Saturday 29 January 2022

Friendship ended with....

 whoever my previous favourite sculptor was. No idea really, Hepworth? Some un-named Medieval gargoyle-former?


Because now Akishi Ueda is my best sculptor




Twitter isn't completely awful, I actually knew nothing about this artist, not even their name, but was drawn in through the algorithm showing images, links and suggestions presumably based on people I was following. 



(This guy in particular reminds me of myself.)





From the links and images I saw an art book was being made and that it was not horribly expensive, and so a purchase was made and thence utterly forgotten about while the book slowly germinated and then slipped across the seas.




Ueda (Akishis?, I can never get Japanese names the right way round), work runs from the beautiful nightmare to the somewhat sugary, probably you can guess which arc of that I prefer more, but all of it is dreamlike, somnolent, the halls of Morpheous open up and processions come forth, all quietly intent upon their own journeys and purposes.




Children dreaming of kings or kings dreaming of children, comfortable terrors.




Many such snouted creatures, they remind me of Baku the dream snaffling monster.




Many Fairytail Riders, creatures like men riding wonders sprung from the impossible paradoxes of a peasant grandmothers descriptions of an impossible beast, yet made real.




Or common figures and characters from parallel-world Fairytails, or visions of us in the dreams of the impossible creatures that might exist obverse to us across the wall of sleep.




There is an instagram here

And you can get the book..



Saturday 22 January 2022

Corpse Fishers

 

Art by Alcopopstar but if you have been following "Queen Mab" you know that.

Hear 

Tapping on the pipes, poking and prodding. Muttering and rambling. Otherwise they move quiet, even with a corpse across their back. 

 

Smell 

Even in the crypt, the stink of drowned rotting meat is particular and strong. 

“Ay the scent sticks to thee after a while” 

 

See 

Tottering, staggering, smiling. Grinning and whistling. Tall for a crypt-dweller, strong and rangy. Holding their hook of office. Bestrewn with twine and hooks, straps and bindings. Who knows what they have in that mess on their back? Rank with shit yet unashamed, they’ll give you a wink. 

 

 

Names 

Flexible James

Tankard Fools

Grit Feeble

Twist Valve

Small-Bird Chips

Nit-Fiddler Franz 

 

The Honest Corpse-Fisher 

Happy fellows(?) who take payment in corpses, always thrilled to be given one “for free”.

Cheery types who likely won’t necessarily try to eat you if they randomly bump into you. 

“Corpse Fishers not Corpse Farmers, that’s the Guild way” 

Pretty great guys or whatever they are, unless they find you poaching

“Seen any meat my lovelies?” 

“I’ll take that off your hands, no questions asked.” 

“Now that would be telling..” 

“Whats this thingy now? Now that’s a tricky thing….” 

“Well now, what say thee, what see thee? Hows thy meat?” 

 

 

Gossips 

Eager traders of information, they want to tell you the news, and they want to hear your story. 

They will listen your tales and share a few of their own. If you need information, they may know where to get it, or know something else useful. 

This is all to get a clear picture of your doings – they don’t care at all about the High Ladies or politics, all they care about is threats to the Saints. If you don’t pose a threat to the Saints, and hold nothing that might do so, then they don’t care at all what you do – except as gossip and tales to chat and trade over. 

Only malificarum matters to them. 

 

Maleficarum 

The semi-secret duty of the Corpse-Fishers is to stop any dangerous tech before it reaches the saints. Specifically any radioactive material, active nanites, bio-phages, causality weapons – maleficarum

“Whats this then my lovely’s? Looks a bit tricky…” 

if a Saint is damaged they will pay in their own flesh. 

The Corpse-Fishers have an ‘arrangement’ with the Hydraulic Church and Court of Melinoe. All malificarum is handed over and in return they keep the Corpse-Fishing rights. 

