Voices

I gave an old woman a recipe which includes a poisonous flower. She later turns up dead by the effects of that poison - but I suspect her son took advantage of that situation to kill her himself, knowing that it would be dismissed as an error in dosage. There is an inheritance involved. Disembodied, I am 'standing' at the edge of the ring of a gladiatorial circus, observing a man who is now lying on the ground looking half-dead, but he is nonetheless victorious and a crowd-pleaser. I am bored. These games have been going on for days now and it is gotten repetitive, I am impatient for him to move on. I shift my perspective, finding the emperor in a large private room attached to the circus. A man in armor is talking to him about the man who is won the games, and the emperor is incredulous - why should the emperor fear or make concessions? That man fears him, the emperor - the proof of that is in the way he travels from place to place and uses the name he does. (His name is a word literally meaning "dark," but associated with low, dirty things.) The man in armor raises the issue of Dark's rumored connection to the queen. The queen's present in the room, tall and dark and with green-tinted hair, hair mostly covered by a black veil. She is legendary for her beauty and suggested to be not entirely human; there is a rumor that Dark is one of her kind, and looking for her. It is close to the truth, but not quite it - in actuality, he is a survivor of the court of her previous husband. She is unaware of this. She only survived that massacre because the emperor refused to give her up, treated her as a prize. She joins in the conversation, teases the emperor, saying that if she ever sees this Dark, she might recognize one of her own kin and turn on the emperor. Her voice is nasally. She then speculates more seriously about what would happen if she ever really did meet one of her sisters - "Lure her to her death." The emperor is irritated with this line of conversation, and tells the two of them that this is enough talk, focus on the tribute instead. Later. Dark is standing in front of an open shrine, holding an antique sword in poor physical condition but with great symbolic meaning. He is telling the spirits that if he enters the dream with this weapon, with all that meaning attached, it will become something miraculous. He is lying. But in actuality, it will lead him to a cross buried in the ground - I see the cross glowing dull red - and then to a bow which will infect him with hatred for a time. I have a body now. I am standing in a temple somewhere bright, talking to a woman who is explaining to me that she will not leave this building. She took a demon into herself, made herself its prison. She describes how she would been fighting someone, and when it was over, a part of herself that should have been restoring was draining instead, and she has not been able to stop it - she can feel herself flaking away, and if this continues, there will be nothing left of her in a mere few thousands of years.