Disclaimer: This work contains extreme scat scenes, general mysophilac filth, exhibitionism, and corruption (sort-of). All characters in sexual situations are over eighteen years old. This chapter will include drug-use, non-sexual violence, and police brutality.
It felt like it was somewhere close to mid-day, but the sky was still dark. Lanovale's shit-witch was out on the road, cloak on. She had left her knapsack behind, buried in the heart of that manure pile (it would take hours for someone to dig it up unassisted.) but with her water-skin and various ratty stolen sacks tucked into her dagger belt. She wasn't sure what she was going to do with the rest of this Long Night yet but it seemed best to assume that some degree of filthy chaos was going to ensue.
The falling sleet was starting to turn to snow, and it was sticking to the ground now; the over-long night felt as cold as if mid-winter had descended upon Lanovale early.
(She'd read about what happened when a Long Night happened during actual mid-winter. It was just as well it didn't happen more than a couple times a century on average.)
She could feel the bitter chill through chinks in her armour of filth whenever a breeze came up, and that counted as barely more than an annoyance to her now. All the muck covering her skin and saturating her clothes and hair was generating just barely enough heat to feel, and that was all she needed to be comfortable.
As an amusing side-effect, there was a faint haze of mist rising from any of her filthy form that was exposed to the air. Most of her was covered by the relatively clean cloak, so there was mist wafting out from the gaps. The choking fecal reek that was her constant companion these days had that slight fishy-vegetable tinge to it now. She found herself occasionally lamenting that her body odor, despite everything she'd done to encourage it, was currently only a minor note to the incredible stench that visibly wafted from her filthy body, but that was a very minor lamentation.
The night was as dark as a demon's soul right now, but the filthy girl's germ-sense let her see every microbe that was within a pace and a half of her, including the ones in the muddy soil at her feet. She could, in a limited fashion, see in the dark. As usual, she used her shit-sense to track down piles of fresh dung on the road and sort-of flitted from one to the next, rather like a fly, and she idly took handfuls and did whatever the fuck she her whims directed when she found them. After all, why not?
She'd had a whole scheme for what to do today. There was a spot picked out, multiple escape routes planned, and she'd compiled a whole list of things that everyone else would consider utterly depraved to do, to be done before as many people as she could attract. (She generally didn't see the things she did as 'depraved', but she doubted many would agree with her arguments.) But then this Long Night had happened.
She eventually made her way to the place she'd had in mind, which was just an unassuming-looking wide spot along Lanovale's main road, in the forlorn hope that the Long Night might end by the time she made it there. No such luck. The sky over the dawnward mountains was still no paler than the rest of the pitch-black overcast night sky. She sat down on a nice flat-topped rock by the side of the road, which was covered in snow. She didn't bother to brush away the snow as she sat upon it. The snow around her developed a brown tinge in an expanding ring. She stared up at the featureless darkness above her, and sighed.
The filthy nameless girl, back when she had been Lyran, had actually researched weird supernatural phenomena, mostly out of boredom. Thanks to having Dovian for a mother, she was acquainted with how there were several Gods whose followers saw it as their duty to keep truly weird supernatural stuff (like
her
) out of the eye of the common man. Dovian insisted Hethaltie was one such God. Scholars only ever officially documented the bits and pieces such groups either failed to hide or didn't think was worth hiding. Long Nights and Days were pretty damn hard to hide (and it probably helped that the scholars didn't even need to leave their desks to observe them).
One particular theory that never quite seemed to die when it came to Long Nights and Days was that there was some sort of pattern to them. There was, but all it was was a bunch of probability bell-curves for the likelihood of any given occurrence within certain time-frames, and
those
tended to fluctuate from century to century. Most of a millennia of analysis had made it plain that there
was
no deeper pattern, but
someone
in every successive generation of scholar would invariably insist on challenging that assumption, only to eventually arrive at the same conclusion and in turn inspire the future generation of fools.
The filthy girl's takeaway was 'don't have any expectations'. This Long Night might end in five minutes, the sun just popping over the horizon to make up for lost time. It was entirely possible that it might last another week. (The last time a Long Night had lasted that long, people had started to legitimately think the world had ended, there'd been so much chaos that actual wars had started, and there was absolutely nothing preventing that from happening again.)
Whatever she did next, she needed to take the non-trivial possibility of an abrupt and inconvenient end to the darkness in mind, just in case. So, nothing
too
risky.
She glanced up towards the lights of Lower Lanovul, spread out over a relatively gentle hillside, then at the wall-enclosed terraces of Upper Lanovul. She tried not to spare Castle Lan any attention, though it was still uncommonly brightly lit.
She hadn't gone into town yet, and now seemed like one of the better times to try. She'd have cover of darkness, but it wouldn't be suspicious for people to be out and about, since it was technically day time. Furthermore, most of the town used the streets as its sewer system, so even her stench wouldn't be all that noticeable.
And she had also had an idea about something she could do in Lanovul. An idea that was so enticing that she couldn't get it out of her head, even though it was one of those
terrible
ideas.
She stood, and started heading towards town. No. No, she was not doing that. Come on. That was a level of both crazy and stupid that went too far, even after all the crazy and stupid shit she'd already done. It could end so badly. But... dammit, the pieces were all there! And the idea of doing it filled her with a weirdly jittery, lustful sort of anticipation. A feeling she remembered well from back when she had covertly played with shit in Castle Lan, and from just before she'd jumped into the privy before running away.
Oh, Gods. She was legitimately considering it.
She wanted to streak through the streets of Lower Lanovul, to do the foulest things she could think of, surrounded by full-on gawking crowds. And she wanted to do that in and near the most affluent part of Lower, where they used chamber pots instead of using the street as a dumping ground. She'd literally have more fresh shit to play with than she'd even know what to do with.
There were so many reasons why doing that was a terrible idea.
She wasn't very familiar with the town. The Long Night could end any minute. There was an actual presence of Lanomen in town, and private guards watched the affluent neighborhoods. If she did it, she would piss off a lot of people, and a lot of those people might feel motivated to help hunt her down, and she would have to try to either hide or escape. If hiding or escaping failed, then she'd have to fight her way out using magic, which would completely ruin her long game. And to top it all off, she'd established by now that she got too nervous in the middle of exhibitionistic stuff to actually get off from it, so it wouldn't even be worth all the trouble. She wasn't actually doing it, plain and simple.
All she was going to do in Lower Lanovul was a bit of exploring, to try to get a feel for the place. She'd been there before, but there had always been
chaperons
with her, ensuring that she was on her best behavior. Just how nice would it be to explore the place while free to do anything she wanted to do?
Not that she intended to misbehave
too
