"Do you remember solution to the riddle about the Basilisk from Maga Ionia's On Mythical and Magical Creatures?" she asks Pen, glancing up from a pile of folded silks and fabrics unearthed from a dusty wicker basket in one corner of Philae's Finery and Antiques. What light eeks in through the thick-paned windows is warped by the slide of the aged glass and comes in ever-broadening beams which set the dust in the air afire, illuminate their dance and whirl-whorling. The dust is so thick in the shop that it almost has a taste to it, and the smell of old books and leather and things left too long to the touch of time is thick and clings to their hair and fingerprints. Everything here is older than each of the Hermetic women, some of it is older than the two of them combined. A great deal of it is junk; a few things are treasures. Pen and Ari have the run of the place to themselves. Philae -- whose name is actually Karina -- has gone across the way to get a cup of coffee.
Something about the ardent woman and her luminous companion inspires trust, or at least requires considerably more caffeine than the shopkeep has in her bloodstream at present.
Ari pulls a scarf out of the middle of the pile. It is pale cream with yellow and purple irises. The pattern is faded just enough that it looks like water color. As she unfolds it and holds it up to the light, Pen can see the detail and variability in the print.
"It's hand-dyed," says the Bonisagus, shaking her head a little as she hands it over to the Flambeau. "Amazing. Six dollars for a silk scarf -- It's like the prices were set by casting lots. Shall I see if there's another?"
lake-light[Do I? Intelligence + Enigmas.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
lake-light"I do, and I remembered the variant too. What rock is lighter than the basilisk's stare and redder than the basilisk's heart? Version one. What rock is lighter than the basilisk's heart and what stone grows into a tree in flower? Version two. Answer: a cherry stone."
Pen is seated, cross-legged, on the dusty ground. In her lap is a box full of spoons, silver spoons and copper spoons, spoons of many shapes and spoons of many sizes, and in among the spoons are rings, a skein of rings, rings upon rings upon rings, some cheap and tawdry fluff, some richer, all of them lost. Pen is for once wearing little jewelry: her wedding band shines like lake-light, star-gloam, milk-light; a ring on her other hand shines just as bright, the sapphire it is set with is a shadow, is a clot of evening. There are stones in Pen's burnished hair, which is swept back at the nape of her neck, and bent so: isn't it fair, and isn't she? Bent so, seated so: there is the hilt of a knife, just falling out of her boot.
Pen lofts her chin to peer fabric-wards, reaching out one hand (from the other, rings and thread and spoons fall, clattering as soft as Echo singing Narcissus' own praises) to take it between her fingers and see the shadow of them through the scarf.
"Maybe they were set by casting lots," Pen says, with a pleased twist of her lips. "It is how I might do it, were I in charge of such a shop. Toss prices in a hat and see what sticks. Or ask people what they thought such and such thing was worth to them, and then what it was worth to me. It's beautiful; if there is another, I'll take it. I think this box has a secret bottom."
Pen: she lifts the box to regard it, and then, "This seems the sort of place one might find Tass, doesn't it? We should look."
evening-star"You should take this one," Ari says, letting go of her corner of the scarf. It float-falls down into Pen's grasp, obscuring all of her beautiful rings, whispering against her skin the way that only silk can murmur-slide and insinuate. Then Ari's quick and nimble fingers are to the task again. It does not take long enough for her to find another, blue-greys and whites and hushed hints of lavender. Batik-dyed silk, for less than a song.
"If they were set by casting lots, then I'd say the Oracle was for once in our favor." She holds this new silk up to the light and the overlapping patterns are caught up in the sunlight, made bluer-black and stark against the streaming through of gold and late afternoon. Attuned as she is to the shape of letters and sigils, she can almost scry the first of a few runes in it. This is the danger with mysticism: it is everywhere. The mysteries refuse to remain hidden. She closes her eyes against them for a moment, and breathes out deeply enough to disturb the whorling-whirling dust.
Pen is fully loaded with her instruments and accoutrements this lazy afternoon and Ari is, likewise, possessed of her wand and her sharp-edged mind, in which the legend to most earthly sigils and the shape of many man-made tongues resides. There is chalk, and pen and paper in her bag is she is in need of something more than circles traced in the ambient dust, which renders all horizontal spaces into artboards and canvases for one engagement of the mind only. Single-use. Fleeting.
She folds the silk into halves, and halves again until it is neat-edged and small enough to carry. Here, on the upward face of it, there is a strike of dye and answering shadow almost in the shape of Radhio, the crossroads, of travel and decisions and omens, and the like. It is hidden in plain sight; readily grasped by the imagination or subconscious.
"We should," Ari agrees. "I can sketch you the symbols, if you wish to Dowse for Baetylus again..." This is said easily, and the Bonisagus is already shaping the heraldry of the rote in her mind.
lake-light"Maybe." Ari is back to her task. Pen sets the box of metal oddments back down on the ground and catches the silk scarf before it float-falls to the ground, proper, and she holds it up, and watches her friend's silhouette through it. Here is Arianna, transfigured into an Art Nouveau dryad, Iris' painted on her skin. Here she is, whispered into a softer world. Pen folds the scarf into quarters, then sets it aside. Six dollars is inexpensive enough that she is tempted, and then she goes back to sifting through spoons and rings and thread. How the thread has gotten into the box she does not know, but it has tangled everything up. Daedalus could not find his way out with this string, could plan a new Labyrinth with this string as a model: it catches on Pen's wrist and on her thumb and she tries diligently and automatically to untangle it, though a glance up, an gaze snagged on the second scarf Ari has found, causes the redhead to smile faintly and privately.
"So be it! You should sketch the symbols in the dust." This is said without snark. "Use the environment." This last is said, perhaps, with a spot of mischief; challenge and curiosity both.
evening-star[Dex + Art (Calligraphy): Drawing Sigils in the Dust...]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]
evening-starSix dollars is inexpensive enough that -- if Pen does not buy it for herself -- Ari might make an incidental gift of it. A thing bequeathed to her dearest of friends simply because the shape of Pen's smile from behind the curtain of silk pleased Ari in ways she does not quite have words for in this language or another. Because Pen is the poet, and Ari is merely a linguist. They each have their Artistry.
Behold: There is a wide and ready expanse of dust on a nearby table, round and only big enough for a breakfast for two or corner occasional or some other side-of-the-room type station. There is not space enough or opportunity to strike out and begin again. Pen's challenge is to perfection, to performance art in an unprepared space and Ari? She rises to it. She becomes it. There is a glimmer of pride and also confidence to the green of her eyes as she tucks one hand behind her back and extends the index finger of the other, as she is both the artist and the instrument, made stylus and the hand that holds it, until there is symbolism in the way she scribes, is made a scribe, has always been becoming one.
They have cast this rote before and only a quarter of a year before -- yes, a quarter year already, though it is hard to believe the year has turned so quickly; Focus! -- and so the shapes are ready in her mind. And also Ari has been toying around with the margins of what she might due with Ars Vis, what she might be on the edge of doing, so these things are at the ready, they are on the tip of her tongue -- which is caught between her teeth to keep her from speaking the Names she writes in Enochian in the slant of golden light, at the margins of Helios's grace, as if she were Venus (both the evening and the morning star) who might sing to the sun and the moon with equal intimacy.
After a few long minutes, Ari steps back, extended finger held aloft and tongue still caught and eyes tracing the lines and curves and bends of the shapes in the dust. There are now berms and valleys, darker wood grain showing through the patina left behind of time. It is quick work, and in a less refined medium, but it is resonant all the same.
"I give you, the finest dust-drawing that I might muster, my lady Weaver and dearest friend. Does it meet with your approval?" she asks, but her mouth is already set in smug self-satisfaction. She is already pleased, even as she extends a hand to Penelope to help her surface from the sea of spoons and back into the warmth of the late-light.
lake-light[Let's Speak It.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 10 ) [Doubling Tens]
lake-light[The Roll, as before.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 5) ( success x 2 )
evening-star[The Roll, plucky side-kick version.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (7, 8) ( success x 2 )
lake-lightPen doesn't answer in words, but rather she gives Ari a long sidelong look, canting her jaw, her naked throat, and the mischief and challenge transmute (alchemical marriages) into good humor. Pen has risen to her feet without needing the hand offered the help but she will take it because it is good to take help because help offered gladly is gladly taken and once risen to her feet she is come to look at the table, its slanting bars of gold light, its crown of late afternoon and how the eddying dust falls just so, just so patterned.
Pen studies the invocation and licks the tip of her finger and draws it through each word and each rune and each Word and each symbol as she pronounces it. Witness this: how she pronounces these words, this chant, this chaunt, witness the straightness of her spine, the supple bend of her head, and doesn't she have a quicksilver air to her, for all she carries herself so still (a vessel [the Word])? Yes, (no: not a vessel; the Word is commanded, the Word is a fist-full of lightning: she will shape light out of the dark, and her voice is Mars simmering in a cup: blood and silver, light and water: isn't it a shining thing, spoken so well? Isn't this how the seraphim communicated when they were in their Ideal forms? Isn't she arresting [beguiling], couldn't she sing the Moon into her belly? Couldn't she speak a heart unbroken?) might.
Pen: speaks.
And before them, the Weaving of the Tapestry, the Tellurian, is colored bright and visible; the places where Tass has gathered a pulse in the throat, a drumming song in the head, this-a-way, that-a-way, but:
Isn't there more? There is more.
There is a door.
evening-starPen speaks and the shadows bend a knee to listen. All things magical gather up their hearts into their throats and wait, poised on every perfect syllable, hoping to hear their Name among the gilded few that spill across the lake witch's lips. Sunlight condenses until it is thick like honey, until it is thick like amber and this! This is a point in time stitched so perfectly into the Tellurian that it might never be altered, of Pen with her stick-straight spine and the delicate bow of her head and the reverberation of her voice captured forever and for always with all the world around her breathless.
Ari is breathless. She, like all the other magical things, waits on bated breath for the speaking of her Name. Even a fragment will do. Even an echo that might hold the shape of one of her names. Just to be closer than touching to the magnificence Pen works, she wants to be named and commanded by the language of the Seraphim.
This is a beauty and power few outside the Order could comprehend. Every particle of dust in the air is on fire; each is a tiny planet and all orbit Pen; Pen is the sun, the giver of truth and and of light and when her voice falls silent the Tellurian echoes. Its strings call back, resonate, reverberate. It is commanded and in that clear, and perfect and immediate answer the bright-shining nodes of collected power and influence simmer and seethe their white-brightness. It is collected here in the bowl of a chipped teacup (Elegance), there pressed into the pages of an outdated encyclopedia (Distilled), there again in the fire of light moving through the cut glass teardrops of a crystal chandelier (Fracturing).
It is there in the worn and heavy wooden door, off its hinges and resting against the wall, which has been used as back splash to a display of other things. There are deep impressions in the wood and heavy iron fittings. It is the sort of door that might hold back intruders, or bar Keeps, or swing open to reveal the warmth of firelight dancing over a worn slate floor.
There are vines and leaves burnt into it, and its top is rounded instead of squared. There is a little window built into the top of it, at eye height, barred by an iron cage. The little door is open and out of its portal streams a fey and greening light. It is fainter than Helios and stranger than moonlight. It is not Pen's radiance or Ari's either, but a thing all its own.
Beckoning.
Ari's attention is pulled toward it before she recognizes the faint, enchanting glow. She is still breathing out the wonder of standing in Pen's orbit; she is still half-hoping to hear an echo of her Name -- and maybe her Name is behind the door, or in the teacup, or pressed between the pages of that old book of mysteries.
"I will never tire of listening to you speak," she says, and it is honest and appreciative and bewitched all the same. "I would not wonder if the Seraphim themselves do long for it, or hear their language of their home in your Enochian. It's flawless."
evening-star[Wits + Enigmas]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
lake-light[Also!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 5 )
lake-light"My tongue feels like bees," Pen says. "I wonder if that's the pleasure of the seraphim?"
Winks, a swashbuckler's wink.
But see: Ari's pleasure in Pen's speaking touches her. She is, even so and even still, always conscious of being behind, of not being where she wants to be, of needing to be better, stronger, faster, of needing to be more than she is, because there will come a time when she needs that, and cannot rise to it, and a price will be paid. If it is only her who pays the price, that is one thing.
That is one thing.
