'Til human voices wake us

Pen
Here we lay our scene. Late night and Penelope is sprawled on the floor, lying on her back with her legs on Nick's lap or the day bed which is pushed against the wall not occupied by her apothecary's desk. Nick's lap and the day bed both are in her study. Nick she put in front of her computer, so he could read over a new poem she has written and give whatever feedback he might.

Pen is reading a book, for fun!, but only to keep herself from talking to Nick while he reads, who she has missed this live-long day. She looks quite serene, and the Magely Fashion Gazette would note that our favourite Flambeau in the House of Hyde and Mars in wearing a pair of (very short) shorts, where-in half of the short is crocheted lace - gray flirting with ivory, with moonlight on water, and the upper half of the short is a dark silkish fabric with a simple pattern of leaves printed upon it, the leaves the same moonlight-on-water, silver-soft deer prints in snow pale color, and a kimono jacket with long, long trailing fringe which spirals over wood just as her hair might if it weren't braided neatly in a coronet a crown for her very red head bright and shining and complexly woven. A tuft of her bangs is sticking up, at odds.

The poem is about speaking; it is about voices, and conjuring voice out of silence; what is more oppressive than silence. The poem is also about a very simple swim: about a river, forking; branching. It is meant to be haunting: to niggle, get inside the skull; it is meant to be: sensuousness, expanding; imagistic, sharp as a knife: narrowing to a point.

It's meant to be a lot of things. It needs work.

Nick
Here they are, the both of them: late night and Nick is seated in front of Penelope's computer, his face bathed in the soft glow from her laptop.  His eyes are dark wells in that light: as the way down is made paradoxically darker in bright noon, as light blinds and casts contrast.  He has a single curl corkscrewing like a horn down over his forehead; the others are sticking out at odds and ends.  The longer it grows the more its coarseness becomes apparent, the more it sticks together in tufts.

Pen's feet are in his lap and Nick has both of his hands around one of them, massaging it not quite absently but without any particular focus (his focus is on her poem, see.)  One thumb kneads her arch, the other the muscle above and behind her ankle.

Her words he reads with fondness: because he missed her all this long day too, and even if the poem needs some work these are still Pen's words and so they are beautiful.  His face is still, placid, thoughtful.  Nick, who perhaps could have once been artistically inclined himself, never cultivated this talent; nonetheless he has long been giving feedback to Anna and now to Pen.

"I like these lines," he says, sweeping his fingertip across the screen, "but I'm not...it still feels like it's in pieces.  Like a few different poems."

Pen
"Hmm." Pen had stopped reading as soon as Nick spoke; propped herself up on both elbows, the book open flat across her ribs, the curve of her stomach - she doesn't sit up so much that she will remove her feet from Nick's lap, you see - and her neck is a long line when she lofts her chin and glances toward the gesture of Nick's fingers sweeping across: well it's just light and shadow, pretending to be words, isn't it?

"Will you read me one of the pieces? I want to hear what you mean."

Nick
[Uhhh...reading!  Charisma + Expression]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Nick
He can feel her weight shift  and redistribute as her legs move, maybe digging in a heel here or there, and so his thumbs still themselves long enough to allow her to do so.  Then they move to her other foot and begin the same ministrations there.

Nicholas glances at her sidelong as she suggests that he read her one of the pieces, and then he says, "I'll read you two so you can see...maybe you can tie them together."  And he begins to read to her, not with any particular skill though Pen knows Nick knows that he can speak softly but poignantly, but these are not his words and he is not a trained performer.

There is a swim through river water through the expansiveness of the water through reeds and: up above the surface light filtering down and through, and silence all around; and also a segment about oppressive silence, about ringing voices and the two segments are quite different in mood and description of sensation.  Perhaps she can see it as he reads, doing his best to add inflection and mood where he will.  "I'm not doing you justice, but," Nick says, and then furrows his brow thoughtfully at the screen, at light and shadow in the shape of language.

Pen
Pen, listening, is as intent as a cat who is watching a bird on the other side of glass it knows will not vanish; and yet, the bird is still there: and probably sweet. The bird comes closer, with its quick heart, its tempting wings; Pen is intent, even intense. An outsider might think her expression is reserved, for she does not smile or frown; she holds herself up on her elbows and when he is done reading to her her eyes cant to the left toward the ceiling. She waves the idea of Nick doing her no justice away with one casual hand, all elegant languor, and then kneads the back of her own neck with her knuckles.

"What is there to say about human voices, Nicholas?" Pen has her musing voice on: her silk and shadow voice, as intimate as heat from a fire is: turned low. "I did always love that line: 'til human voices wake us and we drown." Emphasis. Punctuated by a sharp gesture from her hand. "I want something that sounds like that. Like a knell from the deep. Like that -- you know, that shiver you get in Lord of the Rings, when you hear about an old battle, and then the drumming from the deep is real. And means something other than what you thought. Isn't 'knell' a good word? I find the etymology of it interesting. Knell from - oh Danish ghosts, forgive me: I'm not completely clear on the right accent. But cnyll, which is a noun, verb-form cnyllan, Old English, which means crack. Like," and she lets herself lie flat on the ground again so she can compass a line with her hands, go through the motion of pretending to crack an imaginary - "a tree branch."

She mimes the gesture; clicks her tongue. Crinkles her nose, expression leavening: amusement. "Or a bone. Pop, bang. These sounds all had the same word: cnyll. I don't know if they had others. But it is a word which is a fixed moment. Even when we use knell as a verb, it seems to be only pretending action; it would rather be a noun."

Nick
Hermetics: they are fascinating creatures, aren't they?  The way in which they study language, and how each word in each language has its own significance and the way in which they can tie it all together, weave it into spellwork or wordsmithing or whatever they please because what they please is what they Will.  The way in which they talk about things that few human minds comprehend or care to comprehend as though they are commonplace.

Nick sweeps his fingertips over the top of her foot, trailing affection over her skin.  That hand wanders up her shin, up the ridge of bone.  "Voices sounded distorted when I was drowning," he says.  "I could hear Jonas and Delilah speaking, but they sounded...yes.  A lot like bells, or like an echo that started here had found something on the other side of the Veil which was calling back.  Voices change shape depending on how we hear them."

Pen
Pen's thoughts are so alight that the sensation of the pads of Nick's fingertips sweeping across sensitive skin can be a background pleasure; but she flexes her foot once he has passed it by; might watch him trace the ridge of bone to her knee or look at his hand if it reaches the knee and has her surface from the realm of word-thought. "Something on the other side of the Veil which was calling back? Hummmmmm."

Then, with more immediacy to her expression and her tone-of-voice, toes curling and an alertness come stealing into her eyes: the way dawn'll steal stars from the night, one by one by one:

"Did you understand what they were saying?"

Nick
"Or an echo, as though their voices had struck something and come back," Nick says, and he too is thoughtful because maybe he's thinking about what that means, thinking about how things fit together.  His fingertips reach her knee and then they come sweeping back but under this time, his hand curving around the back of her calf.  His fingertips begin kneading again, here behind her knee and below.

"I couldn't understand them.  I just knew they were talking to each other, but I was too far under and once I started to lose air, I wasn't paying attention anymore."  He could look back with Time perhaps, pick apart that moment: could even dredge the voices out of the deeps if he had a knowledge of Forces too.  If he cared to do so.  "There was just a point where everything began to sound more and more distant.  But they held me there and as long as I could still hear them I knew I was still myself."

Pen
Penelope closes her eyes, the lashes a dark crescent against her cheekbones; the shadow they cast, the same. The rise and fall of her chest is steady, not quite regular enough to play music by, but not unsteady, and the book begins to side off her ribs. She catches it, opens one eye to look at the page number, and then sets it aside. She rests her hands flat over her ribs. She has fallen asleep like that before, but she seems wakeful still.

"Is that why they were speaking during your rite of passage? To give you a road?"

Nick
Pen has fallen asleep this way before and so Nick is sweeping his gaze over her in this way that is simultaneously wary and yet it lingers here and there in a way that wariness doesn't: he is fond and that is all.  She is still wakeful and so he half-turns away from the screen so that he can focus more fully on her leg and foot.

"That might have been.  Or...Jonas uses Words the way you do, a lot of the time, so he may have been speaking ritual so that I didn't lose my way back.  I haven't been taught how to initiate someone that way, so I'm not entirely sure."

