final War. Led by Princess Lizzie, this team was instrumental in gathering intelligence from the rat army's coded messages. Their efforts saved countless innocent lives and played a crucial role in bringing about the end of the war.

"What she saw, it is the flaw, of the Code of Claw." - Bartholomew of Sandwich

"Excuse me," someone calls out from behind, and I turn, letting my hand fall away from the bronze surface, to see a group of students standing right next to me. "Do you mind stepping aside for a second? We just want to get a picture with the statue."

"Oh," I respond, suddenly aware of how long I'd spent staring at the plaque, at the mouse's whiskers, at the wires of the cockroach's antennae. "Sorry, yeah, I - I was just looking."

"Oh, no worries!" the girl says cheerfully, head already turning to smirk at a boy in their group as she shoves her hand onto the polished part of Lizzie's head. I keep walking away. That was the most popular statue in the garden, after all; it wouldn't do for me to get in anybody else's way.

The rat statue from the old sketchbook proves harder to find than the statue of the codebreakers. I spot a figure along one side of the courtyard right away, standing on their haunches with paws outstretched and ears perked up, but something feels off about it as I draw closer, and I wonder if I'd mistaken the shape of their snout - narrow and sharp - or the curve of their ears - big, round circles. Cartesian, I read off the plaque. Protector of the Young.

Cartesian
"Protector of the Young"

When the rat army overran Regalia in the Final War, Cartesian stood guard over its daycare while its citizens evacuated. His heroic efforts in holding off the attackers bought the Regalians time to coordinate their children's rescue; thanks to his strength and valor, every child and every mouse pup refugee in the daycare survived the Siege of Regalia. For giving his life in defense of our holy city, his name and his story will live on forever.

I frown at the description; this Cartesian doesn't seem like the right rat. The scripture had a lot of warriors who died in battle, most of whose names I didn't know, and just like him they always seemed more brave and fearless than sad.

This is also not a rat at all, I realize as I take a closer look at the statue - and the other statue had definitely said it was a rat, that much I'd remembered. This one's head and muzzle are the wrong shape, and his ears and eyes are too big. We'd talked about the difference between mice and rats in school before, when we had to dissect one in class. Rats are bigger in general, and compared to the size of their body they have thicker tails, bigger heads, and smaller ears. When the teacher had mentioned how rats dug deep burrows and mice couldn't dig much, a classmate had asked if this was why the rats in the holy book could take over all the tunnels and caves and leave the mice with nowhere to go, but the teacher said that she wasn't going to discuss Ripredist scripture in science class.

I sometimes wonder how many people believe that there actually had been giant mice and rats existing with normal humans, or if most people think about them in the same way you think about fairy godmothers making glass slippers out of thin air, or rivers that could turn you immortal. Of course, the Capitol could probably make the giant mice and rats if they wanted to, just like they could create dragons and krakens and other mutts. I'd asked Father once whether he thought the mice would be classified in the same genus as normal mice, and whether Ripred would have the same 21 chromosome pairs that rats were supposed to have, but even Father didn't know the answers, and he said that it was unlikely they were mutts; most mutts couldn't breed and form complex communities, or even live for very long without humans caring for them, because they were made for being useful to the Capitol rather than for being able to survive.

Deal with it, Mother's voice echoes across my mind. Adapt and survive. That is nature's only law.

She would tell us, occasionally, that she'd given up her career at the Institute to raise us. My oldest brother had once asked the question all of us were wondering - if she regretted not having the chance to become a famous researcher; she responded with how fame was dangerous, and how doing research didn't give her anything while on the other hand family will always be hers. Then she told us that she doesn't regret quitting but does regret the times she argued with her boss at the Institute, when it didn't matter whose way they did the project with but burning bridges did nothing but make life harder.

And I'd asked if she ever thought about Making A Difference, about putting ideas out there that could make the world a little fairer or easier or more beautiful, and she'd say that I just needed to think more selfishly, when it came to anyone who wasn't family -

- so why -

The rat martyr statue sits adjacent to one diagonal of the courtyard, in between the center codebreaker statue and the corner farthest from the temple hall, where I could hear the faint strains of some hymn being sung. Vines twine against its limestone pedestal, some climbing up almost as high as the rat's feet, with little raspberries beginning to ripen on them.

