Soft Museum

One huge hand curled around the long cypress haft of a wooden mallet, the absurd striking head of which was as broad and bulging as a cask of wine. Roaring in anger, she dug a heel into the sand and whirled fiercely in an arc, striking one agent lethally in the chest- the audacious display having stunned him out of offense alone. The other agent was a sterner creature, and was quick to drive their blade up into the monstrous burgundy’s armpit as she whirled about, taking the strength out of her swing and leaving one lung slack and flat, too ruined to draw air. She staggered and swayed and made herself as dangerous as she could- but it was not enough. Momentum dropped her to one knee, then the other- and as the agent bound her arms and legs with rope and hauled her away face-down in bloody disgrace, the village was spared the Empire’s violence for another day.

Her name was ANGOHADA KOROSUSU, the Empire determined as she lay wheezing and scabbing in a damp, lightless cell. Imperial record clearly stated that she had been assigned to dispose of the dead more than six sweeps prior, during a border “conflict” along the edge of the greater northwestern coniferous territory. Imperial troops had successfully subdued or culled more than fourteen thousand seditious tree-dwelling “free trolls” who had somehow developed the audacity to stake a claim for their own ignorant little nation- an offense this Empire would not brook.

They had assumed she would remain there processing bodies long after the fighting was done, but apparently she had taken flight to the coast as soon as the bulk of the overseeing officers had returned to the imperial core. An eager traitor, then. Not an ounce of loyalty in this burgundy heap of wasted brawn.

She was dead when they came to retrieve her for trial and execution. Her corpse sat stiff and cross-legged in the back of her cell, naked to the waist, her entire left side painted with that galling shade of red-brown that shamed her from birth. They gave the order for a much more provably loyal tender of corpses to dispose of her, and washed their hands of the matter.

Less than a full day later, her living spirit- a strange and resilient thing, a uniquely mighty ghost- returned to her ruined body and sat it up. The killing blow would scar over in time, but for now she wrapped it in scraps of her own sleeves- and likewise her lung struggled to inflate, but it would again. She grew warm and vital and quietly groaned as she lurched up out of a corpse wagon and tossed herself into a ditch to wait for the driver to move on.

She was a fugitive now- but then, she had been a fugitive before, hadn’t she? So what had really changed? She hid away in the shadow of the conifers, following a syrupy-slow river and avoiding any sign of tree-dwelling trolls for fear they’d take her for one of the empress’s lapdogs.

As it happened, she ran into imperial lapdogs before any local dissenters. A patrol of three sharply-dressed agents with curved swords and feathered helmets, laughing roughly as they stalked the riverbank in the opposite direction, shouting into the woods and keeping the locals penned in, away from their only fresh water.

The agents knew who she was- she had murdered their comrade, bent every rib inward with a single hammer blow, puncturing nearly every organ in his possession- and according to them, she was due a little payback for that, returning her to prison aside.

But that couldn’t happen. The hammer she had done the killing with- her otsuchi- had been a gift. She had every intention of returning to the fishing village to retrieve it. Unarmed, she had to think quickly as they descended upon her from all sides- she dropped into a low defensive stance and snatched up a length of fallen pine, sticky with fresh tar and laden with spiked cones like an ungainly flail. A sword passed over her head, striking orange chips from her angular horns- and she reacted with a hoofbeast’s terrible kick, driving the wooden teeth of a geta into the stomach of her rear attacker. As they reeled, the other two pressed their advantage- so she spun and fell onto her back, driving her pine-flail into one's crotch and knocking them sideways- blind to their comrade making a wicked arc with their wrist and bringing their wakizashi down for a killing stab.

She lost her eye then, laying on her back in the dirt- but something in her strange possessing spirit refused to buckle beneath the attack. The blade stopped short of her brain, striking the membranous whorl of a dead woman’s will and bouncing off with a harsh, otherworldly toll. It bought her enough time to wheel her legs around and knock her would-be murderer back into the river’s slow waters.

She pounced then, kneeling on their chest, and held their head under until they stopped moving. The lazy current ran brown with sediment and the loose viscera from her faintly-glowing, empty eye socket.

She marched for the village. For her otsuchi. For the fishertrolls. If revenge was coming for them, she had to be there.

But revenge had already come. Perhaps there had been some mercy- wagon tracks in the sand suggested they had taken prisoners. Their hives had been burnt to nothing and a lone troll, tall and glorious in his polished armor, stood swaggering in the aftermath, turning a glistening scramaseax in his hand. A runny rainbow soaked the blade, a sight which caused an involuntary twitch in the giant Angohada’s neck.

Her otsuchi lay discarded in the same bloody rut in the sand where she had been struck down- and the moment she drew it aloft and laid the handle over her shoulder, she found that stranger’s oily blade inches from her nose, blurring out of focus as she turned her remaining eye on the smug, grinning face at the other end of a muscular arm clapped in decorative gold bands.

One burgundy beating the hue out of four imperial agents was more than enough, he claimed. How did he know about the ones at the river? That had been mere hours ago- truly, the paranoia of this empire was staggering. But if she had such a talent for murder, he went on, then she should pledge that hammer to the crown. There were bounties to be claimed- and, he added with an infuriating chuckle- clearly nothing left here to distract her.

