Summer 31: mound

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Most treasured Zann,

One thing I had managed to do was spend a few minutes with a map of Cas Crid. I had never seen the place back when it was still standing; I had only come to Crideon after it had been thrown down. And even then I had never really looked at the ruins. So if I was going to figure out how to get in, I needed to know what the layout of the place was.

As castles went it didn’t make a lot of sense. Crideon hadn’t been in any danger of invasion for centuries. (Or so they thought.) So the castle, before it was destroyed, was just another city building in a lot of ways. Different kings had added to it, torn parts down, built things on top of other things, and even included some buildings that were by any reasonable standard down the street from the actual castle. There was only about a third of the original curtainwall left, and it wasn’t really trying to defend anything so much as it was trying to stay out of the way. But I thought I had a good understanding of its main parts as I strolled up to it that morning.

Unusually for Crideon before noon, there was a mist around Cas Crid. I thought it seemed like a very lauran, greenkind kind of mist. Dark gray, with vague blue and yellow lights inside it. Like a fool, I walked right into it.

And then everything was different.

Life was pleasant inside the mist, as long as you kept out of the way of Lord Clear. Much nicer than the harsh sunshine world with all the filthy men and women. How long had I been standing here looking at the cairns of earth that had been raised over the corpse of Castle Crideon? Many days, surely, and contented ones. But now perhaps I could continue on my way, and find the rest of the Rosolla Guard within.

I strolled past the first mound, trying to fit it to what I remembered of the map. The one I wanted, I thought, should be in the middle of the cluster of mounds. I didn’t have a shovel with me. What was the point of digging up ruins? If Clear and the Rosollas and everyone were in here, it was through magic, and therefore I would have to find some kind of magic.

One good place to look might be at the top of the central mound.

Climbing a hill of dirt was one of the least frightening things I had tried to do in the past few swings. It was messy but not really very difficult. The mist was still everywhere, but I could see about twenty feet in all directions, and that was enough. Finally I stood on top of the mound, greyness all about me. There was something up ahead to the left, so I went to investigate. It was a flagpole, only about ten feet tall, flying a blue banner with a blue diamond on it. Lord Clear’s, surely. Could it be magical? It could.

I reached up to touch it, maybe to pull it down, and was wrenched aside magically! Something pulled me, roughly, through some walls of reality, and flung me to the ground. My hand stung where it had brushed the cloth of the flag.

I was in a stone room, somewhere, sprawled on the floor. A small torch provided the only light. There was one door, and it opened. Two Rosolla Guards strode in.

Trall and Carsaduam.

Love,

Ybel

Summer 31: light heavy

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Dearest Zann,

Coy and Lasl let me sleep in their boat that night. I don’t know where they slept. It wasn’t too uncomfortable, though it was a little cold.

The next days were… not uneventful, but frustrating. I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but I couldn’t do them until I did other things first. I needed money, for one thing, so I worked most of a day on the docks and accumulated a small handful of pennies. Spent a couple on passage upriver to the palace.

The laziest siege in history was happening outside the palace walls, and as far as I could tell nothing was happening inside them. The greenkind were in there, no doubt, but they weren’t letting themselves be seen. It wasn’t difficult to evade the besiegers and slip into the place, but once I did I was alone. Nothing but echoes in the great halls. Ambe wasn’t in her lair, none of the Rosollas were in our guardrooms. Ellewen wasn’t there; I left him a note just in case.

I figured this might be my chance and sought out the kitchen to see if there was any Sauce around. I couldn’t even find the kitchen. I knew where it had been, but it was hidden from my eyes now.

I found a bit of food in one of the guardrooms and slept there that night. Next morning, back to Crideon and look for Srix. I tried Birch Spit but the place was abandoned. Only one thing left to try, and I wasn’t looking forward to it: go to Cas Crid and see what was happening there.

The city was much emptier than usual too. Where had everyone gone? Fled to the countryside? The war, or whatever it was, certainly wasn’t over, but nobody troubled me as I skulked down the streets and alleys. Mostly I just heard cries and other noises in the distance.

One thing I should probably mention is that thing I found and put in my pocket, back in the laur, as I was turning to ash and crumbling away. It was still in my pocket. Somehow. It was a seedpod of some kind. Made of tough fibers, greeny-pink in colour. When I first took a good look at it, I turned it over and over to see its various details, and I could swear that it turned lighter and heavier as I did so. Heavy, light, heavy, light. In the end I put it away safely.

No more delays. Next time I’ll tell you about Cas Crid and what I found there.