- had I been feeling so sad about -

In fact, there were raspberry stems sprawling in all directions in the ground near the statue, kept in check only by the paved pathway along one edge and by a patch of mint on the other edge that had also overflowed its designated plot. Even the bottom half of the statue's plaque had a raspberry bush growing against it, obscuring the lines of description after the word Warrior.

- a probably-fictional holy rat?

I tug my sleeve over one hand before using it to brush aside the prickly leaves so I could read the rest of the description.

Twitchtip
"The Martyr"

Exiled by the Rat King for her abnormally keen sense of smell, Twitchtip was offered refuge by Our Lord Ripred in exchange for the use of her skills. She aided the Warrior in his quest against the White Bane, sacrificing herself to the rats to allow the young Princess' safe escape. In spite of the humans' prejudice against her, she remained devoted, refusing to confess her information on the Warrior throughout her torture and eventual death in the rats' caves. She is memorialized here as a true hero for her resilience and commitment to His cause.

Yeah. The sketch may have had all the crudeness of a ten-year-old's first attempts at drawing animals, but I hadn't misremembered, or misdrawn her. Definitely a very sad rat.

"Twitchtip." I tug out my sketchbook, mulling over the words on the memorial and how they don't focus on how much she had contributed, like with the codebreakers, or how bravely she had fought, like with the mouse Cartesian. Only on how dedicated she had been, and how much suffering she had to go through, and - it just seems so unfair, that she'd died so powerlessly, that she had to choose between people who really hated her, and people who hated her a little less because she could be useful, and somehow, even still, she'd found that little scrap of difference worth giving up her entire life for.

I sit down on one of the larger rocks next to the pathway, beginning by sketching out the angled shape of the limestone and the square frame of the plaque - and stop.

"The Ma-"

It didn't feel quite right, somehow, drawing her like that, standing on a pedestal and frozen in cold bronze, looking as though she'd be about to squeak out in pain if she weren't made of metal. I erase all the pedestal lines and start again with the outline of a tunnel; Twitchtip would be standing in the middle, surrounded by snarling rats -

No, not right either.

Twitchtip standing next to Ripred, sniffing at the air -

Still not right.

"Twitchtip -" I roll the syllables around in my mouth like a ripe raspberry and wonder if she had ever had moments of happiness or of peace; if she had made the choice to follow Ripred out of her sense of justice, or out of desperation. If she had just wanted to make a choice at all -

I pick at the crumbling edge of a brown leaf, the rest of the bush scraping and swaying against the raised text. If I had to decide the sort of story people would remember my life by, I muse, I'd hope it'd be about what I did or made instead of about me suffering. But much more than that, I'd want to just - have enough time for figuring out what that story is, and for getting to write it myself.

lyrics - close to home, vienna teng
WT

[WT]

You don't usually tell people that you like the stories. Almost no one asks; more to the point, the people who do always seem to be the same people who believe that the only way to care about something is their way, and attempts to correct the misunderstanding take more energy than they're worth. If you're too firm, half the time someone thinks you're making fun of them, and if you're not firm enough, you accidentally invite them to convince you. Given the options, you prefer to stand there making noncommittal noises until you can extract yourself, no matter how uncomfortably even a lie of omission squirms beneath your ribs.

There's no point opening the question; if you had it in you to be convinced, you would have let someone do it years ago. Few of the other kids at Aether—the kids you left behind, you force yourself to think sometimes, in case something in your gut might collapse if you fail to twist the knife lodged there often enough—liked to pray, and those that did usually kept it to themselves. The—your—the staff never encouraged it. But sometimes on a break or after curfew someone would pass time with a story they picked up from their family, back when they had one, and often as not that meant Ripredist lore. You can only recite bits of the prophecies anymore—you remember, with startling clarity, lying curled and silent in your bed but compulsively mouthing along as Viatrix reached the last repeating stanza of the Prophecy of Blood, always your least favorite and perhaps the most memorable for exactly that reason—but you know the main beats: the flood, the wars, the plague, the names of Ripred's inner circle. You knew enough to decide whether to stake your faith in them; you decided not to.

