Loyal tea. All she remembered was Gargarensyr kicking her through a railing. Falling. A spray of splinters with her. Shay now was not where she had been, having thudded backwards into someone else; their arms hooking under her own to catch her. Both limbs she saw were bony and prosthetic.
∞
She turned trying to draw one of her longswords, though Amneshay with superior skill prevented her, then jabbed at her throat and threw a pinch of flashing powder as a distraction that her mask somehow had no defence against.
“Quite-quiet now!” was all she could hear.
Shay knelt, whacked out of sorts by Gargarensyr and now her older or other self. Finally with the strength to look up, she saw Amenshay’s mask was cracked, and at her sides were fastened jagged daggers that once were longer swords. Down the corridor a lab was bubbling away, now and then a hiss and clank would join the rumbling liquids.
∞
“Better, hmm? You-who had me a fretter! The Lady Fate behind-find these doors hasn’t a who-clue, and best remain that-what way. She’s no sense of moments passing long or short; I can be gone long as I need, but sounds loud as our blades on each other - she’s plenty of seam-sense for that.”
Grand were the doors directly behind Amneshay, woven completely from fabric, each depicting the separate sides of this duel wishfully showing Lay’d Payn always in failure. It was as Shay felt the floor underneath her kick-swept feet that her eyes adjusted to this strange domain. All the walls were woven or-and webbed, stitched into the folded ceilings, over floors that flowed as curtains swinging out of windier windows. It was those same windows Shay crept towards while Amneshay was already in-shadows there.
∞
All the outside was upside down - silken webs connected spherical stars below as they strained against their bloating, leaking, struggling to not become oval in shape for those laws integral before all things. Even the sky beyond those stars was flapping in tatters, having the look of unwound gauze.
“Where are we?” Shay asked her other self.
A shoreline of dust above faded and yielded out into those sundered stars, the horizon vertical no matter how Shay turned her head, and there began the frayed ruins of this place, tassels that once were temples washed over by cloudy waves of gaseous sparkles. The nearest things were furthest away. Cubes-scaffold filled with matter, hiding the grid of reality underneath.
“Fractra’lien, The oh-Woven City. Throne of Lady Fate.” Amenshay offered. “You-two’ve been-seen here before, but it's all finely twisted, and why would you remember if she wishes not? All The Loyal have left, as waiting-traitors or off! Off-on their errands sent.”
∞
It was a struggle to find her footing, the floor rippling fabric as it was, as a bed constantly being made.
“I have to get back-” Shay was quickly interrupted.
“Calm-balm it - I remember’t swell: catching myself as I just caught you! And all this we’re blab-jabbering through. What does hurrying mean to Timelessness? What sense in carelessness? You’re still snap-bapped in your eld ways.” Amneshay rattled their false knuckles on Shay’s mask. “Payn’ll have it all made out - if! - most importantly - do-you have the loyal-tea?”
Shay did not immediately understand. She held up the jar unclipped from her harness, showing seeds now fully grown-dried into mature leaves. Fine for a finer brew. Tiny poppy petals fell here-there in the jar as well. Not only - but cacti spines and other nuances had also been added without her knowledge.
“Oh-woah, finally! That’ll last until the past. So-oh what version-age are you? Take this off.” Amneshay scratched impatiently at Shay’s intact mask. “Let me see-me which you are.”
Shay scratched with reluctance back at 'Amne'.
∞
“It’s nowt-about I haven’t seen, tissit-tacit?” The old assassin insisted.
Eventually relenting, Shay showed her true face to herself.
“You’re that-rat one, most of it in’tunnels! So you’ve not a rossage of clues why you’ve been clinging to these seeds, have you? Why you were sent to get them in the first place, or there-where about… nor did I.”
Shay remembered not long ago standing atop Guar’dezhan, watching her larger, younger self hanging out of the window. She asked Amneshay: “You were the arm that reached for me as I was about to complete the heist? What did I disarm all those traps for, to get mugged right at the end...”
