How About Them Apples? (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
applespice) wrote2011-05-04 07:21 pm
applespice) wrote2011-05-04 07:21 pm
Lj Idol - Week 24 - Bats in the Belfry
I can’t imagine Highfield without the Night Tower. It has stood sentinel above the city for as long as I can remember, a single black candle atop an otherwise beautiful birthday cake of tiered marble buildings, immaculate stepped gardens, and tall white colonnades. I’ve looked at it every day of my life, even when I didn’t want to. In my line of work, it’s good to be reminded of the dark side of this soft city.
I’m not from Highfield myself. I live down the mountain in Lowfield, closer to the valley floor. In Lowfield, you can still look out and see the rusting tanks below, the tattered remnants of flags, and the occasional pale glint of sun on bone. In Highfield all you see are bright swathes of wildflowers and long grasses rippling like water in the wind. Small wonder it’s so easy to take from them, blind as they are.
But even from Lowfield I can see the Night Tower, sticking up over the top of that sugar-sculpted city like a charred fingerbone. It sends a chill through my contempt. The Highfielders might be plump and pampered, but beneath those indolent smiles and weak chins they can hurt like the rest of us – like the best of us, if the rumors are true.
Re-Education, Rehabilitation, and Release - those are the letters wrought into the iron gates that ring the Night Tower. We can all guess what “re-education” means – we’ve heard its meaning in the screams that tear through the midnight sky above the tower. “Rehabilitation” is a mystery to me. As for “release,” well. Let’s just say that of the company I keep, a high percentage make their way into the Night Tower sooner or later, and I’ve never known a single one of them to be released. There are whispers, and more than whispers, that the words refer to a different kind of release. That I can believe.
And still I leave my little room every night after dark, to make my way to Highfield and the treasures that lie behind its polished walls.
The buildings in Lowfield are small and squat, hewn from rough mountain stone. Some say they’re nearly invisible against the mountain face. The city was built for protection, not prosperity, and it shows in every bullet-scarred wall. This is where humanity fled when their mutated creations rose up against them, where they made their miraculous last stand. The barricades still stand on the mountain road, tall and strong and bristling with razor wire and machine guns, keeping us safe from the creatures that roam the broken world below.
Highfield came later, when people began to think themselves too good for rock huts and cold mountain nights. Nothing would do but for them to live in smooth-walled palaces and take the air along immaculate gravel streets – nothing would do but the white city, perched against the edge of the mountain like a roosting dove. Of course, not everyone could belong to such a place. Only the best, the finest, the richest would do. And so one city became two, the high and the low, and many of the rejected turned to crime to survive.
As for me, thievery is my legacy. The family business, you could say. This is common enough in Lowfield. For every farmer scratching out a meager living between the rocks, for every goatherd or seamstress or leatherworker, there are at least two thieves. Of course, there are other options – there is always a need for soldiers and hunters, for one thing, to guard our walls and barricades or to search the world below for much-needed game. Then there is heavy labor and mining, for those who are sturdy enough for the strain and dull enough to bear it. But why risk death at the hands of monsters? Why drive oneself into an early grave by hauling rocks or swinging a pickaxe? No, thieving is the best choice, if you’ve got the head and the hands for it. Lucky for me, I have both.
If you don't - if you get caught - it's the Tower for you. The Tower, and who knows what else.
Just after nightfall, nearly every night, I make my way up to Highfield. I don’t use the road, of course – there isn’t any traffic after dark, by order of the high city, and obviously it wouldn’t do to be stopped by the guards at the gate. There is a little path through the trees on the ledge above the road, and I know it so well that I can travel it even in the darkest night without misplacing a single step. It's called "the Thieves' Walk," and it's been used for years by people for whom a quiet entry into Highfield is a necessity.
Where the Walk meets the walls of Highfield, the ground slopes upward sharply. The trees grow close to the marble here, masking the sharp ascent of the forest floor. Lowfielders made this, the hill of dirt that leads to the top of the wall, piling it up bit by bit until they could climb over. I can't imagine how long it took them, but I thank them silently every night as I slip up that incline.
From the point where the ground touches the wall, it's only a ten-foot climb up and over into Highfield. Easy enough to manage if you're small and agile. My fingers automatically find handholds and I scurry to the top, dropping over onto the convenient roof of a marble building on the other side.
Marble! Even if I threw myself down as hard as I could, they'd never hear me through that mass of rock. I'm down on the street in a twinkling, pressed into the cool shadows like I don't exist at all.
