The Accursed (Vale)

This is a story in three parts about Valerias Caan -- I wrote it to fill the time when I was away from WoW for a few weeks recently. The title is somewhat tentative; if anyone has suggestions for a better, I'd be delighted to hear them! (Of course as always, I'd love to hear any suggestions or thoughts, as I do like to improve.) The idea is a somewhat Gothic setting, certainly some surreality, and I'm interested to hear if that's worked. And of course, I hope it's enjoyable!

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‘Prelude: She Walks Unhindered’


A pale rag of cloud twisted across the moon, although neither cloud nor moon were visible as more than a phantasmal glow above the overarching, pestilential gloom that shrouded the forest. There was never enough light, now. Both sun and moon travelled the sky in their affixed hours, hanging above the wood and caressing the topmost leaves, but neither silver beam nor golden ray permeated very far into the depths.

Eyeless things had begun to breed beneath the stumps of ancient trees, feeding on the pale rot-grubs that had grown even paler in the years since the Darkening. Spiders grew to the size of rats and rats to the size of wolves, while in the cavernous hills nameless horrors scratched and slavered, and bones rattled like dry husks whenever the wind awoke.

Yet none of this entered the thoughts of the woman who trod the narrow track through the forest, cloaked by the settling night-shadows and hooded by the black tangle of branches overhead. She walked unshod, and though her robe trailed against the ground, her arms were bare – as if she were a priestess of some long-forgotten cult dressed for a sacrificial rite.

Her thoughts drifted and travelled, leaping above the dusken canopy: they howled with the winds that swept over dry fields and dropped to linger over northern bogs; dipped again to scurry with the mice and forage with the beetles in the forest loam; trailed with the smoke from a thousand chimneys as it curled and settled over the roof-shingles in the distant city.

To all these foreign places her thoughts meandered, lingering before making their way back to her again; and all the while she walked unhindered, a spectre among the thickets and thorns. For she had known the evil places of the forest long before there was a Darkening or a plague, before the poisoned growth of the flora, before the unnatural transformation of the wildlife, before the skeletons rattled in the grave-places or abominations skulked among the cliffs.

There had always been accursed places in the wilds, and it was to one of these that the woman made her way; the ruins of a village that had once belonged to a dark family. She knew them well; she bore both their name and their mark burned against her breast.

‘One: The Dust Remembered’


The woman, whose name was Vale, drifted in and out of the charred foundations, her hand lingering now and again on a blackened beam, the silk of her dress rustling as it touched the driech ruins that had once been a village. An April wind moaned through the boughs surrounding, sparking ancient themes from a ghost-ridden symphony.

It was an old forest, and an old settlement. The wood of the hovels had been reduced to ash, but the land still remembered the people who had dwelt there; the weathered oaks, sighing and creaking in the persistent gusts, still remembered the Caans.

‘We know you,’ whispered the trees as the woman passed beneath a black walnut that for centuries had borne fruit too bitter even for the furtive squirrels. ‘We knew them all, and we know you, too.’

‘But I have become more than they were!’ she said, pulling away from the roots that stretched upward to grasp and twist around her pale ankles.

A crow began to chatter overhead, the whole cavity of the bird’s chest filling and then exhaling in a ceaseless, raw, mocking cacophony. Vale turned away from the edge of the wild forest, but the sound still filled her ears – ‘You are of the same blood. Same blood. Same blood.’

She turned and ran, then, her bare feet flying among the soot and splinters that had once been her home. Accursed blood, twisting and tearing at the walls of the veins through which it coursed; the poison from the scorpion’s sting corrupting the very flesh within which it had been created. And yet it was this blood that sustained her, that gave her potency, that nourished and nurtured the life that had so recently stirred inside her–

She dropped to her knees beside a pile of half-burnt timbers, resting her cheek against a charred and ragged board, and closed her fingers around a handful of heavy ash.

‘I am going to bear a child,’ she murmured.

