A chance encounter

Melantha Argyris

The reason that Melantha does not spend much time in Cold Crescent is out of her control. The Garou notice her when she's there; they can't help but notice her. A cub staying in the dorms or a Cliath walking by or even the higher-ranked wolves; they turn their heads, they watch her round the corner, they sometimes sniff. The worst don't hide it at all, don't show any restraint. The better ones catch themselves, try not to. The best of them ignore her, treat her as they would any kinfolk. But it makes her anxious, coming here.

When she does, because of a mini-sept moot or a meeting or just regular patrols by her packmates, Melantha does laundry or watches t.v. but does not nap. She talks to people occasionally -- more than she used to, though that isn't saying much. She used to never talk to anyone, or go anywhere near them.

Sometimes she strolls the hallways, especially after night, when most of the building is empty. She doesn't steal anything or do anything untoward; she just looks around, imagining the lives in those offices. They are not like the life she grew up with, by far. They are also nothing like the lives she pretended to be a part of, which were so extreme and so gauche in their own ways. These people, though most of them are kin, mostly just seem normal. Well-off, maybe. But far from living in the woods, and far from living in palaces.

She walks by one office, one night, and sees a light on. She sees, through the glass, a woman she recognizes. And maybe that woman looks up, sees her. And then,

Melantha gives a tentative smile. Gives a wave.

Éva Illésházy

Empty buildings are never precisely empty. Not buildings like this one, even without considering the Sept. The floors are lit up and then singularly darkened again as the cleaning crews move up and down and down and up the structure. They do not start until well after sunset.

Sometimes, they work until dawn.

--

And there is always someone else here. Some deal, some negotiation, some dispute, some late-night this-job-is-ridiculous bullshit, some deadline that some office bee, somewhere is working late, or early, or forever to address.

--

Éva is here late more often than most.

She does not have a corner office, but it is a large space with floor to ceiling windows and a view of downtown, half-shaded by blinds pulled down enough to obscure a distinctive view of her from the street when hers in the only window on the floor so illuminated, not so much as to entirely obscure the glittering vista of downtown.

--

This is how she works, late:

she has taken off her suit jacket. Beneath, a sleeveless sheathe dress, but the air conditioning - even in a firm run by kinfolk and for the Nation - is so cold that after hours she has slung a pashmina around her shoulders. Cashmere.

and she has slipped off her shoes, barefoot beneath the desk, a pen not just in her hand, but between her teeth.

A container of yogurt and a cooling mug of tea arrayed around the files.

She glances up at the darkened hallway: the shadow of movement, or the halo of it. Returns the wave with a spare but genuine half-smile of her own. It is not tentative, but any warmth in it is banked, you see. Unleavened.

The lift of her chin serves as invitation.

"What has you up so late?"

Melantha Argyris

Upstairs there is at least one office always occupied. The new Warder is up there. Reverence of Dawn, Master of Challenges, is watching two Cliaths wrestle on the challenge floor to work out their rivalry and angst without bloodshed. There are lower offices, accountants and tech firms, who have a few people working late. And then there's Eva.

Melantha takes the upward nod as the invitation it is and gently, quietly opens the door. She steps inside, and shrugs. "I usually work closing shifts. And live with Erich and Charlotte. So I'm used to nights." There's a pause; there's more there, longer used-to-it-ness, but she doesn't mention it.

"I know I've seen you, but I'm not sure of your name. It's Eva, right? I'm Melantha."

Éva Illésházy

"Erich Reinhardt?" It is less question than it is confirmation. The barest suggestion of a lilt near the end that invites mere assent - or perhaps forbearance. "I know Erich. We've met a few times.

"And yes, I'm Éva. Illésházy, pleasure to meet you, Melantha." The pen she places down, then she is rising in greeting, comfortable enough given the hour or the space or the circumstances that she does not feel any need to toe on her heels and augment her height with a few additional artificial inches.

"I'm afraid I do not have much hospitality to offer. Half-eaten yogurt and cold tea, though sometimes Erich has been known to raid the staff's breakroom and find undiscovered goodies."

Melantha Argyris

Melantha just nods. That's the Erich. She crosses a bit closer, and glances at Eva's toes ever so briefly, and huffs a laugh. "That's kind of uncool of him," she says. "He should buy his own snacks."

There's no malice there, just a comment. And one she's not afraid to voice, not afraid of being disloyal or unsubmissive or threatened, in any way, for just saying what the hell she thinks. She looks around, then back to Eva. "Why are you here so late? You're working?"

Éva Illésházy

"Mmm." One of those indefinite noises, except it sounds precisely like assent. Éva makes no extraneous noises, nor does she slides unnecessary articulations into her speech. "The Firm supplies the food, a business expense. Even a Garou with an appetite is unlikely to bankrupt us.

"I did tell him to stay away from anything in the fridge with a name or initials on it.

"And, yes. I have a hearing early in the morning, then a flight to catch to Coeur d'Alene for an arraignment in the afternoon. Last night my son had a soccer game. This was the only time I could dig out to prep for either."

Melantha Argyris

These things -- the small noises, the measured smile -- Melantha understands. She feels strangely at ease here, with this woman that perhaps not many people feel at ease with. Melantha feels that she is familiar. Melantha reminds herself: her feelings aren't universal. Projecting them on other people is a good way to fool yourself.

Hurt yourself.

"Still. It's not like he's starving. Just seems tacky to me." Tacky. Not dishonorable or so forth, just tacky. As though that matters.

She smiles. "You have a kid? How old?"

Éva Illésházy

"Three," this brief curve of her mouth, elegant as the leading edge of a dying sun. Assured somehow, and wholly contained, and lovely, lovely. Éva's expression - when she speaks of her children - cannot be considered unguarded. She is always guarded; and yet, some things - some few things, some distinct, personal pleasures, both profound and minor, warm her in ways that are easy to read and hard to quantify.

She has that look over good wine, and whiskey, too. Or a lovely piece of fish, thoughtfully prepared, not for but by her. The feeling of potting soil between her fingers.

"Two boys and a girl, three, five going-on-six, and ten. Do you have any?"

Melantha Argyris

Melantha's look, which was pleased, grows. Brightens. She smiles a little broader, her bright eyes that much brighter. "Three?" As though she were personally affected by this in any way, personally happy to hear it. The eldest is a girl. Her brothers are three and almost-six.

Eva asks if she does and Melantha is caught off guard. She wears it all up front, every expression, every thought. She would not need to. She could hide it all. Maybe even from someone like Eva. But that is not Melantha. That is Celia. Maria. Antoinette-called-Toni. Peyton. Anyone but her. All the not-hers she has been.

"Me? No. I'm like twenty-four." A pause. "I'm twenty-five." Another pause. A dawning: "I forgot my birthday again. Crap."

Éva Illésházy

"I was in my thirties before I had Ellie." Éva returns, quiet. "I had cousins, though, who started when they were in their late teens."

Then, a quiet huff. A certain awareness, a certain hike of her sculpted brows as Melantha reveals that she has forgotten her birthday again, curses her lax memory.

"I haven't remembered mine in years." She has not had someone to remember her birthday in years, but she does not mention it, and it does not make her mournful, that. "If you like, I'll buy you a drink for your birthday when I am back in town."

Melantha Argyris

"Well, you have kids," she says. "Parents don't tend to think about their own birthdays." Eva offers to buy her a drink and Melantha laughs, and it's a pretty thing, shy almost, the way she ducks her head. At least it's genuine. She wouldn't look goofy, doing that, if it were an act. She'd look so sweet. She'd look delicious, being shy.

"I haven't thought about my birthday in a long time, either. It wasn't really a big deal, the way I grew up." She hasn't said yes or no to the drink idea. Because she's curious. Because she is asking: "So you're a lawyer? What kind?"

