GIANTS AND WYRMS
Written on September 10, 2021 (♍︎︎)
Author's Notes: Written for Lassarina for Press Start 2021.
It was strange to see Lionel so like itself: humming with merchants and pilgrims who seemed to have no mind for either wars or apocalypses.
Perhaps, Beowulf thought, it was a consequence of the province itself having always been an oddity: a monster of ill-fitted parts like the manticore on its banner. Lionel was a land of knights taking the cloth and clergymen turned to soldiers—of impoverished nobility and commonborn trade kings. The Lionelese revered war, religion, and coin all in equal measure and saw no sin in the bigamy of being wed to God and the world both. It made sense, with every settlement being either a trade city or a holy site.
In the case of Goug, one might argue that the place was a blasphemous amalgam of them both.
It had been raining when the four of them made landfall, and the machine city seemed to creak as if it were trying to shoulder the weight of so much new-growing rust. Mustadio, Reis, himself, and the iron giant: all come home to measure out their decisions of where to go now that they'd wrestled with God and died to the world. Beowulf supposed—again—that Lionel was an oddity well-suited to such decisions. It was where God had died the last time, after all.
Reis stepped off the ferry and onto the pier, and she smiled, looking up at the sky with little care as to how soaked she had already gotten or how soaked she was continuing to get. When Beowulf tried to lend her his cloak, she accepted it, but it seemed entirely a matter of courtesy on her part. He said nothing as he watched the odd drop of rain hiss against her skin, boiling away—he thought—as it met with some place in her still filled with fire.
"We should get to my father's quickly," Mustadio whispered, with a sense of uncharacteristic urgency. "I should imagine that there are few heretics easier to mark than the four of us."
The man of metal, who was draped in no fewer than four cloaks and topped off with an oversized hat they'd sewn him into, groaned a little as it retracted its legs a few more inches into its hollow body. Beowulf laughed as he clapped it on the shoulder.
"I appreciate the effort, but you're only a little less conspicuous than the rest of us. You don't have a history here, after all."
Something clicked inside of it; it sounded like a throat being cleared.
"A recent history," Reis interrupted teasingly. "He probably has more claim to this place than even the Saint did."
"Did the Saint ever come to Goug?" Mustadio asked as he began to walk.
"The Saint's probably the reason Goug is half underwater," Beowulf replied as he followed him. "I suppose Mr. 8 here is well avenged now for a few centuries of tarnish."
The automaton made no remark, and Reis, who stood some ways behind them now, said nothing either. When Beowulf turned back to extend an arm to her, she grinned, racing forward to seize him by the glove with a touch he knew to be light by intention.
He gripped her fingers fast as he pulled her into the maze of wynds and chimneys ahead, trying not to think of what a wreck she would make of him were she to hold him just as tightly.
It was cliche, Beowulf supposed, to relate the tale of how they first met as a moment in which love fell near literally into his lap. He had found, however, that love made many cliches bearable and some cliches even necessary, and it hadbeen the case that she had fallen.
Word had come of the Ordallian withdrawal at Limberry. The war was over. Even if it was not victory, the finality of the event merited celebration, and Lionel was overstuffed with celebrants as the Cardinal's men came marching home. With the authority of both Mullonde and the crown behind him, Delacroix was a man uniquely positioned to call for a feast. The most proximate church holiday found itself elevated to do double duty for the returning soldiers, and it was declared a sin to be caught working in Lionel on the anniversary of Balias' martyrdom.
Alliste had joked that he'd looked very dashing. Three days stubble on his face and a fresh healed scar on his brow: all the stamps of rugged authenticity. The Gryphons were a bit of a patchwork then, making do with whatever equipment poor Limberry had had available in those last sorry months. Beowulf remembered seeing Ordallian scale worn with Gallione colors and southerners marching with Khamja-work pikes. He and Alliste had been riding down the street themselves in gear nicked from a pair of Dead Men who'd died proper and rendered themselves into the lower case. It was—all things considered—the perfect parade for Lionel: monster of a province that it was. The civilian throng certainly was in no way disapproving, and they clambered on every piece of stonework and solid roof they could, to wish them well.
