Chapter 2: Chapter 1: The scholar and the handmaidens

The scholar walked with a woman wrapped in blue, and veiled in blue, and tattooed in blue on the snow-white scales of her tail.

"I'm sorry, what is your name?" he asked. "Your mistress did not say."

"She has eaten our names," the handmaiden said. "Inside her they shall stay."

In darkened halls of lightless fire, blue and fierce and searing, the scholar pondered on the deep and dismal ways of the eaten ones. For they were handmaidens now, and handmaidens only, and inside each the will of their mistress overshadowed all vestige called "I." Sometimes on his wanderings they passed him by without a word or a glance.

So dwelt the handmaidens in Machrae Diir: passing beneath razor archways at the end of labyrinths where tentacular heaps squelched and sprawled. They dragged transparent tubes, filled with glowing matter like blue liquid fire, across balconies marching at irregular angles up the sides of towers like immense blades. They carried curlicues of blue flesh studded by silver metalloids, bronze nodules, eerie wire-arrays. Engines of alien design, for alien purposes, and relics of alien realms that they placed on plinths raised from the reshaped exoskeletal spines of uncanny and alien horrors.

If the scholar spoke, the handmaidens halted and answered.

Forever swift yet endlessly placid: thus they walked. Not in the spirit of living things nor dead, but like oil that billows and skims on the salt-wave's crest. Most went veiled, though some wore masks or helms of shining sharp-shaped silver. Each was happy to speak of their mistress, but never of themselves. And if he pushed too harshly they shivered and hugged themselves and always rebuked him with the same words:

"The mistress did not call us. We come because we desire. We submit because we desire. She rewards us with her colors and the echoes of her form. She rewards us with the dream. We beg you, leech not from us her dream of peace."

Then they would say no more.

In time the scholar gathered his chalks and inscribed upon a black-steel floor the runes of retreat to his universe and his home. There he meant to write an account of dread, of warning, of pleas for the plight of the handmaidens enthralled by the lady of Machrae Diir.

Not a word could he scribe before his pen broke. The parchment tore. Chance visitors. Small sounds.

A sourceless clinging terror that wrote its name upon his flesh in frigid, trickling sweat.

So the scholar strove simply to write what he had seen, and he was permitted to finish his work. He wrote of transformed handmaidens who flowed forever toward errands unknown or unknowable in the infernal halls of Machrae Diir.

Even so, mortals read the same terror into his words that he felt when he walked the lambent halls. They stirred themselves to anger at the demon's malice. Pitchforks clashed, priests beseeched the gods, old soldiers pried forgotten gambesons and tarnished arming-swords from dusty chests to arm their wrathful sons. Torches caught fire, and voices hoarse with rage swore justice upon the fell outsider.

They stormed the scholar's quarters. They stole the runes of realm-bridging to invade the lady's sanctum. With ten mages of great might to lead them, they etched a great circle on a day of grey skies, anchored by obsidian monoliths alight with blazing orange runes.

They vanished.

The scholar grew wiser. He traveled to places nearer and more known, discoveries more attuned to the song of himself. He passed in old age, content.

Still, every now and again in the realm of his birth, a yearning soul reads his words of the lady. And still, they seek her dream.

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