#athrivel

[darlingknave]

[darlingknave]

He wanted to cry but he had long forgotten how. Sometimes his face would grow wet when he was sad, and he supposed that must be why, but he could never feel it in the moment. His eyes were terribly dry and burning at the corners. He was thirsty, but he couldn’t know it; he’d forgotten how that felt, too.

Silas kills people.

That was where it all fell apart. It was fine for them to blame Valek until ‘Silas Kills People.’ Fiz abhors killing, the Finest are all ‘family,’ and to him that meant that Valek enjoyed some degree of safety. They would assume that the san’layn had slipped, had accidentally murdered one of their own, they would correct him, and it would all go away. Then they could go together to find Screescraw and Little Hunk.

But Silas Kills People, and Madie tells dark jokes about carnival games that end in slaughter, and he knows for a fact that dead men are terribly hard to kill. Valek would survive many painful rounds of Silas’ killing games. Valek would suffer the unthinkable, Madie said. Madie hoped. Some of them didn’t like the idea of it, but none of them disagreed: Silas Kills People.

So he told them, and he ran, and he was caught. Now his eyes burned and his throat burned and his mind burned loudest of all. He could finally think again, but he kept that revelation to himself. They all said that they didn’t believe him but he’d seen the way Fiz had fled. He’d caught that horrified expression, wide eyed and pained. He could guess that the tremor in Tweed’s voice was doubt.

‘We don’t believe you,’ they’d said. ‘You didn’t kill him,’ they hoped. They were wrong. If he had never met them, they would have one less danger and one more friend.

[darlingknave]

Dear Diary,

I am so tired. We have one week to go. I am trying as hard as I can to stay like this and not start hurting people again. It isn’t easy. Last month I only took two, and this month none. If I can go one more week then I’ve done it.

They stop screaming in my mind when I end someone, but it never lasts for more than a night and it isn’t good to hurt people like that just so I can sleep. I don’t need sleep. I never slept while I was lost in the In-Between, I should not have let myself grow addicted to sleep now that I’m here.

Food is just as terrible. When I ate there I was only strengthening myself and I could wait and stalk my prey for months if need be, but here I feel weak and gross and wrong if I go more than two days without their dead, empty food. I don’t like that. Why should I have to keep eating to avoid weakness instead of only consuming what makes me better? Flawed system. Terrible.

All of the food tastes too much, just like the sun is too bright, the air is too heavy, and the stones are too solid. Everything about this place makes me homesick. I want to go back to the Island where nothing’s so permanent and awful and real. I want to hear that hum drown out every whisper and sleep under the roots where the soil is cool and soft and the eyes can’t see me because they’re staring at somewhen else. It isn’t the home I left, but it’s close.

Why did I leave? I spent all that time tearing my way out and now that I’m here I want to crawl right back in. Can’t remember what was so good about living this way. I’m trying, really I am. I am learning their ways but it feels like memorizing a dictionary without any map for where the words should go. Hate that. Hate knowing things without their context. Is that even the thing, the word? ‘Context?’ I have none, no context. It doesn’t exist any more.

Finding it makes messes. I don’t have any context until I put something in the wrong context and someone else shows me how I messed up. Then I look stupid. Then it’s damaged. I would like to go back and find my context before I found the faire so that I could be here and meet them after I was whole and good and not make a mess of it all. But I’m here now, trapped and solid, and they See me, so the damage will happen. Can’t be— avoided? Yes. Unavoidable.

Good night, dead book I tell too many secrets to. It would be nice if you could speak up some time.

[darlingknave]

The eyes sleep deeply down among the roots and bones. They dream noxious dreams of writhing limbs, of pacts broken by dead men, and of things better lost than found. Some nights they dream in unison, all of them rolling and shuddering in the soil as they strain to draw their shared vision closer to reality. Those nights, he could almost believe that they really do all belong to a single face trapped somewhere beneath the waves, both blind and all-seeing.

Those are the nights when he finally sleeps, nestled high in the branches or curled under some low ledge. The eyes silence every errant shadow on the whole of the isle, all drawn and consumed in their singular effort. Years of the hunt are cast away for a few lonely hours between midnight and dawn. He wakes only when the whispers become a roar again, his ears throbbing and his mind flooded which such noise that he can scarcely form a thought of his own. For seven nights in each month, he finds rest.

Then it’s back to that damned city with its stone towers and cold dungeons and lies upon lies upon lies. He chews bitter leaves and drinks too much. The leaves keep him awake, the drink dulls the ache in his head, and the two combined make it almost tolerable to sit there day after day drowning in whispers so loud that they could shatter glass if they could only leap from his mind and into the waking world. It’s what the eyes would want. Part of him thinks that it’s cruel to deny them something he could easily bring about with a little knife work and spilled blood.

The rest of him, the pieces trying to become more Person than Thing, shudder at the thought.

[darlingknave]

Dear Diary,

The honey made Topsy feel good and dance so well that the Magic Man could dance in her saddle, but then she fell asleep. It’s not good to have bears fall asleep during a show. Nobody likes it when I give anyone the honey. The honey is no good.

No more Bees. I can’t make the Bees go back to being monsters so I’ll take care of them still but I’m going to stop talking about them and I won’t catch any new ones. I don’t want to become the Bee Man if their honey is bad. That’ll make me bad, too. Maybe it’s not too late to read them books about spiders or beetles instead. They still don’t have a queen so there’s hope. 

I think maybe it is too late to change me though. Maybe once something’s been named for too long, it can never really become something else. Like the Bees. Maybe they can’t become real bees because as soon as their eggs were formed the world already decided that they were something else. They were trapped in those eggs for so long that by the time they broke free they were already what they were. No matter how much they try to look like bees and act like bees they’ll always be Bees That Were Monsters.

I look like a person and sound kind of like a person, but I’m not a person any more than my Bees are bees. I’m not someOne, I’m someThing. I’ll keep trying though. Maybe I don’t have to be a bad thing. 

Writing here used to make things easier to understand when I read back over them but now it only makes me feel sad. I should only write down the good things, that way when I read this book I’ll feel better instead. Yes. I will only write what makes things okay. Nothing else is healthy to keep.

Good Things:

Topsy liked my honey potpie and got a good night’s sleep 

Fiz said I did a good job barking

Before Fiz got to the spot I did one round of the rodeo and it went well

I have four more nights of good sleep before we have to leave

Tweed didn’t die and might be okay again in a day or two

Harkre is nice and even stranger than I am

I know how to bake potpies now

This is better. I will try to only write these kinds of things from now on. 

Good night, Diary. 

[darlingknave]

Dear Diary,

I feel lonely but that doesn’t make very much sense. None of us are ever alone, not really, not any more. The gates are open now. Seems silly to say that I’m lonely when I can count six of them watching me while I sleep. Maybe I’m not lonely. I thought that I was hungry last week but then I had something to drink and it went away. This is just that, only I don’t know what’s really wrong yet.

Today I tried to open a bank account. People have them, so I need to have one too. But the teller said that I had to have papers? I don’t have those. I might take some from someone else, but I’m trying not to kill so many people these days. I’ve noticed that assassins have less friends and more problems. Don’t like that.

I have a father. They told me that he was dead and gave me his dog tags. The eyes in the night told me two weeks ago that he isn’t dead at all, but they wouldn’t tell me where to find him. They tried to trick me into following them back into the In Between but I won’t get stuck there again, not for anyone. They laughed with so many mouths that my ears popped. I think I slept after that.

I have new friends. They are mostly loud, bright, and exciting. The smallest ones have the strongest personalities. I think that I like them. I spend a lot of time with them, so I must like them. I don’t know yet if they can like me back, but I’m trying. I brought them some of the bees from Uldum but they don’t enjoy bees very much. I might try to feed the bees until they make honey for us. They would like honey candy. I ate a lot of it once and it was very pleasant.

I gave one of my friends a jar of the qiraji bees to deliver to my father. She works in mail and deliveries. The postal service finds me no matter how hard I try to disappear, so if anyone can find him, it’s Elweth. Fiz says that Thyme can also find people but that he doesn’t like doing it very much. I might try to pay him in smiles but I’ll need to find several more faces first.

It’s too loud to sleep tonight. I can hear them crying and laughing in my ears all the time now, but it’s so much louder when the sun goes down. They sang so sweetly when I was with them. Why can’t they sound like that here? Why do they have to scream instead? I miss the whispering.

Time to go. Goodbye, diary.

[darlingknave]

Dear Diary,

I’m very confused and I don’t like it. I keep messing things up. My friends are all very nice and polite about it and they want me to do well and they sound like they think I’m doing well but I don’t agree at all. I don’t like feeling things so much. I liked it better in the other place, where all of this kind of thing was farther away. 

It doesn’t help that I don’t make faces like they do. My voice doesn’t do the things their voices do. So even when I do the right thing it winds up looking all wrong and when I do the wrong thing, nobody can tell that I’m sorry about it, or that I’m upset too, and I really don’t know how to be upset. Or happy. Or sad. Am I sad? I think I’m sad. I have no reason to be sad? I have friends? My friends like me? I found Keilmar? I didn’t get hurt? There’s nothing really wrong with me?

My heart keeps racing like something’s chasing me and I can’t stop thinking about how stupid I sounded at the party. Nothing I wanted to say came out right. I tried to tell him how beautiful he was but I just kept saying that he was ‘pretty’ and he said he already knows that. I never want to see him ever again, it was terrible. I am not stupid but I know that I sounded that way. 

I didn’t feel like this yesterday but this morning I woke up and I was cold and my face was sticky and all day I’ve been feeling wrong like that. It’s not okay at all. I want to go back home right now. At least on the Isle it felt a little bit more like home does, but Stormwind is so loud all of the time! I can’t find anywhere that’s even a little bit calm? It’s awful? My chest feels like it’s going to open up again? I keep doing things but it’s not getting better?

I have friends. My friends like me. My friends don’t want to kill me. There is nothing chasing me. There is no knife in me. I can move. 

<Those last few sentences are repeated again and again, filling the rest of this page and stretching halfway down the back of it.>

[darlingknave]

So much blood. How could one body hold so much blood? It couldn’t, he knew; that was why his was spilling out over the ground. He’d seen blood in the moonlight once and thought it beautiful there, strewn across the snow like ink splattered across an empty page. The dead man was the inkwell and he’d been the quill.

Now he was the well, the quill, and the page. It coated him like liquid silk, pooling in every crevice it could reach. He could taste it on his tongue, smell it in the air, feel it on his skin. The thing in his chest that should have kept it orderly had grown still and silent. His lungs wanted for air yet lacked the strength to pull it in or the means to push it about to countless cells that ought to fade but simply couldn’t remember how to end. He was trapped in that space between the last breath and the light leaving his eyes with no way forward or back.

Minutes dragged into hours that crawled like days. The creatures that circled overhead were known only by the shadows they cast, their shapes somehow darker than the night, never descending yet ever nearer in his mind’s eye. He could see them yards away and still their teeth and claws and thousand tongues tore at the heart of him. But not his meat; never that. They weren’t hungry for flesh.

In time he would learn. He would find his own talons, would develop a taste for the beasts that found him so intoxicating. He would devour them, each and all, and pick the pieces of himself from their broken teeth so that he could cobble it all together into something resembling a person.

He would thrive, but he would never be himself again.