Fickle of Heart

Ari

Ring Ring. Ring Ring. It is the first of Spring!

It is early where she is. Before dawn early.  Before the sky begins to lighten early.  But the timezones between them do him the favor of softening the blow. For not all Robins like spring time.  Not all Robins like morning.

It is Arianna's number on his phone.

Rob

Some Robins are, of course, excellent examples of Hermeticism and diligence, are serene at the crack of daybreak and serene at the tolling of midnight, and are serene when they look at their cell phone and see an old friend calling. 

People's voices are different on the phone. He sounds younger, but also stronger, richer.

"Yes?"

Ari

"Kestrel?"

It sounds different for her to call him this from so many hundreds of miles away.  It sounds strange for this piece of his name to be so transmitted, transmuted by the networks ---

--- no. Not just that. It is different because her voice is low, and somewhat raspy.  It is not entirely well.  There is the edge of ill-ease to it.

"Might I bother you a moment?"  And absent is the playfulness, the touch of mercury and something-shining.  He cannot know that she sits in the darkness where she is, that she has rested her elbows on her knees and that she is waiting. On. Something.  One hand holds her phone; it carries his voice to her. The other her wand.  He cannot know, but he might suspect.

Rob

"Yes, I am listening," Rob says. He manages not to sound wry; he understands that people need to wind up, need to work their way in. Ari can hear nothing of ambient noise on the other line, and the connection seems clear as crystal. 

Ari

Ari is usually one of those people. They dance around a topic, taking steps toward its center and away. Shifting. Or at least they had been like this, once upon a time ago.  So the candor might be abrupt in her, or jarring even in his puddle of serenity and calm.

"Have you means to tell if a man's mind is all his own?"  It is wrong.  There is a tension to her words where there should be levity. It should be a feint, not something deeper. "And do you think it to be within my grasp of Ars Mentis?"

Rob

"Yours? No. Why do you ask; who do you suspect of being under influence?"

Ari

Damn.  She does not need to voice the thought for it to carry clearly in the silence on the line.

"I do not know what I suspect just yet. I had hoped to rule the possibility out."  There is quiet on her end of the line as well. It is not as crystal clear and perfect as his.

"I suppose there are less expedient ways in which to do that.  And Kestrel? -- thank you. For what you taught me when we were all together.  And thank you for answering at this ungodly hour," there is levity, here, but it is forced. It is thin and barely brimming over the watchfulness in her voice.  Which is kept low, so as not to disturb someone sleeping.

Rob

"Yes, yes. Now answer my question as I have answered yours, Ari. 'I do not know what I suspect just yet.' I cry bullshit."

Ari

There is a quiet, and perhaps it angers him.  But Ari, who is quite fluent and generous with her words is reticent this early morning. She is cautious with them.

"An old friend of mine is here in Denver.  We are close, but we have been apart.  He seems changed."  A pause.  There is no good way to speak this to a Tytalan; no good way to admit wounds or weakness.  "After a manner, he has hurt me.  It is out of character."

"At least I'd like to think it to be so."

She rubs at her forehead with the heel of her hand.

Rob

Is he made angry by her quiet? It is often difficult to tell when Robin is, truly, angry. Of course it is, because anger is weakness. He is readier to show irritation, faux-annoyance, than he is to show real anger. Real anger begets trouble.

He silent a while after she has finished speaking. Not quite long enough for her to think they have been disconnected, but enough of a space for it to be of note.

"People change, Ari. People change and they don't always know how to behave around others. How close they are does not factor in when it comes to the moment of hurt. How did he hurt you 'after a manner'? Or what of it was out of character?"

Ari

There is a quiet then, which stretches far longer than its due.  He can almost hear her attempts at working sounds together to form words and it is good that they have the phone between them, far better that they do not stand face to face where she would have to step fully into the armor of her misdirections.

There are any of a dozen platitudes she could offer him, and Robin Anton Kestrel would sweep each of them off the table as quickly as she could speak them.  It leaves her spellbound after a fashion -- Arianna Giametti with nothing to say? The quiet stretches to where it is uncomfortable.

"You're right, Robin," she says.  She hardly ever calls him Robin.  "People change.  I was foolish to think otherwise -- and I am lucky to have you to call me on my bullshit."

A beat.

"Anyway... happy spring."

Rob

"If you aren't going to give me specifics, I can't use my superior understanding of human motivation and character to give you a more accurate perspective," Robin says. He says it calmly, and not unkindly; perhaps a little unkindly.

"You'll have Thane soon if you don't have him already. Don't let him get you skyclad," he deadpans, by way of happy Spring. Seasons do not touch Robins. 

Ari

"To give you specifics, Kestrel, I would have to Name the thing." This is said so plainly that it may seem simple, as if it draws nothing more out of her than the words themselves. As if they were effortless: he knows better.  "I am not ready to give it that weight.  I am not ready to make it immanent."

It is an answer to the little bit of unkindliness in his tone.  It gives way; it gives more away than she knows.  But yes, soon, Thane will be there. Thane will be there and there will be jokes and laughter about being skyclad.  It warms her a little; there is the slightest huff of amusement on the line.

Rob

"Never thought you were faint of heart, Ari," Rob says, and he may well be mocking her, needling her, though this next bit is an offhand and true remark which becomes confiding: "Word is fickle of heart perhaps, but we both know that isn't true."

Ari

"Would that I were, Kestrel. That I were fickle of heart.  It would make the rest of this all the easier."  This, too, is a confidence.  It is a thing half-hoped and not likely to erupt into being.

"I miss you," she tells him, and before he can object to it or sneak some ridiculous comment in between, she continues. And it is more like they usually are; she is a bit redeemed and returned to herself for having spoken with him. "I should come to visit and drink your wine and make dinner for you and then, if you still want to know, I will tell you -- but not until we are well and truly drunk; because even Tytalans get well and truly drunk, I have heard it; I have been told.  And then you will know how foolish and faint of heart I am, and I will even let you tell me of it.  Three-fold. And what you say three-fold is true, Kestrel."

A pause.

"What you say is often true."

A pause again.

"I should let you go."

Rob

"Arianna. You are welcome to visit when you're back in town, but you chose Denver over Connecticut. I hope you don't forget that. I won't."

"Send Thane home with some Broncos swag. Happy spring."

And then the silence before a phone call is severed.

The Rite of Spring

[The Hunt]

It is the night that Arianna has come to him, come into his keep and feted with his housemates.  It is late into the night now, and she lay in his bed, with her hand over his heart, and her head tipped into his shoulder.  The slow rhythmic pattern of her breathing tells him that she is sleeping, that the bruises and aches of her body are mending; that she feels safe and guarded pressed in beside him.

Outside, the world is blanketed with snow.  It is hard to believe that Spring dawns with the next morning.  The blizzard will rage for several days, burying the first signs of the coming season with a vengeance only Winter can muster.  Yet, in Silas's home there is the smell of growing things, verdant and fecund: fertile.  It is difficult to sleep, with the pull of the suntides tugging at his blood, shifting the cadence of his veins and arteries to something that thrums; beats; hammers out a tympanic call to some familiar beat.

The wind picks up and rattles the windows of his lofted room.  He can hear the glass stretch and sigh in its panes.  Dark shadows cut across the moonlight that streams in through the windows. The storm calls; Spring calls.

[Silas]

It is the night that Arianna has come to him, and Silas wants little more than to lay here and sleep with her in his arms, but even after exhausting her he finds himself pulsing with an energy that has more to do with the changing of the seasons than anything else.  He is gentle, careful, when he kisses Arianna's forehead and pulls his arm from under her, the better to pace[prowl] the room.  He is nude at first, but it only takes a few more moments to pull on some form of covering; in this case, it's a kilt and some boots and to move in near-silence down the stairs and out the door.


This house that he shares with the bros is far enough from the city center for a back yard firepit - which is no Beltane bonfire, but will do in a pinch.  It's also far enough for some light hunting; not deer, perhaps, not game fowl, but the occasional brace of rabbit finds its way to the table for Tony to figure out what to do with, or to his friend at the coffee shop, or somewhere.  One imagines that selling small game to high end restaurants is as good a way to supplement one's income as any.  So clad just enough for modern decency's sake, Silas slips out into the snow to light a small fire (to danceweave a design around it, following the alignment of the stars).  It flares, just so, with the ebb and flow of his resonance, and then!  Well, then he stills, more silent than one would think a human capable of being.  Were he some other sort of animal, his ears might swivel towards the sound he's heard . . . but he is human, so his head turns, followed by his body, and Silas stalks.

He has his quarry, and will hunt it.  This is the time for such things - the time for birth and sacrifice, for marriage of earth and sky.

[The Hunt]

It is cold in the snow, but the chill gives way wherever it touches his skin, kisses the golden warmth of him, comes to near the sun.  It melts and pulls back, so that his footfalls leave a wider wake than otherwise.  And this is not The Hunt of lengthening nights and coming Winter; this is The Hunt of lengthening days and coming Summer.  He can feel the echoes of talons at the end of each long finger, brutal things that rend and tear; he can feel the shape of hooves for feet, that clip and clomph on rocks buried beneath the snow; but beyond all of this, he can feel the soaring expanse of wings, anchored to his scapulae, overlaying his arms; the flutter of feathers; the rush of the wind.  His quarry soars also, cavorts and spirals overhead.  His trek leads him to the far end of the yard, through a small, low gate, bent and nearly broken at the perimeter.  A thing that wasn't there this evening, and won't be there again in the morning.

His Aunt has trained him about things like this; undoubtedly he is prepared.

There is no path in the field of snow beyond the low gate.  It is pristine and unmarked. It is not currently snowing and clouds have broken up enough to let through whispers of the sky beyond.  The near-full moon above brightens everything to a blue-white blindness where it cuts between the clouds; she is argent and luminous.  The night is still, yet thrums with the same energy that has drawn him out of bed, away from the side of the woman he loves (beyond all reason).  It tugs him forward.  Across what will be a small creek when it thaw, hidden under several inches of snow now.  Around the low mound of an outcropping of granite.  Sometimes he feels closer to it, his quarry, this flightling, fledgling thing; sometimes he feels he grasps the sense of it only darkly, slipping through his fingers, a scent that will not resolve.

It leads him onward until the ring of houses that make up his subdivision are reduced to children's playthings on the horizon; a string of faery lights streaming out of unblocked windows, of steepled roofs covered in a blanketing of snow.  His breath curls up, steamclouds in the frozen night.  His trail of footsteps leads back, broadening to a dark smear-trail as the warmth bleeds out of them, widens, into a trail of breadcrumbs to lead him home.  Or to lead something back to his home on a Hunt of its own; where he Star sleeps, protected only by his hounds; where his housemates Sleep, unaware of the monsters and gods in their midst.

Equally far from him, but just now in the circle of his vision, is a low berm, a rising up with an opening perched low against the snow line.  It's notable because the overhang shadows the ground there from the snow; also for the sense of firelight, a warm glow in counterpoint to the silver of the moonlight all around him.  The pull leads this way, toward the opening in the mound of earth beneath the snow; his Hunt compels him onward.  Beckons him into this low place.  Below the ground.

[Silas]

It is cold in the snow, but the heat, the aggressive life of Silas drives it away from his skin, away from the places where his feet touch.  He is a son of Spring and Summer, of long days and sowing of fields.  He can feel the time coming, can feel it pulling him forward and onward.  He cantersfliesruns towards the gate, and pauses only to look back at the trail he's left, so easily followed to his hearth and home, to people for whom he cares very much (and yes, to the woman he loves [beyond all reason]).  His Aunt has trained him about things like this, though, and he is prepared - there's little he can do about his prints, but he can make sure that he's more interesting to anything that might follow than those he's left behind might be.

And so, with the subdivision and house behind him, there remains little to do but continue forward.  There is a berm with a threshold, and firelight inside, and though Silas doesn't think he'll find game there - he may find a quarry of some sort.  The trail of steps, browngreen smudged through the white snow, continues across the field to the berm, where he pauses outside the door to, perhaps incongruously, knock at the jamb before stepping into the firelight's glow and taking in what he finds there.

Silas is, as always, a Hunter.  Surely there will be some sort of prey.

