the nameless house

wake

It is the dream. It is the dream it is always the dream the dream moves and the dream opens and the dream grows and the dream lives and the dream breathes and the dream beats like a drum and the dream does not change.

Except when they change it.

--

It is always winter here. Spring and spring and the sense of summer young and warm in the air when they wake whereever they wake but it is winter here. The sky is painted with the thinnest edge of light that is either dying or dawning, and snow spits from desultory clouds clotting the sky.

--

This is where they are.

Melantha tackles the boy-named-Jack and the boy from her dreams is the boy from the smiling photograph attached to the folded box where the occasional patron tosses in the odd bit of change. She tackles him to the ground and I miss you she whispers and

I miss everything, he whispers back.

He is crying, too.

Melantha can taste his tears.

--

Tamsin waves and Tamsin tells stories and Tamsin wants to feel his heart: how is it beating, what is its speed, how fast does it pound, and Tamsin is in a strange place with a strange taste on her tongue and George Eldred is gone and down below two young men emerge from a house (a white house) onto a sidewalk (a gray sidewalk) and somehow the morning light is gone. Somehow the morning is gone.

Somehow the morning,

shifts.

Two young men are coming out of a house, they are named Thomas and they are named Erich and they hear a young woman shouting:

"GEORGE ELDRED!" a beat. "GEORGE?" another beat. Lonely: "ERICH MELANTHA KEISHA."

from up above.

--

And then there is one young man.

The other is gone. The other is gone and the morning is gone and there is a kind of

movement

in the ground beneath them.

Something slithering to wakefulness, somehow beneath the skin of everything. Everything. Everything.

--

"Did you feel that?" The boy asks Melantha, stilling abruptly. His breath is warm against her skin. "It's waking up."

Erich

Erich has run down that street a hundred times, or at least a few dozen. He has run down that slope and seen the woods and seen Melantha there ahead of time so so so so so frustratingly many times, and sometimes he sees someone ahead of him and sometimes he sees someone beside him and sometimes he sees none of them except the woods, the smoke, Melantha.

It is different. Tonight is different from all other nights. Tonight is different because there is Melantha, there is the woods, there is someone beside him and then the someone-beside-him is gone; there is someone ahead of him and the someone-ahead-of-him is Tamsin. None of that is why, though. Tonight is different because:

Melantha is there

and Erich does not wake

and Erich's dream-brother is there too. Melantha tackles him and hugs him or maybe just tackles him to the ground; Erich is too far away to see. And Erich does not wake.

A ferocious joy and anticipation bursts in his Ahroun's heart. He bursts out of his skin, quite literally: hits the ground on four paws, a big shaggy dapple-furred wolf that lopes, that bursts down the slope at full tilt. He rushes past Tamsin, uttering a low urgent joyful bark, does not pause to see if the Fianna follows or not. That is Melantha there, and she has not disappeared and he has not awoken. So he runs. He runs as fast as his legs can carry him, down the slope, past that dreadful house, toward one of his two best friends in the whole wide world and toward the boy who said he was his brother.

Melantha

Somewhere between leaping upon him and dragging him down and something waking, Melantha's tackle turns into a strange embrace. She is holding him, little boy Jack who is in a coma, and she knows now he's not one of her brothers, he's not hers at all, but still she misses him. And he misses everything. She cries, too, soft, soundless, and sniffs roughly as her arms shift around him.

On the breeze she hears her name echoing, and Erich's. Her spine tenses, and she props herself on one elbow, her other arm still holding Jack in case he vanishes. Or tries to. He speaks; she looks at him, taking a breath. "What is it?" she asks him, like he knows.

She hasn't seen Erich yet, but soon enough she hears paws thundering against the ground and flinches, grabs Jack closer. "Stay, stay," she tells him, urgently, begging. "I won't let anything hurt you. I promise. I think --"

but she doesn't know. This is a dream, and she can't promise that the wolf that looks like Erich isn't going to hurt them.

Tamsin

Up on the rise, then, before The House, ax for chopping wood in hand but no more nice old man. The house is the house where the dead go, where nobody goes except for sometimes the boy, the house she coaxed George Eldred into bringing her to -- and then he died. He died out there he died like a real person dies he died for good. Who knows how real people die? They don't even know. They're dead. That's nothing.

Tamsin's moon is waning, always, dragging her toward the dark of things, dragging her toward the shadow,

and what does she do, the Galliard-girl? The Fianna-wolf? Does she shed her own young woman's shape to race past the house to the kinfolk she hadn't noticed yet, there in the wood-dark? Notices now with an Ahroun trailing exuberance, clutching someone or something; can she really see from where she is on the rise? Is that a boy?

THE boy, maybe?

The existence of a THE BOY might decide her against going into the house immediately; something is moving under the ground. Good! Good! Move! Whatever you are! Yelling-thing, maybe! Tamsin stomps the ground back. Threat threat threat.

What does she do, other than menace the ground, stomp stomp STOMP enough of that stupid GROUND? Tamsin does follow Erich's general trajectory, but she only looks to see where he went, to get a better look at Melantha and the boy in the kinwoman's arms, to call, "Hey! Do you need me? Because I swore I was going in and so I am!"

And so she does and so she will.

wake

"It's waking up." Jack tells Melantha again, more urgently this time. His breath is harsh and his heart beats fast and his name is something else. Something else something else something else but they call him

Jack.

And there's resistance in his arms, resistance in his body, resistance in his blood when she clasps him close, sudden stiff and also yearning, stubborn, mulish.

And there's this kindling fear in his eyes that has nothing to do with the wolf loping toward them over snowdusted pineneedles, nothing to do with the girl with the moon-dark eyes stomping the thing moving beneath the ground. Everything to do with that ripple that seems to shake and shudder and expand out from some impossibly defined center-of-purpose and,

yes,

that house.

Where the dead go.

--

"It won't hurt me," the boy is still twisting in Melantha's arms, trying to get up but he isn't running away and he isn't scared of any old wolf, no matter how big and bad it appears to be. This is a dream and he knows the dream, knows every pattern of it, every cranny and every nook, and there's this quietly grim assurance when he makes that declaration, which is not at all like the declaration of a boy's bravado, but rather something darker and grim and knowing, see. It won't hurt him.

It will hurt everyone, everyone, else.

"You should go." He tells Melantha, turning into her, urgency in his voice. He means it. "You should all go. I know you're sleeping. I know you're just sleeping so maybe you can wake up. Maybe it won't even remember - "

See? Melantha he's not running, the boy Jack, The Boy Jack, there is not the tension in his body to run, but he is half-rising in her arms, getting himself to his feet, turning with a quick breath to take in Tamsin and Erich-wolf loping over the rise.

"You should all go. Wake up. Run. Run."

Erich

Erich-wolf,

who looks big and shaggy and yes, rather bad(ass), though the big stupid floppy-tongued grin he's wearing detracts a bit from that,

has by now reached Melantha-and-the-boy. He skids to a stop, paws flinging up bits of grass and detritus. His tail is wagging ferociously side to side, he stamps his paws and bounds around girl-and-boy and over their totem link -- if indeed they still have a totemlink here -- there is a vague running commentary, a sense of see! see, i told you i'd find you! i told you we were sharing a dream! even if he's never actually told her any of that. Also a sense of brother! that's my dream-brother! that's my dream-brother and you know him too, and now we're together, and and and and

happy! Lots of happy. Erich-wolf bounds and bounds and rubs his heavy sides against the two and seems quite unbothered by his dream-brother telling him to run, and someone's talking about coma and someone else is talking about going inside and Erich really has no fucking idea what is going on except that he's found Melantha, he has, he's so smart, he found her.

