[Closed] Simple Happenings

[Ezre Vks]

kzecka, hox

some span of achtus 2719

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going—
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.

Kozan Ikkyo

No sun rose, no sun set, but the low song of bells ringing in the thin, frigid air and the twinkling of chimes like the sparkling of stars in the darkness marked the passage of hours and houses—a steady pulse of sound that kept the hearts and bodies of Kzecka's hardy, humble people moving. There was an order to it all but it was, surprisingly, neither a harsh nor a demanding set of laws so much as a reliable, peaceful sense of assurance—the heavenly bodies moved in their courses, the ribbons of light danced in the sky, and daily life went on as expected in some crossroads between the secular and the spiritual.

Ezre'd slept in transit as if he'd not slept during the last month of classes at Brunnhold. He'd slept as if he knew what was ahead of him once he reached the comforts of his cold, snowed-in home. When he woke to familiar bells at expected hours to shuffle barefoot on wood and stone in the dark, he didn't wake his guests—slipping reluctantly from Lilanee's warm company and denying himself the curiosity of peering in to make sure Tom was comfortable somewhere so different in atmosphere, temperature, and, well, everything else.

Instead, he met the polished onyx gaze of his umah in the ruddy glow of a candle she cradled in her hands with a shared, ever so secret, ever so fleeting smile in the dark. She, on her way to the kitchen, and her child on their way outside to shovel snow and bring in water from their communal well.

He put away his independent sense of self and layered on the thick felted wool of communal responsibility as he stood in the foyer, fumbling for his second coat in the thick, inky shadow that clung to the house in these early bells before almost everyone else woke. He'd already stoked the fires his otsur had stirred to life earlier, even if Tuhir was nowhere to be found by now. The young Guide's father, he knew, had left half a house ago, generously giving Ezre one more day of sleeping in while the older Hand lit shrine lanterns along the set route for his Achtus meditations—a duty the returned student would be expected to take over for his stay at home.

The child of raen wasn't alone outside with a shovel in his hands, bundled against the biting chill. A cousin joined him. Then a neighbor. Two more children formed a team. Clouds of breath and the sound of metal scraping stone became a rhythmic song, a mantra all its own.

Smaller children—two nieces and a nephew who'd grown so much it seemed since Ezre'd last visited in Roalis—watched from beneath the covered archway that ran around the courtyard, an open hall of sorts. Pink cheeked beneath all the layers, they giggled and followed behind their elders, gathering snow to toss at each other and pestering the better-traveled Guide about their guests, chattering away in endless streams of Deftung, asking about skin like unglazed pottery and hair like fire.

Once they tired of Ezre's huffed assurances that his pair of foreign friends were most definitely sleeping, the troublesome children grew bored of sliding on ice and hanging off other peoples' coats, scurrying off through the black stone communal housing, slipping past the gilded wooden doors to their homes, climbing everywhere where they shouldn't, and pressing faces against wood-framed, thick-glassed, curtain windows in hopes of catching a glimpse of the strangers from kingdoms far, far away.

[Tom Cooke]

 Sunless Days in Achtus, 2719 

w

hat he smelled was something.

It was still dark. It’d been dark when they’d got in, but he couldn’t remember much more than that; he remembered warm water – though he hadn’t had time to shave – and wonderfully warm wood underfoot, and stumbling down a narrow corridor that was precisely as long as it took for his legs to give out. He remembered Ezre’s voice, in Estuan and in Deftung. He remembered a surprisingly dreamless sleep, unlike the muttering and growling and cursing he’d startled the lad and the lass with on the aeroship.

He wasn’t unaccustomed to waking up on the floor, but it wasn’t usually this pleasant. There was soft fur pressed up against his cheek.

There was a sharp, twisting ache in his stomach, and he smelled it again. Wasn’t anything like kofi or eggs, but if Ezre had told him…

Ezre. Ezre, Lilanee, Kzecka – Tuhir, he remembered, solemn-faced but surprisingly dry, from the way up. The way up – he groaned softly, pressing a hand to his face. For a few moments, he had the strange, dizzying impression of being a compass fished out of a frozen lake, or maybe a pocket-watch; he couldn’t tell time or direction, and he’d nearly forgot where he was.

