Chapter Text
You have surrounded yourself with the detritus and glory of human society. Some of your collection is devoted to finery, to the best ceramics humankind has to offer. But you have a fondness for what has been cast out. You are the only one who realizes that everything has value, everything can be fixed.
The Bazaar's mission is folly, but you can ensure that something survives the fallout. It isn't spite, you tell yourself, it isn't hatred. The Bazaar will need something to take the place of the love that once burned brightly. Better vengeance than despair. Better to resolve yourself to meet death with claws bared.
Just like you did.
Your claws dig convulsively into your desk. You smooth the indentations, feel a stab of regret. Perhaps Apples will be able to repair it.
Broken things . . .
Your shoulders hunch as you reach for a pen. You are have picked a target, someone beloved. Someone so beloved that they would lead a revenger from the surface, into strange lands, past impossible obstacles and odds, all for revenge.
Will it satisfy them?
Will it satisfy you, hollow thing?
Your sources have provided you with a contact. The Lenten Wire is a rising star in the criminal world, a career criminal who followed the promise of more lucrative scores to the realm of assassinations. But there is something about the way he carries himself, the jobs he takes, the hesitations when you speak in person. It isn't familiar. You are doing what you have to do. It isn't familiar. He will make mistakes, subconscious guilt urging him on. He will leave a trail, something to lead a revenger to the Neath, something to lead a revenger to him. In the aftermath, you will take the story, inscribe in the Bazaar's skin. A story of revenge to light its heart.
Something to warm us all when everything is over.
The thought soothes you, until you are as comfortable as you can be down here. A bath in lacre to soothe your burning skin, a bottle of good wine to soothe the dreams, and you are dozing long before you stagger from your desk. You’ve been down here so long that the press of the world is almost comforting. You settle in a nest-like bed and entertain yourself with visions of vengeance to carve into Bazaar walls. A reckoning shall not be postponed indefinitely and you have just enough time to recognize the irony before you drift off.
You inhale . . . and the air is cold and crisp and dry, but far too thick. It cloys, catches your throat. You are standing on rolling hills that seem to go on forever. But it’s the sky that truly draws your attention. If you ignore the wispy clouds, you could almost believe you were home. The strange stars are so bright, clearer than you’ve ever seen on previous trips to the surface. They beckon to you. You can almost hear them calling, inviting you to spread your winds, fight off the planet's gravity and take your place in the stars once more.
Home has never seemed so close, nor so far.
There is a chained watchman on the highest hill. Your mouth moves, but no sound comes out. A silent call to a ghost. Tantalus, always tormented by having what he needs held out of reach.
You stare across illusionary moors at the ghost of your sibling and feel hate surge in your breast. Hate for October, for trapping it here forever. Hate for Apples, for treating the Marvelous as entertainment and never realizing that your word can be a weapon against you. Hate for Candles, for . . . who are you thinking of? The anger fades into deep seated confusion and a growing feeling of revulsion.
Fear suddenly joins the storm of emotion. Are you in October's territory? If you've stumbled into her dreams, dreams she has power over because of that damnable bargain, are you within her reach?
Will you be the next to die?
Will you join Mirrors and the first, stand opposite your sibling for eternity? There was one who died before your sibling, you remember that much. Someone who the Masters conspired to erase, existing in an absence. What marked it to die? What was its name?
Cups?
A feeling like knives tearing at your guts. You can’t think about the implications. You can’t think about the implications.
The ground is seeping, something dark and cloying. It smells of death and decay. Your feet are covered, and the liquid clings to your limbs when you try to lift them, holds them down. And then the grip solidifies, turns into cold hands that drag you down. Human hands.
Humans cannot harm you, you remind yourself, you are above them on the chain. You try to warp the dream to your will. But nothing works and cold fingers shred through wing membranes, tear muscles, wrap themselves around your throat.
What you don't understand is that time is less linear than you think, especially in Parabola. Events leave ripples, traveling through the temporal sphere. Some have never stopped echoing. There are reasons Wines and Spices rarely stray from areas of hard won control in Parabola. Even the first, the one never acknowledged, never truly exerted control. (Your sibling only wanted to reflect dreams).
You don't understand that the dead still dream. Your schemes has sent some of them to the shadowlands and they would love to see you again, return the favor.
Some of them . . .
Cups? Is that you?
Your ears pull out of ripping hands to flatten against your head. The agony of hearing that echoing, grating, terribly familiar voice is far worse than the pain of torn cartilage.
Clawed hands grip your shoulders firmly, sink into fresh wounds, and pull. You are dragged, gasping and wounded but alive, onto the highest hill of Beggar's Wake, at the feet of a ghost.
The shade of your sibling looms over you. More than looms, it begins to change.
Robes reweave themselves, the gauntness of starvation reverses, broken-mirror eyes repair. As it releases its claws from your shoulder, you notice the paling of fur and claws. Something is terribly wrong. Gold glimmers in mirrored eyes. Rusty chains scream under strain as the curator on the hill surges upward. You are showered in broken links as the curator swells to its full size, much larger than your diminished form, something that screams wrongness to the depths of your soul, enormous golden eyes staring your own. Why is it so familiar, familiar in a way that hurts.
The curator tilts its head, fixes you firmly in its gaze. As it does so, you notice a line of gold at the center of its throat, faint at first, but rapidly expanding. The curator gasps through a slit throat, sneezes and coughs compulsively to clear the obstruction. One eye rolls clean from its socket, but the wound it leaves behind is ragged, carved into the flesh and chipped into the bone. The pelt slides off the flesh, flayed from muscle and membrane. Golden blood and golden bones and the flesh . . .
The bones were wrapped in their owner's pelt, cradled in Veils' arms like something precious, something to be hoarded.
The screams still echo. Because when Mirrors . . . the Marvelous . . . the Betrayal . . .
Every mirror has its watcher.
Candles will never burn as brightly, nor as warmly.
The land of dreams has lost its patron and its guardian.
The rest have changed in their own ways. The Twins lost their foundation, one becoming brittle, the other fragile. The Fallen King and the Courtesan turned on each other with blows and screams and scheming, all to mask the guilt buried underneath. The Editor found solace in fantasy, in imagination, in the secrecy of burial. The Plunderer began to dream of the dead. The Immortality-Seeker became more desperate. The Warrior retreated further into silence, into bitterness, into hate. The Engineer now burns with obsession.
You brace yourself for attack, and are startled by a gentle nudge, the knuckles of a hand, claws carefully tucked in, as gentle as a Curator can be.
Wake up.