On River Rocks

Stella

The sun has begun its long, slow descent from mid-heaven and the light of it glances over and gilds the ripples of moving water of the river as it slides and flows and whorls and dredges and moves in all the deep and quick and meaningful ways that waterways move, and there is a thrum of summer bugs already in the air around them, for it is warm enough for insect life and it is humid enough for the sound of them to catch and thrum and buzz and hum.  The grass and weeds along the river banks has grown high enough that each crush of their footfalls brings up the smell of verdant growth, of river mud, a sharpness to meld with the pollen hanging heavy in the air and the taste of pine and cedar sweeping down from the mountains and the hope of morels hidden among the roots of trees.  It is not yet the golden hour, for that comes later, when the sun is slung so low that she has turned from burnished light toward brass and every shadow is slanted hard toward the evening and the thickness of them is almost syrupy, or smoke, but never sweet.

Arianna's hair is piled up on top of her head, secured with a few pins and clips, leaving the back of her neck bare.  Every few minutes she reaches up and slaps at something there, and pulls her hand away to inspect it.  So far she has not been quick enough to catch the offending party that has nipped or landed or merely grazed there.

She grew up in a warm country so when Nicholas wants to go hiking the mid-day after a heavy rain, she is fairly sure it will be warm and humid and dresses accordingly.  But she is not used to Denver, and the dappled light over head and the thick, chunky cumulus clouds that sail between said sunlight, should speak to her of coming rain but rather they seem to be its cessation.

For all the years that Nick has known her, Ari has never seemed the out of doors type.  Perhaps he expected a measure of whining, or wheedling or demanding of reasons for their excursion -- promptly renamed an Adventure by Ari -- but this does not come.  Instead she asks him for the names of trees, or flowers, or birds, and she listens if he will talk, and she is blessedly quiet if he wants to listen to the sigh of the wind or the sway of the leaves. 

"What is this one?" she asks him of a tree that they are passing.  "I like the shape of the leaves, and the armament of its seedpods." Hah, yes, leave it to a Flambeau's daughter to find weaponry so readily in Nature.

crow

He is learning to name the trees and flowers and birds that reside in Denver, for it is all still new to him too; he grew up in the desert, surrounded by rocky peaks and chaparral and sometimes palms, when they were in the city.  He traded that for the New England coast, old deciduous forests and salt marshes and the skeleton of some ancient mountain range.  So he doesn't always have names readily available to Ari, but when he does he shares them.

He does talk, sometimes, as they wind their way down the trail.  He tells her about the times he has been here before (he ran into Alex much farther downriver a few weeks ago, lighting a fire) and about the spirits he has seen (he encountered an Owl spirit, but on another river, and they say Owls can be death omens in some cultures did she know that.)

"That's some kind of alder," he says, with a sidelong look toward the tree and indeed to its armament of seedpods.  With the tendency to poetry and the likeness cast to weaponry, there are times when he is tempted to compare and contrast being out here with Ari to being out here with Pen, and the ways they are similar and yet different.

He is taking them up along the river and there is a place where the river kisses the path and for a little while they are joined, they run alongside each other.  It's not meant to last though (some things aren't) and so when they diverge once more Nick stays along the river.  It's a little mountain stream, with waves and currents that peak and crest and rush alongside each other like a herd of horses.

"I've been curious since we last talked about magick, Ari - have you ever experimented with instruments before?  Maybe back in your wild youth?"  Here, a little smile cast in her direction.

Stella

"My wild youth," she echoes, much amused by something touched upon but not truly called out into the afternoon sunlight.  It curls the corner of her mouth and the green of her eyes is more like grass out here than it is like moss, or perhaps that is only the way the yellowing light has caught them just now.  There is laughter, too, because if Nicholas only knew the truth of what he alluded to.  But it is restrained, too, for they are only recently learning to bend that part of her past forward into this friendship and it is not always easy.

"I spent a lot of time out of doors and outside the walls when I was young," she tells him, and there is a fondness and familiarity with how she watches the coursing of the mountain stream and the way it kisses the banks.  "More so than probably I should have," she admits, with candor but without remorse.  "But I never really dabbled in other instruments."

She considers it now, though, as she watches the light on the water or the movement of the grass as he parts a path for them along its banks.

"I suppose my wild youth and my Awakened days did not overlap as much as I would have liked," she teases now, saying this in a long suffering sigh and touching it through with wistfulness.  Offering him a wink when his attention is next cast her way.

"How did you select your instruments?" she asks him, and there is no mockery or faux interest here, only solemnity worthy of the gravity of the question.  "Were they part of your education, or did they come to you through experimentation?"

crow

When Nicholas took his first few steps away from home and went to college (he wouldn't Awaken until years later), it took him some time listening to other peoples' stories and sharing his own before he realized that his own youth was wilder than most.  It was during those years perhaps that he learned to play his cards close to his chest, those years that gave him a reluctance toward disclosure.  Regardless: perhaps he understands here where Ari draws some of her humor from; perhaps he had already anticipated that wistfulness even if he does not share it (or, more accurately, even if his is rooted in something else, closer to the other end of the spectrum.)

"Should have?"  Here, a glance cut to the side toward her, another smile.  "You were still out learning."  Perhaps it wasn't what her Hermetic professors would have wanted her to learn, and yet.  "Did you ever read or study other schools of thought outside the Order, before you Awoke?"

He listens to the rest of what she says, to the questions she directs toward him.  He wore a pair of solid brown boots, reminiscent of the sort a soldier might wear and they have been scuffed and covered in dust and forest loam and water and ice and are still quite sturdy and unmarred for all of that.  They keep his feet sure on the damp rocks and soil that come up along the banks.  He is looking down into the water as they walk, and there are rocks here aplenty but none that have caught his interest just yet.

"Some I started using partly through experimentation of my own, and partly through experimentation aided by memory of people I was before," he says.  "I used to practice outside the city because it was easier to find spirits there, and there was less risk of detection."  A beat.  "I didn't trust most of the Traditionalists any more than the Technocracy, to be honest.  Occasionally I would learn things from spirits, too, when they were feeling generous.  My first mentor taught me the rest."

Stella

Ari had been a good student, excellent throughout her early years, as befits her House and Names and all of that.  She'd spent her time out of doors and studying, or adventuring, and avoiding most of the trouble that there was to get into as a privileged child of important people.  That had shifted in her years at Academy, where her reputation for being something of a trouble-maker had, unfairly, began.  She embraced that, though, whole-heartedly, when waking up did nothing to allay the rumors and fears that she would amount to a great big steaming pile of nothing.  Or, worse yet, to a clever-enough bargaining chip in the pursuit of ever greater Houses and Names.

It is nothing at all like Nicholas's wild youth.  She doesn't have to ask to know that their wildness was of differing sorts, and with differing aims and instigation.  She hopes that his is more innocent, but she fears that will not be so.  Nothing of life outside of the Order seems any gentler than life within it.

"I did not," she tells him, regarding studying outside of the Order.  "I was exposed to language and literature and art and symbolism and philosophy from many corners of the world, but all of it through an Ordered lens."

The corners of her mouth tuck inward, pensive for a moment.

"You can learn a lot about people through their poetry," she says.  It is not at all the way Pen speaks of poetry, but it is held aloft nevertheless.  "Through what they will go to War for, what they will make love for, how they deify their Deities, or what they surround themselves with when they go quietly into their graves.  But it is not the same as living among them," she concedes as they walk on.

When they talk about her past, or her education, Ari always holds it as a thing apart.  It is from the time before they knew each other, and this makes it separate. It is all Order and none of the melt and chaos of cross-Traditional friendships.  This is why having Silas in Denver is so damnably hard -- he is her past and also her present and there is no good way to melt and blend and smooth the chaos that that brings over to meet the pleasing and provocative chaos of her Work and Friendship with Nicholas and Pen.

"What was it like?" she asks, cautiously because she is having trouble framing the question the way she would like to.  "To seek and grasp and listen and learn all for your instruments?  Do you feel they are nearer to the truth of you, because you gathered them to you rather than chose them from a ready palette?"

crow

"Were you forbidden from reading anything outside of an Ordered lens?  Would it have been frowned upon?"  Perhaps the questions are leading or driving at something; perhaps Nick is merely curious.  There is so much, see, that is foreign to him about the way that Ari grew up.  He can imagine it in the abstract; he can imagine the expectations that will be heaped among the children of Awakened people he has known.

Perhaps he wonders whether the same expectations will be heaped upon his own, should he and Pen live long enough to see them.  It is strange to him to imagine growing up within Awakened society, having the supernatural as one's frame of reference for what is normal.

Ari's questions cause him to draw in a breath as he steps over a little shallow where the river's waters pool and eddy and lick at the bank.  There is no crunch of wet gravel though the water ripples about his feet.  "I think they are what I needed them to be at the time I adopted them," he says, "which isn't always nearer to my truth.  Sometimes I adopted the things that were at hand because they worked.  But a lot of tools that are organic speak to something in me."

He is tilting his head, and there is light in his eyes because he is glancing up into the trees as he thinks.  "I'm beginning to use different instruments, now, that make more sense to me and feel...more consistent, to me.  Things that make more sense as my understanding of how magick works deepens.  Your circles were helpful for that."

Stella

"Forbidden?"

She is less cautious and sure-footed than Nicholas is.  Sometimes the water rolls over her boot, and dribbles down between the laces that criss-cross over her foot.  Her socks are damp, but she does not complain.  She is less at one with the space, and it shows in the splashes that herald her footsteps or the slap of her hand against her neck.  Which still fails to capture the nipping insects.

"Not forbidden, Nicholas, but just... "  She considers this for a long while before continuing.  "There are more things worth knowing in the world than things I will ever get to know.  Even if I devoted my life to the study of all worthy things, and to the extension of my life and intellect so that I might consume ever more of them, and to the study of Time that I might bend and ease and make even more opportunity for learning -- never will I know all of the things I might wish or dream to know.

"Growing up in the Order is like this: it seems like everything you think you might want to know is right there.  So much wonder and magic and that's just the lowest shelves of the library stacks, just the things you can access without permission. And if you are voracious and determined and ambitious you may reach beyond this ready information before you Awaken.  But you are incentivized to learn the Right Things, as it opens doors, and gives you access to deeper secrets and higher Arts.  Even if you know there is more, there is the question of why you might divert your time, and your intellect and your energy into it. 

"It might lead toward majesty, or it may be a distraction that limits the things you could have known if you'd just stayed focused on the Right Things all along."

She tells him this, but she is not quite so certain that it is the truth of things.  She has dallied far too long to have been invested in this absolutism overmuch.  She has wasted too much time and energy and intellect.  Perhaps she is not ambitious or determined or voracious.  Perhaps she is content with the contents of the lower and unguarded shelves.  Would Nicholas believe so? Many in the Order do.

"I think it sounds like you, like Nicholas Hyde, to have instruments that speak to him that he might speak with spirits, and to find circles meaningful, and water hallowed, and truth in river rocks.  I wouldn't have felt that way if I had met you in my wild youth," she tells him. 

Ari stops following him and finds a flat rock beside the river to crouch down on.  She lowers her hand until the water trails against and through just the tips of her fingers.  Until it whorls against her the whorls of her fingerprints, and she leaves tiny eddies in her wake, and she is disruptive and distracts this stream from its appropriate course. When she pulls her hand away from the water, it beads like crystal, hanging from her fingertips, amassing just enough weight until it falls back and joins the rest of the water and any separateness and identity is lost to the flow it was always supposed to follow.

This isn't magic. But it could be.

crow

There are times when, to an outsider, the Order of Hermes could seem a religion unto itself.  And like most religions, it is full of contradictions and it is not always internally consistent.  See here: rewards for learning the Right Things in spite of holding the individual Will above all.

