2020-10-11: An Unseen Axis
- Log: An Unseen Axis
- Cast: Avril Vent Fleur, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: Bevelle - Temple District
- Date: October 11, 2020
- Summary: In her dreams, Avril has a visitor.
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
They had taken her after her unfortunate descent from the wire, however slowed by Boudicca's enchantment and broken by the awning upon which she'd fallen. There had not even been a moment in which to resist. And even if she had, where would she have gone?
The rest had looped together in a sort of blur: she had been formally charged (as it were) with invading the city. Her belongings had been taken from her, and without further ceremony, she had been cast into the prison under the city.
It might have been some small, unwelcome consolation that she wasn't the only prisoner down here for long.
The attempt to rescue Yuna had failed, utterly.
Alone in her cell, she awaits the sentencing, seated here with her back against the walls of her cage, her arms looped around her knees.
It's not despair. Not... exactly. She hasn't given up hope, even in spite of what has happened. There's a sense -- this thin thread that stitches up the back wall of her consciousness -- that something will happen. That things are proceeding -- somehow, somehow -- as they must.
It's not despair.
It's loneliness.
She never did find them after they were separated on the other side. Dean, Rebecca -- no, it's not despair. Not here, either. They're fine. She knowsbelievesthinks they're fine. There is this sense that they must be, or...
Or...? Again she's left chasing after shadows, vanishing as she reaches to grab them as if the sun hung high overhead.
No. She misses them, terribly. It's an ache that goes on and on, that is hardly soothed for the presence of others nearby. She's not alone and yet, she's missing the only things that matter. Her dear friends...
But loneliness can only proceed so long. Eventually, exhaustion holds sway, and eventually, seated like that, the young woman slips into slumber.
BGM: https://failbettergames.bandcamp.com/track/dead-tick-tock-time
...This is a land that has long known the touch of winter. The sun may shine overhead -- only a few clouds mar the bright blue sky. But it's cold here, cold enough to sink into the bones and steal breath away.
This is a land known to no one, a ghost continent even to Avril Vent Fleur. After all, she can only circle the outermost parts of the ice walls that rise and block her from herself.
...No, that isn't right.
Not anymore.
Here the crack widens. Here, a hole permits passage, if one squeezes themself within it.
It's dark in here, within her very psyche. But down she goes nonetheless, as she always does, because she must.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
She can feel the undercurrent of the call deep beneath her. The shift of benthic waters too dark and deep to freeze.
It is not the normal sensation, the shivering pull of something faraway, something that pulls at the strings of every fiber in the being, a clarion call that bids obedience not from the mind, but from every cell in the body. The feeling of 'depersonalization' is great here, the sensation of the body not belonging to you, though your hands still obey you, and your body still moves at your will. There is nothing to overtly prove that you are a puppet. But as the vast flow of the world shifts below you to a song that no one can quite hear, each square of your skin speaks.
You are not you.
A rogue sensation, of a priest falling to his knees, his robes scattered about him. convulsing as if struck by a whip. He heaves, once over and once again, rivulets of spittle drooling from his mouth. He vomits, though his stomach has nothing more in it to give. He heaves, and heaves. Be does this because it is natural for the soul to give up on the body when it so plainly betrays God. Emetic convulsions wracking him, eventually his body gives what it no longer has the right to hold. Vast churning tendrils made up of air and the translucencies of nothing, pour from him, pour from his mouth as his throat bulges. The squirming lengths of his own soul pile on the ground behind him like a fileted squid, ghostlike things slithering out of him. They are long enough to be unreal, unbelievably his, as if every step he took in his life was a foot of ghostly flesh. He lurches in his robes, his hands disappearing into voluminous sleeves, his head more soul than flesh, each haphazard step taken only a proxy for the thing that worms around the braziers and the bars of cells.
He tries to breathe, but breath is a cruelty.
Obscene blue eyes watch him, impassively.
The world shivers. He is there with you, a man in grey, a man standing in front of a silver blade plunged into the ice. "The chosen one," he remarks, in a voice cut from liquid night. "A chosen time. And a chosen place." The crow sits on the pommel of the great saber. He pays only the mildest of attention to her, his mind focused on things far, far away. His mind, in the same place that pulls at every cell of her. The gravity that makes it so easy to fall into. His attention on the bird in front of him, the bird who perches on the blade in the ice.
The crow says nothing, turning to her. It has stark, ice-blue eyes.
It has two eyes too many. Or is it three? Or is it six?
Or have they always looked that way..?
The earth shivers, as if freezing cold.
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
She isn't herself. Every inch of herself is not... her.
It may say much about Avril's general situation that this is not, in and of itself, a new sensation. She approaches the gap within her own being, hesitates a moment before the darkness within and
Oh. Oh, whose body is that now? It must not be cannot be her own, for to walk willingly into a such a cold and dark place... she would not do it. It's a terror that bites deep into her being: a dark, cold, confined place.
She would not go to such a place. The body moving now is not her own.
It is not the first time she has come to this place.
She must always return to this place.
This isn't her in this place.
The divide, as the Trial Knight had noted, cuts deep. She recoils from reconciliation, even as she reaches for it: a paradox right down to the roots. So: she moves inwards, the sensation growing that she is divorced from her flesh, and she permits it to be so. The body grows numb within the the world within: it is easy enough to relinquish oneself.
But then -- ah. She is not alone in her.
Or rather, the body is not alone in here.
"And you are...?" the woman asks, pausing in her inward trek. "I do not believe we have met."
It's not Avril speaking. At least, she doesn't feel as if it's so. Words escape her lips but they feel somehow alien, rounded in strange places and sharped-edged and wrong in others. Is this a dream? --No, has she not been here before? No...
It's wrong. She's watching someone else act, isn't she? Her body feels heavy and off, more like she's standing to the left, or that she's only able to get one arm into a single sleeve of a coat. ...Strange, the way she thinks of these things now.
"..."
Her gaze settles on the bird.
"...What manner of bird is that?"
How many eyes does it have?
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The world tilts on an imperceivable axis.
All of it is like a spreading sickness awakened by the same mad 'eye,' an unseeing organ that commands fealty against even the reality of the world itself. A vast maternal, represented only by the man standing before you, whom represents only a vestigial thing, a hand long forgotten, something left behind in the world that so plainly betrays you.
The incomprehensible, preternatural chill does not seem to bother him, at least not as much as it might the crow standing before him, the bird fluffing up as its downy feathers raise in response, either to her words or an unseen breeze, the same that pulls at the heavy gray travelling coat the man wears. That man absently toys with the trim, a motion which provokes more movement in the ends of his coat than the faintly howling breeze, testament to the weight of the thing itself.
The bird continues to peer at her through sets of eyes that never seem to remain the same count or sit in the same place as she speaks with him. "A remnant of something the world left behind," the man answers in a voice cut from honeyed velvet. He never seems to be the one to speak out of turn -- a handsome time passes between them before he gives reply, and to which end of her curiosity it cannot be said.
This is the thing that is taken from us all, the world promises.
Your self belonged to something greater, once and long ago.
"This is an atrocious thing, that which we must do," he opines gently, out of tune to the natural rhythm of the way people speak and are spoken to in turn. A gloved hand raises, opens in front of him. It's a wonder that he can do it, if his hand does not belong to him as it is told. "Of all the strength in all the world, and all of the cruelties that we endure, the light will not pierce here."
He speaks as a man who is beneath the great wall, ice that has no limits, and no barriers.
"But it is her charge, the river of mercy, and she will have her say," he assures the woman. "I feel for you, a thing left behind. But I will speak to no one for you, and I will beg no one for your consolations. That thing that we build together is for you, as it is for her, and as it is for all else who are lost."
His hand lowers to his side.
"Come to me, and I will give you water."
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
"A remnant..." Avril echoes, moving now as if she were in a trance. But of course, that's exactly the state that she is in now, neither here nor there, not of her flesh nor entirely divorced from it.
It's the same, in a sense, when she awakens that remnant of the Queen's will -- she is taken over, subsumed, yet not vanished, yet not merely a rider to the horse that is that power. She is both, in control, and consumed with an utter lack of it.
The world tilts and she barely notices it.
This is a dream state.
"An atrocity?" she asks, coming to a stop mere feet from him and his malleable, changing bird. "Tell me of the nature of this atrocity. Do you speak of... my own, or that of another? ...I do not know you, I believe. No, I know it to be so. Who are you?"
She may be in a dream. She may feel divorced from herself, split into to two places at once. But she is still herself, and thus--
She will ask such blunt questions, if they prove necessary.
But he continues on. He has more yet to say.
"...Her charge..." she echoes. "Do you mean...?"
Her, the Ice Queen?
Even here in this place, at that apex before the long descent downwards into the maze within, Avril hesitates.
Even as blurred as her perceptions may have become, even with her flesh an alien world to her senses. Even divided. Even so, she draws back a step.
And she says, as bluntly as ever,
"I am not thirsty."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
His response is cavalier.
"You palder with the way of 'a true and beautiful end.'"
The underwater sensation, the feeling of a multitude of indescribably silvern thread connected to the origin of mind, contracts by millimeters, tightening the senses. There is not much connected to a true and real physical sensation, steeped thuroughly with the leaves of a dream as it is, in as much as the thing itself. Even so, the intrusion is palpable, the woman before the queen struggling to right herself, with words, her only liberty in this place where there is no 'mooring.' And this struggle is not unnoticed.