Through the walls, there was a quiet crackle, and a sound like shuffling and the clinking of a pot. The smell, warm and savory but a little sweet in a way he wasn’t sure about, swelled. His stomach turned over and he heard a soft rumble.

The first time he tried to sit up, he went right back down to the mat. His mouth was exceptionally dry. So was his skin; he felt like all the wet a body usually had’d been drained out of him. Or like one of those mummies you read about in books.

He clicked his tongue, coughing, then heard another shuffle through the wall.

Tuhir or Ezre, he supposed. It was a small enough house; he was likely to run into one or the other of them soon enough. Lilanee, maybe, though he didn’t think it likely she’d woken up earlier than him.

Or – there was a prickle at the back of his neck, like a great deal of little legs. Umah, he thought, swallowing dryly.

He hadn’t met the raen yet. Or any raen here, that he knew of. It rattled his half-awake brain again, and suddenly he was strangely alert, aware of every shuffle and cough he made.

There was a slight sting of cold in the air, now he wasn’t tangled up in the covers. His shoulderblades still felt glued together from the mat; that would take some getting used to. It took some fumbling – he stayed quiet, fair quiet – to light a lamp, at least long enough to shed his layers of blanket and put on another clean robe, remembering from the days since Frecks how to arrange the layers. He didn’t much feel like looking at himself in the lamplight, but for once, there weren’t any mirrors, and he suspected he’d’ve felt even more of a stranger had he all scarred six feet and five inches of him to fit underneath these doorways.

His shoes were nowhere to be found.

The hallway was lit when he crept out into it, though it still felt like night. More light was leaking round the doorway at the end, and the smell was stronger here. He didn’t hear Ezre or Lilanee or Tuhir.

“Zie –” He cleared the frog from his throat. “Ziedek?” he offered hopefully, finally poking his head into the small kitchen, where it was even warmer underfoot.

Limned by the light from the stove, he caught sight of dark hair bound up with bone. In that instant, he felt the brush of a field: belike clairvoyant, and something else he couldn’t name.

“Vks-cxil,” he added, trying to ignore the tightness in his throat. He bowed in the doorway, hesitant.

[Ezre Vks]

kzecka, hox

some span of achtus 2719

Lreya found the rolling of dough centering, relaxing, pleasant even, and in all of her centuries cooking and eating, eating and cooking, the raen had found the predictable rhythms of a well-prepared kitchen through the seasons to be one of the handful of things that kept her old soul rooted to some semblance of sanity no matter what the shape of skin she found herself wearing. Hands of different sizes, palms smooth or calloused, nails long or short, the Hexxos Elder knew the way grain flour and water and sugar and yeast and a pinch of salt left to rise overnight near the smoldering hearth felt while she spread it out to make little balls that fit in her current hands, fingers curled, just so.

She'd started the kettle for tea. She'd caramelized onions with garlic and ginger, mixing it with minced goat and deer meat, winter greens, a goose egg, and spicy peppers from the gloriously short summer past. She'd set a large iron pot on the stone and clay stove, filling it with water, fish bones from last night's dinner, and sea weed to prepare a base for soup.

It felt good to have a full house, thought the raen, sifting through memories that layered and folded over each other again and again, her concept of emptiness and loss so very different from the living, from everyone else for whom time still held its intended meaning. It had been a few fistfuls of years (almost a decade, maybe), however, since Kzecka had been blessed by foreign visitors—her child out in the world, reaching with that curiosity they'd always precociously possessed toward all sorts of new experiences, new relationships.

It felt far more natural than supernatural that the now-Guide had managed to meet another raen.

Of course Ezre'd sought what was known to their heart, far from home.

The smooth lines of Lreya's graceful features warmed as she moved about the kitchen, spreading more flour, preparing to roll balls of dough out into soft circles for steamed, filled buns for a hardy, hot breakfast. Aware in her old home, she heard the scraping of snow, the sounds of voices, the laughter of children all outside as well as the creak of wood and the sigh of stone here inside. Curious to see who would wake first, she got to work rolling, the curiously content, eerily powerful weight of her field full of as much interest as well-honed, hospitable warmth, monic signature as alien as it was familiar.

Was she surprised to feel the brush of an aura more belike than could be described in merely academic terms? Dru, not really.