These are not things that Nicholas points out to his Hermetic friends.  At least, he does not point them out directly, because he understands that people grow up protective of their cultural values, he understands that as an outsider he cannot be assumed to understand their mysteries.  Perhaps it serves a purpose; perhaps this procedure is merely there to keep them all grounded.  And yet he wonders.

"I'm curious what you'll focus on now that we're more or less on our own out here," Nick says, with a sidelong glance toward her.  Because they are, aren't they?  Fewer Traditionalists around.  Fewer magi.

He is still watching the path ahead, looking perhaps for a likely place to stop and - ah.

He stops here, crouches down where there are numerous rocks that have been smoothed and polished by the current, some carried down and rolled over and over along the bed.  They might have started at the top of a mountain, taken centuries to arrive here.  Rocks travel, despite the propensity of most people to think of them as stationary things.  Nick reaches into a shallow and pulls one out, turning it over absently in one hand.  "I only bring it up because I've heard you question," he says.

Stella

Long ago, at its inception, the Order might have been less contradictory and constrained.  Surely there are myths unto myths about the founding, and Ari's House would hold them all the dearer for its insistance after being The First. Frankly, she has just assumed that all of that history has about much veracity as the blending of the Celtic lores with their history and edge of written and recorded time.  That there is a shard of something ageless and eternal within her does not lessen her skepticism about humanity as an impartial observer of its own trajectory.

"I think we all question," she says, still crouched by the water and a little ways away from his study of the stones.  Still watching the way the light catches in the beads of dampness that fall from her splayed fingers and when no more beads amass and fall, then she dips her fingers into the water and begins the pattern all over again.  "Perhaps not the most loyal among us, maybe they never doubt, but at some point you lift your head up out of your studies and begin to wonder of your own right."

Drip.  Drip.  It is a calming thing. She could imagine scrying by water instead of smoke or mirror or symbol or sand.  She could imagine scrying by anything, really, but not yet scrying by another Art or Weise.  Not by another name.

"And then there are others, like you, who I imagine begin with wonder and work back and forth toward theory when it serves you.  It is a different thing, to build a house around a shifting thing like a river or on sand than it is to realize there has been a house around you all along and open up a door or window."

Drip.

She is supposed to be interested in river rock, but Ari has been distracted instead by the river itself.

"Maybe you do not need the house at all," she says, whilst focusing intently on the bend of light that is paler than honey and bright like the distillation of the afternoon and not quite between her and Nicholas, but also not apart from them.

"I think I like it, though," she says, watching how the light changes as the drop of honey and afternoon falls through shadow and then disappears into the greater water.  "It suits me for now."

crow

There is a loud plunk as Nick drops the rock he was holding back into the current, and it is a heavy oblong thing and so its descent to the bottom of the shallow is too rapid to be perceived without the assistance of Time.  Another exercise for Nick to take up with Pen, perhaps, these things that could not be noticed unless one were to watch with the help of magick.

The dripping water from Ari's fingers: that's another.

She mentions that he might not need a house at all, and here he is thoughtful, here he rests his elbow on his knee and looks down into the water.  "When I was in grad school I had a professor who was very irritated at the perception that theory isn't needed to ground counseling practice," he says.  "She said we all operate from a theoretical framework regardless of whether we know it, and knowing and naming it is something we have to do in order to know whether or not it works.  Magick is like that too, I think."

Houses, well.  Nick rolls a shoulder here, a shrug.  "So what sort of rock do you think you would like, if you chose one to practice with or use in your magick?"

Stella

"Eh," says Ari. It is the most erudite of responses.  It is not to his question about river rocks and instead to the story about his professor and her particular world view.  She wipes her fingers against her leg to slip the last of the dampness from them.  "That is a very narrow view of Naming."

This, though, is as far as she takes the quarrel with the absent Sleeper woman.  It is left to flow past and around them, remarked on only briefly before they turn their attention to more solid things.

"I think I should like a pale one," she tells him.  "So that I might mark the influences that move across its surface, or the stippling and shape which herald its history, but also because I like the greys and pales in things. I find them pleasing, and if I am to Work with this rock, it should be pleasing to hold and to see, and of a good weight. 

"We can find challenging rocks later," she adds.  And mentally tacks on: and then we can mail them to Kestrel.

crow

Narrow, Ari says, and to this he shrugs; Nicholas often blends his understanding of his Sleeper profession with his Awakened life, and he is aware that for some magi the twain do not meet.  Ari prepares to move them on to other topics, and Nick allows this, still crouching at the edge of the riverbed with one hand in the water.

While the ambient air is comfortable, close to what most people would seek out while lounging about indoors, the water still carries memories of winter, or perhaps of the mountaintop from whence it likely came.  Many of these rivers begin as glaciers, or as some aquifer held deep within the rock.  Regardless: it is not a comfortable temperature for one's hand to linger in, but he does not seem to notice that just yet.

"I don't look only by the properties of the rock, but also how it feels to me," he says, picking another one up off the bed and turning it over in his hand.  "If it doesn't resonate with you, it's difficult to use in practice."

It might frustrate her, relying on that level of intuition when it comes to selecting instruments; nonetheless he suggests it.  "What do you think you could use yours for?"

Stella

She is stubborn.  The water is cold, but she has already partially acclimated her fingers by dipping them in and out of the shallows and watching the sunlight pool and puddle and drip from her fingers.  She will not let the memory of glaciers steer her from finding an appropriate stone and perhaps it will be all the more fitting for having frozen her fingers in search of it.

Challenges to overcome. Hermetic. He is well accustomed with this drill.

When Nick speaks of how the stone feels to him, she frowns a little. It is difficult to know what a stone feels like once she has seen it and set in motion all of the associations she has with color and texture and shape and magical properties.  It is like asking her to hear a word in another language and know what it means, to her, without any taste or context for its native meaning.  And this, too, is a Herculean task, as Ari's mind is equally tuned to language as it is to symbols and so she finds that she must let her fingers drift just over the bed of stones while her attention is on anything but the rocks themselves to get even the faintest sense of what a stone might say.

To her.

Or how it feels absent what it is.

"How do you feel what the resonance of a stone is without feeling of the literal resonance of it, Nicholas?" she asks, stooped low like this and looking up to him with a mar of frustration and utter befuddlement between her brows.  The humidity has coaxed her hair into loose and wild curls where it is free from the pile atop her head and she is not at all the same as he usually sees her. She is anything but triumphant.

She could use hers for a paperweight, she thinks, but does not say.  Frustration alone is not enough reason to mock his Praxis.

crow

"I'm not talking about the stone's resonance so much as how it resonates with you," he says, and his repetition of the words is careful here, deliberate.  So is the eye contact he makes.  He must see her frustration, he must know on some level how difficult this is for her.  He must understand how she is struggling.

He is too perceptive to not have picked up on those things.  Today though his mirror is not an exact one; where she is frustrated he meets it only with patience, with a sort of tranquility worthy of their friend Kestrel in his more peaceful moments.

"Sometimes knowledge is just noise.  It can obscure the truth and keep us from the things we know to be true," he says.  "This is like any other attraction, if it helps to think of it that way."  He stops speaking, but only because he is considering weighing thinking, and then, "Think of it like this.  You can know everything about another person, they can be exactly what you believe you're attracted to and what you believe you need, and you can still feel no attraction when you meet them.  When the spirit and mind and body speak to each other that's when we feel whole and connected to other things around us, and that's something we're looking to echo in selecting an instrument or focus for practice."

He flips the rock over again in his hand and runs his thumb over a few pits, as yet left unpolished by rushing water and time.  "Try just picking a few of them up and paying attention to the differences in texture and shape."

Stella

Nick has hit upon a metaphor that Ari understands better than he might think.  For the Hermetics have a Law about Attraction, and there is also a strong section of rhetoric and reason coursework set to stamping out confirmation bias and other (il)logical extensions of Attraction, but the relational sense in which he speaks of it hits something squarely topical within her and it pulls her glance away from him and out over the water.

She breathes out and lets her eyes half-close, and lets the sound of Nick's nearness blend into the background and also wills herself to ignore the chill of the water -- but she knows that it is glacier-born and that it carries echoes of the place where she and Pen had found the tass, which was also like rock and crystal and ice and Winter.  Ari picks up one stone, and turns it over in her palm, and smooths her thumb along the edge of it, and then sets it aside.

She repeats this pattern, with her attention cast a little out toward the middle of the river, until she thinks she may become bored and rote about it, until the movement is almost meaningless and the gleam of the light on the water distracts as it becomes more brassy and warm-without-warmth, and her fingers have gone numb, and the bugs do not stop buzzing or biting but she is resigned to them.

She is resigned to them, and she is enduring, and she is steadfast.  Pen had called her steadfast once. 

The rock in her hand just now is not pale. It is not grey or perfectly round. It is mostly smooth but with a little fold and seam like section where it may have been cleaved from something bigger once, or possibly warped and bent under so much pressure.  It is dark and somewhat mottled. Not very pretty. Nothing akin to perfect. But it has endured.  It is steadfast.  It is of a good weight and she finds that she likes the way the seam of it slides under her thumb when she worries it. And still her attention is out over the water.  And still her fingertips are all but frozen.  And still there is buzzing and frustration and a burn in her legs where she has been too long crouched there beside this river-not-a-river looking for a focus made of compressed mud and time and travel and translation.

Finally she looks down at the stone in her hand, and then back up to Nick.

"This one is ugly," she tells him.  It is truth; it is not a pretty thing.  "But I like the weight of it."  Which does not begin to address the undercurrents of what she might have felt within it, or from it, except that on the surface it does: the stone has gravitas; it is weighty.  She offers it toward him as she rises, to see if he might think the same of its misshapen seeming.

When the Walls Came Down

Ari

[Mind shields for everyone: Mind 2 + Corr1, coincidental, base dif 3 +2 = 5. Taking time, well-practiced. TN3]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Ari

[Extending. +1 dif.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 9) ( success x 1 )

Ari

[Esoterica: There must be a perfect symbol for the tracing of long-active magics. Clever. If we are very lucky, it will also be a symbol with which Nicholas has some resonance...]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8, 8) ( success x 2 ) [Doubling Tens]

Ari

[Follow the Rote: Corr 2 + Mind 1 + Prime 1, coincidental, +1 hidden target, +1 active magics. base dif 3 + 2 + 2 =7. Coordinating resonance, taking time, instrument (see esoterica roll).  -3. TN4  +WP]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Nick

[Assisting!  Base diff 5, +1 for hidden target, -1 for coordinating resonance, -1 for using instrument, -1 taking time.  WP so we don't botch.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Ari

Chez Giametti is somewhat more inviting that the first few times Nick has visited.  The living room is set up now, with a broad couch and love seat framing a seating area that faces the hearth.  There are places for books, always, and pleasing but somewhat abstract art.  It is tastefully put together, and yet has the warmth in texture and the taste of hidden things that he has come to expect from his Hermetic friends.  Never in her home is there a sense of wanting; this is as close as she comes to opulence.

For all of her tendencies to jump into things, feet first, there is an astonishing pragmatism to how she approaches unfamiliar magics.  They do not simply jump into scrying the threads of the old and twisting rote, no, instead Ari takes a small bowl of water and salts it thoroughly.  She rests a sprig of rosemary in it.  The basin is round and it is silvered and she stirs it, sun-wise, with the index finger of her right hand.  The little sprig twists and spins. The salt dissolves.  As she carries this toward Nick, she speaks over it in the shape of foreign words, she consecrates it with her Will.

Some of this is showmanship, some of it is to call to his symbols as much or more than hers. All of it is magic. It is the sort of magic that mothers work over their children; it is the sort of magic that Masters work over the Apprentices; it is the guarding of one Mind with the Will of another.  Nicholas is standing before her hearth when Ari dips her thumb into the salt-like-sea water and then smudges a damp place over his third eye.  Then she presses her thumb into each of his palms.  It like being anointed with moonlight; it is like having starbright burn from his meridians.