Some people will tell you that they have all kinds of daring adventures while thieving - that they spend every night running from the guards, dodging household attendants, and narrowly avoiding the Night Tower due only to their quick wits and quicker feet. This is ridiculous. Stealing from the Highfielders couldn't be simpler. Their houses are so big that you can slip through a window and wander through the halls for hours without seeing another soul, taking things at will. Of course, there are times when the best things require a little extra skill to obtain, but any good thief will tell you that often it isn't worth the risk. Why put your neck on the line for a jewel on a chain when a nice bit of silverware will fetch a handsome price - and will be quicker to sell, to boot?
Still, sometimes I can't help but try for something bigger than the usual haul of household goods. When the weather gets warmer, the temptation to do something dangerous gets stronger and stronger. So tonight, when the first breath of summer is tickling my nose with scents of rose from the Highfield gardens, I'm looking for something glittery to soothe the rushing of my blood.
The first house I come to is enormous - and occupied. I creep along the halls like a ghost, avoiding the household guards as easily as if they were blindfolded. Still, I don't enter the cavernous bedroom, where surely all the best jewels and precious keepsakes are kept. It feels too much like walking into a dead end, and I'm not sure even I can make a clean escape. The second house is the same.
It's the third when I hit the jackpot - it's obviously home to people with expensive tastes, if the rich velvet drapes and elaborate furniture are to be believed, but no one appears to be at home. At some dinner party, no doubt. That doesn't matter. All that matters is that only the barest collection of guards remains to watch the place, and all I have to do is find the gems and dash away into the night.
The bedroom lies at the end of a wide hall with elaborate carved walls - scenes of fantastic creatures cavorting through a stone forest. It unsettles me a little. Unicorns, griffins, manticores - are these so different from the mutations that drove us up into these mountains in the first place? You wouldn't see pictures like that on the walls in Lowfield, not when some of our hunters and soldiers never return from the world below, killed or maimed or eaten by creatures that someone, at some point, thought were "fantastic."
The room itself is so high-ceilinged that every sound seems to echo, from the minute rasp of my boots on the floor to the soft sighs of my breathing. More and more I regret doing this, but I've come too far to give up now. There's a monstrous wooden table with a mirror atop it - I look nervous and drawn in the glass. But I can see the beautiful silver box, and I can't turn away for the window just yet. I know, I just know, that inside that box, cushioned on red velvet, are enough gems and precious metals to feed me for months. So I reach out my fingers, run them gently across the lid, and open it with eager eyes.
The alarm shrieks through the room so loudly that I shriek myself, dropping the lid of the silver box like it's burned my fingers. I turn, but not fast enough - the door locks automatically with an echoing boom, and bars slam up from hidden niches in the windowsill. I run to the window anyway, my fingers desperately searching for a way out. There's nothing. I can hear footsteps ringing on the marble outside the door, and the muffled shouts of voices through the wail of the alarm.
"No," I whisper as the doors are flung open. "No," as the dart enters my neck. "No," as I fall to the floor, boneless and blind.
When I awake, I'm in a room that's perfectly white, and lit so brightly that I cry out and cover my eyes. It takes me a long time to get used to the light. When I am finally able to open my eyes again, I see that I'm lying on a table, strapped down by my wrists and ankles. I am naked, and my flesh crawls with goosebumps. The room is circular, and there are no windows.
"Good morning," a voice says conversationally. "Or should I say, good night. We do most of our work here at night."
The voice belongs to a terribly thin man with jutting facial bones and a thick shock of blonde hair. He is wearing a white coat, and spectacles that blaze in the bright lights.
"Where am I?" I ask weakly, my own voice trembling.
He smiles sympathetically. "You know where you are." He holds up a shining syringe. "I'm afraid this going to be very unpleasant for you. Hang in there - it isn't forever."
"Release," I whisper, horror-struck.
"That's right."
The needle stings as it enters my arm, and when he pushes the plunger a white-hot sensation streams through my veins. I cry out again, tears burning in my eyes. The room seems to move around me, the white light twisting into monsters and phantasms of terrible brightness.
"Did you really think you would never be caught?" The voice cuts through the visions and I cling to it, though his words terrify me almost as much as the things I am seeing - imagining? I don't know anymore.
