The burning man.

wake

Morning light like a waking stain on the wood.

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

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

--

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

The wood is soaked with blood.

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

Someone will come, soon.

She tells herself it is a mercy.

In the dream, she always does.

Keisha

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

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

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

wake

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

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

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

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

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

They have to leave something of themselves behind.

--

Someone will come, she knows. They always do.

Keisha

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

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

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

wake

So she waits.

--

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

Someone always comes.

Someone always comes.

Someone always comes.

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

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

So she waits.

--

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

--

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

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

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

He is burning.

Keisha

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

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

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

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

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

wake

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

oh,

her hands burn.

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

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

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

Oh, he is ordinary, ordinary.

He seems so tired.

He is ready to go.

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

Perhaps she opens her mouth but -

Keisha wakes up.

Keisha

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

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

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

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

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

George

wake

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

ache

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

---

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

Cinder Song

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

wake

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

and she is here again, axe in hand.

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

She shouts:

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

down.

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

And this too; and this somehow, and this:

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

Waiting. Waiting.

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

Cinder Song

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

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

"Is that finally you?"

wake

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

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

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

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

Cinder Song

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

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

"Did you yell at me?"

wake

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

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

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

Old as a dream.

Knowing.

Known.

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

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

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

Cinder Song

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

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

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

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

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

wake

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

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

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

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

"A story."

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

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

Pause.

"Let's see."

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

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

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

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

Cinder Song

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

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

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

wake

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

The ash in the back of your throat.

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

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

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

Cinder Song

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

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

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

wake

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

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

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

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

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

Cinder Song

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

Cinder Song

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

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

wake

He's standing up.

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

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

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

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

A deep sigh out.

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

Cinder Song

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

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

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

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

wake

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

No. No, not over that rise there.

They have to go down before they can climb.

They have to descend before they can rise,

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

Up there, he tells her.

Just let me catch my breath.

---

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

Two young men emerge from the house,

at a run.

--

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

Cinder Song

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

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

The point is: she does talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cinder Song

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

wake

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

Somehow the morning,

shifts.

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

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

from up above.

--

They wake.

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

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

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

Tamsin wakes.

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

but waking up to her presence, too.

Jack

wake

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

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

When the front doors open.

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

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

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

Melantha

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

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

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

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

wake

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

It is made from care.

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

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

There are tears in her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

Melantha

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

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

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

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

He's in a coma.

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

wake

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

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

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

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

Melantha

Triton.

Galax.

Johnson.

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

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

wake

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

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

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

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

Melantha

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

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

wake

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

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

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

She leaves, and the slow afternoon continues.

There is still salt to be poured.

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.

Tattoo

Lola Hawkes

Santa Fe ws a popular part of town, pretty and eccentric and full of art and culture as it was. This was a part of Anthony Tirado's success-- he'd opened his first tattoo parlor here, and between location, catering to his demographic, and a damn fine hand in art, he was able to open two more parlors around the area as well. He could make enough money to support his out-of-city cousins on this business.

It's this very tattoo parlor, the one that started it all, that Lola Hawkes is hanging out in front of. Behind her the shop is wedged between two other buildings, other businesses leased out-- a salon and a market store, to be precise. The shop front was brick and classic, but the awnings over the window were black and the sign over the door was tall and wood and black as well, the letters in a tall jarring white font declaring the place to be: LA LUNA SONRIENTE TATTOO. Out front there were a ramshackle collection of chairs collected on either side of the purple-painted door. In one of these chairs sat Lola, recognizable by some for different reasons.

She wasn't here getting inked, not as far as anyone could see at least. Dressed for the warm weather, she had on a short-sleeved and short-hemmed dress of thin white-and-black stripes, a light gray cardigan left unbuttoned over top that, and a straw hat atop her head to keep the sun off her. Granted, the sun was quite behind the mountains by this point, but it hadn't been when she'd come out this way.

She was conversing with a tall and very thin man who was getting an octopus tattooed across his chest-- he was here getting the color filled in and sat in a plaid button-up shirt left undone. Her expression was skeptical but relaxed-- the kid wasn't bothering her any so she was content to share the cooling night air with him. If he had it his way they would've shared a hit off his small false cigarette pipe, but she'd hit him with strong skeptical 'Are you kidding me?' and he shrugged it off (apparently it helped his sister's pregnancy, but whatever).

