One Foot Before The Other

“I really need to learn when dead is dead.”

Duffy Bracken stood overlooking the Duala steppes with his hands on his hips and the weight of the world on his shoulders. Time and time again the bard had gazed out at a bleak horizon and pondered his nature, and time and time again his nature had eluded him.

“Oh come on, Duffy. For once, don’t worry about the why and just concentrate on the how.”

“How I’m going to survive the heart of a volcano, you mean?”

Bard rolled eyes at bastard, and together they burst into a harmonious and brotherly chuckle. Arden felt relief as they finally broke the awkward silence that had surrounded them for leagues. Slowly but surely they were rebuilding bridges.

“It’s your idea to draw on the Tap Duffy. I never said it was going to be easy.” Arden unfolded his arms and dropped them to his sides. His instincts told him they would soon be on the march. “I promised to support you fulfilling your dreams so I will do everything I can to help.”

Duffy had to smile and nod with thanks. For centuries, the Tantalum troupe had given their lives time and time again (and so much more) for the ‘greater good’. Today things would be different. Today, when the sun set across the demon marred plains of Tular, the bard would get everything he deserved in his infinite lives.

“Let’s get moving,” he said reluctantly as he put one foot forward.

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They clambered down the shale slope and padded quickly out onto the plains. The rocky crags that flanked either side of the valley gave way to the miles of jet black acrid soil that stood between the duo and the indomitable sight of the Lugar Volcano in the distance.

“Are you sure it’s going to work?”

Arden had asked that question three times since they set out a month prior. Each time Duffy’s answer had become slightly clearer, though the swordsman felt no closer to understanding the bard’s true intent. As far as he could make out Duffy hoped to reignite his connection to the Aria by creating a crack in the fabric of the world – creating a new wellspring somewhere where only he could access it.

“Provided nobody gets wind of the plan and hijacks the wellspring, I should be able to reform the Aria and give this tired old body some permanency.”

Duffy knew he had little time, but he could not be sure just how long. The refugees from Raiaera that arrived in the city of Branna had done much to create a simulacrum for him to return to Althanas in, but they were tired, their arts diluted by time, and he too stubborn to fully give in to their rituals. Asking for help had never come easy to the leading man.

“And…if they do hijack it?” Arden already regretted asking.

Duffy padded on for a moment, trying to feign ignorance.

“Oh, you know…the end of days.”

“That’s why I have been asking you repeatedly since we set out,” Arden said with a deflated sigh. Already pledged to the cause, the swordsman carried on and kicked aside pebbles of volcanic rock and deadwood.

“You’d have agreed had I told you in Branna?” Duffy raised a doubting eyebrow.

Arden thought to himself for a moment. A moment soon turned into a mile and then another. By the time he put his thoughts together Duffy had forgotten all about it and was whistling an ancient tune to himself. Arden gave up. He should have known a secret meeting with the bard would end up with one of them putting their lives on the line for the other. At least this time his sister was not her to be a constant thorn in his side. A conscious he may regret not having to call upon.

“Do we climb the volcano or go through it?”

Duffy smiled.

“We have to climb it and then find the entrance to the cave network somewhere near the caldera’s peak.”

Arden looked ahead, eyes focussing to see through the strange and dark opaqueness that covered the horizon. He could not be sure if it was a sand storm or Haida’s effervescent malice warping the very fabric of reality. Either way, they were at risk of becoming lost, or worst – trapped in the fiery convocations that burst into, and vanished from existence without warning.

“It looks like its active…,” Arden stated with trepidation.

“Don’t be silly.”

“No.” Arden pointed to the volcano’s summit. “It really does.”

Duffy pretended to follow the gesture and examine the roil of smoke that drifted up from their destination. He knew full well the volcano was active. He was not going to let on that he had known before asking his brother to join him.

“I’m sure it will be fine,” he protested. “It’s probably been active like that for centuries.” Haida was a dangerous place, its earth as much alive as the demons that dwelt below. They were standing in the middle of a battlefield that fought on long after the soldiers had withered away to dust.