All my love,

Ybel

Summer 30: head

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Most beloved Zann,

Coy and Lasl were telling the truth when they said they knew of a tavern that was still open and operating normally. It was a place called Sosi’s, and I thought I might have been there once before. Just a little waterfront joint made of two joined cellars.

The first thing I saw coming down the stairs into the common room was a glass jar with a human head in it, in some kind of green liquid, hanging over our heads. The head glared at me for a moment, and then nodded, allowing me to pass.

“He gave you a good long look,” Lasl said. “Got some secrets? Usually he’ll let any normal customer in.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Always just call him ‘the head’. I think he was a wizard.”

The common room was about half full. We sat at the end of a long table. Coy looked over at Sosi, behind the bar, and held up three fingers. Sosi nodded.

“So, Ybel,” Coy said. “Do you think you’re going back to the Guard?”

“Maybe. Probably. Something like it, anyway. I’m still thinking. What about you two? How do you live?” They will glance at each other before answering me, I thought to myself.

Before answering me, they glanced at each other. “We get by,” Lasl said. “There’s always something you can do with a boat. Fishing, if nothing else.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“It’s a pretty good life. Lot of dangerous people in the streets that don’t come out onto the water. Lot of politics that can be avoided. And the air’s always fresh.”

Sosi brought us a large trencher of bread with some strips of fried fish, pickled radishes, and wedges of cheese. Also, three mugs of stout.

“Sounds nice,” I said, trying not to stuff my mouth too greedily. The bread wasn’t very good, but it was fresh.

“Sort of thing that appeals to you?”

I smiled. “I hate to say this, because I’m so hungry for this food, and you’ve already done so much for me. But… you’re only telling me the good parts.”

“What do you mean?” Coy asked.

“I mean that sailing up and down the river in the sunshine sounds much better than having to worry about palace intrigue… but I don’t think I’d like smuggling goods into the city very much, especially when I’d have to deal with the neighbourhood gangs.” I wasn’t sure whether to look Lasl dead in the eye when I said that, or to look Coy dead in the eye, so I switched back and forth between the two of them. I don’t think it made me seem as formidable as I wanted.

“There is that,” Lasl said calmly.

“If you don’t mind my asking, does your gang think of you as their soldiers or their mercenaries?”

“Oh, mercenaries, definitely. They’re too close-knit for us to be anything else. You have to have grown up in their same four-block area or they don’t trust you. Why?”

“I’m just wondering. I don’t have an offer to make, but I would like to start collecting useful people who are available to, well, help the city out from time to time.”

“Are we not helping the city already?” Coy said, pointing a radish at me. “That stuff we bring in, most of it’s food.”

“Food that some mean dastards get a nice profit on before anyone gets to eat it. I agree, it does help, some, but I’d like some other choices for us.”

Lasl shrugged. “If you’ve got something to say, I’ll listen.”

I took a swig of stout. “Sometimes I think we never really woke up from the Nap.” Coy looked at me questioningly, but I didn’t elaborate.

The Nap. We all fell asleep and drowsed while the greenfolk took everything from us. And then we woke, and saw what had happened, and… nothing. We didn’t fight, or leave, or band together. We reacted slowly. We accepted this new madness as a fact and went along with it. Me as much as anybody.

And that was unusual for me. Back before the Nap, up north, I wasn’t like that at all. I… well, never mind that right now. I did a lot of things. I made people react to me. And now? I gave up everything I ever cared about to loiter around a palace on the offchance that a drop of the Sauce would fall in my mouth. But then, I was a different person now, wasn’t I?

But I’d never be so different that I would let everything come to an end just because I was too busy counting the bubbles in my piss. Maybe the people of Crideon had lost the trick of making things happen. Fine. I would relearn it.

And I knew who I had to find first.

All my love,

Ybel

Summer 29: scattering

Matthew ELeave a comment

Zann, my truest love,

I took my long branch and weaved as many colourful flowers as I could into the twigs at the end of it. It wasn’t easy, and I had been swearing continuously for about ten minutes before I found a technique that would work. At last I had a long colourful banner, about twelve feet, that I could wave in the air. I took it up to the downstream tip of the island, and waited for a boat heading up to Crideon.

It wasn’t a perfect plan. The river was wide, and the best currents to travel in were near the banks. Someone on a boat might see me and still not want to come out into the middle of the flow to help me. But it might work.

As it happened, the problem wasn’t that the riverboats were unwilling to come out from the bank, but that they weren’t there at all. When I was working on the docks, and later when I did guard duty out on The Tongue, I would see dozens of boats a day go past the city. The fighting must be keeping people away. I waited there for hours, seated on the sand with my flowery branch.