And considering how many edges of yourself you find yourself holding up to glaring light so you can ask did Aether break this, or was I always this way, you feel surprisingly okay about this one. You don't have to believe in prophecy or giant animals to like the idea that a story about blood can end in peace, or to look for a little of yourself in a boy mired in a fight he never looked for, whose hands moved of their own accord sometimes and who came back to himself bloodied and horrified and confused—a boy who, in the end, surrounded by allies asking something from him that he could no longer bear, smashed his blade and renounced his title.

None of the stories, as far as you know, explain what happened to Gregor after he left Ripred to return home. He had a home to return to, though, and you like to think that after everything, he found a way to build a life he could love. He never had to hold a sword again; he took up music, perhaps, or painting, and made things instead of destroying them.

It's easier to believe, whether they existed or not, that someone else might deserve that sort of ending.

Gregor has a statue in the garden, as expected, but you didn't actually come to visit it. You're here to shore up a hole in your knowledge of District Six that you didn't know you had until an afternoon painting job last week during which, in what at the time felt like a well-measured bid to make conversation, you asked a fellow worker to tell you more about the cloisters she'd mentioned. She looked at you like you already should have known the answer, an expression you will never be so used to that it doesn't make you feel like a child taking their first step onto the training floor, and you clamped your mouth shut, suddenly keenly aware in a way you hadn't been for a while of your only partly hidden accent and the invisible, precarious towers of things that everyone around you seemed to just know, somehow. This new one, at least, you could do something about.

You do have to start somewhere and Gregor is as good a choice as any, but you aren't surprised to find him with a bronze sword in hand and a plaque dedicated to The Warrior. Nobody follows Ripred to honor his protégé's nonexistent epilogue, not even you. And he's posed with Ares, who you can't think about too hard without your throat closing up. You last only a few moments beside them, gingerly tracing the texture of Ares' metal fur with two fingertips, before you have to shy away.

If you focus on the plants, this place doesn't feel terribly different from the square at the College where you've taken to spending free afternoons—less grass, more fruit, but the same green smell and gently shifting murmur of voices and blur of moving people around you. You're not focusing on the plants—you're tapping the ends of Temp's antennae, reading through the small plaque for a small bat you don't recognize, and examining the glowing spot on Lizzie's hair with mild confusion—but the sense of familiarity sits soothingly at the edge of your awareness as you meander. It makes it easier to consider without getting too overwhelmed that you have no idea what Ripredism says about the dead, but that it better be nice, if so many of its important people are dead themselves.

Someone at Aether must have known—must know—but you can't ask them, now.

You slow to a stop beside a rat. It's not Ripred, who you already saw standing stoic and alert beside Lizzie in the central statue, and you suppose it could be Lapblood or Mange, except you would expect to find them together—and maybe it's just that you're already thinking about Aether, but you recognize Ephrath's favorite without circling around to look at her plaque. You know Twitchtip.

It was the nose thing that did it more than the stories, you think; she demanded them so often that Revaz started making up his own, and he wasn't terribly good at it, but Ephrath never complained. Not that you ever asked; she was too dedicated to the competition and you were too—yourself, for the two of you to become friends. You were allies of a sort sometimes, though. She swapped weapons with you behind the trainers' backs if you got one with a hilt that burned your palms for no good reason; then she trounced you with them, without fail, but you still paid her back with food from your smuggled stash on nights when the smell of dinner made her gag too hard to eat. Different types of pain take different reserves to deal with, and she understood that without using it against you, which in both respects was more than you could say for some of the people in charge.

