Lost fiction

[badgersandjam.livejournal.com]

Working on an alternate for Lost, and writing stuff that can serve as both history and justification/explanation for the purposes of approvals.  Hey, they want pages of justiofication, I'll give them pages.

Wrote this up tonight.  Various people involved have approved it, so I put it up for comment.  I have real world history, too, which will form the core of the background.  But that's, quite literally, a different story.

THE ICE MENAGERIE

No matter where Ilyana went to sleep now, she always seemed to wake up in a bedroom of gold.  She hated it.  It gleamed like the sun, but was no warmer than the weak sun outside.  As for the mattress—well, the first time she woke up on a swansdown mattress she nearly suffocated, as it gave continually under her not-inconsiderable flesh and shot up in other unexpected places, smothering her.  Eventually she had trampled and torn it flat in a combination of panic and anger, and went to sleep in the scullery that night, curled under the sink.  Whether her Lord moved her—and he didn’t look that strong, for all the magics at his command—or whether the castle just shifted at the suggestion of his will, she didn’t know, but the gold ewer and basin on the marble table did have a look of the scullery about them if you squinted and closed the brocade curtains to shut out the winter morning.

She checked her face in the mirror, bending from her great height to look full at her face instead of just her shoulders and neck.  Blue-tinged skin; tusks that grew up from her lower jaw, fangs from her upper jaw; rough, chapped skin; fists the size of small boulders that could easily pound their lookalikes into dust.  No, she hadn’t changed.  Not since a few months after she got here.  She broke the ice on the water in the basin and plunged as much of her head in as would fit.  Plaiting her hair afterwards, she reflected that maybe this was a punishment, a reflection that her family hadn’t managed to save the family they served from the hands of the Reds—though she was forgetting what the Reds were at a rapid rate.  She only knew she had left the camp for a promise of sunshine if she would bear all on her broad shoulders.  So she bore.

She heard the huge man-hounds baying to each other outside and went to the window.  She liked to watch the pack.  They had each other as she had once had others—others she had given up or tried to save by coming here.  She grew progressively lonelier, working on her own, ripping up boulders to shape and lay them flat in roads so that the Lord of the Ice Menagerie could travel through his and other domains with his pets, lovers and otherwise, and ripping them up behind him again so the landscape wasn’t marred.  At night she built shelters for the servants—inescapable stone huts like the ones that were fading from memory.  In the morning she tore them down and used the material for the roads.

She watched the pack wrestling and she smiled—a sweet smile, despite the fangs and tusks. 

The Lord of the Ice Menagerie watched from behind the mirror.  That was what he wanted, that smile.  How had she kept it despite the changes he had forced on her?  But she would not smile for him, no matter how he cajoled, or wheedled.  Deprivation seemed to have little effect—well, he’d taken her from one of the Arctic gulags, so that was to be expected.  So he’d gone in the opposite direction, and was amused, at first, to see her reject finery and mannered seduction attempts.  She held enough of herself, still, to remember proper servitude, and what was required, and no more.  Enough of herself to remember what she was bred to.  Enough of herself to remember that she owed blood loyalty to something that wasn’t him, even if he’d stolen the memory of that something.  Enough of herself to smile.

He could taste her loneliness like tears.  He worked on it, surrounded her with alien things, riches, isolated her, makes her walk long roads of her own making, alone.  He made himself as human as he could conceive of himself to be, and offered to make her nights, at least, less cold.  And still she cast her eyes down and shook her head, clawed hands folded in her lap.  But he’d catch the sound of her laughter in the servants’ quarters, like an echo.

 

The Lord of the Ice Menagerie does not like to be stymied for long.  He cheats.  What he cannot own, he changes.  And so, after the hundredth, or thousandth, bedroom of gold, the silken sheets, the damask covering the walls of ice, he tells her the pack is out.  The huntsman has been slain.  She is to find them and bring them home.

The spark of life in her eyes as she leaves the room angers him.  He speaks words, and she changes as she goes.  There are no mirrors save the ice itself to show her.

She paces, bent double to the snow, watching for tracks.  The ice does not bear strong witness.  Back and forth over the frozen lake she goes, till a broken branch gives its evidence.  Then she takes off at full throttle, awkwardly, lurching, till she finds she goes better on all fours at this speed.

It is cold.  It is always cold.  The sun shines, but it gives no warmth, despite being ever in the sky.  White nights.  She runs and runs, never deviating from the track, noticing the numbers of tracks diminishing.  She forgets when she sees the blood that tells her the pack met its quarry.  She rushes by the livery that tells her it was the huntsman that was slain.  The man-hounds he slew lie in frozen attitudes, but they will rise again, or they will not.  She runs, and runs, and runs.

At last they are in sight and she bays.  The remnants check and form a wall against her.  But she is bigger than they—all bar one, a grizzled grey, with tusks that put her own to shame.  She barrels into the pack gleefully and sinks her fangs deeply into the grey’s shoulder.

“Tag,” she says, and smiles.

The Lord of the Ice Menagerie puts down his mirror.  He cannot taste her loneliness any more.  But the pack belongs to him.  Their loyalty belongs to him.  Everything, here, belongs to him.

It is time to hunt.