It circles him in, and marks the boundaries between what is Nick and what is Ari, what is Nick and what is Other.  As if he stood within a circle scribed with salt and iron and ice.  The boundary is clear, and permeable to him; he must invite the Others across it.

To keep with the symbols, she places the sea-salt in her palms and also at her third eye.  The dampness does not burn the same to her; it underscores the boundaries kept between self and Other, yes, but she is practiced in this rite. The mindfulness of keeping it active is spent in its extension to Nicholas and even that is practiced in a sense.  Though Ari is not yet a Mother, or a Master, or even truly a minder of others, this is a watchful, careful thing. She can abide it.

There is a brief discussion of symbology, tuned toward the common things she has previously found with Nick and the settle, quickly, on the shared understanding of circles. Which is positively brilliant, she tells him, as she draws him and silk-wrapped book and the basin of salt-sea water that binds them out onto her patio.  She has been working for the past month at scribing-staining onto the concrete a wide and winding circle.  It had been obscured when they worked at the Talismans, but now it is complete enough to stand in as this symbol.  They drag the outdoor table to the center of it; it is an aluminum altar -- the irony is not lost on Ari, though amusement does not sway her from this pragmatic thing -- and together they lay out the book beside this small blue basin of anchored and anchoring things and together they walk the circle to come back to either side of the narrow table and inspect the rote together.

Each has their own names and symbols and words to speak, but together their magics reach out into the expanse of the Tellurian, each star-bright mind following one thread or another, working faster together and more completely than either might apart.  Tethered as they are, Nick can feel the ebb and flow of the distance between his attention and hers, pulled thin and translucent and then jammed thick again as they come together toward some end.  She is at once beside him, protective of his mind and Will, and apart.  Her father is the Aegis of Ylesephet.  She carries echoes of this guardianship within her bones.

Once again, this space outside her home is made hallowed by his presence and his Working.  Once again it is illuminated by her own.  Once again the stand within a well of moonlight, or within the gleam of moonlight rippling on the water of a well, or over the ripples of a moving water, water being a thing sacred to Nicholas.  They are movement, and light, and something sacred.  They seek...

... but do not yet know what they will find.

Nick

They don't know what they will find just yet.  Nick's presence beside her is a palpable thing, how he hallows this place and lends it some otherworldliness.  For Nicholas, this sort of looking is about expansion, is about extending himself upwards and out, is about inherent and divine connectedness.  And isn't that easy to do, when they're trying to trace another's Working which by definition taps into the raw essence of Creation?

Nick is beginning to be able to articulate these things.  He's on a precipice.  He is beginning to adapt even his instruments to be more in line with it: see here, incense today, burning there in the center of the circle they've walked.

They can trace the ripples across space, from the emotion and resonance embedded within the pages of this book and all the way to a place high on a mountainside.  The rocks are red and the earth is barren and see it could be another world, a lonely planet suspended in space and bereft now of life.  At the base of the mountain, there are crumbling foundations, there is ash and a fine white dust.  Long ago there was ruin, but that is old territory and anyway they aren't using Time today.

Were you there when the walls came down?

Someone was.

This is a place of loneliness, of Hunger and it beckons, see, and maybe not only to them.  Its source is farther up past the ruin, all the way up to a cabin and a circle of bone.  Bone, and grave dust, and isn't it a lucky thing see that Ari thought to shield them before they moved forward because they can feel a dread deep in their own bones, something that would take hold would snag them and they wouldn't want to look away but they would want to all the same.  They don't feel that; for now they are safe.

But that's what they see: tall chaparrel and logs dessicated and dried out by desert heat and wind.

They could linger.  It might not be wise.

Ari

Were you there when the walls came down?

Someone was.

She was.

It is a lucky thing that Ari had thought to shield them for so many reasons just now.  The question, left unanswered in Nicholas's mind has a ready and immediate answer in her own.  Yes. Yes she was there when the walls fell; and there is the sweep of something deadly and decisive across that memory; and it is He Who Wields the Flaming Sword, and it also his foe, and it is righteous and terrifying.  But it is also contained.

This is Self.  This stays within the circle of the salt and iron and starlight that defines the sphere of Ari's influence and while Nicholas can feel the intensity of its flare, he does not know the specific shape of its influence.  Only that it is hers, and not his, and not of this working.  But also that she was there when the walls fell.  That she knows the mortar- and bone- and grave- dust; that she knows the creep of dread.

The line between what is hers and what is not is argent and brilliant and excoriating.  It gives her a place to focus.  The ruins of Ylesephet fall away, replaced by the heat of the desert wind and the scent of chaparral and the red dirt of mountains far from memory.   There are ruins below them and a circle of bones before a cabin.

Because they are safe, she takes the time to count and number them.  Because they are safe she takes note of whether the door stands open or if it is closed, and if it is open whether she can see within it.

Because within her circle she holds the falling walls, and the Aegis and the Arrow, and something righteous and terrifying; she also knows that she can Will this trace to break whenever she is ready.  It is a thin thing held in the hands of her mind; it is kite-string.  The moment the wind seems to sharp or too hot or too wicked she will let it loose, and away the vision will fly.  She will let it loose, and push down the fallen walls and remember the taste of red dust.

Her hands are tight on the edge of the table; even sinew in her body is tight with the flight or fight of two fallen places warring for her interest; of memory both hers and someone else's.  If Nicholas has enough presence of mind to be both here and there, he will see that she struggles but also that she maintains control of it.

Neither of them are rightfully only Initiates any longer; both are at the pinnacle of this stage of their Arts.

Her eyes open and seek to catch his.  If he offers some sign that he is ready, she will release the rote.  There is salt and iron and ice to her eyes; the rote that keeps him safe also keeps him from looking in as completely as he might.

Nick

Nicholas has looked too long and too deeply at Mysteries before.  There are countless cautionary tales of magi who have seen things they were not meant to see, glimpsed before they were ready: magi who have looked upon the face of God and been struck blind, magi who touched the Void and went mad.  Andrés, recently, who has touched Creation in a way that has left him unable to distinguish what is real from what is not, who flew too close to the sun.  Nicholas himself who has brushed up too closely and too many times to that truth of Endings, of Impermanence.

It might be a fortunate thing, then, that Ari is there to hold him back.  Nick while never a true Orphan had an absent Mother and Father and Master; maybe sometimes the watchful eye of his friends when he cannot be those things for himself is what has kept him from fading away into moonlight.

Neither of them can see into the cabin.  The door is closed.  In the windows they can see only shadows, shifting things that seem to hint at something within but who can say what.  There are shadows because behind them there is light from some unknown source, warm and yellow and orange and bright.

The bones are many.  She might lose count.  They are old, and they were arranged with purpose: this they can both tell.

When Ari's eyes open she will find Nick's there but they are wandering, he does not see her for the moment until he realizes she is looking at him.  And now he nods to her once, and now he does not seek to open the cabin door or look into the windows.  And so the rote is released, and Nicholas raises a hand fragrant with incense to his eyes and rubs at them.

"What do you think that was?"

Ari

The tracing falls away.  The sheild she has placed around his mind falls away.  The one that hardens and encircles her own does not.  She holds this for a longer spell, it lingers in her eyes and the hardness of her expression.  Her hands hold, still, to the edge of the table, gone white with the tightness of it, cold as ice.

After a long moment, she releases her hands.  Mindlessly she rubs her palms together, as if to clear the salt and ash and moonlight from them.  Still, though, there is the thrum of her resonance woven around her; still she tastes of ice and iron and sea-salt and starlight. There is a separation: Ari, Nick, and all the Others.  Vigilance. Kept longer than maybe it is needed.

"I do not know but I am worried..." she says, though with the sort of cautious edge one's voice takes when one is not entirely certain, "That the bones were human.  I cannot tell; I have no skill or Arts that would illuminate this thought.  That is more your expertise, or Silas's."

The name comes readily, offered between them without much thought.  And then it demands thought, and her brow creases. But of course she would think of the Incendiary's son, on the heels of memories of Ylesephet, with the closeness they share now.  Arianna breaths out. She can still feel the desert wind and the red dust in her lungs.

"I am torn," she adds, "Between wanting to know and wanting to burn that book down to its endpapers, and hoping it takes that cabin and the bones and the red dust with it."  This is a vehement thing, breathed out with more intensity than perhaps the vision rightfully deserves.  "I do not think it a good omen."

Nick

"I suspect that they were," he says.  "If they were, there are a lot of things they could have been there to do.  I could try to look again to figure that out, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea to do it right now."

There is a point of tension there between his eyes, between his brows, at the juncture of nose and forehead and eyes.  He does not voice his worry; he does not need to.  Just now his expression is a tell enough.  They could be traced back here too: this he does not say.

"If they were bones and they were human, they don't necessarily need to have been placed there for...well, they don't necessarily indicate that whatever is there will be hostile to us.  It could be something that is dangerous, but in the way that magick or hikes in the wilderness are dangerous."  Beat.  "Which is to say that it's not necessarily a bad omen."

He after all is a Death Mage; he has seen plenty of tools at work that would disturb or unsettle magi from other Traditions.  Then again, they have both seen dark magick at work too, they have both felt the touch of magick that would fracture everything it touched, would unmake everything it came into the presence of given enough time.  It's likely that Elizabeth Courtright left them both (left them all) sadder and a little more weary, and wary too.

"I think we need to determine whether there's something hostile there or not, at least as long as we have the book."  He glances toward it, innocently lying there with its bound pages rustling a little at the edges, touched by the breeze outside.  "I doubt we're at harm from the book itself, though."

Ari

"What good omen comes from leaving the bones of your fellows or your foes to whiten in the sun?" she asks, as much of him as of the book, though the latter of the two is what garners the pointedness of her attention just now.  It is difficult for her, with her superstitions and training, to imagine a comfort or security found in allowing the remains of the dead to be defiled by sunlight.

Unless they were purified thereby, and then, again, it brings her back to echoes of ill portents.  But Nicholas is closer to Death in his workings than the Giametti woman is; her dealings with Death have been personal in different ways.  Instead she gives voice to her frustrations in the careful working of her hands, binding that book up again in the silk in which she had carried it to her home.  Silk to consecrate, to bind, to contain.  Her mind is still shielded, at least until this bit of clearing up is done and then, finally, the sense of moving starlight recedes from her.

It leaves her raw around the edges, frayed in ways that he isn't just now. 

Were you there when the walls came down?
Yes.

"Your thoughts are clearer than mine just now," she tells him. There is appreciation and admiration underscoring the words.  "Come inside, and share them. I will fix us something to eat."  Ari captures the silk bound book up her hands, leaving him to bring the incense and the basin of salt water inside with them to consecrate and cleanse her home.

"Did you get a sense of When we were?  I am hopeless at Ars Temporis, but was there some mundane clue to it for you?  And did you, too, have the sense of someone within the walls?" 

Here, though, the question is too unspecific for her own mind. Within the walls of the Keep or of the Cabin or of the grave-dust ruins below them at the base of the hills?  She guides them to the kitchen, to where there is a row of neat bar stool soldiers guarding the breakfast bar, and where there is fixing for open faced sandwiches made of roasted meat and pickled onions and some creamy pungent cheese.  And wine, red to the point of nearly being opaque.  Dense and grounding in the way that chalice-wine must be, though the glass she gives him is stemless and more easily grasped in distracted weariness.

Nick

Nick follows Ari to her kitchen, where there is wine and bread and meat.  There'd been this moment as he followed her in where he'd looked at her at length, his eyes clear and his gaze direct and searching: and he sees her discomfort, he sees how her hands are tense as she binds the book back up.  He gestures Ari toward a seat and then he lays out bread for two sandwiches, spreads a healthy layer of cheese across both slices.

"It seemed to be in the present, to me.  We would have needed the Ars Temporis to look back."  He uses her language easily; he has Worked with Hermetics often enough now.

