Hyacinth

Far Off Unhappy Things

Chapter One: Hyacinth

By Renko Doremi Rodenburg

Audiobook by Tetrahedon. Follow @greenTetra_ on Twitter

“What even is a fox?” Reinhild asked Hyacinth, beautiful Hyacinth.

“Hm,” Hyacinth said, looking up from her book. They sat on the porch of Hyacinth’s house, her little wooden cottage, her farmstead. It took her a while to process things, especially when roused from some activity she was engrossed in.

“Oh,” she then said as Reinhild her question reached her. “One of those things trickling in from that other place. Stories. Things. Concepts. A fox is an animal. It tricks men and pulls clever pranks on women, bright red or orange is its fur.”

“That explains it then,” Reinhild said as she ruffled her own red hair, almost but not quite the same colour as the heath growing all around the Lands Lost, subtly different from the colouring of the perpetually-trapped-in-autumn trees. “How do those in the villages know what a fox is, though?”

“They don’t. You’re the fox now.”

“I’m the fox now,” Reinhild whispered to herself. “Should I get some more pomace inside?”

“Hm,” Hyacinth muttered, already engrossed in her book again. ‘Slaves to the Blind Gods,’ it read on the cover. Knowing her, it was either the most peculiar smut or some essay on Old World horrors. Both would probably drive Reinhild mad, but for quite different reasons.

She got up and went inside. Hyacinth her house wasn’t large, but really- nobody’s was these days. In the kitchen she had a couple of bottles of pumpkin pomace, an alcoholic drink distilled from squashed up, ground up pumpkin meat. Someone in a nearby town made it out of pumpkins Hyacinth grew in patches on her farm. Back outside she poured herself another glass, and filled up Hyacinth’s half-empty glass as well.

Tonight was quiet and peaceful, tomorrow would not be.

The sun slowly sank under the horizon. Before long it’d be too dark for Hyacinth to read, and she’d pace around the house for a bit, frustrated that it was too dark to do anything, before finally going to sleep. It was getting late for Reinhild too. There weren’t too many hours of darkness, so she got up and prepared to go to sleep.

She wouldn’t be caught dead in a bed, though. Instead she sat upright against the south wall of Hyacinth’s house, so that the first rays of the sun would hit her left cheek first. She closed her eyes and felt around for the comfort of her sword, Helmatot, gripping it tightly, and fell asleep.

It was the next morning indeed the sunlight that woke her up, so she relaxed her grip on Helmatot and got up. Hyacinth was already up as well, pacing back and forth before her door, an open book in hand.

“Restless much?” Reinhild asked.

“I cannot read or sit still when there’s a solid chance I’ll be burying you this afternoon.” Hyacinth replied.

“You won’t,” Reinhild said, laughing. “You’re going to draw runes on my sword arm and a sigil on my back, and in the afternoon you’re going to hold me as the pact enacts its toll on my body. No burying anyone.”

“Do not taunt me,” Hyacinth said.

“I’m not.”

“What do you want for breakfast?” Hyacinth asked. “We’re out of everything except for something salt, something that passes for meat.”

Reinhild thought for a bit, looking at Hyacinth. “Why don’t we do the runes now, then go eat something in town? We need to go in the direction of the forest anyway.”

“I will not,” Hyacinth said.

“Come on, accompany me to town for once.”

“No. I’m going to make you a plate of food, then we’ll do the runes.”

Reinhild sighed. “Alright, have it your way.”

The food was indeed salty, and somewhat resembling meat. It went down well with the remains of yesterday’s bottle of alcohol, though. After breakfast- which was spent in silence with Hyacinth absent-mindedly flipping through the pages of a book- Hyacinth started preparing her brushes, pencils, pen and a variety of inks.

“Go wash yourself,” she instructed Reinhild.

“I’m not that filthy-” Reinhild tried to say but was interrupted by her friend.

“You are. Go to the brook and clean yourself. Grab some things to scrub and dry yourself with from my room.”

“Fine,” she said.

The brook was downhill, right behind Hyacinth’s house.

“Eternal Autumn,” Reinhild cursed as she splashed water over her skin and scrubbed it clean with sheets of fabric, the cold biting into her flesh. As she looked out over the tiny stream, the little wooden bridge someone had built there ages ago, and the endless rolling hills covered in orange, brown, yellow and mottled with green and purple, it was almost a scene from a fairytale.

“Shame for the endless fucking cold though,” she muttered to herself.

Clean- or at least, clean enough that she suspected that Hyacinth would stop complaining, she dried herself off, put on her clothes and leather and went back to the house. There, Hyacinth had shoved most of her belongings to the side, and sat cross-legged in the clearing, her tools beside her. Small candles burned in a circle before her.

“And I thought you ran out of candles long ago,” Reinhild said.

“I have run out of candles to waste on frivolous things like reading, or entertaining your simple mind with the gentle swaying of flame,” Hyacinth said.

“I think I’ll go back to the brook,” she replied.

“Sit down, take off your shirt and be quiet.”