 

 

Abilities 

“Identify”; Can spot and identify dangerous hypertech. Is that magnetic bottle full of deadly nanites? Is that butterfly a secret carrier of a viral plague? They will spot it. But they won’t necessarily tell you this

Their aim is to control and restrict these things, especially to stop them reaching o damaging the Saints. They will only tell you what something is if that is more likely to get it out of your hands and into safer ones. 

 

“Disappear”; In the Crypt a Corpse-Fisher can always find a way to hide or sneak away, if they have but a moments distraction to work with. 

 

“Survive”; A Corpse-Fisher will survive one apparently-lethal attack per round. They usually play dead and use the time to “Disappear” 


 

Schemers 

If they can’t take Malificarum from you directly, they will manipulate others into doing so, or directly inform the Hydraulic Church who will then set themselves against you en-masse. The Corpse-Fishers are well-respected and can destroy the reputation of others in the Crypt if they so choose. 

 

 

The Corpse-Fishers Guild 

You have to be part of the Guild to pull corpses out of the flow. Unless caught in the act this is near impossible to prove. 

The Guild gets angry if they hear of anyone breaking their claimed monopoly. 

 


Joining the Guild 

Need; Good relationship with Corpse Fishers, Hydraulic Monks and Melinoe. Proven skill in Corpse Fishing and keeping secrets. No claims against you of eating the uneaten things. 

The Test; Find and bring three specific corpses to the testing ground before the hourglass turns. The Guild places these in advance and the placement tests the situational knowledge, cunning and luck of the applicant. It’s possible for an applicant to bring other corpses so long as they match the description given, this considered the “luck of the pipes”.

Thursday 13 January 2022

The First Amber Court

Before it was an Empire, the Court was a Kingdom, an Ideal, a warren of rooms in the Crypt of an unbuilt Cathedral, and before that, a room, panelled in Amber, the birth point of the concept, and the conspiracy which begat that strange devising.

 "What is known was once suspected, and what suspected was once known." - Kausker Wood.

 Yet this we think we know; K-----1 the Duke of Lataam, possessed a chamber2 panelled in amber, and it was here, shortly after the 'Miracle of Hoögst' that the first secret meetings3 were held, and the germination of the Amber4 Court began.


   

Apocryphal image of the Amber Court in its Late Period
From 'In the Memories of Stars'


1.      On Redactions

 Mind-plague and Cursethought still hover round the record of these times, especially of the later wars of the Amber Court, the Otherworld Wars and the Red Shift, such that only the most pure of our order are permitted to read, write or even consider these matters. The more conservative amongst my order would happily launch a Mnemarchy Crusade to conceal or destroy all records - so greatly do they fear the contagious notions, the "vermin tales", of the Red Shift - that they may spill over, hide themselves in nearby concepts and thereby slowly and subtly re-infect the Lords Causality.

 Here no such redaction has been made. The son of Duke K----- of Lataam, he who would become "The King Beneath the Mountain", "The Twice-Redacted King" and "Lord of the Amber Court", possessed such power over the Lords Causality that, along with many of the higher-ranked members of the Amber Court itself, his name may not be directly written, remembered or considered. This enchantment, or alteration, was, and is, so powerful that it has overflowed even to the identities of that individuals parents and nearby relatives. All we can say of Duke K---- was that his name began with K. His name is written in some of our records but neither I nor any conscious being may read or comprehend it.

   

2.      On The Chamber

 A room  in the Ducal palace or fortress of Lataam panelled in amber and fossils. A twin-walled room, silent due to its inner amber walls, paved with polished trilobites. Servants and guards moved behind the amber panels, in the space between the walls  bearing lamps.

 The shadows of strange insects, curls and spatters of ancient catastrophe and that of one creature something like a mouse, along with the warping and shifting of light as it smoked, more than shone, through the wavelike  thickness of the amber walls and was refracted through the carvings, passed across their features of those who met within. Both the sound and nature of the occupants was disguised. The vague shape - but not identity, of those within could be perceived, and nothing heard.

