![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am in an odd, vaguely gothic, dying-earth sort of mood at the minute, and this is what emerged from it. My apologies.
Title: Lovely, Ill-Mannered Creatures
Rating: R
Universe: The Watchers in the Night
Characters/Pairings: The Spider, The Graveyard Man
Summary: There are creatures, the watchers in the night, who guard the edges of reality, who have chosen to do so for myriad reasons of their own. The Spider is one of them, the keeper of many of their secrets, and she is just rude and incautious enough to tell you one of them. Only a little one, a friendly one. The secret of the Graveyard Man, who is her friend, and probably will not kill her for it
Wordcount: 4468
Warnings/Notes: Um. Horror, fantasy, cosmic horror, transformation, occult, monsters, creatures, necromancers, undead, murder, origin stories, creepy people, friendship, protective agencies, justice
Claimer: Purely the results of my own insanity
Title: Lovely, Ill-Mannered Creatures
Rating: R
Universe: The Watchers in the Night
Characters/Pairings: The Spider, The Graveyard Man
Summary: There are creatures, the watchers in the night, who guard the edges of reality, who have chosen to do so for myriad reasons of their own. The Spider is one of them, the keeper of many of their secrets, and she is just rude and incautious enough to tell you one of them. Only a little one, a friendly one. The secret of the Graveyard Man, who is her friend, and probably will not kill her for it
Wordcount: 4468
Warnings/Notes: Um. Horror, fantasy, cosmic horror, transformation, occult, monsters, creatures, necromancers, undead, murder, origin stories, creepy people, friendship, protective agencies, justice
Claimer: Purely the results of my own insanity
Lovely, Ill-Mannered Creatures
There is a certain ... shall we call it a code of manners? ... amongst the watchers in the night. We do not ask questions of each other. We do not pry into origins and histories and motivations. We do not challenge one another to be truthful, barring that pressing circumstances demand it. A watcher's history is their own. The reasons to dwell along the edges of the worlds are many, oft unique, and oft painful too. It is considered gauche by a great many of us to indulge too often or too blatantly in curiosity.
Of course, curiosity is among those very reasons for dwelling, and thus a somewhat common failing amongst us. One, I must admit, that I myself am rather prey to. There is a lure of secrecy beyond the bounds of manners, and it should be to my shame that I have so often ventured in pursuit of it.
I am not often ashamed. I must tell you that now. It is a civilised conceit that I have long had considerable difficulty in embracing. You may make of that fact what you will.
So then. I am a curious thing, and ill-mannered. I am also, I flatter myself, not unknown or ill-regarded amongst our august and sometimes terrible company. In my handful of centuries, I have encountered no small few of our number at one time or another. I have worked with many, tested myself against others, and count myself friends with a small but stalwart few. And I am, at the base of things, a terribly curious thing. I have asked questions, over the years. I have been rude, and impolite, and dug through the dross of workmanlike conversation to find the gems and bones of deeper truths. I have been, in short, utterly, appallingly gauche.
And I have learned so many things. Secrets and truths. I have hoarded them across the years as a miser hoards coin. My own little treasure trove, prettier and more intriguing than all the jewels and occult libraries in all the many worlds.
Of course, I would not tell anyone. Naturally not. Such secrets are not mine to strew cavalierly across the night. There is gauche and there is gauche, and also it would not be sensible. Things have a way of coming back to people. I am a sturdy thing, well-made and long-lasting, but there are limits, and more than enough of us of a sort to find them. Fiercely determined things, the lot of us. Well, one doesn't survive the night long without it. We are, to a being, vicious, cantankerous, grudge-holding bastards of considerable age and stamina, wily to a body and well-used to squirming our way to victories against considerable odds. We are not good people to cross, even amongst ourselves. There is a reason for the code of manners. It would not be wise break it, no.
But perhaps ... perhaps I might tell you some things, regardless. Little ones. Small secrets, from friendlier beings. There are some who would not hold it against me. We chafe, some of us, against the bounds of secrecy. It niggles at us, tugs at our hearts and at our lips. Secrets want to be told, you know. They whisper for it, crawl around the skull and beg for it. It is so exhausting sometimes to keep them in. There are those, my friends, who would not begrudge it of me to spill some little ones onto a page or into an ear. Probably not. I'm sure of it.
It's all right, yes. It will be fine. Let me tell you a thing. I'm sure nobody will mind.
I should tell you of myself first. That would be polite. My own secrets first, and then those of others. That would be the way to do it. Oh, but I am not interesting! I mean, I have done things and fought things, yes, I have travelled across worlds and found horrors in the darkness, fought them and kept safe some little patches of light. It is my purpose. All of ours. I have done my share, and perhaps there is some interest in that. But I am at heart a dusty thing. There are no great tragedies to my past. I slipped between the worlds for curiosity, nothing more, and stayed for it as well. A perfectly satisfactory motivation, to my mind, sufficient for all these years, but not interesting. Not to anyone else. What do you want to know about a curious old spider creeping in the cracks? Nothing, no. Boring old thing.