And a boat did finally approach! It was a trader, hugging the north bank. I jumped to my feet and flailed the branch around like a maniac, scattering flowers, trying to attract their attention. It was pretty far away, but they had a man on watch and I could tell that he saw me. He called to someone else, and another fellow joined him, and they both watched me bouncing about waving my branch. The boat stayed on its course, though. When it was drawing even with the island, the first man waved back, finally, and pointed at me with both hands, and then pointed downwards, pointing at my feet. He gave me a little salute-like wave and the boat passed behind a point on the island.

He meant something, but I didn’t know what. What about my feet?

Maybe he meant that I should stay here and wait. I could do that.

I waited, for hours. The island was far enough from the city that the afternoon mists were all a thin white that didn’t do anything but smell like trees. It didn’t help the sailing visibility, though, so I had almost given up on any boats coming by when I heard, “Hoy! The island!” from out on the water.

“Hoy!” I called back.

A large dinghy sailed into view. A bearded man was at the rudder. “Do you mind getting wet?” he said. “I don’t know how close I can come.”

“That’s fine,” I said, wading out. “Thank you!”

He grinned, and a woman near the mast threw me a wooden ring on a line. The boat was coming around the island, but I had my arm through the ring and it pulled me along. I swam out, trying to work my way up the rope. The boom swung past the two of them, and the woman helped me aboard.

“Thank you, again. I’m Ybel.”

“Ybel. Glad to help. I’m Coy and this is my husband Lasl. What were you doing on that island?”

“Oh. It’s a long story. I don’t mind telling you, but it’s a really long story. I’m a Rosolla Guard, at the Palace, and I’ve been out of the city for a while, doing all kinds of crazy things. Someone who dislikes me stranded me on the island. What’s happening in Crideon now, do you know?”

“Rosolla Guard, eh? Hm,” Lasl said. “That’s interesting. As far as I know your people are all sealed up in Cas Crid with Lord Clear and a brown glow around the whole area keeping everyone out. So you’re coming back to the city… to do what?”

“A brown glow? Oh. I’m coming back to, well, to try to put things right. I don’t know how. But I can’t just let everything fall apart the way it’s doing.”

“Because of your oath?” Coy asked.

I thought about it. “No. The oath is nice too. I just have to do this.”

I was lying on my back in the bottom of the dinghy. I could have sat up, but every now and then Lasl and Coy felt it necessary to do a sailing thing where the boat changes direction a little and it yanks the boom over top of the hull and everybody has to duck. I never know when to duck. So I just stayed down all the time.

“Brave of you,” Coy said. “I say ‘brave’. Do you prefer ‘foolish’? ‘Suicidal’? ‘Simple’? Or should I stick with ‘brave’?”

I laughed. “Any of those. I don’t know. I’ve been in a lot of unusual situations. I don’t know what can be done. But it doesn’t feel like I have much choice about it.” I paused. “And, there was a time when I let a couple of people down. I cared about them a lot. I still do. But I wasn’t there for them when they needed me, and now it’s too late. But it isn’t too late for the people I know here.”

They nodded. Still keeping their eyes on the water ahead.

“And I count you two in that. You’re really helping me here, and I owe you a debt. And I’ll make good on it.”

Lasl waved it off. “We just did a bit of sailing. We sail all the time. A little run downriver because a fellow on a trader told us that some other fellow was caught on an island? It’s no great thing.”

“In that case, I’ll forget your names.”

They laughed. “There’s still a place near the docks that the laurans and gangs haven’t discovered,” Lasl said. “Come have a drink with us, and we’ll talk about some items of interest, and we’ll say it’s even.”

“Glad to,” I said, and we came around a bend, and there was Crideon, with the sun setting behind her, and the afternoon mists blue and green in her streets.

All my love,

Ybel

Summer 28: leafslime

Matthew ELeave a comment

Dearest Zann,

I tumbled through the hole in the darkness, and landed on mud. The sunshine was bright here, and I squinted as I stood up. Somehow I was still wearing the same clothes from when Ellewen and I had entered the laur. How long ago? I couldn’t tell. I checked that my coin was still hanging around my neck: it was.

Greenery was all around me, long reeds and big leaves coming down from somewhere above. I was on the shore of some water… probably a river. I knew this place, actually. I could see houses on the opposite shore, and the shapes of the hills… this was one of the islands in the Crideon River, some miles downstream of the city. I had never been here before, but I had seen the islands from the land. I tried to remember, did anyone live here? Had I ever seen smoke or farms or anything here?

