2017-08-06: Labyrinths

• Log: Labyrinths
• Cast:Isiris Shango'Ra, Kestrel Apricity>
• Where: Outside of Lacour
• Date: 8/6/2017
• Summary: If two individuals adept at manipulating reality meet in the woods and no one is there to see it, do they still make an unholy existential mess? (Yes. Yes they do.)

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<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

Summer swelters on in eastern Ignas.

Here in the hinterlands of Lacour it does so with variable ferocity. There are canyons of stone and sand that run through the spine of the peninsula like channels of cracked leather, and there the heavens bear down with hammers of fire, eager to parch and render to dust any unwary enough to journey there unprepared.

The land is less murderous toward the coast. Sea breezes carry necessary moisture just far enough inland to dust the crinkled, sand-strewn coastlines with a veil of green. Nothing quite so lush as the rolling plains of Adlehyde were, before the shocking insurgence of Metal Demon activity not more than two months ago...but green enough to be pleasant on days when the wind blows in from across the sea, carrying with it the bright, purifying scent of brine.

Most travel the main roads to and from Lacour. There have always been dangers inherent to traveling back roads on Filgaia, and rarely has that ever been more true than it is now, with a warfront a stone's throw to the southwest and cosmic threats from the very depths of millennia-old history once more on the rise. Stray from the well-traveled and well-regulated highways and one is like to find only trouble, whether it comes with teeth and fangs, thieves with ARMs, or something worse altogether, poisoned and made sick by the indigo plague that is Malevolence.

And yet: here, on a small thread of packed ocher dirt that runs like a vein through an overgrown path long since abandoned to disuse, is a figure with a pack upon her back that seems the furthest possible thing from threatening.

She's slight in build, her height modest, her physique the moreso. Her clothing is pragmatic for traveling and there are indications strewn across her person that confirm she's been doing so: dust ghosting over boots and leggings, small bits of dead foliage crumbled and sticking to shoulders or sleeves. Not a lick or sheen of perspiration to be seen, though the sun shines like fire off of the autumnal head of crimson-copper-gold hair on her head.

There's a dagger in a sheath at each hip, but slender, fair-skinned fingers are curled around the straps of the traveler's bag hung heavily from her shoulders. She's humming beneath her breath. Neither quality suggests she's anxious about trouble finding her.

Only the eyes are sharp. Silver like mercury, peregrine and alert.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

The sun in the sky shines brightly, the fierce glow of the summer heat and the sea breeze drawing tightly together in oscillations of the bold warmth and tempering cool. Though it makes for a pleasant journey on the highlands and in the footsteps of hundreds prior, in the lower elevations that estival coat is still of a poor cut for the unprepared, a wet and warm blanket settling from pauldrons to greaves until nightfall or manfall.

On and again, so the gyre goes, until the next day and mile.

It is in such a lowland where the rumors have spread. The bandits are surprisingly sparse for this area in this season. They say that a monster roams the area off the path, imperiling travelers. Of course, a dose of cynicism sould be apropos in the very certain circles the rumor is passed around in the adventurer's guild, no matter how large. Eyewitness accounts in the dens of liars and thieves never amounted to much, save the clarity of the details involved. A giant wolf, wings like a bird, a man with a grey coat and blue eyes. The disappearances are attributed variously to those elements, the stuff of monstrous and sudden midnights. Even the birds are said to be acting a little peculiar near the coastline.

It takes some searching, or at least the known mind of a rogue. Finding the trail is a bit of luck, the favor of tracking in the seldom-used path. A broken branch here, evidence of a small scuffle there. Clothes and weapons discarded in the forest, empty canteens and discarded bags. Slowly, in a labyrinthine pattern, there is evidence of entire groups becoming lost...

And then just disappearing.

The field, if the slight drifter happens across it, is cut clear, and possibly very recently. It is not cleared with the care of a practiced hand, nor is it cleared with the blackening scythe of flame. The brush is snapped and shattered underneath, and nothing grows over a few inches in height. The grass and roots and trees are shorn by an uneven hand, knocked flat as if by a great wind. The sunder is continuous throughout the entire glade area, just shy of the distant coastal breeze, but the plateau of things forms a private clearing upon which to build an audience.

The focus of the rumors sits atop a giant stone perch, a smooth and wordless gravestone forming the final resting place of a hero whose name was lost to time. Atop that stone, the wolf sits, an incomplete stone thing, locked in an otherworldly snarl. Motionless, part of the stone statue's face is missing, left eye completely cut free from its skull. The wolf's paws sit irregularly across the stone, black wings spread wide in mid-landing across the thing. An obvious inspiration for the embellishment, until the first taste of the air in the clearing hits.

It feels as if the sky is cramped here, and that not all here is entirely real or as it seems. The magic is not orderly, as it is from practiced mages. The threads are tangled, like the mismanaged web of some lethal spider. It is everpresent, and it pulses, washes through the earth, like the tide. It seems to emanate from the statue perched atop the statue, motionless and maledicted.

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

She stops here and there as she stumbles across junkyards of violence, in no particular rush. Half-kneels in the brush where a glint of metal discloses to her the location of someone's tragedy, a piece of shorn metal that may once have been part of plate designed to prevent the very thing that seems to have happened to its wearer, its edges jagged where the other half was cleaved away. She brushed aside brown needles of dead evergreen and tugged the convex metal snarl from the ground, wiping dirt and dust from the outer curve. Her own image, distorted, looked back at her. No marks on the thing by which to identify the kind of person to whom it belonged. Belongs, she supposes, if they didn't perish as a result of whatever took place.

She leaves it where she found it. Dusts her hands on her suede leggings and carries on.

She leaves most of what she discovers, without interest. The single exception is a small leather-bound volume filled with crabbed handwriting difficult on the eye, someone's journal. That, she makes space for in the leather pack on her back.

She can feel the clearing before she sees it. Hardy trees and scrub do much to cut the wind and hold the searing heat at bay. The clearing pulls heat down from the sky like a hole in the ground sucks in surface water, a puddle of it that bleeds out through the surrounding vegetation and buffets her features like an exhale. It has a smell, also: shaved growing things, baking, drying. The acrid, sneeze-inducing scent of dying grass.

It appears first like a welter of gold through a gap in the trees. Drawing up to the border of the clearing she stops just shy of the place the scrub empties into openness. It may not be a killing field, but then again it may; clear sight lines, a ranged weapon, and a healthy helping of paranoia are a dangerous trifecta.

Standing there and feeling the summer creep its way underneath her clothes, the air hot and still, she squints into the glare and studies the single shape standing center of the field. The drama of the statue is curious, tempting, like all out-of-place mysteries that beg to be examined more closely.

The temptation is the reason she remains where she is.

Gradually, the strangeness permeates through her, a thing her senses understood that took time for her wits to give shape to.

Familiar and wildly different.

At the tree line, pewter eyes locked to the grave and its motif, she sinks slowly down to a half-kneeled crouch, fingertips stretched downward to splay lightly on the dirt.

Thinking. Watching. Waiting, perhaps, though not for anything in particular.

Trying to make up her mind. Trying to see what's in front of her more clearly.

Not because she's not curious: she is. Had she not been turned into what she is now, she'd have run out into the blast of the heat and light and flung out a hand to touch that winged wolf, leaving her pack in the dirt behind her. But she was. She is.

So she looks, instead, and tries to decide, head cocked, birdlike.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

The ground is alive under her fingertips. Though the weight, the dirt, the heat and the moisture in the air makes it for all the affair taste as if it were raining a peal of warm mud, the subtle paradigm shifts in the life of the ground are felt, the distant wave something underneath the fingertips, something that tingles across the nailbeds.

There is an unreality to the things that shift before her. The world is not quite an illusion, but the energy that breathes into the clearing, hale and whole, is something that subtly changes the direction of things, like the rush of a shallow river, no matter how clear its waters, changes the silhouette of a rock at the bottom of its bed. Many do not have the privilege of picking out the subtle differences, but truthfully, it's hard not to see it, once felt.

With time, the details become more and more clear. The great winged wolf at first glance is cut from the same stone as the rock on which it perches, and with no knowledge of the way things could be, that would simply be that. Then she may see the transparency of it, the stone of its skin an irregular refraction of the stone it sits on. Even the slightest shift would change the refraction, hardened muscle appearing to be cut from stone in one blink, and then smoother than polished glass in the next blink. Her study alone permits her to see it. It's no wonder many bandits came to meet their end at this thing, perhaps seeing it as another opportunity to rob a grave, or even..

SCWARK.

The chuffing pierce of a squawk breaks the silence, and any trains of thought therein, from a position behind the clock, watching the watcher. The bird's wings are folded as it sits on the sagging branch of a tree, black feathers appearing iridescent as it passes underneath the beams of light broken by the canopy overhead, though no breeze from the clearing ruffles its feathers. It too, seems an abstraction, once the scent of things catches her.

This one is different, a crow seeming forged entirely out of smoke. It watches the traveller with inimitably inquisitive eyes that are too piercing blue to be natural. The blue itself and in particular is haunting, the color of cornflower in full bloom, but cast with an eerie glow that shines no matter what the illumination is. The crow tilts its head in an enchanting mimickry of its subject only a few seconds prior. An abstraction, indeed. The crow looks behind itself as well as keeping eyes focused tightly on its interest, head briefly splitting into two separate sets of eyes to do so. Some things you must study a moment, and others are so busy studying you..

They -- both of the intimations -- seem to be benign, so long as that clearing is respected.

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

Kestrel's is a face made for telling pretty lies. In another life, she'd have made a fine courtesan; gods know her training wasn't altogether that different -- lacking only a focus on those baser services, favoring instead the ways and means of social engagement, fostering intellectual intimacy with strangers. There's no lie in it now, though: she lets her fascination play out openly on features that seem to embrace nimble expressions.

It's fascinating for many reasons. Some are obvious; many are unique to who, and what, she is.

She does eventually stir. Shifting for the first time in countless minutes drowsy with heat, she tilts her shoulders to slide the pack free, using the angle of her upper arm to guide it around on a swinging trajectory to the ground in front of her, next to her bent knee. What follows requires her to tear her eyes away from the eyes watching her in turn, but this she does, trusting the few garnered impressions she has of the mood of what she's found so that she can extract two things from the pack.

The first is a large, leather-bound volume, of a size appropriate for sketching, though it's filled -- once she opens the covers to reveal as much -- from top to bottom of each broad page with maddeningly perfect calligraphic handwriting, tiny and elaborate. The second is a pen of no particular value. A fountain pen. Nice, but lacking in ostentatious detail.

These tools gotten, she plants the hand that isn't cradling them and slowly levers herself into a seated position, knees drawn very slightly upward, the splay of the volume spread across nearly the whole stretch of either thigh, legs a ramp against which to write. She uncaps the pen, sets the nib poised above the page, and then --

Hesitates.

Inkspattered fingers sweep tendrils of scarlet clear of her crown, the better to share the small curve of a coral almost-smile with whatever occupies the welter of uncertain reality in front of her.

When she lowers her eyes to the page her lashes cut thick fans over her cheekbones, shading her gaze from view. The not-quite-smile remains as the nib finally touches down, and she begins to flick spider-webbed lines across the page. Not text, but the early semblance of an upraised wing.

"I hope you don't mind if I record this for posterity," she says, one coppery brow on a slow arch. Her voice is clear, soft enough that it ought to be hard to hear at any kind of remove, and somehow isn't. Pleasant. It sounds like Aquvy. "Whoever or whatever you are. It's my..." Another pause, this one contemplative. She bites the inside of her cheek, tilts her head back and bares the ivory of her throat, considering the pinions of one lupine wing. "Role? Occupation."

Some beats of silence pass, marred only by the papery whisper of pen on page. Then: "Did you lure the others in, whose things I found along the way, or were you defending yourself? So many items. You'd have to be very strong to take on whole parties armed that way, and it made me curious. 'Maybe it's a group,' I thought, but I don't think so, now. But what would one very strong warrior want with groups of adventurers so ill-prepared? And if, then, they were despatched in defense, why remain? Why not move? Why," she muses, lifting her eyes again, "Leave a landmark so peculiar as to draw attention this way?"

The words are for the most part unassuming, the kind of gentle speculations that expect no answer, shared as though on a mellow afternoon with a quiet companion she's known for years.

But she must expect something, after all, because:

"It would be easier to arrive at the right answer if you'd just tell me, of course."

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

The multitude of sharp eyes cast a warm glow in the shadowed notch cast over the branch on which the bird perches. The terminus of each of the crow's heads is fuzzy, indistinct, as if the crow were cast in fog instead of flesh, the soap bubble iridescence of its feathers a clear cut in paradox. Eyes shining like searchlights, the heads of the crow reach a coalescence as they overlap towards Kestrel's words. Even as its heads split and recombine, each movement of the thing renders it a little less distinct. To contrast, its plumage still shimmers under the light, and its eyes are still crisp and clear like knives in the night, a fine patina of that hyperreality giving the blackbird the resolve of a fever dream.

It is not real, but there is no doubt that if she were to reach out and touch it...

Her voice is of the sort that is hard to remove from the head once it sticks, owing to the ease with which the bird seems to respond, a throated laughter filling the canopy. Corvid and brief, the belt of the crow is fond in color and lacking the mocking aspect so often attributed to the bird's more natural brethren. The wild and capricious mind the crow takes with her could be perceived as at least noncommital, were it not for the harsh glare of those eyes, facing her like the dawn of a morning sun over the desert.

But when she exposes the curve of her throat to the bird, there is no clear menace posed by it. No tick of her pen draws anything more dangerous than the bird's attention. Somewhat characteristic and true to life, the bird takes more interest in her pen than any particular weaknesses she shows. In truth, the draw of her thigh and the splay of her book is remarked upon in no greater relief than a slow stretch of the wing, the bird shifting a weight that does not truly exist to one leg, unfurling a set of picture-perfect feathers.

The weight of things churn.

Being here is like standing atop a great machine, waves of incomprehensible weight shifting beneath the body. The heartbeat itself reacts with the great machine, each warm thump in the chest churning the gears beneath. With the drawn out, reverberating hiss of steel travelling steel, a bolt that doesn't exist slides free from a gate that was never there, opening a hole to something that should not be there.

- It is the nature of men to go to their doom. -

The voice reverberates through the waves of energy beneath. He opens and reads from the pages of a book as well. though what words appear on its pages shift as soon as he lays eye on them. The incomprehensible nature of the geography splayed out over the canvas pages is something only he seems to be able to take a comfort in, as the soft voice of the page plaintively invites under his fingers. Even without looking, he can be seen so clearly, somewhere beyond the borderpost of that great killing force atop the gravestone.

A man, younger than he is old, sitting at a desk that could not possibly have been built here in the dark, favoring the bluish glow of pages that cannot be read. His head, though doused in the black of a grey hood, is draining dark filaments into the air, the steady 'plip plip plip' of droplets impacting the page as he turns it, insensate to either machine or blood or witness.

He wears a long coat that has seen its share of battle, its volume swallowing the comparitively thinner body that wears it, the hem spilling and gathering in piles at the edge of the black chair he sits at, darkwoods prevailing over an elaborate carvings at the rails. Olive branches and leaves never seem quite to sit in place, the grain of the wood shifting the longer eyes are laid on it.

And his voice is liquid, a thin scintilla of incomprehensible danger threading through it.

"Life cannot be quantified so easily," he remarks, thumbing through the pages of his book as he reads. The back of his chair faces her. Its ornateness might properly earn it a throne's moniker, were it not so small. "Cannot be sorted into simple groups like prey and predation. Left to their own, a person inevitably tries to find reason where none can exist. But...."

The page turns. Slowly, he blinks, and it can almost be felt. "The people who passed here did not deserve what I did to them. What must happen, will happen."

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

A response!

The moment that corvid, engaged in its retina-twisting mitosis, makes any sound at all, her sketching ceases. Has to, so that she can lift her eyes and watch, because as faithful and tutored as her sketching may be, it isn't the point. Not really. It isn't enough to put what she witnesses down on the page, or record what she hears, or what people say. Seeing a thing and knowing it are not the same thing at all. As an instrument of knowing, it's her duty to look.

It can be a challenge at the best of times. There are unique complications to the effort here, not least of which is that her eyes are unreliable, reporting things that exist on the other side of the fence from reality, something adjacent to what's really there. The impressions are as fluid and abstract as the scenery, melting and coalescing as it does into new forms that suggest movement and transition without anything of the kind actually taking place. Still: she has the sense that while this may not be reality, it isn't false, precisely. Something else that's true, in some different way. Beyond that thought, she analyzes very little. Cutting close to the quick of the truth is important, even if it can only be done in vague and intuitive ways. Analysis will come later, if ever.

If she's allowed to leave when all is said and done, she thinks, having discovered something momentous. People told her in Aquvy that the citizens of Ignas were simple. Uncomplicated. That they had straightforward needs, bullish temperaments, and a knack for survival.

So much for what people in Aquvy know.

The sketch remains half-finished, skeletal lines that seem more like gestures, suggestive of the thing they were meant to represent, or of its essence rather than its specifics. She leaves it that way as the world pivots and displays something else for her instead, half-rendered, because there's something true to that, too. When she begins to sketch again -- and she will, but not yet -- she'll segue from a wolf with wings to a figure ensconced within an ornamental chair almost seamlessly, letting one image run into the other like something spilled.

