Mathius nudged her gently "you can take a room upstairs" he said softly
"...?" Feeling the nudge, Xueqing woke up, and you can clearly see from her face she was drowsy.
After having heard Mathius' words, she nodded. "...sure, thank you." Then, she slowly got off the stool, and went upstairs...
After having heard Mathius' words, she nodded. "...sure, thank you." Then, she slowly got off the stool, and went upstairs...
Andrew Rhodes wrote:
"DAMNIT!"
His repulsors failed in mid air sending War Machine careening through the front door and slamming against a wall. He got to his feet. He was wearing the Mark II War Machine that he had modified, but apparently he didn't fully connect the couplers to the arc power source, and the repulsors cut out. He stood and the suit opened.
"Well.....at least the door is self-repairing. One of the few good things about this place being an inter-transdimensional....thing..."
His repulsors failed in mid air sending War Machine careening through the front door and slamming against a wall. He got to his feet. He was wearing the Mark II War Machine that he had modified, but apparently he didn't fully connect the couplers to the arc power source, and the repulsors cut out. He stood and the suit opened.
"Well.....at least the door is self-repairing. One of the few good things about this place being an inter-transdimensional....thing..."
"What did you break this time, Andrew?"
"I was working on the Mark II and I forgot to tighten down the couplers, so the repulsirs solution off mid-flight. I opened the drag fins so I could have a controlled crash-landing. Thank God I had MARVIN on"
"Ah."
Watari Devante wrote:
Watari’s brow rose, slow and mild, as if her words were no more than cinders lifted by a passing draft. He did not bristle. He had worn harsher speech than this beneath more pitiless welkins. He had listened to worse from dying men. A barbed jest did not reach deep enough to find purchase in him. His hand kept its labor. The brush moved with a measured grace that did not match the war-sinew in his forearm. It was the old discipline of a rider’s wrist repurposed. The bristles kissed the board. A thin line became a beam’s shadow. A soft wash became the hearth’s breathing glow. Forms gathered as if coaxed out of smoke. The tavern’s homely shape began to resolve into a living place, stubborn and enduring, like a hamlet clinging to a hillside while storms argued with it.
He spoke without looking away from the scene for long. “I respect your people.” The words were plain. “Giants are not barbarous. Not in truth. Only in the mouths of those who have never learned to see past their own fear.” His brush slid again, laying down the deepened brown of timber where the kiss of the light failed to reach. He painted the wear of hands on wood. The small, patient scarring of time. “Your culture is different,” he continued. “It is severe. It is beautiful, in the way winter is beautiful. Not gentle. Not asking to be understood. It simply is.”
He paused long enough to wet the brush and draw it clean through the water, letting pigment loosen and swirl like silt in a shallow stream. His gaze remained calm. It did not evade her. It did not cling. It held the middle distance where thought lives. “And I have always been fond,” his voice softening into something that sounded almost like reverence, “of the Tree of Life. Of the Undying Tree. It is an intriguing pillar. Philosophical. Theological. It does not pretend decay is the enemy. It makes decay into a door.”
He turned the brush in the cup with a slow spin, bristles whispering against tin. He did not lift it at once. He watched the water cloud, then settle, as if even disorder could be taught to rest. From the edge of his vision he caught that rare smirk, thin as a blade’s first light. He answered it with a warmth that did not ask permission. He did not press it into something heavier than it was. “I cannot paint something so winsome as a genuine smirk,” he said, and the humor in him carried the ease of a man who had survived too much to be so eoffrtlessly embarrassed. “Some things are meant to pass. They are better as fleeting weather. Kept in one memory. Not nailed to a board like a butterfly.”
He let the brush go and left it standing in the cup. Then he raised his eyes fully, and the lantern’s honeyed glow caught his face and made it seem, for a moment, less carved by campaigns. “I am Nokhoi,” he said. “And I am proud.” The tavern’s small noises continued around them. A spoon scraped porcelain. A log shifted in the hearth. Smoke climbed and thinned beneath the rafters. None of it interrupted him. His voice did not need to be loud to hold weight.
“When the defiled assaulted our world,” he went on, “it was my people who answered the Verdant Dynasty’s call. Our warbands rode when others debated. When Xandera’s command went out, our banners followed. Not because we loved the work. Because we understood what it meant to let rot spread unchallenged.” His gaze dipped briefly, not in shame, but in memory. He had seen banners burn. He had watched triumph sour into ash. He had learned that survival is often purchased with ugly coin.
