morgan
sex: male
occupation: keeper of a withered bracing neurodivergence: huskshedder. under care of sister leaeth of the sixth gate
likes: warm neosoil
dislikes: SunNet shadowbans
blood type: b
‘But there’s not much time. There will have to be other sanctuaries as well protected as the Gardens of the Queen.’
The Epsilon threading is recovered from a crush dreaming, unspun while coastered out. This sojourn will make its way to Ceriel only after the light fleets away. The gardencity has held secrets from ancient bud. They blossom in petaldance to the eyes of those who stare not at the mist but at the neo-soil below. Ponder their footwork. Careful as they toe across chalk shadows. Etched spectres of those bleachnuked long before into this ghosthood. This is what is meant. In that lost heartbeat belched up from loam there will always be a pattern. Strung through the limbs that push and pull. It is for the desperate, the drowned in ichor, to try to see through the black gloop. To make out the sky past the surface which no light ever breaks through. Those who stare at earth exhume it instead.
lesia
sex: female
sex: female
occupation: Andro
occupation: choked girl
likes: armcrate stashes, rearguard backs
likes: good mindfits, bad hair, moon omens
dislikes: vapesmoke chemtrails
dislikes: valley doll flooze,
blood type: ???
blood type: a-
chere
“The spider has taken the same amino acids that are in your hair, skin, body and has put them together to make a beautiful continuous filament with perfect crystallinity.”
But in the only outward radius that matters, the smoothness of her silver is so severe that it ripples the way a whisper stirs over the breathless stillness of the water. You can count on it to crease out some soft patterns before the water settles back to placid serenity.
Well, the only settling this ghost is doing is settling in. And as they commune within her foundation she soon feels it’s the ghost’s foundation and not hers. As if she’s lost in some forest of shadows. What’s a forest? Is that a Hub? But Hubs are never dark. I can’t help you, she says. I’ve never seen a forest.
The ghost is greedy. It’s already attached itself to her where her mem cores the spark of her current, her glyphic pulse, drawing strength to translate itself into another way to read it. That was mine first, she wants to say. But her inner voice is saying something else. Take all you can. You’ll need it for the way home.
-excerpt from Sigma threading crossflow, rivered to via archival by codex ghoster id-claimed as ‘the wren.’
cammy
birthday: 3,074.3.57 HP
sex: female
occupation: hackergurl
likes: a good mem trade, lifefash, ghost sunlight
dilikes: juicebox moons
blood type: a-
seen with: the neuroxia in all eyes
"I mean, what do you really find? Is it trouble for the rest of your life or is it the end of the rainbow? Do you dare to actually open the treasure box?" He turned his hands palms up and shook his head.
she'd sent a venter, harmless, spooled in motley violet and it had coursed
- in a radiance stolen from the loner, she'd thought,
the one fixtured as a stalker slanting from the lowest plane -
and he'd seen, ignored & now of course was thinking over what it meant.
not her true feelings, he'd thought, double checked that thought, her thought, over.
over & again.
but she'd already been out, been gone, or it was gonna happen that way, the way their molting had laid it out, a half-decaled chronosis ago, or were the fibers truer and bluer? by which she'd meant that sickly blue blemish, the pale, streaking glaze of wizened tendon or carc'ed teeth.
and we have, she thinks, not much time left to keep going steady, and thank these angel echoes for that. echoed to where we only see them as our own dreams, and not our good dreams, and only sketched out and taken shape in our angst.
and it would hurt to be released from his trust, but she'd released him from hers, long ago. who keeps going that way? some do, and some must hurt, hurt themselves keeping it displaced like that, about a thousand bytes of it each time, severed only by the break of jawline
-while you think it over-
and say no fault, i am faultless here, and you say that with your silence, don't you?
but he says it with smoke now, clouding her out, dark clouds over her as she traipses through that outside.
