Wake up, Giametti

Andrés

how drunk are we today?

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (10) ( success x 1 )

Arianna

Nono, that roll was clearly for the hobgoblin. Seriously now dice...

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )

Andrés

The last anyone saw him, Nicholas and Penelope were peeling Andrés Sepúlveda out of a car and hauling him up four flights of stairs to drop him off at Kiara's, where for nearly two weeks hallucinations and delusions assailed him. Then the realization that he was supposed to be in Chicago for a fucking forensic pathology conference hit him, and he packed up his shit quicker than anyone had packed up anything recently and dumped himself on an airplane and that was the last anyone saw of him.

Until last night.

Details don't avail themselves right away. Back in town, Andrés wanted to get blackout drunk and be left alone. Mission accomplished. When he wakes up in a bed he doesn't recognize and peels his tongue from the roof of his mouth, the thought occurs to him that he not only needs to backtrack, but:

Any idea what happened to the radioactive spider last night?

And:

Wake up, Giametti, if this thing starts laying eggs we're fucked.

That's one way to start a Sunday morning.

Arianna

Verdammt Spinnen.

Damned spiders.  This is the first reply.  Not long after, comes: On my way. Where?

There is a distinct benefit to having so much recent practice with Ars Mentis. It is this: when Andres' text comes through, Ari has the power to be clear and utterly unfuzzed mentally if not physically, despite the round of drinking of the previous evening.  Oh, and it doesn't make her any less cantankerous about the prospect of spiders yet again requiring her undivided attention.  The Giametti woman struggles into jeans and a button down shirt, ties her hair back in an expediant and still cleverly attractice way, and packs her instruments into messenger bag.

There is cold brew coffee in her fridge -- bless the Gods of foresight and planning -- and she pours some into two Thermoses. 

She isn't entirely sure that Andres is clear of quiet. It's possible that the threat resides in his own mind alone. But there is one thing being the daughter of a War Mage makes clear: treat all threats as if they are deadly until proven others.  Goddamned spiders included.

Having Uber'd it or found some other way home the night before, she is at the mercy of a similar service this morning to ferry her to the doc's location.  Her imperious Hermetic attitude keeps conversations with strangers to the minimum. It is a such a blessing in some circumstances.  She's less than perfectly put together when she arrives at the dedicated location, but even disheveled by Italian standards is pretty on point for American ones.  Before talking or casting can begin, a metal thermos is pressed into the Etherite's hand.

"Coffee," is all the explanation he gets.

Arianna

[Not as think as you drunk I am: Mind 1, coincidental, dif 4, - instruments]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 7) ( success x 1 )

Andrés

Wherever their paths diverged last night it seems as if the Etherite's ended well enough. He has all of his parts when Arianna meets him outside the hotel where one would think he'd stop going for having drawn so much attention to himself in the past. Of all the things he is, forgettable is not one.

Here she comes, bearing coffee like a talisman. Andrés is wearing the same suit he had on last night, minus the jacket and tie. Standing on the street in two-toned Oxfords and a waistcoat and glasses, his hair a rat's nest, he is very much the visual representation of his faction this morning.

"Pinche spider," he says as he takes the thermos. Soon as it's in his possession he's taking off in the direction of a vehicle. "I told you we should have killed it."

Arianna

There is not enough coffee in all of Italia to ready her for dealing with spiders before breakfast.  Ari is halfway through her thermos of cold brew and the cage of Ars Mentis wrapped around her mind is becoming less and less necessary but the irritation of spiders -- thank goodness she is not phobic of the tiny weavers -- does not abate with her growing wakefulness.

"I thought we had.  With extreme prejudice. Is this not what you said last night, Andres?"  Or perhaps it was No no, mercy unto all god's creatures.  She could not remember in the slightest, but it did not sound like Ari to allow an insect in violation of her personal space to continue breathing -- book lungs or not. Their resemblance to her preferred study medium is slight, after all, and not at all enough to spare them.

"Good morning," she tells him, belatedly, as she follows.  It is wrapped in a snarky sort of sarcasm.  "Where is the spider now?" she asks. Hoping beyond hope that it is roughly the size of a quarter and easily squashed by an appropriately coincidental long-distance application of Ars Essentiae.

No dice.

Andrés

"If I knew where the little creep was, I wouldn't be asking you, you know?"

Of all of the Spheres the man is able to manipulate, he somehow never thought to incorporate distance as a variable. This is one of those times where relying on his wife in order to scan across space bites him in the ass. His wife is dead. She isn't coming back.

"It's entirely possible it's dead. You know how I feel about spiders."

Arianna

"Tch."

The sound is paired with her hand on his forearm, just light enough to capture his attention but not arrest his movement.  It is a thoughtful thing, this pause between steps.

"Can we scry for it? Do you know enough of its mind or resonance for me to find it?  I have no skill with Ars..." A little hitch, then she continues with the vulgar name for the sphere, "with Life."

Jokes ahoy! Of course she has no skill with life, she's a chantry-bred Hermetic. Rimshot. What not.  She's heard them all by now, and in at least a few permutations each.

"Do you have a ..." -- don't say Thingy -- "Device that might find it faster?"  Check it out, she speaks Etherite. (Almost [Not at all].)

Andrés

"Do I have a device."

She might as well have asked him if the sky was blue or if he still had alcohol in his system. Granted, asking a scientist if the sky is blue is not nearly so straightforward as asking if he has a device.

Though her hand does not aim to halt forward momentum, the Etherite does turn towards Arianna when a thought occurs to him.

"Here," he says and removes from his pocket a device that looks as if it were the lovechild of a handheld PDA and a radar gun. He starts to press buttons. "This bad boy can detect radioisotopes attached to arachnid bio-signatures in the immediate area, but if you can broaden the area, say, to the size of the neighborhood..."

Arianna

["Improving" the device with Hermeticky goodness?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]

Arianna

Oh, fuck.

To be precise, the Hermetic woman had meant a device for the Etherite to use. Her own magics did not reside in beeping booping twinkling boxes of circuitry and whizbangs.   But he hands it over with such purpose that she cannot help but take from it his meaning: that she ought use the whizbangs and beepboops to find a radioactive spider.

She has had nightmares like this in Academy.  It is clearly some sort of test.

In order to make the device more palatable, and also to give her a familiar framework from which to work, Arianna takes a piece of chalk out of her bag and looks over at the Etherite questioningly before drawing a few resonant sigils -- arcane in provenance and unknowable to most mundane passersby -- onto the body of the bastardized PDA and radar gun.  This would either allow them to work together or it would crash their paradigms so terribly into one another that nothing good would come of collaboration for ages to come.

It is not the sort of thing one should do lightly, in broad morning sunlight, with an elevated BAC.  So these two hop into it feet first.

"I should be able to help find the radiation, but the bio-signature, as you say, I am not attuned to."

There is some special circle of Hermetic hell for Initiates who engage in this sort of cross-Traditional nonsense.  Pretending it does not exist, Willing it to not apply to her -- these are not the best coping mechanisms. And yet, there is a radioactive spider loose in Denver, and she has seen the documentary film of the Spider Man. She knows this ends poorly for everyone.

"Shall we?"

Andrés

Shall we?

He takes the chalk from her, sniffs it, hands it back. Alarm in his eyes, but the scanner survives her misappropriation and the chalk itself passes the olfaction test. Then again, given what happened the last time, he may just be having flashbacks to his most recent Quiet episode.

"It's not a chalkboard," he says of the device. This is as close to acquiescence as she's going to get. He strokes the device like one would pet a spooked animal, even goes so far as to whisper "Shhh" to it before she does whatever fucked-up thing she's about to do.

Arianna

"But it will do," she answers to his assertion that the device is not a chalkboard.

It is breathtakingly beautiful, even just chalk on the odd edges of the device, even impermanent and without having any knowledge of the resonance of the shapes. Crude as it is, Ari's markings are clearly Artwork, and they elevate the device toward some truer -- let's be honest, More Arcane -- purpose. 

In compromise, though, they are not permanent. The chalk will spread to their hands as they work and the whole of the defiling masterpiece will be gone before he knows it.  It call all be wiped clean with water, or those alcohol wipes for cleaning finicky things.  Unmade as if it never was.  Most of her ritual artwork is like this: transient.  Fit to purpose and then lifeless beyond it.

Nick asked her once if it made her sad.  She thought it a stupid question. Does breathing make one sad, knowing that assortment of stardust and wind will never be again in your chest so precisely?  Magic is like breathing; life is built around its scaffolding; it is to be reveled in and not mourned.

When she shows him the device it's clearly unhappy with the adornments.  She might as well have bedazzled it with tiny glistening Hermetic crystals. She might have written the Names of Mercury -- who rules electronic communication -- and Mars -- who will find foes for a fight -- and Delphi -- because Oracles make clear the hidden things -- across it in Lisa Frank worthy brightness.

"And now," so businesslike, very down-to-brass-tacks and bereft of any sense of the ridiculousness of their position.  "To find your spider."  His spider. Because it is most definitely not hers.

Arianna

[Find the effing spider: Corr/Forces/Prime, coincidental, base + 3 = 5, +3 conflicting instrument, -3 coordinating ability, +1 opposing paradigms, -1 going slow = dif 5 +WP]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (1, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Arianna

((Active magicks alert! Active magicks! :) Perhaps this will help give you an entry for Sera! :) ))

Andrés

These two were busy last night.

If the carnage had occurred in his hotel room, he would have been able to view the events in reverse. Not rewind time itself but his perception of it, at least. This is a trick he's told Arianna about before. Joking, of course. He gets blackout drunk on a regular enough basis that asking the cosmos to remind him what the fuck happened last night is becoming old hat for him.

At some point they left the bar where Andrés was celebrating his return to Denver - or celebrating having left Chicago, depending on how you shuffle around the words. He hates Chicago for reasons he may or may not have divulged to Arianna last night.

Last night, they left the bar and stepped into the black. Did whatever the hell led to adopting the phrase 'radioactive spider' into their lexicon. And then went their separate ways.

The spider is dead in the Dumpster out back.

This information pops up onto the screen, brief, in symbols Andrés does not understand. His eyebrows loft once and then he turns it to get a better glimpse at it.

"Filthy pagan," he says with some fondness.

Arianna

The sigils make perfect sense to Arianna. That his device suddenly speaks to her in the language of the Seraphim seems strange, but within the range of reason applied to magical workings.

"Hah! Dead already, and in the rubbish bin around back," she tells him, translating through a series of languages to arrive at something akin to a common tongue between them.  This early, though, it is laced through with her native accent more strongly.  And also with unbridled Hermetic pride.  Not only had they triumphed already over the spider, preventing the horrors of the documentary from unfolding here in a city with insufficient high buildings to swing from, but she had triumphed over the gadgetry and forced useful magics out of it.

Surely there is some sort of terrible backlash coming. All the more reason to be practically gleeful in her pronouncement.

He calls her a filthy pagan and her nose wrinkles in mock disdain; she is too pleased to let it rumpled her feathers just now. Pleased that there is no spider to fight. Pleased that the whizbang did not undo her magics. Pleased that now, perhaps, there will be proper breakfast and coffee to fete their triumphs.

Coffee. Yes.  She recollects her thermos from wherever it has been set aside.  "We reserve that term for the Primals," she tells him, in a stage whisper, with an expression that speaks very much to the knowledge of the offense they are both offering to parties present and also unaccounted for.  Then an exaggerated and mischievous wink.  And then, gods be praised, a sip of her remaining coffee.

Andrés

Name-calling is an arguably preferable method of reacting to unexpected success than, say, grabbing his partner in crime and kissing her right on the mouth. Adrenaline makes people do crazy shit sometimes. This is not one of those times.

