[Caldera] ficlet: Whisper Coin
Nov. 20th, 2025 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidheanThe Whisper Coin is a strange and precious curiosity. Courtney holds onto it for a few days before daring to try, but in that time it becomes a sort of unintentional fidget toy. She flips it between her fingers, rolls it along her knuckles while she’s reading. Traces the surface with her thumb, while it rests in her pocket, as she walks along quiet streets in Dusklight. Speak with the dead. Once per day.
Trouble is, there’s no way to direct that speech. Which she realizes with mild dismay when she activates it for the first time. She gets the sleepy voice of an elderly woman from Dryad who really wants to make sure her granddaughter is watering her zinnias. It’s stupid, but Courtney talks about gardening with the spirit for about fifteen minutes and finally agrees to check on her flowers.
The zinnias are long gone, sadly, but the granddaughter is still living in berry burrow, now an old lady, herself. And her garden is fabulous, full of lantern-flowers and red maples and tangled pumpkin vines touched with frost. Come back in spring, she says. Hell, we’ll plant some zinnias for Grandma, they were always her favorite.
And Courtney has no way to contact the spirit again to let her know, but the next one she talks to, a man who died of pneumonia three winters ago, agrees to try to pass it along if he encounters her in the afterlife. He gives Courtney a recipe for chicken and dumplings, which she has no intention of making, until it occurs to her that Balthiel has probably never had chicken and dumplings, and then she sighs and goes to buy a bigger cooking pot.
She doesn’t try daily, but a few times a week she taps on the coin and asks who’s in there. Every now and again she gets a murderer or a mercenary, or someone who just plain doesn’t want to tell her anything about themselves and takes the opportunity to bitch about the living instead, but for the most part they’re willing to chat and send her on stupid fetch quests to their surviving friends, relatives, and lovers. Becoming Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense was never something she aspired to, but it is a pretty decent diversion, and she’s collecting more insider information and town gossip than she would have expected. Best baker in Grey Ward. Where to find the shells they grind up to make rare purple dye in Salt Spire. The name of trees that grew on Gancheori’s Spine two hundred years ago, which may be extinct now, but go look, child, when you get a chance. If they’re still there, they may be the oldest living things in this world.
(Bullshit, the next ghost tells her. The oldest living thing here is a vast mushroom that grows under the forest on the western side of Terra’s territory. He should know, he was the foremost botanist of his time! Look up his books. There are eight of them and at least six are still in print!)
All these star gods, but there’s no god of the dead here. Courntey wonders about that. And then she wonders where Aella is, and if some day she’ll reach out and run into her, and what she’ll say about Nymion when she hears what’s going on. But maybe star gods go somewhere different when they die.
She’s drinking coffee one morning when she taps the coin, and she almost chokes at the voice that emerges.
“I thought I taught you to use protection wards, young lady, whenever you make an attempt at necromancy. I’m not around to extract vengeful spirits from your skull any longer, you need to be more careful–”
She sets the cup down with a trembling hand. “...Uncle A? How…”
“You tell me.”
So she does. First: Caldera. The quest to help Bonita stop the necromancer making counterfeit bones. The fight with a room full of vampires. Her new friends. (She absolutely cannot bring herself to tell Uncle Aloysius she has a boyfriend. Sorry, Bathiel. But he can read between the lines.)
She gives him a rundown of recent events, and then she starts talking about back home. Will. The vengeful forest spirit. The reemergence of the Byzantine, the self-styled vampire king.
“Courtney!” He interrupts her halfway through the tale. “You didn’t. Gods. Please tell me you didn’t use the Ruptor Maladicta.”
“I didn’t,” she confirms. “Well. Except on a door, I don’t think that counts. But it was a near thing. I think Will kind of saved my bacon there.”
But it felt right, that cursed-blessed weapon, in the palm of her hand. She knows the risk. She’s not as afraid of them as she probably should be. It’s not like there’s anything in a normal life that appeals to her at this point, anyway. Not, at least, except baking horror cookies with friends and making chicken and dumplings for a huge, awkward, powerful man who seems to like her for some unfathomable reason. She might as well be honor-bound to slay the forces of the damned wherever she finds them, until death takes her. Right?
“Listen to me, little one. I understand the appeal. I do. I was…I was about your age when I took the burden on myself. It was glorious at first. Destiny, purpose. All the things I thought I wanted when I was twenty. But by the time you’re thirty, or sixty, or ninety…you won’t want it any longer. You’ll want anything but.”
She sighs, mulish, but trying to listen. “But I’m not you. You don’t know what I’ll want when I’m sixty. Neither do I. Hell, mom and dad are almost fifty and they don’t know what the hell they want now.”
“...making the same mistakes as me is the last thing I wanted for you.”
“Give me some fucking credit, Uncle A. I can make all new mistakes.”
“Language!”
The admonition has the opposite of the effect he desired, probably. She giggles. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Gee willikers, Uncle A, give me some slagging credit for knowing my own ding-dang capabilities.”
She can see the unimpressed expression on his face. The baleful look that would have made her cringe and apologize in her tweens, but just makes her nostalgic now. Gods, she wants to hug him until his bones creak.
“My point,” she goes on. “You remember when you told me if I’m losing the game I’m playing, just play a different game?”
“I remember,” his voice is softer now, sad and tender.
“Maybe that’s the game I want to play. Hide and seek, instead of solitaire.”
“Courtney. Please…”
“I haven’t made any decisions yet, don’t freak out. There are things I need to consider, like who exactly the damned are.” Because she’s not about trying to kill her friends, and there’s a better than zero chance the Ruptor Maladicta would zero in on Rosemary, or even Balthiel. And there are demons here, other creatures of darkness that are for the most part just living their lives and not trying to destroy anyone else’s, but they have a past and an alignment. “And how much choice I get in when and where to fight them.”
“If I could have destroyed that thing rather than leave it to you, I would have.” He sighs, and outside the walls of her apartment, the wind sighs with him.
“Yeah, well. Hindsight. I promise you this much: no one else is gonna touch it, while I’m around to keep it locked and warded.” Because Will deserves better, and so do his little friends. She can absolutely see Cinnamon or Tucker trying to use it and getting in over their heads, and she is not going to let that happen.
“I’m bringing it here. But I won’t use it unless it’s life or death.”
“I hate that you’re thinking about it.” But a dead man can’t be a parent. “Be careful, my dear. I only wanted you to be safe, and have the life you deserved, with someone by your side.”
“...well. You gave me that. Not gonna lie, you left a lot of chaos behind you and I feel like it’s going to be me cleaning it up to spare Will, but…you left me Will. That makes up for anything bad.”
“Mm. Tell him that when you see him next.”
“Ugh. I don’t do sentimental well.”
“You do. You feel things just as deeply as he does, and just as tenderly. I wanted…I wanted you to have one another, after I failed him.”
“I always thought you saw yourself in me, or maybe Calpurnia.”
“In some ways, perhaps. But your heart is very much like Will’s. You have hope, Courtney. Be better than me, won’t you?”
“I…I’ll try.”
The power of the coin can’t linger forever. And maybe she’ll be able to find him again, or maybe he’ll find her, somehow, but when she speaks next, Uncle A doesn’t answer, and she’s not surprised. Maybe she cries into her coffee for a little while, but that’s not that unusual for her. She spends so much time alone so she can sort out her emotions without outside interference, after all.
By the time the cup is washed and put back on the shelf, she’s calm again, and pensive, and getting out her journal to make a note of how many Bones she’ll need to bring a magical weapon here from home.
She’s surprised to find has more than enough already. All she has to do is ask for it.
Trouble is, there’s no way to direct that speech. Which she realizes with mild dismay when she activates it for the first time. She gets the sleepy voice of an elderly woman from Dryad who really wants to make sure her granddaughter is watering her zinnias. It’s stupid, but Courtney talks about gardening with the spirit for about fifteen minutes and finally agrees to check on her flowers.
The zinnias are long gone, sadly, but the granddaughter is still living in berry burrow, now an old lady, herself. And her garden is fabulous, full of lantern-flowers and red maples and tangled pumpkin vines touched with frost. Come back in spring, she says. Hell, we’ll plant some zinnias for Grandma, they were always her favorite.
And Courtney has no way to contact the spirit again to let her know, but the next one she talks to, a man who died of pneumonia three winters ago, agrees to try to pass it along if he encounters her in the afterlife. He gives Courtney a recipe for chicken and dumplings, which she has no intention of making, until it occurs to her that Balthiel has probably never had chicken and dumplings, and then she sighs and goes to buy a bigger cooking pot.
She doesn’t try daily, but a few times a week she taps on the coin and asks who’s in there. Every now and again she gets a murderer or a mercenary, or someone who just plain doesn’t want to tell her anything about themselves and takes the opportunity to bitch about the living instead, but for the most part they’re willing to chat and send her on stupid fetch quests to their surviving friends, relatives, and lovers. Becoming Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense was never something she aspired to, but it is a pretty decent diversion, and she’s collecting more insider information and town gossip than she would have expected. Best baker in Grey Ward. Where to find the shells they grind up to make rare purple dye in Salt Spire. The name of trees that grew on Gancheori’s Spine two hundred years ago, which may be extinct now, but go look, child, when you get a chance. If they’re still there, they may be the oldest living things in this world.
(Bullshit, the next ghost tells her. The oldest living thing here is a vast mushroom that grows under the forest on the western side of Terra’s territory. He should know, he was the foremost botanist of his time! Look up his books. There are eight of them and at least six are still in print!)
All these star gods, but there’s no god of the dead here. Courntey wonders about that. And then she wonders where Aella is, and if some day she’ll reach out and run into her, and what she’ll say about Nymion when she hears what’s going on. But maybe star gods go somewhere different when they die.