Reis had not ceased clambering when things mellowed into the evening. She and her entourage of emboldened maidens were all very drunk. Beowulf—well on his way to drunkeness himself—had not noticed them hanging off the bridge above him until Reis shouted something in flirtatious tones and gracelessly tumbled into the shallow river beside him.
Being a knight, Beowulf knew it was his duty to rescue a lady. Being a lady, Reis knew it was her right to demand a token. With three mugs of sack in him and the saints' only knew how much wine in her, these obligations played out as both of them fumbling together into a gondola and one of them stealing the other's scarf.
Reis was not telling this story as the quartet settled into Besrudio’s studio. She was—as she often was—watching her fellow travelers with a keen interest, tracing the flow of their conversations and gestures as if she were making a study of human speech. She thought to tell it, however, at one point or another. There was a great deal of reminiscing on everyone's part, and she felt that one of them ought to mention that they had some past in Lionel beyond Bremondt.
Besrudio had rummaged about in his workshop's apothecary chests and cupboards until he'd found the cluster of drawers stuffed with tea leaves instead of screws. The younger Bunansa had disappeared while his father waxed eloquent as to the state of his research and reappeared with a plate of sandwiches. Reis was happy for the repast and for the company, even if she had difficulty following several aspects of the old man's exposition—although she understood that he had been doing some manner of investigation as to the iron giant.
"I re-soldered what I could on the wreckage out of Mine 16, but it looks like you're destined for a life of solitude at present." Besrudio knocked his hand against the automaton's chest. "I even bothered the poor archivist out of Gariland trying to look you up!"
"Are there many books on metal men out in Gariland?" Reis inquired.
"He seems the stuff of folklore, doesn't he? I thought I'd give fairy tales a look after I despaired at finding technical manuals."
"Fairy tales?" Mustadio asked. "What sort of fairy tales?"
"I was looking for something about giants—statues maybe, living suits of armor—but it seems Lionel's been infested with proper monsters since time immemorial: griffins, serpopods, and wyrms. "
Reis said nothing as she finished one of her sandwiches: salted meat and several types of pickled something or other. Beowulf, who had been orbiting her as he always did, stopped to lean a hand against her shoulder.
"You'd think they could spare a metal man or two to guard all the damnable dragons," Besrudio added.
Mustadio coughed rather conspicuously as he shot his friends an apologetic look. The metal man present said nothing, but its eyes seemed to shift in color a moment, as if the fire that lit them had suddenly moved on to some other fuel.
The way Reis recounted it, Beowulf had lost his scarf as a result of the ensuing confusion, and she had thoughtfully retrieved it. She hadn't—of course—wished for him to take it to his home wet and ruined after he'd escorted her to her home with such chivalrous care. As such, she laundered it, making only a little bit of noise in flaunting the article before the emboldened maids of the night before.
When Beowulf received word that she still had it, he apparently did not think it a very gentlemanly thing to tell her the scarf was stolen twice over and that her hard won favor rightly belonged to a corpse. Instead, upon coming to her door again, he thanked her most profusely and agreed to stay for the span of a meal.
When she found her shawl missing later that evening, it was a plain piece of necessity that she chase him across the city to retrieve it and a plain piece of courtesy on his part that he allow her to spend the night, lest she have to traipse across Lionel in the thick of darkness.
After that, the pair found a great sympathy in their mutual absent-mindedness, as they were routinely driven to one another's doorsteps in an attempt to retrieve or return some misplaced item or another. Reis soon lamented that her reputation had been ruined for it. She decided it couldn't be helped but that she should give all the city's gossip some basis, knowing how impossible rumor was to dispel.
They finished tea. They had supper. They collectively debated the virtues of every place for which they might all abandon Ivalice on the morrow. Besrudio did not ever describe any of the damnable dragons about which he'd been reading at length, nor did he ever arrive at any answers about Construct 8, which stood calmly by as he shucked off its coats, pried open its access panels, and swore loudly that nothing about it made a lick of sense. They had dinner then. They had coffee and dessert. Throughout it all, Reis and Beowulf would hold hands, clutch about one another's waists and perform all those little gestures of affection that had once been as natural as leaning against a wall or fidgeting with a coat sleeve.
