Stories from RhyDin & The Rings

The Scientist

Runnin' in circles, comin' up tails
Heads on a science apart

Songwriters: Christopher Anthony John Martin / Guy Rupert Berryman / William Champion / Jonathan Mark Buckland

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After opening the overhead security door, and opening a series of locks on the front door, Kruger was finally able to open it and let them inside his shop. "Can't be too careful." Was what he said to Yasmin with a slight shrug of his shoulders. He didn't go into how each lock was a ward against specific types of creatures, though she might have felt something considering what she was.

The lights came on automatically once the sensors picked up their movement. There were display cases that ran the length of the room, though there were openings to allow for walking through. Within the cases was a plethora of knives and daggers in every imaginable shape and length. Along the walls were weapon racks filled with swords by length and type, axes and hammers all occupying their own wall.

"There’s a forge on the other side of that door, where I made most of these." Behind the counter was an additional glass door cabinet. It was smaller, and far less occupied by weapons, but there was a palpable difference that could be felt in the air closer to the cabinet.

Not only did Yasmin feel a tingle across her skin as she stepped past the locks and into the shop, but the band of embossed electrum around her neck rippled, flexing against her throat and forcing a tight swallow. "No kidding." He was, after all, talking to someone who had spent the better part of the last decade living in abandoned warehouses and stores, in shared squats and shelters. Her safest space was the skoolie - but that never felt quite the same without Zeke.

Rubbing the blood from her fingers onto the black jeans she wore, she trailed them across the glass cases, gaze following - she couldn't name the things she was seeing, beyond the most obvious, but art in any form, drew her like a magnet. "I should have known..." She looked up, over the walls, and onto the smith. "The singing."

He stepped behind the counter, looking at the doors on that last cabinet like he wasn't quite sure where to go. His head turned to look from one door to the next, the forefinger on his left hand pointing would be an excellent indicator of where his eyes were looking. Finally he made a decision and unlocked the far right hand door and pushed the pair of gauntlets into it.

"The singing?" he said to her. "You're familiar with the technique?" It was possible they were talking about two entirely different things. A pale purple glow slowly rose in intensity the moment he put his hand in the cabinet. It faded once he'd shut the door again. "Most people think I'm just strange." He turned to face Yasmin as he finished, feeling very warm for some reason. "I should get the air checked..." That had to be the reason.

"I'm familiar with artists." Her voice rasped over the words, hyper aware of how they moved her skin beneath the electrum. How her pulse beat in the hollow of her throat. "Techniques change. But most artists aren't just skilled in one form. Singers move. Crafters sing as they work."

Whether it was the press of the metal, the art, the quiet after the crowd - or the fact that she was still bleeding - there was something more intentional to her. She was still dressed like a street kid, and her voice held none of the subtle obeisance it did around Anubis, Lord Karos, but neither did it have the knee-jerk suspicion it often did around everyone else. "Everyone used to sing as they worked. To thresh wheat, cut stones...people forget we hold rhythm in our very veins. Music is life."

She'd wandered closer to where Kruger stood as she spoke, and drew up short, her fingers curling and tugging at the collar as if it would do any good at all. "Is it always this warm in here?"

"Yeah, no, I'm not sure what's going on with it." That pretty much covered every answer, right? He held up a hand towards a vent, and it did seem to be blowing cold air. "Maybe it's just from the fight tonight." He said it, but there was the hint of uncertainty in his tone.

"Natural affinities, sure, but I do things a little differently." He pulled a bottle out from beneath the counter, and a glass, which he filled with the brown liquor and pushed across to Yasmin. He took a pull from the bottle, and swallowed like he was parched.

"I use the seven elements like the notes in a song. There is a song to create any kind of weapon you can imagine... if you can just find the song." His eyebrows went upwards at first as he started talking but slowly lowered as he ran out of ways to convey his thoughts. "The reverse is true too, but songs of unmaking are rare."