[The Hunt]

The jamb, as it were, is a decaying dolmen to the left, another to the right, and a crossbeam that has weathered and faded to silvered wood.  He knocks and the vibration of it dislodges dust, and clods from above. It shakes snow from the outcropping to feather-float down around him.  The air is humid, damp and ripe and heavy with the scent of earth.  It is warmer than the snow, but chill cool around his ankles.  The light of the fire is buried within; its flicker-flames reflect off the earthen walls, their shadows of shadows reach up to him.  The way slopes downward until it turns a corner, sharply, and disappears from view.

The cadence of The Hunt is stronger here. He feels beneath his feet and in his bones; he feels it like has has been made the tympani, stretched thin like a membrane; that every part of him might vibrate with it.  And the cadence here is revelry, above the beat there is a thin and threading melody, like string humming just beyond his threshold of hearing, a calling pulling him deep into the earth, singing through his blood and veins.  On the floor, etched into the dirt and almost covered by debris, is the outline of a five petaled flower; it is wreathed in oak leaves; it is worn down to nothing more than mere suggestion.

[Silas]

Silas' feet trace (dance) around the outline of the flower; it is a geometric pattern, and an old one at that.  In other words, it's a suggestion that Silas is, on some level, compelled to follow.  And then, of course, it's down and in, deeper - to be born out of the other end of the tunnel, perhaps.  But there is music, and there is a path to [dance] walk, and there is Mystery and Magic.

Of course Silas goes.

Deeper and further in.

[The Hunt]

The path turns frequently, but always to the left.  To the left and down, to the left and down again, as the air gets warmer and thicker and more humid.  Until is damp, and the walls almost seem to glisten with it, and the light from the fire is sharper, and the smoke carries up to him, and the scent of burning things is mixed with herbs, and the richness of deep hearts-blood, and the strains of melody he thought he heard resolving into the baying voices of creatures in labour, birthing foals and kids and offspring conceived on the night of the last great Hunt.  Children conceived between the Great Rite of Belatine and the crowning of the God and Goddess at Litha.   This is the work of Spring, the heavy thing; the terrifying passage of delivery.  The closer he gets to the fire light, the slicker the floor is.  It is not damp with water alone, but with the smear of blood and afterbirth, with the consequence of fertility magicks: there is new life here, but also the scent of death.  Not all mothers make it; not all foals rise onto their feet.

When the passage opens he stands within a low, circular room, with a domed roof that slants lower and lower until it meets the floor at the edge.  The fire stands in the center of it, burning but never consuming the wood set there as fuel.  The floor is clean, though it still squish-squicks beneath his feet like blood.  The air is thick with smoke, but smells of vitae instead.  In warrens and hollows carved into the margins of the low walls, small game hides from him, watching with the pinprick lights of wary eyes, guarding their young.  Shaped from earth, built low and wide and nearer to the fire, there is a berth, a shallow bed, upon which dried rushes and old hay was piled, atop which a soiled blanket lies. He has come too late to bear witness to the birth of this year's God-child, but His caul remains; His mother-blood is spilled across the blanket.  It does not feel quite right; as if some things did not go easily this year.  On the wall and at the edges of the platform of the bed are bloody handprints; grasping things; echoes of the Mother-goddess and her pain.

There is still the sense of revelry, threaded through this grim and violent place; the almost giddy, cavorting, careless sounds of life unfurling, new and bright and heedless of its own boundaries; incautious of the cost it incurs, the consequence it reaps.  The deeper things in him will understand it; celebration being a vital thing.  Here too, harder to notice at first, are the first seeking shoots of new green growth.  They cluster in the bloody places; they displace death to speak of new beginnings.

[Silas]

Birth, creation, is a violent act.  It tears things apart and restitches them into new patterns, sometimes stronger and sometimes not.  And sometimes, neither mare nor foal rises from the blood, shit, and mud.  These are things that Silas knows; they are things that he has taken into himself, that he more-than-knows.  And so, he pauses at the caul and paints a small design on his flesh with the the hard fought mother-blood.  It's an anointment, of sorts.

Silas has ever been stronger in the use of remains than perhaps his Aunt would like.

Over what is left, the Bonisagean whispers a prayer, a benediction, and then he moves forward.  There is revelry, and it is death and life and lifeanddeath, and still it pulls him.  He can taste the wine, can smell the sweat-soaked bodies that dance as if they can't help it . . . and maybe they can't.  No god of fertility and life and light can exist without their opposites, after all.  And where Silas steps?  Those green shoots that seek light are encouraged.  And those that have already reached a significant height begin to bud behind him.

Now, even more than before, he is pleased with his choice of kilt.  He only wishes he'd left the boots behind with his shirt and the rest - it would do him good to be in contact with the earth, he thinks.  Even the boiled leather soles of these boots is too much.  Soon, he may have to find a place to leave them.

[The Hunt]

He is anointed with the mother's blood, with the blood of the sacrifice, and he can feel the story of it is it worms into his veins. He knows the flicker of firelight; he feels the call of the Wyld; he feels it as she succumbs to the great right, the union of the God and Goddess.  The feels also, the way her belly swell and her gait shifts.  He feels the life within her as if it were within himself; feels it become gravid and cumbersome; feels himself become vulnerable and laid low with it.  It is all right there, under his skin; he is the God and the Goddess; he is The Hunt and The Hunted.  It pulls him farther from himself; it calls his echoes forward.

His senses are sharpened; his humanity is dulled.

He presses onward. At the other side of the low round room is another opening.  This path is dark and leads generally upward as he follows it. The air begins as warm and humid, feral and fecund, and then it thins and cools as the path draws onward.  The humidity condenses, becomes cold against his skin.  There is the crack and roll of thunder, lightning only barely glimpsed at a distance, only the barest echoes of a tunnel's end at the edges of his vision.  There is the smell of ozone, and then rush of runoff at his feet.  Above the ground it is raining; it is raining and it melts the snow; it is raining and it melts the snow and the snowmelt and the rain becomes a river that roars down this narrow hallway of the earth. He can press his hands into the walls on either side of him to steady himself to keep from being swept away by the current that rages and swirls and flows.  

The round room will fill with water.  The rabbits and their broods will drown; the fire will spurt and gutter.  The mother's blood will be wiped clean.  The green things watered, and if the water persists then they too will drown.  He is still Hunting, but there is an urgency to it now, a true challenge to his survival.  The current is strong and the current is swift and the floor here is not any more certain or less slick than it had been on the way in.  It is up to his knees now.  The hem of his kilt is damp.

((Dex + Ath!  Don't get swept away and drown, Hunter!))

[Silas]

Silas' senses are sharpened and his humanity is dulled; he hears the rush of water before he finds himself in it, and is prepared.  His feet (or hooves, or talons) find purchase where others might not as he struggles his way up the tunnel.  There is challenge, and there is need of so many varieties that somewhere the more humanly-conscious parts are probably quite glad that they've been shoved back in favor of some older, colder part of the Hermetic's brain.

He can do nothing for the rabbits or plants in the cavern now, even if he wanted to.  Everything he is says keep going, now rising - he's been to depths, now it's time to rise towards the light.  All there is to do is climb, with hands pressed to walls, pulling him upwards.  It is spring, or nearly so, and even as he takes root, he reaches for the sun.  It is the way of things.

And yes, somewhere in his consciousness, he wants to get back to Arianna.  There is celebration to be had at the end of rebirth.  There is life to (symbolically) create.  The time for new things is here, and whatever Silas and Arianna are to each other?  That, too, is taking root and reaching for light.

Hunter @ 6:37AM

Dex + Ath, spending WP (this makes 4 left)

Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

[The Hunt]
The water rises, until his boots are filled with it; until his kilt is water-logged and hangs heavily, dripping, wet wool plastered against his legs, the smell of lanolin to him.  The climb is harrowing; at times he feels he will be swept away with the current, turn not into a stag or bird but forced rather into a lesser form: fish, perhaps, or frog or simple little water fowl.  There are times when his heel fails to connect firmly with the floor below and for a moment he might fear, fear rising up in him; fear is an element of being reborn; not all go smoothly through the trials of it.  It goes like this, for longer than he thinks it must, until the light that come from the end of the tunnel is stronger, until the scent of ozone and rain overtakes the smell of wet wool and fur and hair.

There is mud on his face now, dark stripes of it, like woad or warpaint.  The tattoo of mother's blood remains, but its margins are eroded.  The marks he made are left unclear, chipped away at.  When he breaches the entrance and steps out into the night, the air is cold up against him.  It bites down on his unprotected skin; it is unforgiving.  Even his natural warmth is not enough to drive out the cold; not on its own.

Silas finds himself just beyond the boundary of a clearing, with a carpet of newborn grass, ringed in pale rock and that ring is broken in five places with the semblance of five, five-petaled flowers.  The path that birthed him shallows out, but only after steepening precariously, and the last bit up must be climbed, breath held and arms employed, all efforts given to simply triumphing over the storm.  Within the clearing, some magic keeps the storm at bay.  Away from it, and back into the darkness, he can only see the extent of the storm when lightning flashes violently across the sky.  It pours and seethes and drenches.  He cannot see the faery lights of home.  He cannot feel the pull of his Star, out this far away from her. Perhaps that means to him that they are not in the same place; that they are not, in fact, together.

Maybe that would be a convenient thing to feel, given as the clearing is anything but clear.  There is a fire at its center, yet another that burns and does not consume.  It is warm and inviting; it too speaks of revelry.  Arrayed around the fire are tables and low benches; the tables studded with ruby-filled glasses, shining in the firelight; little goblets of fire that call back to the greater one, fire for drinking so that the warmth of one's belly might also call out to revelry. The Host here, is a race of tall and slender things.  There are three women, beautiful, clad only in the length of their hair, dancing by the firelight.  Hands together, turn, then hands apart.  It is an old dance, but the beat of it matches the cadence of The Hunt that is thrumming in his skin: remember, Silas as an instrument? A membrane? A shallowing?  They are rowan-haired, and raven-haired, and something pale as flax-haired too.  At the next turn of their dance, the closest one shifts to face him, to extend one long and over-pale arm toward him, to beckon him not with fingertips or with smiles but with the shining intensity of her eyes, with the way the fire casts halos in her hair, with the curve of her hips and the shadows below her bust.  He feels the pull of it, and once he breaks the boundary of the circle he will smell the sweet wine and hear the pipes.

Yes, the pipes, played by a man who perches on a stand of rock within the circle, legs spread wide and the glory of him on display.  He wears a crown of thorns and brambles, twisted very much to look like horns, and plays the pipes with a master's tongue. Beside him is a short, stout bottle of something.  Around him are devotees of all imaginable genders; rapt, yet draped easily amongst one another.  They, too, bid Silas welcome, but with the sort of lazy looking over of shoulders, attention cast only momentarily away from the tumble of others, the press of music.

There is music and dancing. There is food and wine to sate him.  There is warmth to push the cold from his bones, and welcome of another sort to help him bury himself in Spring.  Here, the older things in him, and the press of mother's blood into his skin, and the lowered inhibitions of his will conspire to pull him into revelry.  This, his quarry, well Hunted, shall also be his reward, should he lay down his chase for only a moment. Should he lay down and give himself over to the revelry of Spring?


[Silas]

[The Tunnel]

There are moments of near panic.
There are times that Silas' feet, so sure on solid ground, scrabble for purchase.

It goes like this, for longer than he thinks it must, a fight for light and air and life, and then!  Oh, then it's there, the smell of storm and growing things and the sound of music and crackle of fire, and Silas feels a sense of home, a sense of belonging.  This is not, of course, to be confused with a sense of comfort; bacchanals are not meant to be such, and if one finds them so one is almost certainly not fully grasping the situation in which one has found oneself.  There is dancing, and perhaps there are red shoes of the sort that cause the inability to stop dancing; Silas is descended from at least one who is rumored to have had Fae ties, after all.  There is food and drink, and if he partakes here it would be far from the first time he did so while in questionable company.

Silas makes his way towards the center of the clearing - dances his way there, really.  He takes a partner for a few steps here and there, with little regard for gender.  The trio, yes, they garner his attention . . . and yes, he dances with them.  Perhaps kisses and teases (or, more likely, is teased) as well - but is, now, mindful of the finger on which his ring resides.  He does not dwell on it, nor does he hurry from the fruits of his achievement before he's enjoyed them thoroughly.

[The Hunt]

It's on his skin and under it, the call to more carnal celebrations.  He has the taste of sweet wine on his lips and the warmth of risen bread in his stomach.  There are hands here to tease and touch and tempt.  And some things seem natural: laying his kilt atop a rock beside the fire that he make shake the chill of it.  Setting his boots beside the same that they may dry and his feet might dance more freely.  There is scented oil, to mask the smell of muck and damp wool and struggle that has surrounded him and if the trio applies it perhaps more liberally and with more devotion than is strictly required, well, then, that would be part of his due as Hunter and Celebrant, now wouldn't it?

