A/N – Thanks for clicking on The Breaking Spell. It's a sequel of sorts to both Lilies to Tread and The Ordeal of Bitter Fruit. Originally supposed to be 100 drabbles (I think?), but the prompts were collected together and I made a story arc out of them. I've wanted to release it on FFN for a while, but the question arose as to how to go about it. The chapters are sometimes small, especially at the beginning. They're being collected and released in chunks of around 2500 words each, at least until later on in the story when the chapters lengthen. Each prompt is beside the versus' number, i.e. I. Winter. Some versus contain more than one prompt, and in that instance each prompt is listed. The Breaking Spell is approximately 53,000 words long, originally written in late/early 2009/2010. Also, I'm pretty sure there are a few typos in this version—sorry. Personally speaking, it has always been a favorite of my own stuff. Apologies, too, for the less-than-ideal formatting, but we all know how FFN is with its formatting. If you'd like a cleaner .doc version, please message me with your email address.

Non-canon Pairings: G/W/D; G/W; DG/Chessa (OFC); Az/Zero

Note: A full version of The Breaking Spell, properly formatted, is available in epub and mobi formats. Use the link in my profile. Please let me know if you have any trouble.

oOo

VOLUME 1
The Path

I.

The cold seeped through him, hairs to bone to flesh

And seeped back out of him again, somehow, for a moment gone, then coming back in again.

The snow was deep, the first layer of it scraped and roused and sent into a dance by a new northern gift of the wind.

His toes were numb, though his boots were carbon at the toes, leather outside, to keep the damp away. No belligerence, he mused, for the bitterness.

Yet Ambrose had tolerance for this frigidity. Glitch could see him, at his back, walking tall and proud, straight into the acid storm.

How it suited him, held him in his character.

All caustic falls, ice crystals, wet, cold, cold, cold. When living things were unpleasantly dead. For Glitch understood that death held bits of its own beauty, if he angled his head, narrowed his eyes, and lost himself in it. But that was a recognition of pulchritude. Ambrose had a tolerance for death, too.

Winter was his season. The season of Ambrose.

Everything natural, that bloomed in spring and survived the blazing heat of summer

—everything natural was then rendered dead.

-x-

II.

Ignoring Ambrose held difficulty, then it had difficulties, improbabilities.

They were the same person.

Though no, no. They were not.

Lucidity left Glitch believing in what was not believable.

A fractured fairy tale of love and remorse, hate and obsession.

The dread of change.

Glitch knew the statement kept his conviction clear, if lucidity turned drear, corrupted.

Broken again like the fractured fairy tale.

The snow was at his ankles then, the woods around him. He was Glitch, still, forever and always. How about that? Amen.

But he turned about, a shuffle and a kick of the white fluff.

No sparing the shadows, no sparing his thoughts.

He was Ambrose, then as now.

He looked up and up. The naked treetops of locusts and elms fringed the cerulean empyrean. Beside one sun it rested, it winked. Ambrose scowled at it, its nonfeasance, uselessness. He looked behind him.

Glitch waded, glissaded. A masterful, graceful man.

A swan floating on a frozen home.

He looked beyond the fringe of branches, and winced into the glowing empyrean.

There it rested, a little way from the first sun.

The parhelion.

Guiding him on.

-x-

III.

The hours had a way of losing them. One by one, minutes disappeared.

They forgot them at treacherous landscapes.

One minute lost in a bog.

Another of its brethren lost in a fog.

They almost lost their way, too, on some Saturday after the journey had begun.

They had no maps, no atlas of the realms. What did they need them for?

Without a cause, they wandered.

Down on the road from Issilthrush mountain, and away again, to other mountains.

The innominate peaks, nothing in their mind, nothing but snow-capped and wearying on their eyes. They couldn't regard them without fear feasting on remaining orts of bravery. But it loosened sometimes, their want of direction, and they would consult someone.

Strangers gave them peculiar looks, and didn't Glitch know those looks? He hated to talk over his concerns with Ambrose.

Ambrose had nothing to concern him. Nothing bothered him.

"I am better than all, and all is not better than me." He said it, fancying himself free, but he was the very breath of tyranny.

"I know, my love," Glitch would then say, his placations voiced, worried disregarded. The dearest and dear bit of his heart knew the shackles of love. He watched the blackness pool in him, drowning him, night after night, when he knew Ambrose was asleep and lost in the stars.

What wouldn't he do to get away, some nights, and wander the trails of moonlight's dust? Just to get away from him—for a little while.

But it was always he that talked to the strangers. Ambrose eked what he wanted from the unsuspecting, and Glitch was irrevocably methodical: he would have to initiate a scheme, and then he would go in—not for the kill as Ambrose did, but for the friendship.