    

3.      On The Meetings

 One door lead to the dukes apartments and the other to the hedge maze in the garden - a petty labyrinth - but many early meetings were held during parties and gatherings and being "lost in the maze" was sufficient reason to excuse an absence. The great variety of guests and the double-disguise of a masked ball, along with the covering social camouflage of a hist of petty intrigues, clearly sufficed to disguise both the participants, and even the very existence of the meetings themselves.

   

4.      On Amber

 The room was an assembled treasure of the Dutchy of Lataam - partly inherited from the lost Dutchy of Latöm - partly received in dowry on the marriage of Lady Z----- of Frost to Duke K-----. Duke K----- dedicated himself to collecting such amber treasures for much of his life, finally completing the room roughly 15 years before his death.

Born of strange places were they, torn from seams and tipped from fossilised trees on shores left bare by suboceanic shock. The treasures of tribal kings, smoke-stained, ancient even to them. The amber panels dated from many ages and even the panels themselves were composite elements of a composite room.

 Duke K----- allowed re-carving for a more coherent whole. The leering, primitive ancient carvings of the amber mixed and jumbled, overwritten with the forms and shapes of many faces. The ghosts of those primeval forms remained hidden in the shifting yellow light, waiting only the just-so crossing beams to reveal themselves again, and beneath these overwritten patterns watched the still-more ancient emissaries of deep time - the only witnesses to a new era of hope and fear.

 

Wednesday 5 January 2022

"In the Memories of Stars"

 I write of ruin unbound by the past and the unravelling fates of men for you have recalled to me a dream wherein I saw, in the future of my people, a record of the ruin of your own. A vision, not of tumbling towers or oceans folding over the pennants of Knights but of books, and silence in an empty palace where snow drifts through the halls

There wrote a scholar in a voided land. The armies tipped into the rivers to stain the sea red, the peasants ploughed into under their furrows, starved in their hearths, the nobles withered, twitching from the teeth of gnawing rats.. all tumbled away to nothing like a cup emptied from a towers top, leaving beneath it not a splatter, nor a stain, wine drunk by the howling wind

In my dream, which came strangely like a memory, I knew this place. It was the Solar of Irrilyia, a once-sacred chamber I was taken to as a child, built by a long-fallen Prince as a sad offering to his unmarried mistress so that, though she may never be Queen and her children bastards all, yet she might occupy the topmost place in all the lands of Frost. In time, and as dynasties rolled each upon the other it was abandoned, transferred, preserved first as a power, then memory. 

When I saw the Solar, once and still the highest room of the tallest tower of the most sky-deep city of Frost, I recall it full of sunlight as a jewel is full of shine. Yet in my vision no sun wheeled nor stars shone, only a pale lantern and a guttering fire

In my dream I entered quietly, as a child, yet I was no child and moved as if I knew this place well, had walked it before, not once but many times.

In the Solar one black figure sat, robed in black made darker by the shadow of the lamp. They did not turn to me but stayed, sitting, crouching, hunched across the desk which occupied the centre of this room. All else was shadow and gloom, glimmers of firelight catching on the tumbling flakes of snow which drifted from a fissure in the roof

Near the black scribe was bound an orange flame, one locked in the belly of a stove, an iron tripod of the kind soldiers use, one leg was gone, it was propped, I saw on piled books of ancient make with slate and wooden covers though the topmost charred slowly, pressed against the pig-black iron. All was unsteady, the stove wavered, the chair and table tapped, shifting a little under the pressure of each written line as it crawled towards the parchments edge, and the weight of this black writers outstretched hand tilted the table, and so the scribe put out the other arm to grasp the tables side.

The scratching of the pen, like whispers, followed by a soft "thunk", a wheeze, as of from ancient lungs or cleft lips, then "thunk" the table tipped to rightness as it seemed the writer rode it through the black night like a ship in storm. And with this, a squeal, very small, as the chair tipped and bowed a little at each movement. Ill-made tools for an ill-made man for under all was breathing which seemed sore labour.

