[Preparing Spirit Sight before I leave home. Base diff 4, -1 taking time. WP.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 3) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
crow
The day's first pink dawning will find Nicholas Hyde at a river.
Which, if we're being honest, is not much of a river, at least not of the like he could have found farther east: Denver is a country of mountains and plains, of vast woods and sprawling red wastes. He's waited for a Saturday to do this, being one of those Magi still bound to whatever wheel-within-a-wheel that Sleepers keep, not his own timetable, and so he came early and he came ready, and as he is arriving the sun is beginning to shaft through the trees and down into the swirling waters of a small creek still flush with snowmelt.
Nick has not been here before. Since arriving in Denver he's worked in woods and he's worked in caves and he's worked on the floodplains of the creek that rolls through town. Coming here was deliberate; rivers were roads in the ancient times and so too now, because the earth remembers, and sometimes they are a natural conduit into other places.
He has stopped here, and for the past day he's had water but little else. His body protested that at first, as it does every time he does it, and now it has settled into a sort of acceptance. He is taking a drink from his water bottle as he comes up near the water. He has a yew staff in hand, some knobbed but not especially ornate thing that could look like a walking stick to anyone else who is crazy enough to be out here at this hour. (No one is.)
He's Looking, though incidentally. Nick, see, has been looking for ways Through and Across, and his mentor left before she could share this with him and so he's left to explore on his own much like he did as a Disparate.
When he comes up to the banks, he settles back on his haunches. This is mainly to gather his bearings, to center, to extend his senses out around him, and to acclimate to the quiet. He'll meditate, before long.
Warpaths and Whispers
There is a difference out here, certainly but it shows mostly in Nick's thinking and capacity for thought. Namely in this: The River and the Wood and the Land, are anything but quiet.
The River is a charger. Eager and young, if the diminutive rapids (he could wade into it, chest deep and still hold his feet, if he so wished, though the cold might be something to be concerned about there) are any indication. But what few things jut from it's dark waters, the occasional log from a submerged tree, or jutting rock where the rush goes a touch shallow, are all assaulted regularly, effortlessly by the pushing waters. Erosion would soon dislodge or erase them all, given time.
The River is indeed a road and upon such things, life can be found. It is the source for nourishment, within the Forestry, as often times as Nick reaches for his pre-fabricated canteen of water, so to do the early risers of the Forestry begin their day with a sip from the riverbanks. He spies them occasionally, in shadow and in the silhouette. Squirrels and foxes and perhaps a few birds, found small puddles splashed over to wade in.
In a tree nearby, along the banks, far enough to avoid Erosion for another few years (barring floods) but close enough to present prime real estate for the smallest of the denizens of the wood, a red breasted robin clucks at the air, greeting the sun with it's song before pausing...to stare, with one head-tilted eye at the sudden intrusion of Mr. Hyde.
The sounds are plentiful. A rhythm, a heartbeat to it all. Easy to be drawn into the wake of it. Easier still to get lost.
The small rural city nearby, visible from the slight elevation he was on, a landmark testament to the world he'd left behind. The sun was iluminating it's fabrications. Cracks and squares and venues and lanes that did not exist in Nature.
Except perhaps for this river. Communal, busy and comforting.
* * * * *
His stomach has ceased it's rumbling complaints. His blood is light in his veins. His eyes scan surroundings, in search of more. Beyond what is present. The rhythm of the wood greets him, not fondly and not harshly. It is simply a observant as he is of it. Living and patient and-
The sun cuts through the trees and illuminates an odd assortment of branches and harsh foliage. The resilient ever-green casts shadows aplenty and is the permanent home of much. That within it's branches, spaced barely a helmet's visor apart in some places, the ghostly presence of something watchful (Yellow eyes with flaring pupils...) barely outlined, like it was only half there, tells of how appropriate a Home it really is. Nick is watched.
Mostly by more than just what he can spy at this moment.
crow
Nick is watched; he does not know by what.
It is a disconcerting feeling. Nicholas is an observer. He's had to struggle to push himself magickally beyond using Sights, if only because he finds new ways of perceiving the world to be fascinating. He likes to pass through it, pick up new details, note the way blood curdles in the diseased or how buildings unwind themselves or realities layered atop one another even in the center of the city.
He has been afraid to touch the world and change it because he's been afraid to do something wrong; he's been afraid to hurt rather than help. This is changing, or beginning to change.
Regardless: he is an outsider here, in a sense, and that something else has marked his presence does not sit well with him. It's both the above and a prickle of whatever survival instinct he retains from his long long ago ancestors, back when humanity was young and had to worry more about things that stalked them in the night.
Nicholas does not slide into a meditative fugue, just yet. His eyes cast about for the other presence that is there, to discern how inclined it is to speak with him, or whether he will bother it, or whether it will trouble him.
Warpaths and Whispers
The other presence:
The towering evergreen in which the presence resides is not overly secretive about hiding it's occupant, so much as it is dense with obscurity. The branches make it difficult to spy or see anything from anywhere but below. It's where Nick's senses may drag him eventually, drawn through grass and around the wet shores of the River that inevitably try to dig a bit of cool discomfort at his socks or shoes, with their cold waters and damp suggestions.
Below the Ever-green, the presence is visible. Terribly so in the bloom of his adjusted sight: Feathers like some mantle, drip and droop over a branch, weaving by some imagined movement that didn't translate for the thing looked as still as a statue. Like some gown or cape, they bristled and bushed in their fluidity, puffing outward in undulating smoothness. An orb of feathers, vast and long, the very head was a hood of long, trim lines, and bulbous eyes, sunk back into deep sockets, swirling browns and vague yellows denoting the mask of that regarded him from above.
The shift of those odd feathers, so watery in appearance, traveled like a cloak as the 'creature' on the branch high in the pine, turned effortlessly, head shifting in an all too awkward (For Nick at least, in it's unfamiliarity) to regard the Spirit-seer. The head, righted itself and all at once, the image seemed to clarify; an Owl, long, almost sinuous brows perked to either side, stared downward at him. With a frankness that seemed entirely direct. Entirely unapologetic.
Half in, half out. Or maybe that was simply Nick, and the Owl was a touch curious as to the intrusion.
crow
The air is crisp and damp here, and the river is young and so miniscule droplets of water hang in the air and are drawn into him as he breathes. They mist around him and settle in the winding dark curls of his hair and in his bones, and lend an otherworldly sort of chill to the place near the water.
He catches sight of some Presence below an evergreen, and his eyes fixate on that, because he too is both curious and wary.
It's the first time he's seen an Owl spirit. Owls, as creatures, are rare: not always out only at night, but they are shy and reclusive and catching a glimpse of one is either a gift to a hiker or else a sign that the creature is sick or injured. Perhaps the spirits are the same, and so he watches it with a respect that borders on reverence.
To Nick, see, these things are a fragment of divinity, at least insofar as he can understand it. He carries that with him wherever he goes.
He doesn't move at first, as the spirit itself clarifies and tilts its head at him. His own gaze is steady. After a few moments, if it hasn't left, he does rise enough to shift the scant few feet left between him and the water, lets the icy waters cascade up and around his toes. Half in, half out; and so he reacclimates. And then he says, simply, "Hello."
[Spirit 2, so we can talk! Base diff 5, -1 for focus, -1 for taking time. WP.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Warpaths and Whispers
"....You are here but not..."
Direct. Without subterfuge or suggestion. The Owl's voice seems to carry across the worlds, from the realm of Spirit, sifting and translating through the barrier between realms, for Nick's own ears and translation to understand. Perhaps it might have been different, those words, the structure, syntax and interpretation, were the Man himself on the other side but for this moment, with the haze of sight warping and distilling his surroundings as they were, that is what is spoken.
The Owl's head cranes to one side, once again that awkward sense it might pop off at any moment, so abstract from a human's own ability. The eyes blink, click almost into place and back again, feathers undulating as the possible body beneath the shroud of black and brown flight-tips shifted the Raptor around on the branch. It leaned forward suddenly, head lower in the air than it's own feet on the branch were.
"Scared then to pay proper greeting, little mouse?" Talons cracking wood, releasing grip and re-positioning. The Owl moves a few small inches along the branch, further outward from the trunk. It's eyes never swivel or detour from Nick. It's head moves in increments to compensate easily.
crow
Here but not, says the Owl, and perhaps it hasn't ever encountered something or someone like Nick before. Magi that know how to see past the Veil are rare enough; those that can touch and move through the worlds beyond are rarer, and ones like Nick himself to whom it does (or will) come naturally as breathing are rarer still.
And Nicholas, he has only been initiated as a Chakravanti slightly longer now than the time that he was Disparate. By the time he'd been initiated after two and a half years, he'd had plenty of time to explore on his own, and to come into his own understanding of magick based upon books he'd read and legends he'd heard.
They say of Owls that they are death, that the narrow bars of light around their eyes and down their heads are made of human fingerbones. That's what they say.
It speaks of proper greetings, and Nicholas is slightly abashed though who knows how that will look to the spirit. "I apologize," he says. "I haven't met one like you before. I'm unsure of what you consider proper." He can pay them homage in other magick that he does, in taking on an aspect of the world: an owl's wisdom and insight, for example. How that applies here, on the other hand - well, it's different.
Warpaths and Whispers
"...Being more than wisps and scurrying. More than eyes from someplace I am unfamiliar, would be a start..."
The taloned feet ratchet sharply, cloak of feathers pluming outward, wings made visible in the motion, an expanse and length that defied the Owl's body, at least as far as Nick could see from this side of the Veil. It is a moment of bustling motion that settles rather swiftly. A brief animation that turned back into a stillness, unheard of in city living. Those eyes, had yet to track elsewhere, however, except upon Nick.
"Never met me. No I would remember such a strange thing as you...." A mane of feathers sprouts beneath it's neck, head shaking and rattling from side to swift side, to push them back into place. "Where are you?
To Nick's left, from the waters, the splash of something can be heard. Singular, momentary, but deep enough that whatever had slipped, fallen or dove in, was heavy. A glance would reveal little more than some ghostly shimmering atop the rapids that struggled against vanishing aid the shapeless waters. An odd dent and lethargy for the water to return to it's natural shape and rush.
crow
This sudden movement, of wings arcing out like spreading night, and then just as suddenly repose. Nick doesn't startle, but this is difficult; as fascinated as he has always been with worlds beyond and even though he has, at this point, years of experience, he is still wise enough to know that it always carries risks. Spirits are not human, and they carry their own wants and desires, and they can be dangerous.
"I am flesh and blood and bone," he says to it. Its curiosity: this he understands. And then, "I have died and been reborn and I remember what it's like to not be flesh and blood, and so I'm able to see past and to speak with you."
This splash, to his left, and briefly his eyes dart from the owl and in that direction; whatever it was, it was heavy, and there is nothing visible in the waters now. And here this choice: to step out and away, or to remain.
When he died and was reborn, it was in a river, and his heart was not faint then, and so now he remains.
crow
[Perception + Awareness, +specialization]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 2 ) [Doubling Tens]
Warpaths and Whispers
(....Annddd...)
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Warpaths and Whispers
Nick's attention drifts. Wanders, even and there is a brief flash below the waves of the water. Like something sifting amid the currents. Dark, yet luminous, an abstract contradiction-
-Then a brand new sensation. Nothing so invasive as pain and yet the distinct and reflexive understanding of something not quite tangible passing through his skull. The ghostly presence cutting swathes through his brain and leaving behind the threat that such harm might have done him had the talons of the Owl actually been real enough to find purchase, would have undoubtedly left behind.
Instead, it is a brief joining of worlds, imperfect and barely registered. An echo, like a memory, that will stay with the Magi, even as his attention flinches, jolts, startles, or snaps back toward their meeting in time to find the Owl's expressive wing-span, curling outward. It is all shadow and silence (the solid, tangible kind) winging through the branches, as if they were not there. As if it were more solid than the tree it called home and chose whether it's flight would be impeded by those long brown limbs with their verdant green nettles.
A moment, talons like scythes, settling on the branch again, making it creak in protest as it settled and stilled once more.
"...Not even a body to pluck at. Just a voice and some eyes. You are no flesh and blood that I am familiar with, little Twice-born. Perhaps you left more of yourself behind in the rebirth than you thought..."
crow
This is a brand new sensation, and it is entirely uncomfortable, however brief it is. Of something else passing through him, of some sort of Joining, and he has no words for this.
Nicholas, who is hallowed like the yawning barrows which are the final resting places of kings and thanes, like church yards overgrown and overtaken by the wild and like forests untouched by human hands and unvisited by the age of metal and glass: Nicholas brings this with him wherever he goes. People can tell that he is not wholly of this world, though they can never completely express what it is about him that lends him that sort of eerie presence.
And so, he knows he is different, or that he is not typical flesh and blood. Still, the owl's commentary is new, even if its curiosity about him is not.
"It's our way to die and be reborn many times, and each time we leave parts of ourselves behind so that other things can take their place." This is a truth. He does not speak it easily, though the words come through him unbidden, and not with conviction which can be cold and forceful, but with a sort of peace. "What did you do, just now?"
Warpaths and Whispers
"...I plucked at the socket of your eyes, like many little mice before you. Had I found purchase, I would have feasted. It was not so. You are more Twice-born than mouse, it would seem..."
It came across like reading a menu. Like someone who might be perusing options. Almost dismissively casual, relaxed. There was no offense meant or intended because it was not seen as an insult. Animal kingdom laws and rules. The Owl that did not catch the mouse was not frustrated or angry. Simply hungry.
Feathers ruffled anew. The Owl preened, gently beneath it's cloak of feathers, head vanishing for a moment before reappearing with startling swiftness. It's attention seems to swivel, shift in place, stealing it's gaze back from the Young Mage to scan it's surroundings with a renewed interest. During this moment, Nicholas is made aware of the suddenly flush of....something else. That same presence sensation that bothered him before, except in further multitude.
It huddles in the trees around, above his reach and as yet invisible, even with the rise of the sun. Perhaps invisible because of the rising sun. The Spirit realm was not as the real world, afterall.
The Owl's shape seemed to elongate for a moment, stretching into the branches like some looming shadow. At once larger without having grown. The head swivels round to regard Nick again, large eyes, luminous and broad, like some eclipse. Light and dark all at once.
"...I think next time we meet, will be a lesson, Twice-born. Be sure to have some flesh for me, that I can pluck at. Yours or anothers, it makes no difference..."
There is the sudden rush of wind around Nick, here in the real....the physical world...and with it comes the unmistakable clareon of bird-song. Not a chirp, or a warble..
...But a Caw.
"...Yes yes, Bright-thief. Slumber calls and He is yours..."
The Owl stretches it's wings, seemingly ignorant or at once, finished with Nick, regardless of the Magi's own thoughts or intentions. With one buffetting flap, that Nick cannot feel on this side of the Veil, it slips out into the yawning dawn, at once a shadow in his sight. After a second or more, not even that.
Leaving him to contemplate the Forest, the River and the sudden all too tangible silence that seemed to grip him and the scenery.
Another brief caw, this time from the opposite direction as the first, ruptures the air. Distant, deeper and off the path of the River, into the wood itself.
crow
It's a not so subtle reminder that the path he wanders is full of sinkholes and fraught with danger at the edges should he wander off. Animal kingdom laws and rules. Nick is not Verbena, for all that he might carry some of their trappings; he is less a union of man and beast than some of the Magi he has worked with from that Tradition. It is something of a paradigm shift for him, to be regarded as meat.
Yet he adjusts rapidly. A gift of his is that he has remained so open, even in the face of having officially dedicated himself to one following and one path. "Next time I will have an offering for you," he tells the Owl, even as its shining eyes fix on him before it departs, leaving only a swirling wind in its wake.
Deeper into the wood, a caw.
And this, he knows, and perhaps he even senses that he is being called. Nick straightens then, and with only a brief pause as he lifts his hand to his breastbone to calm his beating heart (yes, still in the end flesh and blood, for all that), he steps out of the water. It pools around the soles of his boots as he steps to the river rock at the banks, and then out farther into the grass and soil.
He lifts his pack off the ground, and into the woods he goes.
Warpaths and Whispers
"Careless..."
It's the first word that greets him into the wood. A drifting song that chaps the air and tsks with that 'You've been naughty' parental suggestion. It comes in clicks and bounces, not centred on any one region, tree or location. It's almost as if it's spoken in the smallest of bits and pieces, one from a dozen mouths in a dozen locations. All at once and without precision.
"...You should be more careful who you interact with. Not all of us have a feel for the sort of new naivety you bring with you this far from home."
The caws are generous but without physical counterparts now. The wood is shadowed, the dawn slowly gaining height into day, trapping the rays above the canopy of skeletal limbs. Spring was taking off but not fully formed, leaving shafts of light still enough room to make their way through and illuminate his path. The clearing ahead is filled with dead and rotting wood, uncovered from the snow melt. The smell of rot is fresher here. Cleaner than any polluted city could hope to be. Loam and age in the proper cycles.
"Why so far this time? We could have chatted in the streets and on the wires with much more ease..."
crow
It is far from the first time he has encountered the Murder, or a Murder. (Are they all one? Are they all fragments of one, different manifestations of the same concept or idea or Word? Nicholas is never sure.) When he was a Disparate, he'd make a habit of stealing from Traditionalist nodes with Crow when he grew thirsty; he has shared this with Pen, how very different he used to be back then.
Being in a Tradition has transformed him, in some ways, or perhaps the Chakravanti specifically have changed him. Responsibility and duty will do that.
Still, in some ways he remains careless, and far too naive for his own good in this brave new world. "It was unexpected," he admits to Crow.
His eyes have grown unfocused now, his gaze diffuse as he steps farther into the wood, an easy thing to do given that he cannot quite pinpoint where any of the individual crows are. "I came out here to meet new things. And to look for a way through. It's easier, out here." The smell of rot is fresher here, the end of a cycle.
Warpaths and Whispers
"...Far easier. You should see what it's like up the Mountain."
The flap of wings somewhere nearby. A shadow dances. There are many of them now. Shadows and shades and spectres of inky darkness with the rising day orb. Shafts of light illuminate patches but make the areas they do not touch, that much darker. Still, diffuse light slowly blends with the backgrounds under the canopy and the air with it's freshness, delivering a natural, even comfortable breath with each inhale. Nick might almost feel the pollutants drifting free of his lungs every time he breathed out.
"...Dive off a peak and land in the Paleolithic..."
Nattering laughter. Crow's knowledge of human speech was far less esoteric and abstract than the Owl's. A familiarity with the way the 'Bright-thief' often interacts with both sides of the mortal line. Stealing in cities and...Being, out here in the wilderness.
"...Why do you want to come through? Eager to be snatched up and turned into bones so quickly?"
crow
The Paleolithic, says Crow, and Nick is a mage who is skilled in understanding Time as it relates to Fate, as it can be threaded out and unspooled and spooled back on itself. He understands that past and present and future are One, and exist within the same space as each other, and perhaps this is how it is so easy to go back simply by plunging off the side of a Mountain.
"Eager to see what else I can see, and to understand," Nick says, but there is a smile here because he knows the sensible thing is to stay safely on the other side. Perhaps Pen has rubbed off on him.
"I found an Old Road, once. I want to find another." He is an echo of them, here, with hair dark as their wings and eyes of shifting amber, shafts of light limning his cheekbones and arms and turning light brown skin into a study of curve and line and shadow. He could be a painting of some fey creature, something at once somber and otherworldly and yet, like them, with hidden depths.
He exhales, again. "Are there other things out here I should be careful of?"
Warpaths and Whispers
"Always. All of them."
The Crow sounds dismissive. Or protective. Or maybe just some road-side sign-post pointing the way toward Doom (omni-directional) and safety (back the way you came). It is an answer and not an answer. Nick is finally catching glimpses of them though. A Murder. There are not enough of them present to constitute the almost communal, vastly dominating presence required to attch 'The' to their grouping. Sizeable, in the dozens perhaps...
They light on branches, carrying that same ghostly half-presence the Owl had. Feathers drip, as if made of ink and yet there are no plops or even droplets visible when they finally fall, as if in separating from each Crow, the substance seemed to just evaporate in an instant. Unable to existence beyond their origin.
"...Old Roads are rare. Crafted like a wall or a building. Those have doors. Windows. Entries meant for going in and out. Easily monitored and watched, though so long as the building remains whole. Once it begins to die. Fall apart. Erode...new doors and windows are made by time and fate. Cracks through which anything can sneak and slip. Not many of those are left for long though. Age or Reason eventually comes along to break it all down."
A tree branch overhead lights with one of the Murder. Black beady eyes and a twitchy sort of regard settling on Nick just below the branch, with it's skeletal limbs and little to no foliage. The droplets off the beak vanish as they fall, stainless and invisible.
"...Out here though...well, different story, but then...you don't know what you're looking for out here do you? Because this isn't streets and wires we're talking in. This is a circle you're trying to walk...A circle you're only half familiar with..."
crow
All of them. Well, he had known this on some level. Even Crow: it is wise to be wary, if only because they lie and they trick and what's fun for them sometimes isn't too fun for a mage.
Their feathers are drifting down to earth like ash, like soot, though they don't linger there in the grass and amongst the branches. He stands in their center, aware that he is surrounded, until one of the Murder comes to settle in front of him. Close enough to reach out and touch, were he so inclined (and he could, see: he has learned to do this.)
"How else do we learn?" The question is both rhetorical and also not. Nick has spent this lifetime teaching himself, for the most part.
Safety: back the way he came. It's not the option he chooses.
Warpaths and Whispers
"Discomfort."
The Crow caws loudly. There's a second that erupts into the same manic screech, followed by a third...fourth...fifth. Soon enough the entire murder is parraoting down at Nick from the branches overhead. A cacophony of sensory echoes that waft and drift, insubstantial enough to be indistinct and difficult to pick apart. Not an orchestra but a party filled with conversations, none of which you can take part in...not yet. Strange and filled with flapping wings and bobbing heads and clacking beaks-
"...Why didn't you swipe at the Owl when it attacked?" It's asked. Several times from multiple crows. Laid over and overlayed. On top of one another, like each was fighting to be the one to get answered. Like each was shuffling and pushing at one another.
Nick caught a beak flash out of the corner of his eye, peck at the body of another of the Murder. Feathers bloomed, blood speckled. Red and black drifting to the ground below with ethereal, mournful ease.
crow
They're shuffling, and the Murder is just at this moment like water before it reaches the boiling point, shoving and jostling as they are, this rattling and disturbance with the potential to erupt into chaos. There is blood, this symphony of red and black as they clamor and peck at each other. Nick is certainly no stranger to this, knows the secrets of the body and has seen more deaths than he cares to count and happening in a variety of ways, and yet there will always be a part of him that startles at the sight.
Magi: they are human too, even the ones with one foot in this world and one foot in the next.
"It didn't hurt me," he says. This too, which he does not say: if it had attacked him, he is not sure what he would have done. His skill with weapons is tenuous at best; Nicholas simply avoids getting into fights. A pause; he considers. "I wasn't even aware that I had been attacked, at first. Well, not entirely."
Warpaths and Whispers
"False!"
A body falls out of the trees some ways ahead of Nick. The tumbling shape of a Crow, it's eyes plucked out, blood splatter painting the air as it drops and lands...vanishing with a Thump! that Nick can feel and hear even if there's no body on the ground where it was meant to strike.
"...You didn't know it would hurt until after it had been done. You didn't know it would attack. You didn't know-"
Those last three words. Trickling, tripping, drifting through the remaining murder. Some are speckled in blood now. Beaks, feathers, breasts, bodies. Droplets from their neighbours. One is missing an eye, sealed shut by congealed red but still cawing.
You didn't know
"...Mice run. Deer flee. Wolves fight. Anything with jaws and teeth and power, reacts. Why didn't you swipe at the Owl? Weak, simple, small, ineffectual as it might have been. Why didn't you swipe at the Owl?"
Another body, to his left this time, tumbles off it's perch, leaking red in mid-flight, from breast and under wing. It too doesn't see the forest ground. Nick blinks or the world blinks or the veil blinks and the bird just...isn't there anymore.
Still, they caw.
crow
Nicholas maintains his composure, even as a body spirals out of the branches and to the ground in a cloud of feathers, and dissipates. What happens to spirits when they die? There is no Shadowland for such things.
It names him false. It is rare for anything to name Nick as false: not because he never is, but because it's so rare for something to see through him.
Another body tumbles, and they caw, and here is the brutality of this world past the streets and wires, naked and stark (ah, but it's brutal there, too: just a different sort.) Nick tries on different answers in his mind: that he is man not beast, that he can understand when to fight or not fight and can choose not to lash out. What he says first is, "I have no desire to cause pain where it's not needed," because he does believe that such things can feel pain.
It is not the truth, though, or at least not the whole truth, and it has already named him false once. "...And I don't know what I would have done, if it had been worse."
Warpaths and Whispers
"....You don't belong here."
Whispers in the branches. Soft words whispered underneath the tone of the lead Crow, bloodied as the rest, dripping now in truth, the drops making it to the ground but failing to appear in the real world Nicholas is currently a part of.
"Pain is a truth here. It has a shape and a form. You can shake hands with it, even. You will, at that, if ever you climb out of that soft little shell of yours and see what sort of world exists in that bleak little Concrete Box with its Dying and Sick you populate day in and day out and day in and day out and day in and day out-"
And the words continue, cycling through the forestry with slow reverberating build. The Murder, some of them half-murdered themselves, are cawing it Day in Day out Day in Day out over and over and over again.
"...But you don't belong here. Not like this. You're as good as a meal to the first little shadow..."
The wings flap. The murder ascends. One after the other after the other. Into the branches and out of 'sight', leaving behind that first. The obvious one so close he might be able to touch it.
"...Go back to the City. Talk to the Murders there. They're far more pleasant. Far more civilized. Far less concerned for you..."
The last hops along the branch, backward to the one behind it, further into the dark, single beady eye clicking and blinking. Once. Twice. A third time.
Then it's gone.
crow
These whispered words: he's heard their like before. There is some part of him that knows this is true, that he is not Kiara or Thane and remains firmly grounded in the trappings of Man. Nick is a healer, and perhaps as of now his definition of what that entails is still a narrow thing, comfortable with experiencing the pain of others along with them and with his own but not with dealing it out.
The murder ascends, taking flight and arcing up through the branches and leaving him with its parting words, that perhaps he ought to go back to the city.
And it's true on some level, isn't it? He belongs there-not-here. And yet.
He remains there in the clearing after they leave, and there is this long slow exhale as he shifts his pack on his shoulder. Against the soft little shell of his, the flesh that encases that which is infinite within him.
And, troubled, he begins the trek back to the car and the Concrete Box and day in and day out and day in and day out. Ad infinitum, until something chooses to stop it.
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