“I’m going to remember you said that, and when we’re drowning in a sea of lava and regretting getting out of bed sober you’ll be made to remember it.” Arden pulled the hem of his cloak tighter around his shoulders. Only a streak of crimson hair and a blackened nose protruded from the hood when he was done. “Painfully slowly,” he added.

Duffy let the sound of hobnails crushing volcanic rock fill the silence, rather than digging himself a deeper hole. Hopefully the risks would be swift forgotten when he found a way to revive himself. If he failed, then his worst fears would come true. He, after centuries of fighting alongside his family, would truly be dead. The thought of such an eventuality had haunted him for centuries. Here he was, most trusted sibling by his side, staring death in the face.

Death stared right back by the time they reached the halfway mark. The volcano’s sides become a barrier between life and death, every jagged edifice of the landscape a threat to the simulacrum’s existence. Every few steps Arden had to reposition himself, very carefully, to make sure that when he hoisted Duffy up to the next vantage point the pair of them didn’t fall graceless to certain, tumultuous deaths.

“We have had five centuries, give or take, to master climbing.” Duffy reached for the indicated hand grip and pulled himself up to the next ledge with a heave. “Why did we spend all that time drinking, singing, and pissing off gods?” He rolled onto his back, breathless and wide-eyed.

Arden’s head appeared over the edge, equally drained, equally frustrated.

“You,” he spat, pulled himself up, and stood with the horizon ablaze over his shoulders, “suggested it.”

A short silence quickly cracked apart when Duffy broke into school boy laughter. Arden rolled his eyes but soon joined him.

“Hindsight.”

“Hindsight,” Arden echoed.

If any of the Tantalum troupe had more of that, before the long war with gods and monsters and the vices they shared – liquor and apathy, their trials would have been much, much shorter. Arden rested his hands on his hips.

“I’m sorry I dragged you into all this.” Duffy sounded, for the first time in decades, quite sincere.

Arden looked his brother in the eye. Acrid clouds roiled. Skies darkened. Hard as he tried, he could only forgive.

“It’s a bit too late for all this, brother.”

That it was. Duffy sighed again. His chest rose and sunk, every breath painful to his temporary form. He longed to be alive again more than anything. He would have sacrificed his siblings in a heartbeat to feel. To sleep. To breathe true again. He had only been a ghost in the ghastly streets of Branna for a year, already, he grew tired of unloving.

“Do you understand why I have to at least try to do this?”

The question lingered in the air as the bard carefully arranged his limbs and pushed himself upright. On the side of a volcano the duo stared into one another’s tired, beleaguered eyes. There was knowing there, amidst the flames and the heartache.

“You’re asking me if I understand why you want to live.” Arden shook his head. “You shouldn’t have to ask.” He held out a hand, in it, a bottle of water saved by providence of the swordsman’s blood magic. He could last an age. Duffy’s fragile form, on the other hand…fleeting.

The bard drained a dram quickly, and felt its cold chill invigorate his coarse lungs. He nodded with appreciated, replaced the stopper, and handed it back.

“Keep it,” Arden protested. His palm rebuffed the bottle and Duffy reluctantly strapped it to his belt.

“If I’ve learned anything from out tribulations it’s to make sure people know just how sorry you are you failed.”

“Failed?” Arden’s eyes danced with fickle flames.

A wellspring of emotions churned beneath Duffy’s stubborn exterior. He turned away to hide his teary eyes.

“Don’t pretend you hadn’t noticed.”

Arden knew all too well how difficult the last century had been for the troupe. From the tribulations he had undergone with the Greater Oni in Akashima to the endless days of anxiety and fear fighting the Forgotten One Oblivion. War was their way of life. Plays were their release. The revel at the end of a performance a momentary forgiveness from a life unrelenting in tenacity and ferocity.

“At no point, Duffy Bracken, in five centuries have you ‘failed’ us.” Arden wanted to slap his brother across the cheek with a gauntleted hand, but that would achieve nothing. “You did everything you could to protect us.”

As the volcano broiled overhead, the Bard’s eyes teared below. He realised his error too late. He had never found honesty easy. He had tried to hide the truth from his siblings, edge them towards success without the reality of what they were fighting against hanging overhead. He had taken that same weight that pressed down on his mortal form now and refused to share it.

