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.”
Watari let her words fall where they wished. He did not reach out to catch them, nor did he turn aside from them. They settled in him like fine snow, yet doing little to change the shape of the man beneath. He had seen sharper speech thrown in brighter anger. He had heard decrees spoken in tents where maps were laid like flayed skins. He had learned that contempt, when it is practiced often, becomes routine. It may chill, yet it rarely instructs.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
Watari Devante wrote:
Watari let her words fall where they wished. He did not reach out to catch them, nor did he turn aside from them. They settled in him like fine snow, yet doing little to change the shape of the man beneath. He had seen sharper speech thrown in brighter anger. He had heard decrees spoken in tents where maps were laid like flayed skins. He had learned that contempt, when it is practiced often, becomes routine. It may chill, yet it rarely instructs.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
His brush did not falter, as per usual. In the flickering light of his corner, he worked as steadily as a mason setting stones in a wall that must outlast him. The tavern, for all its noise and smell and small hunger, began to gather itself upon the board. Almost as if its spirit had been waiting to be named. Timber-dark became timber-true. The hearth’s core became a living red that breathed outward into amber. Smoke was not merely haze; it was a low cloudbank pressed beneath rafters. It turned the ceiling into a dusk that never quite lifted. Light pooled where it was allowed. Shadow remained where it had earned tenure. Even the scarring of the tables came through.
Beyond his board, the room continued its homely endurance. A spoon scraped a bowl with the slow insistence of poverty. A boot shifted while a bench creaked. Over it all, the hearth remained, yet near Ixqueya it felt diminished. Almost as if she had judged it; a monarch reduced to an acolyte. Flames still spoke. Sparks still leapt upward like brief bright birds. They perished before they could become anything worthy of notice.
He listened to her correction and accepted it without protest. Pride did not rise in him like a wounded animal. He let the mistake die cleanly. “You are right,” he said, quietly. “I spoke wrongly.” He rinsed his brush. The water clouded with pigment, a small storm in a cup. He swirled it once. The motion was slow and careful, like stirring silt without waking what sleeps beneath. “I do not blur womb with throne,” he added. “Not when it matters. Habit betrayed me. Not intent.” He knew that Xandera was her mother, but her status as a symbol as the lich queen superseded maternal classification.
He set the brush back to the board and finished the stroke he had begun, because he had carried one lesson from war into every peaceful craft. Do not leave a line unfinished when danger is near. Ruin loves gaps. Only then did he lift his eyes to her fully. The lantern's glow warmed the brown of them until they looked like polished wood held too long near fire. His face remained composed as an old tree is beneath wind that has broken younger branches.
Then, as if her inquiry and the tavern’s hush were not the only things that mattered in the world. Watari asked her a question that belonged to quieter seasons. “What do you think of my work?” It was not a plea. Not a bid for recognitiopn. It was the simple curiosity of a craftsman placing his labor before a mind he knew to be sharp, and therefore worth the risk of honesty.
He tipped the board slightly. Watari did not offer it into her hands. He did not step into her gravity. He merely angled it so she could see what he had made of this place. The hearth rendered as a living core rather than a decorative blaze. Lanternlight laid down in honest pools. Smoke as a low canopy of brume. Patrons suggested by posture and weight, not stolen likeness. The room held as it truly was; not noble. It was simply enduring.
“I have painted battle, and battle always lies. It is too loud. Too hungry for meaning. Too eager to make blood into a story that sounds clean.” His gaze dropped to the board for a brief spell, as if he were checking a line for fairness. “This is harder. The ordinary does not shout its name. It has to be listened into shape.” He let that rest. The tavern breathed around it. Fire crackled. A patron attempted laughter and failed, choking on his poison of choice.
Then he returned to her question, as one returns from a window to a blade laid on the table. “As for Sukegei.” His voice remained calm. It carried the plainness of a soldier. “I do not know, with certainty, which role he is playing. If I claimed certainty, I would be lying. You do not seem fond of lies.” He did not soften the admission. He let it stand like a post driven into ground. “I have seen men used as instruments, and I have seen men offered as sacrifices who did not know the altar had already been built. Sometimes the difference is only in the patience of the hand that holds them.”
His brush moved again, almost absent-mindedly, adding a thin line of shadow beneath a bench. A small act. A grounding act. As if to keep his words from drifting. “My mother trains for returns. She does not sharpen blades out of kindness. She sharpens them to be used.” His eyes lifted to Ixqueya again. “If Sukegei is near the flow you describe, then yes. He is there because he can pass where heavier men cannot. Because he draws attention and survives it.” He added one more quiet stroke, a gleam on a tankard rim, the kind of detail that makes a scene feel lived rather than staged.
“If you force me to choose. I would wager he is intended as an instrument first. Sacrifices are chosen for reliability. He is not reliable. He is stubborn. He is lucky. He is infuriatingly hard to kill cleanly.” A faint, dry humor touched his mouth and faded, like sunlight briefly finding a crack in cloud. “But instruments can become sacrifices. Especially when the hand holding them grows impatient. If your net tightens, then roles change. Men discover too late that the door they were meant to slip through has become a trap.”
Watari’s gaze drifted across the tavern for a breath. The counting barkeep. The late-laughing man. The woman whose fingers hovered near her pocket as if rehearsing theft or fear. Ordinary life wearing secrecy like a heavy cloak. “You asked which role he is playing.” His voice gained a firmer edge. “The better question is who is holding the script. Whatever is moving that should not move. Those are the hands that decide whether a man is expendable or not.”
He did not flatter her. He did not fear her. He spoke as one veteran to another force in the field. “And you...You are the kind of winter that strips pretense. If he is near this flow, he will not stay ambiguous for long. You will make him reveal what he is, or you will break him until he does.” He paused. Firelight shifted on the wall. The tavern seemed to lean in, not because it cared for truth, but because it always listened when danger spoke.
Watari tipped the board again, almost imperceptibly. He returned to the earlier thread rather than abandoning it. “So...Tell me. What do you see in it. Does my painting hold the room honestly. Or have I given it too much flair?" He chuckled. Watari's eyes meeting her polar ones. Not as an equal predator, but as a comrade. A fellow soul who understands the bitter winds of death and the tang of iron on winter's wind after a battle.
Ixqueya regarded the proffered board with hoatfrost stillness. It was as though Watari had angled not a painting toward her but some oblique shrine demanding adjudication. Her gaze descended in an unhurried arc. Frost-blue irises dilated, contracting with the slow, inexorable appraisal. The lantern’s aureate luminance refracted within them for a heartbeat and then perished. It extinguished like a votive smothered beneath a pall.
What he had rendered was an ecclesiastically insignificant chamber. A mundane alehouse exhaling its habitual mélange of tallow, sweat, and the sticky torpor of lives led without consequence. Tables scarified by dull knives. Rafters sagging with the accumulated ballast of smoke. A hearth that beat not as a symbol of communal grace but as a crude myocardial contraction. It perpetuated warmth through a structure unworthy of reverence. No liturgies. No martyrdoms. No imperial edicts carved in stone. Only the quotidian detritus of survival.
Yet his devotion to it had a strange, disconcerting accuracy.
“You expend prodigious exertion,” Ixqueya murmured, “on a chamber whose entire metaphysic will be annulled by the next strong frost.” Her tone was dry. “A space destined to be effaced by time, and you immortalize it as though it possessed vocation or sacrament.”
Still, she humored him. She leaned infinitesimally forward, examining the interplay of shadow and varnish he had coaxed into reluctant coherence.
“You do not embalm it in sentiment,” she conceded. “Commendable. False sanctity is an abomination greater than squalor.” One finger, clawed in white-and-onyx chitin, traced an intangible semicircle above the board. “The hearth you have captured correctly. It is not hospitality. It is the rudimentary organ keeping this decrepit carcass marginally animate.”
Her eyes glided toward the rafters he had coated in umbered haze.
“And the smoke, does not ascend like benediction. It stagnates. It broods. As if the structure itself distrusts the firmament.” A narrow inclination of her chin. “You listen to the environment with unnerving fidelity. That is… rare.”
A fractional pause. Then: “Your fixation remains aberrant. You could be chronicling cathedra, coronations, cataclysms. Instead you immortalize a room that reeks of mildew and proletarian regret. Either you squander your aptitude, or you possess a shrewd instinct for where decay incubates its slow apostasy.”
His commentary on Sukegei lingered like a parasitic filament in her thoughts. Hard to kill. Useful to some clandestine mulling. A volatile blade whose edge was never quite what it appeared.
“You are correct,” she conceded reluctabtly. “If he is entangled with those heliolatrous degenerates, then his spine is already bent toward a false altar.” Her voice thinned into a glacial monotone. “The devotees of that so-called Lord of Light specialize in weaponizing the morally infirm. They take fractured psyches, lacquer them in zeal, and hurl them at problems requiring neither zeal nor thought.”
Then she looked him fully in the face; an act she offered rarely, and never cheaply.
“Humor me, do you place credence in that luminalry postor? Do you genuflect to the Tree of Life and the Tree of Undying as mere philosophical scaffolding? Or have you conjured some private cosmogony to justify outliving better men?”
The question was not contemptuous; it was diagnostic.
“You are far too perspicacious to be doctrinally vacant,” she said. “Men always bow to something. Whether idol, memory, principle, or trauma. The delusion of self-sovereignty is merely an unwritten theology.”
Her next breath crystalized mid-air before dissolving.
“Power is an ephemeral construct,” she continued. “A consensual hallucination ratified by frightened minds. Crowds agree, temporarily, that sigils possess gravitas. That thrones exude inevitability, that scriptures confer absolution. They forget they authored the reverence themselves.”
A scoff escaped her. Soft. Serrated.
“Democracy. Dynastic absolutism. Priesthoods. Philosophical canons,” she listed, each term delivered like a judicial indictment. “All are legitimized by credulous assemblies desperate for architecture in their fear.”
Her eyes grew stiller, if that were possible.
“There is only one sovereignty that does not require acclaim. Death.” No theatricality softened the statement. It was arithmetic. “It does not solicit homage. It does not negotiate. It does not convene councils. It arrives. It tabulates. It repossesses.”
She regarded the common patrons he had painted. The soon-to-be cadavers in waiting.
“Perhaps that is the sole tragic elegance of the mortal condition. The immortally challenged alone perceive valuation. They awaken knowing the ledger closes. Their cowardice is honest. Their courage is interim. Their love is a brief heresy against entropy.”
At last she returned her gaze to him.
“So I ask again,” Ixqueya said, voice now a frost-laden verdict." Her scrutiny sharpened into a fine point. “When the fire guttered and the snows pressed in, and no one remained to witness your pieties. Whom or what would you be serving then?”
A final glance toward the tavern’s rendered face.
“Does your art answer that,” she asked, “or is it merely the occupation of hands seeking to distract a mind unwilling to articulate its creed?”
"Yo Theo, why does she talk like that Thanos guy?" He pointed at Ixqueya
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
The subtle spice of a mentholatum smoke filled the air as the cacophony of varied strategems and the work of war cast a resonant symphony of its own, the beating heart of war as it were, a scene played out in myriad forms across the annals of history for so long as there had been life there had been conflict. It was a fact the Lord General was well accustomed to, each must earn its keep upon the realm and the universe yielded naught to one who hadn't the audacity to stake the claim.... and keep it. Only one thing was acceptable to the Imperium, a persistent forward push and in their diction, the term retreat was all but taboo, a strategic necessity, a happenstance oft not repeated more than once. The doctrines of commanders had varied such and such though Aleksandr, characteristic of his Mordian heritage, sought clockwork efficiencies in his warmachine which stood in stark contrast of the traditional doctrines of the massed assault, he garnered where a bludeon took many hits to maim, a warhammer, a truly honed weapon, intended to get the job done precisely and in as few hits as possible.
They were the Astra Militarum, excellence was not the expectation it was the standard, on the other side of which lay only two fates, death or summary execution nevertheless, advances in a new sector were customarily challenging, unexpected lapses in progress spurning strategic contingencies, myriad acts of heroism spurned upon vox-casters to hold the morale not that Aleksandr was particularly concerned about that of hsi own. To the Lord General's eye, war had been tediously gamified and it was a matter of wit and resolve, the ever-precarious gambit unto which territories and lives were laid on the line but then, excellence was the standard, withdrawal and advance, assault and defense, interception and interdiction, terminologies were better described then when they saw action. The schola progenium had played one part in orienting him to the realities of war, but the greatest tutor had been experience and his time in the trenches as Commissar was not forgotten. But the great game was played with far higher stakes at this table, necessitating what was an axiom what described the Lord General; Tactical Discretion.
In the Grim Darkness of this millenium, each foe presented itself anew, countless strata of varying edicts and battle formations each unpredictable and menacingly effective in its own right, every foe bringing the devastations of their own arsenal to the front leaving humans to do what they did best; improvise, adapt, overcome . Ofcourse, not all was left to chance, the Lord General laid upon each battlefield a meticulously master-crafted magnum opus that in some ways did not vary in their degree of detail from the work of that eccentric tailor that had just been lingering around, but ofcourse, War was a far more endearing and passionate endeavor than cloth craft and such and such. Nothing brought the General as much satisfaction as a well planned surgical strike excising away the buboe which was the ambition of the foe, with fire, plasma, las and more, a palette that he exercised with fervid and furious intent upon that eternal canvas, the auspicious arena, the field of honor. What a privilege and an honor it was to serve the Emperor so, he loved his job.
The only shame was he could not frequent that place as much as he would have liked, for the duties of the office now beckoned to him like wanton wench having acquiesced a new suitor.
✠✠✠
" What news from the front, was that Tau expedition in the southern zone dealt with? "
He inquired taking momentary pause from the smoking pipe as he reclined upon the auscpicious pulpit what which bore the imperial seal, that surely hung above them all, symbolically if not in forme.