Let me tell you about someone more interesting. Let me tell you ... hmm. Yes. Let me tell you about Mr Grey. Ah! Now there's an interesting creature. Very friendly, too. Placid, calm. Not the sort to hold grudges for loose lips. Not much, anyway. Yes, let's start with Mr Grey.
Mr Grey, the Graveyard Man. A very halfway thing he is. In lots of ways, really. Born out of tragedy, yes, though perhaps ... not quite his own. Its own. Ooh, that's a thing, yes. Lots of secrets there, though more from habit than necessity, I think. He never seemed to mind my prying, anyway. Found it happily amusing. Very calm, is Mr Grey. Always is. Lots of people like him for that. They think he's safe, you see. They think so mild a being as Mr Grey must not be a very dangerous thing at all.
They're wrong, obviously. There are none of us safe out here. Dangerous to a body, though some more willfully so than others. I suppose he might be 'safe' in that regard. One would have to well and truly cross him to discover otherwise. That's good enough for most, and all the better for those of us who might wish certain fools ... cleaned away. Ha-hmm. Yes.
Mr Grey is a young thing. Relatively speaking. We'll call him a 'him', by the way. It's not true at all, but for convenience's sake. So the old spider doesn't stumble over her phrasing. He doesn't mind. He told me so himself. Another small amusement. The world is very funny to Mr Grey, up until it isn't. That's a sight. Oh, yes indeed. He's a terribly impressive thing in a temper. All cold fire and efficiency. Beautiful. Deadly, naturally, but very, very beautiful.
That is not a word many apply to him, I should tell you. I am a little strange, and a little more experienced than most. To many, he's rather hideous. A halfway thing, an unnatural thing, even by watcher standards. A thing that should not be, and worrisome because of it. Tch. A lack of curiosity, that is. A lack of proper appreciation.
He's made of bones. That's not the unnatural thing. There's many of us are made of bones. They're not his bones. That's slightly less common, and slightly more distressing. Well, one doesn't like to imagine one's remains being used as a coat. Or, well, more of a carriage, really. A mode and means of transportation, the physical embodiment of a thing. That's not really so unusual either, though. There's many a thing rides around in other people's bodies out there. A whole class of us, really.
The problem with Mr Grey is, nobody knows what's doing the riding. The problem with Mr Grey is, not even he knows. Not a clue in his head. He woke up the way he is. A white, shining thing, a liquid effervescence that crawled inside some bones and made a being of them. He has no memory of what he was before, if indeed he was anything. It's worrisome, to those among us who like to know the nature of a thing. Mysteries are unhappy and frequently deadly things out here. There are those of us not inclined to like them very much.
Silly, really. But then, I am a curious thing. It's who and why I am. Without mystery, why, I'd wither up and fade away, wouldn't I? So you see why he's a beautiful thing where I'm concerned. You see why I like him.
But let me tell you more. Let me tell you how I met him, how he answered what I asked, so that you can judge him for yourself.
You must remember first that we fight the darkness. The watchers, all of us. It's what we are, even the strangest of us, and why we are not monsters. Or not only monsters, at least. We have ... It is more than curiosity, you see. There is conscience, too. There is a sense of justice, intrinsic to all of us, that makes us what we are. Even myself, as dusty and boring a thing as I am. There are things along the edges of the world that I have bound myself to stop, the same as all of us. Those I count as my friends, I met most of them there. Along the edges, against the darkness. We find each other when our consciences align against a common foe.
Or against each other, of course, but we are not saints. We each crave a certain justice, but it is often the case that our interpretations of it may ... differ. Slightly. In places. To sometimes hilarious and distinctly deadly effect. Ah well. There are none of us perfect.
He sought to avenge a tragedy, when I met him first. A slaughter, a mass grave. He is the Graveyard Man, you see, clothed in bone and grave-cloth, the scent of charnel and decay trailing in his wake. They call to him, the pits of bones across the worlds. He follows their voices and seeks their cause. He answers them, and forces their authors to answer for them. He is a terrible thing in that pursuit. He is a placid, patient, eternally merciless thing. He is the hand of the dead, and they do not survive long who have buried bones beneath them. For whatever purpose he was born or made or manifested, that is the course he has chosen since. And there are reasons for it.
Myself, at the time, I was in pursuit of a necromancer. Largely, I must say, accidentally. I do not normally meddle with the dead. That is not my favoured boundary. I deal usually in less comprehensible things, outsiders, things in the cracks that wriggle and widen and ooze strange substances into the worlds. That is my purpose, most often, if only because it is the strangest and most interesting. More mundane crimes I leave for others to answer. But she had something, this necromancer. She had found a lever, an object with a flavour of somewhere strange and distant indeed, and she slaughtered in search of the power to break it open. Bad business, that. To mingle death and madness into a gateway between realms. It does funny things to the warp and weft around it. Better not, you understand me. Better to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.
And so we crossed each other in search of her, the Graveyard Man and me. We met and were aligned, rather pleasantly, in a common pursuit. He, to lay her low for the bones she had left behind her, and I, to have that thing and pluck it away to somewhere safer and less seeping.