Ephrath was always one of the favorites the trainers insisted they could never choose. She won more often than almost anyone else in your year and she knew how to sound polite in the way the adults wanted. Neither made her untouchable, but if anyone is fine there, it's probably her. Even so, remembering her makes you wish you prayed after all—makes you wonder if it would feel better to climb onto the pedestal and curl against the bronze and ask the patron of misfits to look after a few of them a little extra hard. And maybe you should have stayed with Gregor and Ares, if you were going to end up here with your eyes dry but your throat tight anyway, shifting your weight onto and off of your toes as subtly as you can, wondering if anyone looked after Twitchtip as a child and hating every answer you come up with.

Nothing says not to climb, but no one else is doing it, and you don't think you can handle a scolding right now. Instead you take a shaky breath, spin on your heel, and sit down in the raspberry bush.

The stems are both pricklier and less dense than you expected. You whack an elbow on the pedestal and you'll probably have to treat raspberry stains, which will mean trying to treat them until you're frustrated enough to either start chewing on your hands or go bother Suman about it. Once you finish flailing and tuck your limbs in, though, it's not so bad; the whole world filters through that green smell now and the shade lifts a pressure from your eyelids that you hadn't yet noticed, but you can still hear a choir somewhere to your left and the chatter of other visitors to your right. Alone but not alone, you can rest your chin on your knees and focus on breathing, deep and steady, until the knot in your throat loosens. In the distance, the choir fades into silence only briefly before a new song drifts out and down to find you.

The raspberry stems rustle.

Your eyes shoot open.

The voice that follows the rustling comes from a few feet away, vaguely toward your right, but you tense a little further at the sound. I'm—cleaning, you start to rehearse, but that sounds ridiculous even as you come up with it. Cleaning what, and with what supplies? Picking berries—no, who does that inside the bush? You... dropped something?

"Twitchtip," the voice says one more time before subsiding.

I... know? you don't say. Sometimes you're okay at knowing what not to say. Unfortunately, that does nothing for knowing what to say, let alone how to say it, and you have no reference for this situation.

Maybe that's okay. You're not actually doing anything wrong, right? You're sitting. You can sit where you like, as long as a sign doesn't say not to. Or as long as you're not loitering, which seems to be defined however a shopkeeper feels like defining it, but this isn't a shop and isn't the whole point to come and sit and look at the statues? You looked at the statues, and now here you are, sitting.

As the raspberries begin to shift again you take a deep breath, sharper than the last one, and stand up as quickly as you sat down.

To your relief, only one person is in the place where the voice came from. To your confusion, you notice, in order: long hair; sitting down; a pad of paper; the general idea that this person may never have cared that you were in the raspberries at all.

"Um," you say, in case using your voice kick-starts some actual words, though you probably should have known better. After your anxious scramble for excuses, the realization that you misunderstood this encounter feels like it ought to come as a relief, but if anything you feel slightly more unbalanced than the moment before; you catch yourself raising one hand to fuss with the hem of your shirt, and lift it instead up to your chest and uncurl your fingers to offer a tiny, hesitant wave.



the entire middle of this post was somewhat less morose before I cracked open Code of Claw to check a detail and accidentally read half the book and had an emotion or three or three dozen

[Lyn𝛿is]

Caitlin Samuels

🐦
claim the truth that gets lost
in the miles of memory and open folds
🐦

I've always imagined Regalia as the Capitol, when they talked of it in the scriptures. There would be gleaming buildings, carved from white stone and glowing golden from torchlight; a domed palace rising from the middle surrounded by gardens; high walls that defended the city as surely as the mountains of the Rockies defended the Capitol against rebels in the Dark Days.

War, terrible war. I'd gotten nightmares hearing the stories of boiling oil poured from the castle walls, of rat soldiers who'd died agonizing deaths, their fur and skin melting from their flesh. There was a certain cruelty, behind those golden spires; a structure of treachery and lies only undone by a boy unwittingly caught in its web, and the Lord Ripred who had guided him through it all.

I glance between Twitchtip and the sketchpad again, and imagine the Dead Lands where she'd been exiled to - rocky, desolate, lonely, without any of the luxuries that would be comfortable to humans in the city. Panem occasionally had people, too, who lived outside the walls - Wanderers, or so we called them, and if the word of gossip was to be believed they were all unkempt and dangerous criminals who roamed in gangs along the district borders, ekeing out a living in the wilderness and entering Districts to rob and steal from lawful citizens.

