Lappland Saluzzo wrote:
Mathius Kothinto wrote:
Be stepped out of the kitchen and wiped his hands on a hand towel. He rested against the bar
"Keeping yourself busy, amica? Try not to drop dead from being too busy~"
"Something like that, sorella. Making chips and dip for everyone. Meatballs and sauce are done"
"Still, don't go dropping dead. I can't have you doing that."
His eyes landed on the newcomer and he observed her carefully.
Ixqueya Jorgenskull wrote:
The Character's sheet.
The tavern had outlived its baptism.
Whatever syllables the first signboard carried had peeled away with the paint. Leaving only a scar above the lintel that the regulars filled with their own blasphemous nicknames. To the magistrates it appeared as a forgettable coordinate on a map. In truth it functioned as a clandestine nave for appetites. A crypt turned inside out and furnished with stools.
Heat congregated within like hoarded guilt. The atmosphere possessed the viscosity of spoiled anointing oil. Lanterns of smoked glass bled a fuliginous radiance that clung to walls in diseased halos. Painting every beam in shades of exhausted amber. Pipe fumes crawled above the crowd as sluggish incense. Not sanctifying anything. Only varnishing lungs. The reek of spirits. Unwashed skin. Overused perfume. Roasted meat. These scents mingled into a single oppressive miasma that smelled like a festival held outside a shuttered temple.
Voices rose in profane psalmody. Dice rattled against scarred timber. Little knucklebones of parody. Coins rang as tawdry offertory. A musician in the corner coaxed a wanton melody from a cracked instrument. Each note staggering as if drunk on its own echo. Procuresses negotiated in low. Economical phrases. Patron saints of nothing at all were invoked in curses. No icon watched from the rafters. Only smoke stains and cobwebs stared down like cataracted eyes.
What vestiges of sacred objects survived had been degraded into curios. A cracked votive shield blocked a draft beside the door. A brass thurible. Chain snapped. Hung repurposed as a spittoon. Prayer cords looped the neck of an empty bottle where flies gathered with the devotion worshippers reserved for relics elsewhere. The entire establishment read like a palimpsest of sacrilege. Prior sanctity scraped away and overwritten by appetitive graffiti.
Winter took notice. It did not arrive with spectacular gusts or thunderous annunciation. Its advent came as a doctrinal correction. Warmth began to leach from the air in incremental thefts. Sweat cooled on clavicles. The hookah’s vapors no longer climbed but sagged and drifted along the floor. Their voluptuous curls collapsing into foggy rags. Lantern flames narrowed to thin bluish tongues that withdrew into their own soot like chastened choristers.
Then the door completed its arc. The alley’s night spilled inward in a single precise incision. Within that vertical wound. A silhouette pausing on the threshold towered above the interior rabble. For an instant she was only outline and contradiction. Height without detail. Presence without narrative. A shard of imported cold rode in with her. Subtle yet sovereign. Breath misted from the nearest mouths. Astonished and involuntary. Like prayers torn from congregants who had forgotten the words.
Ixqueya Jorgenskull entered the den. Her first contact with the warped planking birthed a fragile corona of hoarfrost that sprinted outward along the grain. Tracing old stains and knife gashes in crystalline script. Each subsequent step left behind a brief sigil. A pale mandala that flared then thinned to a persistent chill that sank into the timber. Anklets of aurichalcum encircled her ankles. Heavy rings incised with minuscule glyphs and set with jade cylinders and bone beads. Their muted chiming surfaced through the tavern’s noise as a clear alien tintinnabulation. The sound of a sanctus bell ringing inside a brothel.
Her legs proclaimed a theology of incarnate discipline. Bronze skin burnished to the hue of sun stroked sandstone poured over muscle dense as quarried basalt. Calves swelled with the coiled strength of a veteran climber of ice laden escarpments. Thighs carried the breadth of bastions. Functional mass shaped into luxuriant curves that mocked any attempted divorce between potency and allure. Along the outer arc of each limb laminae of lacquered scale clung close. Painted in searing turquoises and sanguine reds that evoked tropical plumage or heraldic carnage.
From these plates jutted shards of Necro Ice. They grew like glacial thorns. Irregular. Many faceted. Feeding upon the tavern’s warmth with quiet voracity. Their interiors seethed with corpse pale luminescence. Cyan currents writhing within the hyaline bodies. Refractions broke across the floorboards and up the legs of stools. Pricking the shadows with spectral motes like frost stars fallen out of a polar sky.
Around her hips cloth conceded as little territory as possible. A panel of dark weaving held fast to her pelvis. Its dye a shade that devoured the lantern light. Along its hem marched cramped sigils in metallic thread. Archaic ideograms that spoke in strokes of inundation. Famine. Winter jurisdiction. From the girdle that clasped the garment fell strings of beads. Vertebrae. Small carved skulls. They knocked together with every stride. The sound a soft abacus of bone keeping its own uncompromising tally.