He adds pickled onions atop the cheese, begins slapping slices of roasted meat atop that even as she sets the stemless wine glass near him.  "Bones could be laid out in some sort of ritual.  I've heard of paths being cut through the Veil that way, or...you're right, I suppose it could have been a way to purify them.  It could also be some sort of death rite I'm not familiar with.  Part of some larger Working."

In spite of these alternatives he offers, the point of concern between his brows is still there.  He finishes her sandwich first and hands the plate across to her, then slides his own towards a selected stool.  "Are you all right, Ari?"

Ari

The language is a crutch. She could say 'Time' instead of 'Ars Temporis'. It is more expedient and far fewer syllables.  Ari never corrects him if he chooses other names for the Arts and she has, even, in rare moments of extreme cross-Tradition good will, used the common names herself.  For now, though, it lends familiarity and comfort to an otherwise strange moment and she is gladdened by this olive branch he extends.

Ari accepts the plate from him and gathers herself up on a bar stool. There is a seat left between them. She would not have done that if she were thinking; she would not have left a seat open between them for the echoes of the past to roost upon. She is a superstitious thing, at heart, but the gap makes it easier to twist and face each other as they eat. This is what she will tell herself later: pragmatism, not oversight.

"Hmmm."  This answers thoughts of paths cut into the Penumbra.  It brings a crease to her brow that mimics the tension between his own.  And then there is a sharper question to be weighed and answered.

"I have been some place similar," she tells him.  It is true without being entirely true. It is the shape of truth stripped of the weight of it.  "Though it was half a lifetime ago, and not in the desert or near the red hills."

This gives him enough to peg the approximate timing.  She has asked him before what he knew of the losses they have suffered in The War.  It is telling, perhaps, that she chooses food over wine to ground her away from this memory.  And, even as she is chewing that first bite, she frees two napkins from a holder on the counter and passes him one of them.

Swallows.

"If this tie is to Now, then there is a cabin out there, and a circle of bones, and perhaps some greater Working?"  She asks him by canting the words upward at the end, though the sentence is framed as a statement.  There is inquiry in her eyes, and already she is trying to think of the places with red dirt and hills and heat like that.  She has seen some pictures of Arizona, and the red rock hills; perhaps the tether is pulling Nick homeward as it had also tugged her thoughts back toward her own.

He knows what she will say before the words come.  

"We should find it..." 

Nick

"There is," he says.  "Kiara brought me to a place that was full of rock hills like that not too far outside the city.  That place felt more remote, but it could be somewhere in Colorado."  Though it reminded him, too, of the home of his birth if not of his heart; so many wild places out near the mountains could resemble one another.

He takes a swallow of his wine as he accepts the napkin she offers him, then takes a bite from his sandwich.  First one, then rather quickly another: Working always leaves him hungrier than he thinks it's going to.

"We could probably track it directly to the location if we needed to."  Dangerous?  Yes.  Though they have both done dangerous things before.  Nicholas had been out alone when Pen and their other former cabalmates found him, having listened to Crow, having followed leads that no lone Disparate had any business following.

To her response that she has been in a similar place, there is only a noise of acknowledgement.  Perhaps this is because his mouth is full; perhaps it is a placeholder while he considers a response.  He does not miss that she did not answer him, did not say whether she is all right or not.  "Do you want to tell me about the place you were in?  Or is that best left for another time?"

Ari

They have both done dangerous things before and there is, at least, the semblence of security in doing reckless and dangerous things together rather than alone.  That is where this is heading, surely, toward reckless and dangerous things done together but not entirely alone.

Ari takes another bite of her sandwich before answering him.  The cast to her eyes is distant; it is not here and neither is it entirely half a lifetime away. She chews slowly as she considers what she might say to sidestep the question, and also that perhaps it is not the time to sidestep these questions.  It is like the matter of her Hermetic schooling, of her ridiculous trailing of family names, of the entitlement and ease of being something of a Legacy.  This story is part of her Legacy, but not a part she shares with Nick or Pen. She gives them the lightness of it, the glimmer and gilding, but rarely these sorrows.  It is not fair, she has long thought, to burden them with it.

So it is kept light, and as even as words can be kept when talking about deep and terrible things.  When ghosting over the sun-whitened bones of friends and enemies, unburied in the haste with which they left the place.

"One of my father's titles was--is, though he rarely claims it -- the Aegis of Ylesephet," she tells him, still holding her sandwich in her hands, still having not touched her wine.  "He and the Incendiary, who is Silas's mother, who is likewise terrifying in her own right, held the Wards and Walls as long as they could before the Chantry fell during the War.  I have told you of it before, in passing, not completely. 

"We were young and those things leave long shadows. -- I think this is what I said.  Something like this.  Or maybe how his mother was like a Fury. I don't remember, rightly what I said, but all of it would be true in one sense or another. But I am sure that I left off this: we were there when the walls came down.  Silas, his mother, my father and I."

Nick

It will be the first time he has perhaps heard Arianna speak at length of the War and its sorrows: he cannot remember such a time, he was not Awake then.  It is all in the abstract to him, despite stories he has heard from Jonas and Miles and Patricia about what those times were like.  But for the most part they are all summer children, the three of them and the cabalmates they kept back in New England.  This is not to say of course that they have not known strife nor sorrow (summers, too, can be harsh) but theirs are more common, in a sense.  More individual.

The friends they have known who have fallen were all given rites and burials.  Elizabeth Courtright was mourned, both for who she was and for who she became.  They have never left bones of friends and enemies to whiten in the sun, or known starving times save what they knew growing up as mundane children who never had enough.  They have not had to hide themselves and fear breathing the word Magick in public places.

Perhaps they never will.  Perhaps the fates will stay kind.

The attention Nick has focused on her says that she did indeed leave off where she was when the chantry's walls fell.  It says that he is seeing Ari in a new light; this happens from time to time even among close friends.  "I'm sorry," he says, despite knowing that there are no words deep enough for that sorrow.  He is left this way, often, with words inadequate and only his eyes to convey his understanding.  "Will it trouble you, going to a place like that?"

Ari

Of the others, Kestrel had known.  Of course he had known this about her. Either because he helped her with Ars Mentis, or perhaps even before it.  He understood the pull of the thin red ties of name and title and legacy better than the others had.  They all might have been Summer Children, but Ari had only played at the part and she had been so practiced at it, so complete in the method of her deception, that it felt to her at times that maybe she was warm through and through like they all were.  (Which is not fair; Summer is brutal in its own way.)

But here she sits, having told him that in her young teens her home, and her friends, and her mentors were sundered and broken by the war, with her elbows rested on the high counter and her shoulders rounded out a little and there is no prick of sadness in her eyes or sour to her stomach as she takes another bite of cheese and bread and onion and meat and chews it slowly, thoughtfully.

She is simply further away than she usually is. Remote in her orbit, but swaying back toward his gravity.  She chews, and swallows, all without looking over toward his question and then she exhales.

"No," she says, as she is setting down her sandwich and cleaning the tips of her fingers on the napkin.  "Going forward is not the same as going back.  Even going back to Ylesephet would be going forward.  But if there is War coming, as the Order has spoken of, then it will trouble me to leave a place like this along our margins, unexplored and undiscovered."

She shrugs a little, and picks up her stemless tumbler.

"Perhaps it is folks magic or hedge magery, and then," a little shake of her head. "It is not our problem.  Or maybe it is some newly Awakened and unaffiliated working above their education -- and I'd rather we found them than that the Conventions did.  Or maybe it is as slippery as it seems, and if that is true then all I can think is this: I do not want to be flanked by one trouble and another.  But I cannot think of a circumstance that leads us into not going."

Still, though, she does not drink.

Nick is so intently focused on her that he will see what she is not saying.  It will trouble her, but not unduly. It will bother her more to leave this stone unturned and eating at their boundaries.  She finally glances over to him and the sympathy and empathy in his eyes.  It bends the hardness in hers, but not toward sorrow.  Another time, she would tell him, You honor them with your attention.  Another time, but not just now.  The sentiment is the same, though left unspoken.

Nick

There have been rumblings of War for months now with nothing to show for it.  Back in January Pen had gone to a summit, and had told him what the plans were as handed down by some Hermetic Adept; they have heard precious little since.  Plans move slowly though, and Denver so far as Nick can tell is something of an Awakened backwater, with a chantry present but no established social order or political regime such as the type they encountered back in New England.

Though every place has its politics, doesn't it?  Even if it looks different here.  This is a place of stark individualists, people who are leery of other people.  That's the kind of place it seems to be.

He remembers, from years ago, one of Boston's Verbena making some laughing offhand comment about the disorganization in Chicago.  It seems to be their nature.

Regardless, Nick does not know if they can trust anyone here and when Ari comments that she would rather not be flanked by trouble, there is a hum of acknowledgement (another placeholder perhaps) as he takes a long swallow from his glass of wine.  "I think you're right.  But if we go it should be soon, before whatever it is has a chance to trace us back here."

Ari

Something in her fingertips itches when he suggests -- rightfully so -- that something might trace back to them, to find them here at her kitchen counter, eating a peaceable lunch.  It itches because she is not yet strong enough to prevent it wholly from happening.  Some day, though, she would be strong enough to truly Ward her Keep.  Some day.  Some day she would be strong enough to pull the threads of the rote apart, and leave it on the floor of her patio, dissembling and disassembled and unraveling around their feet or she could bend it to another purpose.

Just not today.

"Agreed," she tells him, and now, finally, a sip of wine. She swallows, then takes a deeper sip.  "I don't know the area well enough to guess at where to find red hills like that, but I can help with scrying if we can narrow and get nearer to the area."

And so the discussion goes like this, toward pragmatic and dangerous and only somewhat reckless things.  And this is, perhaps, where Nicholas might need to call his fantastically capable wife into the precedings, or where Ari ought inform her boyfriend of sorts that she was up to some form of no good.  But she doesn't reach for the phone to text or call him, and she doesn't precisely encourage Nick to call Pen.

Because this still might turn out to be a marvelously library book for Pen.
Or it might turn out to be a Nephandic tome.
Or some other trap.

But it could still be rescued into a capital present, and it might ruin the present a bit to pull her along to investigate its correspondence with some far flung hills. 

Ari has a Thomas Brothers -- out of date but serviceable -- and a folded map of the US Southwest.  It will get them started on narrowing the possible areas.  She will pack them up some sandwiches and sticks of vegetables julienne and other snacks for their adventure, as well as her instruments and also two of the charms they have made together -- three if Pen is to be collected along the way.  By the time the kitchen is cleared up from lunch and the last vestiges of their resonance are seeping from the patio, they can be ready to embark on the next leg of their adventure.

From Dust, Ruin

Arianna

There is a chalkiness to the dust that hangs in the air, swirls so that it even diffuses the sunlight. It tastes of mortar and grave dust and pieces of stucco blasted into a thousand tiny pieces.  The ground is dust and the air is dust and the only way to tell them apart is that the sunlight -- dim, diffuse, grey as it is -- streams through the air and not through the ground.

His ears ring.  Perhaps they also bleed.  The air tastes of dirt but his mouth tastes of blood and there is not sound. Images flash without connection. A flash of red hair. A half-remembered face. The shape of someone's eyes, or profile, pieces grasped but not long enough to be made whole.

The buildings are reduced to rubble. Cinder block and mortar dust. Crumbling stucco. Broken red tile rooves. Vehicles move, when they move, on massive tires with tread in which the whole of his hand could be consumed.  This is where the dust has come from, not only from sundered earth but also from the falling walls.

***

Were you there when the walls came down?
He cannot hear the question, but he knows it in his bones.
Nicholas can feel himself answer: Yes.