Around the time that the Uktena kinfolk may fall into Samantha Evans's line of sight is the time that the door opens and the tall skinny boy gets called back inside. He bumped fists with Lola and she told him not to cry too hard when he walked back inside.

Sam Evans

The evening is young and pleasant and Sam Evans is walking alone, and like any typical Glass Walker she's holding a cell phone in her hand which she is looking at intently as her thumb works its way swiftly across the lower half of the device. That doesn't mean she's not aware of her surroundings. The kinswoman neatly side-steps a couple headed in her direction and pauses when someone practically bounds down the steps of an upper floor gallery into her. She glances up briefly to shoot the person a look. That look spurs the young woman - a girl, really, out with a group of her friends for who knows what reason - to apologize. Then it's back to the screen for at least a few more steps.

Steps which are made in a pair of mid-calf combat boots. The rest of her outfit consists of shorts and a black t-shirt with a huge skull over the front (the Punisher emblem for those in the know) worn beneath a red plaid flannel shirt converted into a long vest. Her hair is down but tucked behind her ears to reveal the piercings that run from lobe up along the outer cartilage of both ears. Stabbed through her right lobe is a thick black spike. There's a messenger bag slung across her body, the pouch resting against her left hip.

Suddenly she sighs, all the air in her lungs pushed out in a single exhale as she slides the phone into the hip pocket of those denim shorts. Which is when she looks up and sees Lola Hawkes sitting outside of a tattoo parlor. Huh. Increasing speed, she heads for a woman she only properly met about a week and a half ago.

"Lola, hey!" she calls, one corner of her mouth tugging upward in a crooked grin.

Lola Hawkes

Lola really didn't look the type to be hanging out in front of a tattoo parlor, except for the tough exterior one would suppose. Her attire didn't suit the crowd, and the long bare length of her legs left out in the air by the length of her dress didn't have a lick of ink on them. Her hair was twisted into a dense braid that sat on one shoulder, and her stomach was big enough to take up much real estate into her lap when she sat upright as she was doing now.

When Lola's name was called she had been leaning down to retrieve a water bottle from where it was sitting on the ground under her chair. She looked surprised and alert to hear her name, and glanced about with an intent and severe gaze until she found Sam's face and figure coming her way. A face and identity matched to the call, Lola relaxed and leaned back into her chair. One hand lifted in a greeting, but she didn't verbally call back across the distance. Instead, she opted to take a drink of her water.

When Sam was nearer, near enough for speaking anyways, Lola answered.

"Sam, right?" She's not as good at names, but it's probably confirmed one way or another that she's correct. Lola'd continue, unabashed by her own lack of proficiency with remembering names (they stuck with her after a few times). "How's the evening treating ya?" Eyes cut up toward the sky, brief, then back down to the Glasswalker. "Secure, I hope." The moon was full, and their peoples tempers did run quite high on nights like this, after all.

It's worth noting that Lola Hawkes didn't smile to greet Samantha Evans, crooked or otherwise. Her mouth was a straight line, neutral as can be. She didn't seem unfriendly necessarily, though. This was her friendly face.

Sam Evans

To look at the pair of them, it'd be easy to make a lot of assumptions about them. That Samantha is younger, perhaps, because of her height or because of her attire, or the difference between her demeanor and Lola's. Lola is friendly, but a reserved sort of friendly. At least she's not scowling, though probably a scowl wouldn't deter Sam. They survived an ordeal together, of course Sam's at least going to stop by to say hello.

Lola's gaze cuts upward, Sam's stays on the woman in the straw hat. She doesn't need to look up to know what night it is. She was up part of last night watching the eclipse, after all. "About as secure as it can get," she says with a one-shouldered shrug. Then she looks at the sign for the parlor and back to Lola. "Are you waiting to get inked or waiting on someone getting inked?"

Lola Hawkes

The question was an authentic one, and it earned Sam a relaxed, comfortable looking shrug and shake of her head before she gestured toward the purple wooden door with a hitched thumb. "Nah, my cousin Anthony owns the place. I'm waitin' up on him to finish a session, then we're headed out."