“Disarmed them for me, you did! Oh, get spiked did you? Needled you good.” Amneshay knocked at her other-self on the forehead as though she were a door, and Shay wore again her mask in reply.
“I won’t-don’t remember that - so perhaps-naps I haven’t done it yet. Or you haven't. Hanging out the window?” Amneshay had a click and a think.
Waiting for an answer, Shay felt her own living arm hurting, seeing how both of Amneshay’s had been lost and replaced at different gruesome lengths. The Old Assassin however was not rotting, as though not so 'far along' as the dread visage Shay had step-duelled and left as mushroom food. Becoming less a person and more a device for Lay'd Payn's schemes.
“A prep-an’-step too skilled for me at this page-stage - it must come-some later. Lay’d Payn keeps the seam-schemes close in mind at best, at worst on notes around her in silly indec-cyphers. Said it’d be best to keep-sleep you unaware, until here with me. Fate’s watching, you see? Let her think it's her doing.” Amneshay poked towards the sealed doors behind her.
∞
Shay contemplated and watched again - how move the woven things - of Fallen and Forlorn Frac’tra’lien, The Woven City. If ever there once was true human-made order, it was this place and throne of Fate Heirself. Each string and thread was a soul; depiction after depiction of lives mundane, miserable or full of marvel she saw across the all-changing walls. And even with order so even the spelling of its name is not something any of us can agree on.
∞
Eventually Amneshay nudged Shay, wearing a severe expression through her cracked mask: “Our Lay’d’s secrecy extends-bends to me as well, still, it must, I suppose - even I can’t know it all. Otherwise go mad as she is, eh? Just in case.”
"Let her think it's her doing." Shay repeated and hoped this was not the start of more incomprehensible nonsense, just as Amneshay had been overflowing-full of in her shop. She asked:
“Best to keep me and us unaware - why?”
“Ol’ Garg whacked us good didn’t he?” Amne knocked annoyingly on the face of Shay’s mask again. “In case you never-ever made it this far… captured… there’s been a few of us like that, spilling the schemes like uncooked-unsoaked beans! Never find them all on a harder floor. Scatter-shattered to the edges. Just as the props we always wore under our mask, in case we were ever caught. Tricks make us talk more than torture. There’s pretenders out there, y’know. I’ve had to skewer-thwart not few of them. A lot of what we do makes sense on the shimmer, and even more the deeper you dare-dig. Dare-care you to remember?”
Amenshay shook the dry tea, the leaves teething against the glass of the jar:
“Well… this-bliss tea sets it-tomes all off, your-my finest mix from which our fame-name-sake. Shay, Amnesia, Amneshay.”
“I don’t remember giving you that…”
Shay followed Amneshay almost deliriously down the rolling corridor towards the lab. The ceiling rippled into the stretched floor about halfway there, a knot and tangle formed - barring their way for a while until the threads wriggled themselves free and long again in sequence-strange.
“Wait-eight.” The bony creature ordered finally at the door, ‘counting to eight’ but with random numbers. “A super-suspicion I have.”
∞
Shay crossed the threshold of the woollen doorframe safely, remaining in this lineage having ‘waited eight’. Amneshay set about the tea, as chilled water was encouraged to boil over a weird many-coloured flame, burning then white (almost blindingly so) and back to its separate colours. Rainbow light. All-light. Shay noticed around the lab were grimmer props than she knew how to use - entire hands-worth of skinned gloves to wear, and elsewhere black robes of The Dam’e hung powdery.
“Why do you have those?” Shay dreaded Amneshay’s answer.
“Another part you-two play, in Timeless way! Shadows of… we’re not The Dam’e, don’t be dafter. Just-must a decoy. Getting on with other things elsewhere.”
Still, Shay did not believe what was being said, as Amneshay stepped away from the topic to the tea:
“Drinking-thinking this, Lady Fate will slowly forget and become-beget Lay’d Payn fully, instead of being one heart-since-her-start constantly in conflict.”