"In the movies people get cold from blood loss..." The leap from one to the other made sense in her head - Yasmin wasn't arguing, he certainly knew more about fighting and injuries than she did. The glass was accepted with a smile, and a one-sided cheers -half the glass disappeared with a hard swallow to get it past the unusual obstacle that the collar had become. She hooked the other hand around the metal and tugged again, uselessly. Instinct, since she knew without a doubt the damn thing wasn't just going to come off. She gave a slow nod, lips pressed together - magic was not something she had studied, she hadn’t had to when it became relavant, but rhythm and dance, chanting and music had been staples of the temples she had danced in, and, of course, now it was in every inch of her. Or it was supposed to be. "I'm not even going to pretend I understand the how of what you do...but it kinda doesn't matter as long as you do, right?" A song of unmaking rolled through her head again...her eyes losing focus as a single flute played a random melody in her memory. "So to answer your question, no - but then, I haven't spent a ton of time around metal and smiths...is that why they call you The Anvil?"

"I can get you the first aid kit, if you want? I keep it pretty well stocked. Accidents here can be pretty messy." He indicated all the naked blades in the place. Kruger disappeared behind the counter, when he reappeared he had a large orange duffle bag that was filled with gauze, and bandages, in a vast assortment of shapes and sizes. He unzipped it, turning it so that Yasmin could take out what she needed. "Unless you need me to call for some more knowledgeable medical help?" He knew people, who knew a guy.

"I think I might be able to help you understand. It will take a little trust." Probably not too much, but who knew what she was thinking or he was capable of? "Only if you have the time that is. I wouldn't want to keep you."

He had watched her tug at the necklace more than once, and would finally be driven to ask the question. "Everything okay?" Maybe it was reacting to the heat?

She didn't even have time to agree or disagree before the bag was on the counter, and she started ruffling through it for what she needed, sparing a swift glance up at her unexpected benefactor. "Thanks, no, but if you have some honey..." She was no healer, but most things didn't really need them, in her experience. And classics were classics for a reason.

The skip over was noted, and let go - she had secrets of her own, she wasn't going to dig after his. Focusing instead on the gauze in one hand, she unwrapped a length of it, gently spreading the weft with her fingers, "I don't have anywhere to be - I learned that lesson during IFL. Booked a job the same night as a match...had to show up still in my dance gear." She was still hyper aware of the weight at her throat, and even without clarification, she knew what he was looking at. Yasmin let out a sigh, and ran a hand through her hair. "Yeah? It's...it's not that kind of collar." She knew what people thought when they saw it.
"It - usually it's just there. I barely notice it anymore" Surely, the same person who made everything around her might have some insight into the thing she bore. "But lately...it gets randomly warm, or tight."

"I don't know if there's any honey... I also wouldn't know how old it was if there were some. It's been a long time since Nikolai and I lived here." He said it as he was looking at the ceiling above him.

Kruger tested the tuning of the instrument, making minute adjustments to a couple of strings before speaking again. "I need you to understand, I've only performed two unmaking songs in my life. This is not going to be one of those. Call it a first draft." He practiced the first few bars of the song, trying to get the timing down, and find the key to start singing in.

"It helps that what I'll be working with is something I made. The truth is, that this forge couldn't handle the energy that comes from a true unmaking song." He looked up at the very top of the dome, then traced an unseen line from it down to the billet waiting on the anvil. Once satisfied, he actually turned away from her and it, and stepped closer to the edge of the dais, where the bottom of the dome was near enough to touch. Only then did he, while still facing away from Yasmin, start to play for real.

The chords coming from the guitar were seized almost violently by the curvature of the dome. Their notes spun along the surface and were just as audible, clear, and loud as if Kruger were standing right in front of Yasmin playing the notes. The dome drew every ounce of sound spiraling ever upwards towards the topmost curve.

