Chapter Text
You were six sweeps old - almost six sweeps - closer to six sweeps than to five - when you first encountered the Handmaid of Death.
All trolls that age are little idiots, whether or not they manage to survive to grow out of it, and you were no exception. It was the middle of a dim season, sky streaked with mild light and rich color most of the night, and the old goat had just left the beach again, and you had taken it into your fool head to try and follow him. Not into the water, you weren't that suicidally daring, but you'd watched him go enough times before to know that he almost always went off parallel to the shoreline, at least as far as you could see from your hive. So maybe, you reasoned, you'd be able to follow along on the headland and find where he went when he wasn't looking after your scrawny ass and maybe then you could stay there and he wouldn't have to go off anywhere.
(Sweeps later, you'd learn enough of seagoat habits to know that even had you been able to keep up, it would have been a fool's errand. Your lusus likely swam hundreds or thousands of miles between visits to your hive, and much of that through open ocean. There was no hidden refuge to find. It was probably a wonder that the old goat had come back as often as he had.)
But though dim season nights are long, they aren't indefinite. You spent the first day crouching the back of a low, rocky cave on the shore, wondering if the light or a high tide was going to get to you first. You spent the second day hiding in a boathouse down the beach from a hive that did not look nearly deserted enough for your comfort, cool and dark and dry but too nervous to get any real sleep. And in the pre-dawn chill of the third morning, as you were starting to get worried and upset, bone-weary and beginning to realize this whole plot was a monumentally stupid idea from the start, you came across a grown woman sitting cross-legged on a boulder next to the sea.
You were more or less of a size then, the two of you, though the hard lines of her face and the great curves of her horns left no doubt that she was many sweeps your senior, and when she turned to look at you, the shifting colors of her eyes showed her to be something other than truly troll.
And the Demoness spoke unto you, and she said, "Kurloz. What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?"
You stood and stared at her for a long moment, unable to quite parse her greeting.
She sighed, and slipped down from her perch, almost impossibly light in her landing. "It was a joke, kid, don't sweat it. Well, come on, if you've gotten yourself lost all the way out here you'd better come with me," she said - impatient, long-suffering.
It would be nice to be able to say that it was because of the flickering power that limned her skin and horns, or because you knew of her from stories and whispers and knew her business, that you drew back as she reached for you, but in all truth you were a small boy and wary of adults, whatever else they might be, and it was nothing but mundane nervousness that sent you scrambling back across the beach away from her with a yelp.
"I ain't lost!" you snapped, finally finding your voice. "I'mma find my lusus, I'm not lost."
"...Kurloz. You're being an idiot," she said softly, after a long moment; and this was, you will later realize, the gentlest thing the Handmaid would ever say to you. "He doesn't give a fuck about you."
"Does too!" you yelled at her; as scared as you were, the insult to your lusus and to you made you angrier. You were old enough to know she was right, though, for all you protested. "He's at being busy, is all! He's my lusus and he loves me."
She reached for you again, caught you this time, a thin hard hand around your wrist and try as you might you could not pull away from her grip. "You've never been loved, you little ass," she snapped, drawing her face far too close to your own for comfort. Her eyes made your head hurt and you looked at her mouth instead; blunt even teeth, like the basalt pillars of the seaside cliffs. "And if you don't come with me now, you're going to die burning and unloved on this beach."
"And what else?" you demanded, a little surprised at your own nerve, a little resigned to the fact that whatever was in motion was in motion and you really had very little else to lose. Perhaps the lack of sleep in the past few days had left you loopy and bold. Perhaps you were just, as she said, an idiot and an ass. "What'cha gonna do, you? You gonna be the one what loves me? What's you got to do with it?"
She seemed a little taken aback; her hand tightened on your wrist, and the flickering light that surrounded her intensified just a little. Where it glinted against your skin, it felt powerful, and wonderful, and unclean.
And then she turned on her heel and started climbing through the dunes and the hills and into the scrubland, dragging your sorry ass along with her, refusing to say more, though you shouted and whined and demanded. You could have found a place to spend the day on the shore, you thought; she was going to leave you to die lost in the hills when the sun rose, you thought. It could not be much longer now; the sky in the east was streaked and dappled with angry orange and no-color gray and the sun could not be far behind.
But then - you crested a hill, her pace still as aggressive as ever, so fast for such a small troll, you still scrambling to keep up and not be dragged through the brush on your ass, and suddenly the shallow valley below was full of heavy canvas tents, pitched like some strange striped fungus. You were too confused to be relieved, as she strode into the middle of the camp with you in tow. Even with morning looming, there were trolls about, more than you'd ever seen in one place at one time. Trolls in clothing that looked outlandish to your sheltered eye, trolls whose expressions were hard to read behind masks of paint, or who wore no paint on their faces but braided bright ribbons and bits of bone into their hair and around their horns. Adults in their prime and adolescents not much older than you, trolls who wore a great deal of color or whose blood was evident only in their eyes.
And ever single pair of eyes on the two of you.
She dragged you to the largest tent, in the middle of the camp, to the adult - indigo like you, you noticed, you'd never seen another indigo in the flesh - who wore the most elaborate regalia, and she shoved you toward him with enough force to make you stumble into the dust.
"This one has potential, and he needs to be taught. He's your headache now," she said, and vanished in a maelstrom of light that made the back of your throat hurt.
There was a long moment of stunned silence, and then the troll - the Comedian, you would learn to call him - dropped into an easy squat, studying you. "What d'you think, boy, are you a headache?"
"No?" you hazarded, though you suspected you were.