Above. Her torso ascended like the central spire of a chthonic basilica. Crossing bands of leather dyed the color of deep ocean cinched around the generous architecture of her chest. Anchoring a harness that both exhibited and controlled the weight beneath. Armored crescents of dark chitin cupped each breast. Their polished surfaces bore incised labyrinths of web patterns and snow signs. Lines folding back upon themselves in dizzying repetition. Like the marginalia of some glacial codex. Between those crescents a vertical strip of exposed bronze carried a smear of turquoise pigment over the sternum. Anchored by a medallion of bone and jade. That ornament resembled a stylized inverted sun. Its rays curling inward as if crucified upon its own corona.
The chitin itself was not inert.
Necro Ice infiltrated it. Sprouting through seams and borders in minuscule crenellations. Inside those crystalline protrusions slow radiance gathered and faded with a rhythm not quite her heartbeat yet bound to it. As if some buried aurora had been pressed into service as circulating sacrament.
Warpaint consecrated the visible skin.
Strokes of turquoise coursed diagonally across her upper arms. Over clavicles. Along the prominence of her collarbones. Each band bounded by hair fine crescents of cinnabar laid with monastic precision. This was not cosmetic affectation. It read as jurisdictional gloss. Commentary written on living parchment. Between those strokes scars of deliberate origin traced faint pale lines. Remnants of initiatory incisions that had once opened arteries to let winter in.
Her shoulders carried pauldrons that resembled reliquaries shaped for war.
Layer upon layer of chitinous laminae fanned outward. Edges serrated. Surfaces painted in gradations moving from deep teal into ember red into an absorptive darkness that swallowed the lantern glow. Between these plates Necro Ice colonized like holy fungus. Thrusting hyaline tongues outward that oozed a lambent cyan. Within the armor sunken scenes revealed themselves when the light struck at a slant. Rows of penitents trapped mid kneel inside stylized ice. An inverted tree whose roots coiled about heaps of skulls. A river of swords frozen mid current. The imagery did not invite interpretation. It imposed dogma.
From the armored spine her supplementary limbs unfurled.
Four arachnid appendages emerged in slow hieratic expansion. Joints angled sharply. Carapace glossy as wet obsidian veined with elusive flashes of teal. Each extremity culminated in a curved scythe whose inner edge gleamed with preternatural keenness. As though it had already tasted mitigated flesh. Along the undersides delicate threads of frost stretched from segment to segment. Weaving and dissolving in continuous brittle metamorphosis. These limbs moved in counterpoint to her stride. Maintaining equilibrium. Framing her stature. Proclaiming an anatomy that obeyed a more predatory scripture than mortal design.
Her human arms bore their own constellation of relics. Bracelets stacked along both forearms until skin vanished beneath metal and bone. Gold cuffs engraved with minute glyphs nested against loops of leather threaded with teeth beside bangles of dark horn interspersed with shards of frozen crystal imprisoned in wire. Small charms dangled. Some worn smooth by habitual caress. Others sharp as new offenses. The backs of her hands displayed faint ritual scars crossing the tendons. Pale latticework mapping secret conduits through which the Tlāzōtlalpan siphoned energy.
Her throat and upper chest formed a shrine. A broad pectoral of turquoise plates and hammered gold spread across the superior swell of her sternum. Each segment inset with slivers of bone and chips of ice. The pattern suggested a stylized jaw encircling a captive star. Below. Cords hung with obsidian teeth and jade droplets cascaded toward the shadow between her breasts. At their convergence a single shard of Necro Ice rested like a suspended tear. Within its clear body a miniature storm smoldered. Pale light coiling upon itself in slow somber circulation.
Her face transfigured the monstrous into hieratic splendor.
Bronze skin lay smooth over prominent zygomatic arches and a jaw whose line suggested verdict rather than compromise. Her lips full. The upper carrying a natural subtle bow sharpened now by the hint of wry displeasure. The nose traced a straight unforgiving bridge from brow to tip. A profile suited to palace reliefs carved three stories high. Across this architecture pigments drew a cruciform of intent. Two thick bands of turquoise shot from the swell of each cheek to the outer brow. Beneath them curved narrow arcs of carmine that imitated suspended bloodflow. A further crescent hugged each lower lid. Transforming the gaze into a pair of permanent stigmata.
Her eyes were glacial jurisprudence made visible. Irides of saturated ultramarine encircled pupils with unnerving steadiness. Around each iris a narrow corona of ashen gold traced a thin ring. Less adornment than measuring instrument. These eyes did not wander. They audited. Whenever they crossed a face the recipient felt not looked at but entered into an account. No vulgar sorcerous glow disturbed them. Their intensity came from depth. From the sense of ledgers behind them already balanced.
