Scenes from Beslan

• Portals Out of Roullac (One Shot)

  154th of Gnielm, 297 EA

  Freehold of Roullac, Beslan

  Ceufroy knew better than most that there portals out of Roullac, ways to leave the Freehold.

  People there weren’t forced to stay, not in any literal sense. They could leave the refuge of the factories, where the work was physically demanding and drainingly mundane. They could leave their positions as servants on the whims of capricious merchants. Even the most destitute could leave the delving mines, leave the deeper and deeper draws which correlated with more frequent monster attacks.

  Day in, day out, those apertures between worlds filled his mind. He had devoted his young life to the knowledge of them. He worked, and worked hard, to read the leylines those portals crossed. To maintain the finicky arcanotech, wide rings of interlocking metallic scales, which held them open. To keep up with the latest developments out of Athal, when they would come to some new method that would save the process a tenth of a degree of the latent spell energy it required. All in all, to help others to pierce the aether and jump from one place to the next.

  Because there were portals! And if you moved far enough along those portals you wouldn’t just leave Roullac or the demiplane but the whole cluster of Beslan! You could go anywhere! You could meet faerie pirates on the Expanse of Lasa, or run with the noble werewolves of Harlobe. In Katravok you could walk endless city streets and find a god of your own, and on Athal at the heart of the League’s vast pull you could learn literally anything you could ever want to.

  It was rare, though, that people actually and truly left. Left for good, that is. The Freehold was massive, a metropolis, Ceufroy knew, and so for some there would always be spillover. Ceufroy was happy for those people, the one’s who had been pushed out of this hard place. But he also knew why it was that most people stayed, because it was the same reason that he stayed.

  His family was here. So was Long Shadow, all lit up in sunken light, where he had spent so many nights carousing with his friends. The manufactories on Spiriab and Pitchild put out smoke, but also constant wonders of artifice at a pace unmatched by any in the world. The Hallior Quarter was tight knit, and you wouldn’t find a band of brothers more committed to one another than on Bofeont Street. It would take more savings than he had to make a trip out, and it would mean that he wouldn’t get to see the way that the Corrolier River flowed up the cliff face in the most impossible waterfall. When the sun hit it just right it bathed the whole garden of the Whiodlac in rainbows, and he didn’t want to miss that.

  It was life, just life, in that way that life can root you to something that grew so incredibly beautiful by all the many small trials it inflicted on you and people like you.

  So Ceufroy tended to the portals. He helped people to leave the Freehold, understood them as they moved on with their lives, and he stayed to be there in Roullac.

• Chasing Sunlight (One Shot)

  68 of Aygar, 317 EA

  Freehold of Roullac, Beslan

  Claude sat in rapture on a public bench that he felt in a very deep and personal way belonged to him, because it was where he spent a brief period every day smoking his pipe just prior to his afternoon shift at the manufactury where he dumped most of his waking hours. 

  He had been joined there that day by the bleach-clean skeleton of a cat, moving of it’s own accord. It had sat with him for some half of an hour now, and in that time he thought of the other pitiable scavengers he had seen about the streets of Roullac. He found no resemblance to this little wonder, whose lack of bodily fullness allowed sunlight to flood through its ribcage and across every part of itself. The whole affair was a truer delight than had graced Claude in some time. 

  He drew close, inspecting his new fascination. It held a multitude pattern of delicately inlaid runes, fractal across each ridge and curve. Though the underlying mechanics of the animation passed him by, he still came to think of this thing as something he knew on some subliminal level.

  The creature, for its own part, sat placid as he inched closer.

  “Coo coo cherie, what a little lady you are.” Claude reached out a hand in affection. 

  The cat leaned away from his grasp, sockets regarding him hollowly.

  “Come here. I want to pet you love.” Claude leaned over himself, gut pressing into his legs to push past the initial rejection.

  The cat clacked back to its feet in recoil. It dropped gracefully off the edge and past the noonday shadow of the bench. Claude nearly fell over trying to scoop it into himself before it could move away. The cat’s disjointed tail flicked agitated trails through its space as it backed slightly.

  Claude righted himself, wringing at his hands. The cat started on its way down the street, winding around shadows filtering at angles off of unlit lampposts, resting carts, and the occasional balcony jutting from the side of the higher-up buildings. 

  Claude stood, watching it go. Across the way the cat broke out of sight for a brief moment behind a gaggle of passers by before reappearing at a restful seat pawing at where its ears should have been. Claude took a drawn step towards it, another with a more direct intention, and when it caught sight of his approach it perked up and darted away. 

  Claude gave chase, feet slapping along its path. Rounding a gasping corner, he came to impact against a gaggle of upstarts that he thought must have dallied over from across the river. He pushed through them, distressing a feigned apology.

  The cat, lean and lithe, darted between two buildings. Huffing to the entrance of the alley, Claude found it only a short ways down at the edge of a looming wall of shadow. The cat’s skull whipped back and forth between him and a lit ledge across the vast umbra.

  “Come now, I don’t want to hurt you.” Claude took a step forwards, arms outstretched, and the cat made a dive deeper into the alley.

  The sunbeams that wove and wound their way as ligaments to its joints began to unlace the moment it abandoned the direct beams. It scrabbled up the ledge with a wild and strained clacking, a hind leg disanimating and clattering to the ground below, until once again it was fully restored to a haven of light. 

  Claude stood stunned through the whole affair. He watched it try to make the leap fully up to the roof, but unwhole it fell short and back onto its shelf.

  “Why would you do this?” Claude started down the alleyway, his voice raising as the gloom enveloped him.

  The cat turned its focus to him again and curdled as far back as it could manage.

  “You didn’t have to run!” Claude bellowed from his pinning position below “I can’t have one thing, one godsdamned-“

  The cat loosed an ignominious hiss, cutting him off with a splay of its jaw. He read spite in the emptiness of its eyes. 

  He stepped down and back, jarred. The cat relaxed the hunch at its shoulders marginally. Claude looked around at his surroundings, at the appendicular bones on the ground, and at himself. A pit formed in his gut. Curled in on the ledge, the cat suddenly shifted in his view from a thing of immense beauty to desperate pity.

  Wallowing in this moment, he set to repentant motion. Leaning over, he scooped up the leg-bones. They lay dormant and dusty in his palm. They were colder than he had imagined petting the creature might have been.

  The cat lifted its head to track him, untrusting. He stepped up as close as he could to the ledge. The cat hissed again. Inured to the sound, expecting it, he raised his arm up over his head to the very tip of his reach.

  He saw a flash of movement from the lip, felt a flash of pain in his hand. Tooth and claw drug through his skin. He flinched, but didn’t pull fully back. The cat eased its assault, stopping head-cocked with its jaw clamped onto his wrist.

  He felt the bones shifting and tugging in his palm, and slowly loosed his grip. The cat released in kind. He took a step back, cradling his arm.

  The cat limped to circle its bones once, twice, thrice, and they snapped back into their place with an uncanny magnetism. He felt the knot in his stomach untie as the cat stretched. Capable once again, the little lass made an impressive leap up the wall and onto the roof. It left him, to bathe in the wide openness.

  Claude’s arm bled into his sleeve. From the street behind, the world bustled along without him. He stood a moment longer on the hope that it might return, and when it didn’t he stepped out of the alley to rejoin his life.