Archive of Our Own ^beta

Pickman

When Pickman was twenty-five, a much longer time ago than you would think from looking at her, she and her father had broken into an old, crumbling house. There was supposed to be something valuable in there, some piece of technology, or jewels, maybe even books. If there was, she doesn’t remember it. The only thing she remembered was the sound of her father crying out in the darkness, and turning towards him, a huge shape knocking her down, a sudden, sharp pain in her neck.

They told her later that her father had been slain by some creature, some beast of local legend, and she that had been sickened by fever for weeks. Once it had passed, she didn’t get ill again. She didn’t grow old either, moving on whenever the people around her began to fade and fall. Moving helped her escape suspicion, too, for any strange happenings - livestock killed in the night, people vanishing or caught in a fever themselves.

She preferred not to leave the fever behind. She did not enjoy resigning others to the fate that had befallen her. Surely any person with sense would prefer death over eternal life.

Still, it had it’s advantages. You could travel much further when you could do so at night and required neither food nor water, allowing Pickman to see far more of Sangfielle than any person she came across. It was easier to face down an opponent when you had no real fear of injury and they underestimated your small frame, however irritating such underestimation was. It wasn’t as though she was likely to get taller or grow new muscles.

She hadn’t been able to change much of anything about herself since the fever. Pickman wrapped herself in large cloaks and bulky shoes, giving her the illusion of a tall figure even if she could not make herself a broad one.

The Panic helped her a little - everything was thrown into the kind of chaos she had been forced to live with for so long. Other people were unused to it, running from place to place as though there would be safety to find. Some of them found her , offering blood in trade for her protection, and such a thing seemed easy enough for a time, a trail of caravans moving across the plains of Sangfielle. Pickman tried to give them other skills - she didn’t just fight with her teeth, after all.

Groups came and went, asking for her help or demanding she leave. Some blamed her for the blight on their lands, others believed she could stop it, which was more irritating. She would much rather fight someone with a staff than listen to them beg her for an hour for something she could not do.

Eventually she found herself alone again, the caves under the earth providing shelter and work, delving or hunting. Sometimes she would come across someone of a similar affliction to herself, though such things usually ended with them at the end of her gun. They were all words, the others like her, buzzing like flies around a corpse, when they should have feasted and moved on. Sometimes they gave her useful advice before they met their end. More often than not, their death was an example to her of how not to live.

Pickman took a map of Blackwick out of the cave with her from one such acquaintance, heading towards the town through the night. There was work to be done.

Virtue

Virtue had always had a hunger for knowledge. Her family had enough money to afford a few books, and her father gave her enough leeway since her sister’s death to let her trade them for new ones when she had read them enough to have practically memorised them. She developed something of a reputation in their little town for being morbid and bookish by taking her newest books to read beside her sister’s little grave. If any of them had bothered to ask, they would have found that it was simply a peaceful place to read out of doors, the statue her father had erected providing shade and something to lean against, and a beautiful view of the lake.

Sometimes she felt as though the lake was calling to her, or something under it was, something under the earth. She dreamt of it sometimes, the heartbeat of Sangfielle calling out for her, as though it was begging for her to read through it, to memorise it, to know it. She kept such dreams to herself - the little people of their little town wouldn’t understand, even if she could convince her father that it was the truth of the world instead of madness.

She read more, she dreamed more. Sometimes she went to sit by the lake in the middle of the night and dug her hands into the rich, dark soil, filling her pockets with it before she returned to the house. It helped her dreams, made them clearer. She could understand what the heart of Sangfielle was saying to her, now. She could understand a little better what it was asking for her to do. There were so many things in the world that cried out for her to understand them.

The earth under her feet warned her long before the town had rallied against her. She easily escaped them, those little, small-minded people and their pathetic weapons, disappearing into the forest, disappearing into Sangfielle. She let the heart guide her feet, on towards Blackwick. There were things there for her to know.

Es

The moths were so beautiful. Es had always thought so, even before she became part of them and they became part of her. She felt a kinship with them, even before she had found her way into the great cocoon of them, even before she had seen their city. Their wings were like the most delicate of lace fans, the designs of their backs like silken embroidery. They looked back at her, their eyes a deep and glossy black, and Es had never felt more at home.

There was change, too, with the moths. Her hair shed dust, her eyes turned black and glassy under her dark sunglasses. This suited Es well - she had always longed for change, for new sights, new adventures. Her body hollowed, leaving space for their cocoons. She covered them, not out of shame but because they preferred the darkness. At night, she shed her outer clothing and let them both bathe in the moonlight.

She wandered, a little. There were always jobs for wanderers, tasks considered too dangerous for people to want to do themselves. Delving suited her - she could see quite well in the darkness, and she could feel the moths thrill at being able to fly so free. That she had new things to find under the earth was an added bonus, as was the odd companion she collected along the way, a lanky shape knight who seemed as happy under the earth as he was trying to jump onto a train. After attempting such a thing herself, Es concluded that such an act was not for her, but they parted as friends.

He was heading towards Blackwick in a few months time, he said. The people there wanted to put a group of delvers together for some bigger jobs. Es adjusted her wide sunhat, angling it so she could more easily see Lyke’s sunburnt face.

“Perhaps I’ll see you there,” said Es, and she hoped she would.

He grinned, as sure of her as ever. “Alright. See you there.”

Chine

Chine had always wanted to do more than farmwork so it seemed only natural that, when a group of Telluricist Union folks stopped into town, that he signed up to learn a little bit more about them. He could do the first little bit by mail, he found out. A lot of it felt like it was based on work he already knew by heart, simple, practical things that you did on a farm without bothering to write down.

