[Solo] Make the Best of Death

An attempt at communication is made.

Open for Play
Anaxas' main trade port; it is also the nation's criminal headquarters, home to the Bad Brothers and Silas Hawke, King of the Underworld. The small town of Plugit is nearby.

User avatar
Tom Cooke
Posts: 1485
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2018 3:15 pm
Topics: 87
Race: Raen
Location: Vienda
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Plot Notes: Notes & Tracker
Writer: Graf
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Post Templates: Post Templates
Contact:

Thu Aug 29, 2019 4:38 pm

A Room in Lossey The Rose
After Sunset on the 40th of Roalis, 2719
It was like learning to breathe.

The evening was drawing the sun down under the rooftops, and a cool dark’d washed over the streets. The window was open, and the moth-eaten drapes stirred in the strong, salty wind. Tom felt a gust ruffle his hair, felt it brush his face and fill up his lungs, warm and full of the sea.

He breathed in, out, in, out. He counted the seconds like you’d count them between the thunder and the lightning, like a child counts through the pain of a stinging scrape.

The throbbing in his head was always there to throw him off, so he was careful. Whenever he lost the rhythm, whenever his thoughts started to wander, he mouthed the numbers – one, two, three, four… – he let the counting swell to fill up his head, to banish everything else. Until he could smell the sea-breeze again, until he could focus on listening to the creaking of the wood and the call of the birds, the distant burble of bochi playing in the street outside.

He sat on the floor for a few more moments, bracing himself against his fear; this time, he didn’t push it down. He let it sweep through him like that wind, let it shake him to his bones. It should, he thought. He reckoned he felt it for a reason, and it was a good reason. He would’ve been mung, he reminded himself, to pretend like he wasn’t afraid. They’d feel it, like they felt everything. There was no reason to be dishonest, no reason to play tough.

That was what the books said, anyway. When he opened up his eyes, he saw them, stacked all around him like a strange city. There were some on the bed, some in the chair, some on the table. Two were open in front of him, and his notebook lay to one side, always at hand, covered in shaky copied monite and notes in a messy hand. There were so many of them in piles that they almost, but not quite, obscured the floor:

But the time for books, he reckoned, wasn’t now. He let another thrill of fear rack him, feeling the mona stir all around, agitated and wild. He swallowed a lump, clearing out his mind again. Then, slow as always on his aching hip, he got to his feet and started work.

The light was fading, so he tried to work fast.

The first thing he did was clear the floor. Still wrangling his focus under his command, still counting between his breaths, he picked up the books. The piles on the floor he stacked with their fellows on the furniture; he organized them as best he could, a stack for grimoires, a stack for clairvoyant theory, a stack for monic redemption. A stack for elementary monite. This was all about organization, after all. About taking care, in the best way he could.

Then, grunting with pain, he’d pushed all the furniture back against the walls. Without it and without the books, what sunset-light remained picked out the glistening loops of white chalk on the dark hardwood, the tens of circles-in-circles, interlocking, dancing out of the wood. Some were faded, some were fresh.

With water and soap and a rag, as he’d done dozens of times before, he scrubbed the floorboards clean. The endeavor took the better part of an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and by the time he was done, he’d broke out into a sweat.

For awhile, he stood still in the falling dusk, in the middle of his cramped room. Shadows thronged, but he didn’t light his oil lamp. He’d seen Niccolette’s circle of candles, but he didn’t much think the light or the heat would help him. Instead, bracing himself again for the task ahead, he began to light incense.



It was like drowning, all over again. It’d been two weeks. Tom had scarcely seen a soul since that hazy night. He might’ve thought it a dream, if not for the hangover that nailed his head to the tangle of scratchy blankets; he might’ve even still, if it hadn’t been for the familiar sight of scuffed knuckles, the familiar burning pain. The blood smeared on the upholstery of his armchair, dried, the battered metal mugs: one empty, one full up with cold mint tea.

First thing he’d done was lie crumpled on his cot, face pressed down against the old mattress, while his stomach churned. Not a godsdamn thought in his head.