Above. The headdress rose like a frozen litany. A circlet of engraved gold clasped her brow. Crowded with tesserae of turquoise. Obsidian. Bone arranged in quincunx motifs reminiscent of sacrificial platforms seen from above. From this foundation burst a corolla of feathers. Macaw plumes long and iridescent climbed toward the rafters. Their hues shifting from sea green near the circlet through incendiary orange into oil black at the tips. The lowest row carried fragile sheaths of ice that encapsulated each quill end. When she moved these frozen caps clicked softly. A crystalline arrhythmic chime like frost gnawed chalices touching in an abandoned choir loft.
Her hair fell beneath this avian corona in a dense torrent.
Straight heavy strands of black spilled past her shoulders. Nearly to her hips. Streaked with veins of cobalt that broke the dim light. Snow powder dotted the upper layers. Those flakes refused to dissolve. They persisted as hexagonal glyphs embedded in the sable cascade. Winter annotating her.
The tavern received her with the reluctant stillness of a congregation caught in sacrilege.
Gamblers froze with cards half fanned. A hireling climbing toward violence discovered his fist stranded midway to another man’s jaw. Laughter strangled into uncertain coughs. The musician in the corner let his fingers fall from the strings. His last note stretching into a plaintive squeal that died in the frozen air. Conversations clipped mid invective or mid innuendo resumed only in whispers. Each voice sounded like blasphemy uttered in a crypt.
The cold heaped around Ixqueya Jorgenskull altered more than sensation.
Condensation along the walls crystallized into feathery rime that crawled between splinters. Liquor within poorly sealed bottles grew cloudy. The surface of spilled ale shrank and tightened into amber scabs. Smoke sagged and spread across the floor in low sullen sheets. Resembling reluctant censer clouds forced to crawl beneath a foreign altar.
She advanced toward the counter as if approaching a chancel unaware of its impending consecration.
Bodies parted. Sometimes with deliberate deference. More often through instinct excavated from older hungers. Those too drunk to stand steadily still moved aside as vertebrae remembered older predators. Those who attempted to stare her down found their gazes skidding away. The way eyes retreat from a reliquary that has not granted permission. A handful watched unabashed. Measuring her with greed or curiosity. Her audit took note of them.
The arachnid limbs behind her angled outward. Edges tilting infinitesimally. Defining the volume she claimed. Frost rosettes continued to flower beneath each step. Ephemeral snow mandalas blooming and effacing in rapid succession. The tavern floor served as temporary scripture.
The proprietor waited behind his battered plank. A portly man whose armor consisted of practiced insolence and a smile polished for every sort of sinner.
Both protections failed him.
The cloth in his hands stilled upon the rim of a cup. Color leached from his cheeks. His eyes climbed her height in reluctant pilgrimage. Pausing at harness. At extra limbs. At headdress. Finally at her stare. Whatever welcome he had been assembling died unspoken. Salt glistened on his upper lip in sudden beads.
Ixqueya Jorgenskull did not stoop to take a seat.
She halted before the bar. Towering over its stained surface. Her fingers rested upon the wood. Rime radiated outward from the points of contact. Colonizing grooves left by decades of knife play. The lantern above her faltered. Its flame shrinking until it resembled a trapped spark. For a breath the entire room felt sealed beneath a bell jar of crystalline air.
Within her chest the Tlāzōtlalpan gave a measured convulsion.
The organ drank greedily from the accumulated heat of bodies. Lamps. Steaming dishes. Translating stolen energy into the ordered cold that haloed her. Necro Ice buds along her armor responded. Brightening a shade. An auroral flutter passing through their translucent flesh. She sensed the instinctive recoil of the living around her. Their blood thickening. Their joints tightening. Their hearts stuttering toward flight.
This bawdy grotto had never been inscribed upon her sovereign’s map of shrines.
Nevertheless. Under her scrutiny it began to warp into annexation. Lanterns mutated into unwilling votives. The bar counter into a parody altar rail. Patrons arranged themselves into ragged aisles. The stink of spirits and sweat thickened into a parody of incense. Where moments ago there had been commerce. Now yawned the suggestion of judgment.
When she spoke her voice did not rise.
“Wine.”
The syllable carried the timbre of distant ice calving from a glacier. “Not the sour indulgence you sluice into cowards and debtors. Draw something that still remembers the vineyard it betrayed.”
The barkeep flinched into action.
He poured. The liquid left the neck in a reluctant stream. Thickening as it met the gelid air. Frost feathered the cup in elaborate dendrites that resembled ossified prayers. By the time he slid the vessel toward her a thin film of ice trembled across the surface. Quivering like a nervous conscience.
