The half-a-day airy sprint to Vienda was hardly any time at all in comparison to the ninety-hour flight to Frecks, a trip usually made longer with stops and layovers, foul weather and winds. That didn't even include the cable cars between cliff sides or carefully-carved tunnels through the Spondola mountains themselves just to get to humble Kzecka, isolated and far from the capitol, already buried deeply in snow this time of year.
The Hoxian settled both himself and Lilanee with all his usual well-honed calm, hiding his nervousness at confronting someone else's mother over a funeral for someone that his lover, her daughter, vehemently did not believe dead beneath the smooth, soft fabric of both his bright saffron linen layers and the softer boundaries of his rhakor. Worry and conversation ebbed slowly, the pair drifting into comfortable silence curled close to each other in the small space and Ezre pressing one side of his face against near the cool glass window to let his dark dark eyes wander over the moonlit Anaxi landscape far below while the other ninth form had tucked her head against his tattooed chest.
In the warm comfort left between speaking and listening, he let inked fingers thread through the Hessean's red curls, aware by the steady softness of her breathing that she'd dozed off after an emotion-filled day. Shifting gently, his free hand reached into a pocket, sifting through his rather impressive, expensive collection of seerstones and withdrawing one set into a delicate rose carved out of whalebone. He'd given Tom a small, flat disk inset into a pocket watch because he thought it was clever, because he thought it was a fitting reminder, because he had a not-so-subtle sense of humor when allowed to express it in his own way. His match was a little bone rose—a reminder of the Harbor the raen spoke of and an accidental portent of the East Garden.
Appropriate. Inappropriate. Fitting all around, honestly.
He sighed, turning the tiny, powerful stone over a few times between his fingers, hesitant.
Cognitive scrying was difficult over long distances, but Ezre did not want to wake Lilanee with whatever he had to say out loud, and he was not particularly interested in slipping away from the soothing weight of her person pressed just so against himself to go elsewhere in the airship and make his magical conversation. Cognitive scrying was also disruptive and disturbing to someone not expecting such things—someone like Tom who put on a decent show at being a human in a galdori politician's skin—but he had no idea what the not-Incumbent would be up to at this house and he didn't know anyone else in Vienda to reach out to on such short notice. He didn't know if the raen would truly appreciate such an interruption, either; it was a worthwhile risk.
Closing his hand and pressing the stone into his scarred palm, the dark-haired Guide closed his eyes and gathered his field close, drawing it inward as if even the mona could enter his very thoughts. Focusing himself on the weight of the seerstone in his tattooed hand, the Clairvoyant student sifted through his thoughts, quieting all of them and selecting from within his busy mind his memories of Tom Cooke—his cold, wind-burned face in Bethas, his disapproving, sweaty scowl in Roalis, his Tek words in his Viendan accent, his familiarity with a knife. He filled his consciousness with the way the man laughed, the sensation of his entropic field, and the delicate shape of his galdor-bodied hands.
Breathing in, reaching further, Ezre remembered the raen's mind, the vestibule of space he'd touched before in the other man's Cycle-altered consciousness. He remembered the strangeness of it, the warped landscape of a trapped soul's inner existence, and it was as he pictured these things that he spoke whispered Monite instead of mere Estuan, casting in hushed tones to open the channel linked between the two ferrous-monic oxide stones that had been attuned to each other in their crafting, searching like hands in a dark dorm room when feeling gently for familiar warmth only spanning autumn-chilled distances with magical precision,
Ziea casual greeting, Cooke-vumash. Are you busy?