He loved people. They reminded him of DG and Raw and—oh, by the stars and the galaxies—Wyatt.

He met with a stranger in the next village. A plump little woman and her two plump girls. They wore bright colours and kerchiefs over their abundant curly locks. Their eyes were like his, big and brown and honing mischievousness, yet with melancholy constantly winning.

"Do you know where I might find a witch?"

But it wasn't his voice that asked.

Ambrose, again, whipping up the tempest. His lanceolate voice at once omniscient, inescapable.

Glitch had wanted so very badly to speak with them.

They looked like Azkadellia, didn't they?

Long faces, big, sad brown eyes?

He hated himself for running out of time to ask permission from Ambrose.

He never hated himself for long.

Such an occupation naturally belonged to the other half of him.

His malignancy and non-conformity.

Ambrose had no concept of time.

Tyranny never did.

-x-

IV.

No stranger ever knew where to find a witch.

Jokes were made, at the expense of the Sorceress That Was. "You should ask her," commonly returned to them, between sly smirks and jocosely lifted eyebrows.

But no one knew where to find a witch. They met a paunchy man once, his fat shins sticking out of galligaskins so old and threadbare, Glitch thought of museums full of handmade, sewn antiquities. Galligaskins belonged there. Those in that part of the realm wore them. Kilts in the north. Galligaskins there. He made notes in his journal. The indigenous people of the realm, he scribed, and their unusual instincts concerning haberdashery and husbandry.

They didn't dress like witches.

The galligaskins man was an old mystic. He hid the mysticism from him, but Ambrose knew it. It was in the features. A touch of the earth about him. As though it had come from the plains of some faraway planet, from the dust that made a star, and rested in him. Perhaps on his planet, the popularity of galligaskins had never waned.

"You should find yourself a path of bones, my friend," he told Ambrose. His head was taller than his hair, a white ruffled collar of it.

"A path of bones?" Ambrose repeated.

The finding of bones seemed so jolly, for a little while. On it, the man didn't waver, didn't elaborate. He said chores waited him, and withdrew.

Paths of bones haunted Glitch in his nightmares. He woke at night to find the fire fallen into coals, red and radiating. The warmth erased his cold.

"Where will we find bones?"

One by one, they might show up. A rib. A finger. A toe.

Then a skull, a leg, a femur or two. Beneath a tree, a rock, a shrub,

A meadow, come spring, full of chamomile and feverfew.

Glitch liked the nights when he woke from nightmares all alone.

It meant he was free from the ridicule of Ambrose. "Nightmares again? You're such a child."

I'm ashamed to be seen with you.

Never was this given aloud.

It rattled in Glitch's mind, one suns-set to another.

Rattled around in him like dry bones.

At night, he didn't know why it mattered, why it should come then.

But at night, at night,

He missed Wyatt the most.

-x-

V.

Wyatt was a disaster, and this is how Glitch described him.

Why love with Wyatt went against the goodness of the world.

Ambrose had nothing to say. He thought love was blind, and ridiculous to let itself be so blind. It was colourless, bland as a summer's day. Only hate was real.

Hate was worth giving away.

Ambrose had nothing to say. His smirks were silent. His footfalls garnished with miniature explosions of self-congratulations.

He had come along, a wedge of unbreakable marble, and forced himself among them.

Among the three of them. Or four of them. There was the princess to consider. But it was a ring from Wyatt that Glitch wore.

The little whore. Who needed the love of two, when there was him?

He was the all and everything to Glitch. At night, when they rested, when they'd puzzled over paths of bones, unknown witches, a lost spell, Ambrose held Glitch close. He wasn't there to forget, but to remember.

Remember, Glitch? Forget Wyatt. Forget DG.

"I'm all you need."

Glitch wished he didn't think so.

-x-

VI.

A photographic memory between two bodies, one mind, wasn't so often unkind.

So Glitch could forget, unable to forgive.

So Ambrose could remember everything that Glitch could forgive.

They walked as companions. They talked ferociously.

Glitch wanted to talk of bones, then the old conspiracy; he'd fall into tangent after tangent. A part of him, drawn to it like—like—he didn't know what. The simile avoided him.

Bones plagued him. He consciously sought them.

Beneath the pine boughs, he'd turn in circles. His coat-tails flew. With the inside of his boot, rolled leaves and eaten pine cones were unearthed, moved.

"Owl sick," Ambrose told. He enjoyed naming things before Glitch had a chance.

"Owl pellets, you mean."

Expurgation from the owls: feathers, fur from the creatures they consumed, congealed in a vomited mass, then, by Ambrose's delicate fingers, exhumed.

Little ivory sticks from the grey crumbles. Tiny bones. Mice that once were. Now little ivory sticks, tiny bones. Glitch stared at them, then dashed from them.