"It falls to me to gather them, those who feel most strongly the sting of the loss, those who would not have any other realm but the one in which they were orphaned. It falls to them to bring into this world, and those among it, her charge, a blazon of calamity streaked across the moonlit sky."
"Even so, there are those who would stand in the way. To bring them mercy is the most sacred task. They could not exist, not as they are, in the world that passed us by."
The man in the grey coat turns to face her.
"I am one who was left behind," he explains simply and without despair.
His leather glove opens at his side. It is a moment before he raises his arm, proffering her his hand.
"This world is not one that a person can truly understand. And you, here in this contraction of cut rime. It is no wonder, this way that you have come to face me. A thirst you have had since you were born, a pain so noble that you have no longer come to know of it. Lovely, that you should be so. But thirst is a small, blood thing. A man drinks."
He looks up, obscene blue eyes glowing in the dark.
The crow spreads eye-splotched wings behind him, chattering.
"A soul drowns."
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
"A true and beautiful...?"
She feels like she's submerged. Not drowning, precisely, but sunk deep under the water. Or-- no. Perhaps the more accurate statement would be to say she has sunk to a point where she feels as if she were under the waves, with the full weight of the sea atop her.
Or perhaps, the whole monument of ice that towers overhead? Her wall truly is a monumental thing.
But who is the one who built it?
She sways, tilting mere millimeters to her left, as if attempting to rally despite the growing pressure and disconnect.
"To whom... does this world belong?" she manages, after a moment. This is not her flesh this is not her body her brain her eyes her tongue, and yet she has none other than them. "I believe this realm to be my own. Is it not so?"
She pauses for a moment, all the while trying to feel something with flesh that seems far too numb to the world without.
"Who, then, am I? Am I the one who stands in your path? Or would I be among your 'orphans'? It is," and she blinks long and slow, as if attempting to resist succumbing to slumber's grasp, "true that I have no family and no nation, no place at all in this world."
This is a dream. But it is so unlike her other dreams.
"Do I know you," she wonders, feeling as if she were falling, floating, drifting. "Or... should I instead say, 'have I known you'? I apologize. I have forgotten much."
Slowly, as if leaden, she takes a step forward. Every inch feels hard-won.
"If I could remember... there is much I might change," she says, reaching out her hand.
Only to stop as she sights that bird.
And looks into his eyes.
"...drowns..." she utters, akin to a sleeper awoken during nighttime wandering. "Might I... drown?"
When /she/ wakes up, where will she be?
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Breathe, then, with the full weight of the fluid sky above upon your shoulders.
"The world that passed us by is only a memory that belongs to the will of she. Everything we have and everything we are is owed."
The closer she comes to the man in the grey coat is the closer she comes to her own transmigration -- the obsolescence of the self burgeoned on by cascades of glittering wire, pulling at nerves, dreams, memories and notions without ever truly being seen. It is an agonizing hill to climb, a gyring and merciless nonsense geometry, all merely to approach him.
"It is the original sin of man to stand up for the dying world of the iscariot," the man with the blue eyes answers. "But your body knows, in every cell, the truth of the thing itself."
He takes the woman by the hand.
"We are all orphans."
The streets are covered with black patches of slick ice.
It feels like it's been raining forever, thick, cold splotches of water pelting your raincoat. The abandoned city has been so for a long time, miles of zigzagging streets leading nowhere. The crow is gone, as is the ancient wall of ice, replaced with a city so wide and so large that the vaguest outlines of buildings show through the darkened cloud-shot blue haze of the sky itself. His hand is back at his side.
The lines of an ancient formula are scrawled on the buildings here, vague lines of script extending off around corners unseen.
As the rain peals down, the darkness cast over them hides the 'detail' of his eyes but not the color, that haunting, obscene glow showing a cruel forgiveness to her. "A commonality they all share," he tells her in reply to her apologies.
"You have all forgotten everything."
You can feel the threads of the dream slithering away, slow but receding. Brick by brick, the world he built for you is deconstructing. Time is precious and fleeting, in those winnowing moments.
"You can find those who are 'part of the memory,' if you look hard enough. You must, if you want to be submerged. Otherwise even the mercies that she wishes for you all will not stay these hands. A sad, inglorious fate. The task that must be done, if 'they' are not found."
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
"Her... will..." Avril utters, as if in a trance.
Her will. It makes sense in some strange, foreign way -- who 'she' is. What her intent is. She's able to understand it without truly knowing it. Perhaps some cells in her body remember, even if it has been washed from her mind.
She feels flattened, stretched. She feels like she is tethered in wires and is hoisted, as if by some artifice she cannot see or touch, away from the flesh that should hold her. And yet -- the two are not truly separate. It's as strange as her understanding has become: she is not in this body anymore and she still walks forward.
"Yes..."
That is true. Without question, that is true. By time, by distance, by what she has lost, she is orphaned into the Filgaia in which she has awoken.
