She's going to die.
She's going to die she tried everything she could think of but she's still here, and Jude Perry holds her head firmly still so Kareen can't escape and she'sgoingtodie and her brain is going in so many directions at once that there is a small fleeting part of her that hopes that all of Kareen's terror is pointed at the End and not the Desolation, it hurts already where Jude's hands are on her but her thumbs are descending and she's going to lose her eyes before her life and--
She is NOT DEAD and does NOT HAVE HORRIBLE DESOLATION THUMBS DESCENDING TOWARDS HER EYES. The disorientation is significant; the high of sheer relief is bigger. She shakes and takes deep gulping breaths of air for several consecutive seconds before she manages to draw herself together enough to orient.
(She has a handprint-shaped second-degree burn on either side of her face, just below her eyes and extending onto her ears and into her harilne.)
She's on a misty Cornish beach. Standing in front of her is a woman of indeterminate age, whose eyes are, somehow, not quite correct.
"Good afternoon," she says pleasantly. "I hope my invitation was not unwelcome."
Fucky eyes are probably Beholding, which is promising, at least as regards Kareen's personal safety. Kareen is having a harder time prioritizing things that are not her personal safety than usual.
"Thank you. You saved my life."
"It wouldn't do to assume. To deny another their given death might be considered impolite."
Well that's...unhinged, but Kareen isn't going to argue with a powerful unknown entity even if her best guess is Beholding avatar.
"She was going to go in through my eyes," she settles on instead.
"Then I'm happy to have helped. Though I will admit that my intervention was not solely for your benefit."
Shrug. "Of course not. What do you want?" As long as it's not a Ritual, she'll probably be game.
A small smile. "First: how much do you know of the Secret Histories? Are they spoken of at all, where you come from?"
"...Well, we have secrets, and we have history, and there's overlap, but there isn't any one specific thing I would refer to as the Secret Histories."
The woman turns her steady gaze upon a decrepit castle overlooking the beach. "I am given to understand that some worlds, more distant than any I might reach, operate under the paradigm that... 'what happens, happened'. Here, it is not thus. Our past and present are curated by the Hours, a quarrelsome pack of demi-deities. But the Hours could never agree on one History. There are five Histories regarded as true, and others... less true. One may travel between them, with the proper invocations. We stand in one of the least true, a heterodox pseudo-History in which human life was wiped out by a century of winter following the mutilation of the Sun. It is not a cheery place, but it has the virtue of making it very easy to ward off eavesdropping."
"...Huh." Soooooo an Extinction area, basically sort of, except she has no idea what's up with these Hours?
Also Kareen is fairly in favor of eavesdropping but it doesn't seem helpful to say so. It's not like Dad doesn't go to some measures to keep his secrets.
"Does that mean that there are five Hours, and each one has a favored History, or that there are lots of Hours and the five true Histories are the ones that have the most support, or something else?"
"The latter. There are factors other than their approval, of course; certain prophecies and rituals may lend an event sufficient metaphysical weight that even the Sun-in-Splendor could not suppress it. Which brings me to our location."
She gestures to the crumbling wreck of the castle. "Hush House is one of the branches of the Watchman's Tree, those libraries with the right to house books with secrets which could quake reality's foundation. It has lain in ruins for decades, but a new Librarian has been sent to curate it. As luck would have it, though, her ship capsized, and even now she lies, concussed and dying of exposure, elsewhen on this selfsame beach. The villagers know she is coming, but they do not know her face."
Soft gasp.
"--So are you replacing the Librarian, or do you want me to replace the Librarian?" Kareen is NOT going to allow herself to be too disappointed if it's the former.
"I am disqualified from the position on practically every grounds bar literacy. You, on the other hand, should be eminently suitable."
The woman smiles, and then sighs. "I should tell you: I do not grant you this boon on the expectation of quid pro quo. I expect no specific service. What I desire is that you take the tools you are given, and make things happen. Everyone else who could has grown... predictable. We are old and dull. Be young and strange, and you may reshape the world."
"Oh, I can do that. ...Not in an apocalypse way, I have no intention of enacting any world-ending terror rituals."
Shrug. "Apocalypse is only the flashiest kind of revelation."
She holds out her hand. "My name, by the way, is Rowena. And I have high hopes for you."
She's on the same beach, still drizzling, but there's lights on the clifftop glowing faintly through the mist.
Also, there's a woman at her feet, bedraggled and pale and dying but not yet quite dead.
Well.
She doesn’t have to die alone.
Kareen kneels down and takes her hand.
Despite the circumstance, the woman grips back with bruising force. Her eyes turn to Kareen, and her gaze sharpens.
"Who..."
The ensuing chuckle is dry in tone, though distinctly wet in practice.
"Correct. Who?"
"Someone who rescued me from dying myself," she gestures at her still-red burns, "and explained a lot less than I would've preferred."
Reluctantly, the woman murmurs:
"Not dead. Not yet. And I... know things."
"...She said that the Hours were demi-deities, are any less-demi divinities known around these parts?"
"No. It was Rowena, then... she doesn't care for implying they're right. Just big and scary."
Her voice steadies out as she exposits; probably the Beholding is lending a hand.
"That's what she called herself but I didn't care to assume it was her real name. ...She wants me to replace you as Librarian."
If actually the books she is being asked to Librarian over are all Leitners this seems like a magnificent opportunity to find out.
"Of course. I'm not a proper Librarian any more than she is, not really, just desperate enough to try to break the rules. You'll probably do much better."
"Can you explain what a Librarian is? She said she had no qualifications but literacy, but I have no idea what makes me more qualified than her--I mean, sure, I was studying library science, but I didn't finish, and anyway I doubt a Master's from my home dimension would do me much good here."
"The Librarian is permitted to read books which no one is permitted to read. Some of those books house numena, ideas so powerful that they can believe themselves. The qualification Rowena and I lack is mortality. ...conventional mortality, as you see we can still bollocks ourselves up badly enough."
"--Wow. Okay, uh, I guess it's good that I hadn't gotten around to getting rid of mine yet? I mean, I always planned to, eventually--I'm guessing there's more wrong with you than is visible to the un-medically-trained eye and I can't save your life by dragging you somewhere inhabited and getting you drinkable water."
"Whatever strange power is allowing me to speak is doing an impressive job compensating for a severe concussion, several broken bones, and lungs partly filled with seawater. I'd certainly be dead on my own. If you drag me to the village nearby, I'll only probably be dead."
"Are any of the broken bones in your spine? That affects how I drag you."
"Not that I can tell; everything hurts but my back is no worse than anywhere else."
"If everywhere hurts you probably haven't broken your spine but I cannot emphasize enough that I am not medically trained." She grabs the woman by her armpits, then, and attempts to drag her towards the village.
The woman is tall but quite thin, and can be dragged effectively along the only-slightly-muddy dirt road from the beach.
"I think that if I stop talking, the effect making me able to think and speak properly will wear off," she notes. "So, hello, and it's lovely to meet you, and my name is Artemis Blackwood. Is there anything else you'd like to know?"
"Yeah, sorry, I'm kind of plugged into an eldritch fear god of knowing things and invading people's privacy. Uh, I would like to know if Hours could be reasonably described as eldritch fear gods, that'd be real helpful."
"Eldritch fear gods? They're certainly eldritch, and many of them fearsome, and we've discussed their godliness... but it wouldn't be the first description I'd jump to, no. They're just very big, very strange beings."
"Where I'm from, there are fourteen gods, or maybe fifteen, and each one of them is focused on a different kind of fear. They're called the Fear Entities, or the Dread Powers. It sort of sounds like the Hours are focused on time, rather than fear?"
"All just for fear? How monomaniacal. The Hours... let's speak in specifics, why not. The Malachite is the Hour called also the Ring-Yew. Its blood is honey, its flesh is green wood. It once loved a mortal man, and so the Red Grail, that Hour that is hunger, destroyed him, flayed the skin from him and stretched it on a drum and beat the drum to make the thunder, and now that man is the Hour Thunderskin. All of that is a metaphor except for how it isn't. That's the kind of silly antics the Hours get up to."
"Cultists of the fear Desolation would absolutely skin someone to hurt someone who loved them. That's where the burns come from, actually, is a Desolation cultist who wanted to hurt my parents. Does 'a metaphor except for how it isn't' make more sense on exposure?"
Artemis apparently feels that this question merits an actual wobbly hand gesture. "You get used to it, at least."
"Yes, but you see, I have a pathological need to know and understand things. Are there any lists of hours that claim to be definitive and/or exhaustive, and if so, do they have any meaningful clusters with regards to how many they claim there are?"
"Twenty-one are generally agreed upon. Four more are obvious to those who care enough to look, and two more if you look closer than that. Six are dead, for whatever that's worth. There are almost certainly a few more, but I'd be surprised by more than five."
"They're consistently dead, at least. But that's the kind of thing that could potentially change."
"You said one of them fell in love. Does that mean they're conscious beings who make decisions and understand things?"
"Oh. The Dread Powers don't do that. Are any of them benevolent? Like, on net?"
"They do important work. Sometimes they do terrible things. They are... selfish, sometimes cruel. So are we. I do not think any are committed to the ideals of good, but they bless those who they like best, and in so doing they sometimes make the world better."
“Yeah, that’s more or less not true of the Fears. You can do more good than harm with their empowerments, but it’s hard and most people don’t bother, they either go all-in on being evil or they run the hell away. …You called the focus on fear monomaniacal, and I don’t think that’s true; it would be like saying that trees are monomaniacal about cellulose.”
