Tales of the Many-tailed - 9 - Classification (Patreon)

Anger and disappointment bubbled in Edith when she finally stalked back to her room. What she saw as gross failings had stymied her search for what she needed.

That is not a proper library.

The duty room was nearly empty when Edith passed through; fading sunlight left the glowstones to do most of the illuminating. As she exited the spiral stair leading to her room, a hum of voices in the refectory announced that a meal was in progress. She meant to ignore it but, with her key in hand, logic and not knowing when she’d next eat, she joined.

Dinner that night matched the sourdough bread trencher and savoury stew from earlier that day. After freshening up, Edith joined the line. Unsure if it was standard for someone’s end-of-day meal, Edith still took a smaller portion. During dinner, she tried to focus on her meal, but her body betrayed her.

She had leaned into a conversation with two strapping watchers as she ate. Technically, she didn’t flirt because eye fucking someone doesn’t count as flirting. When she realised what she was doing, Edith locked her gaze on her meal and finished hurriedly.

Even the small portion left Edith feeling ready for bed, so she paced back and forth in her cell, reading the briefing material rather than risk falling asleep. The place was bigger than she expected, and even the dry facts lured her to look around more. With her goal in mind, she looked for ways to leave the city. Variations on possibilities abounded: multiple roads, regular merchant caravans, and river barges, or hiring an escort of adventurers from the charter guild.

If I can get a class, maybe I should hide in with their newbies. Though it might be best to do it in a city far from here. A cat on a river barge might be a quiet and free way out. I don’t know what they even use for currency in Easthaven.

She dug through the notes and found businesses listed at the back, with estimates of daily income in coppers and silvers. The sheer level of detail they had in a mere briefing tightened her mouth into a thin line.

As the moon rose, it stretched the shadow of an eastern tower through her window and across her floor.

Oh well, it was nice to have clothing for a while. Let’s see what happens to it during a change.

She stepped into its path, recalling the scent of her tabby disguise. Its rich warmth filled her nostrils as she pushed it into the shapeshifting rune. As lightning brushed her flesh, her attire turned incorporeal and retracted into her form as fur bubbled out of her skin and her bones warped. Releasing control to the flow of pain, Edith soon found herself clad in the familiar furred shape with no outfit in sight.

Cold enfolded Edith, and fatigue nibbled at her spine as she plunged into the shadow. Swimming up the wall through the shadow’s minimal resistance, she passed through the glass with no effort. Beyond the narrow slit window lay the edge of a garden section, with scores of berry bushes planted in rows.

The memory of the mastiff cornering her kept her in the shadows, and she started around the castle perimeter. Her path crossed barred gates three times, forcing her to climb through the shadows to nearly the height of the outer wall to bypass them. After covering half the outer wall, Edith finally saw the throne room windows.

A trip across open ground led her to a shadow, and she slipped through it into the throne room still in feline form. The heavy quiet that filled the place caused the hairs on her back to prickle as she stalked around the false wall behind the throne and slipped into the corridor. Her feline ears twitched at distant sounds, but with no sign of anyone beyond the door at the corridor's end, Edith resumed her recent human form. The halter-dress that had sunk into her flesh bubbled forth and wrapped around her.

So my identities can at least hold clothes. I’ll have to test the limits of the gear I can carry later.

Edith walked along the corridor to identify all the orbs the king had touched, then frowned when she looked back; each sat on the same level.

Why was his hand wandering up and down? I didn’t hear any other clicks except from the orbs and the horse's chest when he wanted to close the ramps. Perhaps it's a timing thing? Should I try to reproduce the pattern?

Her hand poised to touch the first orb, Edith stopped and crouched to eye the seam at the base of the wall.

It tilted, and the ramp that dropped was wider than the corridor above it. Do I even need to risk opening the ramp?

Her forefinger brushed the seam, and the shadow let her meld into it. Flattened in the darkness, she swam deeper, seeking the ramp’s outer edge beneath the wall. A crevice opened beneath her, the strange shadow space holding gravity at bay. Fingers crossed, Edith descended, slipping between two stone walls and angling toward the throne room.

In the recess before the first door, glowing stones stripped the floor of shadows, and Edith emerged before the rune-covered door, focusing on the framework.

Do I take this chance? Heck, I’m already dead to my family and without a class, lying low here could get very unpleasant. Grace invited Goldie in implicitly by carrying me inside in that form; since the scent is different, let’s use that shape.

The kitten's fragile warmth enfolded her body and clothing, and shivering Edith scampered forward. The metallic scent of ozone within the otherwise odourless stone fought to bring out a sneeze.

Here goes nothing.

With a sharp intake of breath, Edith thrust her claws forward and slipped into the cool darkness within the gap. Lightning seethed and strobed across the door and frame, but its leashed tempest didn’t rip across the thin path that contained Edith. Flattened into the gap that threaded the eye of the storm, she emerged into the next room, fur standing on end. The covered stone bowl and chest were there as she remembered. With nothing magical to set aside, she pushed on and slipped into the gap beneath the door. Two more lightning storms raged above and below, fruitlessly seeking a target. Icy fear dragged at her heart as Edith moved on.

As she emerged from the shadow, the crystals around the room lit with a foxfire glow. They illuminated an irregular, gem-studded rock resting in a granite cradle. Except for the one Princess Grace had touched, each gemstone glowed bright white at its core, but the closest was far out of Goldie’s reach. She sniffed around the chamber, but only the old scents of the king and Grace tickled at her nose.

A push of will disabled shapeshifting completely. The power unclenched within her, and lightning danced over her flesh as she shifted back into humanoid Kitsune form for only the third time since she arrived. The dress that had covered her Human body didn’t reappear. Naked, with a nest of tails waving from her spine, Edith sighed. The rough stone floor prickled coolly, urging her to act.

Get in and get out.

Without hesitation, Edith stepped forward and set her palm to the brightest gem.

The white light that pulsed from it washed through her soul and exposed the bones of her life. Her whole life didn’t flash before her eyes, just a single moment she’d tried to hold in her heart, even as years stole the details. Now, it was all crisp and new.

Morning sunlight brushed her face through the nearly all-glass ceiling, and Edith shielded her eyes with one hand. The woman beside her gently clasped her other hand. Her mother. A person she had only remembered from a couple of battered photographs until now smiled at her. Edith wanted to freeze the moment to take in the freckled brunette and her heart-shaped face, but youthful Edith looked around. As she gawked excitedly at her mother’s workplace, her creamy pink Sunday best dress swirled around her legs.

The smell of books, freshly cleaned carpets and even the furniture wax used to maintain the wood of the reading tables and shelves filled Edith’s nostrils.

“Can we work here together when I’m older?” Edith whispered, keeping her voice low. This was a proper library, far better than her primary school’s.

Her mother had crouched and cupped Edith’s face. “Of course. If you study hard and take the right courses. I’d love for you to be with me all the time.”

Pressing her matching brunette curls against her mother’s shoulder, Edith kissed her cheek excitedly. A moment later, she returned to gawking at the three levels of bookcases and the serious students diligently researching. To her, the Mitchell Library reading room had seemed to contain so much knowledge that it was beyond comprehension. She’d clung to that once-faded memory of visiting her mother’s workplace for the first time, and joy bloomed in Edith’s chest.

An almost religious ecstasy gripped the curious child, delight surging above all else. The twin spikes of emotion from her young and old self combined to provide the stone's energy a target.

“Heavenly Sage.” A warm soprano rang in her mind, and a rune flashed; Edith didn't understand it at first, but as it sank into her being, her soul cried its meaning. Polyglot. It took up residence beside the hollow in her chest where the lightning resided. Nothing further happened, and Edith flexed her fingers thoughtfully as she glanced down at a tail undulating by her leg.

Mum, I did it. I worked there. We would have been together.

Letting out a trembling breath, Edith wiped tears away. The rush of power had set her heart pounding.

Amber said I had to get classes for my body and tails. So how do I get my tails touching gems?

The thought was enough to set them stabbing forward around her sides, their fur splayed across multiple stones, and waves of power struck at once.

The thrum of the tyres on the Hume Highway had lulled her to sleep. A loud screech woke her to flashing lights and blaring horns. Then everything tumbled and flipped as they rolled down a hillside. Sprayed with glass, Edith screamed, terror ripping from her throat as the car continued its deadly plunge.

The station wagon’s rear slammed down with a watery splash but nothing came in through the broken windows near Edith. The initial painless cuts started to sting fiercely and she lifted her eyes to find her parents. In the shattered, twisted remnants of the driver's mirror, she saw what time had erased. A piece of metal pierced where her father's face should be while bright red blood jetted from her mother’s throat. For an instant, their gaze had met in that reflection. There, pinned in place by the crumpled front end and a steel rod through her chest, the kind warmth of her mother’s gaze died.

