Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

Ursula was, in a pick-one-word-to-describe-yourself kind of way, practical. Her staunch realism a miracle in a world peppered with chosen ones and unsexy forest spirits. She woke up at a reasonable hour, kept to well-traveled roads, and never wasted.

She hadn't always been so...pragmatic. Once, she'd had dreams. Like every other little girl, before they abandon their irresponsible debt-ridden fathers for more sensible lives at orphanages, she fancied herself a dictator-princess, a priestess of Order, or when she was feeling especially imaginative, a memory-deficient blue-tang lost in the ocean.

But she'd grown up and killed a witch instead. Which again, since magic is a thing, didn't seem too uncommon. It wasn't a special fun thing she could casually drop in conversation at her next orphanage reunion because literally everyone else had killed a witch too. Even that idiot, Nancy Delaney, had managed it.

She grumbled to herself, donning her patched-up coat as she went outside to the well. She groaned, dramatically, loudly (in part to wake her brother, but mostly to demonstrate her ever-growing dissatisfaction with the general state of her life) as she started to pump water into a bucket.

Gods, what the fuck had happened? Once upon a time, Ursula Fletcher had dreamed of fixing the whole wide world. Even now, she could see it -- upon a undead rotting horse, teeth shaped like a jaguar's, a horde of zombies at her ready. Towns and cities would fall, only to rise again under her all-knowing hand.

But now she had fucking breakfast to help start. "Ulric?!" She screamed, her voice unnerving against the quaint sounds of morning, "Get the fuck up!"

They said that little boys were made out of snips, snails, and puppy dog tails. Well, they didn't. Maybe no one actually did, but someone had because there it was, in his head, a little rhyme about murky origins that made not a single lick of sense at all. It was, by all rights, figurative, of course. A metaphor. A silly explanation for the phenomenon that was a man's childhood.

Snips for all the ragged foolery.

Snails for all the snot and tears and slime and grime.

Tails for that bright, unflinching light that, once lost, was like a passing into adulthood.

Ulric wasn't made of snips or snails or puppy dog tails at all. He was made of bones and meat. He was made of failed expectations and lack of desire to conform. He was made of a conspiracy to kill their caretaker in name only and some alien entity and pulsed and throbbed inside of his soul like some starving tumor.

And none of those things supported the lifestyle of an early riser.

Shrill was not the proper word for the booming call to attention that thundered in through the haphazardly shuttered windows of their shabby Etzori home they now shared, only, between the two of them. It was something somewhere between commanding, insulting, insulted, and loud enough to wake the dead, which, ironically, was something the owner of the very voice in question was quite able to do.

Rolling out of his cot, dark hair sticking out at every which angle, Ursula's younger brother by fifteen chimes was undressed, unkempt, and just barely no longer unconscious. Slinking to the window, he pushed the shutter open and leaned against the sill, bare skin comparable to a plucked goose's as the chilly air met the fleeting warmth that continued to escape him now free of the covers as he was.

"There are no fucks left to get anywhere," he yawned, dark eyes staring lazily at the efficient but forceful movements of his sister, the splashing of the water into the wooden pail, the scene of the morning void of any other souls but their own pair. "But if there were, maybe it'd be better to just put the fuck down, you know?"

She didn't, of course, and she wouldn't. That was Ursula. It was always "up" or "forward" never "down" or "back". She didn't take breaks. She just broke things. She didn't rest. She just did the rest. She was motion and progress and so much rage, which, like the unending and relentless waves upon the shore, uselessly lapped up against his stalwart and unshakable calm that only ever shifted to allow fascination and curiosity to peek bright through his steady ramparts.

When they were younger, those who'd cared to notice had always said they were something like two halves of a whole.

Now that they were older?

They were much more like two distinct human beings with very little in common beyond their shared blood. Strangers who knew each other better than any other being, living or dead -- or somewhere in between.

Blearily blinking back the morning's familiar drag towards his cot, he propped his head up with a hand and asked a question he already knew the answer to. It was the sort of thing he did, mostly because there was the off-chance, however small, one day Ursula might actually give him the reply he wanted rather than the ever consistent reply he expected.

"Need some help?"

It wasn't an offer. It was a request for release, a quiet and unobtrusive opportunity for his sister to be free of him, and he of her. All it took was a single, simple, monosyllabic pairing of consonant and vowel in that order.

A reply she'd never once given in earnest.

Fuck. You.

Ursula had said those words only twice before: once, to her idiot father and then to that stupid bitch Nancy Delaney. She'd never seen either of them again, thank the fuckless gods.

And no matter how close those words itched at her tongue, a breath away, always, Ursula would never say them to her brother. No, unlike her sperm donor or the dumbest orphan she ever met, Ulric was useful.

Ursula had lived fifteen chimes as an only child. In those fifteen chimes, she'd learned the greatest truth: everything and everyone was a fucking mess, herself included. Under that thin film of afterbirth, she only saw disappointment. Her mother's doctors, obviously incompetent. Her father, a crying mess.

And then, a miracle happened. Ulric was born.

And she immediately felt, that because he existed, she would be better. Not only would she be better, but for him, she would make the world better. She promised herself, as that strange doctor swaddled her, that she would do anything for Ulric.

And she did.

She'd left her father, because the orphanage provided healthcare and education. And when Nancy Delaney had tried to worm herself between them, Ursula had stabbed her. And, when they'd stripped Elsa of her knowledge and utility, Ursula had dealt the finishing blow. Every time, it'd been for him.

And that meant, she'd never let him go.

Because, without Ulric, what was she striving for? Sure, a perfect world, but who the fuck listened as good as Ulric? Who, without ever complaining, did what she asked? Who the fuck else wasn't a complete idiot? She could only rely on the dead for so much.

"Start breakfast, please. I think bacon sounds good."

Without so much as a nod, Ulric languidly pushed himself back up and onto his own two feet and slipped away from the window. The air had thoroughly chilled his skin and a shiver had set in only to be ignored as he wandered through the empty house, absentmindedly scratching at his stomach. He'd been in charge of meals since he was at least a foot shorter, and never once had he bothered much to learn anything beyond the absolute minimum of what was required.

Fire from flint and tinder, a pan with a long metal handle set over an ash crusted grate, sizzling strips of fatty meat plucked from an ice chest... one, two, three. Pop, snap, hiss. Scents of fat and salt. Sounds of tearing loaves. The taste of the morning chased away without a mouthful of water that splattered onto the cold stones of floor.

By the time he was finished, two places had been set upon a table meant for one, plates pressed up against the other, individual in nature but singular if contact were the dictating factor. Like he and she. Bacon and bread and two small bowls of bland and boiled oats that were more punishment than sustenance sat neatly plain upon their platters.

A hot breakfast, however, very quickly became a warm one and a cold one soon after that, especially in the waning seasons of the arc.

But that was something, like most things, he didn't need to remind Ursula of. She knew. He knew she knew. And she knew he knew she knew. It wasn't some sort of magic shared between flesh of his flesh. It was something far, far greater and much, much rarer than that:

common sense.

So, as he sat down to eat, not needing to wait for his sister because she too would no doubt be there within the chime, Ulric started into morning conversation as easily as if she sat directly across from him; not because she did but because she would.

"And what is on the agenda today?"

Ursula ate like anyone else in a world torn plagued with reckless divinity.

She ate every last meal like it was her last; she savored the bacon, fat first. Grabbing the smallest knife on the table, she carved herself a generous pat of butter and smeared it onto the stale chunk of bread. While she waited for the butter to soften the crust, she ate the oats, feeling each grain on her tongue.

"You could've spared more cream for the oatmeal," she said, helpfully. It was her duty, as eldest-by-fifteen-chimes, to advise, to guide. Ulric erred and Ursula corrected. Ursula taught and Ulric learned. "But thank you," she said, because she was gracious and kind.

She torn into the her bread, rough against her lips. In a world with magic, with gods, and food still went bad with time and rot. No wonder all of Etzos condemned the Pantheon. Still, she ate it. They weren't yet rich enough to be picky.

"Elsa is useless," she sighed, "That hag wasn't strong when she had a beating heart and death hasn't done her figure any favors." Or her magic just wasn't enough to make Elsa better, which isn't something Ursula would consider. "I'll want to get more corpses, stronger ones, bigger ones." She paused, spreading a bit more butter onto her bread. "Maybe that can be our agenda today. That, and salt."

"And you could acknowledge Etzos has been subjected to a goddess-given plague up until a few trials ago," Ulric replied casually, not a hint of frustration in his easy words as he carefully broke a strip of bacon into smaller bits and sprinkled them over his bowl of oats. "But you're welcome."

His dark eyes watched his pale sister eat. She could have been compared to an animal, perhaps, as her teeth tore and lips smacked. Could have, but wasn't. There was something far too human about her, something that screamed out for anyone to hear that there, beneath that carefully cut head of bobbed black hair was a mind filled to the brim with self-awareness and a fundamental loathing of it. Not because she hated herself, but because she hated that no one else thought to do the same.

People, Ursula said, time and time again, were fucking useless.

Replace the greater humanity with a single, familiar name and-

"Hm."

It was true the old hag had been only marginally more useful than, say, a whetstone - though were a whetstone existed in content, pure in its utility, the self-fashioned "Witch of Etzos" had had ego enough for a small army, which vastly diminished whatever value she might have possessed. She was now, of course, a shifting, shambling, soulless mass of gradually purifying flesh and bone, and, though marginal a decrease, had fallen from "mostly worthless" to "utterly useless".

He took his time with his bite of food; it was sticky, chewy, and vaguely salty but mostly disappointing like so much of the promising trails his curiosity was predisposed to follow to their drab or bitter ends. When he, at last, swallowed, his gaze drifted from his sister's face, off towards the distant mother city of their own little town.

"Should be plenty of bodies, at least. I'll fetch the cart."