third lives in a stolen world

the third part of a lifepath for a stolen world (pt. 1 & 2) 

jerry's kids + big boys <3

brains and thoughts and the hounds that hunt them 

 19. Thoughts are physical things within the brain, like hair-thin iridescent MC Escher worms.

1. Their behavior reflects the nature of the thought; calmer thoughts will be more placid etc. and the state of the thinker; a sleeping thinker's conscious thoughts are slower moving, while their dreams become are more active. 

— Your mother loves the sun with such a radiant adoration that the thought itself glows like a shaft of light. She leaves it to you as you as you slide your hands up through her ribs to find her heart with the sleep needle. Now, by thinking of her very hard, you can coax it out of a tear duct as it tentatively searches for its old home

2. They will be drawn to and repelled by the same things that fit their nature and their thinker is drawn to/repelled by. Thoughts will die if they are not inside a brain of any kind for longer than a few minutes

— Perfumers make slaves out of people by learning the odors that most evoke their pleasant dreams of childhood and using those to coax all of the thoughts out of their brains like a snake charmer. You know this, because it happened to you. One of your enslaved companions teaches you, over the course of years, in moments of held breath, to train your thoughts till they love only the sun, as hers do. You cannot love anything else. Your body is used to holding its breath.

20. Thoughts count as the being whose brain they were born in, and eating a single living thought is equivalent to eating the entire being who originally thought it. Since the being remains visibly uneaten, it does not incur the Ash-Tongue Curse's immediate attention.

— Your leashed Look-Slave saws off your hand in the night to escape. You sleep, dead to the pain. You'd eaten their thoughts for years, each flavored by the fruit and meat you'd force them to stare at for hours. Not once did you notice each morsel was subtly intertwined with the invisibly thin offspring of the pain tolerance it took to endure your chopsticks probing their trepanation holes. Your body is completely numb to physical pain, and you are missing your left hand.

21. If you have the thought of another creature in your mind, provided they have not been there more than a year, you may let your other thoughts eat it. This counts as you eating it, since your thoughts count as you. Your own thoughts will not eat themselves or each other.

— During interminable years spent in Look-Slavery, you learn the trick of empathizing with your master completely. You watch them eat the thoughts they pull from your skull with such focus and calculated love, imagining what it must be like to taste your mind. Your empathy is so complete that your thoughts mistake these imaginings as foreign ideas belonging to your master, and will, if you allow, eat them. In this way you are both sustained and revenged; a perfect feat of bloodless, painless, cannibalism. You may use this trick on another, provided you sleep beside them for at least a year, and watch them eat every meal during this time.

22. Animals with human thoughts in their brains will become like humans, growing more humanlike at the same speed that an infant develops into an adult. So too with humans who have beast-thoughts. 

 — You were spawned in a porcelain pool. From a little dropper you gulp the black ichor that leaks from the unchanging peach orchards of the Principalities. You grow into a fine green frog and then the Princes drill holes in your skull and fill you full of their daughters nightmares. You grow again; a dream-vault, as tall as the girls, and elegant. They are kept safe from Hounds with their madness in your animal skull. Now you play the flute-hook yourself to extract their dangerous thoughts, and your head is ringed with an crown ardenti, in which pungent incense burns. Outside the haze, the Hounds chase each other in a vortex that disturbs no air. Your head is studded with jade nails and contains 3 princesses nightmares: a dog dying of heatstroke (fear of heat), drinking cream and choking on a spider (desire to hurt small creatures), the skins of your family dancing like leaves in the wind (urge to throw away what you own).  Other people's nightmares and madness do not affect you.

23. Thinking and the internal monologue is audible, but muffled by the skull

— you are used as a brainsinger in the home of a powerful perfumer. Your skull is pressed and carved to amplify and modulate the sound of your thoughts, and you learn to eliminate all from your mind save for the piece you are performing. If you can clearly imagine a sound, you can produce it from the holes along your head, even songs with multiple voices and instruments, or the chatter of a crowd. While thinking a song, story, or poem, it is as if all other thoughts in your mind do not exist.

24. The wounded and weak call the Hounds of Id. 

Whenever someone is wounded, sick, insane, or feeble, the GM will roll 1d6 twice. The first roll determines how many Hounds are in the area.

1-2: 1d6 unbodied + 2d6 Hosts
3-4: 1d4 unbodied + 1d6 Hosts
5: 1d4 unbodied
6: None

the second determines how close they are

1-2: there are Hounds close enough to have scented the wounded and who even now race towards their panicked psyche.

3: the Hounds are 3 turns away
4: the Hounds are 4 turns away
5: 5 turns
6: 6 turns

— You and your brother are houndmasters; few are lower. You drive a human herd. Others pay you to take their elderly, sick, and wounded. You kill those who cannot walk and drive the rest before you relentlessly with lead sling-bullets; stay a cold, comfortable distance away. far enough that the Hound-hosts that race to savage them could be mistaken for actual dogs instead of men. If either of you was ever hurt or fell ill, the other would kill them without question. Your body is used to hitting targets at great distances.

25. Hounds of Id are the hunting dogs of the master.

 the horrible disgusting absent soul of man. an invisible thing that you can't feel until it is trying to crawl into your brain and your body and running you till you break. can't be killed, though they're afraid of fire and thick, foul smelling smoke. 

 — You tend an elder-pyre. the aged of your family are not killed, as others do, with sleep-needles before the Hounds take them. Instead, they are surrounded by a ring of fire, leaping green and purple as it gobbles up the smoke herbs you throw onto it. There they will live, and eventually die, unsullied. Your body is used to high temperatures; you can walk on and handle coals unharmed. 

26. Hound Hosts are the frantic idiot fuck puppets of the hounds.

 want to torture you horribly but can't slow down enough to. the invisible god-dog in their brain is chewing it out of existence. man as it was meant to be. they'll grind their bodies into paste pursuing you.

 — You work with your mother, a dream-vault frog with a head full of Physician-Princesses nightmares. She pays a pair of houndmasters to drive the occasional wretch into her swamp, and waits until the Hound-Hosts pursue them into-neck deep quicksand. You watch them. When they grow still, you know the Hound inside their head has finally eaten the last of their brain. You cover the hollow heads with honey each day, so the Hound cannot leave, and when people come, you saw off the heads, seal the necks with pungent fire, and give the Hound-Jars to the assassins and perverts who pay for them. You have two such jars. 

beautiful julia! thank you!!!