“I am thankful for your mother,” he said, and he gave the statement the seriousness of an oath. “The Lichqueen is, ironically, one of the few reasons there is still life in this world. Perhaps in others as well. Who can say where the consequences of her will truly end.” He did not dress it in apology. He did not sharpen it into praise. He let it stand as a hard fact. A stone placed on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
When he spoke of Tonatiuh, there was a shift in him toward curiosity, the way a traveler’s mind leans toward a name he intends to remember. “I do not know this Tonatiuh,” he admitted. “I only know my sister speaks of him. And the Lady of Spice, Indemira, favors his habilment.” His mouth quirked. “For a man who works with needles and threads, he seems to wield influence like a general carrying a standard.”
He looked back to his board, as if ensuring the hearth’s glow was truthful, then returned his attention to Ixqueya with a faint brightening in his eyes. “Someday I would like to meet him. It takes a strong will to educate a Jorgenskull.” He let the jest land with just enough firmness to be felt. “Your line is famed for stubbornness.” Then he added, gently, and with that same warm audacity that did not fit beside her deportment.
“It is good you have friends. You need not hide it. I can hear it in the way you speak of him.” His smile grew a fraction. “It seems even the Hoarfrost Mistress can let her mask slip on occasion.” It was a small counter-stroke. Not cruel. Not timid. A nudge meant to bruise pride lightly rather than flatter it. Something in Watari suspected she could use the contact, like a blade benefits from a stone. He retrieved his brush and returned to the painting, adding the curve of a bench, the dull glint of pewter, the shadow beneath a table where boots had scuffed the floor. He had noticed her inventory of the room. The way she measured exits. The way she weighed strangers as if each were an entry in a ledger. He had not expected that attention from someone so stiff. It amused him.
“And they call me a stick in the mud,” he murmured, eyes alight with mirth as he worked. “If that is true, what does it make you.” His grin widened, sudden and unguarded. It did not mock her. It acknowledged her. “As for drinking me into bankruptcy.” He glanced briefly toward the bar, toward the bottles waiting to be purchased. “That would be costly. Thankfully, I offered knowing you do not care much for alcohol.” His voice carried an easy gentleness. “You are not exactly the life, or the afterlife, of the party.”
He let the humor sit for a breath, then softened it into something honest. “But that is all right. I like you the way you are.” He did not make the words coy. “Frigid. Dry. Determined. Those are acceptable qualities. Better than most.” He shrugged, returning to his work as if this were all as ordinary as weather. A veteran’s ease. A poet’s stubborn affection for the world as it is, not as it should be. Then her question about Sukegei settled between them with the weight of testimony. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded like punctuation against it.
Watari’s brush slowed. He drew one last line to complete the edge of a table in the painting, as though he refused to leave anything unfinished when speaking of old campaigns. Then he exhaled. “Who knows what goes through my mother’s head.” His tone held no resentment. Only acceptance. “I gave up long ago trying to unravel that enigma. She was my mother. She was also her own storm.” He looked up, eyes steady.
“If I had to wager, I would guess this. Sukegei is useful. Vulgarity is loud. Usefulness is quieter.” His gaze returned to the board, and he placed a small touch of light on a tankard’s rim, making it gleam. A mundane mercy. “Back then we needed swords more than we needed morality. Those days were dark. I hope they are behind us.” He let a beat pass. Then he lifted his eyes to her again, and his voice took on a practical attentiveness, as if he were meeting her on her own ground without turning it into a contest. “Speaking of what is not behind us.” He held the brush poised, ready to paint, ready to listen. “How is your investigation coming along?”
He spoke without looking away from the scene for long. “I respect your people.” The words were plain. “Giants are not barbarous. Not in truth. Only in the mouths of those who have never learned to see past their own fear.” His brush slid again, laying down the deepened brown of timber where the kiss of the light failed to reach. He painted the wear of hands on wood. The small, patient scarring of time. “Your culture is different,” he continued. “It is severe. It is beautiful, in the way winter is beautiful. Not gentle. Not asking to be understood. It simply is.”
He paused long enough to wet the brush and draw it clean through the water, letting pigment loosen and swirl like silt in a shallow stream. His gaze remained calm. It did not evade her. It did not cling. It held the middle distance where thought lives. “And I have always been fond,” his voice softening into something that sounded almost like reverence, “of the Tree of Life. Of the Undying Tree. It is an intriguing pillar. Philosophical. Theological. It does not pretend decay is the enemy. It makes decay into a door.”
He turned the brush in the cup with a slow spin, bristles whispering against tin. He did not lift it at once. He watched the water cloud, then settle, as if even disorder could be taught to rest. From the edge of his vision he caught that rare smirk, thin as a blade’s first light. He answered it with a warmth that did not ask permission. He did not press it into something heavier than it was. “I cannot paint something so winsome as a genuine smirk,” he said, and the humor in him carried the ease of a man who had survived too much to be so eoffrtlessly embarrassed. “Some things are meant to pass. They are better as fleeting weather. Kept in one memory. Not nailed to a board like a butterfly.”
He let the brush go and left it standing in the cup. Then he raised his eyes fully, and the lantern’s honeyed glow caught his face and made it seem, for a moment, less carved by campaigns. “I am Nokhoi,” he said. “And I am proud.” The tavern’s small noises continued around them. A spoon scraped porcelain. A log shifted in the hearth. Smoke climbed and thinned beneath the rafters. None of it interrupted him. His voice did not need to be loud to hold weight.
“When the defiled assaulted our world,” he went on, “it was my people who answered the Verdant Dynasty’s call. Our warbands rode when others debated. When Xandera’s command went out, our banners followed. Not because we loved the work. Because we understood what it meant to let rot spread unchallenged.” His gaze dipped briefly, not in shame, but in memory. He had seen banners burn. He had watched triumph sour into ash. He had learned that survival is often purchased with ugly coin.
“I am thankful for your mother,” he said, and he gave the statement the seriousness of an oath. “The Lichqueen is, ironically, one of the few reasons there is still life in this world. Perhaps in others as well. Who can say where the consequences of her will truly end.” He did not dress it in apology. He did not sharpen it into praise. He let it stand as a hard fact. A stone placed on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
When he spoke of Tonatiuh, there was a shift in him toward curiosity, the way a traveler’s mind leans toward a name he intends to remember. “I do not know this Tonatiuh,” he admitted. “I only know my sister speaks of him. And the Lady of Spice, Indemira, favors his habilment.” His mouth quirked. “For a man who works with needles and threads, he seems to wield influence like a general carrying a standard.”
He looked back to his board, as if ensuring the hearth’s glow was truthful, then returned his attention to Ixqueya with a faint brightening in his eyes. “Someday I would like to meet him. It takes a strong will to educate a Jorgenskull.” He let the jest land with just enough firmness to be felt. “Your line is famed for stubbornness.” Then he added, gently, and with that same warm audacity that did not fit beside her deportment.
“It is good you have friends. You need not hide it. I can hear it in the way you speak of him.” His smile grew a fraction. “It seems even the Hoarfrost Mistress can let her mask slip on occasion.” It was a small counter-stroke. Not cruel. Not timid. A nudge meant to bruise pride lightly rather than flatter it. Something in Watari suspected she could use the contact, like a blade benefits from a stone. He retrieved his brush and returned to the painting, adding the curve of a bench, the dull glint of pewter, the shadow beneath a table where boots had scuffed the floor. He had noticed her inventory of the room. The way she measured exits. The way she weighed strangers as if each were an entry in a ledger. He had not expected that attention from someone so stiff. It amused him.
“And they call me a stick in the mud,” he murmured, eyes alight with mirth as he worked. “If that is true, what does it make you.” His grin widened, sudden and unguarded. It did not mock her. It acknowledged her. “As for drinking me into bankruptcy.” He glanced briefly toward the bar, toward the bottles waiting to be purchased. “That would be costly. Thankfully, I offered knowing you do not care much for alcohol.” His voice carried an easy gentleness. “You are not exactly the life, or the afterlife, of the party.”
He let the humor sit for a breath, then softened it into something honest. “But that is all right. I like you the way you are.” He did not make the words coy. “Frigid. Dry. Determined. Those are acceptable qualities. Better than most.” He shrugged, returning to his work as if this were all as ordinary as weather. A veteran’s ease. A poet’s stubborn affection for the world as it is, not as it should be. Then her question about Sukegei settled between them with the weight of testimony. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded like punctuation against it.
Watari’s brush slowed. He drew one last line to complete the edge of a table in the painting, as though he refused to leave anything unfinished when speaking of old campaigns. Then he exhaled. “Who knows what goes through my mother’s head.” His tone held no resentment. Only acceptance. “I gave up long ago trying to unravel that enigma. She was my mother. She was also her own storm.” He looked up, eyes steady.
“If I had to wager, I would guess this. Sukegei is useful. Vulgarity is loud. Usefulness is quieter.” His gaze returned to the board, and he placed a small touch of light on a tankard’s rim, making it gleam. A mundane mercy. “Back then we needed swords more than we needed morality. Those days were dark. I hope they are behind us.” He let a beat pass. Then he lifted his eyes to her again, and his voice took on a practical attentiveness, as if he were meeting her on her own ground without turning it into a contest. “Speaking of what is not behind us.” He held the brush poised, ready to paint, ready to listen. “How is your investigation coming along?”
Ixqueya received his unruffled brow the way a crypt receives incense. With indifference that was not quite indolence. With patience that was not quite mercy. The tavern’s warmth continued to officiate behind iron bars. Yet in her vicinity it felt relegated. A brazier reduced from monarch to acolyte. Flames still declaimed. Sparks still vaulted upward like brief seraphs. They perished before they could become prayer. Smoke accumulated beneath the rafters in a low, fuliginous canopy, as if the ceiling itself had grown penitential.
He continued painting. That, more than his speech, was the irritation. Most men interrupted their own labor to perform respect. He did not. His brushwork remained metronomic. A rider’s discipline translated into artistry. Bristles kissed wood. Pigment became timber-shadow. A wash became hearth-breath. The tavern emerged on the board like a palimpsest made legible. Homely endurance. Scarred furniture. Light pooling where it was permitted. Darkness persisting where it had tenure.
Ixqueya watched him as one watches a doctrinal anomaly. A southerner who did not genuflect. A Nokhoi who did not bray. A veteran whose composure was not theatrical. It was tempered. Heat-cured. The sort of restraint that survives campaigns because it has outlived hysteria. She had been reared to regard his lineage as a slurry of appetites and loud excuses. A wretched stock. Ignoble. Useful only as fodder or noise. Yet the man before her refused the expected script. He spoke plainly. He worked steadily. He offered esteem without supplication.
That was the first hook of the puzzle. He did not beg to be believed.
When he said giants were not barbarous, she felt no gratitude. Only a thin, private contempt for a world in which such a statement still counted as courage. His phrasing was simple. Its simplicity gave it weight. He spoke as if describing weather, not arguing a case. She noted that. She also noted what he did not do. He did not weaponize admiration. He did not turn her people into spectacle. He did not ask for absolution for praising them.
Then he invoked the Undying Tree.
The name touched a deeper chamber in her. Not sentiment. Structure. The Undying Tree was not a comforting parable. It was a funerary calculus. It did not flatter the living. It disciplined them. Decay was not tragedy. It was taxonomy. The clerk-work of the cosmos. Tallies made in marrow. Collections made in silence. Most outsiders either saccharined that doctrine or recoiled from it. Watari did neither. He spoke of rot without squeamishness. He spoke of passage without romantic fog. He made it sound like a door because he had likely watched that door open.
Against her will, a form of praise surfaced. Not kindness. Recognition.
An aberrant man. An outlier. A rare refinement from a base vein.
She permitted the thought one heartbeat, then filed it away. Praise, ungoverned, becomes indulgence. Indulgence becomes error.
Her gaze slid over the tavern again. Mugs held like reliquaries. Hands guarding heat as if it were coin. A spoon scraping porcelain with the slow insistence of poverty. A dog’s wary eye that understood hierarchy without catechism. The room bent around her presence like a congregation that did not like its own piety.
When she spoke, it was quiet. It carried anyway.
“You offer respect as if it were a gift.” Her voice had the chill lucidity of a verdict. “It is not. It is the minimum toll for speaking intelligently.” She let her eyes rest on him. “You are correct. Fear is the preferred theologian of the small. It baptizes ignorance and calls it certainty.”
