Vel'drav T'larryo Klezn Ph'Ssin'urn

[Sulissurn]

But a woman is a changeling
Always shifting shape
Just when you think you have it figured out
Something new begins to take
What strange claws are these
Scratching at my skin?
I never knew my killer would be coming from within

I am no mother
I am no bride
I am king

I am no mother
I am no bride
I am king


What is a legend but a lie that spindles out? From one mouth to another, a web of spittle and magic in air is woven until the thing suspended—like a sacrifice of memory in the middle—becomes too heavy for soaked threads. The threads break from the weight, but they will reform. More ragged, distorted, and twisted than before, but that is the price you pay when you want to live forever. Or in some cases, when you have no choice but to live forever.

There is a legend that is whispered; hot breath in the round, pointed-shelled, beaded ear of a tiny shadow with an edge so great it bleeds cities. A myth is shouted between two burly drunks clattering wooden tankards so hard together that the ale which splashes on tabletops looks black, like moonlit blood. There is a legend. The legend is too big, too wide to cross—a raging river the size of the city itself and perhaps almost as big as her ego.

Is it not funny that minor things make the most significant cuts? Is it not hilarious that the slightest of candles can create sprawling shadows to make children shiver in the night?

She thinks so.

It wasn't a fat, cheery little thing that came crawling out of her hole in the ground. But she loved the thought of second, third, and fourth breakfast.

She contemplated hunger while idly painted in the sticky, clotted red of two long-dead burly drunks laying glass-eyed in splashed ale, red drip-drip-plit-plattering in the silence of a tavern. All eyes on her, all eyes wide, all mouths shut. She doodled a big fat todger in blood on one of the dead drunkards' faces, then rummaged around in one of their backpacks. In a coagulating-coated mess of her hands was a mithril headpiece, small, delicate, obviously elvish.

"Naughty, naughty," said the legend in a voice meant to raise every hair on any mammal's body and croon a siren's song to invite the listener to dash their brains on a rock.

"Mother, did naut teach you naut to steal from little shadows, mm?"

She stuck a glistening finger in her mouth and pulled it out with a startling wet pop in the dread-filled silence to punctuate whatever point she was trying to make. As if now realizing she had an audience to her swift deeds, she glanced around. Eyes reflecting like a feline in the yellow-harvest moon flashed about, mouth curling in what could shockingly be almost called amusement.

She plopped the mithril circlet on her head.
The entire crowd twitched.
The sound of her cackle followed her low-slung hip-swing to the door, and the rasp of her last words floating like a lousy aftertaste.

"Long live the King."

[Sulissurn]

From the houses of the holy

We can watch the white doves go
From the door comes Satan's daughter
And it only goes to show, you know

There's an angel on my shoulder

In my hand a sword of gold
Let me wander in your garden
And the seeds of love I'll sow
You know


Amaryllis belladonna, genus: Hippeastrum.


Last week she found the set of strange glasses once given to her more than a decade ago by a blonde norseman who was othin's son. They were black framed with black lenses, and since finding them, she had read the common letters on the side and tried to say them correctly. Rei bawn. Ray ban. Re bown, mouth a slash of deep red lips forming the words under her breath to distract herself from memories and ghosts. A tiny black creature in red, red dress marching in the snow-sharpened sunlight muttering to itself with switch-sway of long braided hair, made for an exciting afternoon for some. For the rest, they parted from the sidewalks away from her as shoals of fish instinctually do when sharks come swimming.

This week she stalked the streets and homes and gardens and walkways—without anyone's permission—whether they were home or not, gathering armfuls of Amaryllis. All of the Amaryllis. As many as possible. Ox-blood blossoms that shivered daintily in silver scarred arms, tiger-stripped red and white. It didn't matter so long as they had some red in them. Some held in arms still had roots and dirt attached, and as she walked with her burden bold as anything, she left dropped petals like bloodlines and soil with tiny footprints. She's heard a story once. She thinks she did? Perhaps she had read it in a book long gone and long forgotten or listened by the fire at the hearth. She heard a story once about a golden arrow, a pierced heart, and a red flower that had grown in its wake. It remained. The story, not the flower, not where or how or when she heard it. The story.

So last week, she gathered every day armfuls of Amaryllis. And in a cave (in the ground in a hole in a log by a bump in the night), she laid every armful down at the root of a tree that had once been a thousand years old but withered and cut from a lightning strike. She told herself she laid them down because they were pretty (like her) and red (her favorite) and pretended that the smell of stinking rot as the older petals curled, turned brown, and died did not exist. Death and 'gone' did not exist.

She pretended many things that an iron masquerade mask was no longer there. That a hank of pure white hair taken from a busty elf with gem-purple eyes was not tied around a root. And no, there were no tiny rubies trembling hands had once braided in her hair laid to rest, winking and blinking accusingly at her. One would also not find an empty chocolate box, a piece of wood from an inn half-painted with bright blue paint, a specialized wrench from a strange albino woman, or ink and quill and burned candle. No, there was nothing here in these dying flowers.

There was no makeshift shrine in this rags and shreds of fading red, no placement of things that meant something to someone in a place where perhaps a heart wished for miracles to happen. She worshipped the color. She had worked herself for seven days and nights, possibly devastating the amaryllis flower stock of the entire city, not for some transgression she did not understand and certainly not in some broken quest for healing and closure.

This was no shrine to the past. Absolutely not.
But tomorrow, she thinks, she will put on the ree boons and see if she missed any flowers.

It would not do to forget a single one.

[Sulissurn]

The pain
that made you
the odd one out
is the story
that connects you
to a healing world.
—Eleven, by Tanya Markul


"Vel'bol ph'nind xundus." It was the tallest of the females that had spoken, of course. She was standing at the head of the gaggle of children. All of them wore various sunglasses and sunshades provided to them from the orphanage; some crooked, half-cracked, in different stages of repair, some new, some too big for their elfin faces. What are they doing? she had asked. Suliss'urn, arms across her middle, leaning against the doorframe of The Sweet Shoppe, finally turned her head to glance down at the gathering of drow children, male and female—though the males, smaller and thinner, had been naturally relegated to the back.

"It is called having fun," she rasped in common, refusing to speak the dark tongue in daylight and forcing the spiderlings to understand it and, perhaps, practice their surface tongue.

"But, no one is scream?" Asked another female, perhaps just out of her toddler years, face round and chubby thanks to no doubt stealing and eating food from the males. "No one is die? No one is bleed?" The startled expression was hampered by the too-large sunglasses that perched precariously at the end of her nose.

Suliss'urn felt her jaws and teeth clench, tongue rolling to keep her patience, which she was not exactly known for, in check. "No, no dying. You," she pointed. "You, you, and you. Pair up with a male. You will be eating what is known as chocolate and sampling what is known as soda, and you will enjoy it."

Confusion spread like a ripple in still pond waters as even the male and females glanced wordlessly at each other and then back to Suliss'. "What...is point?" A rail-thin boy in bedraggled clothing, both somehow too small and too big for him simultaneously.

"Of fun?"

He nodded.

Suliss'urn pointed to his empty dagger sheath, then the rest of the children's various open weapon sheaths and other places she had caught them all trying to smuggle in something sharp. "Why practice throwing a knife?" She asked instead.

The boy's cheeks blushed a deeper, darker blue. "Is to get good—Hone skill. Be better. Faster." Suliss'urn nodded along, then jerked her chin back to the room of parents and children eating. She did not care that she blocked the doorway with her murder of Drow kids.

"Fun. Play. It is good for here," She tapped her temple with a bare finger, not the clawed hand. "It is good, here—" She tapped her chest, stood up straighter, prouder. "Make you more confident. It is good here," she swept a hand over her entire body. "Make you resilient; it is good here," she tapped her mouth. "You learn to speak better, adapt and interact with this world, and it is good when you find yourself challenged, for what you learn when you play gives you the tools to work through what you feel and express. Things that they—" She finally pointed to her feet, "Would not allow you to do. So you will have fun. You will learn to play. You will learn to play together."

A groan from the males and several hisses from the females. "And you will not bite, punch, hit, scratch, stab, or maim each other, or the human children or I will punish." Flatly.

The children drew themselves up as they stiffened, taking this speech like a small army taking inspiration from their commander and being criticized by them. Several of the children had to stop themselves halfway in giving House salutes. Several more looked fearful about what would happen if they did not learn how to Play and Have Fun perfectly.

"Go." Was all the drow told them, and they scattered like a sea of daddy long-leg hatchlings, determined to have the best, most flawless, most perfect fun and play than any of the others.