Vignette - Getting Wrapped Up
Obro
Awake. Aware. Self.
A figure shuffled across a barren landscape. Boots scraped on the hard-pan dirt, heedless of the stones and obstacles that threatened to trip a careless traveller. A bleached, sandblasted log of bonewood caught the shuffler across the shin, but the trouser leg and all the drapes of cloth simply bent around the offending branch as though the leg was hollow. The leg pulled behind, forcing its owner to notice. A head wrapped in bright and expensive cloth, crowned with a braided silvery coronet, turned an empty face towards the wood.
An observer might have expected some sort of strain or grunt of effort, but would only have seen the cloth-wrapped leg pull the log inexorably from the ground. Like an iceberg it came, a denuded tip attached to a buried section that still bore its bark having been buried some time ago. The ground protested in low grumbles as it begrudgingly yielded its prize, giving up more of the log that had been crusted and vitrified by the unforgiving alchemy of this landscape.
Unrefined. Basic. Banal
An immaculate glove of supple white leather stretched out, fingers twisting into arcane patterns that were accompanied by words of power.
Nothing happened.
No words had come out, even though the words had obviously been thought. The figure waited and tried again.
Nothing.
Silent.
The figure slumped, ripples through fabrics rolled down the entire body.
Something is wrong. Something is missing.
The figure looked down at the ineffectual hand in puzzlement.
This is my hand... my arm...
A further wave of uncertainty.
No memory. Unknown location. Lost. Empty.
The figure looked around at the landscape of broken land, broken rocks, skeletal remains of trees, skeletal... remains. Not far behind, marked by a dragging path through the dust and rubble, stood a tower at odds with the terrain. Where the landscape was riddled with varieties of earth tones, the tower was twisting ribbons of flawless black, pure clean white, and vibrant shining indigo. Spires and towers branched off the main tower, giving it the appearance of a weaponized tree. Platforms floated freely beside and around the structure at various altitudes and orbits, each bristling with devices too distant to be made out. The base was surrounded by a tall wall of toxic-green stone, festooned with crenelations.
Wizard tower. Empty land. Defensible. Strategic. Isolated.
Focus returned to the ineffective hand. Spellcasting had been an instant reaction, certain and ready, a perfect solution to a trivial problem. But without a voice, the magic was hobbled. There were workarounds... but they had to be prepared for.
No past. No memory. Missing. Empty.
The other hand tried to remove the glove from the first. The grip of each finger sunk into the other, as if the gloves were not full of anything. But then, resistance. The gloves were not empty. Something was inside. A tug, however, did nothing to remove the gloves. No amount of pulling would detach the glove from the sleeve. The second hand gripped above the glove at the forearm of the ribbon-wrapped sleeves of the robe and undershirt. Again, loose but not wholly empty. Something hard and unyielding. Two somethings side by side.
The cloth didn’t allow itself to be removed. A handful. Violent pulling.
Stop! Damage!
The figure stopped pulling at the linen and silk. Something inside warned against damage and self-harm.
Self? Empty? Not completely empty. Wrongness. Face!
The face was open at the eyes. Fingers came up to feel the eyes, expecting to find... anything. A surreal experience of a finger approaching, but becoming simply a dark spot as it passed into the cloth and found no eyeball there. Further in, obscuring some but not all vision, hesitant in expectation of pain that did not come, the finger finally stopped, two knuckles deep against something hard and hollow. The twin of that finger followed, finding the same thing.
Questing between the folds around the map, the figure felt for any way inside. They pressed against teeth, but found no lips or flesh beneath the folds. Looking around at the wasteland the figure spotted a confirmation of what was felt.
Skeleton. Inside. Dead... Undead?
The figure knew in an instant that undeath was not what was happening. Of course, this did not satisfy the current information that said that the figure was a skeleton clothed in finery instead of flesh. Worse, there was the peripheral sense that this should be horrifying, but there were no actual feelings of horror or uneasiness.
Empty.
It didn't matter that there was a skeleton inside. This was the normal way of things. Not an undead, just... cloth with a skeleton inside. With no actual memory and nothing but some vague unaccountable certainties, whatever was currently obvious must be the most likely state of normalcy. This established, the figure concluded that the thing to do was to keep moving forward and wait for more information to present itself. No goal in mind, the figure shuffled away from the tower, toward the distant mountains, paying no mind to the barren, blasted, lifeless landscape. The log dragging with each step but giving no resistance.
Thoughts formed, remembrances of knowledge but without context. Ideas and plans drifted through an otherwise purely sensational void. But inevitably these thoughts happened upon something concrete and real. Counting. There was a reality to the amount of things. Amounts made sense. And with amounts came arrangements. Shapes were obvious now, and then colors and other qualities.