Pen
Penelope inches her leg closer to Nick's waist. She is paying attention, although there is no particular sign of it: a certain air, perhaps, though she looks like the model for her namesake, Elaine, floating down to Camelot: she lay as if she smiled, according to Tennyson. Who wouldn't smile, that was half-sick of shadows, and suddenly turned; let the curse fall, in order to breathe new air?

Her brows pull together, once. Smooth out again. A beat. She opens her eyes a lit. He hasn't been taught: she watches her knee, the slope of her shin, the suggestion of movement in the dull glow of her laptop screen.

"Okay. Let's go back. What is there to say about human voices? What good are they? What do they do?" She sounds: imploring.

And adds, "Would you want to go back to New England with me, for a visit?"

Nick
Pen inches her leg closer to Nick's waist, and Nick inches nearer her: scoots himself a little along the floor so that he does not have to reach as far to continue massaging the back of her calf.  His head is bent and his eyes are thoughtful, shadowed and overcast by the sweep of his eyelashes, the fall of his hair.  In dim light he is: an elegiac thing dark as his nickname-sake.

"They're a guide and a tether. They hold you to life and connect you to it," he says.  "And they...hm.  They are a knell, kind of.  Even when you move on past the Veil to the next life they still remember you and call you back, even if you can't hear them anymore."

He glances up at her when she mentions New England and he says, "Of course.  It would be good to see people there.  Who would you go to see?"

Pen
Her smile deepens when Nick uses the word: knell. She mouths the word herself, or the Old English root for the word, and wriggles in place, back: arcing. And her eyes are open; her head tilted to the side, so she can look at Nick.

"Mom. The boys. Mary. Aidan was saying he wanted to come out and visit us here. If Jonas is in town, I could get his take on From the Mixed‑Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and you could check up on him. See Jackson."

Nick
"I do miss Jackson," Nick says, and there is a softness that touches his eyebrows, the corners of his mouth, this slight smile at the names of people who were dear and seem so distant now.  "We could both see Thane again, too.  Delilah might even be around."

Nick scoots himself a little closer, lets his hands come to rest over both of her knees.  "I talked to Rob the other night.  He and I made a bet to see which of us could convince Ari to take a job somewhere like Michael's."

Pen
The right hand stretched on her ribcage leaves it to reach across the floor towards Nick's hands; she arcs her back a little more; she is an elongated C, and there, there: got it; she can reach his hands if she wants to. "Maybe Jackson can be coaxed out here."

But it was just an impulse; she doesn't chase it to its conclusion. He talked to Rob the other night and she follows the line of her thigh back up; stretches the arm over her head; frames her head, so, resting it in the crook of her elbow. And then she laughs: "What do you win?"

Nick
Pen can reach his hands: Nick catches hers in his own, laces his fingers through hers though not tightly as she has to curve her spine in this way to even reach him.  The thought of bending his own spine in that way makes his back ache.  "I think he probably could be.  Jackson likes to travel."

Nicholas, too, does not chase this thought to its conclusion: he is watching her head settle there in the crook of her elbow, her hair nestled there bright as the sun between the clouds.  And he hesitates, in answering her.  "He visits if I win."  A beat.  "You don't have to see him.  I just thought I'd coax him out here and let him know I haven't forgotten about him."

Pen
[Hmm... Charisma+Expression.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

Pen
Impulse! Unchecked reaction! Pen groans; it's just a short thing, almost a grunt: bare bones eloquence, coupled with a distraction. "What does he get if he wins?"

Nick
Pen groans aloud, and here Nick has the grace to look a little abashed.  It's a look that says that he knows he should have asked beforehand, and it's a look that says that he knows that maybe Rob was a little too right.  (He often is, isn't he?)  "I go back out there for a few days on a quest of his devising.  And, uh, a lock of my hair."

Pen
"It sounds as though you did not bargain very well," Penelope says, neat: and measured. "I wouldn't call those very equitable prizes."

She does not sound incensed, or angry, or concerned. The reason becomes evident when she: squeezes Nick's hand, lightly, then stretches both arms over her head, arching her back a different way: stretch, stretch, stretch, all the muscles gone taut: even her legs; she streeeetches. Evident when she: does that, and says, "I want to take part in the bet."

Or not evident yet. Almost evident. "I bet that neither of you will get Ari to work at Michael's."

Nick
"Whether or not it's equitable is relative, I suppose," Nick says, thoughtful here because: that could be a concept to allow to swirl around in his mind, breathe and percolate, because he often bargains.  As Pen squeezes his hand he inches still closer, leans forward just a little.

And laughs, when she announces her intent to take part in the bet.  "It's entirely within the realm of possibility.  What do you get if you win?"

Pen
"Robin's balls in a wee little jar," Pen says, disdainfully, and then: mischievously, "And yours in my hand." Sly walk of fingers toward his hip; of course, she cannot reach. The slyness is the thing; the suggestiveness. "And you must go running with me at four am, every day, for three months. Robin must send me his journal."

Nick
Nicholas laughs again: tracks her fingers along their walk toward his hip, even if they fall short.  "Four a.m.?"  He cannot quite hide his dismay, see: it is still very dark at four a.m. no matter when the time falls in the year, and right now it is hot, and soon it will be cold in the mornings.  Too hot, too cold for running, and too dark always.

"I...I suppose that's fair," he says, with an air of virtue here, see, because he understands that the terms he and Rob set were not entirely palatable to her either.

Pen
"Nicholas, you cannot simply agree immediately to a bargain," Penelope says, even if something causes her to smile: distant, see, like her thoughts are far and away; they are not so far as they seem.

Nick
Pen's smile is a distant thing as her thoughts have been drawn down some unseen trajectory (you'd need Mind, Nick) and as Nick finally leans far enough forward to rest his chin over her hand which rests on his hand which rests on her knee.  His eyes are solemn.  "Why not, if it's a fair bargain?"

Pen
"Because it is not respectful to the art of bargaining, which asks a tithe of wit and contest, Nickolai. Also simply because you do not mind me having winning those prizes does not mean it is a fair bargain; one side of the rock is always dirty."

Pen
ooc: ahem, strike that 'having' before that 'winning' from the records.

Nick
There is a not-smile there, tugging and pulling on the corners of his mouth; they waver.  "Well, maybe I would rather you be the one to come out ahead," he says, as he turns his head in and kisses the side of her knee.  "Or maybe I don't intend to lose."

Pen
When he finishes declaration number one / when he presses his mouth against her knee there is a sharp glint of laughter: she swallows it; it was a bright cinder, and it illumines her eyes; she closes them. Coolly: "You did choose a rather mean prize; I wouldn't want to win it if I were you. What if he doesn't agree to giving up his journal, hmm?"

Nick
Nick keeps his mouth pressed there for a moment, flat until she can feel him smile when he sees the corresponding glimmer of mirth in her eyes.  "He could always haggle and re-negotiate terms.  Didn't you say that's what would most respect the art of bargaining, anyway?"

Pen
"He can't because I take a hard line with Robins," Penelope says, still coolly. The cool approaches cold: this is the truth. Her hair is red and her resonance is one part ardent and she is passionate and passionate and passionate so many people associate her with fire: occupational hazard of belonging to House Flambeau. Flambeau, Flambeaux: candles, many-branched fire-holder. "Unless you bargain in his stead; and it seems, Crow, that you have no interest."

Nick
"Well, I suppose it comes down to whether you'd rather have Robin's journal more or have me run with you for the next three months," he says.  A beat, a thoughtful tilt of his head.  "I do doubt that Robin would agree to give up his journal.  Though maybe he's confident enough in his ability to agree to it."

Pen
"Every morning," Penelope says, helpfully, as Nick is tilting his head, thoughtfully. "Before daybreak. The world is so mysterious in that hour, love."

Then: she squirms again; takes her hand away from Nick's hand and twists so her legs have not moved, but she has twisted at the waist/curved in and now rests her weight on her hip and now (how is it this is a languorous line; how is it she looks like the portrait of decadence and dissolution?) she plants her elbows on the ground and laces her fingers together casually with wanton nonchalance and rests her chin there-upon and looks down/over at Nick.

"And I will have both -- all. Journal and balls and you, running. Did you choose a deadline for this bet?"

Nick
"It's funny that you think Robin would give you his balls in a jar before his journal," Nick says, and now the threat of a smile actualizes.  "You're probably right, but still."

