Content Warning:

Blood, injury, death, messy relationships, abuses of power, typical Empire fuckery.

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nemeses

[Long description: A sketch page of Frey and the Oracle of Caeres. The Oracle is a rather distinguished-looking individual with a sharp profile, perpetually lidded eyes, and a knowing smile. His lips are painted red, with a single streak running from his lower lip to his chin. Her hair falls past her shoulders in loose curls, while her embroidered galero casts deep shadows over her face that are only vaguely sinister. He wears circle-rimmed glasses that hide his eyes when the light catches them right, and a long, loose cloak that obscures his silhouette. Under it, her double-breasted overcoat is tailored to her svelte frame and broad shoulders. She has no business being as tall as she is, and carries herself completely secure in the knowledge that everyone around her knows this.

Frey is a severe-looking mechanic who is rough around the edges, and really is quite full of edges in general. She has strong features and a tall nose, and her hair is styled in a messy undercut, with her bangs bleached white. They fall over her eyes in such a way that she looks chronically pissed. She wears her old mechanic’s jacket with its sleeves cut off, the ragged edges framing her strong shoulders and lean, muscled arms. She’s on the smaller side overall, though. The rest of her uniform has seen better days, and in many places has been defaced so that the Imperial cog symbol is broken or obscured. She totes around a revolver with a shiv taped to it, because of course she does.

The two are drawn butting heads over this or that. In one scene, Frey holds up the Oracle at gunpoint, just after executing the poor sap who was sitting at his desk. The blood spray doesn’t faze the Oracle, and neither does the revolver. She seems inconvenienced at best by the thought of getting this all cleaned up later.

In another vignette, Frey is locked behind bars in a dingy little cell (perhaps for sending that man into an early retirement.) Her arms and legs are bound, though she tries to gnaw the ropes off her wrists. Suddenly, a ring of keys comes soaring through the bars and into her lap. She jumps, and looks up. The Oracle gazes down at her through lidded eyes, her expression unreadable. She walks away before Frey realizes that the keys don’t exactly help her current “no hands” predicament, though.

Another scene shows Frey and the Oracle sitting across from one another. The Oracle holds Frey’s wrist in his hand, so that he can daub perfume on it.

He says “It has notes of jasmine and bergamot. I think you’ll find it too delicate for your tastes, though.”

Frey is distraught. She came here to kill him, and this is not how she imagined it would go. She’s probably revisiting the thought in another doodle, where the Oracle leans over her shoulder and gets uncomfortably close to whisper something in her ear.

Finally, there’s a teeny scribble of an even teenier Frey climbing through the Oracle’s arched window with a shiv in hand. She is furious and singular of purpose, even if she does not seem to know what that purpose is. The labels above her head read “Mistaking attraction for rage” and “mistaking rage for attraction,” with arrows pointing to her. The Oracle just sits in the foreground and reads, smiling placidly, apparently oblivious. The label next to her reads “ambiently infatuated,” with an arrow pointing to her.]

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nemeses

April 1, 2023

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Hi. It’s been 3 months. I am still alive, I have just been busy with… stuff… and things… haha… a… This is not The Thing that i have been busy with, but it is A Thing that i have been using as a siesta from The Thing. You are getting my no-effort warhamster art, because everything else is firing on all cylinders right now. And boy am i more of a no-cylinders kind of gal.

This is Frey and the Oracle of Caeres. They are very messy and also in nemeses with each other. I should probably stop making up gay people who are in nemeses with each other, because the messaging and social commentary about the Empire is suffering. But here we are.

Essays about made-up gay people below.

The Caeres, Kairos, The Oracle of Caeres, The Sacer Vates, the Oracle, the Seer, whatever. Our mans is all titles and no names that the living can remember.

Mercurial and mysterious, the Caeres creates no “Great Works” of his own, as far as anyone can tell. She commands no armies and governs no territories, and no one alive today remembers who she is, where she came from, or how long she’s been with the Archive. Most people don’t even know what office she occupies, because—like most Archivists—she hardly ever works.

Unlike most Archivists, the Caeres doesn’t spend his free time quibbling with his peers for power. The running joke in the Archive is that “the one person we see less than the God-King Himself is the Oracle of Caeres.” He only makes an appearance when he is needed, though these interventions typically don’t make sense until after the fact.

She is someone who holds many cards but plays very few. When she does, she would rather give others the glory of making history by ‘massaging fate’-- passing on a secret message, a forgotten relic, a key piece of intel, and so on. The annals of the Imperial Archive all have her touch on them somewhere. When Kairos can’t be found, one can only imagine that they are out there, somewhere, watching and waiting while their delicate machinations unfold.

The other Archivists recognize her power, and often consult with her behind one another’s backs on matters of politics, military strategy, and petty blackmail. But the Seer gives no innocent answers– if he gives them at all. Most people come away from their meetings with a poem or a proverb, and no meaningful directions for where to go next.

When he does offer more than pretty words, one can’t help but feel like they’re being used as pawns in a much larger game. The Seer does not lie; he gives counsel that is sound on paper and in practice. He has made kings, moved mountains, and brought empires to their knees. And yet she has ways of turning the sweetest success to ash in the victor’s mouth. Some chase headlong after their ambitions, only to become locked in bitter wars of attrition, while others win pyrrhic victories and lose it all. Others yet will live their whole lives owing their good fortune to the Oracle of Caeres, and only years after their death will anyone realize the significance of his involvement. Most are just left wondering what, exactly, the Oracle has in mind for them…

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Frey is the unwilling martyr (can any martyr be said to be willing?) of an industrial hellscape manufactory world. She used to be a mechanic, a forgettable cog in the manufactory’s labor machine. She wasn’t singled out because she was particularly disobedient, nor was she distinguished among her peers as gifted, respectable, or charismatic; she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dissent brewed in the manufactory, as it always does, in places where the straw boss can’t see. But by the time the manufactory’s Foreman caught wind of the rebellion, it was too late. He sought out the Oracle of Caeres for advice, desperate to get his colony back under control before the Powers That Be took notice and got him under control.

The Oracle was not interested in resolving petty administrative disputes. She blew him off with a nonsense prophecy: the Foreman could crush the rebellion, but only if he could find its head and cut it off. “You’ll know the false idol by her mark: yea high, dark hair, brown eyes, work-related injury scar on her right shoulder,“ or something like that. He made up a description of a rebel leader that was so specific and yet so statistically average that it should have been impossible to find… Or so he thought.

It came as something of a surprise to Frey, then, when the orderlies dragged her out of the ironworks and brought her before the Foreman. She had every mark the Oracle said she would–everything but the scar. Delirious with fear and frustrated out of his mind, the Foreman decided that if he could not find his figurehead, then he would have to create her.

Frey gained a scar that day, and lost everything. The awful spectacle was like a spark to a powder keg. The works went up in flames, as the factory floor descended on the Foreman.

Frey was not thinking about anything but her own survival when she crawled out of the wreckage, days later. She disappeared. Ironically, the rebellion was crushed, in the end–it lost its figurehead–but perhaps not in the way that the Foreman had imagined.

For her part, Frey isn’t interested in being made into something that she’s not. She left home bitter, lost, and angry with the hand that she was dealt. The Foreman might have been taken care of, but, it seems, there’s still another who hasn’t answered for what they did to her...