"You people." The voice is disappointed now. "You can never stick to the little things. No - you must have gems and jewelry. What would you do with these? Make enough money to come up here yourself, become one of us? I'm afraid not. There is no place for you in Highfield. Well - not as you are, anyway."
The white light is fading, replaced by a gradual greying and then blackness. Shadows seem to leap out at me, creatures of an even deeper darkness. Creatures from the world below. Creatures men made, the unnatural mixtures of blood and flesh that rose up and destroyed them. A canine face with piggish red eyes in a giant, hulking body that bristles with hair and claws. A woman with lizard scales and slitted cat eyes that glow green and vicious. An enormous bird with two heads on sinuous snakelike necks, with teeth as sharp as a lion's in its curving beaks.
"Terrible, aren't they? And yet beautiful, in their own way. The people who made them undoubtedly had great dreams for them. But they didn't know what we know. They couldn't control what they had made."
I whimper on the table, twisting and turning to get away from the monsters. The voice laughs.
"That's what we do here, you see. We fix the mistakes of the past. It's all well and good to create beautiful things, but they need beautiful minds as well. Otherwise they are just... well, monsters."
I don't understand this, I can't make sense of it. All I know is that the creatures are all around me, growling and snapping and tearing at me. Pain lights up every nerve in my body. I feel as though even my bones are twisting inside me.
"We made some mistakes at first, of course. That's just how science works. But we're getting very close now, yes. It's all about controlling the mind. If you give a creature claws and teeth but don't control the mind, well, it's only a matter of time before those claws and teeth find you." Another laugh. "That won't happen here, not anymore."
I wrench up off the table, tearing through the straps at my wrists. I can see the man in the white coat looking up at me. But why should this matter to me? I'm in so much pain. The bones in my back are bending me forward, the muscles bunching atop my shoulders. I scream as the wings extend out of my shoulder blades; I scream and scream and scream.
"Shh," the man says softly. "It won't be long now, and I will set you free. Wouldn't you like that?"
I would. I would like that. To feel the night air against my skin, to soar above the valley below, seeking meat.
"You will protect us," the man says. "You will keep us safe. Those Lowfielders, with their walls and patrols - what use is that? You could fly over their walls. You could destroy their patrols."
I could, I know it. Long claws have replaced my fingers, muscles wrap around my bones in a thick mass. And the wings...
I want to protect. I want to serve. I want to fly.
"Soon," the man promises, and his voice is sweet as the night wind. "Soon I will release you."
I’m not from Highfield myself. I live down the mountain in Lowfield, closer to the valley floor. In Lowfield, you can still look out and see the rusting tanks below, the tattered remnants of flags, and the occasional pale glint of sun on bone. In Highfield all you see are bright swathes of wildflowers and long grasses rippling like water in the wind. Small wonder it’s so easy to take from them, blind as they are.
But even from Lowfield I can see the Night Tower, sticking up over the top of that sugar-sculpted city like a charred fingerbone. It sends a chill through my contempt. The Highfielders might be plump and pampered, but beneath those indolent smiles and weak chins they can hurt like the rest of us – like the best of us, if the rumors are true.
Re-Education, Rehabilitation, and Release - those are the letters wrought into the iron gates that ring the Night Tower. We can all guess what “re-education” means – we’ve heard its meaning in the screams that tear through the midnight sky above the tower. “Rehabilitation” is a mystery to me. As for “release,” well. Let’s just say that of the company I keep, a high percentage make their way into the Night Tower sooner or later, and I’ve never known a single one of them to be released. There are whispers, and more than whispers, that the words refer to a different kind of release. That I can believe.
And still I leave my little room every night after dark, to make my way to Highfield and the treasures that lie behind its polished walls.
The buildings in Lowfield are small and squat, hewn from rough mountain stone. Some say they’re nearly invisible against the mountain face. The city was built for protection, not prosperity, and it shows in every bullet-scarred wall. This is where humanity fled when their mutated creations rose up against them, where they made their miraculous last stand. The barricades still stand on the mountain road, tall and strong and bristling with razor wire and machine guns, keeping us safe from the creatures that roam the broken world below.
Highfield came later, when people began to think themselves too good for rock huts and cold mountain nights. Nothing would do but for them to live in smooth-walled palaces and take the air along immaculate gravel streets – nothing would do but the white city, perched against the edge of the mountain like a roosting dove. Of course, not everyone could belong to such a place. Only the best, the finest, the richest would do. And so one city became two, the high and the low, and many of the rejected turned to crime to survive.
