The Grey Lady
Of course, there are many backyards in the city, each with its secrets to keep and stories to tell.
Our main reason for selecting this particular backyard as a stop on our tour is the presence of one of Borealis’s most infamous Spectres, the grey lady.
You may see her, drifting around aimlessly, or even wandering through the crowd. You may feel a slight tingle, like cool static, if she brushed against you. Do not be alarmed.
She cannot harm you, many are unsure if she even sees you.
She simply wanders this terrain as she has done for centuries, lovelorn, bereft, and alone.
This is her story.
Once in Borealis, many moons ago, lived two brothers. (This is a hardly an uncommon occurrence, for there are many brothers in this world.) From an early age, the brothers differed greatly in temperament. (Again, this is hardly unusual – fraternity does not dictate that two men will grow up alike, not even if they are twins.) But these two brothers were so different from one another as to be nearly separate species.
The first was stocky, loud, crude and impulsive, quick tempered and violent, with a viciously cruel streak, and an overwhelming desire to control all around him. Where his parents had fled to Borealis many years before, seeking a haven from the civil war that wracked the planet, he sought out conflict and bloodshed wherever he could find it.
As a child he had been a bully, and during his years in the pre-professional training school, he was little more than a thug. It was when he joined the ranks of the military that he really came into his own. It is true that his superiors occasionally had cause to mutter, over his bloodthirstiness, and lack of self-control at the height of battle. But his innate skill with weaponry and fine head for tactics made him a valuable soldier, and his occasional transgressions were stoically overlooked.
A mercenary at first, the Soldier quickly discovered that the strict regime and insistence on absolute control within the Omni Tec Security Forces mirrored exacty his own tendencies and personality, and he soon swore his lasting allegiance to the Corporation.
The second brother was slight, almost feminine looking, with delicate features and distant, dreaming eyes. He tended to drift through existence, equally oblivious to his mother’s attempts to coddle him, his teachers attempts to educate him, and his bother’s attempts to intimidate him.
When pressed into a profession, he reluctantly opted to follow the path of the Metaphysicist.
He viewed his engagement with the metaphysical planes as a purely intellectual one. He would not work with the manifestations of rage, and merely tolerated the healing visitations. The focus of all his study were the mesmeric entities, whom he viewed both as a key to the understanding of the inner consciousness, and also his own personal muses.
For he fancied himself a poet, and to be fair his verse was not without its charms, although the subject matter tended to the esoteric. Most found his poetry to be worthy, but full of overly long words, and more than a dull. They tended to view the Poet himself in much the same way.
For many years it appeared that the brothers would simply drift further and further apart until they left one another’s orbits entirely. But that was before the Soldier returned home, from a long difficult campaign, up in the treacherous Northlands... and brought with him a wife.
The soldier had taken her as much as a trophy of a successful campaign, as out of any lust or desire for the woman herself.
It did occur to him briefly that if he ever wanted a son and heir, he might be better off trading her in for a model more suited to childbearing, for she was stick thin and elfin, as close to an adolescent boy as to a woman. But for now, he simply required a housekeeper to take care of his property when he was away, and to serve his needs when he returned. And the fact that her stinking Clan family would be wailing and gnashing their teeth, thinking of their daughter defiled by rough Omni hands – well those that he had left alive, at any rate.
His wife, of course, did not grieve for her lost family, not outwardly at least. She had quickly learnt what the consequences would be if she did.
By local standards she was a little strange looking, and her accent harsh.
To many she appeared distant and proud, preferring not to mix with the wives and mistresses of her husbands fellow officers, but to remain in her chambers, staring out over the lake, ccompletely immobile. When she was forced to bear their company, they were polite to her face, and made innocent jokes about soap, just within earshot.
But to the Poet - he had called round to his brother’s quarters to query some trivial but necessary point of law regarding the family estate, and the Soldier had summoned his wife to the parlour to be displayed like a hunting trophy – to the Poet, she was perfection personified.
From the moment he set eyes upon her, he could think of nothing else. All of the passion that he had previously reserved for intellectual pursuits now, for the first time ever, burned within him for another human being. The Poet was completely smitten, eaten up inside by love and longing. Hours that he would previously have dedicated to lofty pursuits, penning an essay examining the conversations that men hold with themselves within their dreams, perhaps... well, those hours he now lavished upon an ode to her face, her voice, even her right ear (smaller than the left but somehow sweeter.)
Any thoughts of filial loyalty, already worn thin by years of his brother’s boorish behaviour, evaoprated completely in the blaze of his obsession.
He fabricated detailed excuses to drop by his brother’s house when he knew the Soldier would not be home, and laid upon those even more extravagant excuses as to why he must speak to the lady of the house - alone, and away from curious ears. He plied her with little gifts, both physical – sweetmeats, lacy gloves, once a notum onyx pendant – and intellectual – a line of a long forgotten poem, the view from the highest peak to the mountain rim beyond, the air of a melody he had heard when he was a boy, and never since. He spoke of her beauty, and her charm, and her perfect stillness in repose.