He was a lovely thing, you know. We met deep in the tunnels of her mine, in the damp and the dark and the blackness of another reality oozing up from the depths. He burned like a candle against it, a white shining in the darkness, only vaguely shrouded by a mouldering suit of clothes. Trousers. A grave suit, some few decades or so out of date. It was amusing, you see, because ... Well. A few reasons. Secrets. I'll tell you in a second.
I needled at him, of course. It is my nature. I poke, I prod, I ask questions, I wriggle appendages into the cracks of things and have a root around. Not literally. Well, not in conversation, anyway. The things I literally root around in are ... Anyway. He bore it well, my conversational prodding. Mr Grey bore it with grace and amusement. He was still calm, then. His fury does not generally emerge until the moment of confrontation itself. He's usually calm up to that. Polite, friendly. Teasing. I did delight in that. He teases very well.
I'd heard of him before then. He had been obscure once, but some of his hunts by then had been of sufficient ... impact and magnitude ... to have made a name for himself. He was not impressed by power, you see, nor halted by it either. A creature who carries death beside him and withers power before him makes an impact. I had heard of him. I was curious. I ever am.
I also did not recognise him. He was no flavour of a thing I had ever encountered before, and I had encountered some strange and interesting things indeed. He had the seeming of a familiar thing, any of a number of riders-of-the-flesh, but he did not smell like them. He did not burn like them. The taint he carried, the smell and the taste and the sensation, were of a different thing. It fascinated me. I wished, I admit, to take him apart somewhat. To pry him apart, just a little bit, and see what manner of a thing lay inside him. I admitted it then, too. I said it to him. He didn't mind it. He grinned, even, a strange white smile ghosting across the bony rictus beneath, and opened his grave-clothes to let me see a little bit. The white shining, and the bones beneath. He let me ease one of my more sensitive limbs between his ribs, let me sense the potency there.
You must understand that I love him for that. Such a thing, such a beautiful thing. Completely unafraid, completely unperturbed, letting me wriggle around inside him. Oh, I adore him. Still strange, still unexplained, a perfect mystery still for my tasting. Also, he is a friend. One tries to love one's friends. Especially the intriguing ones.
We could not devote all our time to wriggling limbs and prying questions just then, of course. There was a necromancer and an oozing gate still to deal with. It had to be put on hold. But that was all right too. That was perfectly fine. It meant I got to see him. It meant I had a chance to see his fury in action.
There is a sensation to death and undeath. It is not my normal boundary, not my usual taste, but it is nonetheless a fascinating thing in motion. She was a necromancer. It was her first and last resort of power. But he was something else. That strange, other thing. He carried death, in some unknown and purer way. Entropy. A ... a closing down of things. Not the wildness of raised corpses and opened boundaries. Something quieter, implacable. In his fury, he called a stillness. A drawing in of things, a calming and a closing. He wielded it with fury and without mercy, as calmly and coldly as the thing itself. It was incredible to feel it happening.
I could not give it all of my attention, unfortunately. She had levered the crack unwisely open before we reached her. Where he was a lovely strangeness behind me, the noisome seeping was a weary familiarity in front of me. She would pick that gate. Of course she would. There are some of them more foul-tasting than others, smells and sensations and corruptions, and while she had not picked the worst of all possible options, she had not picked anything flavoursome either. It was a horrible thing to have to knit closed. All filthy clutchings, noisome vapours that crept and clung and strangled. A thickness in the back of the mind, a choking thing like a fog across the thoughts. Disgusting. Oh, I do hate them. Some of them birth such strange and wonderful things, but others ... others are merely dirty. Soot and slime, clinging to the back of the throat and the base of the mind. I don't know why they always try for those ones. No amount of power is worth so cloying a stench, surely?
Still, it was done soon enough. They do always pick those ones, or most of them do, and that wearisome predictability has given me a degree of familiarity and efficiency across the centuries. Some gates I could knit closed in my sleep these days. Not that I would. That would be a little unwise. But still. All I'm saying is that even some strangenesses may become tired and familiar with overexposure.
It was so lovely to turn and find him in the aftermath of it. A new strangeness, smiling and placidly dangerous, so silently merciless. Such a pleasing thing he always is. I think I sighed at him for it. I scuttled over to him, all my limbs held out away from me until the filth had dripped away a bit, and only smiled down at him in pure satisfaction at his presence. Even my sensing appendages were all smeared and fogged, drooping disconsolately towards his friendly, implacable burning. He reached up to touch them. Eyeing me first, asking silent questions of advisability, before running bony phalanges full of white fire across my sensing limbs.
Oh, such a thing he is! Such a friendly gesture, cleaning and cleansing and clearing the filthy fog from my mind. Lovely thing. Lovely being. Such a nice creature he is.
I collected her key as we left, stowed the silly thing away where I carry such interesting but inadvisable objects on the move. He watched this manoeuvre in some mild fascination, but was distracted shortly by a small errand of his own. He picked over her bones. Did something to them. Removed ... a potential from them. Settled them, rendered them inert. He held her femur in one hand for a second, bone on bone, only his white fire to differentiate them. There was an oddness to the expression on his liquid, shining face. A mingled disgust and grief. It is not usually the kind of thing which fascinates me, but I was enamoured of all of him then. I found every part of him curious and intriguing in the utmost.