Memories of dreamlike nonsense still crowded in, trying to assert themselves but failing due to a lack of context. But reality settled back in. Everything else was nonsense, but what made sense right now were the qualities and the numbers.
More. Multiple. Multiply.
There should be more like this. Living clothing, walking about. Memories of long dead wearers bearing things up. And if there wasn't more, well, more should be made. That was the way of things. Loneliness was terrible, and there should be more of everything.
Now with a quest, a purpose, the figure's head turned toward a seemingly unremarkable point on the horizon. A place that was certain to have people.
Yes
427 wooden buttons, 899 strips of fabric in various colors and lengths, a giant's handful of mostly corroded copper pennies, 22 silver dimes, a bent foreign brass dinket, 46 blanks of tin, a lead bar that had been cunningly plated and stamped to resemble a billet of gold, a bar of fine spring steel, a medley of teeth and small bones of every description, bits of pretty polished wood, articles of housewares, cups, plates, bowls, clothing, vials, candlesticks, pepperpots and salt cellars, and now, as it was nestled in among the other treasures, a polished cabochon of banded agate.
The dragon's eyes glittered with pride at this newest acquisition. Nets and strings festooned the walls and ceiling of the basement hollow where the dragon's hoard was hidden away. Every inch of space was covered with something; hiding the broken, muddy bricks and snapped timbers of the ruined room.
Apart from the treasure; wards and trinkets were strewn about the perimeter, making the place hostile to gremlins, helpers, borrowers, ghosts, spirits, elemental pests, mortal pests, and every other sort of thing that made itself at home in Telvin's Nest. Most of them were for show and even more had their magical powers evaporate or discharge long ago. The dragon hardly cared. It was having things that counted. Anyone or anything foolish enough to raid a dragon's den would know the unending wrath they had so richly earned.
Passing through the streets of an evening the dragon had, of course, heard about how useful the helpers could be. The giants talked at length about all the dissatisfaction of their tedious little lives, pining for the little creatures to show up and mend their clothes, clear up sculleries, or do any of the million other chores that they wished they didn't have to do themselves. Others, who had found themselves fortunate to gain the aid of the helpers... inevitably causing the visits to stop shortly after bragging about them.
Helpers were bashful. Helpers were fickle. Helper hated whiners. Helpers loved things left out for them. These and more little facts and superstitions floated around, heeded by the wise, dismissed by fools, and carefully differentiated by the intelligent. The dragon, luckily, was the better two of the three and a good bit more so than most. It was clear, when you got right down to it, that whatever cleaning or mending could be done, it wouldn't come for free. Somehow the idiots of this city never actually considered what free help would cost them.
Besides, the dragon knew that where you got helpers, you got borrowers.
A shudder ran through the dragon’s spine at the thought of borrowers. They were like tiny people whose entire existence depended on pinching little things from the big people that, presumably, wouldn’t miss them… but nothing the dragon had wouldn’t be missed, no matter how insignificant. Borrowers wouldn’t realize that. They’d take something… like say, some wax off of a candlestick… one of the dribbly bits that gave it some character... and the absence would just sit there in the dragon’s mind like a hole in reality. Any dragon could remember everything that had ever been lost that was previously theirs, down to minuscule details, and each loss was a pain in their soul. Some dragons had gone completely mad over it, some became withdrawn and jealous, but most had simply sought out revenge to reclaim their property.
Instinctively, the dragon coiled their sinuous body around the heap of coins and coin-like materials. It wasn’t nearly enough… it would never be enough... but it was theirs. Enough wasn't the point. The point was more.
Still, it was the hoard and the hoard was everything. A dragon’s hoard was its power, and a powerful dragon inevitably had a great big hoard. The bigger the hoard, the stronger the dragon, and thus the bigger the hoard! Compared to some hoards of legend, this hoard was small, but compared to the poverty of the lesser beings it was great. It would grow. That’s how it worked. It was nature. The hoard had to grow.
It would grow to the size of a mountain. It would shame other mountains of the world! The gods themselves would have visions of it and manifest their jealousy across the world to know this collection of wealth lay guarded by the most fierce and relentless of all dragons. Still it would grow, day by day, bit by bit. Eternity was, after all, a very long time.
Comforted, the dragon gave a contented sigh at the thought of all the future wonders and allowed itself to slip into a restless sleep, wrapped around those things that would keep it going out for more of. Dreams came where the mountain was an endless golden expanse sloping away into infinity. Also cakes and cookies. The dragon, for now, was content.
Meeritza
Meeritza stepped gingerly through the sagging boards of the old ruined building. No one went here, not even the fae folk, and that meant there was something worth knowing inside. A moment of sweeping her eyes through the ruins picked out a number of incongruities. First and foremost was the obvious absence of any attention to the foyer. Dust and cobwebs caked every surface, seemingly undisturbed for years. No domestic would ever have conscienced it and no house in Telvin's Nest approached it without some grave offenses having been done.
