Citizens of Carnelian: (enough) Adrien Bellerepho
Alice Raizel
Axiom: hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. But I include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the bourgeois in coats. It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity.
—Flaubert
The
mind
is its own place,
and in itself can make a heaven
of
hell,
a hell
of
heaven.
—Milton
The
only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
—Marx
Adrien
Bellerepho
tiefling continental human
sorcerer (tragic) 5
chaotic neutral socialist-liberal
Strength
13
Dexterity 13
Constitution 10 (14 prior to dot abuse)
Intelligence 16
Wisdom 11
Charisma 16
noted
items: cheap black scholar’s robe, book of reading and writing
+1, rifled musket and stiletto bayonet from his Legion days,
musty pouches of gangika, crumpled up sheet of empty dot paper
noted feats: augment summoning, creative summoning, martial weapon
The Varne has seen the beginning of beautiful stories. Alain Alphonse, the Liberal painter, was once another rentless adventurer in a garret—and today his oils define the imagination of the new Convulsionary world. Valiant Jenna, who first published Bread and Roses from her unheated apartment, has grown into a genuine heroine. The young woman has exposed Frédéric Mervis’ practice of damned soul labour, united the Varne against Senator Kurios and the Anti~Adventurer Laws, and spent a year on the Organising Committee of a revolution. Even Raoul de Loiret—yes, yes, everyone laughs at his hopeless idealism and childish paintings. But give the bard credit: he’s found true love in the world, and the Varne’s permission of his unchurched love has made that happiness possible. These are real things—and if the Varne can disappoint its ideals, it also saves lives, whose survival makes our world more beautiful. “Freedom, love, truth, and beauty” may be romantic stories, but they are romantic stories which actually happen on this plane, and to deny this is to deny reality.
This
is not one of those stories.
Adrien Bellerepho was another rentless adventurer in a garret. He first took a drink in Café Arvandor five years ago, at a late youth, having cast off his merchant family with a colossal show of contempt. His family deserved it. Bellerepho’s childhood was typical for a teifling, an unending drizzle of verbal beatings which would have been kinder had they left the honesty of a physical wound. He matured as soft~voiced, soulful, philosophical, and vulnerable—which looked to his family like ruin waiting to happen. So Bellerepho cursed them, cocooning himself in the virtue of his deeper soul. Keeping truth with your soul, he begged to believe, was most precious thing in the multiverse. He vowed to abandon his family for the Varne and become a poet.
His father laughed, telling Bellerepho he would starve. But that he was free to whatever he wanted. It spared him the embarrassment of disowning his son anyway.
Bellerepho really believed in the Varne. He threw what he had at poetry, and for about six months proudly hosted readings at Café Arvandor—to an audience of half a dozen fellow poets, with half a ducat between them. His aesthetic manifesto shocked the world and agreed precisely with the pangs of every poet at the table. To wit: art is the truly expressed mortal spirit. An artist truly feels. An artist feels the truth. And since what the authentic feel and know (every artist around at the Cafe sighs painfully) is suffering, the mark of the authentic artist is to create suffering. And Bellerepho did. The sad thing is he’s actually a pretty good writer, and the tormented images of The Abyss of Mundanity were lovingly crafted. It’s just no one wanted to purchase visions of pain. He titled his second and more bitter work the Damage of the Bourgeois. It... didn’t do better.
But
what brought him down was love. Well,
poets always
call
it
love—but
they read the
Anatomy of Chloé
Halfelven
like other men. Fortune
did not favour Bellerepho, and where Fortune showed no favour the
favours of women did not follow. A couple of sad experiences with
street rogues only nourished
his
frustration, for which he outwardly blamed capital and inwardly
blamed women. He believed there must
be women with the souls
of
true artists.
Who would understand
him. Who
would care for his deep soul,
and
not for his poverty.
And
so he professed his love to his
personal idol, the woman who was his image of freedom and beauty on
Mundus—the
famed
opera
singer Marissa Lychegrove. He
burst
into
her dressing room inside
the Carnelian Opera House, wearing
an unwashed suit and carrying an armload
of camellias.
This
would have been bad enough with most women, or even most actresses.
But
Marissa was the sort of opera woman who keeps
a tally of her suicidal admirers as a measure
of prestige. No
one has ever shared the words she used to cut him down. Bellerepho
tries
not to share them with his own mind.
He
fails.
