Tag: Andrew Shields

From “Deadly Doctrines: a Chronical of Duels” by Fr. Danrhysi Solcunias

The Church of the Ecstasy of the Blood has a problem when it comes to vampires.

Ideally the world is divided up into “physical” and “energy” and we exalt the physical and condemn the energy. An initial lazy repudiation of that theological structure points out how ideas, relationships, experiences, meaning, and sensation are not tangible yet are foundational to human experience—the Habitation Anchor Precept counters this by insisting that none of that exists independent of physical presence, either in a body’s mind and blood, or in a physical book. They are anchored, they live within a physical presence, and therefore they are acceptable.

Using analogy to sow doubt and confusion is a trivial pastime that scholars and aristocrats elevated to an art form—art fueled by constraint. They maneuver within the laws of poetry to craft sonnets, or build around limitations of pigments, perception, and canvas to paint.

Are vampires excused in the Church theological structure because they are ghosts who have an artificial Habitation Anchor? How is vampiric essence less anchored than ideas, captured in a record of ink and language, committed to the flesh of a blank-slate book that had no meaning before it was connected there? If an idea is written on a chalkboard that has hosted many ideas but been erased, is that idea now suspect because its habitation is temporary, even if the same idea is written in a book? As with ideas and writing, so too with possessing ghosts, and the peak of the form in ghosts melded with a body permanently.

Theological purity was never going to win out over aristocratic enlightened self-interest. The Felswift Report was produced by the Doctrine Committee almost three hundred years ago after a long and contentious process of theological examination (Church records note over 1,200 duel challenges inspired by related doctrinal points over half a decade, with 146 recorded deaths resulting.) In the end, reinterpretation of the Habitation Anchor Precept was codified to allow dynastic hives of ancestral ghosts (properly regulated, of course) as well as allowance of vampires if they could demonstrate that their spirit and their vessel were both faithful to the Church in their respective lives.

Thus you have the open secret of Lord Scurlock’s vampirism excused by the church. An entire tier of blackmail against the wealthy harboring the dead evaporated from sin to distasteful choice. Because of the apparent shallowness of philosophical engagement with the problem, and the transparency of a solution favoring the wealthy and powerful, the Felswift Report is frequently the door through which believers move from viewing Church thought from the inside to examining it from the outside—not as the faithful looking to improve, but instead as the cynic cataloging the wealthy’s self-service.

This particular snippet is about one of the characters, more than about the setting, so it has less general interest. I’m sharing anyway.

Grainer was always too soft hearted. I told you he adopted this street rat in his last posting, when we camped in the Fallow Stables in the Lost District. Grainer let his stray bring in another stray; she had this stinky blanket wrapped around a Solusia bat pup the size of my fist. The locals put out poison that blinded the mice and other vermin so they starved to death. This bat pup ate poisoned vermin, it was dying.

I insisted she abandon the pup or go live somewhere else until it was all over. I was outvoted, but I put my foot down. If we could hear, see, or smell the thing it had to go.

It would start scratching on its wooden box and I would yell “Claws!” Imagine this slip of a girl scolding me on my language, insisting that her bat had wingnails (like fingernails), not claws. Whatever, right? So I would yell “Nails!” and she’d tend to it and shut the damn thing up.

Grainer called in a favor with the vet captain, who dosed the pup with medicine so it just lost one eye. Once it was clear the pup was going to live, I think Grainer’s brat gave it a flowery name too stupid to remember. Everybody called it Nails. If it’s still alive, it would be pretty big by now.

From Zyxa Fen’s unpublished notes on the Sepulcherian Fourth Company interviews

The Sanctorium in Brightstone was designed by the Immortal Emperor himself during his last visit to Doskvol, nearly five centuries ago. He was in Doskvol for a realignment, as a number of civic and religious structures had become wayward and required his personal attention to prevent a civil conflict that could have been on the scale of the recent Unification War. The death toll from the brief trials for heretics and dissidents ran up into the hundreds, and the bones of the executed were worked into the foundations of a monument erected in honor of the Immortal Emperor’s visit.

