But I like the weight of it

Stella
The sun has begun its long, slow descent from mid-heaven and the light of it glances over and gilds the ripples of moving water of the river as it slides and flows and whorls and dredges and moves in all the deep and quick and meaningful ways that waterways move, and there is a thrum of summer bugs already in the air around them, for it is warm enough for insect life and it is humid enough for the sound of them to catch and thrum and buzz and hum.  The grass and weeds along the river banks has grown high enough that each crush of their footfalls brings up the smell of verdant growth, of river mud, a sharpness to meld with the pollen hanging heavy in the air and the taste of pine and cedar sweeping down from the mountains and the hope of morels hidden among the roots of trees.  It is not yet the golden hour, for that comes later, when the sun is slung so low that she has turned from burnished light toward brass and every shadow is slanted hard toward the evening and the thickness of them is almost syrupy, or smoke, but never sweet.

Arianna's hair is piled up on top of her head, secured with a few pins and clips, leaving the back of her neck bare.  Every few minutes she reaches up and slaps at something there, and pulls her hand away to inspect it.  So far she has not been quick enough to catch the offending party that has nipped or landed or merely grazed there.

She grew up in a warm country so when Nicholas wants to go hiking the mid-day after a heavy rain, she is fairly sure it will be warm and humid and dresses accordingly.  But she is not used to Denver, and the dappled light over head and the thick, chunky cumulus clouds that sail between said sunlight, should speak to her of coming rain but rather they seem to be its cessation.

For all the years that Nick has known her, Ari has never seemed the out of doors type.  Perhaps he expected a measure of whining, or wheedling or demanding of reasons for their excursion -- promptly renamed an Adventure by Ari -- but this does not come.  Instead she asks him for the names of trees, or flowers, or birds, and she listens if he will talk, and she is blessedly quiet if he wants to listen to the sigh of the wind or the sway of the leaves.

"What is this one?" she asks him of a tree that they are passing.  "I like the shape of the leaves, and the armament of its seedpods." Hah, yes, leave it to a Flambeau's daughter to find weaponry so readily in Nature.

crow
He is learning to name the trees and flowers and birds that reside in Denver, for it is all still new to him too; he grew up in the desert, surrounded by rocky peaks and chaparral and sometimes palms, when they were in the city.  He traded that for the New England coast, old deciduous forests and salt marshes and the skeleton of some ancient mountain range.  So he doesn't always have names readily available to Ari, but when he does he shares them.

He does talk, sometimes, as they wind their way down the trail.  He tells her about the times he has been here before (he ran into Alex much farther downriver a few weeks ago, lighting a fire) and about the spirits he has seen (he encountered an Owl spirit, but on another river, and they say Owls can be death omens in some cultures did she know that.)

"That's some kind of alder," he says, with a sidelong look toward the tree and indeed to its armament of seedpods.  With the tendency to poetry and the likeness cast to weaponry, there are times when he is tempted to compare and contrast being out here with Ari to being out here with Pen, and the ways they are similar and yet different.

He is taking them up along the river and there is a place where the river kisses the path and for a little while they are joined, they run alongside each other.  It's not meant to last though (some things aren't) and so when they diverge once more Nick stays along the river.  It's a little mountain stream, with waves and currents that peak and crest and rush alongside each other like a herd of horses.

"I've been curious since we last talked about magick, Ari - have you ever experimented with instruments before?  Maybe back in your wild youth?"  Here, a little smile cast in her direction.

Stella
"My wild youth," she echoes, much amused by something touched upon but not truly called out into the afternoon sunlight.  It curls the corner of her mouth and the green of her eyes is more like grass out here than it is like moss, or perhaps that is only the way the yellowing light has caught them just now.  There is laughter, too, because if Nicholas only knew the truth of what he alluded to.  But it is restrained, too, for they are only recently learning to bend that part of her past forward into this friendship and it is not always easy.

"I spent a lot of time out of doors and outside the walls when I was young," she tells him, and there is a fondness and familiarity with how she watches the coursing of the mountain stream and the way it kisses the banks.  "More so than probably I should have," she admits, with candor but without remorse.  "But I never really dabbled in other instruments."

She considers it now, though, as she watches the light on the water or the movement of the grass as he parts a path for them along its banks.

"I suppose my wild youth and my Awakened days did not overlap as much as I would have liked," she teases now, saying this in a long suffering sigh and touching it through with wistfulness.  Offering him a wink when his attention is next cast her way.

"How did you select your instruments?" she asks him, and there is no mockery or faux interest here, only solemnity worthy of the gravity of the question.  "Were they part of your education, or did they come to you through experimentation?"

crow
When Nicholas took his first few steps away from home and went to college (he wouldn't Awaken until years later), it took him some time listening to other peoples' stories and sharing his own before he realized that his own youth was wilder than most.  It was during those years perhaps that he learned to play his cards close to his chest, those years that gave him a reluctance toward disclosure.  Regardless: perhaps he understands here where Ari draws some of her humor from; perhaps he had already anticipated that wistfulness even if he does not share it (or, more accurately, even if his is rooted in something else, closer to the other end of the spectrum.)

"Should have?"  Here, a glance cut to the side toward her, another smile.  "You were still out learning."  Perhaps it wasn't what her Hermetic professors would have wanted her to learn, and yet.  "Did you ever read or study other schools of thought outside the Order, before you Awoke?"

He listens to the rest of what she says, to the questions she directs toward him.  He wore a pair of solid brown boots, reminiscent of the sort a soldier might wear and they have been scuffed and covered in dust and forest loam and water and ice and are still quite sturdy and unmarred for all of that.  They keep his feet sure on the damp rocks and soil that come up along the banks.  He is looking down into the water as they walk, and there are rocks here aplenty but none that have caught his interest just yet.

"Some I started using partly through experimentation of my own, and partly through experimentation aided by memory of people I was before," he says.  "I used to practice outside the city because it was easier to find spirits there, and there was less risk of detection."  A beat.  "I didn't trust most of the Traditionalists any more than the Technocracy, to be honest.  Occasionally I would learn things from spirits, too, when they were feeling generous.  My first mentor taught me the rest."

Stella
Ari had been a good student, excellent throughout her early years, as befits her House and Names and all of that.  She'd spent her time out of doors and studying, or adventuring, and avoiding most of the trouble that there was to get into as a privileged child of important people.  That had shifted in her years at Academy, where her reputation for being something of a trouble-maker had, unfairly, began.  She embraced that, though, whole-heartedly, when waking up did nothing to allay the rumors and fears that she would amount to a great big steaming pile of nothing.  Or, worse yet, to a clever-enough bargaining chip in the pursuit of ever greater Houses and Names.

It is nothing at all like Nicholas's wild youth.  She doesn't have to ask to know that their wildness was of differing sorts, and with differing aims and instigation.  She hopes that his is more innocent, but she fears that will not be so.  Nothing of life outside of the Order seems any gentler than life within it.

"I did not," she tells him, regarding studying outside of the Order.  "I was exposed to language and literature and art and symbolism and philosophy from many corners of the world, but all of it through an Ordered lens."

The corners of her mouth tuck inward, pensive for a moment.

"You can learn a lot about people through their poetry," she says.  It is not at all the way Pen speaks of poetry, but it is held aloft nevertheless.  "Through what they will go to War for, what they will make love for, how they deify their Deities, or what they surround themselves with when they go quietly into their graves.  But it is not the same as living among them," she concedes as they walk on.

When they talk about her past, or her education, Ari always holds it as a thing apart.  It is from the time before they knew each other, and this makes it separate. It is all Order and none of the melt and chaos of cross-Traditional friendships.  This is why having Silas in Denver is so damnably hard -- he is her past and also her present and there is no good way to melt and blend and smooth the chaos that that brings over to meet the pleasing and provocative chaos of her Work and Friendship with Nicholas and Pen.

"What was it like?" she asks, cautiously because she is having trouble framing the question the way she would like to.  "To seek and grasp and listen and learn all for your instruments?  Do you feel they are nearer to the truth of you, because you gathered them to you rather than chose them from a ready palette?"

crow
"Were you forbidden from reading anything outside of an Ordered lens?  Would it have been frowned upon?"  Perhaps the questions are leading or driving at something; perhaps Nick is merely curious.  There is so much, see, that is foreign to him about the way that Ari grew up.  He can imagine it in the abstract; he can imagine the expectations that will be heaped among the children of Awakened people he has known.

Perhaps he wonders whether the same expectations will be heaped upon his own, should he and Pen live long enough to see them.  It is strange to him to imagine growing up within Awakened society, having the supernatural as one's frame of reference for what is normal.

Ari's questions cause him to draw in a breath as he steps over a little shallow where the river's waters pool and eddy and lick at the bank.  There is no crunch of wet gravel though the water ripples about his feet.  "I think they are what I needed them to be at the time I adopted them," he says, "which isn't always nearer to my truth.  Sometimes I adopted the things that were at hand because they worked.  But a lot of tools that are organic speak to something in me."

He is tilting his head, and there is light in his eyes because he is glancing up into the trees as he thinks.  "I'm beginning to use different instruments, now, that make more sense to me and feel...more consistent, to me.  Things that make more sense as my understanding of how magick works deepens.  Your circles were helpful for that."

Stella
"Forbidden?"

She is less cautious and sure-footed than Nicholas is.  Sometimes the water rolls over her boot, and dribbles down between the laces that criss-cross over her foot.  Her socks are damp, but she does not complain.  She is less at one with the space, and it shows in the splashes that herald her footsteps or the slap of her hand against her neck.  Which still fails to capture the nipping insects.

"Not forbidden, Nicholas, but just... "  She considers this for a long while before continuing.  "There are more things worth knowing in the world than things I will ever get to know.  Even if I devoted my life to the study of all worthy things, and to the extension of my life and intellect so that I might consume ever more of them, and to the study of Time that I might bend and ease and make even more opportunity for learning -- never will I know all of the things I might wish or dream to know.

"Growing up in the Order is like this: it seems like everything you think you might want to know is right there.  So much wonder and magic and that's just the lowest shelves of the library stacks, just the things you can access without permission. And if you are voracious and determined and ambitious you may reach beyond this ready information before you Awaken.  But you are incentivized to learn the Right Things, as it opens doors, and gives you access to deeper secrets and higher Arts.  Even if you know there is more, there is the question of why you might divert your time, and your intellect and your energy into it.

"It might lead toward majesty, or it may be a distraction that limits the things you could have known if you'd just stayed focused on the Right Things all along."

She tells him this, but she is not quite so certain that it is the truth of things.  She has dallied far too long to have been invested in this absolutism overmuch.  She has wasted too much time and energy and intellect.  Perhaps she is not ambitious or determined or voracious.  Perhaps she is content with the contents of the lower and unguarded shelves.  Would Nicholas believe so? Many in the Order do.

"I think it sounds like you, like Nicholas Hyde, to have instruments that speak to him that he might speak with spirits, and to find circles meaningful, and water hallowed, and truth in river rocks.  I wouldn't have felt that way if I had met you in my wild youth," she tells him.

Ari stops following him and finds a flat rock beside the river to crouch down on.  She lowers her hand until the water trails against and through just the tips of her fingers.  Until it whorls against her the whorls of her fingerprints, and she leaves tiny eddies in her wake, and she is disruptive and distracts this stream from its appropriate course. When she pulls her hand away from the water, it beads like crystal, hanging from her fingertips, amassing just enough weight until it falls back and joins the rest of the water and any separateness and identity is lost to the flow it was always supposed to follow.