She allowed the cup to rest upon the little frozen plinth. Her attention remained on the patrons. Gaze moved from face to face. From hunched priest hiding in his hood to scarred mercenary with medals tucked into his shirt. From painted courtesan assembling a new smile to young bravo with a hand too near his knife. Each received a fragment of her regard. Each fragment lodged like a splinter of ice.
This was not a visit. It was inspection.
The tavern had built its liturgy upon intoxication. Transaction. Oblivion. Tonight another sacrament arrived. Winter in the person of Ixqueya Jorgenskull stepped into the nave of vice. Carrying a colder catechism. The den might continue pouring envy. Lust. Despair. She had come to count them. To determine which hearts would leave with their sins sitting lightly upon their shoulders. And which would leave embalmed in Necro Ice. Names entered forever in a ledger that did not forgive. And never forgot.
The tavern had outlived its baptism.
Whatever syllables the first signboard carried had peeled away with the paint. Leaving only a scar above the lintel that the regulars filled with their own blasphemous nicknames. To the magistrates it appeared as a forgettable coordinate on a map. In truth it functioned as a clandestine nave for appetites. A crypt turned inside out and furnished with stools.
Heat congregated within like hoarded guilt. The atmosphere possessed the viscosity of spoiled anointing oil. Lanterns of smoked glass bled a fuliginous radiance that clung to walls in diseased halos. Painting every beam in shades of exhausted amber. Pipe fumes crawled above the crowd as sluggish incense. Not sanctifying anything. Only varnishing lungs. The reek of spirits. Unwashed skin. Overused perfume. Roasted meat. These scents mingled into a single oppressive miasma that smelled like a festival held outside a shuttered temple.
Voices rose in profane psalmody. Dice rattled against scarred timber. Little knucklebones of parody. Coins rang as tawdry offertory. A musician in the corner coaxed a wanton melody from a cracked instrument. Each note staggering as if drunk on its own echo. Procuresses negotiated in low. Economical phrases. Patron saints of nothing at all were invoked in curses. No icon watched from the rafters. Only smoke stains and cobwebs stared down like cataracted eyes.
What vestiges of sacred objects survived had been degraded into curios. A cracked votive shield blocked a draft beside the door. A brass thurible. Chain snapped. Hung repurposed as a spittoon. Prayer cords looped the neck of an empty bottle where flies gathered with the devotion worshippers reserved for relics elsewhere. The entire establishment read like a palimpsest of sacrilege. Prior sanctity scraped away and overwritten by appetitive graffiti.
Winter took notice. It did not arrive with spectacular gusts or thunderous annunciation. Its advent came as a doctrinal correction. Warmth began to leach from the air in incremental thefts. Sweat cooled on clavicles. The hookah’s vapors no longer climbed but sagged and drifted along the floor. Their voluptuous curls collapsing into foggy rags. Lantern flames narrowed to thin bluish tongues that withdrew into their own soot like chastened choristers.
Then the door completed its arc. The alley’s night spilled inward in a single precise incision. Within that vertical wound. A silhouette pausing on the threshold towered above the interior rabble. For an instant she was only outline and contradiction. Height without detail. Presence without narrative. A shard of imported cold rode in with her. Subtle yet sovereign. Breath misted from the nearest mouths. Astonished and involuntary. Like prayers torn from congregants who had forgotten the words.
Ixqueya Jorgenskull entered the den. Her first contact with the warped planking birthed a fragile corona of hoarfrost that sprinted outward along the grain. Tracing old stains and knife gashes in crystalline script. Each subsequent step left behind a brief sigil. A pale mandala that flared then thinned to a persistent chill that sank into the timber. Anklets of aurichalcum encircled her ankles. Heavy rings incised with minuscule glyphs and set with jade cylinders and bone beads. Their muted chiming surfaced through the tavern’s noise as a clear alien tintinnabulation. The sound of a sanctus bell ringing inside a brothel.
Her legs proclaimed a theology of incarnate discipline. Bronze skin burnished to the hue of sun stroked sandstone poured over muscle dense as quarried basalt. Calves swelled with the coiled strength of a veteran climber of ice laden escarpments. Thighs carried the breadth of bastions. Functional mass shaped into luxuriant curves that mocked any attempted divorce between potency and allure. Along the outer arc of each limb laminae of lacquered scale clung close. Painted in searing turquoises and sanguine reds that evoked tropical plumage or heraldic carnage.
