Into the Green Wood: Skirmish

evening-star

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.

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Pen?!

"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 )

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[Wits + Alert]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )

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[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]

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[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 )

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"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-light

A
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.

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[Atropos: Zen-like balancing in the face of miraculous, unexpected wind?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 10) ( success x 1 )

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[Init: Ari +5]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )

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[Pen +8]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )

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[Er, that was +7, sorry!]

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[Clotho + 5]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )

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[Atropos the Spider +6]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )

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[Lachesis +7]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )

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Init Summary:

Pen: 16
Lachesis: 14
Ari: 12
Atropos: 10
Clotho: 6

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[Lachesis goes: ???]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

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Declares:

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.

lake-light

[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 )

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[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]

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[Clotho: Killing some LEAVES]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )

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Of 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.

Into the Green Wood: The Warded Door

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"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?"

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[Do I? Intelligence + Enigmas.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

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"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."  

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"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.

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"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.

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[Dex + Art (Calligraphy): Drawing Sigils in the Dust...]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

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Six 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.

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[Let's Speak It.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 10 ) [Doubling Tens]

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[The Roll, as before.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 5) ( success x 2 )

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[The Roll, plucky side-kick version.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (7, 8) ( success x 2 )

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Pen 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.

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Pen 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."

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[Wits + Enigmas]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

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[Also!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 5 )

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"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-light

They 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.

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."

Excita, et sol salutant

Arianna
It has been spoken between them that their homes are so close as to be a walkable distance, not so far apart than the distance would be cumbersome to traverse on foot and Penelope has made the journey at least once and with some burdensome offering, and so it is time for Ari to return the favor, to walk the concrete paths between their doors with something to share tucked under a gingham towel and a messenger bag hung off her shoulders.

It reminds her of Academy.  Many things have reminded her of Academy of late. Nick's questions after Hermetic school; the strawberry blonde at Silas's birthday; the questions he'd asked Ari when she was tucked into his embrace.  Half a lifetime ago, and still the thin red stitches of fate pulled these pages close together in the Springtime and she can almost imagine the way the wind rushed up the cliffs of the Isle and over her skin.

She isn't Primal, but something in her has always loved the seasons, and the rain, and even the snow when it is new and gets caught up in her lashes, but not so much when it is grey and salted and sodden and slumping at the margins of the street.  Not so much when it has overstepped its welcome.  All things are welcome when they are new.

Under the gingham is the sort of lemon cake which is cake with bright, thin, candied wheels of citrus draped and lavished atop it.  It is scented with thyme and fortified with ground almonds.  She keeps it covered so that the smell of it will not pied-piper-like have all the neighborhood trailing behind her on her way up the hill to Pen and Nick's doorstep.

Knock, knock.


See, Ari is a civilized person. She knocks before thinking of ringing the bell.  She does not return Pen's favor by ding-a-ling-ding-dong-ing until deafness sets in. Just two raps. And then a pause.  And then two more.

Penelope
The door opens. Mark this: the door opens, but there is no solid and physical Pen with her hand on the door's handle and her eyes bright with Arianna's presence. Mark this, too: this is a house of wizards, two, and a how of experimentation and of study, and today the study is a study of the little airs which can play servant the invisible host of energies which are perhaps easiest to manage when the air is as it is now, and it is invisible hands on the door, it is Force at the door, opening it for Arianna when she raps raps raps, and an empty foyer before her except it has changed since the last time Ari was over (whether that was two nights ago or two weeks ago or five weeks ago; but surely it would be sooner than that?), because there is now a lemon tree sitting in a pot and taking up a great deal of space. There is a shovel rather ominously positioned, as if someone plans to dig right through the floorboards, into the dirt beneath the foundation and put that lemon tree there. Positions can be misleading; if somebody did such a serious make-over of the house's interior, cutting a hole in it for a tree, right there where it looks like it would be most convenient -- it would also detract from the easy glide down the stair's railing, so probably the tree isn't meant to go right there. Probably it is going to go outside; it is rather an oversize lemon tree for corners. Its leaves clap gently when Arianna enters, shivering as the outside gets inside.




Pen's voice calling from the kitchen: "Arianna!" a bright rill: light gleaming on water; the shadow of it, the shift of it; "Do you remember what was the name of Maga Kerwyn's griffin and the invocation was she was supposed to have written on its skin?"

Arianna
The door opens and now begins a little game, a debate with things to old to be spoken over whether an open doorway constitutes an invitation, over whether she should extend a toe or poke a finger across the threshold just to see, because surely an open doorway alone is not enough to speak to welcome. Doors open by all manner of means and for all manner of reasons.  But what if the open door is also one through which she has been previously invited? Is this enough. Is it enough to hold a key to it, as she surely does to the House of Hyde and Mars, though she knocks out of courtesy and because she is not the kind of person who ring-a-lings the bell --

-- is that a lemon tree? Perhaps Pen will make Limoncello with her come the harvest.  Who can turn down lemons and sugar and spirits? Who? Who? --

And is a key, in and of itself a welcome? It is an invitation, this key, this unlocker of locks and unfastner of secrets?  Is a key an invitation, or does it matter how it is acquired?  Surely one can have a key and not have been invited. It could be an ill-gotten key, for stolen secrets.  That would not constitute a welcome.  Is a voice, calling from within the house, speaking her name, the name of this woman who also holds a key, for whom the door has opened, in this place where she has been welcomed before -- is this enough to constitute an invitation?

The boughs that steeple above their roofline sigh their consent. Yes! Today it is enough, tomorrow, who knows, but today it is enough and Arianna steps across the threshold and into the foyer, where stands the lemon tree and also the grave digging shovel (grave-digging, or grave in its digging?).  She touches the handle-hilt lightly, fingers just tracing the wood of the handle, as she passes.  Because Spades are like Swords, and of course Pen would have one in an entry whose answering is made of air and movement.  This thought reminds Arianna that she ought shut the door behind her.

"Pen!" she calls, in reply, just as the door clicks shut.  "It was named Hrestiael, and upon its skin she wrote:"  And this answer has brought her up into the kitchen, with her pack still slung across her body and the cake still hidden beneath its gingham drape, and her eyes all a-twinkle with merriment. "Excita, et sol salutant."  Rasp-thunk goes the heavy stoneware full of cake as she brings it to rest, still shrouded in checks of blue and white, upon the counter.  "Which is almost certainly just the binding Words of some greater Working."

A beat.


"I come bearing cake, apropos to your new foyer décor."

Penelope
Pen is on the floor of the kitchen, cross-legged in the middle of a circle -- a labyrinth -- scribed with chalk (silver chalk [true metal, pure metal, moon's metal]). The circle and the labyrinth are unfinished; there are Hebrew runes and some small glints of suggestions of Enochian phrases scattered through out but it is incomplete it is a work in progress it is likely going to be smudged before midnight. Her library is gone; she is not surrounded by books and scrolls as she might have been when studying. Arianna knows how Pen looks, studious and intent. Arianna may also know how complete her ability to concentrate, how indistractable she is when she is focused. Robin used to try to goad Ari into a contest: who could get Pen to falter, first. Of course he did: members of House Tytalus must always test their friends; it is because they care that they are such goading, insufferable creatures. Instead of books and scrolls she is surrounded by notes and drawings, all cypher and much of it unintelligible. This is writing for Pen, not for other people to read, necessarily, and so it is a mess.

The copper kettle on the stove-top looks flushed with steam; there is a curl wisping upward now, but it is not screaming and the stove is not on.
There is also a bunny in Pen's lap, a dowsing bunny belonging to an apprentice, a mellow-eyed soft creature, which Pen does not cuddle when Nicholas is around so as not to give him any ideas. Nicholas is not around now, so the bunny is in Pen's lap, its chest fluffed out and its ears soft and enticing.

