The whole of being [STing]

[Witta] There is a hollow in the heart of a King, and in his heartbeat a message, for this hollow is a place where secrets are laid to rest: joy and sorrow, hope and fear, snuggled in tight like bed-fellows, slumbering, hushed.

It is not by chance that the strange, willowy hand of a stranger has found its way onto a scrap of hand-made paper and that paper has found its way into the heart-box. The letters are sketched as much as written, as if each were not a sub-section of a word but meaningful in its own arcane way. As if the shape of the word was enough of a suggestion of its meaning; the precise meaning of it was overmuch for her purposes.

Come when you are ready it says.

Keep to the left-hand Path and do not stray.

Holding the paper tastes like ozone, it feels like the brisk wind presaging a storm. Its edges are rough-torn; there are pieces of leaves and dry flowers in its body. It smells faintly of orange.

There is no envelope and no signature.

[Ashley McGowen] [How expressive are we feeling today?]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Ashley McGowen] [No no. We're a perfectionist, we can do better.]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 7) Re-rolls: 2

[Ashley McGowen] Ashley, when she comes to the Court and reaches into the hollow in the heart of the King, usually has a specific purpose in mind. She leaves things behind in the heart box, poems and errant thoughts written down for those few who come out this way and know where the place is. It's possible that other than Kage, others don't even know who leaves them. Kage knows Ashley is a poet but she isn't terribly open about the fact with everyone else.

There are a lot of things Ashley isn't good at, and dealing with other people is one of them. She's not always the most sensitive, or the most reasonable, or the most mature. So perhaps her ability to stir emotions when she wants to would come as a surprise.

What she's putting in the heart box today was something she scribbled down a few days ago in her notebook, maybe last week lying by the Fountain, a snapshot of a thought and mood when she was in that place. She sat down with it earlier today, reworked the idea and refined it, and now it is Worthy to reside in the heart of a King. She's often sad, Ashley, behind the anger that she allows to fuel her Will, and that comes through in her work in a way that it doesn't come through in her Work (because it does not fuel her Will, because it isn't useful.)

There's a poem, lengthy because it is a tale and short because she has a way of cutting away the extraneous, a tale about a sculptor who found a perfect block of stone and set about to create a Perfect Work from it, and at the end was left with handfuls of chipped stone: layered in imagery and with each Word in its place.

When she reaches in to place it in the hollow, she finds Kae's note and unfurls it, tucking her own away in the heart box. It smells faintly of orange and she can't help but raise it up and sniff at it once before hopping down off of the King's ribs and to the ground again.

There's a moment where Ashley wonders whether Kae (if it is Kae, she hopes so) means for her to open the Paths that she showed her last time, but she doubts it. So she starts down the path that leads away from the Court, and Kae's instructions not to stray are harder for a person like Ashley than one would think. Her gaze, at least, does wander.

[Witta] Ashley doubts. This doubt is what leads her astray and down the black-brown Autumn path that leads away from the point where the two paths kiss. There is nothing remarkable along her walk, and not too many places where she might diverge from the marked path. Keeping to the left-hand path is simple enough if it never forks.

But there is birdsong and a crisp wind. There is sunlight, today, warm enough to reach through her layers of clothes and tickle her ribs. There is the sharp crunch of leaf litter under foot and the suggestion of mushrooms growing in the dark and the ineffable ability for black tree bark to shower blacker crevasses and features, and blacker yet shadows to darken them. Fall-bright leaves still cling to branches, here and there, like dappled decorations for the waning season.

There is a lot to notice, here. Enough to make her think that there was some message behind the words Kae left on the page. Something to fuel that doubt into a certainty, if she Willed it to be so. There is also enough silence, enough emptiness, enough Loneliness to drive that doubt to dissolution.

Perhaps Kae did mean for her to take the Paths. They open out not far from the court, in that little depression with walls formed by dirt berms and tree roots. They were not far from where Ashley's journey down the black-brown began.

[Ashley McGowen] Ashley sees most of the world as a symbol for something else, a fragment of a greater Form, so perhaps she should be less likely to just write this off as plain language. Maybe she's just having an apprentice moment (this, after all, is a very new way of looking at things, and she is very new to this Way even if she's well advanced along the original one she chose.)

But there's doubt as she walks along the path and doesn't see Kae. Ashley frowns and runs her fingers back to rough through the hair at the back of her neck, tugging the strands as she will do when thinking or agitated. And glances from side to side along the path.

It's after she's continued a little ways that she starts to think that no: Kae really did mean for her to open her own Path and walk out to find her. Ashley isn't quite sure of how this is done, yet, really. She knows that there are natural Ways open through the world and there is a Somewhere Between that Kae showed her but she isn't sure what it is yet. That uncertainty bothers her, to some extent.

But after a moment she pauses, her feet rustling through the leaves as she pivots around and backtracks toward the Court, toward the place where that little hollow in the earth is framed by roots. For a moment she just stands looking at the spot. Unsure of what she's supposed to do and how they're supposed to open. Ashley tries a few things. She reaches around the spot, through the air, as though she were hoping to encounter something. It's difficult because she has a knowledge of Space, and she has a knowledge of the fact that it doesn't really exist except as a thought and so can be bent with the Will.

But this is harder. This is almost like asking permission.