Her nose wrinkles. His brow creases as the symbols persist. She takes back her coffee, he takes back the device.

And there they stand on the sidewalk outside the Crawford Hotel, drinking coffee out of thermoses and not having to deal with radioactive spiders.

Which leaves:

"... primals?"

Serafíne

(Awareness or whatever.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

Last night or morning and coffee or whatever.  Something something somewhere somewhere is enough of a scrim against a certain someone's (generally unerring) sense of Magick Afoot.  Or whatever comes close to constituting it.  Distinct enough to bring her out of the vague, thoughtful drifting stupor in which she drowses against her consor's side while he talks about Things or whatever.  Business.  Maybe he's napping, god knows she's been distant lately.  Hardly seems to notice.

She has other things on her mind.

--

Alley? Dumpster?  Sidewalk faire?  Hardly matters.  Coffee shop?  Vietnamese soup joint? Tattoo parlor, vintage clothing store, high-end urban gardening shop, White Castle, brew-pub, tea purveyor, self-serve yaourt (that is French for yogurt and therefore costs more) storefront, used bookstore, pawn shop, beard-groomer's.   Denver has everything.  Even dumpsters full of radioactive spider-parts, perhaps.  Strange how insects dissolve to nothing in the dry air of the high plains. 

--

Also: her.    Somewhere close, but perhaps not-too.  'Round the corner.  Black sunglasses rimmed with silver studs.  Threadbare, miniscule denim cut-offs over torn fishnets.  An old white Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt over a black lace bra, beneath a fraying, vintage macrame vest, because why the fuck not.  Combat boots and a necklace of golden pearls threaded with a bicycle chain. 

The sunglasses fix on Andres.  Swing to Arianna, then back. 

"I think that shit you did woke me up."  Curl of her mouth, one corner, says she's teasing.  Maybe?  Only one of them has met her, and he doesn't know her well enough to read the ticks of expression on her face.  Maybe he's not good with ticks of expression at all.  "'Fucking PDAs, man."   Smirks. 

Though really if they are about to make out our Sera is going to Leave Them to It.

Arianna

"It is particularly Hermetic way to refer to those who prefer twigs and sticks and river rocks and blood in their magics," she says, having lowered the thermos away from her mouth.  There is a seriousness, now, in how she addresses the question. As if she does not wholly approve of it.  "It is poor-form in mixed company."

Like calling her pagan. Which could be passingly true. Possibly. They had never discussed her views on Gods, the old or the new.

Her resonance is stilled pulled in all around her. There is the lingering Ars Mentis effect that keeps her clear-headed despite the night's debauchery and their dancing with spiders.  She is starlight cast through shadows, fleeting and shifting and twinkling in the distance.  Paired with his resonance, she becomes an omen, the evening star held high and remote and cold in its aloofness.  They are oracular, then, an augury spread across the pavement, for Sera to scry when she appears.

For Sera: They are not about to make out. 

Regarding Sera: Her approach is noted, because of course it is, even risen recently from her slumber Sera is strikingly beautiful.  The line of Arianna's inquiry is not hidden behind sunglasses, which would have been a grand thing to remember in her haste to get out the door to battle radioactive spiders, but No! So Sera can mark the way the other woman's gaze roams from head to toe and back again, appraisingly, and how the pride and nigh on smug cant of her smile does not shift much, but the shift it makes is an inclusive sort of thing.  The sort of smile that leans in, that welcomes or invites.  In the right company, she is great at parties.

It is unlikely they travel the same circles, but they do both look as if they would enjoy parties.

Fucking PDAs, man -- says Sera.  Ari makes some small sound of agreement, but it amused and caught back a little. Withheld before introductions are made, as surely they must be. She feels compelled to know Sera a little better, to stand a little more fully in the light she casts.

"How rude of us, to break up your sleeping," she says. It tucks the amusement into the corners of her mouth and keeps it there, barely, in echo of Sera's tease.  "Surely we owe you at least a coffee to make amends. Isn't that so, Andres?" she asks. This should be impetus enough for the Etherite to introduce them. Surely. Right?

Andrés

[int + empathy: IDK, is it?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 7) ( success x 1 ) [Doubling Tens]

Andrés

Several seconds crawl by as Andrés attempts to make sense of the question. The seconds drag his attention across the sidewalk to hang it on the Cultist, with whom he is about as likely to make out as he is the Hermetic. He blinks. That crease between his brow deepens.

He looks back at Arianna.

"Oh!" he says like the answer just hit him upside the head. Then he passes the thermos to Sera. Sharing is caring. "Serafíne, this is Arianna. House Bonisagus, yeah? Arianna, te presento a Serafíne. Cult of Ecstasy."

Smoooooth.

With that he wipes the screen of his device against the thigh of his slacks and tucks it away in a back pocket.

Serafíne

"Everyone calls me Sera," so the creature appends to Andres' introduction.  That's all.  Otherwise: pretty damned impressive, actually.  He even managed to not-apply the new-fangled tradition-name she does not care to remember and refuses to attempt to pronounce.  Unhooks her left hand from the pockets of her denim shorts enough to wave a hallo!  that flashes hints of tattoos: on black ink framing her fingers, both edging and covering her palm.  The curling rather delicately over her inner wrist.  Another, larger piece clear on her forearm. 

This hint of inquiry or awareness as her blond brows lift above the frame of her sunglasses.  "Think I'd prefer a Bloody Mary to coffee.  Or maybe just orange juice,"  last night is still in her veins.  Today has a hallucinatory quality that dovetails with the lingering remnants of magick and wrap of their combined resonance that lends this moment the surreal portent of certain of her dreams, and she is not entirely confident whether she is sleeping or waking.  And sure, she could find that answer with a half-thought of a spell, but why?

Her dreams, though, are not usually so precise.  Sera Understands - though vaguely - that House Bonisagus means Hermetic.  Wonders if that means another tumble of names-and-titles is coming.  Secretly kinda hopes so.   But she wants to clarify.  "So... Hermetic, right?"

Arianna

At some point she has shared her house name with Andres. They were probably drinking.  He had her pegged for Heremtic from about thirty seconds after they had met.  It's not really that she screams it from every pore and sinew, just that there are some turns of phrase and manners of bearing that speak it to it less than subtly.

"You have a beautiful name," she tells Sera, and the expected tumble of titles and names does not come.  It is not even a thing held back, barely, behind her eyes.  There are names and titles and a long enough litany of lineage to appease even the old testament god of begats and begats and begats, and all of that is entirely out of place for a bright-shining morning in Denver.  All of it is blissfully elsewhere.  It could be produced, with suitable flourish and without delay, if requested.

The cant of her words is slightly Othered.  Touched by a romance language, and that is re-affirmed by the multi-lingual cant to Andres' introductions, and the Grazi she offers him in reply.

"And yes, guilty as charged.  Ordo Hermes and bani Bonisagus," this offered with such familiarity with the titles that she could clearly be nothing else.  "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting any of your Tradition before," she confesses to Sera, and it is with some curiosity and open interest, not with the derision or dismissal one might expect from the Order.

"The Tractor Room on..." her brow furrows and she points in the direction of this made-up-on-the-spot brunch location. "I cannot remember the street name, but it is that way, and it has impressive bloody marias."  This is about as helpful as she is about locations in Denver. She probably only knows about it due to Andres.  But it is offered as a potential solution.

Andrés

Her grazie nets her a "Claro" in response. Mindless lapse into the mother tongue and it isn't as if Sera doesn't understand him when he does so. If anything the nearness to another whose English is not native draws out his own accent.

With the introductions over he swipes his bare left hand over the bed-mess of his hair. Lazy attempt at restoring order to it. He needs a shower and a change of clothes but that isn't either of their problem.

"'Impressive,' eh?" Musing tone. Though he has in his possession the coffee he has not been drinking it. If he wanted to be sober, he wouldn't have gotten drunk. "We'll see about that."

And off he goes.

Serafíne

"Cheers,"  so says Sera, by way of a thank-you to the compliment on her name.  Knows Hermetics, or perhaps more precisely A Hermetic Or Two, well enough to understand the importance of names to them.  "A friend gave it to me, back when I was a babymage.  So like, my folks get no fucking credit for it." 

"If I'd known that you hadn't met one of us before, though, I'd've tried to conjure up Jim.  I think he makes a better first impression.  He's really into yoga and shit."
Nothing othered about her own language.  Listen to the cheerful way the creature throws around profanity.  Does understand Andres at least when he breaks out the Spanglish, but also: doesn't really let on.  Keeps her hair bleached a glorious, golden blond, so there's no reason to guess at her roots.  Except for: her roots.  And hell, perhaps the way her skin takes to the sun in the summer, and this one only starting. 

The only thing othered about her is her presence: bright, intense, physical, heady, untamed. 

Swings into not-precisely-step as Andres leads them off in search of Sunday brunch, or at least: Sunday-brunch drinks.   "You sure you know where you're going?"

Andrés

Over the shoulder, cheerful: "Of course not!"

Arianna

"I've made a game of following when he gets like this," Arianna tells Sera, as they all swing into motion, loosely following the Etherite who has put himself on point.  "Sometimes it leads to fantastic drinking, and other times to Apprentices, or to radioactive spiders."

This is a node to the evening before, not that she rightfully remembers it. Also she would not unwind Time, even if it were within her grasp, to better know the fate of the eight legged offender.

"But it is never boring," and this, from the Hermetic, is a sort of high praise.  Her complexion is a faint olive tone, and it echoes her heritage as strongly as the slight cant of her accent.  The point of her chin and the loft of her cheekbones are likewise hallmarks of further coasts.  But her hair is close to its native color, and the crows feet around her eyes are in keeping with her actual age.  Ari is not a Life mage or one that may slow the progress of time against her person.  And as the caffeine in her bloodstream takes hold, at long last, and they shift toward companionable things, she lets the Ars Mentis rite unravel and the thrum of her resonance finally dims.

Serafíne

"Dude, I'd be more down for mad-scientist adventures if I'd been to sleep today." 

So she says, putting to lie her earlier accusation that their magickal antics and/or damned not-precisely-making-out woke her the fuck up.  The sunglasses have not left her eyes, but Ari and Sera and now in a kind of step behind Andres, close enough that if Ari catches the sly side-glance with which Sera favors her, she will have the impression of dark eyes, more pupil than anything else. 

"Do you know Nick and Pen?"

Andrés

"Boring?"

For being as short as he is, the Etherite's stride lends his pace a quickness that is almost inconsiderate. Almost, because it has to compete with his mouth, which is attached via bones and nerves to his brain, which does not give a shit whether it is considerate or not.

He talks with his hands. Lucky for his wingspan, the sidewalk is not churning with people today. Nobody wants to walk far when it's raining.

Sera would be more down for adventures if she'd been to sleep today.

"The average person spends a third of their life sleeping, Serafíne, do you have any idea what one can accomplish if they stop squandering their time like that?"

Asked the mad scientist of the seer.

Arianna

"Quite well, actually," Ari answers Sera, and the spread of her grin is a margin wider.  "They are why I came to Denver."

Perhaps Sera knows that Nick and Pen are caballed with another, a friend from their past who is recently relocated. If so, this is enough to cement the identity of that personage.  If not, then it definitely hints at a breadth and depth of stories untapped in this stroll, which is growing ever brisker in pace.  Ari adjusts her stride length to match the mad scientist's velocity.

"Never boring, I said."  Emphasis on the never.

"I take it you are friends?" This, then, to Sera, but the circle of the question is left unclear. The query is either that she is friends with Andres, which seems likely, or with Nick and Pen, which seems equally likely.  Both are of interest to the Bonisagus, who is failing to keep up with the stereotypes of bookishness know-it-all-ism today.

