This merciless pursuit (our lease on life)

originally i saw the original and then this week i saw this so i don't know what i can tell you about the genuine quality v quantity of what you saw represented but what i can tell you is that they were lost to time for a very good reason. maybe

Minoth, being the uncanny overthinker that Indoline scholars have long thought impossible to appear in the form and guise of a simple and servile Blade, harvests infinite torment from the idea that he may have...botched his entrance, so to speak - all long-studied best-intentions anxious-dodger artistry unwittingly and unmercifully chewed by the scenery.

The scenery, beautiful Tornan countryside. The black and myriad holes in the earth, where once was simple grass and stone. The place where people are supposed to pass without ceremony or incident.

Some are lucky enough to preserve such scripted peace. Others find subtle small-talk tension wherever they go, from the very first print of their boots.

Minoth's awakening, among the group of travelers that Addam has assembled, is his only chance to create a first impression. He's a Flesh Eater; he's never going back to sleep, and he'll never have this cue again.

It is this, only this. It is this that he has chosen to do.

So few scenes in which to be framed. So precious, his penultimately negligible impact.

So simple, before the invisible (laughing, tracked, studio) audience, his exiting ultimate goal.

"A Blade?"

Oh, it's a good hook. The operative question, right? And yet it's completely diegetic.

Minoth could speak, could pontificate, but he doesn't. He just hunches there and waits for Addam to say it.

(Because he knows Addam as well as the Architect, silent and unreliable - by way of being apocryphal - narrator. Addam is a playwright's dream, in that way.)

"He's Minoth."

Sure he is. Ever since he can remember. You've got it, Prince, say it proud.

"Quaestor Amalthus's Blade."

Sure he's not? Sometimes he wishes he didn't. He certainly wishes it wasn't said aloud.

The brilliant blonde Blade, the one with the sword as big as she is, gives only minor recoil. He can't tell if her forthcoming exclamation, reverberation from said recoil, is at the mention of Amalthus's name, or at the smooth possessive that Addam had applied.

She must know who he is, surely. Because Minoth knows who she is just at a glance.

Everyone knows Amalthus. His preeminence, well, precedes him. Even now - even early-career. The Aegis, too, is uncanny in depth of knowledge and judgement. All accounts of Malos tell just this tale. The debut had been striking, as well as destructive.

If she thinks that little of Amalthus's significance, then maybe he's the one overreacting. You know. Could be.

Gritting his teeth, Minoth sets his stance and determinedly throws his back to Addam. If that's how it's to be, then he won't rock the Titan or its ship. He'll ask his own questions, instead, and if Addam doesn't like it, well, tough cookies.

Share a hot meal. Point a few fingers. Act unaffected, generally.

And sleep apart from the rest of the group, neither volunteering for nor shying away from a shift of midnight watch.

(Aegaeon, he likes. Jin still makes him wary. It's not that he thinks the Paragon of Torna is suspicious, no; it's more that he feels like Jin is trying to accuse him of some wrongdoing he cannot recall. Maybe all will be revealed in time.)

But when Minoth wakes the next morning, at some cockeyed early hour, he's in the desert once again, departed from the travelers. Tucked behind a rock for cover, of course, but there are no blankets strewn about, no packs and no embers.

He thinks back to the last meal he'd had, at this point the prior day. How hungry he was - he hadn't felt like this last night, gratified of Energy Stir-Fry among wisps of merry charcoal. He checks the barrel of his right gun. Fully loaded, just as it had been when he'd set to sleep for his final stretch of the desert. He dabs a bare finger to the corner of his jaw. No Eternity Perfume to be traced.

The sounds of struggle greet him in Olnard's Trail. A familiar rhythm: a chest-heaving pause.

Just rehearsal, huh?

Haze describes the spectacle to him with quivering limbs - she's much more excited than the children, it seems. How Addam had been on the very verge of crying out, turning on heel, striking his sword into the beast's foot and making use of the shield of his body for something of adrenaline.

Minoth rather doubts that Addam actually would have done such a thing. He's not so impulsive in his frenzied gullible pastiche of honor.

But Haze, Minoth learns, doesn't see the future, only freezes the past, so it's only the idea of suspense that has courted her so vigorously. Always, with Haze, the temptation.

Mythra, meanwhile, looks chafed, at the very least, to have been shown something so unexpected.

Of course. She'd been just so offended the prior day's present when he'd implied that she and Malos might - and indeed do - share some common DNA, such as it is.

(Perhaps the same can be said of Malos and him. Perhaps they're all desperately interconnected. Perhaps systems mean practically nothing, anymore.)

"So you're an acolyte of Addam's, then?"

She snorts. "As if. I'm just following this guy since he woke me up, and that's it."

Addam nudges her, gently. Though his concern and minor amusement is drawn toward and from Mythra, his eyes are on Minoth, softening more with each passing second. "That's what an acolyte is, I'm afraid."

But Minoth shakes his head, wry wisdom disturbed. "Not quite. For that, you'd have to be a little more helpful. A little more devout."

And then he meets Addam's eyes, and the prince swallows.

Minoth doesn't know about Mythra's disquietude of the false yesterday - her clocking of the off vibe, her wrinkled nose and side-eye. He doesn't know that he'd already handily sent her to the midnight sanctuary of mulling it over instead of brushing it off.

He also can't gamble, then, on the efficacy of his lines now versus before. The intent is to motivate Mythra to leave her ratty blanket and depart for the woods; to make her necessarily set another scene.

They close for sleep that night with little more than a significant glance. Addam doesn't ask for Minoth. Minoth doesn't make himself known, or otherwise conspicuous. In that respect, it's of little contrast to the last time he'd been through this hour.

Maybe Mythra, the clearest call for an instigator, gets all up in Addam's business about this weird, nosy guy who's apparently obsessed with him. Maybe she doesn't.

Minoth doesn't know. He just knows that the desert is getting tired of living in his hair. So something has to budge.

For the third take, he tries Lora. She queries about Flesh Eaters, but Minoth remembers the rhythm well, and intentionally stilts it by reserving explanation and instead passing his eyes around the group to see who looks most uncomfortable.

Jin? He doesn't reveal himself. He has Lora to do that for him. Minoth purposefully avoids direct eye contact with any of them (it's a skill, a vantage, middle distance), so he can't waste time lingering to probe for tells.

Haze is cautious. Brighid has lifted a brow. Aegaeon is deferring to the emperor, and the emperor remains impassive. Mythra attempts to calculate. The kids are too jaded to be frightened.

He slides his gaze to Addam. There, on the prince's open face, is a mystified expression.

"I think I'll stay awhile," pronounces Minoth, ending the all-too-brief question-and-answer session. You know, use my own initiative. Get this show on the road.

On the road to Dannagh, by way of Aletta and the thrills of non-modern medicine. It's as good a place as any to go, right?

But no foliage-filtered light wakes him in the dry air of the desert.

This time, when he shoots the Jagron, the cowboy says nothing at all.

"He's Minoth. Quaestor Amalthus's Blade."

Mythra huffs. Jin grunts. Lora and Haze, unsurprisingly, wear twin looks of innocent pique. Minoth, rather than make a sundry nonverbal vocalization, replies, "Among other things. Some Blades are known to contain multitudes."

He looks at Mythra, because he knows she'll be looking at him. If Jin grunts again, the sound is lost in the malaise of dirt lain rent by tridactyl forces roaring from beyond.

Addam doesn't inquire into the coy comment, however. Suddenly it's become very pressing to answer Lora's question of the first: what is a Leftherian monster doing out here?

Because it surely doesn't beg justification for an Indoline Blade to be haunting, apropos of nothing apparent, Olnard's Trail.

Maybe he should just turn around and hike it back to the port. It's only a day's journey, and he's got, oh, infinite of those to spare.

After all, he'll need them, if he's to keep disembarking from the general vicinity of that gaping purple ether miasma by the mouth of the canyon each time nightfall catches him stray.

What a grand luxury. What a puzzling affliction. Come to think of it, someone should do something about that, shouldn't they?

Once, he tries a snipe from behind a convenient craggle in the cliffside, sacrificing form (and posing) in followthrough for a hasty application of Libre, or three.

If he prevents the attack but remains hidden, it'll be like he was never there. Unless the beast receives stage direction to stare directly into the wings and attack the black-clad crew.

Forced encounter for you, Minoth Ex Machina. The jig is up. The mystique is meaningless. The disguise has been given away.

If this were a union gig, some representative might find it within themselves to start clamoring about craft services and mandated breaks, the covers and the capo. Minoth has never been that type of speaker-upper, in tongues or in writing, but in particular now, he feels no impetus to voice any such concerns.

There's a certain complacence that comes with mid-run rehearsals, isn't there? It doesn't have to be good. If it's not great, it's not necessarily going to get much better.

Or if it's set, a cultural touchstone, to run forever, the audience will eat it up regardless. Come now, there's merchandise, tie-in and residual sales to be made.

The critics and the pockets in the press box are sleeping. Other than that, Lady Origo...employ any plot device you please.

Nobody's in danger, is the frustrating thing about it. Sure, yes, the boys (plus Addam, with remark reserved on whether or not he indeed counts as his own separate category) have to be delivered from the doom of a certain crippling blow, but that's the easy part. Literally, the scripted part. That's the part that always works.

(Or so he thinks? Who's to say?)

If Minoth were a person less infinitely riddled with guilt, he might try, one time, letting them have it, and see where that got them all then. But he can't do that to Addam, let alone to two children he's never met.

(That is to say, it's bad enough that they'll be hurt, or worse. It'll only feel then again doubly worse when he ambles his way along later and has to hide the fact that he knew, and could have stopped it. That he knew Amalthus was the one, and never stopped it.)

It is separately surprising that Minoth, the aforementioned classical overthinker, should be so chill and calm when set against the proposition that history is literally repeating itself in real time, to no observable effect - and think of what Malos could be doing, meanwhile, to advance forward in the instruction set while the country travelers just whale themselves unjumping into a wall day after day, night after night.

Are they not tired? Well, but then again: he isn't.

He could excuse it as a bizarre variant of particularly vivid déjà vu, maybe - could have, at the start. Now, it's a little too long on for that. What, three, four (six, seven) days? Strange thing to forget, he knows.

It's just not obvious. How could anyone honor this much lackadaisical subtlety? How could anyone make a crucial enough alteration? There's nothing there. There's nothing there!

There's nothing gripping. There's nothing bright. There's nothing visceral to hang onto.

There's no explosion. There's no cacophony. There's nothing but awkward camaraderie and a handful of spiritual adumbrations.

If a Jagron jumps at the edge of a forest and no one stops - really stops - to ask why, what's to stop it from happening again?

And again?

And again?

He shoots without needing to aim. The sound of Addam's voice echoing off telltale impotent blades of grass swishing in the wind-machine breeze is more than enough.

It's good sound design, really. You should be able to tell, deep in your gut, when something that massive leaves the ground. You should be able to figure on a pretty big impact, and set the expectation expertly in the audience's mind just to make the payoff all the more satisfying.

He stands still. He hooks it blind over his shoulder. He ambles in backwards. He walks in step, in rhythm.

Doesn't feel. Doesn't think. Just does. Just says. The words and actions are alive in his head, undesperate preimage from the overture.

He sighs to himself, and rolls his eyes. He mouths the blurted dialogue he knows is coming to herald his divining-time.

"Is it over?"

"Milton!"

"Master Addam!?"

(This last one, muffled, from Haze. Alternately, a call from Hugo, or a perfunctory "Addam, you dumbass!" Gathered as an ensemble, the murmurs of all three.)

The bullet. The gunsmoke. The cloud of dust systematically and seamlessly replacing the airborne monster's erstwhile shadow. The breaths, unbated and taken gratuitously.

And then, as Addam turns about with an incredulous, ever-growing grin, he and Minoth, by the synchronized reading of their lips, jointly cry out the Flesh Eater's name.

Doubtless, somebody, somewhere, frowns, but for the most part it goes unnoticed, until it's past time for Minoth's wry rejoinder, and what he says is,

"I thought I told you to stop calling me that."

You know, Quaestor Amalthus's Blade?

This time, at long last, there's a spark of recognition from Mythra - does she, too, know the script? Has she been the subconscious, unaware director, waiting and iterating for the perfect performance to take?

(We still don't know what Malos is doing. Maybe we don't and never did care.)

Her golden eyes flicker from Addam to Minoth to Addam and back again, studying the mutual dumbfounded looks with mounting alacrity. She's not irritated, nor is she illuminated. She's gathering data, most like, and collating it; merging and synthesizing the series in socket of a dozen-odd parallel streams.

Of course, the Jagron is still there, licking its wounds, and the boys are warily peering around Addam, who's patting a scrawny shoulder absent-mindedly as he gathers his thoughts, to regard both it and the newcomer. It'll be dispatched in time. It always is. By now, Minoth figures he could near about dismantle the hide at its drab foam-podge seams.

Addam's armor is much more methodically constructed, with true craftsmanship in each length of red cord and curve of noble plate. Addam's armor is ridiculously singular and idiosyncratic. Addam's armor was made for the leading man.

Addam is the change, the meddle in the moment. Not Jin nor Lora, not Haze or the children (and never the Ardainians at all). Mythra remains the silent controller.

It was always Addam. It was only Addam. It's the difference of admitting it that has made things, all along.

Let us watch and see Mercutio and Tybalt join hands to prevent the recurring, inevitable tragedy.

"Well," says Addam, eschewing guile as ever, or maybe as only recently, "I've got to call you something, my liege."

Then the grin cracks wide, for real this time, even as Lora hastily unfurls her braid to stay the monster.

Talk about chewing the scenery! But it fits, it fits - it fits by meaning nothing at all and yet the most anything can.

Sensation returns to Minoth in that moment, he realizes. Not just hunger, fear, relief, but pleasure and pain, motivation, the spirit of perpetual motion.

Oh, it has been two years, some eight or nine months, and so very many, many days.

i've been getting depressed (literal/figurative) about the stagnation of my collaboration, so i dug up something old to post. let's make it an auspicious day everyone