His description of severity as beauty earned him the faintest narrowing of her eyes. Not displeasure. Calibration.
“Do not make winter into ornament.” Her tone sharpened. “Winter is not beautiful because it is cruel. It is beautiful because it is incorruptible. It performs ablation. It strips pretense. It reveals the load-bearing beams of a soul.”
He had spoken of the Undying Tree with reverence. She did not permit him to keep that reverence untested.
“And do not handle the Tree like a curiosity.” She leaned a fraction into the wall. The tavern’s air seemed to grow more rarefied. “It is not a philosophy to admire from a safe hearth. It is a praxis. It costs. It collects. It does not negotiate. If you truly understand that, you will stop describing decay as if it exists to comfort you.”
Then he said he was thankful for her mother. He named the Lichqueen. He meant it as stone on a grave. Heavy. Necessary.
Ixqueya’s expression did not flare. It refined. Her stillness became narrower. More judicial.
“No.” One syllable. Final.
Her eyes held his without blinking.
“Xandera is not my mother.” The correction was delivered with patrician precision, the sort that makes error feel like a stain. “She is my sovereign. Your mother is the Blood Fox. Do not confuse womb with throne. Men who blur categories do not live long. They become cautionary inscriptions.”
He spoke of Tonatiuh with curiosity. Ixqueya’s mouth threatened a smile, then chose austerity instead.
“You do not know him.” A faint, almost cruel amusement entered her voice. “Be grateful. He will take your measure with his eyes before your greeting ends. He will decide what you should become. He will call it benevolence.” She glanced, briefly, toward the white of her own carapace. “If my palette pleases you, credit him. He teaches color theory like a priest teaches sin. Loudly. With unearned certainty. The results are acceptable. That is why he remains in my orbit.”
Then he spoke of friends. Of masks. Of liking her as she was. He tried to turn her into something intimate. Something containable.
Ixqueya’s face settled into its most perfected contempt. Not anger. Administration.
“You are not a confessor.” Her voice cooled further. “Do not pretend pastoral office. You do not get to diagnose me as though I were a patient.” She let a pause fall. Heavy as wet wool. “As for liking me. Keep that sentiment for those who require it. I do not.”
His jest about drink and bankruptcy drew a brief glance toward the bar. Bottles lined like petty idols. Glass altars for men who wanted forgetfulness to feel sacramental.
Then came Sukegei. Useful. Vulgarity loud. Utility quiet. The soldier’s answer. Pragmatic. Incomplete.
Ixqueya’s eyes sharpened. The hearth cracked behind her like punctuation.
“Useful is not explanation.” Her voice lowered into a colder register. “It is the word men use when they wish to conceal motive behind function.” Her gaze pinned him. “Your mother does not train men out of charity. She trains them to be spent. If she shaped Sukegei, she intended a return.”
At last, his question. Her investigation.
Ixqueya’s attention moved through the tavern again, swift as an audit. The man whose laughter arrived a heartbeat late. The woman whose fingers hovered near a pocket with rehearsed caution. The barkeep’s posture that suggested old lessons in ducking. Ordinary life. The preferred vestment of conspiracy. Rot rarely entered with trumpets. It arrived as habit.
“It advances.” Her words were clipped. Exact. “Quietly. The docks are staged. Commerce is being used as a dirge a ritual meant to distract. The props change. The hands do not.” She paused. Considered how much to reveal. “Objects are moving that do not behave like inert cargo. They draw consequence. They invite attentions that should not exist.”
Her gaze returned to Watari. The puzzle remained. A man of ignoble provenance. Yet disciplined. Clear-eyed. Strangely principled in the way only veterans can be, when principle has been scoured down to what still functions.
She let him feel, for a moment, the rare weight of her recognition. Not warmth. Not approval. Acknowledgment.
“You are an irritant to my assumptions,” she said softly. “That is not an insult. It is the closest thing to praise you will receive from me.”
Then she concluded, voice turning again to iron.
“If Sukegei is near this flow, your mother placed him there because degeneracy is light. Light things pass through narrow doors.” Her eyes did not blink. “That leaves two possibilities. He is an instrument. Or he is a sacrifice who has not yet learned he is already dead.”
She held him, smoke and fire behind them. Winter between them.
“So tell me.” Her tone was calm. Implacable. “Which role is he playing.”
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