Éva Illésházy

"Criminal defense." Éva returns, a certain wry note rich in her voice. "I started out as a public defender, now I'm in private practice. I do some appellate work too."

Melantha Argyris

Melantha is quiet for a moment, hearing that. She catches the wryness, doesn't understand why it's there. She is watching Eva mindfully, thinking of her three children and how she doesn't mention a husband or a mate in any of that, as though -- if one exists -- she doesn't think to do so. She looks at her bare feet on the carpet and her cashmere pashmina.

"Well," she says, "I should let you get back to work. So you're not completely exhausted for your hearing because I distracted you or whatever. And... maybe when you get back I can visit again."

She smiles. "It was good to meet you, Eva," she says, by way of excusing herself.

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.

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.

snow

wake

The old woman and the boy, the smoke and the sky; the memory of tears at the back of her throat. The raw scree of her hatred. Of his. How familiar it becomes, though perhaps never (nearly) welcome. How it slips into the seams of things, how daylight starts to be framed by the memory of smoke-at-dusk or dawn.

The boy, sharper. The boy, sharp. The boy, furious, swallowing his fury, the wood and the rough bite of the fresh-hewn wood against her hands. The smoke, the sting of it, the frame of its memory.

This is how it always is: the road and the dream of the road, and the bordering woods, close in and dark. The sky, starting to brighten or losing its brightness. Some moment, always, of transition. The woods, the sameness of them, some marching serenity of a wood, and then the clearing, and the shrouded body, and the woman, and the pyre.

The reflective necessity of it all.

--

And tonight - tonight, doesn't the old woman seem - faded somehow. Less substantial than the billow of black smoke rising from the pyre. Reaching for the boy who refuses to allow her to touch him and launches himself into the woods: I hate you I hate you I hate you. I just want you all to stay I hate you.

And Melantha, who follows.

--

By the gods she can run; she can run here. She runs full out, lungs burning. She runs with the pounding roar of her pulse in her ears. She runs and the woods, the dark marching sameness of all those damp trees drawn in shadow, becomes no more than a background blur. Here and there dark wheeling shapes of crows are startled from hidden branches, to beat their wings and rings toward, or against, the lightening sky.

The wood grow thicker and closer and she can feel the ground rising, and no matter how fast she runs the boy is faster. Slips between the trees with the familiarity of a forest god, as if everything here moved, for him.

Melantha

[stamina + athletics]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Melantha

Melantha hates these dreams now. They hurt. The ashes on her tongue, the taste in her mouth, the way the world has started to look grey on good days,

on fire on bad days.

She hates the old woman and she hates the man on the pyre, she hates the boy running and the trees grabbing and the waking, the frustration of it, the way she keeps waking wanting to cry and by now both Charlotte and Erich have been told about this dream. They've both heard the story, but they've also seen Melantha sliding into a strange depression. Not severe, not a drop off a cliff where she stops eating and cries all the time. But a flatness to her, a struggle to care. Sometimes she shines through, because she is stronger than a dream, but you cannot wake up with ashes in your mouth day after day and not begin to wonder if the world has died.

She dreams again. She sinks into it, and runs, and waits to wake,

but the dream keeps going. She runs the way she runs in the wild and the woods, over streams, on top of rocks, through rain, drunk on wine and savagery, the way she has hunted before, the way she has worshipped before. She sees that she has run farther than before, it is still going, and something breaks open in her like an egg cracking and then crumbling to shards; Melantha lets out a shriek that, if the mortal world could hear it, would be attributed to banshees, ghosts, madwomen. It is bloodcurdling and it is joyful and enraged.

If she can find a stone, she picks it up mid-run. She throws it. Not to hit the boy, but past him. She doesn't know why.

wake

Melantha finds a stone and she throws it. She throws it. The stone defines a smooth dark arc over the boy's head and he turns, startled, panting. Behind him, something is startled from the brush and breaks through the trees. Not the ever-present crows but something else: some groundling thing. Pheasant or grouse, still dark-winged.

They are near to the forest's edge when the boy turns, spins, stops. He is higher than Melantha but still slight, pale-eyed and blond-headed. Breathing hard though not from the run.

"You're still here."

Melantha

For a moment, the Fury's eyes snap to the small thing in the underbrush, the way she would if she were not a girl, not a kinswoman but a wolf, a hunter, which sometimes she is. She whips back to the boy, who is still running, so she chases him further --

til he stops. Til they are nearly out of the woods, so to speak and so to speak literally. Melantha stops running and starts advancing, though, still coming, not just here but arriving, and closer, with every step.

She exhales, heavily, because she is out of breath. Just nods.

wake

There's something sulky about the boy's mouth when Melantha nods. Just nods. She is continuing to advance and he is backing away, glancing sharply from her to what is visible of the sky above them, and something about his aspect tells her that he is listening to a song she cannot hear.

It is the posture. The cant of his head. The brief interregnum of hang-time between this moment and the next, between this breath and the next.

"Everyone's waking up. Going away. They won't do what I tell them. They won't just be.

"You won't, either. You want to go away too. Before we even get home.

"We're almost there."

Melantha

"You're not their boss," Melantha flat-out tells him. "Maybe you don't get to tell them what to do."

She puts her hands on her knees, but doesn't take her eyes off of him. He takes his eyes off her, though, looking upward, looking around. She doesn't follow. She just looks at him. Tries to see Erich in his face. Tries to see her own brothers, any of them. Anything familiar. She's not angry at the kid, even when she says those blunt words. He's just a kid. No one has ever told him, she imagines, that people not doing what he wants is hardly the end of the world. In fact: it is the world.

"Why would I want to be here?" she asks him, and she's genuine, but frowning at him. "Why would I want to taste ashes all the time or watch a man's body burn or gather firewood or chase you for eternity? Of course I want to wake up. I want to be with my friends, my pack. But every night you're back, and you're tearing my heart out."

wake

He's a boy; that sulkiness framing his mouth deepens when Melantha tells him that he does not have the right or responsibility to frame the world and he gives her a sharpening look, pale eyes slung back down from the sky as she continues.

That sulkiness is dissipating as she goes onward. Is dissolving from the edges of his mouth and the skin framing his eyes into something else, whole and entire. A sort of subdural panic, as if she had just spoken half-a-dozen words a boy like this has no right to hear, ones he cannot precisely comprehend. Not here.

Not on his own.

"Where else can you GO." And this is furious and pained and painful and he's just staring at Melantha and then his eyes snap shut and his hands curl into fists framed all tense around his eyes like he is going to tear them out by the root, like there's something inside that he knows but cannot admire or allow himself to remember. "You have to be here. Everyone does.

"You can't wake up. It's a lie!"

And he turns around, and stomps through the remnant treeline, bending down to retrieve that thrown-stone as he plunges out into the clearing -

Melantha

There's nothing beyond this. Not for him.

"Hey," she starts, her brow furrowing, taking another step forward. He's having a meltdown. He turns to stomp away, grabbing the stone she threw, and she jogs after him. "Stop," she says, firmly. "Seriously, I don't know your name, but STOP. I cannot --"

Melantha is suddenly overcome. It's rage so intense she thinks she might burst from it. She screams after him. "I CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS ANYMORE. Stop making me chase you, you little son of a bitch!"

wake

He breaks through the line of trees.

Beyond: the crest of a ridge, the dying frame of a collapsing house ringed with dirty snow, slumped against the first blush of dawn, or the last flush of sunset.

He breaks through the line of trees and bends to scoop up the stone that Melantha threw at him and she's raging, furious, screaming and he screams too, launching the stone not in an arc over her head, but right at her face.

"You RUINED it. You RUINED it. You RUINED it. You ALL RUINED it.

"Just GO."

The boy is crying. Tears smeared across his face, this slurry of them - he's crying, howling and that rock is spinning towards Melantha, aimed right at her head.

Melantha

[dex + ath]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Melantha

[dex + brawl]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Melantha

Oh, she feels bad for using that phrase. It's so messed up. You call someone bad because of their mother? How fucked up is that? She feels appalled -- she actually feels somewhat sick, hearing herself say it, and her heart wrenches in place. Melantha tightens her shoulders up. She sees him picking up the rock and breathes in sharply,

and ducks, quick, going to the side sharply. And then she, um.

Tackles him. As gently as one can, really, since he's a kid. But she rushes him, grabs him, arms all around him, to bear him to the grassy, leaf-strewn ground, arms pinned to his sides.

wake

Melantha tackles the boy.

He's small.

Fragile.

Smaller than he looks. How strange, he feels all skin-and-bones and the rock sails by her head and he's screaming and screaming and crowing and crying, and they tumble together through the undergrowth and her arms are around his shoulders as they hit the ground and his screaming changes content and context and the fury is draining from it and the snow is starting to fall -

- and Melantha wakes. She wakes up.

She wakes up, and this time, it is the cold brightness of snow that lingers on her tongue.

Melantha

He's small. He's fragile. And she is a fucking Amazon Princess... or something. She grabs him, and it's almost an embrace. It's a weird sort of hug, because she doesn't want him to hit the ground. She just wants to stop him from running, and running, and running, and yelling and screaming and making her chase after him. He's so worked up about people staying. Well. Maybe she'll make him stay. She knows a thing or too about the way people go away.

How it makes you feel like there's no place for you, either.

So she grabs him, and they go to the ground, and his tears are all over her and she doesn't taste ashes for a few moments, she just holds onto him, tumbling to the ground, and it's cold and for once, for once, it's not ashes.

It's snow.

"I miss you," she whispers, suddenly and tearfully, into his ear.

--

And wakes. Not the first time with tears in her eyes.

The first time tasting something other than ashes.

Melantha

wake

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.

Evergreens, tall and remarkably silent, shoulder together in their strange correspondence. The branches have the lush, sweeping, open-handed look of cedars, though somehow with a straight-spined, soldiering conspiracy, each to each, rather than the shaggy ranginess of so many iterations of trees. The wood hugs close to the verge of the road, bracken breaking into a rutted and weedy track, which is more earth than stone.

The morning - evening? - the light has that golden, nostalgic sweep to it, but the chill in the air seems somehow damp, bedewed - the morning, or evening, is all quick in her throat, and the whole world feels hushed, drawn, dampened, as if after a blanketing of snow. Oh, and there is snow, in melting mounds and strange little hummocks, in sheltered coves beneath the march of the trees. Aside from the lone caw of a single crow, the woods are silent.

Melantha

After talking to Erich about this, finally, and after hearing Tamsin describe her own really weird dreams, Melantha allows herself to slip back into it. She knows it's coming. She doesn't want to go here again, taste ashes again. It takes her time to go back to sleep, even though she took one of the clearwaters that Charlotte has gifted her with and rinsed her hair with it before going to bed. Even though she lit her little pretend-candle in her very-real shrine to let it glimmer throughout the night in her alcove, its little flickering can't keep the dream out.

Her mind forgets, at first, that she is dreaming. She doesn't remember any of this at first, is simply there, and standing, looking up, at snow falling. She opens her mouth the way she always does, aching for the touch of nature on her tongue.

The taste reminds her. And she rejects it, wanting to wake, but does not wake; we don't always get what we want. Melantha reaches up, shoulders hunching, covering her face with her mouth. For the first time in any dream, she starts spitting, all but retching, trying to get rid of the taste. This isn't wildness. This is death, all around her. The trees and the crow and the ash and the snow are all symbols of it, essences of it, and not the rich earthy sort of death that she knows is holy. These things feel like omens of murder.

Melantha looks into the woods. And she knows better than to go alone.

She closes her eyes, though she is afraid to, and starts thinking about Erich. She thinks very hard about Erich. About his hair and his haircut and his face and his arms and she realizes by the time she gets to his elbows this is stupid, dreams aren't so exacting. So she expels those thoughts and thinks instead of the feelings. The weird comfort of all their arguments and the falling-asleep-with and the strength in his arms and how he's nearly always a little too silly and playful for her and the way he lies to himself and represses stuff and then how much she loves him and how much it hurts sometimes to love anything, how raw it leaves her, and how nothing is perfect but everything is real and she knows, better than most, that what is perfect and what is everything you want is never real.

And she says his name over and over and over and over in her mind, trying to call him. She even tells him that she's about to go into some dark woods and there's a dead person somewhere and if he doesn't get here she's just going without him, because if there's any chance she could call him into being in her dreams, there's no way he'd let that one go.

She opens her eyes.

wake

The taste reminds her.

The taste always reminds her. There is the scent of snow in the air but oh that is ash; that is something - that is someone - burning. Here is a truth of the world, there is always someone, somewhere, burning. There is always some funereal pyre.

The taste reminds her and Melantha wakes, wakes within-the-dream she did not want to remember, or live again. She wakes within the dream and recognize the omens of murder: the wood, which is silent as woods were neither meant nor made to be silent. The crow. The hour, the ash. Perhaps even the road. Which is, to her vision, no more than a sinous curve of absence between the trees.

She is going to go into the looks.

She thinks and thinks and thinks to Erich. Oh,

she knows better than to go alone.

--

There is no answer, not in her mind's eye, not in her mind's ear. Not in her mind, the interstitial experience of their presence that always asserts itself when she draws that iron needle through her knuckles; bears, somehow, the bloom of blood from the wound. They are there, somehow, somewhere - her connection to pack and totem is not severed. But oh, it is as if they were sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.

And Melantha wakes.

--

Another night; another dream.

Every piece repeats itself, every piece repeats itself; right down to her experience of recognition, the way she wakes within-the-dream, the calls she extends, searching, searching, the feeling that they are - no, not gone. But instead, sleeping too deeply to be awoken.

Another night; another dream.

She is on the verge at the edge of the road, and the road winds through the dark forest, and the trees cast long, straight-spined shadows across the rutted, weedy track, and sky has the pale blue promise of dawn, or perhaps the last brilliance of evening, she opens her mouth, she always opens her mouth, she always tastes the ash.

There is a road. There is a wood. There is a low, swirling plume of black smoke in the sky.

Melantha

Every time they thread that needle and push it through Melantha's knuckles, she has to fight tears, look away, hide her face in Charlotte or Erich. She gets woozy. She puts her head between her legs. It isn't the pain when they rip it out, it's the blood, it's the openness, the bit of herself spread and raw to the world and it makes her very, very dizzy. Every time. It's worth it, though. You can endure a lot if it's for something you believe in.

Melantha knows that better than most, too.

Erich's not there when she opens her eyes, and neither is Charlotte, though there is an unspoken pact between Erich and Melantha right now to maybe not freak Charlotte out before they absolutely have to, or maybe if this is Something not to expose her mind to it, because her mind is sometimes... fragile. She already walks half in this world and half in worlds neither of them can reach.

Melantha tastes ashes. Melantha feels loneliness. Feels grief.

And wakes.

--

The morning after they all agree to try and adjust their dreams, Melantha makes sure Erich knows, and if he knows how to get a hold of Tamsin they have to let her know, too: she couldn't get Erich into her dream. So that sucks. She says again she'll try to do something different, she'll try, because the reality is:

this is going to drive her insane if it goes on long enough. She knew a woman, when she was younger, who went mad from nightmares, from not sleeping. The woman killed herself. Melantha doesn't say any of that. She just says she'll keep trying.

--

And this time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich.

And the next time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich and until after she's started walking into the wood.