This isn't magic. But it could be.

crow
There are times when, to an outsider, the Order of Hermes could seem a religion unto itself.  And like most religions, it is full of contradictions and it is not always internally consistent.  See here: rewards for learning the Right Things in spite of holding the individual Will above all.

These are not things that Nicholas points out to his Hermetic friends.  At least, he does not point them out directly, because he understands that people grow up protective of their cultural values, he understands that as an outsider he cannot be assumed to understand their mysteries.  Perhaps it serves a purpose; perhaps this procedure is merely there to keep them all grounded.  And yet he wonders.

"I'm curious what you'll focus on now that we're more or less on our own out here," Nick says, with a sidelong glance toward her.  Because they are, aren't they?  Fewer Traditionalists around.  Fewer magi.

He is still watching the path ahead, looking perhaps for a likely place to stop and - ah.

He stops here, crouches down where there are numerous rocks that have been smoothed and polished by the current, some carried down and rolled over and over along the bed.  They might have started at the top of a mountain, taken centuries to arrive here.  Rocks travel, despite the propensity of most people to think of them as stationary things.  Nick reaches into a shallow and pulls one out, turning it over absently in one hand.  "I only bring it up because I've heard you question," he says.

Stella
Long ago, at its inception, the Order might have been less contradictory and constrained.  Surely there are myths unto myths about the founding, and Ari's House would hold them all the dearer for its insistance after being The First. Frankly, she has just assumed that all of that history has about much veracity as the blending of the Celtic lores with their history and edge of written and recorded time.  That there is a shard of something ageless and eternal within her does not lessen her skepticism about humanity as an impartial observer of its own trajectory.

"I think we all question," she says, still crouched by the water and a little ways away from his study of the stones.  Still watching the way the light catches in the beads of dampness that fall from her splayed fingers and when no more beads amass and fall, then she dips her fingers into the water and begins the pattern all over again.  "Perhaps not the most loyal among us, maybe they never doubt, but at some point you lift your head up out of your studies and begin to wonder of your own right."

Drip.  Drip.  It is a calming thing. She could imagine scrying by water instead of smoke or mirror or symbol or sand.  She could imagine scrying by anything, really, but not yet scrying by another Art or Weise.  Not by another name.

"And then there are others, like you, who I imagine begin with wonder and work back and forth toward theory when it serves you.  It is a different thing, to build a house around a shifting thing like a river or on sand than it is to realize there has been a house around you all along and open up a door or window."

Drip.

She is supposed to be interested in river rock, but Ari has been distracted instead by the river itself.

"Maybe you do not need the house at all," she says, whilst focusing intently on the bend of light that is paler than honey and bright like the distillation of the afternoon and not quite between her and Nicholas, but also not apart from them.

"I think I like it, though," she says, watching how the light changes as the drop of honey and afternoon falls through shadow and then disappears into the greater water.  "It suits me for now."

crow
There is a loud plunk as Nick drops the rock he was holding back into the current, and it is a heavy oblong thing and so its descent to the bottom of the shallow is too rapid to be perceived without the assistance of Time.  Another exercise for Nick to take up with Pen, perhaps, these things that could not be noticed unless one were to watch with the help of magick.

The dripping water from Ari's fingers: that's another.

She mentions that he might not need a house at all, and here he is thoughtful, here he rests his elbow on his knee and looks down into the water.  "When I was in grad school I had a professor who was very irritated at the perception that theory isn't needed to ground counseling practice," he says.  "She said we all operate from a theoretical framework regardless of whether we know it, and knowing and naming it is something we have to do in order to know whether or not it works.  Magick is like that too, I think."

Houses, well.  Nick rolls a shoulder here, a shrug.  "So what sort of rock do you think you would like, if you chose one to practice with or use in your magick?"

Stella
"Eh," says Ari. It is the most erudite of responses.  It is not to his question about river rocks and instead to the story about his professor and her particular world view.  She wipes her fingers against her leg to slip the last of the dampness from them.  "That is a very narrow view of Naming."

This, though, is as far as she takes the quarrel with the absent Sleeper woman.  It is left to flow past and around them, remarked on only briefly before they turn their attention to more solid things.

"I think I should like a pale one," she tells him.  "So that I might mark the influences that move across its surface, or the stippling and shape which herald its history, but also because I like the greys and pales in things. I find them pleasing, and if I am to Work with this rock, it should be pleasing to hold and to see, and of a good weight.

"We can find challenging rocks later," she adds.  And mentally tacks on: and then we can mail them to Kestrel.

crow
Narrow, Ari says, and to this he shrugs; Nicholas often blends his understanding of his Sleeper profession with his Awakened life, and he is aware that for some magi the twain do not meet.  Ari prepares to move them on to other topics, and Nick allows this, still crouching at the edge of the riverbed with one hand in the water.

While the ambient air is comfortable, close to what most people would seek out while lounging about indoors, the water still carries memories of winter, or perhaps of the mountaintop from whence it likely came.  Many of these rivers begin as glaciers, or as some aquifer held deep within the rock.  Regardless: it is not a comfortable temperature for one's hand to linger in, but he does not seem to notice that just yet.

"I don't look only by the properties of the rock, but also how it feels to me," he says, picking another one up off the bed and turning it over in his hand.  "If it doesn't resonate with you, it's difficult to use in practice."

It might frustrate her, relying on that level of intuition when it comes to selecting instruments; nonetheless he suggests it.  "What do you think you could use yours for?"

Stella
She is stubborn.  The water is cold, but she has already partially acclimated her fingers by dipping them in and out of the shallows and watching the sunlight pool and puddle and drip from her fingers.  She will not let the memory of glaciers steer her from finding an appropriate stone and perhaps it will be all the more fitting for having frozen her fingers in search of it.

Challenges to overcome. Hermetic. He is well accustomed with this drill.

When Nick speaks of how the stone feels to him, she frowns a little. It is difficult to know what a stone feels like once she has seen it and set in motion all of the associations she has with color and texture and shape and magical properties.  It is like asking her to hear a word in another language and know what it means, to her, without any taste or context for its native meaning.  And this, too, is a Herculean task, as Ari's mind is equally tuned to language as it is to symbols and so she finds that she must let her fingers drift just over the bed of stones while her attention is on anything but the rocks themselves to get even the faintest sense of what a stone might say.

To her.

Or how it feels absent what it is.

"How do you feel what the resonance of a stone is without feeling of the literal resonance of it, Nicholas?" she asks, stooped low like this and looking up to him with a mar of frustration and utter befuddlement between her brows.  The humidity has coaxed her hair into loose and wild curls where it is free from the pile atop her head and she is not at all the same as he usually sees her. She is anything but triumphant.

She could use hers for a paperweight, she thinks, but does not say.  Frustration alone is not enough reason to mock his Praxis.

crow
"I'm not talking about the stone's resonance so much as how it resonates with you," he says, and his repetition of the words is careful here, deliberate.  So is the eye contact he makes.  He must see her frustration, he must know on some level how difficult this is for her.  He must understand how she is struggling.

He is too perceptive to not have picked up on those things.  Today though his mirror is not an exact one; where she is frustrated he meets it only with patience, with a sort of tranquility worthy of their friend Kestrel in his more peaceful moments.

"Sometimes knowledge is just noise.  It can obscure the truth and keep us from the things we know to be true," he says.  "This is like any other attraction, if it helps to think of it that way."  He stops speaking, but only because he is considering weighing thinking, and then, "Think of it like this.  You can know everything about another person, they can be exactly what you believe you're attracted to and what you believe you need, and you can still feel no attraction when you meet them.  When the spirit and mind and body speak to each other that's when we feel whole and connected to other things around us, and that's something we're looking to echo in selecting an instrument or focus for practice."

He flips the rock over again in his hand and runs his thumb over a few pits, as yet left unpolished by rushing water and time.  "Try just picking a few of them up and paying attention to the differences in texture and shape."

Stella
Nick has hit upon a metaphor that Ari understands better than he might think.  For the Hermetics have a Law about Attraction, and there is also a strong section of rhetoric and reason coursework set to stamping out confirmation bias and other (il)logical extensions of Attraction, but the relational sense in which he speaks of it hits something squarely topical within her and it pulls her glance away from him and out over the water.

She breathes out and lets her eyes half-close, and lets the sound of Nick's nearness blend into the background and also wills herself to ignore the chill of the water -- but she knows that it is glacier-born and that it carries echoes of the place where she and Pen had found the tass, which was also like rock and crystal and ice and Winter.  Ari picks up one stone, and turns it over in her palm, and smooths her thumb along the edge of it, and then sets it aside.

She repeats this pattern, with her attention cast a little out toward the middle of the river, until she thinks she may become bored and rote about it, until the movement is almost meaningless and the gleam of the light on the water distracts as it becomes more brassy and warm-without-warmth, and her fingers have gone numb, and the bugs do not stop buzzing or biting but she is resigned to them.

She is resigned to them, and she is enduring, and she is steadfast.  Pen had called her steadfast once.

The rock in her hand just now is not pale. It is not grey or perfectly round. It is mostly smooth but with a little fold and seam like section where it may have been cleaved from something bigger once, or possibly warped and bent under so much pressure.  It is dark and somewhat mottled. Not very pretty. Nothing akin to perfect. But it has endured.  It is steadfast.  It is of a good weight and she finds that she likes the way the seam of it slides under her thumb when she worries it. And still her attention is out over the water.  And still her fingertips are all but frozen.  And still there is buzzing and frustration and a burn in her legs where she has been too long crouched there beside this river-not-a-river looking for a focus made of compressed mud and time and travel and translation.

Finally she looks down at the stone in her hand, and then back up to Nick.

"This one is ugly," she tells him.  It is truth; it is not a pretty thing.  "But I like the weight of it."  Which does not begin to address the undercurrents of what she might have felt within it, or from it, except that on the surface it does: the stone has gravitas; it is weighty.  She offers it toward him as she rises, to see if he might think the same of its misshapen seeming.

When The Walls Came Down [Syll co-ST]

Ari
[Mind shields for everyone: Mind 2 + Corr1, coincidental, base dif 3 +2 = 5. Taking time, well-practiced. TN3]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Ari
[Extending. +1 dif.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 9) ( success x 1 )

Ari
[Esoterica: There must be a perfect symbol for the tracing of long-active magics. Clever. If we are very lucky, it will also be a symbol with which Nicholas has some resonance...]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8, 8) ( success x 2 ) [Doubling Tens]

Ari
[Follow the Rote: Corr 2 + Mind 1 + Prime 1, coincidental, +1 hidden target, +1 active magics. base dif 3 + 2 + 2 =7. Coordinating resonance, taking time, instrument (see esoterica roll).  -3. TN4  +WP]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Nick
[Assisting!  Base diff 5, +1 for hidden target, -1 for coordinating resonance, -1 for using instrument, -1 taking time.  WP so we don't botch.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Ari
Chez Giametti is somewhat more inviting that the first few times Nick has visited.  The living room is set up now, with a broad couch and love seat framing a seating area that faces the hearth.  There are places for books, always, and pleasing but somewhat abstract art.  It is tastefully put together, and yet has the warmth in texture and the taste of hidden things that he has come to expect from his Hermetic friends.  Never in her home is there a sense of wanting; this is as close as she comes to opulence.