From these plates jutted shards of Necro Ice. They grew like glacial thorns. Irregular. Many faceted. Feeding upon the tavern’s warmth with quiet voracity. Their interiors seethed with corpse pale luminescence. Cyan currents writhing within the hyaline bodies. Refractions broke across the floorboards and up the legs of stools. Pricking the shadows with spectral motes like frost stars fallen out of a polar sky.
Around her hips cloth conceded as little territory as possible. A panel of dark weaving held fast to her pelvis. Its dye a shade that devoured the lantern light. Along its hem marched cramped sigils in metallic thread. Archaic ideograms that spoke in strokes of inundation. Famine. Winter jurisdiction. From the girdle that clasped the garment fell strings of beads. Vertebrae. Small carved skulls. They knocked together with every stride. The sound a soft abacus of bone keeping its own uncompromising tally.
Above. Her torso ascended like the central spire of a chthonic basilica. Crossing bands of leather dyed the color of deep ocean cinched around the generous architecture of her chest. Anchoring a harness that both exhibited and controlled the weight beneath. Armored crescents of dark chitin cupped each breast. Their polished surfaces bore incised labyrinths of web patterns and snow signs. Lines folding back upon themselves in dizzying repetition. Like the marginalia of some glacial codex. Between those crescents a vertical strip of exposed bronze carried a smear of turquoise pigment over the sternum. Anchored by a medallion of bone and jade. That ornament resembled a stylized inverted sun. Its rays curling inward as if crucified upon its own corona.
The chitin itself was not inert.
Necro Ice infiltrated it. Sprouting through seams and borders in minuscule crenellations. Inside those crystalline protrusions slow radiance gathered and faded with a rhythm not quite her heartbeat yet bound to it. As if some buried aurora had been pressed into service as circulating sacrament.
Warpaint consecrated the visible skin.
Strokes of turquoise coursed diagonally across her upper arms. Over clavicles. Along the prominence of her collarbones. Each band bounded by hair fine crescents of cinnabar laid with monastic precision. This was not cosmetic affectation. It read as jurisdictional gloss. Commentary written on living parchment. Between those strokes scars of deliberate origin traced faint pale lines. Remnants of initiatory incisions that had once opened arteries to let winter in.
Her shoulders carried pauldrons that resembled reliquaries shaped for war.
Layer upon layer of chitinous laminae fanned outward. Edges serrated. Surfaces painted in gradations moving from deep teal into ember red into an absorptive darkness that swallowed the lantern glow. Between these plates Necro Ice colonized like holy fungus. Thrusting hyaline tongues outward that oozed a lambent cyan. Within the armor sunken scenes revealed themselves when the light struck at a slant. Rows of penitents trapped mid kneel inside stylized ice. An inverted tree whose roots coiled about heaps of skulls. A river of swords frozen mid current. The imagery did not invite interpretation. It imposed dogma.
From the armored spine her supplementary limbs unfurled.
Four arachnid appendages emerged in slow hieratic expansion. Joints angled sharply. Carapace glossy as wet obsidian veined with elusive flashes of teal. Each extremity culminated in a curved scythe whose inner edge gleamed with preternatural keenness. As though it had already tasted mitigated flesh. Along the undersides delicate threads of frost stretched from segment to segment. Weaving and dissolving in continuous brittle metamorphosis. These limbs moved in counterpoint to her stride. Maintaining equilibrium. Framing her stature. Proclaiming an anatomy that obeyed a more predatory scripture than mortal design.
Her human arms bore their own constellation of relics. Bracelets stacked along both forearms until skin vanished beneath metal and bone. Gold cuffs engraved with minute glyphs nested against loops of leather threaded with teeth beside bangles of dark horn interspersed with shards of frozen crystal imprisoned in wire. Small charms dangled. Some worn smooth by habitual caress. Others sharp as new offenses. The backs of her hands displayed faint ritual scars crossing the tendons. Pale latticework mapping secret conduits through which the Tlāzōtlalpan siphoned energy.
Her throat and upper chest formed a shrine. A broad pectoral of turquoise plates and hammered gold spread across the superior swell of her sternum. Each segment inset with slivers of bone and chips of ice. The pattern suggested a stylized jaw encircling a captive star. Below. Cords hung with obsidian teeth and jade droplets cascaded toward the shadow between her breasts. At their convergence a single shard of Necro Ice rested like a suspended tear. Within its clear body a miniature storm smoldered. Pale light coiling upon itself in slow somber circulation.
Her face transfigured the monstrous into hieratic splendor.
Bronze skin lay smooth over prominent zygomatic arches and a jaw whose line suggested verdict rather than compromise. Her lips full. The upper carrying a natural subtle bow sharpened now by the hint of wry displeasure. The nose traced a straight unforgiving bridge from brow to tip. A profile suited to palace reliefs carved three stories high. Across this architecture pigments drew a cruciform of intent. Two thick bands of turquoise shot from the swell of each cheek to the outer brow. Beneath them curved narrow arcs of carmine that imitated suspended bloodflow. A further crescent hugged each lower lid. Transforming the gaze into a pair of permanent stigmata.
