#223: Untold Tales of Cleone Swanmay: Mortal

Nine Months Ago:

    The moon rose full over the fir forest, making the last of the snows on the mountaintops glitter. The night was fresh and new, with the slightest promise of a gentle rain later.
    “You’re not going?” Liliana asked her sister. “It is forbidden.”
    “Lots of things are forbidden,” Cleone replied, swirling her feathered mantle around and slipping it over her shoulders. “That’s why we do them.”
    “Father says it is not safe,” Ryalla reminded her. “There are omens and portents, a gathering of dark forces. The mortal world isn’t safe any more.”
    “When has the mortal world ever been safe?” demanded Cleone impatiently. “For our kind or for mortals themselves? And if it was so safe, why would anyone want to visit it?”
    “The world of iron has grown cold to the faerie hosts,” warned Lorressa. “The days when we could sneak out on nights like this and dance under the stars are passed. Even father will go there no longer.”
    “Father is an old man, and he’s set in his ways,” Cleone objected. “We are young, and free, and it is our birthright to fly under the moon and dance upon the silent waters.”
    “There is a moon here,” Druselle pointed out. “And lakes deep and beautiful. And young men too, if that’s what you fancy.”
    “Cleone’s not looking for a young man,” interrupted Janira. “Not even one of those hairy mortal heroes from the old tales. She’s looking for romance.”
    “That’s what I said,” Druselle argued. “The elf-lads from the Woodcombe Deep…”
    “Romance is not the same as sex,” Janira argued. “And Cleone still cleaves to the old ways as our father has instructed us.” She glared at some of her sisters. “Cleone just yearns for the lonely night, for a quiet place to swim and bathe. A place to think. A place of… possibilities.”
    “I suppose I do,” the silver-haired girl admitted. “I’m a traditionalist at heart. I think a swanmay should take flight when the moon waxes big, should fly the mortal realms and taste the destinies of the creatures there. Why should we be given wings if not to soar?”
    “In that case,” sulked Druselle, “what’s so bad about meeting the elf lads? Why should we be given woman’s’ parts if not to…?”
    “We should be obedient to father,” Liliana insisted, glaring at Cleone and Druselle alike. “He is very wise and he has told us that the ways to the mortal realms are closed to us.”
    “He is very wise,” admitted Cleone. “But he does not know everything. Even the King Under the Mountain cannot see what we his daughters can, the hearts of those around us and the workings of destiny. He is mighty in his power, and certain in his purpose; but that very might and certainly insulate him from some of the intangible insights that we see.”
    “That you see,” Ryalla complained. “Or say you see.”
    “Nobody can deny Cleone’s sight,” Janira intervened again. “We all sense the secret workings of the world, but Cleone sees them the clearest, that’s all.”
    “Must be from all that illicit romance in mortal lakes,” Drusells muttered sullenly.
    Palissa came back into the chamber. “Are you still arguing?” she sighed. “Can’t we all just get along?”
    “Cleone still claims she’s slipping out alone to the mortal realms,” Liliana reported.
    “I wouldn’t be alone if you all came with me,” Cleone pointed out. “Thirteen of us would be safer than one alone.”
    “And father would be thirteen times as angry when he finds out,” countered Druselle.
    “And he will find out, won’t he?” Palissa suggested, eyeing the angry stay-at-home sisters. “Look Cleone, it’s a lovely idea, and a lovely night for it, but we just can’t. You know in your own heart that it’s wrong.”
    Cleone strode over to the balcony. “I have to go. The lake’s calling to me, and the stars, and the moon. It’s our destiny to fly, my sisters. It’s the way the story runs.”
    “Don’t blame us when you get burned by the mortals then,” Ryalla said sullenly. “Or when they nail you up with their iron nails in one of their scientific dungeons.”
    “It’s a quick flight to a deserted mountain pool,” Cleone told them. “I’ll bathe and dance and be home before dawn breaks.”
    She pulled her enchanted cloak closer around her and shifted her shape into a silver-white swan, then winged herself off the balcony and over the mountains to her destiny.

