build a brave new foundry close to home. [WT]

You don't usually tell people that you like the stories. Almost no one asks; more to the point, the people who do always seem to be the same people who believe that the only way to care about something is their way, and attempts to correct the misunderstanding take more energy than they're worth. If you're too firm, half the time someone thinks you're making fun of them, and if you're not firm enough, you accidentally invite them to convince you. Given the options, you prefer to stand there making noncommittal noises until you can extract yourself, no matter how uncomfortably even a lie of omission squirms beneath your ribs.

There's no point opening the question; if you had it in you to be convinced, you would have let someone do it years ago. Few of the other kids at Aether—the kids you left behind, you force yourself to think sometimes, in case something in your gut might collapse if you fail to twist the knife lodged there often enough—liked to pray, and those that did usually kept it to themselves. The—your—the staff never encouraged it. But sometimes on a break or after curfew someone would pass time with a story they picked up from their family, back when they had one, and often as not that meant Ripredist lore. You can only recite bits of the prophecies anymore—you remember, with startling clarity, lying curled and silent in your bed but compulsively mouthing along as Viatrix reached the last repeating stanza of the Prophecy of Blood, always your least favorite and perhaps the most memorable for exactly that reason—but you know the main beats: the flood, the wars, the plague, the names of Ripred's inner circle. You knew enough to decide whether to stake your faith in them; you decided not to.

And considering how many edges of yourself you find yourself holding up to glaring light so you can ask did Aether break this, or was I always this way, you feel surprisingly okay about this one. You don't have to believe in prophecy or giant animals to like the idea that a story about blood can end in peace, or to look for a little of yourself in a boy mired in a fight he never looked for, whose hands moved of their own accord sometimes and who came back to himself bloodied and horrified and confused—a boy who, in the end, surrounded by allies asking something from him that he could no longer bear, smashed his blade and renounced his title.

None of the stories, as far as you know, explain what happened to Gregor after he left Ripred to return home. He had a home to return to, though, and you like to think that after everything, he found a way to build a life he could love. He never had to hold a sword again; he took up music, perhaps, or painting, and made things instead of destroying them.

It's easier to believe, whether they existed or not, that someone else might deserve that sort of ending.

Gregor has a statue in the garden, as expected, but you didn't actually come to visit it. You're here to shore up a hole in your knowledge of District Six that you didn't know you had until an afternoon painting job last week during which, in what at the time felt like a well-measured bid to make conversation, you asked a fellow worker to tell you more about the cloisters she'd mentioned. She looked at you like you already should have known the answer, an expression you will never be so used to that it doesn't make you feel like a child taking their first step onto the training floor, and you clamped your mouth shut, suddenly keenly aware in a way you hadn't been for a while of your only partly hidden accent and the invisible, precarious towers of things that everyone around you seemed to just know, somehow. This new one, at least, you could do something about.

You do have to start somewhere and Gregor is as good a choice as any, but you aren't surprised to find him with a bronze sword in hand and a plaque dedicated to The Warrior. Nobody follows Ripred to honor his protégé's nonexistent epilogue, not even you. And he's posed with Ares, who you can't think about too hard without your throat closing up. You last only a few moments beside them, gingerly tracing the texture of Ares' metal fur with two fingertips, before you have to shy away.

If you focus on the plants, this place doesn't feel terribly different from the square at the College where you've taken to spending free afternoons—less grass, more fruit, but the same green smell and gently shifting murmur of voices and blur of moving people around you. You're not focusing on the plants—you're tapping the ends of Temp's antennae, reading through the small plaque for a small bat you don't recognize, and examining the glowing spot on Lizzie's hair with mild confusion—but the sense of familiarity sits soothingly at the edge of your awareness as you meander. It makes it easier to consider without getting too overwhelmed that you have no idea what Ripredism says about the dead, but that it better be nice, if so many of its important people are dead themselves.

Someone at Aether must have known—must know—but you can't ask them, now.