hint of rain nuzzles her hair through her hood, meaning-
stronger than it feels. flame auricked lacing of her hair glued against and into banded nylon heavy with damp, in more obeisance to gravity, she can feel it, even so.
but no curl strings her eyes yet.
and all the fash and trend swims by her, in no way is she swimming through it. plaited clothes strung by the sleeve, skulls shorn seventy-five to twenty-five.
she could zone on this all day, has other concerns, could zone on this all day and that's unfair, something wired into the schema of her percepts and of course she can only blame herself for that.
but she doesn't want to, and where was she going?
her beater is still more dead than alive.
more dead than alive meaning, life enough.
so it wasn't that, she must have wanted something else.
but no, she thinks, couldn't be that, i am not wired that way,
and so she's wired herself out of it but still: dark clouds hanging heavy over her. patches on the pavecrete, blooming in shadow over lines ebbed and in some cases, shorted—
in intent—
if you think, she thinks, there is life enough here, i'll prove you wrong, i'll make you care about it.
but only in hushed voices do they talk about Disillusion, in whispers do they dare into what it means.
what is your problem, she hears someone say, its not a good enough design? some poor loser must have shorted his shit by a headpiece for that. such a waste of time, right?
too detailed, she thinks, too exact an assess of her assess, and it that way she must have dreamed it, because she doesn't think she was caught looking. all this time, she thinks, i don't get caught looking & ...
it's others who need to worry about that.
get caught up in that shit and it'll play you for real.
and so she's skipping past that just to focus on the shadows, blooming like algae clusters, she thinks, some lonely place past the 'wave that's all ocean.
the clusters themselves are cold & dry, sleek where not bittered by age and other people's issues.
her beater, had she left it on? it would be draining now, draining its brightness into the world. the world through the black floor, through the white walls she's never been able to poster up.
when its done it would sleep, she'd set it that way, sleep on the verge of its death,
sleep through its death that way, and that would hit her the next time she logged in, because she wants, she's told herself, to age out through it.
no breath she breathes out through it, and she's at Tachae's anyway, and it's boarded up the way it always is.
if she wanted to she could face the darkness that seeps out between the slabs of spiral-grained wood. bolted in chrome-finished iron. sparks of rust blood the ovalled tips.
go inside, see if anyone's there.
if she wanted to. .
taken from the Velih simtapes, Assembled Headspace 890-A (Pre-Collapse to the Skein of Orche)
hexa
sex: female
occupation: feral Andro, dreamhost
likes: other churns
dislikes: larval slavers, unwelcome ghosts
blood type: ???
‘I slip into we so swiftly was I ever here?’
Catch Chere at the mall with a deadcool mindfit and time to spare to look for the next sign. So not on-clock. She's gotten permish from her dream protocols to keep herself wired with stim today, but the way she'd crashed before she thought she'd deal with fallout for weeks.
Devon is a social vamp she'd picked up in a bar west of Orion Point, on-look with greasy forelocked hair and dead scene eyes. When those eyes are on her she's in a sweat, out of her comfort zone, which is the point.
So when he'd ditched her to check out the latest emulsed dolls, she hadn't triggered his social to say, "actually, they're fully articulated motion figures." She'd just smiled, looked demure, and even when he was just a silhouette down the far walkway line, glassed in on all sides by fronts and facades fresh with graffiti marker, she hadn't induced wisteria but instead turned her own back. The Frost Giants she'd been seeing in panes of glass, in the whites of her own eyes.
She'd just cut her hair, yet to hit her eyes. In crisis sometimes, on the usual, she'd choked out the cramps of the black forest with the freezeburn of the Frost Giants under waning away from the wist, waxing into everything else. So the next sign hits as a girl staring at her with the eyes of Hecate, flowers crowning her rainbow hair.
She thinks, pretty good for post-Capricorn rebound. But if it's clear she's scoring into this girl's eyes just to check for the next guidance path it gets wonky. The Frost Giants have protocols against checking people for personal trips. Chere is dead cold running epsilon into what heaven or hell awaits.
"What're you doing here?" she says. Right hand path. Direct conflict and act like she knows. Deeper spiral into the traces of memory. She does know her, but not from outside herself. Knows her from the swim of holics that had been past the black forest. In the way she'd played with its rhythms like viola strings, stirring the notes in slow sojourn from the cruel silence.
Who you are could swim in slow journey from your core and spread through your skin as it grows.
"Trying a new skin," the strange girl says. "This is what I could look like if I could, but I'll forget soon. Overload warp sent me here to frame the stress. I'll forget that, too."
Chere has the impulse to set her cortisol to bleaching wakemode but all she can do to shut the scream down. Turn it into a steady pulse at least to find space in her breath expelled. With that comes the words. "Which one are you under?"
There's a bunch, she thinks. A different spin would swirl to a different coriolis. Penchant there for not knowing the right way to work the choker. Each facet holds glimmer veined down to the centre. She thinks, though, if she knows for sure, she can script it down the line, to make sure she never zones, fucks it up.
"All of them," the girl says, "I've been under all of them, their weight heavy and forever pressing. Forever crushing." And that's when Chere knows she's read it all wrong. She rolls her eyes skyward, in her thoughts to keep them from the heat, the awk steaming from the girl’s shoulderblades, rising in curls she can almost see. In herself, she knows, to keep them from the clasp on her neck, from the next dose. Bound to come in askew now, ill-timed, off the script, the one script that will take her where she wants to be.
There are so many doses, she thinks, so many scripts to worry about, and how will I know for sure if the signs aren't on me? If what's on me is like this?
So she leaves the girl alone. Still thinking about her later when she's still hiding out in the hypermall. From the cold outside. From the Giants. You can see them, of course, in the whites of your eyes, pale reflections in the glass.
You can also see them in the snow, when you're hitting heat dep, and when she talks about them with her sisters of social she says, they say: it's a frozen heart, is what it is. It's when it stops beating your eyes start burning dry.
She thinks you could pretend, you could trick yourself. From there a short stop to tricking someone else. Puts that deep down. Hopes she'll forget, the way you can forget anything at all. Knows chances are it take root in the loam of her guts, from there flowers vines, tendrils. It does what it wants with her.
Never ends. The social vamp is on a line that buzzes when he hits her up. When she looks back the girl is gone, and by the sound of shrieking a few Ghouls have made it past the shutters. It's their shrieking, of course, in ghoultonge.
Something like: why am I here? I want to leave.
taken from Hexa's dreamtrip log, all of which have been embedded with psyembryonic splicers at the request of Sanctum Hegemön
ORCHE / PHASSA
Blood type: o positive
Likes: illusive veils, pheroweave translations, ghost schemas
Dislikes: being alone
Seen with: Phassa
Blood type: a negative
Likes: sunshadow, the nodal soul, custom leafware
Dislikes: shallow talk, Field trips
Seen with: Orche
“... if the pathogenic organisms are there, it’s unlikely you’ll get them all off. What are you going to do, not eat?” - Patricia Griffin
Orche had said, 𝒾 𝑔𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝒷𝑜𝓃𝑒𝓈 𝒷𝑒𝓇𝑒𝒻𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓈𝓅𝒾𝓉 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝑔𝓊𝓂 𝑜𝒻 𝓎𝑜𝓊, 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓈𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓈 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓅𝒶𝓅𝑒𝓇 𝓉𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓈. She'd said that to pass it on through Laeath’s pheroweavings. An easy ask because she'd be away from it, not worried about it. For her it's time, a bit more wound down and this planar not one spiders brook easy, can wander at their leisure. Because eventually the web sticks with the residue of ground tread time and again. The line gunks up each time, a little more every pass.
Still as Laeath ossifies into the permanence of the oraclehood she thinks, there's no right way to do this. She gathers the billows of her smokeskein through which she controls what she sees, how she sees it, how others see her. Her mission is to record the final moments of Morgan's Tender, at the end of its growth now fading to black. What makes an exile is they can't, in the end, nourish their Tenders. And that would happen, she thinks, without me. Without a Tender, the way to go is full of harm with my eyes not reaching them and when they're gone there goes Orche's prechrysalis. By this time the world of electric flora is in early disentegration. The light breaking through the vein linings, that held back the datastream encased, tinged a phosphor green and the bleed lines web across the sky.
Here where the canopy is tattered enough to see them. Crackling through the bramble, microlatticed up there, with the dying Tender straining to reach them. By now Morgan has passed the clean flame. With him gone the Tender has let the Frost in that she'd spun into foreign attack. Orcha Mutate hangs on with a desperate grip, but sure, she thinks, it's just winter, and winter is when Orche wanted to change.
So as she pulls her smokeskein along its trails lap and spark against the Flora. Gleaning as clear a picture she can, through the smoke as it stabs. She's not a moment too soon, with the white bleach of the Frost coating the nanonodes and spreading through the datastream the way blood flows, carries sickness through it. Through her sight she sees the bleach but not the data itself; the spoolings, inner weavings of Orche are unknown to her.
Of course Laeath could say, I told you so, if it all looms out into something she doesn't want. But she thinks that isn't part of her role here, not as designated by the Gates. And the Gates have strict rules on not going too far, because the last thing the Coven wants is for a stronger power to care for any reason that they're around, scuttling through the Cosmere and knowing, getting close to, the strands thick with meaning.
It's gross, she thinks, and hates herself for it, but Orche had seen value in them, had let them deep into the tangle. Serving a planetconsciousness in its chrysalis was enough for the strains of thought the Gates bled into their clustermind. For indice reasons it wouldn't be her part to watch what happened after.
When the Flora are iced over then she'll know. Even as the corruption spreads the oversweet musk of the Tender wanes beneath the still blotting of nothing, the musk going, the scent fading out, like berries passing ripe, souring, and all her pheroweavings are to capture the scent, strain it from the spreading nothing. So it can be sequenced for schema if needed. Without us so little would get done, she thinks, but she needs to think it. Or else and ever after would she feel the hatred, take it with her like her smokeskein back home, to the clustermind beyond the Gates. Where they all tumble over each other and pattern each others’ weavings, skip across them with needlethin legs, drawing here and spooling there. And before you are gated you are not even sequenced from the hive. When you come back you have a name and a face and you must wait for both to die.
The Tender's final cry is a harsh wind wailing, wavering, as if choking on its own sound. Tenders don't know they can die until they do. When they do they realize they're alone for it, alone and if this one knows her as witness they don't care, it's their keeper that they want. He isn't coming back, she longs to tell it. It's just me and you now. For whatever I am, and you are.
When the Tender knows it can no longer keep going it gives up its ghost to the networked Sun, but other Tenders (the disentegration teaching all the nanonodes to give of themselves to the nothing beyond) wouldn't see it coming. And so Morgan's is the last lonely death.
With that in her memory she is tired. Her banks are swollen and bloat against their limits like bodies pressed against binding rope. Cutting grooves into the shape of it and she knows only when she is past the Gate will she be released of it. For now she holds it, and with weary eyes keeps the smokeskein dusken, the better to slip away, unknown and unknowing into the folds of the outer embrace, itself a cage the kindred could never see. Slipping away where the lilacs are stalk through petal almost not bothered except for the chalk white that strains, in thin trickles and blemish where the trickles meet, running past each other, climbing from the neonic loam like wriggling worms, the kind of writhing she has a taste for, this far out into the black.
taken direct from Sister Laeath's pherosequence churn, extracted upon return to the Sixth
MIHO?/YUKA?
Miho (Yuka?)
likes: optimism, DIY homegrafting
dislikes: long days
blood type: a
seen with: Yuka
Yuka (Miho?[
likes: consequence, fulfillment
dislikes: straightforwardness
blood type:
seen with: Miho