[Falling Leaves] Early morning and the world is still. Even the birds rustle quietly, wake slowly, fluff and preen their feathers and ready their voices to cry out to the dawn. The Prime. The Aurora of another new day, nestled so close to the horizon that if the sun so much as stood on his tippy-toes, Apollo leaned a little upward, the breaking would come, a silent crescendo, a glorious beginning, stretching every skyward, ever outward in pale ribbons of pastel glory, pushing back the twilight blues and dusky lavenders, pinking the heavens' cheeks.
Dawn breaks. The choir of birdsong begins. There is a faint wind that rustles the drying leaves, barely gilt but starting to turn, heralding in the coming Fall. Ushering in the longer nights. Dew still clings to the low places, nestles in the crooked crags of split-bark on tree trunks, gathers at the down-turned points like crystalline tears. It is a damp and lingering touch, the intimate after-trails of late, late night, the breathing out of a world at rest.
The breathing in comes next, in the way that two small and lonely forms traverse the black-brown paths toward the point where they kiss and turn away. Their slow progress not unlike the year they are winding down to a close, the Wheel they are turning by coming here, now, and again, and before, and marking the passage of time in the freeze and thaw of still water, in the rise and fall of average temperatures, in the steady but repeating trek the stars make across the ever-changing ever-same sky.
Those stars twinkle their last melodies, fade, wink out, disappear, dissipate, dissolve in the brightening day. Pink bleeds to white bleeds to a deepening blue, hallmark of colder air overhead, and Ra rises. The sun (Son) rises. Time comes, the time comes, their time comes.
The paths kiss, here, and Emily brushes aside an early fallen-leaf to take her seat on the Fallen King, to lean against his up-stretched arm and watch the ripples form on the nearby water. She listens to the crunch of leaf litter under animal feet, hears the call of birdsong, marks the rustling leaves, notes the cooler temperature, tastes the dew still in the air -- she turns the Wheel of the Year without even knowing it. She brings that Reverence here, to the Court, to the place of beginnings and endings.
A new day begins. The Orphan-for-now bears witness.
And sips at her still-warm tea.
[Candle] [I sing! But how badly?]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 4, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Candle] This path is such a familiar (well-trod [old]) one by now. Not all times are familiar, not all times are well-trod times; all times are old times. Even the newest of them, and summer is shading toward an end; it is gathering itself up into green splendor, into a banquet of harvest-comes-soon, into a certain crispness for just a second at an hour not unlike this one, before summer lifts her (or His) imperious arm and waves her (or His) imperious hand and once again commands that all be green. But summer is going into gold. There is leaf-litter on the ground. Kage is beginning to recognize the seasons turning, not just from what she's read in books, not just symbolism she has studied in her ivory tower, her study and university libraries. She is beginning to know them.
And it is chance -- Chance, bright as a new penny, winking in gutter-sludge; Chance, fickle as heads-or-tails, as here-or-there, as where-are-we-now as now-we-are-where; chance, the hand-maiden of fate; chance, the cheeky lover -- who brings the traditionless Disciple and the Orphan-who-is-a-Chorister, just waiting on the ritual, the catechumen-to-none-and-Many-and-One together. Again.
Here. Of all places. They've almost been visiting this place for a year, now. Almost.
Still a couple of moons to go.
Emily hears Kage before she sees her. Kage is singing P. J. Harvey's Send His Love To Me with the kind of abandon that generally means one cannot hear oneself or one is very confident of one's musical ability. Difficult, before actually seeing the rowan-haired Other come around her usual tree, straying to the center of the path, hands in her back pockets, which it is with Kage: she is so self-contained it's a difficulty, imagining her unconfident.
She is singing with enjoyment. She is singing with a dramatic throb to her voice. She is singing with her full-throat, and the choir hushes, then twitters around: same effect of light, twinking through shadow.
And she stops, when she sees Emily, saying hello to the new day, takes an ipod bud out of her ear, calls -- voice furred, now, slinkster-y, needs-honey -- "Hail and well met!"
[Falling Leaves] Like birdsong, a voice, familiar and yet not, coming round the bend before her rings on her fingers and bells on her toes Rowan-crowned self comes just into view, heralds the Disciple's arrival like the sky-light breaks the dawn. It draws Emily's attention away from the water, captures her blue-dark eyes, narrows them with curiousity, fascination. It slows the progress of her head, to brush a curl away from her temple, crossing her features and obscuring the view for a moment. When that hands falls away the little bird has come into view, a bird with a robin-bright throat, red, crimson, scarlet at the corner of her eye, a shade reserved for Kage and Kage alone. The girl with a name like a trap, candescent, kindling.
Emily's smile is slow, spreads like the daylight, warms with the brightening. Her voice is soft, yet, hushed (hear now? this quiet?) and sleep-stuck.
"Well met, and hello. How fare you today?" Their speech is rounder than birdsong, less sharp and trill at its edges. It's riddled through with ritual, with humanity, with the foibles, follies and greatness of man. It is year-speak, this, this pattern, this calling. Touched with crimson and aubergine, fall touched, brown-gold gilt, rustling.
The girl moves over a little on the bench. She wipes a little drip away from the edge of the thermos with her thumb, then offers it to Kage. It is steaming, spiced and redolent of orange peel. It is heavier on the tongue, lingers at the back of the throat; warm: rich.
[Candle] There is still noise blaring from the earbuds. Kage has forgotten them, momentarily. This is Kage, today: a long, narrow skirt -- it is not best for hikery in the woods; she decided to come to Tekakwitha on a whim, then -- and a deeping purple (aubergine) tanktop, some hole-y (holy [hushed]) knitwear thing thrown over, a multitude of greens and grays. The presentation is generally demure, even with the brightness of her hair, even with the expression in her eyes, the set of her jaw, almost in spite of her resonance, Ardent, ardor, Draining, leeching, immanent, la belle dame sans.
"Well," Kage says. And then, "Gregor is returning." Because this is the good news of the day, of the week. And any good news after the end of last month is to be treasured. Gregor, creepy, creeping, but well-intentioned, self-appointed protector, vanguard, mirror-watch, is coming home.
"And how are you? Thank you." Kage cups the thermos in both hands. There is no steam to pull either Delphic prophesy or mundane observation from, so she sips, slow, careful, and then smiles a touch. "I've been drinking teas like this lately, too. I haven't wanted anything light, anything flowery; I've just wanted smoke and spice."
[Candle] [And awareness for Kage-y!]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6)
[Falling Leaves] [And such for Emily!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 3, 5, 8, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Falling Leaves] "They seem appropriate," she concurs, all quiet-like. All surety and calm. There is a calm to Emily, now, that wasn't there before. It had been pushed aside at the White Picket Fence House, but since then something has rebuilt it, rekindled it, reinforced its reverence. There is surety and grace to it, amplified by this place at this time.
"It tastes honest."
Emily scooches back a bit on the tree, lets her feet dangle. She's wearing dark jeans, and a cranberry red camisole. A cream-white ballet sweater covers the still-healing marks on her arms, covers her shoulders, makes her look a little more demure. It ties under her bust.
"I'm glad to here someone is returning," she says. Then pauses. There is no sharpness to her tone, but there is relief. There is a balance to keep, and the scales have been tipped toward leavings for far too long. Owen, and Declan, and Charlie -- all in the space of a month. Now Gregor is coming back, and there's a rightness to that.
"Declan has left."
Tit for tat. They fill out the balance sheet. Three out, one in, one more on his way back (little do they know). One dead. One taken and then returned (checked out like a library book). August was busy at the mage circulation desk. Back-to-school busy; summer reading busy.
They are a library, a study of studies, a collection of paginated histories. [I am a writer, writer of fictions / I am the heart that you call home / And I've written pages upon pages / Trying to rid you from my bones]
"I am..." She thinks, she rolls the silence around on her tongue, tries it out, casts a long glance across the water (bright on the edge of swells, light touched, shadowed, contrasting, surging, recanting, shhhhh...). She smiles, faintly, and then takes that and broadens it, widens it: Hopeful. "Better. I think I may know what I might grow up to be, after this waiting to Sing has passed. I am hopeful; it's a good way to enter Autumn."
[Candle] Their marks may well match, directed as the ritual (burning [shining]) was by the disciple, when it got away from the apprentice, when it escaped the disciple, and reality came crashing down on their heads, knocking them downward, stamping them with a tracery of iron-wrought lock, something improbable, something someone might look at and think, how did they get their bruises to take that pattern, something that greens as it fades away from deathing and broken.
"I know," Kage says, of Declan, no longer smiling. Rather, her forehead puckers in concentration. It would be a good moment for her to comb her fingers through her hair, which is messy, motley, red-Cap, wolf-flag, murderer and here-for-murdering, which is sun-gilt in the sungold of the opening morning. After a moment, she lets it go - " - I hope he finds what he's looking for, and it does not crush him too low." Again, she almost wants to say. Again. "I think Chicago was a good city for him."
And Emily is better. Emily has found a direction. Emily has found a compass, and it shows in the surety with which she answers. Kage says, "Really?" The note is a question, and the question is more than just Really?
But then there is this, too --
The world, although it is thickened, stultified, ordered in many ways by the Consensus, although magick is less obvious, there are still such things in the world if one only opens one's eyes to them. Kage can feel all of these things, in the general vicinity, pricking on her skin, washing over her like a complicated scent, a melange of spices, Emily's unrelenting reverence, something in the traveler's box they've tucked away in the king's side [spear] which feels of senescing, abundance, revelry, something strong and unusual, something that'll take, re-write, and feels also the -- there's something else, near, in the water, gathering up, dwelling. A lot to look at, a lot to see.
Emily feels the box, more than most. The box, and the demon lover's daughter (lover [child]) leaning against the oak's side and holding her thermos with both hands.
[Falling Leaves] They are talking of Declan and it brings a sweet-sorrow to that smile. To her mouth, which remembers the taste of his, which remembers the warmth of that moment (Can I kiss you? [I don't know. Can you?]), stolen in the half-moon light, beside the swallow-dark stand-in sea, with the sand between her toes. Grit-dirt that didn't quite fall out until she was all the way home, littered the floor of her shoes (house [There was an Old Woman who...).
"I hope he finds what he's looking for," she says, but it's no throw-away cliche. She will miss him, Declan, as she misses all the others. She will miss him more in some ways, less in others. She will miss him not because he kissed her in the moonlight, not because he played the violin, but because of the joy (awe-full) she caught sight of in his eyes. The longing. The drive. How so little given could become be so very much in his hands.
But there is a question to answer, so the sad-touch does not linger. Emily shrugs -- this is an answer -- and reaches over into the heart of the King, the hollowed out hallowed place where the heart-box lived. They had not yet tested it, reached out for it, and it veritably sang in this golden moment. Golden like the apples that Kage had brought last time. Gold, the leaves were turning to gold; everything summers, everything swelters, everything turn-touches to gold in the Fall.
She pulls the box onto her lap, slides her fingers down its sides, uses her thumbs to lift the lid. The thrum of Revelry rises, like an uptempo song, a dance, a jig, a country waltz, a melody uplifting. Off-kilter. Loping. Drive. Dancing. It heightens the warm-thick taste of spices on their tongues, enriches the color of the world around them. Builds up the wonder until it is overfilling, overflowing, o'er the top: Abundance. And even yet, there is a whispering in, an exchange, a thing taken in balance. Shh, a thing taken, tautened, broken.
A dying.
(Can you hear the year dying?)
She pauses here, half in and half out of the box-opening thought.
"I think I may become a Knight."
The word is archaic, but there's a rightness to it. A righteousness -- mark, these are not the same thought. A rightness and a righteousness, and a reverence. Duty-bound. She shrugs again.
The thing in her lap pulls at the quick-bright Disciple. It beckons. Like a flame, Candle. (Am I your flame, Candle?) It calls like lamplight in a still dark night.
