Work Text:
Of th3 Gr34at V4stn3ss3s foretold by th3 Bl1nd S33rs, th3r3 4r3 3: th3 V4st Glub, wh1ch w1ll b3 spok3n by Gl'bgolyb 4t th3 F1n4l R3ckon1ng; th3 V4st Honk, wh1ch w1ll b3 sound3d by th3 Lord of 4ng3ls 4t th3 3nd of T1me; 4nd th3 V4st 3xpl3t1v3, wh1ch h4th no 3nd1ng or b3g1nn1ng: for h1s h4t3 1s th3 l1f3bl69d of th3 un1v3rs3.
--from 4 1 3, or, the S4y1ngs of the Bl1nd S33rs.
> Be The Lowblood Handmaid
You hadn't expected this mission to be difficult.
Even when you were a wriggler, your guardian told you stories of the Signless: as a great and terrible general, as an embodiment of rage; and echoing down ages past, in all your other missions, has been the whispered tale of the Sufferer, the Ancestor of Rebels, who will come again and bring the end of the world.
Here in his own time, though, he's been remarkably circumspect. Uprising, unrest and heresy follow after him, but he himself does nothing but wander around with a small group of hangers-on and tell fairy-tales and fables. It's not against the Condesce's law to tell stories, not even dangerous ones.
Not yet.
You'll have to see about fixing that later.
But for all that, and for all that you only have a dozen or so missions under your belt, you are good at this job, and he's as good at making enemies as allies. It doesn't take much, only a little finesse, a little deception, to stir up against him the fears and prejudices and hatreds of the local leaders on Alternia, and the Condesce is more than willing to let them take care of an annoyance for her. Only yestereve, he and his closest followers were led away in chains; he will be executed early tomorrow morning, and his dearest ones sold into slavery.
(Except for one, the one whom your masters decreed must escape. You've taken care of that one, too. That part of the mission was unexpectedly... diverting.)
There is no way he can prevent his fate. Your machinations are precise, implacable, gears grinding into place like the finest clockwork. When it comes to machinations, you are simply the best there is.
There is one thing that is bothering you, however, like a loose tooth on a ratchet. There is one power currently on Alternia whom you have not touched: the one known as the Grand Highblood, the subjugglator who, by sheer force of personality, has raised his organization from an obscure fanatic paramilitary group to Her Imperious Condescension's private secret police, accountable to no one but Herself, feared by all. Your employer had told you not to bother with him, as his participation was unnecessary to your mission, but without him standing behind the verdict, it will never be complete. And your employer did not forbid you from visiting him.
You find him sitting on a throne-like chair in the innermost chamber of his headquarters. The walls, floor, and ceiling are spattered almost artistically with the blood of his victims, and you note with mild interest that all the colors of the hemospectrum are equally represented: no special hatred of lowbloods evident here. He sits with his legs splayed open, his hands draping heavily over the ends of the armrests, an expression under the face-paint that is perhaps pensive, perhaps simply vague.
When he sees you, though, it sharpens. "I motherfucking figured your pretty little hands were all up in this somewhere," he says. "Not very subtle, chica. I'm taking off points for style."
"I'm sorry," you say. "Do I know you?" You've noticed, a few times, that you seem to have built a reputation for yourself, already waiting for you to step into it. It can interfere with a role you'd planned for yourself, as it's doing now, but you've found it quite useful as well. Sometimes people will recoil from you in terror, or offer you elaborate courtesies. But this - you don't even know what this is.
He gets up from his seat and stalks toward you; his long strides cover the ground too quickly. "You're all motherfucking twisted back on yourself again, ain't you? Oh, sister, do you have some miracles ahead of you." He looms over you, and he strokes one long gray finger down one of your braids, but what you feel is not the ordinary kind of danger. That is not what is sizzling under your skin, making your eyes lock on to his eyes.