And the next time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich and until after she's started walking into the wood and until after she's reached out and put her hand on one of the trees.

wake

The wood is lovely and dark and deep and she knows the words, everyone knows the words, knows the way they paint the world and the wood is lovely and dark and deep and silent. The cedars are so damnably silent in the snow and also; so rich, even in the midst of winter, those lush, low-sweeping branches that fringe the wood's edge are different here, dead needles underfoot, the hush of the wind swaying the treetops.

The wood feels warm; comfortingly warm beneath hands and her feet are near-silent and the hush that she is aware of only deepens as she hikes through those straight-marching trunks.

The sky is gone and most of the light; the shadows too. She loses track of the smoke in the sky, but points herself toward it or perhaps, perhaps she simply intends to go there, and so she does.

Maybe it is the scent, the acrid flare of it against her soft palette that she follows.

Or perhaps she has walked this path before; too many times before, the wend and the warp of it beneath the silent trees.

--

Soon, or perhaps not soon but some time later the smoke thickens. Billows through the air like drifts of morning mist, ghostlike between the branches. There is a clearing and she sees the clearing and in the clearing the pyre is smoldering, sputtering through the shrouded body-of-a-man wrapped in a winding cloth. Two figures at the edge of the clearing shade their eyes against stinging smoke, sort through the hewn wood and found-branches for something dry, and aged, and ready to catch light: a stoop-shouldered, humpbacked old woman,

and a boy, of eight or nine years.

Melantha

She's been dreaming for too many nights now to think of things like poetry. At least: when she's asleep. She keeps drawing what could be an anthology illustration for Robert Frost in her waking hours, sketching. The dream is depressing, is depressive, and she feels sapped by it even though nothing is happening to her. She still sleeps. She just feels flattened out, feels greyed out.

Feels like she's been walking forever when she finds them, and she is unsure of how many nights it has been now, wonders now how many times she has gotten this far, how many times she has choked on smoke, coughed it out, pulled her sleeve over her nose and mouth to try and filter out something that isn't real at all.

Her eyes sting and water. And then she just starts crying, because of the fire, and because of the man wrapped upon it, and the little boy, and the things she has lost. At least the tears moisten her eyes. She doesn't think the emotions come from the dream; they come from her, because she remembers sometimes, and it kills her. Erich was cast out, but... at least his family is still alive. And it's such a self-pitying thought she never voices it, never really even allows herself to think it, but

it's true, isn't it?

Melantha wants to talk to them, but now doesn't seem like the right time. It's a funeral. She wipes her eyes and walks over, slowly,

starts searching through the wood with them for more to put on the pyre.

wake

Their eyes are dry; the old woman and the boy. She is here because she was made to be here because she was meant to be here because she is always here. See her hands; the splinters beneath her nails. See the steady strangeness in the way she lifts her head and swings her eyes to watch Melantha as she arrives; as she finds wood. As she adds it to the pyre.

The boy, blonde haired and blue-eyed, also turns to watch Melantha as she enters the clearing and he is not steady but - something else. Stretched and withheld perhaps, tense as he watches her bend over and select the most seasoned bit of deadfall to toss onto the pyre.

Something about that motion brings the boy to life. The dull thud of the wood against the lifeless body, the hollowness within: whatever it is, he is in immediate motion, lurching out of the grasp of the old woman's gnarled hands, launching himself toward the body on the pyre, tearing at the shroud.

I hate you. That to the old woman as he evades her grasp. I hate you all. I hate him. I hate you. I hate you," that is to Melantha: direct, wild, furious but somehow without venom or rancor, oh no: Melantha recognizes all to well the impetuous, enduring grief of a child. "Everyone keeps leaving. I just want you all to stay. I hate you. I hate you."

The boy is all motion; he attacks the shrouded body then throws himself into the wood and oh the woods absorb him, as if he were one of their own. A few, brief seconds of thrashing echoes through the underbrush, see, and then nothing, nothing.

That silence again. The silhouette of a single crow flushed dark against the sky.

The crackle of the flames.

The shroud has slipped down from the body's face. An ordinary man, not remarkable anyway.

He appears to be sleeping.

The old woman is lurching toward her, three-legged - no, that is a walking stick.

--

And Melantha, wakes.

Melantha

[ONOZ]

Melantha

Blonde hair, blue eyes. Could be Erich's brother, thinks he's Erich's brother. The brother Erich doesn't have, the brother Erich insists is real, real, real though. She moves, he moves, and he throws wood, running at the pyre.

Melantha yells at him to stop, don't do that, no --!

He hates so much. And he hates her but she doesn't feel hate. She hurts with him, hates with him, yes: she understands. Everyone keeps leaving and Melantha is weeping again, openly. The boy runs. He runs into the wood and the woman is coming toward her and Melantha hates her, too, hates her because she remembers someone else, not so old, coming when her mother died, raising her, taking her away when her father died and her brothers died and her other brothers ran away.

"No!" she snaps at the woman. "I don't want you!"

And runs into the woods after the boy, runs into the dark with him, after him, for him, is him,

but wakes. There are tears on her face again.

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!

Monday, March 17, 2014

wake

Monday, March 17, 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 –

Erich wakes. He wakes, in his own bed. He wakes in his own home. He wakes.

wake

Monday, March 17, 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 –

How she rises from the dream, inhaling, long and deep. Expecting the metallic tang of snow on her tongue.

wake

Monday, March 17, 2014

Thomas

The line is five deep and does not seem to move. There’s some disturbance up ahead; a dispute over the pricing of Snickers and Mug Root Beer that escalates with the slow inevitability of an avalanche and he should be irritated because Jesus fuck these things are not that complicated and all he’s here for is a box of kitchen matches except there is a sort of bubble, see, around him. The murmur of stranger’s conversations all around him muted, dampened, drawn down and out and when he looks up and catches a glimpse of his reflection in the shining slide of the cooler doors –

- he has no idea what, or whom, he sees.

wake

Monday, March 17, 2014

Keisha

It takes forever to wash the paint off her hands. It is red; it is crimson. It makes her hands look rather like they were gloved in blood. The water runs; her reflection skewed in the faucet and the mirror is cloudy, covered with steam. The water runs; sluices through the viscous –

is it paint? Is it?

Sluices through the red clings. She turns up the heat until it is scalding. Picks up a pumice stone, scrubs until her hands are raw. Scrubs: thoughtlessly, and furiously, until her hands are raw.

There is still red paint beneath her nails.

wake

And, c'est tout!

wake

Monday, March 17, 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 sound of –

She comes to consciousness like a blind man comes to light. Wakes, in her own bed. In her own body. In her own place. Wakes.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

wake Erich wake

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Some mornings you wake with a dream on your tongue. The memory of it thick, see?

but just beyond remembering.

He wakes with lightning on his tongue, forked and bright. All day. All day, the salt and mercury of it linger in his mouth. Something’s coming.

Or

perhaps

something’s here.

wake Melantha wake

Saturday, March 15, 2014 Evensong

There is a name that she does not remember. It catches between her teeth. It slides beneath the root of her tongue. The glimpse of a face she does not know in the mirror over the sink of the restroom of the bar-and-grille.

The bulb is going out.

The door is swinging closed.

Everything is empty. Everything is full.

Is that a mirror, or

a window, or

– oh yes, now she remembers –

a door.

wake Tamsin wake

Saturday, March 15, 2014

The room is wrong. The window is off-center. The corners skew, and she notices it while she is brushing her teeth; a mouthful of minty foam, the scent of something missing curling soft in the air. As if everything had been taken apart while she slept, and fitted back together by someone who remembered the space, imperfectly, impatiently. Or perhaps merely: not well.

