Thud in the Night [Closed]

Open for Play
Please identify your neighbourhood location in the Topic Tag: Arata, Deja Point, Hlunn, Cinnamon Hill, The Turtle, Nutmeg Hill, The Gripe, The Pipeworks, Carptown, Windward Market, and Three Flowers.

User avatar
Faizra pezre Taci
Posts: 41
Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2019 4:59 pm
Topics: 10
Race: Wick
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Writer: moralhazard
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Post Templates: Plot Notes
Contact:

Mon Jul 08, 2019 5:14 pm

Morning, 23 Bethas 2719
Between the Hours Press
It smelled like bread, the sort that sat out a long time then went in an oven, the sort that puffed up with the baking. It wasn’t a scent that Faizra had grown up with, but she had learned it here in Thul Ka. She thought it strange to fill up your house with heat when there was already so much of it outside, but she couldn’t deny that the end result tasted good. Not as good as flatbread, the sort baked on an open fire, with dark spots where it had burnt. They couldn't make it like that in the city, too many other smells in the way.

But the scent of the bread brought up a soft ache of hunger in Faizra's stomach, and the simplicity of it felt like a blessing from Hulali. There was nothing more dangerous than an injury that left you too nauseous to eat. Sometimes hunger was all you had, but it was enough. Hunger kept you moving, and moving kept you alive. Hunger gave you purpose and purpose gave you strength; lose your hunger and you lost everything.

Perhaps it was the smell, or perhaps it was the feeling of something crawling on the back of her neck. Faizra didn’t move, keeping her gaze on the books, but it wasn’t as much of a shock as it could have been when a throat cleared softly behind her. She held still for a moment, utterly still, then turned slowly to look at the man sitting at the table behind her.

She watched him in silence, taking his measure in the light of morning, mind unclouded by weakness. Tall, broad-shouldered for someone with a field like his. Faizra had felt them before, the ones strong like his had been, and mostly they were scrawny little things. She didn’t underestimate them though; Faizra knew better than to make a mistake like that. But the not-imbala sitting at his table, face drawn and tired, somehow smiling and wary all at once – Faizra wasn’t sure what to make of him and his contradictions.

But, she reasoned, he’d had plenty of chances to do her harm. If there was something else he wanted – Faizra couldn’t think of what – but that he hadn’t taken it must mean it was something he couldn’t take by force. Her eyes flickered towards the books he’d said were full of magic, then back to him even as he looked away from her.

Faizra nodded at the comment about her clothing, shrugging thin shoulders. Her gaze half-dropped to what she was wearing – that must have been his sister’s as well – and she ran her tongue along the back of her teeth at the mention of bread, feeling as well as hearing the growling in her stomach. All the same, her gaze followed his thumb towards the door; all the time he spoke, nothing had moved but her eyes, and just the faint nodding of her head.

“Ioyas Esef pez Roh,” Faizra said, voice hoarse and aching in her throat still. She’d swallowed too much blood and too little else. Maybe she had screamed; she didn’t remember it, but her throat ached as if she had. “I remember.”

Faizra was quiet again, weighing her options. She was more comfortable across the room from him, and she didn’t make any effort to close the distance. It didn’t escape her notice that he hadn’t mentioned the knife either. Faizra remembered that too, all too well, wobbling on the stairs trying to threaten him, the terrified little boy with his doetoed field inching around hers staring at her in horror.

Faizra’s gaze lowered from Ioyas’s, and guilt squirmed alongside hunger in her stomach. “Epa’ma,” she mumbled, tugging at the shawl he’d given her, adjusting it. “… f’r – scarin' him,” she glanced off to the side towards the bedroom she’d left, the boy’s room, then back to the not-imbala sitting with his kofi.

Kofi and bread, bandages, fresh herbs for her wounds. Faizra felt a hard throbbing ache somewhere in her chest, tearing her apart. Better not, she told herself. Better not. But the hunger was raw in her stomach, and her side hurt, throbbing a little more with each passing moment, and Faizra meant to live.

“Wouldn’t – mind some bread,” Faizra swallowed hard and looked up at Ioyas again. “F’yer offerin’.” What pride did she have left anyway, she wondered, after bleeding all over the man’s doorstep and nearly coming at him with her knife when he’d meant her no harm, at least no harm as she could fathom. The danger here wasn’t so obvious; that she knew. “Domea,” she added.