"Come up to meet you, tell ya I'm sorry...You don't know how lovely you are." The sound of his voice wove itself through the notes, binding them even tighter. Vibrations trembled their way through the tools that sat up on the dais as they responded to the presumed intention of the craftsman. The weave of voice around notes spun into the top of the dome and surged downwards into the bar laying atop the anvil as Kruger was reaching the chorus.

"Nobody said it was easy. It's such a shame for us to part. Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be this hard...Oh, take me back to the start." From somewhere in front of Yasmin that same whining tone could be heard as the vibrations impacted the metal. At the final line from the chorus, the tiniest of pings could be heard. It was a little like a ricochet, if an eensy bullet were fired by a pill bug.

Full lips pressed into a thin line - music was the hardest pull for her to resist, and she knew this song. She didn't consciously close her eyes, or allow the slightest sway to move her form, but the resonance of that single guitar and voice, even amplified by whatever hold the dome had on the notes, brought her back to the flicker of flames on faces, the smells of asphalt and refuse cleansed by heat and an acrid hint of treated wood.

A hesitant voice growing stronger as the song built toward the chorus, smiling eyes glancing between fingers more certain than usual and the newest face in the ragtag bunch that was passing around a battered metal bowl, limp vegetables and barely noticeable strings of unnamed protein in what could only be called broth with the broadest of definitions. She hadn't understood the words the first time, but the aching warble hadn't needed them - there'd been days, after, for her to stretch her tongue from the local dialect that was a derivation of her own to the English the lyrics were in. But that night, there'd just been the plaintive offer in the notes, the outstretched musical hand-

“I was just guessing at numbers and figures, pulling the puzzles apart”-

Her brain barely registered the words, still caught in the memory, when the collar flexed, sharply and suddenly against the delicate curve of her windpipe, jerking Yasmin out of the memory, and yet not quite back to the present. Her breath caught against the metal closing around her throat, and her hands jerked to respond, as if it were a hand that could be wrenched away. It had been -

-impact, burning pain and a condescending laugh, shouts and chaos, and then the figure staggered. Attention shifting to the slim, ragged form holding the wreckage of a patched and mended guitar. A single gesture and she'd fought through the explosion of pain, tried to -

Her knees hit the dais, head bowed, breath rasping as the collar wrenched and twisted around her throat, as if it sought to fight even the hint of undoing by entrenching itself into her flesh. She managed a strangled cry, a sound almost universal to the wounded, in the moment she felt the first edge break through, crimson fingertips crashing to the floor as the electrum bit.

Kruger didn't speculate on the things that would reveal themselves to Yasmin. Once he would have tried to be a guide, directing her vision to those which were shown to him. Somewhere along the line it had become less important, he viewed the act as a means to justify himself to them. He had come to understand that it was done from a place of uncertainty in them, in himself. Although it might change again, he was always learning, now he felt that it was better for his audience to have their own experience.

He felt like he was on the precipice with that line of thinking, and might have come to an epiphany if it hadn't been for the sound that Yasmin had made. The song ended abruptly, and with good reason. When he turned to face her, she was on her knees and struggling, it seemed to him, to breathe. He laid the guitar aside, and crossed the dais to kneel next to Yasmin. That was when he saw blood on the floor.

"No!" The word of command erupted from Kruger's mouth, even as he was placing his hands to the sides of the electrum collar. "You may be mighty, but here you will yield to me." The language of his words was unlike any nationality. The words rolled out of his mouth like a landslide as the language of earth and stone should be.

He could tell that Yasmin's collar had stopped contracting. Whether that was a result of the music ending, or something he'd done Kruger didn't know. What he knew, what he could feel was how the electrum reacted to him. The solid metal became almost a liquid, in its state of plasticity, it began to form itself to the contours of his fingers. For seconds that felt like hours he held to the electrum as it rolled and writhed. He only let go once he was certain that Yasmin could breathe again.