She stands in a city which she does not know, and this, too, is hardly a new experience for her. It could be anywhere. It could be any time. Her blue eyes turn up towards the skies and then the buildings about as the rains soak her. "Is this...?"
But she shakes her head. "No. I do not remember."
She lowers her gaze. Her hand will feel cold in his.
"I sometimes wonder what the act of remembering might cost me. What will I lose, I wonder? ...Perhaps that is true of those of which you speak."
She is not here. She is not anywhere.
"What will we lose, I wonder? Will what we gain be worth the price that must be paid?"
She feels like...
...She feels like the world is dissolving about her. Ice, turning to water, turning to steam and
She looks at him suddenly, in the end, as if to fix him with the eyes alone. "Others? Like me?"
Her grip tightens about his hand, and in this moment -- this moment alone -- the queen's grasp is iron.
"...Or others like you?"
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The world tilts on an axis unseen, as if being watched through eyes on the other side of a prism.
There is nothing 'sensical' about the world that frays threadbare around them. A city wound up on itself in a knot and plunged underwater, clouds that used to be a wall as far as the eye could see..
And in the middle, them.
The rainfall is everpresent, ever-constant, though it never quite reaches the skin. For him, it could very well be the travelling coat he wears, the gloves which grip her hand tightly. For her, it is simply that the rain itself never reaches her. Or even simpler, that it is safer and more considerable to say that it simply falls on someone else. The hard peal is all that can be heard.
She demands an answer. The man in grey is quiet for a time, with only the mild paint of neutrality in his mien shown her beneath the horrific cerulean cast by the unknown. Slowly, his lips part.
"Who knows?"
He never meets her grip with any pressure of his own. Instead, he steps into her--into her personal space, filling her frigid space with the inky black of something else entirely, and as she meets him with the blade of her eye, he lifts broken eyes to her entirely -- and the shimmer of his ancient, cold irises fix on her, painting her own blue in a thousand colors, a thousand reflections of the glow his own ice blue eyes cast. A thousand shades of blue, and every last one of them, incomprehensibly wrong, as if nothing human were staring at her. He looks at her with a thousand eyes in two, and the world shivers.
THIS IS NOT THE NOW
"What kind of celebrants would we be if we just worked for our own felicity?" he asks once.
His hand in hers turns only two degrees at the wrist as her grip tightens. And then there is a muted sckwark in her fist, and then a great black beak sprouts up between their thumbs. A chirp, then a great cackling arises between them, feathers spreading as crows flutter from her hand. He holds his migraine inducing gaze right up until a shade of black feathers spread between them. A moment of confusion and he is behind the ice queen. He stands back to back with her, as if he simply stepped through the space that held a person in a flush of blackfeather and hue.
"The promise is as it always has been. Find me, and I will bring you an agonizing peace. The truth is always something obscene. Something beautiful."
As the world of the rainy city unravels around them, the man in grey takes his leave.
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
It's like trying to hold onto mist in a sense: she has the sensation of his form, his body, but there is no resistance, no push against her. And like the mist, he moves in a way she doesn't anticipate.
She doesn't look away. She doesn't step back -- at best one foot slides perhaps an inch, in reflex. No, the biggest tells that the queen presents to him are the way she draws in a breath, straightens, and widens her eyes. She didn't anticipate him to invade her personal space.
But the Lolithia never won a war by ceding to another. She may be displeased to have him here, but she will not surrender. Instead, her gaze meets his, and she looks at him.
Really looks at him.
Can winter itself be made to shiver?
"Those eyes." No, they're not the same eyes that had looked upon her then. But they may well be cousins to that gaze. Volsung, leader of the Veruni. Johnny Appleseed--
No. No, there is only one Johnny Appleseed and it is not /him/.
"You are broken," she proclaims.
She is merely two-in-one, someday to become but one again. He is a shattered mirror, a million glittering broken pieces gathered in their frame, an illusion of being merely 'one'.
His hand twists in her grip: he is mist to her iron. She cannot hold him. Something is being birthed where their hands meet. As if caught in a trance, she does not so much as glance down at their entwined hands, continuing instead to meet his gaze. Until--
The change is a subtle thing. Like frost under the unyielding rays of the sun, though, her demeanor softens, gentles.
Avril turns her face just a fraction to her right, as if to cut off his gaze by that much, and in that moment
He's no longer standing in front of her. He's behind her. Slowly, Avril takes a breath. She does not move. She stands there, back to back with him, her gaze forward.
"It is said that much of what is beautiful in this world is born from ugliness," she murmurs. "...Very well. I shall consider your offer. ...But do not take my consideration for agreement. I will determine this for myself."
The world is shifting. The world is unwinding. The world is...
just mist
in the morning light
The dream -- the nightmare -- sublimates about her. Stirring in her birdcage of a cell, Avril slowly lifts her head from her knees.