wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2019-07-08 10:17 pm
wintersday) wrote2019-07-08 10:17 pm
Fic: A Visitation: Your Aunt
Title: A Visitation: Your Aunt
Fandom: Sunless Skies
Major Characters/Pairings: The Inconvenient Aunt, ensemble cast
Wordcount: ~1,900
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person
Summary: Do you even have an aunt? (This was written for the prompt '100 Words of Eldritch Abomination Aunts,' and it is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.)
Notes: Originally posted at![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
ScriveSpinster.
Do you even have an aunt?
You are fairly certain, when you require yourself to think about it, that you do not. You are willing to state with some degree of certainty that the stern and matronly force of nature which has taken up permanent residence on board your locomotive is not related to you in any capacity whatsoever. There’s even a note about it in the captain’s log, in your handwriting and dated to the night after she came aboard: Remember that you do not have an aunt. But the woman herself projects an aura of Auntness strong enough to overwhelm the objections of a rational mind, and the longer she stays, the less it occurs to you to question her presence. Her scones, after all, are delightful. (Sugar and butter, black currants, a hint of something you can’t quite place. Salt, maybe. Something that reminds you of the sea.) Her lacework, for all its coziness, is remarkably intricate. (Your eyes could follow those interlinked shapes and chains forever, drawn on by the illusion of depth, and still find new patterns hidden there.) Even the Repentant Devil is better behaved when she looks in his direction and frowns (He seems nervous. Is he nervous?), and the Princess, quite coincidentally, will find something useful to do on the other side of the locomotive whenever she enters a room.
All in all, you’re glad you brought her on board.
*
Even when the terror of the Wilderness closes in, breakfast is generally a cheery affair. You and your crew and your officers sit around the table, trading outlandish rumors and tales of distant skies, and ever since your aunt made the galley her domain, there’s always something fresh and home cooked to chase away the hollow chill that’s settled in your stomach.
You settle in, fold your napkin over your lap, and pass the butter down the table to a stoker who is overly fond of butter. Your aunt offers you a scone. Today, it seems, they’re served with raspberry jam, and taste of – salt and sand, blue glass, old memories, the pale light of dying stars – sugar and cream, and very little of the fungal substitute for flour that you’ve been reduced to using until you can make port again. They are, against all odds, delicious.
Your aunt offers you another scone. You savor it: warm and flaky, fresh from the oven, infused with the dust of centuries. Another serving of jam wouldn’t hurt, either, and perhaps some chorister nectar to complement the odd and lingering bitterness. Your aunt is always telling you that you ought to eat more, lest you waste away to nothing.
The tea she pours swirls in your cup; patterns form in the rising steam and dissipate, complex, converging, agnostic to Euclid’s dogma. You remember hearing somewhere that the human mind is uniquely suited to finding the illusion of faces in everything. Funny how that works, you think, and sip your tea, feeling its warmth suffuse you. Invigorating stuff. You don’t believe you’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.
Your aunt offers you another scone.
*
There comes a time when you fly through mists.
The Navigator and Driver huddle together, speaking low as they guide your locomotive through the dark, and the others watch without knowing quite what they’re watching for. There is a deep cold in the air, a looming tension, and the sense of vast, dim shapes moving through the fog outside. Then something shifts, inside your thoughts or at the corner of your vision, and all you can think is, monsters, yes, but not outside only.
You go still, hands rigid on the arms of your chair, primed to flee and yet unwilling to flee for fear of catching the attention of a creature bigger and hungrier than you. The hair on the back of your arms stands on end, and though you can sense no tangible change, some atavistic part of your mind is convinced that something old and formless lurks just behind you, close enough for you to feel the briny current of its breathing on the back of your neck. You shiver involuntarily – and without warning, you find a blanket of warm knitted wool draped around your shoulders. Your aunt, then. Only your aunt after all, proving once again that the skies have made you paranoid.
