graceful tyrants

Chapter One Judgement

Above a street where the people churned and the air was slick with ichor, Caja awoke with brandied breath in a room awash in tired radiance. 

The sores on her back were split. Her chest was creaking when she poured medicinal sticky black past her lips, down her throat and into her aching chest. Her coughs hurt more each day. The doppelganger, with its crimson-brushed eyes and mournful matte-white skin, continued to replace and fester in every reflection.

Her room was littered with tattered books, stories and academic texts both stacked around unwashed clothes and wilted wallpaper. Caja’s makeup mirror, scratched, dusty and proud, hid a box of faux fine jewelry behind it, kept in memoriam of the lady Caja had once hoped to be. It made her nauseous.

“Caja? Caja, are you up?”

Lamplight found purchase beneath the door. Caja considered something awful. The thought of throwing that wretched door open and embracing her love, the warmth she craved on the other side of that door, made her recoil from it like it was death itself.

“I stayed up.” Caja whispered. “You were out ‘til late.”

“I made food.” Isyla’s voice was ever-sweet. Caja heard the plate touch the floor. “You don’t have to eat it all.”

Ccaja’s jaw creaked like a rusted hinge. “Eat it yourself.”

“None of that talk. We’re getting through this.” Isyla gently thumped her fist against the door. “I’ve got a plan. I’m going to get you into one of those fancy sanitariums up north.”

“I’m not crazy, Isyla.”

That drew an irritated snort out of Isyla. “We both know that’s not true. Listen, just trust me. They’re sayin’ folks get better there. Trust me.”

Caja stood, and coughed, and retched, and coughed again, wading across the mess of her room so she could press her hand against the door. The closeness made Caja’s heart and throat gentle. “I don’t want you to save me.”

She felt Isyla’s weight set against the door when Isyla sniffed. “No. Not giving up on you.”

“Isyla…” Caja pleaded, as she slipped down the door, until she was sitting with her arms around her knees, temple pressed against the pine. “Isyla, I barely remember what you look like.”

Silence followed. Isyla’s lamplight slipped under the door and danced about Caja’s feet. She smelt the must mixing with her stink, and the stink mixing with Isyla’s sweet strawberry perfume. 

“You’ve made it through one year,” Isyla assured. “One more year. You jus’ have to make it through one more year.”

“I’ve counted, Isyla. My symptoms are worsening too quickly. I…”

“Shut up.” Isyla muttered. “You’re always thinkin’ of the maths an’ the odds, an’, an’... You’re my Caja. Givin’ up wasn’t never an option for you before, so don’t even dare think about it now.”

Tears were weeping hot down Caja’s cheeks. She took a long, calming breath and placed her brow on the pinewood door. She heard Isyla’s grunting exhale and the sound of a place touching the floorboards.

“Do you have work today?” Caja asked.

“I do,” Isyla sniffed. “ I’m sorry for getting mad. I made meat and potatoes. I know it’s nothin’ fancy, but…”

“Meat and potatoes are great.”

“I have a plan,” Isyla assured. “A proper plan. It’s already done. It won’t be long before we never have to worry . I love you.”

Caja didn’t know what that meant nor cared.

“I love you too.”

Once Isyla left, Caja opened the door and took the meal to bed, from which she could watch the day pass. It was the next best thing to being a part of it. Seeing the sun roll over the sky. Reading books she had read a thousand times already. Watching the shadows of great chimneys and the black they pumped into the heavens, pondering what was happening out there.

Her mind wandered to her parents. Where they were. If they were alive. Like them, the world didn’t seem to want Caja around. They would just have to be satisfied by the fact that Caja was not the sort to give up on a dream, even when that dream has shrivelled to be so small as seeing the woman she loved again.

Until that day, she would await the sound of the apartment door opening.

It opened violently.

A crash against the walls; Boots thundering against the floorboards.

“Two occupants. One is out. The other has consumption. Bring her to me!”

The door to her room swung open and a man stepped in. His face was regaled by the finely engraved mask of ivory that marked him as a Perfect. Caja recoiled and he dwarfed her, made more prescient by the harsh white of his Military Police uniform.

He seized Caja by the arm, and began dragging. Her feet slipped and stamped against the floorboards, her body vain in its efforts to fight back as she was brought to face another Perfect waiting in the hall.

A woman with the same coat and a gorgeous mask of uncarved silver.

“Good afternoon, Caja. My name is Perfect Gaesch. Have a seat.”

She was dragged onto the unfamiliar couch of an unfamiliar lounging room. All the lamps had different shades, and the curtains were different, too. All the books on the shelves had been reorganised, being sifted through by a mortal man with a finely groomed beard and a cane to hold up a trembling leg. 

“Don’t do that,” Caja pleaded. “This is our home.”

“That is Detective Hegeldra. Our chief of investigations. My other colleague is Perfect Schrieker. He answers to me.” Gaesch gestured to the masked man with a silk-gloved hand. “There is no need to worry. We are simply conducting a search for your wife’s belongings.”

Her heart was hammering painfully enough to hurt. It swelled and she doubled over, wheezing and gagging whilst Perfect Gaesch grabbed Isyla’s armchair and dragged it screeching across the floor so she might sit opposite Caja. 