He noticed, and he explained. That is why I think he will not begrudge my telling you all this. He is not reticent, my friend Mr Grey, not as some of us are. He does not mind the telling of things.
"There are memories in the bones," he said to me, as we meandered slowly away from that place, back up through the tunnels. "That's what woke me first, I think. I found myself in a grave, a grave with two bodies, and somehow I ... I knew them. The bones. I heard them whispering to me. I knew they were not part of me. They made me realise that there was a 'me' for something to be part of."
I clucked wordlessly at this, delighted. I gestured towards his skull, the centre of the white fire, though I did not pry it apart. I wouldn't be so rude. He laughed at me, batting my limbs away playfully. He has self-preservative instincts. There are things that can damage him, or at least damage the bones he rides. It would not matter, except that he is fond of some of them. He told me that, as well.
"They're not all the same body, you know," he confided lightly. "They call me Graveyard Man, Mr Grey, but it doesn't ... they're not quite right. Neither me nor the bones. I am nothing at all, and the bones ... the first of them were both. The grave, with two bodies. One was a man, the other a woman. He had been poisoned, slowly, over many months. The taint of it lingered. She had been murdered. Her skull was smashed. I fused parts of it to his in the making of myself. Her hips, too, and his ribs. Her long bones, they were stronger. His fingers. More worn, more delicate. I liked them better. They didn't mind. They wanted me for something, were happy enough to share in me. They wanted justice, and let me have as I pleased in exchange."
I confess I stopped him there, drew him to a halt in the tunnel in order to coo at him, to bring my more delicate limbs to bear and seek out the differences between his bones. I tasted of them, searched out whose were whose. One, two, four bodies. No, six, even twelve. He seemed to replace the small bones a lot. He guarded the fingers though. I could see that, could see how many of the originals still remained, now that I knew to match them against the ribs and the skull. He liked them, he'd said. He really did. He tried to preserve them. Still does. Those two, the first two, he tries to keep them as intact as he can. They matter a great deal to him.
"His son had poisoned him," he told me gently, bemusedly, while I trailed slender appendages across his bones. "She was the son's lover, had discovered what he was doing. Protested, been murdered for it. He hid her body in his father's coffin, disguised two murders with one funeral. They wanted justice for it. The bones called to me. Woke me up, remembered me to myself. It seemed simple enough to bring them that in payment."
Justice, I said. We are all of us, all the watchers in the night, in search of justice. It is a thing intrinsic to us, the defining thing, that which we all have in common with each other. His justice springs from tragedy, but not his own. The tragedies buried with the bones are his cause. He seeks his vengeance for them, because they gave him to himself.
Does it say much, I wonder, that it seems so simple and natural a thing to us? He and I, who have no real tragedies of our own. Is it illustrative, that we answer so naturally to those of others? But no. Probably not. We do what we do because we wish it. Not saints, no. Not monsters either, perhaps. Only curious things. Things neither one thing nor the other, things in the cracks and the night, doing only what seems natural to them. Such simple things we are. So right and beautiful to each other's eyes.
And amusing. Always, always that. Such a funny thing he is. Let me tell you.
They call him 'Mr'. He's only bones. His face is not more than liquid fire, vaguely human where it sits across the bones beneath, but nonspecific. Mixed, blended, over a skull fused from two separate bodies. There's nothing there to make him one thing or the other. But they call him 'Mr' Grey. They call him the Graveyard Man. And it's because of his trousers. It's because he wears the grave-clothes of that first man in whose coffin he'd come together.
"I couldn't bear the skirt," he told me, wry and sheepish. "I don't know why. I kept feeling like I would fall out of the bottom of it. The trousers are a bridge, so that the bulk of my bones must sit balanced on the seam of them, but a skirt is just a funnel straight to the ground. I felt like I'd pour myself down along it and be nothing anymore. It was very disconcerting. So I chose his clothes. I did try hers. She wanted me to. I just ... didn't try them for very long."
Oh! And there's a secret he may be angry at me for telling. Hehe. Maybe. But probably not. He does shame as little as I, at least in such matters. He keeps it on a more moral level, and cares nothing at all for who may laugh at him and for what. It tickles me, though. It has been a long time since I was human, but I was once, and I remember that I am 'she' because of it. But he, he was never anything, never a physical thing. There's no reason for him to be either thing. At the heart of him, he isn't. It makes no difference to him. But to other people, to those of us who were once of particular cultures, he is a him.
And all because, only because, he found a particular set of clothing a bit too vertiginous for his newly-formed peace of mind. Is that not a lovely thing? Is that not a bright little secret to have hoarded all these years, him and I both?
These are the things I hold to myself. These are the things I creep and pry and commit terrible social wrongs to discover. Oh, not all of them are so bright or so simple. We are a mixed bunch, we watchers, and some of us spring from darker secrets than others. Not that murder and vengeance aren't dark enough in their way, but there was ... there was a certain simplicity and grace to how he was formed, my friend. They shared with him, those two murdered souls. They gave him their bones and won justice in return. It is a clean enough trade, as such things go. I have seen far, far worse. Some of us were made from it.