And he laughed, and looked around at the troupe that still gathered between the tents and stared. "Alright, folks, morn's coming. Don't hang 'round gawking, you'll all have plenty of time to get familiar with our headache later."
A perigee later, the circus passed very near your hive, and you were given permission to go retrieve such things as you wanted to carry with you on the road. You burned down the rest. Perhaps your lusus returned the following season. You didn't know, and you told yourself you didn't care, because the Handmaid was right: he hadn't loved you. You'd been stupid to think he had.
Sweeps passed, and you grew, and for these sweeps you grew as happy as any troll manages. You learned the way of the clown and you came to wear the paint. The circus was not much welcome in most civilized parts, but you were never very civilized anyway, and you couldn't much say you cared. What you cared about was that you were valued; you were made much of, little mystic, little dream-weaver, miracle child delivered to them by the Handmaid herself.
And yes, headache. You never shook that name, but they meant it kindly, you thought. An endearment, and a benediction of the Demoness. And you could take a joke, take it and run with it and make it your own joke, and so when you were grown - or at least more grown than you'd been when you left your hive and joined the circus - you took Headache as your title.
The troupe you ran with now was much larger than it was when you'd joined them as a child; it was hardly even fair to call it a circus anymore, though it pained you to see the group sacrifice theatrics for security. But the world was not safe for travelers - not that it had ever been, not that it was safe for anyone, but tensions were high and you'd traveled further and further inland as the Sea-Queen reached out and took land as well, consolidating territory that previous empresses of the deep had never claimed. Most settlements were more suspicious of outsiders than ever before, for all that your people breathed air as exclusively as they did.
You banded together for security and for comfort, followers of the Messiahs and the Minstrels, and if you were not entirely sure why the others would look to the Demoness's Headache for guidance, you weren't complaining about it, either. As sweeps passed and as a caravan became a tribe became a nearly nation, as others who followed the way of the circus came together in dark times and swelled your ranks, you found you liked leadership, though you were not fond of the need to watch your back.
As much a warlord as a ringmaster, now, you were. And though so far your people had held their own, protected their own, kept the faith - you realized well enough that this could not go on forever. Not as the winds of the empire battered at Alternia's disparate hivecolonies. The circus you'd grown to love thrived best on the edges of things, between places, and there were fewer and fewer places between to be.
And one evening, you found the Handmaid in your tent, pouring over the papers that spilled across the table with a bored air.
"The fuck are you doing here," you said, rolling your neck a little to get the points of both horns past the doorway; it wasn't quite a question, wasn't quite a demand. You weren't sure what it was quite. Just wasn't quite.
She looked up as you walked over - well, it was your tent, and if she hadn't killed you when you were young and stupid you liked your chances now - and you were amazed to find how small she was. Even her horns, though still much bigger than your own, spiraled out nearly horizontal and afforded her no real extra height. She did not even come close to reaching your shoulder, a slight little thing. But suffused with strength that had nothing to do with her size, you knew that.
Whatever else the two of you were, you were a troll, and she was something else.
"Do you like running away?" she asked you. There was no real curiosity in her voice, and no outrage; there was precious little anything in her voice, and you wondered if you'd imagined her manner when you were a child.
"Got no revelation what you're getting at," you replied, just a little suspiciously; a fine one she is to speak of running away, when you'd seen no hide nor horn of her in sweeps.
"All the little hidey holes," she said, trailing a hand across a map; there was a scent of burned hair and you snatched the paper away from her, frowning absently at the little scorched trails her fingertips left. "You were so ready to go off to sea after your lusus, weren't you? And now there's a different monster rising and you want nothing to do with her."
Ah, and there it was, now you had a foothold on the conversation. "A monster she's to be, and a people I'm to have," you pointed out. "The motherfucking show must go the fuck on, Demoness."
She looked at you, sharp, sharp as you remembered her being. "You can't hide from her indefinitely; she'll find you. If you take your army against hers, she'll win, though you'll hurt her."
"And is that being in the way of council or prophecy?" you demanded.
The Demoness shrugged. "To heed prophecy is good council, isn't it?" she asked.
You glowered at her. "Not when the prophecy is for defeat, sister," you said. "Not when the prophecy is for the being of the end of being."
"You didn't let me finish," she said, and looked at you, as if waiting for another outburst. You didn't give her the satisfaction, beyond waving a hand irritably for her to go on, and she did. "If you join your force to hers, Alternia will fall to you both."
You considered for a moment, frowning still, but thoughtfully now. "Ain't heard any say that she's righteous," you said doubtfully, and the Handmaid of Death made a most undignified snort of disbelief.
"If the Lord only had use for those who already revere him, your adolescent bones would be bleaching on that beach, kiddo," she growled, and you gritted your teeth, unable to refute her words and unable to explain the extraordinary bitterness behind them. You had been godless, true, but innocent, no heretic; you had learned and embraced the faith with all the power behind each squeeze of your bloodpusher. What was there in your conversion to resent? What in your belief?
But you were unsure what, if anything, you were being accused of, and the Handmaid was one of the few people you knew who you could not now scare an answer out of; you had enough understanding and enough dignity and perhaps just enough of a touch of lingering adolescent uncertainty that you did not have any desire to try. And after a moment she added, "The tyrian's faith is not required, just her cooperation. Send an envoy."
And you had no opportunity to question the order, to ask for justification or clarification, because at that moment there was a rustle at the entrance of the tent, and the Handmaid flickered away in a maelstrom of horrible light that hurt your eyes and cast odd shadows across the face of the intruder, who squeaked and flinched, covering lime-green eyes.
It did you no harm to be known to consult with the Demoness, so you did your best to shake it off and grinned at the girl.