And mindful as he is about the ring upon his finger, no one else here seems to notice it.  The circle is a place outside of places, in a time outside of time.  There are arguments to be made here for it standing outside of other oaths and circles as well; arguments his body is making to his mind; arguments seconded by his Avatar; secured and vouched for by the God of Hunts.  And the one with raven-locks, she almost has the look of Her at conclave all those years ago.  The eyes are wrong: silvered and without the touch of green. It a thought that grips him as she... grips him in a very forward way.

There are no secret places to lay one's claim upon another here.  The bacchanal is not a private sort of thing.  There are tumbles of bodies, shining and writhing; the energy of the place has turned toward such things as he was dancing.  There, the thorn-crowned King has a young one in his lap, hands wandering and expressions lost to lust and ecstasy.  The trio dances close to him, their bodies touch and tease and tempt him.  Their hands and mouths wander.  The sweep of their hair ghosts in light touches and the smell of them tangles into one scent in his mind.  It is compelling; it is inviting.

[Silas]

They eyes are wrong as she grips him so forwardly and this is the first time Silas has hesitated since this began; there's a thin gold band, heavy on his most significant of fingers, and he knows what he must do.  There are kisses that linger, first - not only on faces, as he collects his things.  Had the ring not been moved, this would go very differently, of course!


The Hunter - a stag, a wolf - doesn't bother completely re-covering himself for the run back home.  He hasn't the patience for that, and so wool trails behind him.  Feet are bare.  He is as the Gods made him, and silentfleet of foot when he enters the house.  Perhaps his hounds wake when their master returns; perhaps they even know something of what happened.  It seems unlikely that the hounds of someone such as he would be completely oblivious to who, and what, he is.

It's up the stairs, then, and to his Star in his bed.  Kilt and boots are dropped in a puddle on the floor, and with leaves still in his hair he slides in beside Arianna.  Lips find hers and are hungry; perhaps she can taste the remnants of Faerie food and wine on his lips and tongue when she registers their presence.  But he is not content with lips and tongue for long - soon, soon, there are hands on hips, and fingers in deeper places.  Soon, his mouth is on her chest, her breasts.  Silas is insistent, he is demanding.

It is Spring.

In which Silas's Keep is visited

Arianna: [Chez Giametti]

In 2016, most young people, or even people of a certain age, who are possessed of an inclination to get ahold of one another, rely on the pricking of their thumbs and the promise of technology to bridge the gap.  Most people have a smart phone or tablet or other digital device attached to them at all times.  Most people, but not Arianna Giametti, who has only mild interest in text messages and absolutely no need for an intelligent telephone of any design.

There are older ways of finding one another.  Messages left in common places; haunting of the same; word of mouth -- all vetted, and relatively reliable, but predicated on interlopers.  Then there are methods that pull upon the sacred and more perfect truths of the world around them, things submerged beneath the knowable, quantifiable whole.

Of course, as a Hermetic of the most Hermetic House, Arianna chooses to scry for Silas.  To throw her voice across the space between them using little more than her Will and her instruments alone.  It is not a simple thing, but it is made easier by the bonds between them, by the thin band of silver on the ring finger of her right hand, by the string of syllables spoken in a tumble of tongues (Languages, Invocation) as she sets the incense (Air) to smouldering in the low, shallow basin (Circle) on the broad and covered patio of her now and empty home.  

[The Bachelor Pad]

They are bound together, and so it is inevitable that her spell will find him, that it will cause a ripple in the sound-fabric around him, a shared space, a thing that listens as well as speaks.  It is possible that Silas feels it, this tugging at the warp and weaving, before a familiar voice disturbs his concentration or relative peace.


What does a Hunter do with hounds and roommates when he is idle, when the Hunt is laid low?


"Silas Owen Arthur."  Stated. As if his name were being called at roll in a conclave or classroom.  This is the first that comes through on his side, the end of her incantation, the stating of his name (though not the whole and true of it) to let the link between them pass both ways.  She is about to say: Robinson. He knows it. But perhaps the space of six-syllables is enough for him to react and stop her.


Silas: [The Bachelor Pad]


He feels it pulling (shining) before sound peals, and it's only by virtue of recognizing the voice that blocks (he's not good enough for wards, but he can manage basic blocks well enough) remain down.  That and, "Silas, dude, you butt dialed your mom," paired with music, and the sound of men doing something, keep him from reacting very differently indeed.  It's congenial, the response, even jovial.

"And now I'll have to talk to her, too.  Be right back, Tone."  There is a difference between totally confirming what whoever this 'Tone' is has said and simply rolling with the excuse that's presented itself.  One imagines that whatever window Arianna is using to speak to Silas follows him out of the room; there's the near-silence of him walking, and then the soft closing of a door.  There's quiet for a moment, and perhaps she can imagine the postures and gestures that come along with Silas gathering himself - goodness knows, his Star has seen them before.  There's a fond, canine 'Rarfff!', and then, "Stella.  Where are you?  Are you alright?"  Because of course something must be wrong for her to have contacted him this way rather than by more mundane means.

Perhaps this Hunter has spent to long among Sleepers.  Or perhaps Arianna hasn't yet spent long enough.

Arianna: [Chez Giametti]

This is different, this portal tied to his person and not to some familiar thing in his Chantry rooms.  It is common enough that they conversed through sendings like this, but in a very different time and place.  There is consequence, in the plain and sleeping world, for brazen magics such as these.  It will find her shortly after, catch her up in some misfortune for playing fast and loose with the rules of the realm.  For now, though, she is quietly immersed in the sense of being half here and half adrift with her extended senses.  She has only thrown her voice and not her sight, and thankfully so as her actions have been witnessed, so his postures are left to her imagining.

"I am home," she says, but that is hardly enough to sate him so she says, "More precisely the house that will become my home here, but which now stands empty like a page untouched --" And then, it registers, the concern underlying his second question.  It curls her mouth, and perhaps he too can imagine it. "I'm fine, Silas, dude," she cannot shape the word without mild mockery of Tone, the roommate, and perhaps this is why reality will backhand her so thoroughly shortly.  For now, though, her voice is unperturbed and resonant, warm and inviting.  "Bored, if you must know, and somewhat in want of company.

A pause, in which only silence ripples through the gate between them.  It is still and quiet on her end of the connection, unperturbed by hounds or housemates or other noisy things.  It is possible, then, that his Star has used this manner of greeting for something for which a text message might have sufficed.  If they had exchanged numbers.  If they trusted her phone to work long enough for texting. 

Silas: [The Bachelor Pad]

Everything about Silas had been prepared to go on a hunt (or a Hunt, as the case may be), so now it's a slow relaxation as he perches on the edge of his bead, a hand reaching down to ruffle the ears of the hound that's followed him to his room.  Fainter, further in the background, there's still the sounds of things going on.  Strains of music, and other such things that go along with a house occupied.

"Love, you really must be more cautious with that sort of thing here."  And then, warm, wry amusement.  "Tony thinks I rung up my mother on accident, so we're saved what might have been a very awkward explanation, indeed.  Shall I come to you, or would you rather come here?"

Because if she's bored and in want of company, and called him, she must want one or the other, no?  In some ways, Silas wants the same.  Since they were children, things have often seemed simply (no, nothing is simple between them) better in her company.

Arianna: [Chez Giametti]

It is difficult to remember, when he calls her Stella or he names her Love, that they are so recently returned to one another. That years upon years have passed.  It is comfortable, and warm beyond reason. They have the ready excuse of the promises they've made, but this surpasses that easily.  Ari's eyes are unfocused as she watches the swirl and feathering of the smoke above the basin, disturbed as it is by the echoes of his voice.  This, too, is comforting in a world that is fast forgetting magic.  This is a little more like home.

"We both counsel now to caution," she remarks, and there is both surprise and wry amusement to it.  She had cautioned him when they first met, and now he warns her.  It is not their usual type of push and pull.  Time, or age, or experience has made them wary, less wayward and wind-be-damned.  It warms her that he worries, but it saddens her that they might be getting older.  In the way that older hearts are slow to wonder, quick to judgement, and bound by over many oaths.  "How the years have changed us both.  And how obviously your Tony has not met the singular entity that inhabits your mother."

Hah, then, amusement abounds.  Not that Arianna had been well and truly introduced as a woman whose oath binds the Incendiary's son.  No no, well taught is she to avoid such indelicate conversations.  Like as not, the Arrow of Artemis is unaware that Silas holds the same over his one and only daughter.

"You are welcome here, but the halls are sparse.  No, not sparse: they are empty.  I rummaged a few things together to leverage the Passage of Swift Mercury's Message," ah, yes, forever Hermetics and their love of titled things.  "Perhaps we would be more comfortable," and, likewise, more entertained, "If I came to you."

Silas: [The Bachelor Pad]

"I do not inflict the pleasure that is my mother on anyone, if it can be avoided.  Certainly not on Sleepers."  Still, there's amusement, and truth as well.  "They have met Father, though.  He confuses and delights them.  They think him quite the eccentric."  As, of course, do many of the Orders members.  What Silas' mother, an elite member of an elite House, ever saw in him has often been a matter of gossip and debate - and their union produced Silas himself, who falls somewhere between the two on scales of whimsy, temper, and more.

The way he speaks with her, in private, is very different than what she heard when he was still in the presence of this fellow he's called Tone; this is what feels natural to her, familiar.  The other is strange, and so Common.

"Will you find your way to me, or must I provide an address and directions?"  This is light, teasing, and yes - he's pleased to have her come.  That his roommates will appreciate her as he does seems to be a given in his eyes, though her accepting them similarly?  He finds that less likely.  "Fair warning, it will be a full house soon.  Though we can seek sanctuary in my room if desired."  When they spoke at the coffee shop, Silas hadn't indicated how many roommates there were, or how big the house, or anything.  As she had, he'd assumed they would find each other when it became a stronger need.

Arianna: [Arianna]

"As I have just be cautioned on the wanton use of household magics," she begins, the note of imperiousness in her tone is wreathed in mischief and merriment. "I suppose you'll have to provide directions."  And one supposes that such things are exchanged, and Arianna notates them somehow using the materials she has on hand.  Or, perhaps, she commits them to some sort of intractable memory, a tiny spell of mind and memory, a thing for which he will scold her later.

She makes no comment on his colorful and eccentric father.  Arianna hasn't had the pleasure, at least not recently, of Malcalypse's company.  So she pretends, as does much of the Order most of the time, that no news is good news when it comes to the Xaosian.  

"I'll stop at the grocery and pick some things up, in case I decide to stay for dinner."  She tells him.  Most would ask, but Arianna seems certain that the circle of his invitation extends to however long she wishes to stay this day.  It is snowing out, too, so there is likely some point of the evening where it becomes impractical and unwise to travel home in the darkness and storm.  "I'll bring enough to feed your soon to be full house."  

These are mundane things for them to discuss, the measure and style of which have never come up before them in the past.  Usually it was Arianna pulling him away from one gathering or another; or Silas stealing her from symposiums and studies.  Appearing together in a crowd is a less practiced thing.  Making dinner together, or for one another; visiting one or the other's sovereign demesne.  These are all new and untested.  The meeting of roommates -- hah. Yes, uncharted waters indeed.

There are parting words, endearments undoubtedly and other gentle things, between them before the portal shifts and thins and disappears and they are left with the stunning silence of their own spaces.  The background sounds from hers had been faint, but still it leaves him with a sense of absence.  She was close, and is now far again.  Their transits shift and stretch and wander.

Silas: And so it is that, after a moment of recovering from the feeling of Arianna's nearness being taken away so abruptly (not that he hadn't had warning), Silas heads from his room to make sure everything's presentable (the men living here are not particularly slob-ish, but are all men who live far away from their families and don't always have girlfriends.  So there is some quick neatening while Arianna is at the grocery and on her way.

".....is your mom coming over or something?"  This from Tony, though he helps with an easy camaraderie when Silas explains the circumstances.  For all that the bro-pack knows Silas as a womanizer, as a magnet for certain types of women, he hasn't brought any home, nor given any indication that he takes any of the ones they've seen him with seriously at all.  Clearly something is different about this woman - and she's bringing food, so that's a definite bonus.  As the other roommates arrive home, they help as well; even Damon and Pythias get in on it by putting their toys in the box where they belong.