Then again. Twitchtip had been a wanderer. Perhaps she'd stood there, in the middle of the Dead Lands with no rats or warm-blooded creatures for miles, and felt mostly relief at not having to smell everybody or fear what else King Gorger might do to her as he rose to power. And there was Hamnet -

I do no more harm. Some say he's the one who first made the oath plastered across the walls of every hospital in Six - and his words echo here, in the spaces left by this year's Games. Aeternum was always going to be doomed, folks scoffed, gesturing at the ship and the little documents the tributes dug up from drawers or computers or scattered across compartments. Look at that poor naive sociologist Judas, they said. Look at how foolish he is, thinking there could ever be a Hesperidean society, without envy and conflict. Humans' natural state is war - petty and vindictive and predisposed to feeling superior over others since we flooded the Garden and showed the Lord we could not be trusted to be peaceful without His guidance.

Some of the Ripredist temples around the district have frescos of Silksharp drowning, painted or pieced together in stained glass around the edges of their front doors. Most of those depictions are pretty unnerving - the baby rat contorting in pain as it struggles for air - but I do stop to admire, whenever I pass by it, the Reincarnationist mural splashed across a factory wall two blocks from work, with its rough, impressionistic brush-strokes that seamlessly blur from Silksharp's gray fur to Lizzie's hazy-blue dress, all highlighted by the swirls of deep sky and golden light in its background.

turn and turn and turn again,
you see the what but not the when -

I tend to take the bits I know of Saint Hamnet's story as more a story of knowledge than of atoning for his sins. That he didn't spend years out in the jungle just out of guilt, but out of wanting to learn - about himself, about the Underland, about other species - everything he couldn't find out by staying in Regalia.

And I know that feeling, because it's -

It's drawing a black-and-white sketch on a canvas, and finally having the right watercolors to finish the painting. It's figuring out how to make a gradient blend smoothly from golden orange to dark blue, and being able to do some justice to a sunrise. I shift around the three or four pencils that had been jostled out of order, before pulling out a gray one and two shades of pink from the box.

It's looking back at an old, unlabeled sketch of a bronze rat from ten-odd years ago, and being flooded by the weight of those ten years.

A glint of turquoise -

I want more - insight. I want to see the world as it is, in its entirety, when all of it is fleeting fragments and painfully limited glimpses of something unfathomably big. You don't need to, people would say, you're better off not knowing - no. I need to. It isn't like not seeing - not learning - will make all the complicated bits go away or stop existing, and it makes for a richer picture when you have more pieces of the truth.

I'm glad we can talk about this. Kai folds his arms and leans back against the wall of the abandoned tower. When you first brought it up I was anxious, to be honest...

Well, you weren't supposed to tell anybody about him. But I figured it out myself, so it doesn't count.

I guess it doesn't really matter. He gives a quick shrug, but he's still smirking. It's been so long, folks've probably forgotten him and let all of it go.

I suppose so. I just... like understanding things.

I'm glad he gets that, when most people don't seem to think that way. They'd rather not hear about how sometimes people went missing from the warehouse district, or that figures from the mayor's office came through seeming quite suspicious. And maybe it's a lonely fact, that it'd make others happier not to have any of it in their head, but I can't help aching - still - to reach for that knowledge -

Somehow, despite looking straight at the statue, I manage to miss that there's an entire person inside the bushes, almost making me jump when the raspberry leaves rustle and they're suddenly standing right in front of me. There's a brief flash of anxiety, too, that comes with the surprise - a moment where I'm at once trying to shove it away and pretend I hadn't just been startled, and bracing myself for the dreaded what are you doing? question that often came next.

I'm not supposed to be afraid of that question, because people usually asked it to be friendly. But I can't shake the fear that the next part would be a Doesn't look like you are. You're just staring at a blank sheet of paper, or don't you have better things to be doing than wasting a day wandering aimlessly around the District, or I thought you told Aronzo you'd be busy this weekend, when he asked if you wanted to go to dinner with him.