Six Months Ago:

    “So… what now?” The silver-haired maiden with the moonlit eyes stood in the threshold and looked uncertainly into the darkened shop. “What happens next?”
    “Next,” Xander the Improbable suggested to her, “we have a cup of tea.”
    Cleone nodded in acknowledgement of the ritual of welcome, but persisted. “And then what? What is to become of me?”
    “Then,” the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse went on, “I suggest some Battenburg cake.”
    The former swanmay from the mythlands still hovered in the doorway. “I mean what will become of me?” she asked. “Now that I am an outcast from my family. Now that I am… bound to you.”
    “Well,” the master of the mystic crafts explained to her, “You’ll get given some tea. And cake. And then we’ll talk.” He found the fuse box in the darkness and flicked on the lights in his plumbing and watch repair shop. “You can come in, you know.”
    Cleone reluctantly stepped into the room. “It’s just like the dream version in Frightmare’s realm,” she noted. “Except that one didn’t need as much dusting.”
    “Well, I’ve been away,” Xander said defensively. “Fighting evil and suchlike.”
    The swan maiden looked curiously around the room. Now she examined it closely there were a few differences, little quirks that betrayed the proprietor as someone far from ordinary. How many plumbers shops actually sold rubber ducks? How many had a scale that weighed fairy dust?
    “I didn’t think this far ahead,” Cleone admitted. “When I shared my life-force with you, bestowed my wish-kiss to bring you back from the brink of death, I never stopped to think about what would happen after. And then we were thrown into that horrid war with those Hellraisers and the conflict with the Hell Lords. There was no time to think.”
    “And now there is,” the man in the dusty red robes realised. “I’m sorry. I’m not being a very good host. One lump or two?”
    “Lumps of what?” the swanmay worried.
    Xander realised that tea wasn’t served in the Hall of the Mountain King. “Sugar. Tea is an infusion of Eastern herbs brewed in boiling water, and often flavoured with sugar or lemon. It’s a way of saying hello to visitors.”
    Cleone accepted the I-heart-thaumaturgy mug and sniffed the potion suspiciously. “What does it do?” she asked.
    “It makes you want to dunk chocolate chip cookies in it,” Xander admitted. He finished unpacking the things he’d put away safely, and laid his petrified familiar Harry on the top of the cash register.
    “A geas?”
    “It just tastes nice. Or vile I suppose, depending on your preferences. And making it for you gives me time to think of proper answers to your questions, and helps me decide what we should do next.”
    Cleone smiled a little for the first time since arriving. “That’s the first time you’ve dared speak openly what you’re thinking,” she approved. “I like it when you trust me.”
    “It’s dangerous for a master of the mystic crafts to speak what he’s thinking,” Xander warned her. “I generally try not to do that.”
    “But one gift I did not lose when my cloak was stolen from me and destroyed by that vile conjurer is the ability to know men’s hearts, and to know when they speak true or false,” the former swanmay told him. Cleone had been captured and bound by a black magician while she was bathing in her quiet mountain pool, and when he destroyed her magic mantle she was enslaved to him. Xander had released her by claiming her himself, but before he had been able to break that lien Cleone had used the magic of her first kiss to revive him from death, at the cost of binding her life to his forever.
    “I’m completely lost now,” she realised, sipping at the hot brew. “Everything here is strange and alien.”
    “And you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. In fact you don’t really know who you are any more.”
    “That’s right,” the swanmay confessed. “I gave you my heart’s kiss. Does that mean now we have to…”
    “When you’re the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse there aren’t really that many have-to’s,” Xander assured his guest. “Well, not many that don’t involve stopping dimensional incursions or something. We don’t have to anything.”
    Cleone tried to relax. “I am lost,” she admitted.
    Xander jumped up. “Drink your tea,” he suggested, “and then we’ll show you your new home.”

    Paradopolis was stunning. Cleone had seen it before, of course, when she and Xander had been battling the Hellraisers and she’d had to remain behind as his agent while he travelled to the realms of Frightmare; but the city seemed so different without the stench of mortal danger. It was vibrant and alive; even romantic.
    The carriage ride took them past great St Antony’s Cathedral with its heights of hallowed stone then through Off-Central Park past the memorials to fallen heroes to the distant gothic frontage of the old Variety Theatre. From there they walked into the modern centre of Paradopolis, stopping to try hot dogs from a corner vendor and passing beneath the shadow of the Twin Parody Tower.
    “It’s… very tall,” Cleone admitted, looking up at its mirrored height. “I thought magic wasn’t that common in the mortal world any more?”
    “Oh, it’s almost everywhere,” Xander admitted to her. “We just call it different things these days. Still hungry?”
    Cleone wasn’t used to mortal food, or the need for it. She nodded mutely, so Xander led her across the Plaza to a small shopfront with a few tables outside. Etched on the glass in human glyphs it said Bean and Donut Coffee Bar.
    It was too cold to sit outside, so Xander held the door open and ushered his guest into the warm comfortable interior. Cleone smelled a mixture of strange but pleasant odours dominated by the bitter aroma of freshly-ground coffee beans.
    “A hostelry,” the swanmay guessed. “A placed where travellers find shelter and refuge on their journeys.”
    “That’s as good a description of the place as I’ve heard in a while,” the waitress agreed, handing Xander his usual cheese on granary before asking Cleone, “What would you like?”
    “I’d like to go home,” the silver-haired woman almost said, then caught herself. “I don’t know,” she answered instead. “I don’t recognise most of these foods.” But she found her eyes drawn to a strange cream-topped confection beneath the glass counter.
    “Good choice,” Sarah Shepherdson agreed. “Can’t go wrong with Black Forest Gateau.”
    “The black forest?” Cleone asked with a little smile. “Truly?”
    She received the slice of cake and let Xander guide her to a booth. It was crowded at this time of day in the Bean and Donut, so they had to squeeze in beside a young woman who was hidden behind a copy of the Gothametropolis Squire. “Good afternoon, Hallie,” Xander greeted the absorbed reader.
    Hallie jumped and looked up guiltily from the newspaper. “Oh! Sorry. I’m startled easily these days.”
    “Well you would be, what with being murdered by the Hellraisers then coming back as a flesh-avatar of the Lair Mansion defences,” Xander told her reasonably. “Hallie, may I introduce Cleone? Like you, she’s a stranger to being mortal.”
    Cleone noticed that the girl in the booth had chartreuse skin. “You’re a nymph?” she asked politely.
    “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to…” Hallie said urgently.
    “Hallie is by way of being a manifestation of some universal mathematical principles,” Xander explained unhelpfully. “Look, would you mind awfully if I left you two here for a little while? Only I’ve just spotted Daimon Soulshredder trying to avoid me and I think I’d better go ruin his day.”
    Cleone suppressed a moment’s panic as the master of the mystic crafts picked up his sandwich and hurried away.
    Hallie looked at her warily. “What did he mean, you’re not used to being a mortal?” she ventured.
    “Oh, I’m from faerie,” Cleone explained. “I used to be a swan maiden, one of the daughters of the Mountain King, but then I was bound to the mortal plane and it gets complicated after that. I’m living with Xander now.”
    Hallie raised an eyebrow.
    “I’m his new familiar,” Cleone added.
    “Okay.” Hallie tried to think of a good next line.
    “But I’m not a hamster,” Cleone went on, a bit desperately.
    “I’d noticed. I used to be the world’s largest database. I can recognise hamsters.”
    The two women looked helplessly at each other. Then they burst into laughter.

    “And then he took off his yellow coat and held it out for me, backing off with his eyes shut until he walked into the wall,” Hallie concluded, trying not to snort coffee down her nose.
    “No, really, that’s sweet!” Cleone chortled. “Chivalrous. It’s the sign of a gentleman. Well, maybe not the concussion, but the rest of it.” She carefully unwrapped the chocolate chip cookie with the ritual she’d been taught and dunked it in her coffee before eating it. “Xander gave me a blanket to cover myself with. That was nice too.”
    “I never think of Xander as the romantic type,” Hallie confessed. “He’s so broody and mysterious, and I don’t quite trust him.”
    “He doesn’t think he’s the romantic type either,” the swanmay agreed. “But I have the gift of seeing into people’s hearts, so I know better.”
    “You’re telepathic?”
    “No, nothing like that. I just know whether people are telling truth of falsehoods, whether they’re good or bad, who or what they love or hate. Things like that. It’s the last vestige of my birth gifts.”
    “You can tell who people love?” Hallie asked a little nervously.
    “But I don’t always tell,” Cleone promised her new friend.

    “No, really, you need to talk to Shep about how to live in a mortal body. Ask her for the tampon talk.”
    “How do mortals cope in such a solid world? Everything here is so crude and gross.”
    “Well, I do find it hard to cope with things that burn and prick and itch. Itching is bad. And I hate being web-blind of course. But there are some benefits too. I like your black forest gateau.”
    “Yes, that is rather magical. Shall we have some more?”

