[This thread is made up of posts written 2011 and onwards. Very occasionally there may be edits, but only if I hate the original enough. Insights is made up primarily of journal excerpts, but sometimes from scenes written in collaboration with other players. Please note that most things written here are not public knowledge.]
Tuesday, February 8th 2011.
Never trust fae, he told me.
I forgave Samiel his old prejudices, because he had never known any fae that did not fit this stereotype. Not like I do, counting some my kin. I was content in my knowledge and when I met her, spoke to her for the first time, I was so damn certain I’d called it right.
Aoife seems like such a harmless, timid little creature. Delicate, fragile. All those words that men with antiquated minds figure women are, and should be.
But how many times has she trespassed now? How many times has she witnessed things I’d have no one know of? Things I wouldn’t even choose to remember, if I had the choice. It’s bad enough to be eternally, deeply ashamed of events of the past, but for her to come sliding like a wraith into things fresher and aching tipped the scales.
She has done nothing to earn my trust and everything to make me hate her. But even now I can’t.
Judah came after Samiel. What had she said to make that swaggering bastard think Samiel was at fault? Judah chose wrong. I wonder if he would still have come if he’d known I was involved. Would my voice have unnerved him when he recognised it? No point in being retrospective. He died at Samiel’s hands and his corpse was delivered into my tender care. I should have used the blood there and then to keep him from coming back, but it is powerful, dangerous work, the risks involved many.
His corpse had its uses though, and even though it has finally suffered an end at Aoife’s ‘harmless’ little hands, I wonder whether it was enough.
Will it keep her from straying again and unearthing all my secrets? Was it worth it, feeling this guilt over tormenting her in return?
Aoife. You have pushed me from the grey and into the black.
- M
Insights (Volume I)
Moderator: Mesteno
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Journal Excerpt:
Saturday March 12th, 2011.
It failed. When I saw her next she only smiled at me. I couldn’t read it precisely, only knew that I’d failed.
Kill her and be done with it, I thought. There was no other way I could keep my secrets safe from her, no other way I could keep all the secrets other people have trusted me with from her prying eyes. It would have been so easy to do, such a quick and simple solution, but damn her… She told me she could take my dreams away, that it might keep her from stumbling into them.
I went to see Bjorn. Tracking him down was not difficult, not when the information game is part of my business, and though I felt like an intruder, and undeserving of his patience, it had to be him. I needed one of those ‘good men’ that Samiel and I have spoken of. Someone who would try their hardest to persuade me against the course of action I was leaning towards. Vadriel might have accomplished the same, but it would hurt his heart to remain my friend and know my intentions. Bjorn, despite our history, does not have God clouding his judgement. As for Sam, his hatred of fae and his practicality would only have spurred me on to slaughter. I would not have blamed him had he done it, were the shoe on the other foot, but I could not. Some part of me wanted to believe her innocence and find another solution. Bjorn, as I’d hoped, provided me with a way.
‘Lucid dreaming’, he called it. This ability to be able to control the course of dreams, to be aware that I am dreaming, without actually slipping from slumber. I’m dubious of its success, for even though practicing it is proving to have some results, I am not nearly controlled enough to manage it reliably. I do not believe I could eject her from my dreams the way I would hope to, but even being able to keep things indistinct, to stop the course of them so that she cannot play witness would help.
I sought her out to tell her that I intended no harm from that point, that I wanted to try something, some alternative, and somehow she misconstrued by words. I think she suspected I’d been in talks with Kymeera, but I could not approach the Nightmare Keeper again. Not with Sam around, a potential risk. So we will try, I think, and perhaps just for once there will be an outcome without bloodshed.
Time will tell.
- M
Saturday March 12th, 2011.
It failed. When I saw her next she only smiled at me. I couldn’t read it precisely, only knew that I’d failed.
Kill her and be done with it, I thought. There was no other way I could keep my secrets safe from her, no other way I could keep all the secrets other people have trusted me with from her prying eyes. It would have been so easy to do, such a quick and simple solution, but damn her… She told me she could take my dreams away, that it might keep her from stumbling into them.
I went to see Bjorn. Tracking him down was not difficult, not when the information game is part of my business, and though I felt like an intruder, and undeserving of his patience, it had to be him. I needed one of those ‘good men’ that Samiel and I have spoken of. Someone who would try their hardest to persuade me against the course of action I was leaning towards. Vadriel might have accomplished the same, but it would hurt his heart to remain my friend and know my intentions. Bjorn, despite our history, does not have God clouding his judgement. As for Sam, his hatred of fae and his practicality would only have spurred me on to slaughter. I would not have blamed him had he done it, were the shoe on the other foot, but I could not. Some part of me wanted to believe her innocence and find another solution. Bjorn, as I’d hoped, provided me with a way.
‘Lucid dreaming’, he called it. This ability to be able to control the course of dreams, to be aware that I am dreaming, without actually slipping from slumber. I’m dubious of its success, for even though practicing it is proving to have some results, I am not nearly controlled enough to manage it reliably. I do not believe I could eject her from my dreams the way I would hope to, but even being able to keep things indistinct, to stop the course of them so that she cannot play witness would help.
I sought her out to tell her that I intended no harm from that point, that I wanted to try something, some alternative, and somehow she misconstrued by words. I think she suspected I’d been in talks with Kymeera, but I could not approach the Nightmare Keeper again. Not with Sam around, a potential risk. So we will try, I think, and perhaps just for once there will be an outcome without bloodshed.
Time will tell.
- M
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Tuesday March 15th, 2011.
Sat with one knee drawn up and the other leg swinging loose, he curled his toes over the edge of the cold, steel table. He felt the blood slide where it had begun to coagulate under his bare heel and lifted his hip flask for a slow mouthful of the contents. The heat of the liquor was even more pronounced than usual, the frigid temperature of the morgue with its gently humming wall of body lockers putting an ache to stiff, work-worn joints.
The fume hood drew away the rancid stink of his evening’s work, the results of which were liberally painting the slick, white tile in vivid splashes of red. It glinted under the fluorescent overheads like fractured garnets. It clung to the instruments alongside slender ropes of tissue and membrane. Person parts now unidentifiable, and as much of it clinging to him as his surroundings.
“I hope you enjoyed that,” he confided softly, “because I sure as hell did. Vale, subject two four one.”
The little recording device beside him sat whirring gently, collecting sound. Earlier, it had swallowed up the agonised voice of a dying man, ready to be delivered to his client for entertainment purposes. They’d have preferred video evidence, they told him, but he steadfastly refused to be filmed, and he’d won out due to the recommendations he‘d come with. Quality work, that’s what you’ll get from him. If you want them to hurt, he’s your man.
“I’m your man,” he echoed the memory, once he’d depressed the stop button with a soft click
He lifted the flask again, this time to salute the blaze, barely visible through the little round pane of reinforced glass. Burning the leftovers was a long process, and even with the heat of the incinerator, the thicker bones would need to be ground to powder. Dull work, but he’d had his cheap thrills already. He’d gorged on the severed soul-stuff that had come free of the flesh when it died, toying with it the way a cat might with prey it wasn’t truly hungry for, rolling and stretching and batting lightly with paws softened by sheathed claws.
He half wanted the desert man there for a fine finale, a careless, clumsy culmination of self-indulgent violence, but the other half knew better. Too much catharsis when he’d more work to do would only lead him to hedonistically wasted hours. Even without the sky to look up at, he knew that sun up wasn’t far off, and he didn’t like to handle business at dawn. Neither would she.
A sigh heaved his chest, all flat, lean muscle, deeply scar furrowed, a bloody handprint flaking away from skin Mediterranean dark, then he slipped down off the table and onto the sloping floor. Cleaning up could wait. His contact would not.
--------------------------------
He found Mira at Fortune’s Way, stood beside the fountain at its far end. The broad, circular basin was a mosaic of tiny ivory, bronze and gold tiles, littered with coins. People’s wishes. She was sat on its edge, shamelessly dipping her hand under the water to pluck them out, examining the profiles in high relief on the metal. So many different currencies, but she threw them all back, the bangles clinking around her narrow wrists.
She paused to take a deep drag from her smoke when she saw him coming, then with a shiver beneath the heavy leather of her jacket, she rose to greet him. Just a teenager, eighteen she'd claim, gangly in that long legged, knobbly kneed way, but dressed provocatively to suit her profession. Fishnets and a dress short enough that it didn’t quite cover everything from the rear view. Thin silk, tattered at the hem, smoke stained, sex stained, smudged with ash and mascara. Boots that might have been biker if they hadn’t been heeled high enough to take an eye out.
“Didn’t think you were coming,” she told him from behind her veil of blue-grey smoke, the cherry flaring bright as she inhaled again. Her voice was a dull monotone. Sounded dead. But her thickly kohl ringed eyes were anything but dismissive or dim. They were a startling blue, and her gaze was level and unblinking.
“Am I late?” he asked her, prowling around the spill of orange streetlight to meet her beside the fountain’s edge. A soft quork of a sound above drew his gaze away for a moment. A murder of crows were at roost in the trees a few feet away. Puffed, black balls of feather huddled against the night.
“No,” she smiled, and stepped in to press against him, curling her fingers into the front of his coat. There was no weight to her. She was just as lacking in extraneous flesh as he. “Just pretend for now. In case someone comes looking. I have to make it look like I’m working, okay?”
He knew how it worked and didn’t protest. Instead he lifted a hand to gently guide a lock of wind tousled brown hair back behind her ear.
“You are working,” he informed her, laconic. “You’ll show me where he stayed?”
“Sure,” she replied, the leather of her jacket creaking as she shrugged. She flicked the butt of her cigarette backwards and into the fountain, and it expired in a soft hiss. Winding her arm through his, she led him away across the cobblestones and deeper into the city. The girl didn’t press him for conversation. Smart little thing knew when it was better not to know, but he had questions for her, and couldn’t let opportunity slip by without asking.
“Did you give a sh** about him?” He frowned, wishing he had Sam’s heat to share, instead of the feeble warmth his body put out.
“Do you think I’d be taking you if I did?” she countered with a wry glance his way. The point was blunt enough that he didn’t doubt her honesty, but she went on anyway. “He paid well, he didn’t rough me up, the place is clean.”
“A real gentleman,” Mesteno murmured, biting back a droll comment about how few of those Rhy’din seemed to harbour.
“Sure,” she replied nonchalantly, and he wondered if she was just fond of the word, or truly couldn’t have cared less about the discussion. “I recognise you from the photos he had. The hair,” she smiled, reaching across to catch his between her fingers as if they were scissors, “it’s hard to forget.”
“And what were you doing snooping in his photos, Mira?” he asked her, noting that her smile was no more innocent than her profession. She had her secrets, wasn’t downtrodden by the sex trade she worked.
The girl steered him around a corner, and brought him to a sharp halt in front of a modest looking apartment building. Little balconies with wrought iron railings. Small but respectable. She was looking up, towards the top floor with her blue eyes full of starlight. “I wasn’t snooping. He’d go talk on the phone for ages. Didn’t care if I wandered around. They were just there on his desk.” She tugged at his arm again to draw him onwards towards the door that led into the lobby. He half expected to have to pick the lock, but she brought out a narrow piece of plastic - a key card - and whisked it through to open up for them. “He didn’t like having to come down for me,” she informed him, before shoving her way inside, to hell with waiting for him to open it for her.
-----------------------------------
Alistair had been precise and uncompromisingly English, his manners not contrived but perfectly spontaneous. When Mesteno hadn’t been threatened by him, or double-crossing him, he’d actually liked him. Killing him had not been something he’d plotted, nothing more than an unfortunate, unpredictable turn of events in fact. Now he stood in the man’s bedroom, eyes searching, while Mira danced barefoot in the living room, bulky headphones clamped over her ears and eyes closed as if she were on some private high.
There was little in the way of anything personal. No pictures on the wall, no ornamentation that wasn’t practical, and even the bed itself was shunted to the side, leaving more space for the piano black desk and the cabinets towering to either side of it. The high backed leather chair was the only piece of furniture to show any wear, a depression in the seat that left Mesteno picturing him sat there for hours, puzzling over work. Work that his colleagues would have approved of though, or work he was doing on the sly, collaborating with Rhy’din’s dangerous, living refuse? People like him.
There was no computer to access - Alistair being smart, because saving his work to one was almost an open invitation for someone to hack his files, in this city - so Mesteno set to work on the cabinets, coaxing open locks and rifling through the paperwork with hands gloved. Patience had never been one of his virtues, and the longer he went without finding anything of relevance, the more pronounced his agitation became, until he had to pull away, snarling like a wolf just to breathe, brush himself off and begin anew.
“Found what you were looking for?” Mira asked him, knuckling a cigarette again, jacket discarded somewhere and kohl artlessly smudged around her eyes. He caught a glimpse of what Alistair had found so attractive about her for the briefest of moments, then she broke the spell by moving from the doorway, approaching him with that smile again.
“No,” he replied flatly, ignoring her until she closed her hands over his shoulders and leaned down to match his crouch, flashing more flesh down the neckline of her dress than was decent. His temper flared again, and he was reaching to pry her fingers away, frowning until he saw her tip her head, indicating away from the desk.
“I had a lot of time to wander,” she reminded him.
Alistair’s hiding places were unconventional, discreet, and Mira could have played the braggart rightfully if she’d been the sort to speak no more than a handful of words. Mesteno wondered if the Englishman ever had an inkling that he’d underestimated the girl, found himself recalling her at the fountain examining the coins for no other reason than curiosity, and hooked an arm about her sharply boned shoulders to squeeze gratefully.
Mira allowed it with a carefully crafted smile. Approval meant nothing to her. She stayed while Mesteno absorbed the contents of Alistair’s work, voraciously examining the photographic evidence, dozens of shots he’d never even mentioned.
There Mesteno was at the canals, blissfully ignorant of the camera, while a distant figure trailed behind, nondescript and blurred. Another photo, this time where he was out of focus and the man in pursuit’s features were more sharply depicted. Familiar. Another series from the docks, and another in the Market Square, though it was not always the same man. Here, a woman instead. And there, the large man with only one eye, not nearly so inconspicuous as his fellows.
“He looks like you,” Mira’s voice from over his shoulder, legs in their torn fishnets crossed at the ankles and arms folded.
“The f*** are you talking about?” he asked her, unintentionally sharp. He’d almost forgotten she was there. Too damn quiet.
She pointed with a finger tipped with a darkly painted nail, the polish chipped. “Him. You don’t think so?”
Incredulous, he stared at the shot she’d indicated, lifting it from amongst the others to examine the features of the one eyed man. Dark red hair faded with age, tall and built big, but the angles of his face were heavy at the jaw, pronounced at the cheekbone. A certain cruelty to his mouth which hinted at a parity, even if the fullness of his own lips did not match the narrow lines of this stranger’s.
“Don’t you think?” Mira asked him again. Damn that smile.
Sat with one knee drawn up and the other leg swinging loose, he curled his toes over the edge of the cold, steel table. He felt the blood slide where it had begun to coagulate under his bare heel and lifted his hip flask for a slow mouthful of the contents. The heat of the liquor was even more pronounced than usual, the frigid temperature of the morgue with its gently humming wall of body lockers putting an ache to stiff, work-worn joints.
The fume hood drew away the rancid stink of his evening’s work, the results of which were liberally painting the slick, white tile in vivid splashes of red. It glinted under the fluorescent overheads like fractured garnets. It clung to the instruments alongside slender ropes of tissue and membrane. Person parts now unidentifiable, and as much of it clinging to him as his surroundings.
“I hope you enjoyed that,” he confided softly, “because I sure as hell did. Vale, subject two four one.”
The little recording device beside him sat whirring gently, collecting sound. Earlier, it had swallowed up the agonised voice of a dying man, ready to be delivered to his client for entertainment purposes. They’d have preferred video evidence, they told him, but he steadfastly refused to be filmed, and he’d won out due to the recommendations he‘d come with. Quality work, that’s what you’ll get from him. If you want them to hurt, he’s your man.
“I’m your man,” he echoed the memory, once he’d depressed the stop button with a soft click
He lifted the flask again, this time to salute the blaze, barely visible through the little round pane of reinforced glass. Burning the leftovers was a long process, and even with the heat of the incinerator, the thicker bones would need to be ground to powder. Dull work, but he’d had his cheap thrills already. He’d gorged on the severed soul-stuff that had come free of the flesh when it died, toying with it the way a cat might with prey it wasn’t truly hungry for, rolling and stretching and batting lightly with paws softened by sheathed claws.
He half wanted the desert man there for a fine finale, a careless, clumsy culmination of self-indulgent violence, but the other half knew better. Too much catharsis when he’d more work to do would only lead him to hedonistically wasted hours. Even without the sky to look up at, he knew that sun up wasn’t far off, and he didn’t like to handle business at dawn. Neither would she.
A sigh heaved his chest, all flat, lean muscle, deeply scar furrowed, a bloody handprint flaking away from skin Mediterranean dark, then he slipped down off the table and onto the sloping floor. Cleaning up could wait. His contact would not.
--------------------------------
He found Mira at Fortune’s Way, stood beside the fountain at its far end. The broad, circular basin was a mosaic of tiny ivory, bronze and gold tiles, littered with coins. People’s wishes. She was sat on its edge, shamelessly dipping her hand under the water to pluck them out, examining the profiles in high relief on the metal. So many different currencies, but she threw them all back, the bangles clinking around her narrow wrists.
She paused to take a deep drag from her smoke when she saw him coming, then with a shiver beneath the heavy leather of her jacket, she rose to greet him. Just a teenager, eighteen she'd claim, gangly in that long legged, knobbly kneed way, but dressed provocatively to suit her profession. Fishnets and a dress short enough that it didn’t quite cover everything from the rear view. Thin silk, tattered at the hem, smoke stained, sex stained, smudged with ash and mascara. Boots that might have been biker if they hadn’t been heeled high enough to take an eye out.
“Didn’t think you were coming,” she told him from behind her veil of blue-grey smoke, the cherry flaring bright as she inhaled again. Her voice was a dull monotone. Sounded dead. But her thickly kohl ringed eyes were anything but dismissive or dim. They were a startling blue, and her gaze was level and unblinking.
“Am I late?” he asked her, prowling around the spill of orange streetlight to meet her beside the fountain’s edge. A soft quork of a sound above drew his gaze away for a moment. A murder of crows were at roost in the trees a few feet away. Puffed, black balls of feather huddled against the night.
“No,” she smiled, and stepped in to press against him, curling her fingers into the front of his coat. There was no weight to her. She was just as lacking in extraneous flesh as he. “Just pretend for now. In case someone comes looking. I have to make it look like I’m working, okay?”
He knew how it worked and didn’t protest. Instead he lifted a hand to gently guide a lock of wind tousled brown hair back behind her ear.
“You are working,” he informed her, laconic. “You’ll show me where he stayed?”
“Sure,” she replied, the leather of her jacket creaking as she shrugged. She flicked the butt of her cigarette backwards and into the fountain, and it expired in a soft hiss. Winding her arm through his, she led him away across the cobblestones and deeper into the city. The girl didn’t press him for conversation. Smart little thing knew when it was better not to know, but he had questions for her, and couldn’t let opportunity slip by without asking.
“Did you give a sh** about him?” He frowned, wishing he had Sam’s heat to share, instead of the feeble warmth his body put out.