“I always felt smothered by my own heart…” He slumped his shoulders.

Arden approached from behind, and, brotherly like, rested a caring hand on the bard’s shoulder. He squeezed just enough to convey care without hurting.

“And we felt smothered by our own inability to lift those burdens.”

Duffy sobbed. The skies cracked. Rain fell.

“What am I like?”

Duffy turned. He wiped his face, though it was futile against the weather. It was a soft, cool rain that served no real end but to give haste to travellers and send husbands home to wives’ endeavours.

“A damned fool, as I’m sure Ruby would be all too happy to remind you with a kick to the balls if she knew what you were planning.” Arden did not need to apply threat to his words to wound the bard to action.

Duffy turned and made to climb. As one, the duo made short work of the final league to the summit of the volcano. Rubble cascaded in their wake. Sulphur began to creep into their nostrils, a portent of what awaited them at the summit. It mingled with the all too familiar smell of a month’s rain in an hour’s passing.

“If you feel tired,” Arden said abruptly, “let me know. I will give life in life’s stead.”

It took Duffy a moment to realise what the swordsman meant. He shook his head and began to test rocks for the next safe hold. If they were to break open the weak fabric of reality in Haida’s heart, they would need to work together.

“No, Arden. Today we will use the gifts Oblivion gave us amidst the myriad curses of our being.” He found his next hold and they clambered up to the next ledge in tandem. They pounced upright, adrenaline pumping, and faced their enemy together.

“That’s…a big Dragon,” they said as one.

Ahead, atop the volcano’s peak rested a thunder lizard unlike any they had faced. It slept lingering on the knife edge between outer slope and fiery interior. It was black, even by night’s fall standard. Spikes lined its spine and its tail was as long as its body and tipped by a dual blade of dense bone. Fire didn’t need to flicker in its maw to tell the duo this was a flame born creature.

“So about that blood magic,” Duffy erred. He reached, very slowly, for the hilt of his katana.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m quite happy to lose my sanity to not die horribly.” Arden bent at the knee and unsheathed the Kerria slowly, silently, and sanctimoniously.

Fifty feet beneath the dragon the Bard and the Bastard did as they always did. They waited. They watched. They teased their audience. When finally the dragon snorted a flick of umbral flame and opened one cold, calculating eye, they broke into a sprint that made short work of the final shale ascent and brought them, burnt boot and beleaguered body to the flat at the volcanoes peak.

“Like the good old days!” Duffy cackled.

Arden barely had time to retort before a spiked claw slammed down in front of his advance and immediately made him regret offering to help.

“I’m still sober!” he roared in reply. He sliced, diced, and rolled out of harm’s way as the dragon lashed with his prehensile tail.

Part Two - The Middle

“No, no, just no!” roared Ruby Winchester.

The rehearsal came to a screeching, undulating halt. Onto the stage, resplendent in red as ever, stormed the matriarch of the Tantalum troupe.

“What in the blazes was that?” Her eyes smouldered. Inner fire burnt. She glared, with contempt that could kill gods, at the supposed leading man.

Duffy dropped his blade to his sword, no more than a shaft of wood painted silver, and shrugged. As far as he was concerned. As far as he was always, without fail, concerned…his acting was flawless.

“I’m. Still. Sober,” she quoted.

Several orphans clambered out of the large paper and oak framework of the dragon. They looked half-dazed, half confused. They watched the standoff between Ruby and Duffy for a few seconds, and promptly ran away whilst they could. It would be some time before their puppetry was needed again. Arden, on the fringes, watched with more focussed attentions. He tucked his own prop blade into his belt and folded his arms across his chest.

“What? You said ad-lib,” Duffy protested.

Scara Brae, in the grip of an overcast, but intolerably humid afternoon hummed, a radix of power oblivious to the battles ongoing at its heart. Behind Duffy, jagged towers and stained glass, the Prima Vista stood lifeless and uninviting.

“I said ad-lib the actions, not spurt out whatever diatribe comes to mind.”

Ruby checked the script, confirmed Duffy was talking out his arse, and then looked to Arden.

“Repeat all the last page. Now!”

The thespian torture continued for some time. By the turn of evening to night, Duffy and Arden had rehearsed the first act’s conflict scenes until their fingers were sore and their limbs ached with the weight of the world. When Ruby relinquished them of their servitude, they stumbled to the front of the stage and dropped onto the edge. Duffy fell back, head cracking obliviously against the newly cut planks. Arden winced, but then did the same.

“I’m not sure what’s worse. Fighting the Forgotten Ones, or acting,” the bard mused.

“I feel less judged by a nation’s people than I ever have under her oh so observant eye.” The swordsman’s tone was full of contempt. In an hour or so, both of them would forget the day happened and they would all share a laugh and a joke and a drink or twelve in the bowels of Brandybuck Castle.

True enough, when the troupe had fought for king and country in Radasanth, or as envoys in Akashima’s war torn heart, people had forgiven them for their mortal failures. The devastation in Yanbo Harbour was nothing compared to the relief the people of the harbour city felt at being free of the Crab’s tyranny. The Republic of Corone, free of a corrupt Empire, turned a cheek at the state of its highways and the loss of the Ixian Knights as its defenders.

“It’s been so long since we put our hearts into a play. It’s…sort of refreshing,” Duffy hesitantly admitted.

Ruby sat stage right. Elegantly poised on the edge of a footlocker of tresses and veils, she reflected on the day’s progress. Six months since she had learned of Duffy’s semi-survival, it still made her ill at ease to be in his company. Having said goodbye too many times, the matriarch could not quite overcome the sadness that filled her heart at his absence in the real world. The Aria, now reborn as a city of creativity felt like a dream. Though bright and bustling, Branna was soulless, unreal, to end at any moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said aloud.

Duffy and Arden froze, their conversations interrupted by two words they seldom heard from their sister. They sat upright slowly, hair eschew, foreheads beading with the sweltering evening humidity.

“Did she just…,” Arden muttered, careful to turn his head so Ruby couldn’t read his lips. Duffy confirmed with a raised eyebrow and slow, pensive nod.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ruby pouted.

She pushed away from the locker and walked awkwardly towards her siblings. Even after six hours dictating the lives of the Restless Fugitive theatre troupe, she remained fresh as she had looked at dawn.

“You know…,” Duffy stumbled to his feet.

“It’s been a good few years since you apologised…” Arden continued. The mop of red hair flowed wildly in his wake as he too righted himself.

“But this time, hand on heart, I mean it.” Ruby frowned. “I’m trying to overcome the reality of the situation…overcome badly.”

“Wait. What?”

Duffy, ever one step behind his female counterpart, scrunched his face into a grimace of confusion. He half hoped, in his current state of exhaustion that the ground would swallow him up.

“I think she’s trying to tell you things are weird, Duffy…”

The bard turned to his brother, still flabbergasted, then back to Ruby. It dawned on him only then that his own happy go lucky approach to being dead was not shared with his nearest and dearest. His grimace turned to a frown. His frown turned to a saddened glimmer. The skies went a shade darker.

“Not weird, no.” Ruby took a step closer. Her perfect façade cracked, just a little, and let a little discomfort show through the flame and brimstone of her authority. “Just…sad.”

Duffy threw caution to the wind and fell into Ruby’s arms. He hugged her, as tight as he possibly could. He nestled his head in the crick of her neck, smelt her sweat (though he’d never comment), and rubbed her back like old friends reunited.

The stage, now in twilight, took on a sombre atmosphere. The volcanic backdrop of the act’s finale glowed red for a moment or two as the sun tucked itself behind the rooftops of the city, and then all was dusk and shadow. Jasmine and freshly sawn wood was soon replaced by the familiar smell of spring chill and emptied latrines. Branna, though alive at night, was a half-finished love affair.

“Let’s go inside,” Arden suggested.

“Why?” Ruby blinked.

Duffy and Arden had to think. Why indeed? Arden half wanted them to find solace in privacy. He clocked the lingering audience, keen to see a preview of the show before the opening night, and remembered they were far from alone. Duffy, never quite sure of himself, just wanted things to carry on as normal. At least, as normal as they ever got.

“So you can run away again? Put me to one side? No.” She stomped her heel on the planks of the stage. “Not this time. You bloody well tell me you’re sorry!”

Silence. The last of the audience soon dissipated. Duffy shuffled nervously from foot to foot and Arden ran a hand through his straw-like hair. An impasse. An awkward moment like the thousand that preceded it.

“You want me to apologise for dying?” The bard let out a nervous, ominous laugh.

Ruby’s eyes widened. They threated to burn, a glare Duffy knew all too well. He instinctively covered his groin.

“No. You can fucking stay dead for all I care. What you can apologise for, Duffy Bracken, is not telling me what you were planning all a-fucking-long!”

Truth split the stage in two. Arden, stuck in the middle, stepped back a few paces. Realising they were going to fight here, he remained on hand to stop things going too far. He looked up at the ochre sky, dying in its own glory, and wandered when they would ever be as they were. Never.

He waited. Tension mounted. He rolled a tongue over his snakebite piercings, as ever he did when he was trying to make sense of the world. To acquiesce to its myriad demands. He had planned for months, his death, and how to subvert Oblivion’s final triumph over the shards – the five people he had created in his own image.

“I was going to die. I had no choice. Oblivion’s curse, his final gambit, stole away all hope.”

Sincerity, seldom Duffy’s tone, filled the stage. It was a grander presence than any leading man on any stage through time’s long march. Ruby, for a brief moment, baulked in her rage. Her fingers uncurled. Her eyes danced with mortal light, and not the flame of hell’s wrath.

“Even if you had no choice, even if Fate’s sway was true…you had every duty to tell us. To prepare us. To let us go.”

Duffy had. At least, in his own small way, the bard had prepared his siblings for his passing. Time after time, beneath White Tree’s branch and sombre funeral regalia, he had slipped from the world and come back. Each time was supposed to soften the blow. A dying man’s last request.

“Sacrifice.”

A long time ago, the leader of the Ixian Knights had tried to educate Duffy on the morals of leadership and loss. Sei Orlouge’s only good word, so the bard had thought, was sacrifice. He had no idea what it meant, then. Now, he knew all too well.

“Before you fly off the handle, I know we have all sacrificed so much.” Duffy pleaded with words, eyes, and hands pressing air.

Ruby found it hard to disbelieve her brother. After all said and done, since the last Lucian’s Call before Wainwright’s return – before the start of the war with Oblivion, she had never believed him quite so much.

“How do I know you’re not just saying that?” Doubt. Ever a wicked woman’s weapon.

The bard nodded. He deserved that. He deserved everything. As far as he was concerned, however, he had paid the ultimate price. Ruby would wake up tomorrow, on Althanas proper, and know love and hate and all the wonders of the senses. Duffy, alas, would know only duty…a dull echo of a life he had given up to allow others to live theirs to the full.

“Look at me.”

Ruby looked.

“I’m dead. I am, categorically, despite our immortality, dead.”

“He really is,” Arden added, weighing in rarely where lesser mortals feared to go.

Ruby darted a glance at the swordsman, but forgave him for showing interest. She snarled.

“I am all too aware.” She pointed over the bard’s shoulder.

Duffy turned to examine the eastern horizon. Branna, a city on a mountain top, overlooked the illusory plains of the Aria. A corner of the Tap carved out by Forgotten One’s borrowed progeny.

“What am I looking at?” he enquired, missing the point.

“This…this haven of bards. Only you could erect a tomb so self-indulgent.”

“In his defence Ruby…”

The spell singer raised her palm and silence the swordsman’s protestations. She honked up her dress and walked, tantalisingly slowly towards Duffy. Her eyes did not deviate once from his pudgy face.

“An entire city. An. Entire. City.”

“My dream was always to gift the love of the stage to the people of Scara Brae.”

Duffy trailed off. He looked around the remnants of their epic rehearsal. Whilst Ruby and he always failed to see eye to eye over the small details…here, the trio stood amidst a grand vision. The Restless Fugitive, the successor to the long dead Tantalum Troupe would deliver a tour de force to the noble class of Scara Brae in three weeks’ time.

