that witch house...

“ So, what exactly are we looking for out here? No one has really explained what happened to this place to me beside the way it flooded. ”

Artemy’s hands are tucked against his sides when a cold wind threatens to blow him and Peter over. It isn’t raining anymore by now, which is a blessing, but it’s still dreadfully cold even in his heavy fur coat. Peter looks warm in the heavy quilted jacket he tended to wear, but at the same time, Peter always looked cold.

“ You said you think it’s where that woman went. I’m inclined to agree, since it’s one of the few…unwatched places in town, but still. It’s been fenced off for ages. Do you really think there’s that much interest in it? ”

It’s a fairly simple walk to the Stone Yard, besides the cold, and yet crossing over the bridge makes Artemy…uneasy in ways he can’t really put a word to, pausing at the middle of the bridge.

"Something. Maybe.”

The cold returned and crumpled the townsfolk into dull colored shapes. He was one such shape, holding the lining of his jacket a bit closer to his chest while the cold fog lingered, shallow against his ankles. The great hole in the ground was yawning central to the Stone Yard. Sometimes, when the twyrine would seep into the wrinkles of his brain like bricking cement, he could hear this nest of asps whispering about transcendental things. 

Peter ducked his head further into the heavy collar of his coat.

“The pit’s bottom digs into the ocean... The building fell atop melting erotic figures of glass into the mouth of some primordial thing.”

The fence in question was old industrial wiring. Kids had been tying bows into it and hanging crumpled notes from it. Some parts of it were already caved in and snow ditches dug under it. No one had fallen in, it seemed. Yet, but... how could anyone tell. 

“Looking at it now is simply to offer perspective. Perhaps, seeing nothing is what would be the favorable outcome.”

He sniffs in the cold, tapping at the edge of one of the wire barbs poking out from between the fence latticework. It cut into his finger with a prick and a bead of bright red blood.

There’s too much movement for him to keep track of everything when his ears are still ringing from a shriek that sounds like Nina in the bowels of Hell itself. Their mother is suddenly gone from his side, leaving him to wobble and fall into Peter, to press his face into his brother’s shoulder and mutter soft apologies about blood on his robe.

He feels around the sides of his neck, where the ribbon sat, and there are two long lines on either side that burn, like the drag of a blade with none of the blood. He coughs a little, clears his throat, and feels his head spin again.

Nina’s shrieking disappears behind the cackling once his ears stop ringing and he hears Peter’s voice calling his name. Andrey, Andrey, Andrey.

“ I’m here, I’m – I hear you. ”

He says it quietly, letting Peter’s hands pat over him as he gathers himself. The headache that remains now is none of the twinging pain, but the aftermath of having his head smashed into a wall.

“ That’s what Aspity meant when she said she couldn’t take it off gently. Fuck me running, my head hurts. ”

He presses both hands to his face as the ribbon puddle into blood that stains the flooring at their feet. When it melts away, their mother comes slinking into the room to curl around them again.

“ Yeah, it’s – it’s that bitch all over again. ” He pulls his hands away from his face, steadying himself. “ She’s fractured, but she’s around. No heiress to cling herself to, and she could never get her claws into you. ”

There are lines on his brother’s neck that he feels real sympathetic pain for. He’s not sure whatever bloodborne inheritance they have will heal those types of wounds. There’s an effort though to put both hands on them to stop them bleeding, one on each side with enough concentration put in the gesture to not accidentally wring his neck.

He’s not sure what to say at first while Andrey reconstitutes himself, and knows even less what to say when their mother’s bark-like skin starts steaming and fading into wisps of mist, when she attends to the both of them with the brooding behavior of a hen. 

The transformation is the second thing that paralyzes him in place. Their strange, ancient creature fades into haunting fog that lingers and then fades. In its place is a thin, reedy woman with a hood over her head and draped in a ragged dress. 

She has their eyes, their facial features, and dark hair that peaks out of her cowl and looks permanently wet. She’s old and gently wrinkled up. Her hair is wispy and she’s still markedly elegant.

“Grace, are you alright?” he calls, as an afterthought. There’s just the response of her humming and her concentration. Their mother scoops up Andrey’s hand and tugs on it gently. 