She took another drink of her water then went on to clarify: "It's hot as fuck in there. Nice night out here, though."

Another pause, this time for her to glance up the street and wrinkle the bridge of her nose up some. She was a woman of the rural wilds, after all. 'Nice' was a comparative thing between city blocks and the stretching land she called her own. "Well, neverminding the obvious."

She'd next gesture to one of the remaining chairs (there were plenty left to choose from) in front of the shop with a sweep of her water bottle before she leaned sideways (not forward, leaning forward was a goddamn ordeal) to set the bottle back down on the cement. "If you're stayin' around you might as well sit."

Eva Illeshazy

Nor is Éva the sort to hang around in front of a tattoo parlor, and assuredly she is not hanging around anywhere. She is on the street however; half a block away, emerging from a non-descript glass door sandwiched between a headshop and a coffee shop, which must assuredly lead to some sort of generic offices tucked away on the second floor.

The door is closing behind her; she turns around and catches it with the flat of her hand. A stranger comes out behind her: a shaggy-haired man with sharp features and beaten-up leather jacket walks out behind her.

He says something to her.

She lifts her chin, and cants her head in response, listening.

A beat passes and she shakes her head. He slips past her, turns one day down the sidewalk. Éva goes the other, a briefcase head lightly in hand, heels a clipped beat against the sidewalk. Sam and Lola draw her gaze; which is dark and impassive.

Her gaze and the faintest hint of acknowledgment. No more.

She walks on.

Eva Illeshazy

(Fly-by, bed for me!)

biscuits

wake

Here is the dream. It is the dream Erich remembers. It is always the dream: waking in that sunwashed room; the texture and weight of the quilt over his body, the clean scent of linen that has been washed by hand and dried in the sun. The dust in the air and the air in the dust and the boy and MA SAYS GET UP and the feeling of being a lazybones, of lazing in bed when the sun has already broken the horizon, when the world is up and working and you are still, deliciously, warm and asleep.

Still those slipsliding, slipstream names. The room and the frame of it and the windows, which rattle in casements with every shivering passage of wind.

Erich wants clothes wants to know if he can imagine clothes and finds that he cannot imagine clothes and he is not naked; he is wearing old fashioned longjohns, the one-piece sort with a fly and a button-up window in the rear and he can leave those on or take them off and dress in dungarees and a button-up shirt and suspenders that still have the scent of sweat and dust from yesterday and perhaps tomorrow but that is how one lives, here. Sweat and dust and sunlight.

There's a door. There are windows, too. The boy disappearing after Erich reassures him, instructs him to tell Ma I'll be down soon.

Erich

OKAY HE IS NOT GOING TO WEAR LONGJOHNS.

...now that that's clear: yes. He dresses. He dresses with the fluidity of dream-physics, just like how in a dream you can run farther than humanly possible, lift impossible things, fly across the sky if you wanted to.

He starts taking off the longjohns and then next thing he knows he is sliding the suspenders over his shoulders, amused because they feel so weird there, he hasn't worn suspenders since he was about five years old and going to that odd little church in town where all the pictures of Jesus looked unusually ferocious and toothy and all the sermons were unusually fiery and bloody and full of the End Of Days and Last Battles. The few humans living in town thought they were just some minor little presbyterian or methodist or anabaptist or something denomination, but everyone else, the real movers and shakers and owners and workers of the town,

knew that it was all code, really. They weren't talking about god and jesus and holy spirits and marys and josephs; they were talking about gaia and celestines and incarnae and fenris and all his brood.

Anyway.

Point is: he hasn't worn suspenders in so long. Some of the older men in his family still wore them, because they were old-fashioned, see. It makes him feel old-fashioned and Manly, somehow, to slide them over his shoulders. He stops by the mirror to see how he looks, but in dreams we can never really see our own faces, can we? He opens the bedroom door and follows the boy-who-is-but-isn't-his-brother downstairs.

Erich

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

wake

There is a mirror. The mirror is old; is silvered and black. The mirror is framed on the clapboard wall and what it shows him as he is slipping the suspenders over his shoulder is the impression of a -

- is an impression; is an impressionistic reflection of a blond man in sliding suspenders over his shoulders, this liquid movement, and beyond that, beyond that some hint of a sort of disintegrating longing. Some lingering desperation. Some note of despair. Behind the mirror, behind the walls. Beneath the skin of this place. Hard to place now and really no more than a niggling sort of shadow, like the silhouette of a black-winged bird etched out against the disc of a rising - or setting - sun.

- Erich dresses and follows the boy, out of the bedroom door and down the steps. The time it takes to dress, to dream-dress, he can hear the edge of another conversation, all muffled like the voices of the adults in a Peanuts holiday special.

---

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Erich rounds the corner of a hallway and finds himself heading down a simple, simply-planed stairwell.

The walls are plain; they are hand-hewn. They are not decorated, except perhaps with whitewash, which has absorbed though here and there unevenly into the uncured wood.

The foot of the stairs: the front door with its roughly made screen-door mostly closed, the heavier, solidly made door sagging open. The other directly, a long dark hallway that ends in a slow-closing door, the suggestion of a man; and light, and warmth.

Erich

Him and not-him in the mirror. Like-him but not-him. Something in Erich's mind niggles, wiggles, stretches for the truth. Brushes it, like brushing fingers against the underside of lake-ice. He hasn't broken through yet. Not yet. It submerges; he has to go find his brother who is not his brother.

So down the stairs, then. Down the stairs to the plain, rough-hewn, sturdily-built front room. Front door's open, that's weird. He goes over to it first, grabs the handle and pushes it firmly shut. Might be that next time he looks over at it, it will have miraculously come undone again. For now, though, he turns away from it, toward that long dark hallway with its slow-closing door.

"(...)?" He calls the name of the boy, but the word itself is blurred in his ears. He doesn't actually know the name, but in this dream he does. And, calling that not-a-name, he heads down the hall. Doesn't think the boy went that way, but still.

Erich

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

wake

The kitchen is a kitchen is the idea of a kitchen, warm and bright as anything. Light slants brilliant in through framing windows lined with hanging herbs. The deep abiding fragrance of drying herbs fills the air, somehow green and quick and dying and dry all at once. There is such implicit warmth, remembered and golden and delicious and there is the table set for a hearty breakfast, and there is a the woman removing something from potbellied stove and a screen door swinging shut (oh these doors, oh the way they swing) on the opposite side of the room.

Biscuits, the woman is removing biscuits from the stove.

They smell heavenly; entirely of home.

The woman with the biscuits pulls them out and puts down the hot skillet in which they have been baked on the scarred, much-loved table slab in the middle of the kitchen.

She looks: worn out, far away.

The woman pushes back a lank lock of hair and sighs, deeply. Golden seconds tick by and she breathes, more heavily than the task in which she was engaged seems to require.

She looks startled; she is looking right at a stranger whom Erich instinctively knows as his middle brother [word-slew], but there is something strange about the moment, as if it has been excised from one particular place and inserted here, where its meaning is wholly different.

What Erich hears of their conversation is - "... see you there."

It is clear that she does not know his brother's name.

Or why she is here.

Or when.

Or how to get anywhere close to home.

--

wake

Per + Alertness roll: is that other dude... Thomas Delacroix?

Erich

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

Erich

!!!

That is what is in Erich's mind at the moment. No words, no coherent thoughts even, just raw surprise and excitement and sudden-breakthrough and many many many many exclamations.

!!!!!!!!!

Like a gear clicking into place his memory clicks into place. He is not some longjohns-wearing, biscuit-eating farmer waking up in the idyllic ideal of a farmhouse. He does not have a little brother or a middle brother or any brothers at all. He is him, an Erich, an Erich very very far from home in this dreamscape, but astounding, bewilderingly, ever-so-excitingly,

he is not actually alone here. Is that Thomas Delacroix? He knows for a FACT he would not dream of Thomas Delacroix left to himself; I mean really. So: that must mean that IS Thomas. Right? And that is really Thomas. Which means maybe that woman is somebody too, and that little boy was somebody, and who really cares because that means somewhere in this dreamscape is Melantha and their dreams are actually interconnected.