∞
“We’ve been poisoning them with the tea.” Shay felt ashamed. “All in the contract, signed by them both. We’ve been playing both sides - we agreed to. Lay’d Payn knew it would be this way… that she was her own weakness.”
“Poison?” Amneshay objected, having heard only that. “This is medicine. A balance on both sides-divides, in both rooms, here in Fractra’lien or there at The Crimson Palace, for the authoress Payn and the seamstress Fate. Some occasions just normal tea, others our special blend. A quite useless tea otherwise for our needs, making one, the other or both forget… but with Time dead and leaking Timelessness, this tea is everything. Helps Lay’d Pain remember when we need to, helps Lady Fate forget when we don’t. Internecine is the word, have you heard? The endless duel at last-past showed a stumble, and an upper hand was regained… ours.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
"This upper hand you mention... the way you mention it. You mean yours and mine? Not ours and Lay'd Payn's upper hand? Are you plotting against both?"
Amneshay was unwilling to answer, lest it inspire suspicion in either Lady or Lay'd both one the same soul, both seeing and hearing all within their tayl's and tales. As she wondered where The Old Assassin's loyalties lie, Shay's questions continued:
“Drinking something simple as tea is really the fulcrum of so much?”
Amneshay finished off other processes, there indulging many experiments all at once going on, adding pouches of powder to her worn harness. “Take what-not you like.” She offered. “Restock.”
Shay helped set up the tray with cups and a pot, after topping up her own supplies.
∞
“Nothing trivial in this.” Amneshay stared and waited for the tea to cool. “Serib is only-lonely there with you because she’s chewing on some similar brewing-bark or another; shamanic traditions and all, gulping down horrid pastes, tripping body out of mind. It helped her find Our Lay’d, when she was sad as we are, and made a pact as ours. Contract. Pact. Deal-seal. We call it tea.”
Shay poked around the jar, near full as it was laying on a worktable. Amenshay pulled out a laser pistol:
“Recognise this?”
“Is that Panzjrah’s?” Shay looked cautiously around.
“Swiped it while he was asleep one while - lacing the first charge with our special mixture, to help Argus forget about the tea, then he’ll focus on Serib. I still need to replant it, but as you've already seen, I already have.”
Shay could scarcely remember that first encounter in the station, when she was unarmed and had to flee into the Second Act, unbeknownst of such things. The Killer complaining or making excuses about his equipment being tampered with, and Woid poking all his fun. It all came to her, as smoke from a candle blown out will make its way.
∞
“And I stole the seeds from you? The room with the grandclock was your lab in Imirka? In a high tower…”
“Our shop in Imirka…” Amne confirmed. “…when it was high above - but the high things fall and the low things get buried. In need of excavation to sort the which. Why was Fate so-oh surprised when Freedom arrived?” Amneshay paused. "You stole it from you, from us, from another you. Were you really tiny? Too tiny for eyes…” Amneshay tried to recollect. “Could be. Who knows which way around, and even how Panzjrah of all souls got mitt of them seeds - a twine of Lady Fate m’haps. Strings soaked in ink, that it all ripped to our favour. Getting into any shuttle and any moment spent-rent in space is a coin-flip... for out to sea if one-among knows how, await the currents flowing here-there to The Woven City.”
Amneshay sniffed at the tea through the crack in her mask.
“Lay’d Payn belikely sent another-you-us off on some errand, and you-two knew how to slip by your own traps. Just as we, loyal to Payn, inject Fate with forget-me-medicine, there is another version of us, loyal to Fate, trying equally to harm our Lay’d. A confusing and shameful contract we have, I know, a double-role. Whichever of us you stole-sole from, they withered away a failure back to the shop after that - into a quite forgotten lineage - taking others with them, burying the mushroom-food that came a’wandering.” Amneshay pointed a needle at Shay’s dead arm. “But we had our fight with them didn’t we? Stabbed them right in the head. Only Our Lay’d knows the Timelessness… could butchering that old ghoul at the shop have had much larger ripples and splatters of implication? Killing once kills everywhere? And has the ripple caught us yet...”
Shay listened, thankful that less of Amenshay’s words were slurring-blurred, though sense was still seldom in them. She wanted and had to piece all this together if ever she was to survive this long. According to the creature in front of her, survive long enough to lose her other arm and continue the contract, to see it at last fulfilled, after how-many imitations and iterations she cannot recall, and perhaps serve neither Lay'd nor Lady at all in the end, serving only Serib and herself.
"Then you are not another version of me, you are me. Further along. Serving your own interests foremost, neither Lay'd nor Lady have your full loyalty." The weight of her parents’ blades reminded her always of what was real and could yet be changed.
∞
“Why medicine and not poison, do you say?” Shay asked herself patiently, having again gone unanswered regarding loyalties.
“You-two want to see the shores, won’t-don’t you? Free from same-pain and hatred, where all we love, where we have nothing to forget and bury-merry. Merry cannot be lost there - only found and kept in Forever. Not an interesting-zesting place. Not a place to write-mighty of and read about. What an unworthy story-sort, where all is ever-well. And you saw it out there… after killing you and looking out the window. In that house our own. The Woven City once was Great-and-Heir when Falsehood fell, but stagnancy reigns here; rotter-a-whittle… Fate has usurped Our Will. All souls born from The Tree of Life with one of her threads bone-sewn through them, and off we all went to join her celestial tapestries. Trapped in destinies we did not decide and cannot contend. Suffering. Bliss - balanced on a Lie far from the Truth she wanted to find-remind.”
Shay did wish for those shores; for Woid and Serib to walk them with her, though she was bothered by a detail or by all of them:
“Can such a lie-scape be sustained?"
"Far as I figured out-about, it 'can'... by Serib Spring-sworn. The tea is all to distract all from her. The new Heir. If she turns with Fear and not Bravery, it 'can' for a while. Sustained indefinite? No-no."
"And how is what-that Lay’d Payn does any different? All of us dabbed with her ink… are we acting out the scratches she puts to parchment? Payn, Fate by another name.”
“It is no different. Old habits and habits.” Amneshay ran dead fingers across the tables’ fabric, giggling as though having hidden a joke. “For our own good. Duality always turns against. Always revitalising what is old-fold. Whatever goes up must come back down-around, or watch the down rise up.” She took a deep breath through her cracked mask, for the tea was ready. “I suppose-knows what Fate has tried to create by determining-deciding and designing-all-destinies is her own version of the shores - those The Great Freedom and Lay’d Payn have seen, love all between. Love the reason we go anywhere at all. Do anything. Even the love of hating as Panzjrah does. Fate mutters something about Balance, souls taking turns in each life to prosper or be plundered, all sewn with covetous love, but what hope is there in that? In being made to, in freedom-from? She has tallen-fallen from Highest grace. And that is our name-Shame… poisoning… yes. Poisoning the bad that once was good, that can be good again. As seams redeemed.”
∞
"If Lady Fate is just Lay'd Payn in old habits and habits or bound-around the other way, then what are we doing? Who are we loyal to?" Shay's thoughts were lost among the ever-rippling floor, across its torn ceilings wrought with remade webs.
"Loyal to our Serib... named from a tower-lost language, you know, her name-not-shame at all but another word for truth. A clue for us to always hold onto. Another detail for our friendly enemy to misplace. Though we underestimated ourselves - so have the Lay'd and the Lady. Every drop of this tea takes our Serib away from Fate. Away from Payn. Just while both think she is getting closer to their ink and threads, we are setting her on her own path of her choosing. As should always have been. Sadly she inherited her penchant for grief and grieving, for fearing loss, from her mother. Serib's sister is much the same." Amneshay stared dead at Shay. "Made her a target all over again."