The Gates of Death, rebuilt; the Sanctorium was intended to echo the impression of the supernatural barrier that was shattered millennia ago. The Immortal Emperor tasked the founding families of the City Council with building the Sanctorium to conform to certain parameters, funded by Imperial coffers. This gift to Doskvol provided a place for its citizens to purify themselves of the traces of death that creep into life through age and impure thoughts, and to oversee the ritual destruction of rogue spirits. Catacombs below protect the remains of flesh without life, ashes of the notable contained in expensive urns, more eternal than memory.

The Founding Families have spiritual authority as well as temporal clout, because the Immortal Emperor laid upon them the mantle of policing the boundary between life and death while offering guidance and instruction to the living. They are stewards of the gates of life and death. They choose what endures and what is silenced forever. If they were merely people, like everyone else only with money, a reasonable person could conclude that their influence outstrips their authority. But if they are gatekeepers for this city’s soul-saddled flesh, we owe them everything. As I am sure you know, they seldom hesitate to collect.

From “Six Foundations for Revolt” by Concerned Citizen

When the Gates of Death were shattered, and the Immortal Emperor rose, the entire field of theological enterprise was obliterated. Speculation about higher powers and the afterlife seemed in poor taste. Still, humans need to organize their inner lives, and as they sought a new balance, religious veneration followed two main paths.

The Immortal Emperor lent support to the refocused worship of the mystery of life, seated in blood and bone and air, and recognized the new Church of Ecstasy of the Flesh. If religion must create an “us” and a “them” then all those living could be the “us” group, and those refusing to leave upon dying could be “them.” This did not create the hoped-for unity, but did provide a workable state religion with mysteries, rituals, structure, and costumes.

The other path was to worship things beyond understanding, and personify them. Humans once gazed at the stars before the sky broke; they drew pictures between points of light and gave them names and stories, granted them authority over their lives. So too with the Forgotten Gods, drawn from fragments of stories, inexplicable experiences, or the dreams of the mad. The point is to have secrets that allow people to love, fear, belong, and sacrifice, all without undue interference from the object of worship.

Living flesh minds its own business. But at some point, when the faithful whispered to the nothing, the nothing started whispering back.

From “Findings of a Heretic Scholar” by Fr. Dunswether Kakel

Maybe fifty years ago a traveling zoological attraction suffered fire and shipwreck off the coast of Ankhayat Park, in Silkshore. A monster the owner called a “river horse” got loose. It was massive, twice the size of the heaviest ox, with giant jaws full of blunt teeth. Irritable as hell. The local gondolier-based enforcer gangs cornered it for capture, and it resisted. There were lots of deaths—including the river horse. The toughest gondolier gang working for the Fairpole Grotto Council at the time was the Clamdiggers. Selman, the leader, was looking to update their image.

He mounted that monster’s skull on the wall; fleshless, it looked as fearsome as a dragon. He changed the name of his gang to the River Horses.

Twenty years later only the old-timers remembered the story, and the skull was one trophy among many. Denyek was in charge, he had his mistress paint a tribute to the gang. She made this beautiful mural of a white horse in the river. Even that was old and outdated fifteen years ago, when Sunset had a falling out with the leader and decided she was going to start a proper crew, not just thugging for the gondoliers anymore. If they were river horses, her crew would be River Stallions. She got her crew matching tattoos based on the mural under the Cox Street Stables. They never looked back.

From “Iconography of Dust: Stories Behind the Stories” by Tadger Bleek

This is the longest one, and I wanted to shorten it, but it’s got cultural background I just couldn’t resist putting in from this point of view. Plus, in my head I hear it in Peter Coyote’s voice (the narrator for some of Ken Burns documentaries.)

*

It is a hard thing to be mastered by one who does not love you. This is true for politics just as it is in families. The final blow in an indifferently abusive relationship was the Immortal Emperor’s decree that plasmic refinement would center in Lockport, a city that had a ten year legal wrangle among its chiefs to grudgingly allow the first cannery for its fishing fleet.

In less than a year, the city famous for scrimshaw, canny fishing expertise, and white cliffs was overbuilt to five times its size. The original city was a neighborhood, surrounded by massive refineries and military installations. Slippage and accidents released slicks of undying blood still writhing in demonic agony that left people changed; the mist released by refinement sometimes left a twist of deathless misery and rage in the fog. The cliffs turned black.

It was enough to send the Skovs to war. Over two thousand Skov refugees poured into Doskvol, the closest port, during the war. Even more came after Skovlan lost.

One of them was a sixteen year old winsome lass whose uncle (Hutton) ran the Grinders, a Skov gang of Lockport refugees. Her first week in town, an Akorosian thief stabbed her in the gut. Her own people reported her dead as she lay nursing a mortal wound, and when it looked like she might survive, they tried to kill her; mere facts should not defuse an act of war, even if it is only a gang war. She escaped, found the criminals who attacked her uncle and her people, and offered to broker peace. She could manage it because she was Hutton’s niece; in an underworld driven by wealth and relationships, it was the “Niece” part that stuck, and her name was lost behind it.

She survived dislocation and assault, and chose to try and build a new home with diplomacy among dangerous criminals. She had Skov immigrant credentials, and local grievance, and she used that to bolster credibility among Skovs, giving her authority to counter claims she was nothing more than a mouthpiece for the native criminals. She was smart, and tough, and a natural networker. She had an instinct for turning loss into power. Of course she became a target.

From “Roots, Grudges, and Blood: the Skovlan Influx” by Cyriun Talvadge

Balancing the city’s power with structure is impossible. Structures are occupied by individuals of varying passion and ability. Attempting to stabilize power through laws and rules is like trying to balance a gladiator match by throwing more weapons and armor into the ring. The power of Doskvol has always been its bloody hunger. It is hunger that propels the powerful towards more power, and it is hunger that motivates their enemies to drag them back from it. The only real check against the power lust of the rulers is the power lust of those they rule.

If humanity ever does curb that starving ambition, then the inevitable transition from rulership by mortals to rulership by vampires will accelerate. Vampires have the long view, and experience, and a hunger no mortal can match. So far the main resistance to this inevitability has flourished in the vampire’s blind spot for the current moment. They get lost in future machinations and lose sight of unanticipated changes right before their eyes. The sharpening gift of mortality focuses humans and keeps the churn of power fresh, even when contained in ancient lines of aristocracy and tradition. Lo, before us is a new generation, and right behind it another. New faces, consumed in the oldest game.

From “Six Inevitable Truths of Rulership” by Lady Crolucia VenVaskell

Rail Jacks protect trains from the clouds of starving ghosts in the wasteland between cities. Most trains have a seat behind the engine compartment, the safety seat, where one of the jacks can watch the engineers for signs of mental pressure or possession, and intervene. It’s a good ‘watch and learn’ post for rookies.

So this kid is still an apprentice jack, and he’s in the safety seat, and one of the engineers has allergies. First time he sneezes, the kid overreacts and fries him with the hook, gives the poor bastard the shakes for life. So they put the kid up walking the train for the rest of the trip, and he saw a reflection he didn’t like in the goggles of his partner, fries him with the hook. By the second trip, he had a rep for massive overreaction, posing more of a threat than the dangerous surroundings.

Some say he never had the nerve to be a rail jack, but his uncle was Speeder Zeke, and everybody’s heard of that crazy bastard. So, he didn’t get run off the rails, but he earned the nickname Safety, and people knew to keep an eye on the zap-happy twerp.

From “Tales on Rails: Oral Histories of the Elevated Trains” unfinished publication notes

Another odd instrument that’s perfect for the Dusk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVTcv7t_iCU

I picture a street busker up some stairs on a public street, with a pipe down to the water, surveying the street and playing soulful and weird water music.

A noble endowed the instrument and players for it, in memory of his mother, to play always over the street where she died. Only a few people still know the story two hundred years later, but one of your crew grew up on this street and has the music of this instrument twined with a lifetime of memories. It plays in the background, usually audible, when you’re in your lair and planning your heists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVTcv7t_iCU