Pen sounds a touch distracted. "Thank you. My mind is becoming a sieve; it is letting all the interesting things escape it. Is it cake to bury in the roots of a lemon tree? Is it mete that we feed cake to a tree; I can not remember." Beat. Pen looks up from her drawing (there is the chalk, see, scattered), sees Arianna, and now: now is the bright-gleam beam, a suddenly smile; it is like light breaking through rain-clouds, falling tarnished but lovely on a lake's surface (and now, now, when the light's all reverent and lucent this is when lake-swords are dredged up from the deep and offered this is when quests become a possibility one can taste on one's tongue this is when one resolves into shadow and shift), draws two long dimples out of her cheeks and she sometimes looks young.
"I'm sorry; did you say cake? Lemon cake? Did you make it with your own two hands or did you buy it with your own filthy lucre or did you cannily trick it out of someone?"

Arianna
Kestrel used to goad her into goading Pen? This sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale. Gather 'round, ye children, ye apprentices, and hear tell of a very bad idea turned into a most sporting game and of the singe-ing of hairs and burning of soles it did cause in recompense.
Ari comes just to the edge of the labyrinth but does not step into its twists and turns.  It takes but a moment for her mind to recognize the tongues in use, and to switch from reading left-to-right to right-to-left to mark the Hebrew characters and tones.  The Enochian she cannot help but read inwardly in her most bell like and angelic tones -- this is how Enochian is shaped and shifted. It is, and then the sound follows.  Even in the mind it is the truth of a thing which precedes the Name or Word or Sigil.

"With my filthy lucre?"  Wounded.  Hand to heart.  "Or won through canny trickery?"  Aghast.  Ari tuts a little, a clicking thing done with the tongue, as she looks down to Pen.  "You wound me, Weaver dear. I made it with my own two hands, and the goodness of my heart, and so that it would not be too sweet for you, too saccharine from my love of thee, I have flavored it with lemon which is bright and bracing and biting.  But perhaps you do not want my sweetness, thinking it a stolen or a purchased thing.

"For shame, Penelope.  As if I would bring you lesser offerings!"

Arianna
And then, with her smile only partially restored and a sort of smirkness to it.  "Shall I make us tea? I see you have the kettle on, and it may take you a while to wind your way back out of your Minotaur's lair."

A beat.

"Did Nick get a bunny while you were studying? It is quite... fluffy."

Penelope
"This is Yorick. He is Margot's dowsing bunny, who we are taking care of while she sorts out her living situation," Pen says. She gently strokes the silk-soft  ears and looks down at the diamond shaped head and feels the little thing's skull with her thumb and Yorick's eye are bright and his nose twitches and he regards Arianna but does not seem inclined to move from the lap he is in. "A good drinking game I have discovered with bunnies: every time it shits on you, take a shot." Her voice is a croon: not a devoted croon, but a sing-song invocation. "Nicholas was allowing it to eat a book the other night."

Now then. Pen sets Yorick down and Yorick hops for one of the metallic chalks and Pen stands up, economical, graceful, and then sweeps the rabbit up again and puts the rabbit in a pen. Pen made the pen; it occupies a corner of the kitchen. She brushes herself off and then bounds over to Arianna and:
flings her arms around the other woman. The cake: is it settled; is it safe? Is it on the counter? If it is not, it shall take part in the hug, and Pen will take it from Arianna's hands just after. If it is settled, if it is safe, the better for the cake. Pen smiles after it when the hug is done, and says, "I shall make you tea; what suits your fancy today? Would you like a London Fog? Proper chai? Earl Grey, Russian Caravan?"

Around this time: Pen peeks under the gingham at the cake, and her eyes widen: "How lovely it is; did the goodness of your heart work very hard, laboring over this?"

Arianna
Yorick, who was previously somewhat cute and quite fluffy, moves down to rabbit non grata at the mention of his book devouring ways.  The look Ari sends his way is not particularly clement.  It seems fitting that Pen sentences him to time in what Ari's mind can only rightfully refer to as 'rabbit jail' for this offense.

"Dreadful."

The cake is settled, so Arianna is free to return Pen's exuberant hug with a tight one of her own.  And a smile that breaks through even the book-eating rabbit stories and whatever dreary Spring madness has kept them apart.

"Oooh. A Russian Caravan, I think.  But only if we take out your colored scarves and hang them about the living room and do our best impressions of the Baba Yaga to frighten your poor Yorick into better behavior."  There, then, a glint of her mischeif returns and she squeezes Pen just so, and it is gleeful.

Under the gingham is a tumble of thin slices of candied lemon, bunched and whorled and glistening atop a cake fortified with ground almonds.  The scent of it is sinful, sweet and bright and everything that Ari had promised.  It is not some yellow on yellow on yellow box cake or storefront thing.  It sings of the old world and flavours a little sterner and robust, of home.

"The goodness of my heart is so consumed by the effort that I think, perhaps, there is none of it left."  Woe.  Smirk. Ari settles in enough to slide the strap of her bag over her head. She finds a place to nestle or lean it, which is taller than a bunny might hop, so that Yorick the Destroyer cannot eat its contents on his next book devouring spree.

Penelope

"It is fairy food, Ari." Pen is solemn in the face of mischief -- the straight man's best defense (don't stop [come hither]). The cake did indeed share in part of the hug, and Pen is reluctant to let it go because with it near she can breathe it in and her lungs are better for their association with an Air of Lemon and Lavender. Mars is a martial name, and steadfast. An architectural name: a name of conquest, of victory. And she might sink her teeth into the middle, just to feel the cake break, undo the candied representation of Helios, just to feel what it is like to be so gluttonous for a moment. "I am tempted," and the sidelong cast of a glance is a lure, see, a shining beckon, a promise.

They are not going to stay in the kitchen where Pen's Working has been drawn out and Yorick the Destroyer of Books nibbles placidly on air. Pen puts the kettle on and then leads the way from the kitchen to her study, where she likes to entertain Arianna, and where she has a day bed which looks like a fainting couch of wood which has a silvering cast to it which might have soaked up the moon as the moon sets during dawn which is carved with a graceful ornate romanticism which is romantic which is very excellent to dramatically lounge upon. Pen often dramatically lounges; she invites Ari to partake of this passtime with her.

Down in the kitchen, the water boils.

The cake must be released.

Must it? Pen sets it a small table, on which moves around quite often: it usually holds tools for projects Pen is working on at the large craftsman's draftsman's table if she does not want to set the tools on the table if she wants the whole of the surface. It is clean now, although very scarred up and scratched, pitted and worried by many accidents: burned once. You can see it: the memory of smoke and fire, the way it eats and the way it stains. Lingering.

As they went, Pen said: "You see, I trust the goodness of your heart is only consumed as the phoenix is by its own glorious coda; that it rises again to luminous lord it over future cakes and bottles of wine, not made with granny's bone marrow or granny's blood."

There's a bounce to her step. See. Bounce! It is a good prelude for dramatic lounging, that bounce.

"I'm so envious of your heart I could eat it up!"

In the study, Pen waits for Arianna to arrange herself, and then:

Oh, then. Down in the kitchen, the water boils.

Arianna

It is a fitting thing, isn't it, that the heart of a Star-child, of a lune-ling, of a luminous one that reflects back the light or casts it into the darkness should be caught up in the resemblance of Helios, of Sol, of the bringer of Dawnings, and beginnings and breaker of days.  Ari's heart is baked into a cake and, were they not Hermetic -- were they not truly something far older than Magi and truer than Souls -- it might sound morbid but Pen names her Phoenix, who has more lives than even a Bast's cats, and whose tears might heal and whose undoing might raze, burn down to the bones and even the bones to ash even the ash might burn until some breath of life comes forward and, just as suddenly, just as abruptly, she is reborn.

Ari does not seem to have been reborn, but perhaps in some small truth there is an echo of this revitalizing burn and ache and sunder and cresting going on inside her own heart.  Not the heart which has been baked into the cake, not the goodness of her heart, but perhaps in the vulnerable and honest and untrusting places there is some sort of Phoenix-creasting cycle to behold.

The Phoenix does not belong to Helios; neither does she belong to the night.

"The goodness of my heart is like the moon, I think," she tells Penelope, with a different sort of cadence and thrum to her voice than the Weaver's, but resonant nonetheless.  "It waxes and wanes, predictable in its patterns, full faced and radiant one night; obscured and hidden on another.  But my heart is more fickle than the moon and less generous than the Phoenix and still, Penelope, still, it shall rise to oversee new offerings and libations as is its wont and Will."

There is a curl to her smile.