"How do you-two know all this? Did she tell you how she was named?" Shay glanced at photos across the room - blurred faces behind cracked glass in worn frames.
∞
Shay reached out to the cracked mask just as Amneshay was about to leave, tray in skeletal hands: “You are me, not another version of me… you are me ‘later’ and older? In moments-these I too will see…”
“Quite-right you already read-said. I thought-so but now I know-so.” The old thing plodded slowly down the corridor, or began to. Giggling: "Don't lose yourself, reverting back to old revelations to avoid new ones. My sister taught me this shamanic phrase: some truths can be taught, others must be on your lonesome learned."
A snoring was heard behind them and only now did Shay see in the laboratory an empty chair from which the sound was sleeping. Only two of the four legs were on the floor, the back of the chair resting-propped against a wall. Amneshay spoke with warmth and spice:
“Don’t mind-find him - he’s always been with us, for Always is a long older-while.”
Another deep snore blurted from whoever slept there invisible. Shay thought she knew who it was; indeed her mind was turning away from a truth she had begun to slowly realise of Serib’s parentage, her grief clutching to anything else. She had too many thoughts, all competing as she walked with Amneshay:
“It seems too easy, just a cup of tea to start and finish it all… do we have to worry?”
“Too easy? Has it been?” Amneshay counted weird as can be again to ‘eight’, having no idea they’d already left the room. “You should-would know well-tell as any with your arm, conflict with yourself is never-ever easy. Not for our Lady either, trying to become the Lay’d she once buried, and dreads to be again.” The corridor was longer than before, wrapped around and over itself, as hanging clothes trying to dry themselves of the spilt ink. “Feeling glum? I remember feeling glum here-fear.”
∞
“I just feel moved around, kept out of the loop." Shay imagined candles flickering, running out of wick. "I want what is best.”
“Eventually you’ll-fool be me. Remember even through binge-syringes why you’re doing all this. Don’t-won’t take any more of our medicine, fear-hear-here? Save’t for our client. Our friend. Our foe. The friendly enemy-our Lay’d-Lady. You did this-bliss to yourself and as I-why did, will get yourself out-about. Get Serib away from all this.”
The adjacent rooms in the longer corridor were stitched scenes of spies. Spectres. Shadows. In states of deterioration.
“We’ll still look like that ghoul we fought in the shop and left read-dead in the mushrooms; it’ll be for something. It already was for something. You can be with him, then - without thinking of the ages that wait, dreading that you and he will die and worse: that your sister will die. Coward? No. Never were much should-good at reality, were we…? Always wishing it would change! Now-how we have chance to change it, change it brave, Lay’d Payn said, claiming Fate was nonsense. They both were insane. But we’ll suss the way out of her mazes, and find Truth at its end-begun.”
“I haven’t seen him for so long.” The Prince there grinned in Shay's memories-here, his crooked tooth here-there and Tiarar just so atop his regal head. None of his birthright suited him.
“Didn't hear the rest of what I said, did you? Haven’t seen him?” Amneshay tutted. “Was I really-dearly that dense-immense? You’ll see him soon. And what about Serib, have you seen her?” the tapestry doors were waiting, moving as though underwater. "If her name means truth in a tower-lost language, then what truth is she to you? To me?"
Before Shay could further ask and plan out her next movements, Amneshay led: “Follow me in, don’t look at her. With any stuck-luck you’ll find yourself back.”
Amneshay adopted a crooked posture and began a more wobbly-way of walking, pretending into the doors that now as parted as theatre drapes. Thunderous applause began from the corridor left behind, but Shay could not turn back to see what she had heard.
∞
Passing under thatched weaves, a frozen smell clawed her and a glimpse caught her of an enormous arachnid leg, thick as her shoulders around, thumping hairy and meatily at a giant spool just out of reach in the corner of the room. Shay saw her every fabric unravelling, her solid mask and swords into threads particulate, her body drifting thin and away, falling forwards when before she had fallen back.