So by the time Arianna arrives from her stop at the store, there are four roommates to help carry in whatever she's bought, and to introduce themselves.

"Hey, you must be Arianna.  I'm Mark."  "Dante."  "Tony."  All three offer some sort of handshake or high five, and these introductions are so easy, uncomplicated, and utterly lacking in titles or Words.  And she's brought food, so already she's alright in their book.  Bottomless stomachs are not a phenomenon unique to adolescent boys, after all.

Arianna: [Arianna]



The grocery store is uneventful.  She finds the things she seeks with relative ease, and the thin sheen of resonance that is still wrapped around her causes some others to give her easy passage, wider berth -- Arianna capitalizes on this, and moves through the mundane space without impediment.

When she arrives at Silas's home, it is well and truly snowing out.  Just on the walk from wherever she has parked the car to the front stoop of his home, she has acquired a constellation of snowflakes in her hair, slowly melting in her body warmth.  Perhaps it is easy for the bro-pack to understand why this woman, of all the women Silas has chased or courted, is different.  There is an aire of self-possession to her, evident in the tip of her jaw and the easy posture she adopts among strangers.  There is, still, the feeling of starlight, luminous and mercurial, shifting and shining about her, marking her as somehow othered.  From the grass green of her eyes to the curl of her mouth in greeting, they are struck with the sense that her presence or absence could launch ships, could beach them in the shoals, that she could be the Lorelei or the Leanansidhe; that epics and tales of older times gave names and cautions to women like this; that she could lead them astray just as easily as she led them home; that for Silas, in so many ways, all of this was true (she leads him home).

Mark is first to introduce himself, so Arianna hands over to him the bag of groceries she has brought -- a loaf of soft, warm Italian bread protrudes from the opening, as does a sheaf of fresh herbs.  Inside is meat, and tomatoes, and garlic and mushroom; wine of course, more wine than they strictly need for a gathering of five; the makings for pasta; broccoli raab to go with the same.  "It's a pleasure," she tells him.  The handshake is returned.

Dante and Tony, the names come almost at the same time.  Arianna repeats their names and then says, with hope brimming in her eyes and an accent that can be nothing less than native: Sei italiano? Lo parli? Ho così mancano i suoni della casa.

High fives are less familiar to her than handshakes, but she is clever and cunning and quick on the uptake.  She is almost always ready to trade in the coin of the realm, so when fives are extended, they are met with her right hand -- the hand that bears the thin silver ring around her most significant finger.  And this is all well and good, this greeting of men and this exchange of names, but Arianna has stopped short of crossing into their home without invitation.  Each exchange that draws her close to the boundary tugs at the echoes of bygone eras that she carries in her breast, in her bones, in her blood.  There is a thin line, marked by the doorway and threshold of their home.  It remains barred to her until someone inevitably and overtly welcomes her in.  

This exchange of greeting gives him time to watch and study her.  There is, already, the slightest burr to her voice, a harbinger of what is to come.  She is less guarded of herself than usual, less pulled back and remote.  The truth of her shines more outwardly; she is warm and inviting to his sleeper friends; she is not so careful when they finally reach each other and her hand comes up to cup his cheek, and her mouth seeks his in greeting.  It's is a little deeper than a kiss in front of the bro-pack should be; a bit more heady and inviting.  Silas can wonder if she's staking claim, or establishing her rank in the pecking order, or any of a thousand more hermetic things than this: she has been adventuring. She is half-spent and still thrumming with the conquest of it.  She has come to bask in his warmth and the circle of his safety, but also to gentle that space and to feed his horde of housemates.

"I've missed you," she tells him, when their voices are cast low and intimate and they have not yet pulled back from one another.  She could mean over the last few days, but there is a note to it that says her scale is different.  She is not talking about a portion of a week; she means in this last chunk of her lifetime.

Silas: The answers from Tony and Dante come quickly, and easily - Tony first, though he seems the most bro-tastic of all of them, and in some ways the least likely to answer so fluently.  "Parlo un po 'italiano, imparato da mia nonna. Imparato a fare le polpette, anche - e salsa siciliana! Molto meglio."  He could go on more, too, but instead takes in his bags after the tips of his fingers are kissed with a dramatic flourish.  Dante's answer is slower and more halting, spoken like someone who took a class once but never solidified the knowledge with true experience.  "Ho studiato al liceo, quanto basta per laurearsi."  Then he, too, heads inside - though not until he asks, "Want us to start chopping or anything?  Tony's the best cook of us."

And with her answer, all three boys are inside while Silas returns her kiss, and holds her close.  What a pretty picture the two of them make there, in the snow - the way they fit together, the way they respond to each other on such an instinctive level.

"And I, you.  Come in, before your throat gets worse."  But not before he kisses her again, long and deep; a claim, an older magic, who knows.  Once inside, he points at the dogs, waiting patiently for their own introduction - seated, well behaved.  "That's Damon, and that's Pythias.  The former is generally aloof, and the latter is usually friendly."

The house is full of sound, of light, of green and growing things that are out of season even for inside, but blooming all the same - and they turn to Silas as though he is their sun.  Where the entry way opens up is a living space filled with comfy seating, a large TV, an impressive stereo system, a foosball table, and bookshelves.  Through a doorway she can see a large, open kitchen and dining area.  Somewhere there is a hallway to bedrooms and a bathroom, and stairs to another bedroom and bathroom.  It's neat and clean, but clearly lived in by a handful of bachelors and two large hounds.

"I'm pleased that you've come."  And he hasn't let go of her hand; his is warm, and casually possessive.

Arianna: [Arianna]

It was a stretch, of course, asking the bros if they spoke Italian, and asking with such hope so forward in her eyes. But it brings the mellifluous tongue out in Tony, whose fluency brings a pleased and approving curl to the corner of her mouth, and even Dante strings together a passing stab at her native tongue.  

"Meraviglioso!" This is for them both, with the sort of warmth that brokers and binds fast friendship.  "Herbs and garlic would be the place to start.  We'll be generous," she tells him, mischief forward and recipes be damned. "And we should speak, some times," she says, gesturing between them to emphasize the connection.  "In italiano... This language is nearer the heart," a smirk, "And also the stomach.  Food cooked in Italian tastes better," she tells them, with the certainty and smugness only a daughter of the Romans can manage.

And then they three have tasks that take them away, and she is so overtly pleased with herself for drawing out the language in them, for finding something more than Silas to connect with them on. This satisfaction bleeds into the way they kiss each other, in tangles in her starlight, it swamps her concern over her marred voice and scratchy throat until he remarks upon them and she, with a sort of hapless shrug pushes aside his worries over her well being.

"It's nothing, Si," she says about her throat.  Though these words are rougher yet than even a minute ago.  "Just the parting gift of some adventure in the local mountains."  This, oh, is just a teaser-tell of something greater.  Something to share when they are well and truly alone.  For a Bonisagus, one of the more bookish Houses of the Order, she has a great and terribly knack for finding mischief of one sort or another.  

The slip of her coat is smooth-hushed within the circle of his arms; it is a fluffy thing, stuffed with down and made of pale grey (starlight) fabric.  It gives her the illusion of breadth and depth she doesn't have, so when they move inside and she slips out of it, they fit together all the better.  Her sweater underneath is pale pink lambswool and cashmere.  It is immanently touchable.  The perfectly pressed collar of a white dress shirt peeks out of the vee of her sweater; its cuffs extend at her wrists; she wears slacks that are precisely tailored but of a heathered grey so as not to be too formal -- still, it is clear from the silhouette of her style that she does not worry much over the cost of her clothes; she is finely if reservedly attired.  There is a significant heel on the boots she wears and one is laced just loosely enough that her wand can rest against the inside of her ankle -- always at the ready; occupational (and hereditary) hazard.

Damon and Pythias are met with the sort of careful regard that Silas would expect her to give His Hounds.  This lasts until she has taken her measure of them. Though her thoughts are opaque, she seems to have some immediate fondness for them.  While she does not dishonor them by kneeling down and fawning over them, she does extend a hand, low and open as an empty blade, for inspection as they pass.  

When Silas does let loose her hand, the same reaches around his waist to settle on his side.  She is comfortably snugged in beside him; they fit together just so, it has been noted.  The roommates are in the kitchen and already the smell of garlic and fresh herbs rises to compliment the verdant climate of his home.  She brightens it, this warm and welcoming place. She brings her other arm across his middle so that, from the side, she is loosely embracing him.  Her chin tipped up to rest on the ridge of his shoulder.  Her fingers and her face are cold from the short walk in the snow, but they are warming quickly.  "Will you help me in the kitchen, too?" she asks, but it is muddled through with seriousness and also daring.  Cookery is not their usual sort of ritual and magic, but it an essential thing in binding hearts and minds together.  She is already fast winning fealty from his pack of bros; perhaps this, too, is underlaid in the simple question.

Silas: Damon, white with some black markings around his face and head, is quiet and reserved; he studies Arianna as intently as she weighs him, and is unclear about how he finds her after deigning to sniff the offered limb.  Pythias is less so, and after sniffing her hand bumps up against her legs, only barely repressing the desire to jump, to lick, to do all the exuberant dog things that dogs do.  It's when the hound is about Arianna's legs that Silas notices the wand; his eyebrow raises when he does, and he looks at her questioningly.  "Did you truly think you'd need that here, I wonder?  And if so, to what purpose?"  It's mostly teasing, the question is, and then she's wrapping an arm back around him and he around her.  After so long apart - not the recent days, but the months and years leading to them - Silas finds it difficult to not have some level of physical contact when she's near.  Thankfully for him, it seems that she has a similar trouble.


Will you help me in the kitchen, too, she asks, and he laughs - a warm, low burr of sound kept quiet and just for them.  "I'm not much use in the kitchen beyond cutting things, or sticking them in the microwave.  But yes, I'll help - perhaps by keeping the wine flowing, and beers coming."

The kitchen is full of tile and an interesting composite counter that appears to be a mosaic-style thing of colored glass.  There is an island, and more counter space than most people might consider a household of four bachelors needing.  Here, the music is piped in from the living room, with speakers strategically placed to produce the best sort of environment.  Every now and then, one or the other of the bros will sing a line, or a chorus - mostly badly, and for extreme dramatic effect or emphasis of the conversational flow.

But always, Silas is nearest to Arianna - and the bros seem to know on a very base level that that's how it should be.  They are friendly, asking about family and what she does for a living, where she's from, where she's been, what she likes, and so on, but all keep a respectful physical difference.  Here, perhaps Silas can be considered the alpha.

"Tony knows what to do, for the most part, if you tell him what to make.  Dante needs a recipe.  Mark and I need better direction than that."

Arianna: [Arianna]

He asks her if she truly felt she needed her wand in his keep, and there is a troubled and thoughtful thing in her eyes when she considers the question. Denver is, after all, at the brink of the kind of war that sundered the Aegis of the Order, the sort of cold and brutal war that took prisoners on both sides to no good ends.  They are children of the foremost soldiers from the old and fading fronts.  Does she think she'll need it? Only to good ends.  Does she hope she'll need it? Only to good ends. Will she be caught without it when the standards rise and war breaks over the mountains? Never, never, never to good ends at all.  These things are all caught up in the murkiness of eyes when he mostly teases; closer to the shallower and clearer than they really ought to be.  And though she tries to shift them out of focus with the way her nose wrinkles in laughter at his mock-mockery, they remain just below the shallowings.  The eyes, see, are portals to the soul.

In the kitchen...

"My native tongue and men who cook?" Faux swoon, back of hand to head, very Scarlett O'Hara.  The tuck of something troublesome and taunting just below the shape of her smile.  It bolsters them; it lifts them up.  "Be still my heart, Silas," she says, though the fondness toward him is far more genuine. 

It is clear that he is their alpha, the leader of this unlikely fellowship. As well he should be as their one and only Awakened member.  Lesser Wills do not lead; they follow.  It is clear the is their alpha, but is equally so that he is not hers for the deference she gives him is measured -- this is his keep -- and in keeping with their etiquette, but she is warm and playful as she engages them, engenders easy conversation and friendship. Tony, an early favorite, gets instructions in Italian; Dante is shown a tip for this or that with gestures and little flourish -- it gives Silas a window into the sort of teacher she will some day be, when the Bonisagus call her home to conclave for longer than a week or month or half-year.  When she is possessed of apprentices of her own.

Where is she from?  She was born in Italy, and oh how she misses the Mediterranean climate just now. Dramatic wistful far off look. Roguish grin.
Where has she been? Off on adventures.  Most recently to the Eastern seaboard.  And briefly to the ragged shores of  Ireland.  But now, here, to the wild west -- Is it truly wild? What wilderness and mischief is there here?
What does she do?  She is an Artist.  Arianna is a master penman; a calligrapher elite.

Which perhaps does not jive with what the bros have seen of her this far.  This tangle of languages -- once it is established that none of the Bros speak German, and that Si still does, this is the lingua franca bewteen them for things said in open confidence.  By now she is working on making dough for pasta.  She has pushed up the sleeves of her shirt and sweater until they are bunched above her elbows.  (There is an angry olive and navy bruise along the outside edge of her left arm, just below the elbow. It does not seem to trouble her as she works.)

"Here. Watch," she tells the disbelieving bros as she spreads the dry pasta flour out on a large cutting board.  With nothing more precise than a fingertip, she writes their names, one by one, with uncompromising precision and effortless flourish.  There is no nuance of line or nib, no flow of ink, just valleys in shadows and brightness on crests, but it is enough for them to take her measure.  Between each name she mercilessly draws the flat of her hand across the board, creating a smooth new surface for the next name.

And now, for her next trick, she will turn them into pasta -- an unsettling thought that might only occur to Silas; that like witches and wise women of old and treacherous stories, she might bake their Name of Names into something and feed it back to them. Which is certainly not the overtone here.  She is not that treacherous; not so certain to beach them at the foot of rocky cliffs.

As she works with and around them, her orbit always brings her back to him.  Perhaps because her wine glass is there; and she is new enough to Denver that it does not take much to bring pink enough to cheeks to match that of her sweater.  Perhaps because the nearness they keep to one another confirms for the bros that, however warm and welcoming and knavish Arianna is with each of them, she is inexorably tied to Silas; that they are paired and partnered in ways that do not surface readily in the shallows of her eyes.  By the time the roast is in the oven and the pasta dough has been kneaded and is resting, her voice has roughened to a noticeable rasp.  Her spirits do not seem dampened, but it is possible that the storm raging outside of these warm and verdant halls has touched more than her hair with its frozen fingers.

They will settle somewhere, while the meal does not require their collected attention.  With wine and music and camaraderie.  And Ari will rest on the arm of Silas's chair, or tucked in beside him on the couch, where she can watch the rest of the pack -- both human and canine -- and participate in the revelry, but with an ever-lessening voice.  Where she can be close enough to touch, or better yet if she is in the circle of his arm.  Outside the snow is piling up, inches upon inches falling fast and white beyond the windows.  Inside the smell of roasting meat is paired with garlic and green herbs; is paired with the bouquet of wine against their palates or the prick of hops for those drinking beer.  There is merriment and laughter, for she can partake in laughter without a voice; she can be jovial and warm and celebratory without saying much, and she can goad them into foosball sport, or games and mischief from a place on the couch where she can nurse (obscure) her worsening condition.

Silas: Silly games of Trivial Pursuit, or Pictionary, or Taboo, or that sort of pastime are fairly standard in this house; the men banter and bandy easily, and though Silas is the newest addition to this particular pack he rules it well and truly.  During their interaction, Arianna learns much about the bros - their occupations, that only one of them (Mark) is a Colorado native, that all have families wherever they're from, that Tony has a fiancee, Mark has a boyfriend, Dante is single, and so on.  They, in turn, learn that she is the source of the ring that has moved from Silas' right middle finger to his ring finger, that the two Hermetics have known each other since childhood, and similar details that can be kept fairly superficial.  The bros know a lot about their roommate, and everything they know is true?  But it's far from the whole truth.

While dinner is cooking and games are afoot, Silas and Arianna share a seat that is larger than a chair but smaller than a loveseat.  This allows the cuddling that Arianna seems to crave in the moment, and gives Silas reason to notice that her voice is getting worse and worse.  This means that, without asking, she finds a mug of tea with lemon and honey (and just a touch of whiskey - medicinal, of course!  Nothing more) at hand before too long.  It's a small, subtle thing that's done without drawing the bros' attention to it.

"Are you well, Stella?"  This comes while the bros are distracted, paying little attention to the lovers in their throne.

Arianna: [Arianna]

It goes like this, when they are asked how they met, with her voice pitched low to inspire a sense of conspiracy amongst them, and also out of necessity for it is raw and aching now.  But there, the light in her eyes gleams like mercury on glass, she is Cunning and oh so adept at bending minds and hearts her way.

"Where we come from," she tells them, drawing them closer over their cups as imparting some great and terrible secrets.  Lean in, her body language and smile bids them and like a good audience and to a man, they do.  And this next she says with a twist her mouth but the full authority of self-belief, "I am like a princess. And our Silas? He is like a prince.  And our houses are great and reach back into the time of myth and mystery and legend.  So it was written, when we were children, that we would meet and marry." This, said so matter of factly, so absolutely straight-faced and evenly that the absurdity of it becomes the joke.

"I thought you were from --" one of them starts. And the illusion breaks for the other two.  "Hah, fine, then don't tell us."  She winks and curls back into the hollow she has left at Silas's side.  This may have been the opportunity he takes to bring her tea, doctored as it is, to address the growing issue of her dwindling voice.  The bros are distracted, having turned back to their games after Ari's brief game.

His voice is low and kept between the two of them, and her answer is likewise discreet: a brief shake of her head, a hand placed momentarily over her throat, where her larynx is and where the ache seems worst and most localized.  "It isn't bad," she tells him,moving her hand away to hold the warmth of the mug, but her voice has lost their warmth and is mostly whisper now.  Having no skill in Ars Vitae, she succumbs to cold and over-exertion like any other mortal coil.

Silas: Silas can't help but laugh and shake his head when the story Arianna tells is so close to truth; given their parentage and upbringing, the Hunter and the Star are, indeed, as near to royalty as such things come.  They only thing that would bring them closer is parents with more lauded titles.  And their meeting and marrying being written somewhere in Hermeticism's annals?  Well, it wouldn't make any less sense than what has happened between the two of them.  Given what Silas knows of what certain members of the Order in general and House Flambeau in specific wanted of his mother before she chose Malcalypse instead, it wouldn't even be that surprising.  At least, he thinks, he is falling (or has fallen) into it willingly, without the drama and troubles Elizabeth faced.

Perhaps this is what is intended.
Perhaps this is what is written.

"Dinner will be ready soon," the Hunter murmurs into his Star's ear, underaroundthrough the raucous hilarity of the bro-pack as they continue drinking and playing their games.  "Perhaps after we've eaten, you should rest.  Will you stay, or will you brave the roads that take you home through this snow?"  He's given her room and ability to move, but there is ever some sort of contact - after so long apart, after all that's happened between them, it may be a matter of needing reassurance that she's truly here, that she's with him.  Or maybe it just feels better to have that connection.  It's difficult to tell.

Arianna: [Arianna]

It is just a story to tease and torment the bro-pack; Arianna doesn't worry overmuch about whether their fates have been written down together in some great Book of Ages -- partly because they met when they were young, too young to know the truth of their names and to be bent, so completely, by them.  Too young, also to have chosen their Houses and lineages like these will not fall to lesser ones.  Elizabeth may have chosen Mal, but the son did not follow him into Xaos.  Her line continued on in a noble House.  These things work out; or they become even more fascinating stories.

The contact is pleasing; it is comforting.  It is a balm in the wake of the adventuring and magic she has performed that leave her spent, a little thinner and more open to influence.  She has aches and bruises they have not yet touched upon, reminders of her carelessness away up high where the air is thin and bracing, and he is warm, and he is hers and his pack of sleepwalkers are welcoming and amusing.  And she wonders, the way every Hermetic ever has wondered, why they Sleep.  And if they wouldn't be better in one of the Houses; and to which House they might be assigned.  She has as little impetus to leave his side as he has want of her going, but when he asks about her travel home, Arianna raises herself up enough to look out the window at the falling snow.

"If I go," she says, though it already sounds unlikely, "I should probably go soon and not wait on dinner.  It's really coming down out there..." 

She is still raised away from him, cantilevered on one arm, which presses into the back of the over-sized chair; it lifts her up enough that she can see out of the window.  A stitch of concern mars her brow.  And it is true that her illness is till getting worse; it has not plateaued, leveled out, come even.  He sees it in the light flush of her cheeks; pinked from more than wine and trending toward rosy. Here, voice cast low, low because there is no other volume, now, at which she can speak, she is not directly worried about being overheard (and, besides, Hermeticism is its own secret language): "And I haven't the skills with Ars Fortunae to assure safe passage in the storm." 

It is not the first time she has lamented the absence of this education in herself. Not even the first time in the space of the last two days.  All of this, of course, leads back to the gentle intimation that she would rather stay.  That she would rather indulge in this warmth, in the echoes of their past and future meetings; that after so much first hand experience with Winter, the eddying sense of coming Spring is a thing sought from him, drunk deeply of, and left to burrow into her heart and veins; that it may sluice this weariness and coldness and the chill of long-borne isolation.  But tonight, it is a clearer want; and it is a simpler want; and it has less to do with him being one of Pan's right-hand-men.  It is everything about him being Silas, and being hers, and being here.

Silas: If I go . . .

"Stay," comes, but not too quickly or too eagerly, not a command or even a request, but a suggestion.  "We've plenty of food and drink, and plenty of space.  Come, I'll show you."

While dinner cooks and the bros continue their pastimes, Silas gives her a full tour of the house - points out where the bros sleep, where he's already begun preparations for a garden in the back, where various things are done and kept on the main floor, where the basement door leads to storage, and finally where the stairs heading up lead to his room, tucked into the eaves in what was, originally, a simple bonus space and is now a fairly large bedroom with its own en suite and alcoves and so many bookshelves.  Downstairs is, for the most part, fiction with a few computer language or medical or physical training books thrown in; the shelves here are different.  This could be a small library (though his true Library is tucked away somewhere, not evidenced on these shelves so near to the public).  Here there is fiction, yes, but there's so much more variety of everything than downstairs.  There is a nook with a divan (of course he has a divan) under a window, clearly a reading area.  In two corners are dog beds, and where there are not shelves, there are more plants - including a few orchids, in which he showed such an early interest.  None is as vividly Alive as the one he gave her, though.  None was so carefully crafted to bring its nurturer to mind.

His bed is large and inviting, and as hedonistic in appearance as one might expect of someone like Silas - though there's no evidence of anyone but him having laid in it.  And tonight, he is less the devotee of a god of fertility and virility and more a man in the company of a woman for whom he cares very much.

"There are no extra rooms or beds, but there's this.  And you're welcome to it."  Again, he's holding Arianna's hand - until she wants her freedom to study his plants or his shelves.

Arianna: [Arianna]

Not long from now they will be touring together her own home, with its library and workspace, with its collection of poetry, philosophy, fiction, mythology, and estoerica spanning multiple languages and ethnographies.  It is a very different library than his own, but there are places where they overlap.  She looks, of course, for the small volume of stories she had given him when they were children -- checks out of folly more than in expectation of finding it there.  It is the truncated version of many adventure stories; the daring sort of derring do that catch the reader up, leave the breathless.  She has always liked the heart-in-your-throat stories, the things that stretch the heroes into more than they had seemed in the start.  She has always liked the threat of failure.  And then, Arianna had also liked the sort of daring that paints emotion into words that ripple like water and fall like rain.  When he quotes Whitman to her, she answers in Neruda.  And there are things that she keeps in her library simply because they are beautiful; entirely for form over content; because the illumination is stunning or the penmanship is divine and not because they have written the names of the heavens among them.

But there is no science fiction.  There is high fantasy, but sparingly and only when it evokes the echoes of some other thing.  There is most certainly no computer science or even medical texts -- beyond treatises on the medicinal uses of herbs; things they were required to study as part of their Hermetic education (which is the only education that she has known).  The sight of orchids brings a softer smile to her; hers thrives still and will soon be in Denver for his inspection.

She transits briefly, and then comes back to stand beside him, as if she were one of his verdant disciples, basking in his warmth and light.  She is more independent than that, but perhaps not so very much so this evening.

"You've quite a Keep," she tells him. Or tries.  What was ragged in her voice is raw now; overtly aching.  You--and then the croak, that's all that comes.  Her hand again alights on her throat; a dismayed look crosses her features, and segues to frustration.  She taps her fingers against her throat, twice, and shakes her head.  No more.  No more tonight.  This laryngitis has come on worryingly quickly, deepening over the course of an hour or two to a thing that demands and enforces her silence.  There is apology in her eyes, all but willed across the space between them, that he might understand she did not intend to come to him lacking, or broken in this way; that this was not her intent for the evening.

Silas: Automatically, naturally, Silas' hand comes to her forehead to feel for a fever then her throat to feel for issues there; perhaps he's distracted by the feel of Arianna's skin under his hand, or the noise downstairs, or the smell of that delicious roast filling the house.  Whatever the reason, it takes him longer than usual to get what he's looking for, and it brings a concerned furrowing of brow.  His hand is as warm there as anywhere else, and when it drifts away he leans in to kiss her forehead.

"Maybe you should rest early, after dinner.  Extra sleep may heal the damage faster."  He can feel her resonance shining, naturally, but not that this is the effect of overexertion of her will.  So it is that he offers remedies that would aid her were this a more mundane sort of illness, but probably won't given what it is instead.  "Are you up for more time downstairs now?"

This is what his mouth says, not what his mind is thinking.  It's been quite some time since the were in a place like this together, after all.  But dinner will be soon, and there are the bros downstairs.

Hunter
 @ 9:23AM
[sense flaw: Life pattern, Life 1, practiced, coincidental]
Roll: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 3) ( fail )
Hunter
 @ 9:24AM
[sense flaw: Life pattern, Life 1, practiced, coincidental]
Roll: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 6) ( success x 1 )

Arianna: [Arianna]

What Silas reads in her pattern is not only the hallmark of an uncompromisingly swift cold, but also the badges of courage and foolhardiness that have blossomed along her left side.  Angry olive and navy bruises just below her left elbow, across her ribs of the same side, at her hip and along the outside of her shin, earned by sliding partway down a frozen, rocky precipice.  She does not favor them, but they are deep enough to warrant some concern.  These are strange decorations for her to wear without explanation.  They will open avenues of conversation, surely, once her voice is steadied, and she will tell him with bright and shining eyes the tale of danger and adventure on the mountains.  Whether he will be as pleased as she is by the events remains to be seen.

When he tells her she should rest, there is a flash of disbelief and mischief to her eyes, which lock on his then travel, meaningfully, to look over at the bed and back again.  It communicates her amusement gently, as she is well accustomed with the thoughts his mouth is not shaping just now.  They do not need Ars Mentis to know that they are of a mind after the evening's preferred entertainment and ways to weather winter's last true storm.  There is pasta yet to make and a few last touches to put on the meal; likely Tony could handle this without her but she feels better than she sounds; she is not ready to succumb to this weakening yet, but Silas warmth, and nearness, and succor he offers is dreadfully hard to refuse.  He will win this point before the night is over; he has already won it.

But dinner, first, and perhaps a movie watched with the bros, where she can enjoy his company and quietly acquiesce to resting, and also watch with amusement the coming-undone of a technical specialist in the circle of the influence of her curse.  Oh, does the DVD players simply not work? Is Netflix mysteriously region locked.  Is everything, absolutely everything, in need of rebooting?  And how, then, do the bros react to the ever more amusing game of charades that surrounds communication with their guest, whose eyes and hands and expression can convey so much; whose silence they are blessed with, truly, as she cannot ruin their movie with her constant interjections or corrections.  Maybe Si will tell them later just how very, stupendously lucky they truly were.

Silas: And so when Silas' hand moves away from Arianna's now silent throat, it is to gently smooth over her elbow, her side; not healing, not yet, but his touch feels good.  It warms away tension in tight muscles, eases swelling, and perhaps hastens her body's natural process just a little.  There are a few small benefits to this manifestation of who and what he is, after all.  But so, after this bit of solicitation and a few kisses (with quickly growing heat, one imagines, given those like minds on the subject of beds and what could be done in them), they return downstairs to finish dinner, to eat and enjoy it with the bros.

Then, of course, there is the attempt at some form of media entertainment, at which time they find out that none of their electronics are working properly; Mark, who is the closest they have to that kind of geek, does his best to fix whatever's wrong to no avail, which leads to some light grumbling before settling down to more games.  In truth, the roommates don't mind this; they all enjoy different sorts of TV, and given that it's that insane time for college basketball, it wouldn't have been that interesting for at least two of them.  So after enjoying the making of pasta and the eating of the meal, it leaves a choice.

"Stay down here, or go upstairs?"  Silas is good with either, but there is a preference made clearer by the near-constant physical contact since she arrived.  This contact has grown more intimate with the application of food and wine, but has stopped a bit before the border of eliciting exclamations of 'get a room!'.  They are adults now, after all, not teenagers.

Arianna: [Arianna]



She is feeling a little under the weather. Surely this is the euphemism they use, given the prodigious storm outside their keep, to explain away her sudden silence.  And Arianna does try, here and there, to rustle up enough voice for a sentence or two.  It is rough sounding and evokes winces of sympathy when she tries.  So she tries less frequently; and the bros get better at reading her nuances -- the ones she shows openly; they are not better at reading her when she wishes not to be read (few are good at that game) -- until it is time to part ways for the evening.  At some point in the evening, she does manage to get enough reception to warn Nick and Pen that she is staying 'with a friend' due to the storm, and the rather circuitous drive back to their neighborhood, and the lateness of the hour. 

They are adults now, for some value of "adult".  And Arianna has forgotten entirely what it is like to be tired, with her will spent low and her body bent to healing, and warm in Silas's company all at the same time.  There are echoes here of things she knows well, of wine and him, of want and him, but this sort of connection that starts with something other than a bang, or a shout, or a loud declaration of Scoundrel! or Knave! -- it is new to her.  No less fierce in wanting, but gentled in appearances.

Upstairs, then, to where their careful ministrations to one another will have no audience, will need not be so restrained.  So that when they finally come to rest against one another, he is as spent and tired and laid bare beside her as she is next to him. So that she can sleep, canted in toward him, hand over his heart and head against his shoulder, and the healing he had hoped for her can finally happen in her rest.

Fire on the Mountain

Ari

There are serious things afoot in the wizarding circles of Denver.  Quests to reclaim lost friends. Quests to secure valuable materials.  Quests to establish new strongholds. These are all endeavours worthy of renown and the direct expenditure of enlightened Will.  And then there are the lesser quests, the aims and goals that make them all sound so much more human.  The things that come about in the longer light of the evening, in response to the jarring shift to daylight savings time or simply the apathy around braving a weeknight grocery store run.  Mundane, but no less needful and immediate.

Ari had ghosted pass the door to Nicholas's study, utterly incapable of being as silent and spectral as he was.  And then, with the most of her occluded by the door frame and wall, she had, with her head tipped completely sideways, poked just enough of it into the hollowing that her nose rested on the jamb and her eyes -- bright and full of mischief -- were fully in view.  And she had waited, until the oddity of this drew Nick's attention to her.  Until he, perhaps curious or trepidatious of her whims by now, inquired with little more than the lift of eyebrows, to which she responded, succinctly, and without room for argument, more of her sideways face peeking past the jamb so that he might better hear her:

"We need wings."

And not the fanciful type for flight.  No no, this was made more clear by the next demand:

"And beer."

There is a half-breath, here, just room for him to think of interjecting, before she continues. "Do you remember, when we used to go for wings all together?  All sticky fingers and boastful this isn't even hot! and that? I miss that.

"We need wings, Nick."  Solemn, almost, but for the mischief in her eyes.  Serious, this need of wings.  This need of wings now, and they could always bring some home for Pen -- where is Pen? Oh, off doing resplendent things. Too bad, she can join us, do you have your coat, I CAN DRIVE!

Which is half of how they have arrived, at an establishment called Fire on the Mountain, which pleases her -- how very City on a Hill, she had said, as she pushed open the painted door and let the warm light of the pub spill across their feet in welcome.  For when it is a pub, or a storefront, or anything but a home she does not have to mind the Old Ways so carefully.  This is how they have come to the booth, wooden seats with wooden back rests, and the tumble of wings in a basket between them, and a plate with cast offs, sad little bone pile, macabre if one thinks of it too carefully. But there is a sauce called El Jefe, which seems right up Nick's alley, and a pint of something wheat-white and mild beside her right hand.  And it is almost, but not quite, like it used to be when they were all together.

Nick

It is almost - but not quite - like it used to be when they were all together.

Nicholas, earlier, had taken a long time to notice Ari's presence, or specifically to note that she was staring at him around the doorjamb - at least, what passes for a long time for Nick.  He was bent over his desk, over some book or other that, should she have glimpsed its pages, had sketched circles and notes and drawings and arcane arcane arcane.  He borrowed it from somewhere or someone.

So here they are, at Fire on the Mountain, where Nick has not been before but quite enthusiastically consented to come.  And it's true that this harkens back to earlier times, even if earlier times in this case was just a year or two ago.

There is a pint of something golden and opaque by his left elbow, and he has sequestered the wings that are hot enough to give chemical burns off to the side as well, the better to keep Ari from inadvertently rubbing an eye or her nose or whatever and forwearing his friendship for life.  "I do remember when we used to do this with everyone," he says, and he is thoughful, because Nick has been even more thoughtful than usual lately.

A beat.  "Pen is contacting Thane soon to bring him out here, I think.  Did she tell you?"

Ari

Denver is a clean slate to her. The whole of the city is places she has not been before. When Nichloas is a willing participant in exploration of eateries, it is all the better.  She is not as successful at finding places when she goes out on her own.  It may the feel of something foreign in her bones, or to the cut of her chin, or the line of her cheek.  It might be that she is unskilled at being simple, in a mundane world that is often anything but magical.

There is a pile of napkins near her, too, and Ari insists on wiping away the stickiness between wings, only then, to dirty her fingers again with picking up the next one.  Like this one, which is caught up in her right hand, and gives a little swish-and-flick gesture as she ponders his question -- not unlike the way one of her Order might gesture idly with a wand. A wand made of wings.

Oh, dear.

"Oh?" she asks. The sound invites elaboration, it begs for more but doesn't wheedle.  "It will be good to see him," she says, as if this calling in of favours were not likely tied to the more magnanimous and worthwhile quests their number have been called to of late.

"How hot are those?" she asks him, gesturing with the chicken wand at the sequestered El Jefe wings.  Perhaps he notices that the tiny gleam of silver she wears around her third finger has transgressed, progressed to her ring finger.  Like as not, it is presently besmirched with some form of buffalo sauce where her finger meets her palm. A spicier than usual thing for Ari, but by no means hot on Nick's scale.  Just enough to pink the apples of her cheeks -- or that, perhaps, is attributed to the beer.

"And how long is he staying?"  Thane, then, again. They are back to Thane.  She is sharply curious, but thinks she keeps it just below the surface.  The wand is demoted to dinner, again, and she nibbles at it as he answers.

Nick

Nick, for his part, glories in the messiness; this after all is what sinks and soap are for afterward, and he is comfortable with food that feels a little primal.  He is also sweating, which is perhaps all the answer that Ari needs as far as how hot the ones he's eating are.  He has others that they've been sharing, the bones picked clean: he'll put them in his mouth and scrape away skin and tendon and cartilage until that's all that is left.

Were they not out in public he might have cracked them and eaten the marrow.  Sparse living and childhood habits stay with people, sometimes: though we have already established this.

"Yeah.  I think Margot - have you met Margot? She's an apprentice - I think Margot wanted to learn from one of the Verbena or something like that.  Pen thought to call him in, in addition to nudging her toward Kiara, I think."

Ari is knew, and so there might be a lot of names dropped just now that she doesn't know.  There is a flick of a glance to her in this regard, something that meets her eyes and looks for understanding and if he doesn't see it there, well, he will illuminate.  Nick is frequently considerate of others in this way.

"I'm not sure how long he'll be here.  I doubt he'll stay permanently, though."  Even should they wish it.

Ari

On these names, Ari comes up blank.  An Apprentice named Margot what might learn from the Verbena.  Kiara -- perhaps a Verbena. She's quick at stringing things together, but the shrug of her shoulder and slight shake of her head conveys what he likely suspects: they are all new to her.  Blank slate, and all.

For all her life of privilege, she does not leave meat on the bones either. Ari scrapes them clean with her teeth, and even nibbles at the cartilage.  She relishes rather than requires, and she should not break avian bones apart to suck upon their marrow.  They splinter; they choke.  She will not hazard this, and this is how they are different -- she has not known need that drives one into danger.  Danger that drives one into need? That is a story for another time.