Edith screamed until her throat was raw and then still continued on. Her belt buckle had twisted and jammed where she couldn’t reach, no matter how desperately she tried. Trapped, Edith could only scream and flail her arms at a woman already gone. Those empty eyes and the ruin of her father’s frequently smiling face had revisited her nightmares for years.

By the time rescue came, cold water had crept in through the ruined panels.

Their pictures at the heads of graves and black coffins being lowered were the last memory she had of them. Her parents hadn’t updated either will since they’d married. Conversations heard through closed doors had meant nothing to the traumatised child she had been. Now, Edith knew they’d taken the generous money her parents’ life insurance left and dropped the broken child into the system. Broken child. Screaming thing. She had heard those and other cold, dismissive terms, repeated from behind the closed doors before all her relatives had disappeared.

“Grave Speaker.” The same warm soprano resonated through her, but this time a different rune flashed, etching itself into her soul. Veil touched. Its meaning taunted her with the spectres of the recently deceased that would never let her see her parents. Dead decades past and a world away.

Edith’s mind flinched from grief and remembered pain, but regardless, the waves of power rushed on. Her retreating thoughts saw the landscape they travelled over and knew the events each touched on but shied away from reliving them.

A seven-year-old with recurring night terrors that would bring her upright in bed, wailing like a banshee, didn’t make for a happy home. Though she was a cute seven-year-old and thus easy to place, she returned to the group home four times in the first six months.

Night became a bitter enemy, and she’d sit as long as she could, trying to hold the nightmares at bay. With only streetlight or moonlight to work with, her hands shook as she made bunny rabbits and other shadow puppets to stay awake. Full moons worked best. Eventually, her mind protected itself; the memory of her mother’s warm blood dripping across her face faded and took other memories with it.

“Umbral Mirage.” The voice declared a second time. The rune that came with it struck an old term in the polyglot’s translation: Fata Morgana.

Her own knowledge told her what it meant. A mirage effect in polar regions that makes illusions stack and gain extra detail. She received no explanation of what it could do here.

The next found another moment at a foster home. The bike was a rusted mirror of the one her dad had ridden, a memory already growing vague. At eight, the challenge seemed insurmountable, but the local library had transferred the books that she needed.

Step by step, she followed the instructions and restored it to life. Oiled the gears, patched the leaks in the inner tube, straightened the spokes, scrubbed rust from the frame and repainted it. They gave it to their daughter when they sent Edith back. It didn’t diminish her sense of accomplishment in turning the ruined mess into something useful. Ruined. The word had been sandpaper across still-open wounds.

“Mechanical Maestro.” That class name hadn’t been in the library codex. The rune with it provided the term: mechanical intuition.

The next pulse caught her off guard, and bright arterial blood spurting from a boy’s leg burned through her thoughts and sucked her in. A scream from the bathroom yanked at her, and she flung the door open. Strode into a scene from her nightmares. A thick metallic scent coated the air as red droplets rolled down the bathroom’s white tiles. Pages from first aid manuals burned in her mind’s eye. With only small hand towels on the rail, Edith pulled her t-shirt off and dropped to her knees beside the boy. The straight razor he had used almost opened her knee. Pasty-skinned and beading sweat, he had already passed out from shock. Her hand slicked with blood, she looped the shirt around his leg and tied it off, but couldn’t get the blood to stop, no matter how she’d pressed.

Frantic for something, her eye caught on the toilet roll holder mounted to the wall, and with her heart pounding in her mouth, she ripped it apart. The short rod slipped into a loop of her shirt, and she twisted like a corkscrew, increasing the pressure. Finally, the blood flow slowed, then stopped.

Kneeling in his blood, tears flowed. This time, her screams brought help in time.

It hadn’t helped him when he hung himself three days after being discharged from the hospital. Anything to avoid going back to his parents. He cursed her out in the note he left. Demanded that someone murder the monsters who lived in his parents’ skins.

He also rejected me.

The soprano came from a floating distance, but the word pierced deep. “Panacea.” The rune that came with it danced in her mind’s eye: diagnostic vision.

Mind spinning, the first convulsions hit as the fourth wave found a lightning rod to strike. The events lay out beneath her like a topographical map, a decision tree of stupidity and spite.

Fear bit into her during a school trip to the Blue Mountains. The others left her behind when she tripped; by the time she tended her leg, they were gone. She was sure she’d followed on the same path. Hours later, all she could hear was animals and the ominous creak of gum trees. Their twisted branches swayed above her, and with only the natural sounds around her, she realised she’d become lost. The valley's echoes played tricks, and she couldn’t find the others.

