#30 The Grisaille Quincurion
At night, one might glimpse the Grisaille Quincurion. It is a rare thing to see her alone and rarer still to see her stumbling through the streets. However, she might be seen on some nights, ones which are completely random in date, alone and arms full of her most recent purchase. It has taken her years to track down all of these parts, and many more to bring them all together. Five pieces of–not a puzzle. A game. Five game tokens, scattered across the world (and yet so close, suspiciously close). She might not have been meant to find them all and unite them, but tonight the last one comes home.
She has private quarters in the Lord’s house (quarters which are no where near as luxurious as those ones–but that was a lifetime ago), but she brings the parcel to the Yards on the opposite side of town. While she has her doubts that it will be enough to keep him from interfering, it is safer the farther it is from him. She unwraps it carefully: her strength is inhuman (and what is that? Was that a type of imp?) but it is still awkward in shape and size. Cables run across the room, creating hazards and setting up for awful jokes, and she curses when she realizes that she set it upon some of them. She spends another ten minutes, and she knows this because she has a clock in this room. Timepieces are contraband these days, but this is not an ordinary clock. Three hands tell time, and five pendulum swing irregularly, sometimes slowing down and speeding up without rhyme but definitely with reason. The day they stop is the day that everything will be lost.
She plugs in her purchase, and the middle screen flickers into life. It buzzes with snow, but she expected that. She only wished to see that it hadn’t broken completely on the journey here. She stands in front of the ancient but robust monitor and types:
N45. 46.5148 E4 49.6 2011-11-30
The middle screen flashes many times like it was trying to send a message to her (blinkblinkblink blink blink blink blinkblinkblink) before settling on an image. A strange being is in a room. It sits on a chair before a mirror, fingering long, thin pieces of keratin. It is dark and wiry, falling to its chin (it looks like a chin, at least) in messy spirals which twist and turn in any direction. It seems unhappy with the keratin, tugging on it as if  it would grow faster that way. She rubs her own bald head self-consciously and wonders what sort of keratin would grow upon hers.
(Black, some would say.
White, others.
Fewer would point out that no one knows what colour she is. She never goes out without every inch of herself covered. Not even her four associates know, or are too loyal to her to say. Rumours fly, but no one is certain if she will see about the end of one universe or the beginning of another.)
The screens on the other machines flicker with the same strange message and glow with the light of these strange creatures. They are unlike from each other, but more like each other than they are like her and the rest of these broken kingdoms. Human, she thinks, because she cannot imagine what the word would sound like. She recognizes these beings, and knows that she is too early in their lives. Directing them now would only frighten them. She needs them unafraid when they enter (her past, making it, shaping it, destroying it,).
The Grisaille Quincurion might be seen at night, but she usually is not. She has learnt to walk in the darkness better than shadows, and she will see that her plan comes to fruition.
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