She’s drinking coffee one morning when she taps the coin, and she almost chokes at the voice that emerges.
“I thought I taught you to use protection wards, young lady, whenever you make an attempt at necromancy. I’m not around to extract vengeful spirits from your skull any longer, you need to be more careful–”
She sets the cup down with a trembling hand. “...Uncle A? How…”
“You tell me.”
So she does. First: Caldera. The quest to help Bonita stop the necromancer making counterfeit bones. The fight with a room full of vampires. Her new friends. (She absolutely cannot bring herself to tell Uncle Aloysius she has a boyfriend. Sorry, Bathiel. But he can read between the lines.)
She gives him a rundown of recent events, and then she starts talking about back home. Will. The vengeful forest spirit. The reemergence of the Byzantine, the self-styled vampire king.
“Courtney!” He interrupts her halfway through the tale. “You didn’t. Gods. Please tell me you didn’t use the Ruptor Maladicta.”
“I didn’t,” she confirms. “Well. Except on a door, I don’t think that counts. But it was a near thing. I think Will kind of saved my bacon there.”
But it felt right, that cursed-blessed weapon, in the palm of her hand. She knows the risk. She’s not as afraid of them as she probably should be. It’s not like there’s anything in a normal life that appeals to her at this point, anyway. Not, at least, except baking horror cookies with friends and making chicken and dumplings for a huge, awkward, powerful man who seems to like her for some unfathomable reason. She might as well be honor-bound to slay the forces of the damned wherever she finds them, until death takes her. Right?
“Listen to me, little one. I understand the appeal. I do. I was…I was about your age when I took the burden on myself. It was glorious at first. Destiny, purpose. All the things I thought I wanted when I was twenty. But by the time you’re thirty, or sixty, or ninety…you won’t want it any longer. You’ll want anything but.”
She sighs, mulish, but trying to listen. “But I’m not you. You don’t know what I’ll want when I’m sixty. Neither do I. Hell, mom and dad are almost fifty and they don’t know what the hell they want now.”
“...making the same mistakes as me is the last thing I wanted for you.”
“Give me some fucking credit, Uncle A. I can make all new mistakes.”
“Language!”
The admonition has the opposite of the effect he desired, probably. She giggles. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Gee willikers, Uncle A, give me some slagging credit for knowing my own ding-dang capabilities.”
She can see the unimpressed expression on his face. The baleful look that would have made her cringe and apologize in her tweens, but just makes her nostalgic now. Gods, she wants to hug him until his bones creak.
“My point,” she goes on. “You remember when you told me if I’m losing the game I’m playing, just play a different game?”
“I remember,” his voice is softer now, sad and tender.
“Maybe that’s the game I want to play. Hide and seek, instead of solitaire.”
“Courtney. Please…”
“I haven’t made any decisions yet, don’t freak out. There are things I need to consider, like who exactly the damned are.” Because she’s not about trying to kill her friends, and there’s a better than zero chance the Ruptor Maladicta would zero in on Rosemary, or even Balthiel. And there are demons here, other creatures of darkness that are for the most part just living their lives and not trying to destroy anyone else’s, but they have a past and an alignment. “And how much choice I get in when and where to fight them.”
“If I could have destroyed that thing rather than leave it to you, I would have.” He sighs, and outside the walls of her apartment, the wind sighs with him.
“Yeah, well. Hindsight. I promise you this much: no one else is gonna touch it, while I’m around to keep it locked and warded.” Because Will deserves better, and so do his little friends. She can absolutely see Cinnamon or Tucker trying to use it and getting in over their heads, and she is not going to let that happen.
“I’m bringing it here. But I won’t use it unless it’s life or death.”
“I hate that you’re thinking about it.” But a dead man can’t be a parent. “Be careful, my dear. I only wanted you to be safe, and have the life you deserved, with someone by your side.”
“...well. You gave me that. Not gonna lie, you left a lot of chaos behind you and I feel like it’s going to be me cleaning it up to spare Will, but…you left me Will. That makes up for anything bad.”
“Mm. Tell him that when you see him next.”
“Ugh. I don’t do sentimental well.”
“You do. You feel things just as deeply as he does, and just as tenderly. I wanted…I wanted you to have one another, after I failed him.”
“I always thought you saw yourself in me, or maybe Calpurnia.”
“In some ways, perhaps. But your heart is very much like Will’s. You have hope, Courtney. Be better than me, won’t you?”
“I…I’ll try.”
The power of the coin can’t linger forever. And maybe she’ll be able to find him again, or maybe he’ll find her, somehow, but when she speaks next, Uncle A doesn’t answer, and she’s not surprised. Maybe she cries into her coffee for a little while, but that’s not that unusual for her. She spends so much time alone so she can sort out her emotions without outside interference, after all.
By the time the cup is washed and put back on the shelf, she’s calm again, and pensive, and getting out her journal to make a note of how many Bones she’ll need to bring a magical weapon here from home.
She’s surprised to find has more than enough already. All she has to do is ask for it.