Man Ponders Creator | Aster Desrosiers

[augustaugur]

.26 Janvier, 780.

[A loosely sketched brocade of wildflowers and cultivars, especially roses, separate date from text written in flowing, if sometimes halting, High Mordentish.]

It is said that I am where I ought to be. In some sense I agree. This city is a creature whose organs flow from veins of flagstone and cobble-work, fanning in every direction so long as its blood may empty into the Bay—alive, yes.

But sick, yes, also.

[Opposite, the drawing of a stag. Light, dappled shading suggests that its hide could be as white as the parchment below, the beast captured mid-feed over a patch of crushed grass.]

I see it at every bellow of smoke from a chimney, whenever a child muddy and ragged stumbles into the Publique, pleading for “Momma”. As we gather up flowers, good, beautiful flowers to be thrown into the nearest barrel as “thespian trash”. They act so beautifully in plays, yet I may as well recollect nothing except where I smiled, clapped, and thanked them for the product whilst they untangled themselves from between their own sweat and the shade of pretty, fake trees, all to be crushed in the jaws of our so-venerated Cultural Advisor. What sobering venom.

[The stag looks at the viewer.]

I cannot help but to wonder when this began. Within the last decade? Had it been there, extant, dormant, since the very first stone was dredged from the earth to be hewn as the first bone, boundary of Port-a-Lucine? I cannot yet be certain, nor certain that I would like to be. As Father would say, they are but symptoms of a greater, humorally unbalanced whole, much as I would not beseech him for details of what must be the cause.

I feared I would turn from the city and retreat to Valey. I cannot say the possibility is gone. Probably it never will be, not completely, not sum and totally. Yet I am helpless but to be fascinated or, if nothing else, curious to know how deeply this sickness must penetrate.

[Beside the stag sprawls a detailed illustration of blossoming vines wound around the long stump of what might have been a primeval oak. It appears to be from life.]

It is not all gloom. There are people here that I am growing fond of, and I believe it has been a benefit to Celestin’s disposition far more than the breathless cruelty on display in old Barovia. The Avenue of Progress is well maintained, even if their opinions for how Nature ought to be “arranged” are, simply, gauche. It has been mentioned to me that I ought to commission an heirloom cane from a woman that I would describe as with tension, but well-meaning. I would like to. Then there is my cousin haunting me with demands about the University as well as organizing another great Hunt in the name of the House Desrosiers. I suspect that even if I needed to flee to Valey, I would not find the time for it.

Whether this sickness may be rehabilitated, as has mine, I do not yet know.

[augustaugur]

.26 Février, 780.

[The brocade is illuminated—the roses glitter red, the lillies ghost white and daisies sunshine yellow. It appears to have been gone over several times, each more detailed than the last. The text, however, is fresh.]

A quote: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks were decades happen.”

Were I to impress any amount of summary, it would cast me base and foolish to have waited until now to scribe so much as a word—but I will, and I must. She is safe, and the matter of her safety deserves it. She is asleep, though, and I can only hope that the small rash of candlelight necessary for me to write this will not bother.

[In other pages, there are more sketches. Vipers, does, a boar and their twin-tusked mane. Yet nearest to this entry lies neither plant nor creature—instead, a mask.]

She became my intended only after Celestin invoked her as such, commenting that I had lost her to “an awning”. Before that I am doubtless the word was as strange and foreign a concept to me as would another language. How could it not be? She is a woman. A woman who has had as many suitors as she has had plays, each one, I have to imagine, more trying than the last. Six months ago and I would have been still walking the trails in Valey, a crippled man who had not seen a breath of “civilization” in almost as many years.

[It is white, and only a half.]

I am uncertain from which font animated me. It must have been some instinct, an impulse that skirted past any real logic or reason. Perhaps I am not meant to know—only accept that absent riding to Ameranthe with the others, my time has been spent irrevocably in another’s company. Is it the bald naivety which drew her? The gall, audacity?

That, though, I am certain I am not meant to know.

[There is no eye inside.]

Regardless, it goes without saying that I have been kept precisely as busy as my last entry. Though I have managed truancy for the University and was not available to attend the Hunt, prescient matters require that I be ever vigilant. The disease I had wondered about on entry to the City of Lights has metastasized into multiple unknowns and their investigations. The scent of un-Nature permeates down to the very brickwork on which it lays, I am afraid. How it best be treated I have not decided.

[But, beneath, a jewel. Beside that jewel, the interlocking rings of a shield charm blazoned with sword through belladonna.]

Celestin helped me in and out of seats yesterday, and what we have done for the Mademoiselle tonight had been done together. It is irrepressible fact that we are more different than we have ever been, yet consensus with him is not difficult. We are agreed that we must face every stain rather than let them slip away.

Let us hope it lasts.

[augustaugur]

An interlude...
It began with a burning sensation.

He sat up, anticipating as it raced from waist to thigh to shin in marching, piercing pinpricks. Now came the grimace—not for any surprise, but because you are supposed to. So he grimaced and he scowled, wearing on in silence. Eventually the pain began to ebb as it always did, scouring ice where there had been fire.

Aster Desrosiers was alone.

The “camp” this far up was, appreciably, spartan. About halfway he’d abandoned anything save pinches of seasoned wood to burn and a lay-up, no matter how confident he might have been that no smoke would penetrate past the thick, loping forest canopy. Nothing was worth the alternative.

Aster remained by that little light, his focus on lock, stock and barrel. Someone else might have marveled at the mechanisms—for this flintlock musket was of course Dementlieuse—though to swell with pride that the most civilized nation in all the Core could spawn such a weapon as it would art. And while they might have been marveling Aster was taking a cloth over the barrel before ensuring that the hammer stood half-cocked with frizzen ready to accept powder. Master, yes, but no auteur.

Today had been light game. Within the next five days he’d have to come back down to reconvene with the others, but that was not now and, beside, they had grown accustomed to these isolate “excursions” for months. The Monsieur Desrosiers’ insistence. Perhaps he thought more sport surviving in the wild without a retinue.

Aster held the gun over his shoulder, feeling for it, and stood. With his other hand on the bandolier it only made a light, sighing rattle. Good.

Snap…

But his eyes were ahead. Something else stared from the underbrush.

[augustaugur]

.3 Mars, 780.

[The brocade is uniform today. Roses the color of blush intertwine, each one hiding a small, triangle shaped thorn.]

A quote: “Well, boy, what did you expect?”

I suspect I would see those very words remitted to me were I to write to Father, and I can hear his voice already. He had warned us, of course, and being his son my only choice was to disbelieve him—clinging, stubbornly, to some shade of optimism that he was wrong—until I had seen it with mine own eye. What did I see, then?

Does it need any introduction?

‘The wine, the wine, you must try the wine,’ I overhear, as the maid orbits around us with a platter though some common huckster. I do not mean to admonish her. The work is difficult and her clients barely coherent to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ within twice hours. I am stood there and shocked into rigidity, leg burning, as the Lady-Governor admits “stateship” can be found here, somewhere, within the bowels of drink, laughter and debauchery before she herself absconds to the milieu of a bath, never again to be seen outside. I thought then and I think now:

Is this it? Is this the fabric of the Nation of Dementlieu?

I was insulated in Valey. I was positively a hermit in the lodge. I am a man of twenty-five years with an intended and this—this—was my first exposure, properly, of what it means to be gentry. I watch common workers see to every need and luxury while they themselves will no doubt return to tenements marred by the most crushing poverty I have ever seen and with none of the safety guarantees we enjoy the moment the bells strike past five.

The sickness cannot be total. There are those who care, I know, myself among them. Are we toothless? Stupid?

Even in Valey, how much did I waste? Father? Mother?

Yet I write this surrounded by the affects of a woman I have come to love. I cannot simply “steal her away” to some facade of peace in the East. Father has inured himself because he has removed himself. Waste will still beget waste. It does not stop because we turn ourselves away and flee to the closest notion of what we prefer with our collective tails between our legs. Beside, the corruption has taken root in our own garden. Did they not tell the Marquis knowingly? So why is it now that they ply for the sway of the House Desrosiers?

Did they bid until now that we were better off living in ignorance?

[There are no interior illuminations. The writing has come fast and sloped. The next, as though after a reset, returns back to form.]

I am no longer ignorant. I cannot take what I know and throw it away, declaring any action impossible or ignoble. What I will do, what I can do, is still exhaustingly unknown. But I may be firm in at least one thing.

I will not run.

[augustaugur]

.12 Mars, 780.

[There is no brocade.]

How could a man be so defeated by the written word?

I provided to her that I would write a poem. There is no poem. My note-taking journal is instead a rectory of quotes for which all have failed to percolate. I cannot blame her for being offended, given such clumsiness where I stumble into the right words inasmuch the wrong ones and no higher order thought given to either. She wished to be seen as mature, I provide matronly—I would have twisted the knife less calling her disgusting.

She writes stories, playbills, poems—the thespian’s life is to subsist by the very same which thwarts and subverts me. It is not enough to spend time with her, deferring to her wants and needs. “To Cherish”. Am I daft? I must be.

Titled a request, not question.

I can say with certainty any past success was for the sweet innocence which only oblivious naiveté could have imparted. I misled her. I lied to her. I love her except and solely what I am unable to, a woman who deserves to be cherished in all the ways. Now we are both aware that I am not the prodigal, effortless creature as once appeared, bringing the rest into the sharpest relief. And for what?

This Nation? What about this Nation? The very same Nation which dictates that a woman’s place is at her husband’s side? The very same Nation that cavorts with other countries as though we are the most civilized, the most advanced, while cutpurses and brigands traipse through the night and the poor are crushingly so? The very Nation which casts this city brick by brick on the corpse of Nature, dying of the slow and inexhaustible sickness that is the hubris of man?

Perhaps I should be as Monsieur von Brunk and have hope anyway. Even as I write this the premise tantalizes. I am far from a stranger to finding some amount of solace, if not peace, in religion. Yet I may be so certain that were I to practice what I practiced at the lodge, not even Valey, or old Barovia…

I told her the truth. I told him the truth. There was no other rational option given the lying until now. Yet he smiled at me in that way I can imagine only all Wardens must smile, because it was confession. To hold his hand and know it may be for the first and last time seared into my heart not unlike a brand. And for what?

[The writing has harried into an almost scrawl. What follows after is clearer, measured. It is in Falkovnian.]

“You cannot ask for justice, for Nature will not dispense it. You cannot ask for reprieve, for Nature will not judicate it. It is the Beginning, Creator, and from it all shall return. What happens from start to end is between not man and god, but man and animal.”