“It’s colder out there than you’re used to,” she says. “You’ll want to bundle up.” She pats your shoulder and moves away, and the sense of weight and presence seems to lessen, then vanish entirely.
The blanket has a pattern like white clouds in a blue sky, or white foam on blue waves. It’s curiously difficult to tell which it might be, and the question itself is curiously compelling. You run your fingers over the cabling, thinking that if you concentrate, you might find the answer there, but all you can see when you look closer are spirals and spirals and spirals. Pretty things. They seem to coil beneath your touch, or to writhe, as the tendrils of anemones do around their prey.
Captain.
How peculiar, you think. Perhaps it’s not that you’re falling deeper. Perhaps it’s the patterns themselves that change.
“Captain!”
You look up with a guilty start. The Fatalistic Signalman is shaking you awake – or no, not awake. You weren’t dreaming. Back to the present.
“Sorry,” you say. “Lost in thought.”
The Signalman coughs, and takes a deep drag on the stub of a cigarette he’s holding between two fingers.
“Death comes for us all,” he says, “but I’d rather prefer if it didn’t come because the captain was busy daydreaming while monsters gathered outside.”
Hearing him, your aunt swoops down like a Wings of Thunder Bat descending on a luckless hunter.
“That’s quite enough of that morbid talk, young man,” she says briskly. “And put that cigarette out. They’re not good for you.”
“That hardly matters now,” the Signalman tells her.
She plucks the cigarette from his fingers, straightens his bowler hat, adjusts his bow tie – you blink, uncertain how she’s managing that with only two arms, or where exactly the cigarette went, and your vision blurs like you’ve been staring at a page of half-written Correspondence long enough for the sigils to start taking root in your brain. You tear your eyes away, and outside the window you see something passing by your locomotive, nearly close enough to touch – something huge, coiled and serpentine, its scaled form dotted with a proliferation of sharp-toothed mouths and many, many eyes. It isn’t the worst thing you’ve ever seen – or even, a tremulous voice in the back of your mind insists, the worst thing you’ve seen in the last five minutes – but it gives the worst thing you’ve ever seen an admirable run for its money.
Your aunt glances up at it, and frowns slightly, the way she does when you’ve tucked your shirt in crookedly.
“Nuisances,” she says, with a shake of her head. For a second, it seems to you like there’s a ripple in the world, a sort of gravity, as though there’s more to her than is immediately perceptible with the eye alone. You’ve heard that a great enough weight can bend all things towards it, can tear the skin of the universe and leave it bleeding light and time. You’re certain, without knowing how you’re certain, that this array of matter and law that you’ve grown accustomed to is not so fixed as you’d thought, and very far from permanent, and that it would take very little effort to tidy it up and rearrange it. There’s no excuse, after all, for leaving a mess the way you found it.
You close your eyes, though it isn’t vision that troubles you. A stillness rolls over the bridge, a silence like the inverse of thunder, and when you look again, whatever you’d seen out the viewport is gone, leaving only mist and placid ruins. You wrap the blanket around yourself and stare out through glass, past the gradually thinning fog, searching for a trace of familiar stars.
The Driver holds their course. Second by second, the tension abates. The chill doesn’t fade, but it changes, incrementally, to something more like the simple absence of heat, and less like a presence of its own. And as the empty spaces fall behind, you emerge from the fog near the Quiet Sea, where slow waves lap against drifting wreckage and the Avid Horizon looms. You are very far from safe, in this Lorn Fluke-haunted stretch of sky, and very far indeed from where you were when the mists came over you, but you are not in the place you were, and that comes as an intense relief.
Your aunt, gods bless her, is standing by with a tin of biscuits and an air of unshakeable practicality. She pats your shoulder again; the universe tilts, realigns, rights itself, and you are scanning the skies with an eye for threats while nibbling on something sugary that tastes like chocolate and sea-salt and the particular slant of dusty light through a shower of the Blue Kingdom’s silvery petals.
“Do take care of yourself, dear,” she says. “You work yourself too hard.”
*
After the mists and the silence, once you’ve found your way back to safer skies, it is determined that a vacation is in order – although getting anyone to agree on where is proving a taller order than traversing the Sapphir’d King’s domain unscathed. Caduceus has been ruled out on the basis of being unsafe, and Perdurance on the basis of being unsettling. Port Avon is unfriendly. Langley Hall is too far out of the way. Nobody wants to go near the Blue Kingdom.
“Titania,” the Repentant Devil suggests. “Full of art and culture.”
“Full of bees,” the Fatalistic Signalman says. “Dreadful things. Can’t abide them. What about Polmear and Plenty’s?”
“Full of shabbily-dressed, nicotine-stained philistines,” the Devil snaps, all previous evidence of fondness for circuses to the contrary. Near the back of the room, the Navigator quietly makes a bet with Cinders regarding how long it will be until one of the two is caught discreetly exiting the other’s cabin.
“I hear Worlebury Juxta-Mare is nice this time of year,” the Driver says hopefully.
“Ooh, yes,” the Eccentric says. “I’ve been wanting to try their saltwater taffy.”
“There are quaint little tea shops,” the Princess adds, sounding delighted. “And so very many interesting things to do.”
One by one, your officers express their opinions, which trend increasingly to the positive. The Navigator is tempted by the prospect of carnival games, the Rat Brigade by a diverse selection of mostly-edible items fried in grease. Even the Devil concedes that it might be interesting, and the Signalman that it’s probably what they deserve. Which is to say that Worlebury Juxta-Mare it likely is, and you’re not sure whether you’re grateful or disappointed that the lot of them have selected somewhere so utterly normal to spend their time off. The only person who hasn’t spoken is your aunt, who is busy knitting a patterned scarf that seems, so far as you can tell, to have neither end nor beginning.
“Any objections to a seaside vacation?” you ask, once you manage to look away from the geometry-twisting shimmer that hangs for an instant in the air around her.
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding vaguely perturbed. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Worlebury. Lovely spot for a swim, I’ve heard. But... surely I’m not the only one who finds the place rather odd?”
Fandom: Sunless Skies
Major Characters/Pairings: The Inconvenient Aunt, ensemble cast
Wordcount: ~1,900
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person
Summary: Do you even have an aunt? (This was written for the prompt '100 Words of Eldritch Abomination Aunts,' and it is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.)
Notes: Originally posted at
Do you even have an aunt?
You are fairly certain, when you require yourself to think about it, that you do not. You are willing to state with some degree of certainty that the stern and matronly force of nature which has taken up permanent residence on board your locomotive is not related to you in any capacity whatsoever. There’s even a note about it in the captain’s log, in your handwriting and dated to the night after she came aboard: Remember that you do not have an aunt. But the woman herself projects an aura of Auntness strong enough to overwhelm the objections of a rational mind, and the longer she stays, the less it occurs to you to question her presence. Her scones, after all, are delightful. (Sugar and butter, black currants, a hint of something you can’t quite place. Salt, maybe. Something that reminds you of the sea.) Her lacework, for all its coziness, is remarkably intricate. (Your eyes could follow those interlinked shapes and chains forever, drawn on by the illusion of depth, and still find new patterns hidden there.) Even the Repentant Devil is better behaved when she looks in his direction and frowns (He seems nervous. Is he nervous?), and the Princess, quite coincidentally, will find something useful to do on the other side of the locomotive whenever she enters a room.
All in all, you’re glad you brought her on board.
*
Even when the terror of the Wilderness closes in, breakfast is generally a cheery affair. You and your crew and your officers sit around the table, trading outlandish rumors and tales of distant skies, and ever since your aunt made the galley her domain, there’s always something fresh and home cooked to chase away the hollow chill that’s settled in your stomach.
You settle in, fold your napkin over your lap, and pass the butter down the table to a stoker who is overly fond of butter. Your aunt offers you a scone. Today, it seems, they’re served with raspberry jam, and taste of – salt and sand, blue glass, old memories, the pale light of dying stars – sugar and cream, and very little of the fungal substitute for flour that you’ve been reduced to using until you can make port again. They are, against all odds, delicious.
Your aunt offers you another scone. You savor it: warm and flaky, fresh from the oven, infused with the dust of centuries. Another serving of jam wouldn’t hurt, either, and perhaps some chorister nectar to complement the odd and lingering bitterness. Your aunt is always telling you that you ought to eat more, lest you waste away to nothing.
The tea she pours swirls in your cup; patterns form in the rising steam and dissipate, complex, converging, agnostic to Euclid’s dogma. You remember hearing somewhere that the human mind is uniquely suited to finding the illusion of faces in everything. Funny how that works, you think, and sip your tea, feeling its warmth suffuse you. Invigorating stuff. You don’t believe you’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.
Your aunt offers you another scone.
*
There comes a time when you fly through mists.
The Navigator and Driver huddle together, speaking low as they guide your locomotive through the dark, and the others watch without knowing quite what they’re watching for. There is a deep cold in the air, a looming tension, and the sense of vast, dim shapes moving through the fog outside. Then something shifts, inside your thoughts or at the corner of your vision, and all you can think is, monsters, yes, but not outside only.
You go still, hands rigid on the arms of your chair, primed to flee and yet unwilling to flee for fear of catching the attention of a creature bigger and hungrier than you. The hair on the back of your arms stands on end, and though you can sense no tangible change, some atavistic part of your mind is convinced that something old and formless lurks just behind you, close enough for you to feel the briny current of its breathing on the back of your neck. You shiver involuntarily – and without warning, you find a blanket of warm knitted wool draped around your shoulders. Your aunt, then. Only your aunt after all, proving once again that the skies have made you paranoid.
“It’s colder out there than you’re used to,” she says. “You’ll want to bundle up.” She pats your shoulder and moves away, and the sense of weight and presence seems to lessen, then vanish entirely.
The blanket has a pattern like white clouds in a blue sky, or white foam on blue waves. It’s curiously difficult to tell which it might be, and the question itself is curiously compelling. You run your fingers over the cabling, thinking that if you concentrate, you might find the answer there, but all you can see when you look closer are spirals and spirals and spirals. Pretty things. They seem to coil beneath your touch, or to writhe, as the tendrils of anemones do around their prey.
Captain.
How peculiar, you think. Perhaps it’s not that you’re falling deeper. Perhaps it’s the patterns themselves that change.
“Captain!”
You look up with a guilty start. The Fatalistic Signalman is shaking you awake – or no, not awake. You weren’t dreaming. Back to the present.
“Sorry,” you say. “Lost in thought.”
The Signalman coughs, and takes a deep drag on the stub of a cigarette he’s holding between two fingers.
“Death comes for us all,” he says, “but I’d rather prefer if it didn’t come because the captain was busy daydreaming while monsters gathered outside.”
Hearing him, your aunt swoops down like a Wings of Thunder Bat descending on a luckless hunter.
“That’s quite enough of that morbid talk, young man,” she says briskly. “And put that cigarette out. They’re not good for you.”
“That hardly matters now,” the Signalman tells her.
She plucks the cigarette from his fingers, straightens his bowler hat, adjusts his bow tie – you blink, uncertain how she’s managing that with only two arms, or where exactly the cigarette went, and your vision blurs like you’ve been staring at a page of half-written Correspondence long enough for the sigils to start taking root in your brain. You tear your eyes away, and outside the window you see something passing by your locomotive, nearly close enough to touch – something huge, coiled and serpentine, its scaled form dotted with a proliferation of sharp-toothed mouths and many, many eyes. It isn’t the worst thing you’ve ever seen – or even, a tremulous voice in the back of your mind insists, the worst thing you’ve seen in the last five minutes – but it gives the worst thing you’ve ever seen an admirable run for its money.