She asks after a deadline and his curls sway as he shakes his head.  "No.  We probably should have.  I'm going off of the interpretation that whoever gets her to do it first wins, but with your terms we might have to negotiate a deadline now."

Pen
Another glint of laughter, swallowed and sharp; now her eyes are even darker, though the rest of her is gone to luster because this almost-laugh ends with a wide wide smile lines around her mouth and eyes. The smile diminishes slowly, naturally, fading into thoughtfulness; it leaves behind a glow.

"The end of this summer."

Nick
"The end of the Michael's hiring season," Nick says, and here he offers a thoughtful, even sage nod.  "That's a reasonable boundary to set.  So would that be the end of August?  The autumnal equinox?  The first frost?  We should be precise in the setting of terms."

Pen
"August 31st," Penelope says, stoically, and now she pushes herself up so she is sitting with her weight resting all on one hand and her hip: her knees neatly scribe a triangle; draw together; shift, restive: perhaps now all hint of Pen-still-lounging-her-feet-on-or-near-Nicck has gone the way of myth.

"I had another idea for the autumn equinox this year; and besides, I don't want you to run with me in winter, not unless you've already grown used to it and it is your own free choice."

Pen is an optimist. Nowhere is it clearer than now: she sounds as if she thinks Nick might just make such a choice!

Nick
Nicholas regards her now through a dark spray of eyelashes, up through a lowered brow that says all it needs to say about running in winter and whether he would make that choice of his own free will.  Though perhaps he will grow used to it, if he does it for three months.  Perhaps.

"What's your idea for the equinox?"

Pen
"I'll tell you and Arianna together when the time is right, and I've thought about it a little more," Pen says, seriously. "But remind me how you feel about tattoos?"

Nick
"I used to think I wanted one until I went with Anna when she got her first one," Nick says, with a quirk of his mouth.  "I thought she was going to break my fingers."  A thoughtful tilt of his head, now.  "But she was just eighteen, I guess.  I'm not opposed."

Pen
Penelope nods, and then her gaze wanders back to the open screen of her laptop. She gazes at it, but blank in her consideration; an empty vessel, a chalice, a grail, a cup; bright with some moon-froth thing. "What did you think you wanted?"

Nick
"A sun or a jackrabbit in this stylized way Anna used to draw all the time," Nick says.  "She'd draw little things like that all over the house or in my textbooks sometimes."  On Vivienne's white shoes once too, though he leaves that out: he was never sure whether his sister was angry and secretly pleased, and regardless.

"Why do you ask?"

Pen
"Because curiosity sustains my wild life," Pen says. This quick grin, again: limned in brightness. She lifts her darkened gaze from her laptop, meets Nick's eyes, then - another twist - she languishes on her back right flush beside Nick and her laptop, one arm most dramatically and languorously trailing over his most-coveted-of-spots lap, the other floofing her bangs away. "Because I like the sound of your voice when you speak. Ask me to teach you a word in another language. Why a jackrabbit?"

Nick
Pen's arm trails in his lap and Nick's hand, absent now of her knees, wanders up along the length of her forearm and finds her fingertips instead.  He presses his own lightly to hers, letting his hand splay and web where it arches above.  "They're quick and smart, and Anna drew them with a lot of angles that I liked."

He leans back on his other hand and his eyes sweep over her: contemplative, considering.  Then he slides the rest of the way down, turning on his side to face her, his weight on his hip and elbow.  "Teach me something in Enochian."

Pen
[Something like this? Char + Esoterics (Specialty).]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 1, 6, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]

Pen
As he slides the rest of the way down, Penelope rolls onto her stomach and pillows her chin on her hands, folded neatly just under. Nick turns to face her and she turns to face him, resting the soft curve of her cheek against the joint of her wrist. What does it mean to beguile? Penelope keeps her dark gaze steady on Nick's face - the neat curve of her shoulder hides her chin and mouth. Her tank top is askew.

Even after his request, well, she does not seem surprised, though she inhales slowly. On the exhale, she lifts her head and says something to Nicholas which sounds like light moving on water, shaping itself out of a fall and moving just so, a quick and liquid phrase or word and her throat clicks when she says it. She swallows, after. Does the air have a frisson now, ozone - readying itself to shape into lightning, strike?

"If you can pronounce that correctly."

Nick
[Perception?  You are making mouth-noises.  Astute specialty.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 ) [Doubling Tens]

Nick
[Manipulation + Expression - I can sell this, right?  Diff 8.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Nick
Nicholas is well beguiled: his eyes are fixed on hers, and they are not dark; the light has found them here and they are full of gleam, full of the light of a muddy and slow moving river.  His eyes fix on her mouth as she pronounces those syllables because it's where they're drawn: he watches her lips move, watches them shape whatever Word that is.  Lakelight and lightning.

He is a good enough study to begin to reproduce the sound, to say it convincingly even if he has no idea what he's saying because he goes for the emotion she has evoked or the feeling the Word has created, the imagery: readiness, motion, the flow of one thing into the next.

"How was that?"

Pen
"It made me want to cover your mouth with my own," Pen says, solemn. She'd been grave and attentive, this sense of conscious watchfulness, of gathered awareness; something that can very nearly be felt(ardent, it is). Even when she laid her cheek back down. "But it wasn't right."

She could have said wasn't quite right: he came so close. But when it comes to Enochian, one is either precise and perfect, or one is wrong: and possibly dead, given what is written in Enochian, what beings speak it, what conversations might be had in it.

Nick
He did come close and he knows it, was sharp enough to mark the sounds as she said them and to form some semblance with his lips and tongue and teeth: and he does not understand precise perfection.  Nicholas, living as he does without defined edges and without ever really being fully in one place at one time, would struggle to understand precision.  Wouldn't he.

So his brow just furrows a little, and then he says, "What did the word mean?"

Pen
Pen watches expression chase expression over Nick's face. "Since it was mispronounced, I can't tell you tonight; that would be teaching."

"But depending on where you put it in the sentence it might mean three different things, and can mean a fourth if you write it down beside a - " - and here is another word. It might not be Enochian - some Bonisagan's short-hand for Enochian glyphs. "On its own, it is a Word I find attractive."

Nick
"It had a beautiful sound," he agrees, and then stretches out more fully on his side, lets himself drop with his arm stretched out above his head and his other folded across his chest.

A half a heartbeat later and he is reaching for her, to fold that arm around her instead and slide an inch or two closer to her on the floor.  "Have you ever tried writing poems in it?  Or in any other language?"

Pen
"In Enochian? No." Pen doesn't sound shocked, or scandalized, as if it were so sacred that to turn it to such use would be profane; perhaps she has thought about it. "It is a difficult language." Beat. Then, simply, "I struggle with it."

"As for other languages, I find most poetry written in Latin is like reading a neat little chain of links. It can be nice held up against the light, but it is still a little chain, and can get rather dull. Ancient Greek is nice, but I haven't done anything with it either."

Beat. "I do try to write new ritual with Enochian. Sometimes. Rather than just following the old ones. That can be ... almost poetry. But it isn't quite."

Pen cuddles into Nick and closes her eyes.

Nick
Nick makes a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat as she describes the languages she has thought to use, has read in: both languages that are no longer used, both unchanging and static now.  He rests his chin on the top of her head and: maybe he can feel his eyes beginning to drift shut, to grow heavy.  "I'll try to listen more carefully the next time you do ritual."

Could he reproduce sound without any idea of what it means?  Perhaps, though it is unwise to do so.  Then, "If you fall asleep on the floor I don't think I can carry you to bed."

She'd compared herself to a sack of topsoil before: and so.

Pen
He can perhaps feel the tension that goes singing through her when he declares what he declares. She makes a sound; it could be the edge of a sigh, if sighs were to have edges. She doesn't tell him not to, and she tells her fingers to loosen.

A beat. She opens her eyes, sweeping her hand over Nicholas's belly. Then: energy! Pen leaps to her feet! Isn't she quick, ladies and gentlemen? Wasn't it economical of her?

"Then let us move this conversation to our bed."

--

And so it will go: until sleep claims them both. Pen first, then Nicholas. So long, stars; the morning will soon be near.

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..."

Into the Great Dark [Syll co-ST]

evening-star
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
And we pushed,
And they flew.
- Cristopher Logue

This is the closest their lives in Denver have come to the life that Ari was born to live.  The thin, twisting thread of active magic guiding their advance through the foothills surrounding Denver, the faded colors of twilight painted across a sky that reaches out to the East and onward forever until it is consumed by the deep navy of night. Soon there will be the pricking of starlight; soon Helios will be only a memory; but that thin silvered thread of resonance reaches out before them, like a fishing like trawling through water.  The Tellurian itself is unwound just enough to guide their passage through the warp and weft of the world.

There is only one road.  To take any other would be like swimming upstream.  She has no skill with Time or Entropy, so she does not know if it is fated to have fallen out this way.  Pen was close on the heels of their mystery and also the circle of bones has compelled them -- through either fear or simply the gnawing uneasiness of not knowing -- to adventure out at the first opportunity they have to go together and yet alone.

Here they pass the last gas station, with its overhead lights flickering from age and the weathered, time-pitted metal sign illuminated by one up-cast bulb, which itself is shrouded with dust-dirt and grime.  There are thin bars on the windows, but the proprietor explains that is more for the bears and less about the patrons. He speaks with the sort of slowness one expects from mountain folk; he wears a hat for a now-defunct regional sports team and old denim worn so long that is has gone soft and comfortable in places, nearly threadbare in others.  There is one pump stall.  The last of the daylight pushes through the treetops, sketching long shadows out in the sky and across the ground.

From here, there is only winding roads through the foothills.  The type that hairpin and double-back upon themselves as they slowly climb up the mountainside.  They are paved for awhile, then they are gravel a ways further, and then, the denim-wearing slow-talking man has said they go to dirt alone.

"No one goes up that way much anymore," he tells Nick.

Ari is outside, wrestling a pair of sandwiches out of their box of provisions. There is no use going into the unknown hungry.  Nick has also persuaded her to leave talking with the locals to someone who doesn't scream foreigner and aristocrat from every pore.  Whenever Nick returns, there's a sandwich and glass bottle of some lightly lime-flavored sparkling water for him.  (Because foreigner, and also because aristocrat [Hermetic].)

crow
There are places in the world where the boundaries of reality thin, where a person could question where they are and what year it is and whether this is in fact real or if they've stepped into a novel.  Near brushes with death do that: after an accident, after a gunshot or a head wound or being pulled out of a tangle of metal and wire people will question "Is this real?" and the answer is yes, and.  This place is an and.

Nicholas is proficient in the art of Spirit and growing moreso by the day.  He knows it's the thinning Gauntlet; Sleepers don't.  He knows it's thinning as they draw farther and farther out into the mountains, as they come up to the last gas station which probably looks the same as it has since the 1980s and winding roads that have been there for centuries, were maybe deer or game trails before that.

He'd thanked the man for the information before going back outside.  Nick is suited in some ways to being the face for their little group; he is adept at allowing others to project onto him what they like.  He looks maybe-Mexican-maybe-white-maybe-mixed and his dress is often masculine but nondescript in muted colors and he says little beyond asking questions.  He is an Okay Person To Talk To.

Nick accepts the sandwich and glass of sparkling water from Ari with gratitude.  "The guy in there said that there's not much up there anymore.  I didn't ask too directly about the ruin though.  I wonder what happened."

evening-star
The man is not much used to Thank Yous.  It earns Nick a "Well, you have yourself a good night, then," and a finger touched to the bill of his hat.  As Nick is pushing out of the door, the man is resettling himself on the wooden stool behind the counter and by the time the door closes it is almost as if Nick had never stepped inside.  The man has resumed the same posture he held when Nick pulled the door open; the lights still flicker; the shadows still pull long and thin and are still melting slowly into the broader, overall darkness.

"Most people have a decent sense of self-preservation," she opines, before taking a small sip from a green glass bottle of her own.  The tailgate of her hatchback is open. They can sit on the edge and supper in the growing shadows of the evening.  While Ari does not share Nick's sense of the spiritual realm, there is a prickling awareness to an adventure by any name.  She is excited, and also nervous, and slightly worried, but mostly invigorated by being outside the realm of everyday and routine.  "He's probably never been up there, himself."

Nick can imagine the sort of trouble she caused at Academy.  This need to be anywhere but where she ought to be is not a thing she picked up in her twenties.  It is innate to her, the pushing of boundaries, this standing well beyond the edge of reason and looking back, beckoning others to follow.  Someday, when he is relating this story, all he will have to say to their shared friends is that Ari had thought it would be a good idea to venture out, at nightfall, toward a ruin with an ominous flare for the dramatic and their shared friends will make a knowing face, or nod, or sigh.  They will assume that he had been cajoled.

Had he? Or was he complicit in this madness.

"Might you have a better sense of it, when we're closer?" she asks.  Sometimes proximity removes a layer of abstraction from a riddle. Sometimes it makes it overwhelming. She is not rightly sure what they are wandering into.

The air is thinner up here. It was thin already in the 'low'-lands of Denver proper.

crow
There is only one road, and it has been leading them upward past a place of ruin and death and into the unknown.  Nicholas did not need to be cajoled.  It's a road he has walked before, and before it was alone: it seems far less mad to him now that he has Ari along with him, though Nick has enough self-awareness that he has not fooled himself into thinking it reasonable.

He'd called her in a panic earlier that week: Pen was asking questions, and Nick's lie had been a little too clever.  He'd explained to her that he'd tried to explain away their absence via Rob, that they were making Rob a gift, that he'd hoped it would keep Pen from asking questions.  And it did, after a while.  He is too loyal a friend, too conscientious to not experience some guilt: and so he has resolved to be on the lookout for a gift for their Songrobin, though Rob will be none the wiser.

He's famished and so he is taking quick bites of the sandwich, thoughtful as he glances off along the thread they've both been following.  "I might," he says.  "It depends on what it is, when we come to it.  If there was some sort of tragedy there though, it would be unusual for it to not leave a mark on the site, even if there's no longer any sort of spirit presence.  I heard sirens in the vision I had when looking back after I touched the book, so it can't have been that long ago."

Maybe the man in the gas station remembers.  Maybe he was there when the walls came down.  It's hard to ask without being too obvious, isn't it.

Nick takes a swallow from the green bottle Ari handed him earlier.  "I'm wondering what sort of preparations we should make when we go up the mountain.  Whatever's up there could be dangerous."

evening-star
"Kestrel wants some Broncos 'swag'," she says, with an aire of utter confidence, in response to this matter of righting lies made to Pen. As if she has heard this from his mouth directly.  That is certainly where the slang came from, at least, as Songrobin's are adept at singing in the lingua franca, and little birds like Ari, well, they use terms like lingua franca even with middle-Americans.  "He told me so when I spoke to him at Solstice."

It is not the sort of present that one quests for, though, and Ari has had more productive suggestions on this front as well.  Kestrel once made a borrowed-gift to her of a pen that might write the names of the heavens, and in her hand it has often written the true nature of things so clearly that the speaking of Names and the working of Wills becomes far more trivial. One might argue that he gifted her an instrument; one might argue that Ari loves Kestrel at least as much as she loves Nicholas and Pen and then, truly, one might witness her temper at the insinuation that there might be friends closer to heart than Nicholas or, especially, Pen.  But if there were to be a second circle, Kestrel would clearly stand within that.

"A bell that sounds like twilight," she has said.  "A candle which evokes the sense of fernweh?" Perhaps this is to entice him to move from his roost, to visit far flung friends.  These are idle thoughts that get tossed into the middle of whatever chat they are having when the thought occurs to her.

They would not make for proper preparations.  They must be remarks on the Kestrel-gifting, and not the matter at hand.  Her attention has gone unfocused for a moment, the line of her sight catches up nothing in particular as she thinks.

"We have Zachriel with us," she says, and it is neither too specific for any overhearing sort nor too plain spoken to be mistaken.  "And, if we are truly in trouble I can add to a sword or also to a shield -- in a manner of emphasis," this is more poetical, and she hopes he takes her meaning.  "But these are arts best practiced ahead of time."

She glances up at the thinning light.

"And here we have witnesses."

She glances over to the time-touched building. Then back to Nick.

"If we can keep our minds and wits about us, these are our greatest assets, yes?" Ari quirks a brow, as she takes a bite of her sandwich and lets them both chew on the thought.  Her House is not known for its swashbuckling adventures. She swallows, then asks: "Do you think we'll encounter present danger, or only echoes of it?"

The metal signs creaks and sighs a little in the wind.

crow
Nick polishes off the remainder of his sandwich in a few quick bites, chewing rapidly as he does.  He's tense: it's a way for him to distract himself, to make attempts at soothing whatever worries he has about what they might find, or whatever worries he has that they will end up in over their heads and then Pen will (rightfully) be furious at them for attempting this without her.

She is the more magickally powerful of their cabal, after all, and certainly the most skilled when it comes to handling present dangers.

Ari's musing regarding bells and candles had drawn a sidelong glance, puzzled for all it seemed unrelated to his question.  Once he understood there was a nod, a thoughtful thing.  It's difficult to gift for a man who has enough wealth to buy himself whatever he needs, or for a person who has Robin's prickly nature, and so personal gifts are best.

"I'm not sure," he says, to her second question.  "It seemed like echoes, didn't it, when you looked?  But I think it's better to be prepared regardless."  He drains the rest of the green bottle.

evening-star
"It seemed like Echoes," she agrees.

There is a little hollow in their conversation, then, while she finishes her sandwich without embellishing the thought with more explanation.  Nick cannot know, but Ari is shaping the foundational Enochian words in her mind. The roots of all things; the basis for the off-the-cuff and collaborative magics that Hermetics weild.  They have spoken, at times, about her training and how it differs from his. This is part of it: readiness by rote practice; coming as easy as the conjugation of foreign verbs.

This is what it means to be a child of (the) War.

*** *** ***

"She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world."
― Joanne Harris

*** *** ***

"So the possibilities are -- "  she says, pausing just to take a swig of her water, " -- that it is an Echo, and strong enough to touch our minds.  For this we have Zachriel.  Or a rote, some bound compulsion -- again, Zachriel, and one another to keep us steady.  Some bound thing that does us harm: we can look into the Tellurian when we arrive, to see if there are traps laid plain.  A wraith or spectre: this you will know better than I.  Physical harm by magical effects? Countermagic is probably our best best.  Physical harm by plain laid trap: ... this I have little answer for."

She speaks with and easy confidence she cannot rightfully back up. There are many possibilities untouched upon here, but lacking ready answers for them it seems imprudent to welcome in doubt or fear.

"What have I missed?"  This, then, is also an echo of the training she has been through.  Hers less pointed and formalized than Pen's, but similar in structure nonetheless. Ari finishes her water and tucks the green glass bottle back into the bag of their provisions. It will be recycled later.

See how Silas and Denver is rubbing off on her? Eco-friendly Hermeticism.


crow
Ari's easy confidence, even if it can't be rightfully backed up, is reassuring to Nick.  It is a reminder that of all the things that could happen, she is here with him and he will not be alone.  His friend is thorough: she touches on the many things that could be waiting for them up on the mountain.

"If it is some kind of spirit," he says, "I'm less worried about physical harm.  It probably wouldn't attempt those, even if we are flesh and blood."  Even if Ari is flesh and blood, that is; Nicholas has never said so directly but spirits react to him as though he has been wraith-touched.  Perhaps he has, or perhaps an ancestor was, or perhaps an ancestor was something not wholly of this world.

"I can't...think of anything else that you've missed."  Nick leans back against the car, arms folded, his head tilted to the side in thought.  The possibilities are indeed endless, but it will serve them poorly to endlessly consider options.  Sooner or later one must act.

"I suppose there's only one way to find out, isn't there."

evening-star
[Ho-hum, leaving breadcrumbs just in case: Prime 1, coincidental, base + 3; Practiced.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 6) ( success x 2 )

evening-star
I cast my onto the shore of Eternity,
To be washed by the Ocean of Time,
It has shape, form and substance,
It is me.
One day I will be no more,
But my pebble will remain here,
On the shore of Eternity,
Mute witness of the aeons,
That today I came and stood
At the edge of the world.
- Brian Inder

Ari gathers up the papers that they'd wrapped their sandwiches in and crosses to the lone waste basket of the station, a wire cage surrounding a metal can with a thin, billowy plastic liner.  On her transit back, she pauses by the post supporting the swinging metal sign and its one loan lamp.  Placing her hand against the aged upright, she pauses just long enough to push some of her resonance into the signpost.

To Nicholas, who knows her well, it takes on the sense of shifting shadow in the moonlight. It is momentarily brighter at the edges of his senses, and then that blends into the early nightfall.  Above them, the first stars are pricking through the celestial tapestry.  If Pen does need to come looking for them, if they are swallowed up by the rift in the Tellurian that invites them onward, then this crossroads sign will lead her toward them.

Today they came and stood at the edge of the world.

Ari rubs her hands together as she moves back toward the car.  Nick is climbing into the passenger seat as she closes the tailgate and folds herself back into the driver's seat.

There is only one road.  It winds on and upward.

The dash lights are brighter in the early night.  There is no radio reception up this high, so the quiet classical background sputters, and then fuzzes, and is cut off by the quick press of a button.  The road noise shifts when they meet the end of the pavement.  It shifts again when they lose the gravel.

crow
It has been a long time since Nick has been out this far, since he has walked or driven into a place where the city lights cannot reach and the firmament stretches eternal above.  He spoke of this not long ago to Pen, how his grandmother lived far out on the mesa and told her a story about he and his sisters and finding wonder.  Pen had titled that story "Anna Hyde's Adventure into the Great Dark," and now Nicholas is venturing out on his own without his sister as a guide.

Maybe he's thinking of this now as the radio fizzes out when they lose signal, as Ari cuts the sound short with the press of a button and as they pass onto a dirt road.

Before long it will be so dark out here that the car's lights will give them away as nightfires did in days of old: they could be seen for miles.

"Do you think we should try to find the ruin first?"

evening-star
"Definitely."

What type of person isn't afraid of the dark?  Being afraid of the dark is one of the oldest human fears; it is a sort of self-preservation instinct, a last-ditch safety net to keep the curious from wandering off of a cliff or into a den or away from their fellows in the deepest of nights.  What sort of person isn't afraid of the things they cannot known, or see, or sense coming?

Arianna Giametti is not afraid of the dark.  Not specifically of The Dark.  She is not afraid of striding forward into the unknown; it is her profound belief that the unknown was always out there, it was always coming anyway, and meeting it headlong is better than cowering in the background.  When the car stops and the lights are cut out and they are standing in the faint light of stars and whatever warm-light is cast by the rising moon, and the city is a constellation of bright points on the valley floor, nestled up against the immovable and absolute dark of the Rocky Mountains, she steps out onto the red dirt with her chin tipped upward and her expression watchful but untroubled.

She should be troubled.  It would make an awful lot of sense to be troubled.

The path ahead of them is too steep to navigate the car down with any confidence that even this four-wheel drive hatchback would wind its way back up.  It is not exactly narrow, but neither of them can see its width well enough to have confidence that they would be able to turn around if they traveled down it, and Ari's car does not have the sort of massive tire tread that gives them purchase in reverse to climb their way backwards up a mountain.

The road -- let's call it that for convenience -- has been worn unevenly and there are echoes of that sort of monstrous tread in the broad grooves that interlace and erode and turn this red dirt into a riverway more than a driveway.  The air is thin and carries the dust aloft. Every footstep they make pulls it up into the air around their shins, and then their knees, and finally it is stirred up enough for them to taste.  This dust-dirt is not worn down mountain; it is ash and dust and feathered bits of bone.  It tastes of memory.  The path downward is steep and requires steady footing.  It descends in the half light, and follows the curve of the mountain. They must be cautious to keep their footing with the uneven ground and the pitch of the pathway.

Deeper into the night, the crumbled walls and half-roofed structures of the ruins await them.  Ari's car had only one hand torch, and whoever is in front has the use of it.  She has magics that can cast its beam wider or brighter if needed.  Their progress is easily evidenced by the travel of this bright point in the darkness.

Were you there when the walls came down?

Nick can feel the ground shake and tremble beneath his feet, echoes of long-since exploded ordinance, but it does not cause him to stumble. The roar of it rings in his ears, but is not so loud as to stamp out the present.

crow
[Perception + Awareness]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 10, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

evening-star
[Per + Aware]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

crow
Deeper into the night.

Nick can feel the echoes of the explosion, whatever it was: how long ago must it have been?  He cannot tell precisely, not without further use of ritual here and now.  Sometimes Time works that way, leaves echoes of the past or portents of the future without anything to reference a when.

Sirens.  That's all he really has to go on, to mark it as present day.  But present day can mean a lot.  It can mean: world wars, or Ascension Wars, or last summer.  All it really means is before their time.

"Do you hear the echo?"

Does Ari hear the walls?

It is lucky that they left the car behind and chose to go on afoot.  At one point the trail pitches upward so steeply that they need to explore around to the sides of the trail, where they will find a few rocks that they can clamber up on.  Nick offers Ari a hand up or two when and if she wants it (bouldering with Sera recently did come in handy), and from there they can find their way back to the road.

To their right is a collapsed chimney, made of red stone and the first indicator they have come across, other than the trail tracks, that sentient life comes up this way.  And as they go farther up it becomes evident to Nick first, and then moments later Ari: the sun has not sunk any lower than it was when they started on their way up.  It hangs low just at the horizon line like a disc of molten copper: is it moving at all?

evening-star
Ari is not as athletic as Nick is. This is a fair assumption, even without her knowing about his bouldering with Sera. Her days of adventuring at the drop of a hat have been fewer and farther between in the years after she left Academy.  In Denver, already, she has seen more excitement than she had in all the time she was at conclave or symposium after they all left the East Coast and before she arrived on this Western Front.  So she needs the hand up here or there, and she accepts it without bruised pride or ego.  That the adventure continues and the riddle is solved is far more important than that she conquers every boulder or crag all on her own.

There are times when the descent is so steep that his hand alone is not enough and she must sit on the ground and scoot forward like a child to avoid stumbling.  It leaves grave-and-mortar dust on her clothes, which are clearly to fine of fabrics for this sort of nonsense, but she will have them mended or replaced. This is the luxury of privilege: not having to choose between necessities and wants.

Does she hear the echoes?

Ari pauses, brow furrowed and head tipped slightly to one side.  She cuts an odd silhouette in the setting sun -- and hadn't the city just been a constellation of pinprick lights on the valley floor? hadn't she just felt the relief of rising moonlight? surely she was mistaken in that memory, as the sun is molten and low and angry on the horizon and even Hesperus is not yet to be seen near Helios on the horizon -- stretching her senses to hear the rumble and echo of which he speaks.

"Not yet," she says.  But if he does she surely believes that she will, too.  "Is something coming?" she asks him, the line above her nose still creased with concern.  The hand torch still burns, which is odd, because it is not yet even truly twilight.

crow
"No," he says.  There is a point between his eyebrows, a divet that could have been stamped there or placed by awl, a place where his brows have drawn together and left a small furrow.  It stops short of concern; there is no need for concern just yet.

Though maybe the both of them ought to have been more cautious.  Maybe they should both be more afraid of the dark.

"It sounds like the echoes of the explosion."  His eyes trek back up toward the horizon line, visible now past the mountain.  He has checked the sun once and again, and he is sure now and so he says, "The sun should be lower now than it is, too.  Have you noticed?  It isn't getting any lower."

Nick does not know what would produce that, short of advanced Time magick.  Short of some sort of lingering effect.  "I wonder if something is still here."

evening-star
She is not the adventuring fellow one chooses when caution and carefully considered strategy is required.  That sort of restraint and hesitation is left to other arenas of Ari's life and has no place where the wondrous is afoot.  It will catch up with her one day, in ways far more grave than bruises from falling down mountains.  There are sayings about bright-burning things, and the duration of their brilliance.

So she picks and chooses her footfalls and descends the rest of the way to where he is standing, and her torch is still burning -- though unnecessary -- and the evidence is adding up to support his theory that something is not quite as it seems.

"I thought I remembered moon-rise before we came down quite this far, but then again I thought I might be mistaken."  She is insouciant, and offers a little shrug to pair with this easy admission.  "I'd been more focused on the path than the sky..."

Ari reaches up to push her bangs out of her eyes, to shade her eyes from the setting sun.  Nick wonders if something might still be here and Ari's eyebrows raise up. The next bit of pathway is not so steep and she, with this intrigued expression still focused on him, and with the sort of sway and easy saunter to her footsteps, starts to move further down it.

"I suppose we're in now, aren't we?  Jacta alea est.  We might as well go see what we can see, don't you think...?"

Later, when Nick tells Pen about this adventure, this may not prove to have been the wisest course of action.  But it is action; Ari cannot much abide sitting still.

crow
Nicholas, too, has been more focused on the path ahead of them than the sky; at Ari's admission the little furrow between his brows only deepens.  He is trying to concentrate to remember: where exactly the sun was when they left the gas station.  He cannot.

"I have been too, but I think you might be right," he says.  And Nick: he often knows things in his heart, but sometimes he lacks the confidence to say them.  Particularly where such things are concerned, in matters where he might otherwise be more inclined to defer to his Hermetic friends.

"I agree that we might as well keep going."  He stops short of saying that they have gone too far, because they haven't really: going ahead, and the risks that it entails, is a conscious choice that they are making now.

No excuses, when he tells Pen about this adventure.

And so they walk.

crow
[Let's pick a storyline!]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (10) ( success x 1 )

evening-star
One of the decided benefits of a Hermetic education is learning how to express your opinions, beliefs, or even your passing thoughts with a sort of nonchalance that borders on hubris.  The expectation of a ready audience; the wherewithall to withstand a verbal duel.  Sparring with quill or tongues or any other instrument of the mind is how they hone their paradigms and protocols and their very grasp of the language that gives form to Art and Ars.  The hesitant and the uncertain and the first to fold all get left behind and the crucible formed by those who remain is merciless.

And magical. Transformative.  They are forged in the fire.  Meant to be the leading edge of the blade, the tip of the arrow, the point of the quill.

Ari is not too far from the point, being that she is part siren, or lorelei, or fae light on the moors, or even some ominous star to lead them who wander astray.  It does not occur to her that Nick may feel some hesitance or have reservations or unspoken truth kept gated behind the cage of his teeth because he is unsure or unsteady.

Down they go, until the relentless slant of the path recants and begins to level out, and still they are winding around the circumference of the mountain but gone is the dreadful feeling of descent.  They have come all this way down and not gone under; Hades is not waiting for them here.  The air is less choked-full of dust and sediment here.  The setting sun is merciless and clear.  The buildings here have been spared the ravages of war; their roofs are not caving in, avalanches of red-tile and broken joists and beams; their walls stand upright, rough with stucco and sharp cornered and solid.  It has been a slow progression, as they are moving away from the epicenter of some frightful thing, or perhaps back in time toward a moment before the sundering.

The streets are brick over gravel, set in a herringbone pattern, as if the wide parkways were more for pedestrian than vehicular travel.  Just beyond the edge of their hearing, indistinct but somehow familiar, is the crackle of static interspersed with the brassy jazz of an old radio playing the old songs of a bygone generation.  Down the alley to their left, they can see the swing of a metal garden gate and within its boundaries a low clothesline hung with forgotten and tattered items.  The white have gone grey with the dust and time.  The gate swings on its hinges, though neither of them feel a breeze, and it squeaks idly.

The path cut around the mountain is only wide enough for the street and a few homes on either side.  To widen the town beyond these boundaries, alleys have been cut up and down, steep pedestrian stairs connect lower and upper terraces; it is a warren of tiny passages tucked into, around, and through.  Broad windows decorate the storefronts along the empty street. The letters painted on to reveal their purposed are scuffed and faded.  Yet, out of the corner of their eyes, it almost seems as if they might be legible -- then no again, they are indistinct when direct attention is applied.

"There's no town on the map here," Arianna tells him, frowning at the pitted and worn name of a street on a metal sign affixed to the edge of a building.  "I'm almost certain of it, Nick...."

Dice: 1 d10 TN10 (9) ( fail )

crow
Ari is certain there is no town on the map; Nick is also certain of this, though his certainty comes from the pit of his stomach, a far more intuitive thing.  He knows without looking, he knows because that is how these things go.

Sundown is a threshold, a period of the day when the space between this world and the next draws thinner.  Nick wonders whether they have wandered into a shadow realm, someplace not quite past the Veil but perhaps in that in between place.  There are such places in the world.

"Can you hear the radio?"  He asks her this because he does not yet understand what is happening: he only knows that something is.  "This might not even be...it might not even be in Colorado, depending on what's..."

He doesn't finish because, well, speculation.

Nick brings the spirit world with him; he looks into it as naturally now as breathing.  He has to close his eyes a moment and open them again, has to draw in a breath and breathe out and remember how it feels to be back at the beginning: that's all.  It has gotten much easier over the years.  So: he looks.  Perhaps it will give him a sense of just where they are.

[Spirit 1, Sight: base diff 4, -1 for practiced rote.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 6) ( success x 1 )

evening-star
His cabal-mate belongs to the Autumn; she is sometimes rowan-haired and often mercurial, but her practices lean toward memory, and her heart rules her head more often than she will acknowledge and the season of cups, and of emotion, and of sundering and of going under; this twilight of the year, and as a time of life, of truths that transcend word and knowing; this knowing of things that are not the purview of Air and Intellect alone. She belongs to the Autumn, though she Winters over oh so well, and she can burn like a summer child.  This Nick knows when he peers at her through his Spirit sight; he knows it in his bones as surely as if he had spoken one of her names.

Thresholds are places only truths can endure.

And then, beyond the immediacy of her presence, which is far more permanent and resolved than these others, comes the expanding awareness of the town itself. Held in this moment like a photograph, a breath that can never be drawn in to its fullest, stopped, as it were...

As they were...

The ghostly silhouettes, grey-shaped and translucent, shimmering in the heat of the setting sun, phantasmic, of a bustling small town.  The figures are paused, mid-stride, mid-sentence, mid-something. All of them. A woman in an upper window airing out the laundry, arms aloft in the process of flinging the wrinkles out of some now-lost thing. A gentleman in a hat, whose style gives away the decade, bent forward to speak to a child who is only half his height; pipe held away from his face in one hand, the illusion of smoke curling up and out of it. There is movement in the sound alone, and this is the roll of hard wheels against cobbles, or perhaps the herringbone of the street, but not with the clarity and quickness of cars and neither with the accompanying foot stamps of carriage horses, so perhaps the push charts of market folks further around the bend; there are birds calling but out of sight; trees sigh and rustle in the intangible breeze, though there are no such tall-trees or rustlings in their presence, physical space.

The smell of sea air overwhelms him, the valley floor below having been overlaid with the rolling waters of an inlet. The newspaper headline in the shop window nearest him begins: WAR. It is followed by such punctuation as to be alarmist.

And then, on the exhale, when he thinks he might have a sense of time and space around him, comes the whistle of an incoming, ever nearing object; a holiday firecracker played in reverse; and the sun catches his eye which shifts his mind slightly toward the present, where the walls and boundaries of this space match up too precisely with the echoes of his Spirit Sight.

crow
Sea air: and know that the home of Nick's heart is not in Arizona where he grew up nor in Denver where the three of them live now, but in the hills and woods and salt marshes of the place they left not so long ago.  He recognizes it as soon as he smells it, the brine.  Which means: they are not in Denver, this is an Elsewhere as much as it is an Elsewhen.

There is a newspaper headline in the window.

The holiday was not so long ago and so that is indeed what springs to mind first: a firecracker, the long whistle just before colorful starbursts in the night sky.  Sounds and scents are often visceral things, and they can be as effective as any Time magick in transporting a person to another time: to childhood watching fireworks on a blanket, to being at home and wondering when people will bloody stop launching the firecrackers down the street.

To being in another country a year or two ago and hearing that distant sound just before the conflagration, and knowing that charnelhouse will be his next destination.  He was there to see those walls collapse, though they weren't his.

Ari sees only his eyes fixating on some point in the sky, and: she can see the white of them.  It takes a moment for him to find his voice.  "We're somewhere else," he says.  "I think it's...there was some sort of - "  And he says this and with a rough exhale he shuts his eyes to blink the magick away before the moment of impact,

because he cannot.  Not again.

His breathing is unsteady.

evening-star
[Corr: Where am I? base diff 4, -1 practiced]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (7, 8) ( success x 2 )

evening-star
She is watching him, out of the corner of her eye, when he allows his second sight to overtake his absolute sense of here and now.  She is watchful, ready, the fingers of one hand wrapped around the hilt of her wand wherever it is currently concealed and the fingers of her other wrapped around the heavy torch, which still burns needlessly, which is a light house, or a ladder or life boat or some other thing that might anchor him if he should so need it.  There is no slick of mercury to her eyes, save the grey resolution of a friend who is only half a heartbeat away, and when he is not looking at her she is looking to him.

Ready.

When his voice breaks away from his thoughts, Ari steps in beside him. She moves her hand away from her wand to place the cup of her palm against the round of his shoulder.  Her finger press into its blade, offering a grounding pressure that does not draw forward pain. It leaves no question of whether she is there, of whether he is alone. It anchors.  He braces for impact; she is beside him.

"Nicholas."

"Just breathe."

It is the barest of reminders, sotto voce, on the edge of hearing.  It is not a command.  The strength of her grip on his shoulder relents. It becomes just a presence, then her hand moves in small, soothing circles, until it stills.  Then taps once, as if testing his resolve.  And finally withdraws.

When he is steady on his feet, or near enough, it is her turn to draw in a deep breath. She draws the shape of a circle on the back of her hand, near to the circle made by her thumb and forefinger.  Round, and round again, and round again until her skin prickles with the shape of it, and then she pushes out her sense of place and direction, feeling for the truth of where they are in the vastness of the Tellurian.  They are travelers without even the night sky to guide them; it is one thing to wander and wholly another to be lost.

crow
Just breathe.

Ari's hand on his shoulder is a comforting weight, a reminder of where and when he is and moreso: a line in the sand between the pain of others and his own.  The ease with which Nick understands what's in another's heart is a sword which cuts two ways; he is deeply affected by what he reads from other expressions, from voice and body.

His breath does not take long to steady.  He is practiced at this, too.

"It must have been a long time ago.  The first world war, maybe.  I couldn't see any cars or anything."  Just the bright bloom of artillery fire.

To Ari, too, the place might seem all too familiar as she orients herself, and here is the strange thing: they are outside Denver.  She knows this as surely as though she were reading a map, though there is no town here, there is no sea.  They are also: in a coastal Italian town, somewhere north.  Maybe she passed through that country long ago in her youth; maybe it is hardly known to her.

And they are also nowhere at all.

evening-star
There are towns like this, carved into the face of sea cliffs, colorful and dangerous and festooned with history, throughout coastal Italy.  The immediacy with which she recognizes her home country is almost brutal, it causes her to pull a sharp breath in between her teeth and the dry, thin air of the mountains above Denver is incongruous with the crash-nearness of the sea.  Through memory, she can smell citrus, sun warmed, from the trees that she knows are kept on the tiled balconies and terraces, even though it is not here.

"This is Italia," she tells him, pronunciation canted hard toward home when she speaks the country name, though there is a prick of concern and worry to her expression.  She has not committed to it enough for it to be fear or panic.

"Nicholas," she says, though her placement of where to direct his name is a little off due to her split attention.  "I know this place."  It is like a name just at the tip of her tongue. She knows but does not recognize it.  She knows with certainty that there will be a book shop a couple doors down, and she is compelled toward it, by some fondness or some need to know, some need of something definite.

It stands, as it did in her memory.  On the corner of a narrow alley and the main street.  And she smooths her thumb over the embellishments around the nameplate on the door, worn down with more lifetimes than the span of her own.  They have both been Awake too long for her to waste time with incredulity or assertions that this might be impossible.

"I don't understand."  This is as much as far as she is willing to stretch disbelief.  "It was destroyed in the ..."

Oh.  Some sort of realization crests and breaks in her and Arianna pushes the sense of the other town away from her mind. It is his turn to glimpse the whites of her eyes, widened as they are as she churns though some mental arithmetic. And then alarmed.  Unlike Nicholas, she does not close them against the dawning thought.  She is transfixed, staring at her fingers against the nameplate, remembering; she knows what is coming and yet she cannot bring herself to look away.

crow
He sees the dawning realization in Ari's eyes, and he would not have guessed where they are on his own; he would have needed the magick in truth that Ari only needed to trigger a memory.  Other than to the middle east (Chakravanti business, he would have said) Nicholas has never left the country, save just past the Mexican border.  He'd thought the place charming, like pictures he's seen of Europe: but how many pictures, over how many years?  Things blur.