    “Only once, ever,” Cleone whispered. The conversation was becoming intimate. “But it was my heart’s kiss, the blessing I can grant only once, a wish that can reshape time and space. I had to bring Xander back to life. He’d saved me from horror and shame and slow death, and he was needed to save the Parodyverse.”
    “Was that the only reason you kissed him then, and brought him back?” wondered Hallie. “Payment of a debt?”
    Cleone blushed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Yet.” She finished her second slice of black forest gateau. “What about you? Have you given your heart’s kiss, Hallie?”
    The former artificial intelligence flushed too, then licked the cream from her fingers. “I don’t know either,” she admitted. “I thought I had. But it didn’t change time and space. It didn’t change anything.”
    Cleone looked carefully into her confidante. “Are you sure it didn’t?” she asked.

    Sorry for the delay,” Xander told Cleone and Hallie. The shop was much emptier now, and the two women were helping Sarah stack up the dishes for washing after closing time. “Daimon Soulshredder seemed to feel I was infringing on his private time with those kidnapped schoolgirls, and there was a lot of unpleasantness with the Picnic of Doom and the Dissection Cadavers. How the city cleansing department’s ever going to get those stains off the post office I do not know.”
    “Are you all right?” Cleone asked worriedly as the red-robed mage helped himself to a pickle from the jar on the counter.
    “Well, I’m not the stains on the post office,” he pointed out. “Anyway, I hope you had a chance to get to know Paradopolis today anyhow.”
    “She’s not been out of the shop,” Sarah Shepherdson pointed out.
    “But I think I’ve learned what life is like here in the mortal realm all the same,” Cleone answered. “It is hard and cruel and strange… but there are some wonders and delights to surprise the unsuspecting traveller. And some people whose hearts are fair. Maybe…”
    “Yes…” prompted the master of the mystic crafts.
    “Maybe there is beauty here, when one learns to see it. A life, if one but strives hard enough.”
    “Romance?” Xander asked the silver-haired woman, his voice strangely breathless.
    “Perhaps,” she whispered. “Who knows?” She rose gracefully and curtseyed to the waitress, “Thank you for your hospitality, Mistress Shepherdson.”
    “Sarah’s fine,” the waitress assured her. “Or Shep. People round here don’t need to hear me being called a mistress. Really.”
    “Same time next week, Cleone?” Hallie checked. “Coffee, gateaux, and the chance to compare mortal experiences?”
    “It’s a date,” agreed the swanmay. And for the first time she looked forward to being in the world of iron.

Now:

    “You need to be honest with her. Tell her what you told me, about how you feel your dreams are slipping away. Maybe she feels hers are too. Together you can try to recapture them. Apart you never will.” Cleone let go of the customer’s hand and passed him a small plastic packet. “And here are the tap washers you came in for.”
    The somewhat stunned plumber staggered out of Xander’s shop as the store owner himself bustled in. “Needed to stop things dripping, eh?” the master of the mystic crafts noted.
    “There are so many people here,” Cleone sighed, “All living tiny little lives afraid to reach out and touch each other. To be honest with each other. To love.”
    “Every one we help is a small victory,” Xander comforted her; but she could tell from his voice that something was wrong.
    “What is it?” she demanded.
    “What’s what?” the sorcerer supreme asked casually. Then he deflated. “Sometimes this empathic link can be a real nuisance,” he complained.
    “It’s not our link that’s making you down,” the swanmay observed. “So what is it? Something inside you feels… You’re all torn up!”
    Xander went to fill the kettle but his hand was trembling too much.
    “I’ll do your ritual,” Cleone offered, taking the kettle from him. The cold iron didn’t sear her skin. She was mortal now. She filled it at the tap and set it on the Bunsen burner on the clock counter. “Now what is it?”
    “Am I good or bad?” Xander challenged her.
    “Good,” she answered without hesitation. “I’ve seen your heart, tasted your nature.”
    “There’s plenty of people would say otherwise. That business with the Lair Legion at Christmas…”
    “Oh, most of them have forgiven you now,” Cleone assured him. “Hallie says that most of them automatically assume you’re going to be tricky and untrustworthy.”
    “I made a wager with Sage Grimpenghast, Master of Ignorance and Teacher of Deceptions, to secure the power potential of the Dead Hell Lords away from those who would claim it,” the mage recapped.
    “I was there, Xander,” Cleone reminded him. “You had to find a way to stop some new force of evil just stepping in and taking on the power of the fallen demons. Grimpenghast was first in the queue, but when you won that Christmastide wager with him he was forced to interdict the abandoned territories against all others, so that none could succeed Mefrothto and his ilk. It was an elegant solution.”
    “And I had to risk the lives of the Parodyverse’s finest heroes to do it,” Xander pointed out. “Without their consent.”
    Cleone nodded. She could taste Xander’s misery now.
    “None of them died, as it happened,” the master of the mystic crafts went on. “But they could have. Lives could have been ruined. Would I have been good then?”
    “The master of the mystic crafts who is sorcerer supreme always has to walk a thin line between light and shadow,” Cleone replied. “Everybody knows that. Few can understand it.” She touched Xander lightly on the shoulder. “Did something go wrong with your visit to the Necromancer General?”
    The red-robed wizard shrugged. “He’s a canny old bastard who knows how to stay just the right side of the rules so I’m not justified in wiping him out,” he conceded. “And now he’s used the necromantic energies from that Willingham debacle to divine something he shouldn’t have. Something about that unclaimed demonic power in Everrue Palace on the Abyssal Plain.”
    “Is that what’s bothering you?”
    “No. What’s bothering me is that he’s brokered that information to a fiend of the Outer Darkness, and that I’m going to have to do something to prevent very unpleasant beings from doing very unpleasant things here on Earth and then claiming the legacy of Mefrothto, Blackhurt, and Dormaggadon.”
    “Something difficult?”
    “Something horrible,” Xander confessed. “And afterwards I don’t think I’ll be good.”
    “Then find a different way,” Cleone told him. “A better way.”
    “There isn’t one,” replied the sorcerer supreme. “If there was I’d be using it.” He looked down at the silver-haired swanmay. “I think it’s time we talked about you going home.”
    “I can’t go home,” she pointed out. “My cloak was destroyed, and although I’ve reclaimed the remnants so I can shift to a swan again and suchlike I still can’t get back to the Halls of the Mountain King. And if I could my father wouldn’t allow it. I’m mortal now, and I’ve bound my flesh to a mortal man.”
    “For as long as I live,” clarified Xander.
    Cleone realised then where this conversation was going. “I’ll still be mortal if you die, Xander. Just mortal and alone. I – I don’t want to be alone.”
    “Wait a few days before you say that,” Xander told her with a heavy heart. “In a few days you’ll have to decide where you want to be, and who you want to be with. You’ll have to judge whether I’m good or evil, and you’ll have to choose whether to kill me.” He cupper her face with his hand and stared into her reflective silver eyes. “And I trust you - I beg you – to make the right choice.”

Tomorrow:

The Shallow Gravers were dark twists of hate knotted into rotting bodies of electrocuted murderers, and their electrical discharges silently and easily overcame the keycode lock on Shawn Griffon’s dorm bedroom. Once inside they slithered to either side of the bed and prepared to rend the sleeping Priest of Zeku to tiny shreds.

Continued…

If We Footnotes Have Offended…

Xander the Improbable is the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse, based out of a plumbers and watch repair shop in Hell’s Bathroom, Paradopolis. He made his debut in UT#13: The Skree/Skunk War and had his first starring role in Xander the Improbable and the Curse of spiffy.

Cleone Swanmay first appeared in UT#166: Fall of the Sorcerer Supreme, wherein she was captured and brought to the mortal realms (after the first flashback scene in our story here), then saved Xander by binding her life force to his.

Hallie, the Lair Legion’s resident AI, is comprehensively described in the Nearly Complete Writer’s Guide to Hallie. She became temporarily human during the Hellraisers Ascendant affair in UT#196: The Twist in the Untold Tale, and her appearance in this story takes place just a few days after that.

Xander faced off against Sage Grimpenghast in UT#199: Four Funerals and a Wedding (Except for the Wedding), and his “Christmastide gambit” formed the basis of the plot in UT#200: The Feast of Yule and Other Anomalies and UT#201: And Ever More Shall Be So, or The Season of Murder.

Bogdan Vladivock, the Necromancer General, used the necromantic energies of “the Willingham debacle” in #218: Untold Ghost Stories of the Parodyverse: The Lighthouse – Part Four: 24th May, 2005.

Shawn Griffin is the young high priest of eccentric Earth deity Zeku. We’ll hear more about him next time.

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Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

Post By A quiet interlude from... the Hooded Hood Tue Jul 26, 2005 at 08:24:20 pm EDT	Subject #223: Untold Tales of Cleone Swanmay: Mortal

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