And little by little, she opened up to him.
Maybe his love for her burned so strongly that she could not help but reflect it. Maybe he was the only person in this strange city to pay her the slightest attention, to show her any hint of warmth. Maybe she saw him as a means to escape from her brutish captor, who she found it hard to think of as a husband. Maybe she truly loved him.
Whatever the reason, the two were soon emotionally entwined, surviving from one clandestine meeting to the next on nothing but the memory of a stolen glance, a whispered word, a forbidden kiss.
As the winter progressed and the Soldier spent more and more time away on campaigns, and the lovers grew ever closer. But there was also a new urgency to their assignations. News was filtering through that a truce was in the air, meaning that many in the military would be taken off active service, and would take up guard posts in the major cities.
It appeared most likely that when that time came the Soldier would relocate, and drag his bride off to the capital city, where she would be trapped among those that hated her kind the most, totally despised, isolated, and alone.
And her lover left behind, forever broken hearted, in Borealis.
There was no choice, she told him. They must flee together, to the North, to the Clan lands, to where people who knew her would take her in and shelter them.
The Poet engaged one of his oldest servants to make their preparations, and trusted him to procure what would be needed for a speedy and stealthy journey north. But the servant was loyal only to his own pocket, and he sold his master out for a handful of credits and the promise of more. He informed the Soldier that not only had he been cuckolded by his own brother, but that he and the Soldiers wife were planning to seek succour with the very enemy he had been battling so relentlessly for so long.
This was too much!
To lose a wife was one thing. To lose her to a weakling of a so-called brother was another. But for the pair of them to heap betrayal on betrayal by fleeing to the filthy Clans?
THAT was simply unthinkable.
High with rage, so enflamed that he could barely see where he walked, he charged headlong towards the home of his brother, a small and humble apartment, right here in this very backyard. As he ran, there was a great howl of anger building in his chest, and a murderous rage in his heart.
But as he drew closer to his target, his one man stampede slowed, as his training took over. From an animalistic stampede, he sank into the stealthy, unstoppable prowl of a silent assassin. His rage did not die down, but crystallised, hardening to an icy killing fury.
Moving like a shadow, he slipped into the courtyard of his brothers apartment. He instantly froze as he spotted his target.
His brother was sat on a low bench with his back turned, dressed in his old, faded travelling robe and hood, no doubt waiting for the Soldier’s ungrateful wretch of a wife to come and join him before the pair fled into the arms of the enemy. In motion again, silent as a breeze, the Soldier crept up behind his wayward sibling, slipping his most fearsome blade from its sheath.
The first blow was a measured strike, designed to kill instantly. But with it, the Soldier’s control broke, and his fury erupted. He fell upon his target, stabbing wildly, uncontrollably and repeatedly, carrying on long past the point where even a glimmer of life might have remained.
Prodding the corpse with a boot, he turned it over, planning to look upon the face of his brother in death, and bid him a traitor’s farewell. Then he would wait here in the shadows for his wife to arrive, and drag her home. She may have betrayed him, but she was still his property, and belonged by his side, or at least kneeling at his feet. He believed he might even love her, just a little. But she would have to learn just how painful attempting to escape his love could be.
But as the body rolled over, it revealed the awful truth. The face inside the old grey hood, above the shredded and tattered torso, was that of his own wife.
His appraisal of the situation had been close to the truth, but fatally flawed. The figure on the bench had not been his brother after all. It was his own wife, her boyish frame wrapped in the Poet's own cloak, that had been sat there, awaiting her lover's return.
The soldier was still stood there, transfixed with shock, when the Poet returned, to a very difference welcome than the one he had been expecting.
As he looked upon the murderous tableau before him, his heart seemed to freeze in his chest, his face turned chalk white, and a thin cry of hatred rose in his chest, growing to a crescendo of pain and loathing.
The Soldier went for his side arm, and fired off two quick shots. But the Poet’s howl was more than just sound. In that instant he summoned all the anger, all the rage, all the outright hatred that he had shunned in all his years as a Metaphysicist. The entity manifested at that moment could have felled armies, and swallowed fleets whole. But the one and only focus of his rage was his brother, standing bloodied and panting over the body of the woman he loved.
Even as the shots hit the Poet and he fell, mortally wounded, the Soldier was struck dead on the spot, as his brain, heart, liver and lungs exploded simultaneously, with the heat of a thousand suns.
So a little tragedy, one of many in a vast and hungry war. Brothers that would never have been friends, that were barely kin, torn completely apart by conflict, deception and betrayal.
But the greatest tragedy was that of the poor foreign maiden, taken first from her home and people, and then snatched so swiftly from the mortal plane, that she does not even realise that she is dead!
To this day, she wanders the backyard, waiting, always waiting, ever hopeful, ever patient, for her lover to arrive, and carry her off, back home, to the North.
Copyright 2007 Myz Lilith / Coffeewench
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