We’re going. Come.

And Peter pulls his bloody hands back to himself to balk and process so much, so quickly. It’s processing but also 

“What should...”

She holds out a hand to rub his head.

“Stay and watch her.”

“Okay...”

He’s small and angled and feral, with horns and sharp lines to his features, and the ribbon looks like tying a ribbon onto a hound that was foaming at the mouth. Getting her fingers under it feel the ribbon for what it is – the ribbon feels slick and warm under her hands, like blood.

The scratches look like someone was dragging their nails against him again and again and again, digging deeper each time. The ribbon is pliable under her hand, and when she inflicts her will upon it, the entire thing trembles.

There’s a sharp, sick tearing noise that comes with it, tearing lines along his neck and shoulder. In the waking world, Andrey flinches – whole body flinches – and makes a noise of pain. There’s blood staining his nose and a line that drips from his left ear at the same time.

“ Fuck. Fuck! ”

The ribbon shreds under the touch and the room darkens for a fraction of a second when a shape spills between them, a dark gown and red hair like a banshee of old lore.

Nina Kaina hisses, snarling like a wounded animal, and bolts immediately – her connection severed from the Stamatin brother she had made her toy for so long. She’s out of her element here, unwilling to go toe to toe with the woman who had pulled her out of her ethereal hiding place.

It, unfortunately, looks like a scene from Peter’s paintings, burning red color, shadow, blood blasting into existence like a nightmare. It’s a spike of fear that paralyzes Peter to the ground and he feels his soul slip from him, ice cold. He’s rooted in place when it happens, in abject horror. His mother is not.

She snaps into quickness, flying on all fours into the shadows of the Loft and cutting daylight. It’s accompanied by the shrillest, whistling cackling and myriad of voices. 

And it’s then he finds his feet and grabs Andrey around the shoulders and pulls him back into the folds of his robe to do something while their mother all but vanishes. Her laugh sounds like Andrey after a bloodbath, cold, maniacal, and vicious.

“Andrey, Andrey. Andrey, look this way. This way.”

The ribbon collar is a slump of disgusting red on the ground like a severed limb. It makes him nauseous to even behind it.

“Andrey-?”

There’s still reedy cackling on the air, until it fades. He hears the door open, close, and heavy long footsteps up the stairs. Their mother’s like liquid filling in visual space, slithering towards them, quiet murmurings to herself and curses that mimic their voices.

She goes still and silent like Aspity did, and he holds his breath for a bare moment. Peter checks him over, tugs at his arm and turns his head.

There’s nothing physically on him. The remnant of a good evening with Grief and the stain of blood around his nose from bleeding earlier, and that’s it. He looks well, except for the profound exhaustion he carries.

To their mother, it’s exactly like looking through their witch eyes. His turns curl up, away from his brow, and his eyes glow – and her eyes pick out easily what’s bothering him: the red, red ribbon tied in a pretty bow around his throat, and the multitude of tiny scratches that cover his entire body, like the trailing of pointed nails over his skin.

Whatever shade has caused them is no where in sight for the time being, but the marks definitely linger.

“ You don’t have to go to the bar. I can ask Swan to bounce for me tonight. Going home is…a good idea, honestly. I’m exhausted. ”

He nods slowly when he says it, before he arches his brows.

“ Gray knows where to find me any time I’m not home. But – yeah. Yeah, I’ll go home. ”

She doesn’t look the same, an abject nightmare of a creature in the conjunction that is far, far bigger than what it appears to be. It has four arms, not two, reaching all four down to her son. It’s another child she had failed, she supposes. Too human a child. Her children were all too human or too monstrous without much balance between the two. Those claws of hers gently sink under the ribbon around his neck, lifting it and guiding the creature’s horrific face, a mass of moldable features and fractured expressions closer to inspect this odd magic.

It’s the magic of a new age thing, with the ego of the new age. It smells the same as the violent destruction of the boys’ home for mining operations. It smells like poison water and imbalance. And then she sees the scratches. It’s certainly a curse. A leeching curse tied to the item that has him in a choke hold. 

There’s frustration in finding how delicate the removal was. All of these scratches were like threads punched into him. Magic like this was consistently cast and applied. She knows. She’s done it in the past. Distant memories of her own conception came to her, a ritual and catastrophic apex of power that settled kindly when the powers of kingdoms fell and lost their appeal.

However. This is her son.

And it’s frustrating. Her children could not protect themselves, and she could not protect her children.

Or. She didn’t have the ability to, before. This magic is strong, but she is angry. 

And her will is a long held grudge against such sad situations. They’ve had seven other siblings before this, all dead and all brilliant. Four sisters, three brothers. 

They both ended up enrolled in dancing at a boarding school that they ended up kicked out of because Andrey had come into his violence early – but the dancing lessons had been a good time for them both. Andrey relished in the precise, delicate control of his body – it’s why he was such a brutal fighter now.

He’d like to go back to dancing again eventually. Maybe show Grief or Daniil what he remembers.

“ You can give me a look if you want. I’m – staying at the Heart tonight, probably. I don’t know yet. ”

He shrugs a little bit, rubbing at the back of his neck – and then his mother opens her palm to him and he shuffles closer, holding his hand out to her in turn.

“ Both of you can take a look. I won’t be too bothered by it. I just don’t know if you’ll see anything. ”

He’s interested in what his mother would see. If Sahba could see who was clinging to him, maybe she could too.

“ I’ll go see Artemy – later. ”

She takes his hand and holds it, giving him a thorough look up and down with those strange eyes before both eyes shut and she simply... ceases to move. She looks like a fixture of wooden refuse after a hurricane. If he had not known that she was a being, Peter... wouldn’t have even looked twice. He does look twice.

She still doesn’t move. She doesn’t move in the slightest and Peter looks at Andrey and checks his pupils for dilation, his arms for needles and cuts. He checks him physically for markers of a curse. It’s just Filin, he thinks. Filin, and maybe Daniil, both curse bearers, of course. He can’t find anything physical, prodding and observing him. 

“I don’t know. Perhaps you should stay with your children tonight. Your girl spends many days without you. Or see Burakh and go home. I could be you tonight and guard the Heart for you. You don’t look well.”

He pauses when she looks over and he arches his brows at the sight of the bride. She hadn’t been there when he passed by earlier, but she’s dancing by the bone stake now – and her dancing is beautiful, he admits.

“ Sahba said I should go see Artemy. He can cut whatever Lines need to be cut or…something like that. ”

He watches the dancing and lets himself think back to dancing around the fire pit with Peter as children, dragging him by his hands in wild circles. It’s a good memory, one of the few that remains of their childhood, and he rubs his face a bit when Peter asks again.

“ She said…I’m cursed with something. No, it’s not him. He’s finally left us alone. But it’s – a different mess. One that doesn’t seem to be bothering you. ”

He reaches to catch Peter’s arm, to speak while their mother is watching the dancing outside.

“ You swear you haven’t had any strange dreams? Nothing stranger than usual? ”

He feels that twinge behind his eyes again, enough to make him grunt, before he sighs.

“ It’s why I’ve been having headaches. Nosebleeds. That situation. ”

They think of the same thing. He can feel his brother’s thoughts creeping into his own. Those long summer nights around a fire pit with no understanding of what was happening, but also no care to understand. Their mother educated them on the shapes of flames and the power of their feet. And then they danced in clinically square spaces under the tutelage of an older swan-necked woman, and learned to translate the wildness to faux elegance. Andrey was much better at it. 

“Whatever Lines to be cut... Yes, please see him. I like him. I want to draw his hands-...”

He drifts off until Andrey tugs on his arm and asks about strange dreams.

“Hm... no... Brother, if you are cursed...”

Andrey grunts and Peter loses the train of thought to a little bit of alarm.

“Should I look at you? Or... Where are you going? Do you need help?”

Their mother watches the dancing, and watches them from the corner of her eyes. She opens one of her palms to Andrey.

“ Only fighting with people, not creatures this time. ”

He rolls his eyes when Peter starts on about being cursed and about being checked for curses, and there’s no small amount of amusement in the snort Andrey gives when Peter is hauled up and set into the bathtub like an unruly child.