For all of her tendencies to jump into things, feet first, there is an astonishing pragmatism to how she approaches unfamiliar magics.  They do not simply jump into scrying the threads of the old and twisting rote, no, instead Ari takes a small bowl of water and salts it thoroughly.  She rests a sprig of rosemary in it.  The basin is round and it is silvered and she stirs it, sun-wise, with the index finger of her right hand.  The little sprig twists and spins. The salt dissolves.  As she carries this toward Nick, she speaks over it in the shape of foreign words, she consecrates it with her Will.

Some of this is showmanship, some of it is to call to his symbols as much or more than hers. All of it is magic. It is the sort of magic that mothers work over their children; it is the sort of magic that Masters work over the Apprentices; it is the guarding of one Mind with the Will of another.  Nicholas is standing before her hearth when Ari dips her thumb into the salt-like-sea water and then smudges a damp place over his third eye.  Then she presses her thumb into each of his palms.  It like being anointed with moonlight; it is like having starbright burn from his meridians.

It circles him in, and marks the boundaries between what is Nick and what is Ari, what is Nick and what is Other.  As if he stood within a circle scribed with salt and iron and ice.  The boundary is clear, and permeable to him; he must invite the Others across it.

To keep with the symbols, she places the sea-salt in her palms and also at her third eye.  The dampness does not burn the same to her; it underscores the boundaries kept between self and Other, yes, but she is practiced in this rite. The mindfulness of keeping it active is spent in its extension to Nicholas and even that is practiced in a sense.  Though Ari is not yet a Mother, or a Master, or even truly a minder of others, this is a watchful, careful thing. She can abide it.

There is a brief discussion of symbology, tuned toward the common things she has previously found with Nick and the settle, quickly, on the shared understanding of circles. Which is positively brilliant, she tells him, as she draws him and silk-wrapped book and the basin of salt-sea water that binds them out onto her patio.  She has been working for the past month at scribing-staining onto the concrete a wide and winding circle.  It had been obscured when they worked at the Talismans, but now it is complete enough to stand in as this symbol.  They drag the outdoor table to the center of it; it is an aluminum altar -- the irony is not lost on Ari, though amusement does not sway her from this pragmatic thing -- and together they lay out the book beside this small blue basin of anchored and anchoring things and together they walk the circle to come back to either side of the narrow table and inspect the rote together.

Each has their own names and symbols and words to speak, but together their magics reach out into the expanse of the Tellurian, each star-bright mind following one thread or another, working faster together and more completely than either might apart.  Tethered as they are, Nick can feel the ebb and flow of the distance between his attention and hers, pulled thin and translucent and then jammed thick again as they come together toward some end.  She is at once beside him, protective of his mind and Will, and apart.  Her father is the Aegis of Ylesephet.  She carries echoes of this guardianship within her bones.

Once again, this space outside her home is made hallowed by his presence and his Working.  Once again it is illuminated by her own.  Once again the stand within a well of moonlight, or within the gleam of moonlight rippling on the water of a well, or over the ripples of a moving water, water being a thing sacred to Nicholas.  They are movement, and light, and something sacred.  They seek...

... but do not yet know what they will find.

Nick
They don't know what they will find just yet.  Nick's presence beside her is a palpable thing, how he hallows this place and lends it some otherworldliness.  For Nicholas, this sort of looking is about expansion, is about extending himself upwards and out, is about inherent and divine connectedness.  And isn't that easy to do, when they're trying to trace another's Working which by definition taps into the raw essence of Creation?

Nick is beginning to be able to articulate these things.  He's on a precipice.  He is beginning to adapt even his instruments to be more in line with it: see here, incense today, burning there in the center of the circle they've walked.

They can trace the ripples across space, from the emotion and resonance embedded within the pages of this book and all the way to a place high on a mountainside.  The rocks are red and the earth is barren and see it could be another world, a lonely planet suspended in space and bereft now of life.  At the base of the mountain, there are crumbling foundations, there is ash and a fine white dust.  Long ago there was ruin, but that is old territory and anyway they aren't using Time today.

Were you there when the walls came down?

Someone was.

This is a place of loneliness, of Hunger and it beckons, see, and maybe not only to them.  Its source is farther up past the ruin, all the way up to a cabin and a circle of bone.  Bone, and grave dust, and isn't it a lucky thing see that Ari thought to shield them before they moved forward because they can feel a dread deep in their own bones, something that would take hold would snag them and they wouldn't want to look away but they would want to all the same.  They don't feel that; for now they are safe.

But that's what they see: tall chaparrel and logs dessicated and dried out by desert heat and wind.

They could linger.  It might not be wise.

Ari
Were you there when the walls came down?

Someone was.

She was.

It is a lucky thing that Ari had thought to shield them for so many reasons just now.  The question, left unanswered in Nicholas's mind has a ready and immediate answer in her own.  Yes. Yes she was there when the walls fell; and there is the sweep of something deadly and decisive across that memory; and it is He Who Wields the Flaming Sword, and it also his foe, and it is righteous and terrifying.  But it is also contained.

This is Self.  This stays within the circle of the salt and iron and starlight that defines the sphere of Ari's influence and while Nicholas can feel the intensity of its flare, he does not know the specific shape of its influence.  Only that it is hers, and not his, and not of this working.  But also that she was there when the walls fell.  That she knows the mortar- and bone- and grave- dust; that she knows the creep of dread.

The line between what is hers and what is not is argent and brilliant and excoriating.  It gives her a place to focus.  The ruins of Ylesephet fall away, replaced by the heat of the desert wind and the scent of chaparral and the red dirt of mountains far from memory.   There are ruins below them and a circle of bones before a cabin.

Because they are safe, she takes the time to count and number them.  Because they are safe she takes note of whether the door stands open or if it is closed, and if it is open whether she can see within it.

Because within her circle she holds the falling walls, and the Aegis and the Arrow, and something righteous and terrifying; she also knows that she can Will this trace to break whenever she is ready.  It is a thin thing held in the hands of her mind; it is kite-string.  The moment the wind seems to sharp or too hot or too wicked she will let it loose, and away the vision will fly.  She will let it loose, and push down the fallen walls and remember the taste of red dust.

Her hands are tight on the edge of the table; even sinew in her body is tight with the flight or fight of two fallen places warring for her interest; of memory both hers and someone else's.  If Nicholas has enough presence of mind to be both here and there, he will see that she struggles but also that she maintains control of it.

Neither of them are rightfully only Initiates any longer; both are at the pinnacle of this stage of their Arts.

Her eyes open and seek to catch his.  If he offers some sign that he is ready, she will release the rote.  There is salt and iron and ice to her eyes; the rote that keeps him safe also keeps him from looking in as completely as he might.

Nick
Nicholas has looked too long and too deeply at Mysteries before.  There are countless cautionary tales of magi who have seen things they were not meant to see, glimpsed before they were ready: magi who have looked upon the face of God and been struck blind, magi who touched the Void and went mad.  Andrés, recently, who has touched Creation in a way that has left him unable to distinguish what is real from what is not, who flew too close to the sun.  Nicholas himself who has brushed up too closely and too many times to that truth of Endings, of Impermanence.

It might be a fortunate thing, then, that Ari is there to hold him back.  Nick while never a true Orphan had an absent Mother and Father and Master; maybe sometimes the watchful eye of his friends when he cannot be those things for himself is what has kept him from fading away into moonlight.

Neither of them can see into the cabin.  The door is closed.  In the windows they can see only shadows, shifting things that seem to hint at something within but who can say what.  There are shadows because behind them there is light from some unknown source, warm and yellow and orange and bright.

The bones are many.  She might lose count.  They are old, and they were arranged with purpose: this they can both tell.

When Ari's eyes open she will find Nick's there but they are wandering, he does not see her for the moment until he realizes she is looking at him.  And now he nods to her once, and now he does not seek to open the cabin door or look into the windows.  And so the rote is released, and Nicholas raises a hand fragrant with incense to his eyes and rubs at them.

"What do you think that was?"

Ari
The tracing falls away.  The sheild she has placed around his mind falls away.  The one that hardens and encircles her own does not.  She holds this for a longer spell, it lingers in her eyes and the hardness of her expression.  Her hands hold, still, to the edge of the table, gone white with the tightness of it, cold as ice.

After a long moment, she releases her hands.  Mindlessly she rubs her palms together, as if to clear the salt and ash and moonlight from them.  Still, though, there is the thrum of her resonance woven around her; still she tastes of ice and iron and sea-salt and starlight. There is a separation: Ari, Nick, and all the Others.  Vigilance. Kept longer than maybe it is needed.

"I do not know but I am worried..." she says, though with the sort of cautious edge one's voice takes when one is not entirely certain, "That the bones were human.  I cannot tell; I have no skill or Arts that would illuminate this thought.  That is more your expertise, or Silas's."

The name comes readily, offered between them without much thought.  And then it demands thought, and her brow creases. But of course she would think of the Incendiary's son, on the heels of memories of Ylesephet, with the closeness they share now.  Arianna breaths out. She can still feel the desert wind and the red dust in her lungs.

"I am torn," she adds, "Between wanting to know and wanting to burn that book down to its endpapers, and hoping it takes that cabin and the bones and the red dust with it."  This is a vehement thing, breathed out with more intensity than perhaps the vision rightfully deserves.  "I do not think it a good omen."

Nick
"I suspect that they were," he says.  "If they were, there are a lot of things they could have been there to do.  I could try to look again to figure that out, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea to do it right now."

There is a point of tension there between his eyes, between his brows, at the juncture of nose and forehead and eyes.  He does not voice his worry; he does not need to.  Just now his expression is a tell enough.  They could be traced back here too: this he does not say.

"If they were bones and they were human, they don't necessarily need to have been placed there for...well, they don't necessarily indicate that whatever is there will be hostile to us.  It could be something that is dangerous, but in the way that magick or hikes in the wilderness are dangerous."  Beat.  "Which is to say that it's not necessarily a bad omen."

He after all is a Death Mage; he has seen plenty of tools at work that would disturb or unsettle magi from other Traditions.  Then again, they have both seen dark magick at work too, they have both felt the touch of magick that would fracture everything it touched, would unmake everything it came into the presence of given enough time.  It's likely that Elizabeth Courtright left them both (left them all) sadder and a little more weary, and wary too.

"I think we need to determine whether there's something hostile there or not, at least as long as we have the book."  He glances toward it, innocently lying there with its bound pages rustling a little at the edges, touched by the breeze outside.  "I doubt we're at harm from the book itself, though."

Ari
"What good omen comes from leaving the bones of your fellows or your foes to whiten in the sun?" she asks, as much of him as of the book, though the latter of the two is what garners the pointedness of her attention just now.  It is difficult for her, with her superstitions and training, to imagine a comfort or security found in allowing the remains of the dead to be defiled by sunlight.

Unless they were purified thereby, and then, again, it brings her back to echoes of ill portents.  But Nicholas is closer to Death in his workings than the Giametti woman is; her dealings with Death have been personal in different ways.  Instead she gives voice to her frustrations in the careful working of her hands, binding that book up again in the silk in which she had carried it to her home.  Silk to consecrate, to bind, to contain.  Her mind is still shielded, at least until this bit of clearing up is done and then, finally, the sense of moving starlight recedes from her.

It leaves her raw around the edges, frayed in ways that he isn't just now.

Were you there when the walls came down?
Yes.

"Your thoughts are clearer than mine just now," she tells him. There is appreciation and admiration underscoring the words.  "Come inside, and share them. I will fix us something to eat."  Ari captures the silk bound book up her hands, leaving him to bring the incense and the basin of salt water inside with them to consecrate and cleanse her home.

"Did you get a sense of When we were?  I am hopeless at Ars Temporis, but was there some mundane clue to it for you?  And did you, too, have the sense of someone within the walls?"

Here, though, the question is too unspecific for her own mind. Within the walls of the Keep or of the Cabin or of the grave-dust ruins below them at the base of the hills?  She guides them to the kitchen, to where there is a row of neat bar stool soldiers guarding the breakfast bar, and where there is fixing for open faced sandwiches made of roasted meat and pickled onions and some creamy pungent cheese.  And wine, red to the point of nearly being opaque.  Dense and grounding in the way that chalice-wine must be, though the glass she gives him is stemless and more easily grasped in distracted weariness.


Nick
Nick follows Ari to her kitchen, where there is wine and bread and meat.  There'd been this moment as he followed her in where he'd looked at her at length, his eyes clear and his gaze direct and searching: and he sees her discomfort, he sees how her hands are tense as she binds the book back up.  He gestures Ari toward a seat and then he lays out bread for two sandwiches, spreads a healthy layer of cheese across both slices.

"It seemed to be in the present, to me.  We would have needed the Ars Temporis to look back."  He uses her language easily; he has Worked with Hermetics often enough now.

He adds pickled onions atop the cheese, begins slapping slices of roasted meat atop that even as she sets the stemless wine glass near him.  "Bones could be laid out in some sort of ritual.  I've heard of paths being cut through the Veil that way, or...you're right, I suppose it could have been a way to purify them.  It could also be some sort of death rite I'm not familiar with.  Part of some larger Working."

In spite of these alternatives he offers, the point of concern between his brows is still there.  He finishes her sandwich first and hands the plate across to her, then slides his own towards a selected stool.  "Are you all right, Ari?"

Ari
The language is a crutch. She could say 'Time' instead of 'Ars Temporis'. It is more expedient and far fewer syllables.  Ari never corrects him if he chooses other names for the Arts and she has, even, in rare moments of extreme cross-Tradition good will, used the common names herself.  For now, though, it lends familiarity and comfort to an otherwise strange moment and she is gladdened by this olive branch he extends.

Ari accepts the plate from him and gathers herself up on a bar stool. There is a seat left between them. She would not have done that if she were thinking; she would not have left a seat open between them for the echoes of the past to roost upon. She is a superstitious thing, at heart, but the gap makes it easier to twist and face each other as they eat. This is what she will tell herself later: pragmatism, not oversight.

"Hmmm."  This answers thoughts of paths cut into the Penumbra.  It brings a crease to her brow that mimics the tension between his own.  And then there is a sharper question to be weighed and answered.

"I have been some place similar," she tells him.  It is true without being entirely true. It is the shape of truth stripped of the weight of it.  "Though it was half a lifetime ago, and not in the desert or near the red hills."

This gives him enough to peg the approximate timing.  She has asked him before what he knew of the losses they have suffered in The War.  It is telling, perhaps, that she chooses food over wine to ground her away from this memory.  And, even as she is chewing that first bite, she frees two napkins from a holder on the counter and passes him one of them.

Swallows.

"If this tie is to Now, then there is a cabin out there, and a circle of bones, and perhaps some greater Working?"  She asks him by canting the words upward at the end, though the sentence is framed as a statement.  There is inquiry in her eyes, and already she is trying to think of the places with red dirt and hills and heat like that.  She has seen some pictures of Arizona, and the red rock hills; perhaps the tether is pulling Nick homeward as it had also tugged her thoughts back toward her own.

He knows what she will say before the words come.

"We should find it..."

Nick
"There is," he says.  "Kiara brought me to a place that was full of rock hills like that not too far outside the city.  That place felt more remote, but it could be somewhere in Colorado."  Though it reminded him, too, of the home of his birth if not of his heart; so many wild places out near the mountains could resemble one another.

He takes a swallow of his wine as he accepts the napkin she offers him, then takes a bite from his sandwich.  First one, then rather quickly another: Working always leaves him hungrier than he thinks it's going to.

"We could probably track it directly to the location if we needed to."  Dangerous?  Yes.  Though they have both done dangerous things before.  Nicholas had been out alone when Pen and their other former cabalmates found him, having listened to Crow, having followed leads that no lone Disparate had any business following.

To her response that she has been in a similar place, there is only a noise of acknowledgement.  Perhaps this is because his mouth is full; perhaps it is a placeholder while he considers a response.  He does not miss that she did not answer him, did not say whether she is all right or not.  "Do you want to tell me about the place you were in?  Or is that best left for another time?"

Ari
They have both done dangerous things before and there is, at least, the semblence of security in doing reckless and dangerous things together rather than alone.  That is where this is heading, surely, toward reckless and dangerous things done together but not entirely alone.

Ari takes another bite of her sandwich before answering him.  The cast to her eyes is distant; it is not here and neither is it entirely half a lifetime away. She chews slowly as she considers what she might say to sidestep the question, and also that perhaps it is not the time to sidestep these questions.  It is like the matter of her Hermetic schooling, of her ridiculous trailing of family names, of the entitlement and ease of being something of a Legacy.  This story is part of her Legacy, but not a part she shares with Nick or Pen. She gives them the lightness of it, the glimmer and gilding, but rarely these sorrows.  It is not fair, she has long thought, to burden them with it.

So it is kept light, and as even as words can be kept when talking about deep and terrible things.  When ghosting over the sun-whitened bones of friends and enemies, unburied in the haste with which they left the place.

"One of my father's titles was--is, though he rarely claims it -- the Aegis of Ylesephet," she tells him, still holding her sandwich in her hands, still having not touched her wine.  "He and the Incendiary, who is Silas's mother, who is likewise terrifying in her own right, held the Wards and Walls as long as they could before the Chantry fell during the War.  I have told you of it before, in passing, not completely.

"We were young and those things leave long shadows. -- I think this is what I said.  Something like this.  Or maybe how his mother was like a Fury. I don't remember, rightly what I said, but all of it would be true in one sense or another. But I am sure that I left off this: we were there when the walls came down.  Silas, his mother, my father and I."

Nick
It will be the first time he has perhaps heard Arianna speak at length of the War and its sorrows: he cannot remember such a time, he was not Awake then.  It is all in the abstract to him, despite stories he has heard from Jonas and Miles and Patricia about what those times were like.  But for the most part they are all summer children, the three of them and the cabalmates they kept back in New England.  This is not to say of course that they have not known strife nor sorrow (summers, too, can be harsh) but theirs are more common, in a sense.  More individual.

The friends they have known who have fallen were all given rites and burials.  Elizabeth Courtright was mourned, both for who she was and for who she became.  They have never left bones of friends and enemies to whiten in the sun, or known starving times save what they knew growing up as mundane children who never had enough.  They have not had to hide themselves and fear breathing the word Magick in public places.

Perhaps they never will.  Perhaps the fates will stay kind.

The attention Nick has focused on her says that she did indeed leave off where she was when the chantry's walls fell.  It says that he is seeing Ari in a new light; this happens from time to time even among close friends.  "I'm sorry," he says, despite knowing that there are no words deep enough for that sorrow.  He is left this way, often, with words inadequate and only his eyes to convey his understanding.  "Will it trouble you, going to a place like that?"

Ari
Of the others, Kestrel had known.  Of course he had known this about her. Either because he helped her with Ars Mentis, or perhaps even before it.  He understood the pull of the thin red ties of name and title and legacy better than the others had.  They all might have been Summer Children, but Ari had only played at the part and she had been so practiced at it, so complete in the method of her deception, that it felt to her at times that maybe she was warm through and through like they all were.  (Which is not fair; Summer is brutal in its own way.)

But here she sits, having told him that in her young teens her home, and her friends, and her mentors were sundered and broken by the war, with her elbows rested on the high counter and her shoulders rounded out a little and there is no prick of sadness in her eyes or sour to her stomach as she takes another bite of cheese and bread and onion and meat and chews it slowly, thoughtfully.

She is simply further away than she usually is. Remote in her orbit, but swaying back toward his gravity.  She chews, and swallows, all without looking over toward his question and then she exhales.

"No," she says, as she is setting down her sandwich and cleaning the tips of her fingers on the napkin.  "Going forward is not the same as going back.  Even going back to Ylesephet would be going forward.  But if there is War coming, as the Order has spoken of, then it will trouble me to leave a place like this along our margins, unexplored and undiscovered."

She shrugs a little, and picks up her stemless tumbler.

"Perhaps it is folks magic or hedge magery, and then," a little shake of her head. "It is not our problem.  Or maybe it is some newly Awakened and unaffiliated working above their education -- and I'd rather we found them than that the Conventions did.  Or maybe it is as slippery as it seems, and if that is true then all I can think is this: I do not want to be flanked by one trouble and another.  But I cannot think of a circumstance that leads us into not going."

Still, though, she does not drink.

Nick is so intently focused on her that he will see what she is not saying.  It will trouble her, but not unduly. It will bother her more to leave this stone unturned and eating at their boundaries.  She finally glances over to him and the sympathy and empathy in his eyes.  It bends the hardness in hers, but not toward sorrow.  Another time, she would tell him, You honor them with your attention.  Another time, but not just now.  The sentiment is the same, though left unspoken.

Nick
There have been rumblings of War for months now with nothing to show for it.  Back in January Pen had gone to a summit, and had told him what the plans were as handed down by some Hermetic Adept; they have heard precious little since.  Plans move slowly though, and Denver so far as Nick can tell is something of an Awakened backwater, with a chantry present but no established social order or political regime such as the type they encountered back in New England.

Though every place has its politics, doesn't it?  Even if it looks different here.  This is a place of stark individualists, people who are leery of other people.  That's the kind of place it seems to be.

He remembers, from years ago, one of Boston's Verbena making some laughing offhand comment about the disorganization in Chicago.  It seems to be their nature.

Regardless, Nick does not know if they can trust anyone here and when Ari comments that she would rather not be flanked by trouble, there is a hum of acknowledgement (another placeholder perhaps) as he takes a long swallow from his glass of wine.  "I think you're right.  But if we go it should be soon, before whatever it is has a chance to trace us back here."

Ari
Something in her fingertips itches when he suggests -- rightfully so -- that something might trace back to them, to find them here at her kitchen counter, eating a peaceable lunch.  It itches because she is not yet strong enough to prevent it wholly from happening.  Some day, though, she would be strong enough to truly Ward her Keep.  Some day.  Some day she would be strong enough to pull the threads of the rote apart, and leave it on the floor of her patio, dissembling and disassembled and unraveling around their feet or she could bend it to another purpose.

Just not today.

"Agreed," she tells him, and now, finally, a sip of wine. She swallows, then takes a deeper sip.  "I don't know the area well enough to guess at where to find red hills like that, but I can help with scrying if we can narrow and get nearer to the area."

And so the discussion goes like this, toward pragmatic and dangerous and only somewhat reckless things.  And this is, perhaps, where Nicholas might need to call his fantastically capable wife into the precedings, or where Ari ought inform her boyfriend of sorts that she was up to some form of no good.  But she doesn't reach for the phone to text or call him, and she doesn't precisely encourage Nick to call Pen.

Because this still might turn out to be a marvelously library book for Pen.
Or it might turn out to be a Nephandic tome.
Or some other trap.

But it could still be rescued into a capital present, and it might ruin the present a bit to pull her along to investigate its correspondence with some far flung hills.

Ari has a Thomas Brothers -- out of date but serviceable -- and a folded map of the US Southwest.  It will get them started on narrowing the possible areas.  She will pack them up some sandwiches and sticks of vegetables julienne and other snacks for their adventure, as well as her instruments and also two of the charms they have made together -- three if Pen is to be collected along the way.  By the time the kitchen is cleared up from lunch and the last vestiges of their resonance are seeping from the patio, they can be ready to embark on the next leg of their adventure.