Ambrose cackled at Glitch's misery. "Why are you so weak? Weak! You've only ever been!"

And you're hateful and mean.

Words, minified, scarred into his tears.

I hate you, and I mean to hate you.

To do this, he had to know why he loved Ambrose.

Love came first.

Hate came second.

Fear of the two, it came third.

-x-

VII.

They pottered about the woods. A village wasn't far. The other side of the trees, maybe. Ambrose squinted through the trunks, over the amber and white ground, to perceive what he pretended he could.

It was there because he believed it to be so.

His belief was his life.

His beliefs tossed Glitch into hopeless exile.

Glitch saw less,

Heard more.

He harkened footsteps across the plain, into the woods, not content to leave again.

He swerved around.

To see this stranger, to meet him, before Ambrose!

Ambrose and his indelible watermark. His atrocious behaviour. Murder and bloodlust. He would kill the strangers they came upon, if he but could.

Ambush was best if delivered in madness.

If he kept a poniard, a falchion, what red it would spill.

Not this stranger. He would belong to Glitch.

He would, through conversation, grant normalcy to Glitch.

Before the madness set in, and brought him failure.

He saw bones again.

Everywhere now.

Little ivory sticks, teeth protruding from a mandible.

There, that—a piece of fungus—or a toe.

The man left shadows by his grey cloak.

He had the look of an approaching storm.

He could brew one, Glitch knew he could, with the staff in his hand used to stir the clouds, beg the rain to follow his command.

Men like him do not beg. They have big bones through them. Unbreakable men of steel. Like Wyatt, back home.

Glitch swallowed, writing his silent agony in tears.

-x-

VIII.

"Sir," he started. It ended in a plume from his mouth. The cloud at the man's command.

"Didn't see you standing there."

He wouldn't glance behind him, the sense of evil waiting. "No, of course, so sorry, sorry. I was wondering, if this is a bit odd, I was wondering if you've ever heard of a path of bones."

"Bones, is it? Bones aren't my business."

"No, no… Not the industry of the living. What is your business?"

This is how they met the owl hunter. He didn't hunt them for feathers or meat or purpose. He hunted them merely to find them.

"Mysterious creatures, owls." He angled back his head. The coarseness, unctuousness of his hair, black as a bear with temples grey as sabre blades, kept his hood in place.

It snowed on Glitch's face. He didn't care. The owl hunter must be regarded, and Glitch must guard against the impending Ambrose intrusion. He had won, and he'd wondered how to do it again.

Then a glint of something.

A hilt beneath the cloak.

A revolver, tucked into the holster. So neat. Viable. Violent.

On the other side, a knife.

The owl hunter caught him staring.

Glitch trembled. "Weapons are pointless against him. He'll use you."

The owl hunter glanced around. No one was there. "Who? Who will use them?"

The world bleared whenever he cried. Agonised, intimidated, it was there. It was the beauty of death he hated.

Ambrose could always make beauty out of death.

"Run," Glitch said. He shoved and shoved. The owl hunter wouldn't budge. "Please, run! Run for your life! He's coming! He's… He's coming after you…"

Sobs wrenched from him, even as he knelt.

Listening. Listening for him.

Black was the pool drowning him.

Little bones float.

At first, dead men don't.

-x-

IX.

Glitch couldn't forgive Ambrose.

"One murder," Ambrose said, touching Glitch's mouth with a provoking fingertip, the way DG used to do, before a kiss, before that pleasure of her breath over him.

Murder and gore sobered. Thoughts of love, what dreams they were. Decorated in garlands of old hair, excrescences (moles, abnormal growths), and flowers from yesteryear eaten by a vermicular lot. The stench of mould held him rapt.

He knelt as he had. His knees were stained with cold mud.

Every pore of him filled with cold.

Twilight after twilight came. Days incalculable.

He watched the body of the owl hunter leave its colour behind.

When the skies peeled away the silver lid of night,

When green whispered across the east,

Glitch let Ambrose have his way.

"I forgive you."

What else was he to do?

He needed Ambrose.

Only,

He tasted then the seed of doubt.

Why?

Wyatt and DG, they were needed.

Individual comforts for an uncanny love. But why Ambrose?

What good was he?

Ghastly. Murderous fiend.

"You've turned us into miscreants."

Glitch got up, stood with Ambrose.

It was no good, this act of forgiveness.

Compassion bled out of the owl hunter.

Death, or something like it, all over again.

"No one will miss him."

Then it wasn't murder.

It wasn't the ascension of the deed,

If, of course,

No one would miss him.

Ambrose read what, out of Glitch, might flow next.

"You'd miss me if I were dead."

Not if I killed you.