Quoted By:
>Gordian knot
If only you could see— but it is black, black, and you read the colors of the folders by touch. There is you and there is the shape in the black picking at you and you don't think it's a human shape. Maybe vaguely human. But too long— and those are talons.
This could be so. It could be that you are imagining it. You are certainly imagining the folders, the kick, the rocks, and the skua: all of it a desperate attempt to bring order to formlessness, shape to void, to escape the fact that you have been shaking the Manager's hand for a long, long time. If <span class="mu-i">only</span> you could see. If only your eyes...
Not 'eyes'. You only have one. The other, the bad one, the steel one, the dead one, was smuggled in years ago— you can't remember when or how. You assume it was Richard. You hope it was voluntary. Not that the thing's done a lot of good ever since, serving mostly to draw funny looks and fuzz your peripheral vision. It can see in the dark, you suppose, but so can your good eye. Richard did that. Also, it's not dark here— it's black. It's different.
Still, there's something biting at you, and you don't mean the Manager. Something about the bad eye and seeing in the dark. Something about why you even have it. You assume Richard wouldn't have stuck you with it for no reason— if somebody stabbed your real eye out, couldn't he have grown it back? Or gotten you a replica that looks like an eye, so less people think you're freaky? Sure, he was mean back then, but he's never been impractical. Plus, what if you actually agreed to it? You would've had a good reason.
<span class="mu-i">That's the WYRM's dead eye.</span>
You're not sure you'd like the reason, nowadays, but it would've been a good reason.
<span class="mu-i">It didn't just put up with having only one eye... It made Itself a new eye to replace it? But it could never be as good or bright as the old one, and It can't see out of it nearly as well.</span>
A really good reason.
<span class="mu-i">You crinkle the umbrella between your thumb and forefinger and look up into the lizard thing's saucer eyes: one gold, one iron.</span>
<span class="mu-i">Your pupil is in the shape of a keyhole, too. Because of course it is.</span>
<span class="mu-i">One good one and one dead one during the day. Like you. That's why I thought you might be—</span>
What was that on your wanted poster again? "Fomentation of dissent, desertion, murder"... and something else. Something somebody handwrote. "Undisclosed mutations"?
<span class="mu-i">So you *can* speak, Charlie, Jesse says, and when you look back up at him there's something knowing in his eyes. You realize then that the two of you share a secret.</span>
<span class="mu-i">He tugs the collar down further, and rubs still-wet blood out of the way, and reveals a coin-sized closed-spiral tattoo.</span>
<span class="mu-i">And now look at you! A beautiful young woman! And embarked on the spiral road all by yourself!</span>
It's not that the bad eye hasn't done anything for you. It just hasn't done anything for you the vast majority of the time. On rare occasion, though, it has—
(1/4?)
