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WHO: Ghost (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
badfeyth), Kaveh (fussiest) & Netzach (unsafety)
WHAT: November event shenanigans!
WHERE: TAKE A LOOK IT'S IN A BOOK (READING RAINBOW)
WHEN: Late November!
WARNINGS: Fairytale-typical themes and elements that may include, but are not limited to: blood and/or gore, personal injury/body horror, unhealthy self-destructive behaviors. Figure that if it might show up in a traditional Grimms' Fairy Tale, it might well turn up here.
★★★
Once upon a time, there was a man who died.
The man’s work was the writing and telling of stories, but he could not defy death.
The last story he was working on was about a brave and handsome prince who toiled day and night
at building a great tower to save a city from certain destruction.
But now, it seems that prince's efforts will go on for eternity.
“Is there no end to this?” wondered the prince.
“Is there no end to this?” wondered the city as well.
But there is always a tower, and there is always a prince, and there is always a city —
Just then, a murmur came from somewhere.
“Hold on, you're confusing this with a different story entirely!” said the old man who was supposed to have died.
badfeyth), Kaveh (fussiest) & Netzach (unsafety)WHAT: November event shenanigans!
WHERE: TAKE A LOOK IT'S IN A BOOK (READING RAINBOW)
WHEN: Late November!
WARNINGS: Fairytale-typical themes and elements that may include, but are not limited to: blood and/or gore, personal injury/body horror, unhealthy self-destructive behaviors. Figure that if it might show up in a traditional Grimms' Fairy Tale, it might well turn up here.
★★★
Once upon a time, there was a man who died.
The man’s work was the writing and telling of stories, but he could not defy death.
The last story he was working on was about a brave and handsome prince who toiled day and night
at building a great tower to save a city from certain destruction.
But now, it seems that prince's efforts will go on for eternity.
“Is there no end to this?” wondered the prince.
“Is there no end to this?” wondered the city as well.
But there is always a tower, and there is always a prince, and there is always a city —
Just then, a murmur came from somewhere.
“Hold on, you're confusing this with a different story entirely!” said the old man who was supposed to have died.
★ ACT ONE: EXPOSITION ★
no subject
and so it rises, the tower. golden and silver peaks resplendent in its framing of the sun over the sea, because the people of the world need to remember even in their last days that the sea once had the potential to be beautiful. moorish arches cast long, vaulted shadows over the stretch of an island that still laps against the encroaching of an ever-shrinking shore. in this tower, kaveh knows, he has put his all. the shape of the limestone, the heft of the stone, the chiseled frescos of marble and tile, the sea-green of that stained glass as it winks above the skyline bending to its will the cast raining light. but even still, the uglier bits, the bits that kaveh has carefully hidden with skillfully carved recesses and the cast of sconce shadows: kaveh's eyes, to better see the world with. kaveh's ears, to better hear the waves. kaveh's arms, to better hold up its weight. kaveh's legs, so that it better stands against the tide. kaveh's spine, so that it remembers to stand tall beneath the crushing shadow of the incoming storm.
where is kaveh? this is the only story wherein kaveh does not begin by opening his eyes. kaveh no longer has eyes. kaveh no longer has form. kaveh is in the sea and the sand, kaveh is in the sky. kaveh is in the tower, bound and tethered, his blood dripping in long, braided strands along its spire so that it can be used to once again suture the rip of the timeloop shut. kaveh is a single blue feather resting on the tower's steps.
kaveh is everything, and kaveh is nothing. this is how the story ends. ]
no subject
he'd sought him out, because of course he had, not yet fully aware of how many of them are in the story... but he can't find him. not the way he knows him, how he should be.
then again, netzach's feathered little form isn't how he should be either, so here they both are: a feather resting on the steps of a grand tower, and a duck gently picking that feather up in his beak, holding it like a fragile, precious thing.]
no subject
(She's not transformed. Her boots are her boots where they bite into the dirt and her pack is at her side, heavy with only scant reassurance, and she's just here. Just Ghost.)
What sits badly, she eventually decides, is that this story is small. It's deliberately small, lacking the robust complexity of a world filled with people — a painted theater set where blotches of color represent generalizations of ideas without nuance. The crowd, the city, the people, written in the singular because it's not their voices or their wishes that matter, just the way their will acts as a convenient vehicle to achieve some desirable end.
This is a place where the story itself is more alive than the puppets that inhabit it.]
...Oh. I didn't think there'd be —
[A duck, in this type of story, is probably where her thoughts are going, save for the fact that he's a little too alive and a little too green, and as she finds her way up the path to the creature and its feather, it dawns on her that this isn't another puppet in the shadowplay.]
...Wait. Netzach? Why are you — that is you, isn't it?
[She's going to look and feel real stupid if it turns out that it is not, in fact, him. But idly talking to random ducks is far from the stupidest thing she's ever done in a moment like this.]
no subject
[he glances up at her-- very high up-- and takes a moment to tuck the blue feather into his own feathers. it sticks out, like an accessory.]
It's me, yeah, but I don't know why we're both here, or why I'm a bird and you're not.
[seriously, why does he have to be a bird? what's he going to do, like this?]
no subject
[She frowns down at him, eyes narrowing as she takes in the sight of the blue feather amongst his green ones. It's an odd little thing. Like it's important, somehow.]
What are you doing with that feather? It's not one of yours.
★ ACT TWO: CONFRONTATION ★
no subject
Every world is a real world. Every person is a real person. And whoever wrote this story, whoever set it up like this, evidently didn't care about that. They took their idea and they imposed it on this place, on these people, on this narrative, in exactly the way that a person with this achingly familiar power isn't supposed to do.
It makes her fingers itch in a way that they haven't for years, like a stray ember on kindling that caught light when Lestat made her see things like Meta used to do. It makes them ache like a red cloak and stiletto boots in a pitch-dark hallway dotted with a terror's glowing eyes. Someone did this, and she knows someone did this, and it's everything Nym always said was a wrong use of their capabilities — carelessly rearranging lives and circumstances with no thought to anything but their own whims, and damning all the consequences in the process.
Don't write wrongs, right wrongs!
And this is — wrong. It's wrong, because a prince who is Kaveh is resigned to build a tower to serve a city no matter the cost, no matter what it asks of him. It's wrong because that's what the world says is supposed to happen, and so it does happen, over and over and over again. It's wrong because this story is a tragedy that serves no purpose, a doomed prince and an ungrateful city and a rising tide, always hungry and never satisfied.
And if that prince were anyone else, anyone else — maybe that would be that.
The problem is, this prince stormed her apartment and made her eat stew and challenged every damn thing she'd thought she'd accepted about stories and significance and her roles in both, and had the audacity to call her a hero, and he's wrong.]
...Netzach. I need you to tell me something.
[She is talking to a duck, and that doesn't matter, because that's just about where her life is at right now.]
If I said I thought there was a way to save Kaveh. Would you do it? No matter what it took to help him?
[Because she's not a hero, and that's precisely what this story is missing. But even if she can't be one, she might still be able to make one.]
no subject
[of course he would. because in a similar way, kaveh was a ray of sun that warmed him almost as soon as he'd gotten here. one that showed him that warmth was still so very present in other worlds, with other people, and showed him once again how it felt to be given that light. what it was like to be cared for in ways nobody had in a while.
and in entering this story, realizing what it is and what's going on, what's been happening to kaveh's character--
he's not going to tolerate it, however much of a hindrance this small form might be. netzach doesn't have hands, but he could fly. he can speak. he can do something to help kaveh with this role, just like he couldn't the last time because of the role he was shoved into. the last thing he wants is to see kaveh hurt again.
once upon a time there was a little waterbird who desperately wanted to be something more; he can work with that.]
No matter what.
no subject
But every bridge built has to start somewhere. One pole or brick or pylon or support. However it goes, maybe the bridge falls and maybe it doesn't, but you can't possibly know that if you don't put that first piece down.]
...Yeah. I would, too.
[She flexes her fingers, where they hang at her sides. In, out; curled up into half-fists and released again.]
This place feels like something I could've written. Like it was written by someone like me, I mean. And if I'm right, then somewhere around here you should be able to find a book. Because I think — as crazy as it sounds, I think I won't find it, if I try. Because that's how things like this work, right? When there's a human and an animal and they meet on a path, it's the animal who moves the story along. So I think if I ask for something that you can't possibly know, the story will bend to let you give it to me.
[She pauses, then looks at him directly, and says with exacting candor: ]
Little duck, pray help me, for I would know more of this sad prince's tale. Where is the book that accounts for his toils?
no subject
[netzach, he has to admit, has not read many stories. he was a researcher once, he was a student once, but tales like this were rarely on the reading lists; in the library, where the tales bound in those pages were all drawn from the city and its people, there was nothing quite so fantastical.
he listens to her, as promised, and after she requests the book:]
The prince's tale?
[a brief pause, and--
yes. yes, there it is. there's the familiar script in his head, the knowledge of what he's supposed to say and do, establishing a way to go.]
...there was an old man who once lived outside of the city, and watched the prince at his work. If anyone has written an account, then surely it would be there. [and, just as he suddenly knows this to be true:] I can show you the way.
no subject
Well, maybe it's not even about her. But that doesn't mean she doesn't still have a role she can play, or at least one she can carve out for herself.]
Let's go, then. Show me the way.
★ ACT THREE: RESOLUTION ★