I took a step and slipped in the mud, plastering river muck and leafslime all over myself. Tried to get up, slipped again, and completed the job of bedaubing myself from head to toe. I laughed and stood again, more carefully. I felt pretty good, unexpectedly. I was healthy. Wande and Jhus were fine, wherever they were. And, whatever kind of wars and intrigues were going on in Crideon, it didn’t have anything to do with me. I was just taking a nice walk around an island. Could I even get off the island? Who knew? Maybe I could swim it. I could just walk away from everything.

It sounded good. The greenfolk didn’t know how to rule in Crideon, and the people of Crideon didn’t know what they were dealing with in trying to drive the greenfolk out. The Rosolla Guard was a snakepit inside the larger snakepit of the palace. Ellewen and Ambe and my other friends could all take care of themselves. And I could go somewhere else. North, maybe, back to the Boltmarch.

I sat down on a rock and chewed on a blade of grass. If I did leave, it would mean that I was giving up on ever tasting the Sauce again. And that would leave a large hole in me. Right then, though, with the sun shining on me, and smelling the wind off the river, that didn’t seem so bad.

My fingers found the coin on its old leather thong. Of all things, that little pissard Ran was on my mind. Did I remember right, that his whole neighbourhood had been destroyed by all the fighting in Crideon? Was Ran dead? It might have been something that I imagined. But.

He did live in Crideon. He was in danger. A lot of people were in danger. And somebody had to do something about it. And that somebody was me. I couldn’t just sit on this island eating reeds. I had to, I had to, well, I didn’t know what I had to do. Just that I had to do it. I started looking around for a branch.

Love,

Ybel

Summer 27: maw

Matthew ELeave a comment

Dearest Zann,

After that, there was a long period of nothing. I wasn’t really conscious, but once it was over, I could tell that I had experienced some kind of time. Eventually I became aware of… a place, that seemed dark and looming, like Ambe’s lair beneath the palace. At first I remained still, dreaming. I didn’t feel ashy. I felt normal.

I looked up, and there she was: Jhusdhe, sitting there, scowling at me and kicking her legs.

“Jhus!” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry, Jhusdhe. Are you all right? Where’s Wande? Is she all right?”

“Be silent. It is the great failure of my mater that I cannot pretend not to know you. But I wish to hear no words from your savage maw.”

I straightened, and rose to an awkward sit. “I know you don’t like me. That’s not important. But what happened to you? I was looking all around–“

“I will have silence from you.” She was wearing a green playfrock I didn’t know, not ripped or dirty or anything. That was a good sign. It meant she and Wande were somewhere that their comforts were being seen to. And she seemed, well, not happy obviously, not Jhus, but lively. “You are an ill-bred puppy who has been bumbling through the snow, and now you are here.”

“Where are we? I can’t tell. I was in–“

“You are too stupid to understand. But you cannot stay here. There is a way out, there.” She pointed. “Go. And stop looking for us. You don’t deserve to find either of us, and my poor mother does much better without you.” And she looked away in that infuriating way she has, where the conversation is over and you don’t exist anymore.

I looked where she had pointed, and there was a long spoon, lying silver against the darkness. For a long time I didn’t dare go near it, with Jhusdhe there. What if she knew? She would never keep my secret, I knew that. But I had to do something. I leaned over, reached out. Touched it. But my fingers went in, it wasn’t a spoon, it was a spoon-shaped hole in the world and I was reaching through it. And then I was falling through it. I closed my eyes against the sudden brightness.

When I opened them, I could see that I was no better off.

Love,

Ybel

Summer 26: sared

Matthew ELeave a comment

Dearest Zann,

Ellewen and I stood at the bottom of an ugly hill in a strange, pink-skied realm. Dark green clouds scuttled to block the brown sun, and we stared at a spiky fortress across the plains. Unholy, garlic-like fragrances rose from the ground about us. Ellewen stood patiently, and if he had been a human instead of an unearthly laur–I mean, instead of a greenfolk–he would have been looking at me expectantly.

I figured that I wasn’t going to get any idea of what to do from him, so I had to take the lead myself. I thought about investigating the fortress in the distance, and then I thought it would be even better to not investigate the fortress, so I started off in the opposite direction, around the hill. Ellewen followed.

“Do we have a way of going home?” I asked him, as we stepped around the rocks. “When we want to?”

“Oh yes,” he answered. “It would actually be much more difficult to remain for too long. We aren’t wanted here.”

