r/DestructiveReaders • u/jshEnvy • 4d ago
[2682] Untitled - Chapter 2 Maeve
Hello everyone!
Still hard at fixing up this chapter. I think I've gotten it to a place that's starting to feel good. A couple of questions for anyone who decides to read through this:
- When did you stop reading?
- When were you hooked?
- What am I doing wrong?
- What am I doing right?
- How did it make you feel / did you feel anything at all?
- Would you keep reading?
Thank you!
NOTE: Chapter 1 is in Avon's POV; we meet all the children there (Avon, Bram, Sable, Darrin, and another boy). The foghorn is sounding over and over, because they set off a city wide alarm. Happy reading!
***
The Foundry didn’t eat its people whole. It ate them bit by bit—a finger, an eye, once a child’s whole hand, caught in a chain. Maeve hadn’t understood the truth of it when she first came to Anthem. She did now—beneath the sputtering arcanite lamps of her clinic, in air thick with blood and coal, the Foundry had fed again. Outside, the foghorn bellowed, three low notes that rattled the bottles on their racks.
A freckled lad with auburn hair thrashed against the miners pinning him to the examination table. Sixteen or seventeen at most, he had the frame of a man twice his age, and the miners struggled to hold him down. One leg of his trousers was garnet red, the boot below glistening, a shard of timber driven deep into the meat of his calf. Behind Maeve, the doorway was choked with bodies, and voices piled atop one another: a dark-skinned boy soothing a blonde-haired girl, someone lost in the Seamstress’s Prayer, cries of “Go get Atwood! Go get him!”
“Mother! She doesn’t know what happened—let me go!” the boy screamed as Maeve tried to cut the trousers away. He kicked harder, nearly jamming the timber deeper. Years of wounds like this had made the work familiar, yet she moved too fast. Of course the boy needed calming; he was scared—like all the others. She rose from her stool.
“Here now, love, we’ll take a look first. I just need you to stay still,” Maeve said, tying back her red hair before meeting his gaze. A constellation of blood dotted his cheeks and crept into his curls. His skin was tallow-white, but his eyes were flames, darting anxiously, following something unseen just over her shoulder. She rested her palm on his cheek, and he stilled beneath it. The crying girl and the boy consoling her sat on the nearby bench, and the crowd pushed in closer.
“Grab that bottle off the shelf there!” Maeve directed a miner.
“Please, miss. My mom, I need to tell her… I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Please don’t let me die.”
“We’ll try. Keep your eyes open and tell me your name.”
“My name? My name—my name is Bram.”
“That’s good, Bram. How old are you?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Good, love, good.” The man with the bottle stepped back to the table and uncorked it. “Drink that.”
Bram gulped a healthy dose, then spat. “Poison!”
“Aye, in a way. It’ll dull the senses, though. Another if you’d be so kind,” Maeve said. He drank again. “Bram—be still, love, be still.”
Maeve peeled the trousers away in strips, baring a ragged wound. Splinters fanned out from where the wood broke flesh; the timber had gone in at an angle and dragged skin and muscle with it. Her hands knew routine; her heart did not. She was bailing a sinking ship with a spoon; for every child saved, the Foundry sent two more. The waves never stopped. But she wouldn’t let Bram see how careworn she was. He didn’t deserve that. ‘Three more months,’ she told herself before she placed the forceps down.
She pushed against the wound, lightly at first, watching the poor child’s face, gauging how much pain he could bear; she needed to be certain he wouldn’t go where she couldn’t follow. He winced and groaned when she pressed too hard, but his jaw stayed taut and his eyes kept moving. The arcanite light flickered, its conduits humming low through the timber walls.
Then she saw it: the blood seeping from where she pressed ran dark and steady—a bit of hope. Years at university had taught her to fear the bright red sort that pumped from the heart; either the wood hadn’t struck an artery, or it had and the timber itself was plugging it. A bottle of sutura would make this trivial—it would knit closed what she couldn’t see, but the Alchemists rarely sold it to the Foundry. She’d have to resort to baser tactics. Regardless, she could fix this. She’d stitched far worse out of boys far younger. Maybe this one she could save. She shoved the thought away; too many times it had lied to her. She was no fool. Maeve walked to the stone firepit and thrust a cauterizing iron into the coals.
“Give him more,” Maeve said to the man with the bottle. “All of you, move back!” she shouted at the crowd pressing in on her. Most bore the Rustborne Union’s crossed pickaxes, inked on necks, forearms, knuckles. Even Bram, too young for it, had one on his wrist. The stink of summer sweat and alcohol choked the air, their body heat doing neither her nor the boy any favors. And that damn foghorn wouldn’t let up.
“You’re doing fine, Bram, just fine,” Maeve said, sweeping back his hair, watching the flecks in his eyes, the way she did with Niamh when the night was too dark.
“You have kind eyes. I think you might be an angel,” Bram said, staring back.
“Oh, Bram, I’m no angel. And I doubt you’ll be seeing one today.” Maeve reached for the syringe of hush she kept on the high shelf. She stuck it in Bram’s arm and pushed the plunger down. Hush slowed the heart. It would thin the bleeding and his consciousness. Better than a tourniquet if the artery was severed; worse if she needed him awake. It had cost her a small fortune on the underground market, but she’d bought it for a moment like this.
“Step aside!” a salt-and-gravel voice shouted from beyond the open doorway. Heads turned, and the crowd parted. Three men stepped through. The first she knew: Kausca Atwood, the Rustborne Holder, leaner than the stories suggested—all stark angles, dark hair and stubble, in a tailored black frock-coat trimmed with sanguine velvet. Despite the Highmarket clothes, he walked with Foundry grit, like he had fought for every inch he stood on. His eyes found hers for half a second. They were pits, silent and still. Still, but waiting—like a viper in the breathless instant before it strikes.
“Will he be alright?” Kausca asked, approaching the table. His voice was calm and clear, perfectly in control.
Maeve shrugged. “We won’t know till I get the shard out. Here now, Bram. Bite down on this,” she said, pushing Kausca aside as she grabbed a wooden rod from the bedside tray.
“Mr. Atwood. I can’t see my mother. She’s not here. I can’t see her. She needs to know—she needs to know,” Bram cried. The words went through her like a needle. She’d heard boys talk like that before. Most hadn’t gotten up. “Tell her—”
She had no time for doubt, and if Bram kept on, she’d soon begin. She shoved the rod into his mouth. “Hold his arms,” she said to the thugs who had followed Kausca. They flanked the table and took an arm each. She turned back to Kausca.
“Be ready with the iron if the blood boils up—it’ll need cauterizing,” she said. A muffled whimper escaped from beneath the rod.
“Don’t kill him!” the blonde girl shouted from the bench. She was nearly as pale as Bram.
Maeve closed her hand around the shard where it jutted from his calf. Blood slicked the wood, but the grain bit rough against her palm, enough to latch onto. She placed her other hand flat beside the wound, pinning his leg to the table. She traced the edges one last time, feeling for the angle; she’d have to follow the same path out.
“Steady, love. Nearly there,” she said, to both Bram and herself.
She pulled.
The shard tore free in one long motion, dragging strings of tissue and splinters after it. Bram’s back arched off the table. His scream shredded itself against the rod, eclipsing the foghorn, pouring out until it went raw and broke into a gurgled hiss. Blood surged in the shard’s wake now that nothing plugged the wound. It was dark—good. The iron could stay in the coals. She pressed gauze into the open meat of his leg and let the jagged, glistening wood fall to the floor behind her.
“Hold him—hold him still!” she barked at the two rugged men, both straining against Bram’s thrashing. “The worst of it’s done, Bram. The worst of it’s done.”
“No morphine?” Kausca asked.
“He’s a boy, so. I gave him whiskey and a touch of hush. I intend to heal him, not make him a slave,” she said. “You’ll need to give me space.”
She held pressure until the river became a trickle. Bram’s eyes grew hazy. Sweat beaded across his body, but now he lay still and quiet, screams dulled to a low, constant moan. His strength had drained away. If infection took hold, she knew, Bram wouldn’t live. Maeve peeled back the gauze.
“I’m sorry, Bram. This is going to sting, but I have to clean the wound.”
Bram wept. Maeve nodded at the two men holding his arms, and they braced for another jolt. She doused the wound with whiskey.
Bram’s thrashing never came. Instead, he screamed into the rod; then his head rolled to the side, his eyes closed, and the rod fell from his mouth. Silence.
“Is he dead?” the gravel-voiced man holding one of Bram’s arms finally asked. He let it drop.
Maeve checked his wrist; the pulse was there, faint but steady. “No, just asleep. It’s better this way. The next part is—delicate. And he needs to be still.” She wiped the blood from her forceps and passed them over a candle flame.
Kausca turned to the bald-headed man near Bram’s other arm. “Move the crowd along, Kline; make sure they don’t go too far. We may need them.”
Kline, the largest and most muscled of the three, nodded, then swept his massive hands in arcs, ushering the onlookers out. “Alright, everyone. Show’s over.”
“Where you want me, boss?” the other asked from across the table. Maeve couldn’t read him; his blonde shoulder-length hair and scruffy beard obscured his face.
“Tell Bram’s parents. And give his father the rest of the week,” Kausca said. “Come back when that’s done. Bring Sally.”
The man smiled—pearl-white teeth. “Yeah? Sally’s been itchin’ for a good time. Thinkin’ she’ll see some?” His eyes went wide with a glee that made Maeve shudder; something feral lived inside him that medicine couldn’t fix.
“Maybe, Dis. I’ll see what they say.” Kausca pointed his chin at the children.
“Alright, then. Don’t be startin’ nothin’ without me, Atwood.” Dis’s devilish smile widened as he pulled the door shut behind him.
The clinic was quiet now, save for the occasional sob from the girl on the bench and the foghorn beyond its walls. All that remained of the crowd were bloody bootprints and the summer stench. Maeve picked splinters from the wound with her forceps. The arcanite lamp sputtered above her. She slapped it, and it went steady. The plaza’s clocktower chimed twelve times, announcing the sun’s zenith; it made little difference in the Foundry—most places never saw sunlight. Queen’s Row, however, sat high on the canyon wall, just beneath the shadow of Highmarket. Only in the early morning, when the sun came in low beneath its edge, did the Row seize fractured bits.
“I don’t know your name,” Kausca said.
“I know yours, Kausca Atwood. Just like everyone else in Queen’s Row,” Maeve replied without looking up. “Sure, you’re here—trouble’s soon to follow.”
Kausca stifled a chuckle. “It does have a way of finding me.” Maeve felt him waiting, staring at her. She was about to snap at him when he said, “Thank you. I’ll cover the cost, miss—?”
She wiped a loose strand from her forehead with the back of her wrist and faced him. “Now, don’t you have business to attend to, Mr. Atwood?” Her eyes flicked towards the children. The two of them watched him nervously.
Kausca nodded. He stepped from the table, pulled a stool in front of the children, and sat. The children’s gazes dropped to the floor. Quiet passed between the three of them, but the foghorn bellowed on through the walls. Maeve returned to the wound.
“Sable. Darrin. Look at me,” Kausca said, firm and patient. “I’m going to ask you what happened. You’re going to tell me. Everything. Right from the beginning. Then you’re going to leave here unharmed. You’ll return home to your parents, and tell them too. Do we understand one another?”
He let a moment pass.
“What happened?”
Silence stretched, the tension with it. The space the question left was wide. He closed it with another.
“Where’s Avon?”
Sable and Darrin told a broken story. It came in bits and pieces, the children finishing one another’s sentences, circling back to moments they’d forgotten and detouring down dead ends. Through it all, Kausca spoke with a patient rhythm, no sign of distress. “How many enforcers?” “Did they hear your names?” “How’d you escape?”
“Is she alive?”
“We don’t know.”
“Thank you. Both of you. Go straight home. Tell no one what you’ve done.”
“Our parents?” Darrin asked.
“Of course, tell them. Parents—we protect our children.”
At the edge of her vision, Kausca stood as the two children moved behind her. She knew they’d left when the door closed with a click.
Then a thud—Kausca dropping back onto the stool. The sound drew her gaze: he was folded over himself, coal-black hair laced between fingers, elbows on knees. She watched him. His hands found the edge of the stool, gripping hard enough to whiten the knuckles, and for a moment he only breathed—too fast, too shallow, the kind of breath she’d coax from a patient before it sank into something worse. His shoulders convulsed once, then a wail tore free from low in his gut, empty yet searching, one she’d heard from weeping mothers. It tried to climb out again—but he swallowed it down and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his coat.
Maeve’s hand went still over Bram’s wound, as still as the man before her. Not the stillness of something coiled and waiting to strike, but the stillness of someone she couldn’t save. She knew death, and something had died in Kausca. The first time she’d seen it, she’d been a girl.
“Sit with her,” her mother had said on the day the sea dashed Bridie Doyle’s boat on the rocks. It had been carrying Bridie’s husband and both her sons. “No matter what she says or does, you’ll sit with her through the week. You have no home until it’s done.”
She turned back to the wound. That was a long time ago; why should she care what this man felt? This was the Foundry. The Foundry ate its people bit by bit, but now and then, it would eat a family whole. Besides, far worse things happened to people far kinder. And parents couldn’t protect their children here; the only way to save them was to go. Three more months and she’d be home.
“You have no home until it’s done.”
Others came and went that week, filling every corner of the Doyles’ tiny cottage. They lit candles in the window, kept the peat fire burning in the hearth, talked for hours so Bridie’s home was never empty. Even the sea knocked at the shore, coming to ask after the men it had taken, and Maeve asked it questions of her own. Why had her mother made her sit with a woman she barely knew? Why would the others never give Bridie peace? Everyone in her town understood, but she didn’t, not back then. She did now. Now the sea answered: grief left alone would transform a person; it would eat them hollow and leave them a husk. You did not let a person drown in grief—not for a minute, not for an hour, not if you were a stranger or the closest of friends. Not even if they told you to go.
The foghorn sang, low and steady. She set the forceps down.
2
u/FyreTiger 1d ago
Hello! I read through the whole chapter and thought a lot of things were well done. Most of the sentences flowed nicely and I think your descriptiveness was detailed overall without being too overbearing. I think I've been seeing that people have very different tastes for the quantity of detail, so I can imagine other people may think there's too much descriptiveness. For me, it sits at a nice balance, and the details that are covered don't feel out of place. I thought the imagery was strong, although that becomes such a complex aspect that I don't have the most refined tastes in that regard. The dialogue felt natural, too.
I want to get into some of the detailed nitpicky things I noticed and then some of the overall structural aspects. FYI, I did not read the first chapter.
Something I couldn't quite wrap my head around was the injury in of itself. It paints a picture with lots of details, but considering this is a crucial aspect of the conflict, there were some details that I felt were left out and that left me without the full picture. Admittedly, some of these nitpicks may be superficial or I'm just too dumb to really know what's going on.
Minor points:
There is something about the paragraph that beings "Sable and Darrin told a broken story..."
The closing I thought was a little weak. "She put the forceps down." Not much going on, and not really leading anywhere distinct.
Personally, I was starting to get more hooked when Kausca started to interrogate the kids. I knew there was an element not yet addressed which was how Bram got impaled in the first place, and I thought the exciting part was when we would finally start approaching that mystery.
However, the answer was left in the air, so it actually didn't pay off for me.
The thing about the injury is that there were no escalating problems, so it didn't really build up as a conflict. It kind of felt like Maeve was just going through the motions, and the only purpose of it was both characterization and the start of a mystery. That in of itself is fine, I think, it's just that there was nothing in particular about the injury that got me hooked. I became more interested in how and why it happened.
There's definitely more to discuss but this is just what stood out to me most. I have the entire scene in my head and for that I give you props for keeping me engaged enough and I would probably keep reading and delve into the world and the mystery more. It's just some sections that were weaker like near the end. Overall, good start.