Maybe it was only right to copy it down, so that other people coylf do it without having to be born from a long line of farmers. Chine collected all his own knowledge in a little notebook, filling the pages with diagrams of farmlands and animal dissections, recipes for tinctures and cures of all kinds, manuals for the tools they used on the farm. They brought the notebook with him when they left the farm behind.

He was four notebooks deep by the time he was granted the certification of keen, heading off into the world to continue his study of it. He liked the routine of travel, staying in little towns and outposts for handfuls of months to find out what they knew and share a bit of his own knowledge before he moved on. They met a lot of new people, a positive experience on the whole, especially as the people got stranger. He spent a very pleasant few months with a handsomely dressed man on the road. The specifics of the man’s face faded over time but the details about his life didn’t. He was a delver of some kind, thrilling in the new discoveries of the world.

It sparked something in Chine’s memory, when he heard of the call for delvers to journey to Blackwick. He wasn’t so far away from the town, an easy enough journey to see if their paths would cross again.

And if they didn't, well. There'd be something else new to learn.

Duvall

Leo had been around a long time, drifting in the air or under other people’s skin. It wasn’t bad, as experiences of lives went, and he’d certainly had a lot of them now. It turned out that there were plenty of people who wanted to take a back seat to their own lives for a time, to let you steer them towards more interesting experiences than they could find.

Duvall, his current host, was a restless young man in search of such things. Leo was happy to curl inside him, feeling himself settle around the man’s bones like wax sealing around stone. He let Duvall’s own wants and dreams infuse with his - that was always one of the best parts, that shared connection, that shared experience, finding out the overlays of what you wanted and pulling them together to smooth into a whole.

They travelled together, Leo leading Duvall across Sangfielle. Their paths crossed with a young keen, their tastes overlaying with his for a few months. Chine had the most fascinating hobby of detailing everything down in little notebooks, the practical sitting next to the fantastic in their steady handwriting. They read it together, curled up by the campfire. Duvall took the memory with him when they parted ways.

He’d heard of a call for delvers, down in Blackwick. Another new experience for them to discover together. Maybe he'd run into that keen again, along the way.

Marn

Marn didn’t have the best luck in the world, she’d be the first to admit that. Her sticky fingers got her into all manner of trouble. She worked so hard to get herself out of her little town and into a university in the Unschola Republica, but whenever she tried to pull one of her theories off paper and into the world it seemed to go all wrong and she had to leave in a hurry. She had to leave a lot of places in a hurry.

Luckily one of her theories about the world did work - she could reach out, sometimes, and pull herself through a door to the safety of some other place. A temple, usually, a little quiet space. It was always such fun to talk to whoever was there and find out a bit about their faith. Sometimes she even talked to gods, who turned out to mostly be more like strange sorts of people than the kind of holy concepts she was used to hearing about.

Sometimes she took things from there too, and sometimes she left things behind. Hopefully it was all coming out in the wash and that it didn’t give her more bad luck.

“Sounds to me like you have good luck,” said Lyke, a young (or, she thought he was young) shape knight who’d stumbled his way into her campsite, “you’re still alive, you’re not in jail, you got what you wanted out of the delve.”

“The building blew up,” said Marn.

Lyke shrugged. “Sometimes buildings blow up. You know, they could probably use your luck down in Blackwick, if you want to come with me.”

“I don’t know that I’m much good with trains,” said Marn.

She’d tried a handful of times to collect from them, but they were almost as dangerous as people said.

“It’s not trains, I don’t think,” said Lyke, “something about a haunted house, or a haunted hole in the ground. You know what the caves are like up in Blackwick.”

Marn had heard a lot of interesting things about the caves up in Blackwick. The gods she chatted to talked about it sometimes, about what was hiding out under the little town. Her fingers itches.

“Maybe,” said Marn. She paused, her whiskers twitching. “You’re heading that way?”

Lyke grinned. “I’m heading that way.”

Lyke

Trains were wild . Lyke had always liked that about them, that for something confined to a track they seemed to go anywhere, whenever they liked. They were impossible to wrangle, he was told, and, well, he’d always liked the idea of a challenge.

He’d never been a particularly bulky guy, more arms and legs than most people knew what to do with, but it was to his advantage when it came to the work of shape knights, his long limbs hooking around the metal of a train’s exterior, holding on long after the rest of his group had fallen off. He even left of his own accord, almost, letting go before a pipe could snake all the way around his waist and crush him. He dusted himself off on the side of the highway, his armour dented and his skin steam-burnt but otherwise unharmed.

All shape knights ended up with some kind of reputation or other. Big Bucho was charming and made a mean breakfast, could help you find the person you needed no matter what city you were in. Alekest knew things he shouldn’t, and would trade with you or help you if you knew things you shouldn’t. Lyke developed something of a reputation for recklessness, although he couldn’t say that he agreed with it. He just loved to climb on the outside of a train, whipping across Sangfielle at unimaginable speeds. That wasn't reckless . It was less dangerous to cling to the side of a train than to stand next to one, if you asked him.

Only Es ever did, and she was a little reckless herself. She walked purposefully and confidently in pitch-black darkness as though it were the middle of the day, leading him underground and back out again, leading him across the desert so he could get the jump on a train as it came around a bend.

He managed to cling on for six miles before the train bucked him off, but he took a carriage with him. A victory for the shape knights, and a little treasure trove for himself and Es, a repayment of her guidance under the earth. They traded treasure and jobs back and forth before they parted, leaving one another with the vague promise of meeting up again in Blackwick.

There was a job advertised there, for a group of delvers. Lyke hoped they’d be an interesting bunch.