All day she thinks of paths; of winding roads; of crumbling gates. Sails, somehow, full of a westering wind, painted in the light of a falling sun.

warmoot

Erich

After the dust settles,

-- does the dust ever settle after something like this? after a handful of Cliaths, safe and secure under the protection of one of the most well-organized, resourceful, intelligent Septs around, suddenly stand horrified w to the guardians of that Sept turning on each other in ways that will scar their nightmares for years to come -- does the dust settle? do the scars heal? or do they simply harden and knot over with time?

it's a lie, by the way, that scars are stronger than unscathed flesh. they're not. but: for the sake of argument, or perhaps sanity, we'll pretend they are. we'll pretend flesh heals, and scars fade, and dust settles --

after the survivors have healed each other and comforted each other the best they can, after that horrid night has passed into day: the Sept evacuates. They take out rooms at a nearby hotel. They seal off 1999 Broadway. And of course there's some room or some suite somewhere, someplace where the wartorn survivors can gather and regroup. Because -- true; it's dangerous to congregate right now. It might make them a target. It might be safer to go to ground, to scatter, to fight a guerilla war. But that was never the way of the Garou. Their instincts run toward packs and hordes. Toward coming together, standing strong in numbers, and toward fighting back.

That's what brings Erich here. He comes fairly charging into the room, or the suite, or wherever it is the survivors have congregated. He's not alone. Unless one or two or all have strenuously objected, he's got Charlotte, Ingrid, and even Melantha with him. He's put out word to others, too. That other Ahroun from the moot-before-last, that friend he made fighting for Wyrmfoe. That other Shadow Lord. And that Uktena. And that Bone Gnawer! And really: anyone and everyone he knows, anyone and everyone they know, and so on and so forth, until the growing gathering kinda-sorta starts to resemble

a warmoot.

--

"So... we all know what happened, right?" That's how he starts, perched on a stool from the suite's breakfast bar like some flesh and bone gargoyle. "Some of us were there when it happened, but most of us heard from someone else, at least? Has anyone been able to get ahold of the Warder? Or, y'know... anyone important from the Sept?

" 'Cause if not, I think maybe we need to start figuring out what to do ourselves."

Melantha

Melantha is, in fact, there. She's uncomfortable there, pulled back from the tiny house outside the city and hugging her arms around her chest, but she's there, looking uneasy. Younger garou sniff at her sometimes, or stare at her, even with her hair in a ponytail and her body hidden in a hoodie and not a drop of makeup on her face, because she sort of smells like the best thing they have ever smelled ever omg, but she tries not to notice and she certainly tries not to bare her teeth at anyone for it.

She heard about what happened. She just looks horrified by it, and... well. Helpless.

--

Most of the garou in the room are young, in fact. Cliaths and Fosterns, a few cubs sneaking away from their mentors. These are the garou who are new to the sept or who just haven't risen very high in its ranks. There are a few from Forgotten Questions, too. They are all here for the same reason:

like Erich, they've begun to suspect -- to believe -- that actually, no,

the elders do not have all of this under control.

There's some noises among them when Erich asks if anyone has been able to get a hold of the Warder or Sept Alpha or Master of Challenges or anybody, really, who runs Cold Crescent. They're all still at the sept proper, cleaning up and only really allowing Theurges and a few others to come in and help clean up.

Ingrid

Sam is not there. The kinswoman of Cockroach has recently been indoctrinated into the world of, "Guys you have to give me some notice so I can find a babysitter." She doesn't have a regular one yet, and she's not going to trust any old neighbor child to look after her particular child.

Phoebe is not there. She's at 1999 Broadway, draining herself dry summoning the good spirits to help drive out the bad. She is draining her essence and her will to the last drop, or resting, so that she can get up and do it again. And again. And again.

Ingrid is there, though, making people uncomfortable with her very presence. She is slender and graceful and elegant and poised and there is something not quite right about her. Something that makes her Other, that puts people - particularly kinfolk, particularly the mortals that wander the corridors looking for their rooms - on edge, makes them think she's going to rip out their jugular because she's hungry.

She's not hungry, though. She looks more herself than the last time Erich saw her, her color has returned, her dark eyes are cool and distant. There are faint circles under her eyes, though. Her mask of impassivity - less a mask than most people realize - has been cracked.

"They are there," she says quietly, standing somewhere against a wall, arms folded around her rib cage. "They shoo us away like children. But they are there."

Charlotte

Here is Charlotte: at Erich's side. She is a slight creature and a fae thing, perhaps 5'5" now, but still - those who have known her for some time think that she might still be growing. Might grow, somehow, into the strange and gangly promise of her long-limbs, might lengthen if not fill-out. She is more skin and bone than muscle and sinew but muscle and sinew are visible in her skinny arms only because she has to little body fat to conceal them. Arms like sticks and a gawky, boyish frame made more boyish by her clothes and the blunt cut of her platinum hair, which is dyed pink at the ends and freshly so.

With Kool-Aid, not crushed beets or beatles or the dried blood of her enemies. Erich at least knows that secret now.

She is wearing a raglan t-shirt in heathered green with darker green bands at the collar and cuffs. It says SPRITE on it. There is a dark smear of something at the hem in mostly the shape of a hand but this is not blood. Jeans, old and fitted, and a woven friendship bracelet around her bony left wrist and a pukka shell necklace around her throat and a longer platinum chain that disappears beneath the collar of her t-shirt she looks like an awkward, ordinary nineteen-year-old bird-boned and hollow-faced and wide-eyed enough that with another four or five inches of height she could be a model and with another four or five years of good solid growth in her: of healthy food and exercise and growing up and breaking hearts and being heart broken and laughing at the moon and crying sometimes in her pillow and getting drunk and making missteps and recovering from her goddamned missteps, she could be a lovely young woman.

But she is not a young woman.

She is a wolf, and she is -

achingly

pure-blooded.

Haloed in silver, outlined in a corona of gold. Garou see her: awkward and too-human girl. And they see her promise and her madness and her doom, the fragile and glorious shadow of oh her many ancestors, distilled just so, into a fragile vessel of skin and bone, moon-mad eyes, pink-dyed hair.

They do not see but likely Erich and Melantha, at least, can sense the presence of another consciousness, in and around and under her skin. For Charlotte it is like being half-swallowed by a ghost, this deep breath and then: double vision, old hands, old memories, an old spine. Makes her stand up rather more straight, lends her a steadiness she would never otherwise exhibit.

As now, when she glances sideways at Ingrid as the no-moon remarks that the Warder and elders send them scurrying like children. Then, back to the Ahroun, the others in the room, whoever has come.

"We should try to figure out how they were possessed. And how to protect ourselves from such possession.

"Maybe we start at the place where Champion of Honor was recovered. See what's gathered in the umbra. See what the walls remember. Find a thread and find a thread and find a thread and follow it."

Avery

Not merely cliaths and fosterns and the exiled and the lost but: some few kin. The word drifts, filters. Moves, mouth to ear and ear to mouth and back again. The building is closed. It matters little, Baranski & Greer maintains a satellite office, and the satellite is very specific to the very specific subset of Éva's criminal defense practice, and the more circuitous shadow practice that has her traveling some months twenty days out of thirty, to inauspicious locales in half-remembered places, where the law and the Law intersect with the unfortunate realities of Life as They Know It and her own first law is not to vigorously defend her client, but to protect the Veil.

But see,

here. A hotel suite, a conference room. It hardly matters.

There is another there, sitting in an armchair as though this is her room and not the room of some sept-dweller or four being put up for the time being by that same sept. She sits in surprisingly casual clothes, white shorts and flat-soled white ankle boots made of leather so supple and fine it must be from some poor creature that only exists to provide clothing for the wealthy. Her top is cut to gracefully, demurely draw the eye directly to her cleavage, forcing one to constantly remind oneself of the rules of gentlemanly behavior, good god sir her eyes are up here. It is mostly made of silk overlaid with lace. The room is cool with conditioned air, but her hair is pulled up in a ballerina-esque bun in deference to the heat outside. The diamond set in her pendant only looks tiny if one is comparing it to something above 2 karats.