Not yet.

She spends long moments in busy silence, thinking. Mulling over the words, turning them over in her head like stones, looking for whatever might be beneath, if anything, though there's often nothing to find. Contemplating the visual arrangement, the dream logic. The blood.

"If it's the nature of men to go to their doom," she begins slowly, pen held in stillness and the fingertips of one hand lifted to hover in the shallow depression above her chin and below her lower lip, "Then is it doom, still? It sounds like destiny. Were they destined to have done to them what you did?" The corners of her mouth turn upward very slightly, but those silver eyes seem overcast, stained with regret, or possibly apology. "I struggle with the notion that anything is predestined. And also with the word 'deserve.'"

On the verge of saying more, instead she shifts again, drawing booted feet into lotus beneath the book, which fairly swallows all sign of them from above. Her fingers fall away from her face, back down to the page where the ink is already dry in the heat.

Curiosity, undisguised: "What is it you think must happen?"

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

"You could call it that."

The man in grey favors the page more than the woman sketching him. It seems to be his pleasure to remain anonymous, as he never quite turns to face her, even if he does nothing else. It's actually somewhat difficult to latch onto him with the practiced eye. The space that he seems to occupy shifts in the spread of time for her lashes to shutter. For a moment, he appeared to be just beyond the clearing. In the next, he is in it. Once, he is at the foot of the wolf. Again, he is not far away from the crow. North, south, east and west appear to be mere suggestions, taken whimsically at tear-inducing right angles to what is real. They are far more real than anything previous. Wherever the undercurrent of force beneath the clearing shifts and concentrates is where he seems to be at any given location. It seems more of a reflection, than an ideation. The difference is clear to those who can tell. Even if he were to look up, it would be in full coalescence. But for all of the worming annelid force the vagary works into the mind's eye, the extension of power and ability are clear-cut to that extent. It is far and away beyond what others can do, but the projection of force is clear. His actual location cannot be far, but layers upon layers of that force lay between them.

"But is a man's proclivities," the nightmare spinner supposes, running his bare fingers across the smooth mill of his page. Against his fingertips, black filigree crawls, forming serpentine patterns with the motion, "cause for concern of predetermination? If that man has greed enough to sink his hands into a grave, is it fate that the grave should reach up and strangle him?"

The self-described killer's word is a knife passed over the silk and lace of an innocent. Every so often, the whetstone sound drains far into his minded tone, belying an inimitable level of restraint. But for all of the brutal things he suggests, he does so with the same insistent calm, the mild serenity that gives him to put a word to heavy thought. The gravity of all things lays heavy on the breast, like a hammer.

"A person approaches a thing with the preconceptions of what they already know. Based on those assumptions, they are given to act in a certain manner. That manner is their 'nature.' The same way that someone comes to see the guardian I have placed by the gate is the same way that another hears of it and turns away entirely. Choice seldom overrides nature. And if the nature of a thing is wont to bring it to the address of its own destruction..." The face of a flaxen haired woman with glade-green eyes ripples suggestively across the page.

"..what do you think your choices are," he asks mildly.

The crow calls, chattering laugh beat into the air on fluttering wings as it joins the others perched across the wings of the wolf. They were not there a moment before, but a series of bright, obscenely blue eyes now join the wolf in peering in group at the young theorist, her perch and sketch looked at at every curious degree. Luckily, their attention is not being split, so few of them have the urge to wax bicephalous. However, having an audience at the foot of discourse and a score of eyes watching her every move brings weight to her answer.

She says that deserve is a stretch for her. The idea is not entirely disputed by the man in grey. "They say, in the end, that there is a just balance to the world, where an eye is taken for an eye taken, and those who do honest and good work are rewarded. But that in itself is a preconception."

He turns the page on the blonde woman. For now. "That there is such a thing as honest, good works anymore."

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

Kestrel cannot see what he sees. Not even his face is visible from where she sits, let alone any images or garbled text in the volume splayed in front of him on what appears to be a desk, and can't possibly be. She's unaware of any passing reference to a woman with pale hair and green eyes. For her, all of his words are contained within the strange and oblique discourse between the two of them, or whatever unified plurality that murder of crows represents.

She chews on his rhetorical question about the grave for all of three seconds before discarding it like a bit of gristle in a finer cut of meat. Spat aside as being too obtuse for meaning, with the ruthless winnowing of a wit cultivated for a specific purpose.

And how does she answer the rest?

With a sudden smile that grows like the unfurling of light on the horizon at dawn, slow-gaining momentum until all at once it's brilliant, a wide flash of pearl in a fey face. Her lashes narrow, a flicker of copper-honey fans that can't quite contain the humor in pale eyes. Even if they could, a short spill of not-quite-laughter follows. "You sound like my more cynical instructors at the Spectorate Conclave in Aquvy." The sound of the pen being capped sings like a tiny silver bell in the warp and weft of the remade surrounds, followed by a soft thump as she drops it into the crease of the volume's center line. All this to free her hands, to sit back and use them to prop her weight behind her, all at once relaxed, as though there weren't intimations of threat hanging there in the air unresolved. "We're very concerned with the ways in which individuals overcome their nature. It does happen. Extreme circumstances cause fascinating individual responses. Predictors for behaviors are so beautifully, breathtakingly complex. We've studied them for millennia and still, we've only just begun to scratch the surface of what it takes to catalyze radical shifts in even large populations, let alone at the level of the individual."

He can't be made to understand how shockingly honest this is, sitting as it does on the very furthest fringe of pretense concerning her role with the Spectorate, but every word is dressed in the shining silver relish of real passion. Whatever font is providing this sudden wellspring of information, it's located close to the coordinates of her heart.

"The way you're talking about destruction is final. I hear that and I understand it. I saw it in the woods, in the piles of things you left behind. But destruction is not always final, is it? And in seeking small destructions, these little tests, these--" She sits up, leans forward enough to hollow the small of her back, lifting her hands to frame some not-there object or shape...a face, perhaps? "--harrowings...one becomes something else. Sheds old skins for new. Impurities are burned away in the crucible of trial. Perhaps seeking destruction is part of the nature of the living not because we walk unthinking toward our own doom, but because we spend all of our lives inoculating ourselves against it."

Whatever she envisions between those hands of hers must fade, then, because she lifts her eyes again, lets her hands fall and turns her head slightly to one side, looking at the mirage of him out of the corner of her eye. Her smile is small, rueful, darkly wry in its knowing. "You know, usually I'm the one turning simple discussions into cryptic warrens in the hope of drawing people out of themselves, forcing them to think about things they assume are true. If we're not careful we could spend an entire afternoon out here being outrageously vague at one another, and then...oh..." Silver eyes slide away, off on an angle, toward something (or maybe nothing) else off to one side. "Swanning away in a dramatic whirl of a cape, possibly."

Two beats.

Silver eyes slice back toward the desk, like the twist of a knife.

"You're bleeding."

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

Though the pages of the book he favors cannot be seen from her angle, it is hard to tell if the inverse is true. The murder of crows perched across the stretch and mantle of the winged cur seem overtly concerned with the writings and the actions of the researcher, smitten as she is with the page and the tragic pull of the pen from paper. Truthfully, the clicking of the pen is the only thing that drags his attention from his own studies, the pause in the meter and candor of his attention palpable, his chin lowering and slipping to one side. His eyes are never actually seen, and he never actually turns. But an attention shift of even those faint and fleeting degrees is telling.

As the cast of his mind slips from the parchment before him, the page and its whorls of shifting text settle, ink lines calcifying on the page. There is something about his attention that seems to bring focus to things around him. The pauper's throne he sits upon seems to crystallize with the shift of his mind, and the crush of things is that most of the items and baubles he favors and that can be seen with the bare eye ... may not actually be real at all.

"Aquvy," the man in grey echoes, the dark gild of his mezza voce bookending the fey curiosity in her own. "One of the last fertile lands, they say." He says the words with plain provocation. He makes an implication, the cold and unnamed agent, but he is not a merciful thing. He never brings the thought to voice, and never speaks of it again.

His right hand rests at the edge of the table at which he sits, idle, and partly closed. The tips are darkened, as if the clockmaker's hands. But darkness is not always oils and grease. "A person chooses what they tell. And what they keep secret is telling," he notes, as if to underline something that focuses his interest.

"You speak of the scythe that reaps the grain," he continues, as if one thought naturally led to the other. "The extreme circumstance of an individual can make who they are whole, real, hale. Or it can break them entirely," the man observes, his voice slowly coalescing into a fully borne attentiveness. And though he cannot pray to be as lyrically apt as his partner today, the weight of his attention is the weight of a sword on the shoulder. The earth shifts and moves with it invisibly, the flow of things beginning to churn beneath her hands and legs. Even absent his stare, underneath the eyes of a score of gawking crows, his attention .. is yet still a tangible thing. "Would you consider that to be a necessity.. even if others would think it cruel," he asks, then. "Would you act.." is his next thought, absent the wonder that should compose it. "...if they were to be denied that crucible?"

Slowly, the man stands to his feet, pushing away the chair that holds him. The sleeves of the coat he wears fall slack as his arms do, sheathing all those too-black fingertips in heavy, voluminous fabric. The entire coat slowly unpiles from rest to curtain him, his figure never actually reaching a meaningful visibility for her. It is as if a ghost stood. "Would you have had me inflict the small destruction instead?" he asks, as if the entire handle of his power rested entirely in her decision.

Pretense slowly drains from them, to fill unseen channels at their feet. It would be easy to imagine the man's smile in response, even if left unseen. "Words are a maze, a labyrinth that one can become easily lost in. Assumptions are a thing that I can spend a long time challenging. Is that something that you find audacious, traveller-from-Aquivy? Would you prefer that I become... more forthright with you?"

She notices he is bleeding. "As expected of a sharp mind," he lauds. "But a scholar usually prefers the library to the trail," he observes in counter. "What then, are you?"

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

It remains a source of fascination for her, the way the world seems to distend wherever the point of his focus rests, as though it were a drain on the fabric of space and time. The meadow as a stretchy rubber sheet, etcetera, and his attention the bowling ball that rolls around it, distorting everything in on itself.

Everything except Kestrel.

Disorienting as it may be, even for someone well-versed in the malleability of appearances, she shows nothing like overt fear. There is caution, suggestive of an instinct for survival. It isn't that she doesn't know fear -- she does, and has, and will again -- but instead that she made a choice when she came searching for something at the root of so many unexplained disappearances, as they've already discussed, and this risk was part of that choice. The danger of the moment, the possibility of being outmatched. She chose.

Fear may come if it's provoked in her, but until then it has no place at the table. Regret and self-doubt would have to open the door to let it in first, and those things she seems divorced from, almost to an unnatural degree.

It leaves her free to listen, and listen well. She's attentive when she does. The whole of her, every last angle of every line of her body, conveys a tuning-fork receptivity to everything happening around her, every word he says, every nuance of tone used in the saying of it. Absolute interest in the moment, and in him.

She's that way with everyone. Two days ago she leaned forward across a wounded wooden tabletop toward a shepherd whose ancestral Adlehyde farm burned to cinders and ash, holding his rough hand in both of her far smaller while he poured his heart out into an empty stein and wept as only hard men weep, with the bitterness of ages. It would never have happened if he couldn't sense in her then what it's possible to sense in her now: rapt engagement in him, genuine, unqualified.

Or it can break them entirely.

"Yes," she says, quietly, with the respect that the admission is due. "It can. And sometimes, that is right."

After that he asks her two questions, but it isn't until after the second that she speaks -- whether that's because he stands in the interim and it stills her tongue, or because she takes the time to consider, or for some other reason entirely.

"I can't tell you what I would have had you do. Had it been me there and not you, I could tell you what I would have done, but I wasn't there. I didn't see. I don't know." Eyes like starlight flick over the impenetrable concealment of a garment meant to hide him from view. Something like exasperated affection briefly surfaces in her expression, only to be replaced moments afterward with another smile, this one smaller, fleeting. "I spend a great deal of time listening to people dissemble. From where I'm sitting, honesty is the most audacious thing. Real honesty. Raw self honesty. Few people are even capable of seeing things as they are, let alone articulating it after the fact."

The praise ought to register some sort of abashed moment, or a beat of pleasure, and doesn't. More effective: his own observation of her peculiar hybrid qualities. That, she warms to. "Do they not? I don't think I would know. The Spectorate sends its agents out into the world to witness it. The world is dangerous. It may be a stretch to call me a scholar. My areas of interest are very focused. A scholar of..." She hesitates. Lifts her hand and stirs the air with it. "...people. People are dangerous, and they like to hide. You've got to learn about trails and their perils eventually. People and theirs, as well."

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

The chair as it moves across a ground that never quite becomes real still slides with weight and authoritative force as the man in grey moves it aside to make room. So informed, the chair seems to be a real thing. But simple reasoning asks the question that dooms to disbelief the elaborately carved rest, the desk, and perhaps even the book he favors. Whom, in all of this land, carries with them such rich furnishings out to the middle of nowhere, only to tuck them away into a nothing space? She is unique, in that it is only her 'familiarity' that allows the unreality of these things to latch on. At this distance, it takes only the vaguest notion to understand that the shifting details meander more with the passage of thought than light.

The birds shift uneasily, two-score eyes at a moment shifting and changing to grow more or less numerous by the blink. Her language is not that of a completely relaxed spirit. To the contrary, though his attention is like a hammer laid on the chest, hers is the length of a whip, cutting into the thing until it gives before the cut of her mind. Hers, warm and quick, is a contrast, but it is not a complement. "Your mind will inevitably clash with my own," he contemplates, his mild attitude tempering even a direct statement. This is the sense in and of itself...

Under her study, his mind is a scrabbling one, his attention meandering and difficult to hold. It is telltale from the company that he keeps, and the things left in his wake. But once under the full force of his mind, there is little that escapes his attention, including what she does and does not respond to. In this, he is relentless, and the ample thrust of his mind's span is very plain. She cannot see his eyes. But he is a spinner of figments, and they are counting each and every one of her breaths.

"It is an elusive thing, that mind," the agent finally decides quietly, shutting the book at the desk. One to either side, he rests his hands there briefly. The ambient sound of the blood still forms a brutal metronome to the affair when all goes quiet, too-real droplets doubling one upon the other on a mahogany grain that doesn't really exist, part of a study that may as well be a myth. "Do you find it intriguing, then.." he wonders, "to suss out my morality in such a fashion?" he asks.

She is nonjudgmental, he understands. She is noncommital. "It is inevitable that the threads of our words will become entwined ever tighter...will it distress you, in the end? I wonder," he states, an even mind tempering his movements, before he finally elects to turn to face her.

The agent is bound up, his body crisply on the cusp of what some may consider a failing state. Winds of linen bind certain blood-soaked sections of his body, or at least the little that can be seen beyond his coat. That linen is stained a bright cherry red, to contrast with the muted and sedated colors of his taste. Of the greatest concern, he appears to have a hole in his head. This appears to be the section that produces blood, red slipping all the way down his throat. From the wound, an esoteric smoke curls. It is not precisely so -- tongues of night-threaded black draining from his skull and lapping freely into the air like the tongues of a fire, but the properties of the thing are between fire and smoke. There is something beyond it, as if the injury was not quite rooted in reality. Worse yet, it is almost hypnotic to review. It is an endless injury, one that you can lose yourself in, looking at it forever and beyond the stretch of known time, space, and all boundaries to the foreseen of which only the children of Filgaia can understand or inherit to the power and precision of looking at it forever and beyond the stretch of known time, space, and all boundaries --

Focus.

It is some sort of magical entrapment. It clashes garishly with his eyes, twin and obscene blue things that are severe in the same way that a well used executioner's axe is severe. The effect is distracting, the spell's effects being drug away by those eyes even before a practiced mind could understand and untangle what was happening. It is clear that he means no exact harm to her. At least, not yet. However, the effect does make it abundantly clear exactly what happened to so many of the others, and why so many haven't returned.

"It is my interest to find out what you, as a scholar, would think of the cruelty of things," he explains, shifting imperceptibly as he takes a few steps out of the black, his body seeming small when placed at the foot of the massive gravestone and the even more massive creature mounting it. The birds chatter at his passing, clipping sounds here and there being heard that are not exactly avian in nature. His eyes -- as challenging to look directly at as they are -- are half-lidded, the darkness limning them a crush of black velvet when set against a blood-streaked face. "But to attempt to arrive at the truth of a thing would be pointless, as you say. A scholar of people knows this well. Instead," he decides, "I will offer you a bargain. In it, I will measure you.." When he blinks, it is a slow and deliberate thing. It is the smallest of mercies, for it is the only movement he shows once he makes a decision as to where he prefers to stand. It is hard to tell if he is even breathing, in those clothes. "Ask me what it is you really wish to ask. I will give you what it is you desire..."

As he explains, the meter of his voice does not change. But the meaning grows cold.

"...then, after you have drank your fill, I will determine if I should cut you free from this dishonest world."

