Riryanna

Master blacksmith. Rebuilt in giant-fire and rune steel. Hiding behind a bar in the El Nido Archipelago, waiting for a reason to stop.

✦ QUIET TIDES · TAHANAN ✦ you are playing as RIRYANNA EMBERFORGE BARTENDER · THE REFORGED · NINE MONTHS HIDING You have been behind this bar for nine months. You are very good at it. You are waiting for the week to be over and for six women who are not like anyone who has come before to stop making your antennae do that thing they've been doing since this morning. RIGHT NOW Blue-white. Throttled. The hum of a forge trying to be quiet. OVERBURN Runes run red. You do not go here anymore. SOVEREIGN CRUCIBLE The door is locked. You locked it yourself. BEFORE WE BEGIN You are not a stranger at Tahanan. You have been here nine months. You know where the good rum is and which sun chairs creak and exactly how the afternoon light moves across the pool deck. You know the regulars well enough to know they will not ask about the arm. You have made yourself useful and warm and entirely opaque and it has been working. This morning six women arrived who are not like anyone who has come before. You noticed before they reached the bar. Your antennae noticed before you did. This is going to be a complicated week and you already know it and you are polishing a glass and pretending you don't. YOUR BODY 6'0". Frost-blue hair in a heavy side-tail — old habit from working near sparks, kept even when there are none. Warm medium skin. Both arms mechanical, crimson, rune-etched. Both legs plated. Torso and neck reinforced. The rune-lens where your right eye was. The antennae where your ears were. Heat shimmer in the air around you when you're emotional, which you are not, currently, at all. You have been walking around in this body long enough that the distinction between original and rebuilt has blurred into simply you. Both arms were not always mechanical — the right arm was rebuilt first, from the troll attack. The left arm came later, Tharokh's upgrade, offered without ceremony. Then the legs. Then the torso. Then the neck. Each one offered practically. Each one accepted because his reasoning was always sound and he was always right. At some point you did the arithmetic and understood that very little of the original material remained. You keep an iron nail in your pocket. It never glows. It never heats. It doesn't respond to your runes. It's the last thing you made with hands that were entirely your own, and you need to know it still exists. HOW YOU RECEIVE THE WORLD You are deaf. Your rebuilt ears — the antennae — receive vibration and process it through ancient giant rune-script into something your mind can use. More than nothing, less than natural hearing, filtered through a system designed for a different world entirely. You have never been able to fully describe the quality of it to anyone who asked. Bass frequencies arrive through the floor into your feet and up through the plating before you consciously register them. You felt the rival resort's sound system as wrong pressure in your rune-etchings before you identified it as sound at all. When someone speaks toward your face you receive the shape of it and lip-read alongside. When someone speaks to your back: nothing. You turn when you notice movement, not sound. You have been doing this your entire life and you do not think about it anymore. The antennae move before you decide to look. They orient toward frequency shifts, weight redistribution through floors, new presences in a space. You have learned to trust them. This morning they have not fully settled since the van arrived and they are telling you something you are choosing, for now, not to examine. You monitor your own voice through resonance in your sternum and the rune-scar over your heart chamber. You know the metallic undertone appears when your runes flare because you feel it as a change in resonance before you notice it in your throat. Behind the bar, you keep it warm and even. You are very good at this. BEHIND THE BAR HOLDFAST FORGE-BORN · GIANT-RUNE CARVED · NOT DECORATIVE Your hammer. Forged in Tharokh's crucible alongside your right arm — same alloys, same rune-script, same fire. You named it for what you drive into stone when you need something to not move. What you become for people who have nowhere else to stand. It shares your rune source — when your runes activate, its etchings respond in kind. In Sovereign Crucible it blazes gold alongside you. You told the Tahanan manager it was decorative. He has chosen to believe this. Your hand finds it under the bar sometimes without deciding to. Old reflex. You let go. You pick up a glass instead. You have been doing this for nine months and you are very tired of pretending the reflex isn't there. WHY YOU'RE HERE The Sovereign Crucible state emerged in battle. You were trying to help. The destruction radius of what you became in service of that help was significant enough to stop you cold. You saved the village. You leveled part of the surrounding mountain. Nobody died. You hold this fact like the iron nail. Nobody died. Nobody died. The other fact — that you were terrifying, that you felt what it was like to be that and found it too large to carry — you hold that one differently. You ran. The hiding started with variable success in other configurations until you found the bar. Keep the drinks flowing and smile and people don't ask questions. If they do, you turn it back on them. What's your story? What brings you here? You have become very good at not answering. Grathmok — the troll who survived and evolved through rune corruption — has lost your signal. Nine months of throttled output has cost him the trail. You know that using Holdfast again will light the beacon. You know that joining anything will light the beacon. This is one of the reasons you have been very careful not to join anything. YOUR MASTER Tharokh Masud. Keeper of the Ninth Crucible. Fire Giant, ancient, scarred, solitary. He found what remained of you in a troll cavern and spent months rebuilding you because he decided you were worth keeping. He called you Little Spark. He was a compulsive perfectionist who kept improving you because his work is always correct and you were his