Her eyes were glacial jurisprudence made visible. Irides of saturated ultramarine encircled pupils with unnerving steadiness. Around each iris a narrow corona of ashen gold traced a thin ring. Less adornment than measuring instrument. These eyes did not wander. They audited. Whenever they crossed a face the recipient felt not looked at but entered into an account. No vulgar sorcerous glow disturbed them. Their intensity came from depth. From the sense of ledgers behind them already balanced.
Above. The headdress rose like a frozen litany. A circlet of engraved gold clasped her brow. Crowded with tesserae of turquoise. Obsidian. Bone arranged in quincunx motifs reminiscent of sacrificial platforms seen from above. From this foundation burst a corolla of feathers. Macaw plumes long and iridescent climbed toward the rafters. Their hues shifting from sea green near the circlet through incendiary orange into oil black at the tips. The lowest row carried fragile sheaths of ice that encapsulated each quill end. When she moved these frozen caps clicked softly. A crystalline arrhythmic chime like frost gnawed chalices touching in an abandoned choir loft.
Her hair fell beneath this avian corona in a dense torrent.
Straight heavy strands of black spilled past her shoulders. Nearly to her hips. Streaked with veins of cobalt that broke the dim light. Snow powder dotted the upper layers. Those flakes refused to dissolve. They persisted as hexagonal glyphs embedded in the sable cascade. Winter annotating her.
The tavern received her with the reluctant stillness of a congregation caught in sacrilege.
Gamblers froze with cards half fanned. A hireling climbing toward violence discovered his fist stranded midway to another man’s jaw. Laughter strangled into uncertain coughs. The musician in the corner let his fingers fall from the strings. His last note stretching into a plaintive squeal that died in the frozen air. Conversations clipped mid invective or mid innuendo resumed only in whispers. Each voice sounded like blasphemy uttered in a crypt.
The cold heaped around Ixqueya Jorgenskull altered more than sensation.
Condensation along the walls crystallized into feathery rime that crawled between splinters. Liquor within poorly sealed bottles grew cloudy. The surface of spilled ale shrank and tightened into amber scabs. Smoke sagged and spread across the floor in low sullen sheets. Resembling reluctant censer clouds forced to crawl beneath a foreign altar.
She advanced toward the counter as if approaching a chancel unaware of its impending consecration.
Bodies parted. Sometimes with deliberate deference. More often through instinct excavated from older hungers. Those too drunk to stand steadily still moved aside as vertebrae remembered older predators. Those who attempted to stare her down found their gazes skidding away. The way eyes retreat from a reliquary that has not granted permission. A handful watched unabashed. Measuring her with greed or curiosity. Her audit took note of them.
The arachnid limbs behind her angled outward. Edges tilting infinitesimally. Defining the volume she claimed. Frost rosettes continued to flower beneath each step. Ephemeral snow mandalas blooming and effacing in rapid succession. The tavern floor served as temporary scripture.
The proprietor waited behind his battered plank. A portly man whose armor consisted of practiced insolence and a smile polished for every sort of sinner.
Both protections failed him.
The cloth in his hands stilled upon the rim of a cup. Color leached from his cheeks. His eyes climbed her height in reluctant pilgrimage. Pausing at harness. At extra limbs. At headdress. Finally at her stare. Whatever welcome he had been assembling died unspoken. Salt glistened on his upper lip in sudden beads.
Ixqueya Jorgenskull did not stoop to take a seat.
She halted before the bar. Towering over its stained surface. Her fingers rested upon the wood. Rime radiated outward from the points of contact. Colonizing grooves left by decades of knife play. The lantern above her faltered. Its flame shrinking until it resembled a trapped spark. For a breath the entire room felt sealed beneath a bell jar of crystalline air.
Within her chest the Tlāzōtlalpan gave a measured convulsion.
The organ drank greedily from the accumulated heat of bodies. Lamps. Steaming dishes. Translating stolen energy into the ordered cold that haloed her. Necro Ice buds along her armor responded. Brightening a shade. An auroral flutter passing through their translucent flesh. She sensed the instinctive recoil of the living around her. Their blood thickening. Their joints tightening. Their hearts stuttering toward flight.
This bawdy grotto had never been inscribed upon her sovereign’s map of shrines.
Nevertheless. Under her scrutiny it began to warp into annexation. Lanterns mutated into unwilling votives. The bar counter into a parody altar rail. Patrons arranged themselves into ragged aisles. The stink of spirits and sweat thickened into a parody of incense. Where moments ago there had been commerce. Now yawned the suggestion of judgment.
