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lb_leeTandy, Tandy, Burning Bright
Series: Xanth fanfiction
Summary: When life sends you nightmares, you ride them. When life sends you Smash Ogre, you ride HIM. Tandy deals with her sense of species identity, harnesses her nightmares, faces her demons, loses and regains her soul, and gets a character arc.
Word Count: 21,000
Notes: We have so many feelings and thoughts about Xanth in general and Tandy in particular that we're just going to put them in the comments below. Content warnings for reference to magically-compelled love, an incest metaphor that's never acted on, a magically-compelled suicide attempt (quickly thwarted, everyone's fine), fantasy racism (MAJOR theme), consensual kink (soul play, magical impact play), and sex. Also Tandy becomes median for this fic!
She is a little girl, delighted because her soldier father is home for once on leave. Excited, determined to impress him, she shows him everything Jewel taught her by enacting a game of gem hide-and-seek.
“I’ll hide them, just like Mom does! Then you have to find them. Close your eyes; no peeking!”
Chuckling indulgently, Crombie covers his eyes, pretending to peek until she mock-scolds him. Then she takes the reject gems from her mother’s barrel (blue rubies, round crystals, floppy diamonds) and hides them around the home caves. When she shouts, “Ready!” Crombie heaves himself up from the chair with sounds of comedic effort, tucks his daughter (shrieking with delight) under his arm, and starts the hunt.
Most, of course, he finds right away, stashed in corners, cabinets, and under doilies. The one in the back of his sock drawer earns her a pat on the head and a, “clever child, just like her old man.”
One, though, he can’t find.
He searches high and low, first casually, then increasingly seriously. As she becomes ever more gleeful, he gets more and more determined, ransacking the cave, even patting her down in case she hid the gem in her pocket, but it’s not there. He’s in the process of digging through the gem barrel (even though, by nature, it is always full, so Tandy couldn’t have hidden one in it) when Jewel comes home. She looks upon the chaos—the tousled bedding, the overflowing gems, her shamefaced husband—with dismay.
“Crombie!” she cries, with a smell like burning. “The mess! What are you doing?”
“I hid a jewel he can’t find!” Tandy crows, delighted at having outfoxed an adult.
Jewel’s scent goes from agitated smoke storm to fresh-cut flowers. “Did you?” She bends to hug her daughter. “Well done, my darling! You’ve learned so well. Show me where you hid it!”
Aglow with pride, Tandy steps out of her shoes and plucks the final failure, a floppy diamond, from its hiding place between her toes. It was such a pitiful little thing, it hadn’t even made her limp, and though Crombie had patted her down and checked her shoes, he hadn’t thought to check her socks.
Jewel clucks her tongue, though her scent stays cheerful. “Oh, that’s just a trick. When you grow up, you can’t hide them there, silly girl. The gems have to long outlast you!”
“Aw…”
Jewel kisses her cheek. “You still did a good job. Didn’t she, dear?”
Crombie is silent. He seems thoughtful. He takes the squishy diamond and absently spins it through his fingers.
“See, Dad, see?” Tandy says. “I’m going to be a gem nymph, just like Mom!”
“You’re no nymph,” he says. “You’re too clever. You’re human, sure enough.”
Even though he smiles a second later, it doesn’t reach his eyes. Something about it makes her feel bad. At the time, though, she’s too young to understand why, so she puts the unthinkable thought out of her mind and runs to tell Jewel about her day.
…
A few years later, when Tandy wakes up with blood on her sheets, Jewel does her best to explain the facts of life. It’s a challenge, since Jewel is a nymph, immune to such human indignities, but she is a special nymph, capable of bearing and raising a child, and she’s been married to Crombie for many years, so she certainly knows what sex is.
“You’re growing up,” she says, blushing as she passes Tandy the rags and cottonwood packets. “It’s important for you to know these things.”
Tandy is horrified. Not because of the blood itself—though she does think it’s a rotten trick to play on a person—but because it means she’s becoming a woman, a human woman. Everyone knows how Crombie feels about human women.
But she’s not just any human woman, right? She’s also a nymph, and he does love nymphs. (Indeed, he loved Jewel so much that he had to put a love spell on her, just so she could feel it back!) Tandy’s his daughter. It’s different. It has to be.
But she and Crombie start getting into fights. He insists Tandy’s changing, becoming ornery, deceitful, and bad-tempered “in the manner of her kind.” Tandy swears it’s him. Little things that never seemed to concern him before—what she wears, where she goes—are suddenly matters of huge importance… though only when he’s home. Once he’s gone, things go back to normal, and Tandy’s old enough to notice the inconsistency and point it out.
She doesn’t even remember what starts the fight when she’s thirteen. It’s some piffling detail that never seemed to matter before but does now. Things get heated. Jewel wrings her hands helplessly. Neither Tandy nor Crombie will back down, insisting the other is wrong. They get louder and louder, angrier and angrier.
Then, to her humiliation, Tandy starts crying.
Crombie scents blood. “You want to act like a woman? Be treated like a woman? Fine! Cry all you want. You can’t fool me. Women only cry for one reason…”
But Tandy isn’t crying to manipulate him. She’s crying because she’s so helplessly, furiously angry. It boils in her guts like lava in a volcano, and as Crombie informs her that adults need to learn to manage themselves, she reaches back and hurls her rage at him.
Tandy’s thrown tantrums before, of course. Her magic was discovered in her terrible twos, when it destroyed a particularly hideous dress that she didn’t want to wear. But after causing a dangerous cave-in when she was eight, she’s reined herself in.
She’s grown a lot since then. So has her magic.
Her rage hits Crombie square in the chest, sending him crashing into the cave wall. A shelf breaks, scattering herbs and spices. He slides to the floor, bleeding from his forehead, and for a horrible moment, Tandy thinks she’s killed her father. Then he looks up and glares at her so hard she falls back a step. Jewel rushes to help him stagger to his feet.
“You little… is this how you behave?” he says.
“I’m sorry,” Tandy says. “I’m sorry!” And she is, she truly is.
Crombie turns away, and Jewel turns with him. Over her shoulder, in a soft, sad voice that’s far worse than Crombie’s fury, she says, “It’s not nice to be destructive.”
She smells of cold ashes, and Tandy realizes the true depth of what she’s done. Jewel loves her daughter, but in an ordinary, maternal way. Crombie, though, she loves with magical urgency, the Love of Her Life, the sun in her sky. She can always have more children, but there will only ever be one Crombie, and now that Tandy’s forced her mother to choose between them, nothing will ever be the same again.
And all because of her childish, shameful, destructive magic. Throwing tantrums, like a thwarted toddler.
So Tandy shoves her anger down, deep inside, and keeps it there.
…
After that big fight, Crombie spends less and less time at home, and the few times he’s around, he’s… distant? Not angry, exactly, but something unpleasant and stagnant hangs in the caves, like bad air. Tandy starts waking up at night to find him standing just outside her bedroom door. Never speaking, never doing anything, just watching her in a way that makes her uneasy.
Those experiences prepare her for when she meets the demon Fiant. She could’ve sworn that she knew all the neighborhood demons, that they weren’t building rum works in the area, that Fiant and his works just come out of nowhere. Bur when she blunders in like a child, Fiant isn’t angry. He just smiles a little, and gives her a look that she could swear she’s never seen before, but which she nevertheless instantly recognizes.
When Fiant starts his own nighttime break-ins into her room, he does far more than just stand and watch. He’s so aggressive that Tandy overcomes her fear of her magic to blast him with it. The tantrum does make him leave, but he’ll be back… and now he knows what her talent is, that he can withstand it.
As horrible as Fiant is, he is in some ways a relief. At least Tandy knows what he’s doing, that it’s wrong, and why. He is a relative stranger, so she isn’t obligated to like him, love him, or make excuses for him. She can tell him no, fight back, tell her mother and neighbors without fear, so she does.
The neighbors’ reactions are bewildering. They insist, to a man (or demon, rather) that none of them have ever seen or heard of Fiant before. He truly does seem to have come out of nowhere, speaking and appearing to no one. Tandy’s baffled.
And as for Jewel, she refuses to hear it. She insists that Fiant is a neighbor, and neighbors are lovely, so surely Tandy is misunderstanding the situation. Jewel lives in her own rose-tinted world most of the time, but this is beyond her usual naïveté. Tandy refuses to suspect why.
Even if she won’t allow herself to think it, she knows what she has to do: escape the caves. If her mother and her neighbors can’t help her, then she’ll have to do it herself.
Tandy has never left the underworld before, and she’s never felt so trapped in it. That fear ends up being her way out. When life sends you nightmares, you ride them.
It takes work and practice. Tandy has never ridden anything but her mother’s diggle before, and a giant undulating worm is nothing like a horse, never mind a diaphanous, demonic one. But she is motivated; she trains herself in leaping out of bed to sit astride a couple of chairs (her makeshift practice “horse”). She practices alert, she practices groggy, she practices right as she’s sliding into twilight sleep… and all that practice pays off, when she nabs her first nightmare.
Because it’s the only place on the surface world she knows, she tells the demon horse to bring her to Castle Roogna, where Crombie works. But maybe her nightmare knows better. Maybe it does Tandy a favor, bringing her to her grandfather instead.
Not that Tandy is aware of that salacious bit of family history, yet. That tidbit won’t get unearthed for decades, and when she does finally find out, she’ll be livid. Now, though, living underground with no human contact but her father, she can’t know Humfrey as anything but the famous Magician of Information. He surely knows about her, though; it’s his job, and when his granddaughter collapses on his doorstep, frightened and battered from riding the nightmare all night to escape her would-be demon rapist, he treats her as a supplicant.
“Well?” he grumps. “What’s your Question?”
“I—I don’t have a Question,” Tandy says, exhausted and confused. “I’m just trying to get to my father Crombie, at Castle Roogna.”
Humfrey pauses. He twitches a bushy eyebrow. Then he says, “People always ask the wrong Questions, then refuse to accept the Answers. Well, you can do your year of service in advance. Maybe by then, you’ll figure it out.”
And so Tandy becomes her grandfather’s maid for a year, even as everyone tells her how lucky she is for having the customary three challenges waived. Ever so grateful for his beneficence, she scrubs dishes and chamber pots, polishes magic mirrors, washes and mends and folds countless pairs of socks. (And decades later, when she finds out who her grandmother is, she rages. Sofia Socksorter the Second!)
That’s still in the future, though. For now, she tells herself how lucky she is, does her work without complaint, and shoves it all down into her tantrums, her little bit of magic, which she doesn’t use once, that entire year.
Family history aside, it isn’t bad, her year of service. Thanks to the spirit levels guarding the castle, she’s safe. She gets to learn new skills, hear all kinds of gossip, and see all kinds of beings, if only in passing. There’s a sort of camaraderie among the supplicants giving service (“What are you in for?”) and everyone’s willing to help each other out. That’s nice. She doesn’t even mind cleaning up after the griffins and harpies and even, once, a blindfolded basilisk. How many people get to truly see a basilisk—more than once, that is?
Even telling her parents proves surprisingly easy. Jewel, characteristically, is fine the moment she gets a letter explaining where Tandy is. She doesn’t ask how or why her daughter went to Good Magician Humfrey. Crombie, also characteristically, throws a fit that puts his daughter’s tantrums to shame… but at Humfrey, not Tandy. Her, he gives the silent treatment, which flummoxes (and hurts) her at the time. It isn’t until much, much later, upon learning her family history, that Tandy realizes that Crombie must have assumed she discovered the ancestral link and went behind his back, choosing his loathed father over himself. (Humfrey, of course, doesn’t explain. He just tosses a towel over the steaming magic mirror and says, “He’ll get over it in thirty years. Don’t bother cleaning this one for a couple hours.”)
The spirit levels all over Humfrey’s castle keep demons away, lest their spirits be flattened, but that isn’t enough to completely stop Fiant. The moment that Jewel receives Tandy’s letter stating where she is, the nymph must tell the neighbors, because the following morning, Tandy finds two magic letters for her. One is a comforting, loving, “thank goodness you’re all right!” letter from Jewel. The second, Tandy innocently presumes, must come from Crombie, so she opens it.
It is not from Crombie.
When Tandy doesn’t come down for breakfast, the Gorgon comes up to find her weeping in the supplicant dormitory.
“Tandy!” The faceless woman rushes to her, wrapping an arm and a couple serpentine coils of hair around her. “What’s the matter?”
Petting the snakes (who have ceased hissing out of concern for her), Tandy hands over the letter, too ashamed to say anything more. The Gorgon unfolds the letter and the snakes focus their attention on it, reading along with her.
The spell of invisibility on the Gorgon’s face hides her expression, but the snakes start hissing again, twisting with agitation. One snaps at another.
“Is that why you came here?” the Gorgon asks.
Tandy, still crying, nods. “He must’ve found out from my mother.”
“I see. Well, you’re safe here. He can’t come get you, never mind do any of the repulsive things he says in this letter.” The corners have started to char from the words contained. “Would you like me to bring this up to Humfrey?”
“No,” Tandy says, horrified. Humfrey is a brilliant, important, grumpy man, and she’s absolutely sure he will have no patience for such trivialities. The Gorgon, despite being his wife with a petrifying gaze, has been far more friendly and approachable, in Tandy’s opinion anyway. “I don’t need him to do anything. Just… now every letter I get, I’ll have to worry it’s from him.”
The Gorgon says, “If you like, I can read them for you. Or, even better, I could reroute your magic mailbox to mine and weed out such filth beforehand, so you only receive the proper things.”
“Oh, could you? It wouldn’t be too much trouble? The letters are so…”
“My dear, this Fiant person is repulsive, but he’s a stranger to me. His letters will disgust me, but they can’t hurt me. You aren’t the first person who’s come running from someone. Now, if you want, I can tell you if he sends anything, just so you know…”
“No, no,” Tandy urges. “I want nothing to do with him, or his letters. Just throw them away and don’t tell me anything about them.” She rethinks. “Unless he threatens my mother or something like that. I’d want to warn her. I don’t think he will, though. He’s surely been her neighbor for years, and it’s never been a problem for them.”
“I’ll happily do that for you. That’ll be no trouble at all.” The Gorgon tucks the letter away, and the moment it’s out of sight, Tandy feels better. “Now come along, dear. Your breakfast is getting cold. You’ll feel better after eating.”
The two women go down to breakfast, and that’s the last Tandy hears about any letters from Fiant. She is grateful for that courtesy.
Those are the three men in Tandy’s life: Crombie, Fiant, and Humfrey.
And then there’s Smash Ogre.
Crombie freezing Tandy out has a chilling effect on their relationship, to the point that when her year is up, Tandy realizes she has no desire to go to him. This has indeed led her to decide on her Question: “how do I escape Fiant, for good?”
Having seen Humfrey’s disdain for muddy, poorly thought out Questions, she’s spent a lot of time thinking hers through, and it seems a good, sensible one. Tandy expects the Answer to be similarly straightforward: a purchase of a spell, perhaps a letter to the correct Roogna official.
Instead, she gets called into Humfrey’s office, an intimidating space stuffed to the rafters with priceless magical artifacts and books… and an ogre, who is improbably soaking wet and trying his hardest to curl himself small enough to not break or soak anything. (Having cleaned Humfrey’s office multiple times, Tandy knows that this is impossible, and she has a moment of maid’s panic before she realizes, with some surprise, that such things are no longer her problem.) It isn’t the best first impression.
Though Tandy has certainly heard about ogres, this is the first time she’s seen one. He’s a giant, hulking black furball with a crooked potato nose (clearly broken multiple times) and big pointed cauliflower ears (one missing a chunk) that swivel like a beast’s. He wears an orange jacket, steel gauntlets, and nothing else… which is embarrassing, since her eye-level is right at his groin, but neither Smash nor Humfrey seem to notice, so Tandy straightens her back and desperately bluffs that she doesn’t either.
“The two of you travel together,” is all Humfrey says to her. To Smash, he adds, “You’ll find what you want among the Ancestral Ogres.”
Up until now, Tandy has fantasized, perhaps naïvely, about getting her Answer, fulfilling it, and going home to return to her old life as jewel-nymph-in-training, just now free of Fiant. Now she has a horrid premonition of trying to introduce this monster to Jewel. He’ll barely fit through the door. He’ll knock over every delicate object in the place, chew on emeralds like rock candy, demolish the doilies. And he smells like wet livestock.
No. Tandy is not going home, and she is not going to Castle Roogna.
Where can she go, then?
“If you would do me a favor,” the Gorgon says, “I used to live on an island near the Magic Dust Village. My sister, the Siren, remains in the area, and if you would convey my greetings…”
After everything the Gorgon has done for her, Tandy is more than happy to. But… “But how can I travel with an ogre?” A big, intimidating, indisputably male ogre, alone.
The Gorgon puts a comforting arm around her. “Smash is no ordinary ogre. He’s honest and halfway civilized. He will perform his service correctly, to the best of his limited understanding.” Seeing Tandy’s nervousness, she adds, with significance, “He will permit no harm to come to you.”
Tandy looks dubiously at the ogre—at his face, which requires her to crane her neck. He seems completely unbothered at being talked about like he isn’t there. Indeed, he waves and smiles, showing big, crooked gap teeth, with canines just a little too sharp and prominent for comfort. (One of them is missing, presumably knocked out.)
Fiant is a demon, but at least he is generally human-sized. If this brute gets an idea into his head, though… it seems to her that this might indeed solve her Fiant problem: by giving her an even bigger one.
Then again, as long as she’s traveling, Fiant has no way to locate her. (Unless she foolishly tells her mother again. Ha! She’s learned from that mistake!) And Smash isn’t looking at her with the impatient disdain Humfrey does, or the slavering way Fiant does. He certainly doesn’t look at her the way Crombie does. He’s just looking with benign curiosity, like she’s anyone else. And he hasn’t tried to touch her, even though she’s right there. Indeed, he’s contorted himself into a pretzel to avoid it.
“Don’t misjudge this ogre,” the Gorgon tells her. “The Good Magician Humfrey really does know best.”
Where else is Tandy going to go? What else is she going to do?
And so she agrees.
Tandy avoids physical contact as long as she can, even though it slows them down, and Smash shrugs and lets her, apparently used to smaller beings keeping their distance. It’s not until she ignorantly blunders into a tangle tree that they touch, by accident. In the process of rescuing her, Smash ends up in close quarters, and the tangle tree bonks her into him a few times, a sensation akin to being smooshed against a deep shag carpet. (She has played with them a couple times, in the underground car park.) Her dress is in tatters, but Smash shows no sign of noticing, too busy fighting to free her. He doesn’t even grab her to shove her out, merely clears her path and orders her to go. (She is quick to obey.)
Afterwards, he boosts her up out of danger a few times, but it’s all disinterested, professional even. (If an ogre can ever be called professional!) Maybe the steel gauntlets help the impression, since his touch is only warm metal. He never takes them off, not to eat or anything, and they seem so incongruous on the mostly-nude furball that she can’t help but pay attention to them. They’re shiny, but while Tandy has a lot of training with raw minerals, ores, and gems, she’s not nearly as astute with worked material. Finally, over dinner, she caves to curiosity.
“Where did you get those?” she asks.
He grunts. “Me armor hands in centaur lands.” His voice sounds like a rockslide. He sees her eyeing them. “She want see?”
“Can I?”
He tugs one off and hands it to her.
It smells as expected, being worn during heavy exertion all day, and it’s almost as long as her arm, so heavy that she almost drops it. (Smash chortles when he sees that.) Finally, she props it in her lap to examine it. It’s clearly well made… and well taken care of.
“Do you… clean these?” She doesn’t mean to sound so incredulous, but she’s yet to see Smash bathe.
He looks embarrassed. “Me no clean! Obscene!” Flustered, he adds, “me hard toil, with cloth and oil.”
Oh. He’s embarrassed because ogres aren’t supposed to notice or care about things like that. Cleaning and maintenance are the tasks of civilized people. Strange, though. She knows that Smash has spent time around such people—even if the jacket and gauntlets weren’t a dead giveaway, the Gorgon said so—but why would he be ashamed of that? And how to make it better? To apologize would surely make him feel worse.
Trying to save face for him, she goes, “Well, they’re absolutely disgusting and smell terrible,” and he grins with relief and nods: that’s the ogre way!
Pleased to have negotiated the situation, Tandy returns to her examination of the gauntlets. Up close, she realizes that while she recognizes the alloys, the bulk of it isn’t true metal ore, the kind she’s familiar with, but of ironwood derivation. Even so, she can see the quality of the steel—surely the centaurs had cultivated ironwood in its purest form to get this! As befitting such work, they’re ingeniously made, a series of metal plates cunningly engineered and bolted together, studs and reinforcement at the knuckles. She’d hate to get slapped by anyone wearing such a thing!
Clearly he can take them off at will. If he chose to touch her, he could. He just hasn’t.
It makes her feel… safe.
She’s been looking at the gauntlet too long, but Smash just looks back placidly, even proudly, as though of course it’s an appropriate interest. For ogres, it surely is.
She hands (heaves) it back. “They’re marvelous. That’s good metal.”
Clearly pleased, he puts it back on, flexing his fingers into place. “She not wrong; iron strong.”
She realizes that she was so curious about the gauntlet itself that she didn’t get a look at his hand. Oh well. There will surely be other opportunities, and anyway, she doesn’t feel like she can ask. For humans or ogres, surely it’d be inappropriate.
“You take good care of them,” she says without thinking, and Smash tenses up again. He doesn’t seem insulted exactly, more like she’s caught him at something.
Desperate, flailing, she adds, “I mean, for a big hairy brute like you.”
It’s not a good recovery, not nearly as good as last time, but he relaxes again, leaving her perplexed. Ogres are supposed to be the most callous monsters on earth. What would he have to be sensitive about?
…
Not long after that, Smash blunders into the Eye Queue vine and gains intelligence… much to his horror.
“It has temporarily un-ogred me!” he cries, scraping at his own scalp. His ogrish rhyming is gone, and his vocabulary sounds like a cheap imitation of Humfrey. “I must expunge it from my system!”
Tandy rushes to stop him from ripping off his own head, which he seems only too willing to do. “Oh, no, don’t do that! It’s sort of…” don’t say nice, that’ll only make it worse, “interesting, really.”
Judging by the look Smash gives her, “interesting” isn’t much better.
“I don’t mind you being smart, Smash. It’s much easier to talk with you.”
Smash hesitates. She can tell he doesn’t like it, but she can also see him thinking through the hazards she’s blundered into just because she didn’t understand his rhyming grunts in time. And as far as she knows, there’s no way to remove an Eye Queue. There’s only waiting it out.
“It seems I must tolerate this curse for the time being,” he concedes. “But I assure you, I shall be alert for an antidote!”
“If that’s the way you feel…” she says.
Why does it bother him so much? What’s so bad about intelligence? She knows ogres are proud of their stupidity, but this feels personal.
When they arrive at the Magic Dust Village to get directions, Smash hangs back. “Maybe you should do the talking,” he says, looking shifty.
Tandy blinks. “Okay…”
An earthen wall surrounds the village, and a bored troll guards the gate. He ignores her completely, addressing Smash: “do you come in peace or mayhem?”
“Peace,” Tandy says, loudly enough to get the troll’s attention. “I’m Tandy, and this is Smash. He’s protecting me.”
The troll squints at her, then at Smash, as though waiting for him to put her in her place. When Smash doesn’t, the troll says, “Protecting—?”
“Yes,” Tandy says firmly, crossing her arms.
The troll waits for Smash to speak. He doesn’t.
“Now, we have no prejudice against monsters here,” the troll starts, and next to her, Tandy feels Smash… not squirm or tense, exactly, but something, “I’m a monster myself, and some of my best friends are monsters. But only a fool trusts an ogre. Are you sure you’re not a kidnap victim? You do look good enough to eat…”
His tone makes her shrink back behind Smash, who angles himself between them. His fur is starting to bristle. “She’s not for eating.”
The troll stops looking at Tandy, at least, though only because he’s now directing that incredulous look at Smash instead. “You don’t sound like an ogre! What, did you run afoul of the human transformer-king?”
Now his hackles are fully up. With a hint of roar: “I was whelped an ogre!”
Tandy has seen Smash fight a few times now, but this is the first time she’s seen him anywhere resembling angry. (Is he angry? The word doesn’t quite fit. Offended, maybe? Not quite that either…) Oddly, it doesn’t frighten her, just confuses her. Judging by the troll’s expression, it perplexes him as well. This clearly isn’t usual ogre behavior.
Getting a grip on himself, Smash says stiffly, “My father is Crunch, the vegetarian ogre. We haven’t kidnapped anyone in years.”
Apparently the name is familiar; the troll lights up. “Ah, yes. You have human lineage; that must account for your…” he gives Tandy, then Smash a dismissive look, “language.”
It’s just as well that Smash is too mad (or whatever) and focused on the troll to see Tandy’s own reaction. Human heritage! She never would’ve known. Then again, how many surface-dwellers recognize Tandy as a nymph daughter?
Meanwhile, Smash casually picks up a block of wood roughly the size of the troll’s head. As he squeezes the juice out of it with one mailed fist, he says in an icy voice, “I should advise you, I take exception to the appellation ‘half-breed.’ I am a true ogre.” He opens his fist, lets the remaining charcoal drop.
“Yes indeed,” the troll agrees hastily, waving them in. “No one here would think of using that term.”
After that, Smash keeps his mouth shut, clearly none too eager to be recognized(?) again. Tandy’s happy to take the lead, though she’s distracted. A human mother! And a vegetarian father. Even with her ignorance of the surface world, she knows that’s unusual. Clearly, it’s an emotionally complicated subject, a taboo thing, and considering her own ambivalent feelings about her own heritage, she can relate. She’s never met someone like her before…
She catches herself. Is he like her? She’s not an ogre. Her mother is a gem nymph, her father a human. Everyone in the underworld knew and accepted that. Nobody, not even Fiant, ever called her a half-breed. That look the troll just gave Smash, though… that’s familiar. How? Where has she seen it before?
Her father, twirling the diamond through his fingers. “You’re human, sure enough.” Even after all these years, the memory induces a cold wash of shame—and in that moment, she knows exactly what that not-quite-anger, not-quite-offense was that Smash was expressing. But why would Smash be ashamed of his own mother’s heritage?
Why would she be ashamed of her own father’s?
Meanwhile, on a more superficial, shameful level, she’s wondering how any human woman could accommodate a male ogre, never mind birth another. It sounds like the woman is still alive, so she must’ve survived, but… how?
It’s none of her business, she tells herself, and forces it out of her mind.
Tandy first sees Smash’s hands in the nightmare world.
Tandy barely understands how she gets there—she goes to relieve herself, sees an odd gourd, and the next thing she knows, she’s out in a dingy gray landscape, standing next to a wishing well. When she turns to look at it more closely, she finds Fiant, leaning over the stones, peering down into the abyss, which seems to go down forever into darkness. When he sees her, he looks up and smiles.
“Hiya, sweetcheeks,” he says.
Tandy feels simultaneous panic (no, no, this can’t be!) and resignation (of course it is). She screams. She tries to throw a tantrum—the only thing that ever worked to stop him, however briefly.
Nothing happens.
Fiant chuckles. “Pretend all you like. We both know you’re happy to see me.”
She runs. Fiant follows at a leisurely stroll, yet effortlessly keeps pace with her, in the way of nightmares. A graveyard looms up in front of her, and Tandy has no choice but to run into it. The high, rusted fence pens her in, living skeletons herd her, and she finds herself fleeing down, down, into a crypt, seeking her childhood’s familiar caves in her panic. Of course, they aren’t here. The mausoleum dead-ends at a coffin on a dais. Tandy ducks behind it, shaking with fear.
Fiant’s figure remains silhouetted at the doorway at the top of the stairs. He doesn’t speak. He just stands there, watching her.
Tandy’s crying, and she’s ashamed of crying. Over a year now, she’s been hiding from this creature. How long can she keep doing this?
“Hey, kid,” a dry, reedy voice whispers to her. “I can make him go away.”
It’s the coffin. Presumably a human girl would be frightened, but Tandy’s a child of the underworld. Besides, she’s already as scared as she can get.
“You can?”
“Well, that depends. You see, you’re already deeply in debt to this realm; nightmare rides don’t come cheap. The way I see it, you don’t have a lot left to bargain with here. So the real question is: how badly do you want it?”
Tandy’s tried running, fighting, going for help, capturing and riding a nightmare, slaving away in the Good Magician’s castle. She’s tried traveling with an ogre.
She doesn’t know what else to try.
“What do you want?” she asks.
“Oh, nothing you’ll miss,” the coffin says as Fiant starts coming down the stairs. “Entrust your soul to me, and he’ll never touch it. The most important part of you will be safe, forever. You’ll be invulnerable.”
Everything has a price. Humfrey, her grandfather, taught her that.
“Okay,” Tandy says, and closes her eyes.
Her memories after that are confused, cracked like glass. Tearing. Agony. A violation heretofore unimaginable. Loss, loss, loss, the freefall of desolation and despair. Then it all goes away.
Everything goes away.
Later, the Siren will tell her how they found her, comatose with misery, how Smash followed her into the gourd. Tandy doesn’t remember any of it. As far as she knows, one moment she’s in the mausoleum, the next she’s on the ground outside of it. Siren and Smash will later tell her she’s sobbing with agony, but she doesn’t feel it. It’s like the crying, the pain, is all outside of her.
Then she feels something—a strange pulse of gentleness. Warmth, far away, like the memory of her mother’s hugs from long ago. She almost finds it in herself to pay attention to the sounds of chaos and mayhem that have been going for a while.
And then Smash is coming out of the mausoleum, covered in grave dust. His armored jacket and his gauntlets are gone. His hands are battle-scarred and bare, and cradled in one of them like something precious, something priceless, is a glowing sphere.
“Here is your soul,” he says gently, and holds it out to her. She’s almost afraid to reach for it, waiting for him to snatch it back and sneer, “How badly do you want it?” But he doesn’t; he lets her have it.
The moment she does… it’s like warmth coming into a cold room, colors flooding back into the world. Everything matters again. She’s her again.
She blurts, “I love you!” and is immediately childishly ashamed. Smash is an ogre, she barely knows him…
…But she knows how he touched her soul gently, even when she couldn’t have seen. She knows how he came and brought her back to herself, and in that moment, she’s sure that she’ll love this man forever.
Oh, she thinks. This will be expensive, so expensive.
She girds herself. “How can I repay you?”
But he doesn’t seem to understand. He just says, “it’s my job,” and waves it off with one callused hand.
“How did you…?”
He looks a little abashed. “I had to indulge my natural propensities slightly.” And now that she has it in her to notice, she looks and truly sees the destruction around her: the uprooted tombstones, the cracked crypt door, the pile of bones that was once a skeleton army. (It shudders and settles lower, as though to avoid his attention.)
She can’t believe it. He tromped into this nightmare, smashed everything until he reached the management, got her soul, and brought it back to her… for free? Nobody has ever done anything like that for her before, not even Jewel.
“You’re pretty scary, all right, Smash,” she says. It feels so good to smile.
She snuggles under his arm, and he lets her, and for the first time in a long time, she’s not afraid.
She spends the rest of her time in the gourd studying Smash’s hands. The knuckles are swollen and scarred, the fingers thick and crooked, their roughness belying their gentility. The lingering sensation of his fingerprints on her soul isn’t bad, just comforting.
Idly, she wonders what his soul feels like, and the thought flusters her so badly that she’s relieved when the Siren pulls them out, thereby distracting her.
But the thought will keep coming back to her, night after night.
After that, Tandy catches herself touching Smash casually: reaching up to hold his armored hand, touching his knee to get his attention. He never seems to mind, and she wonders if he should… or she should. But after the horror in the nightmare realm, she needs something solid to hang onto, and touching him… well, it makes her feel better. Her emotions are clearly brewing into a royal crush, but she desperately tries to pretend otherwise. It was just the shock of losing her soul, only to then get it back, that made her feel that way. She was saying, “I love you,” to her soul, not him. (And thank goodness she said it in a realm where the Siren wasn’t.) He’s a big flea-bitten ogre; how could she feel anything but appropriate platonic gratitude?
But she keeps touching him, and he never throws her off or tells her not to. She keeps blurting out things like, “Oh, I could kiss you! But I can’t reach you,” and he just chuckles and says, “Good thing.” And she finds herself paying more attention to how he fights… and how he uses his hands.
Even before she lost her soul, his carnage inspired an embarrassing childish glee in her. Smash has no shame, no self-restraint: he fights with gusto and zeal, joy even. It’s not the free-for-all that it first seems to be; there’s a strategy, even elegance to how he moves, measuring his arcs, monitoring his force. There’s a brutal grace in the way he battles, the ogre-sized holes he smashes through any obstacle. She watches him break stone, tie ghastlies in knots, pulverize ant lions. He truly is a monster.
The more she sees, the more she realizes that she likes it in a way that she’s not supposed to. What’s more, it doesn’t frighten her at all.
She won’t, can’t admit it yet, but once Crombie started watching from her door, he scared her. Even though he never did anything, the looming knowledge that he could was omnipresent. For some reason, even though she sees Smash bash his way through a nest of giant rats, she never once feels he might do that to her. She tells himself that of course he could, of course he might, but somehow she never believes it. Why?
Then she realizes it’s because he fights with such joy. Crombie always has a simmering rage under the surface, a rage much like her own, but she has yet to see Smash fight in anger. The closest to angry she’s seen him was with the guard troll of the Magic Dust Village, where he didn’t throw a punch. For such a fighter, Smash seems… happy.
When she thinks about her father, Tandy has to admit that Crombie is not a happy man, even with a wife who loves him so, even with an honorable job guarding the King of Xanth. Not only that, she isn’t sure what could make him happy.
Then she wonders: is Jewel happy? She’s not sure. Jewel has never hidden the source of her love from Tandy; it’s never occurred to her or Crombie to try. To them, her bewitchment is just another sign of how much Crombie cares about her. But as an adult, Tandy feels… she doesn’t know how she feels about it.
(Is Tandy herself happy?)
If Jewel seems content, it’s only through carefully ignoring certain parts of reality, and that seems no way to live. It might be the nymph way, but Tandy’s not only a nymph. Though she loves her mother dearly, Tandy feels sorry for her. She has to admit having more in common with her father, that anger and frustration boiling away underneath. And that saddens her too. Whatever happens, she doesn’t want to end up like Crombie… or Jewel either, for that matter. But what to do with all those tangled emotions inside?
Smash may be a force of nature, but he’s still only one man—or ogre, rather. So many rats are swarming him that he can’t stop them from climbing his legs. Watching him struggle, laden with Fireoak, the hurt hamadryad, Tandy feels the volcano in her rumble, a surge of possessiveness: that’s her ogre!
Without thinking, she whips her hand back and hurls her fury at them.
Both she and her rage have grown since she was thirteen. The rats drop like flies. Smash staggers, catches his balance, and stares at her with wide eyes. His expression gets a hungry reaction from her that she isn’t proud of. She wants to surprise him like that again, wants him to look at her like that all the time, wants to—
“What happened?” he asks.
Tandy covers her face. “That’s my magic: bad temper. I’m sorry!”
“Sorry?” and he’s beaming at her with wonder now. “That’s a wonderful talent! My legs are numb!” He gives them a cheerful shake. Clearly he means it as a compliment.
“You really think so? I thought it wasn’t nice to be destructive.”
“It isn’t?”
His expression is so devoid of subterfuge, so innocent in its bloodthirst, she can’t help but laugh.
…
The other women who join their group don’t treat Smash as a man, even Chem, who’s known him for years. They treat him like a charming beast of burden, talking freely as though he isn’t right there. Even though it doesn’t seem to bother Smash, it bothers Tandy, enough so that one night, when someone says, “It’s good to just be with women,” she replies testily, “Smash is still here, you know.”
Everyone laughs.
“Don’t be silly,” the fairy girl says. “He’s an ogre.”
Smash appears to be snoring soundly, but Tandy knows how keen those big hairy ears are, so she wrings her hands and says, “Can’t an ogre also be a man?” After all, she spends enough time trying not to stare at his endowment right in front of her face.
The giggles subside, but awkwardly. Fireoak and the fairy avoid her eyes, as though uncomfortable. Chem just looks perplexed; she’s known Smash since earliest childhood, so maybe she still sees him in that light. In the tone of one reassuring a child, the Siren says, “Yes, of course, dear. A good one, too. We take Smash too much for granted,” which is nice, but not exactly what Tandy was getting at. Why don’t they see what seems so painfully obvious to her?
But she’s far too conscious of Smash’s still, seemingly sleeping form nearby, so instead, she says, “After all, I’m a nymph, and I’m a woman.”
“Oh,” Fireoak laughs, “you’re not a nymph, Tandy.”
It’s such a strange thing to say that Tandy can only reply, “What do you mean? Of course I am. My mother’s Jewel the Nymph; she raised me.”
“Nymphs can’t bear children, grow old, or have a magic talent. Those are human things. Even if your mother was a nymph, you’re only half that. I’ve seen your cottonwood rags, Tandy; you’re a woman, but you’re not a nymph, and you shouldn’t go around saying things that aren’t true.”
In the underworld, everyone knows and respects Jewel for her work, and no one would dream of saying such a thing. Tandy is so unprepared, so flatfooted, she doesn’t know how to feel, never mind respond. All she can think is how Smash crushed that wood to juice and coal in front of that troll’s face.
All she can say is, “my mother is a nymph, and so am I.”
Everyone else seems to notice the tension. Chem clears her throat.
“Species-mixing is taboo among centaurs,” she says, “and this conversation makes me uncomfortable. Can we change the subject?”
Tandy’s happy to. “What’s a lady ogre like? Have any of you seen one?”
“One passed my tree once,” Fireoak says. “She was huge and hairy and had a face like a bowl of overcooked mush someone had sat on. I never saw anything so ugly in all my life.”
“Well, she was an ogress,” the Siren chides, who, as the child of a human man and a mermaid, seems equally eager to get off the prior subject. “They have different standards of beauty. I suppose an ogre wants a wife who can knock down her own trees for firewood and kill her own griffins for stew.”
For a moment, Tandy imagines what it might be like, to have legs like mossy tree trunks, fists like battering rams. She fantasizes about having the strength and power to take Fiant in a fair fight and sighs wistfully. “It must be nice to be so strong. No one would ever bother you again…”
“Well, except for amorous ogres,” someone else says with a laugh.
“I don’t know, dear,” the Siren tells Tandy, “Those tantrums of yours are powerful, and extremely useful for the jungles of Xanth. You’re the only one of us with such a talent, and yet you seem so ashamed of it!”
Tandy pauses. “I guess I never thought of it that way before. In the caves… well, it seemed so dangerous. So… childish.”
“Well, I think it’s useful,” the Siren says firmly. Then, with a playful nudge: “And Smash likes it.”
The Siren is surely only teasing her, but Tandy can’t help but go, “You really think so?”
“My dear,” the Siren says, “Smash is a lovely creature and an abysmal liar. Do you truly think he could convincingly pretend otherwise?”
She has a point. Tandy starts throwing her tantrums more often after that, at first gingerly, then with increasing confidence. It doesn’t always work out, but she at least manages to avoid disasters like the cave-in when she was eight or hurting Crombie when she was thirteen. Sometimes, the results are astonishing; she even manages to stagger the Gap Dragon for a moment, thereby saving Smash from getting badly hurt. He doesn’t seem offended at her interfering in the battle, either. On the contrary, he beams with pleasure.
“You hit like an ogress!” he declares, and promptly gets to work binding the dragon with its own tail… which is good, since it means he doesn’t see her blushing. “Reminds me of my mother’s curses.”
Tandy runs for cover, hugging the compliment to her heart. It’s true! Smash does appreciate her magic! He truly likes it!
It isn’t till she’s under safe cover that she realizes something else: she just staggered a dragon. And not just any dragon, the Gap Dragon, one of the most dangerous creatures in Xanth. Her, some nobody nymph/human from the underworld!
She looks at her hands in wonder. Maybe she isn’t as weak as she thinks.
It’s that thought that later emboldens her to save her friends from the pining tree. Smash himself can’t do it, too busy managing the dragon, and anyway, Tandy’s in no hurry to experience a suicidal ogre.
So, using Chem’s rope, Tandy scrambles up the cliff, grateful for all the rock-climbing she’s done in the underworld. It’s not a hard climb, but her delicate (and now badly worn) slippers are useless; she kicks them off to get a better grip with her toes.
“Be careful, Tandy!” the Siren calls from below, and not a moment too soon: Tandy gets into range of the tree.
Despite having just seen its effects on the Siren, Tandy doesn’t expect the sheer force of it, a nigh-palpable wave of despair. She reels, suddenly drained, foggy in the head. She shakes it off as best she can. No time for that now; she has to focus on her friends.
It feels like trudging uphill against high tide, but she makes it happen. Fireoak is too weak to resist but needs a rope harness built for her. (Thankfully, this is something Jewel taught Tandy.) Chem is too big and strong to push around, so Tandy has to bully her into position, something she only gets away with because the normally-hard-nosed centaur is a sniveling slug of misery. (“Don’t pretend you know me! You don’t know me!”) At least the little fairy is easy: she’s so small and light that Tandy can just toss her down into Smash’s waiting arms.
But then her friends are gone, and Tandy is alone. And the wounds in her soul are still so fresh…
She remembers Fiant, the gourd’s nightmare realm, her soul being ripped away. Inside her bubbles up the certainty that nowhere is safe. Even an ogre isn’t enough. She can run all over Xanth, and if not Fiant, there’ll be someone else, and if she goes home, there’ll be Crombie.
Stop it, she tells herself. It’s just the tree. It’s just—
Fiant’s breath on her neck. “Hiya, sweetcheeks.”
Crombie’s shadow in her door. “You’re human, sure enough.”
Fireoak’s laugh. “You shouldn’t say things that aren’t true, Tandy.”
The nightmare coffin. But this time, it says, “You can make them go away. You can make them all go away.”
She looks at the cliff ledge. It beckons to her. She steps off.
The wind rushes through her hair. Then someone warm, strong, and gentle catches her, holds her tight, and she buries her face and hands in his shaggy fur and sobs uncontrollably, first from the raw effects of the tree, then from shame and impotent rage. She hears her father’s voice: “Women cry for only one reason…”
But Smash doesn’t huff, scold, or say anything. He just holds her, tight and gentle, letting her cry. When she seems to be winding down, he passes her to the Siren, who says, “That was a nice maneuver, Smash.”
“I couldn’t let her fall,” is all he says. It’s all he needs to say.
They get back to work escaping the Gap Chasm.
It’s a lot of work, and Smash has to put a lot of muscle into hauling Chem and Fireoak up by rope. He gets slower and slower, breathing harder and harder, and the moment they all make it to the top, he collapses.
“Smash!” Tandy rushes to him, but Chem, having four legs, makes it there first. The centaur’s visible alarm only makes it clear to Tandy that something is badly wrong; Chem of all people would know what he is or isn’t capable of.
“This isn’t right,” the centaur says, “I’ve seen him work much harder than this. Tandy, help me roll him over. Maybe the dragon hurt him worse than we thought and the big oaf thought he could walk it off.”
Even with Chem’s barrel frame, it’s an effort. They get Smash onto his back, but they find no surprise injuries. His armored jacket does its job well, and when Tandy puts her ear to his chest, both his heart and breathing sound right.
“Is he sick?” the Siren asks, lagging behind due to helping the fairy and Fireoak.
“Ogres eat stuff that’d kill a harpy,” Chem says. “Anything that could take him down would’ve surely gotten one of us too, same as bad magic. I don’t understand what could’ve done this…”
As centaur and siren compare notes, Tandy stares at Smash. He doesn’t look hurt or sick. He just looks… drained. Completely exhausted. There’s an odd dimness to him, like a light in him is going out. The way the Siren and Smash described Tandy after her soul was ripped away…
A horrible suspicion blossoms in Tandy’s mind.
Smash groans and comes to. “Are we out?”
“Yes,” she says, “thanks to you.”
He tries to get up, doesn’t even make it to sitting. “What’s wrong with me?”
“That’s what I want to know!” Chem says, rushing over. “Did you—?”
Tandy holds up a hand, cutting the centaur off. “Smash,” she says, “is there something you need to tell me about what you did in the nightmare realm?”
The expression on his face is all the answer she needs.
“Nightmare realm?” Chem asks. “He did what where?”
“The nightmare realm claimed my soul,” Tandy explains. “Smash got it back. He never did say how.” She does her best to imitate her father’s glare.
It shouldn’t do anything to an ogre, but Smash squirms, his ears dipping. “They wouldn’t give it up,” he admits. “Not for free. And the only collateral I had to offer was my own soul. So it’s on… let’s call it a payment plan.”
“You what?” Chem fists her hands in her mane.
“I thought souls were just human superstition,” Fireoak says.
“As far as I know, only people of human derivation have souls,” says the Siren.
Chem snorts. “So, human myth. But some myths have some truth… How long do you have?”
Smash won’t look at any of them. “Three months.”
“And you said nothing!” the Siren cries. “What kind of creature are you?” She answers her own question. “A self-sacrificing one. Oh, Smash, you should’ve told us.”
Tandy just sits there. She thought nothing could hurt worse than losing her own soul. Now she knows better.
Smash recovers after a rest… but now that Tandy has her eye out for it, there’s no missing the dimness in him. No amount of rest will fully restore him, and all they can do is hunt for another gourd so he can go take his complaint to the nightmare management… a total dark horse.
Tandy hates her helplessness. While Smash is off in the nightmare world, all she can do is go forage with Blythe, the newest addition to the party. Venting to the metal woman seems safest, since she won’t be staying long and has the least emotional investment in any of them.
Indeed, Blythe listens to Tandy’s whole tirade with bemused politeness. Then, with an air of sudden understanding, she says, “Oh, you like him.”
Her tone makes it clear what she means, but Tandy tries to act oblivious. (Why not? It works for Smash.) “Well, of course I like him…”
“Let me clarify: he stokes your boiler. Lubes your gears. You want to get your hands on his crankshaft and—”
“Okay, okay, fine, I like him!” Tandy cries before Blythe can say anything more mortifying. “What about it? Who cares?”
Blythe gives her a pitying look. “Human, I don’t begin to understand your squishy meat world, but even I know it wouldn’t work out between you.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, there’s size, for one matter. I know meat people are stretchy, but—”
“Blythe!”
“What? I can’t help but notice, the way he flops around!”
Oh, thank goodness, someone besides her has noticed. “His mother’s human. They must’ve managed somehow.”
“I have to presume at least one of them is astonishingly gifted. And anyway, it’s better to be with your own kind. Fewer unpleasant surprises.”
“Good luck finding one of my kind,” Tandy says bitterly. “Most nymphs can’t bear children, and I’m human and nymph, whatever Fireoak says.”
Blythe scoffs. “I understand why Fireoak says it. You’re clearly mortal, fertile, and capable of regret. I don’t see why you can’t just call yourself human and be done with it.” Seeing Tandy clouding up, she continues, “Not that it matters; nymphs are just what human men wish human women to be. They’re not so dissimilar. Ogres, though, they’re totally different. Plus they eat humans… and nymphs. If he gets hungry enough…”
“Smash came from a vegetarian household! He’d never!”
“The way you tease him, he might…”
“I—I don’t tease him!”
“Please, human, I’ve seen how you cuddle up to him. You treat him like a hot water bottle. What do you see in him, anyway? A face like that, only an ogre mother could love.”
Tandy remembers Smash’s fingerprints on her soul, him holding her as she cried. It’s too raw and intimate to express, certainly not to a bulldozer like Blythe.
Blythe nods as though this only proves her point. “That’s what I thought. No, if you ask me, what you need is a human man with anti-demon magic.”
“I don’t want—”
“You ask me, you’re only interested in Smash because he’s the first semi-eligible male you’ve met who isn’t trying to rape you. He’s protecting you because it’s his job, Tandy. Don’t make it more than it is. If he wanted to be with a human, he wouldn’t be headed for the Ancestral Ogres. I tell you: ogres want to be with ogres, and once you meet a proper human man, you’ll want to be with him.”
Tandy wilts. Maybe Blythe and the others are right. They all seem so sure. “Thank you for your honesty, Blythe.”
“Why are you thanking me? You didn’t like it.”
“No, but I appreciate your straightforwardness.”
Blythe considers. “In that case, I have one other piece of advice.”
“Yes?”
“You shouldn’t get too attached to Smash… but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy him. I don’t pretend to understand why, but if he’s what gets you hot in the furnace, go ahead and enjoy it for what it is: a fantasy that goes nowhere. The way you were raised, you need one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Human, the Siren told me what your father is like: he overcame her song through sheer bitterness, twenty years ago. If I grew up under someone like that, I’d be polishing myself over a big furry bodyguard too.”
Tandy isn’t sure whether she should be offended or not. She settles on, “I’ll keep it in mind. Blythe?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell.”
Blythe snorts, a sound like a train whistle. “You act as though this is a secret, human. It is not.”
She leaves the conversation feeling a little defeated, but also relieved. At least someone (probably everyone) knows now, and she’s gotten at least some permission to feel what she’s feeling. This won’t last forever, so she might as well let herself enjoy Smash’s proximity while she has it. That’s all it is, all it can ever be.
So when he comes out of the gourd, she makes sure he’s all right, and when he is, she says, “I worry when you’re gone. Strength doesn’t mean anything in the gourd, and the more time passes, the more you lose here. You put your soul in peril for me, Smash. I can’t forget that.”
He puts his warm armored hand over hers. “I like it in there. Human nightmares are ogre fun. I’ll be fine.”
But Tandy knows what losing a soul feels like. She can’t bear for that to happen to Smash. He’s so joyous, so full of life and vigor. It crushes her to think that she only got her soul back because he put his on the line instead. Watching him waste away makes her feel so helpless… again. When her soul was in peril, he followed her into the gourd to get it back, and all she’s doing is waiting, wringing her hands and feeling bad, the way Jewel would.
So when Smash stretches out to sleep, she snuggles to his side. He looks surprised for a moment, but he doesn’t stop her or pull away. As she dozes off, she thinks that Blythe is wrong about Smash’s face. Certainly, his features are rough, crooked from old battle fractures, but they’re sunny and open too. The textures of his fur are comforting, his scent too. It isn’t bad, just animal, and anyway, Tandy’s been on the road long enough with him now to smell pretty ripe herself. Smash smells like home, she thinks, and then feels another wash of shame: Blythe would probably consider that a bad sign.
Just a fantasy, she tells herself, and dozes off.
What she has that night isn’t quite a dream, and certainly not a nightmare. There’s no narrative, no setting, just familiar scent, a gentle gloved touch. Then bare hands on her skin, her soul, fur against her, heat, heat, heat—
Tandy wakes up breathless and overheated under Smash’s arm; he’s like a furry furnace. She tells herself that’s why she’s so flushed and flustered.
Smash sleeps on, unknowing. When she makes to squirm out from under his arm, he mumbles in his sleep, pulls her to him like a stuffed toy, and asleep or not, soul-mortgaged or not, he’s still an ogre, so there’s no resisting that. Tandy finds her face buried in the ruff that guards his neck, his heart beating slow and even against her ear, and against her thigh, she feels—
Oh, this isn’t helping the heat in her at all.
She wriggles, but that just makes him squeeze her tighter with a grumble of annoyance. Tandy stills—the last thing she wants is for him to dream of combat and give her the dreaded ogre battle embrace! He cracked Gap Dragon ribs with it, and she’s no dragon.
“Smash,” she whispers, praying none of their companions hear. “Smash, wake up.”
One ear twitches. That’s it. Ogres don’t need to sleep lightly; who’d be foolish enough to attack one in his sleep? She’s seen him go from sound asleep to full combat in an instant, and while punching him probably wouldn’t hurt him, he very well might hurt her, out of reflex. How can she get his non-aggressive attention?
If it weren’t for the gaggle of women sleeping around them (all of them surely judging her poorly for her taste), she would want nothing more than to savor this, snuggle in and go back to sleep (and dream). But they are here, and if they wake up and see this, they will take one look at her face and know exactly what she’s feeling, and Tandy will die. So she pokes him, at first gingerly, then increasingly forcefully when he doesn’t notice. She’s far too aware of the heat of his body next to hers, and—
—And then he shifts against her thighs so now he’s poking her. A delicious throb goes through her, she squeaks into his pelt, and of all things, that’s what makes him wake up and hastily, guiltily release her.
“Tandy! Did I hurt you?”
She supposes the noise she made, under other circumstances, could be taken for one of pain. “No, no, I’m all right, you were just… squeezing me too tight.”
“I’m sorry. I—” and he looks upset, more upset than she expected, checking her as though for bruises. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
Forgetting her embarrassment, she says, “I’m sure. Smash, what’s wrong?”
He looks away, and at first, she thinks he won’t answer. But then he admits, “I… hurt my mother that way once. I didn’t mean to. I was just a child, and I had a nightmare and… my mother’s tough, for a human. But…”
“But she’s not an ogress.”
“No. She’s not. She’s fine now, of course, but…” He’s still looking at her desperately. “You’re sure?”
The ghost of old pain on his face saddens her. Without thinking, she reaches out to stroke the fur on his cheeks, and he nuzzles into her hand. “You didn’t hurt me, not even a little, not even by human standards. I promise.”
He relaxes. “Good. I’m glad.” And then he pulls away.
As Tandy settles and turns over to go back to sleep, back-to-back with him now, she finds herself looking into Blythe’s open metal eyes.
“Tandy, Tandy, burning bright,” she mouths, and the clang of Tandy smacking her (and crying “ow!”) wakes everyone else up.
…
The Void doesn’t look like much, or anything really, from the outside—just a vague swirl, a blank nothingness slicing through the landscape—but after all they’ve been through, Chem, Smash, and Tandy are dubious.
“Historically, the five elements—Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and the Void—have always been mainstays of magic,” Chem says when asked, but when pressed as to what the Void is, even the well-educated centaur admits she doesn’t know. After tying themselves together with Chem’s rope, Tandy chooses to enter it first, since her tantrums are at hand, plus she’s the lightest and can be pulled back most easily in an emergency. Remembering the heat of the fire wall, the agony of the pining tree, Tandy plunges in, bracing for pain.
There’s none. On the contrary, the moment she enters the mist and fog, she feels wonderful, like her mind has been wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket. As the meadow appears in front of her, all fear and worry instantly drop away. Such a safe, beautiful place! Such happiness. Surely nothing, not even Fiant, could ever hurt her here. She barely remembers untying the safety rope.
The first sign that something isn’t right is when she passes a mirror-bright stone, a kind she’s never seen before. When she stoops down to examine it, she catches a glance at her reflection: clean, neat, well dressed. That hasn’t been the case since she left Humfrey’s castle; now her dress is ragged, her feet bare and dirty, her hair charred from passing through the firewall. She is surely a fright to see, but here, nobody seems to notice. In the Void, everyone waves and smiles at her, as though she belongs. Everywhere she looks are happy human couples, treating each other kindly, living peaceful, happy, normal lives.
It’s there, under the foggy illusions of the Void, that she sees the first human man who’s attracted her. Handsome, of course, (it wouldn’t be a good illusion otherwise) tall and dark, all dressed in black with silver gloves. There’s something familiar about him, a softness to his eyes that makes Tandy think that maybe she can manage this whole settle-down, marry-a-proper-human-man thing after all. Maybe, here in this rose-tinted land of the Void, she can be safe, be normal, just another human among humans.
But when she approaches and extends a hand to shake, he falls down.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
He scrambles to his feet. He says something, she knows he does, but it slips through her memory as he says it, leaving only a sense of friendliness, edged with flirtation. And it feels good. For once, she’s doing what she’s supposed to, and it feels good, so when he reaches as though to touch her--
And then an oddly familiar woman with an impressive nose bursts in with, “Don’t hit her, Smash! I think—”
“Smash?” Tandy asks with horror, and like that, the illusion shatters. The woman becomes Chem (now obvious with her proper four legs), and the handsome man becomes Smash, standing perplexed with one fist raised. The moment he sees Tandy (as herself—what was he seeing before?) he hastily lowers his arm with a look of chagrin that mirrors hers.
“My map went out of control in here,” Chem explains, “and I think it’s because the Void is a realm of animated imagination. We see what we want to see, and so my map—”
But Tandy doesn’t hear the rest. It feels like the fates are mocking her. Even in a realm crafted for delight, her perversity still shines through.
“You were awful handsome as a man…” she says, and she already knows she sounds too sad, too wistful. “But why did you fall down when I tried to shake your hand?”
For once, it’s Smash who looks abashed. “Er… my mistake. I thought you were trying to show affection.”
“I was! But you acted like I’d hit you or something!”
There’s no mistaking Smash’s mortification now. When he doesn’t answer, Chem does, giving him a pointed look: “that is how ogres show affection.”
In a split second, everything seems to come clear: “That’s an amazing talent! My legs are numb!” “You hit like an ogress!” “Did I hurt you?”
Maybe Smash isn’t uninterested at all. Maybe Smash only understands giving affection one way, a way he knows through painful experience that humans and nymphs can’t withstand. Maybe he just needs a demonstration.
“You big oaf! I’ll show you how humans express affection!” Since he’s far too tall to reach, she grabs his warm mailed arm and pulls.
He could resist. He’s far too strong for her to force him. But he bends for her, kneels, and that’s what emboldens Tandy to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him.
She knows how Smash reacts when grabbed in a way he dislikes. But he doesn’t fight. He goes stiff, gauntleted hands hovering like he doesn’t know what to do, and he loses his balance. That just brings him more to her height, and she takes him into a controlled fall until he’s flat on his back with her half-astride him. He doesn’t kiss back, exactly… but feeling him bend and fall for her, clearly startled but not resisting… this is far from the indifference he showed when Irene flashed her underwear. He’s responding with wide pretty eyes, the way he does when…
…when she hits him with one of her tantrums.
(“I like your tantrums.” Yes, she bets he does!)
Breathless and triumphant, she laughs, “What do you think of that, ogre?”
His expression is stunned, but at least it’s not displeased.
Chem sounds disapproving. “You gave him an awfully stiff dose for his first time.”
“Well, I’ve wanted to do it for a long time.” For once, Tandy isn’t afraid or ashamed. She feels a sort of fierce, rebellious joy. To hell with the Void’s illusions, with being human, with doing what she’s supposed to! She kissed Smash and didn’t find herself a splat on the moon! She kissed him, and it felt good. She’s still half on top of him and he’s made no move to pull away or flick her off. In this moment, everything is wonderful.
Chem doesn’t let it last. “Tandy, he’s an ogre. They don’t understand human romance. You know that.”
Well, neither does Tandy. Her sole exposures to human(-ish) romance have been Crombie dosing Jewel with a love spell, Humfrey helping him do it, and the Gorgon, who cheerfully slaved away folding socks for a year just so she could then do it for free. Smash, at least, has never hurt Tandy or forced her to do anything. At least he’s kind to her.
“You can’t afford to get emotionally involved,” Chem continues. “He’s not your type.”
“And just what is my type?” Tandy snarls, her anger building. “A demon like Fiant? Smash is the nicest,” not man, she’s not supposed to call Smash a man, “male creature I’ve met in Xanth!”
“How many male creatures have you met in Xanth?”
Tandy is silent.
Smash has been quiet up till now, but at this, he timidly suggests, “We could visit a human village—”
Tandy’s heart breaks. “Shut up, ogre! Or I’ll kiss you again.”
He shuts up. Maybe she’s misread him completely. Maybe he doesn’t want this from her at all, and his timidity is purely out of awkward professionalism, or a desire to avoid a scene, or…
“You have to be realistic,” Chem insists, which is all the more galling because it’s coming from someone younger. “What good will it do you to find your destined man if you foolishly waste your love on an inappropriate object?”
“It’s true—” Smash starts.
“You’re not an object!” Tandy snaps. “And you’re not—”
For a moment, she hates this stupid pointless hypothetical future man she’s supposed to hold everything in reserve for, this man she’s never met and may never exist. What is he likely to be? What would she be to him: a maid, a failed nymph, a woman forever in debt to his demon-destroying abilities? All she wants is here, in her arms, right now—
—And he doesn’t want her back. A fantasy that goes nowhere, just like Blythe said. A fantasy she can’t even enjoy, here in the bowels of the Void, which is made of nothing but.
She’s crying, but the old impotent rage is also surging in her, and her own tears only make her angrier. He doesn’t want her? Fine! Let him remember what he’s missing! Without thinking, she takes her anger and hurls it at him.
She regrets it the moment she does it… and only that moment, because she sees his face and feels his reaction when it hits, the way he arches up under her, the choked, beautiful sound he makes. Maybe he doesn’t want her, and maybe her desire is perverse, but at least so is his enjoyment of her tantrums. She kisses him one last time and this time, he kisses back a little, and she could swear she tastes some heat in him when he does, even if it’s only the residue of the tantrum. No matter what becomes of her, at least she’ll have this to remember and comfort her.
Then she lets him go, and he doesn’t stop her.
“Oh, what’s the use,” she says. “I’m a fool and I know it. Let’s work on finding a way out of here.”
And they get down to brass tacks, pondering a way out of the Void.
There’s not much to be done. Tandy’s growing to see why her mother sticks to the underworld, with its plebeian concerns of cave-ins, goblins, demons, and nickelpedes. All they can do is find Smash a gourd and wait, watching his frozen, vacant body for signs of distress while he fights his way through the nightmare realm. Void or no Void, his soul clock is still ticking.
Day turns to night. Tandy and Chem flank Smash’s unnaturally still body, curl up, and go to sleep.
Tandy wakes up to Smash kissing her.
At first, she thinks it must be a dream, or another of the Void’s illusions, trying (failing) to give her what (who) she wants. It’s his gentility that convinces her, that careful reining in of his strength that he always does around her. This isn’t the fiery kiss she dreamed about. It’s sweet, hesitant even. And what’s more, something about him feels different—like he was missing something, and now he isn’t. Can it be?
“Smash! You’re back!” She hugs him, and he pats her. “Are you all right? Did you…” she’s scared to ask.
“I… have my soul now, yes.” But his words are so carefully picked that she immediately knows the news is bad. “And I have transport for you and Chem out of the Void.”
It’s then that she notices the three nightmares, hovering nervously just at the edge of sight: midnight-black horses with eyes like coals and hooves pale as the full moon. They’re frightening beasts; Tandy still remembers the hellish ride she obtained, at the cost of her soul coming up for collection. Her foreboding increases. “Smash, what’s going on?”
He doesn’t want to answer her, but he does. “The nightmares can go almost anywhere, but they have to be paid.”
No. No, no, no. Even though she already knows the answer, Tandy says, “How are you paying them, Smash?”
He avoids her eyes. “My soul.”
Her scream almost scares off the nightmares. Apparently they’re afraid of her, her midnight ride giving her a certain reputation, and in that moment, she’s glad. They should be afraid of her, with what they’re doing. After all she and Smash have been through, all they’ve done, Tandy refuses to accept that this is how it’ll end for them.
Her scream also wakes up Chem, who grabs her bow. “What is it? What’s happened?”
Tandy points accusingly at Smash, who clearly regrets kissing her awake. “Smash is sacrificing his soul to save us! Again!”
“What? The whole point of him going into the gourd was so he could win his soul back!”
Smash explains, but Tandy’s had enough. For over a year now, she’s been running, running, running. Running from Fiant via nightmare put her soul up for collection and made her Humfrey’s housemaid for a year. Running from her unknown soul-debt only got Smash’s soul on the auction block instead. Running from her fears and pain got them all into this miserable, carnivorous, sparkles-and-butterflies Void. She’s sick of running. None of this would’ve happened if she hadn’t—if she hadn’t—
If she hadn’t run from her would-be rapist.
If she hadn’t had to run.
This is all so unfair. But she’s done with hiding behind Smash. He’s proved willing to sacrifice everything for her, twice over. Now it’s time for her to sacrifice.
She rounds on the nightmares. “Take my soul instead!”
They back away from her, but she only advances, incandescent in her fury.
“My soul’s almost as good as his, isn’t it? It’s the only reason any of us are in this mess, isn’t it?” She tries to shove one of the mares, but it smoke-dances out of the way. “Take it! Take all of it!”
“Tandy—” Smash starts, but she holds up a hand to silence him. This is between her and her nightmares.
“You can’t have him, do you hear me? I won’t let him go. I love him.” It comes out furious. She’s crying again, and she scrubs at the tears impatiently, annoyed at the distraction. “I love him!”
“No!” Smash says. “The gourd isn’t for the likes of you! It’ better for the likes of me.”
She glares at him, and he falls back a step. The nightmares mill nervously.
Chem clears her throat. Tandy wheels on her, fists clenched.
“Quit it, Tandy. You’re right.”
Tandy’s so surprised, she stops being angry. “I am?”
Chem ignores her. To Smash, she says, “You have no right to sacrifice yourself for us, again, and we’ve all had enough of the Void. We can pay the mares and retain half a soul each. We can all escape.”
“But this is all because of me!” Tandy protests.
“Neither of you should have to give anything for me!” Smash says simultaneously.
“Stop it, both of you. Your theatrics are unbecoming. I came into the Void of my own volition, and we’re in this together. We can get by on half a soul if we’re careful. I understand they regenerate in time.” She plants her hooves and crosses her arms. “Do either of you care to debate a centaur?”
No, they don’t. And Tandy… Tandy can live with this. Half a soul was what she originally owed to escape Fiant. Half a soul is what she’ll give.
“Each person can pay their own way,” she concedes.
Smash looks reluctant, but nods.
“Then it’s settled,” Chem says. “Let’s get out of here.”
Tandy turns to the nearest mare and closes her eyes. She braces herself.
“Do it,” she says, and loses half of everything.
It’s harder for the others, having never experienced it before. Tandy knows how it’ll feel, what to expect, and she’s been through worse. It hurts, of course… but not nearly as bad as the first time.
Chem parts ways from them soon after their escape, looking sickly and ashen despite her robust frame. Smash moves slowly, carefully, like he has to measure every move. He’s only half as strong as he used to be, though still more so than any human being. But they’re free and alive, and that’s enough, even though she still doesn’t know what she’ll do about Fiant.
Soon she’ll have to: they’ve reached the Ancestral Ogres, up north. Smash’s new home.
They’re alone together now, but there’s an awkwardness between them. They both know why Smash is here, and they both know they’ll be separating soon. Smash is too softhearted to try and drive her away with cruelty, or even tell her no when she snuggles up to him at night, but he’s clearly trying to keep her at arm’s length emotionally. Even though she now knows his intelligence is permanent, he’s returned to speaking only in rhyme, reducing his vocabulary, as though by reminding her of what he is, he can make her not love him.
Fat chance of that. He’s always been an ogre to her. He’s just also a man too. She won’t have him much longer, so she wants to sanctify in memory every moment she can get.
They haven’t discussed her feelings, or him kissing her. She has to assume it was an impulsive goodbye act that he now regrets, the effects of the Void. Maybe Blythe is right: maybe Tandy is indeed just a human, and maybe it is indeed better to stick with one’s own kind.
Why do those ideas feel so lackluster?
Then they reach the ogres—the first she’s met, other than Smash. The younger ogresses ogle him approvingly, as they should, but the older ogress and the bulls seem less impressed. The moment Smash gives up rhyming (he truly is bad at lying, even by omission), the bull in charge goes, “Half-breed! No need!”
Smash stiffens. He glances at Tandy, straightens his back, and says, “My mother is a curse-fiend, but my father is an ogre, and so am I.”
“Half man! We ban!”
Smash bristles. His fur fluffs… and then goes smooth and flat. He turns away to Tandy. “This isn’t what I want,” he says. “Let’s go.”
They turn to leave, only for the bull ogre to block their exit. He jabs a sausage finger at Smash’s jacket, and Smash slaps it away. Leering at Smash’s gauntlets, the ogre flutters his eyelashes and mimes putting on dainty ladylike gloves, making what Tandy presumes is supposed to be a feminine croon.
“He’s trying to provoke you,” Tandy remarks to Smash.
“He’s doing a bad job,” Smash replies. “The troll was better.”
Giving up subtlety, the bull ogre grabs Tandy and makes as if to eat her. Smash punches him in the face.
The bull ogre drops Tandy and spits out a tooth. “Delight! He fight!”
“No!” But it’s too late. The ogres close ranks around Smash and the battle begins, a ritual designed to test Smash’s mettle and measure his suitability for the clan. Tandy is forgotten, except by the cub who’s too young to take part. She flattens him with a tantrum, but then all she can do is gnash her teeth as, once again, Smash protects her.
He’s losing. He only has half his soul, and strategy can’t compensate fully. Tandy can’t even throw another tantrum; with only half her soul, her emotions (and thus her magic) just aren’t as strong as usual. Of all the times to feel less angry! She’s a poor fighter even full-souled; what good is she with only half?
Something clicks. She knows what to do. She dashes to Smash, who’s buried to the eyes and soaked in beer—an ogre’s idea of a welcome party. Even as she runs to him, he’s yelling at her to get out of here, but she’s not the obedient one in this relationship.
“Smash! Take my half-soul!” And she pulls it free.
She expects it to be agony, like the other times, and it does hurt. But this is different: this is fully her choice, her own making. No one is taking anything from her; she is giving. It’s an exquisite pain, a beautiful, non-suffering hurt. It sinks into Smash’s skin, and she has a brief sensory impression of him—a loving mix of strength and sweetness. Then it’s gone.
Invigorated, Smash rips out of the ground like a zombie, but Tandy’s only half-attentive. Without her soul, her fear and worries calm. Her feelings are no longer a bone-deep turmoil, and the numbness frees her up to focus on tactics. Even Smash at full strength can’t defeat a whole ogre clan on home territory. Getting killed and eaten is only an intellectual concern now (and, in the background, she notes that her souled self would find that troubling) but it’s still unwanted. With or without a soul, Smash is important to her, so her goal is to find them an escape.
Chaos rages around her, but she only notices as much as she needs to avoid it. Her mind clicks along, unimpeded by the loss of her soul. This is old ogre territory; they’ll know all the aboveground routes—
A dragon roar comes from the air. Tandy revises: the ogres will cover the ground, the dragons the air. That leaves the water and the underground—
A boulder flies past the tree she’s hiding behind. Tandy peeks out, sees the tunnel it’s uncovered in the dragon nest. Bingo!
While ogres and dragon fight, she skids down the slope, scattering gems. (Automatically, the jewel nymph in her catalogs them: sapphires, diamonds, tourmalines… a very nice collection.) She darts down into the tunnel and performs a rapid reconnaissance. There’s not much time.
Slick limestone, threads of precious ore in-between. Jewel has been here, which means Tandy has likely been here. But when, where?
A fossil, some small, humble snail the size of her thumb. Can it be…?
Yes! There’s another, and another! She knows where she is now. There’s a route back to Jewel’s caves from here… at least, she’s pretty sure.
She hears another draconian roar, hastily stifled as though gagged. She scrambles up the tunnel, back towards the light.
Smash is there, pinned in the nest. Tandy grabs his arm.
“Come on! I know these tunnels!”
“I can’t leave Tandy!”
“Idiot! I am Tandy!”
He double takes, then follows her into the tunnel. Not a moment too soon either: she hears a hork as the dragon clears its airway. It’ll hopefully scorch the ogres on land first, but then they’re in trouble. And this tunnel is fairly straight, a perfect funnel for dragon flame. Probably the only reason a dragon would allow such a thing in its nest…
Tandy presses her ear to the wall, searching. If she remembers right—
Yes! Echo! A trickle of water!
“There’s a chamber behind this wall,” she says, and when Smash raises a fist, “No! You’ll cause a cave-in. Let me find the proper spot—”
Above, there’s the unforgettable chugging-up-to-steam sound of a dragon preparing to fire, followed by a fwoom and roars of ogrish rage. Smash shifts from foot to foot, clenching and unclenching his gloved fists, but he waits, even as the dragon starts chugging a second time.
Tandy finds the spot. “Here!”
Smash punches through with one hand while sweeping her up with the other, then leaps. Flames blast through the tunnel behind him; then they land with a splash. It’s only thigh deep for Smash, but it’ll protect them from fire.
“There. I’m pretty sure this connects up to the greater underworld…”
But Smash is distracted. “Tandy! You’re… all right?” He sounds uncertain. “You’re different.” That, he sounds surer about.
There’s a grinding crunch, and what little light there is disappears. The dragon must’ve replaced the boulder over the tunnel.
“Ogres have good night vision, right?” Tandy asks. “I grew up in the underworld, so I see fine in the dark, but leading you would be a challenge.”
“Yes, yes, I can see fine, but what about our missions?”
“What missions?” Then she remembers, like recalling a childhood fantasy. Right, she’s supposed to go to some human village and find some dull human male for some absurd nonsense reason she no longer even pretends to care about. With her current clarity of mind, she’s astonished she bothered trying even with a soul.
But Smash looks sad. “One moment.” He sloshes along till the chamber floor slopes up to dry moss and limestone. He doesn’t put her down before that, and even though Tandy can no longer remember why, it seems important, somehow.
Smash reaches into his chest and a softly glowing orb emerges, two lopsided, ill-joined halves. They don’t want to let go of each other; he has to tug a little to get hers free, and he sighs when he does, like he laments the loss. As he loses his temporary wholeness, she sees him wilt and dim.
“Here’s your soul, Tandy.”
It no longer seems so important, but it was vital to the girl she was before, and that’s enough to make her reach out for it.
It all rushes back to her—her fears of the dragon, the ogres, her worry for Smash. Her knees buckle, all the panic flooding through her at once, too late. Smash moves as though to help her, but she waves him off.
“Just… give me a moment.”
She stays, kneeling on the limestone, breathing until the flood of emotions run their course, leaving her drained but calm. Smash sits and waits for her, looking worried but not interrupting. She’s grateful.
“Are you all right?” he asks finally. “The last time, you were comatose. But this time… I didn’t even recognize you.”
“I’m okay.” He’s left more than his touch on her soul now; she can feel him inside her, tiny particles of his soul that adhered during their brief union. It’s… comforting. Intimate. It makes her want to cry, in a good way.
Oh, she was right to wonder. His soul does feel good. She wants more of it. She wants all of it.
Smash is still looking at her uncertainly, so she dries her eyes and chuckles. “I think my soul feels lonely. It was half, and then it was whole with yours, and now it’s half again, with maybe the better half missing.”
Smash scoffs. “Yours is the better half.”
She touches his arm, and she can feel his soul thrumming under his skin, warm and alive as blood. His ears prick forward, and his eyes widen.
“Do you…” she feels foolish. “Do you feel that?”
Something in him ripples. “Yes. It’s… it’s wonderful.”
Her breath catches. It’s not just her! “Yes.”
He doffs a gauntlet, reaches out to her, hesitates. She interlaces her fingers with his.
There’s a surge, intense and electric. They gasp and jerk apart.
“Did you…?” they start, then, “Yes!”
Then they’re laughing, breathless with wonder, and they’re touching again, first carefully, then with more and more enthusiasm.
It’s not the same as when she touched him before. Little bits of her soul are in his now, just like his are in her, and touching seems to pull those bits like magnets, like their souls are pressing beneath their skins, trying to get closer to each other. There’s a simple, rapturous pleasure in it, so much so that they think nothing of pursuing it. Tandy traces the scars across his knuckles, the sensitive rims of his ears, the line of his jaw. His fingertips ghost across her lips, over her charred, chopped hair, down her neck, and it just makes her want more, closer, as close as she can get, and she climbs into his lap to embrace him.
It’s not till she’s buried her face in the ruff on his chest, fur under her hands, trying to wrap her legs around the broadness of his waist so she can rub against him and ease the ache in her core that she realizes what she’s doing. Even then, she doesn’t want to stop. It feels so good, so right. Why should they stop? How could she have ever pretended that she didn’t want this, want him? She’s wanted Smash since he brought her soul up out of the crypt, since she first wondered what his own felt like. She feels her soulless self’s clarity: why does she feel obligated to try so hard to be a human among humans, when that’s never been who she is or what she wants?
“Tandy…” Smash’s voice sounds strained. Does he not want this?
She forces herself to stop, pull away. He’s panting.
“I cried for you,” he blurts, “at the nightmares. I thought I would lose you. But… I thought I was meant for an ogress. I didn’t realize…” he looks away.
Tandy turns his head back toward her with her hand, feeling his soul shimmer under her touch. “That some ogresses are terrible?”
He laughs. “No, I knew that! I didn’t know that I loved you.”
And his soul is so beautiful and open and honest under her hands, she feels tears of joy come to her eyes. “Oh, Smash, you said it!”
“I love you. That’s why I bargained my soul for you, and left the ogres for you. I… haven’t spent much time with other ogres, asides from my parents. I suppose I had a fantasy of how they were, how it would be, and I didn’t feel the same way about you that I felt about them. My mother showed her intentions to my father by knocking him around and stepping on his face; I didn’t want to do that to you, hated the idea, so I didn’t realize…” He looks abashed.
“Do you…” she hates to ask, but she must. “Do you want to stop?”
“No,” he says, so emphatically he seems to surprise himself. “No, in fact, you can… you can touch me deeper, if you want. I like it when you touch me. I’ve gotten to touch your soul twice now, and you haven’t gotten to touch mine at all, so it’s only fair…” And under her hands, she feels the ache of his desire.
Tandy swallows. “I don’t want to hurt you either…”
He chuckles. “I’m an ogre. You can get rough with me. I… I want you to.”
And he does, so badly she can feel it, he’s truly baring his soul to her, and Tandy has never felt so simultaneously humbled and excited in her life. She reaches for his chest, and when he nods at her to go ahead, she touches his soul.
It’s… indescribable, the feeling of his heart in her hands, his joyous, open trust. Her palms pulse with light. And the way he sucks in a breath, leans into her like a plant seeking the sun…
“Yes,” he breathes, and when she tugs it half out of his body, he bends like a drawn bowstring. “Oh, that hurts good…”
She pulls, twists, plays, feeling his breathing roughen, his muscles tense. It takes so little; souls are such delicate things, and Tandy wants to hurt it with respect and gentleness. She twines it through her fingers, watches carefully for signs Smash isn’t enjoying himself, but he’s entranced, eyes closed, totally focused on her touch. Under her hands, she can feel his excitement, his wonder, his pleasure. It’s delicious. True to form, he wasn’t lying: what she’s doing does hurt good. If touches are flavors, pain is spice, sumptuous when used well.
She gets an idea. Bracing herself, she teases her soul forward, out of her skin. It’s a deep ache… and then she entwines it with Smash’s and everything turns blazing and transcendent.
There’s no denying what they want; their souls cling and cleave to each other, like they were made for it, embrace closer than bodies ever could. In the flesh, they’re hugging, as close as they can get, so close but it’s not enough, she needs to get inside him so badly, like when he took her soul inside him.
She kisses him, deep and rough, and time loses all meaning.
Afterward, as they flop companionably together on their backs on the pebbled shore of the cave pool, Tandy announces, “I am going to ask you an embarrassing personal question.”
Smash chuckles. “Oh?”
“I know that Xanth is a magical, improbable place… but how did your parents manage to conceive you?”
Smash looks perplexed. “The way everyone does.”
“I truly doubt they did what my parents did. Your mother wouldn’t have survived it.”
Smash looks alarmed. “You small folk are so gentle all the time, so weak! What did your parents do?”
Tandy tries to pussyfoot politely around it, but Smash is so lacking in subtlety (and so increasingly confused) that finally, she has no choice but to be direct. “You put this,” she touches him, “in here,” she touches herself.
Even then, Smash thinks he must be misunderstanding. “You mean on.”
“No, I mean in.” Many parts of Tandy’s education are lacking, but on that point, so to speak, Jewel (and Fiant) were crystal clear.
Unlike Fiant, Smash seems to find this idea downright dubious. “That sounds… uninteresting. And for us, dangerous.”
“I assure you, from what I’ve heard, human and demon men enjoy it very much.”
“Do the women?”
“I have to assume so, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.”
Smash clarifies: “Do you?”
Tandy sits up and hugs her knees. “I don’t know. I haven’t done it.”
Smash eyes her body language, looking ever more dubious. “Do you… want to do it?”
Tandy looks away. “Fiant did a good job of salting that field, let’s put it that way. But if we ever… you know, wanted to have children… and I don’t know yet, but I think I might want to someday…”
“Oh! I see.” Smash thinks about it, then gently reaches up to tug her back down against his side and tousle her hair. “I might want to too. I guess I’ve never thought about it.”
“I haven’t had much of a chance, with Fiant on my mind,” Tandy confesses. “Obviously nothing like that can happen until he’s taken care of, but I don’t want to think about him right now. Besides,” she tweaks Smash’s ear, “you never answered my question.”
“Well, they certainly didn’t do it human-style! My mother is a rotten lowlife who deserves better. No, my father did what any proper ogre would do to a maiden: he devoured her.” He sees her face and chuckles. “It’s the euphemism we use in front of humans: crunching bones, devouring maidens. My father erupted and then worked it into her with fingers and tongue.”
“Oh,” Tandy says. Then the full image blossoms into her mind, how it might feel, how he might feel, and she hides her face in his pelt. “Oh.”
Smash waits. When she says nothing more, he smiles. “Would you prefer trying it that way?”
She grins against his fur. “Yes. That sounds far less painful.” She pauses. “Wait, wouldn’t that make it less fun, for an ogre? And since when do ogres use euphemisms?”
Smash huffs out a breath. “Well, though we ogres pretend otherwise, our way of doing things is not that simple. Any fool can bash someone with a rock; that’s nothing special. Most ogres are… for lack of a better word, connoisseurs of pain. We have a different vocabulary for it than humans do, a different point of view, and it’s easier to just call it devouring and bone-crunching rather than deal with human misunderstanding. For instance, there’s the kind of pain that comes with misery and suffering, which is the kind you meant, and that’s not fun to me, not with you. Then there’s… a human might call it righteous or joyful pain, which is the fun of a good fight, of being tested, of pushing beyond what seems possible. Fighting the Gap Dragon was a joyful pain indeed!
“And then there’s loving pain, which was what we did just now. It’s putting yourself in the hands of another, trusting it’ll be good. The ideal ogre marriage involves lots of loving pain on both sides… but you’re so small, so fragile, and Blythe told me about Fiant, how he wanted to make ogre love to you, and you’re terrified of him. I never wanted to do that to you. The idea of causing you that suffering pain was upsetting, not enjoyable at all, so I thought what I felt for you must not be love. I still wanted you to hurt me… but I didn’t have a frame of reference for that, so I didn’t recognize what I was feeling.”
“Except when I hit you with a tantrum,” Tandy says, kissing his knuckles.
“Well, yes,” he admits. “Yes, those hurt very good.” Pause. “Since we’re asking embarrassing personal questions… I have to know. When Fireoak said you weren’t a nymph—”
“Oh no, you heard that?” Tandy moans.
He looks apologetic. “When people think you’re stupid and asleep, they sometimes say interesting things. I didn’t get involved because the conversation felt beyond me, and anyway, you handled yourself better than I would’ve. You seem so confident, even though your nymph heritage isn’t visible. How… how do you do it?”
“Well, before I answer, what does nymph-hood mean to you?”
Smash scratches one ear. “Well, you’re a gem nymph, so you know a lot about the underground, rock, and metal. Your night vision’s as good as mine…”
Tandy sighs. “Thanks for reminding me why I love you. To most people, I’m not much of a nymph because to them, being a nymph is just being pretty, infertile, and foolish. It makes me angry, honestly. My mother is so much more than that! Thanks to her, I can recognize minerals by smell, taste, hardness, and scratch color. I know which gems, ores, and metals play nice together, and which don’t, so I can plant gems safely… or cause a cave-in, I guess, if I wanted to create my own funeral cairn. I have her night vision, her agility. Also, my human father did hardly any of the work of raising me. It burns me up to think that he gets to just… I don’t know, squat on my family tree and claim all the glory, when he did none of the work!” She lets her head thump back against the mossy stone. “Our relationship is complicated. I assumed you had similar complications regarding your own mother, and that’s why you don’t like to talk about it.”
“What? Oh, no! No, that’s not it at all!” And Smash does sound a little horrified. “My mother’s a heinous bitch who makes our lives merry hell, and she and Crunch raised me as an ogre. An odd, vegetarian one, yes, but still an ogre, and I don’t like the idea that the measures my father took to survive a lethal curse somehow make him not an ogre. My mother, Termagant, is human, yes, but she works very hard to be an ogress in every way she can, because… well, honestly, her people never treated her well. Humans tend to be cruel to large, strong women who can curdle milk with a smile, and I love my mother, so I never wanted to be a part of a people that would treat her that way. That’s all.”
“I didn’t know that about her,” Tandy says. “That’s too bad.”
“We ogres are proud of our ugliness for the same reason we’re proud of our stupidity: it’s thought to be a lack of human pretense and deception. We are what we are, we want what we want, and there’s no point in hiding it.” He pauses. “Then again, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to hide my own human ancestry, my intelligence, my weakness, so maybe we ogres aren’t as honest as we like to pretend. Anyway, as the Ancestral Ogres were calling me a half-breed sissy, I remembered how you said you’re a nymph and a woman, and couldn’t an ogre also be a man, and… well, it struck me that you’re willing to embrace all of me. And why would I want to spend my life with people who didn’t?” He sighs. “Maybe they’ve been right about me all along: maybe I’m only half an ogre.”
She strokes his cheek, enjoying the coarse fuzz/sweet soul feeling of him. “I dunno, Smash. That sounds really ogrishly stupid to me…”
He beams at the compliment and gives her a squeeze. “Thank you.”
Tandy nods, knowing he can see it in the dark. “Why is it always halves, for people like us? Half soul, half man, half nymph. Like we’re lacking. But what if, instead of half, we’re two? Both? And that has its own rewards. You can have human intelligence and ogre honesty. I can have a human soul and a nymph’s ability to go without.” She cocks her head. “Though I don’t know that I believe that human myth. My mother Jewel supposedly has no soul, but she loves and cares and all the rest of it.”
Smash gives her a gentle squeeze. “You take after her. Even that first time you lost your soul, when you were hardly able to stand, you tried to get me to leave, told me to save myself.”
“I did?” She shakes her head. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“You were in pretty bad shape. But you saved us both the second time.” He tilts his head to look at her. “I’ve never gone completely without a soul, and now you’ve done that twice. What was it like?”
Tandy considers. “It felt like… like there was no color in the world. The first time I experienced that, against my will, it was a terrible thing. But when I was doing it by choice, because I wanted to, it just seemed different, not better or worse. The world feels… less overwhelming, without a soul. Clearer, more neutral. There aren’t good or bad things, just things I want and things I don’t, or things that I know will matter to me when I can feel color again.”
“Well, I owe you half a soul at least once, so maybe I’ll get to experience it for myself.” Pause. “Where are we going to go now? Obviously the Ancestral Ogres aren’t for me, but I’m not sure where is. And if this is the underworld, isn’t Fiant still down here? Are you in danger again?”
Tandy sighs. “Probably, but I need to overcome my fear of him. I’m tired of him running my life from afar. He’s been hovering in the back of my mind, my nightmares, for so long… I don’t even know what he’s truly like anymore, only what I feel about him. Does that make sense?”
Smash tilts one ear. “It’s the only way I can imagine you still being afraid of him, to be honest.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tandy, you’ve bullied and ridden a nightmare, twice. You’ve gone face-to-face with the Gap Dragon with me, flattened an ogre cub without me, walked and run through fire, rescued me from being frozen to death, escaped the Void, and survived the loss of your soul twice.” He turns to look at her, his eyes gleaming gold-green in the dark. “What does this demon have that makes him so much more frightening?”
Tandy’s never thought about it that way before. She has to mull it over. Despite everything she’s been through, despite intellectually knowing the Gap Dragon to be one of the most dangerous individuals in Xanth, Fiant inspires a deep visceral fear beyond all reason. To even think about him makes it hard to breathe.
There’s a solution for that.
“Smash, I need you to take my soul for a moment.”
He raises his head, alarmed. “What for? I don’t need it.”
“It’s not for you. My soulless self has a… a clarity that I need right now. I need to think about this, and the feelings are too loud. Please, Smash.”
Smash looks sad, but he holds out his ungloved, beloved, battle-scarred hand. “Only because you asked me to.”
She tugs her soul free, and as it comes to rest in Smash’s hand, the world clicks into focus. Feelings still exist, but they’re much less overwhelming.
Fiant. A figure of childish terror, even now. Why? He’s just a demon.
…isn’t he?
Without her soul to distract her, Tandy feels something amiss. She imagines Fiant, strong and stout and dark, not unlike Smash. Handsome, in a diabolical way, which is very unlike Smash. A shapeshifting, ever-changing being who can turn to smoke, walk through her bedroom wall, who even seemed to follow her into the nightmare realm…
Strange, that. He was the only one in there whose face she knew. Even Smash saw him—apparently Fiant dropped a boulder on him in that well, and though Smash didn’t recognize him (why would he?), Tandy did when hearing the description. But why would Fiant appear in the nightmare realm to Smash?
Unless he was already from there…
There’s more than one kind of demon. There are the underworld demons, the rum distillers of demon drink… and then there are inner demons, kin to the equine nightmares. Half dream, embodiment of idle fantasy… or the worst of night terrors.
Snapshot of memory: Tandy cowering in the crypt, Fiant silhouetted at the doorway, just standing, watching her.
Like her father did…
The thought would be unthinkable, to the souled Tandy, but this Tandy has no time for such niceties. She is far from Jewel and Crombie, far from home. A thought cannot hurt her, and so she thinks: it’s not really Fiant the other me is scared of.
Then she realizes something else. Maybe she isn’t just scared. She’s also hopelessly, furiously angry.
Clearheaded and soulless, Tandy can’t really feel that anger, never mind discharge it. But there’s a solution for that.
She turns to Smash, quietly grateful that he hasn’t tried to interrupt or interfere. He’s just sitting, letting her think, watching with silent caution, holding her glowing soul in his hand.
“Thank you,” Tandy says. “I think I need to get angry now, hugely angry, which means I need not just my soul, but yours as well. I’m going to scream and cry and get violently upset, and I need you to not comfort me, not try to make anything better. I need you to just sit, and watch, and let this happen. Okay?”
“Of course.” And he tugs free his soul with his free hand, so as to present both to her.
Tandy smiles him, loving him in a different way while soulless, but no less. Then she reaches out and takes the souls.
Colors, feelings, memories rush back, popping off like cherry bombs behind her eyes. Her fight with Crombie, his nighttime lurking at her door, her dread building and building until, just before meeting Fiant, it reached a point where she felt she had no choice but to tell her mother.
Only to hear, “Oh, Tandy. Crombie would never do that. He loves you. You must’ve been having…”
“…Nightmares,” Tandy finishes, and then the rage erupts out of her guts.
Her mind becomes blood and fire. She pounds the stone with her bare hands, and when that risks hurting her, she smashes her way into the pool to kick and punch the water, fighting its passive inertia. She dunks her head so she can scream at the top of her lungs underwater, and that’s so satisfying that she takes all her anger, at Crombie, at Jewel, at all the unspoken, unspeakable truths lurking in those caves, and she channels it into the biggest, ugliest tantrum she’s ever thrown, blasting the pool clear out of its bed.
As the water rains back down onto her, she breaks down crying… from proper sadness this time. She grieves her lost illusions: of her father, of her mother, of herself. She remembers Humfrey: “people always ask the wrong Questions, then refuse to accept the Answers…”
To think, she had asked how to escape Fiant for good! As though any mere spell could remove an inner demon. She feels like such a fool. Fiant may not even be solely her demon; in fact, she’s quite sure he isn’t. He most assuredly is Jewel’s, maybe even Crombie’s as well. So much of her life, lost to this.
Smash sits, watching her rage, then weep. Soulless, he looks drained, tired, and sad, but as promised, he doesn’t interrupt, though he makes as though to reach out when she starts to cry. In her breast, she feels his strong, vital soul, embracing hers as though to comfort her. Even in pain, even in grief, he still feels so, so good.
When her emotions finally run their course, she slogs out of the pool. She’s vented her emotions and thrown a royal banger of a tantrum, but she’s hurt nobody, caused no cave-ins. “I’m done,” she says, tugging his soul free (but still leaving dust-small sparks behind). “You can interrupt now.”
She falls into his arms, and once again, he catches her.
“So?” he asks after a moment. “Do you have a plan?”
Tandy is too tired to smile with her body, but she knows he can feel her soul doing it. “Yes. I think I’m finally ready to deal with him.”
…
Smash and Tandy’s luck is bad. They hope to make it deeper into the old neighborhood before Fiant finds them, but he catches them right at the edge. Even worse, he catches Tandy in one of the few moments when she’s alone—Smash having gone to water some rocks. She rounds a corner, foraging, and nearly crashes into Fiant, who seems as surprised as he is.
He recovers quickly. “Well, send me to blazes! What once was lost has now been found.” He cocks his head. “You looked better before you left, though.”
After months of rough adventuring, Tandy isn’t the cute girl who left the underworld. Her feet are tough and callused and dirty, her hair chopped haphazardly. (At least she’s cut off all the burnt parts.) Her clothes are no longer ragged, but much-mended… and her shirt has, stitched onto the back, the words OGRE’S LOVER. (It has proven useful at keeping lesser monsters off her back.) After all the things she’s seen and done, Fiant still summons a surge of residual adolescent fear in her… and almost two years’ worth of impotent rage.
This is the creature who cost her a year of her life, half of her soul, half her lover’s soul, half of Chem’s soul. So much heartache and fear and pain, all because of him.
She hurls her rage and terror into his face.
The force of it sends her staggering backwards down the tunnel.
“Ow!” she hears Fiant go. “That’s no way to welcome me back! What’s wrong with you?”
Tandy is already running, screaming for Smash. They really do crash into each other, though Smash catches her.
Fiant is already reforming out of the defensive smoke cloud he used to avoid the blast, having apparently learned from the last time she threw a tantrum at him. He’s so mad, he doesn’t even notice the ogre, which is impressive. “Come back here, my little human beauty!”
“I’m not human,” she says, and yanks out her half-soul and shoves it into Smash’s chest.
It seems appropriate that the coffin creep of the nightmare realm wasn’t completely lying, when he spoke to Tandy in that crypt so long ago. Fiant can’t hurt her soul if he can’t reach it, and she is happy to lend Smash her strength—not with which to protect her, but to distract Fiant.
The moment her soul is gone, so is her panic. While Smash hurls himself, roaring, into the fray, she runs a safe distance back into the dark, finds their supplies, and gets to work. They’ve been lugging this stupid gourd for who knows how many miles, and she went through quite an ordeal to get her hands on it, so she’ll be happy to finally be rid of it. Pulling her knife from her side, she cuts the cord that holds the package shut. Yanking the gourd free (and very carefully not looking), she holds it high and races into the fighting chamber.
“I’m here!” she shouts, as they’ve planned.
Smash shuts his eyes and doesn’t look, ears flattening. Fiant, naturally enough, turns to look at the woman he’s pursued for so long. He recognizes the gourd before he sees the peephole, and even soullessness can’t stop Tandy from reveling in the look on his face as he realizes what’s going to happen to him.
“No!” he cries, but it’s too late. His body and expression freeze.
Smash and Tandy wait for a moment. When they’re sure that Fiant is caught, they relax.
“You’re bleeding,” she says to Smash. “Are you all right?”
“Demons hit hard,” he says, staunching the blood from his nose, “but I’ve had my face rearranged by worse, and it felt good to whale on him, after all the trouble he’s caused you. Do you want your soul back for this?”
“Revenge is best served cold. Here, if I remember properly, there’s a really pungent sulfur cavern down this way that nobody likes to use but rheumatic dragons; we can prop him and this gourd in a corner, and nobody will come looking…”
Fiant has been Tandy’s personal demon for so long, it is a singular pleasure to feed him to the nightmare realm that birthed both him and her liberation. It’s only because of Fiant’s waywardness that Tandy harnessed a nightmare at all, so they surely have a bone to pick with him.
When she presses her ear to the gourd, she hears the screams of enraged horses and a cry of demonic terror.
Tandy smiles.
Series: Xanth fanfiction
Summary: When life sends you nightmares, you ride them. When life sends you Smash Ogre, you ride HIM. Tandy deals with her sense of species identity, harnesses her nightmares, faces her demons, loses and regains her soul, and gets a character arc.
Word Count: 21,000
Notes: We have so many feelings and thoughts about Xanth in general and Tandy in particular that we're just going to put them in the comments below. Content warnings for reference to magically-compelled love, an incest metaphor that's never acted on, a magically-compelled suicide attempt (quickly thwarted, everyone's fine), fantasy racism (MAJOR theme), consensual kink (soul play, magical impact play), and sex. Also Tandy becomes median for this fic!
Jewel and Crombie, Gorgon and Humfrey
“I never saw anything so sweet in my life. She was weak and hesitant, just like a nymph. No threat to any man, least of all a soldier. No competition. The kind of female I could really get along with.” –Crombie, the Source of MagicTandy will always remember the first time she truly realizes what she is.
She is a little girl, delighted because her soldier father is home for once on leave. Excited, determined to impress him, she shows him everything Jewel taught her by enacting a game of gem hide-and-seek.
“I’ll hide them, just like Mom does! Then you have to find them. Close your eyes; no peeking!”
Chuckling indulgently, Crombie covers his eyes, pretending to peek until she mock-scolds him. Then she takes the reject gems from her mother’s barrel (blue rubies, round crystals, floppy diamonds) and hides them around the home caves. When she shouts, “Ready!” Crombie heaves himself up from the chair with sounds of comedic effort, tucks his daughter (shrieking with delight) under his arm, and starts the hunt.
Most, of course, he finds right away, stashed in corners, cabinets, and under doilies. The one in the back of his sock drawer earns her a pat on the head and a, “clever child, just like her old man.”
One, though, he can’t find.
He searches high and low, first casually, then increasingly seriously. As she becomes ever more gleeful, he gets more and more determined, ransacking the cave, even patting her down in case she hid the gem in her pocket, but it’s not there. He’s in the process of digging through the gem barrel (even though, by nature, it is always full, so Tandy couldn’t have hidden one in it) when Jewel comes home. She looks upon the chaos—the tousled bedding, the overflowing gems, her shamefaced husband—with dismay.
“Crombie!” she cries, with a smell like burning. “The mess! What are you doing?”
“I hid a jewel he can’t find!” Tandy crows, delighted at having outfoxed an adult.
Jewel’s scent goes from agitated smoke storm to fresh-cut flowers. “Did you?” She bends to hug her daughter. “Well done, my darling! You’ve learned so well. Show me where you hid it!”
Aglow with pride, Tandy steps out of her shoes and plucks the final failure, a floppy diamond, from its hiding place between her toes. It was such a pitiful little thing, it hadn’t even made her limp, and though Crombie had patted her down and checked her shoes, he hadn’t thought to check her socks.
Jewel clucks her tongue, though her scent stays cheerful. “Oh, that’s just a trick. When you grow up, you can’t hide them there, silly girl. The gems have to long outlast you!”
“Aw…”
Jewel kisses her cheek. “You still did a good job. Didn’t she, dear?”
Crombie is silent. He seems thoughtful. He takes the squishy diamond and absently spins it through his fingers.
“See, Dad, see?” Tandy says. “I’m going to be a gem nymph, just like Mom!”
“You’re no nymph,” he says. “You’re too clever. You’re human, sure enough.”
Even though he smiles a second later, it doesn’t reach his eyes. Something about it makes her feel bad. At the time, though, she’s too young to understand why, so she puts the unthinkable thought out of her mind and runs to tell Jewel about her day.
…
“That’s my father, all right! He hates women, and he knows I’m growing up, so he’s starting to hate me too.” –Tandy, Ogre, Ogre, pg. 137
A few years later, when Tandy wakes up with blood on her sheets, Jewel does her best to explain the facts of life. It’s a challenge, since Jewel is a nymph, immune to such human indignities, but she is a special nymph, capable of bearing and raising a child, and she’s been married to Crombie for many years, so she certainly knows what sex is.
“You’re growing up,” she says, blushing as she passes Tandy the rags and cottonwood packets. “It’s important for you to know these things.”
Tandy is horrified. Not because of the blood itself—though she does think it’s a rotten trick to play on a person—but because it means she’s becoming a woman, a human woman. Everyone knows how Crombie feels about human women.
But she’s not just any human woman, right? She’s also a nymph, and he does love nymphs. (Indeed, he loved Jewel so much that he had to put a love spell on her, just so she could feel it back!) Tandy’s his daughter. It’s different. It has to be.
But she and Crombie start getting into fights. He insists Tandy’s changing, becoming ornery, deceitful, and bad-tempered “in the manner of her kind.” Tandy swears it’s him. Little things that never seemed to concern him before—what she wears, where she goes—are suddenly matters of huge importance… though only when he’s home. Once he’s gone, things go back to normal, and Tandy’s old enough to notice the inconsistency and point it out.
She doesn’t even remember what starts the fight when she’s thirteen. It’s some piffling detail that never seemed to matter before but does now. Things get heated. Jewel wrings her hands helplessly. Neither Tandy nor Crombie will back down, insisting the other is wrong. They get louder and louder, angrier and angrier.
Then, to her humiliation, Tandy starts crying.
Crombie scents blood. “You want to act like a woman? Be treated like a woman? Fine! Cry all you want. You can’t fool me. Women only cry for one reason…”
But Tandy isn’t crying to manipulate him. She’s crying because she’s so helplessly, furiously angry. It boils in her guts like lava in a volcano, and as Crombie informs her that adults need to learn to manage themselves, she reaches back and hurls her rage at him.
Tandy’s thrown tantrums before, of course. Her magic was discovered in her terrible twos, when it destroyed a particularly hideous dress that she didn’t want to wear. But after causing a dangerous cave-in when she was eight, she’s reined herself in.
She’s grown a lot since then. So has her magic.
Her rage hits Crombie square in the chest, sending him crashing into the cave wall. A shelf breaks, scattering herbs and spices. He slides to the floor, bleeding from his forehead, and for a horrible moment, Tandy thinks she’s killed her father. Then he looks up and glares at her so hard she falls back a step. Jewel rushes to help him stagger to his feet.
“You little… is this how you behave?” he says.
“I’m sorry,” Tandy says. “I’m sorry!” And she is, she truly is.
Crombie turns away, and Jewel turns with him. Over her shoulder, in a soft, sad voice that’s far worse than Crombie’s fury, she says, “It’s not nice to be destructive.”
She smells of cold ashes, and Tandy realizes the true depth of what she’s done. Jewel loves her daughter, but in an ordinary, maternal way. Crombie, though, she loves with magical urgency, the Love of Her Life, the sun in her sky. She can always have more children, but there will only ever be one Crombie, and now that Tandy’s forced her mother to choose between them, nothing will ever be the same again.
And all because of her childish, shameful, destructive magic. Throwing tantrums, like a thwarted toddler.
So Tandy shoves her anger down, deep inside, and keeps it there.
…
“[A nightmare] had given Tandy a ride to the Good Magician’s castle—which had perhaps been a better destination for her than the one she had sought. […] Her father Crombie, the soldier at Castle Roogna, might not have been much help. Smash knew the man casually. Crombie was getting old, no longer the fighter he used to be. He was also a woman hater who might not have taken his daughter’s problem seriously.” –Ogre, Ogre, pg. 116
After that big fight, Crombie spends less and less time at home, and the few times he’s around, he’s… distant? Not angry, exactly, but something unpleasant and stagnant hangs in the caves, like bad air. Tandy starts waking up at night to find him standing just outside her bedroom door. Never speaking, never doing anything, just watching her in a way that makes her uneasy.
Those experiences prepare her for when she meets the demon Fiant. She could’ve sworn that she knew all the neighborhood demons, that they weren’t building rum works in the area, that Fiant and his works just come out of nowhere. Bur when she blunders in like a child, Fiant isn’t angry. He just smiles a little, and gives her a look that she could swear she’s never seen before, but which she nevertheless instantly recognizes.
When Fiant starts his own nighttime break-ins into her room, he does far more than just stand and watch. He’s so aggressive that Tandy overcomes her fear of her magic to blast him with it. The tantrum does make him leave, but he’ll be back… and now he knows what her talent is, that he can withstand it.
As horrible as Fiant is, he is in some ways a relief. At least Tandy knows what he’s doing, that it’s wrong, and why. He is a relative stranger, so she isn’t obligated to like him, love him, or make excuses for him. She can tell him no, fight back, tell her mother and neighbors without fear, so she does.
The neighbors’ reactions are bewildering. They insist, to a man (or demon, rather) that none of them have ever seen or heard of Fiant before. He truly does seem to have come out of nowhere, speaking and appearing to no one. Tandy’s baffled.
And as for Jewel, she refuses to hear it. She insists that Fiant is a neighbor, and neighbors are lovely, so surely Tandy is misunderstanding the situation. Jewel lives in her own rose-tinted world most of the time, but this is beyond her usual naïveté. Tandy refuses to suspect why.
Even if she won’t allow herself to think it, she knows what she has to do: escape the caves. If her mother and her neighbors can’t help her, then she’ll have to do it herself.
Tandy has never left the underworld before, and she’s never felt so trapped in it. That fear ends up being her way out. When life sends you nightmares, you ride them.
It takes work and practice. Tandy has never ridden anything but her mother’s diggle before, and a giant undulating worm is nothing like a horse, never mind a diaphanous, demonic one. But she is motivated; she trains herself in leaping out of bed to sit astride a couple of chairs (her makeshift practice “horse”). She practices alert, she practices groggy, she practices right as she’s sliding into twilight sleep… and all that practice pays off, when she nabs her first nightmare.
Because it’s the only place on the surface world she knows, she tells the demon horse to bring her to Castle Roogna, where Crombie works. But maybe her nightmare knows better. Maybe it does Tandy a favor, bringing her to her grandfather instead.
Not that Tandy is aware of that salacious bit of family history, yet. That tidbit won’t get unearthed for decades, and when she does finally find out, she’ll be livid. Now, though, living underground with no human contact but her father, she can’t know Humfrey as anything but the famous Magician of Information. He surely knows about her, though; it’s his job, and when his granddaughter collapses on his doorstep, frightened and battered from riding the nightmare all night to escape her would-be demon rapist, he treats her as a supplicant.
“Well?” he grumps. “What’s your Question?”
“I—I don’t have a Question,” Tandy says, exhausted and confused. “I’m just trying to get to my father Crombie, at Castle Roogna.”
Humfrey pauses. He twitches a bushy eyebrow. Then he says, “People always ask the wrong Questions, then refuse to accept the Answers. Well, you can do your year of service in advance. Maybe by then, you’ll figure it out.”
And so Tandy becomes her grandfather’s maid for a year, even as everyone tells her how lucky she is for having the customary three challenges waived. Ever so grateful for his beneficence, she scrubs dishes and chamber pots, polishes magic mirrors, washes and mends and folds countless pairs of socks. (And decades later, when she finds out who her grandmother is, she rages. Sofia Socksorter the Second!)
That’s still in the future, though. For now, she tells herself how lucky she is, does her work without complaint, and shoves it all down into her tantrums, her little bit of magic, which she doesn’t use once, that entire year.
Family history aside, it isn’t bad, her year of service. Thanks to the spirit levels guarding the castle, she’s safe. She gets to learn new skills, hear all kinds of gossip, and see all kinds of beings, if only in passing. There’s a sort of camaraderie among the supplicants giving service (“What are you in for?”) and everyone’s willing to help each other out. That’s nice. She doesn’t even mind cleaning up after the griffins and harpies and even, once, a blindfolded basilisk. How many people get to truly see a basilisk—more than once, that is?
Even telling her parents proves surprisingly easy. Jewel, characteristically, is fine the moment she gets a letter explaining where Tandy is. She doesn’t ask how or why her daughter went to Good Magician Humfrey. Crombie, also characteristically, throws a fit that puts his daughter’s tantrums to shame… but at Humfrey, not Tandy. Her, he gives the silent treatment, which flummoxes (and hurts) her at the time. It isn’t until much, much later, upon learning her family history, that Tandy realizes that Crombie must have assumed she discovered the ancestral link and went behind his back, choosing his loathed father over himself. (Humfrey, of course, doesn’t explain. He just tosses a towel over the steaming magic mirror and says, “He’ll get over it in thirty years. Don’t bother cleaning this one for a couple hours.”)
The spirit levels all over Humfrey’s castle keep demons away, lest their spirits be flattened, but that isn’t enough to completely stop Fiant. The moment that Jewel receives Tandy’s letter stating where she is, the nymph must tell the neighbors, because the following morning, Tandy finds two magic letters for her. One is a comforting, loving, “thank goodness you’re all right!” letter from Jewel. The second, Tandy innocently presumes, must come from Crombie, so she opens it.
It is not from Crombie.
When Tandy doesn’t come down for breakfast, the Gorgon comes up to find her weeping in the supplicant dormitory.
“Tandy!” The faceless woman rushes to her, wrapping an arm and a couple serpentine coils of hair around her. “What’s the matter?”
Petting the snakes (who have ceased hissing out of concern for her), Tandy hands over the letter, too ashamed to say anything more. The Gorgon unfolds the letter and the snakes focus their attention on it, reading along with her.
The spell of invisibility on the Gorgon’s face hides her expression, but the snakes start hissing again, twisting with agitation. One snaps at another.
“Is that why you came here?” the Gorgon asks.
Tandy, still crying, nods. “He must’ve found out from my mother.”
“I see. Well, you’re safe here. He can’t come get you, never mind do any of the repulsive things he says in this letter.” The corners have started to char from the words contained. “Would you like me to bring this up to Humfrey?”
“No,” Tandy says, horrified. Humfrey is a brilliant, important, grumpy man, and she’s absolutely sure he will have no patience for such trivialities. The Gorgon, despite being his wife with a petrifying gaze, has been far more friendly and approachable, in Tandy’s opinion anyway. “I don’t need him to do anything. Just… now every letter I get, I’ll have to worry it’s from him.”
The Gorgon says, “If you like, I can read them for you. Or, even better, I could reroute your magic mailbox to mine and weed out such filth beforehand, so you only receive the proper things.”
“Oh, could you? It wouldn’t be too much trouble? The letters are so…”
“My dear, this Fiant person is repulsive, but he’s a stranger to me. His letters will disgust me, but they can’t hurt me. You aren’t the first person who’s come running from someone. Now, if you want, I can tell you if he sends anything, just so you know…”
“No, no,” Tandy urges. “I want nothing to do with him, or his letters. Just throw them away and don’t tell me anything about them.” She rethinks. “Unless he threatens my mother or something like that. I’d want to warn her. I don’t think he will, though. He’s surely been her neighbor for years, and it’s never been a problem for them.”
“I’ll happily do that for you. That’ll be no trouble at all.” The Gorgon tucks the letter away, and the moment it’s out of sight, Tandy feels better. “Now come along, dear. Your breakfast is getting cold. You’ll feel better after eating.”
The two women go down to breakfast, and that’s the last Tandy hears about any letters from Fiant. She is grateful for that courtesy.
Those are the three men in Tandy’s life: Crombie, Fiant, and Humfrey.
And then there’s Smash Ogre.
Tandy and Smash
“There is only one ogre who ever did anything notable […] that is Smash Ogre, who through a fluke of parentage was not sufficiently stupid, and thus managed to accomplish something.” –Humfrey, Jumper Cable, pg. 79-80
Crombie freezing Tandy out has a chilling effect on their relationship, to the point that when her year is up, Tandy realizes she has no desire to go to him. This has indeed led her to decide on her Question: “how do I escape Fiant, for good?”
Having seen Humfrey’s disdain for muddy, poorly thought out Questions, she’s spent a lot of time thinking hers through, and it seems a good, sensible one. Tandy expects the Answer to be similarly straightforward: a purchase of a spell, perhaps a letter to the correct Roogna official.
Instead, she gets called into Humfrey’s office, an intimidating space stuffed to the rafters with priceless magical artifacts and books… and an ogre, who is improbably soaking wet and trying his hardest to curl himself small enough to not break or soak anything. (Having cleaned Humfrey’s office multiple times, Tandy knows that this is impossible, and she has a moment of maid’s panic before she realizes, with some surprise, that such things are no longer her problem.) It isn’t the best first impression.
Though Tandy has certainly heard about ogres, this is the first time she’s seen one. He’s a giant, hulking black furball with a crooked potato nose (clearly broken multiple times) and big pointed cauliflower ears (one missing a chunk) that swivel like a beast’s. He wears an orange jacket, steel gauntlets, and nothing else… which is embarrassing, since her eye-level is right at his groin, but neither Smash nor Humfrey seem to notice, so Tandy straightens her back and desperately bluffs that she doesn’t either.
“The two of you travel together,” is all Humfrey says to her. To Smash, he adds, “You’ll find what you want among the Ancestral Ogres.”
Up until now, Tandy has fantasized, perhaps naïvely, about getting her Answer, fulfilling it, and going home to return to her old life as jewel-nymph-in-training, just now free of Fiant. Now she has a horrid premonition of trying to introduce this monster to Jewel. He’ll barely fit through the door. He’ll knock over every delicate object in the place, chew on emeralds like rock candy, demolish the doilies. And he smells like wet livestock.
No. Tandy is not going home, and she is not going to Castle Roogna.
Where can she go, then?
“If you would do me a favor,” the Gorgon says, “I used to live on an island near the Magic Dust Village. My sister, the Siren, remains in the area, and if you would convey my greetings…”
After everything the Gorgon has done for her, Tandy is more than happy to. But… “But how can I travel with an ogre?” A big, intimidating, indisputably male ogre, alone.
The Gorgon puts a comforting arm around her. “Smash is no ordinary ogre. He’s honest and halfway civilized. He will perform his service correctly, to the best of his limited understanding.” Seeing Tandy’s nervousness, she adds, with significance, “He will permit no harm to come to you.”
Tandy looks dubiously at the ogre—at his face, which requires her to crane her neck. He seems completely unbothered at being talked about like he isn’t there. Indeed, he waves and smiles, showing big, crooked gap teeth, with canines just a little too sharp and prominent for comfort. (One of them is missing, presumably knocked out.)
Fiant is a demon, but at least he is generally human-sized. If this brute gets an idea into his head, though… it seems to her that this might indeed solve her Fiant problem: by giving her an even bigger one.
Then again, as long as she’s traveling, Fiant has no way to locate her. (Unless she foolishly tells her mother again. Ha! She’s learned from that mistake!) And Smash isn’t looking at her with the impatient disdain Humfrey does, or the slavering way Fiant does. He certainly doesn’t look at her the way Crombie does. He’s just looking with benign curiosity, like she’s anyone else. And he hasn’t tried to touch her, even though she’s right there. Indeed, he’s contorted himself into a pretzel to avoid it.
“Don’t misjudge this ogre,” the Gorgon tells her. “The Good Magician Humfrey really does know best.”
Where else is Tandy going to go? What else is she going to do?
And so she agrees.
Tandy avoids physical contact as long as she can, even though it slows them down, and Smash shrugs and lets her, apparently used to smaller beings keeping their distance. It’s not until she ignorantly blunders into a tangle tree that they touch, by accident. In the process of rescuing her, Smash ends up in close quarters, and the tangle tree bonks her into him a few times, a sensation akin to being smooshed against a deep shag carpet. (She has played with them a couple times, in the underground car park.) Her dress is in tatters, but Smash shows no sign of noticing, too busy fighting to free her. He doesn’t even grab her to shove her out, merely clears her path and orders her to go. (She is quick to obey.)
Afterwards, he boosts her up out of danger a few times, but it’s all disinterested, professional even. (If an ogre can ever be called professional!) Maybe the steel gauntlets help the impression, since his touch is only warm metal. He never takes them off, not to eat or anything, and they seem so incongruous on the mostly-nude furball that she can’t help but pay attention to them. They’re shiny, but while Tandy has a lot of training with raw minerals, ores, and gems, she’s not nearly as astute with worked material. Finally, over dinner, she caves to curiosity.
“Where did you get those?” she asks.
He grunts. “Me armor hands in centaur lands.” His voice sounds like a rockslide. He sees her eyeing them. “She want see?”
“Can I?”
He tugs one off and hands it to her.
It smells as expected, being worn during heavy exertion all day, and it’s almost as long as her arm, so heavy that she almost drops it. (Smash chortles when he sees that.) Finally, she props it in her lap to examine it. It’s clearly well made… and well taken care of.
“Do you… clean these?” She doesn’t mean to sound so incredulous, but she’s yet to see Smash bathe.
He looks embarrassed. “Me no clean! Obscene!” Flustered, he adds, “me hard toil, with cloth and oil.”
Oh. He’s embarrassed because ogres aren’t supposed to notice or care about things like that. Cleaning and maintenance are the tasks of civilized people. Strange, though. She knows that Smash has spent time around such people—even if the jacket and gauntlets weren’t a dead giveaway, the Gorgon said so—but why would he be ashamed of that? And how to make it better? To apologize would surely make him feel worse.
Trying to save face for him, she goes, “Well, they’re absolutely disgusting and smell terrible,” and he grins with relief and nods: that’s the ogre way!
Pleased to have negotiated the situation, Tandy returns to her examination of the gauntlets. Up close, she realizes that while she recognizes the alloys, the bulk of it isn’t true metal ore, the kind she’s familiar with, but of ironwood derivation. Even so, she can see the quality of the steel—surely the centaurs had cultivated ironwood in its purest form to get this! As befitting such work, they’re ingeniously made, a series of metal plates cunningly engineered and bolted together, studs and reinforcement at the knuckles. She’d hate to get slapped by anyone wearing such a thing!
Clearly he can take them off at will. If he chose to touch her, he could. He just hasn’t.
It makes her feel… safe.
She’s been looking at the gauntlet too long, but Smash just looks back placidly, even proudly, as though of course it’s an appropriate interest. For ogres, it surely is.
She hands (heaves) it back. “They’re marvelous. That’s good metal.”
Clearly pleased, he puts it back on, flexing his fingers into place. “She not wrong; iron strong.”
She realizes that she was so curious about the gauntlet itself that she didn’t get a look at his hand. Oh well. There will surely be other opportunities, and anyway, she doesn’t feel like she can ask. For humans or ogres, surely it’d be inappropriate.
“You take good care of them,” she says without thinking, and Smash tenses up again. He doesn’t seem insulted exactly, more like she’s caught him at something.
Desperate, flailing, she adds, “I mean, for a big hairy brute like you.”
It’s not a good recovery, not nearly as good as last time, but he relaxes again, leaving her perplexed. Ogres are supposed to be the most callous monsters on earth. What would he have to be sensitive about?
…
“Are you sure you’re an ogre? You don’t sound like one.”
“I’m an ogre. Would you like me to throw you around some more to prove it?” –Smash and the coffin creep, Ogre, Ogre, pg. 60
Not long after that, Smash blunders into the Eye Queue vine and gains intelligence… much to his horror.
“It has temporarily un-ogred me!” he cries, scraping at his own scalp. His ogrish rhyming is gone, and his vocabulary sounds like a cheap imitation of Humfrey. “I must expunge it from my system!”
Tandy rushes to stop him from ripping off his own head, which he seems only too willing to do. “Oh, no, don’t do that! It’s sort of…” don’t say nice, that’ll only make it worse, “interesting, really.”
Judging by the look Smash gives her, “interesting” isn’t much better.
“I don’t mind you being smart, Smash. It’s much easier to talk with you.”
Smash hesitates. She can tell he doesn’t like it, but she can also see him thinking through the hazards she’s blundered into just because she didn’t understand his rhyming grunts in time. And as far as she knows, there’s no way to remove an Eye Queue. There’s only waiting it out.
“It seems I must tolerate this curse for the time being,” he concedes. “But I assure you, I shall be alert for an antidote!”
“If that’s the way you feel…” she says.
Why does it bother him so much? What’s so bad about intelligence? She knows ogres are proud of their stupidity, but this feels personal.
When they arrive at the Magic Dust Village to get directions, Smash hangs back. “Maybe you should do the talking,” he says, looking shifty.
Tandy blinks. “Okay…”
An earthen wall surrounds the village, and a bored troll guards the gate. He ignores her completely, addressing Smash: “do you come in peace or mayhem?”
“Peace,” Tandy says, loudly enough to get the troll’s attention. “I’m Tandy, and this is Smash. He’s protecting me.”
The troll squints at her, then at Smash, as though waiting for him to put her in her place. When Smash doesn’t, the troll says, “Protecting—?”
“Yes,” Tandy says firmly, crossing her arms.
The troll waits for Smash to speak. He doesn’t.
“Now, we have no prejudice against monsters here,” the troll starts, and next to her, Tandy feels Smash… not squirm or tense, exactly, but something, “I’m a monster myself, and some of my best friends are monsters. But only a fool trusts an ogre. Are you sure you’re not a kidnap victim? You do look good enough to eat…”
His tone makes her shrink back behind Smash, who angles himself between them. His fur is starting to bristle. “She’s not for eating.”
The troll stops looking at Tandy, at least, though only because he’s now directing that incredulous look at Smash instead. “You don’t sound like an ogre! What, did you run afoul of the human transformer-king?”
Now his hackles are fully up. With a hint of roar: “I was whelped an ogre!”
Tandy has seen Smash fight a few times now, but this is the first time she’s seen him anywhere resembling angry. (Is he angry? The word doesn’t quite fit. Offended, maybe? Not quite that either…) Oddly, it doesn’t frighten her, just confuses her. Judging by the troll’s expression, it perplexes him as well. This clearly isn’t usual ogre behavior.
Getting a grip on himself, Smash says stiffly, “My father is Crunch, the vegetarian ogre. We haven’t kidnapped anyone in years.”
Apparently the name is familiar; the troll lights up. “Ah, yes. You have human lineage; that must account for your…” he gives Tandy, then Smash a dismissive look, “language.”
It’s just as well that Smash is too mad (or whatever) and focused on the troll to see Tandy’s own reaction. Human heritage! She never would’ve known. Then again, how many surface-dwellers recognize Tandy as a nymph daughter?
Meanwhile, Smash casually picks up a block of wood roughly the size of the troll’s head. As he squeezes the juice out of it with one mailed fist, he says in an icy voice, “I should advise you, I take exception to the appellation ‘half-breed.’ I am a true ogre.” He opens his fist, lets the remaining charcoal drop.
“Yes indeed,” the troll agrees hastily, waving them in. “No one here would think of using that term.”
After that, Smash keeps his mouth shut, clearly none too eager to be recognized(?) again. Tandy’s happy to take the lead, though she’s distracted. A human mother! And a vegetarian father. Even with her ignorance of the surface world, she knows that’s unusual. Clearly, it’s an emotionally complicated subject, a taboo thing, and considering her own ambivalent feelings about her own heritage, she can relate. She’s never met someone like her before…
She catches herself. Is he like her? She’s not an ogre. Her mother is a gem nymph, her father a human. Everyone in the underworld knew and accepted that. Nobody, not even Fiant, ever called her a half-breed. That look the troll just gave Smash, though… that’s familiar. How? Where has she seen it before?
Her father, twirling the diamond through his fingers. “You’re human, sure enough.” Even after all these years, the memory induces a cold wash of shame—and in that moment, she knows exactly what that not-quite-anger, not-quite-offense was that Smash was expressing. But why would Smash be ashamed of his own mother’s heritage?
Why would she be ashamed of her own father’s?
Meanwhile, on a more superficial, shameful level, she’s wondering how any human woman could accommodate a male ogre, never mind birth another. It sounds like the woman is still alive, so she must’ve survived, but… how?
It’s none of her business, she tells herself, and forces it out of her mind.
Bought and Souled
“Do you think a soul is something you can just carry in your hand?”
“Yes.” –the coffin creep and Smash, Ogre, Ogre, pg. 61-62
Tandy first sees Smash’s hands in the nightmare world.
Tandy barely understands how she gets there—she goes to relieve herself, sees an odd gourd, and the next thing she knows, she’s out in a dingy gray landscape, standing next to a wishing well. When she turns to look at it more closely, she finds Fiant, leaning over the stones, peering down into the abyss, which seems to go down forever into darkness. When he sees her, he looks up and smiles.
“Hiya, sweetcheeks,” he says.
Tandy feels simultaneous panic (no, no, this can’t be!) and resignation (of course it is). She screams. She tries to throw a tantrum—the only thing that ever worked to stop him, however briefly.
Nothing happens.
Fiant chuckles. “Pretend all you like. We both know you’re happy to see me.”
She runs. Fiant follows at a leisurely stroll, yet effortlessly keeps pace with her, in the way of nightmares. A graveyard looms up in front of her, and Tandy has no choice but to run into it. The high, rusted fence pens her in, living skeletons herd her, and she finds herself fleeing down, down, into a crypt, seeking her childhood’s familiar caves in her panic. Of course, they aren’t here. The mausoleum dead-ends at a coffin on a dais. Tandy ducks behind it, shaking with fear.
Fiant’s figure remains silhouetted at the doorway at the top of the stairs. He doesn’t speak. He just stands there, watching her.
Tandy’s crying, and she’s ashamed of crying. Over a year now, she’s been hiding from this creature. How long can she keep doing this?
“Hey, kid,” a dry, reedy voice whispers to her. “I can make him go away.”
It’s the coffin. Presumably a human girl would be frightened, but Tandy’s a child of the underworld. Besides, she’s already as scared as she can get.
“You can?”
“Well, that depends. You see, you’re already deeply in debt to this realm; nightmare rides don’t come cheap. The way I see it, you don’t have a lot left to bargain with here. So the real question is: how badly do you want it?”
Tandy’s tried running, fighting, going for help, capturing and riding a nightmare, slaving away in the Good Magician’s castle. She’s tried traveling with an ogre.
She doesn’t know what else to try.
“What do you want?” she asks.
“Oh, nothing you’ll miss,” the coffin says as Fiant starts coming down the stairs. “Entrust your soul to me, and he’ll never touch it. The most important part of you will be safe, forever. You’ll be invulnerable.”
Everything has a price. Humfrey, her grandfather, taught her that.
“Okay,” Tandy says, and closes her eyes.
Her memories after that are confused, cracked like glass. Tearing. Agony. A violation heretofore unimaginable. Loss, loss, loss, the freefall of desolation and despair. Then it all goes away.
Everything goes away.
Later, the Siren will tell her how they found her, comatose with misery, how Smash followed her into the gourd. Tandy doesn’t remember any of it. As far as she knows, one moment she’s in the mausoleum, the next she’s on the ground outside of it. Siren and Smash will later tell her she’s sobbing with agony, but she doesn’t feel it. It’s like the crying, the pain, is all outside of her.
Then she feels something—a strange pulse of gentleness. Warmth, far away, like the memory of her mother’s hugs from long ago. She almost finds it in herself to pay attention to the sounds of chaos and mayhem that have been going for a while.
And then Smash is coming out of the mausoleum, covered in grave dust. His armored jacket and his gauntlets are gone. His hands are battle-scarred and bare, and cradled in one of them like something precious, something priceless, is a glowing sphere.
“Here is your soul,” he says gently, and holds it out to her. She’s almost afraid to reach for it, waiting for him to snatch it back and sneer, “How badly do you want it?” But he doesn’t; he lets her have it.
The moment she does… it’s like warmth coming into a cold room, colors flooding back into the world. Everything matters again. She’s her again.
She blurts, “I love you!” and is immediately childishly ashamed. Smash is an ogre, she barely knows him…
…But she knows how he touched her soul gently, even when she couldn’t have seen. She knows how he came and brought her back to herself, and in that moment, she’s sure that she’ll love this man forever.
Oh, she thinks. This will be expensive, so expensive.
She girds herself. “How can I repay you?”
But he doesn’t seem to understand. He just says, “it’s my job,” and waves it off with one callused hand.
“How did you…?”
He looks a little abashed. “I had to indulge my natural propensities slightly.” And now that she has it in her to notice, she looks and truly sees the destruction around her: the uprooted tombstones, the cracked crypt door, the pile of bones that was once a skeleton army. (It shudders and settles lower, as though to avoid his attention.)
She can’t believe it. He tromped into this nightmare, smashed everything until he reached the management, got her soul, and brought it back to her… for free? Nobody has ever done anything like that for her before, not even Jewel.
“You’re pretty scary, all right, Smash,” she says. It feels so good to smile.
She snuggles under his arm, and he lets her, and for the first time in a long time, she’s not afraid.
She spends the rest of her time in the gourd studying Smash’s hands. The knuckles are swollen and scarred, the fingers thick and crooked, their roughness belying their gentility. The lingering sensation of his fingerprints on her soul isn’t bad, just comforting.
Idly, she wonders what his soul feels like, and the thought flusters her so badly that she’s relieved when the Siren pulls them out, thereby distracting her.
But the thought will keep coming back to her, night after night.
After that, Tandy catches herself touching Smash casually: reaching up to hold his armored hand, touching his knee to get his attention. He never seems to mind, and she wonders if he should… or she should. But after the horror in the nightmare realm, she needs something solid to hang onto, and touching him… well, it makes her feel better. Her emotions are clearly brewing into a royal crush, but she desperately tries to pretend otherwise. It was just the shock of losing her soul, only to then get it back, that made her feel that way. She was saying, “I love you,” to her soul, not him. (And thank goodness she said it in a realm where the Siren wasn’t.) He’s a big flea-bitten ogre; how could she feel anything but appropriate platonic gratitude?
But she keeps touching him, and he never throws her off or tells her not to. She keeps blurting out things like, “Oh, I could kiss you! But I can’t reach you,” and he just chuckles and says, “Good thing.” And she finds herself paying more attention to how he fights… and how he uses his hands.
Even before she lost her soul, his carnage inspired an embarrassing childish glee in her. Smash has no shame, no self-restraint: he fights with gusto and zeal, joy even. It’s not the free-for-all that it first seems to be; there’s a strategy, even elegance to how he moves, measuring his arcs, monitoring his force. There’s a brutal grace in the way he battles, the ogre-sized holes he smashes through any obstacle. She watches him break stone, tie ghastlies in knots, pulverize ant lions. He truly is a monster.
The more she sees, the more she realizes that she likes it in a way that she’s not supposed to. What’s more, it doesn’t frighten her at all.
She won’t, can’t admit it yet, but once Crombie started watching from her door, he scared her. Even though he never did anything, the looming knowledge that he could was omnipresent. For some reason, even though she sees Smash bash his way through a nest of giant rats, she never once feels he might do that to her. She tells himself that of course he could, of course he might, but somehow she never believes it. Why?
Then she realizes it’s because he fights with such joy. Crombie always has a simmering rage under the surface, a rage much like her own, but she has yet to see Smash fight in anger. The closest to angry she’s seen him was with the guard troll of the Magic Dust Village, where he didn’t throw a punch. For such a fighter, Smash seems… happy.
When she thinks about her father, Tandy has to admit that Crombie is not a happy man, even with a wife who loves him so, even with an honorable job guarding the King of Xanth. Not only that, she isn’t sure what could make him happy.
Then she wonders: is Jewel happy? She’s not sure. Jewel has never hidden the source of her love from Tandy; it’s never occurred to her or Crombie to try. To them, her bewitchment is just another sign of how much Crombie cares about her. But as an adult, Tandy feels… she doesn’t know how she feels about it.
(Is Tandy herself happy?)
If Jewel seems content, it’s only through carefully ignoring certain parts of reality, and that seems no way to live. It might be the nymph way, but Tandy’s not only a nymph. Though she loves her mother dearly, Tandy feels sorry for her. She has to admit having more in common with her father, that anger and frustration boiling away underneath. And that saddens her too. Whatever happens, she doesn’t want to end up like Crombie… or Jewel either, for that matter. But what to do with all those tangled emotions inside?
Smash may be a force of nature, but he’s still only one man—or ogre, rather. So many rats are swarming him that he can’t stop them from climbing his legs. Watching him struggle, laden with Fireoak, the hurt hamadryad, Tandy feels the volcano in her rumble, a surge of possessiveness: that’s her ogre!
Without thinking, she whips her hand back and hurls her fury at them.
Both she and her rage have grown since she was thirteen. The rats drop like flies. Smash staggers, catches his balance, and stares at her with wide eyes. His expression gets a hungry reaction from her that she isn’t proud of. She wants to surprise him like that again, wants him to look at her like that all the time, wants to—
“What happened?” he asks.
Tandy covers her face. “That’s my magic: bad temper. I’m sorry!”
“Sorry?” and he’s beaming at her with wonder now. “That’s a wonderful talent! My legs are numb!” He gives them a cheerful shake. Clearly he means it as a compliment.
“You really think so? I thought it wasn’t nice to be destructive.”
“It isn’t?”
His expression is so devoid of subterfuge, so innocent in its bloodthirst, she can’t help but laugh.
…
“Smash lurched to his feet, amazed at the potency of Tandy’s tantrum; he still felt weak. An ogress could hardly have hit him harder!” –Ogre, Ogre, pg. 186-7
The other women who join their group don’t treat Smash as a man, even Chem, who’s known him for years. They treat him like a charming beast of burden, talking freely as though he isn’t right there. Even though it doesn’t seem to bother Smash, it bothers Tandy, enough so that one night, when someone says, “It’s good to just be with women,” she replies testily, “Smash is still here, you know.”
Everyone laughs.
“Don’t be silly,” the fairy girl says. “He’s an ogre.”
Smash appears to be snoring soundly, but Tandy knows how keen those big hairy ears are, so she wrings her hands and says, “Can’t an ogre also be a man?” After all, she spends enough time trying not to stare at his endowment right in front of her face.
The giggles subside, but awkwardly. Fireoak and the fairy avoid her eyes, as though uncomfortable. Chem just looks perplexed; she’s known Smash since earliest childhood, so maybe she still sees him in that light. In the tone of one reassuring a child, the Siren says, “Yes, of course, dear. A good one, too. We take Smash too much for granted,” which is nice, but not exactly what Tandy was getting at. Why don’t they see what seems so painfully obvious to her?
But she’s far too conscious of Smash’s still, seemingly sleeping form nearby, so instead, she says, “After all, I’m a nymph, and I’m a woman.”
“Oh,” Fireoak laughs, “you’re not a nymph, Tandy.”
It’s such a strange thing to say that Tandy can only reply, “What do you mean? Of course I am. My mother’s Jewel the Nymph; she raised me.”
“Nymphs can’t bear children, grow old, or have a magic talent. Those are human things. Even if your mother was a nymph, you’re only half that. I’ve seen your cottonwood rags, Tandy; you’re a woman, but you’re not a nymph, and you shouldn’t go around saying things that aren’t true.”
In the underworld, everyone knows and respects Jewel for her work, and no one would dream of saying such a thing. Tandy is so unprepared, so flatfooted, she doesn’t know how to feel, never mind respond. All she can think is how Smash crushed that wood to juice and coal in front of that troll’s face.
All she can say is, “my mother is a nymph, and so am I.”
Everyone else seems to notice the tension. Chem clears her throat.
“Species-mixing is taboo among centaurs,” she says, “and this conversation makes me uncomfortable. Can we change the subject?”
Tandy’s happy to. “What’s a lady ogre like? Have any of you seen one?”
“One passed my tree once,” Fireoak says. “She was huge and hairy and had a face like a bowl of overcooked mush someone had sat on. I never saw anything so ugly in all my life.”
“Well, she was an ogress,” the Siren chides, who, as the child of a human man and a mermaid, seems equally eager to get off the prior subject. “They have different standards of beauty. I suppose an ogre wants a wife who can knock down her own trees for firewood and kill her own griffins for stew.”
For a moment, Tandy imagines what it might be like, to have legs like mossy tree trunks, fists like battering rams. She fantasizes about having the strength and power to take Fiant in a fair fight and sighs wistfully. “It must be nice to be so strong. No one would ever bother you again…”
“Well, except for amorous ogres,” someone else says with a laugh.
“I don’t know, dear,” the Siren tells Tandy, “Those tantrums of yours are powerful, and extremely useful for the jungles of Xanth. You’re the only one of us with such a talent, and yet you seem so ashamed of it!”
Tandy pauses. “I guess I never thought of it that way before. In the caves… well, it seemed so dangerous. So… childish.”
“Well, I think it’s useful,” the Siren says firmly. Then, with a playful nudge: “And Smash likes it.”
The Siren is surely only teasing her, but Tandy can’t help but go, “You really think so?”
“My dear,” the Siren says, “Smash is a lovely creature and an abysmal liar. Do you truly think he could convincingly pretend otherwise?”
She has a point. Tandy starts throwing her tantrums more often after that, at first gingerly, then with increasing confidence. It doesn’t always work out, but she at least manages to avoid disasters like the cave-in when she was eight or hurting Crombie when she was thirteen. Sometimes, the results are astonishing; she even manages to stagger the Gap Dragon for a moment, thereby saving Smash from getting badly hurt. He doesn’t seem offended at her interfering in the battle, either. On the contrary, he beams with pleasure.
“You hit like an ogress!” he declares, and promptly gets to work binding the dragon with its own tail… which is good, since it means he doesn’t see her blushing. “Reminds me of my mother’s curses.”
Tandy runs for cover, hugging the compliment to her heart. It’s true! Smash does appreciate her magic! He truly likes it!
It isn’t till she’s under safe cover that she realizes something else: she just staggered a dragon. And not just any dragon, the Gap Dragon, one of the most dangerous creatures in Xanth. Her, some nobody nymph/human from the underworld!
She looks at her hands in wonder. Maybe she isn’t as weak as she thinks.
It’s that thought that later emboldens her to save her friends from the pining tree. Smash himself can’t do it, too busy managing the dragon, and anyway, Tandy’s in no hurry to experience a suicidal ogre.
So, using Chem’s rope, Tandy scrambles up the cliff, grateful for all the rock-climbing she’s done in the underworld. It’s not a hard climb, but her delicate (and now badly worn) slippers are useless; she kicks them off to get a better grip with her toes.
“Be careful, Tandy!” the Siren calls from below, and not a moment too soon: Tandy gets into range of the tree.
Despite having just seen its effects on the Siren, Tandy doesn’t expect the sheer force of it, a nigh-palpable wave of despair. She reels, suddenly drained, foggy in the head. She shakes it off as best she can. No time for that now; she has to focus on her friends.
It feels like trudging uphill against high tide, but she makes it happen. Fireoak is too weak to resist but needs a rope harness built for her. (Thankfully, this is something Jewel taught Tandy.) Chem is too big and strong to push around, so Tandy has to bully her into position, something she only gets away with because the normally-hard-nosed centaur is a sniveling slug of misery. (“Don’t pretend you know me! You don’t know me!”) At least the little fairy is easy: she’s so small and light that Tandy can just toss her down into Smash’s waiting arms.
But then her friends are gone, and Tandy is alone. And the wounds in her soul are still so fresh…
She remembers Fiant, the gourd’s nightmare realm, her soul being ripped away. Inside her bubbles up the certainty that nowhere is safe. Even an ogre isn’t enough. She can run all over Xanth, and if not Fiant, there’ll be someone else, and if she goes home, there’ll be Crombie.
Stop it, she tells herself. It’s just the tree. It’s just—
Fiant’s breath on her neck. “Hiya, sweetcheeks.”
Crombie’s shadow in her door. “You’re human, sure enough.”
Fireoak’s laugh. “You shouldn’t say things that aren’t true, Tandy.”
The nightmare coffin. But this time, it says, “You can make them go away. You can make them all go away.”
She looks at the cliff ledge. It beckons to her. She steps off.
The wind rushes through her hair. Then someone warm, strong, and gentle catches her, holds her tight, and she buries her face and hands in his shaggy fur and sobs uncontrollably, first from the raw effects of the tree, then from shame and impotent rage. She hears her father’s voice: “Women cry for only one reason…”
But Smash doesn’t huff, scold, or say anything. He just holds her, tight and gentle, letting her cry. When she seems to be winding down, he passes her to the Siren, who says, “That was a nice maneuver, Smash.”
“I couldn’t let her fall,” is all he says. It’s all he needs to say.
They get back to work escaping the Gap Chasm.
It’s a lot of work, and Smash has to put a lot of muscle into hauling Chem and Fireoak up by rope. He gets slower and slower, breathing harder and harder, and the moment they all make it to the top, he collapses.
“Smash!” Tandy rushes to him, but Chem, having four legs, makes it there first. The centaur’s visible alarm only makes it clear to Tandy that something is badly wrong; Chem of all people would know what he is or isn’t capable of.
“This isn’t right,” the centaur says, “I’ve seen him work much harder than this. Tandy, help me roll him over. Maybe the dragon hurt him worse than we thought and the big oaf thought he could walk it off.”
Even with Chem’s barrel frame, it’s an effort. They get Smash onto his back, but they find no surprise injuries. His armored jacket does its job well, and when Tandy puts her ear to his chest, both his heart and breathing sound right.
“Is he sick?” the Siren asks, lagging behind due to helping the fairy and Fireoak.
“Ogres eat stuff that’d kill a harpy,” Chem says. “Anything that could take him down would’ve surely gotten one of us too, same as bad magic. I don’t understand what could’ve done this…”
As centaur and siren compare notes, Tandy stares at Smash. He doesn’t look hurt or sick. He just looks… drained. Completely exhausted. There’s an odd dimness to him, like a light in him is going out. The way the Siren and Smash described Tandy after her soul was ripped away…
A horrible suspicion blossoms in Tandy’s mind.
Smash groans and comes to. “Are we out?”
“Yes,” she says, “thanks to you.”
He tries to get up, doesn’t even make it to sitting. “What’s wrong with me?”
“That’s what I want to know!” Chem says, rushing over. “Did you—?”
Tandy holds up a hand, cutting the centaur off. “Smash,” she says, “is there something you need to tell me about what you did in the nightmare realm?”
The expression on his face is all the answer she needs.
“Nightmare realm?” Chem asks. “He did what where?”
“The nightmare realm claimed my soul,” Tandy explains. “Smash got it back. He never did say how.” She does her best to imitate her father’s glare.
It shouldn’t do anything to an ogre, but Smash squirms, his ears dipping. “They wouldn’t give it up,” he admits. “Not for free. And the only collateral I had to offer was my own soul. So it’s on… let’s call it a payment plan.”
“You what?” Chem fists her hands in her mane.
“I thought souls were just human superstition,” Fireoak says.
“As far as I know, only people of human derivation have souls,” says the Siren.
Chem snorts. “So, human myth. But some myths have some truth… How long do you have?”
Smash won’t look at any of them. “Three months.”
“And you said nothing!” the Siren cries. “What kind of creature are you?” She answers her own question. “A self-sacrificing one. Oh, Smash, you should’ve told us.”
Tandy just sits there. She thought nothing could hurt worse than losing her own soul. Now she knows better.
Other Half
“All women have a secret passion for ogres.” –Irene, Ogre, Ogre, pg. 134
Smash recovers after a rest… but now that Tandy has her eye out for it, there’s no missing the dimness in him. No amount of rest will fully restore him, and all they can do is hunt for another gourd so he can go take his complaint to the nightmare management… a total dark horse.
Tandy hates her helplessness. While Smash is off in the nightmare world, all she can do is go forage with Blythe, the newest addition to the party. Venting to the metal woman seems safest, since she won’t be staying long and has the least emotional investment in any of them.
Indeed, Blythe listens to Tandy’s whole tirade with bemused politeness. Then, with an air of sudden understanding, she says, “Oh, you like him.”
Her tone makes it clear what she means, but Tandy tries to act oblivious. (Why not? It works for Smash.) “Well, of course I like him…”
“Let me clarify: he stokes your boiler. Lubes your gears. You want to get your hands on his crankshaft and—”
“Okay, okay, fine, I like him!” Tandy cries before Blythe can say anything more mortifying. “What about it? Who cares?”
Blythe gives her a pitying look. “Human, I don’t begin to understand your squishy meat world, but even I know it wouldn’t work out between you.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, there’s size, for one matter. I know meat people are stretchy, but—”
“Blythe!”
“What? I can’t help but notice, the way he flops around!”
Oh, thank goodness, someone besides her has noticed. “His mother’s human. They must’ve managed somehow.”
“I have to presume at least one of them is astonishingly gifted. And anyway, it’s better to be with your own kind. Fewer unpleasant surprises.”
“Good luck finding one of my kind,” Tandy says bitterly. “Most nymphs can’t bear children, and I’m human and nymph, whatever Fireoak says.”
Blythe scoffs. “I understand why Fireoak says it. You’re clearly mortal, fertile, and capable of regret. I don’t see why you can’t just call yourself human and be done with it.” Seeing Tandy clouding up, she continues, “Not that it matters; nymphs are just what human men wish human women to be. They’re not so dissimilar. Ogres, though, they’re totally different. Plus they eat humans… and nymphs. If he gets hungry enough…”
“Smash came from a vegetarian household! He’d never!”
“The way you tease him, he might…”
“I—I don’t tease him!”
“Please, human, I’ve seen how you cuddle up to him. You treat him like a hot water bottle. What do you see in him, anyway? A face like that, only an ogre mother could love.”
Tandy remembers Smash’s fingerprints on her soul, him holding her as she cried. It’s too raw and intimate to express, certainly not to a bulldozer like Blythe.
Blythe nods as though this only proves her point. “That’s what I thought. No, if you ask me, what you need is a human man with anti-demon magic.”
“I don’t want—”
“You ask me, you’re only interested in Smash because he’s the first semi-eligible male you’ve met who isn’t trying to rape you. He’s protecting you because it’s his job, Tandy. Don’t make it more than it is. If he wanted to be with a human, he wouldn’t be headed for the Ancestral Ogres. I tell you: ogres want to be with ogres, and once you meet a proper human man, you’ll want to be with him.”
Tandy wilts. Maybe Blythe and the others are right. They all seem so sure. “Thank you for your honesty, Blythe.”
“Why are you thanking me? You didn’t like it.”
“No, but I appreciate your straightforwardness.”
Blythe considers. “In that case, I have one other piece of advice.”
“Yes?”
“You shouldn’t get too attached to Smash… but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy him. I don’t pretend to understand why, but if he’s what gets you hot in the furnace, go ahead and enjoy it for what it is: a fantasy that goes nowhere. The way you were raised, you need one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Human, the Siren told me what your father is like: he overcame her song through sheer bitterness, twenty years ago. If I grew up under someone like that, I’d be polishing myself over a big furry bodyguard too.”
Tandy isn’t sure whether she should be offended or not. She settles on, “I’ll keep it in mind. Blythe?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell.”
Blythe snorts, a sound like a train whistle. “You act as though this is a secret, human. It is not.”
She leaves the conversation feeling a little defeated, but also relieved. At least someone (probably everyone) knows now, and she’s gotten at least some permission to feel what she’s feeling. This won’t last forever, so she might as well let herself enjoy Smash’s proximity while she has it. That’s all it is, all it can ever be.
So when he comes out of the gourd, she makes sure he’s all right, and when he is, she says, “I worry when you’re gone. Strength doesn’t mean anything in the gourd, and the more time passes, the more you lose here. You put your soul in peril for me, Smash. I can’t forget that.”
He puts his warm armored hand over hers. “I like it in there. Human nightmares are ogre fun. I’ll be fine.”
But Tandy knows what losing a soul feels like. She can’t bear for that to happen to Smash. He’s so joyous, so full of life and vigor. It crushes her to think that she only got her soul back because he put his on the line instead. Watching him waste away makes her feel so helpless… again. When her soul was in peril, he followed her into the gourd to get it back, and all she’s doing is waiting, wringing her hands and feeling bad, the way Jewel would.
So when Smash stretches out to sleep, she snuggles to his side. He looks surprised for a moment, but he doesn’t stop her or pull away. As she dozes off, she thinks that Blythe is wrong about Smash’s face. Certainly, his features are rough, crooked from old battle fractures, but they’re sunny and open too. The textures of his fur are comforting, his scent too. It isn’t bad, just animal, and anyway, Tandy’s been on the road long enough with him now to smell pretty ripe herself. Smash smells like home, she thinks, and then feels another wash of shame: Blythe would probably consider that a bad sign.
Just a fantasy, she tells herself, and dozes off.
What she has that night isn’t quite a dream, and certainly not a nightmare. There’s no narrative, no setting, just familiar scent, a gentle gloved touch. Then bare hands on her skin, her soul, fur against her, heat, heat, heat—
Tandy wakes up breathless and overheated under Smash’s arm; he’s like a furry furnace. She tells herself that’s why she’s so flushed and flustered.
Smash sleeps on, unknowing. When she makes to squirm out from under his arm, he mumbles in his sleep, pulls her to him like a stuffed toy, and asleep or not, soul-mortgaged or not, he’s still an ogre, so there’s no resisting that. Tandy finds her face buried in the ruff that guards his neck, his heart beating slow and even against her ear, and against her thigh, she feels—
Oh, this isn’t helping the heat in her at all.
She wriggles, but that just makes him squeeze her tighter with a grumble of annoyance. Tandy stills—the last thing she wants is for him to dream of combat and give her the dreaded ogre battle embrace! He cracked Gap Dragon ribs with it, and she’s no dragon.
“Smash,” she whispers, praying none of their companions hear. “Smash, wake up.”
One ear twitches. That’s it. Ogres don’t need to sleep lightly; who’d be foolish enough to attack one in his sleep? She’s seen him go from sound asleep to full combat in an instant, and while punching him probably wouldn’t hurt him, he very well might hurt her, out of reflex. How can she get his non-aggressive attention?
If it weren’t for the gaggle of women sleeping around them (all of them surely judging her poorly for her taste), she would want nothing more than to savor this, snuggle in and go back to sleep (and dream). But they are here, and if they wake up and see this, they will take one look at her face and know exactly what she’s feeling, and Tandy will die. So she pokes him, at first gingerly, then increasingly forcefully when he doesn’t notice. She’s far too aware of the heat of his body next to hers, and—
—And then he shifts against her thighs so now he’s poking her. A delicious throb goes through her, she squeaks into his pelt, and of all things, that’s what makes him wake up and hastily, guiltily release her.
“Tandy! Did I hurt you?”
She supposes the noise she made, under other circumstances, could be taken for one of pain. “No, no, I’m all right, you were just… squeezing me too tight.”
“I’m sorry. I—” and he looks upset, more upset than she expected, checking her as though for bruises. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
Forgetting her embarrassment, she says, “I’m sure. Smash, what’s wrong?”
He looks away, and at first, she thinks he won’t answer. But then he admits, “I… hurt my mother that way once. I didn’t mean to. I was just a child, and I had a nightmare and… my mother’s tough, for a human. But…”
“But she’s not an ogress.”
“No. She’s not. She’s fine now, of course, but…” He’s still looking at her desperately. “You’re sure?”
The ghost of old pain on his face saddens her. Without thinking, she reaches out to stroke the fur on his cheeks, and he nuzzles into her hand. “You didn’t hurt me, not even a little, not even by human standards. I promise.”
He relaxes. “Good. I’m glad.” And then he pulls away.
As Tandy settles and turns over to go back to sleep, back-to-back with him now, she finds herself looking into Blythe’s open metal eyes.
“Tandy, Tandy, burning bright,” she mouths, and the clang of Tandy smacking her (and crying “ow!”) wakes everyone else up.
…
“Well, this demon tried to—to take make ogre love to Tandy—”
“Oh, now I understand! Tandy wouldn’t like that!”
“True. She’s no ogress.” –Blythe and Smash, Ogre, Ogre, pg. 156
The Void doesn’t look like much, or anything really, from the outside—just a vague swirl, a blank nothingness slicing through the landscape—but after all they’ve been through, Chem, Smash, and Tandy are dubious.
“Historically, the five elements—Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and the Void—have always been mainstays of magic,” Chem says when asked, but when pressed as to what the Void is, even the well-educated centaur admits she doesn’t know. After tying themselves together with Chem’s rope, Tandy chooses to enter it first, since her tantrums are at hand, plus she’s the lightest and can be pulled back most easily in an emergency. Remembering the heat of the fire wall, the agony of the pining tree, Tandy plunges in, bracing for pain.
There’s none. On the contrary, the moment she enters the mist and fog, she feels wonderful, like her mind has been wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket. As the meadow appears in front of her, all fear and worry instantly drop away. Such a safe, beautiful place! Such happiness. Surely nothing, not even Fiant, could ever hurt her here. She barely remembers untying the safety rope.
The first sign that something isn’t right is when she passes a mirror-bright stone, a kind she’s never seen before. When she stoops down to examine it, she catches a glance at her reflection: clean, neat, well dressed. That hasn’t been the case since she left Humfrey’s castle; now her dress is ragged, her feet bare and dirty, her hair charred from passing through the firewall. She is surely a fright to see, but here, nobody seems to notice. In the Void, everyone waves and smiles at her, as though she belongs. Everywhere she looks are happy human couples, treating each other kindly, living peaceful, happy, normal lives.
It’s there, under the foggy illusions of the Void, that she sees the first human man who’s attracted her. Handsome, of course, (it wouldn’t be a good illusion otherwise) tall and dark, all dressed in black with silver gloves. There’s something familiar about him, a softness to his eyes that makes Tandy think that maybe she can manage this whole settle-down, marry-a-proper-human-man thing after all. Maybe, here in this rose-tinted land of the Void, she can be safe, be normal, just another human among humans.
But when she approaches and extends a hand to shake, he falls down.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
He scrambles to his feet. He says something, she knows he does, but it slips through her memory as he says it, leaving only a sense of friendliness, edged with flirtation. And it feels good. For once, she’s doing what she’s supposed to, and it feels good, so when he reaches as though to touch her--
And then an oddly familiar woman with an impressive nose bursts in with, “Don’t hit her, Smash! I think—”
“Smash?” Tandy asks with horror, and like that, the illusion shatters. The woman becomes Chem (now obvious with her proper four legs), and the handsome man becomes Smash, standing perplexed with one fist raised. The moment he sees Tandy (as herself—what was he seeing before?) he hastily lowers his arm with a look of chagrin that mirrors hers.
“My map went out of control in here,” Chem explains, “and I think it’s because the Void is a realm of animated imagination. We see what we want to see, and so my map—”
But Tandy doesn’t hear the rest. It feels like the fates are mocking her. Even in a realm crafted for delight, her perversity still shines through.
“You were awful handsome as a man…” she says, and she already knows she sounds too sad, too wistful. “But why did you fall down when I tried to shake your hand?”
For once, it’s Smash who looks abashed. “Er… my mistake. I thought you were trying to show affection.”
“I was! But you acted like I’d hit you or something!”
There’s no mistaking Smash’s mortification now. When he doesn’t answer, Chem does, giving him a pointed look: “that is how ogres show affection.”
In a split second, everything seems to come clear: “That’s an amazing talent! My legs are numb!” “You hit like an ogress!” “Did I hurt you?”
Maybe Smash isn’t uninterested at all. Maybe Smash only understands giving affection one way, a way he knows through painful experience that humans and nymphs can’t withstand. Maybe he just needs a demonstration.
“You big oaf! I’ll show you how humans express affection!” Since he’s far too tall to reach, she grabs his warm mailed arm and pulls.
He could resist. He’s far too strong for her to force him. But he bends for her, kneels, and that’s what emboldens Tandy to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him.
She knows how Smash reacts when grabbed in a way he dislikes. But he doesn’t fight. He goes stiff, gauntleted hands hovering like he doesn’t know what to do, and he loses his balance. That just brings him more to her height, and she takes him into a controlled fall until he’s flat on his back with her half-astride him. He doesn’t kiss back, exactly… but feeling him bend and fall for her, clearly startled but not resisting… this is far from the indifference he showed when Irene flashed her underwear. He’s responding with wide pretty eyes, the way he does when…
…when she hits him with one of her tantrums.
(“I like your tantrums.” Yes, she bets he does!)
Breathless and triumphant, she laughs, “What do you think of that, ogre?”
His expression is stunned, but at least it’s not displeased.
Chem sounds disapproving. “You gave him an awfully stiff dose for his first time.”
“Well, I’ve wanted to do it for a long time.” For once, Tandy isn’t afraid or ashamed. She feels a sort of fierce, rebellious joy. To hell with the Void’s illusions, with being human, with doing what she’s supposed to! She kissed Smash and didn’t find herself a splat on the moon! She kissed him, and it felt good. She’s still half on top of him and he’s made no move to pull away or flick her off. In this moment, everything is wonderful.
Chem doesn’t let it last. “Tandy, he’s an ogre. They don’t understand human romance. You know that.”
Well, neither does Tandy. Her sole exposures to human(-ish) romance have been Crombie dosing Jewel with a love spell, Humfrey helping him do it, and the Gorgon, who cheerfully slaved away folding socks for a year just so she could then do it for free. Smash, at least, has never hurt Tandy or forced her to do anything. At least he’s kind to her.
“You can’t afford to get emotionally involved,” Chem continues. “He’s not your type.”
“And just what is my type?” Tandy snarls, her anger building. “A demon like Fiant? Smash is the nicest,” not man, she’s not supposed to call Smash a man, “male creature I’ve met in Xanth!”
“How many male creatures have you met in Xanth?”
Tandy is silent.
Smash has been quiet up till now, but at this, he timidly suggests, “We could visit a human village—”
Tandy’s heart breaks. “Shut up, ogre! Or I’ll kiss you again.”
He shuts up. Maybe she’s misread him completely. Maybe he doesn’t want this from her at all, and his timidity is purely out of awkward professionalism, or a desire to avoid a scene, or…
“You have to be realistic,” Chem insists, which is all the more galling because it’s coming from someone younger. “What good will it do you to find your destined man if you foolishly waste your love on an inappropriate object?”
“It’s true—” Smash starts.
“You’re not an object!” Tandy snaps. “And you’re not—”
For a moment, she hates this stupid pointless hypothetical future man she’s supposed to hold everything in reserve for, this man she’s never met and may never exist. What is he likely to be? What would she be to him: a maid, a failed nymph, a woman forever in debt to his demon-destroying abilities? All she wants is here, in her arms, right now—
—And he doesn’t want her back. A fantasy that goes nowhere, just like Blythe said. A fantasy she can’t even enjoy, here in the bowels of the Void, which is made of nothing but.
She’s crying, but the old impotent rage is also surging in her, and her own tears only make her angrier. He doesn’t want her? Fine! Let him remember what he’s missing! Without thinking, she takes her anger and hurls it at him.
She regrets it the moment she does it… and only that moment, because she sees his face and feels his reaction when it hits, the way he arches up under her, the choked, beautiful sound he makes. Maybe he doesn’t want her, and maybe her desire is perverse, but at least so is his enjoyment of her tantrums. She kisses him one last time and this time, he kisses back a little, and she could swear she tastes some heat in him when he does, even if it’s only the residue of the tantrum. No matter what becomes of her, at least she’ll have this to remember and comfort her.
Then she lets him go, and he doesn’t stop her.
“Oh, what’s the use,” she says. “I’m a fool and I know it. Let’s work on finding a way out of here.”
And they get down to brass tacks, pondering a way out of the Void.
There’s not much to be done. Tandy’s growing to see why her mother sticks to the underworld, with its plebeian concerns of cave-ins, goblins, demons, and nickelpedes. All they can do is find Smash a gourd and wait, watching his frozen, vacant body for signs of distress while he fights his way through the nightmare realm. Void or no Void, his soul clock is still ticking.
Day turns to night. Tandy and Chem flank Smash’s unnaturally still body, curl up, and go to sleep.
Tandy wakes up to Smash kissing her.
At first, she thinks it must be a dream, or another of the Void’s illusions, trying (failing) to give her what (who) she wants. It’s his gentility that convinces her, that careful reining in of his strength that he always does around her. This isn’t the fiery kiss she dreamed about. It’s sweet, hesitant even. And what’s more, something about him feels different—like he was missing something, and now he isn’t. Can it be?
“Smash! You’re back!” She hugs him, and he pats her. “Are you all right? Did you…” she’s scared to ask.
“I… have my soul now, yes.” But his words are so carefully picked that she immediately knows the news is bad. “And I have transport for you and Chem out of the Void.”
It’s then that she notices the three nightmares, hovering nervously just at the edge of sight: midnight-black horses with eyes like coals and hooves pale as the full moon. They’re frightening beasts; Tandy still remembers the hellish ride she obtained, at the cost of her soul coming up for collection. Her foreboding increases. “Smash, what’s going on?”
He doesn’t want to answer her, but he does. “The nightmares can go almost anywhere, but they have to be paid.”
No. No, no, no. Even though she already knows the answer, Tandy says, “How are you paying them, Smash?”
He avoids her eyes. “My soul.”
Her scream almost scares off the nightmares. Apparently they’re afraid of her, her midnight ride giving her a certain reputation, and in that moment, she’s glad. They should be afraid of her, with what they’re doing. After all she and Smash have been through, all they’ve done, Tandy refuses to accept that this is how it’ll end for them.
Her scream also wakes up Chem, who grabs her bow. “What is it? What’s happened?”
Tandy points accusingly at Smash, who clearly regrets kissing her awake. “Smash is sacrificing his soul to save us! Again!”
“What? The whole point of him going into the gourd was so he could win his soul back!”
Smash explains, but Tandy’s had enough. For over a year now, she’s been running, running, running. Running from Fiant via nightmare put her soul up for collection and made her Humfrey’s housemaid for a year. Running from her unknown soul-debt only got Smash’s soul on the auction block instead. Running from her fears and pain got them all into this miserable, carnivorous, sparkles-and-butterflies Void. She’s sick of running. None of this would’ve happened if she hadn’t—if she hadn’t—
If she hadn’t run from her would-be rapist.
If she hadn’t had to run.
This is all so unfair. But she’s done with hiding behind Smash. He’s proved willing to sacrifice everything for her, twice over. Now it’s time for her to sacrifice.
She rounds on the nightmares. “Take my soul instead!”
They back away from her, but she only advances, incandescent in her fury.
“My soul’s almost as good as his, isn’t it? It’s the only reason any of us are in this mess, isn’t it?” She tries to shove one of the mares, but it smoke-dances out of the way. “Take it! Take all of it!”
“Tandy—” Smash starts, but she holds up a hand to silence him. This is between her and her nightmares.
“You can’t have him, do you hear me? I won’t let him go. I love him.” It comes out furious. She’s crying again, and she scrubs at the tears impatiently, annoyed at the distraction. “I love him!”
“No!” Smash says. “The gourd isn’t for the likes of you! It’ better for the likes of me.”
She glares at him, and he falls back a step. The nightmares mill nervously.
Chem clears her throat. Tandy wheels on her, fists clenched.
“Quit it, Tandy. You’re right.”
Tandy’s so surprised, she stops being angry. “I am?”
Chem ignores her. To Smash, she says, “You have no right to sacrifice yourself for us, again, and we’ve all had enough of the Void. We can pay the mares and retain half a soul each. We can all escape.”
“But this is all because of me!” Tandy protests.
“Neither of you should have to give anything for me!” Smash says simultaneously.
“Stop it, both of you. Your theatrics are unbecoming. I came into the Void of my own volition, and we’re in this together. We can get by on half a soul if we’re careful. I understand they regenerate in time.” She plants her hooves and crosses her arms. “Do either of you care to debate a centaur?”
No, they don’t. And Tandy… Tandy can live with this. Half a soul was what she originally owed to escape Fiant. Half a soul is what she’ll give.
“Each person can pay their own way,” she concedes.
Smash looks reluctant, but nods.
“Then it’s settled,” Chem says. “Let’s get out of here.”
Tandy turns to the nearest mare and closes her eyes. She braces herself.
“Do it,” she says, and loses half of everything.
It’s harder for the others, having never experienced it before. Tandy knows how it’ll feel, what to expect, and she’s been through worse. It hurts, of course… but not nearly as bad as the first time.
Chem parts ways from them soon after their escape, looking sickly and ashen despite her robust frame. Smash moves slowly, carefully, like he has to measure every move. He’s only half as strong as he used to be, though still more so than any human being. But they’re free and alive, and that’s enough, even though she still doesn’t know what she’ll do about Fiant.
Soon she’ll have to: they’ve reached the Ancestral Ogres, up north. Smash’s new home.
They’re alone together now, but there’s an awkwardness between them. They both know why Smash is here, and they both know they’ll be separating soon. Smash is too softhearted to try and drive her away with cruelty, or even tell her no when she snuggles up to him at night, but he’s clearly trying to keep her at arm’s length emotionally. Even though she now knows his intelligence is permanent, he’s returned to speaking only in rhyme, reducing his vocabulary, as though by reminding her of what he is, he can make her not love him.
Fat chance of that. He’s always been an ogre to her. He’s just also a man too. She won’t have him much longer, so she wants to sanctify in memory every moment she can get.
They haven’t discussed her feelings, or him kissing her. She has to assume it was an impulsive goodbye act that he now regrets, the effects of the Void. Maybe Blythe is right: maybe Tandy is indeed just a human, and maybe it is indeed better to stick with one’s own kind.
Why do those ideas feel so lackluster?
Then they reach the ogres—the first she’s met, other than Smash. The younger ogresses ogle him approvingly, as they should, but the older ogress and the bulls seem less impressed. The moment Smash gives up rhyming (he truly is bad at lying, even by omission), the bull in charge goes, “Half-breed! No need!”
Smash stiffens. He glances at Tandy, straightens his back, and says, “My mother is a curse-fiend, but my father is an ogre, and so am I.”
“Half man! We ban!”
Smash bristles. His fur fluffs… and then goes smooth and flat. He turns away to Tandy. “This isn’t what I want,” he says. “Let’s go.”
They turn to leave, only for the bull ogre to block their exit. He jabs a sausage finger at Smash’s jacket, and Smash slaps it away. Leering at Smash’s gauntlets, the ogre flutters his eyelashes and mimes putting on dainty ladylike gloves, making what Tandy presumes is supposed to be a feminine croon.
“He’s trying to provoke you,” Tandy remarks to Smash.
“He’s doing a bad job,” Smash replies. “The troll was better.”
Giving up subtlety, the bull ogre grabs Tandy and makes as if to eat her. Smash punches him in the face.
The bull ogre drops Tandy and spits out a tooth. “Delight! He fight!”
“No!” But it’s too late. The ogres close ranks around Smash and the battle begins, a ritual designed to test Smash’s mettle and measure his suitability for the clan. Tandy is forgotten, except by the cub who’s too young to take part. She flattens him with a tantrum, but then all she can do is gnash her teeth as, once again, Smash protects her.
He’s losing. He only has half his soul, and strategy can’t compensate fully. Tandy can’t even throw another tantrum; with only half her soul, her emotions (and thus her magic) just aren’t as strong as usual. Of all the times to feel less angry! She’s a poor fighter even full-souled; what good is she with only half?
Something clicks. She knows what to do. She dashes to Smash, who’s buried to the eyes and soaked in beer—an ogre’s idea of a welcome party. Even as she runs to him, he’s yelling at her to get out of here, but she’s not the obedient one in this relationship.
“Smash! Take my half-soul!” And she pulls it free.
She expects it to be agony, like the other times, and it does hurt. But this is different: this is fully her choice, her own making. No one is taking anything from her; she is giving. It’s an exquisite pain, a beautiful, non-suffering hurt. It sinks into Smash’s skin, and she has a brief sensory impression of him—a loving mix of strength and sweetness. Then it’s gone.
Invigorated, Smash rips out of the ground like a zombie, but Tandy’s only half-attentive. Without her soul, her fear and worries calm. Her feelings are no longer a bone-deep turmoil, and the numbness frees her up to focus on tactics. Even Smash at full strength can’t defeat a whole ogre clan on home territory. Getting killed and eaten is only an intellectual concern now (and, in the background, she notes that her souled self would find that troubling) but it’s still unwanted. With or without a soul, Smash is important to her, so her goal is to find them an escape.
Chaos rages around her, but she only notices as much as she needs to avoid it. Her mind clicks along, unimpeded by the loss of her soul. This is old ogre territory; they’ll know all the aboveground routes—
A dragon roar comes from the air. Tandy revises: the ogres will cover the ground, the dragons the air. That leaves the water and the underground—
A boulder flies past the tree she’s hiding behind. Tandy peeks out, sees the tunnel it’s uncovered in the dragon nest. Bingo!
While ogres and dragon fight, she skids down the slope, scattering gems. (Automatically, the jewel nymph in her catalogs them: sapphires, diamonds, tourmalines… a very nice collection.) She darts down into the tunnel and performs a rapid reconnaissance. There’s not much time.
Slick limestone, threads of precious ore in-between. Jewel has been here, which means Tandy has likely been here. But when, where?
A fossil, some small, humble snail the size of her thumb. Can it be…?
Yes! There’s another, and another! She knows where she is now. There’s a route back to Jewel’s caves from here… at least, she’s pretty sure.
She hears another draconian roar, hastily stifled as though gagged. She scrambles up the tunnel, back towards the light.
Smash is there, pinned in the nest. Tandy grabs his arm.
“Come on! I know these tunnels!”
“I can’t leave Tandy!”
“Idiot! I am Tandy!”
He double takes, then follows her into the tunnel. Not a moment too soon either: she hears a hork as the dragon clears its airway. It’ll hopefully scorch the ogres on land first, but then they’re in trouble. And this tunnel is fairly straight, a perfect funnel for dragon flame. Probably the only reason a dragon would allow such a thing in its nest…
Tandy presses her ear to the wall, searching. If she remembers right—
Yes! Echo! A trickle of water!
“There’s a chamber behind this wall,” she says, and when Smash raises a fist, “No! You’ll cause a cave-in. Let me find the proper spot—”
Above, there’s the unforgettable chugging-up-to-steam sound of a dragon preparing to fire, followed by a fwoom and roars of ogrish rage. Smash shifts from foot to foot, clenching and unclenching his gloved fists, but he waits, even as the dragon starts chugging a second time.
Tandy finds the spot. “Here!”
Smash punches through with one hand while sweeping her up with the other, then leaps. Flames blast through the tunnel behind him; then they land with a splash. It’s only thigh deep for Smash, but it’ll protect them from fire.
“There. I’m pretty sure this connects up to the greater underworld…”
But Smash is distracted. “Tandy! You’re… all right?” He sounds uncertain. “You’re different.” That, he sounds surer about.
There’s a grinding crunch, and what little light there is disappears. The dragon must’ve replaced the boulder over the tunnel.
“Ogres have good night vision, right?” Tandy asks. “I grew up in the underworld, so I see fine in the dark, but leading you would be a challenge.”
“Yes, yes, I can see fine, but what about our missions?”
“What missions?” Then she remembers, like recalling a childhood fantasy. Right, she’s supposed to go to some human village and find some dull human male for some absurd nonsense reason she no longer even pretends to care about. With her current clarity of mind, she’s astonished she bothered trying even with a soul.
But Smash looks sad. “One moment.” He sloshes along till the chamber floor slopes up to dry moss and limestone. He doesn’t put her down before that, and even though Tandy can no longer remember why, it seems important, somehow.
Smash reaches into his chest and a softly glowing orb emerges, two lopsided, ill-joined halves. They don’t want to let go of each other; he has to tug a little to get hers free, and he sighs when he does, like he laments the loss. As he loses his temporary wholeness, she sees him wilt and dim.
“Here’s your soul, Tandy.”
It no longer seems so important, but it was vital to the girl she was before, and that’s enough to make her reach out for it.
It all rushes back to her—her fears of the dragon, the ogres, her worry for Smash. Her knees buckle, all the panic flooding through her at once, too late. Smash moves as though to help her, but she waves him off.
“Just… give me a moment.”
She stays, kneeling on the limestone, breathing until the flood of emotions run their course, leaving her drained but calm. Smash sits and waits for her, looking worried but not interrupting. She’s grateful.
“Are you all right?” he asks finally. “The last time, you were comatose. But this time… I didn’t even recognize you.”
“I’m okay.” He’s left more than his touch on her soul now; she can feel him inside her, tiny particles of his soul that adhered during their brief union. It’s… comforting. Intimate. It makes her want to cry, in a good way.
Oh, she was right to wonder. His soul does feel good. She wants more of it. She wants all of it.
Smash is still looking at her uncertainly, so she dries her eyes and chuckles. “I think my soul feels lonely. It was half, and then it was whole with yours, and now it’s half again, with maybe the better half missing.”
Smash scoffs. “Yours is the better half.”
She touches his arm, and she can feel his soul thrumming under his skin, warm and alive as blood. His ears prick forward, and his eyes widen.
“Do you…” she feels foolish. “Do you feel that?”
Something in him ripples. “Yes. It’s… it’s wonderful.”
Her breath catches. It’s not just her! “Yes.”
He doffs a gauntlet, reaches out to her, hesitates. She interlaces her fingers with his.
There’s a surge, intense and electric. They gasp and jerk apart.
“Did you…?” they start, then, “Yes!”
Then they’re laughing, breathless with wonder, and they’re touching again, first carefully, then with more and more enthusiasm.
It’s not the same as when she touched him before. Little bits of her soul are in his now, just like his are in her, and touching seems to pull those bits like magnets, like their souls are pressing beneath their skins, trying to get closer to each other. There’s a simple, rapturous pleasure in it, so much so that they think nothing of pursuing it. Tandy traces the scars across his knuckles, the sensitive rims of his ears, the line of his jaw. His fingertips ghost across her lips, over her charred, chopped hair, down her neck, and it just makes her want more, closer, as close as she can get, and she climbs into his lap to embrace him.
It’s not till she’s buried her face in the ruff on his chest, fur under her hands, trying to wrap her legs around the broadness of his waist so she can rub against him and ease the ache in her core that she realizes what she’s doing. Even then, she doesn’t want to stop. It feels so good, so right. Why should they stop? How could she have ever pretended that she didn’t want this, want him? She’s wanted Smash since he brought her soul up out of the crypt, since she first wondered what his own felt like. She feels her soulless self’s clarity: why does she feel obligated to try so hard to be a human among humans, when that’s never been who she is or what she wants?
“Tandy…” Smash’s voice sounds strained. Does he not want this?
She forces herself to stop, pull away. He’s panting.
“I cried for you,” he blurts, “at the nightmares. I thought I would lose you. But… I thought I was meant for an ogress. I didn’t realize…” he looks away.
Tandy turns his head back toward her with her hand, feeling his soul shimmer under her touch. “That some ogresses are terrible?”
He laughs. “No, I knew that! I didn’t know that I loved you.”
And his soul is so beautiful and open and honest under her hands, she feels tears of joy come to her eyes. “Oh, Smash, you said it!”
“I love you. That’s why I bargained my soul for you, and left the ogres for you. I… haven’t spent much time with other ogres, asides from my parents. I suppose I had a fantasy of how they were, how it would be, and I didn’t feel the same way about you that I felt about them. My mother showed her intentions to my father by knocking him around and stepping on his face; I didn’t want to do that to you, hated the idea, so I didn’t realize…” He looks abashed.
“Do you…” she hates to ask, but she must. “Do you want to stop?”
“No,” he says, so emphatically he seems to surprise himself. “No, in fact, you can… you can touch me deeper, if you want. I like it when you touch me. I’ve gotten to touch your soul twice now, and you haven’t gotten to touch mine at all, so it’s only fair…” And under her hands, she feels the ache of his desire.
Tandy swallows. “I don’t want to hurt you either…”
He chuckles. “I’m an ogre. You can get rough with me. I… I want you to.”
And he does, so badly she can feel it, he’s truly baring his soul to her, and Tandy has never felt so simultaneously humbled and excited in her life. She reaches for his chest, and when he nods at her to go ahead, she touches his soul.
It’s… indescribable, the feeling of his heart in her hands, his joyous, open trust. Her palms pulse with light. And the way he sucks in a breath, leans into her like a plant seeking the sun…
“Yes,” he breathes, and when she tugs it half out of his body, he bends like a drawn bowstring. “Oh, that hurts good…”
She pulls, twists, plays, feeling his breathing roughen, his muscles tense. It takes so little; souls are such delicate things, and Tandy wants to hurt it with respect and gentleness. She twines it through her fingers, watches carefully for signs Smash isn’t enjoying himself, but he’s entranced, eyes closed, totally focused on her touch. Under her hands, she can feel his excitement, his wonder, his pleasure. It’s delicious. True to form, he wasn’t lying: what she’s doing does hurt good. If touches are flavors, pain is spice, sumptuous when used well.
She gets an idea. Bracing herself, she teases her soul forward, out of her skin. It’s a deep ache… and then she entwines it with Smash’s and everything turns blazing and transcendent.
There’s no denying what they want; their souls cling and cleave to each other, like they were made for it, embrace closer than bodies ever could. In the flesh, they’re hugging, as close as they can get, so close but it’s not enough, she needs to get inside him so badly, like when he took her soul inside him.
She kisses him, deep and rough, and time loses all meaning.
Question and Answer
“Human beings are so gentle, it’s a wonder they even know what they’re doing. Prince Dor and Princess Irene have taken four years trying to get around to it. Now, if they had a little more ogre heritage, four seconds might be enough to—” –Smash, Ogre, Ogre, pg. 156
Afterward, as they flop companionably together on their backs on the pebbled shore of the cave pool, Tandy announces, “I am going to ask you an embarrassing personal question.”
Smash chuckles. “Oh?”
“I know that Xanth is a magical, improbable place… but how did your parents manage to conceive you?”
Smash looks perplexed. “The way everyone does.”
“I truly doubt they did what my parents did. Your mother wouldn’t have survived it.”
Smash looks alarmed. “You small folk are so gentle all the time, so weak! What did your parents do?”
Tandy tries to pussyfoot politely around it, but Smash is so lacking in subtlety (and so increasingly confused) that finally, she has no choice but to be direct. “You put this,” she touches him, “in here,” she touches herself.
Even then, Smash thinks he must be misunderstanding. “You mean on.”
“No, I mean in.” Many parts of Tandy’s education are lacking, but on that point, so to speak, Jewel (and Fiant) were crystal clear.
Unlike Fiant, Smash seems to find this idea downright dubious. “That sounds… uninteresting. And for us, dangerous.”
“I assure you, from what I’ve heard, human and demon men enjoy it very much.”
“Do the women?”
“I have to assume so, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.”
Smash clarifies: “Do you?”
Tandy sits up and hugs her knees. “I don’t know. I haven’t done it.”
Smash eyes her body language, looking ever more dubious. “Do you… want to do it?”
Tandy looks away. “Fiant did a good job of salting that field, let’s put it that way. But if we ever… you know, wanted to have children… and I don’t know yet, but I think I might want to someday…”
“Oh! I see.” Smash thinks about it, then gently reaches up to tug her back down against his side and tousle her hair. “I might want to too. I guess I’ve never thought about it.”
“I haven’t had much of a chance, with Fiant on my mind,” Tandy confesses. “Obviously nothing like that can happen until he’s taken care of, but I don’t want to think about him right now. Besides,” she tweaks Smash’s ear, “you never answered my question.”
“Well, they certainly didn’t do it human-style! My mother is a rotten lowlife who deserves better. No, my father did what any proper ogre would do to a maiden: he devoured her.” He sees her face and chuckles. “It’s the euphemism we use in front of humans: crunching bones, devouring maidens. My father erupted and then worked it into her with fingers and tongue.”
“Oh,” Tandy says. Then the full image blossoms into her mind, how it might feel, how he might feel, and she hides her face in his pelt. “Oh.”
Smash waits. When she says nothing more, he smiles. “Would you prefer trying it that way?”
She grins against his fur. “Yes. That sounds far less painful.” She pauses. “Wait, wouldn’t that make it less fun, for an ogre? And since when do ogres use euphemisms?”
Smash huffs out a breath. “Well, though we ogres pretend otherwise, our way of doing things is not that simple. Any fool can bash someone with a rock; that’s nothing special. Most ogres are… for lack of a better word, connoisseurs of pain. We have a different vocabulary for it than humans do, a different point of view, and it’s easier to just call it devouring and bone-crunching rather than deal with human misunderstanding. For instance, there’s the kind of pain that comes with misery and suffering, which is the kind you meant, and that’s not fun to me, not with you. Then there’s… a human might call it righteous or joyful pain, which is the fun of a good fight, of being tested, of pushing beyond what seems possible. Fighting the Gap Dragon was a joyful pain indeed!
“And then there’s loving pain, which was what we did just now. It’s putting yourself in the hands of another, trusting it’ll be good. The ideal ogre marriage involves lots of loving pain on both sides… but you’re so small, so fragile, and Blythe told me about Fiant, how he wanted to make ogre love to you, and you’re terrified of him. I never wanted to do that to you. The idea of causing you that suffering pain was upsetting, not enjoyable at all, so I thought what I felt for you must not be love. I still wanted you to hurt me… but I didn’t have a frame of reference for that, so I didn’t recognize what I was feeling.”
“Except when I hit you with a tantrum,” Tandy says, kissing his knuckles.
“Well, yes,” he admits. “Yes, those hurt very good.” Pause. “Since we’re asking embarrassing personal questions… I have to know. When Fireoak said you weren’t a nymph—”
“Oh no, you heard that?” Tandy moans.
He looks apologetic. “When people think you’re stupid and asleep, they sometimes say interesting things. I didn’t get involved because the conversation felt beyond me, and anyway, you handled yourself better than I would’ve. You seem so confident, even though your nymph heritage isn’t visible. How… how do you do it?”
“Well, before I answer, what does nymph-hood mean to you?”
Smash scratches one ear. “Well, you’re a gem nymph, so you know a lot about the underground, rock, and metal. Your night vision’s as good as mine…”
Tandy sighs. “Thanks for reminding me why I love you. To most people, I’m not much of a nymph because to them, being a nymph is just being pretty, infertile, and foolish. It makes me angry, honestly. My mother is so much more than that! Thanks to her, I can recognize minerals by smell, taste, hardness, and scratch color. I know which gems, ores, and metals play nice together, and which don’t, so I can plant gems safely… or cause a cave-in, I guess, if I wanted to create my own funeral cairn. I have her night vision, her agility. Also, my human father did hardly any of the work of raising me. It burns me up to think that he gets to just… I don’t know, squat on my family tree and claim all the glory, when he did none of the work!” She lets her head thump back against the mossy stone. “Our relationship is complicated. I assumed you had similar complications regarding your own mother, and that’s why you don’t like to talk about it.”
“What? Oh, no! No, that’s not it at all!” And Smash does sound a little horrified. “My mother’s a heinous bitch who makes our lives merry hell, and she and Crunch raised me as an ogre. An odd, vegetarian one, yes, but still an ogre, and I don’t like the idea that the measures my father took to survive a lethal curse somehow make him not an ogre. My mother, Termagant, is human, yes, but she works very hard to be an ogress in every way she can, because… well, honestly, her people never treated her well. Humans tend to be cruel to large, strong women who can curdle milk with a smile, and I love my mother, so I never wanted to be a part of a people that would treat her that way. That’s all.”
“I didn’t know that about her,” Tandy says. “That’s too bad.”
“We ogres are proud of our ugliness for the same reason we’re proud of our stupidity: it’s thought to be a lack of human pretense and deception. We are what we are, we want what we want, and there’s no point in hiding it.” He pauses. “Then again, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to hide my own human ancestry, my intelligence, my weakness, so maybe we ogres aren’t as honest as we like to pretend. Anyway, as the Ancestral Ogres were calling me a half-breed sissy, I remembered how you said you’re a nymph and a woman, and couldn’t an ogre also be a man, and… well, it struck me that you’re willing to embrace all of me. And why would I want to spend my life with people who didn’t?” He sighs. “Maybe they’ve been right about me all along: maybe I’m only half an ogre.”
She strokes his cheek, enjoying the coarse fuzz/sweet soul feeling of him. “I dunno, Smash. That sounds really ogrishly stupid to me…”
He beams at the compliment and gives her a squeeze. “Thank you.”
Tandy nods, knowing he can see it in the dark. “Why is it always halves, for people like us? Half soul, half man, half nymph. Like we’re lacking. But what if, instead of half, we’re two? Both? And that has its own rewards. You can have human intelligence and ogre honesty. I can have a human soul and a nymph’s ability to go without.” She cocks her head. “Though I don’t know that I believe that human myth. My mother Jewel supposedly has no soul, but she loves and cares and all the rest of it.”
Smash gives her a gentle squeeze. “You take after her. Even that first time you lost your soul, when you were hardly able to stand, you tried to get me to leave, told me to save myself.”
“I did?” She shakes her head. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“You were in pretty bad shape. But you saved us both the second time.” He tilts his head to look at her. “I’ve never gone completely without a soul, and now you’ve done that twice. What was it like?”
Tandy considers. “It felt like… like there was no color in the world. The first time I experienced that, against my will, it was a terrible thing. But when I was doing it by choice, because I wanted to, it just seemed different, not better or worse. The world feels… less overwhelming, without a soul. Clearer, more neutral. There aren’t good or bad things, just things I want and things I don’t, or things that I know will matter to me when I can feel color again.”
“Well, I owe you half a soul at least once, so maybe I’ll get to experience it for myself.” Pause. “Where are we going to go now? Obviously the Ancestral Ogres aren’t for me, but I’m not sure where is. And if this is the underworld, isn’t Fiant still down here? Are you in danger again?”
Tandy sighs. “Probably, but I need to overcome my fear of him. I’m tired of him running my life from afar. He’s been hovering in the back of my mind, my nightmares, for so long… I don’t even know what he’s truly like anymore, only what I feel about him. Does that make sense?”
Smash tilts one ear. “It’s the only way I can imagine you still being afraid of him, to be honest.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tandy, you’ve bullied and ridden a nightmare, twice. You’ve gone face-to-face with the Gap Dragon with me, flattened an ogre cub without me, walked and run through fire, rescued me from being frozen to death, escaped the Void, and survived the loss of your soul twice.” He turns to look at her, his eyes gleaming gold-green in the dark. “What does this demon have that makes him so much more frightening?”
Tandy’s never thought about it that way before. She has to mull it over. Despite everything she’s been through, despite intellectually knowing the Gap Dragon to be one of the most dangerous individuals in Xanth, Fiant inspires a deep visceral fear beyond all reason. To even think about him makes it hard to breathe.
There’s a solution for that.
“Smash, I need you to take my soul for a moment.”
He raises his head, alarmed. “What for? I don’t need it.”
“It’s not for you. My soulless self has a… a clarity that I need right now. I need to think about this, and the feelings are too loud. Please, Smash.”
Smash looks sad, but he holds out his ungloved, beloved, battle-scarred hand. “Only because you asked me to.”
She tugs her soul free, and as it comes to rest in Smash’s hand, the world clicks into focus. Feelings still exist, but they’re much less overwhelming.
Fiant. A figure of childish terror, even now. Why? He’s just a demon.
…isn’t he?
Without her soul to distract her, Tandy feels something amiss. She imagines Fiant, strong and stout and dark, not unlike Smash. Handsome, in a diabolical way, which is very unlike Smash. A shapeshifting, ever-changing being who can turn to smoke, walk through her bedroom wall, who even seemed to follow her into the nightmare realm…
Strange, that. He was the only one in there whose face she knew. Even Smash saw him—apparently Fiant dropped a boulder on him in that well, and though Smash didn’t recognize him (why would he?), Tandy did when hearing the description. But why would Fiant appear in the nightmare realm to Smash?
Unless he was already from there…
There’s more than one kind of demon. There are the underworld demons, the rum distillers of demon drink… and then there are inner demons, kin to the equine nightmares. Half dream, embodiment of idle fantasy… or the worst of night terrors.
Snapshot of memory: Tandy cowering in the crypt, Fiant silhouetted at the doorway, just standing, watching her.
Like her father did…
The thought would be unthinkable, to the souled Tandy, but this Tandy has no time for such niceties. She is far from Jewel and Crombie, far from home. A thought cannot hurt her, and so she thinks: it’s not really Fiant the other me is scared of.
Then she realizes something else. Maybe she isn’t just scared. She’s also hopelessly, furiously angry.
Clearheaded and soulless, Tandy can’t really feel that anger, never mind discharge it. But there’s a solution for that.
She turns to Smash, quietly grateful that he hasn’t tried to interrupt or interfere. He’s just sitting, letting her think, watching with silent caution, holding her glowing soul in his hand.
“Thank you,” Tandy says. “I think I need to get angry now, hugely angry, which means I need not just my soul, but yours as well. I’m going to scream and cry and get violently upset, and I need you to not comfort me, not try to make anything better. I need you to just sit, and watch, and let this happen. Okay?”
“Of course.” And he tugs free his soul with his free hand, so as to present both to her.
Tandy smiles him, loving him in a different way while soulless, but no less. Then she reaches out and takes the souls.
Colors, feelings, memories rush back, popping off like cherry bombs behind her eyes. Her fight with Crombie, his nighttime lurking at her door, her dread building and building until, just before meeting Fiant, it reached a point where she felt she had no choice but to tell her mother.
Only to hear, “Oh, Tandy. Crombie would never do that. He loves you. You must’ve been having…”
“…Nightmares,” Tandy finishes, and then the rage erupts out of her guts.
Her mind becomes blood and fire. She pounds the stone with her bare hands, and when that risks hurting her, she smashes her way into the pool to kick and punch the water, fighting its passive inertia. She dunks her head so she can scream at the top of her lungs underwater, and that’s so satisfying that she takes all her anger, at Crombie, at Jewel, at all the unspoken, unspeakable truths lurking in those caves, and she channels it into the biggest, ugliest tantrum she’s ever thrown, blasting the pool clear out of its bed.
As the water rains back down onto her, she breaks down crying… from proper sadness this time. She grieves her lost illusions: of her father, of her mother, of herself. She remembers Humfrey: “people always ask the wrong Questions, then refuse to accept the Answers…”
To think, she had asked how to escape Fiant for good! As though any mere spell could remove an inner demon. She feels like such a fool. Fiant may not even be solely her demon; in fact, she’s quite sure he isn’t. He most assuredly is Jewel’s, maybe even Crombie’s as well. So much of her life, lost to this.
Smash sits, watching her rage, then weep. Soulless, he looks drained, tired, and sad, but as promised, he doesn’t interrupt, though he makes as though to reach out when she starts to cry. In her breast, she feels his strong, vital soul, embracing hers as though to comfort her. Even in pain, even in grief, he still feels so, so good.
When her emotions finally run their course, she slogs out of the pool. She’s vented her emotions and thrown a royal banger of a tantrum, but she’s hurt nobody, caused no cave-ins. “I’m done,” she says, tugging his soul free (but still leaving dust-small sparks behind). “You can interrupt now.”
She falls into his arms, and once again, he catches her.
“So?” he asks after a moment. “Do you have a plan?”
Tandy is too tired to smile with her body, but she knows he can feel her soul doing it. “Yes. I think I’m finally ready to deal with him.”
…
“Jewel could not afford to lose her faith in people, because then she would have to question Crombie’s fidelity.” –Ogre, Ogre, pg. 5
Smash and Tandy’s luck is bad. They hope to make it deeper into the old neighborhood before Fiant finds them, but he catches them right at the edge. Even worse, he catches Tandy in one of the few moments when she’s alone—Smash having gone to water some rocks. She rounds a corner, foraging, and nearly crashes into Fiant, who seems as surprised as he is.
He recovers quickly. “Well, send me to blazes! What once was lost has now been found.” He cocks his head. “You looked better before you left, though.”
After months of rough adventuring, Tandy isn’t the cute girl who left the underworld. Her feet are tough and callused and dirty, her hair chopped haphazardly. (At least she’s cut off all the burnt parts.) Her clothes are no longer ragged, but much-mended… and her shirt has, stitched onto the back, the words OGRE’S LOVER. (It has proven useful at keeping lesser monsters off her back.) After all the things she’s seen and done, Fiant still summons a surge of residual adolescent fear in her… and almost two years’ worth of impotent rage.
This is the creature who cost her a year of her life, half of her soul, half her lover’s soul, half of Chem’s soul. So much heartache and fear and pain, all because of him.
She hurls her rage and terror into his face.
The force of it sends her staggering backwards down the tunnel.
“Ow!” she hears Fiant go. “That’s no way to welcome me back! What’s wrong with you?”
Tandy is already running, screaming for Smash. They really do crash into each other, though Smash catches her.
Fiant is already reforming out of the defensive smoke cloud he used to avoid the blast, having apparently learned from the last time she threw a tantrum at him. He’s so mad, he doesn’t even notice the ogre, which is impressive. “Come back here, my little human beauty!”
“I’m not human,” she says, and yanks out her half-soul and shoves it into Smash’s chest.
It seems appropriate that the coffin creep of the nightmare realm wasn’t completely lying, when he spoke to Tandy in that crypt so long ago. Fiant can’t hurt her soul if he can’t reach it, and she is happy to lend Smash her strength—not with which to protect her, but to distract Fiant.
The moment her soul is gone, so is her panic. While Smash hurls himself, roaring, into the fray, she runs a safe distance back into the dark, finds their supplies, and gets to work. They’ve been lugging this stupid gourd for who knows how many miles, and she went through quite an ordeal to get her hands on it, so she’ll be happy to finally be rid of it. Pulling her knife from her side, she cuts the cord that holds the package shut. Yanking the gourd free (and very carefully not looking), she holds it high and races into the fighting chamber.
“I’m here!” she shouts, as they’ve planned.
Smash shuts his eyes and doesn’t look, ears flattening. Fiant, naturally enough, turns to look at the woman he’s pursued for so long. He recognizes the gourd before he sees the peephole, and even soullessness can’t stop Tandy from reveling in the look on his face as he realizes what’s going to happen to him.
“No!” he cries, but it’s too late. His body and expression freeze.
Smash and Tandy wait for a moment. When they’re sure that Fiant is caught, they relax.
“You’re bleeding,” she says to Smash. “Are you all right?”
“Demons hit hard,” he says, staunching the blood from his nose, “but I’ve had my face rearranged by worse, and it felt good to whale on him, after all the trouble he’s caused you. Do you want your soul back for this?”
“Revenge is best served cold. Here, if I remember properly, there’s a really pungent sulfur cavern down this way that nobody likes to use but rheumatic dragons; we can prop him and this gourd in a corner, and nobody will come looking…”
Fiant has been Tandy’s personal demon for so long, it is a singular pleasure to feed him to the nightmare realm that birthed both him and her liberation. It’s only because of Fiant’s waywardness that Tandy harnessed a nightmare at all, so they surely have a bone to pick with him.
When she presses her ear to the gourd, she hears the screams of enraged horses and a cry of demonic terror.
Tandy smiles.
OUR VERY IMPORTANT FEELINGS ABOUT TANDY AND XANTH
Date: 2025-04-13 11:38 pm (UTC)Piers Anthony's work in general, and Xanth in particular, has had a disproportionate influence on our inner system workings--our headspace was named the Void for a good while after the Xanth location, and Rawlin partially drew from (and then intentionally modeled herself on) Smash Ogre; it's why she's so damned big and has those gloves. It also influenced our internal soul metaphysics--like her role model, Rawlin sacrificed her soul to save the girl she loved; it just went far worse for her.
That said, the Xanth series is not worth reading and we do not recommend it. All Anthony's heroines deserve better than they get, but Tandy especially screamed for an arc. Her bravery, creativity, and resilience were inspiring to us as kids and still now, and we weren't the only ones; Piers Anthony mentions in his Visual Guide to Xanth (p. 165) that "A young woman who had been violently raped found solace in Ogre, Ogre.” It is not a coincidence that this book was our favorite for so many years. Many other Anthony heroines deal with threats of rape, but Tandy's is unusual in that it never actually happens... but remains a looming threat for an entire book. Escaping it drives her over the course of a year and a book, she throws every harebrained scheme at the wall to escape her fate, and yet it's only dealt with in two chapters: the first and the last. Smash is the primary protagonist of Ogre, Ogre, not Tandy, but it was SO EASY to write it as though she were.
Tandy's woman-hating father Crombie is a pretty infamous character in the Xanth series. He's also the disappointing son of the Good Magician Humfrey, and Tandy's reaction to finding out is never shown. That plot twist doesn't come to light for another nine books, and Tandy herself doesn't learn it until even later, a whopping thirty years after the time of Ogre, Ogre. Her illustrious bloodline never once seems to gain her anything, and she's the ONLY Xanth protagonist (at least in the first 20+ books) who has to do the whole fucking year of service in Humfrey's castle--no deferments, trades, or freebies. Obviously, it's because Anthony hadn't planned Humfrey to be her grandfather that early in, but with that plot thread added, man, Humfrey is a DOUCHE to his granddaughter! (It's even worse when we crunched the time lines and realized that while we wrote Tandy, Tandy with the idea that Smash and Tandy were 19/20 over the course of the story, in reality Tandy was only SEVENTEEN when she crashed onto Humfrey's doorstep, confused and terrified. SHE DIDN'T EVEN MEAN TO GO THERE!)
For a series that, until this point, focused entirely on protagonists with Magician-level powers (and involved quite a bit of insecurity on their part ABOUT those powers), it's kinda nice that Tandy not only never joins Magician society, but marries a talentless man (well, sorta) and it doesn't matter to either of them. Smash may well be the only native Xanthian of human descent whose talent is nonexistent; when he goes to Mundania, he just loses his ogre strength and ceases speaking in rhyme, which are attributed to his ogre heritage, not the human side. (This also means his magical talent may truly canonically be "speaking in rhyme when he feels like it," the most hilariously petty magical talent in all of Xanth.) But Smash doesn't see himself as human; he sees himself as an ogre, and so his lack of human magical talent is meaningless.
Tandy and Smash's marriage is one of the happiest in Xanth. In Harpy Thyme, Tandy wears a shirt with "OGRE'S WIFE" stitched on the back, and they seem to adore each other even as late as Jumper Cable, a good forty-five YEARS after the events of Ogre, Ogre. Their elderly asses still take out monsters together in combat, and Tandy shows no rage in that scene, which we chose to interpret as Tandy finding peace and emotional stability as she aged.
Smash's mother has never been named; we've seen her referred to as "Actress," or (in one fan's interpretation) "Sleeping Ugly." We decided to give her the name Termagant, after a made-up goddess that medieval Christians mistakenly believed Muslims worshipped, which later became a term for any quarrelsome, overbearing woman. It's not a proper ogre name, like Crunch or Smithereen, but Termagant was an actress before she wed an ogre and smacked the shit out of him, and we figured she might embrace a theatrical name.
Finally, it's pretty well stated in Ogre, Ogre that Smash's sexuality doesn't conform to human ideas. Human beauty norms are totally lost on him, unusual for a male Anthony protagonist, and his desires overwhelmingly seem to be of the, "I want her to beat the shit out of me" variety. For a series that later gave all women's panties LITERAL STUN POWERS (used to paralyze human men and at least one ogre), Smash's complete lack of interest stands out; he shrugs off Irene's panty-flashing as though she's trying to sell him a Bible. His buddy Chet even makes a crack at one point: "I didn't know you were interested, Smash." Smash seems to get by a LOT on pretending to be even more oblivious than he is, and he gets away with it because nobody expects human behavior from an ogre.
Re: OUR VERY IMPORTANT FEELINGS ABOUT TANDY AND XANTH
Date: 2025-04-14 12:18 am (UTC)Re: OUR VERY IMPORTANT FEELINGS ABOUT TANDY AND XANTH
Date: 2025-04-14 12:28 am (UTC)...your brain was probably doing you a favor, it's embarrassing how much mental real estate Xanth still takes up.
Re: OUR VERY IMPORTANT FEELINGS ABOUT TANDY AND XANTH
Date: 2025-04-14 12:51 am (UTC)Re: OUR VERY IMPORTANT FEELINGS ABOUT TANDY AND XANTH
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Date: 2025-04-16 12:49 am (UTC)Also that Tandy and Smash's conversations about their mixed heritage had a lot of resonance for me as a POC. I'm not biracial, but man. Talk about identities that have societal baggage, simplistic understanding from outsiders, and are treated as existential markers about you, your body, and where you belong.
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Date: 2025-04-17 03:22 am (UTC)Good luck escaping that work situation! Get the hell out of there!
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