Thank all the Circle, merciless though they'd shown themselves to be in their mutual existences, that Lreya's back was turned, the small-framed, lithe woman bent over her work, when Deftung left the groggy, hesitant lips of Tom Cooke, hovering in the doorway. Hardly dressed for any formality, the layers of earth toned felted wool were almost humorously topped by an apron, dusted with flour, the Hexxos Elder could smile briefly at nothing in particular, warmth in her voice all that remained of the expression by the time she turned around, rhakor worn with enviable grace like the vipoxz tucked into the loose braids on the crown of her head.

"Hello and welcome, Cooke-vumash."

The lithe, ancient creature bowed, not even wiping her hands while she spoke a Deftung greeting. The caprise of her field wasn't shy so much as reserved, held back, for even the briefest touch of it was like the Spondola winds outside—harsh and breath-stealing.

"Good morning," Her Estuan was thick with Deftung's lack of emphasis on vowels, lingering on those sounds that clung more comfortably to the roof of the mouth,

"I trust you slept—"

Her thoughts on sleep were complicated, for the needs of her borrowed flesh far outweighed her too old for its own good mind. Dark eyes like inky pools, dangerously deep, met the pale gaze of a creature too young to be so old,

"—well enough?"

The kettle whistled and—just like that—the diminutive Hoxian was in motion again.

[Tom Cooke]

 Sunless Days in Achtus, 2719 

h

e wasn’t sure how he had pictured her. Old, maybe – as old in the body as in the soul, though nobody was that old. But there were tekaa elders he’d thought as a lad looked centuries old, hands gnarled and knobbed beyond use, faces sanded and worn by so many lines they were almost – almost – riverbed-smooth. Something like that, maybe, was what he’d pictured.

The woman that turned was younger than him, he thought, though he couldn’t quite tell. Not a young woman by any means, but not an old one, either. She bowed like her back hurt less than his did, anyway.

(Woman? She was cxil, he supposed, like every other Hexx here, but – he didn’t know. He still couldn’t quite make sense of it, of what to call whom.)

He glanced up at the crown of bone her hair was woven through; the vipoxs, he remembered Ezre calling it. She carried herself damned well, even for a Hoxian. But he was used to the rhakor by now, or at least used enough to it to hear the brush of color in her voice. She said something in Deftung, and he heard what he thought was Cooke-vumash, hard-edged but not quite so guttural as it’d seemed to him a week ago.

His throat was still tight. He was holding onto the doorframe, fingertips and knuckles white.

That mant strange field reached out into his, reserved but curious, if he could tell a thing about it; he pushed back a little, politely, and a little more, curious. It was belike, he knew without wanting to know, in more ways than one. There was still a strangeness in the folds of the clairvoyant mona, in the movements of each and every particle. His own met them at the edges as if to say, Look what we’ve found, eh?

Damn, but there was something else there, too. Not just clairvoyant. He blinked, swallowing dryly. He was too groggy for this; he’d barely woken up. He couldn’t figure it, but it sent little cold fingertips tapping up his spine.

He tried to relax, hand falling hesitantly to his side. He blinked again, and his eyes traveled down. She was wearing an apron dusted with flour.

He blinked the third time and glanced back up at her face. He raised his brows. “Oh,” he said, “yes, very well – thank you, Vks-cxil.”

When the kettle went off, he nearly jumped out of his skin. He thanked the Circle he hadn’t gasped out loud, but his hands were shaking a little; he wrung them, trying to get them to still. His legs felt weak, too.

Meanwhile Lreya Vks had turned, busy and matter-of-fact as a daoa cleaning kint, to get the kettle. There were, he noticed now, balls of dough behind her, one of which had already been rolled out flat. There was something heartwarmingly domestic about it all, if you ignored the part about the risen dead.

He hung in the doorway, trying to settle his breathing. He wasn’t doing such a good job of it.

He could hear the muffled crunch and crackle of snow outside; in here, it was quiet, but it smelled like yeast and dough and woodstove-burning and more of what he’d woken up to. Goat, he could identify now, or venison, maybe. It was the smell of onions and ghee that made his stomach lurch and twist – and the warmth that hit his face from the little room, making his cheeks and his nose prickle.

