5th Cylus 706
Cold.
Was an enormously understated way of describing the bitter, all-consuming frostbound wound that ruptured into the world when Cylus kicked Zida out of the room. It was like calling a growing hurricane a gentle breeze or a firestorm raging through the Rhakros jungle a mildly warm incident; it didn’t quite capture the proper reality of what it meant to suffer through 30 days of blizzard and snowstorms and winds dipping so cold you could walk out the door and the storm drain the color and the mind from you, your fingers swelled and rot to blue, your shivers start shivering, and you see snow demons haunt you in the storm, whispering warmth in your ears and asking -oh so politely- that maybe, just maybe, those clothes are wrong, and the snow is right. The snow is lovely, and warm, and if you would just lie down for a bit and rest your head there, everything in the world would make sense for once.
And it did for the next few bits. For the last few bits.
It took too many arcs after for Zipper to separate the superstition from the facts, that there were no intangible snow monsters in the Etzori streets of cylus calling you to an early grave, just the fact of such things like frostbite and, the real killer, hypothermia driving people to madness as their minds went cold and their heart found the blood too chill to pump.
Every fact simplified for a child’s ears, every whim of the weather blamed on demons from the beyond - and not out of some kindness, but sheer fuckin’ ignorance. Zipper spent arcs burning out the rot from a flawed education of a flawed institution, but there was always the sinking fear that the damage done to her was inherent at the foundation: that her mind would never leave the naturally-inclined trappings of orphanage mediocrity.
But that was the problems of the future pre-pubescent Zipper’s. Those was the fears and the insecurities and the tantrums that were never truly resolved, following her all the way to young adulthood
Young Fiona’s only concern was surviving the cold.
They never had enough wool for every child. A lot of them had to make do with their hand-me-down rags hardly fit for the cold. Once in awhile, if the mood -or circumstance- suited a merchant right, a charitable donation would be made to the orphanage for clothes that would fare the children better in Cylus.
Once in awhile.
Lots of burying to do when every other time.
Fiona, naturally, decided to turn to Transmutation: fight the world’s banes with its boons.
She scoured the orphanage for the warmest thing she could find and settled on the flame of the fireplace - the one reliable source of heat in the entire building. Correction: Mr. Barnelby had his own in his office, of course, that selfish old fuck, and the rest of the staff weren’t exactly dropping like flies, so they had their own ways they weren’t sharing.
She couldn’t blame them. She whined, she moaned, she bitched, but deep down in her heart she couldn’t really blame them. They were simply acting out the features of their flawed design: Relentless, black-hearted self-preservation and cold authority that decided that the lives of kids weren’t worth letting a few into the kids into his room.
She couldn’t build people with Transmutation; but at least were meant to be tools on purpose.
She put her hands to the fire and…
It occurred to her that this was the first time she tried to memorize something that wasn’t solid, that wasn’t fixed in the world. Ever-flickering, with a warmth that was too much to bear even before she had wanted to touch it, how would she go about unravelling this unfixed oddity?
She used a piece of wood as a proxy, tossed in by her very hand for the fire to freshly burn from the start.
It charred, it blackened, it ate away at itself while Fiona squatted there looking at it.
She learnt another thing that cold Cylus day: wood took a shitload of time to die in fire.
And as she looked into the flames, she saw the destiny she envisioned for this place when she and Finn were done with it. A cleansing fire that would wipe away everything that was wrong with it and char and break and slice the earth underneath so that nothing would ever grow from this institution of inefficiency.
Everyone has power fantasies. Everyone has secret hatreds they wished to enact, childhood bullies they wished to maim and kill.
Fiona -Zipper- just happened to grow up into the exact sort of person with the will and the way to twist all these fantasies into reality one sick deed at a time.
And every once in awhile, when she found a day she couldn’t fill with busy and busy and busy, she did.
Cold.
Was an enormously understated way of describing the bitter, all-consuming frostbound wound that ruptured into the world when Cylus kicked Zida out of the room. It was like calling a growing hurricane a gentle breeze or a firestorm raging through the Rhakros jungle a mildly warm incident; it didn’t quite capture the proper reality of what it meant to suffer through 30 days of blizzard and snowstorms and winds dipping so cold you could walk out the door and the storm drain the color and the mind from you, your fingers swelled and rot to blue, your shivers start shivering, and you see snow demons haunt you in the storm, whispering warmth in your ears and asking -oh so politely- that maybe, just maybe, those clothes are wrong, and the snow is right. The snow is lovely, and warm, and if you would just lie down for a bit and rest your head there, everything in the world would make sense for once.
And it did for the next few bits. For the last few bits.
It took too many arcs after for Zipper to separate the superstition from the facts, that there were no intangible snow monsters in the Etzori streets of cylus calling you to an early grave, just the fact of such things like frostbite and, the real killer, hypothermia driving people to madness as their minds went cold and their heart found the blood too chill to pump.
Every fact simplified for a child’s ears, every whim of the weather blamed on demons from the beyond - and not out of some kindness, but sheer fuckin’ ignorance. Zipper spent arcs burning out the rot from a flawed education of a flawed institution, but there was always the sinking fear that the damage done to her was inherent at the foundation: that her mind would never leave the naturally-inclined trappings of orphanage mediocrity.
But that was the problems of the future pre-pubescent Zipper’s. Those was the fears and the insecurities and the tantrums that were never truly resolved, following her all the way to young adulthood
Young Fiona’s only concern was surviving the cold.
They never had enough wool for every child. A lot of them had to make do with their hand-me-down rags hardly fit for the cold. Once in awhile, if the mood -or circumstance- suited a merchant right, a charitable donation would be made to the orphanage for clothes that would fare the children better in Cylus.
Once in awhile.
Lots of burying to do when every other time.
Fiona, naturally, decided to turn to Transmutation: fight the world’s banes with its boons.
She scoured the orphanage for the warmest thing she could find and settled on the flame of the fireplace - the one reliable source of heat in the entire building. Correction: Mr. Barnelby had his own in his office, of course, that selfish old fuck, and the rest of the staff weren’t exactly dropping like flies, so they had their own ways they weren’t sharing.
She couldn’t blame them. She whined, she moaned, she bitched, but deep down in her heart she couldn’t really blame them. They were simply acting out the features of their flawed design: Relentless, black-hearted self-preservation and cold authority that decided that the lives of kids weren’t worth letting a few into the kids into his room.
She couldn’t build people with Transmutation; but at least were meant to be tools on purpose.
She put her hands to the fire and…
It occurred to her that this was the first time she tried to memorize something that wasn’t solid, that wasn’t fixed in the world. Ever-flickering, with a warmth that was too much to bear even before she had wanted to touch it, how would she go about unravelling this unfixed oddity?
She used a piece of wood as a proxy, tossed in by her very hand for the fire to freshly burn from the start.
It charred, it blackened, it ate away at itself while Fiona squatted there looking at it.
She learnt another thing that cold Cylus day: wood took a shitload of time to die in fire.
And as she looked into the flames, she saw the destiny she envisioned for this place when she and Finn were done with it. A cleansing fire that would wipe away everything that was wrong with it and char and break and slice the earth underneath so that nothing would ever grow from this institution of inefficiency.
Everyone has power fantasies. Everyone has secret hatreds they wished to enact, childhood bullies they wished to maim and kill.
Fiona -Zipper- just happened to grow up into the exact sort of person with the will and the way to twist all these fantasies into reality one sick deed at a time.
And every once in awhile, when she found a day she couldn’t fill with busy and busy and busy, she did.