"The heart wants what it wants," she says, dramatically, perhaps also a good lure toward that bounce.  "I should think my heart is envious of yours and not the other way around; your heart has wings, Weaver dear, and hallowed host in which to roost."

She settles on the moonlit bench, because of course the moon sets where the moon has set before: across the room from the resting place of her Helious-heart, opposed and therefore made full again.  For the full moon sets opposite the sun, as any Apprentice might well know.  And so the Phoenix is reborn. And so Arianna is ready for the pouncing that must surely come when Pen bounces upon the balls of her feet.

"My heart has cake, and its love of thee, and also its love of wine..."  Hah, then, a smirk, for she cannot keep up this heart-wants-what-it-Wills nonesense for overlong.  It colors the grey of the green of her eyes; it shifts toward merriment.

Penelope

The heart wants what it wants is an excellent lure for a pounce from Penelope. Penelope whose eyes are gloaming, are a witch's eyes at twilight; are dark as bat song, are all quicksilver, are mercury in the shadow; Penelope whose eyes are ardent, even when they are cool; who has mastered the art of restraint just as a glass restrains what (holy) liquid is poured within or a wick restrains the flame: just as that. There are boundaries; they are given. Pen bounces on the balls of her feet; isn't she an elegant looking woman, and striking, striking sometimes with myth in her bones in the strength of her jaw the unusual features the fine sharp nose the pretty mouth the handsome forehead? Arianna settles:

Pen, she bounces on the balls of her feet; and then she settles too, flops out, resting her head in Arianna's lap.

Pen does not touch people regularly. She is not afraid of touch but she only seeks it out from a select band, king of which is (of course) the crow, but Arianna: she was in that court first. First friend. Dear friend.

Pen looks at Arianna from an upside down vantage and she wraps an arm around Arianna's waist and she says, "Arianna, you have just opened a door, you have unlocked a box with your fancy: I was going to seduce you with a poem I have written about you, but maybe I will annoy you instead."

"Tell me about Silas and yourself and your heart and all of that."  

Arianna

Arianna does not much like to be touched. In the confines of her Hermetic life, there are few who have such liberty to even so much as place a hand in the small of her back, fewer who might tuck a strand of hair back behind her ear.  She uses this leniency with touch as a sort of a lure, a trap, which she is forced to be familiar with those she would rather not.  Her heart is kept caged, so tightly that it might stop beating.  This is who Arianna is within the Order: brightly shining and not a thing to be caught or held.  She is the sort of thing that might burn itself out, or fizzle into nothingness, before she might light another's lamp against her will.

This changed when she met Pen.  Pen was, in many ways, Arianna's first female friend.  None of the girls with whom she had attended Academy kept close association after; Ari didn't Will it and certainly did not want it.  That chapter closed firmly, a book with its cover slammed and locked shut, and then she went about being nothing in the way that Consors are less than something until she finally Awoke.  And then, finally, found her way to the Lady of the Lake, to this beguiling water witch whose heart was so far flung from the madness of legacies and lineages that Arianna could not help but see the purity in it.  And so, for the Weaver and her Crow, and then for the Green Man, and also, slightly, for Kestrel, the cage was unlocked.

This is how they have come to be like sisters, with Ari's fingers tracing and smoothing along the bloody redness of Penelope's hair.  How they might be two faces of the Morrigan -- they aren't -- or two types of chanteuse -- they aren't -- or two guardians of ancient ways -- this, they may well be.  How they are affectionate, of warm hands and hearts, without endangering the hands or hearts of one another.

It is the truest sort of magic: love.

"You do not annoy me, Pen," she says, as the words are patient, they are dredged in the depths of Pen's lake-light and brought up gleaming with truth.

"And I will tell you.  I will answer what you ask for I fear my thoughts are in mad disarray about this subject and my heart," she pauses, scrying for some sort of clarity in the shape of the strands of Penelope's hair; they dance like firelight; truth is like ember-ash.  "My heart cleaves to a promise offered long ago.  Before my heart had you, and your Crow.  Before it had found the family-it-chooses.  Things are less clear to me now that when I did swear to him."

This is thoughtful. It does not mislead. It tangles, and trips over itself. Arianna has so little practice in matters of the heart that it may not surprise Pen. But also Pen is possessed of a poet's heart and there is here the making of such poetic things.

Penelope

Pen languid on her back with her head on Ari's lap and Ari's fingers in her hair. This Pen keeps her arm wrapped around Ari's waist and - briefly, see - she traces the line of the other woman's spine through the fabric of her top, and how pensive is her touch: what Muses, they, on the fainting couch of moonlight-seeped wood in the study which smells of linseed oil and old beeswax candles and something sharper. More (al)chemical.  This Pen, Pen who named herself for Mercury but also Hilde the Saint of Song, advisor of Kings, this Pen whose hair is spread out in curls which could be oracles which could be read by an oracle is Ari that oracle to read it by this Pen right now: she watches her friend.

Arianna saved Pen back when their friendship first braided itself into a rope: some shining thing, a thing with strength: for binding, pulling, hanging, drawing, bridging. Did Pen ever tell her?

Pen is a direct young woman, and honest; her reputation is for honesty. It is sometimes easiest to hide behind such a record, such a clear and lucent reputation. The Flambeau cleaves to true mystery; when she does, few know it.

Now: she only looks; she is quiet, her arm around Ari's waist and her head in her lap; she is quiet, and Ari's ring(s) if she wears any catch in Pen's hair, but it must be appealing to watch the shadows at play, and Pen's expression is an open heart. It does not bleed; it does what it is meant to do; you are only allowed to see it.

But she knows, Pen, that Ari is like Nick in some respects: she sometimes wants direction; some scaffolding to lean on, or hide behind, or -

And so Pen says, quiet, "Will you begin at the promise, then?"

She wants to hear it all.

Arianna

Arianna's spine is where Pen last found it, rightfully placed within her body, and the trailing of her friend's fingertips over it does not make her stiffen and neither does she become entirely languid, they do not puddle together like puppies might, but they do tangle.  Ari's fingers in Pen's hair, the thinnest band of silver around her left ring finger threatens to catch but Ari is careful, she is slow and steady and methodical and wise the wily ways of silvered-things.  She is made of moonlight too.

Elsewhere in the city is a thin gold band, similar in seeming but wider in circumfrence.  It encircles the same finger of another, presses against he margin of his palm.

Pen has known this ring to stand on Ari's middle left finger.  For all the time that Pen has known her, that is where this thin slip of silver has been.  So long has it stood there that there is the echo of it still, a paler slip of faintly olive skin, an echo too faint to even call a shadow. A place the sun did not dare to tred for years upon years.

Ari rolls a small sound in her throat as a means of acquiesence. 

"I will begin there," she says, but she pulls her fingers from Pen's hair to hold them above the lake-witch like so: fingers splayed and palms not quite together, with only the tips of her fingers touching. She shows them to Pen; she says this: "But it is not the beginning.  We come together like this: we touch for a moment, so closely that I feel as if his fingerprints might be my own, or pressed into my own, that I known him at my center and then--"

She moves her hands apart again.

"-- we part before we truly come together."  Her chins drops enough that she can look into the grey of Pen's eyes, but they are too true of mirrors and so she looks away again.  Breathes out before she speaks.

"When we are together in the same space and of the same time we are together.  No others.  The rules are very clear.  And when we are apart we lay no claim to one another."

It is plain-spoken and so simply stated.  It is the sort of Oath that young minds and hearts make to one another.  It extends, though, in dangerous ways.  It extends further than either might have meant it to.

Penelope

"Oh! I see. What came before that promise?" 

Pen is a responsive audience: the gloaming gray, the tarnished silver (oh, but untarnishing: always in the midst of being polished) of her gaze goes to Arianna's show and tell, the steepled hands. She regards the bottom of Arianna's palm; the shape of her from this angle. Her fingers twitch; she wants a sketch book; it is always interesting, to see the world (or somebody) from an unusual angle.

Arianna

And so Pen's hair becomes an augury, as Arianna's fingers trace through it again and this is why Ari has not truly studied Time: because of truths grasped in the tangles of Pen's hair, because the shape of some words already lean toward secrets, because her feet have walked the labyrinth so many times her heart remembers without bread crumbs and without strings.

