The afternoon settles thick over the cottage, all heavy warmth and quiet murmurs, the kind of day when the world feels folded in upon itself like an old quilt.
In the tangled garden out back, Ollan leans carefully into the task of watering. His boots squelch gently in the dark soil, and the watering can, still a little too large for his hands, tips in a steady arc that no longer drowns the roots the way it did yesterday. He watches the water soak into the earth with a thoughtful seriousness, pausing between rows the way he saw Eileen do, as if listening for the ground’s approval.
Fenn sprawls in a lazy curve beside the stones marking the edge of the herb bed, one paw flicking now and then at a passing fly, his eyes half lidded but never fully asleep. From time to time, he glances toward the fence line, ears twitching, catching something too quiet for even goblin ears or maybe its just the slow breathing of the land itself.
Ollan hums as he works, a tuneless sound that rises into the slow spinning sky, a wordless offering to the smallness of the moment. He speaks between breaths, not because anyone asked, but because he believes the garden, and Fenn, and maybe even this home deserve to know what he's thinking.
"When I get bigger," he says, tipping water around a reluctant row of onions, "I’m gonna plant trees so tall you can climb into the clouds. And when I get older, I’ll build a fence so high the scary things can’t climb it. Not even the tall ones with too many elbows."
The watering can sputters, empty with a hollow sigh. Ollan kneels by the bucket he dragged from the shed, filling it again with careful hands that no longer spill as much as they used to. The motes had helped him yesterday and yet today he felt like he hardly needed their help at all.
The air shivers faintly. Fenn lifts his head, one ear pricked, still, in the way critters do when the world tries to speak with them.
Ollan looks up too, just in time to see the motes, dozens of them, drifting from the corners of the cottage. They move in slow, deliberate spirals, like soap bubbles that know where they’re going. They weave through fence posts and curling bean vines, brushing nothing, disturbing nothing, until they reach the old laundry pole that stands crooked on its own.
There is nothing special about the pole. Just a stubborn bit of wood with rusted nails and a few faded clothespins, given a good scrubbing by Eileen the day before. But as the motes begin to gather and circle it, something in the pole seems to listen. Developing into a low, patient hum that grows from inside the wood, the kind of sound that knows how to wait.
Around it, the air thickens, not heavier, but more certain. Light bends slightly at the edges. Ollan tilts his head, squinting at the sky. For a breathless moment, he sees something: faint hexagonal shapes, soft and slow, locking together like shy clockwork. A shield, nearly invisible, but absolutely there.
Fenn watches the formation, tail twitching once. Then he looks to Ollan, who stands very still, muddy fingers resting on the watering can’s handle.
“Fenn,” he whispers, not realizing he’s lowered his voice to match the reverence Eileen uses when talking to candles and stars, “I think they made a shield.”
The shimmer pulses, not closing him out but wrapping the garden gently instead, like a second skin stitched from patience and chores and the kinds of kindness that never expects to be remembered. The pole hums once more, deeper now. As if agreeing.
TO: Arch-Scribe of the Ninth Docket; She-Who-Keeps-the-Pen-Wet
FROM: Quill Pnrkt; Finger-licking, Feather-flayed, Ever-shrieking
THREAD FILE: Δ-MAT-0413 – “That Which Suckled the Motes”
PRIORITY: SCALDING / INK-BLIND / DEFILEMENT BY DOILY
By the shriveled ink-sac of the Founder’s Mouth, I submit this second lamentation, penned through froth and feather-loss, on the accursed subject known as The Matron.
O Structure, bear witness to my fingernails.
O System, sip deeply from my molars.
We have lost the cottage.
Not lost as in misfiled.
Not lost as in beneath siege.
LOST, as in VANISHED-FROM-ALL-SCRYING-REALMS, GONE-IN-THE-HEX, ENCASED-IN-FOLK-RIGHTEOUSNESS-AND-FLOUR.
There is no thread.
There is no door.
There is only the hum.
And the hum has teeth.
