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| and you'd better start eating and killing so you can start dying too |
Roll on the vignette table at the bottom of this page 3 times with a d30. Each entry you rolled has occurred at some point in your character’s life prior to this moment. Each is linked to a law of the world; your character knows this law acutely.
Arrange your 3 vignettes in the order they occurred to your character. The first took place as a child, the second in your adolescence, and the third has only just occurred.
Now that you have all your vignettes arranged, answer the following questions about your life before your first vignette occurred.
what was your first meal?
how is that reflected in you?
who fed you as a child?
how did they escape the Ash Tongued Curse?
how many others did they feed?
and who is gonna feed on you?
Then, for the time between each vignette, roll 1d6 to determine how you fed yourself, and what you accomplished:
1-3: famine. you were not able to focus on anything other than your hunger.
roll 1d6
1:3 you fed yourself
what did you mostly eat?
how is that reflected in you?
how did you escape the Ash-Tongued Curse? If you have answered this question before, why did your old method stop working?
how did you ward off the fear of death? If you have answered this question before, why did your old method stop working?
4-6: someone fed you
if you have a relationship recorded, choose one of them to have fed you.
why did they?
if you have no relationships recorded, describe the one who fed you
how do they escape the Ash-Tongued Curse?
how many others do they feed?
how have they changed their body, and to what end?
why did they feed you?
for how long?
either way, you owe them your life. Have you repaid this debt? roll 1d6
1-4: no. what do you fear they’ll ask you to do?
5-6: yes. how did you repay them?
4-6: feast. you were able to feed yourself. how?
since you were fed, you could devote yourself to other things. roll 1d6:
1-2: you devoted yourself to your body. choose a single part of your body. you changed it by:
molding and warping it; to what end?
embedding something in it; what was it, and how did you take on those properties? roll 1d6:
1-3: you became host to a disease, infection, or parasite; the GM will tell you what, and how it affects you.
4-6: no negative effect
3-4: you devoted yourself to your craft: describe what you made, and how you made it. you’ll begin play with that thing.
what additional unintended effect or use does it have?
what flaw in its making are you dissatisfied with?
what does it evoke in others? roll 1d6
1-3: what you have made inspires covetous envy in another person.
if you have a relationship recorded, choose one of them who desires what you made.
why do they need it so badly?
how have they tried to obtain it?
why won’t you give them your work?
if you have no relationships recorded, describe the one who covets your work.
how do they escape the Ash-Tongued Curse?
how many others do they feed?
how have they changed their body, and to what end?
why do they need your work so badly?
how have they tried to obtain it?
4-5: what you have made impresses someone greatly
if you have a relationship recorded, choose one of them who wishes you to make them something new
what do they want you to make?
what are they offering you to make it?
why do you not want to?
if you have no relationships recorded, describe the one who covets your work.
how do they escape the Ash-Tongued Curse?
how many others do they feed?
how have they changed their body, and to what end?
what do they want you to make?
what are they offering you to make it?
why do you not want to?
6: your work inspires a student
if you have a relationship recorded, choose one who wishes to become your student.
why are you afraid to teach them?
if you have no relationships recorded, describe the one who wants to learn from you
how do they escape the Ash-Tongued Curse?
how many others do they feed?
how have they changed their body, and to what end?
what makes you not want to teach them?
5-6 you devoted yourself to others: describe someone you have a relationship with.
how do they escape the Ash-Tongued Curse?
how many others do they feed?
how have they changed their body, and to what end?
what do they need that you can give them?
what do you need that they can give you?
what is your relationship to them? roll 1d6:
1-3: negative; what caused this?
4-6: positive; what keeps it this way?
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| i really do get it yaknow stuff happens |
Vignettes
Your body's ability to perform as you desire it to is always a matter of having eaten enough food that day to accomplish that desire. eating a living thing provides you with the approximate energy and vigor of that creature until you exert yourself intensely or sleep
— you eat a piece of tiger, at a feast paid for by a wealthy twin-farmer. All that night, you pace frantically until you give into its swallowed hunger and devour your host’s beautiful child, as it had longed to. Your jaws are used to breaking bones and caging you forces you to ward off the cringing fear of death.
without shelter, hunger is unrelenting, and if you do not eat for three days, you will be too weak to feed yourself and, after you find somewhere to crawl and hide, your character is removed from play and will die after 3 weeks. with shelter, you will starve and die after 3 weeks.
— Cast out when there were too many mouths to feed, you will not give into the temptation of thievery, and instead lay where they left you, mouth open, waiting. You learn a secret way to slowly slowly slowly milk a little thing like a mouse or beetle between your teeth, allowing it to count as a meal for a day without killing it.
the Ash-Tongued Curse is incurred by eating food stolen from Angbora by a living being, and invites the Curse to place one of its children in your mouth, which turns all food eaten thereafter to to ash in the mouth of the cursed.
— Your child, too young to comprehend the effects of the lie, feeds you a strawberry she claims your spouse bought that day. It is delicious, and it is stolen, and it is the last thing you taste. Now you bear the Ash-Tongued Curse and live green-sick, emaciated and queasy with hunger, barely sustained by the ash that the curse-child in your mouth leaves for you. You can’t run, climb, or swim. Your humanity is overlooked entirely and most people feel the same way about you that you or I would feel about a bug too large to kill.
the Ash-Tongued Curse is a living thing, and is not infallible. It relies on seeing and hearing theft or evidence of theft from Angbora and it is possible to evade it through disguise, deception, technicalities, etc.
Disguising yourself as a particular person, for example, can lead to Angbora cursing the object of your disguise instead of yourself
— seeking to trick the Ash-Tongued curse into nesting in him, you disguise yourself as your forbidden lover’s father, a wealthy twin-farmer who dines on tiger. You make a cast of his face in the night, then bind it to your face. You wear it for a year until your face bones and fat bend to his likeness. You develop an intense, unconscious psychosexual connection to each other; each of you speaks to the other in pools and mirrors. You have not yet been able to bring yourself to set the Ash-Tongued Curse on him by eating stolen food.
Continued evasion of the Ash-Tongued Curse, or particularly flagrant theft is enough to get Angbora to send his servants to investigate.
— Your spouse unknowingly eats a stolen strawberry from the hand of your child and turns green-sick. You are unable to see them this way and flee in a mania, preparing a stolen feast over a raging fire that first lonely night. And then you flee again, this time from the curse. From a strange, melancholic youth you learn the trick of binding your face to look like another’s, and chose the face you know best; that of your spouse. The curses you send flocking to her do no harm, as she is of them, now, but Angbora’s auditors know that one person cannot be in more than one place. They pursue you for many years, and they are now only 1d4 days behind you.
Autocannibalism does not incur the Ash-Tongued Curse, but cannibalism does.
— You clamp the cup down hard over the crying kid’s skull and hold him down until the milk of poppy does. The trephine fly whirs and gnaws and bashes into the head of the child, until it finds the scented thought (black, oily-meaty), spins its crystal bridge into it, begins the process of colonization. The fly is trained, and yours; the thought was a tigers, a foreign guest picked up at a feast, driving your poor, limp patient to devour a twin-farmer’s child. their face is slick with blood, but curse-spared.
It is possible to sustain yourself purely by drinking the blood of a still-living thing. dead blood does not carry this same vitality
— You fall in love and form a strange family with 4 green-sick artists. Each day, one of them dresses you in their clothes, does your hair and makes you up until to curse-eye, you are one and the same. Then, they suckle your blood, and cry with joy. Seeing your unadorned reflection forces you to assert your identity in some pathetic way.
Only things grown on, in, or of the soil of Angbora's earth are protected by the Ash-Tongued Curse
— You work off a debt by serving as blood-garden for a ravenous, dream-addled elder, letting seeds be planted in your flesh and grow to several harvests. Your body adapts, and if you have plants growing in you, when you eat, you may choose to derive nothing from the meal to grow one plant proportionally to the size of the meal.
Angbora counts time in the amount of food required to sustain a person over that time. A biological process requiring a year could be accelerated by consuming all of the food required to sustain you for a year, which would also age you one year.
— whether or not you can bear children, a child speaks to you in a dream of gardens with petals like tongues, and tells you that it is yours, but has been cursed in the future to wait outside your body for 100 years. it asks you to hasten its birth, and you try. You have eaten 95 years worth of food now, and you are old beyond your time. the child is Angbora's twin; you will see this when it is born.
Someone you have fed for long enough that they would have starved to death had they not eaten for that time (around 3 weeks), owes you their life even if, left to their own devices, they could have fed themselves
— you stumble across a grove of starving murderers, rapists, and cannibals. they are starving, hairy, and their finger and toenails curl into their flesh. they have been pinned to the trees with unicorn needles. You feed them for long enough for them to owe their lives to you, but have not freed any of them yet.
Jade is the oldest stone, and remembers a time before the world was stolen and gifted to Angbora. It always will seek to return to the innermost veins of the earth, which do not acknowledge Angbora's authority, and will burrow through younger earth and stone to do so.
— you live for a time as a Jade-Weight Penitent outside of Angbora's gates, holding a huge slab of jade on your back, preventing it from fleeing into the earth, forcing it to endure the Starving Emperor's rule. You and your companions hope to gain an audience with Angbora through this show of devotion; your sibling and their lovers are all green-sick blood drinkers, and it was once your dearest wish to see their curse lifted. Your back is used to bearing great weights.
If your body is used to something, you can do it provided you have eaten a meal of any size.
— for months you are held in the mouth of the Lord of Smooth Stone, a Holy Coward whose lies have swollen him to mountainous size. He leached nutrition from you and the tongue-mates nestled beside you in the warm damp. You are emaciated and your skin has been worn smooth and shining as burnished wood. Your body is used to providing sustenance without being swallowed; someone currently suckling on a part of your body counts as having eaten you
An impressive and specific enough disguise can grant the wearer the qualities (both positive and negative) and abilities of the thing they are disguised as. Such a disguise must be made with materials gathered from the thing it's imitating. to sleep in such a disguise is to risk forgetting the truth of who you are.
— You steal cast-off skins of a gigantic lizard and fashion them into a disguise, frilled and rainbowed. For a time, you live as a god, protecting a family of idiots from nonexistent predators in return for the game they drive into your own mouth and down your throat. At night you shed your skin and bathe in pools of cool water. This lasts until their youngest drugs you into itchy slumber and flees with his siblings. Now you're just a big fat lizard, and unused to fending for yourself.
A mask of river clay wipes away the stable identity of the wearer and grants them the suggestibility of water, always following the path of least resistance.
— Starving, your village comes apart. The able leave to seek some kind of deathless oblivion in the mouth of the Lord of Smooth Stone, the unable sit and wait to rot. in desperation, masks of mud are daubed over the faces of the few who cannot bear to abandon their dependents. You are among them, trusted by your mother to gather food for her, though you will not recognize her face. Alas! Alas! The mud comes from stagnant pools, not the living river. It imparts the secret of poisoned incubation, and nothing more. Foul and harmful thoughts have no effect on you, but in your mind they multiply, grow thick and strong as rope. Within a month, they will grow large enough to ooze out of your nose and ears like leeches.
the body is a pliable, plastic thing and can, by stretching or contorting it continually over the course of a year, be persuaded to distort or alter its shape dramatically and impossibly. A jaw could be unhinged and widened, ribs stretched and expanded into a tent, etc.
— your veins stand rigid, bulging your skin topographic. She's jammed your jaws open with a block of wood. Your tongue points straight ahead, quivering like an arrow. She pulls the hurricane egg out of the ootheca she fashioned for it. It drips amniotic fluid into the rug, still placid with the lie (her craftsmanship was near-perfect, the egg-sac entirely believable). The pearl rolls down your throat. It's all very erotic. The hurricane stirs in you that night. Over the next year, your flesh makes space for the gale within you until your body is a whirlwind rosette from the belly upwards. your features are distributed in spiral with a wet little mouth in the middle. She adores it.
Incorporating something into your body such that it remains whole and allowing your body to heal around it over the course of year imbues that body part with the qualities of the thing inserted appropriate to that body part.
— he wrenches the teeth from your head, replaces them with opal. he pierces your tongue with sapphire. for a year of wine, pulped fruit and ice, the two of you stay away from the salons, the whirlwind-rose orgies. you let his rival have her victory. but finally, when your tongue stirs and speech returns to you, your words drop precious and shining as jewels. everyone values you speaking to them, and only them, as though you were gifting them a gem the size of a tooth.
Twins count as the same person with two bodies when it is helpful to them, and as separate people when it is helpful to them.
— your twin bites down hard on your arm and your sweaty fingers cramp around the shears and your ear - their ear - peels away from their skull and falls onto the moss. You are twins. each of you wears one of the other's ears around your neck on a thin golden chain and when you speak into it, the other hears you.
It is quite possible to live with holes in your skull
— your tour on the funeral parade (ugly, treasonous work, leading beasts to devour the infirm and old before they can become host to an Id-Hound or eaten by Angbora) is rewarded with a trepanned alligator of your own. Two of its thoughts have been fed to the exclusion of all others; hunger and grief. They squirm like reins out through its skull, and by grasping them you can direct their focus and intensity.
If the dying do not run deathless with the Hounds, and do, in fact, die, they are finally eaten by Angbora. After 1d4 days, his servants; emaciated, double jointed and rubbery, crawl from cracks in the ground or holes in trees, fold up their corpses and take them away.
— everyone hates your best friend, the man who waits by the dead until Angbora's servants come for them. He wrings their gristly necks, cooks their oily flesh, and eats it with his hands. Nobody else knows why the Ash-Tongued Curse has not made a home in him yet. Only you. The emperor's servants are not of this earth. Their flesh can be eaten freely. This knowledge must never reach anyone with Ash-Tongue. Even if they do not betray you, their curse will.
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.
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.
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.
Animals with human thoughts in their brains will become 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hound Hosts are the frantic idiot fuck puppets of the hounds. They 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 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.
Mice and rats admire liars.
1. For each significant lie (a lie that would break trust and hurt the person lied to if they found out) you have told that is still believed by anyone, one mouse per person who believes the lie will be willing to follow and obey you.
— mice crawl over you while you're sleeping, nest in your hair, and run over your feet while you sit, marking you as a liar. but you aren't! and you can't command these mice! someone is trying to sabotage your good name; likely an uncle, who has not forgiven you for revealing his lie and telling the funeral parade that your father was, in truth, dying, and must be eaten by an alligator.
2. If the lie was malicious, a mouse OR rat will be willing.
— you run errands for a Holy Coward; a greedy old woman who sits trimming her cigars, eyebrows, and fingernails with a pair of little scissors. she gives you a glass bottle of water and tells you to bring it to her sister. instead, you offer a sip to a starveling in a ditch and glue his mouth shut! an impressed rat swears service to you, growing more irritated by the day as he learns you aren't in the habit of lying.
An unliving thing, if it is shaped like a living one, will come to life if it is treated as living for a full day.
1. A thing that you can fit in your mouth requires only one person to treat it as living; things twice, thrice etc. as large must be treated as living by two, three, etc. people.
— you and your friends are provided for, cradled and fondled by a beautiful woman the four of you molded from clay. you grow insecure and jealous, knock her opal-eyed head clean off and flee with it to where you can feed and kiss and provide for her yourself.
2. this false life lasts until the thing is forced to confront its unliving nature; if it sees its reflection, hears someone speak of its creation, is broken, etc.
— there are many stories of parents who made and lied to their children rather than birthing them, but few artists capable of creating something lifelike enough to survive first contact with a mirror. though you do not know it, your parents and makers were among those few. to help conceal your nature from you, you were taught from an early age that you were fragile, and should fear the Hounds of Id taking you at once if you were ever wounded or alone.
If a lie is told, and there is not a single living person who knows that it is a lie, (including the teller) it will become true, as will anything necessary to make that lie true.
1. If the lie is about a living thing, that thing will come to life as a living lie.
— music comes from the perfumers manor that sounds as though a single singer passes the song between many different mouths.The rumor multiplies. Soon, your services are required. A singer with many heads haunts the halls of the manor and eats the perfumers food freely; one voice compels them to die, another to live, and they are in life-debt. The people in the village below begin to fall to the Ash-Tongue Curse, as the living lie was born from their thoughts. Your own mind carries the knotted Song of Tying; you feed her the thought, she sings it, and her own necks twist tight.
2. telling stories without declaring that what you are saying is fiction is taboo
— you travel through the jungle on the side of the mountain where the eye of Dead Ouroboros lingers. In that jungle live the Lying Apes, creatures that everyone despises and even the hungriest will not eat. You have seen how the forest crawls with their living lies: Horned Foxes and Catawheres and Jellybone Birds. You carry ape's tongue around your neck; if you replaced your own with it, you could speak a single lie into life before falling dumb forever. You know that the apes claim that they are men who crawled from the future-pool of the Eye can only be another fiction.
If the only person in the whole world who knows you exist doubts that existence, you flicker, and stay half gone. You, and anything you possessed that was known to that person and whose existence was doubted alongside yours, are now half-real.
1. If your old, real, identity is ever definitively proved to anyone besides yourself, you are no longer half-real. If you ever doubt your own existence, you vanish.
— An early memory in a lonely country; your only companion, sibling, friend, lost for long enough that your young mind can barely recall them. Then a reunion; joyful at first, until you notice their backwards hands. Desperate, infantile interrogation: their confused pleading is met with the brutal skepticism of the young, and their crying face is gone.
2. A half-real item can be anything until it's seen and declared to be something, at which point it becomes that thing, and always was.
— Your idiot lover trades all of your blood-grown sugar for a package you are told never to open until you know what you want it to be. This makes a great deal of sense to him, and none whatsoever to you. It remains unopened.
3.The half real can do many tricks; some or all of the following. If anyone witnesses them do any of these things, everyone who can see them will stop doing everything and try to kill them on pure instinct.
— At a gallery of tattooed bodies, a woman slips free from a scene on a perfume-slave's back. the hands of the models and viewers (your own?) find her, break her neck, beat her head against the ground. you will not eat or sleep in a place that has visual art anywhere.
4. Their hands are backwards on their wrists, and by performing the motion in reverse, they may undo the most recent thing they did with their hands.
— You are accused of poisoning animals so that Angbora, when he eats them, will take the poison into himself. You are blindfolded in a room that has never seen the light, and tortured by a half-real man who has never been seen at all. He kills you with his hands and undoes the killing many, many times before a sufficient feast is offered for your release. Even blind, even asleep, your body knows what it feels like to be in a room with someone who is going to kill you, and will warn you.
5. The half-real may half vanish in crowds, and whenever anything affects them in a crowd (explosion, gas, rhetoric, whatever) they flip a coin; heads, they are unaffected by it.
— Trial by a Jury of the Half-Real is the rarest and fairest method for dispensing justice. Your bones have all been replaced with porcelain, and you certainly deserve it after beating the dream-vault that housed your joy to a pulp. The cow was innocent of the thought-theft, and to hold another thoughts is both the vaults burden and right.
6. They bleed blue paint, and, if they touch a surface with an open wound, can transform themselves into an artwork on that surface. If the surface is an artwork, they can incorporate themselves into it
— A client returns, irritable. the woman you have tattooed on their back is now in conversation with another, her form more skillfully rendered than you could have ever accomplished, but her placement ruining the composition entirely. you compose a new one, centered around the new woman. she changes her position again. again you oblige her. you give her trees to climb and things to eat. you learn to work with great speed. when your client complains you pay for a perfume to charm the thoughts from their head. your body is used to tattooing large scenes with just a day's work.
7. They have wire bones and in the dark and unseen, can fit through any hole they
can get their skull through. When in the dark, unseen and no one imagines they
could be there, they can fit through any hole they can fit a hair from their head through.
— You enclose yourself in a ball of clay and fat so that the Ash-Tongued Curse will not find you, and roll about like a blind gerbil. Very little age finds you as you dutifully lick the inside of your ball until suddenly, you flicker into half-reality, and worm your way to freedom. If you were ever recognized, not only would you cease to be half-real, but you would be swiftly cursed once more.
8. They have a tin heart, and can, by holding it in their mouth, make themselves seem as big as a galleon or small as a rat. They will be unconsciously treated as if they were this big, though people will not understand exactly why they are treating them this way.
— You find someone's tin heart beating, beating, inside a cotton doll. It will not work its full charm for you, but, placing it in your mouth, you may make yourself seem the grandest or most pitiful in a group, though which occurs is down to a coin toss.
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| now GET OUT |
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