"Um,"

It's a relief, then, when no questions come. When I realize there's no need to come up with a reason why it feels important to spend some time figuring out how to draw Twitchtip, instead of the sort of things that filled up a calendar in a more tangible way; no need to force out explanations that never seemed to be good enough to satisfy people.

Hey. I offer them a hopefully-gentle smile. It's not quite silence, with the choir's sounds - we blossom and we cease - drifting out from the cloister and the ever-present swishing of plants in the wind, but it's quiet enough for the stillness to settle between us, thick like raspberry syrup.

I tug at one corner of the sketchbook and roll - hold the light given unto you - it around. This was... not how a conversation was supposed to start, but also probably better than being the kind of person who stuffed up silences with a barrage of gossip about what an idiot this or that colleague or boss had been, or interrogated the other person with questions.

- in this broken world -

This statue's my fa- I finally begin - and the word favorite dies in my throat; it seemed wrong, somehow, too certain for a figure I hadn't even had a name for. A figure - I look around at the dusty pedestal, at the overgrown raspberries - put up in a corner while folks cursed out Silksharp's name and wrote essays about the symbolism of an author naming a pair of best friends Luxa and Aurora.

- the one I want to learn more about the most. That, at least, was something I did feel reasonably certain enough to say.

- find the love to unfold -

I guess you like her too?

lyrics - close to home + shine, vienna teng
WT

fun things to do: imagining how confusing Christianity references would be in literature if you knew absolutely nothing about Christianity or the Bible

also did I just shamelessly use a Vienna Teng song as a Ripredist hymn? maaaybe :whistling:

[WT]

Stand flat, you tell yourself as you wave, actively thinking the words half out of habit and half for distraction. Heels down. There. At Aether they always said you'd ruin your tendons spending so much time on your toes; you never noticed any problem, but fine, you've had enough people glance at your feet and ask if you're okay to figure they can't have been entirely wrong. (Though they can't have been entirely right, because they always turned around and scolded you for not stepping lightly enough and never seemed to notice or mind that you moved better when you weren't spending half your concentration on flattening your feet. Sometimes you wanted to tell them to make up their collective mind; most of the time, you just wished you could see the invisible line between adequate and reprovable that seemed so clear to them.) At the very least, it draws attention you don't want. But it's hard to resist when you're this type of off-kilter—an unexpected person, an unexpected moment, a hymn you don't know tugging your attention to the side, anxiety thrumming in feet more than half ready to flee.

—how our hearts are worn—

Stand flat.

"Hey."

The stranger smiles in a way you can't quite read. A sliver of tension bleeds out of your heels anyway, then another at the almost-soundless crinkle of paper between their fingers. No one is yelling, or even so much as making you explain yourself; you still feel ungainly and uncertain, self-conscious of your raspberry-ruffled clothes and lacing your fingers in a futile attempt to fill a moment you don't know what else to do with, but relief alone settles the desperate urge to bolt.

"This statue's my fa—"

The pause, more than the actual words, makes you smile fleetingly and fold your legs to sit facing them. (Her? You never like to guess, because you hate when people guess at you instead of asking, but then sometimes they get angry when you ask, as though you're the one refusing to be straightforward about things. Facing her, then.) You can appreciate the time it takes sometimes to track down the right word, and you're happy to wait, swaying lightly to the song that seemed so disorienting just seconds ago, while she gazes past you at Twitchtip's statue.

"—the one I want to learn more about the most," she finishes after a moment. You offer that a wordless sound of acknowledgement, which dissolves halfway out of your throat in surprise as she adds, "I guess you like her too?"