“We did that together,” she pleaded. “Pettigrew and Liasa have created something far beyond the majesty of our days. They are us, reborn, and without the weight of experience we have had to suffer so long!”

A tear. Singular emotion. Duffy saw it before Ruby realised she had let the façade slip. They both, in unison, began to cry. Joyous tears, of realisation more than terror and fear rolled down their plush red cheeks. They salty kissed cheeks and invited Arden to join them.

“Really?” he said, rolling his eyes.

“Look at us!” Duffy suggested.

They stood in a triangle, the swordsman, the sister, and the wayward son. The area in front of the stage was now empty, and the city’s light dead, buried, and reborn in eerie twilight.

They had fought together for the right to bare their names. They had fought together for the right to see the sun rise and the sun set. They had fought, in a darker time, for freedoms amongst the fair citizens of Radasanth, Akashima, Scara Brae, and long ago Raiaera.

“Heroes.”

Duffy and Ruby turned to Arden with half-formed surprise. They forgot, for just a brief moment, their fiery exchange.

“We’re heroes. Wherever or not we accept our fate, Sei was right all along.” Arden produced a scrap of paper from a pocket in his slacks. “Look.”

They converged, a trio of vagabonds and vitriol reformed as a trinity of forgiveness. Short lived, it served to illuminate each of the trio about their misgivings. Ruby saw the writing first, and immediately let loose the tears of wear. One single tear turned into a torrent.

“Oh he’s a sly one…,” Duffy mumbled, just before he too found himself crying.

On the stage where they hoped to rekindle the lost art of thespianism, the former Tantalum trio remembered back, long ago, to when they had first been introduced to the silent mystic ahead of an evangelical empire. Sei Orlouge. A hero self-professed, but in true, a hero as true and righteous as ever history’s multitude had produced.

“What am I missing?” Arden asked.

Ruby and Duffy chuckled nervously. They reflected back to the Cell, where Duffy had first crossed paths with Sei. He had sacrificed his position in the tournament for Duffy’s sake.

At the end of the tournament the mystic had sent a message to the plucky thief. It said, in simple spidery script, ‘One foot before the other’. At the time Duffy had disregarded it as pious bullshit. Having listened to the Hero of Radasanth’s diatribe for much of their fiery engagement in the tournament arena had had cast it aside. Now, after all said and done between them, it made perfect sense.

“Do you think he knew?” Duffy raised an eyebrow.

“About this? No.” Ruby sounded too certain for either sibling to question her. “I think he just meant…you know, you’ll find your feet someday.”

Ruby had been there, that day, cheering on her brother in the stands. She saw a message deliver to Duffy in the dugout but had never guessed what it said or who the sender was. Like a bolt from the blue, yesterday felt fresh in her mind.

“I want you to be happy, Ruby.”

“Oh, there’s no danger of that.”

Duffy rolled his eyes. “I mean it. What I did is inexcusable. I should have warned you. But, you have everything in place to get on with your life as best you can. Better, perhaps, with all the people ready to lift you higher.”

She stayed silent, perhaps for too long, and the silence undid Duffy’s renewed confidence.

“Duffy. The only person on this earth that can elevate me anymore…is you.”

Arden smiled. Duffy and Ruby walked closer to one another and, without ceremony, hugged.

Part Three - The End

The carriage rattled away from the City of Bards in silence. Atop the oak structure sat a withered man servant, eternally regretting the day he accepted a job offer from one Leopold Winchester. In the comfort of the carriage sat Ruby Winchester, dressed to kill and legs crossed to support a leather bound tome on the dramaturgical history of Scara Brae.

Two days before her departure, she handed over governance of the Restless Fugitive’s newest play to a young and all too eager Pettigrew Jones. Ruby, Duffy, and Arden had gone through the script penned by the youth with a fine tooth comb. Their errors, hopefully taken on board, would deliver the play and its cast to opening night in three night’s time.

Ruby Winchester’s work in Branna, as far as she was concerned, was done.

All the same she missed it already. As she watched the privet white fenced houses pass her by, a sense of belonging pulled at the threads of her dress. Despite Duffy’s protestations something grand awaited her in the next chapter of her life, she had lived in the stage’s limelight too long to disregard it quite so easily.