Before you had completed your training, you had spent whole sleepless days wondering what it would be like to do the ordinary things that other trolls do: but even then you had not dreamt that you would ever do so simple a thing as filling a quadrant. Such things are not meant for you. And yet, here you stand in the Highblood's judgement hall, and whatever is sparking between you, it is not platonic. It is not platonic at all.
And then your mind flashes back to your recent interview with the Executor, and the unexpected direction in which it had gone, and you pull away from him before he can notice the color rising under your skin.
"There are no miracles," you tell him from a safer distance. "There is only me, and I am built of clockwork and majjyyks."
He throws his head back, wild hair tumbling around his shoulders, and he laughs at you. You hiss, far back in your throat. In all your life, no-one has ever laughed at you. "But you're all made of miracles, Deathsister," he tells you. "Miracles all over you."
"With your devotion to your little religion, then, what are you doing all alone in here, when there is riot in the streets, and heresy in the courtblocks?"
He looms over your again, and you take a step back. You will always be small for a troll - you were granted a lifespan to match the Condesce's, but you stopped growing at the usual time for one of your blood color - but you have never been made to feel it so acutely as with him. "I have better things to do," he says, and shows you all his teeth.
This isn't going at all the way you planned. You keep retreating ahead of him, even though you know you are more powerful than he is. But there is that sound in his voice like he knows you, and every step you take he counters before you have finished taking it. You have to get yourself back in gear. "Is it not your job, to defend the Condesce's realm from those who would destroy it?"
He shrugs, and his fighting clubs drop into his hands. "I am. I lured the motherfucking Demoness into my lair, didn't I?"
You don't draw your wands in response, but you hold your ground. A physical fight isn't what you're here for, no matter how much he seems to want one, and if you can't defeat him with words, then perhaps you'll concede that your employer was right, and leave him be. "You can't do anything to stop me. But your voice and your face at their back would be of inestimable value to the servants of the Empire who are even now digging out the last of the Signless's sedition."
"They're doing a motherfucking satisfactory job on their own."
"Oh, satisfactory like letting the Disciple escape? Perhaps you want the Signless himself to escape the same way--"
"I knew that was you I smelled on Darkleer," he says, with such warm hate coiled in his voice that you feel the blood rise to your cheeks again. "Serendipity, my indigo ass."
"I am permitted to achieve my objectives whatever way I see fit!" you protest, rather too shrilly.
"Don't tell me any more detail, chica, or I'll start to pity the poor motherfucker. Of all the people to fill a last pail with, and he gets you. Man always did have the worst kind of luck."
You don't let it show on your face but inside you your heart sinks. No, you don't have experience in such matters, but the blueblood had seemed to enjoy the process. And it had been his idea in the first place! Well, mostly his idea. "I will have you know that trolls have willingly died for a chance at my pail," you say through your teeth. It's true enough; one of your first missions had involved instigating a war, early in Alternia's history, by setting yourself up as an object of desire.
"You all trying to flip concupiscent on me?" he asks you with a waggle of his eyebrows. He still has his clubs in his hands, and with his facepaint and wild hair, it's the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen, and the least attractive.
"I am trying to find out why you have so conspicuously kept yourself out of this matter. We ought to be working toward the same goals here."
"Aw, you and me can't never be in cahoots, Deathsister. We're like seawater and sparks, us: flares up real pretty, but afterward there ain't nothing left but ash." He smiles down and pats your head as if you're a slightly slow child. You can't count the number of moods he's flashed through in the time you've been here.
"You can't make fire with just seawater and sparks," you say blankly.
"And you can't make ash with only two," he agrees, whatever that means. His claws tighten into your scalp, near to drawing blood, nearer to threatening the integrity of your thinkpan. He's finally turned on the psychic fear-drawing powers you'd heard about. "And I AIN'T MOTHERFUCKIN' BUILT TO BE A MEDIATOR. And garnet blood looks a lot better on my walls than scarlet. AND YOUR MASTERS TOLD YOU TO STAY THE FUCK OUT OF MY BUSINESS."
> BE THE PERFECTLY ORDINARY INNOCENT BYSTANDER
You are tired.