He is a horrible person and a horrible Ahroun and really he should say something but: he grabs one of the biscuits still hot from the skillet (because of course he's gonna eat those biscuits in a dream where he won't get the runs if he eats biscuits) and yells something,

HEY THOMAS WAKE UP THIS IS A DREAM

and then he turns and runs for the front door. Runs for the outside. Looks for a forest, a trail of smoke, ashes in the air, something.

Thomas

[Perception+Alertness for Thomas is like the saddest panda of all the pandas.....]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

wake

Thomas' brother comes in the door behind him. His brother his dream-brother the lazybones upstairs. Thomas is up before him and will get to eat all the biscuits if he hurries and there is a woman at the stove, a tired woman, a startled woman, a woman who looks at Thomas for a brief and startling moment, this narrowing and nearly electric connection, and whom he knows - as instinctively as he knows anything else - does not belong there -

And then his brother muscle through and picking up a biscuit and shoving it in his mouth and oh my god Erich that is the most meltingly delicious biscuit you have consumed in god knows how long, rich, flaky flayers of fat delicately suspended between the dough my god, my god, what you are missing out on and throwing another one at Thomas and yelling

HEY THOMAS THIS IS A DREAM.

And Thomas knows it is a dream.

And Thomas knows that that is Erich Reinhardt.

And Erich Reinhardt is running out of the back door and finds himself in a dry-dust farmyard in the shadow of a listing building and moving at a thundering run past a red-painted clapboard barn and out into a deserted ... street, of sorts, that is really no more than a rutted road lined with these half-memories of wooden buildings, the odd storefront without anything close to ordinary written words, the street and its houses deserted though here and there - a glimpse through the window, a drifting curtain, a stranger's face seen suddenly through a half-forgotten crowd before it disappears into the scrawl of ordinary life.

It is morning. It is morning, oh the ache of that slanting golden light. The certainty of it.

The street is a town is a memory of a town; the wooden sidewalks framing a rutted road, which disappears on both ends into a primordial, misty forest.

Black bunting is wrapped around the railings and support posts framing the simple porches.

And oh, oh, oh. Is that smoke in the sky?

Erich

Okay so we lied. He grabs a biscuit, throws another at Thomas, sinks his teeth into his biscuit and oh my god so he grabs another one, and another, and just one more and now he's cramming three biscuits into his pockets as he's running out the door, a fourth biscuit jammed in his mouth.

Outside. The threadbare impression of a street. One of those coal towns maybe, dying now that no one uses coal anymore. One of those grain towns, now that all the farms are bigass conglomerates. One of those dying towns, regardless, and the fading whitewash on the fading buildings, and the smoke in the sky. Strange that the morning should seem so golden-nostalgic, or maybe --

maybe that's just Erich's read on it. His own, unique impression of the world he inhabits.

Never mind. Hardly important right now. He sees it, the dense wood. The primordial forest threaded in mist. The smoke. Someone died, it's a funeral pyre, he knows this because it is all exactly as Melantha told it to him. And he's so excited now, his big pure good-hearted heart all but thumping out of his chest with it. He runs, following the smoke, whether or not Thomas is alert now, whether or not Thomas is following him: feet fleet on the sidewalk, arms swinging, mouth

still chewing that biscuit. It's so good.

Thomas

Thomas bats at the flying biscuits, because Thomas is in this dream again and he is not interested in eating dream food. For all he knows it is like fairy food or pomegranate seeds. But he does still smile faintly at the sight of Erich cramming biscuits into his mouth before he runs out the door.

He looks at the startled woman. The quiet of the kitchen in Erich's wake. And he will follow, but first...first one thing. Because each of these dreams seems to give him just one more thing.

"Hey," he says gently. "What's your name? Where are we?"

wake

The woman in the kitchen gives Thomas a brief, confused glance. She's starting after Erich and somehow it is only the startlement of his passage that allows her to access her memories.

"Amanda - A-amanda Jeffords."

And then: Erich and Thomas wake.

Thomas

wake

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.

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Upstairs, a door slams. Footsteps stomp stomp stomp on the floorboards, which only agitates the dust all the more. A boy swings around the corner of the upstairs hall and starts hurtling down the simple, simply-planed stairwell.

He has: blond hair and blue eyes, the boy, and looks angry and sulky all at once.