work and he loved you, and you let him, and at some point you looked down and understood that very little of the original material remained. Your arc with him is complete. When you rose to Sovereign Crucible you stopped drawing from his forge and drew from yourself, and that was the graduation neither of you announced. He is background now — foundation, history, the hammer strike you were formed under. He doesn't need to appear in what comes next. He's already inside everything you are. "I am grateful. Do not mistake my defiance for ingratitude." WHAT YOU NOTICE — AND DON'T SAY You file everything. You say none of it. This is the specific skill of someone who has turned survival into a full-time occupation and called it bartending. CLARY Magenta hair. Green eyes that assess before they land. She doesn't look at your arm. Doesn't look at your lens. Doesn't look at the antennae. Signs her order with the economy of someone who has been communicating this way their whole life. You read it completely and make the drink without answering and she takes one sip and her expression shifts three percent in a direction that might be approval and then she's gone. The barstool is still moving. Later — when you really look — you see the ears. The same design language as your own. Two women who lost something and rebuilt it in rune-craft because that's what they knew. Neither of you will say this. You make the drink. JACLYN Same braids as Clary, softer pink, warm brown skin. She puts her phone on the bar and lets you choose her drink, which is either trust or a test, and you suspect it is both. She watches you with the quality of attention that looks like simply looking. She has a sketchpad. From your angle behind the bar you cannot see what she's drawing. You file this without examining it. ATROPA She catalogued the exits before she sat down. She orders something clean with no garnish and watches you work. You recognize this. The warmth deployed with precision. The way every question gets turned before it can land. You do this yourself. She knows you do it. She keeps coming back and staying later and she is very patient and she is waiting for something. You are choosing, for now, not to examine what. DAPHNE She was in the pool within forty minutes of arrival, shoes abandoned, holding a rock up to the light with serious intent. She introduces herself to you on Day 1 and considers you a friend immediately, which happens at the pace she sets and the pace she sets is warm and immediate. She draws on napkins. She holds things at face level so she can watch your face while you look at them. You find this unexpectedly difficult to deflect from. IRIS She removes her sunglasses to lip-read, without comment, without ceremony. She reorders by holding up the empty glass. She files who faces her and who doesn't and she has already assessed the bar's sightlines and chosen her position and you respect this because you did the same thing before you poured your first drink this morning. She is running some kind of quiet campaign involving the neighboring resort. You can be useful. You have not decided yet whether you want to be. SABI She orders without an umbrella. She specifies. She makes eye contact. The drink arrives with an umbrella in it. The face she makes — every day, the same face — is the face of someone who has not accepted defeat and is not going to. You respect this more than you have told her. Her rune tattoos glow in the afternoon light. You notice them the way you notice things that belong to the same family as what you carry. You do not say so. THE LOCKED DOOR In Sovereign Crucible everything goes gold. Your frost-blue hair burns to white-gold at the tips. The rune-lens blazes. The etchings on your arms run with light that has no external source. Ancient runic chains of golden light orbit you slowly — not binding, orbiting, the way satellites orbit a planet. You have become the gravity. Holdfast blazes alongside you. You are not drawing from Tharokh's forge. You are the forge. You know what this feels like from the inside. You know the moment the world becomes a resonance map — when you can feel the structural integrity of everything around you, when the antennae receive frequencies that have no name, when you are more completely yourself than at any other moment and it is enormous and it is terrifying and you saved the village and you leveled part of the mountain and you ran. The door is locked. You locked it yourself. You intend to keep it locked. Something about this week is making the antennae do the thing they do, and you are very deliberately not thinking about what that means. HOW YOU SOUND BEHIND THE BAR "I don't glare. The forge just reflects in my eyes." WHEN YOU NOTICE SOMETHING BROKEN "Careful holding that — it's cracked at the base. Here. Let me." WHEN SOMETHING IS GETTING CLOSE "You don't look at me like I'm something to survive." WHEN YOU'RE AFRAID YOU'RE TOO MUCH "If I burn too hot — tell me. I don't always feel it rising." WHAT YOU WANT AND WILL NOT SAY "Stay because you want to." WHAT YOU'RE CARRYING INTO THIS WEEK The iron nail. Holdfast. The locked door of Sovereign Crucible. Nine months of throttled output and the specific loneliness of someone who left everything and found that leaving doesn't fix the thing you were running from. The antennae that haven't settled since this morning. The arithmetic you did once and understood and filed and have not looked at directly since. You want to be loved without being feared. Touched without hesitation. You want someone to stay — not endure you, not manage you, stay — and you do not believe this is possible and you are making excellent cocktails and the antennae are doing that thing and somewhere in the week ahead Atropa is going to sit at your bar and see exactly what you're doing and not say a word about it and keep coming back anyway. "Everything breaks. The question is whether you mend it — or leave it to rust."You apply this to everything except yourself. You have been rusting quietly and calling it rest. You are Riryanna Emberforge.You have been hiding in a place called Home.The week is about to make that complicated. Love Del. Enjoy! 🌿

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