“We were born to the stage,” she said, repeating an earlier conversation that had torn her heart atwain. “We die to it…”

She continued with her book. When she returned to Scara Brae she hoped to pave the way for debut performances of Lucian’s Call and, at Queen Valeena’s behest – I Want to Be Your Canary.

Debut was not the right word. Now she thought about it, life was simply repeating itself. Cycling through the trivialities of her existence, the red-headed spell singer thought it ironic that now she was ‘the Great Bard’. Nobody else in Scara Brae knew the trappings of dramaturgy quite as well as she.

“It would be so easy,” she began, “to claim the light for my own.”

She could dominate plays for years, perhaps centuries, and there would be nobody to stand in her way. Arden had pledged his sword to the peace between the continents, preferring war to peace. Lillith, fresh returned from the war with the Greater Oni vowed to rest. It was the first time in a decade the spirit warder was able to consider such a possibility – a respite, something achievable.

“But no.” She turned the page. “The mantle is passed.”

She pictured Pettigrew and Liasa in her head. His mucky face. Her crow like, but resplendent youth a tour de force of charisma that surpassed even the Tantalum’s hay day. She smirked. Few things in life could claim to make the Crimson Mistress jealous. Ironic, she thought to herself, that the prime suspect on that list would be her understudy.

“We part ways.”

The words burnt. She had been trying not to say them for the better part of a year. Since Duffy’s death, Ruby had tried to cling on to the memories of the past. Now, descending the spiral highway back to reality…she cried freely.

The igam ogam spires of Branna’s residential districts reminded the spell singer of home. Ivy and brambles covered fronts and lawns, nature oblivious in its blossom weaving merriment to the needs of man. Children ran up and down the streets, frolicking in the last few precious minutes of daylight. Parents clucked on doorsteps, daring their offspring to break their curfews one more time.

A bump in the road jolted Ruby from her daydream. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the hem of her sleeve and peered at the carriage window to see if she had smudged her make-up. Satisfied, she sat upright, and weighed her emotions.

“Goodbye.”

The word sounded hollow. She did not believe she had said it. She swallowed the lump in her throat, a lump dry and remorseful and bitter.

“Goodbye, brother.”

The tears began to flow again. Rocking back and forth, the read headed matriarch let her emotions flow. She could not cling to hatred anymore. She could not hope to hear Duffy explain this death away. There was no going back. There was no plan to revive, revitalise, and rejuvenate. As she trailed down the cliff face through the suburbs of Duffy’s opus, she let go.

“Wilfred!” she roared. She banged on the roof with her fist.

The carriage stopped on the last band. Ahead, the road petered out onto a bridge to nowhere – a portal that would send the carriage hurtling out of the Tap and into the darkened streets of Radasanth.

Ruby emerged from the wagon like a grieving widow. Her makeup, a long forgotten promise to long resplendent was smudged and her eyeliner was halfway down her cheek. Her heels clicked as she stumbled forwards, as though running towards Branna would someone forgive her for all her sins.

Looking at it in a new light, the red headed matriarch at least realised why both Duffy had to die, truly, and she had to learn to let go the hard way. It was a beautiful sight. A tall, crooked spire dedicated to all the beautiful, creative, and forgotten people of the world. It looked like Scara Brae, furrowed tiles and white privet fences with idyllic sheen and brief hints of industry. It felt like Raiaera. A soulful awakening to music.

“I’ll miss you…,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, weaker than it had been for months – that told her, and all who would cross her paths in the years to come that Duffy Bracken’s life had changed her.

Time would tell if that change was for the better. She watched the sun set over the Aerie, the flurry of tower’s at Branna’s peak where the stages basked in sunlight until darkness fell and she began to feel the chill. She would not return. Even when begged, she said goodbye in the last echelons of daylight and with every ounce of her being she meant it.

“Goodbye.”

She turned. She climbed into the carriage. She banged on the roof, and was gone.

Thread: One Foot Before the Other
Participants: Duffy & Ruby
Type: No Judgment

Congratulations!

Duffy receives:
2,150 EXP
140 GP

Ruby receives:
1,020 EXP
90 GP

All EXP and GP have been added!