“Not exactly like a baby,” he added lightly, “but I haven’t slept like a baby since I died, so it…”

He trailed into a frayed laugh, then blanched. What the hell had he just said? It was Ezre-xi, it was all this Tom and Cooke-vumash fucking with his head; you didn’t just say shit like that.

He cleared his throat. “Er – I apologize, Vks-cxil, I don't know what's gotten into me; I’m not used to journeys like this. I’m deeply grateful for your hospitality.” He gave another little bow, hesitant. Should he sit? Should he stand? His stomach gave another lurch, then an audible growl.

[Ezre Vks]

kzecka, hox

some span of achtus 2719

Like a feral huthah kit or like some shy child visiting one of the gilded stone temples for the first time, the young raen wearing some fair Anaxi's time-weathered face hovered in the threshold between the unlit, chilled hallway and the warm, spacious kitchen. Lreya's dark eyes studied him even if her expression didn't betray her thoughts, not one bit, the vessel of this once-human a galdor surely not too separated from herself in age even if she knew she carried the decades better by virtue of her Hoxian heritage and lifestyle—not that, well, not that it was her place to judge, of course.

Her eyebrows, familiar in their delicate shape to the child she proudly called hers, rose at the confident control of his field, the brush of inescapable entropy laced with an airy promise of begrudging peace through whispers of Clairvoyance like that first hint of dawn after the equinox as summer promised it would return. The Hexxos Elder held her breath as if she worried an exhale might scatter the particles like fish in a pond at the flicker of a shadow, far enough away in the ruddy glow of yellow phosphor and cook fires that it wasn't obvious, but Lreya also knew her field wasn't alien because she was raen so much as alien because it was interwoven by particles never studied in the hallowed halls of Brunnhold, of any university in the Six Kingdoms.

She vaguely remembered what it felt like to stare at oneself in a mirror, though here in Kzecka, there were none larger than what could fit in a pocket anywhere to be found. Here was this travel-weary stranger, foreigner both in life and in death, staring at a creature who was just as dead, if not moreso, than he'd ever been.

It was good the kettle whistled, for it gave her an excuse to turn away, to ease the pressure of her heavy existence from his self-awareness, to not be the full blossom outshining the new bloom in the roses. Instead, the thin line of her lips softened just a little and it was a kindness that her onyx gaze shifted from his face while he fumbled for his borrowed voice and she filled a teapot brimming with dried herbs and spices with steaming water,

"There is nothing to apologize for—comfortable old metaphors often do not seem to fit the same as they once did when wearing someone else's skin." The deadpan delivery belied the depths of meaning in the other raen's not so simple words, the offering of understanding casual but heartfelt.

Besides, the raen before her was, in his own stumbling, unsure, unwitting way, was indeed an infant—reborn but also not born at all.

Setting the kettle to one side, off the hob of the main stove, she glanced over the bubbling broth of her soup base, aware she'd have to fish out the bones before looking to the balls of dough she still had to roll and fill. Stepping gracefully to one side, the angle of her lithe stance allowed for a glimpse of the almost shocking lack of tattoos compared to Tuhir and Ezre save for the delicate lines on the helix of her ears and the single line that traced down the back of her neck beneath the collar of her coat.

A flour-dusted hand waved and Lreya tilted her head, the glint of dark mischief almost ridiculously familiar in her gaze. She chose not to dance around the truth they both knew because it was too early and too cold and too ridiculous to wait on breakfast for the sake of coddling some corpse's ego,

"From what Ez'ia tells me of you, I will take the chance that you can roll this dough while I fill. I will show you, but you must stand here."

That was an invitation, and the Hexxos Elder patiently waited to see whether or not her guest would make it across the stone-floored kitchen past the clay and brick stove and toward the polished black stone counter dusted with flour. It meant stepping closer, unavoidably allowing his fledgling sense of balance between monic decay and monic harmony bask in the shadow cast by defiantly confident power like the silhouette cast by a golden eagle in flight,

"You must leave a little lump in the middle of the circle—like this—" And with that, she used a small, short rolling pin to roll a ball of soft, spongy dough into a circle, leaving a mound in the middle like a knuckle, unconcerned about whether her hands brushed over a stranger's in the process of teaching, unconcerned about her proximity to another of her kind—there was no shame in it, there were so few opportunities to be so welcomed when outside this place, raen were just whispers in the night instead of common understanding,

"—good. Keep going, Cooke-vumash. You have traveled far, but I cannot apologize for making sure you feel at home." Not that the man whose life he had to pretend to take the space of probably had to cook for himself at all, but that was hardly what Lreya meant.