It was only when the first lamp lights were being lit and Mustadio had just finished washing the last of the teacups that the two of them caught a moment alone and had a dialogue.
It was not an argument—not quite. Arguments were not things either imagined were had between lovers who had undergone so many transmutations to save one another.
"Do you miss me as I was?" came to be the weighty question about which everything hung.
He'd tried to smile. "How could I miss you?" He'd kissed her forehead. "You're all that you were as far as I'm concerned, even if you can do a few magic tricks for the adventure."
She'd tried to smile back. "I dream sometimes, you know."
"Reis..."
"I dream sometimes that I'm flying again."
There had been a moment of silence between them. Beowulf had thought back to all those nights in the hills of Golund, snow stinging his cheeks, his breath fogging the air like a wisp of smoke.
"I think most of mankind has flying dreams, Reis."
"Most of mankind has never flown."
"If you're asking if I loved you better as a beast, Reis, what should I say?"
Reis had cocked her head and shot him a look that worried him. For a moment, he'd wondered if she had some aspect of the basilisk mixed in amongst the rest of her. He'd certainly felt in the moment as if he were so much stone.
"Would you have loved me as well if I were?"
He'd swallowed hard. He'd done his best to convey his sincerity in what he said next.
"I think—if you were a beast and I were a vagabond forever following you—I should still count myself as one of the luckiest creatures on this earth."
She'd embraced him very quickly, and Beowulf in embracing her back had done his best not to stiffen or flinch, trying not to balk at her strength and all the fire underlying it.
It was a pretty thing to say, but it was not an end to unease.
In the midst of his dreams that night, all those romantic scenes of Beowulf's life spun by him like players' wagons on the move. Reis was falling back into the river, laughing. Reis was falling soft against his mattress—a puff of goosedown escaping at the seam. Reis was falling apart to talons and scales—her rings and necklace clattering against the courtyard stones as she rose shrieking into the orange sky above them.
She fell and he followed, and it seemed in each new permutation that he might never catch her. He was riding after shadows in the Araguay. He was looming over a map of the unfolded earth, letting a knife drop from his hand. He was paying an augur in his last coppers, stuffing dried flowers and hair ribbons into his deep-lined palms. When he looked to the sky, all he seemed to see were the edges of the clouds, backlit by the moon as they concealed half the night from him.
It seemed now he was the falling one, unmoored from everything and set to float about the world like a Yuguewood ghost. In all those spaces where dream and memory bled into one another, he seemed as though he might slip away from both—that he should escape from everything and come to a black and cold nowhere, far from himself as he was from her.
When he landed, it was she who caught him. He was suddenly lying firm against her belly—her scales embossing dents into his skin that he knew would stay with him for some minutes when they both awakened. He did as he had done all those past nights as a vagabond, holding his breath until she breathed, trying to still his heart so that it could match the sluggish beat of her own. He reckoned that if he could match her in these things, it might be as though they were both beasts together—that the curse might bleed from one to the other, and they could make a nest of one another's limbs.
Beowulf awoke alone, finding himself curled upon nothing more beloved than one of Besrudio's couch cushions. As though in a trance, he stood up, and walked out into the moonlit streets of Goug, stumbling about as he tried to follow a rhythm he swore he could still hear.
Construct 8 had concluded that it was generally sub-optimal to offer verbal input unless one of the Masters requested it. In the 76,912 rest cycles it had undertaken since its first active period, civilization had apparently undergone radical and cataclysmic change, and most of its protocols for social behavior seemed no longer to apply. When the Masters spoke speculatively about its origins or opinions, it offered no clarification. When the Masters made incorrect statements in its presence, it did not undertake to correct them. Even when one of the Masters opened its parts to the corrosive air and attempted to reconfigure its self-sterilization mechanism, it determined to itself that it would not speak unless instruction was asked for or disaster was imminent.
No disaster occurred. No Master was sterilized. When the sun began its own rest cycle, Construct 8 was well ready to join it, and it rerouted the power generally used for mobility functions into repair, its shell shuddering slightly as its mechanisms re-threaded the bolts Master Besrudio had absentmindedly left loose.