"Immediately before?" and this, see, is how her mouth quirks. It is rue, and it is fondness, but it is mostly rue and something slightly bitter but long ago and therefore gentled -- LIES, it is the sort of thing that will never be gentled -- and this is why Ari's heart lives in a cage. Because it is jealous and unsharing and so very quick to judgement.

"He had halfway talked me out of my gown as we snuck off to his rooms, wherein we found very ambitious and very blonde Initiate already in his bed."

This, too, is said plainly and simply and without any way to soften the surprise for Pen.  Partly because some part of Ari is still ardent with irritation, all these years later, and partly because Pen's reactions are priceless. And honest. And truth against which Ari might calibrate her own.

"Hence the Oathing."

Penelope

Pen's eyebrows fly up. This is hyperbole. They do not fly up, literally, fly up off her face and attain cartoonish voices of their own and those voices with definite opinions on the behavior of Young Silas and Young Arianna and Young Ambitious Blonde Initiate. But up they go; her eyes gone wide, too, because Arianna is her friend, and any friend in such a situation: it is a thorn-prick; it is a splash of cold water.

What it is not is surprising, quite. There is something about it which Pen does find surprising, but not the Initiate in his bed. 

"What a terrible thing!" she says. "I would have slapped his eyes out of his head and made him find them using only his eyesight; of course, to no avail, for I'd have stepped on one of them." Brutally, she says this; with full honesty. She holds one hand in the air and (this is a beautiful gesture) brings all her fingers inward, as if she is crushing something.

But then, "And after that? And before that?"

Arianna

"Indeed."  Ari's hand strays from Pen's hair to find her clasped hand. To enfold it. That their fists together might speak to the sisterhood of their rage.

"Before that -- and after, briefly -- there came a time when I named him Scoundrel. And also Knave. And a host of other things, both deserving and unearned.  This finding of another came in the briefest of thaws between us, which is why it was so traitorous a thing.  My heart, Pen, it was almost too pained to hear him out."

Her fingers slid away from Pen's, and came to rest on the moon-gilt thing.  Her hand is pressed into the pattern of it; palm tasting of its measure, fingerprints leaving their own echoes. Steadied.

"When we were younger yet, he held the whole of my heart in his hand, Pen.  I loved him the way that young hearts love, with that abandon and earnestness.  It was not easy, but I thought it would endure.  Because, you know," she says, "Love conquers all things.  This is what they say; they lie, but it is still what they say."

This is the only way that Ari can speak of it: she loved him then.  She cannot say it now; she is too caged. She is too uncertain of where this is going.

Penelope

Arianna speaking of love, in relation to herself, is a seven days' wonder. Pen's eyebrows are already raised, and perhaps to her credit they would not raise any more. That is because Pen is a romantic. (A Romantic, capital R.) Because Pen believes in love: the kind of love that consumes and transforms; unalterable and earnest. Arianna knows Pen believes in it; Arianna knows even, perhaps, that Pen lives it: it is her marrow, and it is her blood, and it is her breath; it is even her resonance (ardent [daring - what is more so?]).

And right now, Pen is torn. She wants to argue in favor of it; of course she does. Yet: she is honest; and Silas - she does not know.

She says, "How did you meet him?"

Arianna

"His mother and my father are of your House," she says. She does not say that Elizabeth Robinson is a terrifying thing, so stepped in the essence of their House that hearths flare brighter at her nearness and candle light stretches further into the darkness and kitchen stoves bubbles over burn and crisp and smoke. 

"They knew each another, and Si' and I were close enough in age.  I don't remember how old we were, but I think it was me at eight and he at six, when we first met.  He handed me a flower and a book of fairy tales.  Later I gave him a treasure map and a book of stories," and Ari's stories were of course better, swashbuckling and pirates and swaying from mizzen masts and all sorts of adventure.

Idly, Ari brings her hands up together and touches the tips of her pinkies together.  She doesn't mean it to, but it echoes the gesture she'd made before.  Then she interlaces her fingers.  Then her hands come back to her sides.

"Once he'd learned about proper adventures," she says, with a little haughty note to it, of course, "We would wander off as friends while our parents were at Symposium or teaching.  The War split us up; Academy brought us back together."

She shrugs a little.

"Once he Awakened, we weren't as fast of friends.  Things got... complicated."

Penelope

"Arianna, what are his qualities?"

 

Arianna

[Oh no, difficult questions: Pause!]

Casa di Giametti

Arianna

When they had all lived in New England, Arianna had not held property of her own. She had stayed in something akin to a boarding house, rooms letted from a common mistress, with the oversight of some watchful adult with ready access to her parental units. She'd been in her twenties; she hadn't really minded. Most of the young Miss Giametti's time had been spent elsewhere, in Kestrel's study, or wherever Nick and Pen were gathered, or off whatever adventure she had talked Thane into.  That she might have an anchor point as significant as a house and holdings, here in Denver, still feels odd.

It is a low slung thing, with no stairs to thunder up or down.  The roof pitch is high to help slough off the winter snow, and its peaks are guarded by bridgework that lends a sort of grace and arching nature to them.  It casts interlacing shadows; there is a sense of elegance to the columns by the front porch and simple shutters rimming the windows.

It is more house than she needs, being by herself; it is more house than even they would need, all three of them crammed in together.  It leaves room for visitations, for an office, and also for a study; and this room for expansion gives it a sense of hopefulness rather than a sense of being empty: there is potential here, promising more.

It is not a long walk from Nick and Pen's more victorian affair.  Close enough that, in the warmer months, they could be at each other's doorsteps by foot as fast as by car.  If by foot means running, and by car we count parking and yielding to pedestrians. It is near enough for her to borrow -- not sugar, but perhaps some essential herb or other thing from Nick's soon to be budding gardens.

There are plants here, but they are still slumbering.  They are also ornamental. Ari knows nothing about green things that grow until they become green things for eating, or green things for mending, or green things from which dyes are expressed and inks are made.  The grey facade and the grey roof and the grey stonework make the house seem somber; soon it will be wreathed in green and brightened by Spring.  The front door is heavy, wooden, and ringed with tiny panes of glass, through which Pen can glimpse the foyer, its ironwork chandelier, and the great room beyond -- which is sparsely interspersed with boxes in careful towers, never over three tall.

Pen

Penelope walks over to Arianna's in the bright of the day, the air as limned with radiance as a mound of grave-goods, with everything gentled by an eerie glow; it comes from the memory of rain, from a certain brittle cleanness to the city as Spring and Helios both fight through and claim the streets for their own. The wind just rising is a katabatic wind, and Denver in Spring is not the same as New England in Spring, and the truth of the matter is if Pen took a moment to think about it or herself (she will not) she would realize she is homesick for daffodils and trees budding white and snowy.

No spell keeps her on the threshold but courtesy, learned and abiding, and Pen adjusts the box she has carried over fitting it against the curve of her waist so she can knock on the wood door. When she adjusts it there is a soft and musical clamor, as of elements frozen into metal rubbing one against the other, the backstage hush before the performance, and she leans to the side to peer inquisitively through the panes of glass at the foyer with its labyrinthine boxes and its chandelier and its home-readying, home-making air of a battle tent.

The box may, somebody who is keenly Aware of matters might be able to tell for certain, but, the box may be something which needs a hand on it: else it will untether from gravity all together (who would use a wagon or a trolley or a shopping cart when they can, with a Word, with their own True Will, have convenience with a magickal air?). Pen keeps a firm grasp on it, and knocks again unless she finds a doorbell.

Then she rings it, rings it, rings it, rings it, rings it, rings it, rings it, rings it, rings it. She is not impatient, but it is a doorbell. It wants to be rung.

Arianna

It does have all the makings of a battle-tent, of a place in the midst of making-ready, which may someday become a place of ready making.  It is in the midst of becoming.  It is not yet made whole.  Through the panes of glass, she can see with minimal distortion.

But Pen finds a doorbell. And doorbells are a fascination, aren't they. A little thing to press press press and elsewhere comes a sound.

