The air is thick with humidity. This strikes them first. The cool, wet heaviness of the air and how it smells of loam, and fallen leaves, and recent rain. How it smells of shade, and moss, and stillness. It is not at all like the stillness of the bookstore, with its ancient dust swirling in the shafts of sunlight which pierced the window panes. Even before their eyes adjust, their other senses tell the women of the Silver Bough that they have entered the Green Wood. The ground is soft beneath their feet. Pen lands and her ankles and calves all work in concert, keeping her upright and ready. Arianna stumbles a bit in the unevenness of the forest floor.
The light here is dappled, rains down through layer upon layer of green, becomes shadows and brightness, becomes a shifting shaded green-grey thing. Where the trees are further apart, the light pierces through like lances, brilliant and unyielding, striking all the way to the forest floor. So luminous that it leaves echoes in the eyesight, fleeting darkness that do not part until they fade away. At the margins of these bright shafts, thin filaments twinkle and shimmer. They are only apparent in the puddling light, not at the center of its brightness or in the shadow of the Green Wood.
Arianna has pulled their resonances tight up against them, so that they do not shimmer in the air, so that they do not become beacons in the grey-green shadows. It is enough to keep them hidden from certain sense, but it is not enough to keep them safe. There is a rustle in the undergrowth, a shifting hidden thing repositioning. Watching.
"Pen?!" When she is answered, Ari moves closer to her friend and heart-sister. Consolidates their position. Is near enough to touch.
Penelope has left a lifeline for them, a mooring at their last known address, a thing by which the Crow could hunt and find them should they become untethered in this wilderness. Should they become Lost to the Mists. There is, indeed, mist threaded through the trees, giving the illusion of spectres in their midst, eroding the sense of distance and space.
Another rustle. A skittering here. The shift of pine needles on the forest floor, the shimmying leaves of a loose, low bush, a persistent, darker shadow that hangs overhead. They have had merely moments to acclimate themselves to the woods and already it is coming for them. Its sentries move forward on their many legs. They surround and encircle and enclose.
The Magi of the Order cannot see it now, they cannot tell how the slick thick sticky silk threads are woven throughout the forest, creating impasses and passages, forming a labyrinth. Not a subterranean journey through the underworld, but rather a half-light, whispering, shimmering middle passage. Where the mists move through the webs, small beads of condensation gather like silvered pearls. They refract the light.
The Lake Witch and the Evening Star, they cannot see the web around them. But the forest rustles, again. It whispers: a lovely rustling of canopy leaves, the sigh of ferns swaying in a breeze, the far-off sound of wind-bells chiming, hung from some distant eave, calling out the names of the Anemoi, summoning the summer rains.
lake-lightPen?!
"I am here." Steady is her voice and easy the cadence of her words. Ari hears it low at first. Low to the ground, but then at the usual height. Pen is lake-light: falling, from a hand, and dazzling. The knife in her boot comes to one hand, the wand in her other boot comes to her other hand. The knife she holds like a street rat street fighter, the wand she holds with the disciplined grace of a (song [a story]) wizard.
The light here falls as thick as milk where it does fall; the gloom is thick gloom and greying: it is a honey haze, and one that might blind the already radiant eye. See: as Ari moves near and consolidates their position, Pen is sweeping her sharp grey eyes over their surroundings and a patch of shadow hits her cheek like a faded keepsake a patch some aristocratic woman from another age might've kept and when Pen moves the keepsake becomes a diamond over Pen's eye and one of her eyes for a moment is darker an inscrutable color and then it dampens the fire of the tiny stones in her hair which burn with their own inner light and wait only to have something else coax it out.
"Do you know a rote to fling sound elsewhere, Arianna? I'd fling it far from our present location. Buy us time."
The mist still hides the webs, and Pen squints at the edges: that filament twinkle: the tunnels, the caught-trap, cloud-ash spiraling architectural nightmare woven all through this strange forest.
A beat.
evening-star[Throwing voices/sound: Forces/Corr 2 + vulgar = dif 6, -Instruments, -1 appropriate resonance (mercurial), +1 active magics, -1 magical realm ]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 6) ( success x 2 )
evening-star[Wits + Alert]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )
lake-light[Let's start with the Wits (One Jump Ahead) + Alert! -2 diff for acute sense.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (1, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]
lake-light[Ariel the Page of Swords, Zephyr the Sneak, because every soldier needs to know how to use the air. Forces 2 + omg vulgar. -1 taking time, -1 magical realm, -1 instrument (wand). Diff: 3.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 3, 5) ( success x 3 )
evening-star"Of course," she says, and her voice is now pitched low as her wand is retrieved and she holds it less like a soldier and more like a scribe, or an Artist whose hand might rewrite history. She cannot, yet, rewrite history but it is difficult to believe that this will always be beyond her.
In a place like this, it is easier to push and bend and sway the threads of the Tellurian. Both Hermetics can feel it as they start to work their rotes. Ari conjures the long-familiar workings of Echo's Misdirection, a rote well honed in her Academy days but set aside in her more adult moments. Here it offers protection, rather than the opportunity to slip past more senior members of the Collegium unnoticed. She holds fast to the rote that is obscuring their resonance as well, becoming the imperfect mirror, the medium which distorts and deceives rather than conveying truth to the beholder.
We could write volumes about the appropriateness of this moment, how its essence pleases the Other within her breast, how she is become and not just beside some aspect of her Avatar. We could, but there are more pressing things at hand.
Like the pitter patter, skitter scratch, silent here and rustle-crash loud there sound of far too many footsteps. Or the shudder of leaves above, and the dust careening down in lazy cartwheels, dislodged from the branches above by some unseen force. Bits of heavier dirt fall faster, more like rain, they come straight down and onto the heads of Pen and Ari, they keep court with the brilliant gems in Pen's hair, they are ash-dark, coal like in comparison.
Ari's spine is straight, she is impossibly taut, fierce and ready and imperious in a way that only the Hermetics have ground into their young. She might be made of stone; she might be immovable; but she is less statuesque when she turns to look at Pen, to nod just once to indicate the thing is done. They have worked together long enough that Ari does not scribe the radius of her Effect; it is the length of her arm plus Pen's own. It keeps them surrounded, but does not envelope much of the forest beyond. Instead, to test her own Working, she shifts her toe in the leaf litter.
The sound of shuffling leaves comes from behind a stout cedar many paces away. The forest skittering stops as the enemy re-calibrates its advances.
lake-lightA
flake
of dirt
drifts
d
o
w
n
touches
Pen's brow. Pen, whose eyes have narrowed. The narrowing is a closing of ranks a closing of the pass a protection and a guard: no dirt to muddy the tarnished silver of her eyes, and make her blink before she is ready. Does it like this: brow rising first, gaze following - drawn up.
And she is sharp, and she can see the dim shadows moving in the mist and trusts to that more than she trusts to her ears, even once Ari nods to let her know that one part is done, even after they can hear the scurry and the clamor and down they come and she
This whole time, as she is watchful, aware
She scribes in the air with the point of her wand and it feels, to her, as it often feels to her when she is performing an act of power, that the wand hits a groove and must be held in that groove though it would be free though it would be consumed flare up though it would be anything but an easy tool until just that curve this one and then it is a song it is a moment of grace it is done well it is done and it is beautiful to perform what she has dubbed Ariel Conscripted, Ariel the Dredge, and other vainglorious names:
More beautiful to feel how reality slips, pushes
And how the slight eddying current of her arm, the swish of her wand, spirals tighter whorls and then (Prospero never did better; but this is just the beginning) there's a damping moment of silence
hush
shh
hh
h
and the mist is swept away; the webs are revealed, and no longer just above Ari and Pen, but over by the tree: one fat-bodied arachnid the color of water, of glass refracting light; a ghost; a many-eyed myth, an hour glass the color of the darknesss which waits behind closed eyes on her abdomen, and time is running out.
That's one. There's another, further beyond: nearer the sound that Ari threw.
And another, smallest but closest, and rather than to the East this one is to the North, and still coming: it clings to the web in the breeze and even the shafts of light like a pour of milk have been disturbed; dissolve, where there is no stillness.
evening-star[Atropos: Zen-like balancing in the face of miraculous, unexpected wind?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 10) ( success x 1 )
evening-star[Init: Ari +5]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )
lake-light[Pen +8]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )
lake-light[Er, that was +7, sorry!]
evening-star[Clotho + 5]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )
lake-light[Atropos the Spider +6]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )
evening-star[Lachesis +7]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )
evening-starInit Summary:
Pen: 16
Lachesis: 14
Ari: 12
Atropos: 10
Clotho: 6
[Lachesis goes: ???]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
evening-starDeclares:
Clotho: Rustling leaves! I kill!
Atropos: Drop on Pen & Ari
Ari: Imbue clothing as armor!
Lachesis: (Reflexive: Um, Clotho, you do you.) Head for fight, into the trees to flank.
Pen: is going to strengthen the wind and smash Atropos into a tree with it. SMOOSH.
[P: Ariel, kill. More oomph for the wind. Let's WP; it's dropping on my best beloved friend!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 4, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
lake-light[Melee, for directed-strongwind-squooshing.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )
lake-light[Squishes for Atropos. 3 from Melee + (4) Magical Strength/Successes.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 3 )
evening-star[Mind 2: BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID, vulgar, -1 Pen is actually scary, -1 magical realm, +1 active magics +1 fast casting, -1 instrument + WP]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (1, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
evening-star[Clotho: Killing some LEAVES]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
evening-starOf course there are webs, here in Minerva's Wood, here in the Green Wood of a Hunter whose provenance was once that of Weaver, of a tapestry so grand that it shifted her destiny. Here in the woods, her work continues, through the able and many bodied host that she has inspired. So of course there are webs, shimmering in their brightness, walls of iridescent water-beads on strings, strings overlaid and interlocked, string and beads made into immovable boundaries, encrusted and embellished. And this is just what they can see at the margins of their vantage point, from the view at the forest floor. If only they could see this place as the crow does, from above, with a holistic view of all it has become; looking down into the labyrinth.
The mists part on a gentle breeze, a thing that spirals out from the careful motions of Pen's wand: they are like wizards in the legends of old. Here they stand in the quiet of the green wood, here like statues, caught in a shaft of that milk-and-honeyed light, spot-lighted, lit, set aflame. Pen, who is picturesque at any moment, crowned with rowan light, ungentled any more by shadow --
-- save for this growing shadow, this bulbous round and swaying thing that broadens as it swings across her shoulder and over Arianna's, and this draws Pen's attention up to Atropos who is suspended above them, the weight at the end of a scrying-witch's pendulum, diviner of their truths and present. And suddenly the breeze is not so gently, and the red of Pen's hair is aflame like Fury, and all it is cupric, and her expression is severe.
The motion of her wand shifts, cutting a more decisive pattern into the shaft of light, pushed forward with more force and the same cool, crisp control, pushed forward and built up into a sudden gust that roars through branches overhead and thrashes the suspended arachnid so violently that the shimmer-steel of his thread breaks and he is sent flying, volleyed through the air, spasming in an attempt to pull his fragile legs toward his center until, with a sickening and somewhat wet sounding smack, he collides with the stalwart upright of a distant pine. Then comes the fall, straight down without tumbling, down down down to the roots woven over the forest floor and crash, again, and then stillness from this quarter.
Lachesis, the nearer of his fellows, shifts her attention from the rustle of leaves toward the greater threat of the Mageborn in their midst. She comes quickly, on nimble legs, coursing over the forest floor with alarming agility and unerring focus. Her body, the color of water, moves in and out of shadows but there is no chicanery cast to hide her movements. The third of their number savages the leaf litter with single-minded focus and little effect.
It is not enough to scribe the many names of fear and terror into the air before her. Ari's will is not as tremendous yet as Pen's but it is wickedly honed in its own right. As Lachesis advances, she speaks the true name of fear. She then calls it by the brothers: Phobos and Deimos. She calls it by the names she knows in every language and holds the picture of it in her mind -- the fall of Ylesephet; when the walls came down -- and from her Words and her Working comes the deepest sort of dread, fear that requires no translation, limbic and subconscious, like water in the knees and a faintness in the head.
Lachesis slows. Then stops. Fear does not relent. Pen holds the whole of the winds with her Will; Clotho rustles and spins and starts in the leaf litter, stage left.
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