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lesmodsalouette) wrote2025-03-16 03:54 am
lesmodsalouette) wrote2025-03-16 03:54 am
Graveyard
Graveyard
The garden is still sprawling and green – despite having entirely lost all its riotous flowers and colors, along with any sign of wildlife or birdsong – though one thing stands out more than anything else: from Monday to Thursday, you can’t see the castle anymore. All that remains where it once stood (or perhaps, usually stands) is an incongruously large tree that towers over everything else and somehow looks larger and more imposing than the castle ever did. The tree’s branches are bare, without any hint of life nor leaf – however, on the weekends (that is to say, Friday through Sunday) a faint projection of the castle appears around it, cradling the only things that the denizens of this alternate garden can see in detail from the other side: the flurry of activity around the investigation, the circus-like dimension that holds the trial, and the mirrors and the grassy dimension that display the execution.
For those curious what the land of the living are up to, a mirage-like and upside-down reflection of the castle garden in its original arrangement can be spotted occasionally overlaying the sky. This strange illusion may sometimes show those in the garden on the other side, flitting in and out of view like stray clouds; but much like the weather, their appearance is mercurial – they cannot be reached and cannot be heard.
Water, Flower, Everywhere
The fountains remain active somehow, though their features seem to have eroded, obscuring the identities of the deities and the wings of the birds, cracking pottery down into nothing but worn shards and handles. At night, only maybe half the lights work (and here they are real candlelight, rather than magical), plunging most of the garden into crepuscular darkness. The trellis walkway looks quite overgrown (mysteriously, bamboo is taking over), entirely covering some statues and other features along its length, and it’s no longer walkable – a miniature canal runs the whole length underneath the arches, feeding into other new waterways around the garden that cut off footpaths seemingly at random. There are small footbridges here and there, but the lack of logic to the whole arrangement makes falling into one of the streams or canals a real hazard.
The waterways do all manage to converge at the pond by the pavilion – neither of which are all that soothing or classical anymore. The pond is only half-full, and entirely lacks water lilies or any dragonflies; its banks sit jagged above the dark waters, and perhaps that’s why the pavilion, too, is half collapsed down into it all. Gone are the curtains and ivies; only dead curling vines and half-collapsed columns are left, but there’s still someplace to sit if you put your mind to it.
Most of the flowerbeds sit fallow or overtaken by weeds – there’s signs here and there that someone might have tried to clear them out, but the bulk of the effort seems to have gone to the orchard by the gardener’s cottage. It might be more accurate to say cottages, given that there are a few of them dotted around that area for some reason. None of them are locked, but all of them have only minimal furnishings apart from the original; they’re also all provided with the full complement of gardener’s tools. Next to them, there are new saplings and half-grown flowering trees: some pear and apple, but also some not. There are new shoots in the kitchen orchard that have just barely taken root, the dirt recently turned.
The waterways do all manage to converge at the pond by the pavilion – neither of which are all that soothing or classical anymore. The pond is only half-full, and entirely lacks water lilies or any dragonflies; its banks sit jagged above the dark waters, and perhaps that’s why the pavilion, too, is half collapsed down into it all. Gone are the curtains and ivies; only dead curling vines and half-collapsed columns are left, but there’s still someplace to sit if you put your mind to it.
Most of the flowerbeds sit fallow or overtaken by weeds – there’s signs here and there that someone might have tried to clear them out, but the bulk of the effort seems to have gone to the orchard by the gardener’s cottage. It might be more accurate to say cottages, given that there are a few of them dotted around that area for some reason. None of them are locked, but all of them have only minimal furnishings apart from the original; they’re also all provided with the full complement of gardener’s tools. Next to them, there are new saplings and half-grown flowering trees: some pear and apple, but also some not. There are new shoots in the kitchen orchard that have just barely taken root, the dirt recently turned.
Hedge Maze(?)
The other most eye-catching feature is what once was an ornamental hedge maze: instead of being a tame height here, it has seemingly grown wild and completely unchecked, towering above the rest of the garden almost like its own overgrown mountain. The hedge walls go up and up and up, making it entirely impossible to see the center or even how far it goes despite the fact that sections of the hedges have also died, reduced to the branches underneath, bristling with interlocked thorns.
Part of it had even spilled over into the garden itself, huge gnarled branches spreading out like burnt-blackened fingers all the way to the edge of the pond – wherever the branches touch, even the greenery is withered, and any statues look more ruined than those in the rest of the area. As of the end of Week 3, however, the branches have retracted entirely and the way into the hedge maze has opened even more. However, there is now a storm brewing over what might be the center or the general area of it. Getting close to the hedge maze or any of the hedge(?) branches is... unpleasant, though it doesn’t usually go beyond a buzz of wrongness and a slight headache.
Part of it had even spilled over into the garden itself, huge gnarled branches spreading out like burnt-blackened fingers all the way to the edge of the pond – wherever the branches touch, even the greenery is withered, and any statues look more ruined than those in the rest of the area. As of the end of Week 3, however, the branches have retracted entirely and the way into the hedge maze has opened even more. However, there is now a storm brewing over what might be the center or the general area of it. Getting close to the hedge maze or any of the hedge(?) branches is... unpleasant, though it doesn’t usually go beyond a buzz of wrongness and a slight headache.
normal day in the graveyard (cw suicidal and general death ideation and implied spousal abuse/sa)
She's done what she could as the being she's become, she thinks, and then they are lured to the tree. And she... was supposed to look for the living, wasn't she, even as a stuffed capybara, but she was looking out for them here, not thinking that the twenty-four hours of trust and cooperation she afforded other human beings would ricochet back the way misplaced trust always does.
Is that how Sariel felt, too? Or was he too hurt and sad and gentle to ever feel anything beyond that, even, was he too trusting the way she thought she had learned never to be?
She feels like she is suffocating. The miasma and the headaches from the befouled hedge maze are gone, but she might as well be locked in a cold stone cell with no view of the sky or the stars. Andrew might as well be eight years old in the Room of Atonement. Maybe she'll go back to her house and get locked there forever, now. And it would really be forever - ]
Ah…? Ah-
[She hears that G'raha's dead before she sees it, but when she sees it, it really sinks in. Her chest feels like its drowning in its own blood again; the Blue Star is back, if only in how she feels. Immortality is a tricky thing to hand someone who had already buckled herself in for her own death. It's tricky to conceptualized for someone who's only had a few months outside of an empty shell or who's become a different person in those short weeks.]
Then what did I… do any of it for? [Her death. Her planned death. The poison. Bleeding Bella out on the floor of her stolen office. Her arrangement with Ish. Her arrangement with G'raha to take Herta's family where her father couldn't chase them down even if Andrew didn't die on her wedding day. Agreeing before she knew she was cursing herself to this kind of existence. Saying she would help the people who were still alive. Realizing that maybe, just maybe, this once, she understood what it meant to have a parent?
What did any of it matter?
... And she's going to get left alone again, isn't she? G'raha will come back, and he'll come back to someone else who has been ensnared in this unholy salvation. And everyone has something that's worth living forever for, but her happiness will melt away in decades, and who will care about a people that were already almost wiped away and reduced to nothing when forever is in the balance? And forever, for her now, when time might pass so differently between worlds, could mean being trampled on for eternity, chained to the violent men of a royal family and a dying bloodline who will use her and use her and trample upon a thing that cannot break.
And Siffrin is laughing.]
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You did it to give them a chance. His chance is still there. [ he's seen g'raha with the cappy, though maybe she means sariel. ] And who's to say he can't still bargain for something else?
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Her failure hurts, but the possibility of eternal loneliness is like a chasm swallowing her, vacuous and devoid of air. She feels it threatening to open up and swallow her whole. Too short a life. Too much of one. She knows now what it's like to be on both sides.]
How can I face him...? [She wonders.] How can I face her? He shouldn't have to bargain for anything.
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He didn’t have a choice when it came to dying.
[ says the hypocrite, calmly. ]
Don’t take away his choice to see you when he comes. Respect him enough to face him.
[ two other things yoru viciously denied people on wednesday. ]
Don’t be like me. Foolishness is my crown now, you know?
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She's still shaking, thumb pressed to the hilt of the knife across her lap.]
That's right. You pulled that stunt.
[But to face G'raha if he chooses to come and find her... she does have to be able to do that. (Then the rest of the trial happens, and she needs to do more than a few laps to make that possibility a reality.)]
It may be the last thing that makes me afraid.
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[ he’s not really surprised, and they’re not close enough for him to feel hurt by her words. it’s true after all; his feelings were burning him out from the inside, his wick especially susceptible to soak in love it seems, and in turn he burned his own bridges. ]
I was afraid of feeling the way I do. It’s so much, and so heavy. At the end, I can’t help but be me.
[ he can’t be good, though he wants to - sometimes. but he’s learned a little that being yoru doesn’t mean being just jin’s escape. ]
… But it’s not the end. I’ll have to face them, too.
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He's back to watching, though in a way different than he had been before.]
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Andrew holds the cup in shaking hands and doesn't drink from it. It might eventually slip from them over the course of the trial, but at least she doesn't ever end up throwing it at something or someone.]
... How do you handle it?
[He's a sword. He's always been like this.]
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Yamanbagiri glances at her, thoughtfully.]
Which part...?
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Living.
[She means, specifically, "not as a mortal," but the question in general is also something that she's been forced to ponder. What life looks like outside of the narrow bars that caged her in... She's not sure she ever fully left the Room of Atonement after she was born in it. Now she needs to know what that's supposed to mean.]