When she spoke her voice did not rise.
“Wine.”
The syllable carried the timbre of distant ice calving from a glacier. “Not the sour indulgence you sluice into cowards and debtors. Draw something that still remembers the vineyard it betrayed.”
The barkeep flinched into action.
He poured. The liquid left the neck in a reluctant stream. Thickening as it met the gelid air. Frost feathered the cup in elaborate dendrites that resembled ossified prayers. By the time he slid the vessel toward her a thin film of ice trembled across the surface. Quivering like a nervous conscience.
She allowed the cup to rest upon the little frozen plinth. Her attention remained on the patrons. Gaze moved from face to face. From hunched priest hiding in his hood to scarred mercenary with medals tucked into his shirt. From painted courtesan assembling a new smile to young bravo with a hand too near his knife. Each received a fragment of her regard. Each fragment lodged like a splinter of ice.
This was not a visit. It was inspection.
The tavern had built its liturgy upon intoxication. Transaction. Oblivion. Tonight another sacrament arrived. Winter in the person of Ixqueya Jorgenskull stepped into the nave of vice. Carrying a colder catechism. The den might continue pouring envy. Lust. Despair. She had come to count them. To determine which hearts would leave with their sins sitting lightly upon their shoulders. And which would leave embalmed in Necro Ice. Names entered forever in a ledger that did not forgive. And never forgot.
He smirked and went behind the bar and produced a glass and uncooked an unlabeled bottle and poured it. "Welcome to Trixie's"
Lappland Saluzzo wrote:
"Still, don't go dropping dead. I can't have you doing that."
"I don't think death is upon my docket just yet. I'm happy Olivia brought in the starfruit. I'm going to dry some and put them out so people can take what they wish. Sort of a homemade fruit snack" he said after pouring the newest patron her glass of wine.
Inside the bar, the newcomer would notice a lot of unfamiliar faces. A girl in yellow, seemingly of paper, a cyborg that almost looked like complete machine, a general with several soldiers alongside him, a petite woman with seemingly a fox pelt on her head...
One of the people inside was a fifteen year old looking girl, sitting on a stool. With a large gash across her upper stomach, a bloodied T-shirt, and a labored short jeans, she looked like she's been through a war.
The one gash was still bleeding, albeit having itself slowly closing. The miscellanous cuts on her body had mostly closed, but they still stained the shirt when they were open.
However, in contrast, the girl looked fine, her navy blue eyes still shining with liveliness. Few people knew why she even survived that. Maybe she had a strong soul, or maybe she just was insensitive to pain.
When the newcomer got in, the girl registered that someone came, and her gaze shifted upon them.
"Hi?" With some nervousness, she waved her right hand.
One of the people inside was a fifteen year old looking girl, sitting on a stool. With a large gash across her upper stomach, a bloodied T-shirt, and a labored short jeans, she looked like she's been through a war.
The one gash was still bleeding, albeit having itself slowly closing. The miscellanous cuts on her body had mostly closed, but they still stained the shirt when they were open.
However, in contrast, the girl looked fine, her navy blue eyes still shining with liveliness. Few people knew why she even survived that. Maybe she had a strong soul, or maybe she just was insensitive to pain.
When the newcomer got in, the girl registered that someone came, and her gaze shifted upon them.
"Hi?" With some nervousness, she waved her right hand.
"Well, if you die, I'll just have to take over and carry my swords anyway~ Hahahaha!"
"I somehow doubt you can tend bar as well as Mathius can."
"Why, because I make desserts and slice people up just as easy? And steal wine from my father's cellar~? Speaking of, I do have a few bottles to give. They're expensive~"
I would not mind sampling your Amasec.
Lappland Saluzzo wrote:
"Why, because I make desserts and slice people up just as easy? And steal wine from my father's cellar~? Speaking of, I do have a few bottles to give. They're expensive~"
"I didn't know any of that. But I'm sure that if Mathius needs any more additions to the staff, he would consider you."
"Still, I have a few bottles from the Saluzzo Estate. Have at them~" Of course, she presented those few bottles, that expensive wine because of course she steals them from her father.
"Oooh, interesting. I'll be sure to bring one for my next date with Mathius."
Lin Xueqing wrote:
Inside the bar, the newcomer would notice a lot of unfamiliar faces. A girl in yellow, seemingly of paper, a cyborg that almost looked like complete machine, a general with several soldiers alongside him, a petite woman with seemingly a fox pelt on her head...
One of the people inside was a fifteen year old looking girl, sitting on a stool. With a large gash across her upper stomach, a bloodied T-shirt, and a labored short jeans, she looked like she's been through a war.
