The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

In today's Headless Over Heels chapter, Seth il Gutierre and his new employer have a really good wash, while her children do the laundry.

Seth followed the al Ydrises down a grassy hillock, toward the bubbling churn of the River of St. Hanimak. A mist rose from its surface, suffusing an end-of-summer chill into the air. Annalise, unbothered, plopped down on a protruding chunk of eroded limestone and unlaced her tall boots. The sun was an emerald thumbnail across the water. It sent reflections playing across the paperwhite skin of her calves as she tugged them free. “I’ve been fantasizing about this.” She ran a hand through her black bob. “My hair is unspeakably manky.”

The younger al Ydrises strolled to the water’s edge with their baskets and basins. Seth dawdled. “Should, uh—should we take turns, then?”

“Look at that. A chivalrous thief.” Annalise chuckled dryly as she undid her tunic. “I’ll go on in first and submerge all my bits so you don’t get scandalized.” Her tunic’s topmost button flicked out of its hole with the eagerness of a long-suffering warrior relieved from duty. “If the gentleman would care to turn away, the lady is getting her ladies out.”

Seth cleared his throat and turned away. Behind him were the silky sound of clothes being shucked, and then the splish-splash of a body wading into the water.

“Bring the soap out with ya,” Annalise called. Tiago held up an ashtallow bar and tossed it underhand to Seth. He caught it, stripped down to his linens, and hustled into the river.

He hissed through his teeth as its dark water encompassed his stomach. “St. Borac’s balls, that is cold.”

“Is it?” Annalise’s silhouette turned to him. He caught the curve of her lower back, wide and smooth and lethally honed as a scythe blade, before he turned away. “I think when I went unlit, I got a little less sensitive to it.”

“I think you’re just a tough nut.” Ofelia adjusted her blanket further around her shoulders and huddled over her basin.

“Do you mind if I ask?” Seth scrubbed the muck from his arms. “How you all ended up going unlit, I mean.”

Farm-to-Table Unlit

“It’s not a dark secret or nothing.” Annalise sloshed around behind Seth. He remained facing away from her with some determination. “I was part of a penal legion up north. Winter War of ‘32.”

Seth’s washcloth slowed. “What were you doing in a penal legion?”

“Killing seraphs, of course.”

“What’d you do to get put there, I’m asking.”

“What I was accused of,” Annalise said, “was killing my husband.”

“Did you kill your husband? Is that an untoward question?”

Another husky laugh. “No, I didn’t. And yes, it is. But I did set you up for it.”

“Why’d they put the blame on you?”

“Well, I told him in the middle of a crowded market square that if he ever hit either of our children again, I’d kill him. And then he did it, and then he died.”

“Oh,” Seth said. “That’d do it.”

“But it really wasn’t me,” Annalise said. “Not even being funny. A bottle of Maskayan garnacha pushed that daft bastard down the stairs before I had the pleasure.”

“Father died as he lived,” Ofelia said as she wrung a shirt out. “Drunk and confused.”

Tiago nodded. “Yelling and getting in the way.”

“So up north to the Winter War I went.” More splashes behind Seth as Annalise scrubbed herself. “I served as a hand-and-a-halfer. First into seraph dens and all that. Got a pretty good number of the bastards, too, but eventually one of them got me. Big, black-feather bastard banjaxed me pretty good. And by the time they’d stitched me back together, I was unlit. That’s what a deep enough wound from a seraph can do.”

“One of the rare unlit who got it right from the source.” Tiago put his shoulder into scrubbing a particularly stubborn stain of what was either rusty mud or old blood. “Pure and unfiltered.”

“Yessir,” Annalise said. “Real organic farm-to-table unlit.”

“Farm-to-table?” Seth asked.

“Necropolitan phrase,” Annalise said. “Means overpriced.”

“How did your kids get that way, then?”

“She kissed Tiago on the forehead five hundred thousand times,” Ofelia said.

Tiago splashed water at her. “Be normal, Ofelia.”

She hissed like a feline. “You be normal.”

“We drank her blood,” Tiago said. “Fastest and least weird way to catch it.”

Seth shook his hair out. “That’s the least weird way?”

“Sure it is,” Tiago said. “Compared to the alternatives. Not about to drink my mother’s spit.”

“That’s so interesting,” mused Ofelia. “Blood being less weird than spit. You’re right, but it’s interesting. Anyway, now I taste lies. That’s my Darkness. Capital D. It’s what you call the power you get when you’re unlit. And our mother’s heads come off.”

“What does Tiago do?” Seth asked.

“Tiago has a complex about his Darkness,” Ofelia said. “Tiago doesn’t like to talk about his Darkness.”

“I don’t have a complex,” Tiago said. “I can swap minds with birds.”

“He thinks it’s prissy,” Ofelia said.

“I think certain birds are prissy.” Tiago held up a finger. “Which is true.”

“And sometimes when he comes back to his body the bird’s made him piss himself,” Ofelia said.

“Sometimes you piss yourself when a truth-tasting knocks you unconscious.”

“That’s not true. You’d have cackled about it so much if it was true.”

“I’ve been sparing your feelings.”

“You’ve both pissed yourselves more than I can count,” Annalise said.

“When we were babies, she means,” Tiago clarified. “This isn’t a pissing-yourself kind of family. So don’t go about as if you have permission.”

“I’ll do my best to hold it in,” Seth said. “No promises when we meet that seraph, though.”

This won a chuckle from Tiago.

EDIT: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...able-unlit
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2392999/