I guess, you mouth but stop short of repeating as you twist your head around to blink at the statue. Do you? More to the point, do you know Twitchtip well enough to like her? Everything you know about her life—the original, the story at the heart of every other version—is at least filtered and recast through multiple children's memories, if not incomplete to begin with. You know she lived in the Dead Lands for a time, but not whether they were exile or refuge; Revaz never seemed to make up his mind on that point. (In the experience you've gained since then, the latter always becomes the former eventually; at first the unfamiliar calm of the wilds was a welcome reprieve, but you missed company before long, and always found new fences a welcome sight. But you have only ever been, at most, yourself. Maybe the peace and the distant smells were worth it to Twitchtip.) You know nothing about her family and almost as little about her friends outside of Gregor, and suspect but can't confirm the reasons for that. You know about her death in the same way you know about her childhood: a vague impression that it happened, without detail of where or how or when.

You feel better with her at your back, though, and still feel something of the urge to tuck yourself against the metal. Both are silly thoughts—even if Twitchtip watched the world through its eyes, metal could neither feel not move on your behalf—but both are true. She's comforting in her familiarity, one of the few things you're glad you took with you from District to District. And some things are constant across all the stories, no matter how confused some of Revaz's could get: her sense of smell, of course, but also that she was brave, and resilient. That after more than anyone should have to go through, she still cared about doing the right thing.

And Ephrath liked her.

(Likes her. Probably.)

—broken world we choose—

(You have no way to know.)

You twist away from the statue, frowning thoughtfully at the ground. "She reminds me of my—" One hand scrubs gently across your knee. The best word you have remains ally, which seems to say both more and less than you want it to: not enough about Ephrath, and too much about what—who—you've so painstakingly worked to not tell District Six you really are. "Of someone I—" Cared about, even though you lived together for years without ever quite getting to know each other? Abandoned? Miss? All of the above? You realize the heel of your hand is still intermittently smoothing and ruffling the fabric above your knee, still your wrist with a forced effort, and curl your fingers over the ground beside you instead. "She reminds me of a classmate. So—yes. Only I don't know which stories I know are re—mm." All of those stories were real to Ephrath in the ways that matter, in the ways that Gregor is real to you despite your certainty that he never existed. Who are you, years and miles away, to decide otherwise? "Which are, are... temple stories. Our other classmate told them, and he—" You look up long enough to decide that looking up was a mistake and slide your eyes down again. "He didn't... care about the war?" That undersells the matter. Spend enough hours on practice, analyze Games footage until you learn to recognize the children on screen by the blades in their hands instead of their faces, and you all had to do something—get used to it like the trainers wanted, or shove everything down until it spilled through the cracks between your fingers, or skate through the days and do everything you could to keep your precious free hours peaceful. Revaz didn't avoid talking about battles and blood because he didn't care; he did it because he cared more than he was supposed to. But it comes out to the same thing, from the outside. "So it's all—mostly the detective stories, and they don't always line up, like—"

The breath you didn't realize you needed sounds harsh and somehow louder than your actual voice. You bite the inside of one cheek, suddenly unsure where you dredged up the momentum you were starting to build and almost nauseous with the sense of teetering on another of those shifting invisible lines you only ever seem to find by crossing them. Keep your steps flat, but not too heavy. Use your words, but stop rambling, no one cares about the details. No, there are no measurements for these things; why would there be? No one else needs a scale to balance the world.

They can't have been entirely right. You think, fleetingly, of your own quiet admiration at Boo's story about their kitten, volunteered for no reason except that you were standing there and seemed willing to listen, and Suman waving easily at an apology for taking too long to answer a question he meant as a passing greeting. Plenty of people care about details. All the same: you've resigned yourself to days without work when someone new smiled politely and whisked you out the door; you've seen Peacekeepers breeze over your illegal signature but eye you more and more sharply the harder you try to explain something true; you've had the everyday stilted conversations that leave you flustered, your accent cracking open under stress. They can't have been entirely wrong.

You look up again—more at the stranger's paper than at her, but you do your best. "I just... never went to temple, so." You hope, and doubt, that your shrug comes across as casual. "Did—what did you want to find out about her?"



see also: how confusing Christianity references would be if you did know something about Christianity or the Bible, but only because your boarding school classmate played you four songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, summarized the first three volumes of Saint Young Men, and let you read his fanfiction