Let it be recorded, that the following scrying rites have failed:
-
Bone-Sight and Feather-Focus
-
Triple-Eye Inversion through Mucous Divination
-
Lard-Ring Tasting
-
Orb of Screaming
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The Very Polite Door-Knock
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Thrice Emergency Womb Echo
She has shielded her dwelling with motes.
Motes!
Our motes!
They should be scrivening in agony!
Instead, they weave hexagons. They purr.
I suspect. Though this thought makes my inks curdle that she has taught them hospitality.
Or worse.
Domesticity.
There is a pole.
A laundry pole.
A stick of no power, no bone, no glyph.
And they have anchored it.
They have made of it a sigil-spear of invitation and hung it with textiles of denial.
We are denied.
We, the keepers. We, the Quills.
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Denied!
The orb cracked my jaw!
The orb did not show the cottage.
The orb showed me a pie.
A PIE.
I am scratching out my own name in protest.
I am un-quilling myself by letter.
Let it be noted that I am currently bleeding out in glyph order, from the vowel to the noun.
The Matron remains.
The cottage stands.
And the Dungeon listens like a cradle wanting to be rocked.
This is no longer a containment issue.
This is a reclamation in reverse.
And we are the afterbirth.
May my screams be properly archived.
In madness, in molar,
Pnrkt Of the Third Fang, Feathered Screaming, Currently Unraveling
Bitten several times out of spite.
The late afternoon light drapes itself across the cottage kitchen in slow folds, painting everything in gold and softened edges. The hearth glows with a steady warmth, and the scent of simmering stew winds its way through the room like a thought half remembered. A pot bubbles low and patient on the stove, filling the space with a hush that asks nothing and keeps its own rhythm. Eileen stands at the stove, stirring the broth with a long handled wooden spoon, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, her movements unhurried and steady, the way one might stir a memory back into place.
At the table, Audry works without being asked. She lays out bowls with quiet precision, then settles onto a stool, her legs swinging just slightly above the floor. A pile of skinned carrots waits beside her, and she picks up a small knife, cutting them into coins with slow, deliberate movements. It is a task she has begun to call her own, made official by the quiet announcement that she is now the “sous,” or so Eileen had claimed, as if the naming of it gave the work a shape she could step into.
Eileen taste tests the broth, considers it for a moment, then adds a pinch of thyme. The scent blooms quickly, curling upward into the steam, rising to find the corners of the room where shadows had begun to settle. She places a mug of cooled tea beside Audry’s elbow, not speaking, not watching, only making space. There is no prompting, only presence. An invitation held open the way one might hold a door for someone still deciding whether they want to enter.
When Audry speaks, her voice is soft. Not pulled by fear or expectation, but shaped by the quiet ache of needing to be heard without knowing exactly why. Her eyes remain on the cutting board though. “They made us bow sometimes,” she says. “Not always for hours. But long enough that your knees go numb.”
Eileen stirs the stew once more, the motion slow, the spoon gliding gently along the bottom of the pot as if nothing had been said at all. The moment remaining unbroken. “There was one time,” Audry continues, her fingers tracing the grain of the wood beneath her, “I bowed and whispered at the same time. I just wanted to see if anyone noticed.”
She glances down at her hands, small and tense, her knuckles whitening as she presses her palms flat against the table. “They noticed.”
Still, Eileen says nothing. She turns the burner down a little so the pot will not bubble over. The knob clicks softly beneath her fingers, a sound too small to punctuate anything, and yet it does. She does not offer comfort for she does feel that the moment requires a naming.
Audry goes on, not because she is being led, but because something inside her has finally found enough room to breathe.
“Sometimes I thought the gods liked it best when we were still,” she says. “Because then you’re easiest to stack. Like kindling.”
The words drift out into the kitchen like the hurried confession of a child unsure of their thoughts being right. A kind of truth that forms only after it has already begun to echo somewhere in the chest. Eileen lifts the lid on the pot, letting the steam escape.
After a long pause, Audry speaks again, quieter now, almost to herself. “But I shook once. On purpose.”
Her hands return to the table, flattening again. The knife has been forgotten. The carrots remain half cut, waiting for her to finish what she no longer remembers starting. “They said that meant I was broken.”