What she’d thought were trails were merely animal paths. A clearing before night offered a meagre sanctuary, a place where she could safely scratch out a firepit, and she made that fire with a slab of bark, grasses woven into a cord, and kindling. Just like a book had shown her. That night, she used the Southern Cross and her cheap outing map to orient herself. Snippets she remembered from another book and their own trip out led her north to the rail tracks through the mountain. They weren’t reachable where she first found them, but they guided her towards Katoomba train station.

The police took her home; their biological son had been among those who had walked on. Shamefaced, that nice family put Edith back in the group home within days. Labelled trouble. Again.

“Peerless Wayfinder.” The woman’s crisp tones sounded again as Edith’s fifth tail brushed a gem. This time, the rune meant navigator. As it took root at the base of her fifth tail, memories shifted within her soul, and the parts of the castle she’d seen bloomed into a mental map, giving her a three-dimensional perspective like architectural plans. Its creation added to the searing pressure within her body.

The waves carried on through her life, and their passage took a toll; with her flesh still carrying four, her bones ached, and her muscles burned. The next memories found had never left her. Yet raised before the strange light, they felt like negatives held up for an alien photographer's critical inspection.

After the blue mountains debacle, two years passed before the foster system gave her another chance. A home with her own room, her own things, not shared. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. From the fourth night on, the way his hard hands touched beneath the covers whenever he said goodnight had terrified her into silence. Days passed. Things settled, and nothing happened; she’d convinced herself it was her imagination, just his way. Then she caught muffled cries late at night from his daughter’s room. The next morning, Edith found evidence that other girls at the home had told her about, and she pulled what happened out of her foster sister. In exchange, Edith promised not to tell anyone. Telling wasn’t on the agenda.

Sunday barbecues were the father’s pride and joy, primal cooking over open flames. The right knowledge is key. Authorities had let her down repeatedly; she wouldn't give them a chance to fail her and another girl. The explosion and flames from the tampered aged gas cylinder didn’t disappoint.

The dad had fallen back into a side table she’d loaded with his rum and vodka, plus cooking oil, before he started the grill. He stood from the wreckage a flailing Roman candle and Edith stayed mute, knowing he needed to fall and roll. If he knew and acted on that knowledge, the shattered glass would open him up. The mother screamed for water and, without hesitation, Edith tossed a full pitcher she’d set on the table away from the barbecue. Burning high-proof alcohol and water don’t behave nicely. She already knew what that would do; invisible flames bubbled his skin. Polyester football shorts melted-combusted into him. 

She had let the rage at the all-mighty for taking her parents and keeping that monster alive for years to hurt his daughter. She’s played the part of the terrified child. That brutal anger, along with spite for killing what God allowed to fester, had powered her shrill screams and tears. The monster died from shock before making it to the hospital. 

The mother sent her back to the group home.

“Arcane Calamity.” The stranger’s voice screamed the words, laden with her own rage, a flare of power burning within. Impetus. Elements compounded and fed each other in her thoughts. The already fierce explosion and flames turned deadly.

The last three waves rushed on, convulsions hitting hard and driving her back in jittering steps as fur and hair stood on end. Pain raced through her body.

A meteor of blazing pain landed amid days whose shadows had left her with deep food insecurities. Another short-term placement at fifteen had sent her up the coast before Christmas.

No one was celebrating; there was no Christmas dinner, and she rarely even had a spot at the table. Each morning, she had stood in a kitchen surrounded by locked cabinets and a padlocked fridge, with hungover foster parents telling her to go play. Four days of hunger gnawed at her, but her books had come through. A bush tucker volume she’d read after the mountain scare at ten had again turned her knowledge into a solution; cooked roots and witchetty grubs had been enough to fill her aching gut. While roaming to find food, she found an old shed on the side of the property and trouble.

She planned to avoid it until the foster parents rejected her third request to go to the town library. She could do without food, but books were her fix. The police raided the hidden greenhouse in her fifth week there and took the parents away. Their source: an anonymous tip. Edith had been back at the group home before the school year started in Sydney; her things, as always, stinking of garbage bags.

As the remaining power spiralled on, the woman’s voice seemed distant, stripped of its earlier vibrancy, a mere murmur: “Forager.” The rune’s sharp lines barely grazed her, an unrealised promise that meant nothing beyond a profession. Harvester.

Twin ribbons of energy remained. Their passage cut fire trails through her mind and soul. The next landed amid a calmer time, even as Edith’s panic grew.