Faizra still didn’t close the distance between them. She swallowed, again, chest rising and falling a little faster, gaze locked on Ioyas for a long moment. Then, slowly, even more slowly than she’d turned to face him, Faizra turned away, putting her back towards him, and made her way to the books he’d mentioned – just a few steps. Her skin crawled, but she didn’t look back, long fingers easing one of the books off his shelf with surprising delicacy, holding it loosely in her hands and carefully opening it. She couldn’t read more than a wick’s monite anyway, and she wasn’t sure her eyes had the strength to focus, but she kept her back to the not-imbala, hoping he’d understand.

Image

Tags:
User avatar
Ioyas Esef pez Roh
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2019 2:09 pm
Topics: 2
Race: Passive
Location: Thul'Ka, Mugroba
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Writer: Muse
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Contact:

Mon Jul 08, 2019 7:27 pm

​​
23rd of Bethas, 2719
​​HOME | Ugh, morning!
​​
​​Ioyas was an osta person. A cat person. A friend of felines more than companion of dogs or banderwolves. He liked most animals just fine, save for perhaps one particularly dumb moa in the Liar's Market, and he kept a few strays alive with his kitchen scraps out his back door on a regular basis. One runt of an osta occasionally found its way through an open window and slept on his sofa, never willing to make it into a bedroom or dare set a paw in the kitchen for fear of being chased out. He hadn't seen the old thing for seasons, but as he watched Faizra hesitate in his living room, watching her body language as she hovered near the bookshelves and the hot, languid breeze caught the curtains, he wondered if the witch hadn't somehow had a secret conversation with his feline friend and decided to tease him with a reminder.

For flood's sake, he was deliriously tired.

"Tendaji? He's just a boy. He's probably scared of the dark." The oshoor lacked an air of detachment in his tone, the words almost overly affectionate when shrugged, but the motion causing him to wince instead of smile because his muscles ached after several long days of printing and so much scrubbing and lifting just hours before, "He'll be fine, and I'm sure he would have been much more frightened had you actually stabbed me."

Amber eyes flicked to the knife, clean on the counter, and then back to the witch who had turned her back to him again, watching her reach up toward his grimoires. His jaw clenched. He'd told her they were dangerous and she touched them, reaching for whichever one caught her attention and sliding it from his shelf. His fingers curled around the mug and the heat clawed through his palms, up the nerves in his sore wrists, crawling toward the base of his skull—

The bread.

He brought the hot liquid to his lips and filled himself with another sip, leaving it on the table while Faizra thumbed through pages of galdori-crafted Monite. The book was full of Static Conversation as well as an ambitious treatise on pigments and chemistry and mixing things to create new compounds, and while the witch certainly wouldn't have any idea, most of it was untested, ground-breaking, or at the very least, totally considered outside the bounds of the noble uses. Needless to say, there were a lot of diagrams and color charts. It was pretty to look at, but for someone without a Thul'Amat education, it was perhaps also totally useless save for what Monite Faizra could comprehend.

He watched her and said nothing for a few moments, moving about his kitchen instead, already sweating from the heat of the hearth and the oven. Pulling a large cast iron pot from the fire, he rolled out the fresh loaf of bread onto the counter to cool while he gathered dried dates and figs, strained yogurt, a little porcelain cup of butter, and his last jar of last autumn's honey. Setting it all on the table, he spoke while preparing the woman's kofi despite her not asking for it,

"You're wikaa, so I don't expect you to understand all of that. Then again, if I were imbala, neither should I." He set the steaming mug on the table across from where he'd sat, close to the edge, like the rest of the food, as if leaving it on the windowsill for a bird, "But if I can learn, so can you."

Ioyas turned to the bread, using a towel and a serrated knife to cut thick slices. Arranging the bread on the towel, he brought it all to the table, wiping his hands on the linen shirt he wore as if he had on an apron and then mumbling a few curses at himself over the mistake in Mugrobi. Reaching for his kofi again, he didn't sit, though all of the preparation had reminded him that he, too, was hungry. He'd not eaten dinner. He couldn't remember if he'd really eaten much lunch, far too absorbed in all the flooding printing deadlines he had to meet.