"I've met one of the others, but did not get as far as trading names.  Deep in his cups he was," she says, and there is something in how her eyes shift away that implies there is a second side to that story anyway.  "I'm pretty sure he isn't Union," said easily, as she inspects the fragile bones for any lingering things of interest.  She is not alarmed.

"And I ran into someone familiar, though I doubt he's made his affiliations known," this, too, is said easily enough between them, but her certainty and vaguery might read wrong to Nicholas.

Nick

Deep in his cups: pretty sure he isn't Union.  "Andrés?" he asks, offers, and the name comes easy from his lips both out of familiarity with the man and the manner in which his name ought to sound.  Nick, much to his grandparents' chagrin, has forgotten most of the Spanish he once knew other than a smattering or two of street language and vulgarity and command enough to tell people that he is a counselor and do they want a translator, but the music of a language is more difficult for the ear to forget.

"Andrés is with the Society of Ether.  It sounds like it might have been him you ran into," and here Nick hazards, because he suspects that Andrés also spends a lot of his time in bars.  Tolerance during an outing tells a lot.

Someone familiar, this draws his eyes again, and hazel though they are they are somehow always bright in dimmer light.  They reflect, they draw in.  "Who did you run into?"

Ari

Society of Ether? Now that piques her curiosity some and lofts her eyebrows.  She studies him for a moment, to make sure that Nick isn't bullshitting her.  But he sees earnest enough, and her reply sidesteps her other opinions.  The wing bones go to the graveyard; the pile grows.  Ari cleans her fingertips again, and then drinks from her beer.

"That explains the sense of something just a bit amiss."  Mad scientist meets poster-child for wizardry?  No wonder their sensibilities had seemed to clash. And the Society was known for its quirks; beloved for them by some. "He reminded me a little of that saying, the one about hell freezing over, all ominous and cold."

This is probably enough for Nick to confirm his suspicions.  It is enough for Ari, just now.  She takes a more significant sip from her beer before setting it down again on the coaster.  She is not quite persnickety enough to rest in in precisely the ring left behind by condensation. But it is a close thing.

"Another Bonisagus," she says, and the classification sounds so official outside of the living room of Chez Hyde & Mars.  It is mismatched to their enviroment.  "We have known one another since we were young but it has been years since I saw him."  There is a little gesture to accompany this, some shape of hands that indicates sincere surprise.  "I would not have expected to see him here in Denver."

She taps the ring on her finger against her pint glass.  It is an absent minded thing, and as soon as it sounds out she thinks the better of it and takes her cup up again to drink.

Ari

(Manip + Subter: Not being cunning.  Not even really being clever.  Yep, just a housemate. Old friend. Nothing to see here.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Nick

[I think I see something.  It's called BULLSHIT.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

Ari

Ari is distracted, and particularly artless in her deflection this evening.  There is something about this fellow of her House which is tied up in that ring she's worn for all of time on her middle finger, which is now encircling a more significant one.  And there is a measure of possessiveness to the way she shapes the inclusive pronouns: we, instead of he and I.  We have known each other since we were young -- it does not even begin to touch on the importance of that relationship to her.

In all the time that they three have known each other, Ari has never had a boyfriend. She has seemed remote and apart from dating as either sport or past-time.  Not unhappily so, but decidedly so.  She was over the moon happy for Nick and Pen when they married, and she believes whole-heartedly in their chance at ever after.  But Ari has never seemed the sort to bind herself to the life of another that completely.

But this begs the question.

She also doesn't seem to know the answer to whatever that question may be; not in full; not with any clarity.  So there is fondness (possessiveness) and wariness (uncertainty) to the reunion she alludes to.  It is murky water, but it most certainly more than a childhood friend come calling.

Nick

Nick, today, is not bullshitting.  It is not unreasonable for Ari to suspect such, given that he has launched into tall tales in the past (she may recall a certain story he spun, about growing up in a megachurch commune when she asked him once about where he grew up, and continued until she either saw through it or the tale got past him).  What Ari says about the man's resonance does confirm his suspicions, evidenced by this slow nod as he cleans another bone.

There is this sharp exhale that Ari could perhaps misinterpret, though this is less to do with anything she has said or done and more to do with the fact that the lower half of Nick's face feels as though it has been hooked up to a mini generator which was then cranked.  She had asked him, earlier, how hot they were and he nudges the basket toward her.

Trial by fire.

The Chakravanti looks up at her through slightly lowered brows, here, as she mentions another Bonisagus who she knew when she was young.  "So what do you think brought him to Denver, then?"  A beat.  "Were you excited to see him?"

Ari

She is, on occasion, foolhardy enough to ignore the obvious signs that something is ill advised for a person of her constitution.  Nick is glistening; Nick who hails from a region that worships the spicier strains of peppers almost as much as they do the sun, Nick is sweating and using all of his native son tricks to manage the burn.

Arianna has no such history or heritage of trickery to lean on here.  Spicy is not her forte and, despite all warning signs that she will soon be in well over her head, she reaches over and plucks one up when he nudges the basket toward her.  It will not be the most foolish thing she has done in the long history of their friendship, but it may be amusingly close.

Trial by fire, indeed, but post-poned enough for her to answer his questions. 

"His family always traveled more than mine did," she says. It's part of an answer, but incomplete.  "And we'd lost track of one another for quite a few years, but I'm glad to see him..." To Nick's trained ear, there's an obvious fondness to her tone.  Another might have missed it. There's a twist, too, as it is somehow more complicated than she is letting on.  Excited she does not admit to, but it is rather on the nose.  Perhaps not quite in the manner Nick means it.

She is not cautious when she bites into that El Jefe wing.  Like diving into a cold pool, Ari plunges into this with both feet.  No looking back, no hesitations. In a moment now, she will wish she had shown more restraint.  Any second.  A shock of pain and surprise ripples through her, seeming to start near the back of her head and move forward.  She gives little shake of her head, eyes pressed shut, very Oh, Gods, What have I done?  But there is no way but onward, and she swallows down the bite, and uses her free hand to fan air into her slightly agape mouth. There are tears pricking at the corners of her eyes already.

Nick

Here, Nicholas is hoisted by his own petard, as they say.  This line of questioning is something he would like to pursue, to tease out of Ari because there is so much more she's not saying, but she takes this huge and very ill-advised bite of the wing she took (Nick wasn't taking bites that big) and now she probably feels as though the sauce is eating a hole through her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

Nick: he somehow manages to be amused and sympathetic all at once.  "Just give it a minute," he says.  "Water will only make it worse."  He turns a studious eye toward her, then takes a long swallow of his beer.  "You know, capsaicin in high enough doses can actually be used as an anesthetic."

Truth or lie, Ari?  Her face right this minute probably says truth.

Nick goes on eating while Ari waits for feeling to come back into her face.  "So your friend, is he just traveling here and passing through, or is he here to stay?"  He waits.  He'll wait as long as he needs to wait.

Ari

This moment brings to mind something her father, the many-titled and highly regarded Flambeau, had told her in her youth: that pain can be clarifying so long as it can also be endured.  Ari, at some wildly inappropriate age to tackle these esoteric concepts, had been unimpressed, but as the feeling of intense and focused pain flared and receded with each breath, she finds the truth in it now.  Nick tells her some bit of chemistry, in a tone that is either soothing or mocking, depending on where she is in the sinusoidal pattern of pain and comparative relief.

But he is right.

And what was pain dies down to a tingling numbness with more the fire of a warm grill than a conflagration.  Perhaps this is how his taste-buds were tempered: exposure and then numbness.  There are still tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, and she has found that the massive bite she thought she'd taken was not so huge after all -- bites can only be so big, when taken out of chicken wings, and most of the wing remains yet.

She holds it, but not as if she would hold a wand. How she might hold a live and squirming salamander, mystical magical creature of fire, slither-slime of pain and agony.  She breaths out a little, but that causes a flare -- not quite a conflagration.

"He's -- thrice-wise Hermes, Nick, how can you eat these things and still..." Break for breathing, "Hold any semblance of a conversation?"  The syllables come quickly. She makes the most out of each exhalation.

"No. He's got a business here, and a place, with dogs and roommates." This is more than she would otherwise say. Mark this: Ari will not hold up well to torture if the torture is capsaicin based.

Nick

Was his tone either soothing or mocking?  Somehow Nicholas manages to make it both.  The expression he gives Ari, the amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes, as she holds the remainder of the wing is the same.  "You get used to it," he says.  "My mom always put chilis in everything, when I was growing up."

He tosses another bone, picked clean, into the pile.

Here, perhaps Ari has some satisfaction because the heat finally seems to be giving him pause.  He stretches his jaw and sucks in a deep breath and braces himself, and he is going to take a few minutes before he eats any more.

"So it sounds like he's sticking around then.  Do you think you're going to see a lot of him?"

Ari

She admires it in him, this ability to be both sympathetic and needling, in the same breath, even in the same heartbeat.  It is a kinship, a bright and shining thing, but she prefers it when it is turned elsewhere.  Best, though, when they may flank and needle someone else together.  Teamwork.  This does not taste like teamwork at all.

She has neither moved to discard the wing -- challenge failed? unacceptable! -- or to continue her enjoyment of it.  She is just taking a bit of a breather, though. Pride will have her finish it. Nick probably knows this; this is probably part of the needling. Knowing needling? Nick is a natural at it.

"Mmm.  Probably," she says, but there is less leeway to it than she implies.  "It will either amuse or end me when you and Pen meet him.  Either you will get along swimmingly, or I will have to ritually sacrifice myself on some sacred altar of friendship to remedy my mistake."  Lighter, this; needling back.  She has regained some sense of control over her tongue, and a bit of flash to her eyes that is not light glinting off tears.

And then, oh then, once more into the breach -- she hazards another bite.  Smaller this time, lessons learned and what not.  It is not as terrible as the first but her expression does not indicate that she enjoys it much at all.

Nick

Ari goes to take another tentative bite; fortunate enough, because if she had not, Nick might have questioned her as to whether she was going to finish it.  Knowing needling, and all that.

Of course, one day in the perhaps not so distant future there will be some sort of grand karmic payoff, because there always is.  That's how these things work, particularly when people like the two of them are involved.

The next thing that Ari says seems to puzzle him a little, evidenced by the way his brows pull together before he reaches for his beer and takes another long swallow.  Water just makes it worse; beer is marginally better.  "What makes you think that Pen and I wouldn't get along with him?"

A beat.  "Or are you just worried we won't like him?"  This is a question that is gently eliciting, it's true, but if Ari were so inclined to look - there's this note just buried beneath it all.  He might be teasing her, a little.

Ari

This bite goes down smoother, as does this particular position in their conversation.  If he is to ask her questions, then at least these serve a useful point. Other than trying to pink her cheeks or catch her out in the sort of vagueries she'd seen other girls imply.  Ari has not said that he's cute, or that she like likes him, or anything of the sort. Her feelings for this unnamed friend are troublingly deep.  They move like currents; they can unsettle many things.  Right now, though, she is debating wiping the tears from the corner of her eyes with the back of her hand -- but doesn't. She stops herself from spreading the burning to anything more delicate than her throat and tongue and lips.

"Hah," then, a little sound of amusement.  A darker twist to the corners of her mouth.  But whatever has provoked the mirth, however dark, is left unspoken.  "Because, as I told him this plainly, you and Pen are dear to me.  You are the family of my heart. 

"He and I, we cast our lots together at a very different time.  It's not a thing I feel I have outgrown, but also life has grown up all around me whilst we were parted.  This is how it feels, is it, when dear ones are to meet?"

This question is turned to him, and meant earnestly at least in part.  The words sound clever, are playful in the way she often seems, but there is sentiment enough to make them resonant.  Ari hazards another nibble; this one provokes no wince but still a careful exhalation to temper the heat.

Nick

Troublingly deep, or simply troubling, or simply deep; Nicholas does not know which of these it is, he only knows that there's something there.  And Nick, he very much likes it when people tell him about themselves.  He likes to know things about them.  (The rare few are the ones in whom he confides back.)

"I think that's also how it feels when it's been a long time since you saw someone last," he says, and there is this perfect sort of acceptance to what Ari said before, this immediate understanding of the thing she is saying.  Nick is a counselor, so it could be feigned or something he does out of habit; still, she has never known him to be deceptive where this sort of thing is concerned.