He comes to a stop, standing beside Melantha. He is a large wolf, adult but still young enough to remember puppyhood and adolescence. His withers come to her waist. He is a hot, breathing, muscular mass leaning so heavily against her that he could bowl her over if she's not careful. His tongue lolls; his eyes -- pale blue even in this form -- blink amiably up at her. He does not seem about to run anywhere.

Melantha

Melantha is curled up on the earth, holding Jack-the-boy closely, tightly, both because she thinks he might run away and because she does not know if this wolf pounding towards them will hurt the boy.

Erich sees it in her eyes again, something he hasn't seen for a year, more than a year now: that savagery, that ferocity that gleams in her blue eyes, the way she looked when she talked of burying some motherfucker in the Senate. But it's not that gleeful destruction of the Wyrm and its influence now. It's something else, protective and powerful, as though every ounce of the energy he saw when she was screaming drunkenly in the woods could and would be turned on him if it meant that the little dream-boy in her arms might be okay, might be safe. She'd burn up the world. Her ancestors would be proud.

She might kick him in the face. Which would actually hurt.

--

But he gets closer, and he's wagging his tail sososososososososohappilyYAY and she hears him in her mind the way she often hears him. He's so proud and ridiculous and SEE I TOLD YOU and she blinks and a weird smile twists over her lips, lopsided and wonky. He's all but bouncing on his paws as he comes closer, rubbing against her side, but she's trying to counter what he's saying with what she can hear, out loud, from Jack-the-boy.

She's on the ground, and Erich's fur is warm, and he's more likely looking down at her than up, but no matter. She looks at Jack, still holding way too tightly, but she doesn't trust him at all because he's a kid and also a boy. She blinks at him. He knows they're sleeping. He keeps talking about 'it' and she's not sure now if he's talking about Erich -- it won't hurt me -- or something else entirely,

it won't even remember.

"Jack," she calls him, as he's rising. She loosens a bit, still holding, getting up with him because damned if she's letting go now. "Look, you have to slow down and act like I'm dumb or something. You know what's going on here but none of us do. So share with the class and tell me what's going on or I'm going to hold onto you and we're staying right here and I guess then we're all screwed, you hear me?"

And for Erich, who she momentarily puts her hand on top of as she's getting to her feet:

sorry I totally just used your back for leverage. HI.

Erich

it's totally cool you could probably even ride on my back if you wanted to just make sure you sit up near my shoulderblades or else you might give me swayback HI.

That is what Erich-wolf thinks back at Melantha. And then, since she's on her feet, he leans against her side. And is heavy and overwarm and generally very happy to see everyone. Also: ears perking upright, all listening-like.

Tamsin

"Ugh," Tamsin says, like there's blood in her throat and she's got to cough it out. She isn't happy; she's still holding the ax for chopping up wood in her hand, like she'd even know how to use it with any sort of precision, like something that's more've a weapon doesn't sleep in her bones.

The house where the dead go has a door or a window or a gap through which to crawl; that's where Tamsin is, having drifted while listening hard for an answer.

The boy wants them to run because something's not going to hurt him but it'll hurt them and he knows they're just sleeping and --

This isn't the time for questions, but it's always the time for questions. Tamsin says, "Is it yours? Didja find it first?"

Eldred said the boy does what he wants here. Tamsin's thinking that maybe an imaginary friend got too attached; became something more than imaginary, shaped itself up and out; Tamsin's thinking -- oh, she doesn't know.

"You gonna be upset when it gets hurt?"

wake

"It's not mine." Says Jack-the-Boy to Tamsin-the-Wolf, this defensive edge to his tone. He and Melantha are both on their feet now and she's still holding on to him, fiercely, and Tamsin has an axe and somehow something in her hands remembers how to use an axe and Erich is a wolf and the boy is also his brother,

the sun splashed floorboards. The bright joy of waking every morning to the sounds of a full homestead humming all around.

Here they are at the edge of the dark wood, the boarded up and boarded-over clapboard house all derelict on this rise looking down over the town, with its marching rows of white houses and its silent windows and its wisps of smoke and its old sort of solid dereliction.

" - not mine exactly," the boy hedges, glancing from Melantha to Tamsin to the wolf and back again. "It was already here. It was always here. I found it when I was - " There is a kind of interrupted passion there, an urgency, but then an abrupt cessation of that animation, and instead he whispers,

" - when we were dying. I held on and held their hands so they wouldn't go they said they wouldn't go they said they said they said but it came and it took them and it takes everyone and everyone and I want them to stay here with me but it takes them all and shreds them to pieces and grinds them up in its teeth and I told the old lady that we should burn them when they pass over so it couldn't have them but it calls them anyway

"even when it's sleeping.

" - and now it's waking up.

"It lives in the house. In the basement of the house. I hear it inside my head.

"It wants you. It wants all of you.

"But I don't want you to go."

Erich

Okay so there's a limit to how much one can convey as a wolf, at least when one is attempting to converse with non-wolves. And that limit is essentially: you get the basics across. You get across that you are happy! or you are angry! or you are frightened! or you are worried! or you are hungry! but the details, the subtleties: that is lost.

So: Erich gives up on being-a-wolf. One moment he is leaning against Melantha, his tail still waggingwaggingwagging and his tongue still lolling, and the next

he is changing, he is shifting, he is briefly HUGE AND MONSTROUS and then he is just Erich. Pushing up off his hands, dusting his palms off as he stands up. Now he's a lot taller than the boy, and taller than Melantha too, who he immediately puts his arm around and squeezes against his side. Because yay. Because he found her.

"Lots of stuff want to shred me and grind me up and stuff," he says to his not-brother. "So far none's succeeded. Though I suppose if someone succeeded I wouldn't be standing here, so that's kind of a moot point. Still.

"I don't think we should run away. I think we should stay and fight. 'Cause if we run, it'll just catch up to us. I mean that's what I do to like, rabbits that run from me when I'm hungry.

"What's your story, anyway? You said you were my brother but I don't think you are. No offense; I think you'd be a great brother."

Melantha

By now Melantha has noticed Tamsin, farther away, at a... house? that Melantha has never seen before. Her brow stitches for a moment at the axe Tamsin holds, and her hand rests on the boy's shoulder where they stand. When he mentions dying, she looks down at him, though. Tamsin and Erich can take care of themselves. Melantha can take care of herself.

Jack is just a kid. And he is talking about his family dying, and how they tried to hold on, and 'it' took them. She looks from Jack to Erich, and her eyes are sharp and intelligent and she is piecing this together from her own dreams and from her own thoughts on death and dying and what happens in the underworld.

Erich shifts. Melantha is hugged, but she is distracted; her mind does that to her, goes into overdrive, pushes everything else down and away. She doesn't reject the hug, she just looks down at Jack after Erich is done talking and tells him:

"This is what we do, Jack," she says, and she is starting to let him go. She says 'we' and not 'they', not Tamsin and Erich. But then: "Tamsin and Erich, more than me, at least when it comes to going into basements and fighting things that sleep and things that eat and tear apart.

"But I'll stay with you, if you want. And if it takes Erich and Tamsin and grinds them up in its teeth, we'll figure something else out." There is a beat. "I'm really smart. So I'll stay with you, if you want."

Tamsin

The ground hasn't moved again; maybe it's waking up slowly, like a giant wakes; like the Wyrm probably woke the first time, in increments, stretching itself up against this thing called Creation, curiously --

or maybe it felt that stomp stomp stomp and rightfully settled down. So there. The Fianna-girl lifts her chin at that exactly like uh huh see, and Tamsin was an only child, had to be an only child, but there's still something siblingesque about that knowing look.

But then the sad story;

and it is a sad story.

"Do you really want to stay here forever? Do you really want us to stay forever? Did you bring us here?"

"This place isn't good for people. The thing waking in the basement might be bad, too, but this place - it's amazing if I'm understanding right; but do you really want it?"

wake

Dice: 15 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 11 )

wake

"If you wake up," the boy is informing Erich quite seriously when he says that if they run it will follow, it will harry, the way Erich himself harries rabbits, " - it can't follow. It can't find you during the daytime. It can't find you when your eyes are open.

"That's why I wanted waking-people. I saw you drifting by and I stitched you in because I thought you'd stay. I thought you could all be here and be there too because here wasn't the only place left for you to be."

Then Erich asks him, what's your story and Jack gives him a very odd and very adult look.

"I'm dying. Everyone here is except for you and you and you. Your friends woke up. I bet they won't come back. They took themselves out, see. They unstitched the stitch I made inside their ears and took themselves away. But everyone else - "

Jack the Boy gives Tamsin a look. A Look, and he shakes his head rather fiercely, and somehow in the midst of all this his hand has found Melantha's and his grip tightens in hers.

"I don't want to stay here forever but I can't go anywhere else and I want people here it's terrible when you're alone and there's nothing, all the houses empty and no one to hear you so you don't even know if you can hear yourself and I did bring you here I thought you'd stay I thought you wouldn't die I saw you at the edges and I brought you over and stitched you in.

"I thought you'd stay. I thought - "

Then he glances back at Melantha. "It won't hurt me. It can't hurt me. I don't want you to go. But I don't want you to - "

There is a deep shudder below the earth. Something liquid to the movement. A certain concavity and ahead of them the house with the boarded over windows and the boarded over doors shudders and half-collapses, like a man falling to his knees, sinking into the earth.

Something - oh, oozes from the ruin. Black, oleaginous, hungry. So filthy it was never meant to see the light of day.

Melantha

[willpower!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7) ( success x 4 )

Tamsin

[wp]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 5) ( fail )

Erich

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 6, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Melantha

Melantha holds Jack's hand. Of course she holds his hand, she would never let go. She holds him tightly, just as tightly as he holds her. He doesn't want to say, and he can't -- she wants to interrupt and tell him he can, he can, one day, but maybe not she's not a doctor -- so she takes a breath. She squeezes him back.

She looks down at him. "First: "

There's nothing after that. The ground erupts, shakes, and Melantha's head is pounding suddenly, like icepicks jammed in her ears. Her eyes fly wide, her free hand grabbing at her skull but her other hand only holding Jack tighter. She gives a shake, bracing her legs, grasping mentally for Volcano, hoping it can hear her, which it must -- she holds her footing and holds onto Jack and does not fall. She looks toward the house, toward the ooze, her mouth and eyes wide open.

Erich --

but really, what is she going to say? That's the Wyrm, kill it. God, please, kill it. Do what your mother told you. There aren't words for it. That's just the feeling that pulses at him through that bond they share with Charlotte. Go, go, please, be good.

Melantha grips Jack's hand and steps closer to him, moves closer. "Your family is trying to help you and get you out of here, Jack," she tells him, though there's a faint trickle of blood in one of her ears and they're ringing and her voice is too loud. "We'll get you out of here. You won't be alone."

Erich

Now that.

was not.

okay.

It's bad enough that whatever shook the earth damn near knocks Erich off his feet -- and, in fact, knocks Tamsin off her feet. Look at her: there she goes, up on the hill near the Scary House. It's bad enough that whatever shook the earth REALLY HURT HIS FUCKING EARS, made them actually literally bleed the way we think our ears are gonna bleed when we hear something awful. That's all bad and awful and whatnot, but

whatever shook the earth also. made. Melantha's ears bleed. And that is just NOT FUCKING KOSHER, the way it was NOT FUCKING KOSHER when those weird gross dudes down in Baja came and snuck up on the tinyhouse where he and Charlotte were living and were spying on them with binoculars and we're digressing.

The point is: it's not okay. And Erich is totally not okay with it. And Melantha is sort of thinking hey go deal with it omg but really she hardly needs to because Erich has both hands over his ears and he's kind of just yelling, just bellowing wordless WTF-rage, and then:

and then he's really wish he had a hammer or a cinderblock or something to throw. And also: something to throw it all. Since he has neither, he grabs Melantha and the boy and kinda gives them each a squeeze on the shoulder that says nothing and says everything. Then he turns and pops into his wolf shape again and goes running up the hill toward Tamsin, and toward the house.

"Wait! If you're going in, I'm going with you!"

Tamsin

Tamsin's gaze shades to something pitying, perhaps, something understanding, something that wants to salvage the boy, wants to know more about what happened and why, what courage it took and what courage it didn't, where the line is drawn, where the mystery is held, the why of it and the heart of it. And of course there's still the smoulder-coal knot of something furious, within, something that is furious not Rageful. Her hand is shielding her eyes as if there's light falling from above, getting into them, and she opens her mouth to say something and

the earth shifts again, greater than before, much greater, and she falls hard on her ass, bruises the bone deep and loses her grip on the axe and the scary house has begun to collapse in on itself, sink further into the ground, the ground yawning up like a grave and this black ichorous ooze bubbling out splashing out and Erich's running

if you're going in I'm going with you

and Tamsin's shifting, because that's just fine; because it seems that now is a time to fight, to go into the house where only death go, to snap at the shadow-filth pouring out and go and go and go and go

and go for its filthy fucking death-taking

heart.

wake

And they

wake

up.

Friday night.

Erich

So Erich is in the Santa Fe Arts District again, and it is in fact Third Friday so the area is swamped with pedestrians and all the art galleries are open but what does a meatheaded Ahroun from Nebraska know about art anyway.

So instead he is at the whimsically named mmm...COFFEE!, which advertises itself as some sort of paleo cafe, which is perhaps not exactly the sort of place one imagines a meatheaded Ahroun to frequent either. But nonetheless there he is: out on the small patio, making that wrought-iron patio set he's occupying seem small with his blond-blue-tanned-muscled-ness, a plate of chicken and a hot chocolate keeping him company.

Also his phone. It is set on the tabletop; he is hunched over it, grinning in that private way people grin when they are terribly amused by whoever it is they are texting, tapping rather nimbly with his fingertips as he neglects his food.

Eva

Something slightly more formal is happening across the street. The occasional town car sleeks up to the door and the occasional grandee slides out in evening or cocktail attire. Some of the patrons spill out the front doors of what otherwise seems to be an unfinished space, and they both stand out from and blend into the Third Fridays crowd. Somehow it looks like the point of confluence of two rivers, one shallow and silty and slow, the other deep, swift-moving, clarified. The punch-and-swirl of it.

--

But Erich does not notice. He's on his phone, grinning, and may be taken by surprise when Eva lets herself in the small metal gate leading to the fenced in patio, and stops at his table, one hand braced on it, leaning over a bit -

"Erich. Do you mind if I join you?"

The briefest pause.

"Just for a moment."

Erich

He is, indeed, taken by surprise -- that sharp animal up-snap of his head, the grin frozen by startlement and then regaining its footing. His eyebrows have climbed halfway to his hairline.

"Whoa," he says, presumably of the dress.

Eva

There is about her a certain patient didacticism. An impassive query in the lilt of her brows.

"I did not mean to startle you, but I cannot tell if that is a yes or a no."

Erich

"Oh!" And he sits up, busies himself with -- tidying up? making the area presentable? In the end all he manages to do is rearrange plate and cup and then extend his foot under the table to kick the other chair out for her. "Yeah, sure. Of course. Sit down."