From Dust [Syllogy co-ST]

Arianna
There is a chalkiness to the dust that hangs in the air, swirls so that it even diffuses the sunlight. It tastes of mortar and grave dust and pieces of stucco blasted into a thousand tiny pieces.  The ground is dust and the air is dust and the only way to tell them apart is that the sunlight -- dim, diffuse, grey as it is -- streams through the air and not through the ground.

His ears ring.  Perhaps they also bleed.  The air tastes of dirt but his mouth tastes of blood and there is not sound. Images flash without connection. A flash of red hair. A half-remembered face. The shape of someone's eyes, or profile, pieces grasped but not long enough to be made whole.

The buildings are reduced to rubble. Cinder block and mortar dust. Crumbling stucco. Broken red tile rooves. Vehicles move, when they move, on massive tires with tread in which the whole of his hand could be consumed.  This is where the dust has come from, not only from sundered earth but also from the falling walls.

***

Were you there when the walls came down?
He cannot hear the question, but he knows it in his bones.
Nicholas can feel himself answer: Yes.

***

Just on the edge of hearing, the ringing begins to resolve into a whine, to sirens. The mechanical type, bent and twisted by the dopplar effect -- moving toward, then turning to move away.  Hearing is not better than not-hearing. It does not give him anymore sense of where he lies.  And he knows he is lying because of the solidity beneath his shoulders, and how the diffuse grey mortar light does not come from behind him, but from above.  How it does not fully relent when he closes his eyes, but shifts to a shade of red that is his vessels illuminated through his skin.

Someone is calling his name. Over and over again. Frantically, as they move through the rubble. He cannot hear their voice; he cannot yet hear his own name.  What will it be? Is he Nicholas here? Some other past life? Some borrowed skin within this vision.

More then: The fabric of his pants is heavy, meant to withstand this sort of landscape.  His feet are encased in heavy boots, boots with treads in keeping with the massive tire-tread, as if he he, too, were meant to wheel over and through and not be trapped by the unevenness of his place.

The ground shudders again, and the dust in the air tremors in reply, and new plumes of grave-dust and mortar are moved into the air.  A little ways away, red tiles fall from a broken roof. They shatter and splinter against the ground. He cannot hear them, but his mind fills in the sounds of it.



Nicholas
Is he Nicholas here?  He does not know; he cannot hear the sound of the name or the shape the syllables take in someone else's mouth, and he only knows that it's his.

They arrived here when Ari asked for - nay, demanded - adventure and Nick's suggestion had been to seek out books.  A present, he said, or a present it would be once they had some gathered, and where does one begin to seek out magickal texts?  It's not as though either of them have ever done this before, in this life.

The bookstore is outside, a collection of little buildings and wooden carts and surrounding it all a fence: inside the buildings are only shelves upon shelves, and the carts are arranged beneath a few brightly colored canopies, a sort of open-air market for books.  They've sat down together in a little clearing, a patch of grass that an imaginary cow could devour in a bite or two, and Nick's primary means of using Time magick is to go inside himself and meditate so there is very little right now to see and give away his vision.

He is there: he can taste dust in his mouth.  He is there: his eyelids flutter as someone calls his name, and one hand braces against the ground as though he'd rise.  He is there not here.

Then: he is here again, broken out of whatever portent by a sudden wracking cough.  His thoughts are of a distant bloody country.

He raises a hand to cover his mouth and, eyes watering, wordlessly hands the book back to Ari.

Arianna
There is not much that truly marks Ari for her chosen Hermetic house.  She is not as bookish and quiet as the stereotypical Bonisagus, and she has not outwardly shown the vigilance and dutiful devotion to her studies that one might expect.  She is rash in her decisions, fierce in her affections, aloof when she is indifferent: tempestuous more than a steady guiding light.  And while she excels at magical theory -- a mere nod toward her require excellences -- she has not compiled the sort of library that she ought to have in her early thirties.  But they are seeking to remedy this, and to restore Pen's library to its former glory, and also to lift their combined enlightenment further toward a common goal.

But an open air book market? It calls her House forward, and it is so unlike everything she has known of Denver.  This little patch of grass is speckled now with tomes and paperbacks and anything she could carry in her arms that might prove mysterious or magical, and she was like a child in a candy store -- yes, there was smelling of the old books, and a sort of gleefulness in pointing out the old typefaces -- until this one book came across her path.

She will swear to him later that it was not the other way. This book positively demanded her attention, much as she had demanded an adventure of him; it would have lept into her hand if it were prone to locomotion, and so she had gathered it up and carried it back to him. Offered it over with a shrug of her shoulder and an overly keen and watchful eye.

So she notices when Nick is suddenly not-here; when he is physically here but elsewhere at the same time.  That look, it is familiar to her. He is not the only Oracle that she has known and, gods, the world is not kind to its seers and mystics and so she has left the Ars Temporis for a future study, but his distance draws her shoulders up higher and the hilt of her wand into her hand to be at the ready should it be required and there is, ready on her tongue, a half-breath from springing into being, the precise syllable that begins the Enochian encantation to bring a forces ward up around them should something happen that ought not be heard or something aggress that ought not get through.

When he coughs it is a relief, and that readiness slips just a bit back, behind the mercury in her eyes -- we must not give the impression that we are over-ready, or that we may over-care -- and she brings the book into her lap, which is covered by some floral pattern in her skirt.  She places a hand on his shoulder and not his knee, palm of it against him, fingers pressed in just enough to anchor.

"Do you want some water?" she asks him. Water being the seat of emotion; cups being the vessel of the heart; chalices leading ever always downward. But mostly because water helps when the throat is dry; when the mouth is parched; when things taste as they shouldn't.  "I have some in my bag."

She'll move for it if he wants it.  Otherwise, she waits.  One hand pressed flat over the cover of he book in her lap, one on his shoulder. Bridging them, but with all of her attention on him.

Nicholas
Water.  He nods, once twice three times in rapid succession as he coughs again.  There is no moisture around his mouth but he rubs at  the corner and at his chin with his thumb regardless, reaches up after a moment to his ears and runs his fingers over the outer edge where they connect with his jaw.  There is no blood; perhaps he is just trying to reassure himself of that.

He accepts the water from her as she offers it to him and takes a swallow from the bottle.  "I saw the aftermath of some sort of explosion, or earthquake or something.  I'm not sure where it was at."

He is not sure whether he was even himself: sometimes that is how these things go.  Nicholas is often careful of his use of Time magick for good reason; Jonas Allard is a cautionary tale if there ever was one.

"I'm not sure whether it's going to happen, or whether that's where the book came from and how it got here.  Is there anything on the inside cover?  Can you tell where it came from?"

Arianna
She has handed him a metal thermos.  Just a few days ago, it was filled with cold brew coffee and smudged with Neith's lipstick.  If his Time sense is still tingling, then, he may get the sense of twinning laughter and mischief, of yellow paired with grey, and a profound and urgent need for... Walmart and tequila?

Once he can speak again, the tension in her shoulders relents and Ari begins her own careful study of the book in question.  She turns it over in her hands, studying the spine and covers for some unusual mark or ornamentation.  Then the endpapers come under her careful review, and then, finally, the printed inscriptions and also the first and last pages of each identifiable signatures.  Was there some pattern to the unevenness of the fore-edge?  Some strange gapping of the pastedown?  She would find it.

These are the places she would leave secrets, were she the sort to write them down in books.  While there are plenty of thin, too-thin, too-gossamer-to-follow slights, nothing rises to importance immediately in her estimation.

"Printed in ..." she passes her finger over the numerals on the page. "That cannot be correct. 1847?  Not with this binding, or this typeset, both are far too modern." she tells him.  The Bonisagus know their books. "It must be a misprint.  I would scarcely believe nine-teen forty-seven..."

Ari's finger traces a pattern above the page.  It does not follow the shape or lines of any printing there. It curves and slashes. Her finger does not touch the paper, but the air between it and the page is slim. It is nearly nothing.

"Et arcanorum arcana quae sunt revelare."

Ars Vis will not entirely reveal the secrets of the book to Ari, but perhaps it will make clear whatever hidden workings are wrapped around it, and it is the sphere she is most comfortable with and the one she has begun to itch and long to push into new skills and abilities.  It seems fitting, here, to watch the weaving of this possible wonder.  And, as always, her Latin pronunciation is flawless.  That it is Latin and not Enochian, is perhaps a nod to inclusiveness for her cabalmate.  Not everything needs to be illuminated and divinely shining, does it?

Nicholas
Ari's efforts to include her cabalmate would not go unnoticed, would certainly be greatly appreciated, if indeed Nicholas spoke any Latin.  If he were to see it in print it's possible he would recognize it; as it is, the syllables she speaks fall into one or the other category of Not English and Probably Not Spanish But My Vocabulary Is Terrible These Days.

He'd pulled the thermos away from his mouth upon first sensing Ari and an unfamiliar woman, a mage, and after he has glanced once at the mouthpiece he lifts it again and takes another swallow.  He watches as she turns the book over in her hands.

"Maybe it's a misprint," Nick agrees, though he sounds less certain.  "Could it have been rebound?"  Which, of course, does not explain away the typeset, but even magi are prone to believe the Consensus, see.

She won't find anything on the spine, or along the endpapers or the edges or even the pastedown.  As she is leafing through the book, dust falls from between two of the pages, fine and white as powder dredged from the surface of the moon, and in amongst it is a small speck of red clay: from a tile, perhaps.  The pages the dust lurked between are smudged and dirty: the words address an older essay debating an alchemical theory, whether it's valid anymore to believe that they are changing only the physical body but whether the essence of the thing changes as well, whether something must be done to the underlying pattern and true transformation is a union of Spirit and Mind and Matter and the Tellurian.

Someone, some book vandal, has marred this page.  On it is a small sketch of one of the mountains, any mountain perhaps though there's a certain precision with which the bare (barren) tree in the foreground is depicted and a play of light and shadow that suggests that whoever drew it had some talent and perhaps had used a reference.

She Feels when she looks at it, and the feelings that spring up in her right away are: Longing, and Loneliness, and a deep hunger that is true hunger, pit of the stomach hunger, and more nuanced things too, focus and perseverance.  They spring up in her and take root regardless of whether she wants to feel them or not; they just are.

Arianna
There have often been essays like this, ones that seek to connect the Pattern Arts to their more ephemeral cousins, reasoning that Vis (or Potentiae as it might also be known) bridges more than the structure of a thing and might write indelibly upon the soul of a thing.

Might rewrite it.
Might re-Name it.

Arianna has split her interests among the spheres of Vis, and Mentis, and Conjunctionalis and Essentiae.  She has studious avoided the stronger patterns, or the emphemera of Temporis and Spiritus.  She is a thing that flits between, but soon will need a stronger anchor for her working; or a sense of how it fits into a broader schema.  But this is partly why she has Pen and also Nick to ground her, why they fit together so.

There is dust on her fingertips, and in the fabric of her skirt, and the red-fleck -- that bit is touched with her index finger and held apart. Glanced at and wondered after.  A distraction or a focal point as the Tellurian bends and:

A sharp breath is pulled in through her teeth, and so close kept are they that it almost whistles in. In, like the way the mountain-sketch pulls her, in toward the sighing of bare-boughed trees, into a place that is lonely and longing, which is too keen to feel just now and so she breathes out.