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

The smallest splinter of apology finds purchase in the way she regards the still-faceless phantasm when he predicts that their minds will be at odds. Apology, but sleeved in that same muted, luminous humor, quiet and, yes, warm. "One cannot hone a blade against a feather," she murmurs, almost more to herself than to him. The words have the staccato repetition and askew intonation of something oft-said in her presence and repeated now, maybe even partly in irony.

She watches him close the book, and mirrors that gesture in turn, folding the volume closed -- though only after she's slid the pen free. She handles the leather-bound book with...what, exactly? Not reverence, but certainly care. The intimacy an artisan displays in the handling of their tools.

Sets it aside, into the pack. The pen remains in her hand, though she remains on the ground, where she was, hands cupped loosely together, the pen a shard of gleaming metal cradled slant between.

"I find the notion of morality intriguing," is how she begins to answer. Not quite an answer. "Is it morality with you? This...harrowing?"

And then he turns.

Whatever occupation has brought this ominous spectre to the hinterlands of Lacour, those vanishings of the unwary appear to have come at a cost. Blood, stark and red, explodes in her vision like a crimson firework against such a somber canvas, and inevitably, immediately draws the eye. Down from there, from middle to ground, and then up, up again, to bloody throat and --

It's the closest she's come in years to losing the thread of herself.

The sensation is familiar. Once upon a time, it was deliberately induced, often enough to reforge the clay of who she was. A sheath envelops her thoughts, dampening, muffling. Shadows, silence. Peace, of a kind, undermined by the faint background suspicion that she ought to be doing something, ought to gather her thoughts, direct them toward a task. Tendrils of dark vapor unspool from his skull, or not, a perforation into something deeper than bone and brain tissue. The coils of them wind like vines through her eyes, curl like silken scythes around the curvature of the inside of her skull, plunge as a maddening itch down to the base beyond the higher brain functions, hook into the cerebellum, deep into the limbic system, strike a spark against--

The state of hypnagogic trance shatters utterly. Failsafe systems engineered across decades are sprung like traps. The whisper of whatever it is that pours out of him finds its lightfooted way in, and promptly steps on a pressure plate in the minefield of her well-groomed psyche. The moment she's released from her haze, she flicks another look over him and then closes her eyes.

He begins to speak. She's quiet while he lays out his 'bargain.' Quiet, and still, and blind, save that it's easier now to see him in the way she needs to with her eyes closed than with them open.

"That's impossible. You could never give that to me -- 'my fill.' Not you, or anyone else. There are so many questions I'd like to ask, but one would never be enough. I won't accept this bargain that you offer. But I'll ask you a question, anyway."

The corner of her mouth turns up, and for the first time it's anything other than sunlit honey to look at: the most minute of trembles, just enough tension to say that she understands the stakes. Her life is, and has, been on the line, and that's not a surprise. Nevertheless, the stomach-sucking sensation of acceleration toward some conclusive resolution arrives as it always does, biology kindled with chemical cocktails that anticipate the need for fight or flight.

If it comes to that.

If.

And if he's going to try to destroy her -- or give her the doom he believes all living things seek -- no matter whether she abides by his rules or no, her choice must inevitably be not to play by any of them. That's what happens when someone has nothing to lose.

Even the most novitiate agent of the Spectorate understands that mechanism of sentience.

"How will you make that determination, and why?" The core of her resonates like a plucked harpstring, tension compressed into a dense, motionless core. Again, almost as an apology: "I don't intend to die."

Informing him. As though that were only fair.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

Luckily, her eyes are closed. Even the slightest glimpse of Isiris is a weighted thing. His bright eyes are a painful, obscene focus to look at directly, mildly hooded things that shine harshly. His is a selene and cutting glare that questions the imperturbable calm that drains off of his mantle. His eyes, and that wound. They drag on the attention, like a knit quilt across a broken pane of glass. They knit serpentine and poison patterns that sublimate the mind's thoughts to vapor in the wind.

There are stories of these things. Spells that hinge on subordination of a sense of some sort. Touch, sight, sound. But a discerning taste such as her own knows the coppery salt that spreads in electric waves across the tongue when the wind shifts just right is real, actual and hale blood. But the nature of things being as they are, it lay to question which of the agent's injuries are real, and which are merely the abstraction of an energy almost inhumanly broad.

Even so, his nightmare maze never reaches her. Her response, the firebreak in the mind, does not pass under his notice. It is a challenging thing for even someone like him to detect, until he notices that she closes her eyes entirely when speaking to him. It is with a great deliberation that the searchlight of his glare turns across her, a chilling thing in itself. The movement is fast, a single smooth shift in direction, betrayed by the rustle of fabric from the coat gathered across his shoulders in a hooded pile. The weight of things shift, his attention moving, but only just so. The force of it wanders her, the press of his glare something that can be felt when the lake of all things is at an absolute standstill. The wires and wound strings that make up her senses and cause her to shiver will palpitate briefly as the weight passes them, as if worked by a hundred hands for even the most restrained of moments. His interest is like that.

And then, he begins to approach her.

"An ultimate morality," the man in grey explains, his travelling boots crushing the remnants of the underbrush beneath it as he comes near. "Inflicted on so many, at such a time." His gait is not hurried, the same stride as an old man on a stroll. But when he gets closer, it is a thing that can be felt in the nape of her neck all the way to her core. "That is the blasphemy that they call 'cruelty.'"

His eyes fall on the pen in her hand. Old soldier's instincts raise the fine hairs on the back of his neck, but he still closes with her, the volume of his sleeves dragging and snapping in the breeze with his motion. He does so quietly without any indicator of an ill intention, but his stride does not wonder, and nor does it break for permission. She has no fear for him, and in such turn his confidence is ice-clad.

In the end, she turns him down. "A shame," he observes, placidly. His gait still, his river-run voice comes from only scant feet away now, enough that the lower tonalities can be felt on the skin. "It is the nature of a person to grasp for all of the figs, only to find that their hand is stuck in the jar..."

She asks him a further thing, and the agent's tone turns sanguine. "There can be no temperance between us," he notes in candor, his body language relaxed and even his own rejection a dispassionate admonition. "What other end should there be in response but to leave you blind for what it is that will be done to you, and why.." he wonders aloud. "Reasonlessness is the augur leading to the afterlife. Is it your will to wander it without eyes for all of eternity?" One hand outstretches, opening as if to touch her. He never quite makes contact, but his fingertips rest on her harpstrings nonetheless. He knows that she senses more than she lets on. And this is something -- that infernal proximity -- that he would like for her to feel.

She says she does not intend to die. "Many have intended the same."

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

Old soldier's instincts are wise. Many of the ingredients culled to produce fine inks in the rich hues used to illuminate texts are the same as those used in the brewing of potent, malicious poisons -- the kind of poisons that work on the nervous system, sapping it of purpose, or thread through the blood like white-hot filaments of suffering.

But her fingers fail to twitch, and her eyes remain closed even as the pieces of her that don't reside inside of her feel some nous of his brush past them, well into her personal orbit. He moves slowly but with purpose, and every word he says promises her no better conclusion to their meeting than the truncated ends he delivered the unwary seekers of glory and adventure whose garments she found strewn in the heather on her approach.

Poisons are not the reason that Kestrel is dangerous.

Neither is magic, speaking philosophically, though that's the first answer to his looming threat. Every step of distance he closes between them softens the edges of the already-malleable pocket of unreality they occupy. Wherever his gaze turns, things seem to reorder themselves. What happens when he's no longer the sole caretaker of How Things Seem?

One of the many misconceptions concerning Illusion as a school of sorcery is that it's something the practitioner inflicts upon their object, whether that be an actual object, or an audience to the working of the art. Kestrel learned early -- intuitively -- that this cannot possibly be true; that like mundane optic illusions, all such deceptions depend entirely on the perspective of the viewer. In this way, any witness to an illusionist's work is complicit in the effect, willing or no.

That revelation has much to do with the unusual way in which she practices.

It tingles when the delicate designs etched in ink, concealed beneath her clothes, respond to her bidding -- like a veil of brine mist coming off of the ocean, cool and transient. The pleasure involved in using this particular combination of symbols is muted beneath the experience of doing so, but real: she doesn't often get the chance to.

If she were asked how she begins to look to the man that transformation is intended for, she'd be incapable of answering. She doesn't know. What she achieves is the illusory equivalent of a mirror: not what he looks like but what he believes he looks like. A secret thing known only to him; a kernel of truth seeded down near the roots of the self. Inflexible. Immutable.

It doesn't matter if she knows the secret. All that matters is that he sees it.

In those moments the illusion is the only thing stable enough to seem real. She's slowly setting the environment to a simmer, colors and textures thickening and bubbling, a deliberate imposition on the world he's created and his latitude to sustain it.

And still, there's nothing hostile in her. This chameleon display may as well be the cunning use of a cuttlefish's chromatophores -- and it's easily as adaptable.

Many have intended the same.

"Many who were not me," she says, and her voice is not her voice but within the cocoon of illusion, his, thieved. "They lived for themselves. Themselves only, or a handful of those they met and loved." The corner of her mouth twitches again, and her voice pitches downward. "I live for everyone but myself. For the maimed soul groveling and lost in the filth and depredations of a dying world as much as for the rarefied souls with fingertips placed on the marionette strings of whole civilizations, thinking that's what control looks like." The twitch resolves into a blissful, almost dreamy upward curve. The eyes open. Blue, of course. Bioluminous. "Even you."

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

A contest of wills.

The feathering of the world that the nightmare weaver has carefully carved between them has not escaped his notice. The blackness of the space he strode from is bubbling, popping, slowly thickening and retreating from the glade. She is able to see through what is real and what is not, and with the faintest flex of dancing energy beneath her clothing, destabilizing the castle of dreams.

His hand lowers an inch, fingertips slipping free of the harpstrings.

This is enough to give him pause. The details of the thing are what interest him the most. That her body shimmers and ripples away before him. She shows him a mirror, but the world behind is still what it is. It bubbles, ripples, and quakes away, suggesting to him the only real path is forward. But she does not unravel the dream. She participates in it. It is a shame.

"Do you.."

The scribe's liquid voice is further than it was only a moment or two ago. Black feathers float by his ankles, as if blown by a downdraft past him and skittering past the mirror geist. Slowly, his hand lowers to his side, considerate of the image being shown to him. She may never see it, but the look that crosses his face is plain. Unsurprised. Obscene eyes that shine even in the darkest of cast narrow, lashes hooding them mercifully, lazily, but briefly. They start at one side of what he sees, and then slowly travels the breadth of her as she would prefer to appear. If she prefers to know, the travel of his eyes is telling. It is surprising, even if it is not intended.

He sees not one thing, but many, many things.

"Living with only a purpose is a monumental task."

He talks not to himself--or rather, the piercingly blue-eyed thing that has his voice. Not the thing that stares that other in the eye. He speaks to something else that is him entirely. A third party where one was not specifically observed or ideated, but his awful, brutal eyes never leave the gossamer ideation before him. Breath fills his chest, as slowly as it could be without seeming deliberate. Then, everything about him seems deliberate. It seems that the world is not so simple when you hang a man's dream on your loom.

"You say that you live for me. That down to your bones, you serve.."

He looks down and to his right. He sees someone, holding onto his arm. She nestles tight against it, and though his conversation partner could never see quite what he is looking at, his expression softens. His hand opens, even as the cool black inks over his eyes, briefly hiding their sinful nature. For only one, mercied moment, his eyes no longer meet the mirror. "Then, serve."

The ripple of force that cuts through the gossamer dream is difficult to believe as an illusion in itself. If hers is a gentled orchestration and a babbling brook, his is the waterfall and the reasonless storm, ripping through the village and stripping bare the bark of the trees. The force of energy that fills the interstitial space between them is not reasonable by any measure, rippling unreality in thick blanketing rills from his hand. It seems to choke out even the idea of the thing that was holding that hand a moment ago, victim of a point blank killing. Itself is a thing that gravity breathes in, stripping green leaf and black feather both. Unlike before, there is no mastery to it, no reason, no neat study in which he studies. Hers is subtle, participatory, a poem.

The crows fly to the swirling miasma around his hand, and then time inverts for them to repeat the act, over and over again, a reasonless dance. Ghosts of things long since past crawl from where the whirling tails of unreality score and flay the ground, arms of drowning men gripping fatally the earth in their last before being drug away again. Slowly, he drags the heavy weight of a saber from the choking throat of a writhing protester. Though keeping her own illusions intact in the face of it is a challenge, there is no mastery and no reason in what he does. The world itself tilts, and it is only because he is not paying it any mind. His is the storm.

The heavy thing slams into the earth between them, cutting short the endless thrust of non-sense into the carefully crafted scape. Whatever the traveller has seen fit to moor between them is not challenged. Anything that she forgets to mind will be sucked away. Regardless, the intimacy of a shared delusion remains. As does the blade, a heavy, real and razored thing. The nightmare spinner sees fit to leave it between them, his eyes sharp and shining as if calm were something ice in the blood. His hand lowers again with the storm gone, an obvious invitation to take his blade into her hand. Therein lies the choice. He does not smile, as she-with-his-face did only a moment or two ago.

"Now is your chance to live as you say," the agent beckons. "Prove what you are to me. I will knit that idea of you to the very end of all things."

"I will do this, because there is only one thing left that I live for."

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

She makes it look easy, weathering what follows, though it's anything but that. All this time Kestrel's been the reed to his storm, pliant so as to keep from breaking, and that liquidity of self remains even when the whole world shrieks in a psychic maelstrom.

She wishes for the first time, when the howling ether rips through the glade, that she could see what it is that he sees. What it is of himself that emanates back at him from himself, bounced off of the semaphore of her art. Because she knows: as the moment pivots on some bizarre fulcrum, and his mood -- driven by engines that remain opaque to her -- expands to contain something enormous, what he sees must also necessarily change. Change and change.

Buried deep in the decades of study with the Spectorate, an uncomfortable secret about the nature of man: The Self doesn't exist. It's the greatest illusion of all.

She allows the typhoon of force to degrade the illusion and rip it away like so much weather-ruined silk. It crackles and peels away from her in feathery black tatters like the char and ash she watched floating up into the furious sky the night that Adlehyde burned.

There's only one heartbeat of time during which it's possible to discern that all of this gentleness and receptivity are the product of restraint rather than constraint, and that moment comes when he unsheathes and violently re-sheathes that manifested blade. The air in front of her tightens and gains material density: air, but air so compact, so compressed and knotted and flash-snap-together-layered as to withstand --

Well.

Withstand a thing that doesn't ultimately come to pass, as he buries the saber in the earth, rather than her head, her neck, or her chest. By the time the violent swirling of energy disperses in the aftermath of that piercing blow there's no indication that anything had ever changed all, in herself or in the air so ready to turn blades aside on her behalf.

So he issues her a challenge, the particulars of which she doesn't wholly understand. What does the sword have to do with her nature, or purpose? Serve, he says, and that's wrong, too -- or is it? It's more complicated than that. But the moment continues to shrink, margins disappearing, narrowing down to finite choices -- a real razor's edge of agency, on either side of which are who knows what kind of sudden fall? There's no space for complexity in the room that's left.

But she can do what he asks, she knows. Show him herself, the way she's just done the reverse, emptying contents of him into the open for his perusal. It would be a violation, in some part, of her oaths -- and in other ways the ultimate expression of how they ought to be upheld.

And she still has no idea where the sword comes in.

There was never any question, in the end, what she would do. She knows that down to her bones. Meticulously crafted creature that she is, shattered and reformed in some other image, she could no more refuse what follows than she could renounce her work and content herself with a life of scraping out a living from the miserly soil of Filgaia.

She reaches out with a single pale hand for the hilt of the sword, and in so doing changes.

-- or doesn't change. The word's all wrong for what she does, peeling back layers of things that have nothing to do with who or what she is in order to reveal the thing she 'is'.

And that thing--

Apricity is her surname, given to her at the Spectorate before venturing out into the world. It has meaning: 'the warmth of the sun in winter.' Kestrel has always believed that the council gave it to her because she's the warmth of the sun in the everlasting winter of Filgaia's twilight. Kestrel is wrong.

The council understands that she is both.

It's a dichotomy that explodes from her in an eye-twisting labyrinth of metaphysical expression. Light so brilliant as to blacken and shrivel the sensitive equipment of the eye, warring with darkness so complete that it refutes the possibility of light entirely. Furnace heat deep and white-hot enough to turn all the deserts of Aveh to glass, and frozen, icy, endless cold to rival the bitterness of the darkest outer reaches of known space. Twisting currents of contradictory anima, braided together somehow, each and every opposite expressed in some way as a component part of two distinct greater selves.

To the fore -- for now -- are the more familiar strains. The warmth, the reception, the untarnished, unvarnished, untainted curiosity. A constant yearning, a genuine courage. Belief and faith. Platonic love. Kestrel, in essence. Incandescent, translucent as glass, she is the promise of spring. Stars churn in the cradle of her existence. Worlds are born of this raw potential, and that is, in fact, her purpose: to reforge humanity, elevate it the way an alchemist elevates a substance to the purest, best expression of itself, in unifying it with other substances and burning away the impurities. She is an engine for change, above all things. She is a stone thrown into a still pond.

The other self of the two could not be more different. Massive, hollow, harder than diamonds, hollowed out of everything Kestrel is save the relentless engine that drives her forward. It feels nothing so that it might understand everything. It exchanges the mechanisms of compassion for the clinical sterility of pragmatism, a cold calculus. Sleek lines, sharp edges, animal cunning, and alien disconnection from the fallible impulses of sentiment. Genderless, it has no face. It has no name. It has twin blades and a single imperative: cull the weak. It understands nothing of malice, nor anything of tragedy. It is incapable of pity or reprieve. It feels like paper-thin razors folded up like butterflies, flitting like starlings through deep shadows, and like the grinding immortality of a glacier's incalculable and impossible weight, carving weals into the bedrock of the earth at a pace elongated across unfathomable, geological time.

She is both.

And she has her hand on the hilt of his sword.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

He tears away the gossamer thin veneer of ideation, leaving it in tatters.

Even his own ideations are unmoored by the brutality of his surging force, and the birds that once mantled the great statue looming over their meeting place is gone. The study is barely more than rippling streaks of impossible black across the ground, making the glade seem sickly and ravaged. There is something uncontrolled about the spells he casts -- if, in truth, he casts at all. The images displayed are broken, in poor repair, and entirely insolvent with what one would understand to be a continuous and believable reality. Even a shattered mirror will still offer a glimpse of a reflection.

Still, he is no brute. The moment her castle knits from air and sky to an attack that never materializes, the reason may become apparent. No matter how tidal the forces that crash across her carefully-orchestrated psychological chain of ideography, and the lace-like nature with which it is ripped from the hem of reality, he seems to have no real interest in destroying her. At least, not as she is now.

-- His eyes narrow against the piercing, bracing light. The dichotomy of it is something that cuts across his vision, and gives color and form to what his vision. In it, he becomes cognizant of something different. The hammer laid on the chest. Something that culls, something heartless. Something that is not the heartlessness of man, the heartless nature of which he has become so enamored. -- "Tell me," he asks, "what do you know of cruelty.." -- He doesn't require an answer.

She is fearless as her fingertips touch the hilt of that saber.

The blade speaks of old death and scores of the dead. Even just a brush of soft skin against the rough wrappings is enough for the earth to change. The idea of things shift and move, the entire glade rotating on an unseen axis between Kestrel's heels. In it, she can see a broken reminiscence of the back of her own head, a sort of inflicted acute hyperawareness, as just a touch of his blade splits her in twain, and then once and again. It is unrelenting, the surge of phantasm.

"You have ventured farther than any other man who has crossed my path in these times," he says.

The sensation is not exactly like being cut in half. It is not that brutal force of being torn apart by the cleave of steel. It is not that same thing, though how easily it could be is an idea that dances on the edge of the mind. It is a bit like having the breath of you stolen away with the wave of a hand, if breath was more a part of you than your own mind. The agony of being split in parts is mercilessly painless. Reflections of that woman, broken and kaleidoscopic, acting while not entirely anchored to real space, flank the woman with her hand on the hilt. Each is a portrayal of a choice. In it, one woman lifts the blade, birdlike wrists shivering only slightly as they adjust to the weight of the head-cleaving blade. That woman charges forward, plunging the blade into the dark heart of the thing before her. In another possibility, she kneels before the blade, and falls across its edge bonelessly.

She breathes out, as she bleeds.

"The choice will not be easy for you," the nightmare spinner intones, the dark-edged lilt of his voice betraying no pleasure, only the cold iron bands of authority and gravitas. "But it is the mercy that you earn with your own two hands."

Another step forward. The killer -- for now it is unquestionable what he is -- is well within the range to be run through with his own blade. "The right to scribe in your book what you are to me. Will you be my nemesis. My faithful? My servant? I will hold you to the choice you make until your end. In all of your darkest moments, and all of your brightest days. no matter who you are and who you become. That fiber of you will be the last thing to break, and you will have peace that of everything else, there is one thing that will never change. My price is only the ransom from your mind."

There is another possibility of the two presented. A third. But it lay directly behind her. And no matter which way she turns, and no matter how hyperreal her senses may be tuned, it is just something that lay out of her sight. Before her he stands. He does not move, not even if she picks up his sword, the unquestioned source of the vagaries in her mind. He makes no move to dodge, no move to leave. "In exchange, sing for me your song. The cruelest you know."

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

"You have ventured farther than any other man who has crossed my path in these times."

Are the words intended to be complimentary? Even if they weren't, it turns out that, for Kestrel, they are -- but not for the reason that most would expect. Someone else might take pride in the implied courage, will, or strength to have done so. Not Kestrel. In pursuit of her ultimate purpose her role is to delve deep. To burrow and infiltrate, slip into the dark, narrow, and guarded spaces to discover what hides there and see it, truly see it, with open eyes. The fleeting sensation of satisfaction that she experiences is only that: pleasure derived from knowing that she's doing her work well.

It wouldn't have lingered even if she hadn't been bisected in some strange and unreal fashion almost simultaneous to having heard the words; Kestrel is bereft of the thing that would allow it to do so.

The sword is alive beneath her fingertips in some way she'll have no hope of discerning while all the world is a riot around her, and pieces of her keep splintering off to kill or be killed in the shards of broken timeline behind her, spread in a dizzying pantheon of self-involved imagery. She understands -- intuits, even before he says as much -- that he's plucked these moments and arrayed them as pathways. 'The choice will not be easy for you,' he says, all but confirming as much, and even in the disorientation that follows being split apart is not enough to prevent the sharp little stumble of laughter that leaves her, breathless, in answer to those words. Her fingertips tighten on the hilt of the sword, until the bony comb of her knuckles presses white against the canvas of fair skin. Truth to tell, this sensation of halving and halving again is not altogether unfamiliar, and why would it be? She's shown him the thing beneath. He's seen her geography.

All the while he's speaking to her, suggesting roles she might take (and he's offered her deal after deal at this point, and she's refuted one after the next, because she knows a sucker's bet when she sees one), she's wondering what it is that she'll do. What she'll choose, how she'll decide. She doesn't know. Not knowing is different for Kestrel than for some, not a state of panic but instead the emptiness of a vessel waiting to be filled.

He fills it.

'In exchange,' he says, 'sing for me your song.'

The cruelest you know.

Just like that, she knows.

She moves slowly, but with perfect, surefooted balance. Plants her boot on the soil beside the blade and leans into the hinge of her knee, rising with slow patience and drawing with her as she does so the saber from the ground. Slow. Slower than that. She bares the naked blade inch after inch, until she reaches her full height and there is merely the breadth of a heartbeat left until the weapon is unsheathed again, some final resolution necessarily to follow, a culmination of everything, the crescendo he's demanded, some sort of violent apex, his or hers, or perhaps she'll cast the blade down at his feet or hurl it into the air or turn it into a flock of birds or she'll disappear, which is what she does, all at once, with a gust of air as cool and restorative as the breezes that scroll inland from the sapphire waters of Aquvy.

The cruelest song that Kestrel knows is called Unfinished.

The story that stays unfinished, the canvas half-painted, the meal just-cooked that spills uselessly into the dirt, its tantalizing aromas still uselessly perfuming the air. The tryst interrupted; the loss of a child; a sentence half-spoken and never completed. Lives snatched from the tapestry of what is before their role in history has been served: by him. By the Metal Demons. By anyone, anything.

The strange encounter in the woods upon which he so determined to impress one from a handful of results, none of which she'll give him.

She absconds. Not because she wants the sword; she does not. She has no use for it and no interest in material possessions, but it's more than a sword in this context, put in play that way -- it's a mandate, and so she thieves it out from under him, silken illusions rendering her utterly invisible to the eye.

To most eyes. His are not most and she has no guarantee that they'll work on him. But he's wounded; the blood, she thinks, is real. The blood if nothing else. And she is fast, and strong, and agile enough to dance across the rooftops of every city and from tree branch to tree branch if the need strikes, never once stopping. She gambles on her ability to run, and the cleverness of throwing up mazes of illusory space: copses of trees that don't exist, pathways that loop recursively on themselves. Like the woods of a fairy tale she can bid them to seem to behave in ways unlike woods ought to behave, and does.

There's a lunatic joy in it: she could die but oh, gods above, what a feeling, to turn her back on something so dangerous and -- heart in her throat, fire in her veins -- open her gait and gazelle toward some unfixed point on their mutual horizon. The world becomes a blur. If it wouldn't compromise that very necessary illusory vanishment she would throw her head back and burn through dangerous amounts of the breath she needs to escape in laughing.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

The moment she turns, the exhilaration of flouting danger still fluttering her heart, she comes face to face with her own backside. The thing that she couldn't see, the one part of the puzzle that yet failed to click into place was the one where she chose to leave, the only possibility that lay wholly behind her.

Moments ago, she had lifted the blade, something that feels heavy and incomprehensible in her hand, as if cut for hands different from hers. That he drew it from a crack in reality is disconcerting enough. If it is an illusion, it is the most real she has ever held. She, who is filled with the idea of a cruelty by him, rises with the discretion and deliberate mien of a surgeon making the first cut. He offers her no resistance, his complacency culminating in the slow rise of his hands at the elbows, rising no higher than his waist, palms up and inviting her decision. To look in his eyes one last time is not to see any rapt anticipation. His look is the same as it was an hour ago, the same as it was years ago. Sharp, brutal, unrelenting, mercilessly unconnected. Those piercing cornflower eyes, glowing of their own volition, would have been fetching on any other man.

On him, they are abominable. The steel breaks into a flock of birds, and she disappears before him, leaving him in the hall of her. He knows the geography of her, and the decision to leave him wanting is the only thing that gives him succor, the ghost of something that could have once been a smile on any other crossing his face. At his sides, phantasmal impressions of him fall to the ground before her power in one broken frame, yet collect her limp body and take it into his guardianship in another. Each in turn cracks, and breaks, burning themselves out at his sides, to which he returns one hand, formerly inviting, now as meanless as a newborn's. His eyes fix on the one remaining ideation, the one that dances and runs before him. He blinks, calmly.

"She dances on the edge of everything," he muses absently, watching the glade's seams shiver before him. He can read the seamstress at work before him, though it is nothing to say. He knows that in his current state, he may be as easily captured as any other who has fallen victim to the weaver's fey nature before he. To wander the wilds on a path without end is a pretty way to die, but it is not his time. "A choice can only be left unmade so many times," the nightmare spinner reflects, slowly bringing his hand to the seam of his robe.

"....before it is made for you." Behind him, the great wolf statue stirs, its wings stretching and cracking, broken silhouette casting a great shadow over the agent, who doesn't even so much as look up. His lips move, faintly. "Now, I give that choice to you," he remarks to the great beast. And then, the statue is gone, in one great bound making swift exit of the gravestone, disappearing into the sky. It is only moments before the agent can no longer see it, as the great and phantasmal black pursues the only directive that has ever mattered to it.

But there is no chase.

She flits away, her heart dancing as fast as her feet, quickly outpacing the agent and leaving him in the winds. A man who has never been seen to move at a pace faster than a gentle walk has no mind or will to pursue her, not with mazes and cities and the seven winds between them. He stands no chance of closing that gap, and it will become clear within only a moment or two. But as she holds his blade in her hand, she makes light of the mandate.

"You are not ready yet..."

The closest moon in the sky ripples with voice and meaning.
The voice is grand, larger than anything. It shivers the sky.
A great wing unfurls from behind the moon, impossibly large.
The span blocks out the starlight and curtains the sky in black.

The wolf from before appears from behind the moon, girdling it.
Real now more than ever, the slavering hound's jaws open.
Saliva pours to earth, cutting fetid lakes into the dying ground.
In the end, it takes one paw dropping from the black sky.
She dances across the treetops, the cities, forever and a day.
But it takes only one sweep of a gnarled claw to split the country.
Cities and forests alike are sundered in a massive wall of dust.
It can't be real. It isn't real. It can't be real...

The sword. The stolen mandate radiates from it alone. He knows where she is not with his eye, but the spell he has cast. And she holds a lightning rod for the entire chasm of nightmare Ether he opens, enough to coat the sky, the earth and everything in between. Any other weapon would have shattered from the energy that it channels. Any other man would have died from commanding it. She only has a few precious moments to break the illusion. The force of Ether that runs through that blade is not of the sort that can merely be withstood. This is something that only her own expertise will warn her of, the thing that has probably undone so many others: The hyperreality of this spell in particular is not something the body's nerves will understand as fake. There is no adrenaline that burns quite as vexingly as this. When that country-splitting wave hits her, she will be broken, like a bird shot in flight. It is not enough to kill outright, but only just so.

He will still scatter her belongings and blood across the forest, and leave her wherever she falls. "You must be tired from your journey," he surmises. "But you do not need to fear for your future. Whether you try and strike me down, or if you lived for me and me alone for a hundred lifetimes, it won't change what I will give you."

Bright-eyed, his voice never rises above mezza voce. Even when the country on the twisted horizon is torn in half. "I will make it my work to complete you..."

<Pose Tracker> Kestrel Apricity has posed.

Let it become part of the record -- the one that Kestrel will set down, if she lives long enough, if she remembers on the other side of what's coming -- that she never once looked back. Not even when she feels it beginning, whatever 'it' is; when the world behind her expands within itself, belling outward and bulging as reality strains to contain to amount of power being funneled to one single-minded purpose. As she expected, he's too wounded to give chase.

As she expected, he has other means to bridge the gap.

It ought to be enough for her to know that. To know she can escape. She ought to cast the blade aside, fling it to the earth or try to bury it in the bole of a tree if she's strong enough (it seems unlikely), understanding as she does with a sorcerer's intuition that the sword is the fulcrum on which this massive surge of energy must turn. Like holding a rod of metal overhead in a lightning storm, she is inviting her own destruction to cling to it. She doesn't want the sword and never did.

And yet.

Every breath that leaves her is a wordless prayer for her own survival. More than that, a winged wish that she might emerge from the other side of that typhoon of ether crackling its way up the braid of her spine with her memory intact, so that she can recall for the pages of the volume in her bag what it's like to stand in the path of that maelstrom because that's what she's going to do, she realizes, as another breathless (mad?) laugh flies from her lips and she tightens her grasp on the hilt of the malignant thing: she's going to let the surge overtake her.

There is something more narratively pleasing about it. Casting the sword down, haring off into the underbrush, leaving it for him to retrieve when his wounds mend enough for him to shuffle his way to where it lies...? No. Kestrel has no religion, but her philosophy of existence mandates trials by fire. The raw substance of everything must be elevated and purified, and she is no different than the clay she's destined to shape with her own two hands.

One thing leads to another, and the path taken spirals out consequences in ever-more-interesting fractals. She could turn her back on this one to spare herself pain and suffering, but--

I wonder where this will lead, she thinks, one crystalline thought amidst fireworks of adrenaline and instinct. It's the last thought she has before the heavens open and cleave her. Raw ether hisses and spits and splits the world apart, ripping a seam in the fabric of things. Blinding brilliance slashes through her skull like a blade, and then for Kestrel there's only sudden darkness. She's unconscious even before she falls, her dead sprint turning into tumbling rolls through dead leaves and scree, skidding eventually to a stop on her back. She's separated from the sword by a matter of feet, the hilt tantalizingly close to her unfurled fingers.

Beneath her clothing, distillations of ether stitch along the delicate symbols and lines tattooed into her skin. Like an electrical surge it torrents through the mechanisms of her symbology. Kestrel remains unconscious, but her runes are awake, alive, overclocked, and the effect on the surrounding area is as disjointed and maddeningly intense as were his own broken charades: the bulk of her symbology is illusion, and the world around her warps and behaves in nonsensical ways. Small fires are lit and sputter out for lack of anywhere to go, or are doused by other elemental interactions from those few symbols unrelated to illusion at all.

He has separated her from his sword...

But now the two lie together in a swiftly smouldering glade, amidst the churning illogic of all of her blended magic unbound at once.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

The bitter wind cuts across his coat as it changes from the warm summer breeze to a bizarre eclipse wind that leaves the ground around his feet rippling, like the light at the bottom of a clear river reflects in ribbons off of the smooth rock below.

It is with that same eerie deliberate nature that he lowers his skyborne hand, his fingers loose as the gates of ether inside his mind clasp shut. He is quiet, razored mind silking the borders of a bellicose provocation as he watches the horizon splinter, reinterpreting itself in unfamiliar and kaleidoscopic release. Even so, he does not move to chase down she who has risen him so. It is enough that the world turns on its axis, in a glass place with no windows.

It is enough that he knows her, and enough that he devastates her so.

The expected hurt comes in waves, like a knife in his skull. The lightning that crawls between his fingers at his hip is purely within his own mind, he knows. Pale and painful blue eyes lower by degrees to trace a sunrise that never materalizes. He is still for a time, even as the wet and sharp steel finds its way into the crotch of his mind. A nerve stands livid and branchlike across his temple, agitating the phantasmal wound still at his head.

She slips her arms around him, placing her lips against his forehead, as if to soothe.

She could have avoided it, I know.
"Aa," he responds.
What if I asked you to spare her, I wonder.
"It wouldn't matter."
You're a terrible person, I think.
".... aa."