Serafíne

"I've got like a mansion and shit that I visit when I sleep, and sometimes birds or talking eyeballs or French-braids or ladies with their heads on backwards," the seer is exagerrating.  Prophetic dreams are nearly always elliptical, evasive, ellusive, even when they are also sometimes: powerful, gut-wrenching, seizure-inducing, "or what-have-you tell me the future and shit, so.  IDK, maybe you oughtta do it more?  It's pretty fucking awesome.

"Plus snuggling.  Snuggling goes with sleep like - "  This quizzical pause.  The search for an appropriate metaphor is enough to stop Sera (fast enough to keep up with Andres, sure, but forever lagging because: morning, because the speed in the LSD has worn off, and left her with the lingering aftermath that is beautiful and achy and SLOW DOWN GODDAMNIT ANDRES) in her tracks.  Finally, she hits upon, "French 75s and a really good night to come.  Or spakly bits and Carneval."

And, Ari takes it that they are friends?  Or inquires, rather.  Sera is: looking up and perhaps catching up.  Maybe they pause for her.  They should.  If not, she could perhaps staccato time.  Seems pretty profligate, but no more so than some of her other uses of magick for her own pleasure. 

Her answer to the question is a shrug, though.  Thoughtful sure, but: she doesn't know them that well.  Any of them.  "I like Nick.  Pen seems cool.  This guy's a fucking weirdo."  

Which isn't a criticism.  Three or four times they've met and Sera knows: this guy's a fucking weirdo.  Okay.  Aren't we all.

Andrés

At the intersection he has to stop and wait for them because of traffic patterns and red lights and common sense. He's reckless at times but not reckless enough to walk across the street when cars are doing the same thing in the perpendicular direction.

He whistles an up-and-down arpeggio while bouncing on the balls of his feet, almost as if he isn't fucking listening. Removes the chalk-smeared device from his pocket. Squints at it. A spark of an idea. At that he looks like he might run into traffic. But he doesn't.

This guy's a fucking weirdo.

"Dale, cabrón," he says to himself. Digs a small notebook out of a back pocket pen pen where the fuck there it is. Pen. Scribbles down the thought he just had before it can get too far. Made his own sense out of the smeared nonsense on the device.

The light may well change before he pulls his head out of his ass, but he's onto something.

Arianna

It is Ari's turn to be the counter-ballast of the conversation, while the other two speaking of sleeping and dreams.  She offers a little approving color -- Sparkly things and Carneval are a capital combination -- and otherwise focuses on keeping up with the hustle.  Even with a typical European walking pace, Andres' hustle borders upon impolite.

When they are all collected at the street corner, watching the traffic swim past, she taps him on the shoulder and points a ways down the street.

"I think it is there," she says, helpfully, though the metal sign and farm-to-table rustic chic atmosphere would have proved a ready cue whether she pointed it out or not.  There is polite conversation to make now, sussing out social connections, feigning interest in one another's interests, but Sera doesn't seem the sort for forced niceties.

Which is a relief. Ari is quite good at the game, but prefers not to play it.

"He's my favorite Denver weirdo so far," Ari says, ruffling her fingers through Andres' hair and smirking as she pulls back away from him.  "Though one of his Apprentices is not bad either.  Oh! This reminds me. Andres?"

A pause, to see if she has his attention.  The cant of her expression has gone serious though her look cannot be as imperious and concerned as it would like, with her hand shielding her eyes from the overhead sun.

"Has Margot returned? Is she hale?"

Serafíne

Neat lift of a sharp chin by way of inquiry.  Here is something strange and almost occasionally incisive about Sera: a certain note, at a certain time, where she has or finds or forges an edge in the very air around her.  Glance; Arianna to Andres.  The ruffling-of-hair. 

Funny how golden the affectionate little gesture makes the morning.  How it focuses Sera's sunglass-hidden gaze quite suddenly on Andres. 

Doesn't say anything.  Considers inquiring about the device and but also considers that the answer could potentially bore the hell out of her.  Capacitors and whatever.  Oh fuck.  That reminds her of the robot-talking-girl.

Andrés

The hair-ruffle is tolerated if he even notices it occurs. Serafíne is better able to read people than he is to pretend otherwise, and she can see below the surface of his beleaguered acceptance of the physical contact.

"How the hell should I know?"

His apprentice and her status are not on his radar, it should seem. Given what they were discussing the last time the three of them were in the same room, one would think the Etherite would have an answer that was not glib or shitty.

He adjusts his glasses and tries again: "Last I heard, they were still in one piece."

And the light changes.

Arianna

Ari is not particularly empathic, so she does not know the depths of Andres's soul or how he feels about her faux-affection, only that it is offered with the sort of annoying fondness that flirts around the edge of friendship's margins and never transgresses into something more.  Mark: Ari has made no attempt to touch Sera. Not even to extend a hand for shaking in greeting. Aside from the hair ruffle -- nay, even including it -- the touches she offers are directed, and clear in their compass, and set to a particular purpose.

"One piece is favorable to many," Ari says, as if this no news is good news approach is acceptable to her.  In truth, it is not, but she obscures that behind an inscrutable indifference.  As if she had only asked after the younger woman to be polite.  Though that is not entirely fair, as the furrow of her brow when she spake Margot's name was more intent than indifferent.

Ari has been accused of being fickle of heart. Perhaps it is true.

The light changes, and she steps off the curb without looking left or right first. Such blind assurance in the rules of traffic -- a surer proof of consensus among the masses than any other she has found in modern society -- and human compliance.

Serafíne

The Cultist is more drifting than speaking now.  Lights change and Ari steps off the curb and Sera, too, although this is less a response to the lights, which she is ignoring entirely, than it is motion-to-motion.  The others step off.  Sera follows. 

Oh, hey.  Here is the place.  Arianna suggested it but Sera knows it.  Or at least: knows the place now that she's here.  The waitress taking orders at the rough-hewn outdoor tables is on Dee's roller derby.  Dark, close cropped hair and enough familiarity that she unlatches the little gate framing the tables off from the sidewalk to let them squeeze in without making them go around.  Time enough for Arianna and Andres to array themselves at the table the waitress offers up while Sera and the other girl exchange hugs and Sera puts in for the first round of drinks and Sere tips up her sunglasses so the other young woman can check the state of her pupils. 

Yep.  Still huge. 

Enough time for Arianna and Andres to talk about apprentices, if they want to.  Or Andres' revelation on the street, earlier.  Or whatever, before Sera comes back to the table to which they have been directed.  Sera is still kinda thinking about how Andres reminds her of Patience.  And other things.

Into the Green Wood: The Warded Door

evening-star

"Do you remember solution to the riddle about the Basilisk from Maga Ionia's On Mythical and Magical Creatures?"  she asks Pen, glancing up from a pile of folded silks and fabrics unearthed from a dusty wicker basket in one corner of Philae's Finery and Antiques.  What light eeks in through the thick-paned windows is warped by the slide of the aged glass and comes in ever-broadening beams which set the dust in the air afire, illuminate their dance and whirl-whorling.  The dust is so thick in the shop that it almost has a taste to it, and the smell of old books and leather and things left too long to the touch of time is thick and clings to their hair and fingerprints.  Everything here is older than each of the Hermetic women, some of it is older than the two of them combined.  A great deal of it is junk; a few things are treasures.  Pen and Ari have the run of the place to themselves. Philae -- whose name is actually Karina -- has gone across the way to get a cup of coffee.

Something about the ardent woman and her luminous companion inspires trust, or at least requires considerably more caffeine than the shopkeep has in her bloodstream at present.

Ari pulls a scarf out of the middle of the pile. It is pale cream with yellow and purple irises.  The pattern is faded just enough that it looks like water color.  As she unfolds it and holds it up to the light, Pen can see the detail and variability in the print.

"It's hand-dyed," says the Bonisagus, shaking her head a little as she hands it over to the Flambeau.  "Amazing.  Six dollars for a silk scarf -- It's like the prices were set by casting lots.  Shall I see if there's another?"

lake-light

[Do I? Intelligence + Enigmas.]

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

lake-light

"I do, and I remembered the variant too. What rock is lighter than the basilisk's stare and redder than the basilisk's heart? Version one. What rock is lighter than the basilisk's heart and what stone grows into a tree in flower? Version two. Answer: a cherry stone."

Pen is seated, cross-legged, on the dusty ground. In her lap is a box full of spoons, silver spoons and copper spoons, spoons of many shapes and spoons of many sizes, and in among the spoons are rings, a skein of rings, rings upon rings upon rings, some cheap and tawdry fluff, some richer, all of them lost. Pen is for once wearing little jewelry: her wedding band shines like lake-light, star-gloam, milk-light; a ring on her other hand shines just as bright, the sapphire it is set with is a shadow, is a clot of evening. There are stones in Pen's burnished hair, which is swept back at the nape of her neck, and bent so: isn't it fair, and isn't she? Bent so, seated so: there is the hilt of a knife, just falling out of her boot. 

Pen lofts her chin to peer fabric-wards, reaching out one hand (from the other, rings and thread and spoons fall, clattering as soft as Echo singing Narcissus' own praises) to take it between her fingers and see the shadow of them through the scarf. 

"Maybe they were set by casting lots," Pen says, with a pleased twist of her lips. "It is how I might do it, were I in charge of such a shop. Toss prices in a hat and see what sticks. Or ask people what they thought such and such thing was worth to them, and then what it was worth to me. It's beautiful; if there is another, I'll take it. I think this box has a secret bottom."

Pen: she lifts the box to regard it, and then, "This seems the sort of place one might find Tass, doesn't it? We should look."  

evening-star

"You should take this one," Ari says, letting go of her corner of the scarf.  It float-falls down into Pen's grasp, obscuring all of her beautiful rings, whispering against her skin the way that only silk can murmur-slide and insinuate.  Then Ari's quick and nimble fingers are to the task again.  It does not take long enough for her to find another, blue-greys and whites and hushed hints of lavender. Batik-dyed silk, for less than a song.

"If they were set by casting lots, then I'd say the Oracle was for once in our favor."  She holds this new silk up to the light and the overlapping patterns are caught up in the sunlight, made bluer-black and stark against the streaming through of gold and late afternoon.  Attuned as she is to the shape of letters and sigils, she can almost scry the first of a few runes in it. This is the danger with mysticism: it is everywhere. The mysteries refuse to remain hidden.  She closes her eyes against them for a moment, and breathes out deeply enough to disturb the whorling-whirling dust.

Pen is fully loaded with her instruments and accoutrements this lazy afternoon and Ari is, likewise, possessed of her wand and her sharp-edged mind, in which the legend to most earthly sigils and the shape of many man-made tongues resides.  There is chalk, and pen and paper in her bag is she is in need of something more than circles traced in the ambient dust, which renders all horizontal spaces into artboards and canvases for one engagement of the mind only.  Single-use.  Fleeting.

She folds the silk into halves, and halves again until it is neat-edged and small enough to carry.  Here, on the upward face of it, there is a strike of dye and answering shadow almost in the shape of Radhio, the crossroads, of travel and decisions and omens, and the like.  It is hidden in plain sight; readily grasped by the imagination or subconscious.

"We should," Ari agrees.  "I can sketch you the symbols, if you wish to Dowse for Baetylus again..."  This is said easily, and the Bonisagus is already shaping the heraldry of the rote in her mind.

lake-light

"Maybe." Ari is back to her task. Pen sets the box of metal oddments back down on the ground and catches the silk scarf before it float-falls to the ground, proper, and she holds it up, and watches her friend's silhouette through it. Here is Arianna, transfigured into an Art Nouveau dryad, Iris' painted on her skin. Here she is, whispered into a softer world. Pen folds the scarf into quarters, then sets it aside. Six dollars is inexpensive enough that she is tempted, and then she goes back to sifting through spoons and rings and thread. How the thread has gotten into the box she does not know, but it has tangled everything up. Daedalus could not find his way out with this string, could plan a new Labyrinth with this string as a model: it catches on Pen's wrist and on her thumb and she tries diligently and automatically to untangle it, though a glance up, an gaze snagged on the second scarf Ari has found, causes the redhead to smile faintly and privately.

"So be it! You should sketch the symbols in the dust." This is said without snark. "Use the environment." This last is said, perhaps, with a spot of mischief; challenge and curiosity both.

evening-star

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

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

evening-star

Six dollars is inexpensive enough that -- if Pen does not buy it for herself -- Ari might make an incidental gift of it. A thing bequeathed to her dearest of friends simply because the shape of Pen's smile from behind the curtain of silk pleased Ari in ways she does not quite have words for in this language or another.  Because Pen is the poet, and Ari is merely a linguist. They each have their Artistry.

Behold: There is a wide and ready expanse of dust on a nearby table, round and only big enough for a breakfast for two or corner occasional or some other side-of-the-room type station.  There is not space enough or opportunity to strike out and begin again.  Pen's challenge is to perfection, to performance art in an unprepared space and Ari? She rises to it. She becomes it.  There is a glimmer of pride and also confidence to the green of her eyes as she tucks one hand behind her back and extends the index finger of the other, as she is both the artist and the instrument, made stylus and the hand that holds it, until there is symbolism in the way she scribes, is made a scribe, has always been becoming one.

They have cast this rote before and only a quarter of a year before -- yes, a quarter year already, though it is hard to believe the year has turned so quickly; Focus! -- and so the shapes are ready in her mind. And also Ari has been toying around with the margins of what she might due with Ars Vis, what she might be on the edge of doing, so these things are at the ready, they are on the tip of her tongue -- which is caught between her teeth to keep her from speaking the Names she writes in Enochian in the slant of golden light, at the margins of Helios's grace, as if she were Venus (both the evening and the morning star) who might sing to the sun and the moon with equal intimacy.

After a few long minutes, Ari steps back, extended finger held aloft and tongue still caught and eyes tracing the lines and curves and bends of the shapes in the dust.  There are now berms and valleys, darker wood grain showing through the patina left behind of time.  It is quick work, and in a less refined medium, but it is resonant all the same.

"I give you, the finest dust-drawing that I might muster, my lady Weaver and dearest friend. Does it meet with your approval?" she asks, but her mouth is already set in smug self-satisfaction. She is already pleased, even as she extends a hand to Penelope to help her surface from the sea of spoons and back into the warmth of the late-light.

lake-light

[Let's Speak It.]

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

lake-light

[The Roll, as before.]

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

evening-star

[The Roll, plucky side-kick version.]

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

lake-light

Pen doesn't answer in words, but rather she gives Ari a long sidelong look, canting her jaw, her naked throat, and the mischief and challenge transmute (alchemical marriages) into good humor. Pen has risen to her feet without needing the hand offered the help but she will take it because it is good to take help because help offered gladly is gladly taken and once risen to her feet she is come to look at the table, its slanting bars of gold light, its crown of late afternoon and how the eddying dust falls just so, just so patterned.

Pen studies the invocation and licks the tip of her finger and draws it through each word and each rune and each Word and each symbol as she pronounces it. Witness this: how she pronounces these words, this chant, this chaunt, witness the straightness of her spine, the supple bend of her head, and doesn't she have a quicksilver air to her, for all she carries herself so still (a vessel [the Word])? Yes, (no: not a vessel; the Word is commanded, the Word is a fist-full of lightning: she will shape light out of the dark, and her voice is Mars simmering in a cup: blood and silver, light and water: isn't it a shining thing, spoken so well? Isn't this how the seraphim communicated when they were in their Ideal forms? Isn't she arresting [beguiling], couldn't she sing the Moon into her belly? Couldn't she speak a heart unbroken?) might.

Pen: speaks.

And before them, the Weaving of the Tapestry, the Tellurian, is colored bright and visible; the places where Tass has gathered a pulse in the throat, a drumming song in the head, this-a-way, that-a-way, but:

Isn't there more? There is more.

There is a door.

evening-star

Pen speaks and the shadows bend a knee to listen.  All things magical gather up their hearts into their throats and wait, poised on every perfect syllable, hoping to hear their Name among the gilded few that spill across the lake witch's lips.  Sunlight condenses until it is thick like honey, until it is thick like amber and this!  This is a point in time stitched so perfectly into the Tellurian that it might never be altered, of Pen with her stick-straight spine and the delicate bow of her head and the reverberation of her voice captured forever and for always with all the world around her breathless.

Ari is breathless. She, like all the other magical things, waits on bated breath for the speaking of her Name. Even a fragment will do. Even an echo that might hold the shape of one of her names.  Just to be closer than touching to the magnificence Pen works, she wants to be named and commanded by the language of the Seraphim.

This is a beauty and power few outside the Order could comprehend.  Every particle of dust in the air is on fire; each is a tiny planet and all orbit Pen; Pen is the sun, the giver of truth and and of light and when her voice falls silent the Tellurian echoes.  Its strings call back, resonate, reverberate.  It is commanded and in that clear, and perfect and immediate answer the bright-shining nodes of collected power and influence simmer and seethe their white-brightness.  It is collected here in the bowl of a chipped teacup (Elegance), there pressed into the pages of an outdated encyclopedia (Distilled), there again in the fire of light moving through the cut glass teardrops of a crystal chandelier (Fracturing).

It is there in the worn and heavy wooden door, off its hinges and resting against the wall, which has been used as back splash to a display of other things.  There are deep impressions in the wood and heavy iron fittings.  It is the sort of door that might hold back intruders, or bar Keeps, or swing open to reveal the warmth of firelight dancing over a worn slate floor.

There are vines and leaves burnt into it, and its top is rounded instead of squared.  There is a little window built into the top of it, at eye height, barred by an iron cage.  The little door is open and out of its portal streams a fey and greening light.  It is fainter than Helios and stranger than moonlight. It is not Pen's radiance or Ari's either, but a thing all its own.

Beckoning.

Ari's attention is pulled toward it before she recognizes the faint, enchanting glow.  She is still breathing out the wonder of standing in Pen's orbit; she is still half-hoping to hear an echo of her Name -- and maybe her Name is behind the door, or in the teacup, or pressed between the pages of that old book of mysteries.

"I will never tire of listening to you speak," she says, and it is honest and appreciative and bewitched all the same.  "I would not wonder if the Seraphim themselves do long for it, or hear their language of their home in your Enochian.  It's flawless."

evening-star

[Wits + Enigmas]

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

lake-light

[Also!]

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

lake-light

"My tongue feels like bees," Pen says. "I wonder if that's the pleasure of the seraphim?"

Winks, a swashbuckler's wink.

But see: Ari's pleasure in Pen's speaking touches her. She is, even so and even still, always conscious of being behind, of not being where she wants to be, of needing to be better, stronger, faster, of needing to be more than she is, because there will come a time when she needs that, and cannot rise to it, and a price will be paid. If it is only her who pays the price, that is one thing.

That is one thing.

The teacup (elegance) and the encyclopedia (distilled) and the chandelier (fracturing [and some would say there is a Destiny]) are one thing. The great heavy door with its green and ancient light is quite another. The ladies of the Silver Bough can come close and quick-witted, sharp-witted, wits as quick as foxes, wits as shrewd as cunning, witted and unriddling (wisely expounded), smart as they are and as able to draw conclusions from broken threads and threads unraveling and it does look like threads or feel like threads to their sixth sense to their second sight the Wards which are bound around that door. Which are lapsing, which Time has worn: and perhaps something else, some Thing else, which has gnawed on the Wards like mice will gnaw at the glue in the spines of books unhappy mice something some Thing some otherworldly intangible thing not body not flesh but spirit has undone what Wizards have polished up metal shield brightness dappled and this thing: this door. This door is a guard post a watch word. This door: the wards are dissipating, and it beckons. There is trouble behind the wards, what might be released (?) when the wards are gone completely: the Wards are clear as they can be in such a state. It is a monstrous rising, and it is sweet.

"We can't leave this alone," Pen says. "But, hmm. It seems to have been warded from the other side; I'd rather not use Magick to lift it. Do you think we together can move the beast? What do you think?"

About it.

evening-star

"Do you think we might shore up the Wards?" she asks.  It is the responsible and upstanding thing to do, but even as Ari asks she knows that she hasn't the skill yet to match this sort of handiwork.  One day: the hope hangs on a distant horizon; it is the gleam of larger works and legacies; it is a thing to aspire to.  But not today. 

"I had heard that there were places still where old and anchored magics like this bled through, from when warding and banishing and saining were all easier," she tells Pen, who has not had the sort of stories read at bedtime in her youth that Ari has. Of triumphant wizards what pushed back the darkness and warded the Night into only half the sky, and also kept the monsters confined to under beds and in wardrobes, and also made the monsters but those stories came at an older age. 

"I haven't seen many on this side of the Atlantic," she confesses, but there is an undercurrent to it: neither has she looked very hard for them.  In the past month, she'd been looking harder, finding the seams in the mundane world where the magic bleeds back through.

"I think together we might do anything we put our minds to," she tells Pen, planting her hands on her hips for a moment and tipping her chin up proudly.  There is still dust smudged on her hand and it leaves a sullied fingerprint on the skirt of her dress.  There is hubris to it, of course, but if they were crafty and without magic, they could manage it.  Like many things, it was all about leverage.

And lifting with one's knees.

But there is also the pull of the thing, and the closer they get the more it calls to them.  To look through the gleaming portal.  To put more than just one shoulder behind the door as they shift it.  To slip into the shadow between, and then through it, and then through to it...

evening-star

[Wits + Arete]

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

lake-light

[Wits + Arete! Wits specialty, totes applicable.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

evening-star

[Ain't nobody here but us chickens: Masking resonance, Ari/Pen, coincidental, base + 3, +1 fast casting, -1 instruments, +WP (hoping for enough successes to mask them both)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (4, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

lake-light

[Prime 1! Imbue the Ring! Leave a breadcrumb! Diff 4 + 1 fast casting. WP.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

lake-light

[Also, here's a take-off and toss roll. Dex + Ath]

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

evening-star

[Does she stick the landing?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

lake-light

They do this.

And the world turns upside down. They didn't quite touch the Door as they should have to avoid the Wards, perhaps. And so the Wards took them. Or perhaps they touched the Door just right and the Wards were too thin so the beckoning, it took them anyway.

They both feel how it takes them. They have time to do something, each to each. They have time to grab for one another, but the thought doesn't occur to them, does it? That they might be separated right now, as the world drops, as the door opens, as the light subsumes them, sublimates them, transfigures them:

Ari is falling, and falling, Ari is perhaps speaking protection, she is perhaps gesturing, scribing in the air, scrivener of magick brim-full luminous mercurial quick how could she not change easy one two three adapt she is seeking to mask them both to hide their signatures she doesn't know what's happening, only that she is falling, but there is a Door, and there is a Fall, and so it might behoove them to cover their faces so to speak,

and Pen. Pen is quick in this way: the ring that is not her wedding band, she takes it off: kisses it off with her mouth, muttering a word in a language some would call dead and others would call poetry, pushes her Will and essentiae into the metal, and it is daring, and ardent, it is resplendent when it arcs through the air when it falls, clink, into a box of many rings and string and spoons, nestling down so it is not near the top, but it can be felt,

and Ari hits the ground. The ground is loam, is wet earth.

and Pen hits the ground. The ground is wet earth, loam.

Ari wobbles (balance is just attained; books speak of it, but do not always teach it), Pen does not (already readied, the Flambeau: as if she'd meant to do it). The light is green: so, too, the forest -

it whispers to them.

On River Rocks

Stella

The sun has begun its long, slow descent from mid-heaven and the light of it glances over and gilds the ripples of moving water of the river as it slides and flows and whorls and dredges and moves in all the deep and quick and meaningful ways that waterways move, and there is a thrum of summer bugs already in the air around them, for it is warm enough for insect life and it is humid enough for the sound of them to catch and thrum and buzz and hum.  The grass and weeds along the river banks has grown high enough that each crush of their footfalls brings up the smell of verdant growth, of river mud, a sharpness to meld with the pollen hanging heavy in the air and the taste of pine and cedar sweeping down from the mountains and the hope of morels hidden among the roots of trees.  It is not yet the golden hour, for that comes later, when the sun is slung so low that she has turned from burnished light toward brass and every shadow is slanted hard toward the evening and the thickness of them is almost syrupy, or smoke, but never sweet.

Arianna's hair is piled up on top of her head, secured with a few pins and clips, leaving the back of her neck bare.  Every few minutes she reaches up and slaps at something there, and pulls her hand away to inspect it.  So far she has not been quick enough to catch the offending party that has nipped or landed or merely grazed there.

She grew up in a warm country so when Nicholas wants to go hiking the mid-day after a heavy rain, she is fairly sure it will be warm and humid and dresses accordingly.  But she is not used to Denver, and the dappled light over head and the thick, chunky cumulus clouds that sail between said sunlight, should speak to her of coming rain but rather they seem to be its cessation.

For all the years that Nick has known her, Ari has never seemed the out of doors type.  Perhaps he expected a measure of whining, or wheedling or demanding of reasons for their excursion -- promptly renamed an Adventure by Ari -- but this does not come.  Instead she asks him for the names of trees, or flowers, or birds, and she listens if he will talk, and she is blessedly quiet if he wants to listen to the sigh of the wind or the sway of the leaves. 

"What is this one?" she asks him of a tree that they are passing.  "I like the shape of the leaves, and the armament of its seedpods." Hah, yes, leave it to a Flambeau's daughter to find weaponry so readily in Nature.

crow

He is learning to name the trees and flowers and birds that reside in Denver, for it is all still new to him too; he grew up in the desert, surrounded by rocky peaks and chaparral and sometimes palms, when they were in the city.  He traded that for the New England coast, old deciduous forests and salt marshes and the skeleton of some ancient mountain range.  So he doesn't always have names readily available to Ari, but when he does he shares them.

He does talk, sometimes, as they wind their way down the trail.  He tells her about the times he has been here before (he ran into Alex much farther downriver a few weeks ago, lighting a fire) and about the spirits he has seen (he encountered an Owl spirit, but on another river, and they say Owls can be death omens in some cultures did she know that.)

"That's some kind of alder," he says, with a sidelong look toward the tree and indeed to its armament of seedpods.  With the tendency to poetry and the likeness cast to weaponry, there are times when he is tempted to compare and contrast being out here with Ari to being out here with Pen, and the ways they are similar and yet different.

He is taking them up along the river and there is a place where the river kisses the path and for a little while they are joined, they run alongside each other.  It's not meant to last though (some things aren't) and so when they diverge once more Nick stays along the river.  It's a little mountain stream, with waves and currents that peak and crest and rush alongside each other like a herd of horses.

"I've been curious since we last talked about magick, Ari - have you ever experimented with instruments before?  Maybe back in your wild youth?"  Here, a little smile cast in her direction.

Stella

"My wild youth," she echoes, much amused by something touched upon but not truly called out into the afternoon sunlight.  It curls the corner of her mouth and the green of her eyes is more like grass out here than it is like moss, or perhaps that is only the way the yellowing light has caught them just now.  There is laughter, too, because if Nicholas only knew the truth of what he alluded to.  But it is restrained, too, for they are only recently learning to bend that part of her past forward into this friendship and it is not always easy.

"I spent a lot of time out of doors and outside the walls when I was young," she tells him, and there is a fondness and familiarity with how she watches the coursing of the mountain stream and the way it kisses the banks.  "More so than probably I should have," she admits, with candor but without remorse.  "But I never really dabbled in other instruments."

She considers it now, though, as she watches the light on the water or the movement of the grass as he parts a path for them along its banks.

"I suppose my wild youth and my Awakened days did not overlap as much as I would have liked," she teases now, saying this in a long suffering sigh and touching it through with wistfulness.  Offering him a wink when his attention is next cast her way.

"How did you select your instruments?" she asks him, and there is no mockery or faux interest here, only solemnity worthy of the gravity of the question.  "Were they part of your education, or did they come to you through experimentation?"

crow

When Nicholas took his first few steps away from home and went to college (he wouldn't Awaken until years later), it took him some time listening to other peoples' stories and sharing his own before he realized that his own youth was wilder than most.  It was during those years perhaps that he learned to play his cards close to his chest, those years that gave him a reluctance toward disclosure.  Regardless: perhaps he understands here where Ari draws some of her humor from; perhaps he had already anticipated that wistfulness even if he does not share it (or, more accurately, even if his is rooted in something else, closer to the other end of the spectrum.)

"Should have?"  Here, a glance cut to the side toward her, another smile.  "You were still out learning."  Perhaps it wasn't what her Hermetic professors would have wanted her to learn, and yet.  "Did you ever read or study other schools of thought outside the Order, before you Awoke?"

He listens to the rest of what she says, to the questions she directs toward him.  He wore a pair of solid brown boots, reminiscent of the sort a soldier might wear and they have been scuffed and covered in dust and forest loam and water and ice and are still quite sturdy and unmarred for all of that.  They keep his feet sure on the damp rocks and soil that come up along the banks.  He is looking down into the water as they walk, and there are rocks here aplenty but none that have caught his interest just yet.

"Some I started using partly through experimentation of my own, and partly through experimentation aided by memory of people I was before," he says.  "I used to practice outside the city because it was easier to find spirits there, and there was less risk of detection."  A beat.  "I didn't trust most of the Traditionalists any more than the Technocracy, to be honest.  Occasionally I would learn things from spirits, too, when they were feeling generous.  My first mentor taught me the rest."

Stella

Ari had been a good student, excellent throughout her early years, as befits her House and Names and all of that.  She'd spent her time out of doors and studying, or adventuring, and avoiding most of the trouble that there was to get into as a privileged child of important people.  That had shifted in her years at Academy, where her reputation for being something of a trouble-maker had, unfairly, began.  She embraced that, though, whole-heartedly, when waking up did nothing to allay the rumors and fears that she would amount to a great big steaming pile of nothing.  Or, worse yet, to a clever-enough bargaining chip in the pursuit of ever greater Houses and Names.

It is nothing at all like Nicholas's wild youth.  She doesn't have to ask to know that their wildness was of differing sorts, and with differing aims and instigation.  She hopes that his is more innocent, but she fears that will not be so.  Nothing of life outside of the Order seems any gentler than life within it.

"I did not," she tells him, regarding studying outside of the Order.  "I was exposed to language and literature and art and symbolism and philosophy from many corners of the world, but all of it through an Ordered lens."

The corners of her mouth tuck inward, pensive for a moment.

"You can learn a lot about people through their poetry," she says.  It is not at all the way Pen speaks of poetry, but it is held aloft nevertheless.  "Through what they will go to War for, what they will make love for, how they deify their Deities, or what they surround themselves with when they go quietly into their graves.  But it is not the same as living among them," she concedes as they walk on.

When they talk about her past, or her education, Ari always holds it as a thing apart.  It is from the time before they knew each other, and this makes it separate. It is all Order and none of the melt and chaos of cross-Traditional friendships.  This is why having Silas in Denver is so damnably hard -- he is her past and also her present and there is no good way to melt and blend and smooth the chaos that that brings over to meet the pleasing and provocative chaos of her Work and Friendship with Nicholas and Pen.

"What was it like?" she asks, cautiously because she is having trouble framing the question the way she would like to.  "To seek and grasp and listen and learn all for your instruments?  Do you feel they are nearer to the truth of you, because you gathered them to you rather than chose them from a ready palette?"

crow

"Were you forbidden from reading anything outside of an Ordered lens?  Would it have been frowned upon?"  Perhaps the questions are leading or driving at something; perhaps Nick is merely curious.  There is so much, see, that is foreign to him about the way that Ari grew up.  He can imagine it in the abstract; he can imagine the expectations that will be heaped among the children of Awakened people he has known.

Perhaps he wonders whether the same expectations will be heaped upon his own, should he and Pen live long enough to see them.  It is strange to him to imagine growing up within Awakened society, having the supernatural as one's frame of reference for what is normal.

Ari's questions cause him to draw in a breath as he steps over a little shallow where the river's waters pool and eddy and lick at the bank.  There is no crunch of wet gravel though the water ripples about his feet.  "I think they are what I needed them to be at the time I adopted them," he says, "which isn't always nearer to my truth.  Sometimes I adopted the things that were at hand because they worked.  But a lot of tools that are organic speak to something in me."

He is tilting his head, and there is light in his eyes because he is glancing up into the trees as he thinks.  "I'm beginning to use different instruments, now, that make more sense to me and feel...more consistent, to me.  Things that make more sense as my understanding of how magick works deepens.  Your circles were helpful for that."

Stella

"Forbidden?"

She is less cautious and sure-footed than Nicholas is.  Sometimes the water rolls over her boot, and dribbles down between the laces that criss-cross over her foot.  Her socks are damp, but she does not complain.  She is less at one with the space, and it shows in the splashes that herald her footsteps or the slap of her hand against her neck.  Which still fails to capture the nipping insects.

"Not forbidden, Nicholas, but just... "  She considers this for a long while before continuing.  "There are more things worth knowing in the world than things I will ever get to know.  Even if I devoted my life to the study of all worthy things, and to the extension of my life and intellect so that I might consume ever more of them, and to the study of Time that I might bend and ease and make even more opportunity for learning -- never will I know all of the things I might wish or dream to know.

"Growing up in the Order is like this: it seems like everything you think you might want to know is right there.  So much wonder and magic and that's just the lowest shelves of the library stacks, just the things you can access without permission. And if you are voracious and determined and ambitious you may reach beyond this ready information before you Awaken.  But you are incentivized to learn the Right Things, as it opens doors, and gives you access to deeper secrets and higher Arts.  Even if you know there is more, there is the question of why you might divert your time, and your intellect and your energy into it. 

"It might lead toward majesty, or it may be a distraction that limits the things you could have known if you'd just stayed focused on the Right Things all along."

She tells him this, but she is not quite so certain that it is the truth of things.  She has dallied far too long to have been invested in this absolutism overmuch.  She has wasted too much time and energy and intellect.  Perhaps she is not ambitious or determined or voracious.  Perhaps she is content with the contents of the lower and unguarded shelves.  Would Nicholas believe so? Many in the Order do.

"I think it sounds like you, like Nicholas Hyde, to have instruments that speak to him that he might speak with spirits, and to find circles meaningful, and water hallowed, and truth in river rocks.  I wouldn't have felt that way if I had met you in my wild youth," she tells him. 

Ari stops following him and finds a flat rock beside the river to crouch down on.  She lowers her hand until the water trails against and through just the tips of her fingers.  Until it whorls against her the whorls of her fingerprints, and she leaves tiny eddies in her wake, and she is disruptive and distracts this stream from its appropriate course. When she pulls her hand away from the water, it beads like crystal, hanging from her fingertips, amassing just enough weight until it falls back and joins the rest of the water and any separateness and identity is lost to the flow it was always supposed to follow.

