You are standing by a tree
There are 3 paths.
One appears to go to a jungle,
one appears to go to a cave,
one appears to go to a beach,
you could try and climb the tree,
there is a nearby shop you could go in,
or you could do something else.
So what's its going to be?
Written by catprog on 01 April 2003
You sit under the tree
You sit under the tree.
Suddenly...
Written by catprog on 21 May 2003
See? Keep moving or you get tranked. That's how the game is played.
Your relaxing moment under the tree is rudely interrupted by an abrupt transformation. You are hit by a tranquilizer dart, which turns you into a person with a tranquilizer dart stuck in their neck. It's an easy change. Of course, your train of thought gets about as far as "Oh good heavens, a dart of some kind. I'd betteeerrgmphqq," at which point the dart takes effect, and you slump under the tree like a drugged-up rag doll. A half-hearted twitch is all the moving you do for quite some time. Eventually, you wake up. When you do, you are...
Written by Zodiac on 27 January 2007
In a dungeon
You feel yourself plucked from your story - plotlines tugging then tearing- as a narrator’s fist uproots you, planting your wet soul in another’s timeline. You have history here- and then, gone…
You wake in pain. You are not screaming, because it is not the type of pain which will drive you to scream; it is the type of pain that makes you like an animal, nosing at the hurts and coiling in a foetal bundle to wait out the long night.
At your wrists and ankles, you feel a winter’s bite of silver gouging into soft flesh. You open your eyes just enough to confirm that you are being hanged by your hands and your feet against a dark brick wall, and that the shackles are dull silver, changer’s bane. Your world is a few square feet of dark, bounded by walls on three sides- you can smell the slick rot that coats them with your stinging-raw nose- and an illusion of space on the fourth. There will be bars. This is a dungeon.
Your body screeches at you- your skin sits wrong, too tight here, too loose there. A tight, hairless tail, like a newborn cub’s, hangs down between your legs. The silver has frozen you whilst changing. Into what, you no longer know.
The silver has robbed you of that. For the last and greatest pain of all is the pain nestled heavy in the stretched bone of your forehead, where bright ice fire traces a symbol inverted against the soft tissue below: all you know is kaum, the crested symbol of the abomination. You cannot even recall your name.
What will you do?
Written by ouroboros666 on 12 July 2016
Stay patient- bide your time
You wait in silence, counting out the minutes in a long and fleeing stream of consciousness. Every so often, you rotate your wrists just a little, enough to stop the silver burning through to the bone. But you are acting entirely on motor memory. You see no reason to fight it. Maybe everyone is born in the dark knowing how to count the minutes.
What are you waiting for?
Nothing. Waiting is a way to give yourself purpose. To forget to panic.
But you don’t know that. The voice that said those words was not your own voice. And you think you have forgotten too much.
You are about to let the silver tear into both wrists when you hear the noises, far away but moving closer. Then torchlight blooms yellow on the blank wall a few paces beyond your bars, and you hear voices, speaking some language you know:
“Filthy Witcher scum.”
“Not in front of the ladies, Teddy. All sweet asleep in their chains, they are. Dreaming silver dreams.”
“I tell you, it’s not right-“
You see three people walking slow into view of your cell- two of them heavyset guards, one a little smaller and paler, half-dragging, half-carrying the third. Your slitted eyes wince back. Red. As if she has been painted all over- red for newly dead- and is now being dragged down to hell. Muscle glistens in strips across the cheekbones of an unidentifiable face. Your eyes meet, her blue ones shining from the bath of red and yours- you wouldn’t know the colour of your eyes.
In a movement so fast you hardly follow it, she jams her fingers into the eye sockets of the left-hand guard and throws herself on your bars.
“I knew… I knew you were…”
You spit words past your half-grown muzzle, needing to know.
“Who?”
Loops of black fluid shoot suddenly over her peeled knuckles, spread wide like the broad blade of a razor, and punch through the throat of the guard who lunged at her. The other, the one she hurt, huddles on the floor.
“Revenge our lost duke! Revenge Antonius and your fellow Witchers! Live… Find the Monkshood… Revenge us both…”
She is staring past you, unseeing. The black fluid spools into the air from every abused scrap of her flesh, and worms between the bars of your cage, decaying them to black-rusted stumps. It mists into dark steam as it hits silver, but she shudders and pours out more, screaming and screaming as you find yourself freed.
Her blue eyes roll upwards, and she crumbles to dust.
Act quickly.
Written by ouroboros666 on 13 July 2016
Turn Left
You turn left, the ice in your bones keeping you steady and numbing your feet enough that you can walk. You let the knowing muscles bunch in your thighs and calves, carrying you from shadow to shade as if you were a dancer in another life. But dancers have the luck of the devil, and perhaps a dancer wouldn’t have died in silver. The corridor takes you upwards, and you took the blond guard’s lantern to guide your path. The other you killed, clumsily- too close to him and grappling past his blind arms to his throat. You left them both in the cell, their heads hanging beside the hanging ropes of silver- a box of puppets and their slack strings, you thought. Ironic.
You trod over the red lady’s ashes to go, and now you ignore the suspended figures in their cages to your right. There is nothing you can do for the dead, or those who sleep too deep like the dead.
You are making for the renegade duke. Bathoset. His name comes back to you from behind silver bars, and you use it as the needle of your compass.
The floor begins to slope upwards: you go with the slope, letting your useless tail drag on the flagstones behind you as you fall to all fours and lope. The easier movement gets you up several short flights of stairs, chasing half-familiar smells and sounds down a long, plain gallery. You are a body of foreign objects, watching the parts of you that run as if from tunnel’s end.
Perhaps you are dreaming that your legs buckle, that stone breaks up in a sure tide from your head to your hips.
You collapse.
When you come to yourself, you are lying on your side beside warm clay oven in a still kitchen that stretches beyond your short horizons, disappearing into a thicket of counter legs and trestles. Heat pens you in on both sides: to your right, it spills from a long hearth, banked well and now down to coals and glow. With a question forming in the baring of your thickened pink gums, you stare at the rough brown wool pooling around your outstretched arm.
“You’re safe, though I wouldn’t answer for how long that’ll last,” someone remarks. “I surely can’t keep you. There’s too much work to be done in keeping my own hide.”
You say nothing.
“Cat got your tongue? I’d advise you to keep it that way. The muzzle is disconcerting: I can’t imagine you have the voice of an angel.”
“Do you know me?” you ask, wondering.
“You’re clearly a Canny. That’s it. I don’t know you. And you need to be going, get out of my kitchens.” There is a little of the hysteric in the words, curling up the ends of statements just enough to make them question. Will you go? Will you?
You pull yourself up, tail flailing bonelessly, and look for him. A cracked voice, like a boy’s, but clearly male, anyhow, and perhaps older than it would sound.
There is nobody- just a kitchen fit for a duke, wooden worktops and fire pits, ovens and stoves.
“You’ve noticed I’m not going to parade myself out for you,” he says. “I won’t have you knowing my face. Yes, I’m Canny, but it’s minor- I’ve hidden it years. I’ve let you share my fire; I’ve given you one of the spare robes. I’ve done enough. Now, go. Look behind you- there’s a door, a small one. It’s the pantry. Go straight through, and the next door’s the winery. Take a left, and you’re in the Low Palace. Find your own way out. Die, if that’s what you’re wanting. I’ve given my dues, so never you turn back on me.”
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 16 July 2016
Seize a cleaver
You feel for the knife block on the counter to your left, closing your fingers around a thick handle and pulling. How much can the Canny see? You jolt just slightly when the weight of the cleaver settles to the end of your arm.
In a split second, you have thrown yourself over the counter, scattering knives, and grip a corner of a heavy stove to throw yourself round it, heading for the voice. He is running, but you catch him, folding his long tunic into your pale fist, pinning the two of you down with only your weight and no scrap of strength, the cleaver stuffed in the dip between his collarbone and chin.
“See this?” you say, letting your head roll down. It is a relief to lower your guard a little, just a little, before someone you can control. “Dungeon brand, kind sir. Should have left the rat where you found the rat, na? But here we are. And, us being here, if you take my meaning, I think you’re going to help me.”
“I saved your life.” The man is middle-aged, very white-faced and creased: not shaven, but leathery and hairless as a snake egg is leathery and hairless- because it is his nature. He sounds shocked- but most people sound shocked with a meat knife working beneath the soft parts of their throat.
“I don’t hold grudges, lucky for you. But I’m alive- yes, and kicking- now, and I think both of us fancy sniffing the air together. See? Natural empathy. Get up.” You tilt the cleaver and rock on your heels just sufficiently to grant him an inch, choking back the pain: needing to be on your feet before he is, you use your own momentum, your body’s dead mass, to swing you up. You kept it from your voice, but it was truly the coin toss that took the Canny to your side that decided you for life. You’re on the bright path now, but it could have gone the other way. A path must be followed and swallowed entire.
The cleaver supervises Canny with needlepoint vigilance as he takes up another kitchen knife- a great deal smaller, thankfully, and he seems to fear you more than you warrant fearing- to saw off the tail. Impossible, that such a limb- a fifth limb, half there- could have so much blood in it, but it does, and a slow wash of red crawls down your again-naked legs to collect at your feet: a puddling skirt, many-layered. You close the stump with the point of a poker fresh from the hearthfire, then drive the yellow metal down Canny’s gullet, drawing closer first and shifting so the swipe can fall swiftly and spare your cold wrists. A flat carving knife to skim kaum from the grain of your forehead, the tail not roasting but burning like tied twigs on the fire- so thin-knitted it is almost transparent- and you throw yourself down in the twinned heats of cooling and burning dead flesh to wait.
A guard in boiled leather strides into the room, hand on the hilt of his smallsword. What do you do?
Written by ouroboros666 on 17 July 2016
Change shape
Your spine cramps and a feeling of tearing fires along it, like stitches being ripped from thin fabric: it jerks back on itself with a sudden give, dog-legging, and you fall to the flagstones. Thin spears of sensation pierce you above your pelvis as the bones compress, and the long lines of your legs jutter and hump to spined slats, tissue flowing like liquid down the length from your neck.
The tines of your ribs unfold in a long corset down your abdomen, and multiply in sleek lumps that swarm across your belly and force your thighs and calves together as bone unravels: a white cast made of just-parted links that spills to the balls of your feet, tugging a thick skein of half-formed hide behind it. The surface of you hardens into long lines of bevelled diamonds, separated by deep cracks that itch.
The thin bones of your toes and insteps snap together with a sound of dice, and the marrow burns away as they slick with the flooding keratin from the nail beds.
Your skull fragments sharply into ragged pieces of bone, held together slack by the thin skin of your scalp; you think of eggshells when a palm is slammed down on their points. The bone grates as it spreads and flattens and reforms in a blunted triangle laced with ducts, your eyes beading small as oil does in a hot skillet. Your chin falls away into the straightness of your neck, and then your upper and lower lip round and swell out from your face, following the lines of bone to shape a flared muzzle even as your nose is taped down with dry strings of tendon.
You breathe through flared slots, your tongue fissuring painlessly down the tip and your arms falling away to stumps, and then nothing. Hair floats down around you, settling in wordless kisses. A short rear for you to open your mouth, and stretch down thick white fangs that fall back in taut pink arches to your gums; in a second, they drip with clear fluid at the tips.
A rattlesnake. You rear at the guard, a hiss boiling back deep in the tube of you. A lifetime that passes in seconds: this is what it is to be reincarnated, the god of all snakes and things that writhe.
As he levels his sword at you, keeping his off side shielded behind a counter, crouching just low enough to spring if it is needed, you worm round soft and swift beneath the warm oven and take him in the ankle as he swings at shadows.
As he follows the brief, brilliant curve of human agony- staring, arcing back on himself at the waist, falling, convulsing- you are already gliding away.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 18 July 2016
The end (for now)