Nicholas sees this: The way her eyes are unfocused as she breathes in, and how she rubs her fingertips together to feel at the dust upon them, and how her eyes press shut -- almost as if wounded -- and then blink open as she breathes out, and how they savage whatever it is that lies before her, seeking some sort of anchor in the present.

Her hands move away from the book. She drags her palms against the grass to remove the feel of time and dust from them.  The Hunger remains; wreathed with other nuanced things.  She tests her fingertips and finds them still too dusty.  The book lies open in her lap to the picture drawn in the margins; to this clue left by a vandal or a Seer.  Even when the threads of the Tellurian are transparent to her again, the gnawing of it remains.  It worries at the corners of her eyes.


Nicholas
"What is it?"  Nicholas indeed saw whatever effect the book had on her, and however shifted her affect and however disturbing his own vision was he cannot help but crane his neck to look over to the page.  Whereupon he too is seized, and he is no stranger to feelings like this either though it has been some time since he felt them so poignantly, and he lifts his hand to touch the drawing.

It was perhaps ill-advised, borne of impulse, but there is nothing that happens to him.  Nick looks away and glances at a spot of fine white dust on the tip of his finger, and then wipes it away into the grass.

What is it?  Dust from that faraway place?  Powdered bone?  Moon-dust in earnest?  He hears Pen tease him, suggest again that he could learn Matter and know for sure.

See, and Ari, she knows the Ars Mentis when she feels it: a simple enough effect, but there and worked however it was through pen and ink.  Nick's gaze is absent of the gnawing, of the worrying, though he can indeed tell that Ari herself is gnawed and well worried.  "Do you think we ought to try to trace it?  Is there a way you can do that, or find where it links to, or..."

Arianna
"Oh," she says, when she is grounded enough again to feel the separation between herself and the scene that bled over the margin of self and other. Blurred the boundaries. Left her Hungry, and lonely, and yet with the sense that something might be done about it. This focus and urgency, this perserverence.

"Oh, you are clever," she says, eyes narrowed and finger pointing accusatorily at the little line art. Then waggling at it -- Oh no, fooled me once -- as the shape of her mouth shifts toward a smile.

"Nicholas," she says, and his name is so-cradled, made precious by the shape of her tongue. "Nick... Nik," here the pronunciation shifts, and pairs with the clicking of her tongue.  "You, too, you are clever too.  My my, this one.  It got you, and then it got to me too. It is Hungry, and alone, and aching, and I saw a tree..."

This trails off as she decides that perhaps speaking to her friend in riddles is not the best way to unravel a mystery.  To reveal it.

"This is a sharp one," she says, appreciatively. Wary now of this thing that they have found, and not only for its alchemical musings. No. Because of all the other things it may yet be.

She taps her fingers against her lips as she thinks.  As she considers.  "I think I could trace it.  I think -- yes.  Yes, I could try at the very least but it will take some muttering in foreign tongues," she says, as if that were not their everyday routine.  "And I would need for you to look out for me, I do not want to wander and become lost.  There is a --"

She struggles for the word and cannot place it.  Her hand makes a dismissive gesture in its stead.

"I think it is a thing of struggle. I think there is a thing to overcome here. I think...  I do not wish to become lost to it.  I have been lonely before, and I do not want it in my bone-dust," she says, echoing some thought of his unconsciously in her metaphor.

Nicholas
Nick's boundaries have been blurred too, though less so by the drawing and moreso by the meshing of past/future (he is still not sure which of these) and faraway with the here and now: and too, with Memory because it was not so very long ago was it that he was there when walls toppled and they heard the far off sound of sirens, but there would be too many injured and too many dead.  Still, perseverance and focus, these things are helpful.

"I wonder if it's a lure, or a cry for help, or..."  He is musing, looking again down at the drawing.  "Maybe someone just wanted to capture a moment.  Maybe that's all."

They won't know unless they trace it, will they.

Ari says she has been lonely before and Nick, as he lifts the water bottle to his mouth again, glances to her.  His palm finds her back between her shoulderblades and its weight is reassuring, brotherly, as it makes a few circles and falls away.  "I can keep an eye on you.  It may be best to Work somewhere that isn't here, though."

Arianna
The part of Arianna that has learned a thousand artful dodges for offered affections or unsolicited touch no longer applies its knowledges to Nick.  His hand at her shoulder, along the boundary of the back of her dress and the places where its straps leave her skin bare, this is a welcome and comforting thing.  It accomplishes something.  In the time when she had been lonely, he would not have even had the chance to make contact.  She has changed, and that difference helps anchor her division of self and other further.  Ars Mentis is a demanding thing; Nick's workings with Ars Temporis are quite similar. There is always a boundary to hold, a threshold to keep clear and sained.

"We shall see," she tells him.  Affirms.  It is bold and unrestrained, this confidence. They will suss out the secrets, the bone-dust or moon-filth, the loneliness; they will scry from the shape of the branches if they have to.  Mysteries will be revealed!

"I concur," she says, to moving their Workings to a more secure place.  And when they rise to return the other, less chosen books to their dusty carts and shelves, Arianna takes a scarf from her bag and uses it to wrap the book that they will purchase and bring home with them.  She does not touch it plainly, not now that a connection has been established.  She is cautious.

And see? This is silk. And silk contains such things; blue silk is sacred to the mind. It is wreathed in calmness. There is blue in the pattern of her scarf, and so there is also calmness to this boundary.  Perhaps the simple act of shrouding it will calm the visions that linger in Nick's mind, will quell the Hunger that gnaws in the pit of her stomach.

The book, wrapped in silk and secured in the backseat of the hatchback, rides along silently as they wend their way back to the House of Hyde and Mars.  It suffers in the warmth of her car when they make a quick stop for groceries, and also for wine -- there must be wine when there is hunger and loneliness.  And finally it is secreted into the old Victorian, which is guarded by the vehement Chicken weather vane, and which is adorned with a (truly it must be ironic) political sign that makes Ari snicker behind her hand even as her front lawn bears the same.

And then there is food, and something slake the sense of sand and grit from his tongue more fully, and discussions to have on how best to follow along the thing threads of mystery and curiosity that they have found, and bargained for, and stolen away to keep as their own.

Thicker Than Water

Nick
They are driving.

There is blood in the backseat of their car; there is blood on Nick's shirt and blood on Nick's hands.  None of the blood is his blood.  He has barely noticed it if we are being truthful: he is Chakravanti.  It is not the first time.

They are driving, and Nick is still wound like a spring, his shoulders stiff as he grips the wheel with both hands.  Kiara lives close to downtown and not so far from the Crawford Hotel and so they still have a bit of driving to do before they're home at last.  He is staring straight ahead, and he is quiet.  Twilight is beginning to fall over the city, and there are lights in many of the windows as they pass beneath the shadow of skyscrapers.  The sun is red tonight, red as Pen's hair as strawberries in summer, red as a dying star, and its light paints the horizon line.

As they finally pass the final tower, Nick releases a long breath and takes his eyes off the road only long enough to look sidelong at Pen.  "Thank you for helping me."

Penny
Pen is concerned about the blood.

Because blood is thicker than water, because blood tells, because blood stains; thankfully, she is good at getting stains out of fabric; there's a ritual for that which no laundry detergent, howsoever gentle and tough-on-stains it might paradoxically be at once, can complete with. Pen is concerned about the blood. Pen is studying Nicholas's profile, unabashed and open-eyed, this entire time, so when he glances sidelong at her she is looking directly at him, her head resting against the glass of the passenger seat, her seatbelt a nominal nod to the rules as she is angled so her back is more against the door than not and her elbow is by the window too near the lock and her wand (graceful thing, and elegantly made) is held in her left hand which is resting on her lap and she is twirling it as idly as a writer might twirl a pen. Pen: she is studying Nicholas's profile; her expression is oblique.

He thanks her. Brisk nod. They're a cabal and they're a cabal of do-gooders trying to make the world a better place and Pen is of House Flambeau of the Order of Hermes.

Thanks aren't necessary; help was the necessity.

"You can pull over; I'll drive. I'll even drive according to the speed limit."

She is lying about the speed limit, probably.

Nick
Seconds after she makes that suggestion the car begins to drift over to the shoulder and Nick's eyes are focused on the road once more, and his doing this has the air of obedience: this because he does it almost without thinking.  She had not been there to witness the cool detachment he'd exhibited when examining Andrés' mangled hand, but he's still there, in that place of seeing without seeing.

He reaches down to unbuckle his seatbelt and, with a glance spared out the side mirror to ensure that there are no cars coming, steps out to the road and around to the other side.

Once they are situated again, once he has fastened himself securely into the passenger seat, he glances once down at his hands and then up to the road ahead of them.  "This is all Andrés', by the way.  None of it's mine.  I wasn't hurt."  Pen is probably lying about the speed limit, but he is too calm right now for the speed of her driving, whether it's too fast, to even register with him much.  "There was a werewolf...wolf man?  I summoned a wolf spirit to lead it away and it said it wasn't a true werewolf."

Penny
"I trusted that you were not, my crow," Pen says. She has forgotten her seatbelt and set her wand down in the cup-holder after tossing a water bottle into the backseat. Her voice is: oh, it's ardent; of course it is. It's ardent in a way that is light on smoke, or maybe shadow on smoke: they are the same thing.

She frowns at the road unrolling before them; she was lying about the speed limit. Faster than a speeding bullet.

She has a rote for that.

"How was it... How did you become aware of the 'wolf man' who was not a true 'werewolf'? How interesting that the spirit had a definition for one which was true. I know there are shapeshifters but I do not know much lore about them."

Nick
"I don't really know the difference either," he says, though: he perhaps knows more lore than she does, even if he is not even fully aware of the fact.  It is difficult for one to spend much time in the otherworlds without picking up some knowledge of shapeshifters, who have shaped themselves that world and the language it uses.

"Andrés asked me to come have a drink with him after work, and there was a man who...he was not well.  He felt like the wild and I thought at first he was maybe one of us and was running from something, so I went to talk to him.  He started begging me to help him and then he began to turn.  Andrés tried to make him sleep and I tried to help, but something...I don't know.  He wasn't using his usual tools and the vial he was using just exploded in his hand, and then he was like you saw him."

Nick is not sure what they saw, if truth be told; he is aware of Quiet, but he frames it in terms of Jhor, the only kind he has seen.  It is so far removed from him that he found what was happening to Andrés more fascinating than frightening.  "I threw my scent into one of the bathrooms and after you fused the door I summoned the spirit."

Penny
Pen has seen Quiet before. Her house-mates are not known for their subtle hand, and while some of that reputation is conflated by propaganda, some of it is rooted in truth; she has seen Quiet before, and the Quiet which is called Jhor, too.

Pen drives and drives, and she is a muse's dream: the bloody sun sinking into a froth (blood, foam, flower) gilding her profile and when they take a curve she asks Nick to get her sunglasses from - but they're not in the glove compartment. Damn it. It's almost coincidental to just happen to find sunglasses on your head after you looked everywhere else for them, but Pen doesn't choose to risk it. Perhaps she is sobered.

"Perhaps he was under a curse. Did you have time to study him -- or that sense of 'wild' you caught? It would be good to be aware of any Curse-slingers." Beat. "Did he seem mindless after the transformation? Did he immediately try to attack you or Andrés?"

Nick
"I don't think he was in full control of his mind, no," Nick says.  "He was...he was very afraid of the transformation, though that alone doesn't mean anything.  I think he must have been cursed."

His brow is furrowed as he stares out the windshield and at the road ahead, and he too is a muse's dream: a different sort of muse.  His black hair is all atumble and the blood has stained the dark navy of his shirt, rendered it the same color as his hair to the human eye, and his hands seem to have gone to rust.  The skin around one of his eyes is tight, he is pensive; it gives him a pained sort of look.

"I wish I had been able to study him before the spirit took him away.  It didn't say to where.  I may be able to ask one of them, later."

Penny
"You can still study him. Can't you, Crow? Just look through time like it is a window, transparent; like it is a singular pane of glass which won't grow opaque even if it is as thick as a century."

Nick
"I can," he says, thoughtful.  "Though...I'm not certain whether I have the skill to tell what he is, or how he got that way.  But it would be helpful to know whether there are curse-slingers about."

He tangles one of his hands into the curls at the side of his head, disregarding the dried blood on them.  "Do you know if there's anything either of us can do to help Andrés?  I know what to do if someone is affected by Jhor, but not..."

Penny
"Have you ever seen the other shapes Quiet takes?" The horizon has gone from blood to liquid gold. Alchemy. The light hits Pen and Nick full in the face: even behind her shades, Pen squints and her pupils shrink and her clear eyes are clearer. Blood on Nick's hands and blood on Nick's shirt and none of it is his.

Nick
"No.  I was always worried that Jonas would..."  Well, he had a lot of worries when it came to Jonas: he still has many worries when it comes to Jonas, even from afar, even though he knows that his acarya-of-a-sort (he has several) is not his responsibility to shepherd.  Jonas has even told him so.  "I only thought that maybe that was what was happening because I've seen it look the same in Jhor, in a way.  The same but different."

There is another sidelong glance, and he folds his hands in his lap now.  "Have you?"

Penny
"Yes." Pause. "Quiet is something most in my House experience at one point or another, so if you don't stick to yourself you see it eventually. Even the most careful Mage cannot be careful all the time or control paradox, alas. I have written essays on it and interviewed older soldiers about it. Lysander made certain to tell us." Another pause.

"You warned me once about Jhor and how I might need one day to be there to bring you back. You may one day need to be my tether to reality, Nicholas. I hope not. I am armed with knowledge enough that I have a hope."

Pen tips her chin up, self-possessed and imperious. She takes the car around a corner, and the sun is no longer hitting them in the face.

"I hope that should I find myself caught in an illusive world of my own making I will be able to will myself free of the illusions. That is the simplest way out of Quiet, whether it takes the shape of Denial -- they used to call it Clarity, some Magi still do. I gather because you become very clear about one perspective: it crystalizes for you, chrysalises for you, and what is born of the chrysalis is madness. You don't see else, but what you see: it is the only thing. The only possible thing. Denial might be a better name for it. I think it is the most difficult to track."

Brief pause. "Where was I? Right. Whether it takes the shape of Denial, or Madness, or Jhor, it is simplest to take oneself out of that state through sheer will, but it requires awareness." Her mouth curves; no humor.

"It will compound if you leave it alone; it is best to be strong willed about it, but when it comes to Quiet, Will can be the sword you fall on. After I attained my Initiate Exemptus rank in Ars Vis, I: well. I was careless; my spell of Quiet was very minor."

"I don't know how we can help Andrés. It depends on how bad he has it. The important thing is to be aware that what you're experiencing or feeling isn't real, you know?"

Nick
Be aware that what you're experiencing or feeling isn't real.

And isn't that the crux of it?  The act of magick determines reality; sometimes it defies it outright.  The Technocracy has labeled them reality deviants for a reason.

And down that way lies Madness.

Nicholas listens to her and he is quiet, his eyes on the road ahead even though he is not driving.  This is misleading: they are not on what lies ahead at all, his gaze is diffuse, and all the light and shadow and hue he can see through the window might as well be a painting there on the windows looking in for how relevant it is to him just at this moment.  He is thinking; he is thoughtful.  "I can try to help bring that awareness back to him.  With Jhor, it's...it's the opposite of love.  Its absence.  I think with this it might be the opposite of...permanence, maybe, or constancy."

Drawing in a breath brings his eyes into clearer focus, and one of his hands drifts and finds the top of her thigh.  She'd said he might need to be her tether; this is his answer.

And now he looks over to her once more  The sun is behind her now, and her hair is a deep red gold, a shining helm.  "What made you want to write essays and interview old soldiers?"

Penny
He thinks it might be the opposite of permanence or constancy and Pen makes a neutral sound, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

"Not while I'm driving, thou rogue." Pen is teasing him, probably; the gracious curve of her mouth has disappeared, tucked away, but it was a humorless one and she is gilt and gilded and: then there can be no doubt about humor and where it might be, because she laughs at his last question, vibrant good humor in the clear sound of it.

"It was classwork; and of course I wanted to learn how to be responsible and good."

Nick
"I like the idea that we learn goodness," he says, and even though she has chastised him, with howevermuch good humor, his hand remains, though it doesn't seem inclined to wander.  See here how Nick's voice is layered like an Enochian glyph, wound around with significance upon significance because Lysander was a good teacher and sometimes perhaps he thinks back to long ago: that sometimes the way in which he knows others made him too proud, too sure that he knew what was in them.

There is a thoughtful little noise in the back of his throat now, something that is not a growl nor a hum, not bright nor gutteral.  They are well out of the shadow of skyscrapers now, and there are houses upon houses, new growth atop the bones of the old city in some places.

"I think I need to learn how to use a weapon.  I've been thinking.  If Alex had shot at me a few days ago, or if the wolf-man had attacked us, I...well, I was defenseless.  I want to be around for you."

Penny
Brief pause.

Pen does not look at Nicholas but it is deliberate, this not looking. Her fingers are on the wheel. Maybe she adjusts her grip; her breathing is steady, and her eyes are steady, and her heart is no one's business but her own, but it is steadfast at least. Pen is driving quickly, although not as quickly as she might usually.

"I know today you thought you might die," Pen says, simply. And then, "What weapon do you want to learn to use?"

Nick
Perhaps it is strange, that this is only hitting him now: after whatever they faced down together when they first met, after they joined with dozens of others in a small New England town on the coast, after Liz, after he was overseas and saw what he saw and hunted there.  Perhaps it is strange that a lone, altogether random incident in this new place would make him reflect in a way that all of that did not.

But he was alone.

"I was afraid," he says, and there are a few beats that are not steady, that are rabbit-hearted, but they find their stride.  "I don't know what I want to learn to use.  I suppose getting better at using a gun would make the most sense."

He tilts his head back against the headrest as he looks over at her now, his chin tilted up and the sunlight slicing bright across his throat, across the shadow of stubble just beginning to crop up over his skin.  Humor here as he says, "What would you suggest?  You're the weapons master here."

Penny
They're almost home. The car is not a horse; it cannot consciously pick up pace, thinking about water or sweet hay or carrots waiting for it, a cozy stall. Penelope is more than capable of speeding, though; she does, and concentrates on the road, and her eyes are in shadow behind her shades (dusk pink; rose pink; cola), and from Nicholas's vantage he can see the translucent shadow the light casts on her cheekbones, the dark shield of her curling lashes, the gray of her eyes. They are on the road.

"I would suggest - " Pen curls her tongue.

"I would suggest you learn Spheres which can influence this world, this physical world we live in and which can threaten us. Be invisible; be faster than you are now. Make fortune favor you."

She glances at him, once. A swift glance. They are passing Arianna's house. Pen honks, but Ari does not come out if she is home to the sounding of that horn.

"A gun is easy to carry and conceal, and you already have some training and need not get too near. I can teach you some basic self defense as well, if you wish. If you find yourself in close combat before you can put some distance. I am assuming you would put some distance."

Here, they are home.

Nick
Her response is something of a surprise to him, evidenced in how his head angles toward her slightly, in how his eyes seek hers though they don't catch (she is driving.)  He can see how her sunglasses cast a shadow across her skin, how some of the pink cast of the glass (plastic?) washes over her face as though it'd been painted there with watercolor.

"I am concerned about learning to kill with magick," he says, and here his voice is shadow soft, eliciting perhaps.  "Quiet is there and risk enough without having magick be the only thing I can resort to if I need to fight."

They were searching, and now he looks away and back to his hands.  They've pulled up in their driveway and so he looses his seatbelt with a click, shifts his shoulder as it slides back into place behind his head.  "Do you not want me in a fight?"

Penny
His voice is shadow soft; Pen parts her lips and inhales on a word, on a sentence, but Nick is faster. She glances at him, but it is in the moment after he's already looked down at his hands.

"I don't want me in a fight," she says, plainly. "I don't want anybody in a fight."

She kills the engine, and then runs her fingers over the wheel.

She can't leave it. "And who said anything about killing with magick? I thought -- " a pause. "Do you want to learn to use a weapon so you can kill threats, or keep yourself and others safe from them?"

Nick
"I want to learn to use a weapon to keep myself safe," he says, "but using any kind of weapon means being prepared to kill.  Magick is a lot of things but as a weapon there's no safe way to grasp it."

He has freed himself from the constraints of the seatbelt, but as Pen is running her hands over the steering wheel he does not move to open the door just yet.  His fingers come to rest on the door though, on the little ledge near the window controls.

"If things are coming down to a matter of seconds, like what just happened, I might not have time to summon or to...find another way to get away.  That's why it seems to me like a good idea."

Penny
"I understand. I've been -- " His hand is on the door. Pen is willing to have a long conversation in the car, but his body posture is like a reminder. She hadn't buckled her seatbelt so she just opens the door. Pauses. "You should take your shirt off before we get out of the car." Beat. "The Neighbors." Stage whisper. His shirt is bloody, and so are his hands. "I'll hold it."

If Nicholas falls for this ruse (it is no ruse!), she takes his shirt and precedes him to the door, opening it with a flourish. The conversation can continue once they're inside and the door is shut behind them (and the neighbor's curtains have twitched closed again).

"I've been trained in many different martial arts for just that reason. I know that if you wield a weapon you should wield it with intention and be prepared to see that intention through, and all its consequences.

"Love, I want you to be able to defend yourself. It just seems a sudden change, and I am cautious, and -- " Solemn. Grave. Quite serious a soldier, Penelope, with her measuring gaze and her hopeful mouth.

"It's only: look, when I suggest learn a Sphere that can effect the physical world, I mean in lieu of a weapon, I mean because it doesn't have to be a weapon but can bring you to the same conclusion. I'll teach you how to brawl, I'll teach you how to wield a broadsword if you want and," a bit of wickedness, yes, guilelessness, "think you could lift it. I'll help you practice with a gun; I'll help you learn how to quickdraw. Not that I'm much better than you with firearms, by the by."

"I'm just concerned."

Nick
Nicholas does indeed fall for her not-a-ruse; he looks down to his shirt (bloodstained, but not overly, see, it could be overlooked) and undoes the first few buttons before shrugging out of the rest.  He folds it in half and hands it over to Pen, and if his expression is momentarily mournful well: being a mage can be hard on a wardrobe.

He follows Pen to the door, and who knows what the neighbors are saying now because he is walking to the door shirtless in dress pants, his hands tucked away in his pockets.  He steps in after her, sparing a glance over his shoulder toward The Drakes, who are out sharing a beer on their porch chairs.  They lift bottles at him, unfazed by whatever they suppose is going on over at the Mars-Hydes' today.

