The measure of love isn't loss. (Rust and the rain endure, I'm sure.)

SELF-INDULGENT DRIVEL/INFODUMP

Silverlock prepares for a funeral, and I am an opportunistic backstory/worldbuilding whore. -Or- I have no idea where this came from (that's a lie, that's a lie!) and all I really have to say is, WTF, Silverlock. WTF. Being solemn and cryptic doesn't count as angst.

Warnings for Silverlock wandering around bleeding and Blaine being both a transcendentalist and dead, but not at the same time. And warnings for nowhere near enough editing, dear god.

---------------------

A bell chimed as the door of the tattoo parlor opened; the girl behind the counter looked up from her sketchpad and grinned. "Well, if it isn't our favorite customer! It's been a while since you rang our bell, Silverlock." She was human, but she wore her skin like a half-elf, and left her apprentice smock unbuttoned to show off the geometric patterns that covered her shoulders and torso.

"It's good to see you, too, Annali. Is Zi in?" Silverlock untangled his hair from the hood of his cloak, still unaccustomed to the weight of the tiny braids.

"You even got skin left under that getup? Thought you'd covered it all over by now- unless you came for new shinies. We got those. What do you need?"

"A blank canvas."

The grin fell off her face in an instant. "Oh, no." She pressed a hand to her mouth. "Zi's gone to visit some of his Kin in Tarmish. Won't be back for another month. Silverlock..."

He shook his head, braids swaying violently with the motion. "It's two days to the funeral. I've already asked Sherrick and Orianne, but they're booked through to next week. Zi's the only other Kin in the city I'd trust for the job."

Annali tore a corner from her sketchpad and scribbled out an address. "Sherrick's a drunk and Ori don't know up from down, anyway. Here, you go to Kupric. Tell him I sent you."

He took the paper and raised an eyebrow at her. "Candlemark?"

"Lot of talent in Candlemark. Just gotta know where to look, s'all. He's the only man Zi'll let near him with a needle." She shrugged uneasily. "Get there early enough, and he'll take you, even for a clean slate."

"Thank you." He paused in the doorway. "You can tell Zi I'll have some work for him in a few months."

The bell chimed as the door shut behind him.

------------

The judicial council gave convicts two choices: they could work and live on the chain gangs in the rock quarries, or they could live as free citizens in Candlemark. Most of them chose the chain gangs. Silverlock had never had to deal much with the district's inhabitants; his clients had always made some effort to walk on the sunnier side of legality. The city watch had abandoned the place to the dogs, and the Guilds avoided it at all costs. Any gods that might have watched over it long ago were dead.

Candlemark was a breath of fresh anarchy; Silverlock had to remind himself that he wasn't here for a fight, no matter how much he itched to break some bones. He cloaked himself in power, sending a not-so-subtle message of "Fuck off" to the groups of hollow-eyed, wolf-like youths haunting the narrow streets. He'd promised to abstain from bloodshed, if only out of respect for the deceased.

Annali's scrap of paper led him to a battered door in a dark, narrow alley. The interlocking rings of Joshel's Shackles had been drawn on the weathered wood in chalk. The door swung open before he could knock.

"What do you want?" The man was practically a half-giant; he had to stoop to fit in the door. Lines of green and bronze bisected his face, and a row of interlocking bronze plates hooked into the skin of his neck as a collar. He radiated distrust and the threat of violence.

"Annali from Zizi's shop in Southmark sent me, said you did good work." Silverlock pulled back his cloak hood and tucked a few loose braids behind his ear.

Kupric grunted, and some of his hostility was replaced with grudging curiosity. "What'd she send you for?"

"A blank canvas."

"Funeral?"

"It's in two days."

The curiosity turned into pity tinged with respect. He held out his hand. "Kupric Sanavess."

"Silverlock D'Alestri." Silverlock took his hand, and felt the respect turn into something more like admiration; he wasn't surprised to find that his name was known even in Candlemark. Fortunately, the man was nearly unreadable beyond his surface emotions. There was something comforting in his utter blankness.

"Room's in the back." He stepped out of the doorway. "Let's take a look at you."

A dim hallway led to the studio, bypassing a number of curtained doorways that probably led to living quarters of some sort. There were other people in the building, all wrapped up in their own sleepy thoughts and emotions.

The room was small, but surprisingly clean and well lit. A padded chair and table took up most of the space and a curtain partitioned off one corner. The walls were covered in charcoal sketches of religious figures and wrapped in aether. It was a solid warding spell, with no obvious weaknesses. There were wards on the case of needles beside the chair, as well.

Kupric leaned against the door with his arms crossed and gave a perfunctory nod of his head towards the table.

Silverlock almost smiled as he removed his clothing. He left his cloak and robes folded neatly on the table, and placed his Guild tags on top of them. He faced the other man, naked save for the black collar around his throat. If he was anything, he was comfortable in his own skin. "Well?"

"Collar's gotta go too." Kupric cocked his head to the side. "Full body blanking usually takes a week. Could be dangerous to do it in a day. It'll hurt."

"Pain is hardly a deterrent." He hooked his fingers underneath the back of the collar an unlatched it with only the slightest hesitation. "I'd appreciate it if we got this done with as quickly as possible."

The artist nodded. "On the table, then. I'll start with your back."

Kupric's touch stung a bit, like the pins and needles tickle of dead nerves being slowly woken up. It wasn't nearly as bad as having a hand reattached, but few things in Silverlock's experience had been. The sensation intensified gradually, but not to the point of being unbearable.

Magic rang clear and bell-like in his head- a familiar tune. "It's none of my business, of course, but I do find it curious that a Leech would live as a tattoo artist in Candlemark, of all places." He pillowed his head on his arms and chuckled softly. "I told you, I don't care if it hurts. Concentrate on your work, Artist, and I'll deal with my own pain."

Kupric grunted, and the magic took on a different tone. The pain spiked; he channeled it away into a separate, isolated corner of his mind. He could deal with it later- a week or a year, or a hundred years from now, when he wasn't preoccupied with other forms of pain.

Something warm and wet trickled down his shoulderblade; he could smell blood mixed in with the ink. It was a good smell.

Silverlock closed his eyes and let himself drift.

----------

Blaine's health had never recovered after all that had happened; humans weren't meant to seize godhood and let it go. It sometimes seemed like he'd left most of himself in the aether, afterwards, as though everything in him that had been truly alive had been eaten away by raw magic.

Silverlock was still angry with Varun for letting it happen, and not only because he'd lost friends to Mandhatri's culling. Even after the heresy and the betrayal, Blaine still held to his faith.

"It's not like I have a choice in the matter," he'd said once, not long before his death. "And that angers me as much as it does you. But even if I did have that choice, nothing would change. It has nothing to do with the gods- I know how little in this world is truly of the divine.

"It's the ideas behind them that matter. I can live as I do and believe as I do, and in doing so I can touch something greater than myself or Varun or the memories of the Six and the Twain. Scoff all you like, but I know you understand it, too.

"I have no regrets now. I am exactly who I choose to be, and nothing else. How could I ever need anything more?"

Blaine always had been very good at throwing Silverlock's words back in his face.

----------

The absence of pain jolted him back to his senses.

"Enough for now," Kupric muttered. "You're still bleeding, so step carefully. There's a bath behind the curtain. Clean up, and then we'll continue."

Blood and ink pooled along the curvature of his spine and dripped down the backs of his thighs as he slid off the table. "I've had worse paper cuts." His back ached in a way that indicated massive bruising.

Kupric said nothing, and began wiping down the table.

Silverlock examined his back in the tarnished mirror behind the curtain once he'd cleaned off the blood. There were still faint shadows of the tattoos in places, but otherwise, his skin was completely blank from the top ridge of his spine to the backs of his knees.

Kupric nodded to the chair when he finally left his contemplations in the mirror. Silverlock sat down and made himself as comfortable as possible while the taciturn artist examined his left arm.

"Spellsigns?" Kupric prodded at a few of the sigils.

"Most of them, but they've been disabled." That was one of the first things he'd done, after the Avatar had taken Blaine. Accidental mayhem was never as fun as the premeditated sort, and some of the spellsigns operated on a hairtrigger. Keeping them active just wasn't worth the risk when he was feeling unbalanced.

"Good." Kupric's hands engulfed his own, and the pins and needles tingle began again.

There was a little magic in all of his tattoos; it was the only way to keep the ink from fading or rejecting. The blanking spell was deceptively simple- Kupric was pulling the ink out of his skin, dragging it to the surface and sloughing it off.

A little blood was inevitable, but the trick lay in not calling out too much of it, or pulling veins and bone out with the ink. There were always stories- rumors of sloppy artists who left their clients mutilated or dead, torn to pieces by uncontrolled magic.

Blood and ink trickled down his fingers and dripped on the floor. For a single disconcerting moment, it felt like he was watching his past drain away to spatter across the floorboards.

"I did most of those myself, in the last few years of my indenture," he said absently, watching the ink seep out of his skin. "As insurance, mostly, in case my master tried to cheat me out of my allotment. As you can see, I'm no artist. It took me years to find someone willing to ink a sleeve around the spells to make them look less like a child's scrawling."

"Zizi?"

"You can tell?"

"Geometric work is his specialty. And he's not afraid of magic." Kupric tapped the center of the sigil on his palm, already half melted away. "Your teacher was an occultist?"

"An eclectic. He knew a few Greater Shrive by name, and he taught me the basics of summoning. It was never one of my interests, though."

"You started out as an elementalist." Kupric touched the rune on the inside of his wrist, then followed a succession of sigils up to his elbow. "Air. But then you found you had a knack for healing and creation, and that led you to necromancy."

"You're good," Silverlock observed. "But I never had much of a knack for healing." He turned his arm over, where another series of runes crawled from wrist to elbow. "I learned fire after I grew bored with air, and then the basics of healing when my master grew tired of cleaning up after me. I spent several years learning creation, and then my indenture ended. I didn't learn necromancy until after I joined the Guild."

"You must have been Gannet Sorlin's last apprentice, then, and Banshee taught you necromancy." The rest of the summoning rune on his hand melted away.

Silverlock laughed; it was a tired sound. "Master Sorlin has been dead a good thirty years now, and Lady Banshee left the Guild not long after I earned my tags. I'd wonder how you know of them, but it's clear you've been in this business a long time. Go ahead, Artist, and tell me the rest of my story, if it pleases you."

Kupric shrugged. "I only know what you tell me." He obliterated another rune with a flash of magic between his fingers. "Your skin is very loud."

"I suppose." He watched the swirls of excess aether drift away from his skin like so much smoke, and thought of silence.

--------

The tattoos on his torso came away layer by layer, arrays of runes giving way to fantastical creatures, which sloughed off to reveal stark abstract lines. Underneath all of them, against bare, blank skin, a line of black cherry blossoms stretched across his collarbones.

"Those were my first- one outline for every year of my indenture." His voice was hoarse from too much speaking; Kupric didn't say much, but he listened, and Silverlock had plenty of stories to tell. "I had to pay back fifteen years when Master Sorlin bought me." He tilted his head back, feeling dizzy with exhaustion and blood loss, and grimaced. "Do you have any idea how much a trained, licensed Southmark whore is worth? It took me decades clear that debt, even after I joined the Guild- I earned more in a month then than I do in a year, now."

That still annoyed him. If it weren't for the Guild's exorbitant fees, his current income would be comparable to the profits he'd pulled in for the brothel.

Kupric didn't utilize much range of facial expression, but he radiated amusement all the same. "Gannet should have paid that debt for you."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But Master Sorlin was a drunkard with a gambling problem; he couldn't afford to buy me, much less pay off my indenture. They only let me go because he marked my face, and there are laws about that sort of thing."

His voice was steady, but he was drunk on pain; they'd been at this for hours, pausing only occasionally for Silverlock to sluice away the blood. "I'm bleeding to death, aren't I?" The only tattoos that remained where the chest piece and his face and neck work.

"A little. I did say this was dangerous."

"So you did. I think I'll survive a bit longer, all the same. Ironically enough, I've nothing left to die for."

"Is what you've lost worth this?" It was the first real question Kupric had asked; possibly it was the only one he didn't already know the answer to.

"Shouldn't you have asked that fifteen hours ago?"

"You wouldn't have known the answer then." The cherry blossoms dissolved quickly; the magic holding them together was old and easily broken. Kupric cupped his chin in one hand and examined the intersecting lines of scar tissue and ink on Silverlock's face. His fingers were warm and slick with blood.

Silverlock obligingly closed his eyes, and felt the tickle of magic on his eyelids a moment later. "The woman who did those told me I was crazy to let her put a needle that close to my eyes. Said it would be my own fault if she blinded me. The writing is Shrivish, one of the Ikatian variations; the words mean different things depending on which direction you read them in."

The Shrive had a love of puns that was, at times, unbearable. The words on his eyelids could be translated as "death" or "the stillness of moonlight reflecting on a pond at midnight," with another half a dozen meanings in between. When combined, they spelled out his own pseudonym: "Silverlock."

Kupric grunted in response, and continued with his work. The words slid away like dark tears, and pooled in the hollows beneath his eyes. The rest of the facial tattoos went just as quickly.

His hair went next; the slide of the razor against his scalp was practically painless, but watching the pile of braids gather on the table hurt more than he'd expected. Three lengths of bleached silver landed on top of the black, and then Kupric was washing away the blood, ink, and stray hair with a soft wet cloth, and the only things left were the letters around his throat.

Kupric's large hands settled around his neck. "Is what you have lost worth doing this?" he asked again.

There was a glib reply on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it; there was no point in avoiding the question any longer. "Of course not. Objectively, I haven't lost much. One lover among many, a few dozen years of my life. I intend to live well beyond the limits nature intended; I can hardly balance everything that I am against the memory of what he meant to me."

Kupric looked at him steadily and said nothing.

"It's time for me to shed my skin," he said quietly. "I owe him a great deal, but ultimately I do this for myself."

The name tattooed around his throat came away with a single swipe of Kupric's hand.

---------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------

I AM SO UNSUBTLE, I THINK I JUST GAVE MYSELF A CONCUSSION. JESUS.

Bleh. There was a sex scene in there that I didn't write, because I feel dirty enough as it is (and I'm incapable of posting any sex scenes that are longer than two lines, anyway), and it ends abruptly because there should be at least another three scenes, not including the sex.

I should, I don't know, maybe write the fucking story. Maybe. (Brief rundown: Nagendra's successor as Avatar of Varun is even crazier than she was; he does a lot of evil shit and kills a lot of people, and eventually Blaine takes him down by becoming an Avatar himself. Afterwards, he goes back to being a normal human, and they all live happily ever after until Blaine stops living. Also, there are riots. I'll do a proper outline at some point, I'm sure.)

City babble!

Shaivhen is divided into six districts: Southmark, Eastmark, Redmark, Candlemark, the Harbor District, and the Temple District. Southmark is the ritzy district- all the fanciest restaurants, all the famous theaters and opera houses, all the most expensive brothels. Eastmark is more middle class- it's also the sales district, where out-of-city merchants sell things in the giant open air market in the center of the district. Eastmark is home to a number of universities, arcane and otherwise. The Harbor District is mostly industrial- shipyards and the like, but there's also a fair bit of organized crime. The slave markets are in the Harbor, too. Redmark is the political and historical district; Rianna's Tower, the Great Library, the palace, and a number of museums are located there. The Guild Council and the City Watch operate out of Redmark. Candlemark is the slum district- all of the districts have a lower class, but Candlemark is the end of the line, more or less. There isn't even any organized crime, because there's no money in Candlemark. It's just a lot of very poor, very hungry people trying to scrape by- and the occasional misfit and ex-convict, like Kupric. The Temple District was once dedicated entirely to the worship of Celesiana, the Elemental of Life- but after the Sundering of the Six, it became home to the Thousand Little Gods. A memorial dedicated to the Six and their Avatars is located in the very center of the district.

The entire city is built on top of an enormous system of tunnels and catacombs. There are entrances to the underground in every district- but some are more easily accessible than others. The Thieves' and Assassins' Guilds guard their entrances vigilantly; the Gypsy Court doesn't care who comes and goes from their camps. There are tunnels beneath Candlemark and Harbor that are rumored to be filled with dark creatures with flailing tentacles and gnashing teeth, but very few people are interested in exploring them to verify those rumors. The Emancipation Movement uses the catacombs to transport slaves out of the city, but with minimal success- the City Watch uses the tunnels as well, and they get a kickback from the slave traders for every escaped slave they recapture.

Very few individuals actually own slaves; most of the slave population in the city is owned by the city, or by businesses. They're expensive; beyond purchasing and upkeep, slave owners have to supply freed slaves with enough capital to become functional, contributing members of society. The laws concerning slave ownership are very detailed, and the fines for breaking them can be astronomical. Most people, aside from the very wealthy, find it more trouble than it's worth.