Caja's response was a rasping squeak, “We aren’t married.”

“But you and Isyla Alderk are romantically involved, yes?” Gaesch asked. “You have had consumption for a year, according to your doctor.”

“You spoke to my doctor?” Caja croaked. “I have been ill for a year. Why are you here?”

“A simple investigation,” Gaesch assured. “Nothing, I hope. If I understand it, the two of you met whilst you attended…” She produced a small notepad from her breast pocket and flipped through it. “South Drovgna university. You attended it, she stole from it. I must say, Caja, your success is quite impressive for a mortal. Bordeinian by birth. Isyla from… the Northern Isle colony.”

It made Caja anxious to be near Gaesch. The thought of her silver mask coming off made Caja shudder.

“Please,” Caja begged. “What is this about?”

“Quite the future ahead of you…” Gaesch remarked. “You planned on being a scholar. It’s reliable income. Valuable to someone like you. Your sickness really did spoil matters, didn’t it? But your… amore? She is somewhat of a lowlife, correct?”

Somewhere else, there the sound of a pile of paper crashing resounded through the apartment. 

“She is a good woman,” Caja insisted. “Whatever you think she did, she is innocent!”

“You know, you could fool me,” Gaesch reclined in Isyla’s seat. “The right outfit, the right training, you could infiltrate a gala. All these books, that might even have been your dream. Especially with those lovely, dainty features. But Isyla? She couldn’t con her way into being a maid.”

Caja’s anger rose, “Don’t talk to her like that! Isyla is a good person!”

“If she is not a criminal as her record indicates, what, then, does she do for work?”

Schrieker took a book from the shelf, and flipped through its pages. Every time he touched them, every time Caja heard the detective’s boots, and every time Gaesch opened her mouth made Caja’s blood boil hotter. Everything in her wanted to look Gaesch in the eyes and tell her what a horrid creature she was, but Caja knew she should never look a Perfect in the eyes.

Caja bit her outraged tongue. “She works at a cotton mill. A cotton mill.”

“A cotton mill?” Gaesch repeated, before she stopped, interrupted by Detective Hegeldra’s cane-tap shuffling. He handed her a handful of papers. She flicked through them, “More like a paper mill. And it comes already printed! Or stolen.”

“What is that?” Caja asked. “I…”

“The worst part is that she was flawless,” Gaesch lamented. “An excellent theft. Inspired.”

Hegeldra remarked, “I think we have her muse.”

“Quite.”

Caja looked at Gaesch and this time, met her eyes. Eyes where the colours and shapes were always twisting and bending, always becoming something new and something subtly impossible. They made Caja’s head hurt.

It all fell into place. She looked back to those pieces of paper, scrawled with ink, and knew that those papers were Isyla’s plan. 

“It’s my fault. She did it for me. Don’t hurt her.”

“I don’t want to hurt her!” Gaesch confessed. “No, no, I want to employ her. That level of craft would be invaluable in my field.” She got to her feet and brushed off her coat. “Unfortunately, this was not my decision to make.”

The name had an august familiarity to it. Verdance was someone important. Caja tried to stand, only to be shoved back down. Her lips curled back a growl beginning in the rotten cradle of her chest, and then there were footsteps outside, and the rage became terror.

Caja tried to scream Isyla’s name. Gaesch slapped her hand over Caja’s mouth.

The door to the apartment creaked open, and Isyla strolled inside. She looked up with a smile that was sharply abandoned.

“Oh. Shit.”

Schrieker grabbed her, and tossed her on the couch beside Caja. As soon as she landed, Isyla was bouncing right back up, only to be suckered in the mouth by Schrieker’s fist. She hit the couch again, and Caja tried to beg but instead began retching and coughing.

Detective Hegeldra gave them a strange look as he left the room. It almost looked like remorse.

Isyla tried to speak, but her words came out slurred. Her jaw wasn’t sitting right. Caja turned to Gaesch, who had walked over to the window to watch the sunset bleach their apartment red.

“Please,” Caja begged. “Show some humanity.”

Gaesch’s hands tightened around each other. She allowed a long exhale, striding to the window to face the setting sun. “One day, our Perfection will fade. But until then, that sort of flaw is absent. Schrieker?”

Schrieker’s hand went up to his mask, and Isyla leapt up again, swinging for him. 

Caja could not understand what she saw when the mask came free. Her head felt white-hot, the world ringing with pain that started behind her eyes. The myths did it no justice. The symmetries and colours of his beauty defied her perceptions, and the world itself seemed to cower and quake in its presence.

The floor warped. The colours of the room began to spill together, wax and wane. The dust was falling slowly. The world outside was moving too fast. Caja turned to Isyla, and found a grotesque of shale in her beloved’s place. 

“Isyla!” Caja cried, and lunged for Schrieker.

His beauty filled her entire being. Her ability to think and feel came apart first, her mind unravelling for the brief moment she was glimpsing. When all reality was poured out of her head and she became one with their Perfection. And she was slow. So terribly slow.

Schrieker met her eyes, whispered an apology, and Caja was hurled somewhere beyond.

She was a droplet of water cast into a sea of ink. She became a soul without union, mind without host, and body without substance; Consumed by a mad and empty realm that knew not rhyme nor reason.

Even there, she was screaming.