Ash 10, 119
Lamplight had long since supplanted that of the sun before Foma found himself making his way down familiar streets and alleys. The day had been filled with an endless array of paper and symbols. He was to copy copied symbols, perfect replication of not only form but intention. Over and over again: each symbol a meaning on its own, then changed together, and changed again and again. Memorization both by rote and motion of hand, endless past the point of exhaustion.
They floated now in his mind. Creation with all its flowing lines. Knowledge deceptively fluid and ready to change at any time. Progress rigid in structure but accommodating in form. These and more and less and formless and nameless... a veritable mess of information that could only be sorted by reflex or revision, both of which he'd fatigued utterly and completely.
But he'd never been happier.
His mind for the first time in his whole life was drained of anything but the most simplistic of thoughts. Everything else was just noise, a steady thrum against his consciousness that hinted, reminded he was a creature of will and desire and curiosity but, in that moment, little more than flesh and bone seeking much needed rest. It was wonderful. He'd never felt like that before. He'd never been so perfectly enervated before.
In all those years working among the Hollows, his body had been worn out time and time again, where thought became a chore, sluggish and almost painful, where rest was to recover and repair what would only be broken and battered the next day and day after that. It had all been so mechanical, so inevitable, and so very draining. Rest had not bred rest but unrest.
Now however?
Now when his head hit his pillow, it felt as though everything he'd learned, everything he'd studied for that day slowly sunk down into him, bit by bit, each morning waking to find just a little bit more had stuck. It was like building muscle, in a way, only where before it had been his body which grew from his labors, it was now his mind that was expanding, bit by bit, symbol by symbol, day by day.
It was everything he'd ever hoped for. Even the surprise that it was all far, far more difficult than he'd anticipated was welcome. The challenges were great and many, and in his short time under Miss Holzknecht's tutelage he had yet to triumph over any of them. But such things would come with time and effort, just as they had before. He'd bought his chance with the same, and now he cultivated it with those very tools that had constructed the path he'd tread upon to get there.
So, as he blithely picked his way through the streets of Nivenhain, his cloak flapping loosely in steady night breeze that pressed its way through tightly packed buildings and passing figures around him, he found himself smiling. It wasn't an alien expression to his features. He often smiled, as did many other Rien for many other reasons.
Sometimes he was happy. Sometimes he was pretending to be happy. Sometimes he just didn't want to let anyone on to the fact he wasn't happy. But he'd always put on a smile, a response, an elicited reply to this or that both external and internal. Now, however, he smiled not because he had anything to express specifically, but because his expression simply couldn't be contained. He'd never felt that happy before. Joy? Elation? Wonder? To put a word to it was something beyond his deliciously weary brain's capabilities.
And that was all right.
With a smile, he rounded the corner, and with a smile he met his neighbor, almost crashing into her. "My mistake, Miss Sharapov!" he offered and took a step back to allow her to pass. "I was hardly paying attention to where I was going."
Nonna Sharapov was an attractive young woman who rented the apartment directly above his own. Long dark hair always kept in careful braids, two impossibly dark large eyes set on either side of a neatly pinched nose and soft half-puckered lips... she would have truly been a vision were it not for the massive scar that ran down at an angle through the middle of her otherwise delicate featured face. The scar itself was rugged, silvery pink, and raised enough that it could catch on nails or teeth and tear.
She, like he, was Nameless, but her profession was of a labor his mother had never allowed for him. In many ways, it was far more arduous than anything he'd ever experience now or then, but she had had no one to watch out for her nor gentle hand to guide her. She had come to Nivenhain alone, as his mother had, but she had found nothing and no one to take her. Nothing and no one but the one place who capitalized on loneliness and sensationalized what might otherwise be deformity.
His mother, when he'd told her of Miss Sharapov's position, had expressed pity, but when Foma looked into those dark dark eyes, all he ever felt in his own chest was admiration. She was a strong woman, no matter how petite her frame, and never once had she ever complained about her lot in life. She embraced it. She worked as he worked. She saved her coin as he saved his coin. Most of all? She dreamed as he dreamed. They each embraced progress, aware that the path to greater heights was fraught with all manner of distasteful things and still they climbed.
How could he not find beauty in that? How could he think of her as anything other than brave and worthy and better? Women like his mother; they were to be pitied. People like his father; they were to be pitied. But young women like Nonna Sharapov? They were to be celebrated.
"No harm done, Kos," she replied with a soft, knowing smile on those lovely lips of hers. The expression twisted the scar upon her face, furrowing it, drawing attention to its asymmetry like a fetid creature's howl. Though he saw her nearly every day in passing, to and fro, one home the other away, still his eyes were drawn to it. She never seemed to care, but that hated reflex always elicited deep within him a heavy twinge of shame.
He saw beauty in Hollows. He saw beauty in her. Yet that scar...
"Are you busy?" They lingered, neither stepping forward though either could have.
"I will be," she laughed. "But at this moment?" Slight shoulders rose and fell as her eyebrows arced. "I could make time for a friend."
"And am I friend?"
Another laugh, softer and gentler than the first. "I would prefer to think of you as so, yes."
His turn to smile, Foma offered her his arm. "Then we are of shared accord."
She slipped her hand over his forearm and wrapped around his wrist, her grip surprisingly firm as she lightly laughed in reply. "You're in high spirits tonight."
"I have every reason to be, you know."
"Do I? How is that again?" She leaned into him, dark eyes bright with merriment. "Or have I forgotten?"
"No no, it's simple deduction," he replied, patting her hand with his other. "I was taken on as Master Wagner's apprentice, yes?"
"Yes."
"And he, in turn, apprenticed me to the young Miss Holzknecht."
"Yes, who is an entire decade your junior," she added with a mirthful chuckle.
"Er-" Foma cleared his throat, much to the amusement of his impromptu companion. "Well, yes, but she's very capable. Well beyond her years in all aspects of artifice and engineering and-"
"So you've said."
"So I've said, yes. Yes... Well," he continued, fumbling with the string of thought. "Today she informed me that my pictographs were passable."
"Oh," Nonna murmured, nodding her head emphatically. "I take it that is... marginally more impressive than it sounds?" Laughter in her tease, but it held no bite nor acid.
"It is," he replied unfazed. "It means I've made genuine progress. Soon I might even begin application rather than endless theory."
"It sounds to me like you might be getting ahead of yourself?"
"All I ever am is ahead of myself," he corrected her with a grin. "And the day I catch up is the day, I fear, I might meet my end."
A slight squeeze about his wrist drew his attention from where they were headed to his partner's gentle expression. "You will, someday, but... I don't believe it will be your end."
"No?"
She shook her head. "No. Rather... a beginning. A new chapter to be bound into what is surely going to be an obnoxiously thick volume." Her smile returned as she laughed out the last few words.
"Obnoxious?" Feigned pain in his eyes hardly net him a performance worthy of even the most basic of roles upon a stage. "Me?"
"Unbearably."
"Are not friends meant to lift each other up?"
"I'm afraid I haven't the strength."
Their laughter mingled, a bright light in the midst of the mire, the scraps of the city they both served. Foma fumbled with the key in his pocket for a second or two before they filed in to his mostly barren apartment. With only a single chair, Foma sat upon the edge of his bed and offered the chair to Nonna who gracefully folded her skirts and settled upon it with all the air of a young celebrant.
"There was something you wanted to talk about?" Her dark eyes searched his, curiosity gently pushing aside her casual mirth.
Foma took his time to reply, brow furrowed and eyes pensive. "Do you recall what you said to me when we first met?"
A soft "hm" warmed in Nonna's throat for a second or two before she popped her lips and folded her hands neatly upon her lap. "I said... 'another dreamer for butcher's block', if I'm not mistaken."
"You're not," he steadily replied, expression soft but neutral. "Do you still think me a lamb to slaughter?"
"Oh, Kos," Nonna gently shook her head, gaze falling to the floor for a moment as she considered. "You are..." A soft sigh. "We are not like them." Her eyes met his again, and their darkness was wide and vast and far more knowing than any woman her age had a right to be. "We dream not out of leisure but survival. Our dream is our hope, and there is..." Her smile was soft, almost sad. "There is nothing else."
"So we are both lambs then?"
A sigh slipped from Nonna's nose. "Yes and no. This world is... difficult. All our hopes, all our dreams... they can be lost in an instant. An honest mistake, a twist of fate, a... feathery intervention."
Foma knew full well what those interventions could cost a person.
"I will admit you blaze far brighter than I first gave you credit for, and if any of us can succeed," she continued, that gentle smile of hers bordering upon matronly, "It might very well be you."
"Or you."
Her smile slowly faded. "I will certainly try."
"We'll try together."
"Together?" A soft chuckle, an absent pressing of the wrinkles in her skirts. "Are you proposing to me, Foma Kozlov?"
"And if I am, Nonna Sharapov?"
Genuine laughter lifted out of her like glistening gossamer bubbles. "Then I'd refuse you, naturally."
A soft gasp of feigned surprise drew another gentle bought of laughter from his guest. "You wound me, Miss Sharapov. So cruel a rejection."
"For your own good, sir," she retorted, leaning back into her chair with a shake of her head and easy grin. That furrowed scar only just slightly pulling his focus now. "For if we are to try together, it is best I reserve my bed for those with, at the very least, two coins to rub together, and you to remain the vestal celibate you've always been."
"Blow after blow, Miss Sharapov. Have you no mercy?"
"Mercy is for those who can afford it," Nonna sighed, standing up and brushing off her skirts with yet another shake of her head. "And we, Mister Kozlov, cannot."
"Cannot yet," he corrected, rising with her to escort her to the door.
"Kos." She paused, halfway between the chair and the door and set a gentle hand upon his shoulder. Dark eyes stared meaningfully into his own, and her voice, though softer than ever, carried with it an uncharacteristic gravity. "You may dream, but you are no dreamer. You make your own reality, never doubt that."
"I- thank you."
Her smile returned as she patted him on the cheek. "It's not a compliment, lamb."
"Nonetheless," he replied, pulling open the door with a gentle smile of his own, "You are no dreamer either."
"A schemer, some would say," Nonna laughed in reply. "But I thank you. You're a perceptive little thing, aren't you?"
"I can't say I have the foggiest idea what you're on about."
"Mhm," she smiled, "Just wanted to have a nice chat, is all?"
"Just that."
"Goodnight, Mister Kozlov." The door closed gently behind her.
"Goodnight, Nonna."
Lamplight had long since supplanted that of the sun before Foma found himself making his way down familiar streets and alleys. The day had been filled with an endless array of paper and symbols. He was to copy copied symbols, perfect replication of not only form but intention. Over and over again: each symbol a meaning on its own, then changed together, and changed again and again. Memorization both by rote and motion of hand, endless past the point of exhaustion.
They floated now in his mind. Creation with all its flowing lines. Knowledge deceptively fluid and ready to change at any time. Progress rigid in structure but accommodating in form. These and more and less and formless and nameless... a veritable mess of information that could only be sorted by reflex or revision, both of which he'd fatigued utterly and completely.
But he'd never been happier.
His mind for the first time in his whole life was drained of anything but the most simplistic of thoughts. Everything else was just noise, a steady thrum against his consciousness that hinted, reminded he was a creature of will and desire and curiosity but, in that moment, little more than flesh and bone seeking much needed rest. It was wonderful. He'd never felt like that before. He'd never been so perfectly enervated before.
In all those years working among the Hollows, his body had been worn out time and time again, where thought became a chore, sluggish and almost painful, where rest was to recover and repair what would only be broken and battered the next day and day after that. It had all been so mechanical, so inevitable, and so very draining. Rest had not bred rest but unrest.
Now however?
Now when his head hit his pillow, it felt as though everything he'd learned, everything he'd studied for that day slowly sunk down into him, bit by bit, each morning waking to find just a little bit more had stuck. It was like building muscle, in a way, only where before it had been his body which grew from his labors, it was now his mind that was expanding, bit by bit, symbol by symbol, day by day.
It was everything he'd ever hoped for. Even the surprise that it was all far, far more difficult than he'd anticipated was welcome. The challenges were great and many, and in his short time under Miss Holzknecht's tutelage he had yet to triumph over any of them. But such things would come with time and effort, just as they had before. He'd bought his chance with the same, and now he cultivated it with those very tools that had constructed the path he'd tread upon to get there.
So, as he blithely picked his way through the streets of Nivenhain, his cloak flapping loosely in steady night breeze that pressed its way through tightly packed buildings and passing figures around him, he found himself smiling. It wasn't an alien expression to his features. He often smiled, as did many other Rien for many other reasons.
Sometimes he was happy. Sometimes he was pretending to be happy. Sometimes he just didn't want to let anyone on to the fact he wasn't happy. But he'd always put on a smile, a response, an elicited reply to this or that both external and internal. Now, however, he smiled not because he had anything to express specifically, but because his expression simply couldn't be contained. He'd never felt that happy before. Joy? Elation? Wonder? To put a word to it was something beyond his deliciously weary brain's capabilities.
And that was all right.
With a smile, he rounded the corner, and with a smile he met his neighbor, almost crashing into her. "My mistake, Miss Sharapov!" he offered and took a step back to allow her to pass. "I was hardly paying attention to where I was going."
Nonna Sharapov was an attractive young woman who rented the apartment directly above his own. Long dark hair always kept in careful braids, two impossibly dark large eyes set on either side of a neatly pinched nose and soft half-puckered lips... she would have truly been a vision were it not for the massive scar that ran down at an angle through the middle of her otherwise delicate featured face. The scar itself was rugged, silvery pink, and raised enough that it could catch on nails or teeth and tear.
She, like he, was Nameless, but her profession was of a labor his mother had never allowed for him. In many ways, it was far more arduous than anything he'd ever experience now or then, but she had had no one to watch out for her nor gentle hand to guide her. She had come to Nivenhain alone, as his mother had, but she had found nothing and no one to take her. Nothing and no one but the one place who capitalized on loneliness and sensationalized what might otherwise be deformity.
His mother, when he'd told her of Miss Sharapov's position, had expressed pity, but when Foma looked into those dark dark eyes, all he ever felt in his own chest was admiration. She was a strong woman, no matter how petite her frame, and never once had she ever complained about her lot in life. She embraced it. She worked as he worked. She saved her coin as he saved his coin. Most of all? She dreamed as he dreamed. They each embraced progress, aware that the path to greater heights was fraught with all manner of distasteful things and still they climbed.
How could he not find beauty in that? How could he think of her as anything other than brave and worthy and better? Women like his mother; they were to be pitied. People like his father; they were to be pitied. But young women like Nonna Sharapov? They were to be celebrated.
"No harm done, Kos," she replied with a soft, knowing smile on those lovely lips of hers. The expression twisted the scar upon her face, furrowing it, drawing attention to its asymmetry like a fetid creature's howl. Though he saw her nearly every day in passing, to and fro, one home the other away, still his eyes were drawn to it. She never seemed to care, but that hated reflex always elicited deep within him a heavy twinge of shame.
He saw beauty in Hollows. He saw beauty in her. Yet that scar...
"Are you busy?" They lingered, neither stepping forward though either could have.
"I will be," she laughed. "But at this moment?" Slight shoulders rose and fell as her eyebrows arced. "I could make time for a friend."
"And am I friend?"
Another laugh, softer and gentler than the first. "I would prefer to think of you as so, yes."
His turn to smile, Foma offered her his arm. "Then we are of shared accord."
She slipped her hand over his forearm and wrapped around his wrist, her grip surprisingly firm as she lightly laughed in reply. "You're in high spirits tonight."
"I have every reason to be, you know."
"Do I? How is that again?" She leaned into him, dark eyes bright with merriment. "Or have I forgotten?"
"No no, it's simple deduction," he replied, patting her hand with his other. "I was taken on as Master Wagner's apprentice, yes?"
"Yes."
"And he, in turn, apprenticed me to the young Miss Holzknecht."
"Yes, who is an entire decade your junior," she added with a mirthful chuckle.
"Er-" Foma cleared his throat, much to the amusement of his impromptu companion. "Well, yes, but she's very capable. Well beyond her years in all aspects of artifice and engineering and-"
"So you've said."
"So I've said, yes. Yes... Well," he continued, fumbling with the string of thought. "Today she informed me that my pictographs were passable."
"Oh," Nonna murmured, nodding her head emphatically. "I take it that is... marginally more impressive than it sounds?" Laughter in her tease, but it held no bite nor acid.
"It is," he replied unfazed. "It means I've made genuine progress. Soon I might even begin application rather than endless theory."
"It sounds to me like you might be getting ahead of yourself?"
"All I ever am is ahead of myself," he corrected her with a grin. "And the day I catch up is the day, I fear, I might meet my end."
A slight squeeze about his wrist drew his attention from where they were headed to his partner's gentle expression. "You will, someday, but... I don't believe it will be your end."
"No?"
She shook her head. "No. Rather... a beginning. A new chapter to be bound into what is surely going to be an obnoxiously thick volume." Her smile returned as she laughed out the last few words.
"Obnoxious?" Feigned pain in his eyes hardly net him a performance worthy of even the most basic of roles upon a stage. "Me?"
"Unbearably."
"Are not friends meant to lift each other up?"
"I'm afraid I haven't the strength."
Their laughter mingled, a bright light in the midst of the mire, the scraps of the city they both served. Foma fumbled with the key in his pocket for a second or two before they filed in to his mostly barren apartment. With only a single chair, Foma sat upon the edge of his bed and offered the chair to Nonna who gracefully folded her skirts and settled upon it with all the air of a young celebrant.
"There was something you wanted to talk about?" Her dark eyes searched his, curiosity gently pushing aside her casual mirth.
Foma took his time to reply, brow furrowed and eyes pensive. "Do you recall what you said to me when we first met?"
A soft "hm" warmed in Nonna's throat for a second or two before she popped her lips and folded her hands neatly upon her lap. "I said... 'another dreamer for butcher's block', if I'm not mistaken."
"You're not," he steadily replied, expression soft but neutral. "Do you still think me a lamb to slaughter?"
"Oh, Kos," Nonna gently shook her head, gaze falling to the floor for a moment as she considered. "You are..." A soft sigh. "We are not like them." Her eyes met his again, and their darkness was wide and vast and far more knowing than any woman her age had a right to be. "We dream not out of leisure but survival. Our dream is our hope, and there is..." Her smile was soft, almost sad. "There is nothing else."
"So we are both lambs then?"
A sigh slipped from Nonna's nose. "Yes and no. This world is... difficult. All our hopes, all our dreams... they can be lost in an instant. An honest mistake, a twist of fate, a... feathery intervention."
Foma knew full well what those interventions could cost a person.
"I will admit you blaze far brighter than I first gave you credit for, and if any of us can succeed," she continued, that gentle smile of hers bordering upon matronly, "It might very well be you."
"Or you."
Her smile slowly faded. "I will certainly try."
"We'll try together."
"Together?" A soft chuckle, an absent pressing of the wrinkles in her skirts. "Are you proposing to me, Foma Kozlov?"
"And if I am, Nonna Sharapov?"
Genuine laughter lifted out of her like glistening gossamer bubbles. "Then I'd refuse you, naturally."
A soft gasp of feigned surprise drew another gentle bought of laughter from his guest. "You wound me, Miss Sharapov. So cruel a rejection."
"For your own good, sir," she retorted, leaning back into her chair with a shake of her head and easy grin. That furrowed scar only just slightly pulling his focus now. "For if we are to try together, it is best I reserve my bed for those with, at the very least, two coins to rub together, and you to remain the vestal celibate you've always been."
"Blow after blow, Miss Sharapov. Have you no mercy?"
"Mercy is for those who can afford it," Nonna sighed, standing up and brushing off her skirts with yet another shake of her head. "And we, Mister Kozlov, cannot."
"Cannot yet," he corrected, rising with her to escort her to the door.
"Kos." She paused, halfway between the chair and the door and set a gentle hand upon his shoulder. Dark eyes stared meaningfully into his own, and her voice, though softer than ever, carried with it an uncharacteristic gravity. "You may dream, but you are no dreamer. You make your own reality, never doubt that."
"I- thank you."
Her smile returned as she patted him on the cheek. "It's not a compliment, lamb."
"Nonetheless," he replied, pulling open the door with a gentle smile of his own, "You are no dreamer either."
"A schemer, some would say," Nonna laughed in reply. "But I thank you. You're a perceptive little thing, aren't you?"
"I can't say I have the foggiest idea what you're on about."
"Mhm," she smiled, "Just wanted to have a nice chat, is all?"
"Just that."
"Goodnight, Mister Kozlov." The door closed gently behind her.
"Goodnight, Nonna."
