![]() ![]() Sometimes it worked and he was driven back, reduced to a fist-sized mass of flesh with a face on it, creeping into a crack in the wall, but it was fair.ĭrowne adapted. He’d worked out the rules to how these things worked, making it a game, always providing a chance to figure out his history, unravel what he was, and stop him. He’d haunted the descendants of that original family, acting the very first moment they showed signs of inheriting their parent’s ugliness, and he’d protected his love, and his love’s descendants. Anger and passion had boiled up, at times, sufficient for Drowne to flood a building, not with water, but with roiling flesh and repeated elements of his face, crawling up from basement, through the house’s walls, to attack the house’s resident. A parasitic, slimelike mass of face that attached itself to others, or polluted a place, the knots and lines in wood grain twisting until it resembled his stretched-out face. The face had lived.ĭrowne had lived a long time as just the face. That time, the damage had been so bad that infection and necrosis had led to his face sloughing off. She hadn’t cared, she’d helped tend his wounds, and so they’d repeated the process. A group of men and boys who’d hoped to win her heart attacked him and disfigured him, particularly his face. He’d won her heart, and he’d made a lot of enemies in the process. She looked, Reid thought, like she was glad to not be reading.ĭrowne had been a man once, an ugly fisherman who’d found a pretty young woman he liked. Drowne sat down on the same couch as Nova, and she curled her legs closer to her body in what could have been read as aversion, but was deferential politeness at best, giving the Visage Drowne the space to sit down. She existed in part as decoration and it was to Reid’s father’s tastes that a fashionably dressed, beautiful woman could be seen in his vicinity, keeping his general company, reading proper literature. It seemed to him that it was more important that she have something she appeared to be doing, and have something to occupy her eyes. Reid was fairly sure she didn’t know how to read very well, and she might not have the capacity to learn, exactly. When she was called on to assist with something or when they mobilized, she would put the book down, and when she picked it up again she’d start from the beginning. ![]() She sat on the couch, reading, but Reid had noticed that she would turn pages, but she never really made progress through the book. The young man had taken her as a familiar, to bring her even further into the world of humans, and Reid’s father had taken her away less than a day later. A guy who’d seemed to find vicarious enjoyment in exposing her to, well, everything. All led by a young practitioner who’d found her alone in a disused temple for a god that was no more. She’d gone dancing, she was studying, trying on wildly different fashions. They’d found her in the midst of her journey to learn pop culture, music, computers, movies, plays. When it was spent she would go still and never move again. A lake’s worth of water that didn’t refill when it was drank from, used to grow trees, used to put out fires. They had a lot of divine power, but it was a finite source that didn’t tend to replenish without the direct attention of the god that made them. Icons served as decoration, representatives, errand-runners, and sometimes guardians. It was possible her skin was ivory, as a matter of fact. A god had put some of its essence into a statue to breathe power and existence into her. Her skin was like ivory, her hair raven black, her top a silver silk halter that very intentionally draped down in folds to reveal her décolletage. Nova Aquila was one of his father’s Others, an Icon. Couches and chairs were arranged throughout, and other Others were seated and doing their own thing. The entire setup was such that there could be a fire in the wood stove down here and a party in the kitchen and things wouldn’t be cramped. Reid knew he’d have to keep his voice down.ĭown here, he had one bedroom, Wye another. Abbas, one of his father’s Others, a Stormchild, was standing by the railing upstairs that overlooked the main area, eyes and hair faintly glowing. A lot of light, and the murmur of conversation. He was hard at work there, both setting up a link to one of his demesnes, and also maintaining a video call with Raymond about managing the school, which involved some virtual images manifesting up there. That one was taken by Reid’s father, the others by his Others, who were currently either up there or elsewhere in the house. Three bedrooms were upstairs, two on each side, with a hallway leading to a living room at the back, and a main bedroom and bathroom at the very back. The cabin was expansive enough for five families to stay in, the lacquered wood a warm orange in the light. ![]()
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