Tuesday, March 18, 2014

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Erich

He is sleeping. He is sleeping in a room. He is sleeping in a nascent, idealized memory-of-a-room, an idea-of-things. Clapboard, windowglazing. Sun washing through trim lace curtains. The threadbare quilt beneath his fingertips, tangled in the curve of a fist. Morning always comes like this, a gullet full of light. His face slack against the pillow. Never any case, just the ticking that has the peculiar and intermediate taste of dust suspended in sunlight.

The fire’s died down. There’s a chill in the air. His first and second and third instincts are to burrow back into the cocoon of warmth trapped between mattress and quilt, but like clockwork -

He rolls over in his own bed.

He finds himself listening for a familiar voice that he has never heard before all day long.

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Melantha

Someone is dead,

and even the trees know it.

The trees have a dark and marching confederacy and she stands at the edge of the woods. There is a road, there is always a road, it both rises and falls from where she stands, but what she knows is the wood and the verge and the bracken. Something is falling, thick flakes drifting eccentric in the bright cold air. The sun is rising. She forgets – why does she forget? – what has been done.

Opens her mouth to taste the snow –

- but no, no. That is ash on her tongue.

Melantha wakes. No matter how many times she brushes her teeth, she cannot get the taste out of her mouth.

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Tamsin

Why does that still clear lake remind her of the sea. Why does she stand on the scree at its edge with the wind scouring down from the heights, raw and bitter in the – failing light? Dawning light? – in the slanting light that consents to touch only the edges of this dark valley. Why does she long for it. Why does that longing –

ache

in her throat. The rip-tide roar of fire through the still-green wood. The wood is always green; it has no time to cure. The dead don’t know. It’s only the living. The water is skinned with ice, but she knows where the ice is thinnest, and when she takes the hatchet in hand -

Tamsin wakes. The rest of the day, she can feel the splintering wood of its handle in her hand.

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Thomas

He can count the knots in the pine, all tongue and groove. Knows them the way he knows – what else do you know like that? Familiar as a waking dream except that it slides away, inevitably, invariably, when no longer in focus. Every morning he does this; looks up. Just as he’s crossing the threshold.

There’s no why lodged in his throat.

There just is.

Thomas wakes. Immediately, and entirely, wherever he slept. He wakes. He wakes. He wakes.

Melantha

D:

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Keisha

Morning light like a waking stain on the wood.

It is a chopping block, she reminds herself. And that is why it smells so thoroughly of blood.

"The first death follows another," he says, quietly, his voice warm in the back of her mind. She always remembers the shape of his mouth. "Everyone who says differently is a liar - "

Keisha wakes. In her own bed, in the warmth of her own room.

eleusis

They have all now started dreaming. The dreams are as vivid as their waking hours; perhaps more so. This is all they recall.

[OOC: from here on, if I miss a day or miss a day with your character, your character still has the dream. It just stays static, i.e. will be the same as the last dream he/she experienced.]

eleusis

For tonight: c'est tout!