“Do you think I’d be taking you if I did?” she countered with a wry glance his way. The point was blunt enough that he didn’t doubt her honesty, but she went on anyway. “He paid well, he didn’t rough me up, the place is clean.”
“A real gentleman,” Mesteno murmured, biting back a droll comment about how few of those Rhy’din seemed to harbour.
“Sure,” she replied nonchalantly, and he wondered if she was just fond of the word, or truly couldn’t have cared less about the discussion. “I recognise you from the photos he had. The hair,” she smiled, reaching across to catch his between her fingers as if they were scissors, “it’s hard to forget.”
“And what were you doing snooping in his photos, Mira?” he asked her, noting that her smile was no more innocent than her profession. She had her secrets, wasn’t downtrodden by the sex trade she worked.
The girl steered him around a corner, and brought him to a sharp halt in front of a modest looking apartment building. Little balconies with wrought iron railings. Small but respectable. She was looking up, towards the top floor with her blue eyes full of starlight. “I wasn’t snooping. He’d go talk on the phone for ages. Didn’t care if I wandered around. They were just there on his desk.” She tugged at his arm again to draw him onwards towards the door that led into the lobby. He half expected to have to pick the lock, but she brought out a narrow piece of plastic - a key card - and whisked it through to open up for them. “He didn’t like having to come down for me,” she informed him, before shoving her way inside, to hell with waiting for him to open it for her.
-----------------------------------
Alistair had been precise and uncompromisingly English, his manners not contrived but perfectly spontaneous. When Mesteno hadn’t been threatened by him, or double-crossing him, he’d actually liked him. Killing him had not been something he’d plotted, nothing more than an unfortunate, unpredictable turn of events in fact. Now he stood in the man’s bedroom, eyes searching, while Mira danced barefoot in the living room, bulky headphones clamped over her ears and eyes closed as if she were on some private high.
There was little in the way of anything personal. No pictures on the wall, no ornamentation that wasn’t practical, and even the bed itself was shunted to the side, leaving more space for the piano black desk and the cabinets towering to either side of it. The high backed leather chair was the only piece of furniture to show any wear, a depression in the seat that left Mesteno picturing him sat there for hours, puzzling over work. Work that his colleagues would have approved of though, or work he was doing on the sly, collaborating with Rhy’din’s dangerous, living refuse? People like him.
There was no computer to access - Alistair being smart, because saving his work to one was almost an open invitation for someone to hack his files, in this city - so Mesteno set to work on the cabinets, coaxing open locks and rifling through the paperwork with hands gloved. Patience had never been one of his virtues, and the longer he went without finding anything of relevance, the more pronounced his agitation became, until he had to pull away, snarling like a wolf just to breathe, brush himself off and begin anew.
“Found what you were looking for?” Mira asked him, knuckling a cigarette again, jacket discarded somewhere and kohl artlessly smudged around her eyes. He caught a glimpse of what Alistair had found so attractive about her for the briefest of moments, then she broke the spell by moving from the doorway, approaching him with that smile again.
“No,” he replied flatly, ignoring her until she closed her hands over his shoulders and leaned down to match his crouch, flashing more flesh down the neckline of her dress than was decent. His temper flared again, and he was reaching to pry her fingers away, frowning until he saw her tip her head, indicating away from the desk.
“I had a lot of time to wander,” she reminded him.
Alistair’s hiding places were unconventional, discreet, and Mira could have played the braggart rightfully if she’d been the sort to speak no more than a handful of words. Mesteno wondered if the Englishman ever had an inkling that he’d underestimated the girl, found himself recalling her at the fountain examining the coins for no other reason than curiosity, and hooked an arm about her sharply boned shoulders to squeeze gratefully.
Mira allowed it with a carefully crafted smile. Approval meant nothing to her. She stayed while Mesteno absorbed the contents of Alistair’s work, voraciously examining the photographic evidence, dozens of shots he’d never even mentioned.
There Mesteno was at the canals, blissfully ignorant of the camera, while a distant figure trailed behind, nondescript and blurred. Another photo, this time where he was out of focus and the man in pursuit’s features were more sharply depicted. Familiar. Another series from the docks, and another in the Market Square, though it was not always the same man. Here, a woman instead. And there, the large man with only one eye, not nearly so inconspicuous as his fellows.
“He looks like you,” Mira’s voice from over his shoulder, legs in their torn fishnets crossed at the ankles and arms folded.
“The f*** are you talking about?” he asked her, unintentionally sharp. He’d almost forgotten she was there. Too damn quiet.
She pointed with a finger tipped with a darkly painted nail, the polish chipped. “Him. You don’t think so?”
Incredulous, he stared at the shot she’d indicated, lifting it from amongst the others to examine the features of the one eyed man. Dark red hair faded with age, tall and built big, but the angles of his face were heavy at the jaw, pronounced at the cheekbone. A certain cruelty to his mouth which hinted at a parity, even if the fullness of his own lips did not match the narrow lines of this stranger’s.
“Don’t you think?” Mira asked him again. Damn that smile.
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Sunday April 10th, 2011
Last summer, Sam told me he’d stray when the rains came. I accepted it because surviving a winter when the heat of the Dry is so easy to reach for instead seemed like unnecessary masochism. I didn’t like the idea, knew I’d miss him like he’d torn a piece of something dark and beating out of me, but I never thought he’d take my casually suggested request that he stick around seriously.
Next I knew we were hunting for property for him, and I wondered if I’d done wrong. Thought maybe I’d hobbled him. It didn’t stop me looking though, selfishly.
He settled on a farm. The Farm, is how I think of it, like it’s the only fucking one in Rhy’Din. I don’t live there with him, I keep Sanctuary and always will, but I come and go like I’ve a right to it, the same way I used to with Willows Walk, and the whole damn herd has moved out of the livery yard to take up space in his stables. The mares he picked out will be dropping foals anytime soon, and knowing my luck the damned, awkward animals are gonna wait until I’m all dressed up to go out to work for the Don, but I don’t mind. It’s something I want to be a part of, and when he needs my help he’ll have it.
This time last year, I parted ways with Tanziel. It was amicable, uncomplicated. I’m grateful for that, and for four years of learning how to do things wrong.
Twelve months later and it feels like I’ve had a damn epiphany. His name is Sam.
For Valentines we went out into the desert, and there were no expensive gifts, just time between us spent perfectly; riding out beneath an unforgiving sun, dirt and blood and sweat, explorers for a day. I never fail to learn when I am with him. There’s a place out there that’s ‘ours’, moulded by nature rather than human influence.
Yesterday we attended a Hanami at the Zen gardens, one of Riley’s projects (ever the busy bee, that Jaguar) and Sam, dislike of social events aside, seemed almost content to be there. I’ve given up waiting for him to do something I’ll disapprove of (in private as well as in public) and to see him on decent terms with said Hostess and David made me glad we’d shown our faces, even if only long enough to dance and mutually declare the food inedible.
Speaking of David, I’d an unexpected request to meet him a few weeks ago - we settled on the old Watch House as a meeting point, much to my amusement. I don’t know whether all the Watch Houses are in as poor a state as that one, but it was like a f****** ghost town. Mixed feelings over that, since the Law has never been a friend to me, but their intentions were more often than not, good ones. I refrained from rubbing David’s face in their failure. I helped him find a puppy for his wife instead. She seemed pleased.
Less successful, are my efforts at this Lucid Dreaming. I’m accustomed to failing where I’m unable to rely on innate skills or those more physical, so that I can only partially bend my dreams to my will came as no surprise. The dreams still rise up and take me by surprise, and no set clock will wake me once I’m trapped in one. I can subtly change the memories that surface within them though, to keep them from reaching any grisly finale. Waking is more difficult. Cold sweats and clammy sheets, always when Sam is not there to witness them. Aoife though, I invited her in, because I wanted to see if I could kick her out.
That didn’t work either, though that seems not to be entirely my fault, but an outside influence. A man I’ve not met who seems to have stolen her abilities. It left her stranded in my head instead of her being able to wake the both of us, and I resorted to desperate measures to escape it. I dragged her into Torrita. I’m glad we woke then, for safe though it is, it’s a private place, and she’s no need to know my comforts as well as my weaknesses.
Bishop showed up when I last saw her. Invited himself to the table where we were talking and I wanted to take him apart. For no other reason than what he did to Sam. Sam might have killed him, but so far as I’m concerned he can die a thousand times over before he’s paid his dues.
Beneath all of this, I’ve the information Mira helped me retrieve to search through for clues. Alistair held back much, and I’m daunted by it all. I’m daunted by having to explain it to Sam. One day. When I know what the hell it is I’m doing.
- M
Last summer, Sam told me he’d stray when the rains came. I accepted it because surviving a winter when the heat of the Dry is so easy to reach for instead seemed like unnecessary masochism. I didn’t like the idea, knew I’d miss him like he’d torn a piece of something dark and beating out of me, but I never thought he’d take my casually suggested request that he stick around seriously.
Next I knew we were hunting for property for him, and I wondered if I’d done wrong. Thought maybe I’d hobbled him. It didn’t stop me looking though, selfishly.
He settled on a farm. The Farm, is how I think of it, like it’s the only fucking one in Rhy’Din. I don’t live there with him, I keep Sanctuary and always will, but I come and go like I’ve a right to it, the same way I used to with Willows Walk, and the whole damn herd has moved out of the livery yard to take up space in his stables. The mares he picked out will be dropping foals anytime soon, and knowing my luck the damned, awkward animals are gonna wait until I’m all dressed up to go out to work for the Don, but I don’t mind. It’s something I want to be a part of, and when he needs my help he’ll have it.
This time last year, I parted ways with Tanziel. It was amicable, uncomplicated. I’m grateful for that, and for four years of learning how to do things wrong.
Twelve months later and it feels like I’ve had a damn epiphany. His name is Sam.
For Valentines we went out into the desert, and there were no expensive gifts, just time between us spent perfectly; riding out beneath an unforgiving sun, dirt and blood and sweat, explorers for a day. I never fail to learn when I am with him. There’s a place out there that’s ‘ours’, moulded by nature rather than human influence.
Yesterday we attended a Hanami at the Zen gardens, one of Riley’s projects (ever the busy bee, that Jaguar) and Sam, dislike of social events aside, seemed almost content to be there. I’ve given up waiting for him to do something I’ll disapprove of (in private as well as in public) and to see him on decent terms with said Hostess and David made me glad we’d shown our faces, even if only long enough to dance and mutually declare the food inedible.
Speaking of David, I’d an unexpected request to meet him a few weeks ago - we settled on the old Watch House as a meeting point, much to my amusement. I don’t know whether all the Watch Houses are in as poor a state as that one, but it was like a f****** ghost town. Mixed feelings over that, since the Law has never been a friend to me, but their intentions were more often than not, good ones. I refrained from rubbing David’s face in their failure. I helped him find a puppy for his wife instead. She seemed pleased.
Less successful, are my efforts at this Lucid Dreaming. I’m accustomed to failing where I’m unable to rely on innate skills or those more physical, so that I can only partially bend my dreams to my will came as no surprise. The dreams still rise up and take me by surprise, and no set clock will wake me once I’m trapped in one. I can subtly change the memories that surface within them though, to keep them from reaching any grisly finale. Waking is more difficult. Cold sweats and clammy sheets, always when Sam is not there to witness them. Aoife though, I invited her in, because I wanted to see if I could kick her out.
That didn’t work either, though that seems not to be entirely my fault, but an outside influence. A man I’ve not met who seems to have stolen her abilities. It left her stranded in my head instead of her being able to wake the both of us, and I resorted to desperate measures to escape it. I dragged her into Torrita. I’m glad we woke then, for safe though it is, it’s a private place, and she’s no need to know my comforts as well as my weaknesses.
Bishop showed up when I last saw her. Invited himself to the table where we were talking and I wanted to take him apart. For no other reason than what he did to Sam. Sam might have killed him, but so far as I’m concerned he can die a thousand times over before he’s paid his dues.
Beneath all of this, I’ve the information Mira helped me retrieve to search through for clues. Alistair held back much, and I’m daunted by it all. I’m daunted by having to explain it to Sam. One day. When I know what the hell it is I’m doing.
- M
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Wednesday May 4th, 2011
Things came to a head with Aoife after another unpleasant development. I wish I’d never sought her out. How stupid to warn her off Sam, when he’s quite capable of defending himself. That was when I first met her. Until then she’d just been this mouse of a girl I’d observed in the company of Judah Bishop while Salvador was still under suspicion of murder. If I’d stayed away, my sleep would be my own now.
This ‘Fairweather’ man who stole her ability to influence my dreaming turned out to be the puppet of something else. Not that she’d warned me of that. I didn’t find out until after a big motherfucker of a spider dropped on my head, size of a horse.
At what point do you forget to tell someone about a giant spider? If things had turned out differently I might have suspected she’d told me to meet her there on purpose, a ‘kill two birds with one stone’ thing but I’m still here and breathing, and when the spider and I were done poking holes in each other, it was her that picked up my sword, stood over me even and finished the bastard off.
I’m not entirely sure of the details, because I passed out, but I woke up in this sleazy motel, and she told me it was Bishop that fixed me. Or at least I figure it was him, and that’s a bitch too, because now I owe him, when what I really want to do is slice him up into really, really small pieces and feed them to Bear.
Apparently, there’s some fire, fertility, spring-fling festival every year called 'Beltane' that I knew nothing about. Some smartass nominated me for May Queen, and when I find out who they are, I will take great pleasure in making their lives miserable. It’s had this troupe of teenage girls following me around town (and oh God what is that metal thing on that ones face?!) and they found me at the lighting of the bonfires. I think they were possibly more terrifying than the giant spider. On a positive note, I didn’t win, which is a good thing because I never showed up for the crowning, but apparently I was the prince.
Stupid crown. I might make Sam wear it.
- M
Things came to a head with Aoife after another unpleasant development. I wish I’d never sought her out. How stupid to warn her off Sam, when he’s quite capable of defending himself. That was when I first met her. Until then she’d just been this mouse of a girl I’d observed in the company of Judah Bishop while Salvador was still under suspicion of murder. If I’d stayed away, my sleep would be my own now.
This ‘Fairweather’ man who stole her ability to influence my dreaming turned out to be the puppet of something else. Not that she’d warned me of that. I didn’t find out until after a big motherfucker of a spider dropped on my head, size of a horse.
At what point do you forget to tell someone about a giant spider? If things had turned out differently I might have suspected she’d told me to meet her there on purpose, a ‘kill two birds with one stone’ thing but I’m still here and breathing, and when the spider and I were done poking holes in each other, it was her that picked up my sword, stood over me even and finished the bastard off.
I’m not entirely sure of the details, because I passed out, but I woke up in this sleazy motel, and she told me it was Bishop that fixed me. Or at least I figure it was him, and that’s a bitch too, because now I owe him, when what I really want to do is slice him up into really, really small pieces and feed them to Bear.
Apparently, there’s some fire, fertility, spring-fling festival every year called 'Beltane' that I knew nothing about. Some smartass nominated me for May Queen, and when I find out who they are, I will take great pleasure in making their lives miserable. It’s had this troupe of teenage girls following me around town (and oh God what is that metal thing on that ones face?!) and they found me at the lighting of the bonfires. I think they were possibly more terrifying than the giant spider. On a positive note, I didn’t win, which is a good thing because I never showed up for the crowning, but apparently I was the prince.
Stupid crown. I might make Sam wear it.
- M
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Friday May 20th, 2011
Sometimes he dreamt of skin beneath his fingers, matte satin to the touch with that delicate, insubstantial feel that came of slumbered remembering. The heat beneath it was a more sharply etched memory, one his subconscious recalled well; like the welcome scald of a bath drawn too hot. It saw him splay his fingers wide to encompass more of the flesh he felt with such vagueness. The flat, sculpted edge of a hip bone lacking even the most remote of curves, entirely masculine. The arch of a rib and its inward sweep towards a spine crookedly adorned with the scars of indigenous rite.
Luna’s light cast the world in argent tones, stealing away saturation which might have meant the skin he explored was any colour, but he knew of whom he dreamed. Knew that in the light of day it was darker even than his own, not nearly so cluttered a canvas.
It was usually about the point that he touched his lips to the slope of a shoulder with unstudied reverence that clarity rudely interrupted. Lucid dreaming, Bjorn had called it, as he stooped over the page, pencil sweeping with the habitual grace of an artist at work as he sketched out diagrams, explained the intricacies of how it might be accomplished.
Mesteno had been a willing student, his alacrity sadly greater than his skill in the end. The fruit of his efforts had been too little to keep the Dreamwalker from seeing things, to push her out. It was ironic that now his labours tumbled him into jarring awareness in repeats of the visions she’d already played witness to.
And so he knew it was coming, the terrible inclusion of the lacerations which had split his lover’s flesh like overripe fruit. The blood which flowed and flowed like an endless wellspring. It was darkly red and glinting, despite the decolourised theme of the rest of the dream. As if his brain were too familiar with the particulars of blood to ever render it in greyscale. Just a dream, he would tell himself as he helplessly relived it, almost too stricken by the horror of it to wake himself.
It was most often upon waking from one of these episodes (and in his own bed, rather than the desert man’s - if a mattress upon the floor could be called such) that he stubbornly, petulantly sought to steel himself against dwelling on the unwelcome aftershocks. A fear which haunted him, prickling with too many questions.
The easiest way might have been to find Samiel, to uncompromisingly stamp the reality of his life into his own stupid, uncooperative brain by being as brutally physical as he could. His lover was ever accommodating, more like to goad him into further violence than protest his appetites, but it was not to Sam that he went. Not when he might be tempted to confess his dreams and appear the vulnerable, fractured boy. Better to forge his self-reliance all the more strongly in some other endeavour.
Of late, it had been to submerge himself in a years old mystery, recently refreshed thanks to the assistance of an intriguing little harlot who went by the name of Mira.
With the dream fading like sunspots on his retinas, his skin clammy beneath a thin sheen of sweat, he set his eyes on the sprawling collage of text and imagery he’d pinned up on one wall. It was a jumble of maps and photographs, haphazard notes and arrows pointing here, there, everywhere. It loomed tall from floor to ceiling, dozens of puzzle pieces and all of them refusing to fit, as if someone had taken a handful of little wooden pieces from myriad boxes and gestured, insisting, there, make something of it if you can. It was the jigsaw from hell.
Years ago, he’d gone missing. He’d lost two weeks and stumbled back into the arms of loved ones with a yawning gap in his memory, a scar upon his calf too clearly and intricately patterned to have been anything but deliberate and a note wedged in the pocket of his jeans. ‘Soon we’ll meet,’ it had promised.
He waited still for this anonymous kidnapper to step forward, but no one ever had. Instead he’d been pursued across the city, but never accosted. Haunted by a group of three he’d never managed to track down. He could see two of them more clearly than the third. A woman - the magic user. The tall, red haired man with the missing eye.
He looks like you, Mira had said. Don’t you think?
The memory of that blithely made remark still rankled, and he caught himself squinting belligerently at the photo she’d been referring to. One of many he’d pilfered from dead Alistair’s apartment. He’d half convinced himself that he was seeing the resemblance out of desperation. After all, his people did not have families, and no parent ever knew their own child in Amhinata - no relative ever knew of shared blood. It could not be that this mutilated man was following because of some lost link.