***

Just on the edge of hearing, the ringing begins to resolve into a whine, to sirens. The mechanical type, bent and twisted by the dopplar effect -- moving toward, then turning to move away.  Hearing is not better than not-hearing. It does not give him anymore sense of where he lies.  And he knows he is lying because of the solidity beneath his shoulders, and how the diffuse grey mortar light does not come from behind him, but from above.  How it does not fully relent when he closes his eyes, but shifts to a shade of red that is his vessels illuminated through his skin.

Someone is calling his name. Over and over again. Frantically, as they move through the rubble. He cannot hear their voice; he cannot yet hear his own name.  What will it be? Is he Nicholas here? Some other past life? Some borrowed skin within this vision.

More then: The fabric of his pants is heavy, meant to withstand this sort of landscape.  His feet are encased in heavy boots, boots with treads in keeping with the massive tire-tread, as if he he, too, were meant to wheel over and through and not be trapped by the unevenness of his place.

The ground shudders again, and the dust in the air tremors in reply, and new plumes of grave-dust and mortar are moved into the air.  A little ways away, red tiles fall from a broken roof. They shatter and splinter against the ground. He cannot hear them, but his mind fills in the sounds of it.

Nicholas

Is he Nicholas here?  He does not know; he cannot hear the sound of the name or the shape the syllables take in someone else's mouth, and he only knows that it's his.

They arrived here when Ari asked for - nay, demanded - adventure and Nick's suggestion had been to seek out books.  A present, he said, or a present it would be once they had some gathered, and where does one begin to seek out magickal texts?  It's not as though either of them have ever done this before, in this life.

The bookstore is outside, a collection of little buildings and wooden carts and surrounding it all a fence: inside the buildings are only shelves upon shelves, and the carts are arranged beneath a few brightly colored canopies, a sort of open-air market for books.  They've sat down together in a little clearing, a patch of grass that an imaginary cow could devour in a bite or two, and Nick's primary means of using Time magick is to go inside himself and meditate so there is very little right now to see and give away his vision.

He is there: he can taste dust in his mouth.  He is there: his eyelids flutter as someone calls his name, and one hand braces against the ground as though he'd rise.  He is there not here.

Then: he is here again, broken out of whatever portent by a sudden wracking cough.  His thoughts are of a distant bloody country.

He raises a hand to cover his mouth and, eyes watering, wordlessly hands the book back to Ari.

Arianna

There is not much that truly marks Ari for her chosen Hermetic house.  She is not as bookish and quiet as the stereotypical Bonisagus, and she has not outwardly shown the vigilance and dutiful devotion to her studies that one might expect.  She is rash in her decisions, fierce in her affections, aloof when she is indifferent: tempestuous more than a steady guiding light.  And while she excels at magical theory -- a mere nod toward her require excellences -- she has not compiled the sort of library that she ought to have in her early thirties.  But they are seeking to remedy this, and to restore Pen's library to its former glory, and also to lift their combined enlightenment further toward a common goal.

But an open air book market? It calls her House forward, and it is so unlike everything she has known of Denver.  This little patch of grass is speckled now with tomes and paperbacks and anything she could carry in her arms that might prove mysterious or magical, and she was like a child in a candy store -- yes, there was smelling of the old books, and a sort of gleefulness in pointing out the old typefaces -- until this one book came across her path.

She will swear to him later that it was not the other way. This book positively demanded her attention, much as she had demanded an adventure of him; it would have lept into her hand if it were prone to locomotion, and so she had gathered it up and carried it back to him. Offered it over with a shrug of her shoulder and an overly keen and watchful eye.

So she notices when Nick is suddenly not-here; when he is physically here but elsewhere at the same time.  That look, it is familiar to her. He is not the only Oracle that she has known and, gods, the world is not kind to its seers and mystics and so she has left the Ars Temporis for a future study, but his distance draws her shoulders up higher and the hilt of her wand into her hand to be at the ready should it be required and there is, ready on her tongue, a half-breath from springing into being, the precise syllable that begins the Enochian encantation to bring a forces ward up around them should something happen that ought not be heard or something aggress that ought not get through.

When he coughs it is a relief, and that readiness slips just a bit back, behind the mercury in her eyes -- we must not give the impression that we are over-ready, or that we may over-care -- and she brings the book into her lap, which is covered by some floral pattern in her skirt.  She places a hand on his shoulder and not his knee, palm of it against him, fingers pressed in just enough to anchor.

"Do you want some water?" she asks him. Water being the seat of emotion; cups being the vessel of the heart; chalices leading ever always downward. But mostly because water helps when the throat is dry; when the mouth is parched; when things taste as they shouldn't.  "I have some in my bag." 

She'll move for it if he wants it.  Otherwise, she waits.  One hand pressed flat over the cover of he book in her lap, one on his shoulder. Bridging them, but with all of her attention on him.

Nicholas

Water.  He nods, once twice three times in rapid succession as he coughs again.  There is no moisture around his mouth but he rubs at  the corner and at his chin with his thumb regardless, reaches up after a moment to his ears and runs his fingers over the outer edge where they connect with his jaw.  There is no blood; perhaps he is just trying to reassure himself of that.

He accepts the water from her as she offers it to him and takes a swallow from the bottle.  "I saw the aftermath of some sort of explosion, or earthquake or something.  I'm not sure where it was at."

He is not sure whether he was even himself: sometimes that is how these things go.  Nicholas is often careful of his use of Time magick for good reason; Jonas Allard is a cautionary tale if there ever was one.

"I'm not sure whether it's going to happen, or whether that's where the book came from and how it got here.  Is there anything on the inside cover?  Can you tell where it came from?"

Arianna

She has handed him a metal thermos.  Just a few days ago, it was filled with cold brew coffee and smudged with Neith's lipstick.  If his Time sense is still tingling, then, he may get the sense of twinning laughter and mischief, of yellow paired with grey, and a profound and urgent need for... Walmart and tequila?

Once he can speak again, the tension in her shoulders relents and Ari begins her own careful study of the book in question.  She turns it over in her hands, studying the spine and covers for some unusual mark or ornamentation.  Then the endpapers come under her careful review, and then, finally, the printed inscriptions and also the first and last pages of each identifiable signatures.  Was there some pattern to the unevenness of the fore-edge?  Some strange gapping of the pastedown?  She would find it.

These are the places she would leave secrets, were she the sort to write them down in books.  While there are plenty of thin, too-thin, too-gossamer-to-follow slights, nothing rises to importance immediately in her estimation.

"Printed in ..." she passes her finger over the numerals on the page. "That cannot be correct. 1847?  Not with this binding, or this typeset, both are far too modern." she tells him.  The Bonisagus know their books. "It must be a misprint.  I would scarcely believe nine-teen forty-seven..."

Ari's finger traces a pattern above the page.  It does not follow the shape or lines of any printing there. It curves and slashes. Her finger does not touch the paper, but the air between it and the page is slim. It is nearly nothing.

"Et arcanorum arcana quae sunt revelare."

Ars Vis will not entirely reveal the secrets of the book to Ari, but perhaps it will make clear whatever hidden workings are wrapped around it, and it is the sphere she is most comfortable with and the one she has begun to itch and long to push into new skills and abilities.  It seems fitting, here, to watch the weaving of this possible wonder.  And, as always, her Latin pronunciation is flawless.  That it is Latin and not Enochian, is perhaps a nod to inclusiveness for her cabalmate.  Not everything needs to be illuminated and divinely shining, does it?

Nicholas

Ari's efforts to include her cabalmate would not go unnoticed, would certainly be greatly appreciated, if indeed Nicholas spoke any Latin.  If he were to see it in print it's possible he would recognize it; as it is, the syllables she speaks fall into one or the other category of Not English and Probably Not Spanish But My Vocabulary Is Terrible These Days.

He'd pulled the thermos away from his mouth upon first sensing Ari and an unfamiliar woman, a mage, and after he has glanced once at the mouthpiece he lifts it again and takes another swallow.  He watches as she turns the book over in her hands.

"Maybe it's a misprint," Nick agrees, though he sounds less certain.  "Could it have been rebound?"  Which, of course, does not explain away the typeset, but even magi are prone to believe the Consensus, see.

She won't find anything on the spine, or along the endpapers or the edges or even the pastedown.  As she is leafing through the book, dust falls from between two of the pages, fine and white as powder dredged from the surface of the moon, and in amongst it is a small speck of red clay: from a tile, perhaps.  The pages the dust lurked between are smudged and dirty: the words address an older essay debating an alchemical theory, whether it's valid anymore to believe that they are changing only the physical body but whether the essence of the thing changes as well, whether something must be done to the underlying pattern and true transformation is a union of Spirit and Mind and Matter and the Tellurian.

Someone, some book vandal, has marred this page.  On it is a small sketch of one of the mountains, any mountain perhaps though there's a certain precision with which the bare (barren) tree in the foreground is depicted and a play of light and shadow that suggests that whoever drew it had some talent and perhaps had used a reference.

She Feels when she looks at it, and the feelings that spring up in her right away are: Longing, and Loneliness, and a deep hunger that is true hunger, pit of the stomach hunger, and more nuanced things too, focus and perseverance.  They spring up in her and take root regardless of whether she wants to feel them or not; they just are.

Arianna

There have often been essays like this, ones that seek to connect the Pattern Arts to their more ephemeral cousins, reasoning that Vis (or Potentiae as it might also be known) bridges more than the structure of a thing and might write indelibly upon the soul of a thing.

Might rewrite it.
Might re-Name it.

Arianna has split her interests among the spheres of Vis, and Mentis, and Conjunctionalis and Essentiae.  She has studious avoided the stronger patterns, or the emphemera of Temporis and Spiritus.  She is a thing that flits between, but soon will need a stronger anchor for her working; or a sense of how it fits into a broader schema.  But this is partly why she has Pen and also Nick to ground her, why they fit together so.

There is dust on her fingertips, and in the fabric of her skirt, and the red-fleck -- that bit is touched with her index finger and held apart. Glanced at and wondered after.  A distraction or a focal point as the Tellurian bends and:

A sharp breath is pulled in through her teeth, and so close kept are they that it almost whistles in. In, like the way the mountain-sketch pulls her, in toward the sighing of bare-boughed trees, into a place that is lonely and longing, which is too keen to feel just now and so she breathes out.

Nicholas sees this: The way her eyes are unfocused as she breathes in, and how she rubs her fingertips together to feel at the dust upon them, and how her eyes press shut -- almost as if wounded -- and then blink open as she breathes out, and how they savage whatever it is that lies before her, seeking some sort of anchor in the present.

Her hands move away from the book. She drags her palms against the grass to remove the feel of time and dust from them.  The Hunger remains; wreathed with other nuanced things.  She tests her fingertips and finds them still too dusty.  The book lies open in her lap to the picture drawn in the margins; to this clue left by a vandal or a Seer.  Even when the threads of the Tellurian are transparent to her again, the gnawing of it remains.  It worries at the corners of her eyes.

Nicholas

"What is it?"  Nicholas indeed saw whatever effect the book had on her, and however shifted her affect and however disturbing his own vision was he cannot help but crane his neck to look over to the page.  Whereupon he too is seized, and he is no stranger to feelings like this either though it has been some time since he felt them so poignantly, and he lifts his hand to touch the drawing.

It was perhaps ill-advised, borne of impulse, but there is nothing that happens to him.  Nick looks away and glances at a spot of fine white dust on the tip of his finger, and then wipes it away into the grass.

What is it?  Dust from that faraway place?  Powdered bone?  Moon-dust in earnest?  He hears Pen tease him, suggest again that he could learn Matter and know for sure.

See, and Ari, she knows the Ars Mentis when she feels it: a simple enough effect, but there and worked however it was through pen and ink.  Nick's gaze is absent of the gnawing, of the worrying, though he can indeed tell that Ari herself is gnawed and well worried.  "Do you think we ought to try to trace it?  Is there a way you can do that, or find where it links to, or..."