The whispering pen, the "thunk-thunk-squeal" and the labouring lungs, all sounds bound like slaves or spirits to the fierce unending flow of the text, unseen to me, a hidden river yet it pushed and rode the writer and commanded every effort of this desolate and fractured place as if a demon, possessing but one vile and ancient servant, unable elsewise to touch at all our material world, stood invisibly and with imperious will, lashed, howled without sound and commanded "Write. Write! Write!!" Such was strangely fearful in this little sight; a  black robed-man writing in a high castle.

I stepped within, or I remember that I had stepped in so, in that old-old story of the Pale Scribe which surely I remembered now. 

Cold was the Solarium, yet not bare. Books were piled against the walls, scrolls tacked and jammed in gaps and between piles. The wind panted outside and pressed fingers against the windows, once clearest glass, now blocked and shuttered, curtained by rags and browned tapestries. Yet still some wind keened and a whispering slip across the darkened floor like a carpet of snakes. Papers and scraps, pages and letters, fragments, skittered like leaves, flowed like embers on the cold air.

Why this word-hoard? Were they relics? Treasures? How? In the whole of Samaris were these charred and misbegotten scraps somehow stolen, or preserved?

"What do you here? What place is this, and when?"  

So I wished to scream and cry out, to ask this grim librarian.

Were they mad this hermit? Or was this all, the last remains of Samaris and Frost? Was there anyone still who knew the story of Illyria, or that this was her room and why it was made? But I remembered, or saw, I had seen somewhere or been told, that in this scene, this story, nothing was spoken or said, for one would not, one could not, and so both were silent.

He sighed then, and the black shape paused, shifted. It writhed I think. The Demon did not want it to be still. The words called, like a black river of ink which if dammed must burst. But I think there was a moment of silence, of recollection, as of an old, sad memory, a stillness of regret. Then again, "scratch-thunk, scratch-thunk-squeal" and the labour of breath. I think if this scribe knew of me, and I felt somehow it did, and yet did not, but that it cared not at all, intent upon his text here at the end of the world.

It.

Was it truly pale?

I did not want to see its face, or to be seen, but I knew that, as dreamers know, that I must read.
That was how the story went and would go, that was the reason for the memory, why it had been passed on. Or the vision... But I must read nonetheless, for to do otherwise were like a joke half-told.

Though I saw and could see nothing of the outside world I imagined a black horizon and red fires burning under stars which swam and melted like ice, like tears.

The wind stirred and in the shadow of its sound I crept. I breathed through open mouth as a child does creeping in a game, and like a child I felt great dread, so much that my thighs itched and quivered as if holding on a climb, for all that my tread was soft.

He stank, though the cold hid it. He stank like a leper. Rags folded him and he was hunched beyond belief.He seemed to be in pain, or past pain, for I think for him no deed or moment lacked it.

I was within the fires red glow, and little heat it gave. I saw the surface of the table.

"Scratch-scratch-thunk"

And the "skree" of the chair as he leaned his bowed body and reached, forcing limbs which seemed to which to curl upon themselves, like ferns, pushing them, his withered self, bowing to force the grey half-bitten quill to the edge of the table, the edge of the page.

The hand.

Was, could this be a mans hand?

So white. White as the moon and vile as a wound.

What had been done to him? What had he done?

A punishment? Burning. Perhaps acid, or feathers and tar. Were those still fingernails or something else?

I looked down, in the vision, in the memory of the tale I remembered that I had done this, down at my own right hand. It was normal, and shared no mark or blemish with that thing. There was no way, it would not, I would not become…

So, unspoken fear assuaged, I stepped, only a little step. The rank beast stink and the pitiful breath. The "scratch-scratch-thunk" resounding now like hammers. I was right behind him. Right behind his shoulder, invisible, unseen and even if he should rise, should turn and see me, I could hurl him down like a dog, withered as it was. This was the secret I was bound to see. The black words crawled across the cracked palimpsest.

It was my tongue, not the one in which I write to you, but that of my birth, in an educated, elongated secretary style. My eyes darted, sections, headings, repeated phrases, amber, the amber court, chrysalis wars, ruin, great working, the names of great nations. 

What dark history was this? Not mine, thank god, but some names I knew. Oderlane, Day and yours, or your title at least.

"The Ruin of the Amber Court"

All this was written in past tense, and grimly, as if too long done, but I saw horror, vague and terrible as if from scripture or nightmare. I read of shapeless legions, of lands I knew yet "turned from any Path and Broken", of rains of corpses, of generations cursed by dark foreknowledge, of lands where the babes were born dead, yet sentient and grieving themselves, of cities tipped into the "Fabric" and make alike unto curses, or worms or dragons of myth; "and Redgaar turned then at the time of Third Turning and broke its Path and the Cord of its Peoples and moved behind the Fabric as a hungry ghost which swims in black water and was cursed". I read of dreams made vampiric, of tilted skies which spilled forth quicksilver men that hated all, of the harrowing of Time and ever and again, repeated; "The Ruin of the Amber Court".

I leaned forwards, puzzling and darting, lost in dark wonder and frustration. What was the Amber Court? For then I had never heard the phrase. 

I leaned and He turned, and saw

Or just remembered. His eyes searching mine, or looking through them. Could he see me at all?

What before I feared in horror I saw now in inexpressible sorrow. A face so altered and unmanned, eroded by tortures and sculpted in pain, yet, regret, regret and yearning unto madness, as if in in a call or heralds cry, his face alone begged me; Do not let this be.

Did our eyes meet?

I woke from my vision, or came from my memory, weeping. So sad, so sad and fearful yet I knew not what for. For a fantasy. I could neither be consoled nor speak of what I had seen. What could I say but that I wept for a dream I could not well recall?

All this lay within me, for how long? A week? A month? Though the memory slowly faded, I wrote notes, made images and verse for, though I could not speak of what I had seen directly, I could freeze instants of it through art, like nails in my soul.

Only weeks I think.

Can you imagine now, or begin to, what flowed through me as I deciphered your letter? (By my own hand, for I would trust no other). Letter by letter, phrase by phrase. Of what slow nightmare, no, for there was no shadow or enchantment to it, but only horrid clarity, like a deadly sentence handed down by a mediocre judge.

Those Self Same Terms

The Exact Words

And the very concept! Not in history, but as a plan! A yet-to-be! Can you understand? I wish I wish I wish that you could see my visions as I saw them, but I know you will doubt, and if not doubt, defy. Such is your nature. You are fearless, and there is a great terror in that. God made fear for a reason, we do not think it is a blessing but it is. You will doubt and see only a warning, and you will plan and devise, thinking to overcome. Such is your way, your nature to the core.

Still I implore you. I beg you, if you have ever respected my talents, as your words would suggest, if you can believe me in any way. Do not do this.

There is still time! Fate is not yet set. Whatever horrors you have seen since Albraneth and the Canticle, whatever winding paths your Seers have put before you, I know you are outraged by these times and their falseness, by the ignorance and hypocrisy, and yes I agree with you that Oderlane is mad and likely a Sorcerer, and his beasts both fanatical and corrupt. Tet still, I beg you, do not do this thing. I have seen it and it is terrible.

I will not join you beneath your mountain.

I wish I knew words to move your soul but I fear none such exist.

Peace to you in all love.




---------------------------------------------------

Apocrypha of "In the Memories of Stars". Copy of a document said to have been recovered, year 672, from the ruins of lost Samaris. Transcribed and included in the 732 First-Block-Printed edition. Retained only as Apocryphal as all dates and names either removed or lost and provenance of original impossible to ascertain.