The second man was more elusive. He followed at a greater distance, never more than a man-shaped smudge, as adept at vanishing into a crowd as Mesteno himself. He stood with a finger accusingly pressed to the photograph, scowling as it as if by some untouched skill he might penetrate the housing of his soul until it bled out helplessly through a million pin-prick pores.
Half an hour passed, and it seemed very much as if nothing would ever fit. No epiphany came of his studious concentration, only a sense of failure which gnawed at his pride. He’d exchanged the dream fear for an ego knock, an unsatisfactory outcome.
Sneering in self-reprimand, he padded barefoot to where his jeans were pooled on the bedroom floor, foregoing underwear, anything clean, even a shower. He’d just rob Sam of something less rumpled when he reached the Farm, he’d decided. Shower later, when the necessary chores of an efficiently run stable had been taken care of.
He was stalking past the sprawling map work on the wall when he spotted it. A handsome face succumbing to middle years, familiar yet not. Just beyond his own shoulder in another snapshot he’d been unaware had even been taken. He tore it down, careless of the rip the pin but in its upper corner and stared intently. Familiar, yes. He’d known this man’s name once.
An old trick?
An old flame?
“Who the fuck're you?” he murmured, lips gently slack. This at least, could not be coincidence.
Sometimes he dreamt of skin beneath his fingers, matte satin to the touch with that delicate, insubstantial feel that came of slumbered remembering. The heat beneath it was a more sharply etched memory, one his subconscious recalled well; like the welcome scald of a bath drawn too hot. It saw him splay his fingers wide to encompass more of the flesh he felt with such vagueness. The flat, sculpted edge of a hip bone lacking even the most remote of curves, entirely masculine. The arch of a rib and its inward sweep towards a spine crookedly adorned with the scars of indigenous rite.
Luna’s light cast the world in argent tones, stealing away saturation which might have meant the skin he explored was any colour, but he knew of whom he dreamed. Knew that in the light of day it was darker even than his own, not nearly so cluttered a canvas.
It was usually about the point that he touched his lips to the slope of a shoulder with unstudied reverence that clarity rudely interrupted. Lucid dreaming, Bjorn had called it, as he stooped over the page, pencil sweeping with the habitual grace of an artist at work as he sketched out diagrams, explained the intricacies of how it might be accomplished.
Mesteno had been a willing student, his alacrity sadly greater than his skill in the end. The fruit of his efforts had been too little to keep the Dreamwalker from seeing things, to push her out. It was ironic that now his labours tumbled him into jarring awareness in repeats of the visions she’d already played witness to.
And so he knew it was coming, the terrible inclusion of the lacerations which had split his lover’s flesh like overripe fruit. The blood which flowed and flowed like an endless wellspring. It was darkly red and glinting, despite the decolourised theme of the rest of the dream. As if his brain were too familiar with the particulars of blood to ever render it in greyscale. Just a dream, he would tell himself as he helplessly relived it, almost too stricken by the horror of it to wake himself.
It was most often upon waking from one of these episodes (and in his own bed, rather than the desert man’s - if a mattress upon the floor could be called such) that he stubbornly, petulantly sought to steel himself against dwelling on the unwelcome aftershocks. A fear which haunted him, prickling with too many questions.
The easiest way might have been to find Samiel, to uncompromisingly stamp the reality of his life into his own stupid, uncooperative brain by being as brutally physical as he could. His lover was ever accommodating, more like to goad him into further violence than protest his appetites, but it was not to Sam that he went. Not when he might be tempted to confess his dreams and appear the vulnerable, fractured boy. Better to forge his self-reliance all the more strongly in some other endeavour.
Of late, it had been to submerge himself in a years old mystery, recently refreshed thanks to the assistance of an intriguing little harlot who went by the name of Mira.
With the dream fading like sunspots on his retinas, his skin clammy beneath a thin sheen of sweat, he set his eyes on the sprawling collage of text and imagery he’d pinned up on one wall. It was a jumble of maps and photographs, haphazard notes and arrows pointing here, there, everywhere. It loomed tall from floor to ceiling, dozens of puzzle pieces and all of them refusing to fit, as if someone had taken a handful of little wooden pieces from myriad boxes and gestured, insisting, there, make something of it if you can. It was the jigsaw from hell.
Years ago, he’d gone missing. He’d lost two weeks and stumbled back into the arms of loved ones with a yawning gap in his memory, a scar upon his calf too clearly and intricately patterned to have been anything but deliberate and a note wedged in the pocket of his jeans. ‘Soon we’ll meet,’ it had promised.
He waited still for this anonymous kidnapper to step forward, but no one ever had. Instead he’d been pursued across the city, but never accosted. Haunted by a group of three he’d never managed to track down. He could see two of them more clearly than the third. A woman - the magic user. The tall, red haired man with the missing eye.
He looks like you, Mira had said. Don’t you think?
The memory of that blithely made remark still rankled, and he caught himself squinting belligerently at the photo she’d been referring to. One of many he’d pilfered from dead Alistair’s apartment. He’d half convinced himself that he was seeing the resemblance out of desperation. After all, his people did not have families, and no parent ever knew their own child in Amhinata - no relative ever knew of shared blood. It could not be that this mutilated man was following because of some lost link.
The second man was more elusive. He followed at a greater distance, never more than a man-shaped smudge, as adept at vanishing into a crowd as Mesteno himself. He stood with a finger accusingly pressed to the photograph, scowling as it as if by some untouched skill he might penetrate the housing of his soul until it bled out helplessly through a million pin-prick pores.
Half an hour passed, and it seemed very much as if nothing would ever fit. No epiphany came of his studious concentration, only a sense of failure which gnawed at his pride. He’d exchanged the dream fear for an ego knock, an unsatisfactory outcome.
Sneering in self-reprimand, he padded barefoot to where his jeans were pooled on the bedroom floor, foregoing underwear, anything clean, even a shower. He’d just rob Sam of something less rumpled when he reached the Farm, he’d decided. Shower later, when the necessary chores of an efficiently run stable had been taken care of.
He was stalking past the sprawling map work on the wall when he spotted it. A handsome face succumbing to middle years, familiar yet not. Just beyond his own shoulder in another snapshot he’d been unaware had even been taken. He tore it down, careless of the rip the pin but in its upper corner and stared intently. Familiar, yes. He’d known this man’s name once.
An old trick?
An old flame?
“Who the fuck're you?” he murmured, lips gently slack. This at least, could not be coincidence.
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Monday May 16th, 2011
Facta non verba. Deeds not words.
Rhy’Din is full of men who fail to grasp such a simple thing. How do they expect to be taken seriously when they yap like little dogs and flash their pretty teeth but ultimately do nothing? There are those who think they’ve something more to offer, strive for public approval, and ultimately fall flat.
I suspect that every man or woman who stood wishing to be elected for Governor will prove disappointing. What chance have they when the people have no more faith in them than they had in the Watch? What chance have they when they’ve no authority, when the balance of power shifts in ways so unpredictable they cannot possibly hope to influence anything but a trifling matter here or there? There is too much chaos for order. We like it that way.
We’re here because there’s conflict and it tastes like something illicit, too addictive to walk away from. If we wanted order, we’d be packing our bags for Earth. Let the vigilantes do things their way. Let the heroes with a taste for adventure swim with the sharks for as long as they’re able before they’re swallowed up, or tainted. No one ever stays pure and white for long.
I watched the debates with Fury beside me. I’ve always liked Fury, she’s unapologetically austere, won’t mince words. We’re nothing at all alike, and yet she’s one of the few pleasant reminders I have of the days when her kind were a frequent presence. One day I’ll sit down and share a drink with her.
I met a shadow yesterday. He was full of teeth and appetite. A secret eater he says, and naturally I couldn’t feed him. Just probed to see whether an eater of secrets might occasionally bleed one out. I learned many things from him (and - rudely according to a certain feline! - tested a theory) for an afternoon spent away from Sam, it was acceptable. Until the being he is anchored to arrived and proceeded to turn his aristocratic nose up at his lover’s company.
That might in part be my fault. I stole away some prey from him only a few nights prior, but any predator worth being wary of should be more careful to take his meal further than the damned porch. Amateurs. I suppose he felt hard done by, because he lamented his lack of fun, irked his shadow and left like a puffed up rooster minutes later.
This often seems to be the way of rich men, and I’ve known many. A few at best are able to shirk the stereotypes they seem to strive for - Vadriel and his tender heart, Marius Vega who is - despite being a modern day prince, a badass despite his peacock ways. Gideon, as I learned his name to be, judged a book by it’s cover and assumed I was some unintelligent, drunken member of the great unwashed I’m sure…but I might have assisted him a little in that assessment. Let a man see what he wants, I’d hate to disappoint when they’ve such high expectations. And here we come full circle. His vague threats…
Facta non verba. Too many little dogs.
- M
Facta non verba. Deeds not words.
Rhy’Din is full of men who fail to grasp such a simple thing. How do they expect to be taken seriously when they yap like little dogs and flash their pretty teeth but ultimately do nothing? There are those who think they’ve something more to offer, strive for public approval, and ultimately fall flat.
I suspect that every man or woman who stood wishing to be elected for Governor will prove disappointing. What chance have they when the people have no more faith in them than they had in the Watch? What chance have they when they’ve no authority, when the balance of power shifts in ways so unpredictable they cannot possibly hope to influence anything but a trifling matter here or there? There is too much chaos for order. We like it that way.
We’re here because there’s conflict and it tastes like something illicit, too addictive to walk away from. If we wanted order, we’d be packing our bags for Earth. Let the vigilantes do things their way. Let the heroes with a taste for adventure swim with the sharks for as long as they’re able before they’re swallowed up, or tainted. No one ever stays pure and white for long.
I watched the debates with Fury beside me. I’ve always liked Fury, she’s unapologetically austere, won’t mince words. We’re nothing at all alike, and yet she’s one of the few pleasant reminders I have of the days when her kind were a frequent presence. One day I’ll sit down and share a drink with her.
I met a shadow yesterday. He was full of teeth and appetite. A secret eater he says, and naturally I couldn’t feed him. Just probed to see whether an eater of secrets might occasionally bleed one out. I learned many things from him (and - rudely according to a certain feline! - tested a theory) for an afternoon spent away from Sam, it was acceptable. Until the being he is anchored to arrived and proceeded to turn his aristocratic nose up at his lover’s company.
That might in part be my fault. I stole away some prey from him only a few nights prior, but any predator worth being wary of should be more careful to take his meal further than the damned porch. Amateurs. I suppose he felt hard done by, because he lamented his lack of fun, irked his shadow and left like a puffed up rooster minutes later.
This often seems to be the way of rich men, and I’ve known many. A few at best are able to shirk the stereotypes they seem to strive for - Vadriel and his tender heart, Marius Vega who is - despite being a modern day prince, a badass despite his peacock ways. Gideon, as I learned his name to be, judged a book by it’s cover and assumed I was some unintelligent, drunken member of the great unwashed I’m sure…but I might have assisted him a little in that assessment. Let a man see what he wants, I’d hate to disappoint when they’ve such high expectations. And here we come full circle. His vague threats…
Facta non verba. Too many little dogs.
- M
Re: Insights (Volume I)
[Adapted from live play. Thanks to Aoife's writer!]
Saturday June 18th, 2011
Aoife had found a note as promised, day and time, and slipped from the loft to a room in a place, someplace forgotten. Sleep did not come easy.
For Mesteno it arrived for Mesteno after a healthy dose of liquor. The gently soporific effect combined with the lulling, June heat had been all he needed to alleviate the day's tensions to the point that he could drift off untroubled. He lay on his side on a matted, sheepskin rug. It was the only thing in his living room, aside from books stacked tall - ancient, crumbling things in the Latin tongue - and sheet music screwed angrily into balls, cast aside when his inspiration had failed him mid-composition.
A short distance away, a sleek, white cat with eyes like pale winter skies observed with malaise. If ever an animal had a sixth sense...
Lucid dreaming forgotten for this particular encounter, his mind tumbled towards blackness, with only snatches of dream-images surfacing on his descent. For a Dreamwalker, that must be terribly confusing. A headlong plummet towards nothing.
Nothing had a way of finding Aoife. They'd become fast friends as of late. But nothing tends to fall apart into pieces sometimes, fractured images too scattered to place back together. In dreams like that, the wrong step was dangerous. But the path he'd left for her was there, tainted with the smell of alcohol. Here, in this world, it affected the mind and the chain of events and the meaning behind the words. Not all is as it seems. So, she could only wait until Mesteno's mind landed after the fall.
It seemed an eternity that he tumbled, willingly drawn into an unfathomable abyss. It was warm however, not the breath stealing, frigid rush of air which made falls so terrifying, and there was no impact to shatter him when at last he landed in the blurred outlines of a world yet to clarify.
It's edges and colours remained foggy, the sounds dimmed as if behind a glass screen. What materialised was a familiar world; a narrow alley in Rhy'Din's docks, a clear stretch of sky visible above between the rooftops of old warehouses leaning towards one another. Small, dark figures huddled amongst refuse, beneath newspapers and against one another. Some were too still to be living. The winter had taken them. Far away at the other end of the alley, a pack of dogs were tearing into one such specimen, squabbling over flesh lacking any malleable qualities. Rigor mortis. No decay set in to soften. Not yet.
Alleys had a way of hiding secrets. If there were any ever to had, this was the place to lay them. The stench of low tide blended with the smells seeping from the walls and the ground making confusing scents and covering them up. Paper rustled with a breath that snuck in, though the sound was filtered behind that invisible screen.
That movement of air also took a few black-blue gatherings of hair with it, teased from the shoulder of the Dreamwalker who was pressed back against the wall of one of the buildings. She avoided the dogs and their last supper. At least it wasn't raining.
No rain. But where the ground was pockmarked with hollows and gullies, rainwater had gathered into stagnant puddles. The moisture glistened on the brickwork, moss and clinging, tenacious plants were growing into the mortar, and a steady drip, drip from broken guttering overhead seemed to have been remembered more clearly than the sounds of the hungry mutts in the distance.
Amongst the many huddled on the damp, numbing ground, were a familiar pair. A doll of a child, so tenderly young, tucked in close against a youth in his adolescence. Thirteen perhaps, but tall. Tall but slender as willow limbs. Starved. Hollow cheeked. He'd curled his abjectly thin frame into a concave barrier to keep the chill creeping up the alley away from the little one he guarded. They both lay with their eyes wide open, unwillingly awake. Too cold to sleep.
Everything else was smothered except the dripping. A constant beat, one-two...one-two...one-two...into the puddle blow; like the restless fingers that tapped the same on the wall behind her. It spidered out in to thin rivulets that spread like fingers seeking to create a city. Eyes were the window to the soul some said. Two sets of too wide ones stood out from the shadows and darkness. Recognition was slow, the path here had been less than...appealing. They weren't but ten feet from Aoife's own, just across the narrow gap.
When Aoife had met the child before, the dream had been lucid. Mesteno had sat in a basement, swarming with terrified children, but he'd not been one of them. And now, unprepared and with an utter lack of control over where his subconscious chose to take him, he didn't even realise that they were being observed. Aoife might have been a shadow upon the wall. Another huddled figure. The reaper come to take him...and didn't he look ready?
While the little girl tucked against him watched the night with fierce defiance in the soft features of her face, her exhausted guardian looked as if he might not make the night. As if all he'd left to give her was what warmth his malnourished body produced.
"I hate you," the girl spoke, the resentment in her tone a childish accusation meant to sting, rather than any true sentiment.
Mesteno, behind her, did not so much as flinch. It was a whip he'd become numb to.
Aoife hadn't seen him this young in a while, but it didn't take long to place those eyes where they belonged, in the face of a soon to be Sadist. The little girl though, last she'd seen, had been the picture of calm among the many that rushed at exits echoed by the whimpers of fear. Like she knew, and she had because she'd spoken those words of truth to Aoife when Mesteno had disappeared among the shadows. She learned young, that girl, to taunt the boy into responding. She murmured from her shadows through the space that separated them.
"Hate is quite a burden to bear for such a young girl. It injures the hater more than the hated."
The boy's eyes rolled to fix upon Aoife. They'd none of the nocturnal gleam they possessed in the here and now, but they were the very same amber-gold. The shrewd intellect had been stamped out by the glassiness of fatigue, even his blinks lethargic. No recognition.
Here Aoife was only a stranger, and yet her words interrupted a memory, threatened to bring the cogs of it screeching to a halt as the subconscious struggled to make heads or tails of the intrusion.
"I hate you," the little girl repeated, a deja-vu instance, surreal. Like a section of film replaying itself for the benefit of its audience. "I want to go back!" If she'd not been curled up, her little foot might have stamped demandingly.
In a dream, the mind functions more quickly, therefore everything seems to feel more slow. The world is built by the Dreamwalker and the dreaming, but the dreamer's mind populates it. The subconscious recognizes when something doesn't belong; a foreign nature. Aoife did not belong here, the mind of the boy did not know her and would never remember. She swept the area with a look, wondering how she was supposed to help him when he wouldn't even know what he needed help with. The edges of the dream flickered, turned into smoke and hovered like mist.
The girl quietened again, the beginnings of what had become a world class tirade, a miserable pursuit and eventually, a sickening finale resulting in her demise stalled by Aoife's interference.
The Dreamwalker's control of Mesteno's mental landscape seemed to return some vitality to the boy, who watched the drifting smoke as if he expected some new nightmare to be spawned from it. The little girl seemed to fade by the tiniest of increments. The dogs ceased their snarling.
"Who are you?" The boy asked Aoife, speaking in the voice of the man he would become.
Sounds moved, shifted, and crashed. Remember those invisible walls? Like glass, they blocked them into that narrow space, a barrier meant to ease the unease of the mind. Concentration was key.
"A guest." She spoke as if she was invited to a ball, though there was no glitz and glamor to show for it. Her ease from the wall left an imprint there, right in the air that surrounded and the shadows that cooed. It held itself, a mold cast, before melting down into a splotch of gray, of the nothing that once was. She moved across, careful eyes and equal steps; she was barefoot. A glimpse of movement had her crouching down next to the waifish pair, the pretty little doll nothing but a shell of an outline. "Will you let me in?" A whisper to the boy, as if there were others to hear the words.
The teenager wound his arms tight around what had been the little girl. What had become nothing more than dirty blankets. He didn't seem to sense the loss of her though; that she had been there at all did not register. He sat up as Aoife left the wall behind and the world beyond her, around them became a swamp of flat, non-colour. The sleeper's mind was too deeply submerged to make any sense of what had happened to the dream. Reflex ruled here, and Aoife did not look like any of the terrible figures from his past. She looked little older than a girl herself. Mutely, he nodded.
Remember that smoke at the very edge of the scene? The edges crept inwards, listening. Waiting. Aoife balanced on the balls of her feet, elbows on knees and hands dangling between, swaddled by too long sleeves. Always too long. "Where does she want to go back to?" Questions and answers co-mingled. The dream would know which was the right one.
She? He glanced down at the bundle of rags in his hands, the lack of her, and seemed to curl in on himself as if to escape something dark and awful. Whether it was what lay in front, or what he'd dragged her away from, both prospects terrified him. Both were things he clearly recalled, not missing patches of memory.
He shook his head, trembly as a fledgling tumbled from a nest. The smoke around them drawing close drew his eyes away from her, watching, and some scrap of his mind intrinsically linked to his 'work' shaped them into forms with more substance. People, animals, a riot of nonsense to distract from where the girl had wanted to return to.