Only then did he scrape himself up, stagger unevenly across to the table. With thick-fumbling fingers he got the mug to his lips, though it felt like it took an age. Felt like it took since the War of the Book. He downed all that bitter-cold mint tea, and then, when that wasn’t enough, he went looking for his pitcher of water. When that wasn’t enough, he poured himself a little of the cheap whisky in the cabinet.

He nursed it out on the stairs. The morning sun had warmed the old wood underneath his erse, but he’d slept past morning; the sun was high. Still, the chill of early Roalis was in the air, carried on the breeze between the close-set houses, and he wrapped his coat round him like a blanket.

All the little sounds of daytime needled in his ears, but the whisky made it easier. A ragtag band of bochi were playing ball on the street below, kicking it against a crumbling brick wall. They’d stopped, staring at him curiously, as he’d ambled out with his head in a hand; he’d met their gazes, but he hadn’t brought himself to smile. When he’d sat and started drinking, though, they’d gone back to their play, shouting and scuffling and laughing.

He rested his head over against the banister, squeezed his eyes shut, tried to think. There was a feeling, half-forgotten, that was tickling its feather against the back of his mind, and if he focused – if he focused through the swimming maelstrom of thoughts – he could almost reach it. It hovered, strange and beautiful, behind a thick, dark curtain, but he remembered it in snatches.

He remembered leaning his head back against the window, buffeted by the night wind, feeling the mona in Niccolette’s field mingle with his for just a moment. Feeling her reach out through them with her organization, with her calm. For just a moment…

So Tom went back inside and wept.

Maybe it was that gave him strength, or maybe it was something else – maybe the wind off the bay, maybe the sounds of Sharkswell, where he’d grown up, out his window. Maybe the feeling of his busted knuckles, the way that punch had made those soft, fine-boned politician’s hands feel a little more like his. Maybe the warming of Roalis, or the fact that he knew that, a year ago, on one of these benny summer days, he’d died. The fact that he had a fair idea of how he’d done it, too.

Or maybe he would’ve done it anyway. He poured out the last of his Low Tide, and the brandy, too, and the Gioran whisky he’d brought from Vienda, and he prayed to Alioe that the dubious gift he’d been given – the rest of his waters in Anatole’s cup, the one strength of body he’d never had – would carry him through.

He didn’t think it’d last, not this time; he was realistic. It didn’t have to last but long enough. Tom’d come out to the Rose to do work, and if he could clear his head just long enough to get that work done – he didn’t know. But he knew what he needed to do.

It’d been two weeks, and he’d dug all his books back out. He’d spread them back over the faded chalk on the floor; before now, ’course, he’d traced that chalk again and again, trying to commit the simplest of plots to memory. Now, with the scraps of monite and theory he’d studied, he turned his attention to a clairvoyant grimoire.

He’d spent the last few weeks meditating, oes, counting out his breathing, struggling with his headache that was getting worse and worse. He’d also spent it committing a spell to memory, like he’d committed those bits of the al-Jenwa. The monite was simple enough, and although he could only hope he’d pronounce the lines correctly when the time came, he knew what he was saying. He let himself feel it, down to the roots of his soul.

It was an elementary ward. You could’ve taught it to a second year, maybe a third year; in a footnote, the editor went on at length about its superfluity. It must’ve been taught at Brunnhold, Tom’d thought, years and years ago, some bygone time when they still took this vodundun seriously. It was an elementary ward for protection against ghosts, but that wasn’t what interested Tom. What interested Tom was how it worked.



Felt like a drowning man learning to breathe. It was dark in the room in Lossey. Benea and Osa, crescent and quarter, trickled through the open window like Alioe’s waters. The breeze carried them in, only a little cooler than it had been that evening: it was still a warm updraft, the kind that had always made Tom wish he was a bird over the Mahogany, the waters crashing down below. It also carried in the gurgle of many distant voices, the laughter of children – the smell of smoking meat.

That smell mingled with the smoke inside. Sage, thyme. Rose and and ever-present lavender. The sounds mingled with the soft scrape of chalk on wood.

Tom breathed deep of all of it. In, out. One, two, three, four, five. At first, the chalk had trembled in his hands, but he had remembered: deliberate motions; no hesitation. Like cutting a man’s throat, like caressing a lover. Like all the things he’d been. When he wrote along those sweeping plots, he remembered to push his straights and to pull his curves, like all those books had said.

He moved back along the lines he’d drawn with chalk-whitened fingertips, stalked back toe-to-heel with his controlled clumsiness. With a sliver of that fighter’s grace he’d once had, he didn’t let his feet so much as touch any of his circles.

Then he sat, cross-legged, in the middle of all of it. He felt terror tingle through him, but he breathed in patchouli smoke, and he knew his terror would not stop him.

He cleared his throat and drew his voice out, past the butterflies in his stomach, past the hammering of his heart. When he started the simple invocation, the sound of Anatole’s voice – after so many days without words – startled him, and he nearly paused; but he counted in his head, and he breathed, and he continued.

He asked the clairvoyant mona to draw near, to thicken the air with their presence, to provide interference – to protect anyone in the tiny room against the supernatural. The mona were repulsed by his presence; he knew this, and he bent his head to them like he’d bend the knee to Hawke. They could, he knew, force him out of his body, force him back out into the cold like they almost had in Bethas. He addressed them knowing this, and he still asked them to come closer. He opened his mind as best he could – his headaches and his fear and his loyalties, his disloyalties, his addictions, all the unnaturalness that made up his soul. His guilt.

Despite all that. This was, he thought, his only way to pay tribute to the gods and the Cycle he’d slipped out of, the only way his broken soul ever could. He moved past the invocation and into the spell, and he sat still, and he prayed.
Image

Tags:
User avatar
Muse
Site Admin
Posts: 400
Joined: Sat Mar 24, 2018 10:12 pm
Topics: 99
Race: Storyteller
Occupation: Your Local Admin
Location: On your monitor.
Character Sheet: My Office
Plot Notes: My Manifesto
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Post Templates: Templates for Everyone
Contact:

Sat Aug 31, 2019 11:49 pm

In the Stillness
Midsummer 2719
The mysteries of the Cycle were still not entirely understood or explored, just like the mysteries of the mona—the invisible particles that made magic possible on Vita and gods only knew where else—were not at all as well-communicated as one might expect from sentient beings of such unfathomable power. The mona flowed through the fields and glamours of magical beings without whispering wisdom into their lives so much as reacting to their words, bending to their wills, and exerting their control over that which was visible all while remaining unseen and unheard. Or so galdori had long persisted to proclaim as factual truth.

There was a tangible expectance that seemed to gather as, once again, Tom drew the careful plot with chalk on wood, retracing faded lines as well as delineating new ones. Whether it was his own frayed, frustrated aura of mona that seemed unwilling to entirely let him go—was it Anatole they'd been attached to before his death or had they come to follow Tom through the world as he existed in it now?—it was impossible to tell, but the mona seemed to be in the mood to listen: Anticipating. Curious. Light and airy and bright like the golden afternoon sun reflecting off the harbor in Roalis.

The raen settled into his place and beyond the sound of his borrowed breath, outside of the fluttery, frightened thrum of his stolen heartbeat, there was nothing but silence.

When the mona choose to respond to the Monite that fell from galdor lips and channeled through a galdor body, it would feel like a sigh. Not an impatient one, not that hiss of an exhale when one had simply had enough of something and wanted to move on, but a soft, purposeful one as though one had been keeping air in their lungs and forgotten. Did the sentient particles have a sense of humor? Did they feel the irony of a lost soul warding against other supernatural, other unnatural beings such as himself?