It waited, however, to power down its cognition, recognizing that Master Reis still remained conscious and that it was pacing the room in 4-5 dohm cycles. While it seemed improbable that it would issue any commands, it was a part of its functioning to remain alert when a potential operator was present.
Master Reis eventually stopped its circuit. It flopped back onto the couch where it had been attempting to undergo deactivation. It stood upright and moved to the window. Then, in contradiction to predicted behavior it turned to put its hand on Construct 8's surface, and addressed it.
"What do you think, giant? What sort of fairy tale is it in which we're caught?"
The gears in Construct 8's speechworks wound themselves back into action.
"Unknown value: Fairy Tale."
The Master issued a sound Construct 8 knew to correspond with amusement. "I suppose it would be an unknown if we were in one. I don't suppose you have any insight as to how one determines just what genre it is to which our narrative belongs?"
"I require clarification. What are the parameters of 'our narrative?'"
"That's a good question."
"Thank you, Master. I am pleased to have produced a good question."
"Can you provide any good answers?"
"I can provide a wide variety of answers to questions within my domain of knowledge. I hope the Masters will find them to their liking."
"Do you know if my narrative began or ended at Nelveska?" Its voice dropped low. "I sometimes think that it was the latter—I sometimes think myself very lost for going there."
Construct 8 hummed audibly to show its brainworks were in operation as it tried to place the name "Nelveska." It blurted out its answer very abruptly when it arrived.
"Loss should not occur in the operations of Repair Station 7."
"What?" The Master's voice shifted measurably in tone.
"Loss should not occur in the operations of Repair Station 7. Unless specific instructions have been given for augmentation or disassembly, Repair Station 7 only rearranges extant components. Loss is a failure state to be avoided."
For 17.21 seconds, there was no sound from the Master save for the dull rattle of its breath. Then, it moved very suddenly to press its lips against the cold iron of Construct 8's shell. It made another sharp sound of amusement after doing so, and Construct 8 did its best to record in detail the particulars of the interaction in the hopes of deciphering it later.
"That is a good answer!" It suddenly turned to leave, marching out of the door before Construct 8 could finish engraving an entry into one of its long term memory sheets.
"Thank you, Master. I am pleased to have produced a good answer," it chirped alone in the dark.
It thereafter waited exactly 120.75 seconds, ready for the Master to return and make further inquiries. When nothing happened, Construct 8 finished its deactivation procedures.
Reis did not know where she was going, but that had been a constant in her life. She had fallen into love, into tragedy, and into adventure without much self-direction, and she thought that dashing about the streets of the Machine City as a lone woman and wanted heretic was no greater a danger than the rest of her existence. She tried, as she did so, to remember all those traces of reptile living she was now convinced still lay within her: to think of how she might feel slithering between the gaps in buildings and chasing the street cats that had re-emerged with the end of the rain.
It was a strange night. She was a strange creature.
When she came back round to the docks, it seemed that all the stars were trying to climb down to rest in the sea's dark water, and she looked out and wondered if she would ever travel in that direction. She felt very giddy. She felt very alive.
When Beowulf appeared from absolutely nowhere, running towards her, it seemed a completely natural occurrence. She smiled as he stumbled in her direction, his voice cracking as he shouted her name.
"What are you doing here!?" he exclaimed, obviously worried. "Were you... were you going to—"
He gestured to the outlines of boats around them, some of which still creaked with the echo of footsteps. It took Reis a moment to register that he was afraid she might depart without him.
She shook her head just before he crashed into her.
"I don't understand, Reis? I'll follow you again though." He was shaking with something—tears or laughter.
"I know," Reis said warmly. His arms around her felt like a vice.
"I'll be a knight or vagabond or beast along with you. You can have your pick."
She didn't know how to convey it to him: that they could change their ors to ands—that they didn't need to choose. She grinned as she matched force with force and clasped him hard against her. When in their fumbling embrace they toppled off the pier and into the water below, it was with a peal of mutual laughter.
Amongst sane and ordinary people, it would have been a dreadful and dangerous mess to be caught in. The waters around Goug were neither clear nor inviting. To Reis though, as she flew through the clouded deep, it felt like a past twice stepped in.
She knew, even before she caught him, that they'd be buoyed up soon enough.
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