We do not tell of them. Our code of manners, that is why it exists. There are some secrets I would not tell, no matter how fiercely they itch against my skull, how desperately they whisper to be spoken. Sense, a desire to avoid ferocious vengeance, but also some respect, I suppose. I am not ashamed of learning these things. I think perhaps I would be ashamed of telling them.
But this. This little thing, this smaller secret of a friendlier creature. This one does no harm. A coin for your hoard, those of you as curious as I. A pretty little gem of a thing to hold to the light and watch shine. There are things out there worth learning, just to know you know them. I believed that, when I slipped first between the worlds. I believe it still, will always believe it. It is my nature. I am what I am because of it. A curious, sturdy, ill-mannered thing. A watcher in the night, and a guardian against noisome things.
A perfect, beautiful specimen of a thing. I am, we all are. We are lovely things, I tell you, the loveliest in all the worlds.
But that, of course, is something you will judge for yourself.
There is a certain ... shall we call it a code of manners? ... amongst the watchers in the night. We do not ask questions of each other. We do not pry into origins and histories and motivations. We do not challenge one another to be truthful, barring that pressing circumstances demand it. A watcher's history is their own. The reasons to dwell along the edges of the worlds are many, oft unique, and oft painful too. It is considered gauche by a great many of us to indulge too often or too blatantly in curiosity.
Of course, curiosity is among those very reasons for dwelling, and thus a somewhat common failing amongst us. One, I must admit, that I myself am rather prey to. There is a lure of secrecy beyond the bounds of manners, and it should be to my shame that I have so often ventured in pursuit of it.
I am not often ashamed. I must tell you that now. It is a civilised conceit that I have long had considerable difficulty in embracing. You may make of that fact what you will.
So then. I am a curious thing, and ill-mannered. I am also, I flatter myself, not unknown or ill-regarded amongst our august and sometimes terrible company. In my handful of centuries, I have encountered no small few of our number at one time or another. I have worked with many, tested myself against others, and count myself friends with a small but stalwart few. And I am, at the base of things, a terribly curious thing. I have asked questions, over the years. I have been rude, and impolite, and dug through the dross of workmanlike conversation to find the gems and bones of deeper truths. I have been, in short, utterly, appallingly gauche.
And I have learned so many things. Secrets and truths. I have hoarded them across the years as a miser hoards coin. My own little treasure trove, prettier and more intriguing than all the jewels and occult libraries in all the many worlds.
Of course, I would not tell anyone. Naturally not. Such secrets are not mine to strew cavalierly across the night. There is gauche and there is gauche, and also it would not be sensible. Things have a way of coming back to people. I am a sturdy thing, well-made and long-lasting, but there are limits, and more than enough of us of a sort to find them. Fiercely determined things, the lot of us. Well, one doesn't survive the night long without it. We are, to a being, vicious, cantankerous, grudge-holding bastards of considerable age and stamina, wily to a body and well-used to squirming our way to victories against considerable odds. We are not good people to cross, even amongst ourselves. There is a reason for the code of manners. It would not be wise break it, no.
But perhaps ... perhaps I might tell you some things, regardless. Little ones. Small secrets, from friendlier beings. There are some who would not hold it against me. We chafe, some of us, against the bounds of secrecy. It niggles at us, tugs at our hearts and at our lips. Secrets want to be told, you know. They whisper for it, crawl around the skull and beg for it. It is so exhausting sometimes to keep them in. There are those, my friends, who would not begrudge it of me to spill some little ones onto a page or into an ear. Probably not. I'm sure of it.
It's all right, yes. It will be fine. Let me tell you a thing. I'm sure nobody will mind.
I should tell you of myself first. That would be polite. My own secrets first, and then those of others. That would be the way to do it. Oh, but I am not interesting! I mean, I have done things and fought things, yes, I have travelled across worlds and found horrors in the darkness, fought them and kept safe some little patches of light. It is my purpose. All of ours. I have done my share, and perhaps there is some interest in that. But I am at heart a dusty thing. There are no great tragedies to my past. I slipped between the worlds for curiosity, nothing more, and stayed for it as well. A perfectly satisfactory motivation, to my mind, sufficient for all these years, but not interesting. Not to anyone else. What do you want to know about a curious old spider creeping in the cracks? Nothing, no. Boring old thing.
Let me tell you about someone more interesting. Let me tell you ... hmm. Yes. Let me tell you about Mr Grey. Ah! Now there's an interesting creature. Very friendly, too. Placid, calm. Not the sort to hold grudges for loose lips. Not much, anyway. Yes, let's start with Mr Grey.
Mr Grey, the Graveyard Man. A very halfway thing he is. In lots of ways, really. Born out of tragedy, yes, though perhaps ... not quite his own. Its own. Ooh, that's a thing, yes. Lots of secrets there, though more from habit than necessity, I think. He never seemed to mind my prying, anyway. Found it happily amusing. Very calm, is Mr Grey. Always is. Lots of people like him for that. They think he's safe, you see. They think so mild a being as Mr Grey must not be a very dangerous thing at all.
They're wrong, obviously. There are none of us safe out here. Dangerous to a body, though some more willfully so than others. I suppose he might be 'safe' in that regard. One would have to well and truly cross him to discover otherwise. That's good enough for most, and all the better for those of us who might wish certain fools ... cleaned away. Ha-hmm. Yes.