Clairvoyant mona did not have the weight of Physical or the heat of Static. The mona of communicative magic, to those with ley lines sensitive enough to distinguish all of the categories galdorkind had academically delineated and debated for centuries, were subtle and elusive as if they could ever properly be anthromorphized into Estuan descriptors. For a brief moment, the usual, familiar chaos of Tom's buzzing, entropic field rippled and stilled within the confines of the chalk circle and the careful writing. For a brief moment, the press of calm silence would make his ears ring, would rest heavily on his shoulders, would without warning seem to clamp him in place.

Rough hands. Too much dirt over a body. Sinking in deep water in too many clothes. Too much to drink. These were similar sensations, but still so far from the reality.

The mona listened, and, in its' own way, the mona made itself heard:

Instead of the hard shove or forceful yanking, instead of the dizzying sensation of being spiritually removed one root at a time, the raen would feel held. Unharmed, there was no obvious objection to his request, though the acceptance, even minute as it was, was hardly pleasant or kind. It simply was a meeting in the middle. A moment. A pause.

Bound in place, Tom would find himself acquiesced into a magical stillness.
User avatar
Tom Cooke
Posts: 1485
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2018 3:15 pm
Topics: 87
Race: Raen
Location: Vienda
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Plot Notes: Notes & Tracker
Writer: Graf
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Post Templates: Post Templates
Contact:

Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:04 pm

A Room in Lossey The Rose
After Sunset on the 40th of Roalis, 2719
As Tom spoke, he felt a stirring round him, like the sun on the shifting summer waters. At first, it scared the hell out of him, and he wanted to stop; he nearly did. He knew better. He remembered the way they’d all fallen on him in the phasmonia, prying him from his limbs bit by bit, boiled up to a fury. He remembered when Ezre broke off halfway through his ward, and what they’d done then; it’d saved their lives, but it’d been a risk. Oes, Tom knew better: he kept speaking, kept reciting this thread of poetry as he remembered it, because whatever it would bring, brailing was worse.

That was the way of most things, though. Whatever you started, you had to finish it. It was worse to do a good thing halfway than to finish a bad thing. So Tom drew his stolen voice through the rest of the spell, and then, with a grim sort of confidence, curled it.

It seemed to him that something around him sighed. The evening had grown quiet. It wasn’t the quiet of a street in Lossey in the late night; Tom couldn’t even hear crickets. The children’s laughter had gone, and the smell of cooking things, and the distant chatter. Even the creak of the old house.

What surprised him, at first, was how he could hold on. The last syllable rang in his head like a bell. Despite the rasp of his voice, his first-form fumbling monite, it was clear and crisp; if he focused on it, he could manage to hold the last note. It was hard – maybe the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. But the note unfurled, lit gold against the blanket of dark behind his eyelids, and in the stillness and silence, he thought he could feel it in him, too. Running like a stream along his bones.

So he kept holding on. All the while, that silence pressed harder and harder. The ringing in his ears ran alongside the note, threatening his concentration; the air thickened with it, grew heavy and still.

It wasn’t like water all around him, or dirt, but he wondered if this was what it was like to be buried. Or drowned. He didn’t know, but he didn’t think so. It was still, but it wasn’t like a stagnant pond or a lake covered in ice. This was a presence, heavy and alive, and he knew it was attending him, even if it didn’t have a voice he could understand.

It was all around him, and it was holding him, same as he held the upkeep. He couldn’t have opened his eyes or moved his lips even if he’d wanted to. He couldn’t move his hands in his lap. He should’ve been afraid, but the upkeep took so much of his concentration.

He couldn’t, he realized, feel the riot of his field. It was quiet, too. He couldn’t feel the constant, painful scrape of it. He could feel – they were clairvoyant, and the air was full of them. Soft, difficult to pin down. They were holding him still, but they didn’t seem offended, as far as he could tell. He felt as firmly rooted to his flesh as he ever was.

The part of him that could think was full up with questions. He didn’t know what he’d expected; he couldn’t’ve prepared himself for this. Could he? He didn’t know if the spell was working. He didn’t know what any of it meant. He’d half-expected another disaster, the mona tearing him from the incumbent’s body successfully this time. As he’d prepared, he’d accepted that. He’d understood that he was likely giving his life again, and it’d seemed worth it. Still did.

But that wasn’t what was happening. It dawned over him slowly. If he could’ve moved his face, he might’ve smiled. A ward to bind a ghost, he thought. He was too amused to be offended. He couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him; he couldn’t not see the humor in it.

If he was right...

Still cautious, but a little more good-natured this time, he let his mind relax. Everything he’d focused on that single tone – slow, careful, he let all the threads unravel, let his mind wander. He let himself lose whatever he’d been holding onto, and instead, he just focused on breathing.
Image
User avatar
Muse
Site Admin
Posts: 400
Joined: Sat Mar 24, 2018 10:12 pm
Topics: 99
Race: Storyteller
Occupation: Your Local Admin
Location: On your monitor.
Character Sheet: My Office
Plot Notes: My Manifesto
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Post Templates: Templates for Everyone
Contact:

Fri Sep 06, 2019 1:58 pm

In the Stillness
End of Summer 2719
It was theorized that mortal emotions were well beyond the seemingly ageless mona, that the concepts of mercy and humor, hatred and cruelty, love and lust were far too base for sentient particles capable of bending the laws of the universe itself at a mere series of strung-together syllables. Despite this, it was also taught that the mona demanded respect, deserved reverence, and deemed offense as they saw fit—hence the horrible consequences of brailing and the occasionally deadly reprimands of a backlash. Further confusing was how the mona could be used to manipulate all of these things and more through magic, that galdorkind and tekaa alike had played upon uncountable heartstrings with uncountable variations of spells, their minds and their bodies and even their own feelings bared to these particles who surely saw everything anyway.

The conflict of all of these ideas and practices made it clear that even the galdori had an incomplete, almost blindly worshipful view of the mona, that their understanding was far from exhaustive and that their ability to effectively communicate was limited to spells on a page instead most of the time instead of stretched into the kind of relationship touted as the magical ideal. It meant that there was still so much about the mona that was just a damn mystery. As enticing as mysteries were, of course, they were also dangerous.

Was this humorous? Was this kindness? Was this thinly veiled discipline, the way the mona held Tom's displaced soul in his borrowed body in place like some firm, parental hand on the shoulders of an unruly child? Was this a strange step toward reparation, the way the mona weighed down the raen like a stone?

There was no sensation of malice, no pain like runoff from a miscast spell, no discomfort other than the immediate realization that not only had Tom's spell succeeded in some way, but it'd succeeded against himself. Of course, there were no other so-called supernatural beings in the room that he knew of, and so the logic of the monic response slowly filtered into his thoughts, filled his mind. It was with that realization that the sudden stillness of his field became tangible, the usual mess of perturbed mona spending every moment objecting to his out of Cycle existence inside the reanimated, very much strangely still alive body of Anatole Vauquelin now organized and calm, attentive.

Listening.

Expectant.

Present.

Tom's settling into his concentration, Tom's settling under the ward was like the uncurling of fingers, tightly grasping some important object. One at a time, grip loosening, the monic hold on his existence lightened—the letting out of sails into a gentle wind, the ruffling of hair in a sea breeze, the slipping of a body into the Harbor waters. Muscles released their tension. His field expanded. There was an edge there, an inescapable roughness that was far more familiar than the calm he experienced now in this moment, but that edge was dulled in a way that was unmistakably intentional on the part of the unseen particles he was intentionally communing with. The raen was wordlessly invited to enjoy a brief, bittersweet lull in the chaos he'd come to call his own collection of mona.

For a few precious moments while he breathed and relaxed into his bound-in-place spellwork, this must have been what other actual galdori felt, a cloud of obvious sensation, indescribable but at peace.

It was a glimpse of what had once been. Or what could be.

A memory and a tantalizing promise. A warning and a forgiveness.

A mercy and a cruelty all at once.
Post Reply Previous topicNext topic

Return to “Old Rose Harbor”

  • Information
  • Who is online

    Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests