Little rock [Harv ST]

Nicholas Hyde
It has been a little while since Nick's last foray into the wilds beyond Denver (he doesn't belong there) but that's not to say he has been idle.  Now more than he ever has, perhaps, he has been turning an eye to learning more about the world around him and how to affect it: slowly, he has begun to transition from a passive observer to something more.

What the "more" is, well, that's yet to be determined.  Sometimes a person who is searching for something doesn't always have that thing in mind.  What's that saying: it's the journey, not the destination?

Not too long ago, he and Ari ventured up onto a mountain and he saw a dead world, a place that was not wholly here and not wholly there and he had never seen anything like it.  That is still fresh in his mind today, how much he still has to learn.

Today: Nick is out late for a man who has recently turned thirty and spends more nights cooking and playing games with his wife than doing anything someone younger than he is might consider respectable.  Today he is here with purpose, as the sun sinks low and the sky turns dusky.  This is a threshold time, as the recently bygone midsummer is a threshold time.  Weaker, but it seems like an appropriate time to be summoning.

In Denver's farther reaches there are industrial fields and shipping yards.  They are from a bygone time, left over from when Rail and Horse ruled the western lands, but still used today though mainly by trucks.  He biked here: the skyscrapers of downtown are still visible, though distant.  There are fields out here empty save for roadkill and the occasional murder victim and the loud blast of diesel engines.  That is, empty to some extent of man: Coyote and Crow and Deer make this their home, though they are still close enough that the sight of him will not faze them.

Looking Beyond is as easy to Nick as breathing, now.  He has only to close his eyes.

And that is how we'll find him: out wandering a fence.

Regent
The Fence is transparent where he walks, eyes sifting through webwork and strands to find the other side and it's outright defiance of the standards nature and reality designed so elegantly: The City is, for lack of a better term ugly by comparison.

The industrial yards are a wasteland of old solidity, forming patches of scrubbed or faded or eroded substance, while the decay seems to make it all brittle. There is a flaky sort of brittleness, as if the entire realm were moments from being swept away by a strong gust or gale, while the ground here is littered in enough slender strands, one might think they would be walking through ash. The way they crumple or fall apart at the merest bit of pressure from a passing breeze or simply crumbling into nothing under the weight of their insubstantial selves.

The City is depressing by comparison, nature's grasp here limited at best and horribly ruined at worst. The streets are long and empty, devoid of the life they were paved for, while the buildings are squat subjects in a shadowed landscape, with an overhead skyline of stillness that seems to only move it's cloudbanks or overcast when the observer is not looking. As if it was all a secret.

Nick can see bunches and bundles of former substance, material long since eroded into nothing recognizable, gathered in the corners of alleys or on the former roofs of buildings like detritus. Folds and bunches and smears of broken spirit left to crumble and degrade.

Entropy having a field day, without life to give it meaning.

He walks and the silence in this area of Town is deafening.

Nicholas Hyde
There is Entropy here, and strands of some sort of spirit-stuff that scatter and crumple underfoot: old remnants of the Weaving he has seen closer to downtown, perhaps.  It would be easy to think of the Weaving as evidence of humanity, of human influence: except there are people out in the wilds, too, aren't there?

The Technocracy is so pervasive that even Nick has to remind himself, at times, that it is not the whole of Man.  This may well be the age of Reason, but Instinct once had its heyday outside the city and someday will again.

This is a grim place, though he has never walked through anywhere like this while perceiving the world past the Veil and so he is glad he has done so.  This sort of sight has a way of revealing truths in a way his own eyes do not, in a way the other Arts do not, and: he is glad this sort of truth-seeking comes naturally to him.

Nick has his hands tucked in his pockets and his curly dark head is bowed.  He has been compared to a haunt, to a woodland creature, to one of the fey; it is not difficult to picture him as any of these tonight, looking as he does like he was painted by a Victorian artist in a particularly somber mood.

He glances up once or twice, across the field and past the fence.  He left his car behind some time ago.

Perhaps there really is nothing here: there would be more fruitful places to seek out friends.

Regent
Entropy, spirit sickness and...something else.

The drifting pitter patter of footfalls can be heard. Slight, as if belonging to a child. They drift all around Nick, in the alcoves and corners and dark areas of this part of the landscape. Ruination has not bled free all life in it's entirety, merely provided a different avenue. A different quality of...quasi-life.

At one point he finds himself staring up at a building, where perches on it's corner, the wrinkled image of some skinless thing. Not skinless in the dripping of blood over exposed muscle, but skinless in the emaciated remains of something gaunt and skeletal, lost all it's external layers and is making due with some sort of shrink-wrapped remnant that clings to every odd knob of it's frame. Gums have receded and the teeth, flat and solid, are almost metallic, the eyes, lidless, staring down at him with a regard that can't be anything other than avid with no lids to measure expressions with. Bald, impossibly malnourished and unstuble, it hunkers there two stories up, backed by the errant and vague illumination of the distant city and the circling presence of an overhead moon.

It is easy to be lost in shadows here, but Nick catches them. Curious and perhaps a little hungry looking, darting around on bandy limbs, scraping and scrounging amid the substance that litters the ground, plucking at strands of spirit that still hold some tangibility and chomping and chewing at them with lipless teeth.

Scavengers all around, frightened or nervous or mad, enough not to approach or venture toward Nick, merely observe and wait for his passing from one area to the next.

Nicholas Hyde
Up there in the corner, on the building: something that hunkers there, some nightmare, and it startles him.  Nick grew up in an unstable family, and he has been a counselor for years now: this is enough to have developed a respectable poker face, which is the only thing that saves him from recoiling entirely.  His eyelashes flutter, when he first catches sight of the Thing that stares at him a little too avidly.

Once, years ago, he found himself in a shadow realm that was full of such things, these and more terrible: he has not come across them since.  He would not have thought to come across them here.

But it is a reminder that this world they live in is not a safe one.

He thinks unbidden of Jonas Allard, of a fragment of story that Jonas told him when Jonas told him the story of himself: "...out to a field filled with rust at the edge of a chain link fence, where the crows circled overhead..."  His something-of-an-acarya, something-of-a-friend has been on his mind lately.

He does not turn around.  He has turned a careful eye to the scavengers: a curious one.  He is not sure what exactly it is that they are feeding off of.  He does not think it wise to speak with them.

Nor does he think it wise to linger, but he has come this far, hasn't he?

Regent
"...Come far, little rock..."

The voice is familiar with a cadence of difference. As if someone he knew had affected a different accent that was entirely and thoroughly convincing of it's origin country. Yet this is not an accent, so much as it is a feeling. He can tell the difference before his eyes circle the yard and landscape of industrial waste zone, to localize where the blackwing is.

Which is difficult, given all the shadows at play. Nicholas is forced to step a little closer to an alley between a large warehouse and what looks to be a former office space. The windows of the smaller structure are caved in and the remnants of a desk, or what would have been a desk if the make-up of it didn't look like a heap of used matchsticks, ready to fall and crumble to pieces.

The Scavengers, frightful and frightened, seem to part before any meandering steps he takes, dashing off down the alley or through the dark nearby, to gain some much wanted distance, their skeletal fingers crawling and supping at the ashen remains of spiritual stuff. Hunger ever present, even if they grasp at dirt and nothing.

The voice within the dark belongs to a pair of beady eyes, perched as if...on a shadow. It hops and leaps and dances about, as if the dark itself were tangible, stepping up as Nick approaches, onto some higher level that fails to obscure those dark eyes or give dimension to the body they are attached to.

"Took your time about it, didn't you?"

Nicholas Hyde
The voice is a familiar one: Nicholas has spoken with Crow often throughout his Awakened life, or to separate Crows (are they all one? what does that imply about the nature of human beings, about all life, if they are?)

This is to say that he recognizes it as he hears it, and the ridge formed by his shoulders softens and relaxes.

He found spirits such as this when he was alone in the Shadowlands; they became as friends.  He finds them in the dark places.

Nick turns to venture down the alley, the shadows scattering before him.  He does not do so without caution, casting an eye ahead and behind, though: what good will this do him when the shadows themselves are alive?  Reality is different here.

"You're harder to find in the city.  I figured I might have to come looking for you, after all."  There's levity there in his voice: familiarity, even.

Regent
"City has no rules worth following and those who make those rules, are Scary, little rock, even for tricksters like me"

It is a warning. A suggestion as well. That perhaps Nick should be a lot more careful than even he is willing to be. Nature had it's rules and guidelines. It's distinctions and elements. He'd seen that in the way the Owl's curiosity had nearly gotten his eyes taken from him but that...was understandable. Negotiable, even. One needed knowledge to define those sorts of things.

A bullet though. One bullet, in the city, could potentially cause ripples felt from family to family, generation to generation. What might one bullet do to the spirit of the land in a City?

You've found me though. ill-advised as that might be" A question and a query. Crow either doesn't remember telling Nicholas to find him or is being contrary...or is reinforcing the warning of a moment ago.

The shadows in the alley are thick. Nearly tangible. They cup and paw, mewling and soft at Nick's legs, are at least, that's what his eyes are telling him. Suggesting. In reality, it's probably just some garbage bags or refuse he's dusting up against.

Nicholas Hyde
The Sight was the first thing that began to warp reality around him, when he first Awoke or became aware of Awakening.  He knows that in the other world, the one his physical body is still in, there is probably a trash bag winding around his calf, suffocating the skin: if he squints he can probably even distinguish it from what his eyes are telling him.

It's no wonder that at first he'd thought he was losing his mind.

"I met one of your brethren out in the woods, a few months ago.  I've been trying to get a better idea of the lay of the land here in Denver."  Though he is farther now than he had been: he has bargained with a Wolf spirit, he has done small favors for little garden and house spirits and ghosts where he has found them.  The types of spirits are different, but what they want remains fundamentally the same.

"That Crow had some unflattering things to say about whether I belonged out there in the wilds.  So I thought I would try here."

Regent
I met one of your brethren-

"I remember."

Which perhaps puts much of what Nick understands of the 'One Drop is the Ocean. The Ocean is one drop' theory into perspective, the Crow's reaction one of absolute recognition.

"The land here is ever shifting. Changing, despite the Spider's best attempts. Your mortals are fond of adaptation and fads enough to warrant little solidity. Even here, amid the ruins, decay sifts to nothing and waits for the inevitability of condos, gentrification and shiny shiny chrome..." A clucking laugh disturbs the darkness around him and Nicholas can see it ripple in response, an intangible liquid moving in and out of his vision.

"You do not belong in the Wild. You are mortal. Despite your best intentions to reach beyond that. The Wild is a place for simple things and you are not simple. You eat and drink poison, then pee and shit into bowls of porcelain and flush perfectly good water into waste zones where nothing is done with it, except to make life worse for other things. You are not the simplicity of the hunt, the kill and the cycle. Life oversees everything you could ever need and yet still you struggle..."

More clucking laughter. More rippling shadow. Whatever had snagged at his calf has loosened and fallen away. Nick can hear the echoes of his footsteps, muted and dull in the background of the alley.

Nicholas Hyde
Nick can hear the echoes and he half-turns, in spite of himself, swiveling at the hip to turn an ear and a an eye back toward the alley.  He can hear his steps here, where they are soundless in his day-to-day life: this always throws him, the unfamiliarity of his own footfalls when he is attuned to the spirit world.

"Kingdoms rise, kingdoms fall," is his response to Crow as the spirit speaks of gentrification and condos coming to the area in which they stand.  It is said with the simplicity that his mortal body lacks, said matter-of-factly.  He is mortal: he is also Chakravanti, and he knows that all things end and are reborn.

"There are mortals that make their home in the Wild," he says.  This, however, is not said with that same level certainty; it is almost a question.  He has met them, or at least he has met other magi who claim such: whether or not the spirits accept them, he cannot say.  "What makes them different?"

There is a beat and Nick flexes his leg, almost unconscious that he is doing so, as though to shake whatever residue the shadow may have left behind, clinging there to his skin.  "Life can't only be defined by the hunt and the kill."

Regent
"Nothing. They adhere to the rules of Nature as the animals do and make an effort to try and fathom those rules and their depths. When those depths prove to be too much or too simple, they lash out. Those mortals you speak of are children, returned to childish thoughts. Eager perhaps to define themselves by a simple little creed, because their mortal world has grown too complicated, dangerous and unpleasant for them."

If Wild Crow was harsh about Nicholas' tendencies when out in the wild, City-Crow's as abrasive and dismissive about those of his kind living out in the wilds and wilderness.

"Life will be defined by what it wants. You are life. Life is not you. It does not owe you an explanation or any other, though you Mortals are so very fond of attempting to find one anyway. The hunt and the kill is all there is. The most simple of cycles. One to the other, to the other, to the other. Kingdom kills a kingdom kills a king to become a king..."

The shadows seem to part and Nicholas finds himself on the other side of the alley, beyond the small office building and facing a street with oddly swirling patterns carved, etched or built into the surface. Frayed threads, like loose strings from some natty sweater, jut up here or there, bouncing like springs in the soft breezes of the Umbra that he cannot feel.

Nicholas Hyde
Children, Crow says, and Nick's gaze goes soft and unfocused and thoughtful: directed out and down the alley, perhaps, though in reality at nothing at all.  It is not unusual for him to do this when seized by a thought.  "So if they're wrong to seek simplicity and life owes us no explanation with no meaning to be found, what is there then?"

The shadows divide and separate the way oil will when swirled through water, and Nick finds himself out and beyond the alley.

And here there is the carved street, and he stands at the edge of it and after a moment takes a few steps and walks the edge, walks the circumference of whatever implied circle is formed by the carvings.  His gaze is intent, though he is still cautious.

Not as cautious as he ought to be, perhaps, nor as cautious as Crow has indicated may be necessary, but still: some.  More than his wife or his cabalmate and friend might have.  He does not touch them, but investigates.

Nicholas Hyde
[Wits + Occult]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )

Regent
"Who said they are wrong? or that Life knows any better than you do"

Crow's clucking laughter is...a touch more mocking than his Wilderness counterpart. At least the latter had the decency to take Nick's questions with some seriousness. Or at least, severity.

Nick's turning circle reveals the 'image' before him to be something all together foreign. Alien, even. A distinct pattern is visible, but without any markings or distinctions that would be obvious to Nicholas. The carvings are crude, but the decay has eroded their edges too the point of incomprehensible.

Something etched it though. Twelve feet across if anything, the pavement itself of this part of the umbral floor, has been chewed and gnawed though, with large patches of that same erosion having carved up the surrounding buildings and structures as well.

"There are greater mysteries and threats in this realm and world than you can admit to, Little Rock. Greater still than you might think to consider impossible and even more than you would not even consider. In all that mystery, do you imagine there is a meaning worthy of your time?

Nicholas Hyde
Crow's laughter is mocking, though: Nick is well accustomed to this.  He has had Arianna and Robin Kestrel to break him in over the years.  There is a suggestion of a smile at the corners of his mouth as he says, "Point taken."

As he makes his circuit he reaches back through his memory, the tales he has heard and the words he has read and the bits of information he has picked up from extensive time around Pen.  He tries to shape those fragments into something resembling an explanation, grasps for some bit of knowledge about the carving he is faced with now.  He cannot.

It is utterly foreign to him: something he might have expected were he to step past the Veil, but perhaps not here, in the places where it has grown thin but remains rooted in reality.  Perhaps he should have expected it; the world is ancient and it did not always look as it does.

Kingdoms rise, kingdoms fall.

"I imagine so," he says, of meaning.  Another smile.  "I think when your time is short, more things seem to be worthy of it.  So who knows."

He nods then toward the carvings.  "What is this?"

Regent
"Can hardly blame Time for your lack of commitment to living..."

More laughter, though it is abrupt in ending, as if the Shadow behind Nick now, Crow huddled still in the alley, though his voice is no less audible for it. There is some consideration there, as if for the first time, Crow is coaching his answers. Be careful about what is to be said.

"Somethings remain. Somethings are taken. Those things taken, can be taken back but never return to what they remained as. That...is evidence of something taken back and the realization it can never be the same as it was..."