[Tom Cooke]

 Sunless Days in Achtus, 2719 

I

t was too early for this. He was taut fit to break; that, or he felt like his legs were about to melt to puddles.

He didn’t know what he’d thought the morning would be like. He thought there’d be some ceremony to meeting her, at least; he hadn’t expected her to be just down the hall, with a boiling pot on the stove and flour all over her apron. For all he knew of these folk, he shouldn’t have, but he’d expected – pomp, ceremony. At least enough to give him some warning.

Instead, there were only a plethora of smells to make his stomach rumble and ache, and a stone floor so warm underneath his bare feet that it broke his heart. But there was a – his mind kept stumbling over it, scrambling, feeble – a raen, another raen – hundreds of years old, his mind kept shouting at him, waving round its arms and stamping its feet while he stood dumbfounded –

Her voice came on a fragrant waft of tea. He swallowed tightly. I suppose not, he thought, but he couldn’t seem to draw the words out of himself; his throat was a well that had gone dry.

She had said wearing someone else’s skin as if that were remotely a normal thing to say. As normal as admitting to having died at least once in the middle of someone’s kitchen. You just didn’t say things like that. Nobody said things like that.

Nobody except him.

It had stopped troubling him, rhakor, as much as it could stop troubling any Anaxi, over the last two weeks, over the course of knowing Ezre. Now, it made him feel his footing even less. He felt it every time her eyes caught on him, but she was in motion; at first setting the teapot aside, then looking over the stove, then moving to the dough again, limned by warm light. With her hair up off her neck, he could see one slim line tracing down the back of it, but she had less ink than Tuhir and Ezre both.

He was in motion almost the moment she waved her hand, before he even meant to, like a puppy told to sit. It was when she met his eye that he paused.

It hit him like a strong breeze, but not a cold one. Maybe it was that her field had distracted him, before then; maybe it was the strangeness of all of it. But he would’ve sworn he was looking right into Ezre Vks’ glittering dark eyes, only there were a few more little lines around the corners.

Even in the midst of all those strange mona he couldn’t put a name to, and the confident, easy strength of them, he found his own face slipping into a familiar wry smile.

It was still eerie to sidle up next to her. Thankfully, it was too early to think too hard on it, and it was warmer by the counter past the great brick and clay stove. The smell of the dough made his heart ache. Her voice went on, clipped with its strong Deftung accent but rhythmic; he nodded, watching her roll out the dough.

He nodded, lips pressed thin. Carefully, he rolled out one of his own, leaving a mound in the middle, all under the supervision of her slim, deft hands. They looked like Ezre’s, too. He felt a jolt when they brushed; her skin was warm. Somehow, he had expected it to be cold, colder than his.

Good, she said, and his smile widened a little more. Then – he glanced over sharply.

He laughed softly. “That I suppose you can’t, Vks-cxil,” he said, a little of the tension going out of the set of his shoulders – a little. “Do you have an extra apron?”

It was good to have something to do. It was strange to see Anatole’s hands like this, too, dusted with flour. There was already a little bit of dough underneath one of his fingernails and in the space between two fingers.

“I’m glad,” he murmured after a few moments, into the warm bubbling quiet of the kitchen, “Ezre-xi gave you an impression of me as a man who can roll out a dumpling.” I hope he also gave you the impression that I crack jokes when I’ve got nerves this bad, he thought, because if not, this is a hell of a first impression. “This is wonderful,” he added, a little more sheepish. “The smell nearly broke my heart when I woke up. What are you filling them with?”

He didn’t deepen his caprise, didn’t dare, but it lingered in Lreya’s, timid but curious. Whatever else he felt, he didn’t draw back; he rolled dough matter-of-factly, as if he weren’t barefoot beside a centuries-old raen.

[Ezre Vks]

kzecka, hox

some span of achtus 2719

"Apron." There was a pause in the other raen's voice, a moment of sifting through time and space and syllables of language—she'd managed not to forget Estuan but sometimes certain words in Estuan slipped through the cracks in her existence for a few precious heartbeats too many,

"Ah—zjai."