The tip of his left forefinger was the last part of him maintaining contact with the metal. As he pulled away that final connection a coppery filament distorted from the collar, remaining in contact with both until it finally broke away from the collar and surged to form a ring about the base of that finger. "That was...unexpected." Kruger looked at the electrum adorning his finger, turning his hand over and using his eyes to follow the ancient designs embedded in the metal.

As the air rushed in, so did reality...the here and now of the forge, and the calloused, warm weight on her shoulders. Her own fingers stretched against the stone, reaching - desert storm eyes open wide, but there was nothing to see, just feel. Just out of reach. The distraction of the metal, the stretch of it from her tanned and trembling pulse to something stronger, meant she could feel the faintest glimmer of what it stole from her.

She was so focused on the sensation that she forgot to breathe, even as the electrum obeyed and released its literal chokehold on her. Mental, physical, magical - it was the closest to freedom she'd felt in a millennia or more.

And then it all came crashing back. The collar snapped back into place and severed her connection to that piece of herself, and the breath rushed into her lungs with a sob that clenched her eyes shut with the pain. Her skin felt raw where the metal had bit deep, cool where the blood trickled, drying in the heat of the forge. "Tas, hi-nehm...thesu-tu" The words rasped across her tongue and she shook her head, curling her hands into fists against the stones. "It's...joined together. Bound." For once her accent was thick, as if her tongue were trying to speak two languages at once. Combined with attempting to put voice to concepts she only barely understood, Yasmin had to force her head up, demand her lungs fill with air, hold and release in an attempt to remember how to speak. "It's a single piece, there's no seam, no break in the -"

It might be clear from the echo in her voice that it was not the first time the band had reacted poorly to an attempt to remove it. At some point, she had forced her eyes open, not that she needed to see, but it gave further solidity to the circumstances. She expected to see the smith staring back at her, but instead, "Your ring." She hadn't noticed it before but she hadn't really been looking either. There'd been so much else to look at. One shaking hand rubbed at her throat, wincing at the added damage...it was really not her night for injuries. "It...usually doesn't listen to anyone. Maybe that's why?"

"It's not mine." Kruger could have tried to explain the relationship between himself and certain domains. It was relevant, but this was not the time. "This is a gift from your...restraint." There was an attempt from his new accessory that he could feel. It sought to hinder him. The prohibitive command was not sentient. Kruger was not the same as Yasmin, and the rules were just as far apart.

This directive to shunt away his power was unable to adapt. Maybe that was because of the difference in the world of his origin, or maybe something like how the power manifested. There were too many possibilities at the moment, he would need time to sort through things. He'd hoped that whatever difference there was would translate to being able to remove the metal from his forefinger. That was not the case, which added implications to the entirety of the hindering device that subjectified Yasmin.

"I'll have to thank it for the opportunity, but not now." Kruger put his hand atop the anvil, his fingers blindly sought something. Once he'd located it, he brought a sliver of metal that had broken away from the original billet. It was so thin that it looked like a strong grip would bend it, or break it to pieces.

He started to take one end and perhaps try to fit the steel between his finger and the ring, but stopped and took in his surroundings. "No, not here. This place is not guarded enough. It's fine for making repairs, or less enhanced objects." He was speaking loud enough to be heard, and his words were directed at her, there was in them however the sense of thoughts hidden deeply in his mind.

"I'll pass on the message." Yasmin ran a hand back through her hair, in a concerted effort not to touch the metal resting in its familiar place again. You'd think she'd be used to it by now, but that brief glimpse of freedom had made the weight of it all the more obvious. Maybe it was just the cuts beneath it. Maybe she just hoped it was. Most of the time, she could forget it was there, forget that someone, somewhere, was siphoning off the power that was rightfully hers. As much as anyone could really ever forget such a thing.

The little Egyptian dragged herself up to her feet, assuming his words were a signal that whatever tonight was, had reached its end. She didn't think either of them had expected the events - she certainly hadn't. Yasmin leaned heavily into the anvil, and forced her legs beneath her, pushing herself to stand in an approximation of a hip-cocked ease, arms half-crossed, half-wrapped around her ribs. "Guess it likes you too." She nodded her head at the implacably stubborn metal band. "It's not so bad - people won't ask weird questions about a ring." As opposed to the metal collar she sported, which got rather more attention. Not usually one for apologies, it took a long moment before the unfamiliar words made their way between her lips. "...sorry about - it's never done anything like that before. Come off, like that. Or - attached itself to anyone. I would have warned you, not to..." One shoulder rose and fell with exhaustion.

"Likes doesn't seem to be the right verb. I believe it's inclined to suppress anybody that might overcome it." He stood up and offered Yasmin an ironic sort of smile. "First impression, only. It would be interesting to see what would have happened had I not let go when I did." Would the device have transferred completely to him? How would that have changed things from what they currently were?

He had questions. Finding answers would take all of his knowledge and skill. He put a consoling hand on Yasmin's shoulder. "There's nothing to apologize for. It's impossible to know the latent properties it has, even for me when it's obvious that it was formed, not forged." He was starting to believe that the function of the collar was more than simple suppression. It was best not to share that with her, there were no guarantees that he was correct.

An itch in the back of his hand had him glance away from Yasmin. What he found as his eyes lighted on that hand was a tiny chain made of electrum that linked itself to the ring at his finger, and a newly formed bracelet about the same wrist. Kruger's eyebrow twitched at the sight, although he shoved the hand deeply into his pocket in an attempt to conceal it from her. "I've worked on worse."

Yasmin shifted, putting more of her weight onto the end of the anvil, fingers pressing to her temple. Lashes dipping, she shook her head with a wry smile at the smith. "Maybe that's how it got me the first time...I didn't let go." Because she didn't remember how she'd been snared. There was life and art, a swift flicker to mark the shift from mortal to immortal, and then - darkness. Tight, confining nothingness - a sort of half-existence.

The weight of his hand, heavier even than it looked and he wasn't a small man, dropped her knock-kneed to sit on the hard metal surface. There was a pounding in her head, as if something were being hammered into her temples, and goosebumps rose illogically against the heat that washed over her. Distracted by her own ills, she didn't notice his hand being shoved into his pocket - not that she would have had any insight if she had. Her hunt for someone to get it off had only taught her how unique her situation was.

Nodding turned out to be a very bad idea - the gesture made the room swim around her, and her effort to stand had her feet slipping out from beneath her and the rest of her crashing toward the floor.

"Maybe..." He didn't really have time to get any deeper into it than that. When Yasmin finally dropped. Kruger did what he hoped anyone would have. He picked her up, carried her up the stairs to the little apartment he'd once shared with his son. What furniture existed was covered by a sheet. It had been a long time since anyone had used this space.

He removed the sheet from the double bed as carefully as he could to keep the dust from rising. A fleece blanket, with a burnt rose printed on it, was still there, waiting to be pulled back. How long did it take for scents to leave things like that? He deposited Yasmin on the mattress, then covered her over with the blanket.

When she finally woke up she'd find three things on the counter in the kitchen. A bag containing Danishes which was still warm, almost as if he'd stayed there all night. A cup of coffee, with steam coming out of the lid sat next to a handful of creams and sugars. The final thing was a handwritten note.

Sorry, I have a bunch of places I need to go. The Danish is from the bakery on the next corner, coffee is from Slim. He's got a cart that he pushes through the neighborhood, make a good cup though. I'm not sure if you need it or not, but there's a spare key on a hook near the door. Feel free to stay here, or crash as you need to. Before you start talking about costs, I only open the shop three days a week. Would be nice not to have to worry about keeping the weapons cleaned and oiled. No pressure though. I don't use the apartment anymore, seems like a waste for it to be empty. It served me pretty well, just watch your head, some of the ceilings slant.

I'll be in touch,

K