[Wraith] Ashley, too, is going to miss Declan. The violin, it's been returned to her closet, locked away once more in darkness, and shutting that door struck her through: she'd liked the idea of it being played again, of a bow making the strings sing. She'd liked the idea of someone else building something out of her loss. She'd liked the idea of someone taking something ugly and meaningless and full of suffering and transforming it, transmuting it into something beautiful (alchemy.)
Then again, she consoles herself, it still helped. Even if he didn't keep it for that long. Or at least that's what she's going to be telling herself.
The disciple had skipped ahead to sing a song Ashley can't hear, and once in a while her voice drifts back through the leaves, discordant, dissonant, no longer a voice but a wail, a keening. Something eerie and painful to listen to. So Ashley doesn't.
They can both sense her approaching hunger, there winding along the path through the trees. She isn't walking very fast; she's taking a chance to just be herself in the forest for a while, to feel like she's alone among the trees. Ashley is quiet and subdued right now, the sort of quiet that comes over the sleepless, the preoccupied. The sort of quiet that settles over people who are aching.
But she knows how to find the Fallen King, and the sight of the tree brings back other times: lying in the water with Kage talking about Boston, and she and Morgan came out here once, and she and Daiyu came out here once, and she came out here alone a few times to leave poems in the heart box, little shards of herself.
In coming upon the other two, catching the tail end of their conversation (too dim for a single ear) there's a tired smile toward Emily, a pull of the corner of her mouth. She hasn't seen the Singer-to-be since last week at the house. The (almost a) week has carved itself on her face.
Still, she rakes hair back out of her face, sits down on one of the claw branches.
[Candle] Emily is opening the box, and there is something inside; something that touches, something that calls, something which causes Kage, her fingers still curved around the thermos like some painted-girl with autumn-hair in a Victorian painting that seeks to summon up (drum up [dream up]) the idea of paganism, but not too strongly, because sensualism, all of that, must be deep-weighted, must be dark-dredged, must be a subtle hint. See how prayerful they are. See how (ir)reverent. Kage is entirely unconscious of this effect, and although she has dyed her hair blonde before, she has no inclination to dye it again, so she will not help its associations. Kage, fingers curved around the thermos, fixes her gaze on it. Says -
" - somebody's left something interesting."
But it doesn't feel dangerous. And Kage, she feels everything right now. A glimmer, a glean, a fish-hook's sharpness that could be -- intention; if she chooses to open her eyes. It feels dangerous, but not malicious. Not a smutty, besmirched trap-thing. Maybe just something wondrous. And maybe because it doesn't feel dangerous, because it just feels like possibility, Kage isn't entirely distracted.
"And I think he'll find what he's looking for. He knows how to make himself into a compass. He just needs to want to point it home. Or - where ever. It sounded like that's what he wanted in the note he left me."
Knight, Emily says. The word is archaic, and the way they dance around words when they're at the Court, the word could also be a metaphor, be something imbued with passing meaning. A knight is an archetype; Justine told Kage that Ashley's Bran was a knight. " - what kind of Knight?" she asks.
And Ashley is here. Kage doesn't start, guiltily, as another might and say: oh, and by the way, just behind me, down the forking path, just beyond the leaf-litter carpet by the stone with three holes - or - Crap, I forgot to say - Ashley's here - I left her behind - She does turn her ipod off, so there is no longer tinny, tinny noisomeness coming from the earbuds, and she tucks them into her pocket, half-glances at Emily for permission, and if permission is granted, she hands-off the thermos of tea [of orange peel, of incense] to the Hermetic.
Who is a wraith. A ghost, today.
[Falling Leaves] She glances up at the sound of footfalls on the path, on the leaf litter (crunch) and the black-brown ground. Emily looks first to the half of the path where she has come up, the way by which her guests have come. They have not taken Kage's route; that was not hers to share.
Long ago, because the Court was a her-and-Kage thing, before they'd begun to name it aloud as anything more than that Place or a convenient Fallen tree, she'd sat here with another. Snow bright and Winter cold, sharp, curl smoke exhalations. Sapphire blue eyes. Feline grace.
More recently, she brought another here. Intense, watchful, corrosive. And they were happy for awhile.
But mostly it has been her, and it has been Kage, and their well-mets and hails. And now there is Ashley, who wanders in and takes a seat at the foot of the Throne, on claw branches.
"Well met," Emily says, enfolding her in the ritual, wrapping her in the Loneliness and wonder of the place. It is, after all, important. Keeping these tiny traditions amongst not-entirely-Traditionalists is important. It is vital in a soul-deep way. The week has not been gentle, has not been kind, but it has not been entirely irredeemable. So she greets Ashley as she would Kage, and she nods a tacit approval to passing on the (not jasmine sweet) redolent and spice-heavy tea. It is thick-imbued and clings to the back of her throat if she drinks of it.
The thermos passes to Ashley, the heart-box to Kage, and it leaves Emily's hands empty. She plants them on the bark beside her hips, rolls her shoulders forward a little, looks out across the water with an uncanny weightlessness.
What kind of Knight? Kage asks.
"A good one," Emily answers.
She smiles faintly, looks again to the far-off shore that has so often failed to offer up answers, offer up promises, offer up Hope. She knows, now, that it's because she had to find these things in and of herself. She knew, then, too; now it is clearer.
[Wraith] The two of them, they're speaking of Knighthood, good knights. Ashley listens without attempting to break into the conversation, content just to listen for now: introverts, they're good at that sometimes. That smile on her face turns wistful, because it makes her think of Bran.
Not an annointed knight, though, Bran (blessed), no oils and smoke and vows. Just chivalrous and valiant, just driven to build and raise something with his hands, build something lasting. Just the promise of an eternal and undying summer. Emily and Bran would probably have liked each other, all told.
Knights don't always slay monsters. There are tales (more recent, new even though they've built on old ideas) of how they tame them. And they were happy for a while.
"Morning," she says to Emily, without that speech of ritual. Because Ashley, she has respect for ritual but she isn't an archaic creature, has shed many of the trappings of Tradition in order to embrace the new age. In order to shed skin. Then she is silent, then she just listens.
She takes the tea, and sips it from the thermos, and looks toward Kage there with the heart box.
[Candle] The air stills. Listen. Not a whisper in the leaf-branches. Listen. Not a murmur 'neath the green-flung verdancy. Listen. There is nothing, except for the net of bird-song, the sound-cage of twittering, audial equivalent of sunlight glancing off the smooth surface of pebbles just beneath the non-smooth surface of a shallow, shallowing streamlet. But the air: soundless, and still. The kind of still that feels like weightlessness. The kind of still that feels like [Sanctuary (Lonely)] a place to stay, to belong, solitary but safe, wanting, wistful, but in no danger, not bereft.
"But how will you measure good?" Kage says, because of course she can't leave a statement like that alone. Just like she can't leave a closed box alone, when it has something inside that revels, that holds the cup up high and fills it, that sounds like a party, like dancing, that - well. Who knows? Someone could have just plunked some old forgotten postcard that has gathered quintessence and wishes up over the years, soaked it up like a sponge from elsewhere: there are strange things to be found. "Oh," this is a half-thought, absent: "There are brownies in my bag."
Kage's bag. Hip-bag, brown - suede, clasped closed. Kage leans away from the fallen oak, lightning-scratched-up, calligraphied-ruin and offers it to whomsoever wants to take some brownies. Food and drink: that's how the ritual goes, yes?
The box has its usual assortment of things: a flower, wilting, fading, someone thought was neat; a stone, a rubber-band -- indeed, the same post-card as before; one of Ashley's poems, a scrap of notepaper, a ribbon, a packet of rose seeds, and a book. The book is prayer-book sized: small, to fit against the palm, measure itself by the palm and fingerspan, a thumb to clasp. And it makes a dry, husking sound, when Kage takes it out, careful, careful, because it could easily fall apart. Or it looks as if it might. It's bound in wood, plain, and there is an open lock without a key, and the pages are pale (bone) yellow, crinkled, wavering, because they're corn-husk. There is corn-grain woven into the binding, corn-grain on the front -- deep brown, russet-kissed.
And an apple on the cover page. Kage opens it, and that's all there is. The apple.
No ink appears, just yet. But when it does -
And it's almost overwhelming, to the Aware. This is a Wondrous Thing.
[Wraith] [Whaaaaaat?]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 8, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Candle] [Where oh where do I go!]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 2, 2, 8 (Success x 1 at target 5)
[Falling Leaves] There are brownies and Emily is, officially now, a graduate student. And graduate students, you see, do not pass up free food, not free brownies, not brownies that Kage might bring. Not anything food and drink offering-like that these three might offer up as gifts to one another, in ritual or elsewise. For this Triad (as they are [as you were]) is particular. About their magics. About their friendships. About all that they let in.
We are all that we let in.
Kage tips open the book as Emily slides off the trunk of the King. Her fingertips touch the scorch marks at His ribs, the bruise-black the echoes the writing on her own. This place is rife with symbolism, with happenstance, with resonance. It is filled past overflowing. So saturated that they could not take it all in. There's a whisper at the small hairs at the back of their necks, and a richness that fills their nostrils.
The Apprentice (only barely) is ferreting out breakfast to share with them all when the space at the corner of her eye flares. It is bright like midday, crisp-clear like Autumn, there's laughter (only just) and a tug, a tug, a tugging that pulls her attention back...
... to the place where Kage wasn't.
The box tumbles. Its precious and hidden treats tumble. They spill out like a feast across the table-bed of dried leaves. A ribbon curls among the cancer-white mushrooms pressed up against His side, the stone tumbles down to the claw-feet where Ashley sits.
The book sits, cradled in the little crag-corner of the upstretched branch. It is held, as if the King had caught it, spared it the indignity of falling to the ground. It all but thrums with the intertwined resonances. Revelry. Abundance. Senescence.
There is an apple on the cover, and it is slowly turning to gold.
The Apprentice stands, slowly. Frowns gently. Looks to Ashley for a moment, before she moves away from the brownies and toward that small book. She reaches for it -- and if Ashley does not call her away, or stop her, will take it up to study, too.
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
There is a brightness, day bright, suddenly high-noon, suddenly enraptured, enthralled, turn your eyes away from this -- burn bright, overwhelming the Candle, see the backs of your eyelids bright. Burn, baby, burn. It swells, peaks, and dies out. All in an instant. It is gone, then, and the after-image slowly dies away from her eyes.
There is a path, thick and fat-black, under her feet, and the King has departed leaving golden fields of wheat to either side of this throughfare. It is warm but not too hot, with a slanted-high sunlight, and the stalks sway hither and thither and Lo! -- there is a fork up again, where the black river parts into a narrow branch and a truer one, fat like the father-vein. And at that fork there's a lightning-shattered trunk, still upright, like a sign post, where a broad wicker-wreath hangs.
At its apex, a gourd-thing, hollowed out and filled with beans, that rattles when the wind shakes it, when the children push the pole-tree from side to side, whenever it wills. There are leaves wrapped through it, and bright berries, and apples -- apples that are golden, and just starting to wither.
There is a fork in the road, and at the fork a signpost, and the fat path is well traveled, the little one littered with small rocks and leaf-crush. It is the path less traveled.
[Wraith] Graduate students do not pass up free food. Neither does Hunger, and Ashley likes sweets. The Hermetic reaches for one of the brownies, draws a leg up while letting the other dangle, rests her elbow on her knee while she eats it in small bites. That curiosity, however diminished at present, is still there while she watches the other two handle the book.
Ashley sits there at the base of the Throne, leans her back against that scorched and scarred tree. Could have reigned the city once, the Hermetic. At the moment this is the kind of throne she seems to prefer.
She watches Kage as Kage opens the book, as Emily goes about bringing out breakfast for all of them to share. Repast, because this place is ritual, and these three are fast becoming a triad in all but name. Studies the bloody-haired Orphan while she holds the book with the apple on the front there in her hands.
And then Kage is gone.
"Kage?" And Emily is frowning gently, but Ashley is not. Ashley's voice is holding a note of panic, of pain, and the half-eaten brownie drops from her fingers as though her hand was stung and tumbles into the dust, utterly forgotten. Emily might not get a chance to look at the book, because Ashley is already scrabbling off the tree toward it, but her lack of depth perception betrays her and she tumbles, falls, barks a knee. Doesn't notice.
Emily opens the book.
------------------------------
[For Emily]
There is brightness, but it's all been blotted out by a canopy of spreading boughs, weaving and interlocking together overhead. It's held up, held aloft, by pillar trunks lined up in a row like soldiers marching across a muddy field. Unmowed, the grasses beginning to grow wild.
The air hangs heavy with a heavy scent, a spicy one, unmistakable: apples, some rotting there on the ground, turning brown and soft even as their fragrance wafts upward, some weighing down the branches, round and weighty and sweet. There is no path here; to her left is a stone fence, crumbling, some of the stones fallen inward and outward.
Forgotten place.
[Falling Leaves] [Arete roll for weirdness!]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 7, 10 (Success x 2 at target 5)
[Candle] [Er - Wits! Quicklike! How wtf?]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Candle] And Emily vanishes, as surely, as cleanly, as completely as Kage before her.
And Ashley is alone beside the oak-tree. This time, the book is not caught by the King. This time, the book hits the verdant ground. The pages chafe one against the other, and there is no wind to come and thumb through their edges, rifling them. There is just the book, and its cover, and -- look. Ashley, maybe Ashley sees this, notices it, or maybe Ashley notices nothing at all except that she is alone, and she is alone because of the book [burn], but look: the cover-page, where there is an apple in roan-ink and, on either side of the apple, in brown-ink, flowing, two silhouettes of girls, moving toward it.
There is no Emily.
There is no Kage.
There is no air.
Just the book.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Part Two. Kage.]
There is wheat and there is gold (and it is everywhere, harvest-timing; it is a sea, blanching, bleaching in the days, as the days grow shorter, shortest, short), and there is no Fallen King, and there is no Emily, and no Ashley, and no book. There is Kage, though, and the woman with hair so red -- so heart's blood red that it's touched her Name, that it's part of who she is when she is remembered by others, hair as red as th desire to spark - is still holding her hands as if she were also holding a book. But her hands are empty.
There's a moment when she could be frantic. There's a moment where her heart yells at her, climbs up her throat, like it wants to peer out, to see whether it should just flee, give up now, and then she swallows it (stay, safe). There are children. There is a path, and she is on it. And she isn't -
There is no book in her hands. First, Kage looks for that, compassing a slow circle, looking out toward the horizon she supposedly came from. Then she is reaching out to touch wheat-stalks, tall, crowning -- real? Yes, real. Then she is saying, utterly fervent, completely ardent -
" - Fuck."
She starts to approach the sign, warily; then she stops, and draws an X where she was first standing. She is utterly confused, but she is also Kage, so she is poised. She is still shocked, and she is not freaking out. Yet.
[Falling Leaves] There is a blotted-out brightness, a shade, a shadow cast by the interlocking branches of the canopy overhead. She lifts her gaze upward, tipping her head back; doesn't think to notice if the brownie came with her, feels the emptiness in her hands where the book might have been. It's forgotten, for a moment, lost in the stretch-reach and flutter -- the insistence (Unrelenting) of a something, buried in her breast, that she reach onward, and upward. A longing to settle on those overhead branches, to rise above the boundary of the canopy, to soar.
It's a sharp-ache, like talons grazing over bone-white ribs, that steals away her breath and causes her to gasp, to draw in the sweet-rot-apple scent, deep into her lungs. There's a flutter, an unseen rustle of feathers, an imagined brush of wind. She knows these things from Seeking, knows the restlessness they bring.
She walks toward the stone wall, to where it has crumbled, to run her fingertips over the worn stone. It reminds her of an Abbey, a place crumbling and old, reverent and ancient. The Singer-to-be closes her eyes, and calls up the memory of that Song. Threads it through this forgotten place with its wild grass pushing long fingers up along her jeans, seeking for weaknesses, for a place where the hem darts away from her leg enough that they might reach in and touch against her skin. Above her sock, below her knee, hidden away by the dark fabric.
She reaches out with her Awareness, to take the measure of this odd place. To mark it down. To know it. Because it is a place aside, a little to the left, just like the Court. But it was not the Court, and she was beginning to think she should be somewhat alarmed.
[Awareness!]
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
The stalks are real, the horizon is real. It is far, far away. So far away that it becomes hazy, indistinct, before it is truly recognized. The fields go on for some time, some space, dappled here and there by taller things. A farm house in the distance. A stand of trees, up ahead, tall and tightly interwoven, like a blight. A darkness. Green and clustered; a shadow cast perhaps by a cloud -- no, there are no clouds in the sky, which is a deeper blue than Summer. It is not a white-blue any longer.
Now there is an X-marks-the-spot; she makes it, she wills it. A definite waypoint. Possible a beginning, maybe an ending, who knows?
She reaches the signpost and it is thus: on the ground beside the pole-tree, beside the black-scarred (like iron-wrought imprints) upright, all around, strewn merrily thus, are gifts. Offerings. Dried ears of corn, orange-bright pumpkins, apples (always apples) both crimson and gold, aubergines. Closer, now, she can tell the wreath is not wicker, instead it is made of grape vines, replete with tendrils dried down to the color of Ashley's hair.
Ashley who is not here.
Hanging from one of those tendril is this: A ribbon of red, a ribbon of white, a ribbon of black; all threaded through the upper loop of a heavy, silver key that is old. Antique. And a key is a promise, that there will be a lock to fit to it, that it will unlock a mystery, a secret, a something.
There is a key, Kage, left to hang from the signpost. A signpost which offers less information than most. There's a thin path and a thicker one. The thin leads toward the blight, the darkness, the shadow; the thick leads over a little hump of land, over a nearer horizon, away and out of sight.
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 6, 8, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Candle] [Alert-ish?]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 3, 6, 6, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Falling Leaves] [For Kage]
Oh, alert are we star-bright, Candescent, Candle, Luminous and Amorous and smoulder-soot? Alert, was that it. Why, then, well down at your feet, all but cover o'er by the offerings, there's a pair of branches. One silver, one gold.
And the silver has apples, they're round and resplendent, they almost seem juicy however fine-wrought and metal-cast they are now. But the gold has oak leaves and acorns, finery in equal measure, detailed as the other. They're there, by her feet, overwhelmed by the harvest.
Abundance, and beneath it these glint-glimmer-whispers.
to Candle
[Wraith] There is no Emily.
There is no Kage.
Ashley's mouth sags open as Emily disappears, too, and as the book flutters to the ground, as its pages flap open, light, a whisper like paper wings. She's on the ground, now, where she fell, where her knee struck the roughness of the tree's bark, where it's stinging beneath the fabric of her jeans.
And for an instant there's a stab of despair, a few rapid intakes of breath as she rocks back on her heels. As her hands grip either elbow and she stares a second at the book, before the part of Ashley that is resolved, that is Relentless Determination, finally kicks in.
You're being pathetic. Do something.
So she picks up the book, and there are two girls making their way toward that apple, and Ashley too opens it and looks inside.
----------------------------------------
[For Emily]
The tendrils of grass snake up along Emily's legs, whisper against the fabric of her clothing, and they rasp like an unused voice, like a person that has forgotten how to speak. Some of them brush against her skin and it is the first human touch those blades have felt in a while.
She can follow the wall, and it stretches for a long, long time even though she steps out of the orchard before long. There's just the field and it's there, and muddy, and in the far distance she can see the ribs of an old structure, stark and black. A chimney, rising from those ashes, soot on its exterior rather than its interior.
This is not the Court.
But it feels a little like the Court, because this too is a place of loneliness, a forlorn place, a place that others have found before her and then left again.
[Candle] When she inhales, she can smell the end of summer, drawing nigh; more than drawing. Nigh, nigh. When she inhales, she can smell the apples, wither-rotting, softening, ripening into mush, into mulch, into sweet Lamb's-wool (delicacy [eat it with cloves]), and that raw, scraped-out sense of fire could happen at any moment now that the earth's drying out, maybe it'll kindle come winter, keep living things wick. When she inhales, she can smell her own shampoo, lavender, vanilla, and Kage regards the dangling key for a long time. A crow calls, somewhere.
Kage closes her eyes, and says, cool, "Come out." You'd think she was calling to whoever left the harvest-goods, but she isn't. Kage is calling to Him, and hoping, wanting, him to come out. He should. This is just His kind of place: a cross-roads, uncertainty; and she isn't wrong, because there is a Shadow. See Him? He comes out from behind the wicker-work, the pole-tree, [gallows pole] while she crouches next to the abundance left there, while she regards the glint of silver branch, the shine of gold, the apples and the acorns.
"Is this you?" she says, looking up quickly; "If it is, what do you want? There are easier ways to get my attention. We just - you woke me up; am I still there, or are Emily and Ashley just - ?"
He hunkers down, too. His feet are bare, and they root into the earth. He looks like anyone, just now. There is nothing terrifying at him at all, except for his lack of shadow, for the brightness hidden under his swarthy skin, his dark hair, his darker eyes, the star tucked through a button hole, how it struggles, squirms, clinks when he leans forward against his button like a scream.
This isn't mine, he says, simply. And, sly - I'm not going to torment you. This is different. I like it. It reminds me of a flock of crows. What are you going to do, Kage?
"I'm going to - " and she hesitates. Then she takes a deep breath, and draws another thing in the dirt. But she draws this with a ring she has, something she thumbs out've her pocket, slips on.
[Prime 1/Entropy 1! I'm - watching the flow of luck, gathered around this here place of offerings. There's no CURSE, is there? -1 foci. -1 practiced.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[For Ashley. Chapter ?]
There is brightness, and it is winning. There is brightness, and it is gathering up overhead. It is a blinding, unshadowing thing; it makes Noon jealous, makes the Moon swoon, fan herself back from pallor, pales the Moon with wanting; it is just that bright. In the first instant, it is bright enough to blanch Ashley's bones, although she's wearing her shape of flesh and blood, sinew and skin. It's certainly enough to make her one good eye wince; to make her flinch, as if she'd just had salt flicked in the healing wound at her side [it'll itch, soon, and they'll - ].
There is brightness, see, and it is a white brightness, which gathers cupped by the dome over Ashley's head. It is a man-made thing, glass, bolstered by some metal (rusting, badly rust-eaten), and the glass is broken. There are panes still whole, intact, which gather the light and make it into the palest of rainbows; there are panes partially damaged, and sunlight slants through them, honey-and-dusk, and if she's still looking up, Ashley can follow the architecture to a central point [a star, a pentagram, an apple-seed map] where there is just clear air.
The building she's found herself in could never have been a barn, but it smells like one. Smells of hay, of sweetgrass; smells of burning, and of mulling spices -- something brewing, somewhere; some fire, someone's smoke. There is, in the center of this not-barn, this cathedral-of-barns, glass-topped, ruined, a pair of twining trees. The first tree is an apple tree, naturally, gnarly and crabbed and dead, barren, all leaves gone except for one, very high up. The second tree is an Ash-tree, naturally, white and stark and old, with shadows that are blue with age. There is a key-hole, bisecting an interlocking of apple-wood and ash-wood, and there is also this:
Hanging, from the opening of the cathedral, just above the highest branch of the trees [Tree], something bundled up, something in sack-cloth, tied with brown-as-ink twine. Horror would say: that's a human body, in that sack, wrapped in that cloth; that's a human body, that's the head, those are the shoulders, and He's so still.
The hanging man swings in the air, gently, like a lullaby, pressed against a child's temple: with a kiss.
There is also a gathering ring of crows, one by one by two by four perching on the edge of the opening. They're not silent. They're not ominous. They're not staring, bead-eyed and black feathered. They sound like they're cackling, they sound like they're having a whole conversation: like they're revelling, around the hanged-man kept from them by the cloth, by the ropes. They sound like they're having a good old time.