You slow to a stop beside a rat. It's not Ripred, who you already saw standing stoic and alert beside Lizzie in the central statue, and you suppose it could be Lapblood or Mange, except you would expect to find them together—and maybe it's just that you're already thinking about Aether, but you recognize Ephrath's favorite without circling around to look at her plaque. You know Twitchtip.

It was the nose thing that did it more than the stories, you think; she demanded them so often that Revaz started making up his own, and he wasn't terribly good at it, but Ephrath never complained. Not that you ever asked; she was too dedicated to the competition and you were too—yourself, for the two of you to become friends. You were allies of a sort sometimes, though. She swapped weapons with you behind the trainers' backs if you got one with a hilt that burned your palms for no good reason; then she trounced you with them, without fail, but you still paid her back with food from your smuggled stash on nights when the smell of dinner made her gag too hard to eat. Different types of pain take different reserves to deal with, and she understood that without using it against you, which in both respects was more than you could say for some of the people in charge.

Ephrath was always one of the favorites the trainers insisted they could never choose. She won more often than almost anyone else in your year and she knew how to sound polite in the way the adults wanted. Neither made her untouchable, but if anyone is fine there, it's probably her. Even so, remembering her makes you wish you prayed after all—makes you wonder if it would feel better to climb onto the pedestal and curl against the bronze and ask the patron of misfits to look after a few of them a little extra hard. And maybe you should have stayed with Gregor and Ares, if you were going to end up here with your eyes dry but your throat tight anyway, shifting your weight onto and off of your toes as subtly as you can, wondering if anyone looked after Twitchtip as a child and hating every answer you come up with.

Nothing says not to climb, but no one else is doing it, and you don't think you can handle a scolding right now. Instead you take a shaky breath, spin on your heel, and sit down in the raspberry bush.

The stems are both pricklier and less dense than you expected. You whack an elbow on the pedestal and you'll probably have to treat raspberry stains, which will mean trying to treat them until you're frustrated enough to either start chewing on your hands or go bother Suman about it. Once you finish flailing and tuck your limbs in, though, it's not so bad; the whole world filters through that green smell now and the shade lifts a pressure from your eyelids that you hadn't yet noticed, but you can still hear a choir somewhere to your left and the chatter of other visitors to your right. Alone but not alone, you can rest your chin on your knees and focus on breathing, deep and steady, until the knot in your throat loosens. In the distance, the choir fades into silence only briefly before a new song drifts out and down to find you.

The raspberry stems rustle.

Your eyes shoot open.

The voice that follows the rustling comes from a few feet away, vaguely toward your right, but you tense a little further at the sound. I'm—cleaning, you start to rehearse, but that sounds ridiculous even as you come up with it. Cleaning what, and with what supplies? Picking berries—no, who does that inside the bush? You... dropped something?

"Twitchtip," the voice says one more time before subsiding.

I... know? you don't say. Sometimes you're okay at knowing what not to say. Unfortunately, that does nothing for knowing what to say, let alone how to say it, and you have no reference for this situation.

Maybe that's okay. You're not actually doing anything wrong, right? You're sitting. You can sit where you like, as long as a sign doesn't say not to. Or as long as you're not loitering, which seems to be defined however a shopkeeper feels like defining it, but this isn't a shop and isn't the whole point to come and sit and look at the statues? You looked at the statues, and now here you are, sitting.

As the raspberries begin to shift again you take a deep breath, sharper than the last one, and stand up as quickly as you sat down.

To your relief, only one person is in the place where the voice came from. To your confusion, you notice, in order: long hair; sitting down; a pad of paper; the general idea that this person may never have cared that you were in the raspberries at all.

"Um," you say, in case using your voice kick-starts some actual words, though you probably should have known better. After your anxious scramble for excuses, the realization that you misunderstood this encounter feels like it ought to come as a relief, but if anything you feel slightly more unbalanced than the moment before; you catch yourself raising one hand to fuss with the hem of your shirt, and lift it instead up to your chest and uncurl your fingers to offer a tiny, hesitant wave.



the entire middle of this post was somewhat less morose before I cracked open Code of Claw to check a detail and accidentally read half the book and had an emotion or three or three dozen