Her legs are crossed. Her arms are draped over the armrests of the chair. She is holding an iced green tea that has two leaves of muddled mint inside to complement the honey. It is not a Starbucks cup but a glass one made to seem like a portable to-go cup from a similar establishment. That glass cup is etched on the front with her monogram, though it looks almost like a business logo, with A S M stacked to the left of a very large, elegant C.

Avery sips her tea while a few others talk, listening. After Charlotte offers a suggestion, an idea, a firm we should, Avery glances around, looking to see what other ideas there might be.

Eva

Éva arrives late; later. Slips in through the door and circles the edgy crowd of young Garou. She is more than twice the age of the youngest cliaths, who are all more adult in the eyes of the Nation than she. By now, any sting that that awareness breeds in her is well-hidden behind her dark eyes. Actually, any sting is gone. What she feels, when she feels anything for them, strangers all, is a vague sense of compassion.

They are all so monstrously young.

--

She is: composed, dressed in a dark and formal business suit that is well-suited to the air conditioning and to hotel conference rooms and to marble-floored courtrooms and cheaply-paneled hearing rooms and also: to the sleek modern formality of contemporary jails but not at all to the heat outside.

There is a hint of perspiration at her temples. It is warm outside. She has not been sheltering in this motel. She made a choice, and chose to come here.

Someone else had to sort out her schedule.

--

Éva does not sit. She stands comfortable on the outskirts of whatever circle has formed in expensive leather heels that are more than two but not so much as three inches. More leather over her shoulder: a purse and a briefcase. This is like to be a long meeting, so she does lower the latter to the floor and rest it against the wall.

There is a hint of breeding to her. Just enough to confirm their first impression - that dark eyes and clear features and dark hair and that sort of remove and composure means: Shadow Lord. Perhaps some of the Fosterns know her as Andraj's mate. He's been dead for more than a year, and most of those in the room know him not-at-all.

--

"Have you perhaps considered," when she does speak, she does so evenly and well. Her voice is modulated, quiet enough that one has to pay attention to hear, precise enough that it cuts through the white noise of the room. " - asking, not where they are, but what they want. With an office building, at 1999 Broadway, in Denver, Colorado, which is something, but is not-a-Caern.

"They do not attack Forgotten Questions. They were chased away and have an entire continent on which to practice their depravities, but they came back here, and fixate, once more, on Cold Crescent.

"Which was not always," the most minute lilt of her dark brows, "ours. The Nation purchased the building in 2005. What was it - whatever it is, that singularity you have found - before that? Have they focused themselves with such exacting fury merely because it is a home for us in this city, or because they want it, want to take it back, because they dream of it, need it, wish to use it as some magnified focus and terrible focus to - "

There is something fierce there, and driving, and steady, and ferocious and then she pulls it back. Cuts it off.

A beat.

The smallest, sparest smile. Apology as much as anything else.

"I don't know. I don't see the world the way you do. But perhaps you should start looking for answers not out here," a lift of her chin, northeast, in the direction of 1999 Broadway. Specific enough to suggest that she is aware of her exact orientation in the nameless and faceless suite-or-conference room. "but in there.

"Perhaps it is wrong to try to puzzle out the motives of an unreasonable and and monstrous enemy. Perhaps the motives matter not a whit. Perhaps they are motive-less. I don't pretend to have anything to offer you except questions."

With that, she steps back. Cedes the floor, to whomever else might speak.

Erich

Erich has a seat sort of close to the door, where he can see who comes in. Where he can, if need be, hold the line and keep out the forces of darkness if they come for them here.

Or well. Try, at least. But a nice side effect of sitting there is that he gets to see all the forces of light that come filing in, too. So he sees when Ingrid enters, and that's when his face brightens noticeably! -- but only momentarily. He nods her over beside him, though if she goes find herself a different dark corner to skulk in he doesn't complain. He sees when Avery enters, too. She gets a fistbump. Understated and a little surreptitious, but it's there. Offered, anyway. The rest of them: he doesn't really recognize anyone. Maybe that other-Ahroun, his rival-friend, who gets a quick hike of his chin. He looks at everyone though, trying to remember their face, their smell, some detail about them that will separate them from others.

Some of the Cliaths sniff at Melantha. She doesn't bare her teeth at them, but Erich does, and vociferously, growling in his chest every time a stray eye, ear or nose wanders her way.

--

Charlotte isn't just-Charlotte today. She is Charlotte-plus-one, and that makes Erich a little nervous. He remembers what happened when that other plus-one of Charlotte's showed up, and what a catastrophe that almost became.

This plus-one isn't a screeching disaster, though. This plus-one actually speaks sense. And Erich listens, and looks around to see how everyone else takes it. Then he raises a hand. "If you're going back, I can provide some cover. Just in case the place is crawling with Them."

--

Later, a latecomer: Eva, dark of eye and hair, smelling very faintly but unmistakably of Thunder. And Erich, completely forgetting that he was growling at Cliaths and cubs to stop sniffing Melantha, sort of stretches out his neck and sniffs at her as she walks in.

She passes him. Finds a place by the wall. Sets down her stuff and Says Stuff. Pretty sensible Stuff. It sparks a memory in Erich, who raises his hand again like a schoolboy or something.

"You know," he says, "I should've mentioned this earlier, but a couple of us ran into a couple of Them a week or two ago. At a bar? That was when we picked up that lady with the broken hip and her baby. They were with one of Them. And he actually... talked to us? I mean, he kinda almost had a conversation with us. He talked about how he was just trying to make the world good for his kids, or something. Or well no, he talked about how he was going to burn the world down so his kids could have a brand new start. Pretty crazy shit, but." Erich shrugs. "Anyway.

"Point is, then we attacked him. Well, I attacked him. Which I probably shouldn't have, because then he almost killed us all. But that was the weird thing. He could have, I think. It took pretty much everything I had just to make him bleed, and, look, maybe I'm not some Elder Ahroun? But I'm not a wuss. He was just like a TANK. This is really scattered. What I'm trying to say is: he was way stronger than anyone had any right to be. But he didn't kill us. He just... literally burned the bar down around us and left us alone.

"So... this is kinda going off what she said," he nods at Eva. "Maybe what's in there is just the old world they're trying so hard to burn down. Maybe they're trying to take apart all the structure and familiarity we have, leave us leaderless and lost. And then we'd be easy pickings. Not to kill, but to corrupt. 'Cause that's kinda what they've been doing with all the people we've been picking up from them, right? Corrupting the lost and aimless."

Lola

Lola Hawkes has her way of hearing about things like this. The Sept of Forgotten Questions was abuzz with the news, so of course the Kinfolk Guardian knew. Eddie told her about this moot, told her where it was and when to be there. She was appreciative enough to offer him a ride along with her, but the Skald had declined as now more than ever he needed to stay and make sure the Bawn was secure.

So Lola had driven into town with Hector-- he'd tried to tell her that the warmoot was happening but Lola was a few steps ahead of him and had already gotten a cousin to look up directions for her so she could write them down and know exactly where to park the truck and which doors to go in. They arrived about ten or so minutes before this meeting was set to begin, sat together wherever there was space left for two people to sit, and listened to what was being said.

--------

When Lola felt it was time for her to share her words, she lifted one hand with the palm out toward the room, almost as though she were flagging them down for their attention (not so much raising her hand, nothing about her came across quite so juvenile as that). She didn't stand, though. Her voice carried well enough that she didn't need to be a head above the other sitting bodies in order to be sure that she could at least grasp a flicker of their attention.

"Hector here told me about that incident," she said with a nod toward Erich. "I also heard about the attack on that caravan taking the Cub from Cold Crescent to Forgotten Questions. Heard about the one still in his human body stopping the van full-force with just his hand."

