and it's there I read on a hillside gravestone

[lessthanelementary]

Who| Neffa and Katurian
What| Neffa's luck runs out.
Where| Adventureland???
When| Early week 4
Warnings/Notes| Description of injury/death

The sponsors had given up on him. Neffa could hardly blame them. He'd played them most cruelly - given them cold, charming smiles and cheerful, violent promises, offered them infinite expectations and made good on exactly none of them. He'd run from every confrontation, begged for every scrap of help he'd bought, spent his time crouching in corners and muttering gibberish into the air, and ended up here, stretched out flat on the banks of the swamp half for concealment and half because his trembling legs wouldn't hold him in one place that long, pulling water to his mouth one shaking handful at a time and startling at every distant splash.

All in all, a terrible way to do business. He might have been the worst investment prospect in the arena, he mused - no good way to measure that, of course, but at the least he was a strong candidate. How embarrassing. He'd have asked for compensation for wasted time, were he them.

The water tasted foul, and it sat in his stomach about as well as the remains of the rat he'd cooked in the early hours of the morning. He wasn't sure if that was what had him feeling so feverish, or the cut on the back of his head that still throbbed and stung, or perhaps the chilly, sleepless nights - life had felt like a gift, when first he'd snatched it back from the mouth of the Cornucopia, but he saw now that what he'd begged off the gods was less life than slower, more miserable death. Stupid.

If nothing else, the water made walking seem a less daunting prospect. He staggered to his feet, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and turned to follow the edge of the swamp, moving slowly in the direction of the great pyramid looming in the near distance and thinking little of keeping under cover. Let anyone find him - he had nothing, and the only way to win something was to find someone willing to make him an offer. A calculated risk. Good business, yes? Gods, let someone be willing to negotiate.

Gods, my head hurts.

Comments

[lessthanelementary]

This time, he screams. He finds his tongue first when the knife twists, wrings out of him something hoarse and horrified; the sound doesn't stop when the knife leaves him but weaves its way into his breath, ragged and unceasing.

He should run. He wants very much to run. But fear is tangled up in his legs and swimming in front of his eyes, and when the knife is wrenched away he manages only a single, stumbling step back, like he wants to run but is still unsure about the idea, and by the time he has taken the time to look down and make sense of the blood coming out of him, there is no more time.

The second blow silences him. He puts up a hand, vaguely, like he means to stop the knife that way, but he's finding himself harder to locate in space, and the knife goes by without trouble, goes into his neck without trouble, and quite suddenly breathing is a great deal of trouble.

He notices, in a distant way, that he has fallen to his knees. He cannot tell if the knife is still in him or not. He thinks soon his breath will go the way of his legs, will fall out from under him, and the panic is like a second knife, right in the center of his chest.

He's no longer looking at Katurian. He's curling into himself, like he can hold the blood in that way-- he falls forward, catches himself one-handed on Katurian's leg, and he's not sure whether his grip says Please, please save me or Please, please let me die.

sorry for the delay!

[downbeat]

It takes so long for a person to die. Katurian knows this -- intellectually and through previous experience -- but it still puts a lump in his throat like a solid object. He gasps, pants, as though he were the one with the knife in his neck. This poor man, crumbling to the ground because of something he did. This poor man, dying in degrees instead of all at once. Like they all do.

The hand on his leg is cold like shivers. He takes it in his own hand reflexively and holds it tightly, comfortingly, like a parent guiding a child across the street.

"I'm sorry," he says, because he can't stop the urge anymore. He can't stay silent. He lets go of the hand to take Neffa's head, to pull it back and expose his neck. "I'm so sorry."

And then he slices one last time.

no problem at all! THANKS FOR AN EXCELLENT MURDER

[lessthanelementary]

They say in Ristopa that dying is the most private thing a person can do. To step into an empty room and lock the door, to stand on a mountaintop alone, to lie in the dark and hear nothing but one's own heartbeat, is simple loneliness; to step out of the world and find the way back closed, to remove one's heartbeat from the infinite murmur of all things living, to vacate the anchoring elemental body, is a solitude that defies human nature, and cannot be undertaken in company.

They say in Ristopa that a dead soul belongs to the Mother, whose provision is fire. They say that when the body has released it, it comes to know its true nature, and becomes a thing of heat and light. The dying, though, belong to the Faceless Lady, who stands on the borders between invisible things, and who hears only the prayers spoken in solitude; hers is the perfect loneliness of the transforming soul.

Neffa's belief in the gods has always been tenuous at best. But when the warm hand in his disappears, when the knife flashes before his eyes and vanishes from his sight, he thinks of the Lady, in that instant. All his time spent crouching in the shadows before a makeshift circle failed to summon her, but maybe this will bring her out of the woodwork, he thinks - maybe she will wait for him in the in-between and he will have an instant in which to demand an explanation. He is formulating the question in his mind (blank-eyed, staring at the sky, his breath a ragged whine) when Katurian cuts his throat.

No one comes. Breathing is cumbersome, and it hurts, and so he stops.