She waved a hand toward a collection of dark-dyed cotton on simple pegs near the wall next to a broom and a dustbin, next to a collection of baskets, not bothering to make excuses for the hint of confusion.

Everything decayed.

Everything unraveled eventually, after all.

This one would understand, for sure. If not now, then one day.

Once Tom had rejoined Lreya in Tuhir's apron (not that he knew but she did and it pleased the old creature to see the young raen's innocent choice) and once she'd given her demonstration of rolling dough, she gave him space to make a few more, watching carefully.

Her gaze lingered with a timeless curiosity on the Anaxi man's hands, marked by time that he'd not spent using them and yet put to use out of necessity none the less. Aged hands, delicate and smooth, with pale skin letting the dark lines of veins show through the veil of flesh as a reminder that life still flowed beneath the surface of this borrowed body Tom moved in. Ezre had said he'd been human, after all, and it would be an untruth for Lreya to claim she'd not been able to imagine the shock of such a physical transition—as if the realization of one's continued existence hadn't been shocking enough.

She'd never been able to judge the age of foreigners, however, not any more, anyway. Time had begun to lose its meaning a century ago, honestly, and while she seemed to cling precariously to temporal persistence despite the entropy that haunted her every moment of her being, she'd stopped counting the days for herself so much as to keep track of the life she'd made together with Tuhir—for Ezre. Perhaps it was better to say she'd given up trying in a way—those handful of far-wandering spiritual seekers who'd made it here to Kzecka from Anaxas especially seemed to age faster. She'd heard something was—what did Ez'ia say in their own ambiguous but serious way?—just in the air there,

"Xî did give that impression, zjai. It was not wrong." There was a fondness there, not just for her child but for the timid—well, perhaps rightfully intimidated—raen who now shared her humble kitchen. She would make a few corrections, here and there, of the flattened dough passed to her before filling them and neatly, deftly, crimping the sides into a little crescent shape, but she didn't criticize his efforts, "Goat and deer, peppers, greens. We like our breakfast here in Hox—strength is needed to face the cold and dark."

She was in her home, private and quiet, and so the fleeting flash of a smile that graced her face was as quick as it was unexpected. In their closeness, the slow, strange flow of monic particles was unavoidable, her weird signature far more expressive than her face even with that brief smile. There was something comfortable about it, however, something that couldn't have been familiar and yet still was, a feral nostalgia that quelled the restless entropy Tom had perhaps grown to begrudgingly accept as if she was a tall tree spreading out cool shade from the Yaris sun.

Without asking or really telling, her hands began to instruct his on proper filling, and there was no hesitance in the touching that was required, Lreya's unmarked fingers brushing over the young raen's wrists and the backs of his hands without ceremony or pretense, without any revulsion,

"Ez'ia has kept much of what he knows of you to himself—for my sake, I think, but also yours. So that you can choose to share what you wish in my company instead of being afraid I already know too much and have judged you, Cooke-vumash." The old creature met Tom's gaze, depths of centuries in polished obsidian, offering comfort,

"I was not sure you would agree to travel all this way."

With that, the spry Hoxian woman let her attention drift back to crimping dough, looking toward her broth,

"I am glad, though. Were that I able to speak to others like us when I was lost and new."

[Tom Cooke]

 Sunless Days in Achtus, 2719 

h

e caught that smile, sure as anything.

The caprise of her field around them was strange, stranger than strange – if pressed, he wasn’t sure that he could have described it, except for its baffling familiarity. And its sharp unfamiliarity, too, about which a part of him was burningly curious. What wasn’t strange was the swell of warmth through it, like leaves turning back over after a rain. It lingered long after smooth rhakor had replaced the smile.

The clairvoyant mona in his field shivered bastly to join it, like little fishes swimming in the shadow of a whale. It still frightened the hell out of him, but the clairvoyant mona seemed to gravitate toward them, entirely independently of him.

He smiled too, casting a sidelong glance to her flour-dusted hands, her elegant, unmarked fingers. That, he understood. The smile fell off his face once or twice, focused; he paused to watch her adjust the shape of his dough, and tried to keep it in mind when he rolled out another round. He watched her fill them in the corner of his eye with that lovely-smelling blend - goat, she said, so his nose had been right; and venison, that was the gamier scent – then crimping the edges of the little crescents. His stomach growled audibly at least once.

“We like our breakfast in Anaxas, too,” he grunted after a moment, daring a grin. It softened. “At least, my people do.” He hesitated slightly, casting another splitsecond of a sidelong glance, but then went on. She knew; she had to know that much. “Not so cold and dark, there, though. I daresay I’ll need to eat my weight to make up for all the shivering.”

Not so cold and dark in terms of weather, at least, he thought but didn’t say. All those things seemed very far away, here. He had heard what must have been temple bells earlier that morning, still thick in his dreams. He also remembered Lreya-cxil’s pause, confused, after he’d asked for an apron; she must have forgotten the word. He’d heard plenty of Estuan in Frecks, albeit Hoxian Estuan, but he supposed Deftung was more common here. Had there been a language she had spoken before it? How long had she… He swallowed a lump.

He wondered what the man he’d been once would have said to all this. The man he was now scarcely knew what to say.

Except that he was grateful. He startled a little again, sheepish, when Lreya guided his hands to the filling. Then he smiled, inclining his head; he felt proud and oddly giddy, and more than that – with a much deeper ache – at peace. Both of them were dusted with flour.

Her hands were as warm as the last time, and this time, he hadn’t expected them to be cold.

Her hands, he noticed, did not shake. His had a slightly tremor underneath them. He tried to make up for it with care, but there was still a little clumsiness, a little palsy, in the way he crimped the edges.

He looked up, surprised, when she spoke again. She was looking at him; he met her eyes, dark and old and – still, knowing what he knew, oddly familiar. Oddly like Ezre’s.

“That’s gracious of him,” he said quietly, but with genuine warmth. He couldn’t help but think of the dressing-down he’d given the lad back in Roalis, for telling Drezda his secret. “Of – xî?” he tried hesitantly, questioningly.

She was looking at the broth, now.

“I can – well imagine.” He sucked at a tooth. “To be honest, I was – afraid of the idea, at first. Afraid of meeting more of my own kind, of…”

He folded in another dollop of filling, letting his nerves trail off into the warm dough, the steady work. “I almost didn’t want to accept it, when Ezre-xi told me. All I’ve ever been is human. I wasn’t ready to be something else. You must’ve spent longer, not knowing; that, I can only imagine.”

[Ezre Vks]

kzecka, hox

some span of achtus 2719

"It has been a long time since I have experienced a summer outside of Hox, let alone a meal prepared by hands that were not galdori. Not that I do not remember—oh—you will have to compete with Ez'ia for that much food, I am afraid." The mischief of her answer was only in her tone, not her face, but it flavored the lightness with which she led the once-human through the making of dumplings. He caught on quick enough, and if she noticed that his vessel's hands were less steady than her own, she said nothing.

She was aware the raen before her had not been given the macabre gift of choice, the gift of willing sacrifice such as found here in the safety of the Hexxos; instead he'd made the choice of instinctual survival, the feral decision of continuing his existence instead of further drowning in entropic madness. He'd not known, then, and even though he knew now, she guessed he was loath to consider what he would do once the flesh he wore began to truly fail instead of merely remind him of how time passed so cruelly despite the persistence of their displaced souls.

"Ezre is perhaps comfortable with either form of address—as am I. Xî is most comfortable between all Hex'en, who consider themselves outside of the need for gendered convention, but at the same time, for someone like Ez'ia, the rest of the world sees his choices and he has bent a little, as if to the wind." She remembered how her child had chafed at the requirement of Brunnhold to decide on male or female for dormitory residence, for uniforms, and for manner of personal address.

At Frecks, he'd not been the only child there who moved through the world unattached to such concepts, but Hoxian educational standards were structured in a way that were far more supportive of such choices, from co-ed living arrangements in dorms to a lack of particular attachment to a coded uniform so much as color and style requirements. Hexxos weren't the only Hoxians who had let go of such things, who were open-minded, she supposed, but at the same time, here Ezre was in Kzecka not only with Tom Cooke, the raen, but Lilanee, the Hessean young woman.