She sniffed some, but didn't seem uncomfortable speaking to a room full of Garou. Her tone and body language could almost fool those who have never seen her before into believing that she was one of them-- it could work were it not for the lack of Rage or Spiritual Forces within her flesh and blood body, were it not for the humming promise of strong hawk-eyed children in her blood.

"What if this isn't just some very clever, very strong pack of Black Spirals? Maybe they've made pacts beyond the Green Dragon, ones that we don't really have much knowledge of yet? I'm worried they're not just Black Spirals anymore-- that maybe they've merged with something worse on the Otherside and brought it here. Or maybe they've mutated into something beyond that...."

Her words petered out, and she rolled her shoulders in a shrug and leaned back a little more in her chair. "Just a thought," she concluded.

Javed

Keisha does not attend the gathering, as much as she might like to in order to provide her insight. Like her packsisters, she is too busy with the act of dealing with the spiritual backlash of what went down at Cold Crescent. And when she doesn't have that on her plate she's been learning the Moot Rite and preparing so she can lead the opening howl for this month's gathering.

===================

Alexis, for his part, is spending his time supporting the pack which holds his (reluctant) protector. While the Desert Oracles expend every ounce of their energy and mind into helping the Cold Crescent do clean-up and more, Alexis makes sure that the Desert Oracles don't falter. He goes on food runs for them, offers them his home to set up in if they need somewhere closer than their own homes but choose not to stay at the hotel for whatever reason. Sees to anything that they might need beyond that. And he has a job to hold down as well, so he is not present at the meeting either.

===================

Javed is there. The Iranian metis arrives and sits near the door to, like Erich, provide a potential first line of defense should anything take this moment to strike. The Strider doesn't draw Erich's ire by sniffing in Melantha's direction. He doesn't know most of these people and those he does…well, he probably doesn't recognize. All metis have their curses, including him. But he recognizes Ingrid's voice, and he listens to the voices of those he doesn't.

And when he listens, he absorbs everything that they have to say. He takes in the fact that the Elders are still there, just not answering questions. He listens to Charlotte suggest that they start where the now-dead Guardian was recovered from and follow from there. He hears Eva ask a different tack of questions; she doesn't ask how but why. And Erich speaks up again, suggesting a possible reason.

When he takes that moment to speak, it's in a baritone with enough rasp to avoid it being crystal clear. His diction is excellent and he speaks in the precise English but heavy accent of someone who has extensively learned the language as a foreigner.

"With due respect," he says to Erich, nodding his head to the other Ahroun. "That seems very much a possibility. The Wyrm scorches the Earth with its foulness, leaving no ground left to go to. No rescue, no safe haven. But there is a safe haven, even if the city sept falls. And, as I understand it, one they have failed in the past to capture. I would think they would choose, if they were strong enough, assault the Forgotten Questions and send people to the Cold Crescent where there is no Caern and into the city, where their people are stronger. And they certainly seem strong, if these tales are any indication. The Wyrm is madness and its servants are mad, but that seems—if you will excuse my saying—a bit more than madness. It's poor tactics."

He takes a breath, then speaks again. "There were those, I understand, that found Champion of Honor with only a single guard easily taken down within the city. And then Champion of Honor was brought back, soon after which his packmates destroyed themselves. One has to be purposeful of the other; they must have expected that we would try and perform a rescue, and they planted what was essentially a bomb. This is an enemy that fights with cunning and intelligence, not poor tactics.."

He turns his single-eyed gaze back at Erich. The Strider's mind is trying to work tactically, puzzle these seemingly random things out. "He attacked you, and though he was incredibly strong he did not kill you. I think it is important to ask why. A happenstance encounter, or did he intend to have something happen? And if so, the question is what?"

He looks to Lola when she speaks up, listens to her describe another incredibly powerful member of this group. He frowns, considers. There's a conceding nod there…it is entirely possible, as far as he knows. But he has nothing of experience in the way of Spirals who have become something more, and Javed only speaks when he has something to add.

Hector

With Phoebe absent only one alpha sits in the room and he has been silent this whole time. Not as if he doesn't want to be here but as if he isn't used to being in group situations with Cliaths from other tribes and the entire thing is beyond his comprehension so instead of participating he's just observing. He's slouched down in a chair beside his kinswoman and has his arms crossed low on his body and when he speaks up it's after clearing his throat as a warning.

"I think he was just minding his own business," Hector says to Javed, "and then we pissed him off, and then something made him stop before he could finish us off."

He's wearing that Off In Lala Land look writers and other creative types get when they're in the midst of a first draft. It won't go away until he tells The Tale of Sam Evans, Baby Stealing Badass at the next moot.

Ingrid

It is the job of the Ragabash to question. Question motives, question tactics, question question question. There aren't many young Ragabash as active as Dances With the Hurricane, not many as quiet as her, either. Like Javed, rather than running off at the mouth, questioning just to question, she speaks only when she has something to add. Her expression is for the most part impassive. Except: When Erich mentions attacking one of them, him, almost getting himself and a few others killed. Something of her expression tightens oh so slightly. It passes.

When not!Charlotte speaks, when Éva and Erich, the Uktena kinswoman, all of them speak up, she listens, and she considers.

"I have heard," she says finally, when all have had their say for now, "that Cold Crescent is an offshoot of Forgotten Questions." This of course is hardly secret knowledge. "Tactically, it is a better launching point for a defense of the city than the Caern. Perhaps the question of 'why' is not that there is anything particularly special about Cold Crescent, but a matter of logistics. Take out the tower. Burn the city to the ground. Then launch an assault on the older, more settled sept from a position of greater power."

It is just one option to be considered.

"Or. Perhaps the key lies in the Warder who will not allow himself to be questioned by Cliaths. Has anyone thought to question his brother?" Because she didn't, not until that very moment when she remembered the presence of that brother at the last moot.

Erich

Erich nods in enthusiastic agreement with Lola. "I wouldn't be surprised if they were more than just Dancers. I mean forgive me if I'm wrong but even Elders fucking bleed. This guy, I had to chew him like a squeak toy before I tasted a single drop of blood. And yeah, he wasn't there waiting for us, as far as I know. I mean I was just there for two-for-one steak night. I dunno why everyone else showed up. I think it was just ... our paths crossed and he started ranting and I was like OH HELL NO.

"As for why not attack FQ if they're so strong -- well, maybe the fact that Cold Crescent's less defensible is precisely why they're targeting us. And maybe they want us to all concentrate here, so then they can go strike at a less well-defended Caern."

Lola

"That would make sense," Lola adds. The Galliard she sat next to seemed to exist in other places in his own mind, and as far as his Kinfolk by tribe and by pack was concerned that was just fine. He was a Galliard, and even though he Alpha of his pack she knew they weren't necessarily a war-driven pack of Garou.

Lola, though? She was an Ahroun at heart. She ate this shit up.

"That right there--" to what Erich had just mentioned, "--is exactly what I'm worried about. They're drawing our attention in on the city, but why would they want Cold Crescent? No offense, but it isn't even a fully-fledged Caern. It has nothing at its heart to be taken over or corrupted or killed... whatever it is they want to do with it. It's just a place where the city-wolves band together."

The Kinfolk's dark eyebrows furrowed together and she shook her head. Concern and worry wrote novels across her face and caused typically smooth skin to wrinkle and crease when giving way to this frown.

"I know it's important to keep the Spire to ourselves.... But isn't the Caern-- the proper one with Gaia's spirit within it... Isn't that the more important thing to keep safe? Especially now, with all this mayhem?"

Thomas

And once again they say it, only this time there's a deep scoff and a grunt from one corner of the room. He hadn't been hiding there. Its almost impossible for someone as disproportionately tall and long of limb as him to hide anywhere. But he had been silent for the most part, perhaps still dumbfounded at the turn of events. And from the uncharacteristically uncombed state of his hair, this meeting caught him by surprise.