Ashley isn't the sort to give up, and she's been left to find her own way on many an occasion before. But she stands and stares, frustrated, trying to wrap her head around this new Way, this place that is not quite physical and not quite Thought either, where she has to take her entire body and not just her Mind even though she isn't just imagining space to be illusory either. She crouches in front of the spot. And stares at it and stares it down as though she were trying to force open a door. When she rises again the earth gets kicked, irritably.

She remembers how she felt when she was there: that it felt like water, that it felt like being in her own dreams and lingering somewhere between Thought and wakefulness, and she imagines that if she could pull her body along that...

A small cut to the side of her arm later, there's a symbol drawn into the side of her arm because the Will and what her blood tells her are much the same, there's a unity of all of these layers, and she Wills the path to open. But it isn't just flinging aside some portal and striding through as though she owns it. More like: she wants to go through here, she wants to find this way that's been tread before, this way that people have known since before time and she just has to understand where it is.

And then she's keeping left. And she doesn't stray.

[Corr 1, diff 5 (vulgar), +1 for it being brand new. -1 for focus.]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 4, 7, 7 (Success x 2 at target 5) [WP]

[Witta] There are places where this world and the next are so close to one another that they might kissing like the Court paths that run up to the fallen King. There are places where the boundaries between Thought and Thing are not so sharply delineated. Where Here and There are but a passing distinction. There's power in these thresholds, but the thresholds are Ashley's to find. Doorways, Dolmen, Graveyards, Twilight, Daybreak -- there are all manner of thresholds in the World, marked in all manners of observances, and each carries to it a tiny hush.

Wonder.

Power.

These are the suntides of the World. Knowing them, Naming them, using them is a birth right. Kae has told her such: these Paths are a birth right. In walking them, Ashley has claimed hers.

Uncertainty, that unsettled place before Epiphany, that is a threshold as well.

There is a ripple, like water, that slides over her skin when the Paths finally open to her Will. It flows over her, like an exhaled sigh, like slipping through a place that ought be too narrow. This is Between; she is neither Here nor There. It is outside of the Words she has used to define her world until now. Until this moment.

It is a long walk through the grey of between, and Things here are not as well formed and solid as they are in the Waking World. Things here are still flexible, half-formed and not yet solid. They are easily influenced. This much can be said about Things; far more could be said about Thoughts. In this place, Thoughts are Things. Words are Manifestation. It is an odd World Beside The World that Ashley's will and mindset cultivate, and it is not at all the same as the world Kae hears and feels when she walks this path. But it is not like swimming upstream, and keeping to the left will take her, in time, to the place where she has been called.

There are other thinnings along the way, branched paths, places where she might surface into another place, all tangible and whole again. The place she has been before seems familiar, though, where the others do not. And when the walls of this lumen thin again and she slips through, again through a space no bigger than her body-soul, again with the sense that the world merely breathes out and it is made so, she will be standing beside the fallow field, where the great lumbering beast of an old farm truck sat before.

Today there is no one to greet her, just yet, but the brightness of the sun and the sweetness of mowed grass are enough to assure her she has arrived. In moments, more than five minutes but less than ten, the truck will come lumbering, rumbling, ambling down the gravel path, driven by the diminutive woman it has swallowed up into its cab. Today it will be mud-spattered and work-weary, but the cab's heater works and it makes up for its appearance with warmth and welcoming.

[Ashley McGowen] It feels strange to her, this kind of navigation. Here is one of the things she could tell Emily Littleton about being a mage: if there is ever a point in which you stop realizing, now and again, that the world is a much bigger and more complex place than you knew before, you've stopped growing. There's always more to learn and more to wonder at, new things opening up.

And here Ashley herself is an odd sort of embodiment of two places, two things, a small human shell and the wraith of fire that she appears as when she navigates Thought itself, she's both of them, and she is becoming Hunger more and more as she joins the two together. Hermetics understand the process of becoming their Word, something divine, as a different thing to each, but there is still that sense of fulfillment and a sense that she is managing to keep herself open to all of these new things while retaining the core of who she is.

She's still figuring it out. And her arm stings. But she's getting it.

She pushes back through and finds herself in front of the farmhouse once more, and Kae is not there yet. Ashley turns her thoughts to investigating her environment while she waits, because she has no idea how long she will be waiting. She tilts her face up to the sun, she looks down at the dried blood on her arm and wishes she had something with which to wipe it away - but she doesn't - so she just lets the sleeve of her jacket fall down over it again and cover it up.

When the truck's engine reaches her ears (belatedly) she looks up and waits for Kae, moving to the side to get out of the way of the truck.

[Witta] The farmhouse is sleepy and quiet when uninhabited, but it retains that comfy and welcoming aura. This is not magic. This is lifetimes of purpose instilled in a singular thing. The house, while not Aware of itself or its purpose, exists in accordance with that purpose. It fulfills the requirements of giving shelter, welcoming friends and family; it does these things so well that it has taken on a luster, of sorts. It is a farmhouse to surpass all other farmhouses, and it is still made of stone and wood and steel nails and wrought by human hands.

Kae brings the mass of truck to a slow stop, and the door slams a bit when she hops out of the cab. She has to lean up against its dirty side to reach far enough into the bed to grasp hold of her grocery bag and her satchel (which is nothing more than a messenger bag with an embroidered flap). She has the bag of foodstuffs tucked between her arm and her side, balanced against her hip, when she greets Ashley. She carries it a bit like one might carry a child, using the bends of her body to brace it better.