Her next placement came midway through the same year. Sixteen and filled out, she worried what her next foster dad would be like. Would another set of wandering hands slip her way? Would they even care to feed her? The shed at the back of their acre place in Windsor had worried her. The first night she’d crept out to check. Seeing rows of equipment and white oak barrels for his small business operation brought forth rolling laughter of relief. Her slipping out hadn’t gone unnoticed, so the dad found her laughing there. His brow furrowed with irritation and concern, but his feelings shifted when she started asking questions. So many questions! Despite the late hour, they talked for ages about learning how to run his craft whiskey distillery. His gaze brightened as he went into more detail. Edith knew the joy of a personal passion.

On her first day at the new school, she found books to research it. She didn’t want to move again or go back to the group homes. This time, Edith made herself useful and helped improve the dad’s home-brewing operation. She was still there when she turned eighteen and got accepted to university. Though the family couldn’t afford to help her, they celebrated her success. It had been a little while, a home she’d dreamt of for so long. Two short years of acceptance.

“Distiller.” The voice had softened to a whisper. The rune that accompanied it was another simple one with no explanation: potency.

The ninth wave faltered and yet still burned on, and when it struck, the exposed event lingered. It settled into the fear, desire, and delight entwined in it. Floating high above it, the effect once again gave only the barest outline: a bone silhouette on an X-ray. She knew those years, knew them well. Every curve of those years. The target event happened in her early months of university, after months of struggling to fit enough shifts around classes. Experienced staff got the better-paying shifts; she got days, often when she had classes.

 Sharing a rental house on a bus route to campus kept costs low, but she still needed money with no family to support her. When the manager cut her shifts back, she could have looked for another mundane job; she chose a different route. Her first Saturday in the brothel had netted her more than a month flipping burgers. A side benefit was that it calmed her libido enough for her to fully concentrate on her coursework.

The last fading light fell on a man’s burn-scarred face; even in the brothel, his eyes carried an expectation of rejection. Yet the very power she had to hurt him softened the pain inside. Rejection and loss were the same pains that had engraved themselves into her year after year. All that bottled-up pain had come forth in Jeremy’s approach to sex, vigorous and passionate but not hurtful. Despite the burns across one cheek and along his chest, he had that special something that had just done it for her. The brightest spark among her patrons. Even as the class anchored that moment in her life, the memory of them cuddled in the afterglow rushed through her thoughts. Not drawn by the power but by her own nostalgic joy.

“How can you look at me that way?” he’d rasped, head pressed against her naked breast, and she felt the first tears dusting her heated skin.

“What way?”

“Your eyes feel like they’re sinking into me,” Jeremy replied.

“You have very expressive eyes. My mother used to say there is something to love in everyone.” He didn’t catch the lie. By then, Edith remembered almost nothing of her mother; she'd read the line in a book.

He shifted, and the way his fingers dug into her hip only highlighted the precarious difference in their strength. “Why do you work here?”

He could hold me down with one hand, and I’d have no chance of pressing any emergency signal.

Her heart had thudded at the thought of dying in that bed, her dreams unrealised. Edith wrapped her arms around him and pressed tighter against the dangerous animal.

“I enjoy sex. Do you want to complain? If I didn’t work here, you wouldn’t have met me. When you come to a brothel, you’re supposed to do the picking. If I hadn’t walked up to you, you'd still be in the lounge, giving side-eyes that turned everyone else away.”

He snorted, and it turned into a bass rumble. The first of many laughs she’d got from him over the years, though most came after they’d married. The love she’d finally found in life hadn’t started with fairy-tale innocence. Instead, it began with transactions, then a random meeting after she’d left the industry.

“Companion.” The voice was a soft, tired sigh that carried the sense of exhilaration that the dopamine and other neurochemicals from sex had provided. With it came a rune whose sharp lines fashioned the term tender allure.

The foxfire of the chamber’s lights swam in her vision as her surroundings reasserted themselves. While the first burst of power had caused her heart to race, the subsequent nine that raced through her together had left her sprawled on the floor in a vomit-splattered mess. Despite the pain, her struggling thoughts went to Jeremy. The hollow his death had left in her heart eight years ago surged with the fresh pain ripping through her body.

He hadn’t been looking for me, just an out-of-print book. I might have never met him again.

The thought of all that lost joy sickened her, spiking the pain that wracked her body, and the world spun faster. Her vision swam, and as shadows bulged from beneath the doorframe, more spasms thrashed her against the stone floor. A swollen tide of darkness devoured her.