Eileen does not answer right away but she does let the silence hang long enough so that it becomes folded around them in a way that does not feel like judgment. “Sometimes a thing only feels right,” she says, gently, “because you haven’t yet learned how to listen to the part of you that says otherwise.”
The pot bubbles again.
The door creaks open, and a cool breeze slips across the kitchen floor, edged with the scent of damp earth and bruised herbs, the kind of air that only arrives after something has spent the whole day growing. Ollan steps through first, his arms full of crooked vegetables and tangled greens that look more like treasure than food. His shirt is smudged with dirt from the elbows down, and his cheeks are marked with a long streak of dried mud, the kind that suggests either a fall or some secret rite of passage performed in solemn silence with a stick and good intent. He dumps the pile onto the nearest table in a sprawling heap, then plucks a radish from the top with both hands and holds it aloft like a relic.
“I think this one is the leader,” he announces with pride. “It was sitting on top of all the other vegetables like it knew.”
Fenn follows close behind, fur damp at the tips, one paw muddy but entirely unbothered. He pauses by the door to sniff the baseboards, lets out a faint chirp of approval, then leaps lightly onto the bench beside the table and stretches along the entirety of it as if reclaiming territory that has always belonged to him.
Audry looks up and smiles not wide, not performative, but real in the quiet corners of her eyes. She does not speak though, she only watches as Ollan begins arranging his findings with the careful importance of someone revealing a map to a forgotten kingdom. Four knobby carrots, three onions with tangled hair, a cluster of green leaves that smell slightly bitter and unfamiliar, and the radish, now resting on a folded napkin as if awaiting its coronation.
“They’re a little weird looking,” Ollan says, brushing soil from one of the onions with his sleeve. “But they grew here, just for us. That's why we need to eat them!”
Eileen receives the offering with a bright smile and a soft hum of approval meant to feel like a well done job or 'I see' the things you do for us. What she does not do is mention that she has already used the last of the fridge vegetables for the stew. Instead she takes the new ones to the sink and begins to wash them, her sleeves already damp from the work of the day.
Ollan lingers nearby, watching her hands move. “William says the garden is too quiet,” he says after a moment, almost as if the silence had asked first. “He says it feels like everything is watching him. But it’s probably just the sniffles. He’s not feeling good.”
Audry glances toward the door, her hand still resting around the cooling mug. She doesn't ask anything, but her eyes shift toward the entryway like she’s expecting something to step through it and doesn’t know if she'll still feel whole when it does so.
William enters without a word.
He walks like someone carrying a weight that cannot be set down. His clothes are clean now, but there is a kind of dust still clinging to the space around him not visible or real, but deeply present. He keeps his eyes on the floor as he crosses the kitchen, and when he sits, it is not at the table, but on the floor beside it, his back against the wall, knees drawn up loosely, arms resting on them like he's bracing for orders that will never come.
No one addresses him or interrupts him. Even Fenn only flicks his tail once in William’s direction before returning to his lounging. The conversation resumes without ceremony, Ollan explaining, in great detail, the tactical advantages of planting spring onions near the garden fence, because the stones there have good energy.
Eventually William folds his hands in his lap, then unfolds them, then folds them again. His face is expressionless, not blank in the way of sleep, but hollow in the way of someone who has misplaced all the pieces they once used to hold a story together. He does not ask for food when they have dinner but does not decline it when Eileen hands him a big bowl with extra helping of fresh bread. He simply exists alongside the scent of stew, the rhythm of conversation, the warm stretch of something alive that does not require him to participate.
“William’s just not feeling good,” Ollan says again towards the end of the meal, a little louder this time, as if that alone might make it less strange. “He might be sick. Or maybe his brain is sleepy.”
No one corrects him, not yet. Ollan had not been there. He had not seen what had happened in the camp, he does not understand how tightly William still clutches to pieces that are cutting him back.
But the comment causes Audry to glance toward the wall where William sits, and for a moment her gaze lingers, not pitying, not afraid, but wondering. Then she looks away again, her hand returning to the mug she cannot bring herself to sip.