"I have inhabited too many vessels to worry much about how I am addressed anymore, honestly, for while this one is closer to—to who I began this life as, I have explored many choices since then." It was not said in gloating so much as humble deference, Lreya aware that the body she moved in now carried the marks of having grown life within it as well as nearly five decades of living in the harsh landscape of isolated Kzecka.

Using long, thin sticks of wood as utensils, she began to pick out bones delicately from the soup that was roiling gently, unconcerned about leaving behind rich marrow or leftover meat that all but melted into the liquid,

"I understand that fear."

The raen answered quietly, softly. She glanced over again, dark eyes warm, "I cannot remember the exact amount of time I passed through—not knowing and confused, like stones tumbled by a swift current, but it was certainly more than a handful of years. I still remember before, even after all this time, more because I wrote it down than because my mind has stayed sharply resistant to being worn smooth."

Perhaps that was too much honesty even for the old creature, for the diminutive Hoxian vessel looked away as quickly as she'd let her gaze linger on Tom, putting a lid on the soup as she snuffed out the flame beneath it,

"It was—it still is—not always easy."

[Tom Cooke]

 Sunless Days in Achtus, 2719 

I

ah – huh. I see.” The words tumbled out before he could help them.

Between the stove and the pot bubbling on it, his cheeks were starting to tingle with warmth. He was looking over now, one red brow sharply-raised. Steam spilled round Lreya’s slim shoulders; her hair, all caught up in her vipoxs, was limned with warm light. The sticks glistened as she picked bones out of the broth, dripping and glittering. He couldn’t read her expression, and he was only just catching onto the subtle tones of her voice.

He knew, logically – he’d certainly thought about it enough, and Ezre’d told him as much – but it still took him aback. It was hard to think of somebody in front of you, warm and moving, with a different face, with a different voice; if he’d pictured Lreya at all, it had been as a succession of vessels in cold, remote Kzecka, a succession of galdori, a succession of… women, he supposed.

Strange to think of Ezre-xi, too. “When xî told me that, I’ll admit, I didn’t – understand, at first,” he said, crimping the edges of this dumpling more neatly than he had the previous. “If I’m anything, Vks-cxîl, I’m Anaxi, and we have… ideas, about that sort of thing. Humans in particular, I’m afraid. I hadn’t thought about what it might be like, to –” He cleared his throat. “Well, I suppose I have thought about it. A little. Especially since.”

Good to have something to do with his hands, he knew that much. He supposed that was wise on her part, too. This was a hell of a conversation to have anywhere, but it was easier folding dumplings and breathing in the rich scent of the soup. He could feel his stomach growling. If he were competing with Ezre on the basis of enthusiasm, he thought he’d have a shot at eating his weight in venison.

I understand that fear.

When she caught his gaze this time, it was with the echo of the light from the stove in her dark eyes.

He wasn’t sure what expression was on his face; he thought he felt himself sag, tired. Lreya’s voice had been very quiet. It was quiet still as she went on, with that lovely Deftung turn of phrase in her Estuan, like stones tumbled by a swift current, so unlike Mugrobi metaphor and Anaxi bluntness both. It reminded him of how strange he’d thought Ezre-xî when first they’d met.

Who were you, once? he wanted to ask, and knew he oughtn’t, not by the way she had averted her eyes. A woman, he supposed, based on what she’d said. A galdor? A human, like him? Hoxian? There might’ve been a hundred people hiding behind that face that looked so much like his young friend it made his heart ache.

(Will I remember Tom Cooke? he wanted to ask. I’m already not him; I don’t know who I am, but I’m already not him.)

“No, I’d imagine not,” he said instead as she looked away, busying himself again about the dumplings.

In the corner of his eye, she put the lid on the soup, and the warm light dimmed.

“I suppose I should start writing, shouldn’t I?” There was less levity in his voice than he wanted. But he smiled a little. “Ezre-xî told me that part,” he added softly. “That you’ve a great many journals. I never asked if any of them – how many of them were from… before you even found Kzecka.”

Or before Kzecka found you. He wasn’t sure which he could picture. All he knew was that Lreya wasn’t the last raen to have found Kzecka, and nor was she the first. What a strange place, as drew the dead.

He grew quiet. “If an Anaxi raen wanted to be, ah… called xî, in this place, would that be strange? I’ve never brought it up; I suppose I worried Ezre-xî’d… well, find it amusing.”