Arianna

"Oh," she says, when she is grounded enough again to feel the separation between herself and the scene that bled over the margin of self and other. Blurred the boundaries. Left her Hungry, and lonely, and yet with the sense that something might be done about it. This focus and urgency, this perserverence.

"Oh, you are clever," she says, eyes narrowed and finger pointing accusatorily at the little line art. Then waggling at it -- Oh no, fooled me once -- as the shape of her mouth shifts toward a smile.

"Nicholas," she says, and his name is so-cradled, made precious by the shape of her tongue. "Nick... Nik," here the pronunciation shifts, and pairs with the clicking of her tongue.  "You, too, you are clever too.  My my, this one.  It got you, and then it got to me too. It is Hungry, and alone, and aching, and I saw a tree..."

This trails off as she decides that perhaps speaking to her friend in riddles is not the best way to unravel a mystery.  To reveal it. 

"This is a sharp one," she says, appreciatively. Wary now of this thing that they have found, and not only for its alchemical musings. No. Because of all the other things it may yet be.

She taps her fingers against her lips as she thinks.  As she considers.  "I think I could trace it.  I think -- yes.  Yes, I could try at the very least but it will take some muttering in foreign tongues," she says, as if that were not their everyday routine.  "And I would need for you to look out for me, I do not want to wander and become lost.  There is a --"

She struggles for the word and cannot place it.  Her hand makes a dismissive gesture in its stead.

"I think it is a thing of struggle. I think there is a thing to overcome here. I think...  I do not wish to become lost to it.  I have been lonely before, and I do not want it in my bone-dust," she says, echoing some thought of his unconsciously in her metaphor.

Nicholas

Nick's boundaries have been blurred too, though less so by the drawing and moreso by the meshing of past/future (he is still not sure which of these) and faraway with the here and now: and too, with Memory because it was not so very long ago was it that he was there when walls toppled and they heard the far off sound of sirens, but there would be too many injured and too many dead.  Still, perseverance and focus, these things are helpful.

"I wonder if it's a lure, or a cry for help, or..."  He is musing, looking again down at the drawing.  "Maybe someone just wanted to capture a moment.  Maybe that's all."

They won't know unless they trace it, will they.

Ari says she has been lonely before and Nick, as he lifts the water bottle to his mouth again, glances to her.  His palm finds her back between her shoulderblades and its weight is reassuring, brotherly, as it makes a few circles and falls away.  "I can keep an eye on you.  It may be best to Work somewhere that isn't here, though."

Arianna

The part of Arianna that has learned a thousand artful dodges for offered affections or unsolicited touch no longer applies its knowledges to Nick.  His hand at her shoulder, along the boundary of the back of her dress and the places where its straps leave her skin bare, this is a welcome and comforting thing.  It accomplishes something.  In the time when she had been lonely, he would not have even had the chance to make contact.  She has changed, and that difference helps anchor her division of self and other further.  Ars Mentis is a demanding thing; Nick's workings with Ars Temporis are quite similar. There is always a boundary to hold, a threshold to keep clear and sained.

"We shall see," she tells him.  Affirms.  It is bold and unrestrained, this confidence. They will suss out the secrets, the bone-dust or moon-filth, the loneliness; they will scry from the shape of the branches if they have to.  Mysteries will be revealed!

"I concur," she says, to moving their Workings to a more secure place.  And when they rise to return the other, less chosen books to their dusty carts and shelves, Arianna takes a scarf from her bag and uses it to wrap the book that they will purchase and bring home with them.  She does not touch it plainly, not now that a connection has been established.  She is cautious.

And see? This is silk. And silk contains such things; blue silk is sacred to the mind. It is wreathed in calmness. There is blue in the pattern of her scarf, and so there is also calmness to this boundary.  Perhaps the simple act of shrouding it will calm the visions that linger in Nick's mind, will quell the Hunger that gnaws in the pit of her stomach. 

The book, wrapped in silk and secured in the backseat of the hatchback, rides along silently as they wend their way back to the House of Hyde and Mars.  It suffers in the warmth of her car when they make a quick stop for groceries, and also for wine -- there must be wine when there is hunger and loneliness.  And finally it is secreted into the old Victorian, which is guarded by the vehement Chicken weather vane, and which is adorned with a (truly it must be ironic) political sign that makes Ari snicker behind her hand even as her front lawn bears the same.

And then there is food, and something slake the sense of sand and grit from his tongue more fully, and discussions to have on how best to follow along the thing threads of mystery and curiosity that they have found, and bargained for, and stolen away to keep as their own.

Housemates

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

[Manip + Politics: How prepared am I for House shit today? Because Syll & Jamie scenes always start with dice. Also, Cunning.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 4, 9, 9) ( success x 2 ) [Doubling Tens]

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

It's abso-fucking-lutely beautiful in Denver today. Because of course it is. Because there wasn't just a threat of snow, in fucking May, just a few days ago. But Arianna is not about to quarrel with the weather when it is behaving itself. This is weather more becoming of the period between Beltane and Midsummer, and she is dressed finally in clothing more becoming of her figure. A summery dress, cut impeccably to her figure, with the sweep of its skirt swirling just at her knees. Open toed and strappy heels that loft her to nearly five-foot-ten. She is beautiful in the way that Italian women are rumored to be.

It is a good palette from which to address the politics at hand. The House, which is not a Chantry -- but which will have to do, as Denver does things in ways the Order would find strange -- is her destination. She has a messenger bag with her, no doubt filled with bookish things and also with mischeif. The keys for her blue-as-night hatchback are caught up in one hand, and the other carries a metal thermos of cold-brew coffee.

She is not quite at home in this communal space, but it serves as a fitting meeting ground when one is not certain of the tenor of a new acquaintance.

For Neith: Arianna's family names preceed her. Her mother, Isla Fioretta, is well known within the House. A renowned ritualist, a gifted teacher, an Adept of Ars Potentiae. Her Father is the Arrow of Artemis, Adept Major of House Flambeau. Their daughter, Arianna, is a mere Initiate Exemptus though a gifted artist. Her artwork and illumination often grace House documents or teaching materials.

Ari stands in the front room of the Chantry house, sipping at her coffee. She is five minutes early for their agreed meeting -- a rarity. Usually she might be five minutes late. Time is not a speciality of hers.

Neith al-Khaled

Neith's story is not quite spread enough to have her reputation arrive ahead of her, but for she Awakened while the Technocracy was in the act of capturing her father, a time traveler. They did not capture him that time. When they did, he told her to run, and she ran.

She does not have a gymnast's body anymore. Nor a runner's. A fighter, sure. Kickboxing was a pastime she took up while studying esoterica and history in Boston. Kickboxing doesn't stop her from wearing flowing skirts and high heels.

All this to say: they have heard of each other. They have not met, yet. Someone told one or the other that what a coincidence. They reached out.

Being an initiate of Time, Neith turns the doorknob precisely on the hour. Sweeps inside wearing aviator shades and a sheer yellow scarf over her shoulders. Even wearing stiletto heels, the girl is below average height.

"Hey!" she says, as if they're old friends. "You're here!"

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

Let the Informal Meeting of the female contigency of House Bonisagus in Denver commence. Stilleto heels, time travelers and foreign nationals. What the hell could go wrong?

"You're here! And you look marvelous," she says, returning the greeting as if they were old friends. If Neith follows in her father's footsteps, its possible that they will actually become the fast friends that they pretend just now. Echoes, after all, they flow in many directions and time is less like a river than it is a --

"That yellow really works for you." A compliment. Admiring. The same cannot be said of Arianna. Yellow makes her eyes too green, it eats up the slip of mercury in them. She crosses to Neith to kiss cheeks, because the other Bonisagus seems the sort who might appreciate the European customs that Arianna has had to set aside in these more heathen western climes.

"I have coffee..." she says, after greetings, which implies a certain quality given her collection of surnames. If Neith shows interest, then Arianna tucks her keys into a pocket of her bag and pulls out another thermos, chill to the touch, of potent brew.

Neith al-Khaled

So far as she could tell, her father made friends in every year in which he stepped. Other Etherites know Dr. Khaled Abandonato as a bold mind, a pioneer in the fields of Entropy and Time, and they know it is hard as hell to get ahold of him because of the way his paradox converter works.

Her father hasn't been born yet, and people know who he is, enough that his first name is enough to spark a hint of recognition.

"Thank you," Neith says with a brimming of pride in her tone, accepting both the compliment and the European greeting.

Then comes the matter of coffee.

"I think I love you already. Is that cold brew?"

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

"It is," confirms Arianna, who then goes on to say something serious about how it is unseeming to carry around thermos of aged brewed coffee. Something about sacrilege. Something about spoiled offerings. All in the sort of companionable and judgmental way that becomes Hermetics everywhere.

"This is what passes as a Chantry here," she says, keeping her voice low enough that any of the proper guardians of the house might miss the disappointment in it. Arianna knows proper Chantries, of which this is clearly not one. "The grounds are lovely, the Library is suspiciously cross-pollinated with popular belief and yet sufficient for the study of new pursuits. The locals are..."

A meaningful pause. She lifts her eyebrows toward Neith and crooks the corner of her mouth in a wicked smile.

"Intriguing."

A little pause, then: "What brings you to Denver?"

Neith al-Khaled

"The locals."

This, with a touch of chagrin. As if the answer is one she would only utter with a pen, commit to her diary and then never show anyone. It might come out in her behavior but she would never give the thing a Name. Used to be she thought names were just words for objects but she knows now what it is to Name something.

"One, in particular." As if she knows the other gal will needle if she does not complete the thread herself. Neith removes her sunglasses though the place does still let in a lot of light, hangs them from the bosom of her sundress by an earpiece. "William Holmes and I, we're friends from when we were both still Disparates, and I ran into him again, recently."

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

She is sipping from her coffee when the name is loosed, and so at first all Neith gets is the glint of recognition in her eye and slightly raised brows. Then the thermos lowers and Ari's smile confirms it.

"William is such fun company," says the Giametti woman, who has a decade on the Jerbiton in age but perhaps not entirely in restraint or wisdom. Ari gestures to a chair, magnanimously, as if this sitting room were quite her own. If Neith sits, then she will as well, tucking the messenger bag up against the chair leg, crossing her own demurely but more out of habit than out of any desire for propriety.

The typical Hermetic introductions have not come into play yet. No bani this ordo that titles for days and begats and whatnot. They have a common point of connection here, and someone in Boston to drop names of one to the other, and that is enough for Ari. For now. They are not stitching their family lines together; this is coffee klatsch at most. Right?

"I am trying to goad him into teaching me French." This is offered, but the other woman will know that William Holmes needs very little goading to assist a pretty and attentive woman with any of her requests. Jerbitons are a delight in that fashion.

Neith al-Khaled

That gesture provokes a response, and the younger woman gathers up her skirts that they won't tangle her legs when she stands later before sitting herself down. This sitting room has multiple points of entry, a lot of open space around the furniture, and while Neith seems aware of her surroundings, she does not seem skittish.

Confidence will take anyone far. She is growing into a confident young woman. One can read it in the way she sits up but without worrying things with her fingers.

"That shouldn't take too much effort." The goading, or the French, she does not say. She does say it with a touch of a laugh. "Get him drunk enough, you'll have to learn French just to understand him."

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

"That sounds like an idea," she says, with a wickedness in her smile echoing Neith's laugh. Ari leans forward just enough to make her posture seem conspiratorial, it inspires a sort of impishness in the right sort of companions.

"We should get him drunk and see how many languages come out. It's a bona fide Hermetic Drinking Game, you know?" Smirk. No mention of how many tongues she might lapse into. "I think four... no, five. What would be your wager?"

Neith al-Khaled

Ari leans forward and finds Neith mirroring her posture. Bracelets and charms rattle on her wrists as she rests her elbows on her knees. Really leans in. That smirk is met by a grin, a shimmy of eyebrows.

"Four," she says. Leans back now that that bit of damage is done. "One of which is Enochian. If we're wagering."

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

"Oh, of course," she says, with a flourish and gesture, when Neith mentions Enochian. Because every Hermetic worth their salt speaks Enochian, though perhaps not loosely when they are drunk. But it does amount to great fun when someone's creepy Uncle gets sloshed at Yule and accidentally speaks the words of power that set the curtains on fire.

Not in Arianna's very well bred family. But in others. Or perhaps only in rumor and innuendo, which is far more fun to trade than truths.

"I wonder what he's up to this evening," she says, with a leading tone, though she does not move to investigate the matter immediately.

Neith al-Khaled

"I'm not sure. When I left the apartment this morning, he was still asleep."

Oh well isn't that a bit of business. She says it offhand, as if there is nothing more to glean from it than what she said. They're living together, temporary on account of she not planning on staying here in Denver past the summer. It's cheaper than renting a motel. Less chance of bedbugs.

Like those of her generation, the cellphone seems to materialize in her hand when it's needed, when it doesn't seem as if the user glued it to their palm. She recites as she types.

"Do... you... have... time.... for... a... drinking... contest... against... Arianna... tonight... question mark."

Bloop.

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

"Oh, don't leave yourself out of the fun," she says, looping Neith right back into the fray. Arianna doesn't pull out her cellphone, mostly because there is no guarantee that it will work today, but also because Neith has this handled.

"I would not be surprised if you bested us both in tongues," she adds. And on the matter of where Neith is sleeping, or with whom: not a peep. If she was expecting any clutching of pearls or mutterings under her breath, then Ari was the wrong Hermetic to seek them from. If anything, Neith gets a subtle raise of her coffee on its next transit. Not quite a fistbump, but definitely not puritanical either.

Neith al-Khaled

To the matter of tongues, Neith trills hers, making a low suggestive purring sound and waggling her eyebrows again before taking a demure swallow of coffee. Sweet, sweet nectar.

Her lipstick is matte and the color of wine. It is designed not to smudge or smear but it does stain on the rim of the thermos where contact happens, as if to demarcate. To keep the germs from contacting each other directly.

"I speak Spanish," she says, "and read Latin, and know a little bit of Arabic. I stay out of--" Her phone buzzes, and she looks down, and she laughs. Recites, "'Already drunk, will come for round two if sober. Let Arianna know the gauntlet is Thrown! I won't lose my title of King of Patrón to a Bonisagus.' Whoa-oh."

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

Whoa-oh.

This brings laughter out of the elder Bonisagus, and some sotto voce murmur in Italian. There is a joke to be made about how the romance languages make for cunning linguists, but what Ari says instead is laced with something darkly amused.

"He forgets, I think, that I have been training in the ways of tequila with our resident expert."

Lose to a Bonisagus? The gauntlet has indeed been thrown. It is possible that her cabalmates or their House's black sheep might have to come scrape her off William's floor before this over, but Ari will not let the challenge go unanswered.

Neith al-Khaled

"Yeah, Dad mentioned in one of his last letters that he thought your name sounded familiar."

Implication: Tales of Giametti and Sepúlveda's exploits are still floating around in the 2060s, long after they've both died, and when Abandonato is finally old enough to join a tradition.

Reality: Neith is joking.

As she types, she adds, "I'm reminding him that he is an initiate of Life and he should sober the fuck up so we can do this. Pardon my French."

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

"Truly. I thought that was the whole point of learning that much life in Academy was the instant-sober, plausibly deniability rotes," she says. Though, there are other direct applications in Academy of having such control over one's anatomy.

It pleases Arianna, in some small way, that perhaps there would be a Giametti legacy floating around out there that was about revelry and not about war. It would be a fitting use of her misspent twenties and early thirties.

"Shall we investigate the stores? If there's nothing here that suits Mr. Patron, we'll have to run out the market." Which would not be such a bad thing; Ari could put them together some fantastic and quirky spread of delicious things to nosh whilst tormenting William.

Neith al-Khaled

"We shall."

With that, Neith finds her feet and returns her sunglasses to her face, though they're only going further into the house to take inventory of the half-bottles of whatever Serafíne has left lying around, and whatever the Verbena and the Chakravat to whom the place technically belongs have under lock and key.

She offers her elbow to her newfound Bonisagus sister and adds, "We're going to have to stop at Walmart so I can buy a bathing suit. I heard this place has a hot spring out back."

Arianna Fioretta Giametti

It takes very little encouragement for Ari to slip her arm into Neiths, for them to be co-conspirators and new-found sisters, especially in the name of mocking and gently ribbing the good Magus Holmes bani Jerbiton. She floats a question, true curiosity, about whether Neith wonders too if swimsuits were optional in the hotspring. Ultimately, they must decide that it would be an unfair distraction for William were there nudity in addition to drunkness in the linguistic battle to come.

Which means that Neith will be party to Arianna's first trip ever to Walmart. Which is eye-opening, for everyone involved.

Please admire my restraint

Ari

There had been a flurry of text messages between a less-than-sober Arianna and an always-eloquent Penelope regarding someone else's brilliant and clearly risk-adverse (sarcasm) plans, and how they might have possibly raised something akin to wary askance side-ways looking concern in the Silver Bough's Bonisagus.  Not that Arianna concerned herself with Apprentices, or apprentices-not-apprentices as the case may be here, especially those outside of the Order and especially especially those who may have yet to declare or secure allegiance to/from a Tradition. There were boundaries on her Good Will toward men. One had to have standards. Such Hermeticking surely factors in at some level except this:

She is passingly fond of Andres' female apprentice.

This bevy of fleet footed texts was Saturday, and then some damnable thing or another had interceded into Sunday and so feasting and general comradeship was postponed into Monday -- evening as Nick insisted on having an occupation other than Hermetic Mage, which was good, as being Chakravanti was not consistent with a life goal of occupation: Hermetic Mage -- which is to say that it is after work, and Ari has finished or set aside whatever passes as her daily grind and headed over toward Nick and Pen's and as this is damnable Denver she has taken the short ride by car because the weather says something about possible snow down to 6000' and just about anywhere in the city is close enough that she does not wish to measure the rise of the hill upon which the House of Hyde and Mars resides to be certain she is safely below the snow-line.

Past fucking Beltane, and the snow still came.  For this sort of ridiculousness she could be high in the Alps enjoying Swiss chocolate and the tangle of languages that feel closer to home. She could be testing the magical principles of Correspondence in the Himalayas -- does the thinness of the air affect the transmutation of space?

On Saturday she had worn a dress with a hemline that swung around her knees and fit just so and it was feminine and elegant and perfect.  Today, though, she is returned to slacks, and boots, and a coat.  But she draws the line at buttoning it up.  And on the short hike up their hill to their front porch -- eyes cast up to the steepling of the tree boughs now bedecked in a flurry of whispering leaves, eyes cast next to the swing and groan of the furious weather vane, eyes at last coming to rest on the warm light spilling out of their windows -- she refuses to bend enough to this Denver weather to button up her coat or sling a scarf around her neck.  Her breath makes small clouds before her, steam pushed aside as progress requires their parting.  Grey slacks, a pale pink sweater, an unreasonably white coat that gleams in the light of the gibbous moon.  She is a slip of moor-light moving up their path; she is luminous even before she graces their doorway.

And knocks twice.

And then twice again.

Because she is impatient.  And because the things she has brought to add to the feast weigh down the canvas bag in her right hand.  And because if she didn't knock twice twice, then the House might not recognize her name.

Hyde

To one side and across of the House of Mars and Hyde, there is a war.  It's funny that Ari should imagine Switzerland because that is the role her friends seem to be playing just now: across the road from them the yard there has grown up a crop of Bernie Sanders '16 signs.  Next door to their house, Donald Trump '16 signs bristle up like the rifles of a distant army glimpsed at the horizon.  One wayward Sanders sign appears to have somehow been 'misplaced' there amongst them.

It will escalate.  It will most certainly escalate.

But for now, Ari is not the only one dismayed, left dismal, by the weather and the surprise reappearance of snow.  Nicholas has been bemoaning it since he first heard the forecast.  Were he some haunting spirit, someone who had died frozen in Denver's outer reaches and left to wander its plains and mountains for eternity, his refrain might be: Snow!  In May!  What the fuck.

He curses infrequently enough and saves it for those moments when he is truly in anger or in shock.

Much like the time Ari surprised them at their doorstep several months ago now, when he hears her knocking Nick tromps down the stairs to answer her, though by now her knock is grown familiar.  She lives so close, close enough that if it were not snowing! in May! he would most certainly have teased her about hailing a cab to come over here.  He appears at the door wrapped in a heavy cardigan of natural wool, undyed, and smiles at her as he beholds her there on the doorstep.  He looks past her just once to take this in: there is one more sign out there than yesterday.

"Come on in, Ari."

Ari

It is worse than Nick has thought. Arianna has not hailed a cab. She has driven herself, but still she parks her car at the bottom of their hill and walks up because something about amassing all their resources in one location -- daughter of a Flambeau general; occupational hazard: Legacy Mage -- or another paranoid nonsense hand-waving thing.  Or perhaps because she counts the hike up the Hill of Mars & Hyde as excersize, thus excusing the indulgence of friendship and feasting and fete-ing.

There is no need to linger on the doorstep, torn between old ways and new, wondering if she might trick the cosmos into accepting her welcome. Nick speaks it freely, and so she pulls him into a one-armed hug even as she crosses the threshold.  With Pen and Nick -- and also with Thane -- Arianna is affectionate.  In Denver, only Andres has won the right to sling his arm around her waist as they sway from one establishment to the other.  (We do not mention Silas, as he won his rights elsewhere, and also because it is a touchy subject, and also because reasons.)

"Can you believe this damnable weather?" she asks him, knowing that Nick is as fond of the slow creep of seasons as she is.  (Snow! In May!) But her mouth is curled toward friendship and teasing, and the hug is tight and fast and quick.

"I made ravioli," she tells him.  "Because they go with everything."  The canvas bag is hefted slightly, as if to prove the weight of her offering.

Mars

Pen is bare foot and bare foot and bare legged she comes down the stairs after Nicholas, doing what one might describe as: frolicking, prancing, skipping, bouncing, whisking, dancing. Dancing is perhaps the most dignified, and Pen is a dignified woman; still she comes dancing down the stairs like a maenad or a murderess, her red red hair a bloody halo and a bruise on her thigh (visible when the skirt she is wearing flicks to the side, and why shouldn't it flick? It is essentially fringe: sparkling, glistering trails of starlight -- of course it is all silver; ribbons of it; fringe; swish; a poem of movement, a kinetic dream) like a crushed blackberry. 

"Do they go with your beautiful eyes," she says, by way of greeting,"Do they go with the thrumming of your blood? Do they go with Mercury's transit past Helios? Do they go with women grieving less for Icarus and more for their own eyes, for these women went blind when wax from his wings hit them? But then they were looking upward and saw something remarkable; what do they grieve for, and is ravioli good for it? Hallo, Arianna!"

"Nicholas didn't laugh at my joke earlier, but," and she starts laughing at herself, in advance. "It's, did you see the si, the signs, the political signs, I said we should," and she laughs, and she laughs and she laughs, "that we should put up a sign that says," 

Damn it, Mars, pull yourself together,

"one that says," and she laughs even harder. Nicholas will remember this joke: it was, to be fair to him and to Pen, a reference to an obscure but famous (if you are a Hermetic) political rivalry within the Order of Hermes, and it is a nice updated Hermetic meme and the quote tags she came for each candidate's signs were very clever, and there was absolutely no reason Nicholas should know what the Hell she was talking about.

Ari

[For my amusement: Int + Politics: Does Ari get Pen's obscure reference, based only on giggles and political signage hints?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 5, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Ari

Ari's arm is still around Nick when Pen comes dance-shimmer-shining down the stairs, wreathed in bell-like laughter, already heralding some sort of mischeif and so it is mid-transference of the hug when Pen's meaning hits home for their Bonisagus friend -- who is most definitely aware of obscure Hermtic politics and who most certainly is not on her best behaviour about them.

