i say cling to rocks and i mean hold my hand

 i say cling to rocks and i mean hold my hand

 

Ole Lukoje Rode to War, by korintic

 

Being bound to someone is like the screaming wind calling out for you and you don't know where from; plummeting away from yourself forever into darkness; being alive and not being dead. It's maybe the only thing that's like being alive and not being dead, and it's still a little like being dead. 

 

These rules also apply to friends who need to carry you a while. Even just from one day to the next.

 

• Each bearer has three things they LOVE and three which they FEAR.
• For each Love you detour or stop for, mark one BOND at journey's end. 
• For each Fear you encounter, roll 1d6 under bond or else erase one bond.
• If bond would drop below nothing, then your bearer abandons you however they can.
• Your bearer's SPIRIT and HEART add up to bond: raise or lower them as needed.
• Compared to walking, being borne cuts journey time in half and lets you carry twice as much. 
• Your bearer's speed improves with their Spirit. You arrive sooner by one moment/hour/day/week/fortnight/month/season.* 
• Travel always takes time. If your journey is only a day long, Spirit 3 and Spirit 7 are the same.
• Crossing dangerous terrain will WOUND your bearer, unless they set you down a while.
• Your bearer can also be wounded by attacks. A wounded bearer cannot hold you. 
• Each Heart allows your bearer to safely bear one additional wound. 
• Wounds are healed at journey's end, even if that end is premature. They aren't forgotten.
• At seven bond, a boon. If you commit entirely to Spirit or Heart, another.

–––––

Kinematic Motor-Carriage Model 7 "Miss Holocene"
A consummate hedonist. I slide through the world like sleet in summer air. Gorgeous, going, gone.
Loves: Swallowing tar-black ghosts in great wobbling gobbets; the delicate caress of your hands on my cleverest components; a road that runs from the sunset like a slant of dying light.
Fears: Vengeful fangs tearing through my fuel tank in panicked flight; the molten crack of grinding strain; bog-rot marsh in swallowing rain.
Bond 7: Torquefreak chatter on the teleradio. I'll preserve you from the songs of ghosts and drives alone. 
Spirit 7: A thousand screaming faces torn from history. I'll burn any unliving thing for fuel. All the memories of this world. And this world.

Heart 7: Embraced by leather and locks. Every burning inch of me is given purpose by your body inside me. You'll never die if I could die instead.

Miss Jacaranda
Lavender purple and soft as summer fruit. My ancestors knew these woods, but I only know the near reaches and their tasty truffles.
Loves: The aforementioned truffles, and other chthonic morsels; cuddly naps in a warm and gentle place; dappled woods and dreamy lakes.
Fears: The lightning taint of air-grown things; strangers with stone voices and steel-sharp eyes; bleak and lonely lands, even when you're there.
Bond 7: My warm heart over yours. My ribs like branches and your skull like a nave. When we lie to sleep, we intermingle, warm and soft anywhere.
Spirit 7: The nymphs of the grave-gardens like to pet my ears and nuzzle my snout. When we rest in cemeteries, we'll be safekept from time.
Heart 7: When you die I'll mourn you with my tusks and my warm tongue. I'll nurture your memory and go on being friends with your dancing bones.

Terror Bird
Shining dark and running fast. The ten-body-blade of me cuts the world apart. I am perfect. See them cower.
Loves: Ripping and tearing their guts; pursuing them like a bloody nightmare; mountains that carve scars in the sky.
Fears: Blasphemers bigger than I; the sheer affront of rebellion and reprisal; wet and wretched lowlands.
Bond 7: Spitting out their empty skulls. Each one engraved with a precious thing they sought to keep from you.
Spirit 7: Carving through their pretty bones. Charge to strike: turn life to vapor.
Heart 7: Feasting with my little daughter. Place your face next to mine, taste the carcasses we made: wet and raw and good. All our dreams will be good tonight, and all our wounds will heal.

Spider Phaeton
Night-black jewel-bright twins in love. The aching flex of chitin on metal, consummated only in you.
Loves: Iridescent factory-birds and expensive massage oil; secrets to hide and gendarmes to outrun; neon lit streets with crowds that part in awe.
Fears: Old things grown in the earth; to be slowed, detained, or parted; high bright places that expose us.
Bond 7: Our love is ours alone, so you are ours alone. A precious secret kept and swallowed like a stone. All the extra things we let you carry are hidden from search or seizure.
Spirit 7: So long as we don't encounter what we Fear, we can shake any pursuer. If dear Phaethon had known us, he might have kept the sun forever.
Heart 7: The city hears us laughing and remembers what it was to be new. Its leanest alleys will part like crowds to permit passage. But only for us.

Conqueror Chassis
Ragged agony rising from wing-shadow scars to scald your skin. Slick with black sludge that seeps through slits in tangled guts. Dyspeptic belches of rainbow smog that settle in your lungs like ash. Heavy paws to rend the earth. Rotten to skeletal profile, stately as a dead lioness, I live.
Loves: A glut of too much everything for this world to sustain; surveying those ruins that remember me; deserts of bare stone and blasted concrete.
Fears: To be deprived, to be told "tomorrow"; those once-conquered who will never forgive me; dark wet fecund places.
Bond 7: Heraldic lights and secret phrases in the tongue of Verity: secrets to breach vaults or security doors or follow paths across the sea to perfect Shaddad. We'll die there.
Spirit 7: Shaddad's advent wounded its heart, and it bled shining roads. I can see them still, binding ports to mines to the cities they drew up into the light. If we follow them, we'll be thrice as fast, and maybe some ragged flickers of their blessing still remain for us to know.
Heart 7: Once my tongue was heavenly opal and my eyes blazed with exterminating light. With your heart beating strong in my chest and my blood-slick plugs in your noble skull, I can blaze once more to eradicate anything. But only once.

A Bedabbled Axayacatl
Kind traveller, rest your weary head on my breast. Lie with me here, supine in the sun in this gentle sea. Watch: I breathe my blood into the sea and it carries me on the gentle froth as far as I desire. I can cary you with me, across the sea and farther, if you mingle yours with mine.
Loves: Sunlit forests under sea; islands with spires of turquoise and palaces of sweet smoke; migration-roads where lords and ladies of the fishes process.
Fears: Birds like whales; whales like continents; storms like anything.
Bond 7: You don't know the price you've paid me, kind one; what secrets I have drawn up from the wells of you. Here is a little one of mine: to drink the sea like summer wine.
Spirit 7: It's been lovely to hold you, my traveller. What sights we have seen! Here is a precious treasure: to see my stained-glass wings illuminate the empty air~ I even promise not to drop you.
Heart 7: You're so good to me, bunny. I wish I could keep you forever. But instead, here is my gift: to breathe my blood like perfumed air and live (others' blood too, if you truly must).

Hobby-Horse
... [This bearer provides no benefit at all.]
Loves: Imaginary tea parties with fancy cakes; careful mending by your hand; to see you filled with awe and joy.
Fears: Anything living that's now dead; to be held by anyone but you; to see you break a promise to yourself.
Bond 7: I love you. I have struggled to say it, and I will struggle still. All the love you have shown me I will return again, to carry you swift as any steed.
Spirit 7: I love you and the rivers will burst their banks and the stars will burst the sky and behind that velvet air it's all one pretty face that says "I love you." By night I will fly like a bird.
Heart 7: I love you and it's agony but I'll hold you in my arms as long as I can. I will never die so long as you live.

*special thanks to garamondia for this rule. ^_^