The first two steps beyond the doorstep were muffled by the layers of dirt, blown in and caked on by storms past, but further in the floor became tiled in a ceramic mosaic of geometric shapes. It was colorful and all the pieces interlocked, but somehow no pattern became apparent in all of it. Domestics, the house-fey of Telvin’s Nest, had long ago abandoned this place, but something was still active here. The dragon, she reminded herself, not ‘something’. It was definitely a dragon, probably the size of a large housecat from what she had seen but much more long and slender. But there were no tracks in the dirt. That made sense, she reasoned, because she had seen the dragon flying. It would probably never even have to touch the ground if it was agile enough.
Something was wrong with the floor.
Meeritza took a moment to survey what her feelings had hinted at. Suddenly it was obvious. She had seen people laying tiles before, and always they left the gaps between until last. There was a special mud that got filled in and sealed before the floor was finished to keep the tiles in place while people walked over them. This mosaic had something else in the lines between the tiles. Leaning down to inspect them, Meeritza discovered that instead of the hardened mud she had been expecting, the grout lines were filled with crisscrossing cords, coated in dust so they would resemble grout. The scale of the floor struck her as obsessive, though she didn’t actually know the word itself. Someone, the dragon most probably, must have spent hours… days even…
None of them were connected at the ends. Each line simply merged into the dust covered section of floor. Sweeping a little away revealed that each line was capped with a pinched lead aglet, but nothing special and definitely not anchored. Just hidden.
Definitely a trap.
She couldn’t imagine how this would actually work, but there was no doubt that this was deliberate. Deliberate, disguised, and the first defense, but how could she get past it? Each tile was only slightly larger than her foot… and it would be like stepping into a net anyway! Even if she were nimble enough to pick out some sort of sequence, she would be stepping into a net! Whatever this was, she wasn’t going to set it off. So, after a moment, she decided that sneaking just wouldn’t be the correct thing here.
“Hey! Dragon! I know you’re here! I brought you something. Just let me see you.”
Yes's head snapped up at the sound. An intruder! Someone had found out! How could they...
“Come on. I don't know how, but I can see you. I have a plan. I think we can help each other out!”
Yes slithered along the ceilings, partially flying, partly climbing to make the passing easy and silent. There was a figure, darkened by the lights behind it, a fair way inside the vestibule, and just outside the network. One of Yes's great regrets was that the control of ropes and cords did not allow them to move on their own, but only flail and coil and knot around. It would be enough, plenty enough, if the figure actually crossed into the area, but they were just clear of it. Perhaps a little deception was in order...
“Is that you on the ceiling? I see you there, and I saw your trap. Come on, I can help you get stuff if we work together.”
Yes was shocked. The figure... it was that urchin that spoiled the bakery plan! Yes turned to flee... but this was the lair! It couldn't be abandoned! The treasures would be plundered!
“Look, you ran away before, but I'm not trying to hurt you. I don't want your stuff. I just...”
“What do you mean you don't want my STUFF?!” Yes shouted, “STUFF?! You dare call my treasures stuff?! It's a magnificent dragon’s hoard you insolent... insolent... And how could you NOT WANT IT?! It’s amazing! More wealth than you’ve seen in your life!”
“So,” Meeritza mocked, "if it's so magnificent then you don't need more. Like... you wouldn't want these.”
She brought out a handful of smoothly polished jasper cabochons, showed them, juggled them, and stashed them in a pocket, then did the same with a few coins, some fine linen handkerchiefs, and a pewter statuette of one of the local minor deities.
Yes's eyes glittered at the treasures. The desire was there. Those things were real. It was a lot to be allowed to remain on the strange child. It should be in the hoard! It belonged in the hoard!
“Ok, so hear me out. Just hear my proposal and all that is yours. I'll give it to you.” Meeritza said.
“You mean... you're giving me tribute for my favor?” Yes asked, edging the inflection of the question so that it was clear this was the way it should have been said.
Meeritza picked up on the meaning and retried.
“Oh great dragon,” she said, mimicking the accents of the high-born, ”I bring a tribute that I might seek the favor of a... umm... meeting?”
“You seek my counsel,” Yes corrected.
“Right, I seek your counsel for a proposal to get even more treasures for both of us.”
“And more stuff from the bakery. I like those little sweet cakes best.”
“All that and more,” Meeritza assured, “I think that you and me, together, could get more than we could both get on our own. I have some ideas.”
Yes sighed, greed and desire wrapping the dragon's heart with a warm glow of anticipation. Perhaps, just perhaps, this would be worth considering.