He moved quietly into the large open room full of sunlight and books, curling his toes onto the bare floor that had once been hidden beneath a rug but not stepping so close as to impose his far weightier field upon her glamour, too comfortable in his own home to hide it like he often did when out in the rest of the Turtle around those who would rather greet him as imbali like everyone else,

"You can eat." He spoke from over the rim of his mug, not reaching to pluck his book from her hand, "I will wait."
User avatar
Faizra pezre Taci
Posts: 41
Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2019 4:59 pm
Topics: 10
Race: Wick
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Writer: moralhazard
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Post Templates: Plot Notes
Contact:

Mon Jul 08, 2019 7:56 pm

Morning, 23 Bethas 2719
Between the Hours Press
Faizra’s first surprise was that the inside of the book wasn’t handwritten. She stared down at it, squinting a little at the regular letters – she knew they were letters anyway – arranged in irregular groupings to make words. But they weren’t handwritten, couldn’t be, because no one could write that evenly. One hand continued holding the book and the other tentatively touched the page, feeling how smooth it was. She pulled her hand back and shot a quick glance towards Ioyas, looking back down at the pretty thing. It didn’t seem as if her fingers had stained it.

Slowly, carefully, Faizra worked up the courage to touch it again, turning a page. She jerked back in surprise at the monite, also printed, and squinted at it. She couldn’t make out any of it – it seemed like nonsense, some of the words familiar and others brand new, all combined in orders that didn't make any sense to her – but it left her brave enough to try turning the page again. The next page she landed on had a diagram, and Faizra stared at it, frowning a little. Just looking at all this gave her a headache; her eyes hurt already.

Was this how arata learned magic, Faizra wondered. Reading books like these? She thought of her gitgka’s hands waving over their almanac, mint-scented and wrinkled with age, but her voice as sharp as ever as she explained some spell, forcing Faizra to puzzle out the words to it rather than just remember it. Faizra swallowed, a little, the memory more painful than she wanted to think on.

Faizra glanced down at the thing in her hands, then back up at the shelves. All these books – like this one – with their strange regular words written by something other than hands, full of – what, monite? Faizra shook her head a little. As if you could learn to get the mona to do anything from a book.

Ioyas spoke again, and Faizra turned back to look at him, the quickness of her motion betraying that, perhaps, she hadn’t been as unaware of his presence as she might have tried to pretend. Faizra shook her head a little at Ioyas’s comment. “Can’t read ‘cept the spells,” she told him. “Jus’ wanted t’see it.” There was no shame in her voice, nothing but honesty, and her gaze was fixed on the food perched at the edge of the table.

Faizra’s eyes devoured what looked to her like a feast. Dates, figs, yogurt, butter, honey – to all of that Ioyas had added kofi and thick slices of bread, then just – stepped away and left it behind. Faizra shrank back a little when he drew close, the reaction more physical than anything. She closed the book, not quite brave enough to turn away from him now, reaching back up behind her to place it (upside down) in the shelf where it had been.

She could eat?

Faizra looked at the food again, then back at Ioyas. Her mouth opened to say something – to protest – he didn’t mean for her to have that, did he? That wasn’t only bread; that was a feast. Faizra shut her mouth again. If she didn’t ask, she thought, he couldn’t correct himself. She edged sideways, slowly and carefully, creeping around the outskirts of the room to stay out of range of his field, her own glamour drawn in tight around her. Her gaze flickered from him to the food on the table, back again, Faizra’s whole body tense and taut as if the permission to eat might be withdrawn at any moment.

Faizra crept all the way around the edge of the room until she was in the kitchen. Now she didn’t look at Ioyas again. It was too late, Faizra decided. If he regretted offering her so much he’d have to stop her himself. The only thing that made her pause was the sight of the knife on the counter. Faizra hesitated, torn between it and the food, trembling for a long moment in the center of the kitchen. She glanced over at Ioyas again, then back at the food, at the thick slices of steaming bread.

Faizra swallowed, hard, and left the knife where it was. She crouched on the edge of the chair more than sat, tough bare feet flat beneath her. She closed her eyes and whispered quiet prayers over the food, to Ophur first for this prosperity, to Roa next for the gift of life, and then Hulali last, because everything was owed to water in the end, all this bounty nothing if not for water.

Then, ritual forms satisfied, Faizra ate. The only decision left to make, and it was a hard one, was what to taste next. She ate a date first, the sweetness trembling on her tongue, bread with butter and honey next, a little yogurt, a sip of the kofi. At some point Faizra tasted salt on her tongue and realized that she was crying. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of the fancy shirt – useless to waste water like that, she told herself – and kept eating.

At some point Faizra realized she couldn’t eat any more. There was food left – there was still so much food – but her stomach was beginning to ache, and the sticky sweetness of it clotted her mouth. She stared down at it, knowing that to continue was to risk making herself sick, and losing everything she’d gotten down. She wiped her mouth on her arm, leaving a smear of stickiness against her skin, and sat back. The cup of kofi she cradled in sticky hands, taking small precious sips of it, thinking for a moment of her father, of watching him prepare it, of the smell filling the air, his calm voice explaining the significance of all of it.

There were more tears on her cheeks then. Faizra lowered the cup to the table and pressed her bruised face into her sticky hands, begging Hulali to help her stop being such a fool, to help her keep the water inside where it belonged.

Image
User avatar
Ioyas Esef pez Roh
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2019 2:09 pm
Topics: 2
Race: Passive
Location: Thul'Ka, Mugroba
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Writer: Muse
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Contact:

Fri Aug 16, 2019 2:04 pm

​​
23rd of Bethas, 2719
​​HOME | Ugh, morning!
​​
​​Faizra startled and curled away from him at his approach like any feral animal on the street would have, Ioyas' expression remaining somewhat passive at her admission that she couldn't read,

"Epa'ma." He blinked, the oshoor realizing he'd moved too quickly and stood to close. Giving her room to move away, he held up his hands while she slipped from his vicinity, setting his kofi on the bookshelf before straightening the book she'd returned upside down, "Help yourself. Let it not be said that Ioyas Esef pez Roh is unkind to strangers in his house."

His smile was gentle, but there was a bitter edge to his words as if he felt some guilt or shame at the admission. He kept his word, however, watching her creep toward the kitchen and his small table, amber eyes roaming over the choices she'd made of his sister's clothing and glancing at the bandages on her person before he turned his back to her and fussed over straightening several books on his shelf as if her curiosity had made waves in them when it had not.

He sipped and re-arranged, trusting he wouldn't end up with a knife in his ribs while he did so, exhausted and quietly mulling over the evening before and her few words this morning in his mind before carefully choosing his words,

"I won't ask your circumstance and I won't pretend to even want to know what happened, but my physician friend did insist you try to keep your wounds clean. Infection is merciless and far more painful than the injury. Hulali forbid you have your life saved only for you to waste the generosity of strangers." He murmured almost distractedly while Faizra served herself. It was only once he turned and saw that there were tears down her face that he fell quiet, that he brought a calloused hand to his face and rubbed the ink-stained palm over the stubble of his chin and over his mouth as if to keep himself from speaking more.

His brows drew together, weary and confused, bordering on the delirious had he felt like admitting his sleepless form of exhaustion, and while he watched her select from the food he'd laid out for her. Ioyas had never wanted for much of anything, save acceptance. He wasn't imbali. He wasn't arati. Or so both his people here on the Turtle wanted him to believe. Or so the arati outside the walls of his home wanted him to believe, as well.

He'd never known hunger. He'd hardly known fear.

He had no judgment for this stranger, regardless of how she'd arrived, regardless of how she'd greeted him in her bloodied desperation.

"Listen, Faizra, you know where my doorstep is, should you need it again. If you are ever hungry or need easy coin, I may have a need for some occasional errands, but I understand if, perhaps, if it would be too strange to cross paths again." Ioyas hovered outside of the kitchen proper, leaning against the curved archway that separated his living room from the dining area, staring into his empty mug instead of continuing to look at the witch and her tears and her face, sticky with honey and dates, until she hid it all from him in her hands.

"Being what I am, there are sometimes places I cannot go or people I cannot speak to, but the nature of my business makes such connections still worthwhile."

The tall oshoor yawned, rolling his head between his hunched shoulders, feeling the ache of so much printwork in every tendon and muscle, feeling an awkward sense of unknown in the company of this young woman who'd bled all over his floor just hours before. He stepped cautiously into the kitchen, filling the small space with the weight of his field, drifting toward the sink to wet a towel and wring it just so, setting the folded, moist square of fabric on the table opposite of the witch in obvious offer for her to wipe herself clean should she feel the need to do so.

He wasn't visibly afraid, but it also seemed impossible for him to be particularly threatening.

"You can stay as long as you wish, but I have no desire to keep you. I can package up what won't spoil, fresh bandages, soap, and herbs ... and you don't have to remember my face." Ioyas added softly, almost as an excuse, an apology, a cautious assurance that there were no expectations. He turned away from her again to begin shuffling through his cupboards.

User avatar
Faizra pezre Taci
Posts: 41
Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2019 4:59 pm
Topics: 10
Race: Wick
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Writer: moralhazard
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
Post Templates: Plot Notes
Contact:

Fri Aug 16, 2019 10:00 pm

Morning, 23 Bethas 2719
Between the Hours Press
Ioyas was talking; Faizra wasn’t so mung that she didn’t recognize the tone of his voice. It was the way her father would have talked to one of the ratty pups that lived on the edges of the Turga’s trading posts, the ones that survived on scraps and handouts and rats, when they could get them. The memory was almost sweet; with her face buried in her hands and her stomach full, Faizra could almost think of it – blowing on a bit of too-hot roasted root until it met with her father’s approval, then crouching, holding it out to a scrawny pup with tattered fur. Her father had talked to it the whole time, slow and soft and gentle, and Faizra had tried too, piping cautious encouragement – promising not to hurt it.

Eventually she’d set the root down and scampered back, and her father had set his hand on her shoulder. She had watched, beaming with pride, as the pup snatched the root and fled to eat it in a safe place.

Faizra shivered.

The heavy press of Ioyas’s field was painful, an unwelcome reminder of things Faizra desperately wished she could forget. Faizra’s glamour pulled up at the edges of it, shying away, tucking back against her skin. She looked up to see him carefully wringing out a towel, setting it down on the table. Faizra watched him step away, and only then did she reach forward, slow and careful, taking the towel and wiping her hands clean first, then her face, where tears tracked through traces of sticky honey. She did it quickly, and her eyes were on Ioyas’s back again within moments, cautiously following his movements through the kitchen.

Faizra wiped her hands on the edge of the cloth one last time and set it back down on the table. After a moment, looking at the crumpled thing, she picked it up and carefully folded it back into a square, then set it down again, her eyes flicking up to Ioyas again as he rummaged through the cupboards.

Faizra swallowed a little, her throat not so dry as it had been before, but aching, still sore. “Domea domea,” she said, quiet. She shifted from the chair to the ground, rose, and took a few steps back, putting a little more space between herself and the man, just enough so she could breath. Faizra shifted, uncomfortable, looking down at the ground, then back up to Ioyas’s back.

After a moment, Faizra gathered herself, and spoke. “I ent – ” she was quiet, working her tongue over her teeth. The taste of the food he’d given her lingered in her mouth, and Faizra shook her head a little, and changed course. Maybe he knew already it was half-cracked to be like this, and, anyway, she oughtn’t be the one to tell him. “Yer generosity does honor t’ Hulali,” she offered in their native Mugrobi, the ritual phrase more at home in a kofi ceremony than shared between near-strangers but not entirely inappropriate. Faizra ran her tongue over her teeth again, teased a little scrap of dried fruit from between them, swallowed again.

Faizra’s eyes shifted from Ioyas to the exit from the kitchen. She held still while he gathered the things he offered, and didn’t speak much until he set the little bounty down for her, until he’d stepped away.

“S' better ’f I go,” Faizra offered, finally, quietly. “Domea,” she repeated the thanks yet again. She edged forward, crept again around the edges of the room, and took the cloth he’d wrapped it all in with the same quick, anxious motion, as if worried he might withdraw it. Faizra’s eyes dropped to the knife on the counter, then back up to Ioyas. She hesitated, closed the distance between them in a few quick steps, took the knife, and retreated back just as quickly, tucking it away into some secret space against her back before she’d even turned.

“Sana’hulali,” Faizra said from the doorway, looking at Ioyas one last time. Then – like that – she was gone. She stopped at the box of clothing he’d offered, took a shirt and a pair of pants that looked like they might fit, and eased herself out of his door much more quietly than she’d entered it, shutting it behind her. She squinted against the early morning light, her side already aching, and made her way quietly down the streets of the Turtle.

Sleep, Faizra decided. With how much she’d eaten, there wasn’t any need to beg or steal that day; she’d find a quiet spot, somewhere nobody’d disturb her, and curl up to sleep her fill. It wasn’t hard; by now she knew a few places in the Turtle, and one or two she thought would maybe be all right during the day time.

Faizra clutched the little bundle Ioyas had given her close, and did her best not to think too much on any of it as she walked. Didn’t help, Faizra told herself. Couldn’t help. There was nothing for her there, not with a half-cracked half-arata and his child apprentice. She found a dark place in the shade and slipped inside it, curled up there where the Saffron Street runners wouldn’t find her, and drifted off to sleep with the taste of kofi still on her tongue.

Image
Post Reply Previous topicNext topic

Return to “The Neighbourhoods”

  • Information
  • Who is online

    Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests