beneath the surface lay only a shallow depth. [trigger #348]

It was in Rowan’s 252nd year that he encountered the Sea of Verbosity for the first and, he hoped, only time.

He would have avoided it altogether if he could have, but the life of a scoundrel and rogue gets complicated enough as it is when you don’t add magic and prolonged life into the mix. Rowan had gotten himself into trouble again, but as the caretaker for an artifact that was prophesied to save the world, he had no choice but to get himself out of the current installment of self-inflicted woe.

Rowan had been riding high for a bit, had a streak of a few decades where everything seemed to bounce his way. As a result, he’d gotten cocky. The same would have been true for any of us. For Rowan, that cockiness is especially dangerous, being that he frequently brushes shoulders with some of the most dangerous people in the world, villains as sadistic as they are ancient. They aren’t the sort you want to irritate even the slightest bit, and they are definitely not the sort you want to find yourself owing large sums of money. Rowan has a tendency to irritate people even in the best of circumstances, and to call the sum of money he owes large would be an understatement on par with some of the greatest understatements of the age.

Thus, here Rowan is, at the Sea of Verbosity, against all his better instincts. He somehow has to make it to the other side, collect whatever it is he finds there, and then make his way back. At first appearance, this doesn’t seem to difficult a task. The Sea of Verbosity is large, but not truly a sea. It is dark and foreboding, but there is no depth to speak of. One could stand up in it at its deepest point without getting wet knees. Yet, many who have tried to cross this peculiar body of water have drowned, most have gone mad, none have made it back from the other side with anything they didn’t take with them.

The problem with the Sea of Verbosity is that it is constantly speaking to whomever tries to cross it. Speaking incessantly, not in any way that is particularly menacing or dreadful. The Sea whispers at times, which can be a bit eery, but for the most part it speaks at a reasonable volume. It talks and talks and talks, and eventually, those trying to cross it begin to lose sense of reality. What happens it that the Sea of Verbosity obscures reality, clouding reason and judgment to frightening degrees. The Sea speaks in circles, recites facts, mixes in a few artfully told lies, brags and flatters, tells stories and fables, carefully explains historical events and their significant, and all the while, whether they want to or not, the person listens, and eventually, they lose the line between what is real and what isn’t. The Sea of Verbosity never seems to have a single goal in mind, it mostly just talks and talks to hear itself speak, indifferent to the listener altogether. The brave adventurers who try to traverse the Sea become confused about even the most basic parts of themselves and their reality. Sometimes the result is harmless, the journeyers return without the aim of their quest, but are mostly none the worse for wear, merely believing that the earth is flat, or that they were hatched from an egg and raised by chickens, or that Two and a Half Men was the greatest sitcom in history. They adopt various mad and absurd beliefs that invoke pity from friends and enemies alike.

Others discover a darker fate. They forget whether or not humans breath air or water, or become convinced that their legs don’t work, or become convinced they actually live inside an episode of Two and a Half Men, far scarier stuff indeed. These are the ones who die or never return, or else do return but so stark-raving insane that they are institutionalized for the rest of their natural lives.

So, if he can make it to the other side and collect whatever is to be found there, Rowan will be the first. In the interest of self-preservation, Rowan has a plan. He is going to beat the Sea of Verbosity at its own game. He isn’t the first who has planned to speak back to the Sea, to fight fire with fire in a battle of wits and conversation. Most who have utilized this strategy go mad quicker than the silent types who try to block it out, eventually talking themselves in circles right along with the Sea. Those who have rigidly held to reason and fought tooth and nail to keep a grip on reality had failed, every woman Jack of them. That’s why Rowan’s plan is to throw reason and sense out the window immediately, give in right away to the insanity of it all, and hopefully poison the Sea of Verbosity with its own bitter medicine. Rowan’s plan is, from the very beginning, to argue the claim that the Sea of Verbosity isn’t a body of water at all, but a small dog named Abelard. He has armed himself with facts and statistics and philosophical arguments to prove it.

 

just a horse and buggy. [trigger #347]

Morgain was a taxi service, delivery person, and junk carter for one simple reason: when they took everything from her, what they left her with was just a horse and buggy. It wasn’t intended as a kindness. It’s a different kind of cruelty to leave someone with almost nothing, to watch them cling to what they still have in desperation and powerlessness. Leaving them with nothing is closer to a clean cut, they either die from it, or they can heal. Leaving them with almost nothing is like breaking off a part of the blade within the flesh, it might still kill them, but likely in a gangrenous fashion. The horse and the buggy were calculated when they left her with them. The horse was sick and weak, wheezing like pneumonia would claim it sooner rather than later. The buggy was rotted and eaten away by water damage and termites. It was barely holding together, and was missing a wheel besides. They left these two things with her, as insult added to her injury, but Morgain took it and began to build her empire with it. She would not forget or forgive, but she would play the part of the lunatic and hide her growing return to glory from them until it was too late for them to do anything about it. No one else in town could have nursed that horse back to health, but Morgain did, enough that some wondered if it was a new horse altogether. No one else could have gotten even scrap wood out of that buggy, but Morgain had it operational again, freshly painted and mostly useful. Morgain was on the rise again, and for some reason, with the new fuel of vengeance fueling her, the second rise from almost was even sweeter than the first, back when she was but a girl.

she finally died. [trigger #346]

On a Tuesday in February, Abby finally died. It’s what they all thought, even though none of them would say it out loud. The relief they felt was simply the strongest emotion in their hearts, and it was no fault of their own. The sadness was there, but was nothing more than a coda to a grief they’d been processing for some time. Abby hadn’t been herself for over a decade. Her mind had deteriorated, the dementia cruelly eating away at her sense and awareness as it is wont to do. To her children and her sister and her grandchildren she was no longer a person they could speak to. She no longer recognized any of them for who they were, no longer responded to them in ways that made any sense outside of her own broken mind. There was still a likeness that was precious to them, but mostly she was just a body to be cared for, bathed and fed and clothed. For them, Abby had been gone for so long, and her death was just a formality. It was a formality to everyone. Everyone that is except for Abby. For Abby, her life was still a thing to lose. She had long since been untethered from chronology and sense, the faces in her mind were no longer tied to reality, but they were still faces she treasured and loved. She bounced in her mind from memory to memory without realizing they were memories, the moments she experienced were no longer the ones her physical body was in, but they were still precious to her. She was trapped within herself, on an island within her past, but she still had something to lose. For each of us, no matter how dark things are, no matter how much of a relief the end might be, no matter how inevitable our demise might have grown, death is never a formality. We all die, finally, but none of us finally die.

stranger in a strange land. [trigger #345]

I’ve always thought Peter was strange, but I suppose he is no stranger than anything else. He just wears his strangeness on his sleeve with less shame or disguise than the rest of us. Not that Peter comes without disguises. It isn’t that he isn’t hiding, he just isn’t hiding his oddity. In fact, I think he’s discovered just how well one can intentionally use oddity in order to keep others off balance, to be the one with the advantage socially. Before knowing Peter, I never would have described an actual person I’d known as a trickster, but he changed that. Perhaps he isn’t a god or a myth, but I actually wouldn’t put that past him. He keeps everyone guessing. He confuses the certain and assures the confused. Every barb or accusation seems to slide off of him, without finding purchase or breaking the surface of his reputation. Any time you think you’ve figured something out about him, he seems to sense it, and he immediately does something to subvert the idea. Decide he is chaste and he does something perverse, decide he is a pervert and he does something prudish and old-fashioned. He is endlessly fascinating. He is my best friend, and a complete stranger, and I have a feeling there are countless others who feel the same way, whom he lavishes with affection when they feel alienated, and scorns when they feel closest to him. If I ever meet a more interesting person in this lifetime, I’ll eat my own hat, which is probably a dangerous claim to make since now that I’ve thought that I’m certain Peter will sense it and arrange a meeting with a more interesting person tomorrow.

trouble accepting help. [trigger #344]

Martin sat in the waiting room, not sure if he wanted the time to go by quickly to get the whole conversation over with, or to crawl by and hold off the potential news he was about to get. Part of his brain assumed he was about to hear words like malignant and terminal, the other part knew himself to be prone to negative thinking, a Gloomy Gus as his mother used to call him. He had no idea where this would actually go, but he was trying to work his brain through what he would do if the news was bad. He wasn’t sure who he could ask for help, not in something like this. It wasn’t that he thought no one would help, the dreaded C word would be the shibboleth that opened doors into people’s goodwill, feigned or otherwise. His friends would at least try, but he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to accept it. Maybe he just wouldn’t tell anyone, not until it was impossible to hide. He’d never really been there for any of his friends, not in a way that mattered, and he suspected there was no chance he could ask for help from them now. They wouldn’t call him on the discrepancy, but internally it would probably be too much for him to bear. He’d just never stepped up the way he wanted to when his friends needed him, and now he would need them before ever being able to store up what he felt was the necessary goodwill to cash in during his moment of need and not feel dirty about it. Helping them was beyond him. It wasn’t an issue of desire or intent, it was quite simply an issue of ability, he felt as incapable of offering himself to another person in a real situation as a paralyzed man would in trying to move his legs. He so very much wanted to, but his will was too weak.  

and so we weep. [trigger #343]

The world is dark and ugly, and so we weep. The world is full of beauty and delight, and so we laugh. We will never have enough of all the goodness there is, and so we hunger. The world is too much for us to understand, and so we close our eyes. We cannot endure alone, and so we love. We are too sure of what isn’t and too ignorant of what is, and so we kill.

Bel read through the passage again, none of it meaning anything to her. She’d hit that point in her afternoon studies when she could simply not get her brain to focus on anything else. She might as well read the passage in another language for all she was going to get out of it now.

She’d rather be out riding with Marcy. They were each getting much faster at slicing the head off of a dummy, switching hands, and burying the blade in the bullseye at the end of the training course. It is thrilling, how little separates them when they compete, and win or lose those moments are always the best parts of her day.

She isn’t sure what these studies into these ancient philosophical passages have to do with her training. They all seem so arcane to her, and when her instructor tells her what a given passage means she assumes the woman is just making it up as she goes along.

Bel wants to feel the sting in her hands when she buries a blade in a wooden practice dummy, as the vibration continues up through the handle and all the way to her elbow. Or the ache from a weekend spent on a horse when they’re given days away from the tabernacle for extended tracking practice. She has trouble tolerating the sting in her eyes from staring at the same paragraph for too long, her temples throbbing.