Mr Grey is a young thing. Relatively speaking. We'll call him a 'him', by the way. It's not true at all, but for convenience's sake. So the old spider doesn't stumble over her phrasing. He doesn't mind. He told me so himself. Another small amusement. The world is very funny to Mr Grey, up until it isn't. That's a sight. Oh, yes indeed. He's a terribly impressive thing in a temper. All cold fire and efficiency. Beautiful. Deadly, naturally, but very, very beautiful.
That is not a word many apply to him, I should tell you. I am a little strange, and a little more experienced than most. To many, he's rather hideous. A halfway thing, an unnatural thing, even by watcher standards. A thing that should not be, and worrisome because of it. Tch. A lack of curiosity, that is. A lack of proper appreciation.
He's made of bones. That's not the unnatural thing. There's many of us are made of bones. They're not his bones. That's slightly less common, and slightly more distressing. Well, one doesn't like to imagine one's remains being used as a coat. Or, well, more of a carriage, really. A mode and means of transportation, the physical embodiment of a thing. That's not really so unusual either, though. There's many a thing rides around in other people's bodies out there. A whole class of us, really.
The problem with Mr Grey is, nobody knows what's doing the riding. The problem with Mr Grey is, not even he knows. Not a clue in his head. He woke up the way he is. A white, shining thing, a liquid effervescence that crawled inside some bones and made a being of them. He has no memory of what he was before, if indeed he was anything. It's worrisome, to those among us who like to know the nature of a thing. Mysteries are unhappy and frequently deadly things out here. There are those of us not inclined to like them very much.
Silly, really. But then, I am a curious thing. It's who and why I am. Without mystery, why, I'd wither up and fade away, wouldn't I? So you see why he's a beautiful thing where I'm concerned. You see why I like him.
But let me tell you more. Let me tell you how I met him, how he answered what I asked, so that you can judge him for yourself.
You must remember first that we fight the darkness. The watchers, all of us. It's what we are, even the strangest of us, and why we are not monsters. Or not only monsters, at least. We have ... It is more than curiosity, you see. There is conscience, too. There is a sense of justice, intrinsic to all of us, that makes us what we are. Even myself, as dusty and boring a thing as I am. There are things along the edges of the world that I have bound myself to stop, the same as all of us. Those I count as my friends, I met most of them there. Along the edges, against the darkness. We find each other when our consciences align against a common foe.
Or against each other, of course, but we are not saints. We each crave a certain justice, but it is often the case that our interpretations of it may ... differ. Slightly. In places. To sometimes hilarious and distinctly deadly effect. Ah well. There are none of us perfect.
He sought to avenge a tragedy, when I met him first. A slaughter, a mass grave. He is the Graveyard Man, you see, clothed in bone and grave-cloth, the scent of charnel and decay trailing in his wake. They call to him, the pits of bones across the worlds. He follows their voices and seeks their cause. He answers them, and forces their authors to answer for them. He is a terrible thing in that pursuit. He is a placid, patient, eternally merciless thing. He is the hand of the dead, and they do not survive long who have buried bones beneath them. For whatever purpose he was born or made or manifested, that is the course he has chosen since. And there are reasons for it.
Myself, at the time, I was in pursuit of a necromancer. Largely, I must say, accidentally. I do not normally meddle with the dead. That is not my favoured boundary. I deal usually in less comprehensible things, outsiders, things in the cracks that wriggle and widen and ooze strange substances into the worlds. That is my purpose, most often, if only because it is the strangest and most interesting. More mundane crimes I leave for others to answer. But she had something, this necromancer. She had found a lever, an object with a flavour of somewhere strange and distant indeed, and she slaughtered in search of the power to break it open. Bad business, that. To mingle death and madness into a gateway between realms. It does funny things to the warp and weft around it. Better not, you understand me. Better to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.
And so we crossed each other in search of her, the Graveyard Man and me. We met and were aligned, rather pleasantly, in a common pursuit. He, to lay her low for the bones she had left behind her, and I, to have that thing and pluck it away to somewhere safer and less seeping.
He was a lovely thing, you know. We met deep in the tunnels of her mine, in the damp and the dark and the blackness of another reality oozing up from the depths. He burned like a candle against it, a white shining in the darkness, only vaguely shrouded by a mouldering suit of clothes. Trousers. A grave suit, some few decades or so out of date. It was amusing, you see, because ... Well. A few reasons. Secrets. I'll tell you in a second.
I needled at him, of course. It is my nature. I poke, I prod, I ask questions, I wriggle appendages into the cracks of things and have a root around. Not literally. Well, not in conversation, anyway. The things I literally root around in are ... Anyway. He bore it well, my conversational prodding. Mr Grey bore it with grace and amusement. He was still calm, then. His fury does not generally emerge until the moment of confrontation itself. He's usually calm up to that. Polite, friendly. Teasing. I did delight in that. He teases very well.
I'd heard of him before then. He had been obscure once, but some of his hunts by then had been of sufficient ... impact and magnitude ... to have made a name for himself. He was not impressed by power, you see, nor halted by it either. A creature who carries death beside him and withers power before him makes an impact. I had heard of him. I was curious. I ever am.