She did. In total silence, dreadful silence that reminded her of vague things that had already happened and of things yet to pass, Reinhild took off her shirt and sat down in the circle of candles before Hyacinth.

Soft tinkling- the mixing of paint, wooden tools tapping against glass and metal pencils being filled broke the quiet that had persisted too long. She shivered as Hyacinth put a sharp, cold shape against her back and slowly drew a circle.

“Don’t move,” Hyacinth whispered.

First a circle, then patterns too complex for Reinhild to track by sense of touch alone. As Hyacinth drew, she felt a chill draw into her body. A chill different from the witch’s demeanour, or the biting of the brook or wind. It was the chill of the dead, stiffening her flesh and hardening her skin. Behind her, Hyacinth started muttering words, poems, to quiet the chthonian spirits the sigil was drawing into Reinhild’s body, so that they would not tear the skin or break her bones.

As the thaumaturgical rigor mortis set in, Reinhild lost most feelings in her flesh and skin.

“Arm,” Hyacinth commanded her when she was done, and placed her hand under her shoulder, nudging her to lift her right arm. “Turn around and give me your arm,” she said, not satisfied.

Hesitant, Reinhild turned around, and Hyacinth grabbed her right arm and immediately started etching the outlines of the runes with a wooden- yet sharp- knife. She was not at all interested in Reinhild’s body.

Her skin cold and hard, what Hyacinth was doing wasn’t really cutting. It was more carving, woodwork rather than surgery. After setting the patterns, she took out brushes and paints. As she inked in the runes she had carved in Reinhild’s tough flesh, a heat started to fill her right arm. As Hyacinth filled them up, the cracks and cuts in Reinhild’s arm started to glow with heat. As she set the final dots of blue paint next to a set of red and yellow, it was overwhelming.

Reinhild her arm burned with energy, vigour, and life. Fire leaked from the cracks, lighting up the runic patterns.

“Do you need help putting on your armour?”

“No.”

She struggled to put her armour on. The pieces wouldn’t sit still, it wouldn’t move as fluidly as she wanted, and the straps were too tight and too large. The world was warping and buckling under some kind of strain, and her head hurt with a fever. Colours made no sense and the heath outside might as well have been some construction of endlessly towering painted rolling flames in all the poet’s colours.

“Reinhild,” Hyacinth said to her as she stumbled outside. “Rein? Keep it together.”

“Yeah,” she replied. Words felt thick on her tongue, as if she was coughing up sludge instead of sounds. “My heart’s stopped so walking is difficult.”

Hyacinth shook her head, and dragged her along the long, winding path to the edge of the forest.

Every now and then Reinhild would get frantic bursts of energy, and feel like sprinting the rest of the way, but Hyacinth calmed her down. “Not yet, not yet,” she’d say.

Almost completely delirious, Reinhild walked after her friend. The once familiar landscape had warped into an almost unrecognisable cacophony of colour, smell, sensation, all somehow too loud and too bright at the same time. After what felt like a week, an endless week of walking along the blasted heath and dusty trails they reached the edge of the forest.

“Don’t go running off into the forest,” Hyacinth said as they walked along the treeline towards a ruined building.

She was right. Reinhild had been eyeing the forest that marked the border of the Lands. Now, delusional from spells and magic, the forest seemed like an enticing wildernis to get lost in. Get lost in the green, brown and black- crawl on all four, rip out the throat of a boar-

“Rein,” Hyacinth said as she saw her salivating, hunched over and growling. “We’re almost there. Hang on for a moment more.”

The stone building had once been an abbey, or perhaps a dormitory for some other place now long lost. They walked in through a crumbled gash in the wall. Inside, on the courtyard, two people were waiting for them.

One was dressed in black, with elfin features like Hyacinth. The other was a young man, in chainmail and colourful cloth. In his hands he gripped a sword- a rapier, more fit for thrusting than slashing, more fit for puncturing than stabbing.

Instinctively, Reinhild reached for her own blade, the shortsword Helmatot.

“Not yet,” Hyacinth chided her.

As the young man looked Reinhild over, he became visibly anxious. Afraid. Fear wafted over from him thick in the air, and Reinhild gave in.

“Reinhild,” Hyacinth said sternly but to no avail.

She was already sprinting towards him as she drew her sword. For whatever reason the young man responded by stumbling backwards, which set Reinhild off even more. Gripped tightly in her now burning, blazing, right arm she held Helmatot, and swung it at her opponent hard.

He tried to deflect, but his rapier wasn’t made for that. The thin metal bent the moment the shortsword hit it, leaving it in a borderline unusable condition, and barely slowing down Reinhild’s blow, causing her to hit him hard enough in the sides that he buckled over in pain. His chainmail prevented the sword from cutting him, but that was all it did. Reinhild immediately swung again, but in her dissociative state she wasn’t as skilled as she’d be sober, and cleaved open the man’s skull.

The women who had come with him screamed a name.

She howled in victory and dropped on all fours, crawling over to the broken corpse. She tried to get to her opponents soft bits, tender flesh and warm blood, but was frustrated by the armour and cloths in her way, and yelled in frustration.

“Reinhild,” she heard someone call, far in the distance. Someone she knew, perhaps. It didn’t matter.

“Reinhild,” she heard someone scream as she finally managed to rip the annoying, interlinked metal rings asunder and sank her teeth into soft flesh. It was sweet, and despite it being rather lean and chewy, had more taste and texture than any preserved meats she had had in recent memory. Plenty of blood flowed from the grisly chunks she tore from whatever it was the flesh belonged to, salty and with a lingering taste of iron. Slowly her mind calmed, lulled to sleep by sweet victory and good food, and she cuddled up to mangled meat and broken armour, and drifted off into sleep.

When she woke up, the sun was setting. She was outside somewhere, and struggled to make sense of her situation.

Slowly but surely, hazy images of a stone ruin and rolling fields came back to her. She was sitting against one of the walls of that ruin, she realised.

“You’ve woken up,” someone beside her said. Hyacinth, beautiful Hyacinth.

“I feel terrible,” Reinhild said.

“You should see the other guy,” Hyacinth said.

“I feel broken. Dehydrated, too. Like my entire body is made of parched leather. My right arm- indescribable.”

“Did I win?”

“You’re still alive. For now. Scattered through the courtyard are the remains of Fleur’s champion.”

“That’s-” she didn’t finish her sentence.

“At least that’s going to make my night easier,” Hyacinth said.

“Why’s that,” Reinhild asked, but then remembered the taste of flesh and tang of blood fresh on her tongue. “Oh,” she said.

“Yes,” Hyacinth replied.

“We should head homewards, then. I don’t want to be out in some field when midnight strikes.”

“There’s plenty of time. It’s not far, and we have until a bit after midnight.”

Reinhild got up, groaning in pain as she did. Blood dripped from the gashes in her right arm. She could feel a wet patch on her back- also blood. At least that was her own blood- in contrast to the dried-up stains on her leather chestpiece and the rest of her clothes.

“Helmatot,” she asked Hyacinth.

“Over there,” Hyacinth replied as she pointed to Reinhild’s beloved shortsword. “I know you prefer it in your hands, but I didn’t feel like being beheaded during your terrible sleep.”

As they walked home, memories came back to Reinhild bit by bit. A strange realisation that this was the same world she witnessed a few hours ago through completely different eyes.

“I want to wash myself when we get home.”

“Not until I’ve disinfected and bandaged you and your wounds start closing up.”

“I’ll freeze to death, then.”

“Then you wash yourself tomorrow. You might get stained still, anyway.”

It was dark when they got to Hyacinth’s farmstead three hours later. Reinhild could barely breathe when she got home- Hyacinth had, to her crippled body, walked at a gruelling pace.

The moment they were inside Reinhild started undoing her armour and kicked away her clothes. She curled up on a rug made out of the hide of some terrible, woolly beast that laid before the fireplace. The eternally burning fireplace that was just slightly too cold to be mistaken for natural fire.

Hyacinth brought her a glass of pomace, which she greedily drank.

She laid herself down again and tried to doze off. She felt unnaturally vulnerable, sleeping without armour or sword, in a building where she wouldn’t hear people outside approaching, nor smell them on the wind. She was too broken to care, and fell asleep.

An hour after midnight it began.

She shook awake, wracked by pain and hunger. The toll had to be paid in due.

“Hunger,” she said, hoarse.

Behind her, Hyacinth embraced her. “I promised,” she said.

“This is worse than opiate withdrawal,” she groaned. “I’m not a child, I won’t scream. I’m not a child.”

Tremors shook her body, and she felt colder than she ever had. Sweat dripped from her forehead.

“So hungry.”

Hyacinth behind her stretched her arm out, and produced a knife with her other hand. She pulled it down her wrist and commanded Reinhild to drink.

Despite being made majorly of paint, Hyacinth’s blood felt, smelled, and tasted quite like the real thing save for the slightest tinge of linseed oil. Memories of the young knight she’d molested came back. The taste of flesh and tang of blood.

Hyacinth’s blood was different. More invigorating, less real. More real than the world around them, less real than Reinhild was. An ethereal pink in colour, though that could’ve been the illumination of the fireplace or her own addled brain.

Beautiful like Hyacinth was, tasted like she imagined Hyacinth would taste.

She howled.

“Be quiet,” Hyacinth said.

“I never know when you’re taunting me,” Reinhild groaned. “More.”

“Do you want me to die of anaemia?”

“More,” Reinhild howled.

Hyacinth tore open her wrist further, and held her arm above Reinhild’s head.

“Closer,” she sputtered as her mouth filled with pink blood.

“You’ll bite me, you animal,” Hyacinth chided her sternly.

“That’s your fault,” Reinhild said.

“That’s your fault,” Reinhild started crying.

“That’s your fault,” she could barely repeat through the tears.

Her face covered in her friend’s blood, her pain waning, she fell asleep, sobbing.