The teacup (elegance) and the encyclopedia (distilled) and the chandelier (fracturing [and some would say there is a Destiny]) are one thing. The great heavy door with its green and ancient light is quite another. The ladies of the Silver Bough can come close and quick-witted, sharp-witted, wits as quick as foxes, wits as shrewd as cunning, witted and unriddling (wisely expounded), smart as they are and as able to draw conclusions from broken threads and threads unraveling and it does look like threads or feel like threads to their sixth sense to their second sight the Wards which are bound around that door. Which are lapsing, which Time has worn: and perhaps something else, some Thing else, which has gnawed on the Wards like mice will gnaw at the glue in the spines of books unhappy mice something some Thing some otherworldly intangible thing not body not flesh but spirit has undone what Wizards have polished up metal shield brightness dappled and this thing: this door. This door is a guard post a watch word. This door: the wards are dissipating, and it beckons. There is trouble behind the wards, what might be released (?) when the wards are gone completely: the Wards are clear as they can be in such a state. It is a monstrous rising, and it is sweet.
"We can't leave this alone," Pen says. "But, hmm. It seems to have been warded from the other side; I'd rather not use Magick to lift it. Do you think we together can move the beast? What do you think?"
About it.
evening-star"Do you think we might shore up the Wards?" she asks. It is the responsible and upstanding thing to do, but even as Ari asks she knows that she hasn't the skill yet to match this sort of handiwork. One day: the hope hangs on a distant horizon; it is the gleam of larger works and legacies; it is a thing to aspire to. But not today.
"I had heard that there were places still where old and anchored magics like this bled through, from when warding and banishing and saining were all easier," she tells Pen, who has not had the sort of stories read at bedtime in her youth that Ari has. Of triumphant wizards what pushed back the darkness and warded the Night into only half the sky, and also kept the monsters confined to under beds and in wardrobes, and also made the monsters but those stories came at an older age.
"I haven't seen many on this side of the Atlantic," she confesses, but there is an undercurrent to it: neither has she looked very hard for them. In the past month, she'd been looking harder, finding the seams in the mundane world where the magic bleeds back through.
"I think together we might do anything we put our minds to," she tells Pen, planting her hands on her hips for a moment and tipping her chin up proudly. There is still dust smudged on her hand and it leaves a sullied fingerprint on the skirt of her dress. There is hubris to it, of course, but if they were crafty and without magic, they could manage it. Like many things, it was all about leverage.
And lifting with one's knees.
But there is also the pull of the thing, and the closer they get the more it calls to them. To look through the gleaming portal. To put more than just one shoulder behind the door as they shift it. To slip into the shadow between, and then through it, and then through to it...
evening-star[Wits + Arete]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )
lake-light[Wits + Arete! Wits specialty, totes applicable.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]
evening-star[Ain't nobody here but us chickens: Masking resonance, Ari/Pen, coincidental, base + 3, +1 fast casting, -1 instruments, +WP (hoping for enough successes to mask them both)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (4, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
lake-light[Prime 1! Imbue the Ring! Leave a breadcrumb! Diff 4 + 1 fast casting. WP.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
lake-light[Also, here's a take-off and toss roll. Dex + Ath]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 6 )
evening-star[Does she stick the landing?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )
lake-lightThey do this.
And the world turns upside down. They didn't quite touch the Door as they should have to avoid the Wards, perhaps. And so the Wards took them. Or perhaps they touched the Door just right and the Wards were too thin so the beckoning, it took them anyway.
They both feel how it takes them. They have time to do something, each to each. They have time to grab for one another, but the thought doesn't occur to them, does it? That they might be separated right now, as the world drops, as the door opens, as the light subsumes them, sublimates them, transfigures them:
Ari is falling, and falling, Ari is perhaps speaking protection, she is perhaps gesturing, scribing in the air, scrivener of magick brim-full luminous mercurial quick how could she not change easy one two three adapt she is seeking to mask them both to hide their signatures she doesn't know what's happening, only that she is falling, but there is a Door, and there is a Fall, and so it might behoove them to cover their faces so to speak,
and Pen. Pen is quick in this way: the ring that is not her wedding band, she takes it off: kisses it off with her mouth, muttering a word in a language some would call dead and others would call poetry, pushes her Will and essentiae into the metal, and it is daring, and ardent, it is resplendent when it arcs through the air when it falls, clink, into a box of many rings and string and spoons, nestling down so it is not near the top, but it can be felt,
and Ari hits the ground. The ground is loam, is wet earth.
and Pen hits the ground. The ground is wet earth, loam.
Ari wobbles (balance is just attained; books speak of it, but do not always teach it), Pen does not (already readied, the Flambeau: as if she'd meant to do it). The light is green: so, too, the forest -
it whispers to them.
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