Your aunt glances up at it, and frowns slightly, the way she does when you’ve tucked your shirt in crookedly.
“Nuisances,” she says, with a shake of her head. For a second, it seems to you like there’s a ripple in the world, a sort of gravity, as though there’s more to her than is immediately perceptible with the eye alone. You’ve heard that a great enough weight can bend all things towards it, can tear the skin of the universe and leave it bleeding light and time. You’re certain, without knowing how you’re certain, that this array of matter and law that you’ve grown accustomed to is not so fixed as you’d thought, and very far from permanent, and that it would take very little effort to tidy it up and rearrange it. There’s no excuse, after all, for leaving a mess the way you found it.
You close your eyes, though it isn’t vision that troubles you. A stillness rolls over the bridge, a silence like the inverse of thunder, and when you look again, whatever you’d seen out the viewport is gone, leaving only mist and placid ruins. You wrap the blanket around yourself and stare out through glass, past the gradually thinning fog, searching for a trace of familiar stars.
The Driver holds their course. Second by second, the tension abates. The chill doesn’t fade, but it changes, incrementally, to something more like the simple absence of heat, and less like a presence of its own. And as the empty spaces fall behind, you emerge from the fog near the Quiet Sea, where slow waves lap against drifting wreckage and the Avid Horizon looms. You are very far from safe, in this Lorn Fluke-haunted stretch of sky, and very far indeed from where you were when the mists came over you, but you are not in the place you were, and that comes as an intense relief.
Your aunt, gods bless her, is standing by with a tin of biscuits and an air of unshakeable practicality. She pats your shoulder again; the universe tilts, realigns, rights itself, and you are scanning the skies with an eye for threats while nibbling on something sugary that tastes like chocolate and sea-salt and the particular slant of dusty light through a shower of the Blue Kingdom’s silvery petals.
“Do take care of yourself, dear,” she says. “You work yourself too hard.”
*
After the mists and the silence, once you’ve found your way back to safer skies, it is determined that a vacation is in order – although getting anyone to agree on where is proving a taller order than traversing the Sapphir’d King’s domain unscathed. Caduceus has been ruled out on the basis of being unsafe, and Perdurance on the basis of being unsettling. Port Avon is unfriendly. Langley Hall is too far out of the way. Nobody wants to go near the Blue Kingdom.
“Titania,” the Repentant Devil suggests. “Full of art and culture.”
“Full of bees,” the Fatalistic Signalman says. “Dreadful things. Can’t abide them. What about Polmear and Plenty’s?”
“Full of shabbily-dressed, nicotine-stained philistines,” the Devil snaps, all previous evidence of fondness for circuses to the contrary. Near the back of the room, the Navigator quietly makes a bet with Cinders regarding how long it will be until one of the two is caught discreetly exiting the other’s cabin.
“I hear Worlebury Juxta-Mare is nice this time of year,” the Driver says hopefully.
“Ooh, yes,” the Eccentric says. “I’ve been wanting to try their saltwater taffy.”
“There are quaint little tea shops,” the Princess adds, sounding delighted. “And so very many interesting things to do.”
One by one, your officers express their opinions, which trend increasingly to the positive. The Navigator is tempted by the prospect of carnival games, the Rat Brigade by a diverse selection of mostly-edible items fried in grease. Even the Devil concedes that it might be interesting, and the Signalman that it’s probably what they deserve. Which is to say that Worlebury Juxta-Mare it likely is, and you’re not sure whether you’re grateful or disappointed that the lot of them have selected somewhere so utterly normal to spend their time off. The only person who hasn’t spoken is your aunt, who is busy knitting a patterned scarf that seems, so far as you can tell, to have neither end nor beginning.
“Any objections to a seaside vacation?” you ask, once you manage to look away from the geometry-twisting shimmer that hangs for an instant in the air around her.
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding vaguely perturbed. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Worlebury. Lovely spot for a swim, I’ve heard. But... surely I’m not the only one who finds the place rather odd?”