"I'm glad you came," she says, with a broad and welcoming smile. It brightens her eyes and rounds out her cheeks when she grins like that. Her nose and cheeks are pink from the chill, and Kaeley stamps the dirt from her boots as she ascends the porch stairs. "C'mon in and make yourself comfortable," she tells the Hermetic with the faintest hint of a drawl.

She makes no mention of the remarkable thing that Ashley has just done. Must have done to end up here, at the Dyers' farmhouse. Kae brings the sack of groceries into the kitchen, shelves them quickly. Her satchel puddles on the floor beside one chair, strap all akimbo, lazy and loose-shaped. She puts the kettle on to boil beside a stockpot that has been simmering a vegetable soup all afternoon. The house smells of nourishing foods and slow-cooked warmth.

Without asking whether Ashley is hungry, Kae pulls down a bowl and plate and begins to make up a meal for the Hermetic. Once that is down on the kitchen table, she'll serve herself. The meal is vegetable soup, a hearty grain bread and a bit of Irish Cheddar. Tea or coffee will come later, once the water boils.

"Did you have a nice trip?" she asks, much in the way that people ask after someone's flight or train ride. "Any trouble with getting here?"

Kae slips into a chair at the table, breaks off a little corner of bread and cheese to chew on while Ashley answers. Through the window behind her, Ashley can see the massive Oak Tree in their backyard. Massive seems the wrong word for it, but it is definitely accurate. Perhaps Venerable, or Mighty would do better.

[Ashley McGowen] Ashley makes no verbal reply when Kae greets her, but the Verbena gets a return smile that is quite genuine. She rather likes Kae, and it's rare that she develops this kind of comfortable ease around other people, especially so quickly. If she thought about it, it might alarm her that she can still do it - because right at this moment she isn't particularly inclined to develop attachment of any kind to anyone or anything, or to further it where it exists.

But those aren't the kinds of things she thinks about often. She follows Kae into the farmhouse, not expecting any mention or praise for what she accomplished. Those are things she isn't used to hearing from a mentor's mouth, and Kae isn't actively working to make her life difficult so she can surmount the challenge: that's good enough for Ashley.

She walks in and her stomach rumbles as though on cue, which might be precisely why Kae doesn't ask her if she's hungry. Or maybe she just knows because she's starting to know Ashley.

Ashley sits down at the table and waits until Kae sits down and serves herself before she starts to eat (courteous - and observing old traditions besides). She folds a piece of the cheddar into a bit of the bread she's broken off and then dunks it all into the soup and chews it before she answers. Then her eyes flick up and meet Kae's.

And she admits, "A little. I wasn't sure how you did what you did to get the Paths to open, before. But I figured it out." This is with confidence and certainty but without any overt pride to speak of. It's not out of modesty that it isn't there, but rather that she expects those things - if they're displayed - to be promptly undercut. She's treating Kae like a mentor of sorts even if she's unaware of whether she is in an official capacity.

[Witta] Kae avoid being as many things as possible in any official capacity. Sometimes the very act of Naming a thing changes it, shifts it away from its decided purpose. Too much talking ruins a thing as much as too many cooks spoil soup. She teaches Ashley, in her own way, in her own time, in whatever method or medium she thinks the Hermetic will take to, in ways that do not violate her oaths or her principles. To narrow this down to Mentoring, and then open it up to all the connotations and denotations that word carries is to complicate a very simple thing needlessly.

"I'm glad."

This stands in for Congratulations. It carries a note of approval, if not elevated praise. There is more going on here than it seems, but Kae makes no move to name that either.

She watches Ashley eat for a moment, and then nods a little.

"What we do is of the Body as well as the Will. You want to learn Life; you should know this. Everything we do takes its toll on the body, not just the spirit. After you Work, you should eat something and drink something. It grounds the body, but it also replaces what you expended. You have to think of these things as intertwined -- your Will is in the vessel, but it is also a part of that vessel. So we eat after magic; it's not just about community or celebration."

Kaeley explains to her the root of sacrifice, and it has nothing to do with the cut on Ashley's arm. It is something more intrinsic than the foci they choose to hone their Wills. These words are conversational, simple, ambling and easy. They're spaced between mouthfuls of soup and bread, and when the kettle begins to whistle, she breaks off talking to tend to it instead.

[Ashley McGowen] Ashley isn't used to this, really, the way in which they're communicating without giving a Name to what they're doing. The Order of Hermes is a (sometimes overly) very formal Tradition, and they define the relationship that exists between student and mentor because it allows the student to know they are doing the mentor's Will, because it reminds the mentor of the responsibility that they have and it reminds them of how the student will represent their Working in times to come.

But Ashley takes to it well nonetheless. Maybe it's because her first mentorship experience met an unfortunate end, or maybe it's because she's an Adept and hates being told what to do, or maybe it's just that the way speaks to a part of her that the Order of Hermes refined and suppressed to some extent. But she's all right with it.

Ashley grins, once, when told to eat and drink something after Working. It's a rule she isn't going to have any difficulty following. "So you replace after diminishing yourself."

Kae is explaining sacrifice: she gets it. She understands this part of it better, on a more intellectual level, than she would have at one point in the past. Not so long in the past, really. "I think of it kind of as...the reverse. As though it's an extension of my mind." Rather than a physical shell she was chained to, which was how it once was. "But it should still apply."

