#whatsleftundone

[mancerandmaiden-blog]

"Venn, I want to teach your daughter how to survive in the wilds. For that, I'm going to need to borrow your Calamity Cannon."

Venn is suitably unimpressed when he is approached at his makeshift workstation by his erstwhile colleague. He gives a harsh bark of laughter at the man’s utterance. He’s used to being spoken to this way, without so much as a ‘please’.

“First of all,” he begins, scathingly, “This is nothing so vulgar as a ‘Calamity Canon’. It is a weapon of my own make that w… we’ve dubbed the Flashlight, and it is much, much more precise.”

He happens to be working on it now. He slots a new cartridge into the barrel with a satisfying clunk and pumps the lever on the end, priming it.

“Secondly, why exactly do you think I would approve of such an outing? While I wish my daughter to be properly protected against all things that might seek to harm her…” his eyes narrow, “You cannot have imagined for a second I’d let her go with you? Perhaps the starlit child, but…”

He sighs. His dilemma is that they are all on the same side now. Rucks has no reason to harm Zia. But he doesn’t want his daughter spending any more time with the man. The man who, with the rest of his ilk, wouldn’t have batted an eye if the Calamity had come to proper fruition.

And perhaps there is a hint of jealousy towards the closeness they have cultivated, deep down.

[sybilofthecamerata]

Pantheon

ˈpan(t)-thē-ˌän, -ən: a building serving as the burial place of or containing memorials to the famous dead of a nation.  

There was little, very little, that Sybil Reisz considered herself incapable of when it came to people. 

Everyone, so she believed, had a capacity for envy. Thus born was her modus operandi: being that one particular someone who could get things done, who could offer things of worth to individuals unable to obtain them on their own, surely made her someone of worth as a consequence. 

Neat row by neat row, Sybil fashioned her plans. Cloudbank appreciated the effort; particularly lavished its attentions on beautiful, composed, capable little Sybil Reisz with her cool smile that cut quick to the heart; with her silvery voice, the crushing ease with which she carried out her business. Nobody doubted, of course, that she also had a wholehearted passion for what she did-- such was her talent with balancing the disimpassioned, businesslike demeanor and the ardor for her craft that she possessed. 

Then came a singer, and a tool with which she and three others thought they would fashion a new city from-- to save it, of course. Always everything, absolutely everything, for dear Cloudbank. She couldn’t bear to look her colleagues in the eyes when she departed the Bracket Towers, one last time, and said that she would fix what she had wronged.

Instead now she stands in what she thought was the Country with the phantom pain of the Transistor and its gold-teal edge burning through her chest, and even more strangely, the sight of a crumbling city overflowing with verdant green foliage and a patchwork-assortment of buildings. 

Step by tiny step, she makes her precarious way across a pathway-- that, to her astonishment, forms as she makes her way forward. The worn rubble smooths itself into a series of steps that she climbs up, withering ivy clinging to its sides, roots dangling off into a steep drop-- mustn't look down!-- and here she sets foot upon the Bastion.

After Cloudbank, with its ever-shifting landscape, and the lingering artificiality of it all, this place brings a sense of crushing nostalgia. The colors-- a splash of piercing blue gems next to a building made of wood that glows with an amber intensity, and a gentle breeze that sends her white dress billowing behind her, makes her marvel, if only for a bit. 

Her voice is scratchy from disuse-- thank the Muse, Sybil thinks, that it is not the processed, fractured facsimile that she spoke with when facing Red. “Hello?” she ventures, peering at the buildings around her, which burble quietly with various sounds; surely someone must have put them to work in order for there to be smoke from the chimneys- and steps forward. “Is there anyone here?”