You blink, and you can't tell anymore if the veil of red across your vision is blood dripping down from your head wounds or just plain fatigue.
This is partly because you haven't slept for nights: they arrested you right under the mid-day sun, hooded and cloaked against the light, while the Dolorosa was showing you a public garden that had been a favorite of hers in her youth. You hadn't slept well for days before, and you haven't slept since.
Mostly, though, you're just tired of all of it. Tired of always having to fight, and hide, and fight. Tired of all of the people who would rather be miserable and powerless than simply listen to what you have to say. Tired of the people who do listen to what you say, and then treat you as if they expect you to be some kind of miracle messiah from a joke religion.
Tired of putting up with it all. Tired of losing touch with your dreams.
Specifically this moment, though, you're tired of the ache in your shoulders from the way they've left you shackled with your hands above your head. Your dreams at this point in your life stretch about as far as hoping that your wrists will stay at least this numb right up to when they weld that other pair of irons onto you tomorrow. Maybe if you're really lucky, your hands will turn gangrenous and fall off before they can even do it. It would serve them right.
You try not to think in terms of ways to make them pay, because you know, even if no-one else does, that you can be better than that. But there's not much distraction when you're shackled in solitary confinement in a dungeon, and you take what you can get.
Right now, what you've got is the door of your cell opening, and letting in a tall, broad-shouldered figure with unkempt hair and loosely spiraled horns. "I missed you at my trial," you say. "It was full of mirth and gaiety! Just your kind of circus."
"Trials ain't my thing. I get my hands on a perpetrator, they don't need no trial," he says.
"Still, I think I'm hurt," you say, and rattle your chains a little for effect.
He reaches forward and brushes his hand across your forehead. Oh. It was blood, after all. He looks down at the smear of color across his hand, still shockingly bright. "I figure, you knew what you were getting into when you started this. You ain't stupid."
"Evidence suggests otherwise," you tell him.
He sighs and steps back. "I was going to stay all out of this. Ain't none of my affair. You ain't said a word against Herself, not outright and undeniable. But then I got a visit from a mutual friend of ours. You got any idea why the Demoness wants you dead?"
The Demoness. The way the scattered and decentralized leadership on Alternia has so suddenly united against you makes more sense, now. She has directly saved your life at least twice that you know of, and perhaps more, but you've long since given up trying to understand her motives. "You would know better than I would, it's your Messiahs she works for."
"There's folks as are calling you by that title," he says.
"Are there really." You roll your eyes toward what would be heavenward if there weren't several stories of stonework and Palace of Justice intervening. As if you would fall into a trap as simple as that. "What do you think?"
"I think I was going to let it be, but now I'm thinking, if it'll fuck her shit up, maybe I'll just up and put you back on the streets."
Look, it's not that you don't want to live - tired isn't the same as suicidal - but you saw what was arrayed against you in that courtblock, and you know, Demoness or no Demoness, that you're going to die before you breathe free air again. You've been playing cluckbeast with death all your life, and you finally stepped over the line. You can deal. "I appreciate the gesture, especially since you're only doing it out of spite," you tell him, "But don't bother. There's no chance in hell."
"What's 'hell'?" he asks.
It takes you a second to realize what he's asking. Your followers have picked the word up from you, but Hell is a term you learned in the world in your dreams; they use it there to refer to another world, a place in which you can be trapped after death. It is a universe of nothing but pain and punishment, where there is no love or friendship or family, where 'trust' is teaming up against mutual enemies and 'happiness' is getting revenge, where light burns and darkness kills. "Alternia," you answer him. "Hell is Alternia."
He pulls his gaze away from yours like a barkbeast with a guilty conscience. "Your Disciple's escaped," he tells you. "Free and clear. Figured nobody'd bothered to tell you."
You breathe in, and something unlocks in your chest, and it hurts again. Disciple. Free, the way she was always meant to be. "How?"
He grins. "I ain't seen it myself, but they're saying that it was pity at first sight. There she is, all chained up for the Executor's arrow, and it's pale serendipity. He can't do it. She's gone, and he's exiled. Motherfucking beautiful chaos."
It's like something out of a fairy tale. And not even an Alternian fairy tale, but a story from the other world. You can't believe it at first, but you can't believe it's a lie, either. He's looking at you as if he wants, of all things, your approval.
Too bad. You don't have anything to give him. "I hope you aren't planning on following in their footsteps," you tell him. "I'm all out of pity."
And even as you say it, you realise that it's true. Of all the things that are left to you, here in your dark room at the end of your shackles, pity is not one of them.
> BE THE GRAND HIGHBLOOD
When she found you, you'd been trying to decide. You knew that, for your Empress and for your job security, you should have been right beside the rest of them as they condemned the red-blood heretic mutant and spat on him. You've fought your way up the power structure of Alternia and you know exactly how it works. You belonged in that courtblock with the others.
BUT YOU DIDN'T FUCKING WANT TO.
Following your bloodpusher's what got you this far. YOU AIN'T GOING TO STOP NOW. You'd known as soon as she'd turned up what you were going to do, and when they send one more terrified rustblood messenger to request your presence in the council chamber, Lord, at your convenience, you go. You don't even take the time to wash the blood off your hands first.
And there they all are, sitting around a conference table in their self-satisfied circle, like they think they CONTROL SHIT-FUCKING ALL: the LEGISLACERATOR ARCHEOPHYTE, the GUIDE OF SEERS, the MOTHER JADEBLOOD of the brooding caverns, the LORD OF ALL THE SEAS, the STATIONMASTER, each grabbing onto their little bit of Alternia as if that will be enough to KEEP THEM SAFE.
The Archeophyte smarms up at you as you walk in. "Subjugglator!" she says warmly. She thinks you're on her side. "Have you finished your other business?"
They know that you could have any of them culled with one word to the right person. You smirk at the Archeophyte. "Figured I'd get myself on the record again as saying that YOU'RE ALL IDIOTS."
"Hwat hwave hwe done now?" the Lord of the Seas asks you, feigning boredom.
You wave a hand negligently. Every eye in the room is riveted to the bright red bloodstain on it. "Building up rebellion against the Empress."
"We are ending the rebellion," the Jade tells you primly. "As you are very well aware. We can't afford the possibility of riots, or, worse!" She sniffs. "Armed conflict! This near the mother grub!"
"And you brothers and sisters think killing the Signless is going to end it? He's fucking BEGGING you to MAKE HIM A MARTYR."
It's fucking TRUE ENOUGH. You're a lot SMARTER THAN YOU ACT, but it don't take a genius to know that this ain't going to end here, and now you'll be able to say I TOLD YOU SO when it fucking BACKFIRES ON THEM. That's why you'll still be at the top of this PILE OF WORTHLESS INSECTS.
But it's not why you're FUCKING DOING IT.
"What would you suggest we do, then?" the Seer asks you softly. CREEPY BASTARDS, seers, all of them.
"If you want to end this," you tell them, "You set him free. Don't say NOTHING about why. Let me put some DOUBTS in the right thinkpans and in a perigee he'll be the BEST TOOL YOU HAVE."
"Nice try, Subjugglator," says the Archeophyte. "But sentence has been passed, and justice will be done. The only question remaining is whether or not you will be standing on the side of justice. We had thought, with the recent... personnel rearrangements among our executors, that you might wish to do the honor yourself."
You cock your head, pretending to think this over. And then you lean over the table, your face bare inches from hers. "Nah," you say. "I DECLINE THE HONOR. Bright fuck-off scarlet DON'T ALL UP AND MATCH MY DECORATING SCHEME."
When you walk out, you leave a shining crimson handprint on the table right in front of her. You don't look back.
You could still get him free. You'd leave half of Alternia in flames behind you, BUT YOU COULD. You have no desire to end up like Darkleer, though, especially since you're PRETTY SURE you wouldn't even get to pail the Demoness out of it.
Besides, you ain't no hero of a tragic romance. You ain't no hero of any kind.
So you don't attend the execution, where half the city is flocking to WATCH HIM PAY. It takes him a long time to die. You're standing on the balcony of your private residence block, watching the first red tongues of dawn creep into the sky, when the world goes black around you.
Night black. Hate black. Hate. There is nothing left of you but hate: pure, caliginous, endless, all-encompassing hate. There may be words in it, and they may be profane, but you are beyond that now, and besides, you don't need them: I despise you. Everything about you is wrong. I thought you could at least be good enough to take me down, but of course you aren't, you're a failure at everything, I'D KILL YOU ALL BUT THAT WOULD BE A MERCY AND YOU HAVEN'T EARNED MERCY JUST FUCK OFF AND TALK TO ME AGAIN IF YOU'RE EVER WORTH TALKING TO WHICH I DOUBT ON AND ON YOU ARE LOST IN IT YOU ARE NOTHING BUT HATE-- and then just as soon as it started, you're yourself again. You look down and see your hands, indigo-knuckled, stained, with a deathgrip on the balcony rail, and you start to laugh.
The Signless had never demonstrated any psi ability to speak of. He had notable resistance, and he slept without sopor, and he was sometimes said to walk in daylight, but he had nothing that might be dangerous. And so OF COURSE THEY HADN'T BOTHERED to put any psionic dampeners around him when he died.
"He won. That scruffy hornless unclaimed peacenik mutant MOTHERFUCKING WON."
You know a broad-spectrum sustained psi burst when you feel one, and that one was stronger than any you've felt before. Any you've HEARD OF, and you know psis who power INTERSTELLAR STARSHIPS. But the range on that, if you're ANY JUDGE, AND YOU ARE, was INTERGALACTIC. The Imperial Fleet will still be running into that from behind A THOUSAND SWEEPS FROM NOW.
"Sure did," she says. "That's part of the background psi radiation of the universe now. Stronger in some pockets than others, but it even broke the chronal barrier and echoed all the way back around to the start."
She's perched on the balcony rail beside you, staring pensively into the shredded remains of the sunrise. You didn't notice her arrival. She's not the same woman who visited you this evening; though she still looks like a maroon-blood in her prime, she carries the weight of thousands of sweeps on her. "Annoyed the bejegus out of my masters," she adds cheerfully. "They didn't expect that."
You've hated her since you met her, since you were a raw-boned recruit over-proud of getting his first assignment and his first pair of polka-dotted pants, but you find, when you reach for it, that there's no hate left in you. That vast cry burned it all up, and the place where it should be is empty like a calm gray sea at evening.
You wonder if this is what the Signless meant by 'peace'.
"Ain't your masters meant to know everything?" you ask her mildly.
"You live a few thousand sweeps, kid, you'll start to learn how limiting omniscience is."
You'd guessed right about where she is, then. "I ain't going to see you again, am I?" you ask. Something started this dawn - something that is going to change all of Alternia, something that not even your Messiahs could control. But something infinitely smaller, something UTTERLY UNIMPORTANT, is ending. Has ended already.
She shakes her head. Her braids undulate behind her like waves on the open sea. "I shouldn't even have come now. I'm on my way to my very last mission, as promised. And you've got other things to do. But I wanted... one last time. A farewell tour, if you will." She reaches up to pull your head down to hers, and kisses you right between your horns, the touch of a lusus more than a quadrantmate. "Keep the faith, Highblood," she says. "And never stop holding out for miracles." Then she disappears in a flash of green moonlight.
But you've barely blinked away the red afterimage when she blinks back in again. "Oh, and Highblood?" she adds. "Y'all really need to consider a different method of execution for heretics." She waits a beat, and adds with perfect comic timing just as she flashes out again: "The temptation to call it an ironic end is just too much."
You start laughing again. You can't help it. "Girl always SHOULD have been a motherfucking clown," you tell the scarlet sun.