She couldn't promise him that they wouldn't go there. The subconscious was a powerful thing and took control away from her like it was nothing but a fought over toy. He was playing with it, testing the edges and she had the inkling of a thought that he didn't even know. It wasn't the place itself he'd forgotten. A different route, perhaps. "Who is she?"
Her inkling was correct. Her questions panicked him into further distraction-making though, and he fumbled up off the ground that was so perfectly lacking in definition now, the blankets falling about his feet to melt away into the grey nothing.
"She...who do you mean? There's no one here. Where are we?" For he'd no way of identifying it now. There was no memory to match this. So rarely were his dreams of things he had not experienced, and finding himself in one, albeit unknowingly left him looking ready to bolt, even if those feeble limbs looked so slender that they'd snap with the effort.
She was slower to rise. How ironic it was, the situation they were in. She, the one who skittered on the edge of panic most of the time was the one approaching it from the opposite direction. The edges he toyed with were closing in. The docks shivered into nothing and the sky was a smoky haze. Her hands feathered to her sides, limp and unthreatening, as if Aoife could ever be threatening.
"In Rhy’Din. How did you get here?" She pressed a hair closer with nothing but a lean, a subtle shifting of her foot.
"Rhy'Din," he whispered as if he related the word to relief. For Rhy'Din he knew, and had known for his entire life.
Saturday June 18th, 2011
Aoife had found a note as promised, day and time, and slipped from the loft to a room in a place, someplace forgotten. Sleep did not come easy.
For Mesteno it arrived for Mesteno after a healthy dose of liquor. The gently soporific effect combined with the lulling, June heat had been all he needed to alleviate the day's tensions to the point that he could drift off untroubled. He lay on his side on a matted, sheepskin rug. It was the only thing in his living room, aside from books stacked tall - ancient, crumbling things in the Latin tongue - and sheet music screwed angrily into balls, cast aside when his inspiration had failed him mid-composition.
A short distance away, a sleek, white cat with eyes like pale winter skies observed with malaise. If ever an animal had a sixth sense...
Lucid dreaming forgotten for this particular encounter, his mind tumbled towards blackness, with only snatches of dream-images surfacing on his descent. For a Dreamwalker, that must be terribly confusing. A headlong plummet towards nothing.
Nothing had a way of finding Aoife. They'd become fast friends as of late. But nothing tends to fall apart into pieces sometimes, fractured images too scattered to place back together. In dreams like that, the wrong step was dangerous. But the path he'd left for her was there, tainted with the smell of alcohol. Here, in this world, it affected the mind and the chain of events and the meaning behind the words. Not all is as it seems. So, she could only wait until Mesteno's mind landed after the fall.
It seemed an eternity that he tumbled, willingly drawn into an unfathomable abyss. It was warm however, not the breath stealing, frigid rush of air which made falls so terrifying, and there was no impact to shatter him when at last he landed in the blurred outlines of a world yet to clarify.
It's edges and colours remained foggy, the sounds dimmed as if behind a glass screen. What materialised was a familiar world; a narrow alley in Rhy'Din's docks, a clear stretch of sky visible above between the rooftops of old warehouses leaning towards one another. Small, dark figures huddled amongst refuse, beneath newspapers and against one another. Some were too still to be living. The winter had taken them. Far away at the other end of the alley, a pack of dogs were tearing into one such specimen, squabbling over flesh lacking any malleable qualities. Rigor mortis. No decay set in to soften. Not yet.
Alleys had a way of hiding secrets. If there were any ever to had, this was the place to lay them. The stench of low tide blended with the smells seeping from the walls and the ground making confusing scents and covering them up. Paper rustled with a breath that snuck in, though the sound was filtered behind that invisible screen.
That movement of air also took a few black-blue gatherings of hair with it, teased from the shoulder of the Dreamwalker who was pressed back against the wall of one of the buildings. She avoided the dogs and their last supper. At least it wasn't raining.
No rain. But where the ground was pockmarked with hollows and gullies, rainwater had gathered into stagnant puddles. The moisture glistened on the brickwork, moss and clinging, tenacious plants were growing into the mortar, and a steady drip, drip from broken guttering overhead seemed to have been remembered more clearly than the sounds of the hungry mutts in the distance.
Amongst the many huddled on the damp, numbing ground, were a familiar pair. A doll of a child, so tenderly young, tucked in close against a youth in his adolescence. Thirteen perhaps, but tall. Tall but slender as willow limbs. Starved. Hollow cheeked. He'd curled his abjectly thin frame into a concave barrier to keep the chill creeping up the alley away from the little one he guarded. They both lay with their eyes wide open, unwillingly awake. Too cold to sleep.
Everything else was smothered except the dripping. A constant beat, one-two...one-two...one-two...into the puddle blow; like the restless fingers that tapped the same on the wall behind her. It spidered out in to thin rivulets that spread like fingers seeking to create a city. Eyes were the window to the soul some said. Two sets of too wide ones stood out from the shadows and darkness. Recognition was slow, the path here had been less than...appealing. They weren't but ten feet from Aoife's own, just across the narrow gap.
When Aoife had met the child before, the dream had been lucid. Mesteno had sat in a basement, swarming with terrified children, but he'd not been one of them. And now, unprepared and with an utter lack of control over where his subconscious chose to take him, he didn't even realise that they were being observed. Aoife might have been a shadow upon the wall. Another huddled figure. The reaper come to take him...and didn't he look ready?
While the little girl tucked against him watched the night with fierce defiance in the soft features of her face, her exhausted guardian looked as if he might not make the night. As if all he'd left to give her was what warmth his malnourished body produced.
"I hate you," the girl spoke, the resentment in her tone a childish accusation meant to sting, rather than any true sentiment.
Mesteno, behind her, did not so much as flinch. It was a whip he'd become numb to.
Aoife hadn't seen him this young in a while, but it didn't take long to place those eyes where they belonged, in the face of a soon to be Sadist. The little girl though, last she'd seen, had been the picture of calm among the many that rushed at exits echoed by the whimpers of fear. Like she knew, and she had because she'd spoken those words of truth to Aoife when Mesteno had disappeared among the shadows. She learned young, that girl, to taunt the boy into responding. She murmured from her shadows through the space that separated them.
"Hate is quite a burden to bear for such a young girl. It injures the hater more than the hated."
The boy's eyes rolled to fix upon Aoife. They'd none of the nocturnal gleam they possessed in the here and now, but they were the very same amber-gold. The shrewd intellect had been stamped out by the glassiness of fatigue, even his blinks lethargic. No recognition.
Here Aoife was only a stranger, and yet her words interrupted a memory, threatened to bring the cogs of it screeching to a halt as the subconscious struggled to make heads or tails of the intrusion.
"I hate you," the little girl repeated, a deja-vu instance, surreal. Like a section of film replaying itself for the benefit of its audience. "I want to go back!" If she'd not been curled up, her little foot might have stamped demandingly.
In a dream, the mind functions more quickly, therefore everything seems to feel more slow. The world is built by the Dreamwalker and the dreaming, but the dreamer's mind populates it. The subconscious recognizes when something doesn't belong; a foreign nature. Aoife did not belong here, the mind of the boy did not know her and would never remember. She swept the area with a look, wondering how she was supposed to help him when he wouldn't even know what he needed help with. The edges of the dream flickered, turned into smoke and hovered like mist.
The girl quietened again, the beginnings of what had become a world class tirade, a miserable pursuit and eventually, a sickening finale resulting in her demise stalled by Aoife's interference.
The Dreamwalker's control of Mesteno's mental landscape seemed to return some vitality to the boy, who watched the drifting smoke as if he expected some new nightmare to be spawned from it. The little girl seemed to fade by the tiniest of increments. The dogs ceased their snarling.
"Who are you?" The boy asked Aoife, speaking in the voice of the man he would become.
Sounds moved, shifted, and crashed. Remember those invisible walls? Like glass, they blocked them into that narrow space, a barrier meant to ease the unease of the mind. Concentration was key.
"A guest." She spoke as if she was invited to a ball, though there was no glitz and glamor to show for it. Her ease from the wall left an imprint there, right in the air that surrounded and the shadows that cooed. It held itself, a mold cast, before melting down into a splotch of gray, of the nothing that once was. She moved across, careful eyes and equal steps; she was barefoot. A glimpse of movement had her crouching down next to the waifish pair, the pretty little doll nothing but a shell of an outline. "Will you let me in?" A whisper to the boy, as if there were others to hear the words.
The teenager wound his arms tight around what had been the little girl. What had become nothing more than dirty blankets. He didn't seem to sense the loss of her though; that she had been there at all did not register. He sat up as Aoife left the wall behind and the world beyond her, around them became a swamp of flat, non-colour. The sleeper's mind was too deeply submerged to make any sense of what had happened to the dream. Reflex ruled here, and Aoife did not look like any of the terrible figures from his past. She looked little older than a girl herself. Mutely, he nodded.
Remember that smoke at the very edge of the scene? The edges crept inwards, listening. Waiting. Aoife balanced on the balls of her feet, elbows on knees and hands dangling between, swaddled by too long sleeves. Always too long. "Where does she want to go back to?" Questions and answers co-mingled. The dream would know which was the right one.
She? He glanced down at the bundle of rags in his hands, the lack of her, and seemed to curl in on himself as if to escape something dark and awful. Whether it was what lay in front, or what he'd dragged her away from, both prospects terrified him. Both were things he clearly recalled, not missing patches of memory.
He shook his head, trembly as a fledgling tumbled from a nest. The smoke around them drawing close drew his eyes away from her, watching, and some scrap of his mind intrinsically linked to his 'work' shaped them into forms with more substance. People, animals, a riot of nonsense to distract from where the girl had wanted to return to.
She couldn't promise him that they wouldn't go there. The subconscious was a powerful thing and took control away from her like it was nothing but a fought over toy. He was playing with it, testing the edges and she had the inkling of a thought that he didn't even know. It wasn't the place itself he'd forgotten. A different route, perhaps. "Who is she?"
Her inkling was correct. Her questions panicked him into further distraction-making though, and he fumbled up off the ground that was so perfectly lacking in definition now, the blankets falling about his feet to melt away into the grey nothing.
"She...who do you mean? There's no one here. Where are we?" For he'd no way of identifying it now. There was no memory to match this. So rarely were his dreams of things he had not experienced, and finding himself in one, albeit unknowingly left him looking ready to bolt, even if those feeble limbs looked so slender that they'd snap with the effort.
She was slower to rise. How ironic it was, the situation they were in. She, the one who skittered on the edge of panic most of the time was the one approaching it from the opposite direction. The edges he toyed with were closing in. The docks shivered into nothing and the sky was a smoky haze. Her hands feathered to her sides, limp and unthreatening, as if Aoife could ever be threatening.
"In Rhy’Din. How did you get here?" She pressed a hair closer with nothing but a lean, a subtle shifting of her foot.
"Rhy'Din," he whispered as if he related the word to relief. For Rhy'Din he knew, and had known for his entire life.
Re: Insights (Volume I)
[Continued from previous post.]
The readiness to run still played about his hunkered posture, but the fear in his eyes was waning due to the lack of intimidation bleeding off his 'guest'. Guest? Why was she his guest?
"Across the salt flats. I came across the salt flats. And when I try to go back, they won't let me. They don't want me to go back." Ah but this wasn't what she'd asked. The little girl and what she'd wanted to return to had been forgotten completely once she'd melted away, her presence in his dreamscape fading into insignificance. His eyes fastened to Aoife's, searching her face as if she held the answers, some key to the exit out. "Why don't they want me to go back?" he asked her, as if she must know. Had to know!
A tiny dimple appeared between her brows, pulling them slightly closer. Her words were held back by hesitation and a tipping of their surroundings. The buildings leaned and then straightened, coincidence that it mimicked the movement of her head as it canted to the side.
"Let me go with you. We'll see." And she held out a hand, palm up. Small, pale delicate fingers waited for his. She wondered which one of him would be there as the boy and man were one.
Even as young as thirteen, his fingers were long, and easily engulfed hers. Taller than her too, albeit thinner. He was a jumble of bird bones, and his grasp was tentatively light. "You're going to take me there and see?" he asked, unsure how she meant to accomplish it. "What if they try and stop me again? What if they--"
They. Three figures loomed up like the shadows he controlled, stretching their way out of gloom and smoke to stand beside them within the invisible walls that Aoife had placed within the amorphous alley. Two men. A woman. The tallest of the three, more distinct than the others was missing an eye, and the remaining one watched intently, green like poison. Toxic.
In an instant, the tallest shadow's arms lifted, something heavy and blunt wielded like a truncheon. He swung at their heads. Aoife had a split-second to try and avoid it. Mesteno was too rigidly fixed to do anything but suffer the blow, and he crumpled like a marionette, strings severed.
Aoife launched into the boy and tucked her head, trying to throw what little weight she had into taking them both down. A split second too late it seemed as the boy Mesteno once was, was hit, the ending arc of the object caught nothing but the trail of black hair sending it flying in pieces. His limp body curled in and down, taking Aoife with it in a tangle of skinny limbs to puddle on what once was filthy ground of an alley.
Strange that within the dream, Mesteno felt no pain. Not even an echo of it. Instead he experienced only the wash of dizziness, the fear, then for the second time that slumber, the world became a black mess of nothing.
He was dimly aware that there was the pressure of another body against his own. That it was a fragile thing and probably needed protection. Perhaps it was Ari again, the little girl with the doll's face, and with no other conclusion to draw, his leaden arms curled around the feeble frame. Aoife had probably never expected to be embraced by those long limbs, never dreamed it in her worst nightmares, but it appeared to be happening anyway, and in that blackness there was more weight, more strength to the body she was drawn against. The teenager was gone. These were the proportions of an adult male, his grasp sure.
Aoife expected the boy, not the man, to be falling with her. But this was a dream, his dream, and perhaps the right question stirred the right answer from the right face of the man himself. The man also knew nothing of her nightmares so when the thinnest of frames started to fill out under her, above her, all around, the warmest of forgotten breath teased the skin at neck and shoulder as that's where she'd tucked her chin back at the beginning. Remember, she had latched on first. The landing was going to be...interesting.
The world stayed black. He stayed wrapped tight about her. The texture of the nothing beneath them became a something again, prickly, but yielding. Warm and rustling should either of them shift. There were voices.
"He won't be able to hold him on his own, you'll have to help," declared a woman's strident voice, all patience lost.
"Well I don't feel like finishing up my duty here with a broken neck. You haven't seen what he and I have - down in that pit. They have to pull him off!" A man's voice this time, raised to match the woman's volume, though there was a pause in conversation before the same voice added, "What'd he just say?"
"You don't want to know, it wasn't very complimentary." the woman assured, "but you don't have any choice in the matter. If we don't do this, I can't place the ward, and as soon as I cut into him with that scalpel he's going to feel it and start getting nasty. We didn't come all this way to fail."
A challenge then on who was going to move first. They were probably the closest they'd ever been and would mostly likely remain so as there were voices too close. Was it hay they lay silently in? Was it light or dark out? Inside or out? Her eyes were shut, a childhood rule...if I can't see it, it can't see me... The conversation was bits and pieces and offered no answers, only more questions.
It was impossible to tell the time of day. There were no windows. No light limned doors. The ceiling kept the sky from their vision, and Aoife keeping her eyes closed made no difference. She'd have seen no more had they been open.
"This is insane," the man growled at his cohorts, but the defeat was obvious in his voice. He'd no valid argument to offer them.
For a minute or so, the conversation faded. Brief, broken sentences as they talked tactics, though only ever the two voices. The third remained silent, either unwilling to comment, unable, or too quiet to be heard.
The limbs around Aoife finally began to unfold. He remembered. He remembered what came next, and wanted to be ready for it.
Slowly, as if some trepidation marked the movement, someone opened a door, and flooded the space with light. It was artificial, hadn't the warmth of daylight, but it revealed the straw strewn floor where they'd been tangled about one another. The tall man who'd swung the truncheon stood silhouetted in the doorway, blinding Mesteno with the torch's glare.
The disorientation of falling gave her no clue as to their positioning as she'd yet to open her eyes. Mesteno and the dream itself should consider themselves lucky she wasn't aware that they were in a room with no windows.
When those heavier limbs started to unwind themselves and the pressure of another body eased, her lids slivered open. Her hands withdrew as he did. Though before he could move too far, she gathered fistfuls of his shirt, his hair whatever her little fingers caught, and held. But the flare of fire and presence of another caught her attention first.
He growled, baring his teeth like the jaws of an iron trap. The light had turned his eyes away from the silhouette of the entering man, down to the sudden hindrance of fingers in his shirt, in the great, wild mane of his hair. The world closed in on them again, made the movements in periphery hazy.
Aoife. Yes, he knew her now. His 'guest', though he'd no recollection of inviting her there, only awareness of who she was. "Where are we?" he demanded of her, before the captors struck.
The two men quite literally launched themselves at him, miraculously avoiding stepping on the vulnerable Dreamwalker as they bowled Mesteno from above her and sought to wrestle him down against the straw.
The one eyed man looked particularly enormous, grizzled and with a great mess of greying, red hair. The other, approaching middle aged but handsome, hadn't his strength, but tussled with as much vigour. The woman watched from the doorway, her face lost in shadow while the ersatz illumination from the flash-light picked out the details of the three men as they rolled around, kicking and snarling, swinging fists.
Mesteno felt sluggish, as if he'd been drugged and hadn't any power to his punches. It was infuriating to be so slow. Maddening that he couldn't eel his way loose of their clutching hands. He roared his frustration at them while they subdued him.
Like separate scenes from a movie reel, frame by frame. The way a dream moved so slow was insane sometimes. The mind continuously perceives the world spontaneously that it's hard to realize what's happening because it's so real.
The two men tore him from her grasp and off somewhere else on the floor. This gave her the chance to scramble on hands and feet through the straw until her back hit the wall. Again, distraction proved the savior in this scene because here eyes darted from glimpses of Mesteno in the struggle to the woman in the door.
"Make them stop. They need to stop." The words ran so fast into one another they tripped and fell out, useless and quiet.
The woman remained impassive, watching over the maelstrom in the middle of the straw littered little building like some Goddess standing in judgement. There was a wicker basket hooked over one of her wrists, and she kept it tucked close to her side. The opposite hand held something which gleamed, unmistakeable metal when the light caught it. Hadn't she mentioned a scalpel?
As for Mesteno, he fought because he could do nothing else. The blows raining down upon him did not hurt - his dreams always seemed to lack that particular sense - but he felt the weakness, the way his body began to fail in the fight as if the injuries kept him from any effective resistance.
In the end it was not the beating he suffered which rendered him immobile however. It was the smaller of the two men, grappling his wrists flat above his head, looming over him too close not to be easily examined.
His lips went slack, eyes wide as if struck by revelation. "You!" he exclaimed, breathless, but the man seemed not to hear him.
The woman stepped in, out of the doorway, and the night flooded in behind her.
Did they not see her? This could possibly go much better than she'd expected in those precious few seconds she'd had to make a decision. Using the wall as a guide, she slid up to stand as the woman approached. The silver kiss of metal winked at her in the torch light and promised things and made her skin hum. But those promises weren't meant for her. She had no means of a weapon to threaten with, but honestly, would any of them consider her a threat if she welded one?
Looking like she'd just took a rowdy tumble in the hay, as pale yellow stalks tangled with her hair, she stepped from that place she'd taken as her own and said, "Wait."
With that one word, everyone stilled.
The woman paused in her approach, the scalpel still deftly held.
The men remained where they were, an ungainly heap with two crushing one into the straw, twisted into a position that must have been agonising when it happened years ago, back in the physical world.
Even Mesteno's eyes flicked Aoife's way, wild as a frightened horse, as if he'd forgotten she was there.
The moment of truth. She'd stopped the progress with one, simple word and had the attention of each manifestation of his memory. Now what?
Racing thoughts chased panic as the walls around her started closing in. In the Dreaming, her emotions were somehow muted, more controllable, easier to latch onto certain ones. A long shot for sure, but what could happen besides the distraction of the mind and the turning of focal point?
"Let me." She held out a hand to the woman, palm up.
The readiness to run still played about his hunkered posture, but the fear in his eyes was waning due to the lack of intimidation bleeding off his 'guest'. Guest? Why was she his guest?
"Across the salt flats. I came across the salt flats. And when I try to go back, they won't let me. They don't want me to go back." Ah but this wasn't what she'd asked. The little girl and what she'd wanted to return to had been forgotten completely once she'd melted away, her presence in his dreamscape fading into insignificance. His eyes fastened to Aoife's, searching her face as if she held the answers, some key to the exit out. "Why don't they want me to go back?" he asked her, as if she must know. Had to know!
A tiny dimple appeared between her brows, pulling them slightly closer. Her words were held back by hesitation and a tipping of their surroundings. The buildings leaned and then straightened, coincidence that it mimicked the movement of her head as it canted to the side.
"Let me go with you. We'll see." And she held out a hand, palm up. Small, pale delicate fingers waited for his. She wondered which one of him would be there as the boy and man were one.
Even as young as thirteen, his fingers were long, and easily engulfed hers. Taller than her too, albeit thinner. He was a jumble of bird bones, and his grasp was tentatively light. "You're going to take me there and see?" he asked, unsure how she meant to accomplish it. "What if they try and stop me again? What if they--"
They. Three figures loomed up like the shadows he controlled, stretching their way out of gloom and smoke to stand beside them within the invisible walls that Aoife had placed within the amorphous alley. Two men. A woman. The tallest of the three, more distinct than the others was missing an eye, and the remaining one watched intently, green like poison. Toxic.
In an instant, the tallest shadow's arms lifted, something heavy and blunt wielded like a truncheon. He swung at their heads. Aoife had a split-second to try and avoid it. Mesteno was too rigidly fixed to do anything but suffer the blow, and he crumpled like a marionette, strings severed.
Aoife launched into the boy and tucked her head, trying to throw what little weight she had into taking them both down. A split second too late it seemed as the boy Mesteno once was, was hit, the ending arc of the object caught nothing but the trail of black hair sending it flying in pieces. His limp body curled in and down, taking Aoife with it in a tangle of skinny limbs to puddle on what once was filthy ground of an alley.
Strange that within the dream, Mesteno felt no pain. Not even an echo of it. Instead he experienced only the wash of dizziness, the fear, then for the second time that slumber, the world became a black mess of nothing.
He was dimly aware that there was the pressure of another body against his own. That it was a fragile thing and probably needed protection. Perhaps it was Ari again, the little girl with the doll's face, and with no other conclusion to draw, his leaden arms curled around the feeble frame. Aoife had probably never expected to be embraced by those long limbs, never dreamed it in her worst nightmares, but it appeared to be happening anyway, and in that blackness there was more weight, more strength to the body she was drawn against. The teenager was gone. These were the proportions of an adult male, his grasp sure.
Aoife expected the boy, not the man, to be falling with her. But this was a dream, his dream, and perhaps the right question stirred the right answer from the right face of the man himself. The man also knew nothing of her nightmares so when the thinnest of frames started to fill out under her, above her, all around, the warmest of forgotten breath teased the skin at neck and shoulder as that's where she'd tucked her chin back at the beginning. Remember, she had latched on first. The landing was going to be...interesting.
The world stayed black. He stayed wrapped tight about her. The texture of the nothing beneath them became a something again, prickly, but yielding. Warm and rustling should either of them shift. There were voices.
"He won't be able to hold him on his own, you'll have to help," declared a woman's strident voice, all patience lost.
"Well I don't feel like finishing up my duty here with a broken neck. You haven't seen what he and I have - down in that pit. They have to pull him off!" A man's voice this time, raised to match the woman's volume, though there was a pause in conversation before the same voice added, "What'd he just say?"
"You don't want to know, it wasn't very complimentary." the woman assured, "but you don't have any choice in the matter. If we don't do this, I can't place the ward, and as soon as I cut into him with that scalpel he's going to feel it and start getting nasty. We didn't come all this way to fail."
A challenge then on who was going to move first. They were probably the closest they'd ever been and would mostly likely remain so as there were voices too close. Was it hay they lay silently in? Was it light or dark out? Inside or out? Her eyes were shut, a childhood rule...if I can't see it, it can't see me... The conversation was bits and pieces and offered no answers, only more questions.
It was impossible to tell the time of day. There were no windows. No light limned doors. The ceiling kept the sky from their vision, and Aoife keeping her eyes closed made no difference. She'd have seen no more had they been open.
"This is insane," the man growled at his cohorts, but the defeat was obvious in his voice. He'd no valid argument to offer them.
For a minute or so, the conversation faded. Brief, broken sentences as they talked tactics, though only ever the two voices. The third remained silent, either unwilling to comment, unable, or too quiet to be heard.
The limbs around Aoife finally began to unfold. He remembered. He remembered what came next, and wanted to be ready for it.
Slowly, as if some trepidation marked the movement, someone opened a door, and flooded the space with light. It was artificial, hadn't the warmth of daylight, but it revealed the straw strewn floor where they'd been tangled about one another. The tall man who'd swung the truncheon stood silhouetted in the doorway, blinding Mesteno with the torch's glare.
The disorientation of falling gave her no clue as to their positioning as she'd yet to open her eyes. Mesteno and the dream itself should consider themselves lucky she wasn't aware that they were in a room with no windows.
When those heavier limbs started to unwind themselves and the pressure of another body eased, her lids slivered open. Her hands withdrew as he did. Though before he could move too far, she gathered fistfuls of his shirt, his hair whatever her little fingers caught, and held. But the flare of fire and presence of another caught her attention first.
He growled, baring his teeth like the jaws of an iron trap. The light had turned his eyes away from the silhouette of the entering man, down to the sudden hindrance of fingers in his shirt, in the great, wild mane of his hair. The world closed in on them again, made the movements in periphery hazy.
Aoife. Yes, he knew her now. His 'guest', though he'd no recollection of inviting her there, only awareness of who she was. "Where are we?" he demanded of her, before the captors struck.
The two men quite literally launched themselves at him, miraculously avoiding stepping on the vulnerable Dreamwalker as they bowled Mesteno from above her and sought to wrestle him down against the straw.
The one eyed man looked particularly enormous, grizzled and with a great mess of greying, red hair. The other, approaching middle aged but handsome, hadn't his strength, but tussled with as much vigour. The woman watched from the doorway, her face lost in shadow while the ersatz illumination from the flash-light picked out the details of the three men as they rolled around, kicking and snarling, swinging fists.
Mesteno felt sluggish, as if he'd been drugged and hadn't any power to his punches. It was infuriating to be so slow. Maddening that he couldn't eel his way loose of their clutching hands. He roared his frustration at them while they subdued him.
Like separate scenes from a movie reel, frame by frame. The way a dream moved so slow was insane sometimes. The mind continuously perceives the world spontaneously that it's hard to realize what's happening because it's so real.
The two men tore him from her grasp and off somewhere else on the floor. This gave her the chance to scramble on hands and feet through the straw until her back hit the wall. Again, distraction proved the savior in this scene because here eyes darted from glimpses of Mesteno in the struggle to the woman in the door.
"Make them stop. They need to stop." The words ran so fast into one another they tripped and fell out, useless and quiet.
The woman remained impassive, watching over the maelstrom in the middle of the straw littered little building like some Goddess standing in judgement. There was a wicker basket hooked over one of her wrists, and she kept it tucked close to her side. The opposite hand held something which gleamed, unmistakeable metal when the light caught it. Hadn't she mentioned a scalpel?
As for Mesteno, he fought because he could do nothing else. The blows raining down upon him did not hurt - his dreams always seemed to lack that particular sense - but he felt the weakness, the way his body began to fail in the fight as if the injuries kept him from any effective resistance.
In the end it was not the beating he suffered which rendered him immobile however. It was the smaller of the two men, grappling his wrists flat above his head, looming over him too close not to be easily examined.
His lips went slack, eyes wide as if struck by revelation. "You!" he exclaimed, breathless, but the man seemed not to hear him.
The woman stepped in, out of the doorway, and the night flooded in behind her.
Did they not see her? This could possibly go much better than she'd expected in those precious few seconds she'd had to make a decision. Using the wall as a guide, she slid up to stand as the woman approached. The silver kiss of metal winked at her in the torch light and promised things and made her skin hum. But those promises weren't meant for her. She had no means of a weapon to threaten with, but honestly, would any of them consider her a threat if she welded one?
Looking like she'd just took a rowdy tumble in the hay, as pale yellow stalks tangled with her hair, she stepped from that place she'd taken as her own and said, "Wait."
With that one word, everyone stilled.
The woman paused in her approach, the scalpel still deftly held.
The men remained where they were, an ungainly heap with two crushing one into the straw, twisted into a position that must have been agonising when it happened years ago, back in the physical world.
Even Mesteno's eyes flicked Aoife's way, wild as a frightened horse, as if he'd forgotten she was there.
The moment of truth. She'd stopped the progress with one, simple word and had the attention of each manifestation of his memory. Now what?
Racing thoughts chased panic as the walls around her started closing in. In the Dreaming, her emotions were somehow muted, more controllable, easier to latch onto certain ones. A long shot for sure, but what could happen besides the distraction of the mind and the turning of focal point?
"Let me." She held out a hand to the woman, palm up.
Re: Insights (Volume I)
[Continued from the previous post.]
I've never been afraid of the highest heights,
Or afraid of flying high,
I've never been afraid of the wildest fights,
Not afraid of dying...
But now I want off this ride cause she's scaring me,
And I don't like where we're going,
I need a new funfair, cause she's scaring me,
And I don't like where we're going.
- Example
It was another of those stiff, uncertain moments where memory wanted to refuse the interjection. When that deja vu moment in the alley with the little girl had occurred, the repeat of words as if to obliterate Aoife's comments, Mesteno had been more deeply ensconced in his recollections. Now he was panicking, seeing things which had been spell-obscured for years, and the Dreamwalker's presence was a familiar one. Almost something to strive towards for safety instead of a presence to flee from.
Except...she was there asking for the scalpel. The threat of it, small and gleaming in the strange woman's hand suddenly became more sinister, and he lurched violently beneath the two men, rousing them into grappling with his legs and wrists. He thrashed and twisted until it felt as if the bones should have dislocated, splintered, but their hold upon him was as sure as iron manacles, and his mind was accepting the possibility of Aoife putting the scalpel to him.
The woman offered it over, blank eyed to the Dreamwalker, her face a blurred, ill defined mess in the shadows.
The Sadist swore, raged like an inferno, but all his violence and cursing was ineffectual in dream land.
Everything ceased to exist for Aoife when the woman willingly handed over the scalpel. Funny how fingers that danced to silent music never even twitched. She was a still frame. When her fingers closed over the handle, the edges of the dream flickered like dying fluorescent lights struggling not to wink out. In this world the scalpel was real and it was in her hand.
"Tell me what to do." She hadn't looked at the thrashing Sadist yet. The swan's song the blade promised was too sweet.
"The ward must be placed," the woman replied smoothly, evenly, untouched by the noise of the furious young man struggling beneath her comrades. Memory kept her voice as it had been when events had happened in the waking world. When he'd been stretched flat and limp and unresisting, "or the search will find him. They're too close, it must be done now."
The woman drifted over to the men, and gestured that they should turn their captive, a job they achieved easily despite his eeling in the straw. The larger man with the eye patch sat heavily on the small of his back, effectively pinning him, while the woman knelt by his ankle, taking scissors from her basket to cut up the back of Mesteno's jeans to the back of his knee.
"Here," she told Aoife, placing her palm over the back of his calf.
Between thumb and forefinger, the blade rolled back and forth and each time it caught the glow of the artificial light, it threw silver kisses at her. Promises. The distraction was her vice and she offered the woman nothing but the flick of a glance and a subtle shifting of her body. "Why do they search for him?"
The reply was silence. This was not something which had been disclosed during Mesteno's incarceration, and as such the woman had no words to tell. She only knelt there dully, holding her palm to the tawny skin of Mesteno's calf.
As for Mesteno, he was laying there like a man exhausted, only his eyes hinting at the danger still lurking behind the momentary calm.
When silence was given for the question asked, she slid her eyes from the line of the blade to trace the curves from Mesteno's ankle to calf. The space around them seemed hushed, not even the straw sighed when she shifted and stepped to stand beside the woman.
A murmur of movement and she was crouching too, balanced on the balls of her feet. She reached and placed a finger on Achilles' weakness and traced a slow line up that dark skin. "A ward. What kind of ward?"
The pause lengthened, as if the woman might not answer, but it was the handsome man, the one who'd done all the protesting outside of the stable and now pinned the Sadist's wrists who spoke up first.
"I still don't understand what this'll achieve," he complained to the woman, as if Aoife did not exist. "The magics are so old they'll probably see through them straight away."
Some vitality seemed to return to the female at that point, hand drifting away from Mesteno's limb.
"It's because it's so old that it will work, you fool," she snapped with underlying impatience. "They'll be trying to detect the signature of more powerful things. Of him...and when they don't, we may just get lucky. They may move on. I can't think of any better way to keep him hidden, can you?"
When the woman removed her hand it was replaced with another, another that felt all too real. A familiar touch, cool, but not cold. Like a breeze on a hot day that teased the skin and reminded it of memories. Their conversation only splintered each question she had into three more. So many paths to take and no bread crumbs to follow. As if they were the only two in the room, Aoife leaned closer to the woman, secrets between girls.
"Hide and seek. Why must he hide?"
The more Aoife spoke to the woman, the more real she seemed to become. Less an apparition and more a fleshed out female of long, curling hair and almandine eyes. Not exquisite by any measure, but striking enough to be attractive. She did not seem to see the way Mesteno flinched under the weight of that colder palm, as if he expected the bite of metal.
"Because he woke. Ignorance kept him safe. Now, every time he does it, it's like a beacon to them. Now it isn't safe to merely be so far away. Cut...here, the first line." She traced the path with the tip of her finger. "Come, do it quickly."
"He woke." The woman's finger was a figment, a sight of touch. Aoife followed the path with her own then as if testing the skin. How deep did she have to go? "Was he sleeping?" Again that line was retraced, this time with the tip of her nail. "Why do they answer when he calls?"
"Liber artis *** mortuis loquendi," the woman spoke without hesitation. Perfect Latin, the accent very much like Mesteno's. Perhaps even stronger, very little like the ecclesiastical. "They will take him back, and then we will have failed. We will have failed, do you hear me? We have to protect him, even if only to save our own necks." More vitriol here, for the man who spoke.
The one eyed man observed, but said nothing.
"Why did he leave?" Up and down, up and down. She kept tracing a fine line on his calf with her nail. The skin was red. Latin meant nothing to her, the words floated up and popped like bubbles, insignificant. The scalpel was still there, still an unseen threat as Mesteno was face down. When did she have it now?
"No one knows. He was safe. Then one day gone. Seven years old." The woman's speech was becoming more fractured. A hint of uncertainty had entered her voice, which might as easily have been due to Mesteno's memory of her, or his own suspicions bubbling up to be spilled between her lips.
"Let me go. Get the f*ck off me." he was growling, cheek against the straw and squirming renewed.
"Cut!" Insisted the woman, suddenly alarmed at this recurrence of fight in him.
Uncertainty was contagious. The woman's form, so real the more they spoke, started to shift and fade, like the dream itself was threatening to fall apart. Cool fingers wrapped around Mesteno's ankle, so gentle in its press to keep his leg still. Aoife eased onto her knees, one on each side. Maybe just one, to keep the woman's calm and...and there it was, the burn of a kiss from a blade against flesh. She was so good at it, ask her. Nothing more than the thinnest of lines, straight and narrow along that tawny skin. Memories didn't share physical pain, they only remembered. This time though, crimson red, warm and real the smallest of drops welled up though not enough to weep.
"Why can't he go back?" Perhaps now, now the woman would be happy.
The pain was expected, and yet to actually experience it in the unreal confines of a dream, shocked the dreamer. The razor keen edge of the blade split skin, bit deep enough to spill blood, and the delicate, white-hot line of it made him bellow protest.
Back in the little cabin amidst the tangle of woodland that Mesteno called home, he groaned where he lay sleeping upon the sheepskin rug, one leg lashing out in a spasmodic kick which almost struck the little white cat who'd come slinking nearer.
The dream shook around them all as if the walls might not fade, but actually come caving in and crush them all. Waking was near.
"Because he is a relic," the woman replied. "They always hunt the relics when they are born, and what is there to go back to? Amhinata lies in ruin. Ruin and rubble and corpses."
Poor Dreamer, it was very likely he wouldn't be happy when he woke and found a gift from the Walker. Again, distraction pulled her into a place where white walls were canvases made only for red paint. The scalpel was forgotten when blood made bright color in the grayscale of the dream.
"Do they want to hurt him?" Hurt like she did? Nothing spoke of hurt when she ran the pad of her thumb up the line she just made, smearing blood to the sides. So proud.
The sleeper bled. It soaked into his jeans, staining the denim darkly. The cut lay precisely where the pale ridge of a scar was. An intricate pattern in the flesh that Aoife's new 'friend' had placed there years before. Mesteno might not be pleased about receiving injury, but what he remembered upon waking would be invaluable.
"Hurt him? They will take him down the black road."
"We should just kill him while we have the chance," the man insisted vehemently. "Then we wouldn't have to worry about him being found. The next in line wouldn't wake for another twenty years, and we'll be too old by then to care."
"Shh..." For all of them and the man on the straw littered floor. It was like a song, a lullaby meant to soothe the subconscious. "It's all right now." Her smile was something else, a secret thing that the man who sat on Mesteno would never see.
Aoife turned and rested her chin on her shoulder staring at the woman crouched next to her. "You can go." Cupid's bow lips puckered into a pretty, little heart to funnel a breath towards her.
Soothing was a good thing, and considering the strength of his panic, Aoife couldn't have chosen a better moment to apply that soft, hushing sound. He might have doubted her words, but his pulse slowed, the grasp on his limbs slackened, and the urge to kick and buck became less intense, less necessary. Mesteno lay still in the straw.
The woman stared at Aoife, eyes blank as if the instruction had somehow failed to compute, but she collected up her basket, leaving the scalpel in Aoife's slender fingers, and rose to wander away soft footed through the doorway she'd entered by.
Frame by frame, she moved, inched her way on knees up, up the legs to which she'd just held one down. She reached out to run two fingers down the back of the man who sat on Mesteno's. "You can go too." Her words were too quiet.
The large, one eyed man glowered at her, though it seemed more a permanent feature of his face, some unchanging and obdurate malaise than personally intended. After a moment, he rose too, and followed after the woman.
That left only Mesteno, growing more placid by the moment, and the handsome man who kept hold of his wrists, the one who'd spoken so frequently in an effort to dissuade.
"I know you," Mesteno was mumbling, leg still bleeding, eyes dull as the lullaby quality deepened.
Such a bold little thing she was when she took the place of the one eyed man, settled herself right there on sway of Mesteno's lower back. Her hands rested on her thighs, one still held on to the scalpel with such tenderness. She stared at the man holding a set of wrists, the picture of impassivity.
"Will you tell me a secret?" One shared between friends. One of those.
Had he been awake he'd have been indignant that she dared. Had he any fight left in him there in the dreaming, he might have been railing at her furiously. But Mesteno only lay there, his golden eyes glazed and heavy lidded as the world around them began to waver further, all the lines beginning to blur and the straw becoming more like a soft, diffuse glow from the light from the torch, instead of seperate strands.
The man - middle aged, past his prime but still worthy of attention, peered at Aoife across the stretch of his captive's back. "What secret?" he asked her, without a hint of suspicion. His voice was a pleasant baritone, easy to hear when not raised in irritation at his female companion.
It was as if she'd forgotten who exactly it was she was sitting on. Not like her weight was anything significant to keep him grounded. It was somewhere to perch, a handy spot closer to the man with the handsome face.
"Your name. I promise to keep it safe." Idle fingers, covered in blood, find a strand of red on Mesteno's back and start to toy with it. "I'll never tell."
And Aoife was such a sweet faced little lady, was she not? The man had nothing to fear from a face like that. He smiled at her warmly. It was an expression that had not been dreamed up. One that Mesteno must have seen before. "I'm Ben," the man replied easily.
From the straddled young man in the straw, there came a sudden murmur. Monotone.
"Ben. Okay Ben. You talk too much..."
He remembered. And just like that, the dream unravelled, the shock of recollection and the throbbing pain in his calf sitting him bolt upright, the cat startled and hissing as her owner scrambled across the floor to press his be-ringed spine to the wall.
Aoife had asked the right questions.
"Names have power, Ben." Was all she said before the threads of memory slipped apart and she fell through and down, landing once again into herself.
It was as if breath had been forgotten, her lungs drew deep and cried with the release. And where miles away a Sadist scrambled for the real, the Dreamwalker rolled onto her side and tucked her arms close. A brick wall was good enough to stare at. The scalpel was left behind in a dream.
[Adapted from live play with Aoife Duggan.]
I've never been afraid of the highest heights,
Or afraid of flying high,
I've never been afraid of the wildest fights,
Not afraid of dying...
But now I want off this ride cause she's scaring me,
And I don't like where we're going,
I need a new funfair, cause she's scaring me,
And I don't like where we're going.
- Example
It was another of those stiff, uncertain moments where memory wanted to refuse the interjection. When that deja vu moment in the alley with the little girl had occurred, the repeat of words as if to obliterate Aoife's comments, Mesteno had been more deeply ensconced in his recollections. Now he was panicking, seeing things which had been spell-obscured for years, and the Dreamwalker's presence was a familiar one. Almost something to strive towards for safety instead of a presence to flee from.
Except...she was there asking for the scalpel. The threat of it, small and gleaming in the strange woman's hand suddenly became more sinister, and he lurched violently beneath the two men, rousing them into grappling with his legs and wrists. He thrashed and twisted until it felt as if the bones should have dislocated, splintered, but their hold upon him was as sure as iron manacles, and his mind was accepting the possibility of Aoife putting the scalpel to him.
The woman offered it over, blank eyed to the Dreamwalker, her face a blurred, ill defined mess in the shadows.
The Sadist swore, raged like an inferno, but all his violence and cursing was ineffectual in dream land.
Everything ceased to exist for Aoife when the woman willingly handed over the scalpel. Funny how fingers that danced to silent music never even twitched. She was a still frame. When her fingers closed over the handle, the edges of the dream flickered like dying fluorescent lights struggling not to wink out. In this world the scalpel was real and it was in her hand.
"Tell me what to do." She hadn't looked at the thrashing Sadist yet. The swan's song the blade promised was too sweet.
"The ward must be placed," the woman replied smoothly, evenly, untouched by the noise of the furious young man struggling beneath her comrades. Memory kept her voice as it had been when events had happened in the waking world. When he'd been stretched flat and limp and unresisting, "or the search will find him. They're too close, it must be done now."
The woman drifted over to the men, and gestured that they should turn their captive, a job they achieved easily despite his eeling in the straw. The larger man with the eye patch sat heavily on the small of his back, effectively pinning him, while the woman knelt by his ankle, taking scissors from her basket to cut up the back of Mesteno's jeans to the back of his knee.
"Here," she told Aoife, placing her palm over the back of his calf.
Between thumb and forefinger, the blade rolled back and forth and each time it caught the glow of the artificial light, it threw silver kisses at her. Promises. The distraction was her vice and she offered the woman nothing but the flick of a glance and a subtle shifting of her body. "Why do they search for him?"
The reply was silence. This was not something which had been disclosed during Mesteno's incarceration, and as such the woman had no words to tell. She only knelt there dully, holding her palm to the tawny skin of Mesteno's calf.
As for Mesteno, he was laying there like a man exhausted, only his eyes hinting at the danger still lurking behind the momentary calm.
When silence was given for the question asked, she slid her eyes from the line of the blade to trace the curves from Mesteno's ankle to calf. The space around them seemed hushed, not even the straw sighed when she shifted and stepped to stand beside the woman.
A murmur of movement and she was crouching too, balanced on the balls of her feet. She reached and placed a finger on Achilles' weakness and traced a slow line up that dark skin. "A ward. What kind of ward?"
The pause lengthened, as if the woman might not answer, but it was the handsome man, the one who'd done all the protesting outside of the stable and now pinned the Sadist's wrists who spoke up first.
"I still don't understand what this'll achieve," he complained to the woman, as if Aoife did not exist. "The magics are so old they'll probably see through them straight away."
Some vitality seemed to return to the female at that point, hand drifting away from Mesteno's limb.
"It's because it's so old that it will work, you fool," she snapped with underlying impatience. "They'll be trying to detect the signature of more powerful things. Of him...and when they don't, we may just get lucky. They may move on. I can't think of any better way to keep him hidden, can you?"
When the woman removed her hand it was replaced with another, another that felt all too real. A familiar touch, cool, but not cold. Like a breeze on a hot day that teased the skin and reminded it of memories. Their conversation only splintered each question she had into three more. So many paths to take and no bread crumbs to follow. As if they were the only two in the room, Aoife leaned closer to the woman, secrets between girls.
"Hide and seek. Why must he hide?"
The more Aoife spoke to the woman, the more real she seemed to become. Less an apparition and more a fleshed out female of long, curling hair and almandine eyes. Not exquisite by any measure, but striking enough to be attractive. She did not seem to see the way Mesteno flinched under the weight of that colder palm, as if he expected the bite of metal.
"Because he woke. Ignorance kept him safe. Now, every time he does it, it's like a beacon to them. Now it isn't safe to merely be so far away. Cut...here, the first line." She traced the path with the tip of her finger. "Come, do it quickly."
"He woke." The woman's finger was a figment, a sight of touch. Aoife followed the path with her own then as if testing the skin. How deep did she have to go? "Was he sleeping?" Again that line was retraced, this time with the tip of her nail. "Why do they answer when he calls?"
"Liber artis *** mortuis loquendi," the woman spoke without hesitation. Perfect Latin, the accent very much like Mesteno's. Perhaps even stronger, very little like the ecclesiastical. "They will take him back, and then we will have failed. We will have failed, do you hear me? We have to protect him, even if only to save our own necks." More vitriol here, for the man who spoke.
The one eyed man observed, but said nothing.
"Why did he leave?" Up and down, up and down. She kept tracing a fine line on his calf with her nail. The skin was red. Latin meant nothing to her, the words floated up and popped like bubbles, insignificant. The scalpel was still there, still an unseen threat as Mesteno was face down. When did she have it now?
"No one knows. He was safe. Then one day gone. Seven years old." The woman's speech was becoming more fractured. A hint of uncertainty had entered her voice, which might as easily have been due to Mesteno's memory of her, or his own suspicions bubbling up to be spilled between her lips.
"Let me go. Get the f*ck off me." he was growling, cheek against the straw and squirming renewed.
"Cut!" Insisted the woman, suddenly alarmed at this recurrence of fight in him.
Uncertainty was contagious. The woman's form, so real the more they spoke, started to shift and fade, like the dream itself was threatening to fall apart. Cool fingers wrapped around Mesteno's ankle, so gentle in its press to keep his leg still. Aoife eased onto her knees, one on each side. Maybe just one, to keep the woman's calm and...and there it was, the burn of a kiss from a blade against flesh. She was so good at it, ask her. Nothing more than the thinnest of lines, straight and narrow along that tawny skin. Memories didn't share physical pain, they only remembered. This time though, crimson red, warm and real the smallest of drops welled up though not enough to weep.
"Why can't he go back?" Perhaps now, now the woman would be happy.
The pain was expected, and yet to actually experience it in the unreal confines of a dream, shocked the dreamer. The razor keen edge of the blade split skin, bit deep enough to spill blood, and the delicate, white-hot line of it made him bellow protest.
Back in the little cabin amidst the tangle of woodland that Mesteno called home, he groaned where he lay sleeping upon the sheepskin rug, one leg lashing out in a spasmodic kick which almost struck the little white cat who'd come slinking nearer.
The dream shook around them all as if the walls might not fade, but actually come caving in and crush them all. Waking was near.
"Because he is a relic," the woman replied. "They always hunt the relics when they are born, and what is there to go back to? Amhinata lies in ruin. Ruin and rubble and corpses."
Poor Dreamer, it was very likely he wouldn't be happy when he woke and found a gift from the Walker. Again, distraction pulled her into a place where white walls were canvases made only for red paint. The scalpel was forgotten when blood made bright color in the grayscale of the dream.
"Do they want to hurt him?" Hurt like she did? Nothing spoke of hurt when she ran the pad of her thumb up the line she just made, smearing blood to the sides. So proud.
The sleeper bled. It soaked into his jeans, staining the denim darkly. The cut lay precisely where the pale ridge of a scar was. An intricate pattern in the flesh that Aoife's new 'friend' had placed there years before. Mesteno might not be pleased about receiving injury, but what he remembered upon waking would be invaluable.
"Hurt him? They will take him down the black road."
"We should just kill him while we have the chance," the man insisted vehemently. "Then we wouldn't have to worry about him being found. The next in line wouldn't wake for another twenty years, and we'll be too old by then to care."
"Shh..." For all of them and the man on the straw littered floor. It was like a song, a lullaby meant to soothe the subconscious. "It's all right now." Her smile was something else, a secret thing that the man who sat on Mesteno would never see.
Aoife turned and rested her chin on her shoulder staring at the woman crouched next to her. "You can go." Cupid's bow lips puckered into a pretty, little heart to funnel a breath towards her.
Soothing was a good thing, and considering the strength of his panic, Aoife couldn't have chosen a better moment to apply that soft, hushing sound. He might have doubted her words, but his pulse slowed, the grasp on his limbs slackened, and the urge to kick and buck became less intense, less necessary. Mesteno lay still in the straw.
The woman stared at Aoife, eyes blank as if the instruction had somehow failed to compute, but she collected up her basket, leaving the scalpel in Aoife's slender fingers, and rose to wander away soft footed through the doorway she'd entered by.
Frame by frame, she moved, inched her way on knees up, up the legs to which she'd just held one down. She reached out to run two fingers down the back of the man who sat on Mesteno's. "You can go too." Her words were too quiet.
The large, one eyed man glowered at her, though it seemed more a permanent feature of his face, some unchanging and obdurate malaise than personally intended. After a moment, he rose too, and followed after the woman.
That left only Mesteno, growing more placid by the moment, and the handsome man who kept hold of his wrists, the one who'd spoken so frequently in an effort to dissuade.
"I know you," Mesteno was mumbling, leg still bleeding, eyes dull as the lullaby quality deepened.
Such a bold little thing she was when she took the place of the one eyed man, settled herself right there on sway of Mesteno's lower back. Her hands rested on her thighs, one still held on to the scalpel with such tenderness. She stared at the man holding a set of wrists, the picture of impassivity.
"Will you tell me a secret?" One shared between friends. One of those.
Had he been awake he'd have been indignant that she dared. Had he any fight left in him there in the dreaming, he might have been railing at her furiously. But Mesteno only lay there, his golden eyes glazed and heavy lidded as the world around them began to waver further, all the lines beginning to blur and the straw becoming more like a soft, diffuse glow from the light from the torch, instead of seperate strands.
The man - middle aged, past his prime but still worthy of attention, peered at Aoife across the stretch of his captive's back. "What secret?" he asked her, without a hint of suspicion. His voice was a pleasant baritone, easy to hear when not raised in irritation at his female companion.
It was as if she'd forgotten who exactly it was she was sitting on. Not like her weight was anything significant to keep him grounded. It was somewhere to perch, a handy spot closer to the man with the handsome face.
"Your name. I promise to keep it safe." Idle fingers, covered in blood, find a strand of red on Mesteno's back and start to toy with it. "I'll never tell."
And Aoife was such a sweet faced little lady, was she not? The man had nothing to fear from a face like that. He smiled at her warmly. It was an expression that had not been dreamed up. One that Mesteno must have seen before. "I'm Ben," the man replied easily.
From the straddled young man in the straw, there came a sudden murmur. Monotone.
"Ben. Okay Ben. You talk too much..."
He remembered. And just like that, the dream unravelled, the shock of recollection and the throbbing pain in his calf sitting him bolt upright, the cat startled and hissing as her owner scrambled across the floor to press his be-ringed spine to the wall.
Aoife had asked the right questions.
"Names have power, Ben." Was all she said before the threads of memory slipped apart and she fell through and down, landing once again into herself.
It was as if breath had been forgotten, her lungs drew deep and cried with the release. And where miles away a Sadist scrambled for the real, the Dreamwalker rolled onto her side and tucked her arms close. A brick wall was good enough to stare at. The scalpel was left behind in a dream.
[Adapted from live play with Aoife Duggan.]
Re: Insights (Volume I)
July 6th, 2011
Amnesia is one of those Rhy’Din issues. Anywhere else it’d be a rarity, but here it’s one of those things everyone seems to experience at least once. Some forget it all. Others the trauma of recent years. I lost two weeks.
Really pissed me off, too.
Actually I’m still pissed off about it, because now the veil has been lifted and I can see at least a little of what happened. And to make it worse, it’s because Aoife dug it all up. I won’t focus on that for now though.
The memory was concealed by the same group that stalked me and carved things into my leg. I worked out some time ago that it was a customised version of a ward I found in one of my old stolen volumes, but now I know it was to ward me against harm. Protective. If I’m to believe what I saw in the dream, these people are guarding me against something connected to my necromancy.
One of the group, Ben, I have met before. I let him take me to lunch one day, oblivious to the fact that he was working to distract me from the presence of the one eyed man and the magic user female. He’s the face in the photos I couldn’t remember. The one I never thought about because he was nothing but a vague blur. His companions were always the stronger presences in my mind, thanks to disfigurement and gender.
Now I know their faces. Now they’ll need to hide…if they’re still in the city. The possibility that they’ve left entirely leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, and Alistair’s work is years old now. There are no fresh footprints to follow.
If they are my allies, why act so suspiciously? Why did Ben repeatedly call for the woman to kill me? Why did she refer to me as a relic?
More importantly, why is my necromancy an issue? I am not the only necromancer in this city. There are the Vaudun practitioners, the Satanic groups, Temples openly worshipping deities of death. I am no exception. The only clue I have is the woman’s words. Mentions of me being ‘taken back’, and I have to assume that she means South, back to Amhinata.
My home city is in ruins. Devastated by war, or so I was told when last I made the journey to visit. I have to face the possibility that I’ve been lied to, but the woman spoke of corpses and rubble. I wish I could recall it all more clearly. I wish I knew of some technology which might have stored the dream to be watched ad infinitum.
Why Amhinata would be connected to necromancy I do not know. I need to research why my people abandoned Rome, escaped through Torrita to set up on the salt flats the way they did. Did they abandon, or were they forced out? I may have to return to Italy, search through the tunnels by the guard house I bought with Michael. The thought makes me uneasy. I do not think Samiel would like it.
And Samiel…I’ve told him nothing of this. I’m guarding my secrets when I should be offering them openly, but it is not due to lack of trust. Only a want to keep him safe from any harm our association might bring. But it is difficult. My mood is foul when I am away from him, and lacking in work to distract. The temptation to drink away my cares lurks ever behind, the lure of self-gratifying violence - a simple vicious brawl resulting in someone’s end - is becoming almost impossible to resist.
Maybe Ben was right. It would have been far wiser if they’d done as he said.
- M
Amnesia is one of those Rhy’Din issues. Anywhere else it’d be a rarity, but here it’s one of those things everyone seems to experience at least once. Some forget it all. Others the trauma of recent years. I lost two weeks.
Really pissed me off, too.
Actually I’m still pissed off about it, because now the veil has been lifted and I can see at least a little of what happened. And to make it worse, it’s because Aoife dug it all up. I won’t focus on that for now though.
The memory was concealed by the same group that stalked me and carved things into my leg. I worked out some time ago that it was a customised version of a ward I found in one of my old stolen volumes, but now I know it was to ward me against harm. Protective. If I’m to believe what I saw in the dream, these people are guarding me against something connected to my necromancy.
One of the group, Ben, I have met before. I let him take me to lunch one day, oblivious to the fact that he was working to distract me from the presence of the one eyed man and the magic user female. He’s the face in the photos I couldn’t remember. The one I never thought about because he was nothing but a vague blur. His companions were always the stronger presences in my mind, thanks to disfigurement and gender.
Now I know their faces. Now they’ll need to hide…if they’re still in the city. The possibility that they’ve left entirely leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, and Alistair’s work is years old now. There are no fresh footprints to follow.
If they are my allies, why act so suspiciously? Why did Ben repeatedly call for the woman to kill me? Why did she refer to me as a relic?
More importantly, why is my necromancy an issue? I am not the only necromancer in this city. There are the Vaudun practitioners, the Satanic groups, Temples openly worshipping deities of death. I am no exception. The only clue I have is the woman’s words. Mentions of me being ‘taken back’, and I have to assume that she means South, back to Amhinata.
My home city is in ruins. Devastated by war, or so I was told when last I made the journey to visit. I have to face the possibility that I’ve been lied to, but the woman spoke of corpses and rubble. I wish I could recall it all more clearly. I wish I knew of some technology which might have stored the dream to be watched ad infinitum.
Why Amhinata would be connected to necromancy I do not know. I need to research why my people abandoned Rome, escaped through Torrita to set up on the salt flats the way they did. Did they abandon, or were they forced out? I may have to return to Italy, search through the tunnels by the guard house I bought with Michael. The thought makes me uneasy. I do not think Samiel would like it.
And Samiel…I’ve told him nothing of this. I’m guarding my secrets when I should be offering them openly, but it is not due to lack of trust. Only a want to keep him safe from any harm our association might bring. But it is difficult. My mood is foul when I am away from him, and lacking in work to distract. The temptation to drink away my cares lurks ever behind, the lure of self-gratifying violence - a simple vicious brawl resulting in someone’s end - is becoming almost impossible to resist.
Maybe Ben was right. It would have been far wiser if they’d done as he said.
- M
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Wednesday February 8th, 2012
"How's Sam?" "Tell Sam I said hello." Sam, Sam, Sam.
And I tell 'em "Oh he's fine." or, "We're good."
Because it's easier than telling them that I haven't seen him since September. Like I f**king jinxed us by daring to put quill to paper and scrawl here that there were no rough waters to rock our happy little boat. How stupid was that?
His visits to the Dry for business with the tribes out there, and to keep an eye on the little camping point he'd got set up were infrequent but necessary. I didn't think anything of it the last time he went, and we couldn't both go since the Farm is full of horses - Christ, almost yearlings now - so off he went on Horse in the autumn drizzle and that was that.
Of course, after a few days with no word I started to worry. Rode out there to look for him when I'd made arrangements for the animals and got nowhere. I tried the valley we found last Valentines, the cave with the little pool where we stopped with Riley after we kidnapped her, even the spot where we had to barricade ourselves in from the Sand Lion that Sam wrestled, and nothing. I thought maybe he'd gone back to the place he'd been left after he was carved up and left for dead, but I don't know where that is, nor how to get there. My only other option was to go through that f**ked up borderlands region we crossed with Gem, but I don't know the way out, and what point would there be in getting stuck there and eaten by some...nevermind. Pointless, is my point.
I can't find him. Maybe he got lost, or taken captive by one of the tribes. Maybe he finally found that fae he'd been chasing for so long and he forgot all about not caring anymore, having more important things to stick around for.
It'd be easy for me to assume that maybe he just got tired of me, but I've had enough lovers to know when at last they're despairing of me. When they hit that "Oh hey, maybe he's not going to change and he's going to keep right on being a bastard." I never had that with Sam.
It's been almost five months now.
I took to going out again, snatching a few hours at the inn between getting all the work at the Farm done and working nights for the Don or whichever contact requires my...services. That made it better for a while. Made a few new friends, met some old ones again (Cooper, Thorn and Paige are all around some) and Rei, my Godson appeared out of the blue. Didn't know what to do with him, and almost got tempted to let him think Gem was dead because there was too much of Kakabel in him.
Strangely, I don't think I'd have ventured out if it hadn't been for a couple of strange incidents involving Bjorn. He showed up at Sanctuary one night on horseback, with a big fucking wolf, wanting to know if I'd poke around some brothels he intended to blow up. Wasn't too happy about that, but he pointed out I owed him for his help with the lucid dreaming thing and there was something off-kilter about him. I still don't know the whole story, maybe it's better I don't, but when he, Gem, Paige and Ezekiel showed up at my place a few nights later with a couple of unconscious hookers I got the impression he was up against something big. And then I wanted to be out again, in the thick of whatever went on in the city, not just some shadow at its outskirts like a man in mourning.
Maybe it was a bad idea. It meant I had to get fond of Katt - who subsequently got carved up by Brian Ravenlock. It means I have to see Gabby walking around looking like she's gone three rounds with a truck, because that woman cannot avoid trouble. It means I got to know Ortnim, care about this family trouble he has, trouble he won't speak of because I'd be incapable of helping.
It's almost Valentines. This stupid, over-commercialised day that means nothing to my people anyway. It's not something we celebrate. It's just not easy to ignore it, or what's missing, when it's shoved in your face by way of giant pink hearts and sighing romantics.
Where the fuck are you, Samiel?
- M
"How's Sam?" "Tell Sam I said hello." Sam, Sam, Sam.
And I tell 'em "Oh he's fine." or, "We're good."
Because it's easier than telling them that I haven't seen him since September. Like I f**king jinxed us by daring to put quill to paper and scrawl here that there were no rough waters to rock our happy little boat. How stupid was that?
His visits to the Dry for business with the tribes out there, and to keep an eye on the little camping point he'd got set up were infrequent but necessary. I didn't think anything of it the last time he went, and we couldn't both go since the Farm is full of horses - Christ, almost yearlings now - so off he went on Horse in the autumn drizzle and that was that.
Of course, after a few days with no word I started to worry. Rode out there to look for him when I'd made arrangements for the animals and got nowhere. I tried the valley we found last Valentines, the cave with the little pool where we stopped with Riley after we kidnapped her, even the spot where we had to barricade ourselves in from the Sand Lion that Sam wrestled, and nothing. I thought maybe he'd gone back to the place he'd been left after he was carved up and left for dead, but I don't know where that is, nor how to get there. My only other option was to go through that f**ked up borderlands region we crossed with Gem, but I don't know the way out, and what point would there be in getting stuck there and eaten by some...nevermind. Pointless, is my point.
I can't find him. Maybe he got lost, or taken captive by one of the tribes. Maybe he finally found that fae he'd been chasing for so long and he forgot all about not caring anymore, having more important things to stick around for.
It'd be easy for me to assume that maybe he just got tired of me, but I've had enough lovers to know when at last they're despairing of me. When they hit that "Oh hey, maybe he's not going to change and he's going to keep right on being a bastard." I never had that with Sam.
It's been almost five months now.
I took to going out again, snatching a few hours at the inn between getting all the work at the Farm done and working nights for the Don or whichever contact requires my...services. That made it better for a while. Made a few new friends, met some old ones again (Cooper, Thorn and Paige are all around some) and Rei, my Godson appeared out of the blue. Didn't know what to do with him, and almost got tempted to let him think Gem was dead because there was too much of Kakabel in him.
Strangely, I don't think I'd have ventured out if it hadn't been for a couple of strange incidents involving Bjorn. He showed up at Sanctuary one night on horseback, with a big fucking wolf, wanting to know if I'd poke around some brothels he intended to blow up. Wasn't too happy about that, but he pointed out I owed him for his help with the lucid dreaming thing and there was something off-kilter about him. I still don't know the whole story, maybe it's better I don't, but when he, Gem, Paige and Ezekiel showed up at my place a few nights later with a couple of unconscious hookers I got the impression he was up against something big. And then I wanted to be out again, in the thick of whatever went on in the city, not just some shadow at its outskirts like a man in mourning.
Maybe it was a bad idea. It meant I had to get fond of Katt - who subsequently got carved up by Brian Ravenlock. It means I have to see Gabby walking around looking like she's gone three rounds with a truck, because that woman cannot avoid trouble. It means I got to know Ortnim, care about this family trouble he has, trouble he won't speak of because I'd be incapable of helping.
It's almost Valentines. This stupid, over-commercialised day that means nothing to my people anyway. It's not something we celebrate. It's just not easy to ignore it, or what's missing, when it's shoved in your face by way of giant pink hearts and sighing romantics.
Where the fuck are you, Samiel?
- M
Re: Insights (Volume I)
Tuesday March 6th, 2012
Out here, the heat was enough to suck away the moisture from a man’s skin in the space of a few seconds. The ground was baked dry, the brush as brittle as tinder and any breath of wind which stirred the dust felt as if it had drifted off a furnace. The air shimmered like a harem girl’s gauzy veil, warped the world beyond it so that static landmarks seemed to ripple, their distances imprecise. Mesteno would have died out there, once upon a time, but he’d learned the ways of the Dry under a lover’s tutelage, returning to it often enough without him, of late, to become confident in the intricacies of survival.
He veered away from the suspiciously furred cacti, which, up close, wore a jacket of swarming spiders ready to leap. He avoided too, the tiny mounds in the sand which might conceal a sheltering snake…or the delicate formation of crystalline rock known as desert roses.
Once upon a time he’d lain there belly down in the dust, the sun prickling at his shoulders as Samiel taught him how to tell one from another, watching his obdurate attempts to claim one of the exquisite little structures with unconcealed amusement. Less amusement, when Mesteno had presented it to him, for it had been Saint Valentine’s Day. Neither man had troubled themselves with the giving of gifts, and instead of partaking of the city’s commercialised celebrations, they’d escaped to where they could roam the wilds on horseback, abandoning responsibility for trouble in one another’s company. For all the sweltering heat, such an excursion had been a breath of fresh air, had made the day something worth remembering again, after so many years of what had ultimately been unnecessary efforts. Attempts at romance where he never quite seemed to grasp how it was done.
He’d been out there for half a day, setting off while the sky was streaked gaudily in half a hundred shades of dawn light, finding his way out to the guesthouse where the proprietor had told him, tiredly (and perhaps with a carefully concealed sympathy) that she had seen nothing of the desert man, and tossed him an apple from last year’s harvest. Sam had been fond of the orchard there, been content in his rooms above the stabling before he’d made the decision to put down roots.
From there, he’d followed a route the Arabian he rode knew as well as he did, and they’d loped along at a lazy, rocking horse canter while Rhy’Din’s winter chill ebbed with the shifting lands around them, that tell-tale distortion which marked the passing from one realm to another. The heat had pressed in, and all the smells of the Dry had come with it. Scorched stone and dust, the sulphur stink of the pools they’d explored, the scent of old death when they travelled past the small, sunken, bleach-boned carcass of a dead fennec fox. It was almost noon by the time they’d trotted down into the rocky little canyon, the shade of its high walls and the broad but slow-moving, shallow stream keeping the air a few degrees cooler.
He’d dismounted then, checking cautiously for any lurking threats and trusting the horse’s nose to warn them should a Sand Lion come stalking. Further downstream, the chatter of bird call was sing-song, rather than alarm shrill, and the water appeared clear of any debris which might come carrying unwanted parasites. Safe enough, he decided, to linger here and do as he’d intended.
The skull was colossal, large enough for two men to sprawl upon side by side. It jutted some twenty feet up out of the rocky wall, dark instead of pale, smooth either by nature or by centuries of weathering. Upon finding it they’d speculated over the nature of it, for this was clearly no creature designed for life upon the land, rather some predator of the oceans, something primeval and of the most base instincts. It might have been a great presumption to dare state that last, but this was no ordinary archaeological find. Even now, millennia since it’s death, it exuded the very same ill that it had incapacitated its prey with; fear.
It kept the birds well away, and he’d never witnessed anything else living that would willingly come close. But it did not keep him away. The ancient pulse of its power was little more than an unease compared to what it must have been once, a shiver along the spine with an anxiety low-lit in the gut, not a terror to send a man fleeing with his bowels turned to water. So up he climbed, preferring bare hands and feet over anything he could not feel his way in, and descended from above the protruding skull to drop down atop it, instead of trying to slither over the slippery dome where he might as well have been trying to scrabble at glass, for all the opportunity for grip it gave.
There was a bag slung over his shoulder, dust stained to ochre and fraying over the woven straps, and he let it slide down one long, wiry arm, carelessly disentangling it from clinging strands of hair - dark as aged blood and light as burnished gold, every shade in between tangled in great, snaking lengths that he hadn’t bothered to bind back. Sam had always preferred his hair loose. Sitting down with due caution for the slippery surface of the skull, he spread his knees wide and flattened the soles of his feet for purchase, as he went digging into the bag for the tools he needed.
“S’Gem’s birthday soon,” he spoke aloud to the empty air, but softly, as if daring to break the silence might wake the colossus beneath him. “I thought I’d make use of our friend here and make her something with an edge. Don’t worry though, I won’t take much.”
Further down the gulley, the stream spilled out into a waterfall, and the land below was one of the Dry’s few, true treasures. A delicately balanced, rare strip of life which had seen the men exploring like a pair of Adams in Eden, respectful of a beauty which hid as much potential for danger in the bite and sting of the unknown inhabitants, as it did for indulgence. Both had been astounded that the valley had not been discovered by the local tribes, who might have left their mark upon it, swarmed it like locusts and moved on again. Then they’d found the very skull he was sat upon, protruding like some grisly warning, tasted the fear it bled into the surroundings like a dark miasma, and taking old superstition into consideration, had known why their little haven remained untouched.
Trying to remove the ancient remains would have stolen the protection, thus he was not greedy in what he chipped away with the spell-hardened tools. Nothing else had sufficed to even leave a scratch, but here he persevered, hammering a slender line into the dark bone with a precisely angled chisel.
“She’s havin’ a baby. Asked me to be it’s Godfather. Thought you might find that funny. Oh an’ she’s getting’ hitched to that Ezekiel of hers. He’s a good guy. ‘Bout the only one s’ever seemed to fit right, you know?”
He was answered by nothing more than distant bird call, the soft scrape of the Arabian’s metal-shod hooves on the stone as the animal drowsed in the cool respite.
Undeterred, he continued his work, stoop-backed, the pebbling of his spine and its laddering of crude, steel D rings shoving barbarically through the thin fabric of his shirt. The tearing left by Aoife’s barbed wire was healing neatly, did not trouble him, but he kept the scabbing which ringed his wrists hidden by long sleeves, as if reluctant even out here, for them to be on show.
“She asked about you,” he told the man that wasn’t there. “But she’s not the only one that has. I lied to Viki. Told her y’were still around, but I gave up pretending. I was never very good at deceivin’ people. Yeah, so I told Gem the truth and she was asking me what I’d do. Women do that, don’t they?” Wryly questioned, with a sickle sharp smile that looked resigned. “Won’t let a subject lie. Gotta make you think about the sh*t you don’t want to. Like Paige tellin’ me I need to get laid.”
When didn’t he, more to the point? Abstinence had never been his strong point.
“S’fine though, my wrist can take the abuse just as well as you used to.” Lost in memories of a most pleasant nature, he worked, and the hammer struck the chisel smoothly, a predictable staccato rhythm which had the bone split beneath it, but did not crumble it like rock.
“She said a year,” he added, later when the chunk was almost cleanly cut, and a pause had been necessitated by a tumble of hair which threatened his eyes. “Like the way people mourn. I don’t think I like that,” low and confidential. “I mean, even if you did just decide to up’n leave me, I wouldn’t want you dead for it. And I don’t want to think you’re dead, either. Wouldn’t I have felt that, anyway?”
Wishful thinking, idiot, the pessimist whispered, and outwardly he appeared to snarl at nothing.
The afternoon was spent searching, much like the day which followed. His excursions took him progressively further, saw the dust ingrained into each little crevice of the skin and the silvery hide of his horse as earth-stained as his clothing. Finding the desert man had become something of an obsession, a spur which cut more deeply with every day of his absence, because if he were not dead, and if he had not simply left, he was somewhere lost or harmed. The simple potential for that scenario outweighed any personal concerns or bitterness.
One day, he’d find the bastard. Then he’d decide whether he wanted to kiss him or kill him.
Out here, the heat was enough to suck away the moisture from a man’s skin in the space of a few seconds. The ground was baked dry, the brush as brittle as tinder and any breath of wind which stirred the dust felt as if it had drifted off a furnace. The air shimmered like a harem girl’s gauzy veil, warped the world beyond it so that static landmarks seemed to ripple, their distances imprecise. Mesteno would have died out there, once upon a time, but he’d learned the ways of the Dry under a lover’s tutelage, returning to it often enough without him, of late, to become confident in the intricacies of survival.
He veered away from the suspiciously furred cacti, which, up close, wore a jacket of swarming spiders ready to leap. He avoided too, the tiny mounds in the sand which might conceal a sheltering snake…or the delicate formation of crystalline rock known as desert roses.
Once upon a time he’d lain there belly down in the dust, the sun prickling at his shoulders as Samiel taught him how to tell one from another, watching his obdurate attempts to claim one of the exquisite little structures with unconcealed amusement. Less amusement, when Mesteno had presented it to him, for it had been Saint Valentine’s Day. Neither man had troubled themselves with the giving of gifts, and instead of partaking of the city’s commercialised celebrations, they’d escaped to where they could roam the wilds on horseback, abandoning responsibility for trouble in one another’s company. For all the sweltering heat, such an excursion had been a breath of fresh air, had made the day something worth remembering again, after so many years of what had ultimately been unnecessary efforts. Attempts at romance where he never quite seemed to grasp how it was done.
He’d been out there for half a day, setting off while the sky was streaked gaudily in half a hundred shades of dawn light, finding his way out to the guesthouse where the proprietor had told him, tiredly (and perhaps with a carefully concealed sympathy) that she had seen nothing of the desert man, and tossed him an apple from last year’s harvest. Sam had been fond of the orchard there, been content in his rooms above the stabling before he’d made the decision to put down roots.
From there, he’d followed a route the Arabian he rode knew as well as he did, and they’d loped along at a lazy, rocking horse canter while Rhy’Din’s winter chill ebbed with the shifting lands around them, that tell-tale distortion which marked the passing from one realm to another. The heat had pressed in, and all the smells of the Dry had come with it. Scorched stone and dust, the sulphur stink of the pools they’d explored, the scent of old death when they travelled past the small, sunken, bleach-boned carcass of a dead fennec fox. It was almost noon by the time they’d trotted down into the rocky little canyon, the shade of its high walls and the broad but slow-moving, shallow stream keeping the air a few degrees cooler.
He’d dismounted then, checking cautiously for any lurking threats and trusting the horse’s nose to warn them should a Sand Lion come stalking. Further downstream, the chatter of bird call was sing-song, rather than alarm shrill, and the water appeared clear of any debris which might come carrying unwanted parasites. Safe enough, he decided, to linger here and do as he’d intended.
The skull was colossal, large enough for two men to sprawl upon side by side. It jutted some twenty feet up out of the rocky wall, dark instead of pale, smooth either by nature or by centuries of weathering. Upon finding it they’d speculated over the nature of it, for this was clearly no creature designed for life upon the land, rather some predator of the oceans, something primeval and of the most base instincts. It might have been a great presumption to dare state that last, but this was no ordinary archaeological find. Even now, millennia since it’s death, it exuded the very same ill that it had incapacitated its prey with; fear.
It kept the birds well away, and he’d never witnessed anything else living that would willingly come close. But it did not keep him away. The ancient pulse of its power was little more than an unease compared to what it must have been once, a shiver along the spine with an anxiety low-lit in the gut, not a terror to send a man fleeing with his bowels turned to water. So up he climbed, preferring bare hands and feet over anything he could not feel his way in, and descended from above the protruding skull to drop down atop it, instead of trying to slither over the slippery dome where he might as well have been trying to scrabble at glass, for all the opportunity for grip it gave.
There was a bag slung over his shoulder, dust stained to ochre and fraying over the woven straps, and he let it slide down one long, wiry arm, carelessly disentangling it from clinging strands of hair - dark as aged blood and light as burnished gold, every shade in between tangled in great, snaking lengths that he hadn’t bothered to bind back. Sam had always preferred his hair loose. Sitting down with due caution for the slippery surface of the skull, he spread his knees wide and flattened the soles of his feet for purchase, as he went digging into the bag for the tools he needed.
“S’Gem’s birthday soon,” he spoke aloud to the empty air, but softly, as if daring to break the silence might wake the colossus beneath him. “I thought I’d make use of our friend here and make her something with an edge. Don’t worry though, I won’t take much.”
Further down the gulley, the stream spilled out into a waterfall, and the land below was one of the Dry’s few, true treasures. A delicately balanced, rare strip of life which had seen the men exploring like a pair of Adams in Eden, respectful of a beauty which hid as much potential for danger in the bite and sting of the unknown inhabitants, as it did for indulgence. Both had been astounded that the valley had not been discovered by the local tribes, who might have left their mark upon it, swarmed it like locusts and moved on again. Then they’d found the very skull he was sat upon, protruding like some grisly warning, tasted the fear it bled into the surroundings like a dark miasma, and taking old superstition into consideration, had known why their little haven remained untouched.
Trying to remove the ancient remains would have stolen the protection, thus he was not greedy in what he chipped away with the spell-hardened tools. Nothing else had sufficed to even leave a scratch, but here he persevered, hammering a slender line into the dark bone with a precisely angled chisel.
“She’s havin’ a baby. Asked me to be it’s Godfather. Thought you might find that funny. Oh an’ she’s getting’ hitched to that Ezekiel of hers. He’s a good guy. ‘Bout the only one s’ever seemed to fit right, you know?”
He was answered by nothing more than distant bird call, the soft scrape of the Arabian’s metal-shod hooves on the stone as the animal drowsed in the cool respite.
Undeterred, he continued his work, stoop-backed, the pebbling of his spine and its laddering of crude, steel D rings shoving barbarically through the thin fabric of his shirt. The tearing left by Aoife’s barbed wire was healing neatly, did not trouble him, but he kept the scabbing which ringed his wrists hidden by long sleeves, as if reluctant even out here, for them to be on show.
“She asked about you,” he told the man that wasn’t there. “But she’s not the only one that has. I lied to Viki. Told her y’were still around, but I gave up pretending. I was never very good at deceivin’ people. Yeah, so I told Gem the truth and she was asking me what I’d do. Women do that, don’t they?” Wryly questioned, with a sickle sharp smile that looked resigned. “Won’t let a subject lie. Gotta make you think about the sh*t you don’t want to. Like Paige tellin’ me I need to get laid.”
When didn’t he, more to the point? Abstinence had never been his strong point.
“S’fine though, my wrist can take the abuse just as well as you used to.” Lost in memories of a most pleasant nature, he worked, and the hammer struck the chisel smoothly, a predictable staccato rhythm which had the bone split beneath it, but did not crumble it like rock.
“She said a year,” he added, later when the chunk was almost cleanly cut, and a pause had been necessitated by a tumble of hair which threatened his eyes. “Like the way people mourn. I don’t think I like that,” low and confidential. “I mean, even if you did just decide to up’n leave me, I wouldn’t want you dead for it. And I don’t want to think you’re dead, either. Wouldn’t I have felt that, anyway?”
Wishful thinking, idiot, the pessimist whispered, and outwardly he appeared to snarl at nothing.
The afternoon was spent searching, much like the day which followed. His excursions took him progressively further, saw the dust ingrained into each little crevice of the skin and the silvery hide of his horse as earth-stained as his clothing. Finding the desert man had become something of an obsession, a spur which cut more deeply with every day of his absence, because if he were not dead, and if he had not simply left, he was somewhere lost or harmed. The simple potential for that scenario outweighed any personal concerns or bitterness.
One day, he’d find the bastard. Then he’d decide whether he wanted to kiss him or kill him.
Re: Insights (Volume I)
[Journal excerpt]
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Life has a way of dragging me back into the thick of things by the hair. Sometimes it’s good. I’ll get the kick up the ass I need to get motivated again, to stop dwelling on shit I can’t change. At other times I really resent it, because the methods are pretty fucking reprehensible.
It put Gem in the hands of some crazy blood magic users, tortured and risking her child. It threw Aoife back into the mix with my brother hard on her heels, and it had me making deals with a dead man which, in retrospect, probably not the smartest thing you ever did, Mesteno. Yeah, really good calls where he was concerned. Fucking sublime. To top it all off, it threw Bjorn back into the picture too, dangled him around in front of my nose like a toy for a while, like bait on a damn hook, then waited until I bit to watch me fall flat on my face. Repeatedly. More on that later.
Aoife’s meddling interrupted my rescue attempts with Rei, and by the time I was done dealing with the after effects of that, Bjorn and his wolf man and a bunch of other Rhy’Din heroes had already brought her back safely. I let her down. The Dreamwalker’s games became tangible things at last, and there is no forgiving that. Then she decided to get into Bjorn’s head. But that wasn’t enough. She had to screw Salvador. Somewhere between punching him in the face and bottles of booze I decided I wanted her dead, and in a fucking spectacular moment of sanity, I gave the job to Gideon, in exchange for my blood.
I conveniently forgot that just a few weeks before I’d been trying to rot his face off and open up his throat in the middle of the inn.
He tricked me, and the end result was that Aoife ran away free leaving us both looking like the most incompetent killers in the whole city. It left her free to drag Bjorn and I into her dreams, and I can now quite soundly say, electric shock therapy is not on my list of kinks. I don’t know where she is now. She seems to have vanished into thin air, but I know that she lives. Killing women is a nasty business though and I haven’t got the drive to hunt her. Maybe Salvador knows and maybe he doesn’t, but either way, he’s keeping quiet.
As for Gideon, well there’s a tale and a half. Somehow he found out where I live, and I’d been laying low for a while after an encounter with this crazy, corrupted witch at Bjorn’s. My hands were burnt, and he decided he’d try to fix it for me. Fuck knows why he was concerned in the first place, or why he was offering to help - turns out he likes to - but I figured there had to be a reason for it, ran my mouth and he left furious.
He’d done me a favour though, because I can’t heal up quick like half the city, and preternatural, holy methods seem to have the reverse effect thanks to my necromancy. Blood, it turns out (particular of certain species) works just fine though, so I decided to pay him a visit this time, make up for being an ass.
I knew how to reach him, I’d broken in once before when that Kestrel bitch was hounding him to congratulate him on being pussy-whipped. This time I took him out of his fortress and the evening ended with torn clothes and so much bone dust in my pants it felt like I’d been at a graveyard, not a nightclub. Unexpected. Pleasurable. Hell we even had fun. I figured that’d be the end of it - he’d had my blood at last, novelty gone. But it wasn’t. Fate conspired, as the bitch often does, and we wound up hunting the same marks, for completely different reasons (mine professional, his personal.) Because I’m a fucking genius (obviously) I offered to help him with some this n’ that. Decided that hey, he might be a spoilt rich kid but he’s probably actually a nicer person than I am, if you take away the fangs and the swagger. I actually liked the bastard.
But then there were bullets and getaways and him saying some dumb shit like he figured I’d still want to try finding a way to off him and I got pissed. I didn’t really think it through when I left him strung up in the bathroom with half his blood on the floor. Was too busy being angry to remember he spent a lot of last year tied up and drained and alone. By the time it dawned on me, it was too late. He’d gone loco and my fantastic plan of ‘let him down and then run really fast’ did not work. One moment I was on my feet, the next I had his fangs in my face and I was too stunned to even see straight.
I count myself lucky I didn’t get eaten. I should apologise to him, but I made a big fucking mess with that, and he’d probably appreciate not seeing me again.
Somewhere in the midst of all this craziness with Aoife, Salvador and Gideon, two other things happened. Their names are Bjorn and Evander.
The former, old friend, eternally potential (but never quite) lover: He and I have spent years in this (frankly) frustrating cycle of friendship, flirtation and trying to kill each other, and if he’s happy with this Ivanya guy, I should just let him be. I tried. I also should have known better that to spend any time alone with him. I should’ve known a ‘one last time’ would end up being something to feel guilty about too, but Karma came calling for that when his giant picked up on it and tried to kill me under the effects of this crazy, blood-bond related berserker rage.
Bjorn’d been taken by Niamh, who also happened to be the dark influence behind Zion’s attempts to fuck the world up, years ago. I didn’t know about this until Evander let it slip one night at the inn, and I finally met the bitch herself when I drove out to Bjorn’s to ask about it. She wasn’t far behind.
The proverbial shit storm descended a month ago, with Bjorn being kidnapped (and you just know that had to hurt his pride) and intended as a sacrifice to open the way back to Vhamere. I could write endlessly on this subject - how I hate even mention of the place. How it brings back the old guilt. How I’ve all along been this outsider that should have backed the fuck up and never quite figured out how to. It didn’t matter that Bjorn’s (or Leo’s?) people wanted me dead, or that Bjorn and I clashed again in the middle of all this. He is one of those people who I would do anything for, and so I teamed up with those very people that thought I needed killing. And I teamed up with his lover, whom I lied to, to keep Bjorn safe.
I should probably warn him about that sometime, in case his big idiot Viking-giant-lover starts asking questions. I lie so rarely I’m not used to having to cover my tracks.
He’s safe now. Or he was when I left the gate site. Since then I’ve stayed away. Part of me resents Ivanya for being in the way when I actually found myself single and ready to give shit a try with Bjorn, but the other part is perfectly okay with it. I want that to work out for him. I do want him happy. And you know, it’s easier because of Evander.
It was tempting fate to even get acquainted with him, because he was supposed to die when Niamh died. And I knew that she hated me already, after Zion, and the mess at the manor. But fucking her old lover? Salt in the wound. Bjorn would probably be annoyed with me about it, sleeping with one of his people (and sleeping is a wholly inappropriate term for what we do) but he doesn’t have to know. And it might start sounding like Evander is a substitute for what I couldn’t claim, but the men are nothing alike.
Truth is, I barely know him beyond his problems. The whole of my knowledge is based on what I glimpsed in shared memories, what I saw of him on the night we tried to save Bjorn and failed. He’s not my ‘anything’.
No, I lie. He is my friend. I have decided to claim him as one, even if I am Masgad.
I would like to know him though. For reasons.
Primarily these being he’s not a good man, he’s lived and done it the right way, he’s suffered and come out harder for it.
What he thinks of me, I don’t ask, and I don’t intend to. Right now it’s just good to know the shit’s all over and done with, and no one expects anything of me other than to be around, be a friend. I’m done living in abstinence waiting for someone that’s long gone. I’m not gonna be that fool.
- M
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Life has a way of dragging me back into the thick of things by the hair. Sometimes it’s good. I’ll get the kick up the ass I need to get motivated again, to stop dwelling on shit I can’t change. At other times I really resent it, because the methods are pretty fucking reprehensible.
It put Gem in the hands of some crazy blood magic users, tortured and risking her child. It threw Aoife back into the mix with my brother hard on her heels, and it had me making deals with a dead man which, in retrospect, probably not the smartest thing you ever did, Mesteno. Yeah, really good calls where he was concerned. Fucking sublime. To top it all off, it threw Bjorn back into the picture too, dangled him around in front of my nose like a toy for a while, like bait on a damn hook, then waited until I bit to watch me fall flat on my face. Repeatedly. More on that later.
Aoife’s meddling interrupted my rescue attempts with Rei, and by the time I was done dealing with the after effects of that, Bjorn and his wolf man and a bunch of other Rhy’Din heroes had already brought her back safely. I let her down. The Dreamwalker’s games became tangible things at last, and there is no forgiving that. Then she decided to get into Bjorn’s head. But that wasn’t enough. She had to screw Salvador. Somewhere between punching him in the face and bottles of booze I decided I wanted her dead, and in a fucking spectacular moment of sanity, I gave the job to Gideon, in exchange for my blood.
I conveniently forgot that just a few weeks before I’d been trying to rot his face off and open up his throat in the middle of the inn.
He tricked me, and the end result was that Aoife ran away free leaving us both looking like the most incompetent killers in the whole city. It left her free to drag Bjorn and I into her dreams, and I can now quite soundly say, electric shock therapy is not on my list of kinks. I don’t know where she is now. She seems to have vanished into thin air, but I know that she lives. Killing women is a nasty business though and I haven’t got the drive to hunt her. Maybe Salvador knows and maybe he doesn’t, but either way, he’s keeping quiet.
As for Gideon, well there’s a tale and a half. Somehow he found out where I live, and I’d been laying low for a while after an encounter with this crazy, corrupted witch at Bjorn’s. My hands were burnt, and he decided he’d try to fix it for me. Fuck knows why he was concerned in the first place, or why he was offering to help - turns out he likes to - but I figured there had to be a reason for it, ran my mouth and he left furious.
He’d done me a favour though, because I can’t heal up quick like half the city, and preternatural, holy methods seem to have the reverse effect thanks to my necromancy. Blood, it turns out (particular of certain species) works just fine though, so I decided to pay him a visit this time, make up for being an ass.
I knew how to reach him, I’d broken in once before when that Kestrel bitch was hounding him to congratulate him on being pussy-whipped. This time I took him out of his fortress and the evening ended with torn clothes and so much bone dust in my pants it felt like I’d been at a graveyard, not a nightclub. Unexpected. Pleasurable. Hell we even had fun. I figured that’d be the end of it - he’d had my blood at last, novelty gone. But it wasn’t. Fate conspired, as the bitch often does, and we wound up hunting the same marks, for completely different reasons (mine professional, his personal.) Because I’m a fucking genius (obviously) I offered to help him with some this n’ that. Decided that hey, he might be a spoilt rich kid but he’s probably actually a nicer person than I am, if you take away the fangs and the swagger. I actually liked the bastard.
But then there were bullets and getaways and him saying some dumb shit like he figured I’d still want to try finding a way to off him and I got pissed. I didn’t really think it through when I left him strung up in the bathroom with half his blood on the floor. Was too busy being angry to remember he spent a lot of last year tied up and drained and alone. By the time it dawned on me, it was too late. He’d gone loco and my fantastic plan of ‘let him down and then run really fast’ did not work. One moment I was on my feet, the next I had his fangs in my face and I was too stunned to even see straight.
I count myself lucky I didn’t get eaten. I should apologise to him, but I made a big fucking mess with that, and he’d probably appreciate not seeing me again.
Somewhere in the midst of all this craziness with Aoife, Salvador and Gideon, two other things happened. Their names are Bjorn and Evander.
The former, old friend, eternally potential (but never quite) lover: He and I have spent years in this (frankly) frustrating cycle of friendship, flirtation and trying to kill each other, and if he’s happy with this Ivanya guy, I should just let him be. I tried. I also should have known better that to spend any time alone with him. I should’ve known a ‘one last time’ would end up being something to feel guilty about too, but Karma came calling for that when his giant picked up on it and tried to kill me under the effects of this crazy, blood-bond related berserker rage.
Bjorn’d been taken by Niamh, who also happened to be the dark influence behind Zion’s attempts to fuck the world up, years ago. I didn’t know about this until Evander let it slip one night at the inn, and I finally met the bitch herself when I drove out to Bjorn’s to ask about it. She wasn’t far behind.
The proverbial shit storm descended a month ago, with Bjorn being kidnapped (and you just know that had to hurt his pride) and intended as a sacrifice to open the way back to Vhamere. I could write endlessly on this subject - how I hate even mention of the place. How it brings back the old guilt. How I’ve all along been this outsider that should have backed the fuck up and never quite figured out how to. It didn’t matter that Bjorn’s (or Leo’s?) people wanted me dead, or that Bjorn and I clashed again in the middle of all this. He is one of those people who I would do anything for, and so I teamed up with those very people that thought I needed killing. And I teamed up with his lover, whom I lied to, to keep Bjorn safe.
I should probably warn him about that sometime, in case his big idiot Viking-giant-lover starts asking questions. I lie so rarely I’m not used to having to cover my tracks.
He’s safe now. Or he was when I left the gate site. Since then I’ve stayed away. Part of me resents Ivanya for being in the way when I actually found myself single and ready to give shit a try with Bjorn, but the other part is perfectly okay with it. I want that to work out for him. I do want him happy. And you know, it’s easier because of Evander.
It was tempting fate to even get acquainted with him, because he was supposed to die when Niamh died. And I knew that she hated me already, after Zion, and the mess at the manor. But fucking her old lover? Salt in the wound. Bjorn would probably be annoyed with me about it, sleeping with one of his people (and sleeping is a wholly inappropriate term for what we do) but he doesn’t have to know. And it might start sounding like Evander is a substitute for what I couldn’t claim, but the men are nothing alike.
Truth is, I barely know him beyond his problems. The whole of my knowledge is based on what I glimpsed in shared memories, what I saw of him on the night we tried to save Bjorn and failed. He’s not my ‘anything’.
No, I lie. He is my friend. I have decided to claim him as one, even if I am Masgad.
I would like to know him though. For reasons.
Primarily these being he’s not a good man, he’s lived and done it the right way, he’s suffered and come out harder for it.
What he thinks of me, I don’t ask, and I don’t intend to. Right now it’s just good to know the shit’s all over and done with, and no one expects anything of me other than to be around, be a friend. I’m done living in abstinence waiting for someone that’s long gone. I’m not gonna be that fool.
- M
Re: Insights (Volume I)
[Journal excerpt]
Saturday November 3rd, 2012
There’s probably a word for it, but I don’t know it. One to describe an unhealthy, persistent, sometimes debilitating need for someone.
He takes up too much of my head space. I wonder what the fuck he’s doing. Whether he’s safe. Why the fuck I want him again so soon when really, it’s been no time at all. It doesn’t matter if we spent a few filthy minutes in the mud or a whole night in a rented room, flesh on fire with blood and venom - I’m still left resenting the fact that he’s not right there to touch, to look at, the moment he’s gone.
Fucking ridiculous really. He’s never even spent the night at my place.
I’d call it lust, but it’s more than that. Not love because I know the damn difference, and I know that neither of us really, want to be thinking about that shit. Not after Sam. Not after Niamh. But somehow he’s got under my skin, with his snarling mouth and his antagonism, with the way everything about him is so inappropriate he shouldn’t be allowed out on the streets. It’s hard to be in public with him. It’s hard not to look at him in front of everyone and when I do, I’m pretty sure that it’s obvious. That for all my temper and impatience, all I really want is to eat at him, get my damn hands all over him and spread him out in the most obscene, unthinkable of ways, fighting me for every inch.
God, I love the way he fights me.
Maybe obsession is the word I’m looking for.
I was supposed to be writing about everything that’s happened since the summer. About Gem’s marriage to Ezekiel, about the mess at The Circus with Gambino’s boy, about Vadriel being back in the city and how things between Gideon and I developed (or devolved) after the mess at the Lanesborough. And there’s so much I could have noted here about the current crisis with the Vhamerians.
Instead it’s all Evander fucking Antony.
Fuck.
- M
Saturday November 3rd, 2012
There’s probably a word for it, but I don’t know it. One to describe an unhealthy, persistent, sometimes debilitating need for someone.
He takes up too much of my head space. I wonder what the fuck he’s doing. Whether he’s safe. Why the fuck I want him again so soon when really, it’s been no time at all. It doesn’t matter if we spent a few filthy minutes in the mud or a whole night in a rented room, flesh on fire with blood and venom - I’m still left resenting the fact that he’s not right there to touch, to look at, the moment he’s gone.
Fucking ridiculous really. He’s never even spent the night at my place.
I’d call it lust, but it’s more than that. Not love because I know the damn difference, and I know that neither of us really, want to be thinking about that shit. Not after Sam. Not after Niamh. But somehow he’s got under my skin, with his snarling mouth and his antagonism, with the way everything about him is so inappropriate he shouldn’t be allowed out on the streets. It’s hard to be in public with him. It’s hard not to look at him in front of everyone and when I do, I’m pretty sure that it’s obvious. That for all my temper and impatience, all I really want is to eat at him, get my damn hands all over him and spread him out in the most obscene, unthinkable of ways, fighting me for every inch.
God, I love the way he fights me.
Maybe obsession is the word I’m looking for.
I was supposed to be writing about everything that’s happened since the summer. About Gem’s marriage to Ezekiel, about the mess at The Circus with Gambino’s boy, about Vadriel being back in the city and how things between Gideon and I developed (or devolved) after the mess at the Lanesborough. And there’s so much I could have noted here about the current crisis with the Vhamerians.
Instead it’s all Evander fucking Antony.
Fuck.
- M
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