Something akin to a snerk escapes Arianna, whose eyes have gone wide and her lips are pressed thin in an amused attempt to hold back laughter.  When she does speak the name, it is thin and wheedlingly so, as if giving it full voice will only break her down into convulsive giggles like Pen.

"Higgority Valantius, he's the only man for us..."

Aha.  Ahaha.  No, no she cannot maintain a straight face. The terrible rhyme; the terrible name; the even worse political platform. It all echoes something of a particular presence in modern politics.

"Oh, oh gods Pen.  I think I know where I can find a likeness of this sign. I think it is a Bonisagus library, friend of a friend of my mother's -- I could." Barely contained snerk again. "I could... fashion you one for your lawn."

Hyde

Nicholas does indeed remember this joke, and he did not laugh at it earlier.  By her laughter he can assume it was a good joke, a clever joke, but there is no reason he should know what the Hell she is talking about and indeed he does not.  His expression deadpan, he looks sidelong at Pen as she repeats the joke and laughs and laughs.  And he smiles because he likes to see Pen laugh, but this is touched with affection, not shared mirth; it looks different.

Oh but of course Ari gets it.  Higgority Valantius.

Mind you: Hermetics choose their names.  This man chose that name for himself.  That is what Nick thinks about while the two of them laugh.  He also does not say that the Sleepers are likely to believe it to be a Harry Potter reference.  Best not to pick at scabs and all that.

"We're only good Valantius folk in this house."

Nicholas holds out his hands for the ravioli, which he appears very happy to accept, in preparation for taking to the kitchen.

Mars

Pen's eyes are bright with the tears of laughter; she has her right hand wrapped around her stomach, her spine curling because the laughter is convulsive and she does not do it still right now; she lets it take her, drifts; bends; doesn't break; reedy, see? And when Arianna gets it, of course Arianna gets it, she flashes Nicholas such a look and such a smile; but he's the only man for us - and Pen's hands are lifted to her face; she covers it completely and her shoulders shake. Then: one hand snaps out; she points very dramatically at Nicholas, peeking through her index and middle fingers, "See! I am hilarious. I am the cleverest most hilarious person except for Ari who is equally clever and hilarious."

Signs! And Nick jumps in, too. Pen clap claps her hands at Ari's offer to fashion one for her lawn and clap beams at Nicholas when he deadpans and then, quite earnest,

"But Ari, if we do a sign for our lawn, we have to do one for your lawn too. Oh, oh oh oh, oh, oh we can send pictures to Eve, Imagine his face. Remember that argument he and, well that argument he had? It ended, Nicholas, in tragedy. A stuffed pig was unstuffed and a spirit unleashed."

"Oh I will take that," and Pen who is One Jump Ahead will slip in take the ravioli dish bag box and head to the kitchen first. Dance to the kitchen. Prance, frolick: whatever.

She seems in high spirits, or at least.

Ari

This proves Ari's point, by the by. If her Nonna's ravioli could go with obscure Hermetic politic jokes and remembrances of Eve, then surely they could go with anything.  They would be good with anything.  They are relinquishes to the Mars-Hydes' custody.

"I thought Xavi might spontaneously combust..."

This is all that is said toward the dicussion of the horrible Name, yes chosen Name, yes chosen perhaps for its awfulness -- Ari cannot rightfully remember his House, though she does the inward equivalent of crossing herself thrice and hoping it is not her own.

"Of course," she says, when Pen insists there should be one in Ari's yard as well.  Pen's dancing continues toward the kitchen, and Arianna shoots Nick a little raised-brow amused look before tripping that way herself in a manner that might be construed as dancingly.

"I made as many as I could stand to fold, and then a few more just for good measure."  This is again about ravioli.  They are filled with sage and cheese; there is sage butter to brown and coat them with. It will be delicious, thought it will not in truth go with everything.

"I failed to gift a sending stone to Margot," she adds, very by-the-by, as if she expects Nick to already be caught up on the gossip shared via text message. Because of course them are.  "She is adamant about facing her past herself."

A beat.  Business intermixed with other things.

"Can I help with anything?" she asks, shrugging out of her coat and draping over something too high for Yorick to scale.  The destroyer of books has been remembered.

Hyde

Pen is in high spirits, frolicking past him to the kitchen with ravioli in hand, and Nick is a more solemn creature even in his good humor, walks after the swaying Hermetics without dancing.  Yorick is in his pen at the moment, as he often is when Nick is not in the mood to follow him around the house cleaning up after him.

He would not have to do that with a dog or a cat.  He has commented on this to Pen, more than once, frequently in texts that involve photos of puppies and kittens and adult dogs and cats that are currently available in local shelters.  Some of them are missing eyes and have three legs, but, well, he likes to give things second lives.

"A sending stone?"  He looks sidelong here at his friend, and his tone suggests that he was not caught up on the gossip after all.  "It's important to her to do it alone, I think.  She believes it's going to help her grow on her own."

His tone is not approving or disapproving; it could perhaps be trying to be neither of those things, to respect Margot's wishes without letting his own feelings influence them too much.  He might have many things in common with the Verbenae, but he is not one nonetheless.  "You already made us ravioli," is the simple reply when Arianna asks after help.

Mars

Here is the true advantage of being the one who brings the ravioli dish into the kitchen. One can steal a ravioli from it, and break fast by popping it in one's mouth, and then: no. Pen does not moan; she does, however, sink against the side of the kitchen counter, eyes closed as she tastes. Bliss.

One would think she were not listening to Nicholas and Arianna, but of course she is. She usually listens, and pays mind.

She even looks at all of the pictures of animals they will not be adopting which Nicholas persists in sending her, and when Yorick is hopping around, crapping on the ground or, as in one memorable and hilarious case, on Nicholas's laptop which was on the floor for whatever reason, Pen is serene in her refusal to help. When he is around, she rarely even pets the bunny. He is usually not around, what with his day job, but what Pen does on her own is nobody's business.

"I think that is too bad, Ari," she says, once she bliss has subsided: somewhat. The oven is on and Pen: she takes out a loaf of bread, crusty and handmade and homemade, and begins slicing it up. The bread's center is a delicate white; it wants to be smoke. From the refrigerator, she takes: fig jam, brie. From the bowl of vegetables, an heirloom tomato: begins slicing, slathering. These will go into the oven to crisp. That Margot wouldn't take the sending stone, that is.

Cut, cut, cut. "Nick, get Ari a drink, why don't you?"

Ari

"Well, not really a sending stone," Ari says, back tracking a bit from claims of true Talisman crafting in a hotel bar. "But a close-enough thing.  Something we could have used in similar ways."

She is saying this and Pen is sneaking a ravioli, which is filled some deliciously musty cheese mingled with sage and salt, which is delicate and slippery and nutty from the browned butter and marvelously redolent. It transports her. Where? That is up to Pen's memories of things delicious and indulgent and too nuanced to be found in a delicatessen's case.

"A true sending stone," she says, for Nicholas's benefit, "Is more than merely an anchorpoint for scrying or other Correspondence work.  It could even hold the whole of the sending ritual and only require activation.  I might have made this false one by pushing a bit of my own resonance into a thing which Margot could have taken with her. Then if she stays overlong in the perils of her past, we might find her -- and not be distracted by the larger well of my resonance, as my location would be clearly known to us."

Hermetics: saying everything the long way.

Hyde

Wine glasses click together, though whatever sound the smallest impact makes is shortly drowned out by the delicate ringing that follows, by the glass shuddering in ways too subtle to be seen by the naked eye.  He is carrying three of them, two held between the fingers of his right hand, their stems crossed, and he sets those down first.  "White or red, Ari?"

She gets a glass of whatever she requests, as does Pen.

A curl flips down nearly into one of his eyes as he glances up at Ari, who offers many explanations about magick the long way.  He has never given any indication that he minds; he has learned things from her more often than not.

He flicks his head, an eyelash fluttering in irritation as he tries to toss the curl away, all to no avail.  It clings as assuredly as grasping vines do to old brick.  "She agreed to contact me if she gets in over her head.  I think it might be the best we can hope for."

Mars

"Even without the sympathetic magic, I believe we could find her without very much trouble, although it never hurts to have an edge; perhaps Yorick would even be useful," this, with a Look for Nicholas. Pen is still in high spirits; the Look is accompanied with the suggestion of one singular dimple, the other being an ace tucked up her sleeve.

"I said it over text; I'll say it again." Now she is laying cheese and sliced tomatoes over the fig jam, like so: perfection. "I am only concerned if 'facing the past' means 'going to murder somebody because now I have magical powers.'"

Her voice is not tinged with a sarcastic edge. She does not sound sardonic; only thoughtful and steady and perhaps a bit hungry.

That ravioli. Would they notice if she ate it all, slowly, while they waited?

Pen wants red wine tonight.

Ari

"Red, please."  Ari and Pen are of a mind about wine for the evening.

"Mmmmm."  It is a thoughtful and not entirely agreeing sound.  Neither of her cabalmates seem overly concerned about the Apprentice -- is one an Apprentice if one has no Tradition to confer and recognize one's rank? Is one truly? -- hieing off on some ill fated adventure.  Far be it for Ari to be the only concerned party if the others are unmoved.

Far be it indeed.

"Well. I hope that she returns unscathed."  It is about as magnanimous as Ari will get on the matter.  The remainder of her thoughts, eloquent and thoroughly judgemental as they would prove to be, remain closeted behind her teeth.  Such restraint. Twice now on the subject.  This time in the presence of wine, which is lifted in silent toast to the Hyde-Marses before she drinks.  And it is a chalice; and is a cauldron; and mostly it is a very good red, to which she nods her approval.

Hyde

Pen's reaction has had his gaze straying, intermittent, toward the ravioli, which are waiting there and occasionally the scent of brown butter wafts out into the space held between all three of them.  He does not reach for it just yet; he is observing some decorum perhaps.  If they eat it all now there will not be any left for later.

It is red wine for all of them, and as glasses are set down and then raised up again, he takes a thoughtful swallow from his own.

"I don't think she wants to kill anyone," he says.  "She is being so secretive about it because she's worried someone will get hurt otherwise, I think.  You know they...she and Ned, they aren't very trusting."  Though maybe they don't know; he can't precisely be sure of what Margot has confided in him and what she has confided in the others, and how it differs.  And he does not like this space, this weight given to one person's confidance and the desire to share with two others who are dear to him.

"We can't force her into making the safer choice, Ari."  He says it to his wine glass, though it's addressed to Ari.  He is less precise with his words than a Hermetic would be: they can, of course, but the rue his tone is laced with says only that he will not.

Ari

"I don't think she wants to kill anyone," Ari says, but the sentence has an alarming amount of momentum. It does not stop there. It keeps going and yet still manages to fall short of saying all of the things she has been so good at not saying to date.

"And no, no we can't make her do anything. None of us has that authority as she is Disparate and seems to have divorced herself from even Andres' mentorship -- a thing I do not understand. I mark the change of resonance on her; it is palpabale, but that does not an Initiate make."

It falls short of saying all the things she has been thinking, whilst still saying some of the things she has been thinking. More of them than she might in other company.

"I like her. I do not want to see her hurt, or burdened further by things she should not have to face alone. But mostly I do not want to see the people I care deeply for hurt by the extension of whatever may hurt her, because you are fond of her Nicholas, and also Thane has invested in her and even myself, for all that I do not will not gods willing you cannot make me take an Apprentice yet, for all of that I think she might even be a bit dear to me and NOW, good friends. Now we drink. Because this thing where we can do nothing about it but also where we know it is not right: I despise it."

A beat. She breathes out.

"And I did not say even a word of that to Margot. Please, admire my restraint."