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There was a place where the River ebbed. A pool of stillness, of peace. And in the quiet of that place was a man.
Well. He was only mostly a man. He had been fighting against the River’s current for some time, and no matter how strong a will he had, the constant struggle was beginning to tell. He stood with his feet in the shallows, tearing his lab coat into thin strips of white-ish cloth. On some of the strips, glowing words in the divine language glistened like golden tears.
On others, the words had failed to take, leaving gaps in the narrative. Every time he came to a blank strip, he would stare at it for a long time. Occasionally he managed to recall what he’d meant to write and could reconstruct it, tongue tripping over complicated syllables. More often, he would stare, and sigh, and pocket the blank strip for later reuse. There was nothing else to be done.
Rusalka had been watching him for some time. His continued presence was an itch against her spine, the crawling sensation of a bug that could not be swatted away. Still, she had no particular desire to drown him. He was not a wicked sort, or at least no more so than average. And his persistence was annoying to the Cutting Stone, those pathetic souls who sought to patrol her banks. As if she was not presence enough for the River.
This was, however, the first time she had been curious enough to speak to him. Rusalka rose up out of the water, draped her arms over a stone that obligingly supported her breasts in the most attractive way possible, and smiled her shark smile at the ghost. “What are you writing?” she asked, her soft purr clearing away the mist between them.
The poor man flinched, dropping several strips of cloth as he startled away. “Lumens above!’
“Lumens below is more like,” Rusalka trailed a hand into the mist-covered waters of the River. “Hello Dref Wormwood.”
Clutching his words as if for protection, the ghost turned to face her. He reached up to adjust his spectacles, having just remembered they should be there. “I do not know—oh. Yes. I was Dref.”
“Shall I call you Alistair instead?”
“No, no.” Dref stood a little straighter, and Rusalka watched in amused fascination as he pulled himself into more of a person. His coat became beaten canvas, stained with blood and other fluids. He put the rest of the story in his pocket, careful of their order. “Dref is fine.” he hesitated, shifting his weight like he wanted to take a step back. “What…is there anything you’d like me to call you?”
“You know my name.” Rusalka grinned, letting the water rippling musically around her. To his credit, Dref did not flinch.
“I thought it would be polite to ask.”
Rusalka laughed. “Yes, that’s usually what men are concerned with when they see me. Politeness.”
“Are you here to drown me?” he asked abruptly. He kept both hands in his pockets, but she could sense his shivering by the ripples where his feet stood in the River.
“That depends,” Rusalka smiled. “Are you looking to drown?”
Again he did not hesitate. “No. No, no thank you.”
She liked him. Only a fool was not afraid of her, but it took real courage to refuse her anyway. And to do it here, in her domain? “You have made friends with more dangerous creatures than I,” she told him archly. “Stop quivering.”
He frowned, at first. That life, those memories of being alive, that wasn’t part of the story he was telling. It was likely—though Rusalka could not be certain—that he had removed himself from the story entirely, in the name of “objectivity.”
“I don’t—I’m sorry, I don’t recall anyone like that.” He reached aimlessly with one hand, as if memory was something he could grab and hold. It would be cute if it wasn’t so pathetic. Rusalka took pity on him, because having a conversation with a ghost was boring otherwise.
“You remember Gable,” she told him, not as a question but as a command. “And, loath as I am to say he’s dangerous, the Changeling, Travis Matagot.” Rusalka had cheated Matagot before, and knew exactly what she owed.
“Travis, yes…I remember. But I don’t think they are quite the same as you. ”
Rusalka laughed. Here he was, digging for secrets after his own death, but completely unaware of the living ones he’d left behind with his friends. “They are more like me than you could possibly know, Wormwood, but I think if I told you the story now you would not remember it.”
He blinked owlishly back at her, frowning, but did not deny it.
Rusalka slid from her rock, moving towards him with the smooth grace of a snake. She laid an arm around his neck before he could flinch, her teeth sharp and black as stone as she smiled. And there was a sharp flicker of enjoyment when he shrank back, when she moved with him as easily as water and he realized there was no escape. It was her nature to relish the chase. She fit herself to his side, her body warm as life and softer than silk, but she allowed him to remember how dangerous she was.
“Tell me a story, Dref Wormwood,” she purred, running her fingers across the stubble of his hair. “Tell me what secrets you’re fishing for, here at the edge of the River.” She did not have to tell him that if she didn’t like the story, she would drown him. They both knew it, and it would be rude to say out loud.
He took a deep breath, his chest heaving as he remembered a little more of being alive. “You know it, I’m sure,” he began. Rusalka did not nod, but she let her eyes slide shut, the better to listen. “The Cutting Stone is a new Luminary, I can’t be sure how new. But it was created, not born, and it is so very angry. It hates me—hates necromancy , but I cannot determine…why? The only thing that makes sense is that it was made from necromancy, and…”
“You of all people should know how to hate the things that made you,” Rusalka murmured, running the tips of her fingers along the inside of his arm. She left trails of water, spreading slowly as they soaked through to his skin. Dref shivered.
“It was made by the Church,” he said, quiet but very sure. “I don’t know how, or for what purpose. But it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
The more he spoke, the more solid he became. It woke a hunger in Rusalka, a sharp and predatory interest. She wrapped a watery arm around his waist, half of an embrace he would never leave. Dref’s voice skipped up an octave…but he kept talking.
“I thought—but the spell I made is still working. My work on Orimar Vale.” A reluctant pride colored his voice, but he looked sideways at Rusalka and did not linger on it. “I have considered the irony, of course. That he was tethered to my work when I was alive, and now I am tethered to him in death. Did you ever meet him here? Did you talk to the captain the way you are talking to me now?”
“Orimar Vale would not ask me such questions,” Rusalka sighed, very much the snubbed debutante. “So no, not as we are talking now. If I had caught him, I would have drowned him.” But Orimar Vale had not lingered so long on the banks of the River. Had clawed his way back to the shambling rot of his body long before Rusalka knew the shape of his soul. Dref, of course, had no body to return to. Nor an exceptionally talented sage to work upon it.
“But you are not drowning me… ” Dref ventured, very cautiously. Rusalka could not completely contain her smile, but she softened it deliberately by drawing back. She stood a little taller (whatever taller meant, when she was made entirely of water) and crossed her arms safely over her chest.
“You’ve heard many stories about me,” she said, and it was not a question. “Have you not considered that you are already in my grasp? Sweet Wormwood, I have woven your thread more often than you know. It pleases me for your story to continue a little while longer, for you are past all warnings and all safeguards.”
“The stories I have heard,” Dref said, still very cautious but unable to keep down his curiosity. “The stories I have heard say that you delight in cutting short the lives of men who reach too far.”
Rusalka sighed and ran a hand through her hair (made of black eel grass and decorated with snail shells). “Those stories are true, in their own way, but there is such pleasure in the reaching. In the moment before you overbalance, before you fall…it is sweeter than a kiss.”
“And I have…not fallen?”
Oh she wanted him. Now, when he was here, not torn half to tatters by her River, but so close to being whole, and himself. He might even be able to cast a spell or two, and make it fun.
Ah, but more than him, she wanted the story he was telling. The power unfolding in his strips of cloth, written in the divine language because it was the only language left to him. She wanted to know the whole of the Cutting Stone. She wanted to unravel it.
“No, Dref Wormwood,” she told him, her black teeth gleaming in the sourceless light of the River. “You have not fallen yet.”
He stood still when she swept close to him again, braced like a deer about to leap. But she only leaned up, just enough to press a cold kiss to his forehead, and then dissipated into a cloud of fog. “Not yet,” she whispered, because one day everything would pass through the waters of the River. “And until you come willingly into my arms, I want you to remember.”
And she left him there, with the water rippling like smoke around his feet, and her protection keeping the constant rush of the River away.