Ashley is still alone.
[Candle] [And now with roll! should also be -1, taking time >.>]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 2, 6 (Failure at target 3)
[Candle] [... nuh UH. Avatar's right there.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 2, 5, 6 (Success x 2 at target 4)
[Falling Leaves] Speaking without words has never been an oddity to her; language has never been something on which she could steadily rely, moving around as much as she has. And now she has James to remind of what that immersion in unintelligble sound was like, the struggle, the point-and-smile, and hold up so many fingers. The respite of not being constantly assailed with information, seeping in, skin deep, from every angle. So she can recognize the touch of Loneliness in the grass, and how it echoes back to their more familiar Court. She can follow the long and worn wall, but not just yet.
Before she leaves, Emily reaches up, on her tip toes if she must. She reaches up to pull an apple from a bough. Even though there are stories about women in orchards (in Gardens), of temptation, in Good Books and in others. But the boughs are filled to overflowing, they bend under the weight of this crop, and in the place she has left she was hungry, she was seated beside Hunger herself. It is time to breakfast, and the fruit is inviting.
There are cautions about eating fruit in strange places. Myths. Legends. But the air is filled with sweet-scent, and the structure in the distance is a long walk away. So she'll gnaw on the apple while she walks, and when she's closer she'll study the soot-stained chimney, the ribs of a structure. The Architect in her will sigh sadly, for the failed purpose, the destruction.
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
There is no curse, Kage. No curse at play. No things turned black and withered beyond their seemings. No sickness to take in. Draw down. Down like moon bright. Nothing to capture and seep into her bones, to slosh in her marrow, to fill them up with aching.
But there -is- a magic to it, a building up, a presence. It flows around the gallows pole, spiraling ever inward. It goes widdershins about it, turns, and turns, and turns, and if she looks into it, this spiral, if she lets herself feel drawn into it, like a whirlpool, like a vortex, like a cone of descending energy -- it draws down, into the earth, into the Underworld, the hollowed out places. This building up of gifts, it draws the energy down. Puts it back into the land from which this bounty came.
There is a key above, on its tricolor cord. It hangs down like a pendulum. Down like a dead weight. Down like an omen. Down, but it isn't burdened by curses. He rocks back on his heels, stands with a grace, moves with a swagger -- you borrow that Kage, he's seen it, but he's of it, personified, embodied, perfected. He reaches for the key, but his fingertips pass through it. They don't so much as brush against it.
He sighs. Looks to her. Looks to the key. Looks to the markings she's making in the dirt, and his mouth curls -- mocking, only just, ah but there, she's got it, she holds the effect, it does not entirely falter; the smirk fades a little.
[Wraith] She stands before an apple tree and an ash, twined together, a hanged man there above its boughs. The ash, it's a sacred tree, it's there in her Name: and the Tree does not grant its wisdom to the weak or the faint of heart. One has to be willing to sacrifice, to Hang there while a crow snaps up her eye and the other snaps up her ear. One has to be willing to be devoured, to devour, spanning the world until its end.
The first thing she does is look where those trees meet, look at that keyhole, that little space between the trunks, and Ashley reaches a hand into it. Unafraid of something lurking within, something that might snap off her fingers.
This is a world of wonder, and any fear she has, it's been forgotten. Left by the wayside. Ashley is afraid of so little.
Her fingers skim the interior, sensitive fingertips, the kind of sensitivity one gets by gauging their environment partially by touch rather than sight. She doesn't expect to find anything. And all the while her eyes are turned up toward the sky, to the revelling murder of crows and the body in the tree.
She'll have to climb.
--------------------------------------------
[For Emily]
This is a perfect apple: the skin is still firm, but the flesh beneath isn't hard, isn't too soft either, is fresh and unbruised and it crunches between her teeth. The juice fills her mouth, Macintosh, tart and sweet at once, biting and with all the headiness of cider in late fall.
It's so perfect that she isn't sure anything will ever taste that good again.
But there are no snakes, nothing to cast her out, no bursts of insight or the sorrow or grief of the world suddenly crashing down on her. Just that taste, amazing as it is, and it makes her want to eat the whole thing and then find another one.
But the house, too, beckons.
[Wraith] [Arete roll for Jess]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 3, 5, 6 (Success x 2 at target 5)
[Wraith] [Dex + Athletics, for climbing.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 9, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Candle] It's habit, this. This making a secret of a response to Him; the faint curl at the corner of her mouth, just there, something star-kiss'd, burning, pleased and wry at once, making it subtle rather than overt, just in case somebody's around to wonder at why she's suddenly laughing, or grinning, or blinking back tears, or so furious she could - it's habit. It's become habit, this remove.
He tries to take the key. He tries to hook his fingers under the ribbons, and take the key from the gallow's pole. Kage reaches into her bag, still at her hip, and takes out one of those brownies she'd mentioned, places it with all the rest. Then she stands, hooks her fingers under the ribbons, takes them, regards the key curiously, rests it (labors it) in the palm of her hand.
Kage is a wary creature, but her fingers are naked, and her palm is bare - "And what? Now I click my heels together, Home, Home, Home?"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[For Ashley, Chapter ?]
So she climbs.
And she climbs well, perhaps as well as she is able. The trees are so enmeshed that it is difficult to stay with the ash, rather than the dead, dying apple-thorn; they should both be dead, perhaps - they should both be held, dying - and her foot finds purchase on the key-hole, carved, and for a moment her foot is cold, numbness emanates from within the wood, and it's as if she's skimmed her foot through winter, skimmed her foot into winter, and winter is nothing but ice, but inkiness, water. And then the chill is gone, but leaves behind an impression; she can still feel it for another minute of climbing, and now she is in the branches proper. They're everywhere.
And she can see, tied to the wood, little scraps of paper.
And she can see, carved into the wood, runes.
And when she reaches the top, she can touch the cloth-covered hanged man's face, if she wants. When she reaches the top, she can take away the cloth, or try to call to the crows, or sit in silence, or let herself fall and see if the Ash'll hold her, if she can gain more wisdom just from the hanging.
There is also the apple tree's last (only) leaf. And the crows, which sound as if they're trying to have a conversation with her. Hello. What are you doing? Did you hear the one about She doesn't want to hear about your Uncle But NO [No] No (But I like the one about the Uncle-) Heaps of abuse, mockery! Crescendo!
[Falling Leaves] It is a perfect apple, and for a moment she wants to turn back, to lade her sweater, this first taste of Fall. This perfection. It's her favorite season, the one in which she Awakened, and it has finally returned.
She wants, but she doesn't need. Emily is not Hunger. Emily is Reverence. She can hold on to this memory, this perfect apple, this hollowed and forlorn place, this soot-stained memory, low wall, worn stone, tall grass -- she can quell the Hunger, leave it to Ashley's demesne, while licking the juice from her fingertips and nibbling the last flesh from the apple core.
And she can save the seeds in her pocket, just in case they make it across the divide between here and the Court. Maybe the three of them, see, can plant them. Maybe she can use her upcoming gifts to nurture these seeds, help them grow into a tree, a tree with deep roots, with broad branches, bearing sweet and perfect fruit.
Maybe the Court needs an apple tree, Macintosh, she thinks, as she walks. Because the house beckons, and it is ruinous, and there is a part of her that needs to know if there's anything there to name, to know, to save, to lift up, to wipe the soot away from. And when she gets there, rest her fingertips on the chimney stones, surveys the shell of a place, looks for a door in, or a gap in the once-wall, once Emily is near that place there is a calm and a surety to her. A purpose.
Find the firmaments, the things that stand true. Look for the details to tell her what happened.
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
She takes up the key and He seems pleased. Please enough to place one hand on the Gallows Pole, to walk around it, around it like a jig, a little taunt-dance, a revelry, a lightness, a pleased thing, in if you merry -- Are you merry? -- Is He happy with her choice.
The key is warm in her palm, weighty. It has been heated by the sunlight, the late summer sunlight, blessed by the harvest moon (Corn Moon). Her brownie seems at once at home and at odds with the rest of the offerings, but the space does not balk, does not spit it back, does not refuse it. Sweet, rich, it will offer counterpoint; it is color-perfect; it is enough.
Around and around and around He goes, and where He stops nobody -- He stops, places a hand on the top of His head as if to steady Himself. He is standing on the left-hand path. He, like an Oracle, live living (living?) diving rod, has come to rest on the narrower of the two.
"Two roads diverged in a yellow - uh - field," He quoth (with adjustments). It was a rejoineder to her quote. A tit-for-tat. Fair, really. "And I took the road less traveled by."
There is an unsteady point here, upward, to the heavens. A point made. Overhead, in the unbroken blue of the sky, a dark bird idled by. Swept past. Moved right-to-left, toward the thinner path, all signs point to: an Omen. There is a shadow that glides across the field, cast by this raven or crow that does not so much as call out.
[Wraith] There's still the chill of winter, the bite of ice and death, in her foot even as she climbs. Ashley tries to shake it out, tries to keep purchase on the tree. Worn canvas sneakers aren't made for climbing, the soles of Chucks wear down fast and the bottoms are getting slick, but she manages through the strength in her arms, through being light and small enough to stay on the branches.
And here's the top of the tree, and here are the crows. Hovering about, chattering loud, chaos. Ashley looks at them once, and it's without disgust, it's with respect even. She says nothing, not yet.
There are little scraps of paper about, and Ashley opens one of them and reads it. She looks over at the lone leaf, still there on the dead apple tree so entwined with the ash. And for some reason it makes her ache, gnawing pain and hunger in the pit of her stomach. She doesn't reach for it, not yet.
The hanged man, the bundle, is also waiting, and she intends to remove its cover.
But not yet. First, the paper.
-------------------------------------
[For Emily]
This is a forgotten place, and Emily knows that when she reaches it, the taste of the apple still in her mouth, the seeds in her pocket. There, ready to be grown into something new. There's a reverence in that.
This is a forgotten place, forlorn, and she can gather that by the way the ash is undisturbed over the bones of the structure. There are no footprints, nothing disturbed within what once was a Home, what once was a house. Some of it has been shuffled around by wind, by rain, by time. There's no heat from the ashes, no embers. It's all still.
There are objects within that she can see lying covered through that layer of dust (all is dust.) A long rectangular shape that could only be a chest, there toward the opposite end of the structure from the chimney. Within, next to the chest, a covered round object lying among others.
Bones. Forgotten bones.
They don't inspire horror. There's no blood, no viscera, and she can't see the grin of the skull. It's just empty here, and lonely.
[Wraith] [Linguistics + Int, specialty Abstract Concepts]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[Wraith] [Er, oops. Extra die.]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 1 (Botch x 1 at target 6)
[Candle] See. Okay. See? Kage can feel [hear] the senescing pull (sinking [draining] leeching) of Power down and down and down and down and out underneath the harvest and the pole spiraling and spiraling and draining to push back into something amorous later on in the year, and it unsteadies her, she feels it in her gut, and looking at the pole and the offerings helps.
There is a pair of branches beneath all the rest. A silver branch and a gold. Apples and acorns. There is a shadow, in the air; an Omen, a blot of dark and air. Kage looks at the key in the palm of her hand, where it sits, a bit of tarnished watershadow, where it's as warm as sun'ssorrow, where the metal remembers the kiss of morning's fire, tries to echo that memory back. Her fingers close around it, and she watches Him out of the corner of her eye while he turns himself into a swaggering, confident compass (True [North]), quotes. She smirks. Her back straightens, deer-grace, and she glances the way He points.
The path that leads toward blight and darkness and shadow, and she wraps the ribbons around her wrist, and her smirk becomes something eloquent in the way of of course You'd pick that one, of course. Her pulse is quick, but not too quick. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. Then she moves to stand, and take that path. Arrests herself, mid-motion; that glint-gleam of silver and gold, snagging her gaze again. She pauses, and then reaches under the squash-gourds, dappled green-and-yellow, and plucks an acorn and a leaf from the golden branch [burnished], and plucks an apple and a leaf from the silver.