And, in fact, works on a level she hadn't thought of before: as an extension she is feeding her soul's Hunger with things of the body. It's an idea that rather appeals to her.

[Witta] Mugs here are rough hewn things, as if someone threw them on a potter's wheel and slapped on a handle. Some of these braces have broken off, and there are handle-less mugs in the cupboards aplenty, but Kae finds two that are reasonable for small hands and have handles yet. She brews them with a brewing teapot, but the tea inside is a mixture of herbs and nuts and berries. It is not a thing she purchased somewhere, but a blend she made to address some need this fall.

She nods at Ashley's reply. Many of her answers and acknowledgments are like this. A nod. A small gesture. Things that say I heard you and I do not disagree without cluttering up the moment.

"The greater the struggle, the more keen the sacrifice is felt. So if, in your time, you learn to heal yourself or others you might think to feed not only your patient but yourself after. Or to allow yourself time to rest or recuperate. Even Small Gods require a Sabbath," she tells Ashley, tongue-in-cheek and clearly teasing with her wording.

"I only mention these things because Life is not a collection of rituals and rotes and rites, not for us. It is the whole of being, wrapped up in being part of a greater whole. Not unlike this question of the Will and the Body is the matter of the Mage and Magic, or more perhaps more precisely the Witch and the World.

"A lot of the Struggle in Life magic comes from trying to change a whole of which you are also part, from which you can never truly be separate. To mend the Body with the Will which is also of the Body is hard enough; to mend another's Body, which is to touch the vessel of their Will, is harder yet; and because there is struggle to both of these acts, there will necessarily be sacrifice. I have thought a lot about the offerings you gave within the Circle. Do not be hasty to spill your blood as a simple foci; I assure you that the spilling of blood and sacrifices of the flesh will come in time, and they will neither be clean nor simple. We choose the paths of least resistance when we can, and work within natural means where we can find them, because it lessens the strain on the whole and ourselves. It lets us do more with less. It is not weakness, but a drive to preserve ourselves, knowing the hard times will come."

[Ashley McGowen] This is a rather pragmatic way of explaining things, something Ashley can understand, this idea of preserving herself for a greater fight later. It's something she's had to learn and teach herself over time, through the course of her Awakened life. She Awoke a brash teenager, barely, and throughout her early twenties she resonated with power and enthusiasm and threw all of herself into whatever she undertook, as though she could devour it all within seconds.

It's a tendency of hers that she's had to continue to try to moderate. There are times when it's a good quality: it has, for example, appealed to the few lovers she's had and that singlemindedness of purpose and desire has served quite well in motivating her through many of the challenges she's come across. But it was also what lead her to leap headlong into Dylan's Mind instead of investigating, carefully tasting, and it's what sometimes leads her to disregard how her actions will affect others if she's only thinking of her hunger at the time. She's inherently a selfish person, and she's reckless, and it's gotten herself and people she cares about into trouble more than once.

So when Kae explains all of this, there's just a nod, because she's at least self-aware enough to know that it is a problem that she has. She thinks about what is said, and lifts the mug so that she can inhale the steam for a while before she starts to drink.

"I was doing it because it's kind of...a reminder for me, of my blood and my instinct being an extension of my Will," she says. "Or...them being tied in together. It was a way for me to bind the two." But, she supposes, it could be done just as well without spilling it. "But I understand."

That it's a way of being, that she understands; that, she had already assumed. Ashley is not the sort of mage who sees magic as a formula, focus plus careful application of Will equals result. She seeks to become; she seeks underlying truths, the Words at the root of all things.

[Witta] [Life 1: practiced -1, focus -1, needs extra success to share with Ashley; extending if necessary]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 5, 6, 7 (Success x 3 at target 3)

[Witta] Now that Ashley has said she understands, Kae will say nothing further if Ashley continues to use her own blood as a focus. It is enough for Kae to know that Ashley understands the ritual and focus is not the sacrifice itself. She nods, again, and silence descends as they both finish their meals and sips from their tea.

"Have I told you about my Awakening?" she asks Ashley. Kaeley is relatively sure she hasn't. She hasn't told anyone of it in many, many years. If Ashley says no, or indicates any interest, Kae will lead her to the yard toward the tree. She carries her mug of tea with her.

The side door of the kitchen opens out into the yard. To one side is the barn. A little ahead, a thick-trunked Oak rises to dwarf the farmhouse. It is larger than any tree had right to be, with roped and cragged limbs and a full canopy of slick green-black leaves. It is a Living Oak, one that does not turn in the winter. One that holds its leaves until Spring's new growth pushes them to drop.

If Ashley had to guess which came first, the house or the tree, it would be an easy answer. A tree of that size must be more than a hundred years old. It is ancient, in the span of human lifetimes.

Kae reaches out withe fingers of one hand to touch its trunk in a hello, much like greeting a mare. There's fondness in it, and a note of respect. That hand falls away as she speaks, and she idly draws clockwise circles in her tea with one fingertip.

"This is my Family Tree," she tells Ashley. At first it might seem strange to hear her speak of this literally, but she's said before that she comes from a Family Tradition. It will be made clear. "My father's family has lived here for many generations. That line runs deep with Witchcraft. Several generations have been born here, lived here, died here.

"When my Great Aunt died, she asked me to help her. I had attained my third degree; I was a priestess in my own right, but the Rites we practiced among Sleepers were not so visceral. We gave blood as offerings, at times, but never lives. When she died, she used her Will to open up the vein in her arms. She bled out here, and she pulled forward my Sight to watch it happen. Her lifesblood fed the tree that watches over our family. It stained my hands and clothes. There was nothing I could do to stop it, and I wouldn't have if I could. She died, and her gift passed to me."

Kaeley takes that fingertip that is damp with herbal tea and draws a symbol in the palm of Ashley's hand. She does not presume and touch her face. Kae's awareness of living things bleeds across this connection, bringing with it the thrum of energy from the world around them. Even in Autumn, where the energy of the world is heavy with senescence and dormancy, there is a vibrancy to her pattern, to Ashley's, to the sharpness of the cut on Ashley's arm, to the robust vitality of the tree before them.

It is a veritable Cathedral, with thick-spun branches for stained glass and the rustle of oak leaves for hymnals. Its roots go deep, deep enough that Ashley will have to follow them consciously to find where they end. Its boughs reach far and high, and she will have to soar to find the treetop. It is not as old as she may have expected, but it carries with it the strength of many lives offered up. This is a holy place, one rooted deep into the earth that will not be carried away lightly.

There is Sacrifice here, but it is thoughtful and absolute. It is given so that others may continue to live life to its fullest extent and that Vitality also comes through. Intermingled as they have become over time, even Kaeley cannot discern the individual voices and energies of her relatives in this patchwork of reworked resonances. She can still find the place where a babe was buried among the roots, but not its signature. The child has returned to ashes, to dust, and is not a living pattern any longer.

"Some day my blood or my ashes will rest here, too."

[Ashley McGowen] They're talking about Awakenings, and when Kae's awareness extends outward to the tree and to Ashley herself, she can see the marks that Ashley's own Awakening left on her, even if she doesn't speak of it. Her left eye is indeed blind, the inner workings of the ear on that side, delicate as an old clock, also ravaged; there are pieces of her brain that remain a ruin, the nerves crushed, skull held together with a plate that the scalp has been pulled over, grown over top of like new foliage after a fire. She should not be as coherent, as articulate, as she is: a walking Paradox animated by Will.

Ashley listens to Kae speak, and while she does her own fingertips drift out to skim over the bark of the oak as though she could feel the vitality surging beneath, though she's yet blind to it. She just likes to touch things.

Kaeley touches her palm and draws a sigil there, and Ashley looks down at her hand - and then, when she realizes what she can suddenly See there's a sharp intake of breath. Her attention redirects itself to Kae, then to the tree and the boughs that soar above and the roots that reach down deep and she chases them, taking in detail. She looks at her own skin and the cut on her arm, sensing for the first time her own Pattern in this way. Sensing, also perhaps for the first time, a kind of vitality around her that she can't deny the existence of or the ties it holds to the Thought that birthed it.

But what, perhaps, surprises her the most is that she's not just seeing other Wills like this, but the extension of other things that exist, other things that are bound by blood and sap and affect the world all the same: just by living. Maybe that simple realization surprises her a little.

Ashley touches the tree again, lets her fingers wander over the bark and down, and it's not going to be long before she teaches herself to do this too. Like with the Paths: sometimes all a person needs is to be shown that something exists.

"Do you all feed the tree that way, when you die?" she asks, and by this she presumably means Kae's family.

[Witta] "Not all of us," she tells the Hermetic, who is becoming more Verbaenic each time they meet. "To be honest, it's only symbolic for those who do have neither hedge-witchery nor Awakened magic. There is nothing gnostic of it for the uninitiated."

She shrugs a little, but that motion is lost to the overwhelming awareness of each other's breath and heartbeat and the vitality surrounding them. Kaeley often chooses to share this sense with someone new at this point in the year, when there is still enough to sense to feel connected but not a Summer fullness or headiness. Offering up these senses at the peak of pre-Harvest verdancy is hardly fair. Initiating someone in Winter is unnecessarily bleak. Spring or Fall, the swing seasons, middle places, neither here not there -- they are good for beginnings and endings.

"With enough understanding of Life and Prime, it is possible to give back not just the heartsblood but the Quintessence we carry. The right Sacrifice at the right time, in the right place can even cause a welling up or Awaken a Node from slumber. The Quintessence any of us carry is small, and the heartsblood we spill nourishes the tree -- blood and bone meals are common soil ammendments," this aside is a reminder that this Farmer's house is not a thing for show. There is a rootedness here, to the Storm-swept Verbena, for all that she wanders there is home here. It is not where her accent or her magic hails from; her heritage goes deep into another land's time. But here, in this New World, this is the pilgrimage point.

"It's not just family, either. Other hedge witches and Tradition mages have lived here, are buried or remembered here, people we've worked closely with or trained; people we've loved over the years. And when there are no more of us, the Tree will remain for awhile. I think that is everyone's hope: to leave something thriving and solid and beautiful in our wake, something that upholds and endures."

[Ashley McGowen] Kae mentions awakening a node, and that makes her think of Catherine who slumbers after she destroyed the Nephandi that gathered around the well within. She's been slumbering since then, unavailable to the magi of Chicago - and that, too, has been part of the reason for Ashley's low mood over the past few months, seeing something she'd sworn herself to damaged and disappearing.

"The node we have in Chicago," Ashley says, "was created by a woman who was a Verbena, once. She sacrificed herself and the node came into existence and she's actually in the node now. I've spoken to her." She offers this because she trusts Kae and this conversation brings it to mind. "She let me hear music when I spoke to her."

That was, in fact, why Ashley swore herself over to the protection of the place. It's something she's been disinclined to mention to the majority of magi.

After she's done investigating the tree she focuses on Kaeley, the pattern of her breathing and the pace of her blood, contrasts it with what she can see of her own: a mixture of studiousness and wonder. To what Kae says of the family tree, she simply nods, because it is something she can appreciate, that hope and what the tree represents.

[Witta] "What she's done is quite rare," Kaeley says, of Catherine. There's esteem and wonder to it, untempered in any way, unobscured.

The Verbena's pattern is strong, much as one would expect of a Disciple of Life. There is no sign of weariness or infection, but rather a hardiness that has built itself up over time. She is not a broad-shouldered woman, but the muscles she has are strong and carry her well. There is no weathering, here, no small knicks and burrs, no hangnails or skinned knees or lingering bruises. Compared to Ashley's own pattern, it is a refined thing. Not because she's been unmarred by harm over time, but because there was a constant subtle polishing to rub out the imperfections. A mindfulness.

"To be aware of your body is the first step," Kae tells her, and they are not talking about Catherine or the tree now. "To know how it reacts when you are frightened, or aroused, or happy. Tired or hungry. To know the difference between Hunger and hunger, between craving and deficiency. To name and know the hurts you have that you might mend them. To be aware is always the first step; notice what you notice."

The Verbena's breathing is slow and steady, her heartrate is low and her pulse is strong. She is steady; she holds steady. She has control over these things like Ashley might regulate her own mind. Kaeley's body will not betray her as readily as anyone else's, should she have need of such subterfuge. She rarely has need, but this awareness may be familiar to Ashley. It may be the first true point of similarity this short and fair-haired woman has with the Disciple Ashley better knows.

"A life is not like other patterns. It feeds, produces, reproduces, has byproducts in things and actions. It has imperatives; at its base, all Life has the same imperative function: to reproduce and survive. Matter does not have purpose in this sense, not even the physical or elemental Forces do. Perhaps your closest study will have been Mind."

[Ashley McGowen] Mind is where Ashley has chosen to focus, and it has struck her for some time, the similarities between living patterns and Wills. They have the same drive to exist and the same drive to fight each other and prey on each other, and they become something better and are honed over time as they experience more and as the weak are sorted out. She has that sort of awareness of her own mind, control over her own thoughts and maintenance of her Self: this is one of the reasons she has managed to persevere over the course of the year as she has. The methods she uses to Work the Ars Mentis are thoroughly woven in with how she manages herself in day-to-day living.

Ashley is becoming aware, and she's starting to notice how Kae has exerted her Will over her own body and let it be an extension of her mind in a way that Ashley has not. Ashley is aware, like this, of how the trials of living have worked themselves over her pattern and that as it is, currently, it is a less than perfect thing; there have been ways in which her body has been broken and allowed to mend itself back together, in the past. She's had broken ribs, she's been shot several times: in some ways it resembles a piece of paper crumpled up into a ball and then smoothed out again. It retains its shape, but all of those crinkles and marks still persist.

She tries to be aware. Particularly, she is aware of how her thoughts affect her body, and which comes first - whether her blood tells her something that reaches her Mind or if it's the other way around - and sorting that out interests her, though it might be a touch precocious at this point. Her heart is beating fast because she's fascinated and a little excited, because she's devouring.

"Do you want me to just study it, then?" she asks Kae after a moment. "I know how it's similar to the mind and I've been studying it that way. Is it just a matter of kind of...translating it over, or...?"

[Witta] To this, Kaeley's not quite sure of how to answer. She rolls a thoughtful sound across her vocal chords, but does not shape it into a word. Ashley can sense the vibration of it as readily as she can hear the sound. She can see how th Verbena's body shifts to support her words with breath.

"I met you when your thoughts and paradigm were fully formed. Perhaps it is as simple as translating it over, for you. Each path is different. For now, I want you to find the thing so vibrant and visceral and solid and real and alive that it helps you find this awareness, to call it forward for yourself. From there, the real study begins.

"You well know your mind. You have studied it for years. You've learned to express yourself, and order it, to study and learn and adapt and grow. You must do the same with your body, to fill in whatever awareness you were not raised into. I can help you; we can study medicine and herbal remedies, different thoughts on how the body's life force paths through, meridians and chi, or chakra, but none of these matter, really, until you can call up this sense for yourself."

Kaeley sips from her luke warm tea. Ashley can see the motion her tongue and throat makes to usher that down toward her center; she's aware of digestion (though she may not call it that, just yet) from their recent meal. A body is a busy place, not simple in the slightest. Even the great Oak is busily preparing for Winter.

"I studied the pathways of the body. Old wisdom and new sciences. I was trained as a nurse, so this came readily to me. I was raised in the Craft, so a lot of old remedies and acts of faith-healing were familiar to me. I found that by ... navigating my will through these known channels, I could change things to be what they needed to be. There's an echo there of what a pattern ought be; if you help it to resolve toward that pattern, it is easier than trying to write a new thing overtly. The more you observe, the better you know a thing. The better you know it, the more easily you can influence it."

[Ashley McGowen] Ashley has not had much occasion to learn new Spheres since her Awakening. Much of what she knows now was innate, was there for her and she could sense it already: the sole exception is the Ars Essentiae. Her mentor taught her that upon her induction into the Order of Hermes, and it was simple enough to grasp once she had all of her other knowledge in place.

Regardless, it's been a long time since she's had to do this, build from the ground up. Much of what she's focused on has been an expansion of things she already knows, and she'd forgotten how it is, suddenly attuning herself to an aspect of the world she didn't know about before.

Kae's suggestion for how she should learn, what she should study, brings a thoughtful frown to her face. She isn't sure what she'll focus on, and she's already turning her thoughts to what she can study to find the sort of awareness Kae is talking about. Her thumb curves over the outline of one of the chain links under her shirt, thoughtful. Wistful. But there are other things.

"You can bring it in line with its Word," Ashley says, to the last of what Kae says. And this too is thoughtful, and this is why she has always worked on expanding her knowledge rather than starting anew: this is just how her mind works, and the abstract understanding that she has to reality is conducive to understanding the things around her on a deeper level. She's impatient, just scratching the surface, has to work in order to properly appreciate the small things. She's been doing that more and more.

"It'll be hard, finding things that are alive in winter," she says, but this is more a musing than a complaint. It's thoughtful. Perhaps that's the point.

[Witta] Ah, yes, Hermetics and their Words.

"It's something like that, yes," Kaeley says. There's an odd note to her tone; she is agreeing without agreeing. Kaeley doesn't believe that things have a fundamental Word; in fact, using Pattern in its place is a falsehood as well. They have a correct state of being, that is self-evident with enough awareness and patient. They follow a pattern. They have a Voice, a melody and harmony all their own.

It's little Wonder that her Cousin was a Singer, though they had remarkably little influence on each other's magic.

"There's more alive in Winter than you may think. Not everything that slumbers has died. Think of things more like soldiers, fortified behind their thick walls, waiting out the interim and the cold. They're alive, but sequestered. It's more about readiness and quiet, and less about rampant growth and action."

[Ashley McGowen] Perhaps at one point Ashley too might have seen things this way, as an interweaving of melodies. But those are something that she has been deaf to for years, and Ashley has been struggling to find some sort of connection since then. But Kae doesn't debate with her, because Words are how she sees it now and how she will continue to see it. She's always going to have that Hermetic influence.

"I suppose that's a good way to think of it," she says, of Winter, "but it's hard to...find something vibrant like you were talking about, I guess. Or maybe it'll just make it easier to focus on something if I find something that is, since it'll stand out."

Ashley has never liked the winter months. She finds them cold and hard and gray, without sunlight and rather unlike her own nature and those with whom she's associated herself. Even when she lived near the ocean, which is too big to slow down and ice over, that was a true thing. She's learned to cope with Winter, though, in her way.

"I'll study," she promises Kaeley, and she will. She makes for a diligent student.

[Witta] When the Disciple drops her Sense away, it does not fall like a sundering. She is practiced and artful, though not necessarily subtle. It fades away, softens and retreats. At some point, Ashley will notice the absence of the overlaid awareness, and then it will be gone.

"I do not doubt it," Kae tells her, with some notable approval.

There is a pause then, and, almost as if she'd forgotten her earlier lecture on eating and drinking and magery, Kaeley seemed ready to leave things there. This caesura drags on just a moment too long to be purposeful.

"I've pie, if you want some," she tells Hunger with a tip of her head toward the house. Kaeley's footsteps are more of a saunter than a purposeful stride; she ambles; she's not driven just now by any particular thing. "You can stay as long as you like. In fact, you can come whenever you like. You know your way here and back, now. The door's almost always unlocked, and if not there's a key under the mat. A few people come in and out now and then -- my cousin Aedan, tall, redhead, and Devin with her boys; they stay sometimes when her husband's out of town."

She holds the screen door of the kitchen open and lets Ashley past her and into the house.

"Sometimes it's nice to have a place to be where no one expects anything of you, y'know?"

[Ashley McGowen] No sooner has Kae offered her pie than she's ambling along after the Verbena, and she isn't the type to turn down food, particularly not some variety of fruit and baked good. She tucks her hands into the pockets of her coat, able, for the time being, to ignore the spark of pain that lights up along the inside of her forearm when the cloth of her jacket brushes against it. It's only a small cut, and by the time she gets home it might not even need to be bandaged.

She smiles a little when Kae offers to let her come whenever she likes. While she probably won't take the Verbena up on the invitation too often, it's helpful for her to know that it's there, that she has somewhere to go. Somewhere she's welcome. There aren't many places like that right now, with Kage out of town so often.

"Yeah, it is," she agrees when she strides past Kae and into the farmhouse again - though in truth, she always anticipates that something will be expected of her, even when people say this. It's something she's on guard for, even if she isn't the sort who comes across immediately as suspicious (because she isn't. There's an acceptance to her cynicism: this is just how things work.)

"Do you live here alone?" she asks, with a glance around the kitchen. "Other than people who come by to visit, I mean."

[Witta] If Ashley stays, there will be a room with a firm bed and a pile of hand-made quilts upon it. At that foot of that bed would be a cedar chest. There is no TV. There is a crystal radio that has not been used in some time. There is a piano. The sitting room is arranged for conversations around a well-loved coffee table and before an oft-burning hearth. It is a compact house, with no hallway space to speak of, smaller rooms and single paned windows, but it manages to be cheerful in its own ways.

"For now," Kaeley says. she does not seem perturbed by this. "I had expected to raise children here, to have them grow up with their grandparents and extended family close at hand. But that..." there's a glimmer of sadness here, a thing she still suffers for "Is not now. It may be some time in the future, I don't know. I have never muddled much with Seeing."

"Devin lived here for a bit with the boys. Aedan has lived here, but he found a place of his own nearer to town. When I did not live here, my parents did, and then for awhile Aedan did alone until I came back. People come and go. Some, live Devin, weren't family before and are now. Whenever there is a cluster of Verbena nearby, this seems to become a Tradition house."

Then, deadpan and not entirely amused.

"There was this dreadful time when friends of friends of my mother's used the barn for something called Jazzercise. I think it was the 80s. It was wretched."

She brings a piece of pie for Ashley, but only a sliced apple for herself. Kae adds a bit more warm water to the kettle.

[Ashley McGowen] Ashley is quite comfortable in places like this; her own home is rather compact, snug, without much extra space to throw around, but it's also warm and almost cheerful in its way. Perhaps all the more surprising, since it was inherited from her own mentor, who kept places and hidey-holes scattered around the country, places upon which she'd impressed her own resonance and her own Will. She'd reworked it upon moving in, made it into hers.

She takes the pie, finding a chair and finally shucking her jacket, letting it find a place hanging over the back of her chair. For a few seconds she examines her arm, then gets up to wash the blood clean. It's dry, but she can rather surmise that however Kae feels about blood and bone meal in her fields or sacrifices offered to the tree, she probably doesn't want it flaking all over her house.

She sticks her arm under the faucet while she listens to Kae. The sadness doesn't go unheard: it's still very much there in Ashley, and listening to Kae's voice is like listening to her own, an echo of what it will be when a few years have gone by. Just memory and the lingering regret of what could have been. But there is nothing she can say to it.

Amusement colors her voice at the mention of jazzercise, as she finally scrubs the blood clean from her arm and turns off the faucet. "I guess I'm lucky I was spared the horrors, when I could still hear it," she says. Then, "Sometimes if I'm upset about not being able to hear it I look up the lyrics of current pop songs for consolation. 'I wanna take a ride on your disco stick' is apparently an actual line floating around out there."

A beat as she returns to her chair and picks up her fork and says, "At least you can dictate the uses, now that it's your barn."

[Witta] "To some extent," Kae offers. She could probably dictate more, if that was her style. "But I kind of like knowing the place has a life and a flow all its own. I lived for some time in a Chantry. It's less lonely, feeling that you live in the center of something bigger, a community. Whether there's four or twenty people at the board for dinner, any number is better than one."

Her apple is crisp and sharp-sweet. Kaeley is eating the lone granny smith that was rolling around the crisper bin. She's eating it in segments of pale-bright flesh, and green-bright skin.

"A lot of what's on the radio these days is pretty awful," she agrees. "I've always leaned toward folk music, classical and jazz, myself. There's not much of that around with lyrics regarding disco-anythings. Strangely, I feel no loss for it."

A little wink.

[Ashley McGowen] The Chicago chantry is, at present, a community only in the loosest sense. Its members are disparate, keeping largely to themselves and coming together when there's a crisis or when there's some bit of bureaucratic wording to be picked over and argued about and decided. Ashley isn't sure if the house itself is part of the cause of this: at present, no one lives there except Gregor, who lives in the basement and tends the node. Most of them see the house as a place to be avoided, a place tied with painful memories.

Ashley remembers that it wasn't like that in Boston, though. It's just that building a community and getting people to talk to and appreciate each other is not a strength of hers. She doesn't really engender warmth and camaraderie and comfort. She knows it.

"I can see that," she says - though on that front, she has little to say.

Kaeley's mention of her musical preferences, the wink, draws a grin out of the Hermetic. And a companionable quiet.

[Witta] The quiet settles in around the table, like a friend pulling up another chair. It is unremarked upon for a long time, and the room fills with the sounds of chewing and breathing and the tic the pilot light in the stove makes, and the occasional flare of the furnace in the attic and rumble of air moving through the overhead ducts.

At some point, the Verbena rises to wash the dishes and set them in the drainboard. She dries her hand on a plain towel, with a small fringe of worn embroidery. Almost every textile in the house has some hand-wrought pattern to it. Most of the wooden furniture is notably unique pieces. The floorboards have been tended to by carpenters' hands over time. The bed quilts have been mended my seamstresses. It is a well-worn, well-mended place that feels a little anachronistic.

At some length, Kaeley remarks "I've a few teas to put together for people in town, and a some patients to see on my way back. You're welcome to come with, or stay, or head back. If you'd like help with the Paths, we'll have to leave soon so I'll get back in time to run into town."

Whatever Ashley decides, Kae is fine with it. If she stays to help assemble the herbal pouches, then Kaeley will tell her a bit about each herb, and its medicinal and magical uses as they work. If she stays to go into town with Kaeley, she'll see the community building and caretaking that the Verbena undertakes, even in her relative isolation here. She is the town's witch and medicine woman, who operates alongside and in good standing with the town's physician.

If she wants nothing more than a ride to the shallowing where the Path opens and tidings of safe passage, then Kae can manage that as well, offer up a pointer of how to track her way home from this direction, and wish her pleasant travels.