A wind dragged through the ashes in which she crouched, whispering to her as it stirred her hair and left dark flecks of cinder on the whiteness of her neck. ‘So said your mother and her mother before her, and look– now they are nothing more than dust.’

‘I am not dust!’ she cried, flinging the handful of ash upward – the bones of her father and of Iriden her cousin, the wooden skeletons of the rooms in which she had wept and the walls and doors behind which she had ducked and hidden. She flung them all into the heart of the wind, laughing as they scattered and dissipated and were swept away into the shrouded sky.

If I do this thing, she thought, it will be for myself only. If I keep this child, it will be otherwise than it was with my mother and her mother before her, and otherwise than with any child that was ever birthed in this evil hollow. We, who were all left to rot and fester and canker before we could grow.

She turned her marble cheek, surveying the ruins and the twisted trees, all full of the memories of ghosts, and spoke to the evening darkness that had begun to close in around her.

‘This child is an heir to the same blood that enslaves us all, oh yes; but its life would be my own creation, solely mine, and nothing of yours!’

A dark-flecked snake slid through the detritus at Vale’s feet, pausing for a moment to rear its head. Vale bent her shoulders with a slender grace to stare into the black eyes as the forked tongue flickered. She watched the snake, statuesque, as if time itself had fallen away from that place... but there was nothing in the deep pools of its eyes, and no hissing words of challenge met her ears before the serpent bowed its face to the dirt again and went twisting away across the charred ground.

Vale straightened her shoulders again and drew a blackened hand across her white arm, replacing the slipping sleeve of her gown. And as she uncurled herself and rose from the stained and ruined earth, she smiled a serpentine smile.

Perhaps, she thought, this is my one chance to be the author of something lasting, my single chance before the years catch up with me, before the jagged knife-twist in the dark.

‘Two: A Knife in the Dark’


That morning on the outskirts of the black wood, two men had had an argument. The first gestured wildly toward the cover of the trees, his hands angry, reminding his companion of the dangers and the rumours and all of the old stories. Had he forgotten? Was he a proper sodding ruddy fool? But the second man pointed to their empty satchels and their tightened belts, and in the end, the ragged pair of highwaymen scuttled into the thin veil of trees on the edge of the forest.

Now, both were chilled and damp and feeling murderous; hours of crouching behind a ridge and listening to strange cries and scratchings from the trees and thickets and distant places had harried their senses and frayed their nerves. Yet still they waited, for they had neither coin nor bread, and something intangible held them to their purpose.

A dark-flecked snake lay nearby in a venerable sycamore, the gleaming rope of its body looped several times around a gnarled bough. It was a strange place for a forest snake, which unlike their greater cousins in the jungles to the south are not given to passing time in trees; but this particular snake, resting like a trailing vine, was in the branches to observe.

‘Someone’s comin’.’ A whisper, the nudge of an elbow, the sudden alertness that accompanies hope.

The two men wrapped their fingers around the handles of their knives, and one produced a pistol from his threadbare coat. Without a lantern they could see little, but the soft murmur and tap of footsteps was unmistakable – and down the path, in the dimness, moved a figure of human size and shape.

Who would be fool enough to walk here without a light? thought one of the thieves.

‘Stand where you are or I’ll bleedin' shoot you,’ said the other, leaping over the ridge and standing in the road. He cocked his pistol at the approaching figure.

It paused. The hand holding the pistol shook slightly.

The second thief scrambled down beside the first, an oil-soaked torch newly blazing in one hand and a knife in the other. The leaping firelight forced back the heavy gloom, creating shadows that flared and flickered over the intended victim: it was a woman. She was tall and pale and filthy from the forest, and wild hair fell around her like a shroud.

‘Let’s see your coin, lady, and no one gets hurt,’ said the man with the pistol, though this time his voice wavered like the torchlight.

She didn’t move for several moments, watching them from under thinly arching brows; and then she lifted her hands.

‘I don’t intend to hurt you,’ she said, her words a falling whisper, ‘though as you see, I carry no coin.’

‘Anythin’ you have then – and don’t try to be smart. That silver chain round your neck.’ The man waved the pistol and the smooth handle seemed to slither in his grasp.

‘You would waylay a Caan in her own forest?’ A smile.

The second man felt a cold finger on the back of his neck, and holding both torch and knife aloft he moved suddenly toward the woman. The sputtering flamelight fell across the draping silk of her dress, and in a sudden flash of colour the cloth shimmered poison-green.

‘You ain’t no Caan.’ He thrust the knife toward her, brandishing it mere inches from her throat. ‘They’re dead! Old stories!’

‘Stories?’ she murmured. And then with a fey glint in her eyes she tossed back the wild mane of her hair and tore away the silk from one side of her chest. There above her heart, on the curve of her breast, was burnt a scorpion’s tail. She pressed her fingers around the mark, and looked up, her mouth twisting.

The highwayman with the knife, who knew more about both the forest and the Caans than did his companion, met those fey eyes and what colour was in his face drained away.

‘The accursed ones,’ he whispered. And then, with a shout that stung the heavy dimness of the forest and startled the eyes and legs and husks in the undergrowth surrounding– ‘Damn you!’

He leaped forward, flinging the torch aside as he brought the knife down toward the mark burned into her chest. But before the knife could fall, the man screamed, lost in a torrent of vast, engulfing violet flame. He stumbled aside, his cries ragged with horror.

His companion, his fingers still clutched around the pistol, saw merely a white and wide-eyed face behind the unearthly fire, and a pair of white hands upraised.

‘Run.’

He ran.

* *

The snake chose that moment to appear, unwinding itself from the sycamore and sliding across the black earth. It curved gently around the woman’s bare ankles.

‘What now?’ said Vale, her voice like a rustling of leaves. A dim violet flame appeared in the palm of her hand, casting a small glow on the dark-flecked snake. It uncurled, raising its head before her feet.

‘Ah.’ Her mouth bent in a smile. ‘You see everything, don’t you?

The snake dipped its head and, as the woman knelt on the packed earth of the road, coiled delicately around her arm and eventually settled over her shoulders, draping loosely around her like some strange and heavy necklace.

‘You would leave with me for the city? –where I can bathe the ash from my arms, but where the trees are spare and few?’ A forked tongue brushed fleetingly across her skin in answer, and again Vale smiled. Satisfied, she turned to the body of the man who had leapt at her with wild eyes.

‘Not yet time for my knife in the dark,’ she said, bending softly to slip the blade from the white knuckles. He had known; he had remembered. There were fewer and fewer who remembered the days when the Caans had haunted every path and glen in the forest. The very whisper of their name had once been as a sentence of death, and their reach had been long.

‘I am not like them,’ she said to the splayed and charred corpse before her, ‘but I am a Caan. You were wise to want to kill me, if not wise enough to save your life.’

He had had fair hair, she noticed, as her gaze lingered on the face now burnt beyond recognition. And she remembered the murdered traveller she had found lying in this same stony track when she had been a girl; the first person she had ever seen with a head the colour of straw.

Vale smiled a small, terrible smile as the memories rose and drifted around her, like a heavy layer of dust disturbed after a score of years, caressing her ear and her cheek and the delicate fibres of her mind. She gathered the lacewing folds of her gown, grey once more in the embrace of the unlit forest, and into her girdle, slipped the slim blade that had not been the instrument of her death.

As the snake made itself comfortable around her shoulders, she thought of the city, of its white streets and her lover's arrogant mouth, and she set her feet to the road once again.

It was time to go.

So much of what's at the heart of Vale as a character (at least in terms of what formed her) is wrapped up in this story, and it's been both on my mind and relevant to RP lately. So I'm sneaking in here to nudge this upward and hope it might be of interest to those who haven't yet read it.

And, to set the mood to begin the reading... music.

YouTube: Soil's Song by Katatonia

Just came home and decided to read through some of the stories here on the board, and I approve of this one, o'yesh. :3