I also did not recognise him. He was no flavour of a thing I had ever encountered before, and I had encountered some strange and interesting things indeed. He had the seeming of a familiar thing, any of a number of riders-of-the-flesh, but he did not smell like them. He did not burn like them. The taint he carried, the smell and the taste and the sensation, were of a different thing. It fascinated me. I wished, I admit, to take him apart somewhat. To pry him apart, just a little bit, and see what manner of a thing lay inside him. I admitted it then, too. I said it to him. He didn't mind it. He grinned, even, a strange white smile ghosting across the bony rictus beneath, and opened his grave-clothes to let me see a little bit. The white shining, and the bones beneath. He let me ease one of my more sensitive limbs between his ribs, let me sense the potency there.
You must understand that I love him for that. Such a thing, such a beautiful thing. Completely unafraid, completely unperturbed, letting me wriggle around inside him. Oh, I adore him. Still strange, still unexplained, a perfect mystery still for my tasting. Also, he is a friend. One tries to love one's friends. Especially the intriguing ones.
We could not devote all our time to wriggling limbs and prying questions just then, of course. There was a necromancer and an oozing gate still to deal with. It had to be put on hold. But that was all right too. That was perfectly fine. It meant I got to see him. It meant I had a chance to see his fury in action.
There is a sensation to death and undeath. It is not my normal boundary, not my usual taste, but it is nonetheless a fascinating thing in motion. She was a necromancer. It was her first and last resort of power. But he was something else. That strange, other thing. He carried death, in some unknown and purer way. Entropy. A ... a closing down of things. Not the wildness of raised corpses and opened boundaries. Something quieter, implacable. In his fury, he called a stillness. A drawing in of things, a calming and a closing. He wielded it with fury and without mercy, as calmly and coldly as the thing itself. It was incredible to feel it happening.
I could not give it all of my attention, unfortunately. She had levered the crack unwisely open before we reached her. Where he was a lovely strangeness behind me, the noisome seeping was a weary familiarity in front of me. She would pick that gate. Of course she would. There are some of them more foul-tasting than others, smells and sensations and corruptions, and while she had not picked the worst of all possible options, she had not picked anything flavoursome either. It was a horrible thing to have to knit closed. All filthy clutchings, noisome vapours that crept and clung and strangled. A thickness in the back of the mind, a choking thing like a fog across the thoughts. Disgusting. Oh, I do hate them. Some of them birth such strange and wonderful things, but others ... others are merely dirty. Soot and slime, clinging to the back of the throat and the base of the mind. I don't know why they always try for those ones. No amount of power is worth so cloying a stench, surely?
Still, it was done soon enough. They do always pick those ones, or most of them do, and that wearisome predictability has given me a degree of familiarity and efficiency across the centuries. Some gates I could knit closed in my sleep these days. Not that I would. That would be a little unwise. But still. All I'm saying is that even some strangenesses may become tired and familiar with overexposure.
It was so lovely to turn and find him in the aftermath of it. A new strangeness, smiling and placidly dangerous, so silently merciless. Such a pleasing thing he always is. I think I sighed at him for it. I scuttled over to him, all my limbs held out away from me until the filth had dripped away a bit, and only smiled down at him in pure satisfaction at his presence. Even my sensing appendages were all smeared and fogged, drooping disconsolately towards his friendly, implacable burning. He reached up to touch them. Eyeing me first, asking silent questions of advisability, before running bony phalanges full of white fire across my sensing limbs.
Oh, such a thing he is! Such a friendly gesture, cleaning and cleansing and clearing the filthy fog from my mind. Lovely thing. Lovely being. Such a nice creature he is.
I collected her key as we left, stowed the silly thing away where I carry such interesting but inadvisable objects on the move. He watched this manoeuvre in some mild fascination, but was distracted shortly by a small errand of his own. He picked over her bones. Did something to them. Removed ... a potential from them. Settled them, rendered them inert. He held her femur in one hand for a second, bone on bone, only his white fire to differentiate them. There was an oddness to the expression on his liquid, shining face. A mingled disgust and grief. It is not usually the kind of thing which fascinates me, but I was enamoured of all of him then. I found every part of him curious and intriguing in the utmost.
He noticed, and he explained. That is why I think he will not begrudge my telling you all this. He is not reticent, my friend Mr Grey, not as some of us are. He does not mind the telling of things.
"There are memories in the bones," he said to me, as we meandered slowly away from that place, back up through the tunnels. "That's what woke me first, I think. I found myself in a grave, a grave with two bodies, and somehow I ... I knew them. The bones. I heard them whispering to me. I knew they were not part of me. They made me realise that there was a 'me' for something to be part of."
I clucked wordlessly at this, delighted. I gestured towards his skull, the centre of the white fire, though I did not pry it apart. I wouldn't be so rude. He laughed at me, batting my limbs away playfully. He has self-preservative instincts. There are things that can damage him, or at least damage the bones he rides. It would not matter, except that he is fond of some of them. He told me that, as well.
