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Feb 28

At long last, Chapter 11!!!! To be clear, I finished the book (mostly) before I started posting these. I pretty much blasted through it! And I have the physical copy now (!!!!) so I can read it again! 8D

Anyway, I'm glad to be back and wrapping up the last 2 chapters! Buckle in, they're quite the ride!

Spoilers for the Kidd Commander book and webcomic below!

[The walls are etched with long horizontal grooves that, by some trick of the alien light, seem to pulsate, and the tunnel itself is rounded, making it hard to find her footing. She’s been here before, but the tunnels underground had smelled musty and dry, and this passage is the damp sort of rot that makes things soft.]

It sounds exactly like the tunnels (arteries) she and Ulrich took on the way to the buried starstone heart. Except the damp rot, eugh.

[The sky here is a different blue than the one over the desert, deep watery sapphire rather than dry robin’s egg, and exploding with storybook clouds, white and cotton-candy soft.]

Goddamn. Gorgeous. I swear, this book has changed how I write forever. Opened up my eyes to so many possibilities!

[Hazard turns to look at her. The hole in his face is huge now, fracturing up through his hairline and down his neck, more and more of his skin breaking away to spiral down into the void like sand.]

Hazard...😭

[“What can they do, no one with any power ever listens! You don’t even care enough to hate the people you step on!”

“…But you’re listening to me,” she says, trying to shiver out the excess energy. “The tain and the stars are all listening to me. And I say this stops.”]

A voice for the voiceless. Rage and love against hate and indifference. Certified Phineas Moment.

[“Are you a patron of the people, or are you looking for a sympathetic excuse to sate your own ego?”

Her anger ebbs briefly into surety; Phineas can’t help grinning at the question. This, she’d hashed out with herself ages ago. She says, “I can manage both, yeah?”]

Hell yeah, I love this bit! The ego on this girl-shaped being, I love it! Please go check out the webcomic to see Phineas as she says this, it’s great. She has so much personality!

[“I wanted so much to believe in him,” Hazard moans, hanging his head. The water stains with black where it touches him, like ink, like blood.]

=((( He's a bastard but goddamnit, I cant help but feel sad! Which is the point! We're supposed to care! And goddamnit, I do!

[With his touch, she knows: despite the grief as wide as the sea, his mind is sound. He is not mad, he is heartbroken, and he is this way because of Gideon.

“I’m going to dump your broken body at his feet,” he says, utterly passionless. “I’m going to carve every trace of stolen light from his bones, and finally this wretched business will be finished.”

It’s nearly verbatim what the tain had said to her during that first encounter. She wonders briefly which side it’s coming from, but it doesn’t matter.]

Damn. There’s so much here. Gideon broke his heart. =( And I wonder as well how much of that is tain influence. He’s of sound mind, but he’s still influenced. Then again, he and the tain have a common goal.

[There is the sound of cracking glass, a mirror-fracture, and the hole in Hazard’s face razes across his skin straight through his remaining eye.

“No,” he says, the only sound in the world. “You can’t.”]

Damn. I’m speechless.

[Her reflexes come when she calls them and she redirects her inertia to the sand around her: while the grains obediently ignore physics to fall faster, impacting loud enough to echo from the walls, Phineas slows to a safe speed.]

Her cheap tricks are so cool!!

[Thunder roars through the cathedral.

The only light comes from behind the windows, flickering like the world outside is on fire, casting the hallway in watery blue.]

Damn, this is a cool boss fight! The atmosphere is impeccable!

[Phineas reaches out with her spirit but only finds Hazard, that freezing riptide she hadn’t been able to get through before is closing in from every direction. Her body is still but internally she reels, her orientation thrown when she can’t find the planet or the ship’s heart through the vortex. The room spins like she’s drunk, and now her body lists, stumbling on nothing in empty space.]

Oh, that’s an effective tactic against a commander!

[She even sort of finds Ulrich this time, a quiet but resonant note under everything, singing like a tuning fork in her senses.]

Oh, he’s a beacon even now! Something so clear and solid, a lighthouse in a sea of energy!

[Growing up from the floor like seaweed thrashing in the tide, Hazard’s body forms from the darkness in a boiling column of sinew and feathers, starry and black.]

Goddamn. That’s so cool. Visuals like this are why you should read the webcomic, btw. The art is fucking gorgeous, especially in the latest chapter. I highly recommend checking it out.

If you wanna see some of that gorgeous art and the sheer style inherent in everything Kidd Commander, check out me raving about receiving the 4th Kidd Commander comic book. Even the packaging is so thoughtful and delightful. Everything was done with intention, and it feels so good to admire it!!

Anyway! Back to Chapter 11! Cold Hazard Approaches!

[The face is gone— where the eyes had been, a pair of wings crosses instead, and underneath is smooth and white.

In the empty space beneath the wings, a jagged wrinkle buckles in the white like the skin of rotting fruit. It bursts open, the skin dripping over a sea of black, speckled with blue stars. The mouth widens, haaah-h, a ghost’s moan wisping from an empty vessel. Hazard’s endless robes resolve around his body where they cover him; there’s nothing underneath but the rot now, the body only exists as hands to carry out a will, a mouth to cry cruelty.

He channels the tain like water; completely under his control, their movements now are ruthlessly efficient rather than wild and desperate. They slither and melt together behind him,

(they form six wings, just like Phineas has, just like)]

DAMN, THE ANGELIC IMAGERY. WHAT IF ANGELS WERE HORRIFYING, HUH? WOULDN’T THAT BE NEAT? And it fucking is!! ANGELIC HORROR, LET’S GOOOO!!!

(Six wings just like Gideon)

[black and blue, eyes and teeth, all around him like the mantle of a god. The spidering veins of light through the tain, the chasms in Hazard’s skin- he is nearly stained glass himself.]

This is what I’m talking about! Angelic horror! 🎉💖🎉💖🎉💖

[“STOP!!” Phineas screams, the command so strong it spikes into the air like lightning. The tain, strung everywhere like sooty spiderweb, shudders to a standstill. Phineas’ voice cracks the mirror in front of her again. The adjacent mirrors fracture as the echo spreads, gaining strength like a boulder sailing over a hill. The word dissolves into a nonsense echo, the mirrors shattering one by one.]

Damn, this is so cool!!

[in an elegant gesture he reaches, like drawing a sword from a sheath. His hand moves as if it’s drawn through thick water. Behind it, in a mesmerizing, eerily gorgeous curve, a sliver of silver moonlight slices into being. It’s so long he has to extend his entire arm around the curve to form it. The blade is colossal, a crescent moon curved around Hazard’s head; the scythe shines so brightly Phineas can hear it.]

Goddamn that is the coolest looking weapon!!

[The movement is slow enough for her to follow it, cyan light jutting up through a crack in the altar behind Hazard. The sight of the fissure opens a pit in her stomach, strong enough to make her sick with it, cut straight through all her bravado and surety to tweak a primal, animal nerve that howls, get it away from me, get it away. The chasm spreads through the floor, all along the walls; it even spreads through Hazard.]

This is so cool and horrifying! Goddamn this fight is awesome!

[Rook wraps her arms around herself. It’s a gesture calculated for elegance over comfort, it makes Ulrich think of the older divas who found excuses to hang around the theater long after they’d played their last role. “You don’t go to this kind of trouble for something you don’t love, somehow. You know what I mean?”

“I might,” Ulrich says carefully.

Rook smiles at him, small and sad and genuine. He has to loosen his shirt collar, it’s suddenly warm in here.]

Phineas and Ulrich are having very different experiences right now.

[“I had several unlucky days,” Ulrich says evenly, peeling away the paper wrapping. “And the odd job out in the Sprawl can be lucrative in ways most occupations are not. Simple transactions, hard to trace. But it gets filthy…In an effort to keep my own hands clean, I’ve been looking for someone strong and simple to pair up with. Phineas Kidd is both. Though, if dirt can be avoided altogether, even better.”]

The Official Story™ of Ulrich Weiss. I wonder how much of it is true?

[“I am too afraid to be ashamed,” he admits. “I am too tired. Anything would be better than the way things have been, but I…” He clears his throat roughly before his voice can start to tremble. “You know I’d still rather not go into a negotiation blindly. What can you tell me about these people you work with? What is Dusk like?”]

Most Tired Man Alive would like to learn more about Dusk, The Mysterious Benefactor. Yes for absolutely innocent reasons. Consider: I am just a scared little guy.

[“Mm, where do I start? He’s…”You know, it’s strange,” she says. “For someone who calls himself Dusk, he seems…bright. He shines.”]

I’M SURE THIS DOESN’T HAVE DISTURBING IMPLICATIONS ABOUT TAIN AND STARS AND HUMANKIND. I’M SURE DUSK IS SO NORMAL. JUST. THE NORMAL-EST BEING AROUND.

[There’s fireworks in her belly, soda-pop in her veins- Phineas’ laugh is explosive, her spirit sailing out like she’s a dandelion puff on the wind. The whole world sings and she can hear it!

Gideon’s smile is warm above her, lighting her up with him even through her connection with the earth.]

And now a cute interlude!

[“Jo said it’s ‘dissociation,’” Phineas says, still the most imperious eight-year-old alive even while her voice rasps over its wounds. “I ain’t stupid, I can hear y’all talkin’.”]

I LOVE LITTLE PHINEAS SO MUCH

[“You thought he cared.”

It’s like he reaches out and plucks a wire somewhere deep inside, holding some impossible tension she hadn’t been aware of until it began to shiver. The world goes white, her senses blown out with rage.]

Uh-oh. Also, ouch. =(

[when something touches her it’s her back. It’s like ice.

She doesn’t have time to turn before the scythe passes through her.

…Now she feels every lightyear like jagged glass, her entire existence reduced to nerves and tissue, screaming as they’re pulled apart and raked across the void. The agony is cold as death, a frozen blade trying to force its way between every cell in her body and prise her apart.]

Ouch!!! But also holy shit!

[No- not her body. It’s trying to take her star. She’s screaming too, clawing at Phineas’ heart to keep from being torn from her as the scythe carves its way through every sense they share, every facet of their reality. There isn’t room for rational thought, there’s only Phineas’ humankind instinct. She reaches blindly for her companion with whatever it is in her that does that, seizes her shackled wrists and-

It stops.]

Oh thank god it stopped! They are a set, they cannot be separated!

[“Joined seamlessly. What an awful thing he’s done to you.”

…Phineas staggers to her feet and turns to get him in her sight. She is shaking so bad she can hardly stay upright, more furious than she’s ever been in her life.]

Phineas and Mana are exactly what they want to be.

[“He didn’t even say goodbye, did he?” Hazard drones, static and miserable. “He never does.”

“Don’t project your shit onto me,” she says, ragged, starlight misaligned and jagged against her own voice. “It ain’t my fault you couldn’t hack it.”

It is a more direct hit than anything she’s done so far. What functions as Hazard’s face crumples, the feathers shivering madly. Phineas sees a single sliver of his eye, malice overwhelming, and he brings the scythe down through the air between them. The corners and the angles of the sunken ship splinter from each other, and the ship surrenders to the depths.]

Damn, that was a direct hit! This is some cool anime shit! Go check out the webcomic if you want to see cool anime shit!!

[“It’s just…I, could not bear the thought of never seeing you again.”

“Ulrich you have got to figure out how to express your feelings without firearms,” Rook sighs.]

LMAOOOOO

[She leans forward, and now Ulrich can taste her lip gloss, feel her mouth soft and insistent against his, her hand sliding up against his neck to rest in his hair. He closes his eyes and settles his own hand across hers.

Something clicks. Rook makes a puzzled sound and straightens, checking the back of her hand where one of Ulrich’s poker chips has appeared.

Ulrich has always appreciated the sound these make, he’d worked on the formula longer than necessary to get it just right— a tidy, hearty crack! That sounds especially good when it’s set off in a place with auditorium acoustics. It’s a small, controlled explosion, but it’s more than enough to vaporize Rook’s right hand.]

Now ki-kill. Yes, I was going to say kill, why do you ask?

You didn’t forget he was armed, did you?

[It’s so unexpected that it takes Rook an extra moment of staring down at the bloody, ragged stump of her forearm to realize what’s happened. Ulrich, or, the misty afterimage of him left when he ported away as he’d done on the roof and in the mine, is dissipated by a spray of gore. Her blood spatters against the white velvet cushion, and that’s when Rook begins to scream.]

She is, very suddenly, having a very bad time.

[Ulrich picks up the freshly reconstituted trinket, previously a ring on Rook’s finger, now a glass flower the size of a bottle cap…It is in perfect condition again, as expected: under the clear glass, oil-slick colors shimmer slowly, purring against his skin, back where it belongs.]

Oohh, beautiful! And probably very happy to see Ulrich.

[Ulrich makes a sign with his fingers and the flower shivers, now cast in blue, and it sprouts a pin from its underside. He digs in his pocket for an old butterfly clutch and fastens his lotus to the left fold in his shirt collar. It’s heavy, and currently the collar of this shirt is more wrinkle than fold. The pin drags it down awkwardly, the fabric pulling enough for him to be aware of it. Ulrich takes a deep, contented breath.]

Everything is finally as it should be. Ulrich and his lotus (Bel?).

[“I can’t imagine you’ve ever had occasion to be injured like this,” Ulrich says, right over her screeching. “You’re handling it well, though now is usually when the nausea hits. It is a good thing we were finished eating. Ach,” He reaches out to take the last tea sandwich, crosses his ankle over his knee and points in the grass a little to her left. “My other chip, would you hand it to me?”]

ALHFJAJF, HE IS SUCH AN ASSHOLE 🤣

[His manner is easy, but he holds her gaze in his like a knife to her throat. She can only breathe hard, the mangled stump of her arm slowly freezing over as she comes to her senses enough for triage. Ulrich leans forward, radiating the malice that drags and tears through his veins like a fishhook. In a voice like pliers pulling teeth:

“Why would I turn myself into this for money?”]

Damn. Ulrich is a scary guy.

[“I am going to continue doing awful things because they are necessary. I am not so weak I would try to absolve myself of their weight by finding someone else to blame for my actions.”

“I am nobody’s dog,” he says coldly, the taste of lotus petals on his tongue. “My decisions are my own.”]

Hmmm. How much of that is that the lotus speaking?

[She flinches as Ulrich pulls the trigger, a puff of icy vapor hanging in the air between them an instant too late to catch a bullet.

The revolver clicks, turns. No one breathes.

It clicks a second time and Rook shrieks.

“Are you KIDDING ME?!”]

LMAOOO! WHAT ROTTEN LUCK! Right in the middle of business, too!

[He’s losing it, he can feel it going, completely thrown by his gun not working. It doesn’t matter because at that second the pendulum from the clock comes apart and crashes into the lawn, the scythe shape embedding itself deep into the soil.]

Oh shit?

[the heavy metal ringing painfully loud even as it lands on soft grass. The garden shudders, a thick rumble like an earthquake’s soaks the air.

The episode is brief. The shaking stops as quickly as it had started, only lasting long enough to scare the shit out of Ulrich. He clutches his chest with his empty hand, the cortisol so painful it makes him angry.

“What in the hell was that?!”]

Nobody is having a good time.

[There’s a

( c h i l l )

wind that ruffles through Ulrich’s hair, the feeling of snow settling on his shoulders. He shivers involuntarily, his eyes screwing shut, and by the time he gets them open again Rook is gone.

She is gone, and Ulrich has what he came for, still tugging reassuringly at his collar.]

She got away! But alls well that ends well?

[Bel settles on the glass-top table in front of him, her bare, dirty feet settling in the grass between his own dirty boots. She never seems to bother with shoes anymore.]

Direct Bel interaction!!!

[She makes a gun with her fingers and mimics shooting him with it, grinning in a way that stretches the sheet of golden scales draped across her cheek. They connect to a bolt in her left temple, embedded in the end of a long, messy scar that runs along her forehead above her mismatched eye. It is the same color as Ulrich’s eyes. Her cheeks look more hollowed every day, her skin more sallow, but her eyes are bright as ever, sharp as sin.]

Looking worse every day, huh? Like Bel is wasting away? I wonder how much of that ‘dreaming princess’ stuff was technically true?

[There is still a bullet in the revolver, right where Ulrich had known it to be. There is no reason it shouldn’t be in Rook right now. Ulrich looks at Bel inquisitively, but she only takes a drag on her cigarette.]

Not rotten luck…perhaps something else?

[“There we are. Now suck it up and get back out there, go find her,” Bel says, the steel in Ulrich’s spine, ruthless and wreathed in diamond smoke. She touches his temple with her fingertips and he closes his eyes, leaning into her touch as it ghosts over his cheek. “And would it kill you to smile?”]

I want to like Bel, but I don’t like how she talks to Ulrich sometimes! But is that a me problem, or intentional context? Is this just Bel’s rough edges?

[Phin, the card read. The only word on the empty card, in the empty house. She sat there for a long time.]

Gideon left. =(

[Jo finally looked her in the face. Her expression burned permanently into Phineas’ impression of Jocasta Hubris: there was the scent of her cigarettes, the silk of her gloves, the sound of her talons on hard wood floors, and this face looking across at Phineas on a very bad day. Grown-up Phineas still doesn’t quite understand it, there are some obvious answers that work like “pity” and “frustration,” but like everything about Jo and Gideon, it still feels like she’s missing some vital context. Something so titanic and strange that it would change the definitions she knows, like she’s only been feeling the texture of a painting without seeing the colors.]

Damn. Seeing the shadow of something titanic swimming far below you. The weight of history on the people around you.

[But the Phineas at the dinner table, with clean clothes and swollen feet, saw enough to pierce the thing squirming in her with a hot knife, sending it into panicked hysterics. Pliers to a rotten tooth, all the rot surging after, pouring from the wound. It crawled past her teeth, over her tongue, the words coming up like glass:

“Please don’t get rid of me.”]

WEEPING!! OTL I am on my knees!! 😭😭😭

[“You are losing because you are fighting a man for a ship,” her star says, ruthless. “This is about something else. Don’t you understand? This is about-”

“Gideon,” Phineas whispers. “He…he said as much, but I didn’t-”]

He’s pulling on those deep, dark fears, turning them into knives.

[“You know what we must do. I renounced my god long ago, but you’ve held on to yours far longer than you should have. These two men are failures, we must persevere beyond both of them.”]

Damn. She’s right too.

[Her companion, here with her in the deepest dark, makes herself known in a way she rarely does. Her name crosses Phineas’ mind, a hand outstretched between two who are one.

“Then finish this,” Mana glares.]

They’re never alone! Hello Mana!!

[It’s magic, the sea is Hazard’s magic-

“It’s not real,” Phineas says, her voice coming clearer. “It’s not real, I’m-”

The world turns on her axis, orienting to what is true, and the bubble bursts.

Cold Hazard, maintaining the spell keeping Phineas imprisoned, is caught completely off his guard.]

She’s out! The tiger is out!!

[Her light falls across his face. Every nerve in her body freezes over.

“It’s me, it’s me!” Crow Gideon says. “Phineas, what are you doing?!”

It’s him, cowering here in front of her, his face staring up in hurt confusion. Gideon’s face, Hazard’s face.

It’s the same face.

“Oh no,” Phineas moans. Gideon’s face, Hazard’s face, relaxes into something smug and miserable.]

Surprise! Twins!!!

[agony explodes across Phineas’ body as something stabs into the meat of her lower back, running her all the way through and punching out near her clavicle. She has an instant of perfect clarity to recognize the end of Hazard’s scythe, her blood streaming gracefully from the blade before it rips back out of her.]

Holy shit. That’s a big stab.

[He weaves a sign with his hand, and just behind the movement of his fingers, in her commander’s perception, she can see them. Shining gossamer threads, the same she’d seen him use in the mine, the same she’d seen in the inherited ship, the same she’d seen a thousand times back home trailing behind Gideon’s movements. The visual manifestation of Hazard’s magic, something as unique as every soul that casts it, is identical to Gideon’s commanding.]

Damn. Twins even in this way. That’s so fucking cool! What a neat detail!!

[The rich, dark olive of Gideon’s skintone is bleaching back to the bone-white of Hazard’s; his features lengthen, thin out, his eye sinks into its socket as it loses its color. They had grown in wildly different directions, but it’s so clear now: the cut of their jaw, the texture of their dark hair, even kept at the same length. Of course they are the same, anyone else would have seen it, how had she missed it all this time?

…He is himself again, but even through the toll of years of decay and misery Phineas can hear it. It’s unmistakable that their voice had been the same, some impossible time ago.]

Damn. This is fascinating. Once the same, or similar, and yet they’re so different now…their paths diverged so much. Makes me sad. =(

[“It couldn’t be that he would abandon his own twin in such a sorry state. Our golden boy would never.”]

Crying 😭

[Phineas’ body explodes, skin and bone and blood jutting out and out in the shape of light, stretching and convulsing and unraveling as the corpse is forced around an expanding star. It wrenches what’s left of her mouth open, teeth and tongue and eye screaming out into a maw bursting and collapsing and bursting again with each word:

“THIEF” Mana howls, bloody and bright. “M I N E THAT’S M I N E”]

Holy shit. I know I’m a broken record at this point, BUT C’MON!!!

[On her porch, Jocasta Hubris moans, something dangerously close to a sob drowned out by a violent fit of coughing.

In his office, Dusk Pica hisses and nearly spills his coffee, picks at his gums with a fingernail until they bleed.

Far, far from anything he owns, Crow Gideon clutches at the space under his eyepatch. He goes to his knees, observed only by the silent ruins around him.]

I’ve always found it very interesting that Dusk was included in feeling/sensing Raven’s death, all the way back to the webcomic (this whole fight and scene look amazing, please do yourself a favor and read it). Dusk seems like if the Tain somehow gained a humankind shape…and I wonder if that has something to do with what happened to Maggie. =(

[The other star hovers between the two of them. It’s shaped like an ocean creature, rainbow light dancing along the flow of its delicate body.]

Gorgeous. Please go check it out in the webcomic, it looks so gorgeous!!

[Mana’s voice is a solar flare forced through a pinhole.]

Goddamn

[Mana sighs, not like a bell or a song or any of the pretty words that hung on the other star. But the other star couldn’t reach out to take Phineas’ hand like Mana does now.

“I know,” she says, a fire in the hearth.]

Aaaaaawwwwwww!! 😭💖

[His color has returned, all strikingly similar to Gideon’s save for the blue of his eye. The cracks in his skin have all but gone, their shapes marked with faded scar tissue. His empty eye socket is no longer anything but human.

…His voice is only a voice, no static, no distance.]

No tain, no star, just…just Raven. =(

[“Dragging someone into a suicide pact is pretty uncool, man.”

Hazard snorts, which makes him cough again.]

Haha! Very uncool.

[“We can do better,” Phineas snarls. “It doesn’t need to be this way, cruelty is not the natural state of things. If that’s the law I don’t accept it. I will rewrite it.”

She holds his bleary gaze in hers and says, “I can fix everything.”]

Certified Phineas Moment.

[As Ulrich dashes towards her, she can see the corridor he came through is crumbling, chunks of ceiling taking out the floor as they fall, making huge holes for the blue sky outside to show through. Ulrich flinches from a new chasm in the floor, a crack that follows alongside him for a moment before he outruns it.]

Well that’s not good. I love it though!! The original in the webcomic was more comedic (makes me laugh just thinking about it), but I like this version too! Poor Ulrich collecting even more reasons to hate starstone ships.

[“Just, stay close to me,” Phineas says, lacing their fingers. “Don’t let go.”]

Aaaaawwww!!! 💖

And that’s (pretty much) the end of Chapter 11! The final chapter, Chapter 12, to come soon! Look forward to it!!

#kidd commander #gttc #grist to the cannon #phineas kidd #ulrich weiss #kidd commander spoilers #grist to the cannon spoilers #gttc spoilers #horror?#fuck yeah we're so back!!

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