There are a few surreptitious glances around, as though perhaps he were afraid (or maybe hoping) he might be mistaken for her date. Or maybe he's looking for her actual date. Or maybe he's wondering where her kids are. Perhaps it's the last, because then he asks:

"Where are your kids?"

Eva

"I stashed them in the truck of the limo." She takes the seat with a certain grace and allows her bemusement over his business in the tidying up (?) to show through, but seems almost entirely - straightforward - in the disposition of her children.

"They'll be fine, don't you think? Just for a few hours."

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Erich

Erich. Looks. Horrified.

"Uh," he says -- clearly flailing for the most diplomatic way to say this, "well, at least it's nighttime so it's probably ... not too hot in there? But you might want to go let them out. Like, soon. Like, before they die."

Eva

"Sound advice, Erich." This quick-sliding smile crests her mouth, and is gone as quickly as it came. "Thank you.

"I will see to it as soon as we finish our chat."

Erich

"Wait," all squint-eyed, "they're not really in the trunk, are they. Oh, duh," the penny fairly crashes down, "it's not like you'd go to a black tie party with kids in tow. Man, you're a convincing liar. I guess that's a good thing."

He's practically having the conversation all by himself. He stops; he pushes his plate of half-eaten chicken toward her in instinctive offering. You share your kill with the kin; that is what you do. Even if the 'kill' was recently bought from a paleo cafe.

"How've you been, anyway? I haven't dropped by to get food from your office very much lately."

Eva

Erich tells Eva that she is a really good liar. She does not point out the contrapuntal idea: that he is an especially gullible young man, in part because she does not believe it. The smile that coiled across her mouth settles in again.

No response to his question about how she's been; instead, "Good. You had the support staff in an uproar. Passive-aggressive notes about missing pepperoni sticks and gogurt for weeks. Rhonda Porter started keeping her cheese slices in her desk, but locked them into a file drawer and the smell - "

Poker face.

"So if you need food, it would be best if you brought me a list.

"Or my assistant, Richard. He is kin as well."

The most minute pause. Then:

"How involved are your plans this evening?"

Erich

"I don't need food," Erich is a tiny bit insulted at the assumption, "I'm a wolf. I can get my own food. It was just fun to go down there and see what you guys were munching on. The gogurt wasn't me though. Or the cheese slices! I only took meat."

Obviously.

"My plans?" He looks bemused. Amused, as well. "Well, I don't really have any. I'm just hanging out here. My one packmate is doing theurge-y stuff and my other is at work. So it's just me. Why?"

Eva

"Then perhaps you were not the source of office strife."

An arch of her brows.

"Your plans?"

Erich

"What, like specifically?" He thinks a moment. "I'm gonna eat my chicken and drink my hot chocolate and then maybe wander around a bit and not understand any of the art they're showing. Then I was gonna go home."

And again, "Why?"

Eva

"There's a man in that gallery I think you should track, and perhaps kill, instead.

"His skin is too hot.

"And where his collar rubs his neck, the skin has come away. A hint of green, beneath.

"If you follow me across the street, I'll go back inside and make sure you know the one I mean."

Erich

"Oh."

And that is the only answer for a while: a simple oh ripe with all the connotations of ohs spoken from Garou to their watchful kin. Erich's fingertips drum on the wrought-iron surface of the cafe table for a second. Then:

"Okay, well, lemme eat my chicken and then we'll go."

--

So that is what happens. He eats his chicken -- quickly, he doesn't dawdle -- and then he drinks his hot chocolate and then he kinda rumples everything up and disposes of the disposables and sets the plates atop the trash can to be collected.

They cross back toward the gallery. Not together; that would look too weird. Eva goes first, and she slips back into that exclusive-looking party of hers, all swooping necklines and bare shoulders and satin lapels and diamond cufflinks. Erich loiters around outside and tries not to look too suspicious, though already the doorman is casting him stink-eyed looks, but he doesn't have to stay long.

Just long enough for Eva to indicate the man,

mark the kill.

--

She does not see her much younger tribesman for quite some time after that. Actually, she does not see him again for the remainder of the party. She doesn't see him when she goes to her car, either, whether it's her everyday car or, in fact, a limousine. She doesn't see the man she pointed out either, the hot-skinned creature whose hide was beginning to split to reveal true horror beneath. In fact, she will never see that man again.

--

She does, however, see him before the night is entirely over. When she has left the party. When she has gone home. Just before she actually enters her house, that is when she sees him, sitting at her curb, keeping a respectful distance away from her front door and the young souls that sleep within. Headlights sweep him out of the darkness. He stands up as her car pulls to the curb, or into the garage.

He looks no worse for the wear. Maybe a little scuffed. Maybe a little -- calmer, is that the word for it? The moon is still so, so close to the full. Calmer is not the word for it. But a little more settled, not quite the crackling, heavy presence of before.

He waves at her. Foolish thing; no subtlety at all.

Eva

He wants to finish his chicken. She favors him with this quietly thoughtful glance as he does, warmer than you might imagine. Something concealed but searching about her eyes as she makes him in that space, that patio, the edge to him; and the youth; and strange and strangely bare simplicity.

Says nothing, though.

There is nothing to say.

--

And: there is no limosine, just a quietly expensive Lexus parked down a quietly expensive sidestreet with a quietly expensive handgun hidden thoughtfully beneath the dash.

After the soirée, Éva is eager to get back to the Lexus and the weapon quietly hidden inside. She is always armed, except when she is dressed as she was tonight,

and then she feels naked.

--

Much, much later, a suburb. Quiet streets. Dark houses. The low hum of the engine, the sweep of the headlights. The shadow of the mountains against the sky.

She sees him, of course.

Cuts him a glance, the edge of it lilting-fine.

One rises above the curved leather of the steering wheel as she makes the turn into the gated drive.

Is she returning the wave?

Perhaps; though he will never know.

She could have just been turning the wheel.

The burning man.

wake

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 - "

--

The house casts a deep and slanting shadow over the sere yard. It is winter here; winter everywhere. Spare winter, always. Dry and broken grass, dirtied snow. The fallow garden harrowed but not yet seeded. The bitter wind drives away any hint of warmth that might radiate down from the wan sun.

The wood is soaked with blood.

There is blood on her hands, caked beneath her nails.

Someone will come, soon.

She tells herself it is a mercy.

In the dream, she always does.

Keisha

She hates these dreams, truth be told. Yes, they're dreams and she can wake up and everything fades away, but it doesn't really. Even if she weren't a Theurge and one of Themis the Dream-Weaver's supplicants, she's sure that it would stick with her. These mean something more, more so than most dreams. She knows that simply because she knows that she isn't alone.

She looks at that stump, the blood-saturated thing, and she looks at her hands. The sight of her extremities so soaked chills her to the bone, more so than even the winter would do to her. And she knows that someone will come. Before then, she crouches in front of the stump and reaches out to put blood-encrusted hands on a blood-encrusted piece of wood.

"Who were you?" she asks quietly. The words push through a lump in her throat, pass underneath eyes that are rimmed with the pain of seeing this. "Who did I do this to?"

wake

There is a shadow of smoke against the sky somewhere and the whisper of fir trees in the wind. A marching darkness to them, a certain irreducible sameness, a spare sort of immediacy, the richly textured shadows that pool around their trucks. The wood seems impenetrable, the sky so far away.

The house is lone; it stands alone. Intact, though it feels somehow both abandoned and impervious to time or ruin or rot: always here. Always failing, never fallen.

Someone has tacked up roughly planed wooden planks over the lower windows. Curtains - old, lace - frame in the dark view of the wavy glass in the upstairs windows, only shadows inside.

Keisha crouched in front of the stump; sinks to her haunches, already mourning. There are no answers, just the echo of her voice against the peeling clapboard. The mournful rattle of the windows in their casements.

The block is too small for a human head, she realizes, this close.

They have to leave something of themselves behind.

--

Someone will come, she knows. They always do.

Keisha

She runs her hands over the block of wood. It's not an adoring touch of course, but neither is it hatred either. It's a simple act of committing it all into her tactile memory. Her fingers trace the lines of the rings, catch the natural divots and edges and roundings of the object. And then she stands up from it, takes a step back. The chill has settled into her bones and she's driven by it, quietly propelled that step away.

She looks up and around. There's that smoke out there in the distance, somewhere in the forest. She wants to go to it, see who is there. Just like she wants to go into the house. Keisha needs answers, a conclusion to draw that could lead her to knowing why, why, why. But she doesn't go to either at this moment, because Someone Will Come.

And she wants to know who that someone is before she goes off into those woods. Someone who comes is someone who may have answers for her.

wake

So she waits.

--

Someone always comes. She knows that the way she knows his mouth, the way she remembers his smile, the way she wears the skin of the winter beneath and around her skin. The way she knows the wood now, knows the skin of its stained skin with the skin of her stained skin.

Someone always comes.

Someone always comes.

Someone always comes.

It might be days; it might be centeries but: someone always comes.

They cannot stay away. Someone strays, someone falls, someone rises: someone comes.

So she waits.

--

Waiting has its own rhythm and its own pattern and its own time and Keisha waits and waits and waits and the light does not change; the light does not move. There is the suggestion of the sun behind a scrim of clouds but the sun is, unmoving. We are always at the edge of things. We are always incised. We are always -

--

No noise but the sound of her own breath; no movement but the wind in the trees, except once - just once - the sudden flush of a wide and dark-winged bird from the depths of the woods.

The acrid scent of smoke creeps into her consciousness. First a few strange tendrils, then more, then more.

This is where the dead come. He is still wearing his winding cloth, his shroud. It is on fire.

He is burning.

Keisha

She's patient; she can wait. As much as her Rage wants her to push onward and take action, it is low in this one; she knows that sometimes it is the details that are left behind which are important. And in a dream, these kinds of things are significant. If someone will come, you should find out who because they are coming for a reason. And while this isn't your standard dream...

Well. It's still a dream. And so she waits, and things are static. Garou are creatures who hate stasis; even outside of the Weaver they are built for change, for cycle. The changing of the moon, the changing of their forms. Calls to action and the drive to prevent the Wyrm's Apocalypse from coming. The rise in rank, the rise and fall of Warriors great and small. And even for someone as calm as Keisha, this galls her a little. But still she waits.

And then the dead comes. She sees the bird, and she lets that go. Keeps it in mind. Dark birds, she thinks. Sparrows, crows, ravens. They are death but also knowledge; that which should not be known. But here, perhaps they are just death. Ferriers across into the Dark Umbra. She keeps it in mind.

And then the smell of smoke. The burning man. She knows that if he's walking, still wearing his shroud than perhaps the fire won't hurt him. He's already dead, after all. But she is someone who doesn't let harm come to others; she heals. And even the dead can be hurt.

She moves toward him, running quickly. Along the way she leans down, scoops up snow in one hand. It will be a poor substitute for water but it might help. And she moves to rip the shroud away, see if the burning is mostly on the shroud or if he is entirely engulfed himself.

wake

If he has a face he does not remember it she does not remember it they do not remember. Listen: the flames do not touch the wood; do not touch the low-hanging branches, do not scorch the trees as he passes through from the place where the pyre was laid to the place where the end comes but: Keisha throws her handful of snow at him and pulls it away and oh,

oh,

her hands burn.

He does not stop; he is walking, the slow-shuffling gait of a sleepwalker and beneath somehow he is spare, refined. Fading. Not burning but still - consumed, the way flames consume anything, everything. Transfigured, see.

He does not stop; her hands are burning and he does not seem to notice the gesture. The flaming shroud flares and then disintegrates itself into these heavy flakes of ash-like-snow, that rise to the sky and begin to fall. His path continues, through the snow, through the wood, toward chopping block.

When he arrives he looks back at her, over one shoulder although he does not seem to have registered her presence, not precisely.

Oh, he is ordinary, ordinary.

He seems so tired.

He is ready to go.

"Strange," he tells her, "The things you forget to remember."

Perhaps she opens her mouth but -

Keisha wakes up.

Keisha

The pain...it happens. Which isn't to say she doesn't feel it or doesn't care; it's her hands burning away and she is agonized by it, feels every bit of it. But she expected the pain; it is a necessary sacrifice when you're trying to help someone. They have to leave something of themselves behind and Keisha certainly does that.

And in some ways, though she is dismayed that it doesn't seem to help, it wasn't about the result so much as the act. Like protesters, it is the act that matters as much as the result. You always try to accomplish something, but the fact that you acted; that's important. And so she sears her hands and he doesn't seem to notice, but she tried nonetheless.

The things you forget to remember. That's important, too. It means something, something deep and buried perhaps, long forgotten. Something in the woods? Remember all this, Keisha. She knows she will, but still she forces it. She'll need it later.

And she does open her mouth to ask What, why, who and yet she's suddenly awake. And in her mind there is still pain in her hands, even though there aren't any burns.

She gasps for breath, and then sits up and runs into the bathroom. First to throw up (the smell, the blood) and then to run her hands under cool water. Tactile memory, it goes both ways.

George

wake

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 -

---

she is dreaming. This is the dream, the same dream that she always dreams. The same sky, the same waters. The same wind, the same cold. Where she lives it is spring now, and warmth gathers in the lowlands, radiant, but when she dreams, the pale mountain lake is still framed with ice.

Cinder Song

The girl fey-blooded with a wolf under her skin and a wolf in the marrow of her bones and a monster that men and women should and do run screaming from run mad away from that girl here she is in a dream again the same dream it is always the same dream and they who share it or seem to share it have discussed it yes and the Fianna tries to pull meaning from the slant of light from a premonition of disaster from bitter salt on her tongue that stayed for weeks that she could not cease tasting although this is not a sea-place but she has yet to pull meaning, does she, and here she is with a hatchet in hand and it is about to splinter as it always does before she wakes but instead she doesn't wake and it doesn't splinter because she doesn't sink it into what ice perhaps or more wood. The wind takes her hair and blows it into her face and she cups one hand around her mouth and yells into it - " - what do you know? Where are you?"

wake

Everything in the dream is always the same until it is not, and then it changes; or it ends. Everything rises and then falls see and the last change that was not her own was a voice, shouting, insistent, absolutely insistent that they had ruined EVERYthing and should get OUT GET OUT get OUT and now the voice is gone,

and she is here again, axe in hand.

There is a half-cord of wood piled on the spare graveled flats of the shallow lake and the sky reflected on its icy surface, this mottled melange of many-colors of raw grays and choked corals, every stage of filtered, impermanent golds.

She shouts:

there is no answer; just the echo of her voice against the high peaks, which narrow into a couloir that leads to this glacial lake, which in turn trickles further down the slope, beneath the low-swept, shrouding branches of a dark wood. Fir trees, that perfect and impenetrable green, too dark to suggest anything like spring. No: no cycle here. Just a sort of wintry permanence to the wood, the light scrawl of snow across the narrow track that leads -

down.

Smoke somewhere, and she can smell it. It tickles the back of her throat.

And this too; and this somehow, and this:

this sense (when she shouts) of awareness, all around her. Above, below, within.

Waiting. Waiting.

From below, the sound of footsteps. Climbing up the track.

Cinder Song

"I know you're - " Tamsin begins to say, shout, Fianna-thing wants words, wants to speak wants a tongue to unriddle and unrule everything, but then there is the crunching and crunching of footsteps and she knows that there's a fire and she knows that there were matches bought by somebody else and she knows that somewhere else there was a light-filled room full of anticipation and she knows there was a path of thresholds with ash falling and sorrow and she knows:

not who the crunching footsteps belongs to but isn't that an answer of sorts to where are you. Maybe it's Erich or Melenatha or Thomas or Keisha; Tamsin doesn't set the ax down but she quick quick takes a pocket mirror from her pocket and unsnaps it to look herself in the eyes; to find her eyes, arrest herself still for a moment wondering what will happen if; then hurry toward the track and the sound and -

"Is that finally you?"

wake

A man: pale-skinned, shadow-eyed, older than he looks, older than you'd think. Tired but with a threaded determination that Tamsin can sense somewhere beneath the threshold of his skin, a sort of grit that has not made itself entirely manifest here. That is sloughed-off and held back; that is dammed but not damned. He has a yoke over his shoulders from which fall two rough-hewn and hempen ropes, and two roughly shaped buckets.

Bristle on his face is gray and dark. The hair on his head, too: iron-threaded and his hands are old and his knuckles are oft-broken and his nails are split and dirty.

"Aye," he says, as he emerges from the track and the dark march of trees to the spare shore of the icy-choked lake. He always says that.

He always says this, too, after a long moment's winding pause. Somehow it startles him. The frame or shape of it, but - "Were you waiting long?"

Cinder Song

"Hours," she says, and it is strange, remembering things as she does in these dreams, this sort of knowing which is beneath her skin and does not mean knowledge; just a visceral knowing.

"I fell asleep and had a terrible dream," she says: "A wood was on fire; people died or were going to die and I didn't know who I was. I opened my mouth and I tasted the sea and I wanted to cry; maybe that's what I was tasting."

"Did you yell at me?"

wake

"I don't remember my dreams anymore." The man returns, a wry sort of shrug cresting over the shadow of his mouth in the shadow of his beard. His eyes are weary, bloodshot. The closer they are the worse he looks.

And he's working while he speaks. Lifting the yoke from his shoulders and the empty buckets with it, lowering them - with a degree of care that must come from regular repetition - to the ground.

"They were so intrusive when I first came here." And here, a moment's odd consideration. He - smiles - but it is as spare as the land feels, and older than it seems like he might ever be. Older than the trees that shiver over the flanks of the peak. Older than the bones of the earth beneath.

Old as a dream.

Knowing.

Known.

A breath out; his breath mists in the cold air and this is laughter, wry. "They seemed to devour the edges of everything. Now, though, I can hardly remember what they were. This hallway that moved like water. The lights above my head, rushing, with this rhythm like a train. That intercepted regularity. Anyway - "

And he shrugs, and he gets to work, carries the buckets to the lake's edge, where she has broken through the ice with her small, splintering hatchet. Where water skims over the ice through a small, jagged hole.

"I didn't yell at anyone and there's no one up here. Could've come from the house, though. Sound travels strange up here."

Cinder Song

"You look like you could use some sleep," Tamsin says, now that he's close; now that she's looking into his eyes. Her own eyes are still somewhat narrowed; watches the yoke and the bucket without offering to help. Perhaps she has no idea what the hell they're for, city girl that she is; or she thinks he's some sort of sisyphus and he's going to go down to the smoke or this house and then -

He's still an answer. Even if he says he didn't yell at anyone. They ruined something. Maybe -

- her eyes are dark. This wary alertness cupped within them. Tamsin does stay at the man's side, pacing him to the lake's edge. He looks like he could use some sleep.

"Maybe you are still dreaming and that's why you don't remember them anymore. Maybe you came here and your body said finished lay me down this is a good bed of bones. You know, um, what's better than sleep?" she says. He looks like the kind of person who'd say work, so she cuts that off at the pass with: "Stories."

Wistful: "Will you tell me a story? Tell me a story about me. About us. Me n' you."

wake

His laughter and it is a kind of laughter is also: nothing more than a breath, exhaled, a sort of sliding sigh, a sort of sighing slide. He is kneeling, somehow, one knee down and the other bent, rough hands ripping the lip of the bucket beneath the water, and doesn't this feel like rote, like ritual, like a prayer to the heavens.

Pauses in his work to hold out his rough hands. Swollen red knots at his knuckles.

"Pretty sure I wouldn't get chillblains from a dream. You sound like - "

But he does not have a word for what she sounds like and he glances back at her; the lifting look has his irises briefly framed in the slanting light, all illumined, all illuminated. His breath, doesn't it suddenly feel rattly, as if he were drowning, as if he were already drowned.

"A story."

Another laugh. Another smile - genuine - as bright as the light in his eyes, but also so polished-worn around the edges that if seems to below to an age ago. Two. Three.

"A story," indulgent though. See: he wants to please her, wants to satisfy that wistful note in her voice. " - alright, a story. Let's see."

Pause.

"Let's see."

He's glancing away from her, the moment spooling out from him, and a note of consideration slips between his brows. He looks like somone remembering everything he has forgotten or nothing that he has forgotten but merely the act of forgetting, the fact of forgetting.

Brows narrow together and he gives her a glance, skinned and strange. Inhales.

"Well. I climbed up with the buckets and you were here with the axe. You cut the wood and you cut the water and I climb up after to ferry the water and the wood back to town. They use it to wash the dead or sometimes the living. For the hearths or the pyres. That's the story about us.

"That's what we do." Another noise in the back of his throat. "Strange, that's the only one I remember."

Cinder Song

Tamsin reaches for and picks up one of the buckets. The one he hasn't dipped into the lake already; maybe she's going to help. He did just tell her a story, watch it thread chill into her eyes more surely than the wind; a spark of anxiety, sublimated by a little persuasive crescent moon sharpness of a smile -

" - you made it sound like a fairytale. You didn't give us names. You should give us names."

Tamsin still has that axe; now she has an axe and a bucket. She looks at both, considering.

wake

He gives up the bucket easily enough; lets it go, allows it to be taken from his hand. It is cold up here, and his breath mists and the lake mists and the seems to be wreathed in it; or is that smoke. How do you tell the difference, except for the flame.

The ash in the back of your throat.

The flash of his teeth in his rough-hewn face, the way that expression settles into the remarkable network of lines framing his eyes. The depth of the look.

"I'm George Eldred." His catches her eyes, still smiling. He knows her. He has always known her. He has known her since time before time and in measure beyond measure. They have always been here; she is as familiar as his shadow, and as changeable. He knows her, he meets her eyes with that knowledge in his, and opens his mouth, and looks away, away, away -

"You're - " another glance back; such recognition. And yet, " - you know, I don't know your name."

Cinder Song

"I'd like it if you called me Éowyn - no! Idril Celebrindal," Tamsin says, and then her shoulders hunch forward. "But it's Tam actually." See how cagey she is: just part of her name. And she would like to be called Idril. "Somebody did yell at me; maybe it was from the house. Let's go there right now!"

Tamsin reaches like she's going to help George Eldred stand but her hand's are full, aren't they - she frowns at the bucket but keeps it - keeps it - then throws it onto the ice as far as she can.

"I'll do the work later. Double. Just once." The just once tacked on quickly like just in case the devil's listening and it's a contract. "I mean um double the amount of work the one time."

wake

"Well, alright [name-slew]," George Eldred seems relieved to have a name, to have three names, to have any names to give to the girl at his side, but also all the more tired. There's no way for Tamsin to know what name he gave her, what name he named her. Éowyn or Idril or Tam, any or all of the above. When he says her name to her, whatever her name, it all smears together like a word-sludge.

"Except, we don't go to the house. The boy does sometimes, no one can stop him, but even he doesn't get close. No

"You know where it is. You can't see it from town, but it's just over the rise. No one does.

"Except the dead. But we can't stop them.

"No. I'll do my work. That's what I'm here to do."

Cinder Song

"Don't you want to remember another story?" Tamsin says, urgent, reaching out to pluck at his shirt - cautiously: "Please come with me, George Eldred; please? Come away from here just once. If you went away from here, you'd be there to do something too, you know?"

Cinder Song

[Manip + Expression! Manip Specialty: Persuasive. C'mon bro. You're clearly in an evil dream trap or something.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1

wake

He's standing up.

George Eldred is standing up, there's a creak in his knees and a crick in his back but he is, listen, rising. Watching her cantwise and then cutting a glance back to the rough-hewn bucket as it skitters across the thin-ice of that glacier-fed lake and breathing out see like a sigh or a song. He regrets the loss of that bucket.

It will be back the next time he dreams this dream.

Or - no, see. Come away from here just once she says and something plaintitive in her voice cuts through the fog of his awareness, and he feels like if he comes away from here just once he might cease to exist, he might disappear or he might die, his heart might be carved through with a thousand wormling holes and filled and then retracted, sapped, collapsed. He might consume himself, he might be consumed, he might find himself devoured he might -

It is painful for him and Tamsin can read all of his in the framework of his body and thw twist of his mouth, but - but -

A deep sigh out.

"Alright. I'll come with you as far as I can."

Cinder Song

Tamsin doesn't smile bright; she isn't a bright sunlight girl, somebody with a hearth burning in her bones. Tamsin was born as the light waned from the moon; leeched into darkness, but still full enough to slant poetry across the land - and her smile is a quiet thing, and the caution in her fingers when she plucked at his shirt is behind her smile, the plaintive whatever, that's there too, a certain darkness which is aware of what she can read in the wry twist of his mouth and his body; but she's glad he said he'll come anyway. She doesn't think he'll disappear. She doesn't know what she thinks except she wants him to come with her and maybe he's caught and maybe well she doesn't know - yet?

"Thank you. You'll see. It'll be good to do I bet. Over the rise you said? That one there?" she gestures to it with her chin and, another lick of caution, offers George her hand, the axless one. Maybe she thinks he's so old he needs it; that's what she read from his shape.

Once he indicates yes or no off she (they) set.

"What boy goes sometimes? Do people try to stop him?"

wake

"The boy. No on tries to stop him. He does what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, here."

No. No, not over that rise there.

They have to go down before they can climb.

They have to descend before they can rise,

and so they do, down the narrow track beneath the weight of the limbs of the fir-trees, the heavy branches, the steep slope, the suggestion of a streambed gamboling alongside. Down they go to a place where the track intersects with another, a place of crossing, a cross-roads. This road is wider, is made for more than two men to walk abreast. Three or perhaps four could comfortably walk here and the woods are silent all around them, except for the occasional flush of a bird from the treets.

The birds are always crows: the beat of great black wings against the snow.

There is a fire somewhere close and now she can smell it, and they have been walking for hours or days or moments, three beats of her heart, time slews until it has no meaning beyond the immediate: this is now, this is now, this is now.

--

And the track descends as the road descends and perhaps they speak, perhaps Tamsin tells George Eldred some stories, perhaps she tells him old stories or made-up stories or faerie stories. He feels, he tells her half-way down, very, very strange. Light-headed and contrary but maybe, he is thinking, maybe this is right, correct, proper. Maybe -

The road descends, see, through the woods still, shouldering it on either side, down to a long, spare line of white clapboard houses all same-like, marching in rows and wreathed in mist, and if it was winter above, doesn't it feel like autumn here, the neverending edge of it, wet pavement, strange skies. Here are there, silent faces in the windows, behind the doors.

And here, here, after they have descending so far, here is the ridge. Here is the rise, beyond the houses, behind them, rising, see, the shoulder of another mountain that sweeps upward and casts half the long-hollow in shadow. They are climbing, climbing, climbing, George slower, and slower.

Up there, he tells her.

Just let me catch my breath.

---

Down below, in the town, a door swings open.

Two young men emerge from the house,

at a run.

--

When Tamsin turns around, George Eldred, he is gone.

Cinder Song

Tamsin wants to know how the boy looks. How old the boy is. What boy? Tamsin doesn't remember a boy; she describes Thomas and Erich, testingly, but that was as they were descending.

Tamsin does tell George Eldred stories since he only has one. She makes something up; then the made-up something becomes a fairy story that First Light told her the night they met; then it becomes something quoted from Tolkien because she loves Tolkien because Tolkien, man, because fighting against impossible odds and darkness. It's hard for George Eldred to leave his work; he doesn't want to; feels he might disappear. Tamsin; she can't leave her work either, really, and she is disappearing; she doesn't want to do it. It's hard.

The point is: she does talk.

Her eyes are narrow on the faces in the windows; her eyes are narrow on the crows, which she tries to count. Her eyes are even narrow on the town; she waves to somebody to see what happens. Looks for Keisha, Melantha, Erich, Thomas -

George Eldred feels very strange. Tamsin asks him if it's his heart. Wants to feel it; she doesn't know how to heal anybody but maybe if his heart is beating fast that'll tell her one thing maybe if it's slow it'll tell her another thing.

He wants to catch his breath; below, in the town, two young men emerge from the house at a run.

Up there. The house where the dead go? Where nobody goes? Tamsin does turn to look at it; when she turns around, he's gone and she almost drops the axe, a lick of rage-fury-alarm, breath sucked in suddenly -

- she spins around in a tight circle, looking for some sign, something, and then she shouts,

"GEORGE ELDRED!" a beat. "GEORGE?" another beat. Lonely: "ERICH MELANTHA KEISHA." Another beat. Her grip on the axe tightens; up there, he'd said, and Tamsin squares her shoulders: sucks in another lungful of air - autumnal air.

She's going to go into the house; going to go up there. Going to disappear, too? It's just a dream but it feels so real and she still wants to go to the house that maybe the insistent shout earlier came from. She calls - deliberately; seething, rimmed in tension the way the lake, see, was rimmed in ice -

"Hey! Hey, boy! Boy are you here? Was it you? I'm coming in, by - " - a pause; it sounds like an oath " - by the black in a crow's feather and the heat in a pyre burning in winter, I am, I want to - "

- plaintive; perhaps she's just yelling at an abandoned house in a dream and she'll wake up and it will be with a sense of loss. Tamsin wants to know.

Anyway: that's what she does and that's what she says.

Cinder Song

ooc: shit, there should be "THOMAS?" pause. "ERICH MELANTHA KEISHA." in that post.

wake

Tamsin waves and Tamsin tells stories and Tamsin wants to feel his heart: how is it beating, what is its speed, how fast does it pound, and Tamsin is in a strange place with a strange taste on her tongue and George Eldred is gone and down below two young men emerge from a house (a white house) onto a sidewalk (a gray sidewalk) and somehow the morning light is gone. Somehow the morning is gone.

Somehow the morning,

shifts.

Two young men are coming out of a house, they are named Thomas and they are named Erich and they hear a young woman shouting:

"GEORGE ELDRED!" a beat. "GEORGE?" another beat. Lonely: "ERICH MELANTHA KEISHA."

from up above.

--

They wake.

"Hey! Hey, boy! Boy are you here? Was it you? I'm coming in, by - " - a pause; it sounds like an oath " - by the black in a crow's feather and the heat in a pyre burning in winter, I am, I want to - "

- plaintive; perhaps she's just yelling at an abandoned house in a dream and she'll wake up and it will be with a sense of loss. Tamsin wants to know.

Anyway: that's what she does and that's what she says.

Tamsin wakes.

With, yes, a sense of loss. Something shifting. Something changed. Something moving underneath. Something, somewhere, slumbering see:

but waking up to her presence, too.

Jack

wake

An ordinary day; a slow day; a goddamned Tuesday and this Tuesday Melantha has picked up an extra shift. The lunch rush is well-over and the evening has not yet started and the tables are cleared and there's what, two tables lingering over some in-between sort of meal, requiring nothing more than occasional refills of draft beer and iced tea.

There's work, there's always work. Silverware to be rolled and stations to be cleaned. Ketchup bottles and salt cellars to be filled and cleaned and refilled, ice to be churned and coolers to be cleaned but it is slow take-a-smoke-break work grab-a-refill-work, slide-in-to-the-stool-at-the-register-work and watch the street visible through the front doors.

When the front doors open.

A young woman, sunblind, blinking in the darkness, takes a moment just inside to let her eyes adjust. Walks up to the counter, a reuseable bag in her right hand.

"Hi," to Melantha, " - uhm. Can I talk to the manager?"

She could, perhaps, if she waits. The manager's on a bank run.

Melantha

Melantha is worn out. She works fast, in comfortable sneakers and jeans that are a little looser than they were a couple of weeks ago and a belt that is a bit tighter and her 'uniform' t-shirt. Overhead around the stage there are bras hanging, which always makes her mad, but she figures one day she'll just steal a bunch on her way out of this job and burn them in front of the saloon or something. Mostly she tries to ignore them. She's tired.

The dreams tire her out. Work tires her out. Sometimes she and Erich go pretend-camping in her Jeep and that tires her out but it's a much better tired-out than the dreams or the work. She is filling salt shakers at a table off to the side since it's slow, but she looks up when someone enters, glances around, notices no one is at the counter.

She starts to say Welcome to -- but stops, when the woman speaks. Asks what she does.

Melantha, eyes dark-ringed, gives a tiny wince. "Sorry," she says, shaking her head. "The manager stepped out for a few. She should be back, if you want to wait, or maybe I can try and help you."

wake

"Sure, uhm," the young woman is perhaps not as worn-out as Melantha, but there is a sort of wearing written into the lines of her body and the shadows of her face. The dim light does her some favors but when she turns and is illuminated by a shaft of sunlight from the sweeping arc of the door opening into the saloon the wear is evident.

It is made from care.

And something about her seems apologetic and rote, two things in confluence, not opposition. She is winding herself up and winching herself away from some question she has asked so often and so regularly, which still - somehow - so often seems such an imposition.

"I don't know your policy on this but I was wondering if you would put out a collection jar for a week or two or a month. My cousin? I know it sounds scammy but I brought clippings about it. We have a sign and stuff that we put up, and you can confirm that everything's legit with the Gold State Bank branch in Breckenridge."

There are tears in her eyes.

"I know I'm terrible about explaining it but - "

She's sliding a picture of a boy across the counter.

Blue eyes, blond hair. Smaller than you'd think. Smiling at the camera, the sun in his eyes. She takes in a deep breath, exhales it, managing not to shudder. That's good, that's good. That's so very good.

"His parents were killed in a house fire last - last year. He's still in a coma. We're just trying to raise money for some of the co-pays and some extra therapies that Medicaid won't cover. They're experimental or something. Anyway, we just leave the box out for a couple of weeks. You can send whatever comes in straight to the bank.

"I'm sure you get lots of requests like these so - "

Melantha

Her first thought, instant and perhaps uncharitable, is that this is yet another woman who apologizes for existing. It's not exactly unusual, in Melantha's experience, but she never ceases to find herself somewhat annoyed by it.

She doesn't let it show, because she doesn't want to be an asshole, and tips her head as the woman goes on. A collection jar? Her cousin?? 'It' doesn't sound scammy in part because at that point Melantha has no clue what she's talking about. By the time the woman starts to tear up, Melantha is frowning, a tight little furrow to her brow that makes her lips actually pout a bit by habit and simply the way her facial muscles work.

At first, she doesn't look down at the picture. She looks at the woman, whose cousin's parents died in a fire. Melantha almost flinches, and her face pinches, and she has to fight some tears of her own -- they are coming suddenly these days, unwanted and nonsensical. He's in a coma.

Melantha looks down at the picture and the pinch leaves her features. She stares. She reaches and lifts up the boy's photo, and the woman's voice becomes nothing but a dim buzz for a few seconds, tears or no tears. Melantha finds she is not breathing, then exhales in a long, slow sigh.

He's in a coma.

"Not a lot," she says quietly, regarding the last thing the woman says. She's frowning at the picture of the boy, then looks at the woman. "What's his name?"

wake

"I mean, you see them everywhere, you know. Some animal shelter or a kid with cancer or a family that lost everything in a fire or a Sunday school teacher without insurance. You know? The March of Dimes. These boxes full of quarters.

"Triton." The other woman says, relaxing into a breath that sounds like a long and slow unwinding. Like something somewhere inside being loosened. Like the relaxation of a too-tight vise. She smiles at the edge of it too, not a full smile but the sort of smile that comes tightly tinctured with tears but the ones in her eyes stay in her eyes and the laugh deepens.

"Triton Galax Johnson. We called him Jack, though."

Easy to see why. Triton's a ridiculous name.

Melantha

Triton.

Galax.

Johnson.

Oh, sweet Christ. Melantha looks the way most people look when they hear that name laid out. There's no part of it that isn't a bit horrifying. That poor kid. Even without being orphaned and in a coma, that poor kid.

But then she remembers: he was orphaned. She was orphaned, too. Fire came into play in both their lives. She got out. He never woke up. Melantha blinks rapidly, sighing, looking down at the photo again. "What about that experimental stuff you mentioned?" she asks. "Like. What is it? A drug, or what?"

wake

"It's like, adventure therapy. Sorry, that's not the proper term. But see, they'd take him out to the baseball stadium or the zoo. Horseback riding. He has to be hooked up to all that shit, the monitors, and have attendants and all that, which is why it costs so much.

"So it's just like. Taking him out of the long-term care facility. Getting him exposed to things that might... pull him back from wherever he is.

"Anyway," a quick and narrow shrug, she probably is one of those women who is always apologizing for the space she takes up in the world. "Medicaid says it is experimental and we couldn't afford to COBRA his dad's insurance when it ran out. So yeah. Boxes.

"That has all the information though, references and everything. I can leave it so your manager has the chance to look at it and swing by later, if it's a no."

Melantha

Melantha is staring at her, and at the photo. She nods dumbly. She doesn't want to ask too many more questions. She feels her heart pounding in her chest. She exhales and just nods, and nods, and swallows hard.

"Yeah, totally, it's... I'll just like put it out and... can you leave your number or something?"

wake

"Sure, absolutely. " This quick smile, small but genuine. The sense of weight, lifting. The brief erasure of a burden she will soon have to assume again, and yet:

sometimes that is all one needs. Respite of some sort, no matter how brief.

Her name is Ann. Ann Johnson, and she leaves her name behind and a number scrawled on a napkin and the box with its picture of a smiling boy, blond-haired, blue-eyed, being held up to the camera by a white woman with a full set of hippie dreadlocks, what looks like a small, mountain-high A-frame beyond her, both laughing, delighted. She leaves behind clippings about the tragedy and the name and number of several references, the bank branch, everything.

She leaves, and the slow afternoon continues.

There is still salt to be poured.