We had a choice of paths between different withered, rocky hills. The pass to the left looked a little easier, so I took that one. Ellewen’s shadow fell beside me. It was an ugly purple colour. It looked like there had been a structure here. The rocks were tumbled blocks and walls and timbers. One of the timbers had fallen to create a narrow bridge through the area. I could see sparkles from debris in the rubble, and… a familiar smell?

A sound from up ahead: boots on the rocks. Ellewen sighed.

“Who’s there?” I called.

The most beautiful man in the world bounded up onto a scarred boulder. He had long copper hair flowing down past immaculate cheekbones to equally emphatic shoulders. His skin was the green of a stagnant pond and his eyes the grey of burned corpses. It felt like I had never wanted anyone more. “Still here, flower-grower?” he said, ignoring me and addressing Ellewen. He was carrying some kind of… I don’t know what it was. It was made of metal and wood, and he pointed it at Ellewen like a weapon.

“As you see,” he answered.

“Can you help us?” I asked the stranger. “We don’t really know why we’re here, and–” and he knocked me down.

I don’t know how he did it; he wasn’t anywhere near us. He just acted, and the air struck a sharp impact all along my left side, and I fell backward. I lay there in both pain and pleasure, trying feebly to get up.

Something was under my hand, something strange-shaped. I put it in my pocket.

“It’s nothing for me to kill you and your pet,” he said to Ellewen, “but if you go now I may not bother to try.”

“I think we’re just going,” Ellewen said. “If we–” and he looked at me. “Oh.”

“Whaf?” I said. “Elleven?”

“Ybel,” he said, kneeling beside me, concerned. The lovely man grunted in impatience and made his weapon make a noise.

I tried to push up with my hands, but it didn’t work; my hands didn’t seem to be able to make any force against the ground. I looked down. Where my lower arms used to be, there was only ash. It didn’t hurt. Some more of my right arm crumbled as I watched it. “Heff me,” I said, and ashes puffed out of my mouth. “I’m sared!” I said, and laughed. I don’t know why I laughed.

“It will something something,” Ellewen said. All the sounds went quiet. The sights were turning grey. The last I saw was a flash from the man’s weapon as the ash completed my body.

All my love,

Ybel

Eliza Dushku

Matthew ELeave a comment

Eliza Dushku (b. 1980) used to be an actress. As such she played more than a few roles that resonated with the GenX stereotype in her time. First, she was Dana Tasker, the sneaky latchkey-kid daughter of a spy in 1994’s True Lies. Later, she played Faith Lehane, the sexy, ass-kicking bad seed who surrendered to her demons and then fought them back down in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel TV shows, and also Missy Pantone, the sardonic gymnast slumming it as a cheerleader in 2000’s Bring It On. Other notable performances included Dollhouse, in which she played Echo, an amnesiac-for-pay, and Bull, where she was a shrewd lawyer. At all times, she came across onscreen as someone who was a lot of fun to watch but you’d better watch out for what she might do.

But that’s just what we saw. Turns out Dushku was abused on the set of True Lies, and then again mistreated while on Bull. So she did something about it: she told the truth, and she got out. She doesn’t act anymore; she got a Master’s in clinical mental health counselling. She’s a therapist now, helping others deal with the things she had to deal with. Good for her.

Crystal Minton

Matthew ELeave a comment

A couple of elements of the Generation X stereotype are a) we are kind of bad, and b) we cut through to the truth.

Many people were surprised by Donald Trump’s first election victory, and didn’t know how to process it. Didn’t know what to expect from it. Didn’t know how to react to the things he did. Some of these were Trump’s own supporters, who found that they had released forces they couldn’t control.

One such person was Crystal Minton (c.1981), a Trump voter and prison employee who was displeased with how the government handled hurricane relief in Florida. She said, of Trump, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” And, for a lot of GenX, that’s what it’s all about. Are enough of the right people getting hurt?

—

“Trump voter: ‘He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting'” MS NOW, Steve Benen, Jan. 8, 2019.

News: Patreon

Matthew ELeave a comment

I have started a Patreon. It’s for, I explain uselessly, all the writing I do that doesn’t appear here or at Legion Abstract. No, really though; most things I do will still show up where you’d expect them to show up, including *Palace Guard*, which I will be getting back to, but sometimes there will be things on Patreon and sometimes they’ll be behind a subscription wall.

One such is the short story “How Silently”, which is available to subscribers now. So okay! Let’s get this going! Tomorrow the world!

Here’s a link to my new Patreon page. All are welcome!