she’s a changeling; they get reborn all the time

[swan_tower]

I have no idea when and how I will do it, but I suspect that one of these years, Ree is going to find her way into some piece of fiction I write.

She was my Changeling character in a long-running LARP, and over the course of five years of playing her, I worked up a fascinatingly complex framework for the metaphysics of her personality. She was a changeling: a faerie in a human body, which meant that psychology and metaphysics and narrative were essentially three sides of the same coin (and hey, it’s the Dreaming; why can’t a coin have three sides?). I don’t know why she came to mind tonight, but she did, and I found myself re-reading the transcript of a scene I once ran via e-mail. Jadael hosting people at his manor for some kind of party — I don’t remember why — and Ree in the middle of her cyclical Court change, which meant she was Unseelie and overwhelmed by fatalism and taking it out on everybody around her. So Jadael, being the perfect host, took her to a building out back and let her beat the ever-living shit out of him in a fight . . . because that was clearly what she needed. Which was both true, and not. It probably wasn’t good for her. But it made her feel better, because she had more anger than she knew what to do with, and whaling on Jadael with her fists let her inflict the fatalism on him, too, and make him bleed into the bargain. And there’s the whole layer that got added in by the Mesoamerican faerie stuff I had invented — stuff which got reworked into “A Mask of Flesh” and several other stories from that setting I haven’t finished and sold yet — Ree formally thanking Jadael at the end for giving her blood, which meant more than he realized, because of the concept of a debt of blood and what it signified to her. She was a diamond that had been shattered, and ultimately I got her out of the pit of her Court change and her fatalism by way of a metaphor, Ree understanding that you don’t fix a diamond by gluing it back together, you recognize that what you have — what you are — is coal, and you make a new diamond through unspeakable pressure over a long period of time.

I don’t think you can tell that story with a human being. Whatever I do with it would have to be higher-fantasy than that, because you need somebody whose soul is a story, somebody who exists through and for the telling of stories, who can re-tell her own story to fix what got destroyed so long ago. Somebody whose psychological problems are metaphysical and metaphorical at their root, tied up in diamonds and blood and fire and ice. Parts of it will go away, I’m sure: the two jaguars and her totemic tie to them, which is straight out of the Mesoamerican stuff and will wind up in the Xochitlicacan stories if it winds up anywhere. The specific framework of the Changeling cosmos, with Seelie and Unseelie and Ree as an eshu. Many of the characters she interacted with. But something about the core is still there in my mind, simmering away, and like blood, it will out.

Someday. Somehow. I’ll let you know when it does.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Heheheh. I felt like I should dig up an address for Wally or something and tell him that scene with Jadael was cool enough that I still remember it more than, what, seven years later? (If memory serves, Thraxx was at that party, too, and was one of the people I was fucking with -- thus prompting Jadael to get me away from his guests before I could ruin the party.)

[gollumgollum.livejournal.com]

Ahaha. I think he'd appreciate that. (Thraxx was definitely there, and if i remember correctly, he was in a mood to ruin the party. Which, let's be honest, was kind of his default some days.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Some days? <g> At least Ree was only out to rain on everybody's parade during the new moon.

Mostly.

Um. >_>

Until that stretch of time where the game kept falling on the new moon, and I spent so long in her Unseelie Legacy that I couldn't find my way out again. oddsboy laughed his ass off when I told him that in the early days of playing Ree, the biggest challenge by far was figuring out how to play her fatalist side.

Do you know if Wally still uses the same e-mail address?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Actually, scratch that last question; the only address I ever had for him in the first place was the one for Jadael. I'd be very surprised if he still uses that one.

[sarcastibich.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think he still does.

[sarcastibich.livejournal.com]

or failing that, he is on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/lwkendall?fref=ts

[(Anonymous)]

And, by happenstance, did a search while talking to Zach (aka Grendel) about Jadael and ended up back on Livejournal. Synchronicity and all of that.

You can still reach me at that address, or at azorielios at hotmail. That being said, It's one of the scenes that I think I saved solely because I not only loved the scene itself, but it was made even more awesome finding out what I had done after the fact.

-W

[azorielios.livejournal.com]

More than anything, I tend to remember scenes with both you and gollumgollum. Thraxx's stabbing (which, while not Ree, both of you were involved in), the party (which was Yule, by the by), and a conversation Ree and Jadael had while he was in prison, shortly before his death. All of them seemed to have played more in my memory than they maybe should have.

The most humorous bit of all of this? I found this post while doing a search to find the story "Loyalty" that concerns events after Jadael's death, that gollumgollum wrote (I think) when working for BEE afterward. Which I found some time ago while looking for something else entirely.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Hey there! Synchronicity indeed. I'm delighted to know that those scenes stick in your mind, too -- I was thinking a while ago about Jadael asking everyone what makes a hero, and Ree telling him what her mortal self had done at Dun Aengus on the Ireland quest, just before everyone went to Arcadia. I think you didn't get a chance to ask me that in game, so we had the conversation after it was over, at Chili's or wherever we had gone. If I'm remembering correctly, then that conversation the last IC thing I ever did as Ree. It was a good note to end on.

The Yule party must have been the year Cihuacoatl showed up on Samhain, because I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that could have made Ree foam at the mouth like that when Jadael started talking about revenge. It makes a nice companion piece to the lengthy scene James and I ran mostly via e-mail, that started out as Ree and Lucas swapping stories in the Irish Lion, and took a really unexpected turn when he got her to tell the real story of what happened when she was Cihuacoatl's prisoner. If I had the season finale in text somewhere, Ree getting her heart cut out and tearing out Cihuacoatl's throat, I'd have most of that arc right there on the page. :-)

Good memories. And if something in that vague shape ever shows up in my fiction, maybe with a fist-fight offered up by an oh-so-helpful host, you'll know why . . . .