"Were you and he in a cabal together, before?"

Ari

"No," she says, and shakes her head a little.  "Nothing like that.  Technically we studied together, but that is not the root of it." 

And this gives Arianna pause enough for her to nibble at the last of that El Jefe wing.  She does not strip the tendons from the bone, or suck the cartilage of this one clean.  But she does pick off the meat of it; she is not wasteful.  When she sets it aside, she is cautious in how she clears her fingertips of it.  She does this while elaborating, though the spark and teasing has fled her eyes.  He is left with the sense that she is being uncommonly candid.

"He was the first boy to ever bring me flowers, though, at eight, I would have preferred less fragile things."  The curl to her mouth is kinder, gentler.  "I gave him a book of adventure stories; I think it made the better impression."

The burn has settled now to where she is daring enough to try a sip of her beer.  It goes less poorly than she has expected.  She is waiting, then, to gauge Nick's reactions.

Nick

Nick has started to eat his again, though the pile has dwindled and there are only a few left.  He nudges the basket toward Ari again, with a waggle of his eyebrows that is so ridiculously exaggerated that it could not possibly read as anything other than comical.  He knows she probably will not take it, and he also knows that her pride is going to rankle just a little because she probably will not take it.

Something in Nick likes to hammer on other peoples' pride like a xylophone, see.  It's a fun game.

He leaves off though, because Ari leaves him with the sense that she is about to divulge something, and he even lowers the wing and sets it nearly on the basket so he can listen.  Then: this quick little smile, multi faceted because Nick finds children cute, and he can tell this is something of a dear memory to Ari, something private and treasured from a long time ago.  People box away those sorts of memories the way they would elementary school assignments or childhood art projects or particularly prized toys, and it's rare that they draw them out at all, much less for someone else.

"So it's been a very long time since you've seen him, then."

Ari

This is indeed an old memory for her, something rarely touched upon.  They didn't speak much about her past when they were all together in New England; there was enough shorthand and subtext to the interactions she had with the Hermetics around them to imply some things, but less time to delve into secrets and truths.  She says something about when she was eight, which is practically two thirds of her lifetime ago.

"We were close, off and on, for quite a while after that.  He went to stay with family when..." she pauses, and something dark slants through the light of her eyes.  Ari shrugs it away and doesn't continue; this is not a conversation about when the War came.  This is not about being the children of generals; this is about something altogether different, however tied up in the darkness it may also be.  She uses the pause to reach over and pluck the proferred wing from the basket.

Pride goeth... and all that.

"I won't bore you with war stories." This is all the explanation he gets for the omission. "We were young and those things leave long shadows.  Any way, it's been six, seven -- gods, maybe eight years since we saw each other last.  I keep thinking we'll run into each other at some conclave or the next, but I guess even the circle of our House is too broad to invite much in the way of coincidence."

And there, by the end of this she's righted herself to some sort of middle ground between the darkness and the push-pull of her normal cadence.  Not only did she take it, but, valiantly, she takes a small bite -- oh, how it burns, though less completely than before.

Nick

Nick, perhaps, is pleased by Ari's rapid acclimation to the heat.  Pride goeth, and yet: it is perhaps even in small moments like this that he can appreciate that his friend and cabalmate is a rare person, someone he is glad he has chosen to invite into his house and Work with him and share in some of the most private things in his life.  It's funny what a person can take away simply from sharing a meal (even this lowbrow, not especially nourishing one) with someone else.

War stories, Ari says, and Nick's eyebrows crest and crash together, dark waters during a storm.  He does not remember the War; he was barely Awake then and, more or less, a rogue living at the fringes of Awakened society, spirit-talking and thieving from chantry nodes.

"It sounds like he's very important to you, even if you haven't seen him for a while," Nick says, and takes another swallow of his beer.  The glass is empty now, and there's this contemplative look he directs toward it.  More beer?  More beer.

"I'm glad that the coincidence, if it is that, seems to be a happy one in this case."  This quick little smile toward her: because he is glad.

Ari

Nick does not remember the war, but Ari does.  It's the sort of thing that is carved into her bones; not because she fought with her Will or her own two hands, she was too young for any of that and sleep-walking still at that, but because she was old enough to understand it and stand helpless in it.  It is a nuanced thing, and one that has passed and been laid to rest, but this talk of new flaring up, this taken Disparate -- she is not yet of Denver, but these things are meaningful to her in deep and personal ways.  And her people, Nick and Pen, the family of her heart, are touched more directly by it.

It is not the time for old war stories; new ones are cresting the horizon; there is a coming storm.

"It is happy so far." Said, between nibbles of the wing. Between the numbness that has set into her gums where they ring-wreath her teeth, into the tip of her tongue, into the skin pulled tight over the hard of her palate.  It is not her favorite sensation, but it is a new one. A thing to be marked and measured. It is novel.

She follows his look toward the empty pint glass, marks the little warble of debate, and agrees with his conclusion.  "I don't know about you, but I'm going to need another to wash down this fire."

Fulfilling her most earnest role: ready excuse.  Wing finished, she fans her mouth a little and then deposits the bones into the growing pile.  She is ready, perhaps, to point them in a different direction. A new topic, something less about her mysterious and still nameless friend. But she has learned that Nick speaks as much in his silences as he does through his questions.

She has learned, on occasion, rare occasion, to wait.

Nick

He does indeed.  Though sometimes a silence is just that, a silence.  Nick is comfortable with them; he is not the sort of person who feels the need to fill up his time with other people with empty chatter.  He has spent time with friends of his and gone hours where words were not exchanged; perhaps he has spent such times with Ari, out hiking or simply in the garden: they were there together, in that shared space, and enjoying each others' presence without expectation.

So for a little while while he waits for his next beer to arrive, he is quiet.  He eats, he finishes the wings and adds a couple more bones to the pile.  His gums hum pleasantly, and it wakens him.

"I would like to meet your friend," he says then, finally.  Who knows what he was ruminating on between now and then.

And then, "Ari, I think if we're all going to be in a cabal together we should...I don't know.  Do something to mark the occasion.  What do you think?"

Ari

She doesn't answer him in words, but Ari's smile echoes that want.  She'd like them to meet. She had known that, on some level, but talking with Nick about it had cemented that for her: she wanted to find a way to draw her past-friends and present-friends together.  It was a simple thing to want, and more complicated to acheive, but Will alone moves mountains in their circles.  Sooner or later, it would come to be.

"You have mentioned this before," she notes, when he talks about some thing to mark their kinship and promises to one another.  "I think now, as I thought then, that is a very good idea." This is punctuate by a salute, slight tip of her near empty pint glass as she raises it to drink.

"Do you have any thing particular in mind?  Or, perhaps, a type of thing in mind if it is not yet coalesced and shining in your mind?"

Nick

Her questions make him thoughtful, and perhaps he would have answered her right then, but another beer suddenly appears before him and he reaches out to take and sip from it.  Perhaps his tolerance of the heat, the seeming nonchalance with which he'd finished those last few scraps of food, was another of his lies.

It's hard to tell sometimes, with Nick.

As he sets the glass back down he says, "I'm not sure.  I would..."  Hesitation, here.  "I would want to do something that is in line with what you and Pen believe."  And because Nick is still learning to articulate the things he himself wants, he adds, "Maybe we can...I don't know.  Draw a circle together, or do some other sort of Working together.  Something that...that is symbolic of the partnership and the friendship at once."

Because Ari is better than he is with symbols and ritual and working with others, all, he looks toward her then.  "Is there something specific you can think of?"

Ari

She considers this for a moment, as this question requires more than the dregs of her last beer and the first sip of her next.  And, mark, we are approaching the place where the apples of her cheeks are pinked by more than fire-spice.  The thinness of the air invites a looser sort of relationship with sobriety.  Ari has driven them here but Nick may be the one to drive them home. Or they both may sit, in this wooden booth, and plot and scheme and opine and needle-wheedle-jest until the drunkard's path runs straight and smooth and plain again.

"There is a lot of beautiful ritual for binding," she says, and wistfully, just so, because beautiful is the word she well and truly means. Ari feels for ritual and liturgy the way others feel for poetry, as if it stirs and touches and evokes the heart of things when done correctly.  This is only partly because she is born and bred and dyed whole-cloth in Hermeticism, though if she had come to sleeping parents she might have found her way there on her own.  But for all that it pulls her heart forward and her spine taller and such, this is what she says next:

"But things like this, like you and me and Pen, the bond is in the living of it.  The talks we have about your river rocks," she has not forgotten, and here she elevates them to sacred things with the way her tongue cradles syllables, with the earnest appreciation in her eyes.  "In the tasks we set before each other, to keep us safe, to keep us honest, to build us up and push us onward.  For me, the rite of it began when you opened your doorway and brought me through it.  When we ate popcorn, and laughed, and woke up all under the same steeple of the trees that shade your porch.

"I am happy to Work some rite with you, to mark this commitment and sane it in old and sacred ways. But I carry you already in my heart.  Even if we nothing more than talk about this, it will be, for me, enough."

Nick

Penelope has had to pick Nicholas up drunk from the bar already once in Denver; she may have to do it again, if he and Ari carry on for too long.  Still, though there is a little pink in his cheeks he has not had that much yet, all told, and tonight he is not trying to keep up with Andrés either.  There is nothing here tonight that either of them are trying to drown.

These are things he did not expect Ari to say, and the smile he gives her now is gentle, tinged with appreciation: touched even.  "I also appreciate that bond," he says.  "For me, I like a way to mark the beginning of things.  It's less about marking commitment as it is...new birth, I suppose.  A new chapter.  It gives us the opportunity to cleanse the old when we begin the new."

A thought, then.  "And maybe the bond is all it has to be.  Maybe we sit down together and play a game, and talk about things that we always wanted to talk about then and never did.  The things we would like to do.  It could only be that."

Ari

She thinks on this for awhile, how to mark the birth of a new chapter in their lives and friendships. How to bind them ever more together.  Fast on the heels of talk of home and Silas and other dear and seldom touched upon things, she is sentimental in a way she rarely seems.

"I have read, you know," of course she has, "Of ritual outside the Order, and I think, perhaps, there are some things there to be marked and to be admired?  I think, perhaps, that they marking we should make is less about symbols," the words sound strange but feel somewhatright.

"And more about the things that we bring to one another." Ari taps that ring against her pint glass again, and the focus of her eyes is on something distant and off toward the right. 

"I should like to make you dinner.  Get up in the morning and go to the market.  Make bread -- it is a slow thing; it can take all day to rise -- and pasta, and knead these, while thinking about our fellowship.  I'd like to eat beside the fire, and tell stories or play games, and drink too much wine, or not enough wine, until we are foolish with each other.  Warm and laughing, but not unkind. And I would like, when we are warm and foolish, for Pen to read us poetry, and for you to watch her as if she were the only flame that burned in the vastness of a dark dark night.

"And I would like for us to promise, that it is the first of many nights.  That when things are dark and serious outside the circle of our friendship, that we will still draw close, close ranks, and seek warmth and laughter in each other.

"I want," she says, "A living rite.  A thing that breathes and bends and remakes itself anew as needed.  But I think these rites are more your speciality than mine."

Ari does not have Pen's presence, though she has a way about her that is entirely her own, and when her voice is pitched low and a little distant it is easy to forget (or easy to remember) that she might be the Lorelei, the voice that launches and beaches ships; that stars are omens and oracles and false-gods as much as they are guiding lights. She is only luminous and old beyond her seeming.

Nick

I have read, says Ari, and Nick knows that what is about to follow is going to be a lot of words.  But that's all right: there are many things about Hermeticism that he enjoys.  He must, or so many of them wouldn't have found their way into his life and inner circle.  He holds his glass up just in front of his mouth as though he'd drink from it at any moment, and above the uppermost rim his eyes glint.

Ari finishes, and here he laughs in this unreserved and clear and rich way he has when he's caught off guard.  He leans over and into her, his head on her shoulder and some of his curls probably flop over and into her face before he lifts his head again.  Nick is fond of touching, moreso than Pen; this too she might have gathered over the years.  He does it without reservation.

And it's easy to forget that he might be the Morrigu, terror and awe, a death herald and an oracle, the crone and mother and maiden.  He is only hallowed, drawn to the sacred, and this he is free to interpret as he will because in addition to these old Stories they bear they are also human.

"I would like that too.  Let's...Pen can read poetry, and we'll tell stories, and maybe you and I can play a game.  I think it's a fitting rite."