As for me, thievery is my legacy. The family business, you could say. This is common enough in Lowfield. For every farmer scratching out a meager living between the rocks, for every goatherd or seamstress or leatherworker, there are at least two thieves. Of course, there are other options – there is always a need for soldiers and hunters, for one thing, to guard our walls and barricades or to search the world below for much-needed game. Then there is heavy labor and mining, for those who are sturdy enough for the strain and dull enough to bear it. But why risk death at the hands of monsters? Why drive oneself into an early grave by hauling rocks or swinging a pickaxe? No, thieving is the best choice, if you’ve got the head and the hands for it. Lucky for me, I have both.
If you don't - if you get caught - it's the Tower for you. The Tower, and who knows what else.
Just after nightfall, nearly every night, I make my way up to Highfield. I don’t use the road, of course – there isn’t any traffic after dark, by order of the high city, and obviously it wouldn’t do to be stopped by the guards at the gate. There is a little path through the trees on the ledge above the road, and I know it so well that I can travel it even in the darkest night without misplacing a single step. It's called "the Thieves' Walk," and it's been used for years by people for whom a quiet entry into Highfield is a necessity.
Where the Walk meets the walls of Highfield, the ground slopes upward sharply. The trees grow close to the marble here, masking the sharp ascent of the forest floor. Lowfielders made this, the hill of dirt that leads to the top of the wall, piling it up bit by bit until they could climb over. I can't imagine how long it took them, but I thank them silently every night as I slip up that incline.
From the point where the ground touches the wall, it's only a ten-foot climb up and over into Highfield. Easy enough to manage if you're small and agile. My fingers automatically find handholds and I scurry to the top, dropping over onto the convenient roof of a marble building on the other side.
Marble! Even if I threw myself down as hard as I could, they'd never hear me through that mass of rock. I'm down on the street in a twinkling, pressed into the cool shadows like I don't exist at all.
Some people will tell you that they have all kinds of daring adventures while thieving - that they spend every night running from the guards, dodging household attendants, and narrowly avoiding the Night Tower due only to their quick wits and quicker feet. This is ridiculous. Stealing from the Highfielders couldn't be simpler. Their houses are so big that you can slip through a window and wander through the halls for hours without seeing another soul, taking things at will. Of course, there are times when the best things require a little extra skill to obtain, but any good thief will tell you that often it isn't worth the risk. Why put your neck on the line for a jewel on a chain when a nice bit of silverware will fetch a handsome price - and will be quicker to sell, to boot?
Still, sometimes I can't help but try for something bigger than the usual haul of household goods. When the weather gets warmer, the temptation to do something dangerous gets stronger and stronger. So tonight, when the first breath of summer is tickling my nose with scents of rose from the Highfield gardens, I'm looking for something glittery to soothe the rushing of my blood.
The first house I come to is enormous - and occupied. I creep along the halls like a ghost, avoiding the household guards as easily as if they were blindfolded. Still, I don't enter the cavernous bedroom, where surely all the best jewels and precious keepsakes are kept. It feels too much like walking into a dead end, and I'm not sure even I can make a clean escape. The second house is the same.
It's the third when I hit the jackpot - it's obviously home to people with expensive tastes, if the rich velvet drapes and elaborate furniture are to be believed, but no one appears to be at home. At some dinner party, no doubt. That doesn't matter. All that matters is that only the barest collection of guards remains to watch the place, and all I have to do is find the gems and dash away into the night.
The bedroom lies at the end of a wide hall with elaborate carved walls - scenes of fantastic creatures cavorting through a stone forest. It unsettles me a little. Unicorns, griffins, manticores - are these so different from the mutations that drove us up into these mountains in the first place? You wouldn't see pictures like that on the walls in Lowfield, not when some of our hunters and soldiers never return from the world below, killed or maimed or eaten by creatures that someone, at some point, thought were "fantastic."
The room itself is so high-ceilinged that every sound seems to echo, from the minute rasp of my boots on the floor to the soft sighs of my breathing. More and more I regret doing this, but I've come too far to give up now. There's a monstrous wooden table with a mirror atop it - I look nervous and drawn in the glass. But I can see the beautiful silver box, and I can't turn away for the window just yet. I know, I just know, that inside that box, cushioned on red velvet, are enough gems and precious metals to feed me for months. So I reach out my fingers, run them gently across the lid, and open it with eager eyes.
The alarm shrieks through the room so loudly that I shriek myself, dropping the lid of the silver box like it's burned my fingers. I turn, but not fast enough - the door locks automatically with an echoing boom, and bars slam up from hidden niches in the windowsill. I run to the window anyway, my fingers desperately searching for a way out. There's nothing. I can hear footsteps ringing on the marble outside the door, and the muffled shouts of voices through the wail of the alarm.
"No," I whisper as the doors are flung open. "No," as the dart enters my neck. "No," as I fall to the floor, boneless and blind.
When I awake, I'm in a room that's perfectly white, and lit so brightly that I cry out and cover my eyes. It takes me a long time to get used to the light. When I am finally able to open my eyes again, I see that I'm lying on a table, strapped down by my wrists and ankles. I am naked, and my flesh crawls with goosebumps. The room is circular, and there are no windows.
"Good morning," a voice says conversationally. "Or should I say, good night. We do most of our work here at night."
The voice belongs to a terribly thin man with jutting facial bones and a thick shock of blonde hair. He is wearing a white coat, and spectacles that blaze in the bright lights.
"Where am I?" I ask weakly, my own voice trembling.
He smiles sympathetically. "You know where you are." He holds up a shining syringe. "I'm afraid this going to be very unpleasant for you. Hang in there - it isn't forever."
"Release," I whisper, horror-struck.
"That's right."
The needle stings as it enters my arm, and when he pushes the plunger a white-hot sensation streams through my veins. I cry out again, tears burning in my eyes. The room seems to move around me, the white light twisting into monsters and phantasms of terrible brightness.
"Did you really think you would never be caught?" The voice cuts through the visions and I cling to it, though his words terrify me almost as much as the things I am seeing - imagining? I don't know anymore.
"You people." The voice is disappointed now. "You can never stick to the little things. No - you must have gems and jewelry. What would you do with these? Make enough money to come up here yourself, become one of us? I'm afraid not. There is no place for you in Highfield. Well - not as you are, anyway."
The white light is fading, replaced by a gradual greying and then blackness. Shadows seem to leap out at me, creatures of an even deeper darkness. Creatures from the world below. Creatures men made, the unnatural mixtures of blood and flesh that rose up and destroyed them. A canine face with piggish red eyes in a giant, hulking body that bristles with hair and claws. A woman with lizard scales and slitted cat eyes that glow green and vicious. An enormous bird with two heads on sinuous snakelike necks, with teeth as sharp as a lion's in its curving beaks.
"Terrible, aren't they? And yet beautiful, in their own way. The people who made them undoubtedly had great dreams for them. But they didn't know what we know. They couldn't control what they had made."
I whimper on the table, twisting and turning to get away from the monsters. The voice laughs.
"That's what we do here, you see. We fix the mistakes of the past. It's all well and good to create beautiful things, but they need beautiful minds as well. Otherwise they are just... well, monsters."
I don't understand this, I can't make sense of it. All I know is that the creatures are all around me, growling and snapping and tearing at me. Pain lights up every nerve in my body. I feel as though even my bones are twisting inside me.
"We made some mistakes at first, of course. That's just how science works. But we're getting very close now, yes. It's all about controlling the mind. If you give a creature claws and teeth but don't control the mind, well, it's only a matter of time before those claws and teeth find you." Another laugh. "That won't happen here, not anymore."
I wrench up off the table, tearing through the straps at my wrists. I can see the man in the white coat looking up at me. But why should this matter to me? I'm in so much pain. The bones in my back are bending me forward, the muscles bunching atop my shoulders. I scream as the wings extend out of my shoulder blades; I scream and scream and scream.
"Shh," the man says softly. "It won't be long now, and I will set you free. Wouldn't you like that?"
I would. I would like that. To feel the night air against my skin, to soar above the valley below, seeking meat.
"You will protect us," the man says. "You will keep us safe. Those Lowfielders, with their walls and patrols - what use is that? You could fly over their walls. You could destroy their patrols."
I could, I know it. Long claws have replaced my fingers, muscles wrap around my bones in a thick mass. And the wings...
I want to protect. I want to serve. I want to fly.
"Soon," the man promises, and his voice is sweet as the night wind. "Soon I will release you."
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Your language in this is SO gorgeous.
I love the tale, but especially the ending. I could see all the creatures in my mind. And the way the body begins to change, and the character begins to agree with what the man is saying is chillingly well done.
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Great imagery here.
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Thank you!
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