As soon as they are in the door Nick steps around to the kitchen, where the water will be running; he is washing his hands.  The specks of blood that have dried there come undone, stream down over the stainless steel in pink rivulets.  "What concerns you?"  He glances up at her after he asks the question, his brows furrowed.  "I...it was just really the first time I've been alone when something like that has happened.  At least since I was a Disparate."

Penny
He glances up at her; she did not follow immediately. She splits off for the living room where she divests herself of her bag. She raises a hand to touch her braids, lingering on a pin she finds as if she'd undo it; she doesn't. She works her fingers against her scalp, beneath the pinned coronet, and then sweeps her bangs off to the side. He has looked up and found her absent; she appears in his line of vision just after, leaning against the door frame, her arms folded across her ribs. She listens, but doesn't answer immediately either (it is no longer a moment for immediacy). Her gaze goes distant and aloof.

"What I said, that's all. It seemed sudden; I understand. I only want somebody who has decided to wield a weapon to do it out of - but I know you aren't impulsive and don't have a care for casting a shadow. I just want you to stay clever, too."

"Do you want self defense lessons, along with shooting practice?"

Nick
Pen says she wants him to stay clever, and the quizzical expression he was wearing shifts, and it's a subtle thing but his eyebrows lower, there's a lift in the corners of his eyes.  It's warm, that expression.  "Pen, I have no intention of using a weapon more often just because I know how.  I just want something to rely on when cleverness isn't enough."

He rinses the soap from his hands, shakes them and flicks water droplets off of his fingertips before turning to find the towel hanging off of the side of the oven.  "I would like self defense lessons.  And I will do my best to pretend that I desperately want to get away."  He towels off his hands and his forearms, which are wet almost to the elbow, before leaving it hanging haphazard over its bar.

Penny
"Perhaps when it comes time to test you, I will surprise you. Perhaps I will wake you up for your self defense lessons. Will it not be easy to pretend you desperately want to get away then?" The good humour is real -- but there's still a stitch between her eyebrows. Pen cants her head so her temple is resting against the doorframe. Her folded arms loosen.

Nick
He turns to face her now, leaning back against the countertop, leaning on one hand.  His head is slightly tilted, and this is partially because he is exhausted but it lends something to the look he is giving her, softens it: searching is too harsh a word.  Good humor ripples there from his eyes outward as she teases him.  "I hope when the time comes you'll be merciful."

They both know how he sleeps.

There is still a stitch between her eyebrows, and so a stitch cannot help but appear between his. "What is it, Pen?"

Penny
"I won't be."

A promise.

The redhead lifts her head from the door frame when he questions her, stitch disappearing but only because she has lifted both of her eyebrows. The human face is eloquent - a moving thing. That's what paintings don't capture, although the very good ones suggest it: how in the next moment, that Fury will open her mouth and scream; in the next moment, that lady will fall to her knees and pray. That one will laugh. Cry.

Pen rubs her palm over her head, and says quietly (occulted [occluded]), "I wish I'd been there. Perhaps when I get a grasp on Ars Temporis, I will find a ritual for sensing danger, and so have advance warning. Have you ever done such a thing?"

Nick
Nicholas folds an arm across his stomach, brings one hand to grip the other elbow.  His gaze is for the floor tile just now; the stitch between his eyebrows is still very much present.  "Yes," he says, and here his voice is hesitant, there was a space between her question and his answer.  "It can be done, with care.  Otherwise you'll be seeing danger, always.  And sometimes the portents are so vague that even if you know there's danger, you don't know where it'll come from, you don't know what shape it will take."

He will say something similar to Ari a few days from now, when a vision seizes him while they are out seeking a gift for Pen.  "It turned out all right.  I don't...I know a lot of other people wouldn't have tried to save him."

Penny
"Lysander used to say it wasn't a portent if it wasn't vague. Diana said that was because he was a step up from being illiterate in the reading of portents," Pen says, and she holds out a hand.

Then: she sounds surprised. "Tried to save who; the wolf man?"

Nick
He is smiling at her as she relates what Diana had said; it is not a difficult thing to imagine Diana saying.  "I'm not as advanced as Diana by any means.  I'm sure she knows something I don't."  It's not glib, not necessarily: if he respects anything about Diana it is her knowledge in this.

When she mentions the wolf man he only nods.  "I think for some people the answer would have been to kill him."  Though: Nick comes from the perspective of his Traditionmates, always.  It skews.

Penny
"That might be the right answer." For such an ardent woman, such a fiercely opinionated Hermetic, Pen is remarkably good at being neutral; it is why she has played diplomat before between her house and members of other traditions. One of the reasons. "Why didn't you think so?"

Nick
"He was obviously not in control of himself," Nick says.  "And out of place.  I had thought he was one of the nightfolk - the true ones, not whatever Wolf said he was - and I thought if we got him back to his own kind it might make a difference."  Pen is good at being neutral; it is the kind of neutral that Nick takes no notice of, or perhaps simply does not make especial note of, because it is something he affects so often.

"Does it worry you that you weren't there?"

Penny
"Does it worry me that I wasn't there?" Pen repeats. The words sound different in her mouth than his; she tastes them, alert.

The right hand corner of her mouth lifts. She has not taken her sunglasses off yet; the kitchen is half-lit, half-sepia, a tea-stained glooming, red seeping through: from her perspective. The color of her eyes through the shades is dark from where Nicholas is standing. Were he to come close, that would change; the darkness would clear up, and the iris' look more like only a tint or two darker than the shades themselves.

"What do you think?"

Nick
"Well, I...of course," Nick says, and he has folded the arm he is gripping up along his chest, is pulling at his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger.  "I would have been worried.  Either of us could use Time to have advance warning that way.  We could...figure something out so that one of us could be called if..."

Though of course he does not have that level of skill in Correspondence.  The stitch between his brows is back, and his gaze has come to rest on the floor tiles.

Penny
"If what?"

Nick
"If something were to happen again.  If one of us is alone and there's some sort of danger."  They are a smaller cabal now and the Awakened community of Denver is a different sort of place altogether than the one they left.  "At least until we have a better sense of to what extent we can trust the others here."

Penny
Pen turns so her spine is flush against the doorframe and then sinks into a crouch, there on the threshold. Her profile is as sharp, as delicately drawn, as the edge of a communion wafer. The rose-petal skirt, the skirt of Spring diaphanous layers, puddles around her feet; she rests her forearms on her knees. She glances back through the dining room, with its many bookshelves, toward the living room; there is the soft place beside the point where jaw meets here; there is her jaw; the shell of her ear, a hook of red hair, sharp against her neck; then she lets her head thunk against the doorframe and she sinks the last inch or two to the ground, wrapping her arms around her knees.

"Between you, me, and Ari, we can figure something out. I consecrate my ring to thee. Perhaps something to carry which can be broken in an emergency and, if broken, alert the rest. Even only using consecration as a connection; it would take finesse to work out the message system but it is not I think outside our reach."

Nick
Nicholas is standing over her, and it is dark and there is only a light overhead near the window and so the shadow he casts is a short one tonight.  (They were talking about portents: hopefully this is not one of them.)  It is strange, standing over her this way and looking down at the part of her hair, the slant of her nose: so it is not long before his descent, more rapid than hers, begins as well.  He sits crosslegged with his back against the counter, adjusts so that the knob of one of the drawers is not poking into his shoulderblades.

"I think between the three of us, yes.  If I learn Life as I've been planning it might be helpful in case someone can't speak."  Or is unconscious, or...well, best not to think of all the circumstances under which that could be useful.

His shape has begun to shift within the past year, her Crow; maybe she's noticed.  He's thickened somewhat about the shoulders and chest, has less of the rangy boyishness many young men are given to.  He is looking over at her now and at the way her skirt has pooled around her there on the floor.  "I don't think it will be long before I Seek.  I can do more to help then."

Penny
"Do you mean to Seek soon?"

Her arms are wrapped around her knees; she rests her chin in the shallow valley between them and the sunglasses slip low enough on her nose that she sees him and the kitchen in their true colors (rather than rose petal, amber-light), and she is intent on Nick.

Nick
"I feel ready," he says, which isn't really all that much of an answer.  Still: a long time ago Lysander had asked him whether he would take a student one day, all the while supposing that Chakravanti did a more grim sort of preparation for that time rather than feeling any sort of joy at the prospect, and perhaps he was right; perhaps, too, this is like that.  "Mostly."

He too draws his knees up now, resting his arm across them.  And he says, "I can't fully remember what it was like, before my last one.  Can you?"

Penny
"It wasn't a year ago," Pen says, and her arms tighten around her knees, drawing them closer to her chest. The beat of her heart. "I remember."

The year has been a year of moment. It hasn't been a year since they married. It hasn't been a year since the duel which cost Pen her library. It hasn't been a year since her Seeking. It hasn't been a year since the final argument with Robin Anton Kestrel Melchior. It hasn't been a year since they moved.

"What will you do?"

Nick
"Well, I...the one before that," Nick says, his voice touched with apology for the oversight.  He, too, remembers her last one: he remembers what came before it, because all of that was a year of moment too.  A different year, different sorts of moments, different sorts of changes.  He remembers her last one, and he remembers how exhausted he was, how colossal the task of Seeking himself seemed to him then.

"I don't know what I'll do yet," he says.  "I may need...I may go out physically, like I have before.  The last time I followed a river."

Penny
Pen's gaze sweeps over his shoulders and over his chest. She lets her hands slide down her shins and circle, through her skirt, her ankles. With her right hand she reaches under her skirt and works one slipper off and then the other. The movement is heralded by tiny shifts in the way her skirt puddles; shifts in shadow. She grips her heel and squeezes, letting her knuckles press then against the arch of her foot. Her hand is under her skirt; it is hidden, like her feet. Her gaze travels from Nick's chest to his stomach to his hands. She knows the scant musculature of Nicholas's body better than she knows her own. She cherishes his bones, his clay, the fire hidden within it.

"I think I remember what it was like before the first Seeking. Just like I remember what it was like before I Awakened. I feel there are clear distinctions between one state and the next, for me. I am not wholly changed, but the quality of the air," she smiles, rue, because this is not quite right, "it is not the same on my skin."

"You may need to hold vigil, you mean. Your Avatar likes them, doesn't she? And threshold places? Perhaps you will need to go high."

"If so, how fortunate that we are surrounded by mountains that would scrape the stars from heaven."

Nick
Nicholas has not moved, has acquired an almost meditative stillness now as they recount Seekings, as she suggests threshold places.  His Avatar likes battlefields, she [they?] like old places and forgotten places, and isn't that what all of those are?  "Yes," he says now, thoughtful as he unfolds one of his legs and bends it under him, "maybe I will.  Climb one and see where it takes me."

He lifts his gaze now to regard her, the way light ripples along her skirt.  "Will you teach me soon?  Tomorrow?"

Penny
Her heart twists, suddenly: pain that isn't pain. Pen squeezes her heel harder; presses harder into her arch. Pain and pressure; she curls her toes and then splays them.

"If you ask me to," Pen says; this ardent lick of sentiment in her voice, bright fondness; a gleam moving beneath cool restraint.

Nick
There is no twist of his heart, but what she says makes him smile and here now he rocks up on the balls of his feet, crabwalks the few feet over to her before he lowers himself again.  "I think I just did," he says, and he is resting now at the edge of her skirt, where it lies like fallen petals against the tile.  "Tomorrow, then."

And today he is wearied; she can see it now that he has drawn closer, in how his expression is more telling (in how there is less restraint there: he has less to give) and in the lingering shadow the day has left behind.  "I think I'm going to call in tomorrow.  Do you think your language lessons and weapons practice will keep?"