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.