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.