patron saint of the wholly unserious

Welcome to... I've been writing about The Baron. :)

So many nights now, he's tried not to sleep. Better that he doesn't, isn't it? All Marisportum is tossing and turning, not one fuck given to the hour—if he slips under, the whole place might wake belly-up. But he does. He slips. Falls, fast and flailing, into sleep—nightmares of a dark he can't name, a mirror with no face inside, a doom he can feel but can't place. Not anywhere but inside his skin, and that's why it's crawling the second his eyes snap open. There's a name on his tongue. He isn't sure how it, of all things, found him on the edge of that dream, when in the throes of it, no matter how hard he looked, she was nowhere near. He swallows it down. Someone's breathing within earshot. Far too close. He blinks, pries apart his crusted warp-be-damned eyelids, under some fucker's harsh light. Another tide's rising, the groxfucker says. We're all going to drown. He bolts up. Doesn't remember what he asks: only that his throat burns like he's swallowed seawater. That the cage of his chest is small, too small, even though no wound's there to shorten his breath anymore. The whelp sputters something about a fallen tomb, about saints and holy fire; something that makes the Throne-forsaken Confessor's face swim behind his eyes, makes him snarl and spit and reach for lho to calm his racing pulse. Then the name comes loose. The best he can do is try to wrangle it, somehow, as it falls from his lips. Frame it like some question, some meaningless curiosity, rather than a plea. "Phiosa?"