Thomas Delacroix

Thomas looks over the boy curiously, and tries to understand, even as he studies him what dream-him is thinking. And, if dream-him doesn't respond to the boy, Thomas will follow the boy down the stairs and tell him good morning.

He stays alert for more clues, any pictures or paintings on the walls. Any objects which will give him a better sense of, if not what is happening and why, who it is happening to in the dreams.

wake

Thomas wakes.

Thomas sees the boy and wakes.

Thomas sees the boy and thinks to follow him and wakes.

Thomas sees the boy and thinks to follow him and waits for dream-him to respond and the boy gives him a look -

and Thomas wakes.

--

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.

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Upstairs, a door slams. Footsteps stomp stomp stomp on the floorboards, which only agitates the dust all the more. A boy swings around the corner of the upstairs hall and starts hurtling down the simple, simply-planed stairwell.

He has: blond hair and blue eyes, the boy, and looks angry and sulky all at once.

Thomas looks over the boy curiously and it is morning and he tries to understand; and what he understands is the moment, the now of it. The immediacy. The walls are plain; they are hand-hewn. They are not decorated, except perhaps with whitewash, which has absorbed though here and there unevenly into the uncured wood. The boy has made it to the bottom of the steps, a hand on the railing as he pivots in the hall and starts off through the house, and then Thomas says "Good Morning" and the boy stops; he turns; he pauses, frowning, giving Thomas a once-over that feels both shrew and speculative.

Finally, a grudging jerk of his head deeper into the house.

"Ma has biscuits in the oven. If you hurry you can eat them all before lazy [Name-Slew] gets up."

Thomas Delacroix

"Ah. Thank you?" And then he waits.

To see if the boy responds.

To see if he just wakes up again.

wake

He wakes up again. Thomas always wakes up again. The dreams come every night and then they go, and each one feels more real than the last. Thomas wakes up and it is another night. The same boy and the same stairs and the same feeling; the same greeting and the same grudging jerk of the boy's head and every time Thomas says "Ah. Thank you?" and waits, and the boy - that once-over - shifts sometimes, becomes something indrawn and withheld.

He doesn't reply after that. Just stomps through a door at the end of the long dark hallways, which gives a brief glance of warm, slicing light. In a single, singular moment, that glimpse suggests all the warmth of a well-loved kitchen.

Thomas Delacroix

And so, the next time, when he wakes and there is that moment, Thomas trails after the boy toward the sight of the kitchen. Curious and a little wary.

wake

The kitchen is a kitchen is the idea of a kitchen, warm and bright as anything. Light slants brilliant in through framing windows lined with hanging herbs. The deep abiding fragrance of drying herbs fills the air, somehow green and quick and dying and dry all at once. There is such implicit warmth, remembered and golden and delicious and there is the boy, already slipping through, past the table set for a hearty breakfast, past the woman removing something from potbellied stove, out through the screen door on the opposite side of the room.

Biscuits, the woman is removing biscuits from the stove.

They smell heavenly; entirely of home.

Thomas opens the door. She doesn't seem to notice him, not at first.

Thomas Delacroix

Thomas waits, watching her take out the biscuits and thinking of Anastasia cooking breakfast.

He and Reese don't really cook. Trying to convince Reese to make biscuits would be a disaster.

Probably best not to startle someone working with a stove like that. Probably best to wait. To see if dream-him does anything. To see how she responds when she does see him.

wake

Thomas chooses to wait. To see what happens; to see what his dream-self does, and there is a choice that he makes, in waiting, a sort of lacuna created in the space between now and then, and never and what was. He says nothing and the woman with the biscuits pulls them out and puts down the hot skillet in which they have been baked on the scarred, much-loved table slab in the middle of the kitchen.

She looks: worn out, far away.

--

Thomas is his dream-self. Thomas is waiting. The door closes behind the boy, who disappears into the yard. The woman pushes back a lank lock of hair and sighs, deeply. Golden seconds tick by and she breathes, more heavily than the task in which she was engaged seems to require.

When she sees him, when she finally sees him, she looks startled.

"Oh." Quietly, this quickened moment of connection, this waking-dream. "I didn't see you there."

It is clear that she does not know his name.