The shame- that she couldn’t save them, that she couldn’t escape the eye of the imperial crown even after all this- was too much to bear. Something in her buckled, and something else bent. Bounties, then- she learned on this day that she was no hero. She would not die as a giant, she would live as a dog.

And for many sweeps that followed, she bloodied her treasured otsuchi again and again for the crown, and tossed her gold away as quickly as she felt the weight of it, into liquor and food and tolerant company. Her own laughter tasted bitter on her tongue as she made comrades of other agents and mercenaries who had likewise surrendered their way into untold luxury. She was filled with a loathing of herself so deep and so painful that, were she able to die, she might have done the job herself.

This loathing snarled around her insides like a debilitating sickness, and she found that her work became sloppy- even incomplete. Bounties were getting away, and she no longer cared. Her blows were softening, and she was quietly grateful for it. Nobody kept a dog for its perfection. Perhaps she could live as a failure and dam up whatever onslaught the empire sought to channel through her.

But such a notion was quickly struck down by her handlers, who had grown impatient. She was given an ultimatum, after her third reported failure. If she could not dispatch a simple rustblood cultist who was rallying animals against the empire’s patrols, then she was due for a job that would prove her value, as her betters were rapidly beginning to forget whether she had any.

“Kill the troll styling itself as The Recorder, or report for execution. Again.”

The hermit called The Recorder lived on a secluded island, far enough past the horizon that it seemed one had to wrap around a corner of the map just to see the thick bank of mist that shrouded it. But on a sloop rented for a few pieces of loose gold, she pressed through the isolating fog and onto a beautiful, untouched shore. This place was utterly remote, and eerily silent- no seabirds laughing, no snuffle of wild boar, even the waves seemed to hush as they rolled in, lapping at the edge of her vessel with a subtle, cloying pull, silently begging her to turn away.

She couldn’t.

Hammer unslung and braced on her back, she crouched through pampas grass and then jungle, sandswept ridges of jagged tan stone and odd little plinths covered in glowing runes, until she reached a ringed courtyard around a tall, simple tower of polished beige rock, decorated with stained glass in shades of orange, yellow, and green.

She called out for The Recorder.

He answered the call, ominous and silent as the rest of his island, dressed in a clingy black robe and floating freely in the air with beads of liquid light like molten iron orbiting his wrists and fingertips.

She did not finish her declaration on behalf of the Empire before the hermit struck out with his terrible killing magic- but to the shock of them both, the surge of angry fluid light erupted into a cloud of stinging sparkles between them as Angohada drew her hammer around in a mighty uppercut, smashing into the murderous projectile with the full force of her giant body.

The two exchanged a charged look, and Angohada realized that though she had deflected the spell, her cherished otsuchi was smoldering and woefully off-balance, much of the cask-like head instantly reduced to ash.

“Go then. And live,” the Recorder demanded in that silky, dangerous voice.

Angohada did.

Now thrice a fugitive, she returned to the mainland as one of the empire’s most lucrative bounties, marked by her failure as paradoxically an easy kill and a persistent threat to the security of the crown. A heap of glittering gold and fabulous jewels to the one who finally tosses her grinning idiot head at the feet of all she betrayed.

There was no hiding. She was too huge and- with the yoke of the empire once again off her shoulders- too bombastic. She was quick to find another village and swear herself to its protection in exchange for food and a place to sleep. She commissioned a new otsuchi with the last of her gold and spent her days training with it, overcoming old aches and compensating for her halved depth perception until she no longer felt the loss.

In the scorching day she would hide in the shade of a funerary shrine and die a while, packing her smoking pipe with lethal herbs and leaning off the mortal coil to speak with the dead she had visited upon her previous passing. In speaking with them, she would make amends as best she could and gather information on the movement of agents across the realm, those who would kill and kill again to cut clear the path between Angohada and the law. This information she passed along to the village- so they could hide, stock extra crops and catches, or know when to be on their best behavior until it was safe to breathe again.

In time the spirit of the tree-dwelling pine trolls and the beach-dwelling fishertrolls was alive in this village where the calendar was set by the rice and aurochs they tended. A hundred, maybe two hundred trolls felt the pang in their heart to shuck off caste and live for their neighbor, mirroring the example set by their laughing giant and her terrible hammer.

Recounting the death-dreams of the empire’s victims by day and driving off its agents by torch and hammer every night, Angohada protected this village throughout the bloodiest days of the late Exigent Era, committed body and soul to every jagged set of grinning teeth and pair of ribboned yellow horns under her protection. It was bliss- as it had been by the sea- to drink and laugh and love and clang her great otsuchi against the funeral bell to warn and protect those she truly knew, and who truly knew her.

She did not see the end of the Exigent Era- and ultimately, the Empire will take what it’s due. There came a day when she drew deep on her pipe to seek answers, passed away slumped in the corner of the shrine beside its great bell, and never returned.

Somewhere in the valleys between the Widowhorns, in the low wet land where the lazy river runs between the rice paddies, her people still live and wait for her return- trolls who bear otsuchi and chambered gourds, who have still not truly bent the knee. They send off their wagons of rice and offerings of hardy aurochs, even in this modern age- and wait for their protector, the one they called Sister Tollingbell, who history calls Angohada Korosusu- to stir from that terrible quiet and let them know that the time is finally nigh.

As the attacks grow more sophisticated, as guns take their place over swords and the sky fills with flashing lights that cut and burn all at once, they hold fast- and listen for the sound of the bell.