"No, cold crescent serves no purpose. Except as a garrison. When the city packs that patrol the city have to run to ground, they run there because Forgotten Questions is too far away. No caern maybe, but its a building fulla pains in the ass. We may not be a danger to them but to their children..." He echoes the quoted Spiral now, reminding them that they may have been given the answer. "...We are death. They can't have cubs and cliaths with Cold Crescent around. We do have something to corrupt, and they've corrupted it. Hit us where it hurts.

"That doesn't mean that Forgotten Questions isn't the target. If there's an attack on the caern, the preparation for it would likely come from the city. A rally point in the woods would be too noticeable to be of any use. Then again, if they've become something more, that probably wouldn't stop them. So...we can't figure it out. So what? Why not figure for both? If Cold Crescent is just a building with an address, then there's nothing they can take. There's other spots in the city. As long as we're still here, stickin it to 'em. But on the chance that its not, we look into it. Dig deeper and find out what they're after.

"And while we're doing that, put Forgotten Questions on alert. Matter of fact, reinforce it."

Javed

The Strider listens to everyone as they speak. He nods at Hector and Erich's assertions that the attack was happenstance, conceding the point. They were there and he was not; they would certainly know better. The is a warrior who thinks of each strike with purpose and that's the direction his mind turns to when analyzing his enemy's--their enemy's--moves. But not every assault and every action is the result of carefully planned missions. Sometimes war spills out into the domain of circumstance. He asked, it was answered and he leaves it there.

Ingrid, whose voice he recognizes from his first encounter on the streets with Denver's Garou, speaks up and discusses the purpose of Cold Crescent; the tactical reasons the Beloved Horror may have for taking it down. She also asks (like a Questioner of the Ways should) about the Warder and a brother whose attitude and sudden presence, respectively, she finds curious. His brow furrows, considering, though that is set aside for the moment as the suggestion is put that Cold Crescent is a distraction to drew resources from Forgotten Questions, making it vulnerable to attack. It is even suggested that the city Sept is just a gathering point, a garrison.

He doesn't bristle at that, but he does frown a little. "There are many septs around the world," he says, addressing none of them in specific but rather the group, "as Caerns fade away or run dry from repeated efforts against them, where there is no Caern. They would disagree quite strenuously that they serve no purpose but a gathering point from which to launch attacks from a better location, even with another Sept nearby. All Septs are communities...safe haven, home, and yes, gathering point and garrison. And they are all essential. It is my understanding that the Cold Crescent was not chosen at random; there were specific reasons that brought us there."

He gives at assenting nod in the Glass Walker's direction at his suggestion. "I would agree. The matter warrants further investigation. And at the same time, the Forgotten Questions should be fully apprised, if somehow they are not, and bulwarked."

A pause there, before continuing. "Where, then, does the investigation begin?"

Erich

"I'm down with checking out the place where we found Champion of Honor," Erich says. "It seems like the only lead we have right now that's a place we can comb over."

Thomas

"You got people to go with you? he asks, but obviously feels uncomfortable asking it. he was new, or at least relatively so, and couldn't tell the different packs on sight just yet. He bristled, trying to hide that..what was that? Shame?

"Personally, I'd like to look more into cold Crescent's past. Anybody who wants to team up with me on that is more than welcome. We also need folks to go up to Forgotten Questions and work with their warders. That's teams one two and three. I know we're all hurting right now but its not time to stand still. Its time to pick our teams."

Eva

After speaking up the first time, Charlotte and whoever she carries with her are both quiet. Charlotte listens, looking a little bit eldrich and a little bit odd and does not speak up to defend Cold Crescent as a Place or a Thing of importance because in truth it feels wrong to her; and alien and strange and she belongs to the sleeping earth and the dreaming sky rather than the gleaming things that interrupt the sky but:

Erich is down with checking out the place where they found Champion of Honor.

The Glass Walker asks if Erich has people to go with him, and Charlotte, who remains close to Erich but closer to Melantha in this gathering, gives him a sideglance. A curl of a shoulder. A look or a Look that curls like a leaf into this slip of a shy (yes shy) glance. "You should come with us. If you want."

--

And, Éva has remained for much of the meeting as well. Standing against the wall, in her dark suit, her leather handbag still over one shoulder. Other than the questions she asked early in the meeting, she does not interrupt. And does not contribute. Does not participate in the discussion, though she follows it, oh she follows it with a subtle flicker of her dark eyes.

Near the end, she has dipped to retrieve the briefcase. Checked the watch that drifts around her left wrist, all gold links and gleaming dial. Fixes Thomas with a steady look that does not quite (never quite) meets his eyes. It is a constant calibration, to slip between the worlds of men and wolves, but see how finely she shifts gears.

He would like to look more into Cold Crescent's past.

"I've started making inquiries," once more, her voice is pitched to carry through the room, but low enough to require a certain degree of engagement, of concentration, "in the human world."

This subtle twist of her mouth, which looks wry but is nothing like it. Part of a mask drawn over - grief, yes grief, and an anger that feels depthless and unbounded when she is alone, and unobserved, and it is dark, and the house is still, and her children are sleeping in their beds, and there is moonlight through the windows and that well manicured xeroscaped lawn around the well manicured, bound and gated home and beyond that the high plains, full of a vast and shifting darkness and she allows her chest to open up around it and tries not to picture the -

the -

oh, Jane.

- but here, call it measured. Call it, steady. Call it, unbending.

"Research into the property records, titles, deeds. The construction, the church. The history of the land. Et cetera. It will take some time, but I'll share what I learn."

There are, after all, histories and histories. Éva is marooned on this side of the gauntlet. Half the simmering world closed to her, deaf and dumb and blind to all but the immediate, the physical, the almost-human. information.

"If you are willing to do likewise," So she offers him a business card, with her contact information. And turns to take her leave.

Javed

The Strider speaks up again crosses his arms over his chest, listening to Erich, Tommy and Eva commit themselves to tasks. When the kinfolk is finished, he speaks up again. "I am happy to aid in tracking from the point where Champion of Honor was recovered, if you will have me Hunting suits my talents better than investigation. Otherwise, I will be happy to work with the warders at the Forgotten Questions, or helping with the investigation"

He pauses. "Perhaps an additional team, or an additional task for the team working with the Warders, is needed. Or even an extra responsibility for anyone who can. While Cold Crescent recovers, the city is missing its patrols. Perhaps packs or associations of unpacked Garou can take on some of those duties in the interim, for the safety of all."

ST

[Officially calling this thread to a close from On High! Feel free to wrap the discussion however feels right to you! Or if it's easier, some Adren comes in and shoos everyone to scatter. Uppity youngsters! *shakes fist*

Points Raised/Questions Asked:
- How did Champion of Honor get possessed?
- How do we stop ourselves from getting possessed/corrupted like that?
- What does the Beloved Horror WANT? What's their target, and what's their end objective? Do they have one?
- Why are they attacking Cold Crescent? Is it related to aims at Forgotten Questions? Is it about logistics/weakening a stronghold or is there something special about Cold Crescent?
- How are they so powerful? / Are they not 'just' Black Spirals anymore?
- Why won't the elders or Warder of Cold Crescent even answer questions?
- What was that about their 'children'?
- What about past interactions with this pack with either sept?

To-Do List: - Investigate the apartment where Champion of Honor was found.
- Further investigation into 'Why Cold Crescent?'.
- Further investigation into 'How are they so powerful?'.
- Further investigation into lack of response from Cold Crescent's elders.
- Guard duties for Cold Crescent. (This is going to be 'assumed'; the Warder may not be taking questions but regular patrols have been reinstated... just by volunteers :[ -- a great way to throw random open scenes together, however.)
- Bulwarking Forgotten Questions. (They don't really... need the help, but will welcome additional guard patrols. Can also be assumed/background.)

Let me know if I missed anything!]