“ Thrice-cursed? How’d you manage that? ”

He has been sketching. The theatre performers marked by perpetual surprise, and the shapes tearing each other apart…ugh. That makes his skin crawl a little. He can perfectly imagine it in color, black morphing into terrible fleshtones.

“ Be careful with going up high. We already built our staircases all over the place – where would we place a new one? ”

He doesn’t stop his mother from slinking closer to him, reaching to rest a hand on her forearm and turning his attention away from Peter to look at the shape she offers him.

It’s…close. The hunch of his shoulders, the hard-set jaw and irritated expression (that wasn’t actually irritation, but simply how he looked.) The bull horns make him laugh.

“ Yeah, just about. He doesn’t normally have horns. You can see his house from here. That…lot, the one with the bone in it, that’s right behind his house. Where you met with us? ”

He tilts his head in the direction of the Burakh household.

“ Good friend of Peter’s. ”

She looks where he’s pointing, a slow motion, and then there’s a noise of surprise from her that is altogether too human and strange and it makes Peter jump. Their mother looks out the window. There’s a Bride dancing over the ice and snow alone around the Bone Stake. It was as if winter never came with her lovely movements. She imitated the movements of the river, the slow rotations and breakings of the Earth, the fire that burned low around the Bone Stake. It’s a mourning dance but it’s a dance of renewal too.

“Ah!”

She fidgets like Andrey now, quick and suddenly seems not so old. There’s a spark in those brilliant green eyes when she watches the dancing.

“What did Sahba say?” she asks him, first, “Look. Sister dances and calls.”

The magic light disappears, and Peter creeps back out of the bathtub to move under their willow of a mother to get a glimpse of what she is talking about. The memories of them dancing together are... hazy. But he remembers them. He remembers dancing around a fire with her- not like a Bride, but like wild fires and disasters. All sharp and aggressive.

“What... did Sahba say?” Peter echoes, more quietly now. There’s a focus in there that is concerned already. He’s walking around with a charm like Grace and Farkhad had been the last monstrosity that had caused it.

“ Terribly depressed, but on your feet again. That’s an improvement. ”

Capturing omens in stone. Ah, so Peter was making art like that again. He’s not entirely surprised, because any time inspiration comes back to Peter, he paints or carves or sketches omens.

It had been an omen that led them to finding Farkhad, after all.

“ Have you painted anything…recently? Like you used to? ”

He mutters it quietly, though he’s kept from following Peter about the room by his mother’s hands on his shoulders. Her hands follow the wide sprawl of the Pest scar mantle he bore, her palms river-cool against his shoulders.

“ Yeah, I just left from Sahba’s place, actually. Again, had a rough night, Grief suggested I talk to her about it. ”

He’s not being entirely truthful, he knows. He doesn’t want to worry Peter, especially not when it concerns Nina.

Tap-tap-tap. His mother is still prodding at him, and his head still hurts. It’s lessened since he left Aspity’s hospice, but the throb of it remains.

“ She gave me this to help out. Says it’s supposed to bring good luck or somethin’. I don’t know. ”

"It is... And you’re unwell. How the pendulum swings. What happened? Did you fight some other creatures again?”

He kind of looks like he did. He looks like he was once again mauled, but in a more agreeable way. Of course, he was with Filin, how could it not be agreeable? He crouches to look up into Andrey’s eyes for a moment, studying them and their bloodshot whites. 

“Sahba hands those charms to those who are cursed. Ah... damn. It’s true! The bell tolled for the cursed! See! It tolled every time that you or I entered! Not for Burakh! I knew that it was not that simple. Oh, let Mama check you for curses too... I am now clean of curses- I did not know I had been thrice cursed! That bell, brother! It howled!”

Mama takes one hand and wraps the entirety around her yelling child’s body, slowly lifting him while he yelped, and clung to her palm.

“Yes- I’ve drawn! Drawn, not painted. No, the colors haven’t come to me yet-”

He’s carefully deposited on the pile of comfortable pillows he’d relocated into the bathtub. He scrambles up to point at the lines of sketches along his walls. Some are of those masked theatre fellows, and some are shapes cannibalising other shapes and shredding them.

“You see- I’ve thought about space.”

As he always does.

“I wish to build a staircase atop a staircase. I am too close, I think, to these notions of flesh and organs below the surface. Everything is moving inside. It feels like... Like there are parasites. It’s nauseating.”

Their mother slowly slithers down to crouch and offer her deepset, gaunt eyes down to Andrey. She offers the empty hand and light congeals in it to form a hunched man with a serious face and bull horns.

“ You’re carving again? You really are feeling better. ”

He says it with an absolute incredulous tone, even as their mother pulls him in against her side. She’s plucking at him, and he squints one eye closed at the flick of a tongue, his hands pushed into his pockets.

His knuckles brush the charm he’d been given by Aspity, which just makes him consider the situation at hand.

“ I had a rough night. What about you? Same as usual? ”

It’s more to Peter than their mother. He’s not sure she even sleeps, let alone sleeps enough to have a difference between good nights and rough nights.

“ What’re you even considering? You haven’t touched your carving tools in years…fuck, I need to get the ones from the Crucible. Khan said you could have the Judge’s old stuff. ”

He swears softly, raising one hand to rest on his mother’s arm as he shuffles a bit closer to peer over Peter’s shoulder – and to just check his brother over in general.

“I’m terribly depressed, but I am me.”

He’s tired, but he’s always tired. His eyes are clear, intense, and wandering over the little things in the place that happened to capture his attention. The weaving of a particularly interesting shoelace had caught his attention, and he had been struck with a strange punch of inspiration in the form of textiles. Of course he could render flesh and hair in marble- liquid was still a challenge, and so were fibers.

“-- Hmmm. I want to imbue this with the texture of stretched fibers. Make minute details again in painstaking marks. It will take hours, but the referential nature of it will be quite interesting. And then... then the bottom portion will be referential in the more complex way. A foreshortened metaphor. Capturing omens in stone, I think. Fair or foul.”

Their mother puts both huge sets of spidery palms and long fingers on Andrey’s shoulders and croons like a mourning dove, one needle finger tapping the clay of the charm. She’s been interested in the things Peter has brought from Aspity. She’s been interested in the charm he personally has. 

She’s fawned over these things when she moves, and it is not often. Peter watches her fingers move.

“Oh. You’ve... seen Sahba! At last he does. See, I thought you should for a long time. You speak with her often enough.”

“Sahba, a ƿiċċe,” like an old oak tree talking.

Peter tilts his head, curious now. Grace is home now, chipping away at the stone and thinking. She had brought him the most fantastic piece for this sculpture, a fang he would use as a toll to accomplish what he set out to do.

Go see Artemy, says Sahba. Get your shit checked out by Artemy, says Grief.

He will. He’ll go see Artemy…but in the moment, in the early afternoon with the smell of blood still stuck to the inside of his nose, he wanders straight past the Burakh household up towards Peter’s Loft.

The bell has been taken down, which makes him laugh, and he ascends the stairs two at a time to announce his presence with the thump of his boots.

“ Peter! Are you here? ”

It’s shouted at the top of the stairs before he ducks into the room and speaks quieter to address the spindly woman who still watched over the main space of the Loft.

“ Hi, Mama. ”

Thump, thump, thump.

"Andrey?”

He’s taken the studio space and cleared it for the block of neolithic rock that had been found and brought to him by a friend he had met at dear Yelena’s. A kinsman from out of town. He’d taken a fancy to the fellow, who happened to be a friend of the Pochard. The popular opinion was that there were quite a few curses on him that the bell could sense. Mama had checked him after he mentioned it, several times over like she was looking for deer ticks. 

He, surprisingly, trusted her without issue, and she combed his hair out with a very, very harsh comb, and dragged it back into a tight braided bun for him. No hair in his eyes, it seemed to improve his clarity. The robe on his back seemed to also give him enough inspiration to set the bust sized piece of material in his room to consider the contents of. He had given Grace a smaller block of the stone to do with what she would, and some basic tools to consider her own possible creation.

“Yes. I am considering something.”

Their long creature of a mother that hardly moved seemed to come to life like a harvestman spider, one long leg over the other with creaking limbs to creep to him and slip the old rags she wore over him like a blanket on a cold cat. Peter unfolds too, standing to have his robe slide over all the pigments and tools when he walked.

“Are you sick or something? Why do you look so green?”