The one gash was still bleeding, albeit having itself slowly closing. The miscellanous cuts on her body had mostly closed, but they still stained the shirt when they were open.
However, in contrast, the girl looked fine, her navy blue eyes still shining with liveliness. Few people knew why she even survived that. Maybe she had a strong soul, or maybe she just was insensitive to pain.
When the newcomer got in, the girl registered that someone came, and her gaze shifted upon them.
"Hi?" With some nervousness, she waved her right hand.
The one gash was still bleeding, albeit having itself slowly closing. The miscellanous cuts on her body had mostly closed, but they still stained the shirt when they were open.
However, in contrast, the girl looked fine, her navy blue eyes still shining with liveliness. Few people knew why she even survived that. Maybe she had a strong soul, or maybe she just was insensitive to pain.
When the newcomer got in, the girl registered that someone came, and her gaze shifted upon them.
"Hi?" With some nervousness, she waved her right hand.
Thud
The sudden jerk of motion was unexpected though clearly intended to direct intention to its source,
Thud
It was Aleksandr hitting the stool, albeit gently, atleast to a degree which the Lord General considered gentle, with his boot.
" Hr-Ahem. Greetings, Citizen. "
He added, folding his hands behind his back in his regal and imposing mannerisms though it was obvious he did not intend harm.
" I couldn't help but notice you've been wounded... mortally at that. You... clearly do not have that long left to live. "
He leaned in somewhat studying the being before him intently, curious as to how she did not react to the pain, he took out a vox-scanner detecting cybernetics in her frame.
" Ah, I see... your internal workings seem to mirror servitor circuitry to some degree... nevertheless, the wounds seem to be debilitating you... at a rapid pace might I add... I have a proposition "
He held out a hand for one of his guards to hand him a chainsword, giving it a rev as it issued loud chainsaw noises, the general laughing, a little concerningly maniacal at that.
" Oh.. Ahem... Apologies... I tend to get a little carried away in the presence of Hildegard... yes... she's served me well over the years, fitting quite comfortable within the hand still... why... I remember only yesterday I was a commissar...
He added gazing at the weapon, affection in his eyes, a big smile, shaking his head with nostalgic memory before he erupted into mania
" HACKING THE LIMBS OFF OF FOUL XENO AND TRAITOR ALIKE... SEVERING HEADS CLEAN OFF THE SHOULDER... BAPTISING THE BARREN SCORCHED EARTH WITH THE ENTRAILS OF THE EMPIRE'S FOES !! "
He added swinging the blade in the air as his soldiers stepped back,
" RIPPER, TEARER, GOUGER... ahahahaw... they would present themselves as... no commissar... please have mercy... we shall repent unto the Emperor... I have a family... oh boo hoo hoo... WELL YOU SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THAT BEFORE DEFECTING TO THE RUINOUS POWERS !... ahem... but... but ofcourse that isn't the reason why I have presented myself unto you. I can help you as it is evident that you are lame and dying. "
Aleksandr gazed intently.
" Ehrm... your body is much too weak and frail to be of service or use in a combat capacity... it would be worthwhile to discard it... but your head can be... salvaged and repurposed, I have in my possession, a relic armor sourced from the dark age of technology... a suit of armor capable of great feats which would augment your capacities significantly... if you are amenable to these demands then perhaps I can assist you by severing your head... with life supports and under the appropriate conditions ofcourse... to be ported onto that armor... in return you will be granted status as a warrior of the Imperium and help us fight our foes on the frontline "
" What say you then ?... Off with your head ?... hrahah... I'm joking... i'm joking ofcourse... unless... you find this agreeable ?
Lappland Saluzzo wrote:
"Still, I have a few bottles from the Saluzzo Estate. Have at them~" Of course, she presented those few bottles, that expensive wine because of course she steals them from her father.
My thanks.
"...And here I thought I might not be a good queen, but I'm also not thinking of beheading actual children."
Siege wrote:
"...And here I thought I might not be a good queen, but I'm also not thinking of beheading actual children."
Ofcourse you would rather let them bleed out and die, given you are amenable to a wretched existence. I am offering her a meaningful and rewarding life... at the cost of some sacrifice.
Theo does a spit take upon hearing that. "What the *BLEEP*?!"
Theo Stark wrote:
Theo does a spit take upon hearing that. "What the *BLEEP*?!"
" Oh hush now, it isn't that much different from being interred in a dreadnought "
Aleksandr Von Drakenfell wrote:
Lappland Saluzzo wrote:
"Still, I have a few bottles from the Saluzzo Estate. Have at them~" Of course, she presented those few bottles, that expensive wine because of course she steals them from her father.
My thanks.
He placed a tumbler full of his recipe Scotch with ice on a coaster in front of Aleksandr.
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