"They're not all the same body, you know," he confided lightly. "They call me Graveyard Man, Mr Grey, but it doesn't ... they're not quite right. Neither me nor the bones. I am nothing at all, and the bones ... the first of them were both. The grave, with two bodies. One was a man, the other a woman. He had been poisoned, slowly, over many months. The taint of it lingered. She had been murdered. Her skull was smashed. I fused parts of it to his in the making of myself. Her hips, too, and his ribs. Her long bones, they were stronger. His fingers. More worn, more delicate. I liked them better. They didn't mind. They wanted me for something, were happy enough to share in me. They wanted justice, and let me have as I pleased in exchange."
I confess I stopped him there, drew him to a halt in the tunnel in order to coo at him, to bring my more delicate limbs to bear and seek out the differences between his bones. I tasted of them, searched out whose were whose. One, two, four bodies. No, six, even twelve. He seemed to replace the small bones a lot. He guarded the fingers though. I could see that, could see how many of the originals still remained, now that I knew to match them against the ribs and the skull. He liked them, he'd said. He really did. He tried to preserve them. Still does. Those two, the first two, he tries to keep them as intact as he can. They matter a great deal to him.
"His son had poisoned him," he told me gently, bemusedly, while I trailed slender appendages across his bones. "She was the son's lover, had discovered what he was doing. Protested, been murdered for it. He hid her body in his father's coffin, disguised two murders with one funeral. They wanted justice for it. The bones called to me. Woke me up, remembered me to myself. It seemed simple enough to bring them that in payment."
Justice, I said. We are all of us, all the watchers in the night, in search of justice. It is a thing intrinsic to us, the defining thing, that which we all have in common with each other. His justice springs from tragedy, but not his own. The tragedies buried with the bones are his cause. He seeks his vengeance for them, because they gave him to himself.
Does it say much, I wonder, that it seems so simple and natural a thing to us? He and I, who have no real tragedies of our own. Is it illustrative, that we answer so naturally to those of others? But no. Probably not. We do what we do because we wish it. Not saints, no. Not monsters either, perhaps. Only curious things. Things neither one thing nor the other, things in the cracks and the night, doing only what seems natural to them. Such simple things we are. So right and beautiful to each other's eyes.
And amusing. Always, always that. Such a funny thing he is. Let me tell you.
They call him 'Mr'. He's only bones. His face is not more than liquid fire, vaguely human where it sits across the bones beneath, but nonspecific. Mixed, blended, over a skull fused from two separate bodies. There's nothing there to make him one thing or the other. But they call him 'Mr' Grey. They call him the Graveyard Man. And it's because of his trousers. It's because he wears the grave-clothes of that first man in whose coffin he'd come together.
"I couldn't bear the skirt," he told me, wry and sheepish. "I don't know why. I kept feeling like I would fall out of the bottom of it. The trousers are a bridge, so that the bulk of my bones must sit balanced on the seam of them, but a skirt is just a funnel straight to the ground. I felt like I'd pour myself down along it and be nothing anymore. It was very disconcerting. So I chose his clothes. I did try hers. She wanted me to. I just ... didn't try them for very long."
Oh! And there's a secret he may be angry at me for telling. Hehe. Maybe. But probably not. He does shame as little as I, at least in such matters. He keeps it on a more moral level, and cares nothing at all for who may laugh at him and for what. It tickles me, though. It has been a long time since I was human, but I was once, and I remember that I am 'she' because of it. But he, he was never anything, never a physical thing. There's no reason for him to be either thing. At the heart of him, he isn't. It makes no difference to him. But to other people, to those of us who were once of particular cultures, he is a him.
And all because, only because, he found a particular set of clothing a bit too vertiginous for his newly-formed peace of mind. Is that not a lovely thing? Is that not a bright little secret to have hoarded all these years, him and I both?
These are the things I hold to myself. These are the things I creep and pry and commit terrible social wrongs to discover. Oh, not all of them are so bright or so simple. We are a mixed bunch, we watchers, and some of us spring from darker secrets than others. Not that murder and vengeance aren't dark enough in their way, but there was ... there was a certain simplicity and grace to how he was formed, my friend. They shared with him, those two murdered souls. They gave him their bones and won justice in return. It is a clean enough trade, as such things go. I have seen far, far worse. Some of us were made from it.
We do not tell of them. Our code of manners, that is why it exists. There are some secrets I would not tell, no matter how fiercely they itch against my skull, how desperately they whisper to be spoken. Sense, a desire to avoid ferocious vengeance, but also some respect, I suppose. I am not ashamed of learning these things. I think perhaps I would be ashamed of telling them.
But this. This little thing, this smaller secret of a friendlier creature. This one does no harm. A coin for your hoard, those of you as curious as I. A pretty little gem of a thing to hold to the light and watch shine. There are things out there worth learning, just to know you know them. I believed that, when I slipped first between the worlds. I believe it still, will always believe it. It is my nature. I am what I am because of it. A curious, sturdy, ill-mannered thing. A watcher in the night, and a guardian against noisome things.
A perfect, beautiful specimen of a thing. I am, we all are. We are lovely things, I tell you, the loveliest in all the worlds.
But that, of course, is something you will judge for yourself.
Tags: