Weekly Writing – November 23 2024

“Anything that moves and acts must be animated by a life force,” the guest explained. “Most people know this, but they make two false assumptions from it. The first is that the moving thing must have been born with that life force. Not so – though the art is widely frowned upon, life force, which some call the soul, can be extracted and moved from one vessel to another. The second assumption is that the life force must be located directly inside the body it animates. This art, too, is often seen as obscene, and is far more difficult than the first, but a properly channelled force can control even bodies it doesn’t occupy. I believe the construct that attacked us was a product of the first art – a life force harvested from elsewhere and locked in a body of stone.”
“That’s terrible,” Trina said, without any of the sense, as before, that she was just searching for fitting words. It was terrible, to think of being torn from a warm, living body and sealed in a cold stone cage, in the lonely dark and rain. “What do you suppose happened to- to the body that soul came from? Could they be brought back together somehow?”
He gave her such a strange look then, it seemed to her she had spoken straight past an answer she should already have known. Another thing lost in the dark, but how was she to know?
“Perhaps,” he said. “It would be immensely difficult, however, and I doubt the construct would be cooperative. It struck my companion’s horse with its next blow, and the beast, mad with pain and fear, charged off the edge of the cliff with its entrails dragging behind it. With my companion and our precious burden still on its back.”
She could see it all too clearly. Not in the dreamy swirls of an oil painting, but as if she had been there – the rain rolling around the whites of the poor horse’s eyes, washing away the streak of blood that its mortal wound painted across the stone.
“My apologies,” the guest said. “This wasn’t a story suited to a night’s diversion.”
“No,” she insisted, as life had so rarely given her the chance to. “It’s all right. You must have fled back down the road then? And found the path to the manor?”
“Just so,” he confirmed.
“Will you really not tell me what made you take such a horrible risk?” she asked. “If it’s lost to the mountain now, could there be any harm?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been toiling over it in my mind, and it seems to me there might be a way I can complete my mission yet. However, if I stay here for as long as your mistress might hope to keep me, I suspect I’ll lose my chance.”
She had lived for so long within her mistress’s will, just as she did within air and her own skin. She had been small and uninteresting, and perhaps that was why she had never felt that watchful prickle so keenly at the back of her mind. As if a hundred eyes had just opened there, watching through her, watching her, with the utmost scrutiny.
“It is urgent, then?” she tried to ask as if they weren’t. “If so, if you speak with her, she may understand. She- she’s not unkind.”
But she’d never had to brook disobedience, had she? Never had things go other than the way she wanted them to. Was she kind, or just kept content?
“Perhaps,” he said, in the same tone as every doubt that echoed through her watched mind. “Perhaps, though, it would be best if I didn’t trouble her. If I simply-”
“Sir- don’t,” Trina implored him, pressing her hands to her ears. “You mustn’t speak of this to me. I can’t keep secrets from my mistress.”
Though her mistress would have had her listen for just that reason, wouldn’t she? To relay all the secrets she could. Why was she sitting there with such freedom to disobey? Was it her mistress’s way of testing her, to see whether she could be trusted to work outside of her simple duty?
What would become of her if the answer was no?