Bellerepho
wanted to die. No, he wanted to live—in
the vivid belief he was more capable
of wanting life than most men. But there was no life for him,
not in this demonic lower universe he styled the Bourgeois Plane of
Existence. And so, he
would make his
last
grand romantic gesture, he
would prove he has the soul of
an artist.
He
would join the Foreign Legion to
die in the colonies. Only then, he vividly imagined, would they
all believe
him,
that
their
world truly
was
unbearable.
So Bellerepho signed his papers and shipped off. The truth is, well, no one in the Varne missed him. And, beneath his passions, he simply wasn’t paying the rent anyway.
He
knew he’d made a mistake, before his ship left the lights of
Carnelian. But
Bellerepho did not
have time for regrets any longer. The Carnelian Empire took his
romantic gesture and processed
it through the cold machinery of state. They sent the hurting poet
straight to Île-de-Chocolat,
where Colonel Tiero’s Foreign Legion maintained half a million
mortals in slavery. Bellerepho cried he was a sensitive man of
letters; the Legion replied it had a use for that. Tiero’s adjutant
Major
Ratche
assigned the young man to a death party. These mobile
killing groups were short on literate men who could operate
books
of reading and writing.
And
beyond that, Ratche saw a purpose for the poet’s creativity. What
better means to deliver terror to rebellious noirs—than
unleash
the things in this degenerate’s mind? Imagination
is the power to bring new things into being and
on Mundus such power is manifest in sorcery.
There
were people
who didn’t
break under knives. But
they hadn’t
seen
a
poet’s inner demons walking the sunlit earth.
Thus,
in fear and coercion, Bellerepho brought the verses of the
Abyss of Mundanity
to life. In
waking mania he brought forth monsters. Half~boneless
things in the shape of men, whose foundering limbs made
others shapeless
at a touch. Quadrupeds with anguished human faces: guilty,
recalcitrant creatures
burdened with an
armour of poisonous
spines. Or
crawling, unnatural vegetation,
whose black foliage sprouted
lidless
mortal eyes. No
one knows from which
Abyssal realm these
demons were
conjured.
But if, as is said, the Abyss is endless, and if (as
the radical illusionists claim) the
Spiritual Plane is
the incarnated
creation of our imaginings,
then its creatures must
contain
all permutations of mortal nightmare. It is even possible—and
the notion torments
him—that
Bellerepho’s vision creates
such creatures—that
the activity of his fertile imagination alone grants reality to these
flowers of evil. Or perhaps not—the
planes of the Abyss are varied and vast, and the poet’s imagination
easily
overestimates its originality. This
thought torments him also.
Bellerepho was assigned to the orders of an assassin known only as the Ambassador. The man was a monster himself—a thoughtless murderer conscripted to the Legion from a louche condottieri band. His orders were to break the will of any slaves who escaped the cane fields, or who offered shelter to Comrade Martine’s maroon rebels. The Ambassador resented his superiors and regarded the noirs with mere indifference—but he was virtuous in performing to task. Bellerepho was placed in uniform and trained with a rifled musket alongside seasoned torturers. He genuinely doesn’t remember the night of his first raid. But he remembers the second, and all of the others. And his ungainly, towering stick-insect demon, whose seven narrow limbs poked pieces from restrained prisoners.
He looked back later, after a year of these days which refused to end. His memory was blotted, but he’d kept a diary, which he fantasised would be published as literature. The raids had been infrequent; most of the death party’s time was spent lounging in secret houses. There was little to do but cards and vice. And there was plenty of vice: Major Ratche gave his disposable resources little enough respect, but he indulged them in rum, tobacco, and a rage~inducing potion seasoned with gunpowder. Bellerepho’s poison was gangika, which he smoked whenever the Ambassador allowed it—which usually meant following his good performance in some unthinkable massacre. He needed it. His fellow soldiers despised him, or at best didn’t notice him. He found one friend: the half~Chocolatine Lio, who fronted for the band when diplomacy was needed. He was an untrusted loner too—because he’d betrayed his people to join a death party. As the only way he knew to escape slavery.
Bellerepho
devoted endless hours to his diary, composing gloomy aphorisms to
himself, hoping the right combination of words would bring peace to
his life.
“I
am condemned to be responsible for
my fate.”
“I
wish to exit, but my
place is nowhere; I am unwanted.”
“When
they shoot the Carnelian oppressor, both oppressor and oppressed will
die. There shall emerge a free
man, and a dead man.”
In
the end Bellerepho was
liberated. But it was nothing he did himself: the Chocolatine
Convulsion came.