Nick has raised a hand to his chest and he is gently rubbing at the muscle over his heart, as though he could calm himself this way, could soothe the remembered heartache of someone else.

"I wonder how this place got here," he says.  "It must be someone's memory.  Some survivor who came here and did some other Work, maybe.  I don't know how else this would have gotten here."  It challenges his understanding of the Veil, though this is of course not complete.

The world is still full of mystery, isn't it.

"Do you want to leave?"

evening-star
It is possible that this place shows them echoes of their own echoes. That it is only in Italy because she is here; that it only causes him this particular heartache because of the lives that he has lived.  It may be a labyrinth, a thing bordering on thresholds of its own.  It may be drawing them down into its belly so that they may emerge, changed, reborn, renewed.

She had still be numb when she'd heard that the cliff-side town had been sundered by the War. Numb from the loss of so many friends, aching from her own wounds and the ruins of her sense of surety and place within the world.  The Order was not unassailable after all.  She'd been far from the sea, but beyond that, Arianna remembers little of place they'd sheltered.  Instead she remembers her father's voice, counsel kept with others late at night, the ever-burning light in his study, the way his eyes sunk into his face and the terrible pressure of his resonance always and immediately around them.

When she finally pulls her hand back from the nameplate it is all at once, pulled back toward her center as if she has been burned or bitten; wounded.  She does not have as firm a filter for these memories as he does; instead she religiously avoids their echoes.

"Yes."  She is smoothing her hand against her pants when she looks over to him, using the feel of the fabric to erase the memories in her fingerprints.  Her eyes are clear but not calm when she looks over to him.  Conflicted.  "I do not want to linger, but still -- if someone has survived and come here.  I want to know.  Someone should know."

Duty wars with self-preservation.  There is no clear victor just yet.

crow
Echoes of their own echoes: or Mind, perhaps.  It would not take significant skill to produce such an effect.  Nick knows of magi who can do this; there is something unpleasant that triggers in his memory when he thinks about it.  Not of the green door, not of the firm pressure of Lysander's hand on his shoulder, but something associated something -

He cannot quite place it.

But it is no matter.  Whatever was on the tip of his tongue at the edge of his memory, he is sure it is not here.  "There are still ghosts lingering.  They might know, though if they died a long time ago what they can tell us is probably going to be limited and cryptic."

Nick says this with the confidence of someone who has done this, and often; he might not often speak of himself or his spirit work but there are often things to be read in the things he knows about and knows how to do.  "If you want to stay, I'll stay with you.  But we should be cautious."  More cautious than they have been, at least.

evening-star
If you want to stay...

Pen is not here to defer to.  She cannot pin this on Silas.  There are no ready scapegoats and Nick is looking to her which means that she is -- Verdammt! -- responsible for this decision.  The Giametti woman weighs this for a moment, with her lips pressed together and her gaze cast down toward the interleaving bricks.  She breathes in once, and then out again, and that is all the time it takes to decide.

"No."  Self-preservation has won out.  "If I had known what was coming then, I would not have stayed.  I do not want to stay now to see if it will come again."

There are still ghosts here.  There are stories hidden in the twisting alleys and crammed in between the bricks.  But whatever she remembers is more terrible than the pull of the unknown.  It overtakes her curiosity and even her disdain for consequence.  Ari's hand has move back to whatever pocket houses her wand.  He cannot see her white-knuckled grasp on it, but he can see the bloodless hue of the hand that holds the torch -- still burning, still needlessly so.  He can see the tension to the lines of her face and the pull of her shoulders.

There is something she is keeping from him, and not terribly well.

crow
Ari decides not to stay, and as Nick breathes out there is a slight but visible bow that appears across the line of his shoulders: they relax.  He would have indeed stayed, and stayed from loyalty and no small measure of his own curiosity: but caution wins the day.  This is fortunate, perhaps; the last time Nick was in a place like this, he left with his soul rotting from the inside out.

Each time he'll have to question whether or not the tether Pen (Ari, too, but especially Pen) provides would be enough to stay him: eventually one time will be the last.

Best to avoid it.

"We can go then.  We can always come back, or try to get a better idea of what's happening from afar."  He wonders: are there places where they have to be present?  This is outside of his understanding of Correspondence.

"What is it, Ari?"

evening-star
She is afraid.  Ari, who is not afraid of the dark. Ari, who is headfirst into most adventures. Is terrified of what comes next.

"Nothing," she lies, and offers him a smile. It would be convincing, were he not Nicholas and were they not family of the heart.  And then, immediately upon its heels and in conflict with her assertion, she tells him: "I'll tell you when we're clear of this place."

Because it is not the time to tell him that it shatters, and blisters, and burns.

Climbing up a steep incline was somehow easier than carefully descending.  Still, though, Nicholas is her better in the mechanics of this escape.  All the while she is waiting for the scream of incoming magics or artillery rounds; for the inevitable crash, and boom, and breaking.

crow
[Dex + Athletics?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

evening-star
[Dex + Ath: Upward...?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

crow
[Uh...doing that again.  Diff 7.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 6, 10) ( success x 1 )

evening-star
[Oh... it gets steeper...]

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )

crow
[Stamina?]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (6, 7) ( success x 2 )

evening-star
[Stamina: I can totally keep going...]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (5, 8) ( success x 1 )

crow
[Okay.  Home stretch?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (1, 2, 9) ( success x 1 )

evening-star
[All the way back to the top?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (6, 6, 7) ( fail )

evening-star
[No, seriously, I want out of this place. +1 for retrying]

Dice: 3 d10 TN9 (4, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )

Hourglass [Mood Post]

You are fourteen years old and you hang with death wrapped around your neck and your feet swinging free.  

Later your sister will find you.  She will wipe the vomit from your face as you cough and gasp for air.

You are twenty-four and you find a woman washing clothes in a stream, blood unfurling beneath the water like a child’s ribbons.  It is moments later you realize the clothes are yours.

I am the one to place a hand on the center of your chest and hold you beneath the water.  Your nails left gouges in my forearm, because by then you wanted to live.

I cannot remember anything before the darkness.  It is later that we speak thus:

“You wish for that because you wish for a just world.”
“I want that because I believe in choice.”
“Nicholas, this is my choice.”
“But you could be happier than you are now.  You…you’re suffering, Jonas.”
“My suffering has meaning.  Our choices are different.”
 

---

Stories interest me.  Yours interests me.

There is an old Buddhist story that goes like this:

A woman is running from a tiger.  She reaches the edge of a cliff, and in this moment of desperation she sees her opportunity to escape with her life: there is a thick vine descending to ground some feet below.

She begins to lower herself in time to escape the tiger, which paces above as she guides herself down against the rock wall.  It is at this time that she notices a second tiger below.

Of course she is trapped there, certain her only chance of escape is to wait out one or the other.  She hangs suspended.

After a time, two mice – one black, the other white – appear and begin to gnaw on the vine.  As it begins to fray, the woman notices that growing from the rock there is a single ripe strawberry.  The woman looks to death above and death below, and at the vine itself which she notices has grown thin as the trickle of sand from an hourglass.  And then the woman eats the strawberry.  She lets go.

This would not have been my choice.  I am glad that it has been yours.
 

---

So here we are.  I can see your face in the reflecting pool where you can also see mine: we have no need of the Technocracy’s toys.

“Do you think you still would have chosen the Chakravanti, if you had been older when you were inducted?”

“I was nine.  It has shaped my life to the extent that I can’t imagine another.”

“There’s a man here in Denver who asked me to induct him recently.  I’m having second thoughts because…he killed so easily.  He doesn’t feel, or he didn't at the time.  But I…”  You are hesitating.

“You are asking me because I kill easily.”

“Well…yes.”

You are an insightful man, and I am not.  How do you not realize you are on a cusp?  “Nicholas, you are not inexperienced.  You don’t need my permission.  If you choose to induct him and you want my presence, I will come.”

“I just…I don’t know if it’s a different role, or if I ought to be leery for a reason.  I don’t know what the responsible choice is.”

“You were inducted because we trusted your judgment, and because you brought something new to us.  So trust your own judgment.”

“I…there’s just enough suffering in the world, without my mistakes adding to it.”

And I am a poor substitute for your acarya, but I know enough to know not to give you answers.  Soon enough you’ll find your own, or Fate will create them for you.