This isn't magic. But it could be.

crow

There are times when, to an outsider, the Order of Hermes could seem a religion unto itself.  And like most religions, it is full of contradictions and it is not always internally consistent.  See here: rewards for learning the Right Things in spite of holding the individual Will above all.

These are not things that Nicholas points out to his Hermetic friends.  At least, he does not point them out directly, because he understands that people grow up protective of their cultural values, he understands that as an outsider he cannot be assumed to understand their mysteries.  Perhaps it serves a purpose; perhaps this procedure is merely there to keep them all grounded.  And yet he wonders.

"I'm curious what you'll focus on now that we're more or less on our own out here," Nick says, with a sidelong glance toward her.  Because they are, aren't they?  Fewer Traditionalists around.  Fewer magi.

He is still watching the path ahead, looking perhaps for a likely place to stop and - ah.

He stops here, crouches down where there are numerous rocks that have been smoothed and polished by the current, some carried down and rolled over and over along the bed.  They might have started at the top of a mountain, taken centuries to arrive here.  Rocks travel, despite the propensity of most people to think of them as stationary things.  Nick reaches into a shallow and pulls one out, turning it over absently in one hand.  "I only bring it up because I've heard you question," he says.

Stella

Long ago, at its inception, the Order might have been less contradictory and constrained.  Surely there are myths unto myths about the founding, and Ari's House would hold them all the dearer for its insistance after being The First. Frankly, she has just assumed that all of that history has about much veracity as the blending of the Celtic lores with their history and edge of written and recorded time.  That there is a shard of something ageless and eternal within her does not lessen her skepticism about humanity as an impartial observer of its own trajectory.

"I think we all question," she says, still crouched by the water and a little ways away from his study of the stones.  Still watching the way the light catches in the beads of dampness that fall from her splayed fingers and when no more beads amass and fall, then she dips her fingers into the water and begins the pattern all over again.  "Perhaps not the most loyal among us, maybe they never doubt, but at some point you lift your head up out of your studies and begin to wonder of your own right."

Drip.  Drip.  It is a calming thing. She could imagine scrying by water instead of smoke or mirror or symbol or sand.  She could imagine scrying by anything, really, but not yet scrying by another Art or Weise.  Not by another name.

"And then there are others, like you, who I imagine begin with wonder and work back and forth toward theory when it serves you.  It is a different thing, to build a house around a shifting thing like a river or on sand than it is to realize there has been a house around you all along and open up a door or window."

Drip.

She is supposed to be interested in river rock, but Ari has been distracted instead by the river itself.

"Maybe you do not need the house at all," she says, whilst focusing intently on the bend of light that is paler than honey and bright like the distillation of the afternoon and not quite between her and Nicholas, but also not apart from them.

"I think I like it, though," she says, watching how the light changes as the drop of honey and afternoon falls through shadow and then disappears into the greater water.  "It suits me for now."

crow

There is a loud plunk as Nick drops the rock he was holding back into the current, and it is a heavy oblong thing and so its descent to the bottom of the shallow is too rapid to be perceived without the assistance of Time.  Another exercise for Nick to take up with Pen, perhaps, these things that could not be noticed unless one were to watch with the help of magick.

The dripping water from Ari's fingers: that's another.

She mentions that he might not need a house at all, and here he is thoughtful, here he rests his elbow on his knee and looks down into the water.  "When I was in grad school I had a professor who was very irritated at the perception that theory isn't needed to ground counseling practice," he says.  "She said we all operate from a theoretical framework regardless of whether we know it, and knowing and naming it is something we have to do in order to know whether or not it works.  Magick is like that too, I think."

Houses, well.  Nick rolls a shoulder here, a shrug.  "So what sort of rock do you think you would like, if you chose one to practice with or use in your magick?"

Stella

"Eh," says Ari. It is the most erudite of responses.  It is not to his question about river rocks and instead to the story about his professor and her particular world view.  She wipes her fingers against her leg to slip the last of the dampness from them.  "That is a very narrow view of Naming."

This, though, is as far as she takes the quarrel with the absent Sleeper woman.  It is left to flow past and around them, remarked on only briefly before they turn their attention to more solid things.

"I think I should like a pale one," she tells him.  "So that I might mark the influences that move across its surface, or the stippling and shape which herald its history, but also because I like the greys and pales in things. I find them pleasing, and if I am to Work with this rock, it should be pleasing to hold and to see, and of a good weight. 

"We can find challenging rocks later," she adds.  And mentally tacks on: and then we can mail them to Kestrel.

crow

Narrow, Ari says, and to this he shrugs; Nicholas often blends his understanding of his Sleeper profession with his Awakened life, and he is aware that for some magi the twain do not meet.  Ari prepares to move them on to other topics, and Nick allows this, still crouching at the edge of the riverbed with one hand in the water.

While the ambient air is comfortable, close to what most people would seek out while lounging about indoors, the water still carries memories of winter, or perhaps of the mountaintop from whence it likely came.  Many of these rivers begin as glaciers, or as some aquifer held deep within the rock.  Regardless: it is not a comfortable temperature for one's hand to linger in, but he does not seem to notice that just yet.

"I don't look only by the properties of the rock, but also how it feels to me," he says, picking another one up off the bed and turning it over in his hand.  "If it doesn't resonate with you, it's difficult to use in practice."

It might frustrate her, relying on that level of intuition when it comes to selecting instruments; nonetheless he suggests it.  "What do you think you could use yours for?"

Stella

She is stubborn.  The water is cold, but she has already partially acclimated her fingers by dipping them in and out of the shallows and watching the sunlight pool and puddle and drip from her fingers.  She will not let the memory of glaciers steer her from finding an appropriate stone and perhaps it will be all the more fitting for having frozen her fingers in search of it.

Challenges to overcome. Hermetic. He is well accustomed with this drill.

When Nick speaks of how the stone feels to him, she frowns a little. It is difficult to know what a stone feels like once she has seen it and set in motion all of the associations she has with color and texture and shape and magical properties.  It is like asking her to hear a word in another language and know what it means, to her, without any taste or context for its native meaning.  And this, too, is a Herculean task, as Ari's mind is equally tuned to language as it is to symbols and so she finds that she must let her fingers drift just over the bed of stones while her attention is on anything but the rocks themselves to get even the faintest sense of what a stone might say.

To her.

Or how it feels absent what it is.

"How do you feel what the resonance of a stone is without feeling of the literal resonance of it, Nicholas?" she asks, stooped low like this and looking up to him with a mar of frustration and utter befuddlement between her brows.  The humidity has coaxed her hair into loose and wild curls where it is free from the pile atop her head and she is not at all the same as he usually sees her. She is anything but triumphant.

She could use hers for a paperweight, she thinks, but does not say.  Frustration alone is not enough reason to mock his Praxis.

crow

"I'm not talking about the stone's resonance so much as how it resonates with you," he says, and his repetition of the words is careful here, deliberate.  So is the eye contact he makes.  He must see her frustration, he must know on some level how difficult this is for her.  He must understand how she is struggling.

He is too perceptive to not have picked up on those things.  Today though his mirror is not an exact one; where she is frustrated he meets it only with patience, with a sort of tranquility worthy of their friend Kestrel in his more peaceful moments.

"Sometimes knowledge is just noise.  It can obscure the truth and keep us from the things we know to be true," he says.  "This is like any other attraction, if it helps to think of it that way."  He stops speaking, but only because he is considering weighing thinking, and then, "Think of it like this.  You can know everything about another person, they can be exactly what you believe you're attracted to and what you believe you need, and you can still feel no attraction when you meet them.  When the spirit and mind and body speak to each other that's when we feel whole and connected to other things around us, and that's something we're looking to echo in selecting an instrument or focus for practice."

He flips the rock over again in his hand and runs his thumb over a few pits, as yet left unpolished by rushing water and time.  "Try just picking a few of them up and paying attention to the differences in texture and shape."

Stella

Nick has hit upon a metaphor that Ari understands better than he might think.  For the Hermetics have a Law about Attraction, and there is also a strong section of rhetoric and reason coursework set to stamping out confirmation bias and other (il)logical extensions of Attraction, but the relational sense in which he speaks of it hits something squarely topical within her and it pulls her glance away from him and out over the water.

She breathes out and lets her eyes half-close, and lets the sound of Nick's nearness blend into the background and also wills herself to ignore the chill of the water -- but she knows that it is glacier-born and that it carries echoes of the place where she and Pen had found the tass, which was also like rock and crystal and ice and Winter.  Ari picks up one stone, and turns it over in her palm, and smooths her thumb along the edge of it, and then sets it aside.

She repeats this pattern, with her attention cast a little out toward the middle of the river, until she thinks she may become bored and rote about it, until the movement is almost meaningless and the gleam of the light on the water distracts as it becomes more brassy and warm-without-warmth, and her fingers have gone numb, and the bugs do not stop buzzing or biting but she is resigned to them.

She is resigned to them, and she is enduring, and she is steadfast.  Pen had called her steadfast once. 

The rock in her hand just now is not pale. It is not grey or perfectly round. It is mostly smooth but with a little fold and seam like section where it may have been cleaved from something bigger once, or possibly warped and bent under so much pressure.  It is dark and somewhat mottled. Not very pretty. Nothing akin to perfect. But it has endured.  It is steadfast.  It is of a good weight and she finds that she likes the way the seam of it slides under her thumb when she worries it. And still her attention is out over the water.  And still her fingertips are all but frozen.  And still there is buzzing and frustration and a burn in her legs where she has been too long crouched there beside this river-not-a-river looking for a focus made of compressed mud and time and travel and translation.

Finally she looks down at the stone in her hand, and then back up to Nick.

"This one is ugly," she tells him.  It is truth; it is not a pretty thing.  "But I like the weight of it."  Which does not begin to address the undercurrents of what she might have felt within it, or from it, except that on the surface it does: the stone has gravitas; it is weighty.  She offers it toward him as she rises, to see if he might think the same of its misshapen seeming.

When the Walls Came Down

Ari

[Mind shields for everyone: Mind 2 + Corr1, coincidental, base dif 3 +2 = 5. Taking time, well-practiced. TN3]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Ari

[Extending. +1 dif.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 9) ( success x 1 )

Ari

[Esoterica: There must be a perfect symbol for the tracing of long-active magics. Clever. If we are very lucky, it will also be a symbol with which Nicholas has some resonance...]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8, 8) ( success x 2 ) [Doubling Tens]

Ari

[Follow the Rote: Corr 2 + Mind 1 + Prime 1, coincidental, +1 hidden target, +1 active magics. base dif 3 + 2 + 2 =7. Coordinating resonance, taking time, instrument (see esoterica roll).  -3. TN4  +WP]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Nick

[Assisting!  Base diff 5, +1 for hidden target, -1 for coordinating resonance, -1 for using instrument, -1 taking time.  WP so we don't botch.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Ari

Chez Giametti is somewhat more inviting that the first few times Nick has visited.  The living room is set up now, with a broad couch and love seat framing a seating area that faces the hearth.  There are places for books, always, and pleasing but somewhat abstract art.  It is tastefully put together, and yet has the warmth in texture and the taste of hidden things that he has come to expect from his Hermetic friends.  Never in her home is there a sense of wanting; this is as close as she comes to opulence.

For all of her tendencies to jump into things, feet first, there is an astonishing pragmatism to how she approaches unfamiliar magics.  They do not simply jump into scrying the threads of the old and twisting rote, no, instead Ari takes a small bowl of water and salts it thoroughly.  She rests a sprig of rosemary in it.  The basin is round and it is silvered and she stirs it, sun-wise, with the index finger of her right hand.  The little sprig twists and spins. The salt dissolves.  As she carries this toward Nick, she speaks over it in the shape of foreign words, she consecrates it with her Will.

Some of this is showmanship, some of it is to call to his symbols as much or more than hers. All of it is magic. It is the sort of magic that mothers work over their children; it is the sort of magic that Masters work over the Apprentices; it is the guarding of one Mind with the Will of another.  Nicholas is standing before her hearth when Ari dips her thumb into the salt-like-sea water and then smudges a damp place over his third eye.  Then she presses her thumb into each of his palms.  It like being anointed with moonlight; it is like having starbright burn from his meridians.

It circles him in, and marks the boundaries between what is Nick and what is Ari, what is Nick and what is Other.  As if he stood within a circle scribed with salt and iron and ice.  The boundary is clear, and permeable to him; he must invite the Others across it.

To keep with the symbols, she places the sea-salt in her palms and also at her third eye.  The dampness does not burn the same to her; it underscores the boundaries kept between self and Other, yes, but she is practiced in this rite. The mindfulness of keeping it active is spent in its extension to Nicholas and even that is practiced in a sense.  Though Ari is not yet a Mother, or a Master, or even truly a minder of others, this is a watchful, careful thing. She can abide it.

There is a brief discussion of symbology, tuned toward the common things she has previously found with Nick and the settle, quickly, on the shared understanding of circles. Which is positively brilliant, she tells him, as she draws him and silk-wrapped book and the basin of salt-sea water that binds them out onto her patio.  She has been working for the past month at scribing-staining onto the concrete a wide and winding circle.  It had been obscured when they worked at the Talismans, but now it is complete enough to stand in as this symbol.  They drag the outdoor table to the center of it; it is an aluminum altar -- the irony is not lost on Ari, though amusement does not sway her from this pragmatic thing -- and together they lay out the book beside this small blue basin of anchored and anchoring things and together they walk the circle to come back to either side of the narrow table and inspect the rote together.

Each has their own names and symbols and words to speak, but together their magics reach out into the expanse of the Tellurian, each star-bright mind following one thread or another, working faster together and more completely than either might apart.  Tethered as they are, Nick can feel the ebb and flow of the distance between his attention and hers, pulled thin and translucent and then jammed thick again as they come together toward some end.  She is at once beside him, protective of his mind and Will, and apart.  Her father is the Aegis of Ylesephet.  She carries echoes of this guardianship within her bones.

Once again, this space outside her home is made hallowed by his presence and his Working.  Once again it is illuminated by her own.  Once again the stand within a well of moonlight, or within the gleam of moonlight rippling on the water of a well, or over the ripples of a moving water, water being a thing sacred to Nicholas.  They are movement, and light, and something sacred.  They seek...

... but do not yet know what they will find.

Nick

They don't know what they will find just yet.  Nick's presence beside her is a palpable thing, how he hallows this place and lends it some otherworldliness.  For Nicholas, this sort of looking is about expansion, is about extending himself upwards and out, is about inherent and divine connectedness.  And isn't that easy to do, when they're trying to trace another's Working which by definition taps into the raw essence of Creation?

Nick is beginning to be able to articulate these things.  He's on a precipice.  He is beginning to adapt even his instruments to be more in line with it: see here, incense today, burning there in the center of the circle they've walked.

They can trace the ripples across space, from the emotion and resonance embedded within the pages of this book and all the way to a place high on a mountainside.  The rocks are red and the earth is barren and see it could be another world, a lonely planet suspended in space and bereft now of life.  At the base of the mountain, there are crumbling foundations, there is ash and a fine white dust.  Long ago there was ruin, but that is old territory and anyway they aren't using Time today.

Were you there when the walls came down?

Someone was.

This is a place of loneliness, of Hunger and it beckons, see, and maybe not only to them.  Its source is farther up past the ruin, all the way up to a cabin and a circle of bone.  Bone, and grave dust, and isn't it a lucky thing see that Ari thought to shield them before they moved forward because they can feel a dread deep in their own bones, something that would take hold would snag them and they wouldn't want to look away but they would want to all the same.  They don't feel that; for now they are safe.

But that's what they see: tall chaparrel and logs dessicated and dried out by desert heat and wind.

They could linger.  It might not be wise.

Ari

Were you there when the walls came down?

Someone was.

She was.

It is a lucky thing that Ari had thought to shield them for so many reasons just now.  The question, left unanswered in Nicholas's mind has a ready and immediate answer in her own.  Yes. Yes she was there when the walls fell; and there is the sweep of something deadly and decisive across that memory; and it is He Who Wields the Flaming Sword, and it also his foe, and it is righteous and terrifying.  But it is also contained.

This is Self.  This stays within the circle of the salt and iron and starlight that defines the sphere of Ari's influence and while Nicholas can feel the intensity of its flare, he does not know the specific shape of its influence.  Only that it is hers, and not his, and not of this working.  But also that she was there when the walls fell.  That she knows the mortar- and bone- and grave- dust; that she knows the creep of dread.

The line between what is hers and what is not is argent and brilliant and excoriating.  It gives her a place to focus.  The ruins of Ylesephet fall away, replaced by the heat of the desert wind and the scent of chaparral and the red dirt of mountains far from memory.   There are ruins below them and a circle of bones before a cabin.

Because they are safe, she takes the time to count and number them.  Because they are safe she takes note of whether the door stands open or if it is closed, and if it is open whether she can see within it.

Because within her circle she holds the falling walls, and the Aegis and the Arrow, and something righteous and terrifying; she also knows that she can Will this trace to break whenever she is ready.  It is a thin thing held in the hands of her mind; it is kite-string.  The moment the wind seems to sharp or too hot or too wicked she will let it loose, and away the vision will fly.  She will let it loose, and push down the fallen walls and remember the taste of red dust.

Her hands are tight on the edge of the table; even sinew in her body is tight with the flight or fight of two fallen places warring for her interest; of memory both hers and someone else's.  If Nicholas has enough presence of mind to be both here and there, he will see that she struggles but also that she maintains control of it.

Neither of them are rightfully only Initiates any longer; both are at the pinnacle of this stage of their Arts.

Her eyes open and seek to catch his.  If he offers some sign that he is ready, she will release the rote.  There is salt and iron and ice to her eyes; the rote that keeps him safe also keeps him from looking in as completely as he might.

Nick

Nicholas has looked too long and too deeply at Mysteries before.  There are countless cautionary tales of magi who have seen things they were not meant to see, glimpsed before they were ready: magi who have looked upon the face of God and been struck blind, magi who touched the Void and went mad.  Andrés, recently, who has touched Creation in a way that has left him unable to distinguish what is real from what is not, who flew too close to the sun.  Nicholas himself who has brushed up too closely and too many times to that truth of Endings, of Impermanence.

It might be a fortunate thing, then, that Ari is there to hold him back.  Nick while never a true Orphan had an absent Mother and Father and Master; maybe sometimes the watchful eye of his friends when he cannot be those things for himself is what has kept him from fading away into moonlight.

Neither of them can see into the cabin.  The door is closed.  In the windows they can see only shadows, shifting things that seem to hint at something within but who can say what.  There are shadows because behind them there is light from some unknown source, warm and yellow and orange and bright.

The bones are many.  She might lose count.  They are old, and they were arranged with purpose: this they can both tell.

When Ari's eyes open she will find Nick's there but they are wandering, he does not see her for the moment until he realizes she is looking at him.  And now he nods to her once, and now he does not seek to open the cabin door or look into the windows.  And so the rote is released, and Nicholas raises a hand fragrant with incense to his eyes and rubs at them.

"What do you think that was?"

Ari

The tracing falls away.  The sheild she has placed around his mind falls away.  The one that hardens and encircles her own does not.  She holds this for a longer spell, it lingers in her eyes and the hardness of her expression.  Her hands hold, still, to the edge of the table, gone white with the tightness of it, cold as ice.

After a long moment, she releases her hands.  Mindlessly she rubs her palms together, as if to clear the salt and ash and moonlight from them.  Still, though, there is the thrum of her resonance woven around her; still she tastes of ice and iron and sea-salt and starlight. There is a separation: Ari, Nick, and all the Others.  Vigilance. Kept longer than maybe it is needed.

"I do not know but I am worried..." she says, though with the sort of cautious edge one's voice takes when one is not entirely certain, "That the bones were human.  I cannot tell; I have no skill or Arts that would illuminate this thought.  That is more your expertise, or Silas's."

The name comes readily, offered between them without much thought.  And then it demands thought, and her brow creases. But of course she would think of the Incendiary's son, on the heels of memories of Ylesephet, with the closeness they share now.  Arianna breaths out. She can still feel the desert wind and the red dust in her lungs.

"I am torn," she adds, "Between wanting to know and wanting to burn that book down to its endpapers, and hoping it takes that cabin and the bones and the red dust with it."  This is a vehement thing, breathed out with more intensity than perhaps the vision rightfully deserves.  "I do not think it a good omen."

Nick

"I suspect that they were," he says.  "If they were, there are a lot of things they could have been there to do.  I could try to look again to figure that out, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea to do it right now."

There is a point of tension there between his eyes, between his brows, at the juncture of nose and forehead and eyes.  He does not voice his worry; he does not need to.  Just now his expression is a tell enough.  They could be traced back here too: this he does not say.

"If they were bones and they were human, they don't necessarily need to have been placed there for...well, they don't necessarily indicate that whatever is there will be hostile to us.  It could be something that is dangerous, but in the way that magick or hikes in the wilderness are dangerous."  Beat.  "Which is to say that it's not necessarily a bad omen."

He after all is a Death Mage; he has seen plenty of tools at work that would disturb or unsettle magi from other Traditions.  Then again, they have both seen dark magick at work too, they have both felt the touch of magick that would fracture everything it touched, would unmake everything it came into the presence of given enough time.  It's likely that Elizabeth Courtright left them both (left them all) sadder and a little more weary, and wary too.

"I think we need to determine whether there's something hostile there or not, at least as long as we have the book."  He glances toward it, innocently lying there with its bound pages rustling a little at the edges, touched by the breeze outside.  "I doubt we're at harm from the book itself, though."

Ari

"What good omen comes from leaving the bones of your fellows or your foes to whiten in the sun?" she asks, as much of him as of the book, though the latter of the two is what garners the pointedness of her attention just now.  It is difficult for her, with her superstitions and training, to imagine a comfort or security found in allowing the remains of the dead to be defiled by sunlight.

Unless they were purified thereby, and then, again, it brings her back to echoes of ill portents.  But Nicholas is closer to Death in his workings than the Giametti woman is; her dealings with Death have been personal in different ways.  Instead she gives voice to her frustrations in the careful working of her hands, binding that book up again in the silk in which she had carried it to her home.  Silk to consecrate, to bind, to contain.  Her mind is still shielded, at least until this bit of clearing up is done and then, finally, the sense of moving starlight recedes from her.

It leaves her raw around the edges, frayed in ways that he isn't just now. 

Were you there when the walls came down?
Yes.

"Your thoughts are clearer than mine just now," she tells him. There is appreciation and admiration underscoring the words.  "Come inside, and share them. I will fix us something to eat."  Ari captures the silk bound book up her hands, leaving him to bring the incense and the basin of salt water inside with them to consecrate and cleanse her home.

"Did you get a sense of When we were?  I am hopeless at Ars Temporis, but was there some mundane clue to it for you?  And did you, too, have the sense of someone within the walls?" 

Here, though, the question is too unspecific for her own mind. Within the walls of the Keep or of the Cabin or of the grave-dust ruins below them at the base of the hills?  She guides them to the kitchen, to where there is a row of neat bar stool soldiers guarding the breakfast bar, and where there is fixing for open faced sandwiches made of roasted meat and pickled onions and some creamy pungent cheese.  And wine, red to the point of nearly being opaque.  Dense and grounding in the way that chalice-wine must be, though the glass she gives him is stemless and more easily grasped in distracted weariness.

Nick

Nick follows Ari to her kitchen, where there is wine and bread and meat.  There'd been this moment as he followed her in where he'd looked at her at length, his eyes clear and his gaze direct and searching: and he sees her discomfort, he sees how her hands are tense as she binds the book back up.  He gestures Ari toward a seat and then he lays out bread for two sandwiches, spreads a healthy layer of cheese across both slices.

"It seemed to be in the present, to me.  We would have needed the Ars Temporis to look back."  He uses her language easily; he has Worked with Hermetics often enough now.

He adds pickled onions atop the cheese, begins slapping slices of roasted meat atop that even as she sets the stemless wine glass near him.  "Bones could be laid out in some sort of ritual.  I've heard of paths being cut through the Veil that way, or...you're right, I suppose it could have been a way to purify them.  It could also be some sort of death rite I'm not familiar with.  Part of some larger Working."

In spite of these alternatives he offers, the point of concern between his brows is still there.  He finishes her sandwich first and hands the plate across to her, then slides his own towards a selected stool.  "Are you all right, Ari?"

Ari

The language is a crutch. She could say 'Time' instead of 'Ars Temporis'. It is more expedient and far fewer syllables.  Ari never corrects him if he chooses other names for the Arts and she has, even, in rare moments of extreme cross-Tradition good will, used the common names herself.  For now, though, it lends familiarity and comfort to an otherwise strange moment and she is gladdened by this olive branch he extends.

Ari accepts the plate from him and gathers herself up on a bar stool. There is a seat left between them. She would not have done that if she were thinking; she would not have left a seat open between them for the echoes of the past to roost upon. She is a superstitious thing, at heart, but the gap makes it easier to twist and face each other as they eat. This is what she will tell herself later: pragmatism, not oversight.

"Hmmm."  This answers thoughts of paths cut into the Penumbra.  It brings a crease to her brow that mimics the tension between his own.  And then there is a sharper question to be weighed and answered.

"I have been some place similar," she tells him.  It is true without being entirely true. It is the shape of truth stripped of the weight of it.  "Though it was half a lifetime ago, and not in the desert or near the red hills."

This gives him enough to peg the approximate timing.  She has asked him before what he knew of the losses they have suffered in The War.  It is telling, perhaps, that she chooses food over wine to ground her away from this memory.  And, even as she is chewing that first bite, she frees two napkins from a holder on the counter and passes him one of them.

Swallows.

"If this tie is to Now, then there is a cabin out there, and a circle of bones, and perhaps some greater Working?"  She asks him by canting the words upward at the end, though the sentence is framed as a statement.  There is inquiry in her eyes, and already she is trying to think of the places with red dirt and hills and heat like that.  She has seen some pictures of Arizona, and the red rock hills; perhaps the tether is pulling Nick homeward as it had also tugged her thoughts back toward her own.

He knows what she will say before the words come.  

"We should find it..." 

Nick

"There is," he says.  "Kiara brought me to a place that was full of rock hills like that not too far outside the city.  That place felt more remote, but it could be somewhere in Colorado."  Though it reminded him, too, of the home of his birth if not of his heart; so many wild places out near the mountains could resemble one another.

He takes a swallow of his wine as he accepts the napkin she offers him, then takes a bite from his sandwich.  First one, then rather quickly another: Working always leaves him hungrier than he thinks it's going to.

"We could probably track it directly to the location if we needed to."  Dangerous?  Yes.  Though they have both done dangerous things before.  Nicholas had been out alone when Pen and their other former cabalmates found him, having listened to Crow, having followed leads that no lone Disparate had any business following.

To her response that she has been in a similar place, there is only a noise of acknowledgement.  Perhaps this is because his mouth is full; perhaps it is a placeholder while he considers a response.  He does not miss that she did not answer him, did not say whether she is all right or not.  "Do you want to tell me about the place you were in?  Or is that best left for another time?"

Ari

They have both done dangerous things before and there is, at least, the semblence of security in doing reckless and dangerous things together rather than alone.  That is where this is heading, surely, toward reckless and dangerous things done together but not entirely alone.

Ari takes another bite of her sandwich before answering him.  The cast to her eyes is distant; it is not here and neither is it entirely half a lifetime away. She chews slowly as she considers what she might say to sidestep the question, and also that perhaps it is not the time to sidestep these questions.  It is like the matter of her Hermetic schooling, of her ridiculous trailing of family names, of the entitlement and ease of being something of a Legacy.  This story is part of her Legacy, but not a part she shares with Nick or Pen. She gives them the lightness of it, the glimmer and gilding, but rarely these sorrows.  It is not fair, she has long thought, to burden them with it.

So it is kept light, and as even as words can be kept when talking about deep and terrible things.  When ghosting over the sun-whitened bones of friends and enemies, unburied in the haste with which they left the place.

"One of my father's titles was--is, though he rarely claims it -- the Aegis of Ylesephet," she tells him, still holding her sandwich in her hands, still having not touched her wine.  "He and the Incendiary, who is Silas's mother, who is likewise terrifying in her own right, held the Wards and Walls as long as they could before the Chantry fell during the War.  I have told you of it before, in passing, not completely. 

"We were young and those things leave long shadows. -- I think this is what I said.  Something like this.  Or maybe how his mother was like a Fury. I don't remember, rightly what I said, but all of it would be true in one sense or another. But I am sure that I left off this: we were there when the walls came down.  Silas, his mother, my father and I."

Nick

It will be the first time he has perhaps heard Arianna speak at length of the War and its sorrows: he cannot remember such a time, he was not Awake then.  It is all in the abstract to him, despite stories he has heard from Jonas and Miles and Patricia about what those times were like.  But for the most part they are all summer children, the three of them and the cabalmates they kept back in New England.  This is not to say of course that they have not known strife nor sorrow (summers, too, can be harsh) but theirs are more common, in a sense.  More individual.

The friends they have known who have fallen were all given rites and burials.  Elizabeth Courtright was mourned, both for who she was and for who she became.  They have never left bones of friends and enemies to whiten in the sun, or known starving times save what they knew growing up as mundane children who never had enough.  They have not had to hide themselves and fear breathing the word Magick in public places.

Perhaps they never will.  Perhaps the fates will stay kind.

The attention Nick has focused on her says that she did indeed leave off where she was when the chantry's walls fell.  It says that he is seeing Ari in a new light; this happens from time to time even among close friends.  "I'm sorry," he says, despite knowing that there are no words deep enough for that sorrow.  He is left this way, often, with words inadequate and only his eyes to convey his understanding.  "Will it trouble you, going to a place like that?"

Ari

Of the others, Kestrel had known.  Of course he had known this about her. Either because he helped her with Ars Mentis, or perhaps even before it.  He understood the pull of the thin red ties of name and title and legacy better than the others had.  They all might have been Summer Children, but Ari had only played at the part and she had been so practiced at it, so complete in the method of her deception, that it felt to her at times that maybe she was warm through and through like they all were.  (Which is not fair; Summer is brutal in its own way.)

But here she sits, having told him that in her young teens her home, and her friends, and her mentors were sundered and broken by the war, with her elbows rested on the high counter and her shoulders rounded out a little and there is no prick of sadness in her eyes or sour to her stomach as she takes another bite of cheese and bread and onion and meat and chews it slowly, thoughtfully.

She is simply further away than she usually is. Remote in her orbit, but swaying back toward his gravity.  She chews, and swallows, all without looking over toward his question and then she exhales.

"No," she says, as she is setting down her sandwich and cleaning the tips of her fingers on the napkin.  "Going forward is not the same as going back.  Even going back to Ylesephet would be going forward.  But if there is War coming, as the Order has spoken of, then it will trouble me to leave a place like this along our margins, unexplored and undiscovered."

She shrugs a little, and picks up her stemless tumbler.

"Perhaps it is folks magic or hedge magery, and then," a little shake of her head. "It is not our problem.  Or maybe it is some newly Awakened and unaffiliated working above their education -- and I'd rather we found them than that the Conventions did.  Or maybe it is as slippery as it seems, and if that is true then all I can think is this: I do not want to be flanked by one trouble and another.  But I cannot think of a circumstance that leads us into not going."

Still, though, she does not drink.

Nick is so intently focused on her that he will see what she is not saying.  It will trouble her, but not unduly. It will bother her more to leave this stone unturned and eating at their boundaries.  She finally glances over to him and the sympathy and empathy in his eyes.  It bends the hardness in hers, but not toward sorrow.  Another time, she would tell him, You honor them with your attention.  Another time, but not just now.  The sentiment is the same, though left unspoken.

Nick

There have been rumblings of War for months now with nothing to show for it.  Back in January Pen had gone to a summit, and had told him what the plans were as handed down by some Hermetic Adept; they have heard precious little since.  Plans move slowly though, and Denver so far as Nick can tell is something of an Awakened backwater, with a chantry present but no established social order or political regime such as the type they encountered back in New England.

Though every place has its politics, doesn't it?  Even if it looks different here.  This is a place of stark individualists, people who are leery of other people.  That's the kind of place it seems to be.

He remembers, from years ago, one of Boston's Verbena making some laughing offhand comment about the disorganization in Chicago.  It seems to be their nature.

Regardless, Nick does not know if they can trust anyone here and when Ari comments that she would rather not be flanked by trouble, there is a hum of acknowledgement (another placeholder perhaps) as he takes a long swallow from his glass of wine.  "I think you're right.  But if we go it should be soon, before whatever it is has a chance to trace us back here."

Ari

Something in her fingertips itches when he suggests -- rightfully so -- that something might trace back to them, to find them here at her kitchen counter, eating a peaceable lunch.  It itches because she is not yet strong enough to prevent it wholly from happening.  Some day, though, she would be strong enough to truly Ward her Keep.  Some day.  Some day she would be strong enough to pull the threads of the rote apart, and leave it on the floor of her patio, dissembling and disassembled and unraveling around their feet or she could bend it to another purpose.

Just not today.

"Agreed," she tells him, and now, finally, a sip of wine. She swallows, then takes a deeper sip.  "I don't know the area well enough to guess at where to find red hills like that, but I can help with scrying if we can narrow and get nearer to the area."

And so the discussion goes like this, toward pragmatic and dangerous and only somewhat reckless things.  And this is, perhaps, where Nicholas might need to call his fantastically capable wife into the precedings, or where Ari ought inform her boyfriend of sorts that she was up to some form of no good.  But she doesn't reach for the phone to text or call him, and she doesn't precisely encourage Nick to call Pen.

Because this still might turn out to be a marvelously library book for Pen.
Or it might turn out to be a Nephandic tome.
Or some other trap.

But it could still be rescued into a capital present, and it might ruin the present a bit to pull her along to investigate its correspondence with some far flung hills. 

Ari has a Thomas Brothers -- out of date but serviceable -- and a folded map of the US Southwest.  It will get them started on narrowing the possible areas.  She will pack them up some sandwiches and sticks of vegetables julienne and other snacks for their adventure, as well as her instruments and also two of the charms they have made together -- three if Pen is to be collected along the way.  By the time the kitchen is cleared up from lunch and the last vestiges of their resonance are seeping from the patio, they can be ready to embark on the next leg of their adventure.