" No, your grace. No engagement was recorded by the perimeter patrol, they departed soon after, we speculate it was an impromptu scouting party with some other motive. They did not intend on being discovered, directed by intel our augur arrays were directed to the area with the machine spirits running a more scrutinizing protocol that was able to diffuse the scrying noise put in place by the xenos, we were able to get a lock and I presume they were well aware, this likely prevented an exchange since the perimeter patrol was not appropriately equipped ... er... supposedly. "
Aleksandr pondered for a moment, his semblance conveying neither displeasure nor approval
" Hmn... very well... see to it that I am not mocked... caution is to be exercised for the principle strategy of that particular breed of xenos is to strike from out of sight, we should anticipate that we are being watched, stagger the patrols, change the routines, Commodore, you have my approval to start conducting regular sorties in that zone utilizing our augur-craft. And... have a basilisk division deployed at the second line, so we have the capacity to strike back if caught unawares... "
The officers receiving command nodded dilligently
" In the meanwhile make our claim against the manufactora in Noumensyd for the debt the locals owe us "
Aleksandr added, taking a slow drag off his smoking pipe
At once, your lordship
Aleksandr, issued a slow exhale of the smoke, before returning to thought
" Still no word of that man of Regac's ? He who took the Thrones ? "
Inquired the Lord General
" No, your lordship "
Was the precarious and somewhat hushed response of a subordinate
" Nor will there be... "
Was the sly response issued from a Colonel Martellan, brooding in the corner amidst other officers
" This was a ploy of Regac's to take the thrones and blame another, this man is well hid and your Lordship's money well spent... I wager it.
A subtle grin appeared over Aleksandr's features.
" You have a rare grasp of the conspirator's mind, Martellan... and are to be commended on it. Better us than the Tau, doubtless sowing discord by virtue of bolstering notions of resistance. "
✠✠✠
" Some speak of certainties and others seek to defy them, for better or for worse, there are those who inspire poetic allegory and those who write and sing of it and better to be in the former camp, excess consideration of intricacies whittles the mind, what matters truthfully is absolution in the present. The Emperor beckons us to live while we live, oblivion is a certainty but it is also the end and better therein to invest in the journey than to dream about ends... on my part, I do not wish to keep company with the dead, so long as the heart beats and there is vivacity, Emperor willing we shall go on with vigor. And nothing quite inspires vigor as.... Amasec "
Ruby waves cascaded into crystalline chalice, sweeping unto themselves as rich crimson settled, an exquisite vintage nonetheless, the grape that had given its life for such delectable ends was not without its meaning and the bottle itself paid homage to the vine, to some meaningless theatrical eulogy, to others an epitaph, an edifice of celebration, perspective is what differed, the only flaw was to be so grounded in one or the other, to live excessively or to give in to lamentations and obsess over death. Aleksandr had no sympathies for heartless neuters, a contradiction into themselves, a cry for grandeur ill-earned, a beckoning for adorations unmerited, the expectation of reverence by virtue of ill-fulfilled privilege, misconstrued and ill-afforded by parasites with ulterior motives what would easily be confused for true respect and then in subtle jest to make challenges upon it, but a cliff was neither daunted by the roar of the wave nor did it afford its audience.
In truth, a profound sense of self-respect could be easily mistaken for pride, but the former needn't supplication, it was equally at home upon the throne or within the trench, for its virtue was act, not record. These things became increasingly incomprehensible, hubris was easily afforded to those who narrowed the confines of their horizons to absolute truths, in one forme or the other. And why should one not aspire to some measure of greatness, posterity would not afford recognition to those not emboldened to seek some measure of glory or to defy the mundane simplitude, the principle greatness therein was that a portion of the quill that writ fates was present in the hands of even the unlikeliest of souls. There were those to call Alexander proud whom had not marched the deserts at Opis, there were those to call Caesar proud whom had not baptised themselves in the frigid Rubicon, but were they proud to aspire to something more than themselves and to not be contented with anything less than the world and if kings and conquerors were truly forgotten then they would have no place in the histories of civilizations and peoples far removed from them by centuries.
Carpe Diem... Carpe... Diem.
Or forever be unto those whom should say, it was luck, it was fortune, it was favor, it was far too difficult, it was not known... and so forth. But to be granted a day and not invest it in some measure of achieving greatness was in and of itself not necessarily virtue. The theatrics were well-merited, the bravado festive and unperturbed, the passion unabashed and the will indomitable. The Emperor had not left in his stead those whom should see the galaxy surrendered to others, his gilded visage beckoned conquest and battle to every soul in the Imperium, for therein was progress, the endless, unforgiving, glorious march. And in the end, to possess dignity was to have something to be dignified about, it phased not the wise and self-assured but infuriated those whom had something to envy.
✠✠✠
The lord general issued a slow swirl to the sanguine concoction, a fresh measure of Lho-substrate added to the smoking pipe, easing himself for a moment. The wall decorated with the skulls of various xeno and heretic, trophies taken from past foes and great battles, they were game unto him. Frigid eyes scowered the horizon beyond the window.
" Arpat will be ours "
He muttered, before eyes shifted to the great library beside him, the deeds of the imperiums great heroes, treatises on strategies and great battles and anecdotal volumes on varied disciplines of science, technology and medicine.
" Your Lordship "
Stated one of Aleksandr's subordinates coming forth with a large case, undoing the clips before bowing down on one knee presenting the contents to the Lord General. A gilded galvanic rifle, a true masterpiece of mechanicus ingenuity.
" Ah, Archibald, you've been missed old friend... "
The Lord General added, addressing the rifle.
" The magnificent trait of the galvanic rifle is that it kills yet leaves the corpse intact, well-suited for the mechanicus to conduct their experiments or... for a trophy hunter to process their quarry. Tell them to ready the lander and we'll see if those feral orks continue to be a problem "
✠✠✠
Mathius Kothinto wrote:
Mathius came out of the dishonor his his hair tied back and spashes of water were on his apron and sweat was on his face. He bloated his face with a separate hand towel and he discarded it into the laundry bin.
He approached Sue and Basil with a bit of a grin. A sad and longing grin. He reached up and patted Sue's pelt on her head. "As time passes, the more I doubt you'll ever get to meet Azumi and Ren. You remind me so much of Azumi. Usually when I'd say her name, she would poof in and make a joke, then start chasing her tails"
He approached Sue and Basil with a bit of a grin. A sad and longing grin. He reached up and patted Sue's pelt on her head. "As time passes, the more I doubt you'll ever get to meet Azumi and Ren. You remind me so much of Azumi. Usually when I'd say her name, she would poof in and make a joke, then start chasing her tails"
Sue looked at Mathius with surprise, her fox-tail wagging softly while she listened to him. "Azumi, huh? It sounds like you miss her a lot..." She nuzzled her pelt-head into his hand. "I hope she comes back, maybe, one day."
Lin Xueqing wrote:
"...?" 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...
Basil whistled and phased through the ceiling, meeting Xueqing at the top of the stairs. "What's cookin' sista?" She asked, her eye-lights studying the girl.
Realizing that a skeleton was in front of her, her footsteps paused as she tried to stabilize herself.
"...Devilish scare. Mobs invading my home. Getting myself almost dead. Then a weird woman coming in doing weird stuff."
Xueqing seemed like she wanted to sleep. Really.
She gave a big yawn, then proceeded to look for a bedroom. Or at least a bed.
"...Devilish scare. Mobs invading my home. Getting myself almost dead. Then a weird woman coming in doing weird stuff."
Xueqing seemed like she wanted to sleep. Really.
She gave a big yawn, then proceeded to look for a bedroom. Or at least a bed.
Lin Xueqing wrote:
Realizing that a skeleton was in front of her, her footsteps paused as she tried to stabilize herself.
"...Devilish scare. Mobs invading my home. Getting myself almost dead. Then a weird woman coming in doing weird stuff."
Xueqing seemed like she wanted to sleep. Really.
She gave a big yawn, then proceeded to look for a bedroom. Or at least a bed.
"...Devilish scare. Mobs invading my home. Getting myself almost dead. Then a weird woman coming in doing weird stuff."
Xueqing seemed like she wanted to sleep. Really.
She gave a big yawn, then proceeded to look for a bedroom. Or at least a bed.
This girl literally passed out the second she made contact with the bed.
Someone put a blanket over her. /hj
Someone put a blanket over her. /hj
Andrew Rhodes wrote:
"Yo Theo, why does she talk like that Thanos guy?" He pointed at Ixqueya
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
"I dunno. I never met that overgrown raisin."
Her gaze, hoarfrost-still, moved over the board with the slow certainty of a glacier reading the valley it intends to take. He watched that appraisal without flinching. Ixqueya’s inquests were to be expected. She was nothing if not demanding. Nothing if not precise.
In his corner, the tavern was a small hollow in a larger wilderness. A wooden burrow dug into the flank of night. The hearth’s fire pulsed behind its grate like a captive sun, lesser than the true sky but stubborn in its service. Lanternlight fell in amber patches across the floorboards, like late autumn sunlight finding gaps in a canopy. Beyond those pools, shadow held its ground. Patient. Old. Watari painted as though he were listening to a landscape.
The board took pigment the way bark takes rain. Dark umber became beam-shadow. A warmer wash became the hearth’s breath. He coaxed the room into being with the same attention he once gave to tracking prints in windblown grass. He did not prettify. He did not condemn. He rendered what endured. Scarred tables. A bench worn smooth by a thousand restless shifts. The dull gleam of pewter. The soot-stain that climbed a post like a slow vine.
He nodded at her commentary. He smiled as well, faint and unoffended, as if she had named the obvious truth of a hill. Small. Temporary. Bound for erasure. “You are right, this chamber is not a cathedral. It is not a throne-room. It is not a place that expects remembrance.” He laid another line. A thin edge of light on a tankard rim. A shadow under a table where boots had worried the boards. Small details. Honest ones. “But the world is not only made of what announces itself,” he continued. “The great deeds happen under banners. Then they pass. The quiet lives happen in rooms like this. They pass too. Often faster.”
His voice stayed gentle. It carried the cadence of long roads. Of campfires under open sky. Of stories spoken low so as not to wake the wolves. “In the steppe, the land does not keep your words for you. The wind takes them. The grass folds back. Hooves erase tracks by morning. If you want a thing remembered, you must place it somewhere the weather cannot reach so easily.” He glanced at the board as though it were a small cairn built from color.
“Everything is forgotten in time,” he said. “Even death claims memory. It takes names. Then it takes the mouths that speak them. It is not enough that a man dies. He must also be unmade.” His brush slowed, then hovered. The bristles trembled with a bead of pigment like dark sap. “Art is how we delay that. Not by victory. Only by stubbornness. A leaf pressed between pages does not remain a leaf. It becomes a sign that autumn once existed. A creature trapped in amber does not live. Yet it refuses complete erasure. That is what I chase.”
He rinsed the brush. The water clouded like silt in a creek after rain. He swirled it once and set it down again with the care of someone who has learned that even small tools deserve steadiness. Then he did something that did not fit her severity. He asked, simply, and with real curiosity. Inside him, the question she had asked kept turning. Whom do you serve when no witness remains. It was the kind of inquiry that strips a man down the way winter strips a tree. Leaves gone. Sap slowed. Only the load-bearing branches left.
He thought of what he had bowed to over the years. Not crowns. Not applause. He had bowed to necessity. He had bowed to comradeship. He had bowed, at times, to sheer survival. He had outlived men who deserved longer summers than they were granted. The memory of them sat in him like stones carried in a pouch, not heavy enough to stop him walking, never light enough to forget. He looked at Ixqueya again, and answered her creed-question without trying to polish it into something impressive. “I do not believe in that Lord of Light. I do not feel it in my bones.”
He let the statement stand cleanly. Then he softened it, not into faith, but into tolerance. “But I find it inoffensive,” he added. “Some have found peace beneath it. Some have found the courage to be kinder than they would have been. If that is true, then I will not begrudge them their warmth, even if it is not mine.” His gaze lowered briefly to the board, to the humble scene he had chosen as subject. Then he spoke of the Tree. “As for the Tree of Life. The Undying Tree.” His voice grew quieter, as if he were speaking of roots beneath soil. “I do not hold it as ornament. I subscribe to it because I have seen it.”
A pause. A breath. “I have seen endings refuse to stay ended. I have seen rot become door. I have watched the world take what should have been final and fold it into a new shape. When you have seen that, it stops being scaffolding. It becomes weather. It becomes terrain.” He shrugged one shoulder and set the painting back onto its stand. His eyes traveled its details again. The way a forester studies a grove, deciding where the deadwood lies, deciding what should be left untouched.
“I paint to preserve,” he said. “To raise questions. To make a mind stop and look twice.” A small grin came, bright as sun on snow. It held acknowledgement and a gentle jeer. “You should understand that. You lecture about how ice preserves. How cold keeps rot from doing its work too quickly. I do the same with pigment. My frost is color.” Then he exhaled. Her philosophy deserved respect. It also deserved friction where it overreached.
“You say power is a consensual hallucination. Often it is. Crowds are easy to steer. They will crown a man at dawn and stone him by dusk if hunger sharpens.” His eyes lifted to her. Steady. Warm. Unafraid of her verdict. “But some sovereignties do not need acclaim,” he continued. “A river does not ask permission to carve a valley. A mountain does not require a vote to cast its shadow. Winter does not convene a council. It arrives.”
He did not deny her last sentence, either. He refined it. “And yes,” he said, “death is sovereign. It comes. It tabulates. It repossesses.” His voice remained calm, yet something firmer moved beneath it. “But it is not the only force that does not require applause. Love does not ask a crowd to make it real. It burns in one heart. It changes what that heart will do. Memory is the same. Principle too. They are not thrones. They are roots. Quiet. Persistent. They crack stone over time.” He looked again at the painted patrons. The soon-to-be-forgotten. The soon-to-be-dead.
“These small lives matter while they are here. Not because the cosmos claps. Because choices ripple. A hand shared at the right moment can keep a man from becoming a corpse that night. A kindness can turn aside a cruelty that would have taken root. It is not grand. It is still real.” His hand rested lightly on the stand, not painting for a breath. The tavern continued its murmurs like wind in reeds. Fire cracked. Smoke brooded overhead.
“When the fire gutters,” Watari answered at last, “and the snows press in, and no one remains to witness me. I will still be serving the same thing.” His smile returned, smaller now, true. “I will be serving remembrance. Not glory. Not comfort. Remembrance. The refusal to let the world vanish cleanly.” He tilted his head toward the painting again, returning to her final barb without bitterness.
“And if it is also distraction; then it is a humane one. A mind cannot stare into the night forever without finding it staring back.” His eyes held hers. He let the question stand beneath the low canopy of smoke, like a lantern set on the ground in a dark wood.
In his corner, the tavern was a small hollow in a larger wilderness. A wooden burrow dug into the flank of night. The hearth’s fire pulsed behind its grate like a captive sun, lesser than the true sky but stubborn in its service. Lanternlight fell in amber patches across the floorboards, like late autumn sunlight finding gaps in a canopy. Beyond those pools, shadow held its ground. Patient. Old. Watari painted as though he were listening to a landscape.
The board took pigment the way bark takes rain. Dark umber became beam-shadow. A warmer wash became the hearth’s breath. He coaxed the room into being with the same attention he once gave to tracking prints in windblown grass. He did not prettify. He did not condemn. He rendered what endured. Scarred tables. A bench worn smooth by a thousand restless shifts. The dull gleam of pewter. The soot-stain that climbed a post like a slow vine.
He nodded at her commentary. He smiled as well, faint and unoffended, as if she had named the obvious truth of a hill. Small. Temporary. Bound for erasure. “You are right, this chamber is not a cathedral. It is not a throne-room. It is not a place that expects remembrance.” He laid another line. A thin edge of light on a tankard rim. A shadow under a table where boots had worried the boards. Small details. Honest ones. “But the world is not only made of what announces itself,” he continued. “The great deeds happen under banners. Then they pass. The quiet lives happen in rooms like this. They pass too. Often faster.”
His voice stayed gentle. It carried the cadence of long roads. Of campfires under open sky. Of stories spoken low so as not to wake the wolves. “In the steppe, the land does not keep your words for you. The wind takes them. The grass folds back. Hooves erase tracks by morning. If you want a thing remembered, you must place it somewhere the weather cannot reach so easily.” He glanced at the board as though it were a small cairn built from color.
“Everything is forgotten in time,” he said. “Even death claims memory. It takes names. Then it takes the mouths that speak them. It is not enough that a man dies. He must also be unmade.” His brush slowed, then hovered. The bristles trembled with a bead of pigment like dark sap. “Art is how we delay that. Not by victory. Only by stubbornness. A leaf pressed between pages does not remain a leaf. It becomes a sign that autumn once existed. A creature trapped in amber does not live. Yet it refuses complete erasure. That is what I chase.”
He rinsed the brush. The water clouded like silt in a creek after rain. He swirled it once and set it down again with the care of someone who has learned that even small tools deserve steadiness. Then he did something that did not fit her severity. He asked, simply, and with real curiosity. Inside him, the question she had asked kept turning. Whom do you serve when no witness remains. It was the kind of inquiry that strips a man down the way winter strips a tree. Leaves gone. Sap slowed. Only the load-bearing branches left.
He thought of what he had bowed to over the years. Not crowns. Not applause. He had bowed to necessity. He had bowed to comradeship. He had bowed, at times, to sheer survival. He had outlived men who deserved longer summers than they were granted. The memory of them sat in him like stones carried in a pouch, not heavy enough to stop him walking, never light enough to forget. He looked at Ixqueya again, and answered her creed-question without trying to polish it into something impressive. “I do not believe in that Lord of Light. I do not feel it in my bones.”
He let the statement stand cleanly. Then he softened it, not into faith, but into tolerance. “But I find it inoffensive,” he added. “Some have found peace beneath it. Some have found the courage to be kinder than they would have been. If that is true, then I will not begrudge them their warmth, even if it is not mine.” His gaze lowered briefly to the board, to the humble scene he had chosen as subject. Then he spoke of the Tree. “As for the Tree of Life. The Undying Tree.” His voice grew quieter, as if he were speaking of roots beneath soil. “I do not hold it as ornament. I subscribe to it because I have seen it.”
A pause. A breath. “I have seen endings refuse to stay ended. I have seen rot become door. I have watched the world take what should have been final and fold it into a new shape. When you have seen that, it stops being scaffolding. It becomes weather. It becomes terrain.” He shrugged one shoulder and set the painting back onto its stand. His eyes traveled its details again. The way a forester studies a grove, deciding where the deadwood lies, deciding what should be left untouched.
“I paint to preserve,” he said. “To raise questions. To make a mind stop and look twice.” A small grin came, bright as sun on snow. It held acknowledgement and a gentle jeer. “You should understand that. You lecture about how ice preserves. How cold keeps rot from doing its work too quickly. I do the same with pigment. My frost is color.” Then he exhaled. Her philosophy deserved respect. It also deserved friction where it overreached.
“You say power is a consensual hallucination. Often it is. Crowds are easy to steer. They will crown a man at dawn and stone him by dusk if hunger sharpens.” His eyes lifted to her. Steady. Warm. Unafraid of her verdict. “But some sovereignties do not need acclaim,” he continued. “A river does not ask permission to carve a valley. A mountain does not require a vote to cast its shadow. Winter does not convene a council. It arrives.”
He did not deny her last sentence, either. He refined it. “And yes,” he said, “death is sovereign. It comes. It tabulates. It repossesses.” His voice remained calm, yet something firmer moved beneath it. “But it is not the only force that does not require applause. Love does not ask a crowd to make it real. It burns in one heart. It changes what that heart will do. Memory is the same. Principle too. They are not thrones. They are roots. Quiet. Persistent. They crack stone over time.” He looked again at the painted patrons. The soon-to-be-forgotten. The soon-to-be-dead.
“These small lives matter while they are here. Not because the cosmos claps. Because choices ripple. A hand shared at the right moment can keep a man from becoming a corpse that night. A kindness can turn aside a cruelty that would have taken root. It is not grand. It is still real.” His hand rested lightly on the stand, not painting for a breath. The tavern continued its murmurs like wind in reeds. Fire cracked. Smoke brooded overhead.
“When the fire gutters,” Watari answered at last, “and the snows press in, and no one remains to witness me. I will still be serving the same thing.” His smile returned, smaller now, true. “I will be serving remembrance. Not glory. Not comfort. Remembrance. The refusal to let the world vanish cleanly.” He tilted his head toward the painting again, returning to her final barb without bitterness.
“And if it is also distraction; then it is a humane one. A mind cannot stare into the night forever without finding it staring back.” His eyes held hers. He let the question stand beneath the low canopy of smoke, like a lantern set on the ground in a dark wood.
Andrew Rhodes wrote:
"Yo Theo, why does she talk like that Thanos guy?" He pointed at Ixqueya
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
Watari won't respond as he doesn't know earth lore. And his name isn't jack. And Thanos wishes he could talk like her. Lol
Novellaro wrote:
Andrew Rhodes wrote:
"Yo Theo, why does she talk like that Thanos guy?" He pointed at Ixqueya
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
Watari won't respond as he doesn't know earth lore. And his name isn't jack. And Thanos wishes he could talk like her. Lol
Andrew is just wild. He's basically what happens if War Machine acted like Deadpool with memes.
Watari Devante wrote:
Her gaze, hoarfrost-still, moved over the board with the slow certainty of a glacier reading the valley it intends to take. He watched that appraisal without flinching. Ixqueya’s inquests were to be expected. She was nothing if not demanding. Nothing if not precise.
In his corner, the tavern was a small hollow in a larger wilderness. A wooden burrow dug into the flank of night. The hearth’s fire pulsed behind its grate like a captive sun, lesser than the true sky but stubborn in its service. Lanternlight fell in amber patches across the floorboards, like late autumn sunlight finding gaps in a canopy. Beyond those pools, shadow held its ground. Patient. Old. Watari painted as though he were listening to a landscape.
The board took pigment the way bark takes rain. Dark umber became beam-shadow. A warmer wash became the hearth’s breath. He coaxed the room into being with the same attention he once gave to tracking prints in windblown grass. He did not prettify. He did not condemn. He rendered what endured. Scarred tables. A bench worn smooth by a thousand restless shifts. The dull gleam of pewter. The soot-stain that climbed a post like a slow vine.
He nodded at her commentary. He smiled as well, faint and unoffended, as if she had named the obvious truth of a hill. Small. Temporary. Bound for erasure. “You are right, this chamber is not a cathedral. It is not a throne-room. It is not a place that expects remembrance.” He laid another line. A thin edge of light on a tankard rim. A shadow under a table where boots had worried the boards. Small details. Honest ones. “But the world is not only made of what announces itself,” he continued. “The great deeds happen under banners. Then they pass. The quiet lives happen in rooms like this. They pass too. Often faster.”
His voice stayed gentle. It carried the cadence of long roads. Of campfires under open sky. Of stories spoken low so as not to wake the wolves. “In the steppe, the land does not keep your words for you. The wind takes them. The grass folds back. Hooves erase tracks by morning. If you want a thing remembered, you must place it somewhere the weather cannot reach so easily.” He glanced at the board as though it were a small cairn built from color.
“Everything is forgotten in time,” he said. “Even death claims memory. It takes names. Then it takes the mouths that speak them. It is not enough that a man dies. He must also be unmade.” His brush slowed, then hovered. The bristles trembled with a bead of pigment like dark sap. “Art is how we delay that. Not by victory. Only by stubbornness. A leaf pressed between pages does not remain a leaf. It becomes a sign that autumn once existed. A creature trapped in amber does not live. Yet it refuses complete erasure. That is what I chase.”
He rinsed the brush. The water clouded like silt in a creek after rain. He swirled it once and set it down again with the care of someone who has learned that even small tools deserve steadiness. Then he did something that did not fit her severity. He asked, simply, and with real curiosity. Inside him, the question she had asked kept turning. Whom do you serve when no witness remains. It was the kind of inquiry that strips a man down the way winter strips a tree. Leaves gone. Sap slowed. Only the load-bearing branches left.
He thought of what he had bowed to over the years. Not crowns. Not applause. He had bowed to necessity. He had bowed to comradeship. He had bowed, at times, to sheer survival. He had outlived men who deserved longer summers than they were granted. The memory of them sat in him like stones carried in a pouch, not heavy enough to stop him walking, never light enough to forget. He looked at Ixqueya again, and answered her creed-question without trying to polish it into something impressive. “I do not believe in that Lord of Light. I do not feel it in my bones.”
He let the statement stand cleanly. Then he softened it, not into faith, but into tolerance. “But I find it inoffensive,” he added. “Some have found peace beneath it. Some have found the courage to be kinder than they would have been. If that is true, then I will not begrudge them their warmth, even if it is not mine.” His gaze lowered briefly to the board, to the humble scene he had chosen as subject. Then he spoke of the Tree. “As for the Tree of Life. The Undying Tree.” His voice grew quieter, as if he were speaking of roots beneath soil. “I do not hold it as ornament. I subscribe to it because I have seen it.”
A pause. A breath. “I have seen endings refuse to stay ended. I have seen rot become door. I have watched the world take what should have been final and fold it into a new shape. When you have seen that, it stops being scaffolding. It becomes weather. It becomes terrain.” He shrugged one shoulder and set the painting back onto its stand. His eyes traveled its details again. The way a forester studies a grove, deciding where the deadwood lies, deciding what should be left untouched.
“I paint to preserve,” he said. “To raise questions. To make a mind stop and look twice.” A small grin came, bright as sun on snow. It held acknowledgement and a gentle jeer. “You should understand that. You lecture about how ice preserves. How cold keeps rot from doing its work too quickly. I do the same with pigment. My frost is color.” Then he exhaled. Her philosophy deserved respect. It also deserved friction where it overreached.
“You say power is a consensual hallucination. Often it is. Crowds are easy to steer. They will crown a man at dawn and stone him by dusk if hunger sharpens.” His eyes lifted to her. Steady. Warm. Unafraid of her verdict. “But some sovereignties do not need acclaim,” he continued. “A river does not ask permission to carve a valley. A mountain does not require a vote to cast its shadow. Winter does not convene a council. It arrives.”
He did not deny her last sentence, either. He refined it. “And yes,” he said, “death is sovereign. It comes. It tabulates. It repossesses.” His voice remained calm, yet something firmer moved beneath it. “But it is not the only force that does not require applause. Love does not ask a crowd to make it real. It burns in one heart. It changes what that heart will do. Memory is the same. Principle too. They are not thrones. They are roots. Quiet. Persistent. They crack stone over time.” He looked again at the painted patrons. The soon-to-be-forgotten. The soon-to-be-dead.
“These small lives matter while they are here. Not because the cosmos claps. Because choices ripple. A hand shared at the right moment can keep a man from becoming a corpse that night. A kindness can turn aside a cruelty that would have taken root. It is not grand. It is still real.” His hand rested lightly on the stand, not painting for a breath. The tavern continued its murmurs like wind in reeds. Fire cracked. Smoke brooded overhead.
“When the fire gutters,” Watari answered at last, “and the snows press in, and no one remains to witness me. I will still be serving the same thing.” His smile returned, smaller now, true. “I will be serving remembrance. Not glory. Not comfort. Remembrance. The refusal to let the world vanish cleanly.” He tilted his head toward the painting again, returning to her final barb without bitterness.
“And if it is also distraction; then it is a humane one. A mind cannot stare into the night forever without finding it staring back.” His eyes held hers. He let the question stand beneath the low canopy of smoke, like a lantern set on the ground in a dark wood.
In his corner, the tavern was a small hollow in a larger wilderness. A wooden burrow dug into the flank of night. The hearth’s fire pulsed behind its grate like a captive sun, lesser than the true sky but stubborn in its service. Lanternlight fell in amber patches across the floorboards, like late autumn sunlight finding gaps in a canopy. Beyond those pools, shadow held its ground. Patient. Old. Watari painted as though he were listening to a landscape.
The board took pigment the way bark takes rain. Dark umber became beam-shadow. A warmer wash became the hearth’s breath. He coaxed the room into being with the same attention he once gave to tracking prints in windblown grass. He did not prettify. He did not condemn. He rendered what endured. Scarred tables. A bench worn smooth by a thousand restless shifts. The dull gleam of pewter. The soot-stain that climbed a post like a slow vine.
He nodded at her commentary. He smiled as well, faint and unoffended, as if she had named the obvious truth of a hill. Small. Temporary. Bound for erasure. “You are right, this chamber is not a cathedral. It is not a throne-room. It is not a place that expects remembrance.” He laid another line. A thin edge of light on a tankard rim. A shadow under a table where boots had worried the boards. Small details. Honest ones. “But the world is not only made of what announces itself,” he continued. “The great deeds happen under banners. Then they pass. The quiet lives happen in rooms like this. They pass too. Often faster.”
His voice stayed gentle. It carried the cadence of long roads. Of campfires under open sky. Of stories spoken low so as not to wake the wolves. “In the steppe, the land does not keep your words for you. The wind takes them. The grass folds back. Hooves erase tracks by morning. If you want a thing remembered, you must place it somewhere the weather cannot reach so easily.” He glanced at the board as though it were a small cairn built from color.
“Everything is forgotten in time,” he said. “Even death claims memory. It takes names. Then it takes the mouths that speak them. It is not enough that a man dies. He must also be unmade.” His brush slowed, then hovered. The bristles trembled with a bead of pigment like dark sap. “Art is how we delay that. Not by victory. Only by stubbornness. A leaf pressed between pages does not remain a leaf. It becomes a sign that autumn once existed. A creature trapped in amber does not live. Yet it refuses complete erasure. That is what I chase.”
He rinsed the brush. The water clouded like silt in a creek after rain. He swirled it once and set it down again with the care of someone who has learned that even small tools deserve steadiness. Then he did something that did not fit her severity. He asked, simply, and with real curiosity. Inside him, the question she had asked kept turning. Whom do you serve when no witness remains. It was the kind of inquiry that strips a man down the way winter strips a tree. Leaves gone. Sap slowed. Only the load-bearing branches left.
He thought of what he had bowed to over the years. Not crowns. Not applause. He had bowed to necessity. He had bowed to comradeship. He had bowed, at times, to sheer survival. He had outlived men who deserved longer summers than they were granted. The memory of them sat in him like stones carried in a pouch, not heavy enough to stop him walking, never light enough to forget. He looked at Ixqueya again, and answered her creed-question without trying to polish it into something impressive. “I do not believe in that Lord of Light. I do not feel it in my bones.”
He let the statement stand cleanly. Then he softened it, not into faith, but into tolerance. “But I find it inoffensive,” he added. “Some have found peace beneath it. Some have found the courage to be kinder than they would have been. If that is true, then I will not begrudge them their warmth, even if it is not mine.” His gaze lowered briefly to the board, to the humble scene he had chosen as subject. Then he spoke of the Tree. “As for the Tree of Life. The Undying Tree.” His voice grew quieter, as if he were speaking of roots beneath soil. “I do not hold it as ornament. I subscribe to it because I have seen it.”
A pause. A breath. “I have seen endings refuse to stay ended. I have seen rot become door. I have watched the world take what should have been final and fold it into a new shape. When you have seen that, it stops being scaffolding. It becomes weather. It becomes terrain.” He shrugged one shoulder and set the painting back onto its stand. His eyes traveled its details again. The way a forester studies a grove, deciding where the deadwood lies, deciding what should be left untouched.
“I paint to preserve,” he said. “To raise questions. To make a mind stop and look twice.” A small grin came, bright as sun on snow. It held acknowledgement and a gentle jeer. “You should understand that. You lecture about how ice preserves. How cold keeps rot from doing its work too quickly. I do the same with pigment. My frost is color.” Then he exhaled. Her philosophy deserved respect. It also deserved friction where it overreached.
“You say power is a consensual hallucination. Often it is. Crowds are easy to steer. They will crown a man at dawn and stone him by dusk if hunger sharpens.” His eyes lifted to her. Steady. Warm. Unafraid of her verdict. “But some sovereignties do not need acclaim,” he continued. “A river does not ask permission to carve a valley. A mountain does not require a vote to cast its shadow. Winter does not convene a council. It arrives.”
He did not deny her last sentence, either. He refined it. “And yes,” he said, “death is sovereign. It comes. It tabulates. It repossesses.” His voice remained calm, yet something firmer moved beneath it. “But it is not the only force that does not require applause. Love does not ask a crowd to make it real. It burns in one heart. It changes what that heart will do. Memory is the same. Principle too. They are not thrones. They are roots. Quiet. Persistent. They crack stone over time.” He looked again at the painted patrons. The soon-to-be-forgotten. The soon-to-be-dead.
“These small lives matter while they are here. Not because the cosmos claps. Because choices ripple. A hand shared at the right moment can keep a man from becoming a corpse that night. A kindness can turn aside a cruelty that would have taken root. It is not grand. It is still real.” His hand rested lightly on the stand, not painting for a breath. The tavern continued its murmurs like wind in reeds. Fire cracked. Smoke brooded overhead.
“When the fire gutters,” Watari answered at last, “and the snows press in, and no one remains to witness me. I will still be serving the same thing.” His smile returned, smaller now, true. “I will be serving remembrance. Not glory. Not comfort. Remembrance. The refusal to let the world vanish cleanly.” He tilted his head toward the painting again, returning to her final barb without bitterness.
“And if it is also distraction; then it is a humane one. A mind cannot stare into the night forever without finding it staring back.” His eyes held hers. He let the question stand beneath the low canopy of smoke, like a lantern set on the ground in a dark wood.
Ixqueya withheld her reply.
The panel remained before her like a reliquary laid open for inspection. Not a devotional object, but an exhibit. Hours macerated into stain and glaze. She did not appraise the depiction alone. She weighed the mind that had composed it. The strict rationing of radiance. The sanctioned persistence of umbrage. The way the grate’s embercore was rendered less as comfort than as deposition, as if flame itself had been compelled to testify. It was a restraint elevated into a principle. A homily without a congregation. A memorial that refused sanctimony.
Around them, the tavern persisted in its paltry observances. Mugs rose and settled with the cadence of small appetites. Cutlery whispered against crockery in a slow abrasion that sounded like thrift made audible. Vapors from the hearth refused ascent. They clung beneath the rafters in a low, self-inflicted canopy, soot-dark and meekly interminable. The blaze continued to speak in bright crackle and ruddy breath, yet near her it felt diminished by classification, not quenched. Subordinated. A domesticated astral thing penned behind iron.
On the painted surface, bodies existed without appropriation. A shoulder angled toward warmth. A back bowed into vigilance. Fingers strangling a tankard as if it were a charm against the next hour. No pilfered faces. No sentimental larceny. Only mass, inclination, and intent. The commonplace reduced to its cadaveric syntax.
When she finally spoke, her cadence carried no mollification. No warmth. Only the immaculate sound of adjudication that required no public assent.
“You take my austerity for disdain,” Ixqueya said. “You are mistaken. I do not hate recollection. I despise the pageantry that anoints it.”
Her gaze did not lift to him immediately. It lingered in the interval between them, as if assessing whether speech itself merited habitation in that air.
“Remembrance is not dominion. It is a leech that survives by sufferance. It squats within the living and perishes when the living deny it lodging.” A pause. Mortician-calm. “A page without eyes is pulp. A bone without rite is offal. A name without a mouth is mute air.”
The lantern’s amber pool quivered across the board’s grain. The painted hearth remained a bruised nucleus of heat. Her pupils did not widen. Her features did not soften. Her attention had the chill of stone floors in chapels where the dead are kept near the altar so the faithful do not forget the tariff of breath.
“You speak like a man enamored of roots,” she said, eyes returning to the work. “You forget that ground turns rancid. That hoarfrost thickens. That tenacity is not eternality. It is a treaty with what will outlast you.”
Her armor answered her breath with minute, arthropodal assent. Plates settled. Seams flexed. A faint kiss of frost lingered where she had stood before, then ebbed, leaving only a pallid trace as if warmth had been taxed and found wanting.
“You have raised a creed of postponement,” she went on. “You traffic with dissolution. You bottle instants like specimens in spirit.” Her gaze drifted along a stingy highlight he had granted to a tankard’s rim. It was exact. Intractable. “You do not claim conquest. You pursue deferral with the devotion of a man who has mistaken delay for virtue.”
Her eyes narrowed. Not in rebuke. In discernment.
“Here, we part.”
She straightened, and the room’s heat seemed to recoil in reflex, as if embarrassed to be discovered in her vicinity.
“You treat reprieve as service,” Ixqueya said. “I treat it as implement. A fulcrum. A wedge. A key.” Her voice acquired that flinty, tutelary cadence that dismantled illusions without raising volume. “Finality is the only reason your refusal matters. Remove death, and your preservation becomes trinketry. A narcotic for the timid who cannot bear clean endings.”
Her regard swept the room; the barkeep’s counting fingers. The patrons hoard warmth like coins. The choreography of creatures behaving as though tomorrow were owed to them by covenant.
“Your work is not frivolity,” she allowed, and the concession arrived antiseptic, unromantic. “It is accurate. It notices what most discard. That has use.” The word sat like a cold weight. “Do not alchemize use into transcendence. Preservation is not revolt. It is collaboration with inevitability under terms you cannot ultimately impose.”
She inclined her head with the sparseness of a magistrate acknowledging competence. Nothing more.
“You are not a zealot,” she added. “That alone prevents you from becoming tedious.”
Praise from her came as an absence. No ornament. No caress.
When she spoke Sukegei’s name, it fell into the air like a chill coin dropped onto stone.
“Your inference aligns with my own,” Ixqueya said. “Tools are seldom told when the altar is already dressed. Foreknowledge compromises function.” Her eyes hardened, pale as lake ice over depth. “If he endures, it will be by mischance. Not by mercy.”
Silence coagulated. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded, for a moment, like punctuation.
Ixqueya retreated a pace. Then another. The tavern’s warmth crept into the territory she vacated, cautious as a mendicant testing whether the storm had truly withdrawn.
“You have answered sufficiently,” she said. “I require nothing further.”
Her gaze lingered on the board once more. Not possessive. Not wistful. Appraising, as one appraises a bridge after crossing. Which supports are held? Which joints protested?
“Continue,” Ixqueya concluded. “The mundane requires witnesses, even when it does not merit them.”
She turned away.
No flourish attended her withdrawal. No threat. No blessing. Only the winter recession from a room that had endured it without succumbing to its polar spell.
She did not depart the establishment. She repositioned.
Nine feet of cold jurisprudence moved with a rehearsed economy. The floorboards registered her passage in deep, reluctant groans. Patrons tracked her with peripheral instinct, then performed forgetfulness with the quick reverence of those who understand the etiquette of tempests.
She returned to her corner. The same alcove of thinned traffic. The same angle from which the room could be read like an account book without requesting permission. She did not sit immediately. She regarded the chair as one might regard an animal with a history of biting. Then she lowered herself with measured inevitability. Wood complained. The table trembled. The furniture offered its small, ignoble prayer by enduring.
Her ledger waited where she had left it. Clasp sealed. Cover cold and dark. She drew it nearer without opening it. Not yet. It was not solace. It was an audit. Her palm settled upon it with a gesture that could have resembled benediction in a kinder creature. In her it was ownership. A hand laid upon an altar to remind the altar who dictates the rite.
From this vantage, she observed without being approached. She accrued the room.
A sleeve tugged down too quickly. A glance rehearsing exits. A coin counted twice, as though arithmetic could bargain with fate. A laugh arriving late enough to betray its manufacture. Kindness performed too loudly to be clean. The banal always indicted itself when watched long enough. Deceit required motion. Innocence did not.
Her eyes drifted, briefly, toward Watari’s corner again. Not an invitation. Assessment. He had resumed his labor. He would, because men who treat quiet craft as a vow are less predictable than braggarts. Braggarts announce themselves. Vowed men persist. Persistence could be a virtue. Persistence could be camouflage.
He was Nokhoi. Southern. A lineage she dismissed in aggregate with the ease others reserved for vermin. Yet he possessed a restraint that did not smell of court. It smelled of attrition. That incongruity made him an irritant to her taxonomy. A blade tempered without vanity. A mind that could have knelt to cheaper idols and instead chose a harsher discipline.
She watched the room the way a mortician watches mourners. Patient. Unsparing. Mildly contemptuous of performance. These patrons would lie still one day. Their fears would become irrelevant. Their schemes would lose their hands.
Death did not require applause. Only time.
Her gaze slid to the hearth. The fire looked vigorous. Hungry. Demanding fuel, air, attention. A poor god. A god that could be starved. Warmth drew worship because it sells the illusion of permanence.
She did not grant the illusion of laughter. Her mouth moved in a minimal curve that was not amusement—recognition, sharp and private.
“So much devotion,” she murmured, too low to become theatre. “To things that cannot keep their promises.”
Then she returned to silence.
Observation became sacrament. Cataloguing became prayer. She watched patterns cohere. She watched aberrations germinate in damp timber. She waited for the room to disclose what it was concealing.
Winter remained in the corner, enthroned in a chair that resented the honor. A priestess of endings, unmoved by the tavern’s small gods.
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