Arianna is not visible within the sweep of the foyer or the ready-making room beyond, but perhaps Penelope knows already what her friend's reaction will be.  Because Arianna is likely in the middle of something, and everything Arianna does is fiddly in its own way, it is perfectionism, it is perfect-making, it is --

PEN IS HERE! PEN PEN PEN PEN IS! PEN IS HERE! DING DING RING SING CHIME GONG DING!

The Bonisagus tenses and mentally notes: a) that the doorbell works, and b) that Penelope has found it, and c) that the doorbell should best be disconnected and d) that the doorbell is quite loud inside a near empty house.  Instruments of one sort of another are set aside --

DING DINGALINGDINGRING DING

-- and quickly, then, she appears from around one corner or another.  The dark of her slacks and the soft grey of her shirt resolving as she comes nearer, near enough to open the door, pulling it back and open and grinning and welcoming.

"Come in! Come in, come in," a little flourish, a little sweep of hand, a gesture to seal the spell of friendship and hospitality.  Arianna makes no apologies for the disarray of her home while it is a thing in-becoming, instead she finds a way to sweep Pen into a hug, firm though swiftly as she is carrying a package, to bring her across the threshold and swing shut the door behind them. "Benvenuto! Casa mia è casa tua.  I was just putting together some small plates -- are you hungry?  Would you like something to eat?"

And yes, also, what have you brought, and is it a present. But this is not what she says; this is what is implied by the curious look in green-grey eyes, the slick of mischief there which only seems to bow to the formalities of hosting visiting delegations.

Pen

There is something that wants to be satisfying about pushing a button. Not as satisfying as pulling a rope, letting some message wing out Echo-laden, bronze-deep or silver-bright over the rolling hills, and imagine that there was a time (Plague) when all the bells rang and rang, and they rang out warnings, and imagine the terror of silence then.

Bells are rung at weddings, at births, bells are rung to scare away the owls and the crows, birds of ill-omen and ill-repute, and bells are rung to gather Court in drowned cities, and bells are rung for treats and bells are rung for memory, bells are rung because hallowed is a name, and there is something satisfying about ringing a bell even if it is this modern-day thing, this button-push bell that isn't really a bell, just a sound repeated over and over and over again.

Here comes Arianna, whisking around a corner and divided into diamonds as far as Penelope can see. Here is Penelope, looking in through the window: gray eyes inquisitive, alight, direct; her eyebrows lofted, but hidden beneath the messy sweep of her ruddy bangs; an omen Penelope, la belle dame sans merci (there is no mercy: there is a doorbell!), and when she sees Arianna resolves behind the glass into less of a spectre she smiles at once and leaves off ringing the bell so that when Arianna opens the door she is standing expectant before it her feet together the box still held neatly against her hip (her muscles must work to do so; the angels would resolve into light in the upper realms if they were allowed, rather than imbue a box with weightlessness), and Come in!

The smile goes bright and reflective; it brings out her dimples.

Come in, [the corners of the smile are gone coy, not sly because Pen can never quite  manage sly, but we might pretend it is sly] come in a little flourish and a sweep of hand [and Pen steps over the threshold and into Arianna's embrace].

Curls her free arm around Arianna, splays her hand against the other woman's back. Releases her and spins around in a tight circle, looking up at the iron chandelier (shouldn't she be diminished by iron, Pen? Shouldn't she be dissolved, or weakened?).

"I am as famished as the arrow which sang before. I would like something to eat, and something to drink; I have brought you a gift, but I need a room to wrestle it into submission. Ari, I do like your foyer; do you think the chandelier swings?"

"I've always had that goal, you know..."

Lead the way, Ari. Pen will follow in your wake.

Arianna

When Pen asks if it swings, Ari's attention shifts upward -- and yes, if they were well and truly Fae the iron would burn; it would freeze; it would strip the essence of them, but as they are only (are they only) borrowed of that other realm, it is a firm and stalwart thing; it gives gravitas to the light which spills from its bulbs; it casts that light more like the gleaming of firelight, torchiers held aloft.  It is a fitting thing for Arianna's keep.

"I think it might, and if it were to, you should be the one to test it.  It seems a thing befitting of your House," aha, a little smirk then, a curl to her mouth and then, where Arianna might have led her left to progress on to the kitchen, the footfalls shift and take them into the Great Room, with its boxes, with its broad hearth which is currently dark and lifeless, but soon, soon, shall be bright and glimmering with revelry.  Into the Great Room then, quick to the right again, through double-doors thrown wide, into a room ringed in bookshelves with a padded seat before the windows. 

This is destined to one day be her study.  For now the dark grained shelves are almost empty, but there are several cases, glass fronted, which are evidently for books and scrolls of a more esoteric flavour.  The light here, is filtered through the palest sheers at the window, diffuse but bright enough for reading in the day time.

"I present to you, the Study.  To the Study, I present the esteemed Penelope Mercury Mars, bewitcher and be-wed of Nicholas, who is Brilliant, Brave and Shining ..." It is knavery, of course, and playful.  "This will be the Library, when my things arrive, so I feel you should be well acquainted, and also that you should visit often."

Silas

At some point after visiting Silas and his roommates at their home, Arianna gave her fellow Bonisagean her address.  it can only have been with the expectation that he arrive at her door at some point, and so here he is - seemingly not far behind Pen.  He does not come empty handed, this Hunter - in one hand, there is a paper bag of groceries (wine and cheese and crackers and fruit and vegetables), and in the other there is a clever cloth bag of other things, which will be revealed later.

Ring, goes the doorbell, or perhaps knockknockknock goes the door.  Lo, there is someone seeking entrance to Arianna's keep.

Arianna

RING DING SOMEONE ELSE IS HERE -- goes the doorbell.  In truth, it is more a demure thing than that, but Penelope had so excited it with her pushing and pushing and pushing and so, that it can hardly be expressed in a mere ding-dong any longer. Not for this scene.  For this scene's remainder, it shall be a half-drunk herald which rings with abandon, rings rings rings and, announces, always announces.

There is a limited cast of callers whom the doorbell might announce.  Limited thusly: Penelope, who is present; Nicholas, whose whereabouts Penelope probably knows, and as Penelope does not have that wistful look of near-Nicholas-ness, it is unlikely to be her Crow; and Silas, who was last seen in the Park amongst the Verbaenic others.

"I will let you two get acquainted," she says, to Penelope and the room. With a merry little loft of eyebrows, which almost entirely obscures the curious cant to her eyes, shifted toward the front door and is caller, as if she might observe them through the wall -- she might! but she doesn't; it is a poor use of Will and resources.  "While I see to the door, and also to refreshments."

It is the briefest transit, through the sweep of the double doors, out into the Great Room and now, appearing in Silas's line of sight and he in hers, through the tiny panes of glass, glimpsed for a moment before the door is thrown wide and a more complete measure can be taken.

"Well met and welcome!"  There is warmth in her voice, and something mischief-touched and dancing in her eyes. It is not, perhaps, the greeting he has imagined. "Come in; Penelope is here.  We shall have small plates and wine, and whatever you have brought."

The hug she offers him is neither as deep nor as intimate as either would like, but lingers, just a moment longer than the one offered to Pen.  The door is closed behind him, but not barred.  "You've met Pen, you said." Her voice is loud enough to carry back to the Flambeau.  "I hope you find her smashing, and if you don't then you are wrong."  Aha. A dig, a little teasing thing; it sets the tone between them, it sets the tone for Pen.

Silas

But there's a thing, see, and that clever cloth bag is not so large or so heavy as to get in the way of an embrace or, once said embrace is achieved, a kiss; in short, Arianna is not allowed to escape quite as quickly as she intends, or as untouched by Hunters.  The kiss, see, is a thing that lingers longer than the hug was intended to do, and only with it done - after holding her closer against him than she may have initially thought - does Silas release her.

"Hail and well met, then, my friends - we shall drink and know each other better.  I bring measures of wine, and things to nibble on - and glasses too, since when last we talk there was the echo of empty places.  They're plastic, but they are many - they will do well enough for now.  A pleasure to see you again, Pen."

This last is offered as he and Arianna - separate entities, see, not even the slightest bit of contact between them - step from vestibule to office.

"Was the concert as loud as Sera and Grace led us to believe?"  And then, an aside for Arianna, "We met at a bar.  There was to be a show, which I missed because of the roommates.  Such a tragedy, and one that I'll have to remedy at soonest opportunity."

Pen

They shouldn't encourage her. Arianna. Nicholas. They shouldn't encourage Pen to take risks: needless ones, for the sake of (Daring) doing. As they pass by the chandelier, Pen's head falls back and she tracks it until natural laws and anatomy no longer allows her to, but there is a gauging glance cast toward some high thing to leap from. Stairs, perhaps, or a tower of boxes, or if there were a bench here, or if one said a Word just at this particular moment and then: all to say, Pen is considering the logistics of chandelier swinging when Arianna brings her into the Study.

"Such a room," Pen says, who'd quirked her mouth at Arianna's introduction. "Such readiness! My tumultuous and haphazard moving ways are put to to the blush. Are you giving me a new title, Ari? Bewitcher of Crows?"

The quirk to her mouth has become a smirk: good-natured as most smirks are not, but sharp still, sharp as the nib of a fountain-pen and were it pressed in what might it draw what ink would well would it blot or draw fine it is a little smirk and the smirk becomes diffuse soft solemnity as she regards the shelves. The box begins to drift (sh, no it does not, you see nothing Reality, one has already taken her bruises), and she sets it down. Pushes it down?

And a door bell! Pen glances in that direction; continues to lean on the box. It is not quite big enough to sit on but one could place one's boot upon it, and-

And Arianna sweeps through the double doors, out into the Great Room, and Pen turns her attention to the box. "Stay down," she murmurs to it, coaxingly: just as a myth might tell a knight to reach out for a gift. "Stay down right now; why are you so irascible? What did I overdo?"

Ari is greeting Silas; Pen is listening.

(You've met Pen, you said,) "Fine, I cancel you," Pen murmurs, and breathes out a word in Enochian. (She is - ) THUNK. ( - smashing.) Guilty glance cast through the doors; the box is still. And heavy. And no longer wants to reach the Sun. Pen straightens and brushes her hands off on her thighs.

Here comes Silas, and Pen offers him a tempered smile.

"Hello again, Silvanus! I mean Silas. Sorry! The concert was indeed sound and fury, a clamor from the deep, with Serafíne's voice a shining thing cast light above the rest when it was not transformed; she has a voice like light on fog, but the fog was all noise."

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Pen

ooc: Those dice were nothing! Ignore. *grin*)

Arianna

Was Ari giving her a new title? Was she? Was Naming within Arianna's ready reach.  There is a light in her eyes as she catches Pen's for a just a moment before disappearing through the doors, catches Pen's eye and sight of the irascible box -- which is not an adjective often put to...

... which may explain why she is caught so readily by the Hunter at the doorway of her Keep. Caught and kept close beside him.  Caught with her arms around him and his mouth on hers and her knees, they are like water for a moment; and he calls to her as summer calls to rain; and it is dramatic, this, this recompense he issues for her naming him a 'childhood friend'.  Penelope is just beyond the wall, so perhaps she cannot see how the green of Ari's eyes goes softer; how Silas is a wicked thing. She might see the tailing end of it, as the Bonisagi come through the double-doors together, side-by-side but not quite touching. How they are framed for a moment by its jamb and crossing.

Ari moves to take the grocer's bag from him -- if Silas will relenquish it to her. If. If. If is a strange thing; Ari is used to knowing. She is used to being fully assured, or falsely so; she is rarely on her back foot.

"I am sorry that I missed it!"  Not that she has been invited, but that she is quite sure the thing of it lives almost up to Pen's poetry of it.  "Oh, and you two, you should introduce yourselves."

A beat. A look for Pen. Glancingly amused as it calls back an echo of other homes and other greetings.

"Fully, if you please."  It is her best Pen-impression.  Her gallantry a mimicry of the Flambeau's, because Ari is not quite as Daring, she is not as artfully cavalier, but long association has lent credence to the approximation.  And turn about fun is a pleasing thing. One imagines they have had many turn-abouts like this, a thing said re-echoed.  Her smile is cast wide to welcome Silas in as well, and Ari has given very little thought to what might be included in his Fully...

... a thing she realizes about a minute to late to stop the unfurling of the thing.

Silas

This intimation that he should introduce himself fully gets a raised eyebrow shot Arianna's way . . . and then a slowly birthed smile, a bit sharp around the corners and edges.  The Hunter has claws, of course, and teeth too, and now is a fun time to toy with prey.  He allows Arianna to take the paper bag of food and drink, to do with as she will, but not the cloth bag; that's something different.

"Fully, hmm?  I am Silas Owen Arthur Robinson, Initiate Exemptus bani Bonisagus ordo Hermes."  The look slanted Arianna's direction is sideways and obscure, perhaps a bit left handed in bent.  "In some company, they want to know my parentage - but I suspect this is not that sort of occasion."  There's a wry, sweeping sort of bow from the man who looks and feels as if perhaps he ought to have antlers affixed somewhere to his head, who resonates radiance and tempestuousness.

He does not give titles of any sort, Hermetic or otherwise - but what he does give is more than he's yet given anyone else in Denver.  And the familiar way his words bend around Arianna could mean he is simply a childhood friend, or it could mean more.  Or less.  Or all sorts of things, or nothing at all.

"I am pleased to make your proper acquaintance."

Pen

Pen recognizes herself in Ari's impression, the Echo of herself, and the recognition is visible in Pen's expression: the way she looks at Ari, a beat before Silas raises his eyebrow, because Pen turns her eyes back to Silas just in time to see the raised eyebrow become an angular smile, something more befitting a Hunter's moon than a young man.

Pen keeps her gaze on Silas's face as he introduces himself, her head canted a spare half-inch to the side.

Here's Pen. Pen's hair is getting long, has just reached the small of her back, and will soon be cut. Until then, and today, she bound it in a thick braid. Her bangs are rakish, swept back behind her ears, and it is Rossetti hair, captures the light (yes, captures, puts into thrall) and shadow of this Study with its haze over the window and tarnishes it then lets it burn an ardent ember and why well perhaps because Pen herself is an ardent woman, her magick is seeped in it (and Daring, and Resplendence), and in turn her marrow, and in turn she already a certain kind of Presence becomes ardent in all glint-y facets. Pen's eyes are lake-light, dappling some hero's blade; Pen's eyes are considering, tempered; she seems reserved in a way that is not cautious, but rather self-sustaining. She is only wearing five rings today, one of which is her (Hallowed) wedded band. She is wearing a shirt with a plunge V-neck the color of fog rolling in at twilight and a belt with a buckle that is both arcane and made of metal and fascinating and set with jewels like a reliquary, a pair of laced-up-at-the-side strangely feminine pants which might've been sewn together when somebody held down the moon and skinned him for a lake-witch's dowry. There's a dragonfly's iridescence there. Boots, too. Green. (There's a knife in one, probably; certainly). A lake-green coat, much-worn and somewhat threadbare at the elbows and in one or two places, adventure-tattered, because it might be cold later.

She offers Silas her hand once he has introduced himself, fully.

And then she says, "Penelope Sylvia Katabasis Hilde Nyneve Mercury Mars," and here there is a liquid (Beguiling) measure to the cadence of her Titles: which she, of course!, tells Silas. They are very good titles, too. Very suiting, very poetic, very Hermetic. And perhaps one day the gentle reader will get to know what they are too, but for now characters will have their little secrets. Finishes with: "Adept bani Flambeau."

Pen is not a legacy Hermetic; she had frowned at the thought that some company might ask Silas's parentage. Perhaps someone did that to her once. Perhaps Arianna was there, to hear Pen's answer and see the temper-wicking fall out.

When she is done being courteous, she says, "Yes, well, I hardly feel acquainted with you at all yet. I'm sure that will change. What are you doing here in Denver?"

Arianna

[Empathy: Pen-of-many-titles.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4) ( fail )

Arianna

She is pleased.  Ari hefts the bag against her hip a little and watches the progression of names and titles with a sort of glee that is reserved to Hermetic children of Hermetics through the ages.  There is a sort of dance and weave to it, the cadence of it; it is pleasing.  Some older thing in her approves, and misses entirely whatever other tones there may be in Silas's smile or Penelope's tone.

"I have it on good authority," which is on Pen's authority, which is good enough for Ari, "That no one here cares after our parentage, Si."  Amusement brims in her eyes, perhaps because this place is so unlike the others in which they have met.

"But, come: Pen has said that she is hungry, and Silas has brought food --" she looks to each of them as she says the other's name.  "Perhaps we should adjourn to the kitchen, and I will make us small plates?"

She is watching Pen when she crooks her head toward the doorway, in the universal sign of follow me and shall we walk together, but she is near enough to bump Silas with her hip. And this is how she signals the shift to him. Each in and of their own measure.

Silas

"Ah, good, because my parentage has little care for Denver.  I believe the query was, 'you're moving where?  Why would you want to do that?', when I told them I was coming.  Perhaps this means that they'll stay away."  There's a wink here, and when Ari bumps his hip, Silas' free hand comes to just briefly rest in the small of her back.  It's brief, the touch - hardly noticeable, hardly there.

"And I am always hungry.  There are some wines and cheeses and things in that bag, Stella."  She calls him Si, and he calls her the only nickname he's ever called her, the one only he calls her.  "The kitchen seems a fine place to be.  You can put me to cutting things or plating them, if you wish."  He'd said, when she visited his keep, that he wasn't much use for actually cooking things; he'd never had reason to learn beyond the most basic of basics.

So of course he moves into the kitchen, full of casual talk and posture.

Pen

"I am still famished," Pen says, solemnly. "Even more so than I was before this moment."

The way to the kitchen is mysterious: she waits for Ari to strike a path, then follows it; considers Silas still as she does, alert and clear-eyed and did we mention alert, a conscious sort of alertness, how it wells - see - like twilight sometimes seems to, from a deep place gathered. 

She'd asked him why he was in Denver, and then there was talk of parentage, casual chummery, and Pen -- she likes to be clear, and she is also direct, so:

"So you came to Denver to escape your parentage? Or do you have work here, Silas?"

Arianna

There are nicknames, one more exclusionary than the other, one which claims something that the hand in the small of her back echoes. Something she does not outright deny in her bearing or her movements.  Out, then, they go of the Office and into the Great Room, and once they are there it is easy to see the kitchen off to their left.  There is an island with a counter upon which to casually lean while they continue getting to know each other.

The task Silas is best put to, in Ari's estimate, is the opening and pouring of wine.  She chooses a red from his offering, and pulls a white from the fridge -- chilled, but not too cold.  There are no utensils for eating but there are wine glasses and a corkscrew, this speaks to her priorities quite plainly.  All things presented to that island breakfast-ish bar, for Silas and Pen to sort amongst themselves. 

It is easy to see why Ari chose this place.  The ceiling of the Great Room is so lofted that it rides just under the ridgeline of the roof.  There is a feeling of expansiveness, of almost standing out under the sky, but without the bother of the weather.  At the far end of the room, french doors lead out onto a broad patio, with an equally valuted cover.  Fireplaces stand in the inside and outside spaces alike.  In the summer, they will be able to throw wide the doors and unbar the threshold of inner and outer spaces. Move freely between inner and outer worlds.

She is a creature of symbol and ritual: it is now apparent in her home.

And no, Arianna does not spare Silas from Pen's inquiry. Instead she busies herself with readying things to eat. First a plate of cheese, dried fruits and pickled things -- mushrooms marinated until they are bright with vinegar; cornichon; slippery sweet-tart onions.  Then thin slices of bread.  Crisp vegetables in neat and orderly julienne.  Last, thick luscious pieces of fruit: bright oranges, ripe and ruddy strawberries; dried figs and dates to round out the seasons somewhat.  She works quickly, but quietly, and watches them each with equal measure.

Silas

"Ahhh, my mistake.  Yes, I came in part to slip the leash of my parentage - but not just those that bore me.  It was time, I thought, to strike out, to make my way from familiar, safe things.  And I've never worked in a climate quite like this one before, so when my finger found this spot on a map, I bought a ticket."  There's a pause as he opens both bottles of wine and lofts eyebrow questioningly at each of the women present - the better to pour them what they'd like to drink.

"I'm a master gardener and landscaper by trade, you see.  I've a specialty in labyrinths, and orchids, and species that people think are lost causes."

This matches the warmth of his hand when it clasped Pen's in greeting, and the feeling of riotous, fertile growth about him that's more subtle, perhaps, than the impression of antlers and hunting horns, but no less there.

"I find it well enough, thus far.  I think it will treat me fair."

Pen

"I will have the white, if you please," Pen says when the wines come down, and then adds, "I'm much rather in the mood for apple-light and moon-light," with an air of conscious apology, a gaze that flicks up to the ceiling briefly. Maybe she is hoping for another chandelier to swing from. 

In the kitchen, she is curious: pokes around without opening anything, quite, because she is still being courteous, and then finds a spot to settle her back against and keeps her regard (mostly) on Silas still.

See: a vibrant lick of ardent attention, at that job description; a focused curiosity. "How interesting; are you going to build a labyrinth here? Have you contacted the Denver Botanic Gardens, whatever organization maintains them? I bet they would be interested in such a project; if not them, some of the Art Galleries down on Santa Fe have very interesting people in charge of them. You could have help."

"What sort of species in the plant-world do people think are lost causes? I like to garden a bit," this smile, faint, surfacing; a rill of something, just beginning to break through cool water, "but I am no horticulturist."

Enthusiasm, enthusiasm! Directed, swoop, sluice, slice.

Arianna

"The white, please," Ari says, at the question of wines. She does not elaborate like Pen does, but she shares the want of something apple-crisp and slightly sweeter.  When it is handed over, she compells them to some small toast before drinking.  Because sharing cups is always fellowship; and glasses are cups and cups are caldrouns between these Hermetic women.

Ari leans against a somewhere nearer to Pen than to Silas; the better to regard him through the veil of her lashes.  The better to tap her glass against Pen's with a To Denver -- a thing they can all agree upon, or possibly only in parts.

"Your orchid will be here soon, should you want to inspect it," she tells Silas.  It is an opening, but perhaps not as much of an opening as it would seem.  "It is, I think, the only plant entrusted to me that has not hastened on to meet its maker." 

The curl of her mouth behind her glass is wry; it is playful again.  She is balanced again.  The cup seems made to be paired with her hand; Ari has an ease about alcohol and the social situations they often find it in.  It is why she has taken up Drinking with Andres as a sort of competitive sport; it is why the pale light from outside catches up in the bowl of the glass, where is held by her fingers, and as Pen has spoken -- it is almost like moonlight.

"I should like it if there were a labyrinth in Denver.  Pen, do you truly think some Gallery would back it?  That would be glorious--"

DING DING OMG I AM THE MOST ANNOYING DOORBELL DONG.

We have discussed the doorbell in past paragraphs, dear Reader.  The sound of it is not so jarring as all of this, and would not be to Ari but Penelope, liebe, Penelope, mein hast dingdingringed it to within an inch of it's life.  So the chime sounds and Ari's eyebrows lift and mid-sentence she pauses.

"That's probably Nick."

And then, again, she is moving through the house that will soon be familiar but currently is not. Out of the kitchen and into the foyer, and door thrown wide again in greeting, smile warm and inviting and wine glass held aloft.

"Come in, come in!"  He, too, is welcomed across the threshhold, into the foyer guarded by the iron chandelier.  "Pen is here.  And Silas is here. I hear you three have met before," this all said as she hugs him, of course she hugs him, and before parting to close the door she says, for his ears only: "You missed the introductions. Very Hermetic. Many titles.  Rest assured: Pen wins this round."

Arianna

"I think you should with: Nick. Nick Hyde. Chakravanti.  Bringer of wine. Who also knows secrets."  The grin; it is dangerous.

"Very James Bond.  Don't you think?"  The wine is captured easily in her free hand; this is some sort of opulence, to hold a bottle in one hand and a glass in another, but Ari wears it easily.  She guides him back toward the kitchen, where the others are, through the maw of the Great Room, which is not entirely unlike a cathedral with its vaulted roof and empty spaces. There voices are low when they enter; her suggestion goes unheard to the others.

Silas

The white is a bright and summer-sweet-citrus-crisp Sauvignon Blanc, with just a hint of sparkle, while the red (which Silas chooses) is a deeper, darker Pinot Noir.  His is let to sit and breathe, not sipped yet, and then . . . oh, unfortunate then.  In time with the doorbell ringing Silas' phone (miraculously thus far untouched by the gremlins that attend Arianna) chimes.  He frowns, knowing only few here in Denver has his number, and checks it against some potential for emergency.

This leads to a sigh, heavy, as he eyes the glass he's poured himself, and the company.

"I left my hounds in the charge of one of my roommates," he offers by way of explanation, "but he got called into his hospital."  And this is what greets Arianna and Nick as they enter - this statement, and a hint of rue.  "It pains me to leave such esteemed company as that in which I find myself this evening, truly."

And this, this moment?  This is what leads him to Arianna, to wrapping an arm around her waist and placing a kiss on her lips - it lingers just slightly, just enough, and then it's gone.

"I will have to return after I've seen to the keep.  Sorry to say hello and goodbye so quickly, Nick."  That hand, offered for a shake, is as warm as it was when first they met - there is just as much impression of antlers, and growth.

((This is the trouble with having children and needing to be awake during the day - a bed time!  We'll have to have a longer scene soon.))

Pen

Alas, poor Timing, how ill-used it is, and how ill it uses these characters. Pen had not been at all troubled by newcomer at the door especially not that newcomer; a shadow, when Silas gets his bad news; she watches him get it over the rim of her wine glass. "That sounds most unfortunate," she says. 

When Silas kisses Arianna hello and fare well, Penelope's eyebrows are still somewhat drawn together too bad shadow consternation though there's a rill of brightness when she glances at Nicholas and smiles (warmth), then notices something on one of her rings and adjusts it.

What if she took it off and dropped it into her wine cup? She does that, watches the luminous bubbles stream from the ring up and up again. Was it satisfying, Pen?

Yes, it probably was.

Arianna

It turns out that there will be no need for titles after all.  All the titles that need be exchanged are done so in the presumption of how Silas wraps his arm around Arianna's waist and kisses her -- it is a kiss returned, though, perhaps less ardently than it is given.  It is not the three kisses on cheeks, oh, yes, we are European, or anything which could be misconstrued so neatly.  And, of course, with her hands full -- wine glass in one and bottle in another -- there is little she can do to shape the sense of it.

Then he says something into the curl of her ear, and then he is going, then he is gone.  "You may go, but I'm keeping your wine," she tells him; this is the answer to whatever he has said, to the kissing of lips; it is in the crows feet at the corners of her eyes, and the slick of something hidden in the green of them.  It is not given away, this something -- she hopes. 

They are childhood friends.  That is clearly not the whole of it. 

It is barely a handful of footsteps to the door and back again.  And then there is Nick to fold in to things, and the cabal is made whole again and things move simply:  She finds another wine glass.  He has his choice of red or white (he is asked his preference) for pouring.  She moves Silas's glass from the counter, to beside the sink.  In all of this, Ari has missed Pen's inspection and drowning of her ring.

Pen

"The white is very good, Nicholas," Pen says, eyeing Silas's untouched cup before she sets hers down on the island, leaning on the palms of her hands with her chin a notch higher than it is wont to be so she can peer down (Circe, Medea, Lake-Witch) at it. There are still a few pearl-bright bubbles clinging, dogged, to the ring's side: she may be marking how long it takes for them all to flee upward. "The red's all meat gobbets!"  

Silas

And so Silas is gone, to re-meet the Hyde duo on another day.  Exuant, stage left.

Arianna

The red he says, so she takes up the bottle--which Silas has brought, so she takes a minute to study the label, to know what she is pouring and then.

Meat gobbets.
... White, please. Ari.

The white, it is.  One bottle is set down, exchaned handily for the other, which bears a slick of condensation, a sheen; it is chilled, see, as whites want to be. She is not a savage. She pours and hands his glass over; heavy on the pour, light on the flourishes today.

"If it is meat gobbets, then, perhaps it is destined for the soup pot."  Said easily, as she leans a hip into the counter and regards the Mars-Hyde constellation over the brim of her own cup.  "Good thing Nicholas has brought us a replacement.  And welcome, now, well met and welcome in earnest, without titles and all of that after all."

Pen

Her gaze is quite steadfastly on the wine. Cat at a mouse hole.

She doesn't say anything at all just yet, though her mouth curves in a quick compulsory smile for Ari's welcome now and well met and in earnest and without titles and all of that after all etcetera.

Arianna

There are no barstools just yet.  Just as there are no furnishings in the Great Room.  In the Great Room there stands a sparse number of boxes, clumped here and there, ordered by subject and stacked, where appropriate but never more than three boxes tall.  Through the kitchen and on to the dining room, there he could find chairs.  And a broad table, too wide to be intended for only ever the three of them, and chairs to seat eight at close quarters.

Ari's player is making things up on the spot; one may recognize her own kitchen table in this space.

"Thank you," she says, and her smile is broad and genuine. There is less trickery for just a moment, before talk slides to Silas.  Talk, glances, other's attention -- it all slides to Silas sooner or later.  To this she shrugs. "He makes a certain impression at Conclave; our House is rarely canted toward such green-and-outdoor things."

Mark: she does not say Primal, even where it would be appropriate, because to give that word full due is unfair; it is prejudiced.  But there is not truly a good stand in for it.

Pen

[Nothing to see, Nick!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Arianna

((guys... I am turning into a pumpkin... and Jess distracted me with Verbaenic things... and I cannot focus to write :(  ... Pause/fade/something?))

Pen

Pen straightens, buoyant, and then raises one hand - Nick hip-checks her and she turns her head to glance at him, though her eyes linger on the wine for a heartbeat more - then, savage!, she fishes her ring back out and rests it (communion wafer) on her tongue once it occurs to her that hey now this ring tastes like wine. She hip checks him back, eyebrows lofted smile halved and bright. 

"Yes, speak about the last Conclave you were at, Ari. Or tell us of your ideal Conclave. Was there a chandelier at the last one? You never said in your highly amusing letters."

And perhaps talk will turn: it always does, with friends.

Arianna

[Epic Story? I am too lazy to decide on my own. DICE! Expression +Char (I need to buy this up, as Ari talks all the goddamntime)]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Arianna

[Also epic bullshitting at appropriate points?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Arianna

"There was a chandelier, in fact..."

And this is how it begins.  They lean against counters and share the spread of small-enough-for-fingers morsels and Arianna tells them of the chandelier which hung in the foyer of the Chantry, which clung to the coastline of the western shore of Ireland, where the sea beat against the shore, rhythmic and savage and never ceasing.  And from the chandelier -- upon which no one to date has ever swung, Pen, can you believe it? -- they move to Conclave as a concept, a meeting of minds assembled as an academic body, of debate and its -- yawn -- structure and rules, which, are, of course, debatably followed.

There are questions asked and answered, and some answers are fanciful, and some answers are true.  Some are both. Some are neither.  Cups are refilled and there is a discussion about whether to stoke a fire in the fireplace -- which fireplace -- oh did I tell you about the fireplace, which was large enough for a soup pot and a spit, because the Chantry is old and the kitchen hearth was a working hearth and -- oh, Nick doesn't believe me? Well, that's because he is sharp, Nick, always thinking.

But there was a great hearth there, and as they move through the shadow spaces of her soon to be home she tells them how, on that broad and covered patio, she plans to cast a circle. To draw it on the stone flooring.  So wide and broad that it swallows up the whole of it. And it will be sacred, and it will be sained, and it will stand there as witness.  With a hearth at its margin; with room for all manner of rites within; where they can be outside but also covered and there can be moonlight as well as comfort.

And at some point, they will have drunk all the wine and eaten her out of house and home -- or whatever meager stores her fridge could offer up so soon in her unpacking.  But before they go, she offers to each of them a single key on a length of twisted silver silk. She repeats what she has told Pen in greeting, that her house is their house; the the Library will be here soon, and it is beside itself with eagerness to meet them properly. And there are goodbyes, but not as final or as solemn as they might be.  As the trek back from Ari's house to the Mars-Hyde home is a matter of minutes. Close without being in each other's pockets.