Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 8

Abaddon

Abaddon was the place where those below had their closest servants among the people of the Charry Mountain.  It comprised the surface fort on the mountain's face and the sub-structures that ran through the old mountain itself.  The surface fort's been the property of a succession of ruffians, bandits and the kind of mercenaries who favor red and black in their color schemes.  The underneath, well, there are a lot of entrances, some that come out pretty far from the mountain itself.  The first generation of explorers and would-be settlers sent people in to check out what had happened to Abbadon almost first thing.

They have since collapsed all the entrances they could find.  There is nothing in Abbadon.  No reason to go, nothing to be gained.  The people who went there had nothing, because anything you had that was worth having, you'd give up in a heartbeat to keep yourself out of Abaddon.  If you were starving, at least you starved in the open air.  If your babies were dying, be grateful they died in the sunlight.  You don't go to Abaddon.  They checked every inch of the place and found nothing you want to see.  If there are entrances from that place to the domain of those underground, they were entrances they wanted you to find and use.  Don't bother.  Undressed planks, hapazardly wedged into angles of quarried stone, ragged remains without names or means to identify.  That's all.

Abaddon was where the people of the region sent their worst and sent their weakest.  Calls for more were uncommon, but there was always a trickle, mostly criminals, but others, too.  People that could not be made to fit.  There was never a transfer station that was too far, and those who took the people below were always waiting, concealed in basket hats and bulky clothes that looked like they were made from wasp paper.  They took them below.  Anyone you sent to them, they took.

When the first explorers returned to the region, they came to Abaddon to see if anyone survived, because no one among the refugees claimed to escape.  No one ever did.  There's no point in looking.

Rabbit City (Don't Lay it On Me, Man)

Rabbit City never was abandoned.  Not a lot of maps show the city, though it was the fifth largest in the region even before the rest of the cities emptied.  There is only one road that leads to the city, up a winding, narrow pass, and that one is in poor repair and half-choked with green briars for much of the year.  Rabbit City is built in a gentle valley surrounded by terraced farmland, self-sufficient, so far as anyone can tell; at least they have very little apparent access to the rest of the region or to the underground.  This remoteness undoubtedly contributed to its ability to remain inhabited and habitable without interruption.

Outsiders don't visit the city often.  It remains fairly isolated and remote, even to the lines of exploration made by those who would plunder or resettle the region.  There also seem to be times, related to the phases of the moon, where the city itself is especially difficult to reach, starting at the waning of the moon and culminating with the new moon where the city is apparently impossible to locate by any means.

Those who visit note that the population has dropped some from its apparent previous capacity, and there is talk of people having left.  Most visitors do not leave, however.  Almost anyone who spends significant time in Rabbit City eventually partners and has a family with a local, regardless of their prior feelings on relationships or other relationships they may have been in.  Couples who come to the city together seem to drift apart after a short time, taking up with locals instead.  Very few visitors return; those who do do not stay away from the city for long, and almost everyone who has spent time in Rabbit City seeks to eventually settle there.

Apparently the locals smell good.

The city was initially settled by the last group that those underground brought to the region, and while most of the residents of Rabbit City retain at least some features, culture, vocabulary and written language of their imported ancestors, they aren't significantly less diverse in feature and history than other folks from the region.  They do, however, share some features; ears that appear slightly pointed, significant freckling and raised birthmarks on the back that resemble scarring, and an apparently attractive scent.

We know that those underground were not shy about tinkering with the forms and features of animals they brought to the region, but only rarely did they extend that tinkering to the human form, and those cases were well-documented, subjects tended to be sterilized in the process, and the results were either very short-lived or disastrous.  Whether the apparent alterations to the people of Rabbit City are deliberate or occurred naturally is something we do not know, and it's largely an assumption based on a majority of the reports of explorers, as few natives of the city have gone to surrounding areas and those who do have not submitted to the kind of testing that would be necessary to determine if these stories have any basis in anatomy.

The Veins

Those who lived underground brought people to the Big Charry region as slaves with three main occupations: construction, mining and the raising and slaughtering livestock for what we can only kind of assume was consumption.  That last bit got revealed to be more of an assumption than proven fact since those who live underground left or died, or whatever it is that happened to them.

Most people are pretty certain that the veins don't exist.  It's something that people made up in the last days when the tide was turning; propaganda, and no one takes it seriously.  But if it is fiction, it's got some deep roots among the people who worked closest to the habitations of those underground.

Miners have stories of digging deep, away from coal, away from iron and all the other things that those underground wanted.  Moving tons of rock to move rock.

Construction workers tell of dressing stone in straight tunnels in the wake of miners.  Excavations which were not mines, but also obviously not fit for habitation.  They were like elaborate sewers, only deep under the earth.

Those who worked at the stockyards remember how important it was to catch all the blood they could in the drains.  How the drains themselves were set into the floors and lined with glass so the stone would not soak up the blood.

The folks who have returned to the region, poking at the past, at the secrets of those underground, almost to an adventurer, they know someone who saw the network in the earth, stone vessels and viaducts circulating the blood of hundreds of millions, still, echoing with the quiet, steady beat of an unseen heart.  No one is the person who saw it, but they all know someone who has.

Billacree Woods

Billacree was a coal miner, a tall tale figure with exceptional bad luck, usually only half his fault, and exceptional good luck, what with his ability to survive one tale of intricate disaster to another.  In the shadow of the mountain, a Billacree is either a sob story of exceptional, terrible happenstance.  Sometimes you tell them for laughs, sometimes for sympathy, and sometimes they're just lies set to get you out of trouble.  No one is really expected to believe a Billacree, though there is a strong cultural pressure among Charry Mountain folk to let one slide, if it's any good.  Except if the listener is your mama.  She's under stronger expectations to tack your hide to the woodshed wall just for trying that out on her, independent of what you actually did.

Anyway, Billacree was a coal miner.  Not for most of his life, but he gets remembered as such because that's what he was expected to do and not doing when he died.  The actual mechanics of the tale, well, Billacrees, especially the ones starring their namesake, are like shaggy dog stories, so the telling depends on the teller and how dirty is too dirty for the company.  Sufficed to say, it involved a mine-damp, a lamp, and a number of other improbable, often sexual, usually scatological things and ended up blowing most of the mine so high into the air that it made a cloud that settled on the animals in the surrounding forests and stained their fur, no shit, black as coal.

Billacree forests are usually hemlock, pine and spruce, fairly dense and pretty small.  The largest continuous Billacree forest in the region is maybe a hectare, which is respectable some places, but Big Charry is all forest and swamp where the mountains don't rise too high and most of them don't.  Animals local to these forests display almost universal melanism, a trait which runs through all vertebrate animals, reptiles, birds, mammals, amphibians, even fish that live within the confines of the woods.

These animals are good luck for you if you see them briefly, for when Billacree got blasted, his luck got blasted, too and rubbed off on the animals of the forests where his cloud touched ground.  If you see them for a while, if one starts coming around, or if Heaven and the Powers forbid, you kill one, that's not so good.  Actually, it's pretty bad.  Likewise, lingering in the forests or taking anything from them is bad luck, but there are shrines where you can go along the borders of the forest closest to travelled routes to leave your woes and hard luck behind. 

Hand Berries

Hand berries come from low, evergreen shrubs that grow all over the Charry Mountain range.  They're a little smaller than peppercorns, green in the spring and early summer, turning fiery orange just past midsummer's and going to a purply brown by the time fall comes.  Once brown, they are safe to harvest.  Any time before then, they are moderately poisonous, and ingestion has killed a person or two.

Hand berries smell a little like pepper and cloves and maybe something dark and pulpy and starting to go rotten.  The scent used to be a common one on the hands of the people of Big Charry and the surroundings (traditionally men, but many women as well as time and necessity relaxed a lot of the gender rolls in the area).  In the shadow of Big Charry, the berries are used as a hand soap, and thus their name.  Four of five of them, rolled vigorously between the palms, releases the oils that are quite effective in combating or preventing all kinds of infections (Charry folk do subscribe to an idiosyncratic and not-fully-accurate version of germ theory, but arguing the finer points of the difference between a bacterial or fungal infection with a Charry country doctor is frustrating for everyone).  The oils are also mildly sticky, which plays into the legend of their discovery.

A forester once tracked a devil of a mountain bear, the kind you only see once a century or so, a maneater who ate her way to human sentience and human wickedness, not to mention super-ursine bulk and wicked magical powers of stealth and fear and shadows.  You know the like, even if you've never seen it.  If you ever do, you won't mistake it for anything else.  This bear, she got the better of the forester, not so much the better to add him to her menu, but bad enough, and blood made his hands too slippery to draw his bow.  Searching around in the brush, he seized upon the hand berries (which had a different name back in the time of folktale and legend, if they had been yet named at all), and found their oils sticky enough to let him fire his arrows. After the battle, he noticed that rolling in them prevented his wounds from getting infected.  He gathered as many as he could and brought them back home where others were suffering from wounds given them by the bear (she liked to injure those she was too full to eat, knowing that her mouth and claws were so filthy that her wounds were incurable).

Hand berries remained an important part of wound care until it was no longer practical to harvest them.  Entire businesses formed around farming and packaging them (in round tins similar to those used for shoe polish and hair pomade).  Charry folk preferred the rolling method, but some businesses pressed the oil and added it to more conventional soap for export.  Extracts and tinctures of the stuff were used in place of iodine for preventing infection, though hand berry oils do sometimes irritate more sensitive skin (it's possible this contributed to the notion that use of hand berries for hygiene was a man's ablution).  The oils from the hand berries do make it into other medicines (it is a laxative, but only safely so when combined with other ingredients).  The rest of the plant is very poisonous, and ingestion of any other part causes vomiting, diarrhea, internal hemorrhage, and an unpleasant demise. 

The Grave

Death is a part of life everywhere, a fact that doesn't really need to be repeated too often, but in the shadow of Big Charry, death manages to outdo itself and be several different parts of life.  The dead don't always do the best job fulfilling their part of the "lie still and trouble not the living" bargain, and sometimes they rise.  Sometimes they rise in numbers, and sometimes they rise in such numbers, from such a wide area that you'd be forgiven for thinking that the people in the mountain's shadow just buried their dead where the poor devils fell and that was every inch of ground.

There's a courtyard in Cold Water Academy, along the banks of Three Corner Reservoir, which was dug down, once, to bedrock, with carefully screened and baked and shriven soil replaced there.  Cold Water was a school that, before it was abandoned, had necromancy on its curriculum, and part of the tests was pulling a body up from that courtyard.  Those who do (and Cold Water had a very impressive graduation rate, no mistake), say that it's only harder to do there because it seems like it should be harder, because of expectation.

The Cold Water resurrection test was one of a number of long-running experiments designed to test for the existence of an Otherworld that usually goes by the colloquial name of the Grave.  The Grave is theorized to be... well, it's tricky.  It was hypothesized to be a holding area for the bodies and the fragmented cast-offs of consciousness, but folks have identified roaming dead in the shape of those whose funerals included cremation, and the bodies so identified show no sign of such disposal.  In fact, some stubborn risers have been burned a number of times, only to return in a form that suggests earth burial.  The risen dead have only fragmentary consciousness at best, and then only rarely, so interviews about their dwelling arrangements remains a challenge.  Channeled spirits will recognize their likeness in the faces of the dead, but report that it is very much like seeing a twin or doppelganger.  Many departed spirits become quite uncomfortable in the presence of what are ostensibly their resurrected corpses and flee their channelers.

There are some signs that lead to the Otherworld hypothesis.  The soil of the Grave is loose and dark and wormy, often in contrast to the normal ground in an area.  People have reported that, during a mass resurrection, there are paved and cobbled areas which appeared to be soft and loamy as a murderer's back garden.  Spontaneous growth of watermelon and pumpkins, vine, flower, fruit and all, in or out of season, is common in areas touched by the grave.  Adventurous souls, often looking for a "source" of the resurrection in the mistaken hope that they can turn it off like a water spigot, find deep pits shored up with the bodies of the dead, limbs grasping one another in an endless knot, or branching catacombs in soft earth, apparently shored by the frescoes and friezes that decorate them and the occasional twisted root.  Folks have brought back grave goods from their explorations, which find their way into the hands of collectors and necromancers.

Of particular note are hinges.  There are not many doors, nor coffins with hinged lids in the living-accessible portions of the Grave, but there are some, and it has been discovered that hanging a door with such hinges, knocking three times and opening said door, will give a person access to explorable catacombs within the Grave.  For this reason, such hinges fetch high prices with necromancers and other similarly-inclined folks.

The Trooper

This is accidental magic.  You have to spill blood and have your blood spilled.  The blood you spill and the one who spills yours need not be the same person.  It must be in a skirmish or a battle where more people die in the course of a day than the number of people you have ever known by name.  It is more likely if the battle is indecisive or a massacre, though this is not a guarantee, and some have come away from well-fought and decisive battles with the mark of this working on their souls.

When this happens, and other things that people cannot fully understand, let alone engineer align right, the survivor or survivors in question see the face of evil.  Every culture that fights in war knows something of how witnessing battle changes and damages a person.  This is different.  When you see the face of evil, evil sees your face as well, and it's the nature of evil to never, ever let you alone.

Evil chooses a guise for you, a beautiful disgraced servant of the Powers, a grinning skeleton in a dark robe bearing rusty tools, a beast whose sweat steams and muscles strain on chains that fade into the distance, a sweet-faced young king with bloody footprints and a dark, dark shadow.  The face you see is the face you will always see, when you are quiet, when you are alone with your thoughts, when a conversation falls into lull.  In those spaces, evil will speak to you, and you may choose to speak back.

No one has ever gone into this bargain willingly or with foreknowledge.  If you are desperate for power, there are better ways, but, when evil speaks and you reply, there is an opportunity to force your will on evil.  If you win, it will do a thing for you, anything but leave you.  If you fail, evil gets a free hand to manifest in your world.  One man so cursed kept a journal of his intercourse with evil and discovered, at the end of his life, that he had won out in the will against evil five times for every eleven. 

Decaffeinated? And I'm Waking Up?

Trying to make myself do things again, so I am making this my accountability place.  Also, it makes me feel a little less like a recluse.  I'm writing little things this month, because I have gotten back into the habit of not writing, and that's a bad habit I mean to break.  At the same time, Beast Fears Fire became kind of too big, and I wrote nothing else last winter, so I am making this much smaller so I will write other things.

Also, posting my walkies, so I have something to look at to make me feel more inclined to walk regularly, and maybe, dare I hope, run?

For instance, my walk today:

http://runkeeper.com/user/watermelontail/activity/276920526

The Seven-Gorge Swine

The town at Seven Gorges (to be honest only 4 of them can be called gorges, and then only if you're being charitable to the third and fourth.  The first one is quite worthy, and still has the elevators and infrastructure for lowering animals and supplies down to the underground cities) used to have a big iron statue of a sow in the middle of town, a sort of testament to its importance as the stockyard for the underground cities and a gateway to the underground.  The statue is long gone, as are the stockyards and the cities (we think) that they used to supply.  The town is empty in the shadow of Big Charry Mountain, and no one who has tried to set up camp there stays for long, thanks to the ghosts.  There's no record of human spirits in Seven-Gorge Township, though, you'd probably find them if you were willing to crawl through the herds of ghostly swine and cattle in order to see them.

Individual animals don't make ghosts (usually), but there is one story that relates to the iron sow of the Seven Gorges and individual ghosts that came to be in her square.

The story goes that a littler of piglets got lost in the town as a storm rolled in over the mountain.  They made their way through the streets in cold wind and stinging hail until they saw the iron sow.  Mistaking it for their mother and seeking shelter, they snuggled under here and started to suckle at her iron teats.  Then the lightning struck.

In the last days, they alloyed the iron from the sow into steel and used it to make swords.  There are a lot of these about, short, but with broad, tapered blades.  Every once in a while, they'll deliver a strong shock, which makes them sought after, but there is another quality that sets them apart.  Every so often, in the presence of one of these swords, you'll see one, a clump of shadow in the shape of a pig, crackling with electricity, haloed in blue.  Someone with one of these swords and the right mojo can make a servant of one of the crackling piglets of the iron sow, for a while.  They rest often, slip away regularly, and walk through the streets of Seven-Gorge Township with the rest of the herds.

Colthead Valley

Salt pools well up from the caverns on the upper slopes of Colthead Valley and the water still drip, drip, drips down from pool to pool as they were set up before their owners fled.  There's a shrine up there, for salt, for hunting, but it's hard to find.  That difficulty's on account of it moving.  It doesn't do it often, just often enough, and there used to be a family that could keep track of its comings and goings (buck deer with salt crystals riming their eyes and ears and antlers draw it away with salt-crusted ropes that anchor to it in their teeth, or it grows giant centipedes for legs and scuttles away, dark orange in the twilight), but that family is all gone, now, and their almanac got sold three nations away as a curiosity to a rich man who has never seen the valley.

Salty streams run down the slopes.  They are the tear tracks and their banks are lined with plants that do not appear anywhere else.  A couple are medicinal.  One is a dangerous poison.  One works in strong with local magic.  The rest are precious for their own sake and rarity.  No fish swim in the tear tracks, but there are little pinkish animals, closest to sea cucumbers, which the locals used to call salt piglets.  The things were edible, even palatable with practice, but no chef has ever succeeded in making them tasty.  The river runs brackish by the time it hits the downstream edge of the valley, and fishing here is mediocre at best.  There are a couple of lower areas in the slopes themselves where salty water collects into swamps.  Those places are supposed to be good places to find witches.  For exciting and terrible values of good.