The apple goes into her bag, and the acorn into her pocket. The leaves get tucked into her hair, which she pulls into a messy braid, and the cadence of her soles is even, as she takes the smaller, more secret path, and winds away from the beginning.
"All right."
~~~~~~~~~~
[For Ashley, Chapter ??]
The ash was reluctant to give Ashley (who has made itself kin to this wood, by virtue of the name she has chosen; the clan she has adopted as family; the tribe of white-wood, cold-wood, wood-as-pale-as-never, never-pale; it's just wood, and all wood ashes, when put to the flame, and Ashley belongs to an Order that wields fire) one of its papers, and it was difficult to unwind from the spindling branches. Not unduly so, but the branches she's caught amid seemed less steady, and the branch the paper was tied to, wrapped around, seemed to pull away, to cling, to magnetize, drag her. Still, she won, she got the paper. They're written in no language that she should know, but she knows enough of language that, somehow, still, the words aren't just Babel-punishment to her. They're words. And what she reads on the paper, the papers, is somebody's prayer (not a wish).
"that the Apple Man dies easy this year, and without the drama of last."
And another paper says,
"that the road brings strangers to drink of the dying Corn's first cup."
And another paper says,
"that my singing is sweeter than a crow's"
And another paper says,
"that I get everything I want."
And another,
"that the apple seeds travel."
Another,
"I want a crow's kiss."
Another,
"Anything for a crow song,"
And another,
"If they know the road to the moon, I'd like to hear it"
And another,
"Health."
And one of the crows, bold, young, inquisitive, hungry, lands on the feet of the hanging man, and the hanging man sways, and swings, and swings, and sways, and the rope that he is suspended from makes a high sound, something taut. And another, heavy bird, heavy bird, lands on the same branch Ashley's left foot is wedged against, and the branch dips at the end, graciously, like an arguer conceding a point. The crow sidles closer to Ashley, but doesn't threaten her.
This place doesn't feel like a threat.
[Falling Leaves] Emily stands at the margin of the soot-stained house. Home, she corrects herself. The sweet of the apple lingers on her lips, her fingertips are just a little sticky. They will take up the ash-soot, bind it to her fingerprints. If she isn't careful she'll leave little bits of herself here, little reminders, small tells.
It's all still and the only markers of passing time are the wind-rain patterns in the soot and the bareness of the bones. She knows, now, that it takes time for bones to turn white-clean and new again. She knows, now, that death is not so pretty, not close up, not near to the moment. It's smelly, and vile, and takes time to smooth away, to turn to ash, to find repose.
She feels no horror, only the pull of loneliness, and loneliness is becoming like an old friend to the Orphan (Singer [maybe some day]). But it strikes her, still, as not quite right that these bones were not blessed, not buried back within the earth.
It takes time for her to cross into the room, disturb the dust-quiet with her footsteps, kneel before the chest, inspect the bones. She is quiet while she looks these things over; there's a reverence to how she tests the lid of the chest, seeks to open it, treats it like something sacred.
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
And so she goes, with silver and gold, laden with offerings, gifts. A key, an apple, an acorn, a secret. Ties of red and of white and of black. Ties of life and of death and of birth. Secrets. Keys are for secrets, one she wears around her wrist as she travels the path less taken.
He falls in lockstep, two paces behind and one to her left. He falls in like a Guardian (Really, and when have you Guarded?), like a watchman, a warder. And the path grows ever rockier, ever more ingrown with grass, ever less vigilantly marked.
Until the stones in the grass seem more like pavers. Until those pavers are sparse again and the road goes sweet beneath her feet. No injustices of sharp stepped upon stones. Just grass, worn down, worn under, trod over. Until it brings her to the edge of a wood -- and all this time He has said nothing, but now, now he leans back, hoods his eyes with one hand, scans the top of the tree-line.
Makes a little sound. A Hmmmm.
The trees here are thick, holding hands thick, laced through one another thick, they form a canopy tall, shroud the light, but that tree line is broken with the bent spire of a a cathedral. The shimmer of glass, domed upward. A place within the forest, and the crow they were following circles, then dip-dives behind the up-stretched apex (like an up-turned finger [like the King's coat-rack]).
He waits on her, but seems loathe to enter the shadows. The cawing of crows is loud. Cacophonous. Clear. They are laughing, and laughing, and laughing -- or singing. It's so hard to tell with dark-birds; so wretched their voices, so macabre their songs.
[Candle] [Awareness?]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 8, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
to Falling Leaves
[Wraith] Here are the prayers writ upon the tree, and it feels invasive to be looking at them, to be holding these wishes of other Minds that have been worked into conscious thought, into language. Ashley takes the prayers and leaves them there on the tree, wonders at their fulfillment. She would wonder if anything of hers has ended up here
except that she doesn't pray.
"Does anyone grant these?" she asks one of the crows. Do they go heeded? Do they matter?
And looks, briefly, toward the Apple Man, and wonders if he died without drama this year. Wonders who he is.
-------------------------------------------------------------
[For Emily]
The dust powders about her feet as she steps through the ash toward the house, toward the bones lying still and silent. They are not white and bare, the bones: there's char about them, places where they were scorched, where flesh was seared away and the bones themselves bared.
They are there in the ashes like logs burnt after a summer fire. But they have indeed been there for a long, long time.
The chest, too, feels old under her hands. It's a testament to the sturdiness of it that it wasn't burnt to cinders along with most of the house. Still: the outside is black and it flakes, and the clasp in front has melted. With some working she can pry the lid open, and some of the lid falls away in being lifted. Brittle.
Inside, there is a roll of canvas, yellowed by heat. It is the portrait of a woman: wistful, young, with a wry smile playing about her mouth and infinite patience in the gray eyes that watch the painter. As though she were tired of posing, continued through as a favor. Her clothing is plain, a dress that is different somehow though Emily could not place what. Features blurred: some of the paint has melted. But there is still that touch in her face, that humanity.
Perhaps someone did not want to leave without it.
[Candle] Kage isn't the Jakes girl who's good at braiding hair. She's not bad at it, but Margot could do any sort of knot she wanted. Margot used her little sister as a little doll when she grew enough hair to be useful, and their parents were just happy to see their girls getting along, and Kage only rebelled sometimes. The oak-leaf shines, star-glint, sun-glow, against the ruddy dark of her braid, and the apple leaf glows, moon-shine, star-gleam, too, but the braid holds. She stays wary on the path because she opened a book and found herself in another world, or in somebody's dream, or - she doesn't know. Maybe it's just happening in her mind. Kage didn't see herself disappear, and doesn't know how complete this magic trick really is.
Up ahead, there is a spire, a building, and a host of crows [angels]. Kage starts trying to count them, but soon gives up. There are far too many to fit in a rhyme. And there's also, up ahead, the sense of Hunger, of thriving, of -
"Ashley!" Kage's voice likely isn't loud enough to cut through the crows. Still, she tries, cups her hands around her mouth and shouts again: "ASHLEY!" And follows the path -- what's left of the path -- toward that building of glass, made momentarily careless of the placement of markers. There's an arrogance which surfaces, sometimes, when one knows how to find oneself, always, always.
~~~~~~
The Apple Man. Ashley, she looks toward (what she assumes is [ah, ah, don't you know]) the Apple Man, hanging on a rope, crow-crowned at his foot, crow-swallowed, crow-swarmed, and it is quite possible there is a shadow where his mouth is, under the wrap of rough linen, rougher wool, and that the shadow changes texture, draws in and darkens, draws out and lightens. When she glances up at the higher crow, a bead of sunlight catches on the edge of glass, and briefly blinds her in her good eye, makes her sightless. The moment passes, and the crow on the branch she is wedged against has lifted. She felt it, in the lift of the branch beneath her. That crow flew down toward the ruined ground, and it is jabbing its scavenger's beak into the ground, the old floor, pulling things out've nowhere, dragging something from the roots of the dead apple tree, or the living white ash.
The crow on the dead (?) man gives Ashley a look that's full of merriment and mischief. It's also a look that's somewhat sarcastic. It's a look Ashley's probably well familiar with. It's a look that she has, herself, on occasion had cause to use, when somebody says something ridiculous (haven't you ever bathed in the morning dew [just for instance]). And then it clicks its beak at her, crackling.
[Candle] ooc: *wedges a [For Ashley: Chapter ??] in there*
[Falling Leaves] Deft hands, delicate hands, are oh so very careful with these bygone things. It's a little like stepping into a museum and man-handling the exhibits -- worse, yet, as this was someone's life, someone's home. There's soot on her knees now, and ash on her hands. There's work to be done here, however belated. However long beyond meaningful it may seem to some. Ashley does not pray, but Emily does.
She nestles that picture back into the chest. She gingerly takes the bones and tucks them in with it. They were clearly meant to be together, if not in this lifetime then perhaps in what comes next -- and the Orphan-or-Singer is not so sure what the After might be; she's not sure that knowing matters. But she places them together, tucks them in safe, and then rests her soot-hands on her thighs and bows her head.
There's a thrum of Reverence, a building surety, a Grace, as she opens herself up to the Song that is here, to the Song that is trapped yet in these scorch bones, these memories. Emily has no mastery of Time, but this she can manage: to bear Witness to whatever is left in these bones. To listen, to echo, to hear, and perhaps to repeat with wonder and dignity, saying There was a time once...
She's at a loss for the prayer beads, but shaping the words of a prayer comes naturally even without them. To bless, to remember, to know. These are holy tasks, things in the compass and reach of all of God's Children. These are simple rites, blessings, passings. Recognition.
This Home has a heart-box, not unlike the King. So she listens for the heartbeat, for the resonance, for the Song within it. For the Unity between this place, these people, and a visitor such as herself. (We are all but guests here.)
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
Kage counts. Kage loses count. Kage finds the count again: a baker's dozen, three and ten, thirteen crows if her count is correct. There's no knowing, though, if he count is correct for they won't hold still, defy this attempt to be named and numbered. Thirteen, possibly more, possibly less. More than five and less than twenty.
Once she breaks through the tree-hug-line, the going is easier and there's no mistaking the place she is seeking. It's big, like a barn, like a cathedral-barn, too-grand-to-be-a barn, glass topped with an aperture at its roof ridge, pentagram, apple-seed-map. And the light, here, seeps in in slants of honey-dusk, shades of early evening. There is pollen-dirt-dust in the air and it shines like starlight, swirls around her her; makes the breeze seem alive and the stillness remarkable.
there's a thin trail of smoke comes up from that center hole. Trails up like a whisper. Thin. Frail. It smells of burnt wood and spices, redolent, splendid. Mulling spices. Something brewing. It smells here of sweet-grass, of hay.
There is a door into the structure, standing ajar. A bucket beside it, dew catcher, rain catcher, filled with water bright and clear. There's a small stone stoop, a thatched mat upon it. A little further down the wall is a pile of corn husks, of silks, of stalks bent and broken down into small segments. They're drying, the green slowly leeching out of them. Gnats and small flies buzz lazily around them.
There is a door the goes in, and the feeling inside is stronger. It is familiar; there is a familiar something or someone there within. From where Kage is, she cannot see the intertwined trees, cannot imagine the Ashley is conversing with crows, does not know she's aloft in the center of the sacred (?) space. Out here it is lazy-quiet-calm, golden and ample. There are hints of Abundance, not made over clear but present nonetheless.
It seems a warm place. It seems safe.
[Falling Leaves] [Emily: Prime 1, base dif 4]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 9 (Failure at target 4)
[Falling Leaves] [Retrying: dif 5, plus WP]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 3, 8 (Success x 2 at target 5) [WP]
[Wraith] Blinded by radiance just for a few seconds, until it's so bright that she angles her head away, finds a more comfortable place to direct her gaze. The wind is stronger up here at the top of the tree, and it tangles her thick hair as she perches there on the branches with the crows around. Their voices are harsh; it does not bother her.
The crow, it tips its head at her, and she does indeed know that look. A smile tugs at the corner of Ashley's mouth even as she looks down at the scraps of paper, and it isn't a happy smile (belies an ache, a pang, old and familiar).
It was, after all, a ridiculous question.
A voice reaches her ears, and her head lifts again. Someone is calling her name. It takes her a moment to immediately place the voice, though she knows it well (difficult when tone is a bit distorted, you see.) "KAGE!" is the return call, bellowed from the lungs, even though she can't see her yet.
Because Kage isn't here, just yet. The hanged man she considers; it is a dead man covered and though she is curious there is respect for the dead there. Respect for sacrifice. So she instead edges over to the dead apple tree and plucks the last leaf. Holds it because she wants to have it, and she wouldn't be able to begin to describe why. She just does.
--------------------------------------------------
[For Emily]
Emily listens to the song of the world, and though this world isn't a familiar one the tune is similar. It takes her a moment here: because this place is choked by dust, because this is an old place.
The place resonates more strongly with her now: she can feel this forlorn place in her bones and hear it hum in her ears, that soft minor key. She can feel its longing for remembrance, the way all forgotten things long to be remembered again before they are fully snuffed out of existence, out of thought.
This place will decay. The portrait will decay, even the bones eventually.
They settle in the box with a soft sigh, like a longing fulfilled.
[Wraith]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Wraith] [Athletics, my bane.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 4, 9
[Candle] You'd think she had no wonder in her, Kage. Because sometimes, there's just something too cool, too streetwise weary, too much urban balladry, about the measured way of her regard. Just now, for instance, see? Because there's a wary space after the second time she yells Ashley's name, when she listens hard for watchers, for ogres to come growling out of the woods, or maybe wolves with wintery teeth. Why wary, Kage? Just Chicago living? This place seems safe. What else seems safe? Big white house with a big white picket fence, culmination of the dream most American tales.
Kage takes a deep breath. Hears, distant, Ashley's voice. Not so distant. The breath is sweet, and on the exhale - "ASHLEY!" Before going through the door, Kage dips her fingertips into the rainwater, gathered, cool, cups it in her hands, and almost takes a drink: last second, lets it dribble away. The key is drawn through water, the way it dangles; the ribbons wetted.
And then she goes inside.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ashley, Ashley hears, called again; and closer. But she doesn't see the rowan-haired Orphan, or someone who sounds remarkably like her, just yet. The prayers that Ashley unwrapped to read won't go back around the branches, so she has to either drop them, and they'll drift downward, sift downward, like leaf-fall, uneven, staggered, or keep them, and then they'll crumple against the inside of her pocket, filling it up, making it feel heavy, tingly, like a root. Because rooting is good, deep, green, and needs to happen in winter which is coming, after all this smoke, after all these crows've finished picking at the scraps of summer, at the colors of autumn.
No. Ashley reaches for the last leaf, and plucks it. And the leaf falls into her hand, with relief. The leaf falls into her hand like music used to fall into place in her head when she listened to it or glanced at a sheet.
And there is a crack, all through the wood,
And the ash-tree and the apple, they begin to split apart. Ashley just barely manages to choose one or the other, to find her balance again, just barely manages to not fall, go tumbling toward the ground. And now, when she looks down, she can see the dark heart of both trees, and something there, some object, although she cannot quite tell what it is yet:
just that it isn't what you'd expect, in the space that was closed (shut [tight]) between two trees.
The hanging man sways,
there is no wind.
[Falling Leaves] This isn't a familiar song, choked through with dust, but it is familiar in some ways. It reminds her of the first place (old and broken [no roof beyond the firmament of the sky]) that she heard the song of the world she wanders, the one she calls home. There, too, was a fine grit of age, a dust of ground-down time. There was not soot on her fingertips, but her breath rose from her lips like smoke, like steam, hushed and filament-thin clouds, whispers.
That was a different song: Winter (Wonder). Different but no less hallowed. The Orphan-who-Sings reaches out reverently, gingerly closes the heartbox that belongs here. She does her best to re-fit the clasp. To secure these whispers and wants from the sun overhead, from the coming rain, from the ravages of Time. She lets her fingertips linger, there.
She wonders, now, who it was that settled her god-father's bones in their final keep. Who chose what things to place beside him, who laid him to rest before his heart-box could be lowered down into the earth. She'd not been there. She'd waited until the grass grew over, until the rain came down again; she'd waited until the thrum of his Song was six-feet-under and it did nothing to keep the keening from her bones.
She knows the Latin; it's one of the few phrases she knows, all of them from Church services, from catechism (before the word had taken on a side-stepped slant), but Emily speaks the words aloud in her mother tongue instead.
"May you rest in peace."
Then she rocks back on her feet, presses herself to standing. There are dark smudges on her jeans where the soot and ash has settled. Her fingertips are colored, her palms marred. She is marked by this duty, however simple, however small. Emily exhales and slowly makes her way out of the ruins to where she might see the sky again, unmarred and unmuddied.
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
The rainwater is soft on her hands, soft like moonbright, soft like nightfall, gentle, quiet, refined. And when the key dips in there's a soft chiming, a ringing of a large distant bell, a sound that wicks outward like the rings in the rain barrel, reflects, resonates, resounds. The key shines like moonbright now, candesces in this near-gloaming. Kage's fingertips are bright with it, too, luminescent, silver-bright, Ardent.
Burning. Shining. Cold-bright.
This is water gathered after the full moon. She knows it, down to her quick. She knows it like stories scored onto her bones. Knows it like heartsblood. Knows it keeps brownies outside of the threshold, knows it smooths freckles away from one's brow, knows it brings good dreams, soothes restless bairns about to be born; knows it like blessings.
Her hands are for blessings, now, as she presses inside. And there, in the middle of the room, she beholds what the Adept before her has seen. There are two trees, cojoined, comingled, interdependent yet uniquely whole still. An Ash and an Apple -- and did you know, Kage? That a Mountain Ash is a Rowan; a Rowan-haired Other. And o'er-head are the Crows, raven-fletched, black-feathered, cawing and crowing and...
There is a great Crrrraaack-creak from the trees, and they begin to part ways, and something familiar goes tumbling but rights itself in time. And Kage is there to see it, to see the sundering, the division, the split. She is there with her hands for blessing (for mending [for soothing]) and her secret-key all aglow.
The hanging man sways,
there is no wind.
[Wraith] Ashley doesn't pray. But she can't get those scraps of paper to attach to the tree again, and the thought of letting them flutter to the ground discarded when she removed them in the first place - she can't do it. They're tucked in her pocket, where they'll moulder and take root. But at least they won't be thrown away like trash.
The leaf, too, is held in hand, clutched as the wood splits underneath her feet, as the world suddenly become unstable. She forgets to respond to Kage while she clings to the branch like a panicked cat, blue eyes swelling.
The trees have split, she's separated them when they've been twined like that - when they grew together - and she regrets that. Still, it's a passing thing, and after a few seconds she works her way down the trunk toward the heart of the tree. Toward the object she can see there.
She just wants to see what it is.
-------------------------------------------------
[For Emily]
It's odd, the way this song works, how Emily's Reverence seems to seep into the place. Hallows it, indeed, just by the pronunciation of those words in her mother tongue.
It's forgotten, but she has remembrance locked away in her pocket, she has the apples from that orchard once lovingly tended. It's seen winters and summers and harvests without the touch of that which now lies within the box, but there is her memory, and one memory is enough to be made into something.
For a few minutes there is quiet and Emily may begin to wonder where her friends are. The entire place is very still, hushed in spite of the sun that still glints overhead.
But then there's a nudge, a tugging from within the box, except that it tugs her not toward the box but elsewhere: a telling, a thanks, a hint. There's a song of Hunger and a song of brilliance, not far. Not far at all.
To the north.
[Wraith] [Athletics]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 7, 8, 10
[Wraith] [Alertness]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 3, 5, 7, 10, 10 (Success x 2 at target 8)
[Candle] And Kage wants to touch somebody, now. The redhaired (ember-tressed, damsel-undistressed) Orphan doesn't have a reputation for getting into people's personal space, for touching people, for being open to being touched; this is because she generally does not, generally doesn't want to, generally is not. Because Kage is private; because He's always around, somewhere. But now, after skimming her fingers through the gloam-cool water, the smoke-clear brilliance, moon-caught, throat-kissing element, her hands a couple of possibilities, like maybe she could do this, or maybe she could do that, she wants to touch somebody and see what happens. The easy thrill of that water, of the chill, dripping key, dangling from her wrist, sings out've her marrow, and she's Wonder-full,
and then Ashley's hanging, a high, high above-the-ground speck, while the two trees split, and the dead (?) man hangs, and the crows wheel. Not just wheel: they patterned, rise-and-fall, then spread-out, scatter, flying under glass, so the glass takes their shadows, throws it up into ghost-shadow crow.
And then, Ashley starts to climb toward the chasm, and Kage, forgetting all about the water, what it made her want and feel, comes at the trees warily, at an angle.
There's still Emily, somewhere. She's here, too, right?
~~~~~~
Descent.
It's easy, especially when you're falling. Ashley isn't falling. Ashley's just climbing, down, down, downward, toward the open heart of the two trees, and it's all darkness, condensed, clotted, palmed into a knot, into the color that exists only in the space between two lovers' hands pressed (prayerful [wishful]) one against the other, and then there's the object. Today, Ashley is nimble. Today, Ashley could give a kitten named Luka more than a run for his money, because seriously, Luka's just not very good at climbing yet, but Ashley is. It's harder going down, since she isn't falling, but at least she has some control. When she gets to the split, the dark feels cold.
What's down there.
A very tiny and very tall tripod thrusts out've the split, and set upon it, a bowl (bronze [glowing]), and in the bowl, something that smoulders. Beneath the tripod, improbably and impossibly, a round (trap [cage] no) door, hinged with old metal, and covered over with mould. The smoke is sweet, and it must be the source of burning [prophecy (parting of the veils, this world and the next)]. The light only just illuminates this for her, and for once - for once, she is very sharp, about picking out details, putting together a full picture.
The crows follow Ashley downward,
and still, the hanging man sways,
mouth moves, a word.
[Falling Leaves] There is a song of Hunger and a song of Brilliance and it's not far away now, not far away at all, just to the North where the dark trees gather. She knows these names, knows them by other ones, knows them as faces and friends and sisters-in-arms.
It's good that they've found their way here, she thinks, that they're all in this together, trined somehow (intertwined somehow) on this odd adventure elsewhere. She does not doubt for a moment that the Hunger is Ashley, that the Brilliance is Kage -- she thinks, maybe, they can feel her coming, too. As a tugging, a hint. A Reverence.
With one last look for the ruins, Emily steps back and away. She turns, on a heel, and begins to walk her way North. She tries to smudge the ash from her fingertips, wipe it off on her jeans, as she walks. There's a calmness to her, a quiet. A hallowed and lonely set to her features.
*** *** ***
[For Kage]
Ashley climbs down as the trees split, part ways, disentangle, all with a shudder, with a shattering sound, with a groan and a creak. They're painful these sounds, felt right down the marrow, but Ashley descends -- quick, agile, deft little monkey-kin, clamoring over, drawing down, until she's half obscured by the maw of the trees-heart she looks into.
There's a thin trail of smudge-smoke rising from the trees-heart. It curls as it rises, dances, cavorts. There is Revelry to it, a lightness, a litheness, and Kage can see how it curls around the Adept, how it wreathes her in blue-blush, and then it ascends.
The crows follow Ashley downward.
And then: a word.
*** *** ***
[And Ashley]
Remembrance.
And then another: Thanks-giving.
And then another: Returning.
[Wraith] Ashley slides down the trunk with forgotten agility, briefly remembered, perhaps soon to be reignited (no different from animals - who said that to her, once?) She's deft in spite of this ever present ache, something that makes her stomach clench for having separated the twined trees. It strikes her as indescribably sad. She doesn't know why.
It's astonishing how easy it is to rend a thing asunder with just a touch.
The smell strikes her before the smoke does, that sweetness that overlies a scent of burned wood. It hangs about her like mist when she peers in just before it rises, shadows her long eyelashes and the delicate line of her jaw. She doesn't understand. Just wonders.
The Hanged Man draws her gaze with his Words, and perhaps she hears them as they are. Perhaps she hears them with all their nuances, with all the Power they convey. Ashley just crouches there in the sundering and bows a head still veiled. Touches a hand against the leaf and prayers in her pocket.
And remembers.
---------------------------------------------------------
[For Emily]
Here is the way north, and if Emily follows that strict cardinal direction there will be no path to guide her way. There are fields of gold just beginning to lose their glory, become brown and brittle (they can't stay.) There are wild flowers that spring up and cling to their remembered summers. The frost hasn't killed them yet.
There are briars that snag at her clothing, char smudged and muddy, and she can find her way around them. She knows a song, knows where to find a rowan and an ash, called to the same by the black smudges now on her jeans. Ash, after all, is a thing of Reverence (mark your forehead with it.)
She hears the cawing before she sees them. She passes a barn before she sees them: safe place, she could wait here and see if they come.
And she hears, not so distant:
Rememberance. Thanks-giving. Returning.
And then here is Kage, here is Ashley, and overhead is a flock of crows.
[Candle] There she is. Emily; that kiss of reverence (unrelenting). Approaching, and closing the distance (like closing a book, and all the leaves within ordered to their place). Kage can feel the catechumen's approach between her shoulder blades. They're sharp-things, those blades. Someone she used to know told her they'd cut his palm, during one of her skinny phases, when food was a secondary thought.
And Kage was approaching the tree, warily, at an angle; and she stops in its roots, and she stops, because the roots are uprooting, thrusting out, all around her, earth gaping, darkness, white lacery of go down into the deep, unsteadied, and Ashley, smoke-wreathed for a moment, silhouetted for a second, has disappeared into the hollow chasm between the two trees. Her hands still feel blessingful, and bright, and she twists to look for Emily, wonders if she dare assay the trees as well, and puts her hand against the trunk, and swallows, throat working around the stupid thing she's about to do, which is climb. The key clinks against her wrist.
The hanged man speaks, and it isn't the kind of speaking that is heard, so much as the kind of speaking that is felt: that goes out across the ripe-gold fields, the blanching-white fields, and tells them the secret that'll turn the season.
Behind Emily, in the woods, and in the fields, there are shadows, peeling from corn-tall Courtiers, courtiers-that-are-corn, tall, and a great shadow peeling from a pole surrounded by offerings, and there is movement. Things approach; she might hear music. It isn't the music Kage might hear. And Ashley, she hears no music at all. Perhaps a drumbeat, or a heartbeat, but perhaps not. Beautiful movement could be enough. [Or maybe it's all silent. And the music is implied, offered, dragged out, imagined. Revelry.]
There's no sense of threat. They're staying back, following, drawing inward.
Ashley looks up.
The hanged man isn't swaying, from this angle. From this angle, he is spinning, Widdershins, against-sense, against-reason, he is spinning moonwise, from West [where the apples grow] to East [where the sun brights]. Of course she can't see his mouth. Of course she can't even see everything that's surrounding her, because one eye was sacrificed, and she doesn't get the whole picture, blind spot, but she can see the crows settling 'round the splitting chasm, the groaning wood, and looking downward. They aren't portentous, full of doom, deathing stories caught in their scavenger's beaks, ugly dagger beaks, no -- they're acting like a family, like wild cousins from the rough side of town or the joyful forgotten hills, and they're proud, waiting for a party, some of them are uncertain, hushed, now, or this, or is it happening yet (shush, you just wait, don't rush),
There's expectation.
And Ashley bows her head, and remembers, and the leaf-litter, cinnamon-sticks, other-things in the bronze (copper? [autumn]) bowl smoulder, and when her breath touches them, they smoulder into a spark for a moment, before ashing further white.
[Falling Leaves] And so they're all drawn in...
In like a spiral, through the touch-hug-tangle trees and the blight dark of the canopy that holds out the light, into the clearing where the honey-dusk scrambles the pollen-dust into starlight, galaxies that swirl and laze. Into the clearing with the glass-domed cathedral-barn, where the sweet-grass is heavy and cloying and clean, and the hay is fresh mown and dry, the cornhusks: whisper in the late afternoon breeze. Where somewhere overhead the nighttime is coming, and the shadows grow long-limbed, with clawed hands and knock-knees, and the prick-bright of starlight readies itself, waits on a cue.
Emily breaks through the tree-line to the smell of mulling spices and the glimmer of gloam-cold water in a pail by the stoop. And the gold light tangles up in her eyelashes, touches her highlights, paints her skin sunkissed and generous and warm. It lifts up her voice as she calls (just as Kage had):
"ASHLEY!"
And then:
"KAGE?!"
But there is only one door, and it leads to a safe place. Her footsteps are not slow, now, not contemplative, not Reverent. There's a joy in finding them, or hoping to find them, in finding she'd missed them while she journeyed alone. One hand alights on the barn door, pushes it aside as she steps in, eyes bright with evening and fingers black-holied with ash.
And so they're all drawn upward...
Kage's hand rests on the trunk of the crooked apple tree, and she feels the bark stretch, and rend beneath her fingers. The old bark, the dead bark, parts like the two-trees, makes way for new girth: this is not sundering, no. Her hands are for blessings but this is rough beneath her fingertips, and it presses upward -- drags soon-to-be new growth against her palm like sandpaper, like scoring, small leaf buds that will one day push out like thorns, like daggers, that will soften to sweep-kissses, to foliage, red-bright and green-turning.
This root plunges downward and this root rises up, so it seems just a footstep, a ladder to guide her in climbing this tree, but the apple is growing, it is reaching. And thin new limb brushes her hair with its fingertips, nudges (almost snags) the silver leaf there.
Her hands are for blessing, for mending, for turning and the higher she climbs the taller it grows. The thicker it becomes. The stronger the boughs.
And so they're all drawn down...
And Ashley can see the crows settle down like a family, wachful with beady-eyed alertness and keen curiosity. She can feel the weight of their stares, the promise of their dagger-sharp beaks, the clutch of their talons as they all fall silent. Not a caw. Not a whisper. Just a watchfulness; an ever-present watchfulness.
There's expectation. And a quiet, and the ingress of Reverence and then? Then the Apple starts shifting and the silence is broken and a few of the crows caw, call out (response: Sush you! [Shush yourself!]) and resettle a little higher up. A little further away. But still close. Close enough that she can imagine what the sweep of their feathers might be if they brushed up against her, all dark and omen-full, these birds of portents.
The Apple is shifting; it grows. She has not ended it; she has not taken its very last-ever leaf. She has not robbed it, rather chosen a momento. A memory.
The Brilliance draws nearer, with her hands dipped in moonbright, with a thing-silver and a thing-gold in her copper-red hair. With a cold-key at her one wrist, as she climbs ever upward.
They're converging at the tree-heart, these three, as the book-page-sheaves draw tighter and the night closes in, and the wood-worn bindings of the Apple Book draw closer.
Draw tighter.
In a forlorn-lonely place, where the trinkets and secrets are spilled out like a feast, on the floor of a clearing, beside the breadth of a King-tree, who has fallen, is hollowed out (hallowed [covered in ash]).
[Wraith] Kage's hands are for blessings, and here, this tree, it's springing to life beneath them. She thinks that He won't let her learn, but here and now she gets to experience it, watch the old bark rend beneath her hands to make way for the new like it's shedding an old skin.
The tree is drawing up around the two of them, drawing up around Ashley where she is, watching the branches stretch and split outward. Watching the holy tree spread wider, feeling the trunk ripple beneath her hands, imagining the flush of sap beneath.
Kage climbs higher and Emily draws nearer to the tree, but she's still there on the ground. The forcefulness of growing makes the hang man sway though there's no wind, thrashing there at the end of his rope.
Kage draws nearer to the heart of the tree and Ashley reaches down to take hold of her elbow, to help her the rest of the way. And then they are both at the tree's heart and the new growth is forming a place around them while they are there in the hollow and the scent of the mulling spices strengthens here, close.
Emily is still on the ground with the sun kissing her hair, with the apple seeds in her pocket waiting to be sown. The tree's heart is still open.
But it's drawing tighter, enveloping the two above, growing around and embracing them as the bindings draw to a close.
[Falling Leaves] [Dex + Athletics]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 3, 5, 5, 7, 7
[Candle] You'd think she had no wonder in her sometimes, Kage. The dead tree splits open beneath her palms, sloughing off, rending, shedding like a snake sheds its old lives; reveals something shiningly new, vital. Kage flinches; the roots re-arrange themselves, and they're nearly stairs. Kage hesitates; she presses her hand against the wood again (deliberately [hesitantly]), and then, looking up, she laughs. It's just a bark of laughter, really, a sudden thing, a crow's laugh. There's something wry, to the corner of her mouth; it's almost subsumed by (burning [ardent]) something a lot sweeter, delight shook-free. And she climbs, and as she climbs, the tree grows, and when Ashley is there to take her elbow and help her into the heart of the two trees, her expression is some mingled alloy of bemusement, wondering, wistful and wary (always).
Inside the heart, she looks up at the hanging man. Pauses; he is thrashing. The trees are closing up, as if they'd caught fireflies in the palm of their hands, were going to cup them close, bring them home to show their momma, and Kage says, breathing heavily, with all that climbing, "Ashley!" A beat. "We're in a book." And her breath touches the bowl, too, because she'd leaned over, hands on her thighs, and the stuff in the bowl sparks again, more fire. And more ash, whiteness.
Kage, leaning out, "EMILY, come on!"
And, see. See, see, see. The revelling shadow-things, keeping their distance, they're approaching more closely now. And they see them, Emily, Ashley, Kage. They see their shapes, graceful, bending; the patchwork lacery of leaf and shade, the green fuse that drives the flower, the moonshadow mystery of their expressions, nothing quite human, nothing quite inhuman, symbols, metaphors, a woodland rave, a Bacchanalian troop, a piece of Mummery, spinning, rowdy, sedate, ungraced and made graceful again by some rambunctious at last we're here, and they're closing around Emily, around the trees and the hanged man under glass and open air,
And Emily needs to run, to make it to the tree(s) in time. And when Emily gets to the roots, she'll have the hardest time of all, climbing, because there's a lot of darkness under these trees, and that's where Winter is kept, all of Winter's halls, and the owls, the cold, sharp owls with their yellow moon eyes, and they collect souls, and it's not time to go into that cold. But that darkness, it's punctuated by the roots, life-that'll-keep, life-that'll-make-those-hollow-spaces, and there's still a twisting, gyrating almost-stairway, almost-path-up, where Kage climbed, where apple and ash became bright again, and Emily's
(there must be music. Mustn't there? Because music makes a party. Because music's right, for revelry; for celebration of abundance, for - )
almost there
almost.
[Falling Leaves] And run she does, for Emily knows the Winter-shadows. She know the frozen cold, she knows the still-capped water, reflection, still waters, deep movements. She knows the slumber and she remembers the Waking and last Winter wasn't kind at all. Wasn't Still. Wasn't Reflective. And yet it was somehow gentler than Spring, and kinder than Summer. So she runs, away from the jig-dancing shadows and into the root-tangle, scrabbling over it. She wedges fingers into crags in the bark, pulls herself upward, pulls her hand free just as the crags close in like raven-talons, like grasping bits, like thorns to bedraggle, to tangle, to mar, to touch.
There's a lot of darkness under those trees and of all of them Emily has eaten of the Apple orchard, she has seeds in her pockets, she'd be easily doomed to six months here in slumber, pressed between pages (steal me away from my mother). And there's a lot of darkness in watching her friends enfolded by the tree heart, caught up like fireflies, snatched away. So she climbs away from one tangle and toward another, frantic and hopeful.
Let me get there in time.
Let me not be left behind.
Not again.
And she is the last one to ascend. She doesn't look over her shoulder at the ambling shadow-kin. Does not look up at the hanged man, perilously swinging. Gallows Man. Apple Man. Dead Man. She does not look up to ponder his plight, but rather stays focused on getting to the aperture before is tightened, to reach out fingers to touch, to return.
Overhead the last of the gold-light is swallowed by lavender. Swallowed by blue-light. Pricked through by stars. It's lavender blue, dilly dilly, above lavender green. They can almost make out the crisp laughter of star-break, the blink-bright before moonrise. It cools the air, rushes over like a hush. And the Shadows grow broader, they fatten, they feast and cavort and tumble into one another, birth new shadows, new long-faced watchers with reflection-bright eyes (oranges, greens, yellows [like cat eyes]).
There is a cadence underscoring all of it that each woman can feel. It resounds in their heads, taut like drums, rattle-empty, and rolls down their spines. It keeps time to the dancing, to the growing, to the progression of dark-chasing-light behind the glass dome of the sky. And for Ashley it's a pressure, like a tapping of twig-thin fingers at the base of her neck, on her shoulder blade, an impatient thing, a steady thing, a rhythm un-needing to be heard to be known.
[Wraith] Emily doesn't want to be left behind: not again. Not after four leavings in one month, not after all the leavings there have been in her life. She runs and getting up the tree is difficult for her in spite of how much taller she is, how much more athletic than at least the Tytalan in the tree.
But here's the last step, and there's a knot that forms beneath one of her feet as she climbs ever upward, something to give her purchase for that last push upward with the ball of her foot. Ashley extends a hand down so that she can tug Emily up into the heart of the tree.
That cadence: it hurts her head, plays the xylophone with her vertebrae. She can't possibly enjoy it. She doesn't, but the movement is beautiful and it's this she watches (she used to watch another dancer, there without the distraction the noise became.) There's a wistful sort of wonder about the tilt of her eyebrows and mouth. No wariness.
She leaves that to Kage.
The shadows spin and cavort and finally, there is darkness when the heart of the tree seals, a cawing in their ears as one of the crows is trapped in the heart of the tree with them. And here they are sealed: sacrifice. Small things, but just the same.
The tree will open again next year, but who knows how long this year will be.
From Emily: the feel of the blades of long grass against her hands, of how it pokes and rolls like straw between fingertips.
From Kage: the scent of a bonfire in chilling air.
From Ashley: the taste of cider sharp against the tongue.
It weaves these things into itself, and the memories are locked inside the book, inside the heart of the tree.
They arrive again at the King, before the Throne, after a while. As though they slept. The book lies shut on the ground with a light dusting of forest loam across the cover. And their are apple seeds and prayers and a key in their pockets.
Ashley awakens first to a weight on her chest, to a beady eye looking at her, and the Hermetic starts and swears and claps a hand over her good eye. Scoots backward and promptly falls off of the branch she was sprawled upon, topples off the Throne.
The crow takes flight.
[Candle] Kage coughs, when she wakes. Makes a sound like a croak, like (calling like a) crow. The crow that came out've the book takes flight and Kage, who is awkwardly positioned, just beneath the lightning mouldered arch of the Fallen King, her head pillowed on her bag, dirt on her jeans, her shirt, leaf-litter falling out've her braided (unweaving) hair, blinks and squints against the brightness. Sun's moved, since they've been gone. Sun's reached a high point, shadowlessness. All that walking, that climbing, that reading, that talking, it took a toll. She gives a grumpy look off to one side, and the grumpiness clears, dissipates, and instead she sits up, careful of her head (almost bumps it), and says, "Are we all...?"
[Falling Leaves] Emily is the last one up into the tree, she is the last one to awaken in the clearing around the King and she opens her eyes to see the cancer-white mushrooms growing out of the muck tucked under His ribcage, and there are crinkle-leaves loud in her ears, the footsteps of forest bugs, the --
"UGH!"
Was that a beetle, crawling over her hand. The Apprentice starts, with all the indignation of the Adept's swearing, and sits up hastily. Pushes up to her feet with a jump, a start, a not o'er my hands please wrinkle to her features that settles. That gentles, as she looks around with Wonder and a little surprise.
Ashley has fallen off of a branch, and Kage cleared her grumpiness, and Emily pushes a tangled curl out of her eyes, leaves a smudge of ash along her brow, looks over at the other two and then up and the fleeing crow and then? And... then...?
"Ah, so, um. Everyone alright then?"
Oh yes, so very British-proper. It's comical, this, the disheveled Apprentice asking after them all. Trying to right herself. Head wreathed in smoke-black bramble-curls. Jeans smudged. Forehead anointed.
[Wraith] Ashley has landed hard amongst the fallen leaves and the thick black soil on the ground around the King, studded with wood chips and smelling so faintly of decay and also the richness of the woods. The Hermetic lies there for a few seconds trying to catch her breath, trying to banish the fear that crow had ignited in her (not my other eye, I already gave you one.)
She looks up at the sprawling canopy, and though the other two rise she does not. She just lifts herself on her elbows and, once, skims a hand beneath her shirt to run it over the scab that is throbbing a little at her ribs. The pain is mostly gone now: she wants to make sure none of it was torn away.
"I'm okay," she tells the two of them.
And looks, once, toward the book that is still lying there on the ground. Her eyebrows loft, and she reaches a hand into her pocket. Feels the outline of the apple leaf, the crinkle of paper, the whisper of prayer.
[Candle] We have passed over the threshold and dipped into Mystery and come again to home. Kage, standing, leans against the tree (doesn't touch it, though). Her knuckles are knobby, and she regards her hands, twining fingers with fingers, so that she doesn't drag her fingers through her hair, rake the messy braid flop back. Her wrist, the ribbons, the key: still there; silver, gleam, glint. Kage's expression is very grave, almost solemn, for all she's also flushed [Innamorata], burnished-like. "I'm well in body," Kage says, "but considerably rumpled in spirit, thank you very much."
Kage is looking at the book, too. The apple. The corn. And she was the first one who touched it last time. Some people never learn. She's the first one to touch it again, to handle it carefully, opening it. Says - her voice low, taut - "Look at this."
[Falling Leaves] Emily wanders around the King, rather than clamoring over. She's had her fill of climbing, thank you, but the rumpled expression fades now that they've all checked in as more or less hale. She wanders around His fallen body to where she had leaned earlier in the day, cants back enough to rest her bum against him, legs a little forward, hands resting on His bark at her sides.
Kage reaches for the book and Emily's eyes close, reflexively, against the burnish-bright light that accompanied her first sweeping-away. But the light does not come. And, for now, the Apple Book is just a book, and the Orphan girl exhales with obvious relief.
"Je-sus, Mary and Jo-seph, Kage," she says, breathing out an epithet they never hear fom her. Emily shakes her head a little. "We just got out, are you itching to dive back in again?"
There's a note of caution, but also an affectionate laughter. Kage is Cavalier; they all know this. She is their Rogue (heart of gold [don't you tell anyone]). Caution to the wind, all that lot.
But when Kage opens the pages, Emily leans in a little closer, her interest piques, and she's drawn in again for what she hopes is just a story.
[Wraith] Ashley, too, twitches when Kage reaches for the book. Pulls the hand out of her pocket, lets it shove flat against the ground, fingers curling into the soft crumble of the soil. The leaves crunch against her hand. She's ready to go lurching to her feet, to try to knock the book away before it can suck Kage back in.
It doesn't do that, though. The Orphan is looking at something in the pages. Ashley perks, rolls to her feet.
Edges closer so that she can peer over Kage's shoulder.
[Candle] Je-sus, Mary and Jo-seph, Kage, Emily says, and Kage's gaze (greenish, grayish, mossy) cuts up, touched by a smirk that can only be described as mischievous (dark). It says, One of these things is not like the other, and has not very much bearing on the story at all, except that it's what Kage does, what's in her look for a second. She doesn't realize how well Emily and (still? even) Ashley know her, or what they think of her. "Would be nice to have a book to literally jump into, just occasionally," she says. "Just think how easy it would be to avoid people you didn't want to see."
The pages of the book were blank before. They're not, now. Ashley's the only one who saw some hint of this: of the apple on the frontis piece, on the table of contents, the two girls walking toward it, and now - three. The pages (not all of them [not nearly]) are all marked, now. A simple story, told mostly with silhouette art -- something peasantish, folkish; deep roan-red and brown. And at the end of the pages that have pictures, writing,
instructions, for planting seeds.
[Falling Leaves] When Kage is not disappeared, does not fall back in between the pages, is not swallowed up whole, Emily relaxes a little further. Her brow unfurrows under the smudge of holy-war paint, under the weight of remembrance and she breathes out, low, slow, careful. She breathes out Wonder.
So there they are, the three, peering into the book of corn husks pages, studying the roan-red ink, the brown shadows the story they'd walked, when Emily looks to the instructions and makes a surprised little Oh.
She steps back and one hand dives into her pocket, pulls out the remnant of apple core, of pale brown little bitter-seeds. She places them in the palm of her hand (and there's the Reverence) and holds the out for the others to see.
"They followed," she said, with a little surprise. A little excitement. And then? A burgeoning smile; mischief and merriment; wonder and plans-afoot. A veritable grin.
"Do you think we might grow them?" she asks the other two. As if it were a reasonable thing. Grow an apple tree from the Other place. Grow it up strong. Just see what might happen. What might happen? Surely good things.
[Wraith] Ashley is running her fingers through her hair, letting some of the flakes of wood, some of the twists of decaying plant, fall from it and flutter to her shoulders, lets them dust her shirt. Ashley did indeed see the girls who'd been making their way toward the apple, and now there's her too, and the sight of that story makes her smile.
"There were just the two of you at first, until I went in too," she says. Then, an afterthought: "Someone should read it to Marcelle."
Her face and clothes are smudged and dirty, elbows covered in grit and her hands with debris that's worked its way in around her nails. Glances up at Emily and smiles once, briefly, a bright flash of blue and white teeth amidst all the dirt. "...She asked, as though we aren't Willworkers."
It's playful, that. Doubting apprentice.
[Candle] "Hey, not all Willworker's have a green thumb," Kage says, flicking her eyebrows up at Ashley. There'd be a brief smile, but it fades, awe-touched, maybe, by the memory of a tree (new [whole]) coming out've the dead. Kage didn't feel as if she were doing it, as if she, herself, had anything to do with that resurrection, except insofar as it was her touch, like a mistake, like a mystery, a secret.
A beat. Kage will pass the book to whoever wants to look through it. If noone does, she'll crinkle the edge of its pages with her thumb, and it'll make a dry-husk corn-song sound. "But yeah," she says, to Emily, "Sure; why not? There are instructions."
[Falling Leaves] There are instructions, Kage says, and Ashley teases, and Emily's mouth crooks in a familiar wry smirk. It's a good thing, a hale thing, a less wearied and lonely things; and God knows she has been lonely of late, the Leavings are taking their toll on her.
"I'm working on the Green Thumb, actually," she says, lofting a knowing eyebrow, besmirching the shape of that smudge she wears unknowingly. Emily accepts the book, curling her fingers around the precious seeds first and plunging them back into the safety of her pocket. She looks over the steps, considers them carefully.
"We can start the seeds at my new flat, then move them out here if they take. The King needs company, don't you think?" There's a smile now, broadening and genuine.
[Wraith] "I'll help you, if I learn in time," Ashley tells Emily as the younger Orphan (not for long) slips the seeds into her pocket. She takes the book from Kage to look through it while it's closer to her, there in her hands. To read the words, which tell a simple story of three girls who set out to find the heart of fall.
Quest. Journey. And maybe it makes Ashley think of something, something that brings a pensive furrow to her brows and causes her to glance at the other two. But she says nothing of it. Just reaches into her pocket again, runs her fingertips around the edges of the leaf of a tree that had been so entwined with the ash, and then rises to her feet.
[Candle] [roll credits]
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