2024-02-26: The Sun Burns Everything in Time

• Log: The Sun Burns Everyone in Time
• Cast: Gwen Whitlock, Isiris Shango'Ra
• Where: Ruid
• Date: February 26th, 2024
• Summary: Despite Ruid's distance from everything, it was still attacked by Althena's Guard. Now, while Gwen tries to recover, Isiris visits her in her dreams, letting her know that his work is not yet done.

---

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

    While its walls of reinforced steel protect Ruid well from outside invaders, the unknown teleporter inside its ruins made it child's play for the two high-ranking operatives of Althena's Guard to take the fight immediately inside. Between Dragonmaster Ghaleon's knowledge of magic, White Knight Leo's reluctant presense, and Red Priestess Mauri's relentless fire-casting abilities, everyone was caught off guard.

    And then, there was... Gwen Whitlock, super courier, taking on a priestess with complete control over fire, as well as her protective brother, Leo, who was in complete denial. Gwen even punched him! ... and got a concussion for it, courtesy of the pommel of Leo's sword.

    It got worse from here, when Mauri transformed into a ghastly hydra, leaving her brother utterly shocked and Gwen.... did not have a great time.

    Somehow, the Fiends got Althena's Guard to retreat, likely to avoid Mauri and Leo falling into the enemy's hands once the Red Dragon's Aura had been stolen from Mauri.

    Repair had begun, while those wounded now lick their wounds (and burns), and rest. It may be an added benefit that so much of the housing and construction here is metal, stone, and glass; there's very little that can sustain fire for long, once its source was removed.

    Gwen is one of the wounded, completely knocked out as she lies on her cot. Her burns have been dealt with, thanks to the efforts of people like Mariel and Lanval, as well as... Voltie, who has been spitting web on anything it thinks needs to be fixed.

    None of this matters here; this is the physical world, and Gwen is in her dreams, slowly sifting through to the surface as her body heals.

    It's just a part of healing; the slash Gwen received from Leah still smarts on her chest, so maybe it's good to be able to rest, once in a while.

    What's the worst that can happen?

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

 
     His footsteps resound down the halls.

     There is a low-voiced trickle of heartbeat sound at his passage, the lowly and unassuming man in the grey coat. A great hood has been pulled over his head, and his boots resound harshly over the plate steel. The hollow tread of the fortress gives a subdued echo with each step, ominously warning intruders of the thickness of its walls and the impenetrability of its defense.

     The young man passes by a black-feathered Beastman in the steel streets, a creature whom bothers to look up, bothers to notice his passage for only a moment. Eyes piercing red widen in alarm, before a milky haze pours over the irises, bleaching the color right out of them, cracking the lens until all the beast can see is broken glass and the ground. He squirms there awhile, on the ground, until his body catches alight. The flame burns dark and black on him, casting long shadows scrabbing to get away from the site of the murder. Shadows that peel from the ground, spread wing and take flight in the man's leave.

     That agent descends down each step of the spiralling gantries and battlements that make up the battery of defenses, passing both merchants and guards bent on reinforcing the area's formidable defenses, to not repeat the mistakes of before, of allowing enemies into the fortress.
     They are too late.
     Their enemies were here long before they ever laid claim to the land.

     The man makes his way all the way down into the infirmary. And with him, the grasping benthic sense of -eversion-, of creeping, agonizingly slow emesis as raw pulsing flesh that shouldn't fingers along the glistening rim of the entry. Probing jet-night touch into the hall, creeping along and spreading dripping flesh like a curtain over the fixtures, hungry suckling at light overhead, casting raw shadows and confounding attempts to mend and suture, to diagnose and prescribe in a vast, incomprehensible hunger, entirely indifferent to the writhing struggles of any mind caught in the spread of shadow, in the warm, merciful kindle of flame deep in the mind.

     A surgeon nearby her draws a medician's staff from leather, the sound entirely like the unsheathing of the agent's sword, a glimmering crescent of steel in the middle of the infirmary, drawn as he arrives, as he approaches, the hiss of the razor cut audibly sharp --
     And then, a finger snap.

     Everything drains at the center of the mind, the whirl of heady sensations and emotions getting pulled into a steel-and-fire corona at the bottom of the ocean. Limbs are meaningless in the coruscating tide, and what is up and what is down, what is left and what is right ceases, abruptly, to have relevance in the ragdoll flow of time and the sharp leash pull of a single shattering sound.

     She is pulled violently into the AEther, the tumbling, frictionless twilight between thoughts, a clouded nightmare space overlooking a vast night ocean savannah, the sparks and stabs of nearby starlight hostile to notice at the back of the mind. There the nondescript man sits, at rest with elbows slung over his knees.
     "And what," he asks, "if you had to think... would you have done with mercy?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

    The inconvenient sounds of life in a frontier town inhabited by the forsaken are a temptation to those who threaten to surface into it from the twilight land between coma and wakefulness. They are a distraction, and must be deleted.

    And so, in the memory world of Gwen's mind, it is deleted. The Stranger walks the streets, and the process begins, spreading outwards like a fire. It's another invasion coming from an unlikely place, invited by the strangers the town had brought in. Where before Gwen was merely one of a duo of Filigaians that call themselves Fiends, here, she is the direct cause.

    The young man isn't here for anyone else but her.

    The mind's eyeview of Ruid collapses in on itself, with Gwen caught in it, sucked in from going further above, but not allowed to float into the mundane black of a coma.

    This is a different sort of black she's sucked into, a dimension of which Gwen is spit into as an honored guest.

    The Stranger will have to forgive Gwen if she takes a few moments to sputter and cough.
    
    "... M-mercy?" It feels like an ironic question, as Gwen lies there on her hands and knees, grey blue eyes staring down at the space between her two hands. She had warned Loren that she wouldn't hesitate, but she still did. She had warned she'd attack Althena's Guard, and she did, having learned her lesson. ... And then she paid for it, because she forgot Mauri was Leo's sister.

    "What.... the hell..." Gwen's head hangs; she reaches up and, if Isiris isn't ready, she'll grab at his hood with her left hand, in order to shove her face towards his hood.

    "_... is your goddamn problem_?!"

    It has to be a dream; Gwen has to assume it is for her own mental health, for what little good it'll do while she's stuck here. But would she really feel any differently if it were real?

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

 
     "The world that is 'now' is far more indifferent to your suffering than you assume."

     The ground gently gives under the boots, a vast living scape made of crushed basalt and veins, the squishy fleshlike tread leaving red marks with every inaccuracy and discomfort, each shuffle of stance, each tiny trepidation. And yet, none of it is his, his own boots never moving very much at all, with no more sign he is alive than that winnowed voice. No more evidence he is human at all than the tiny sliver of skin visible from where his coat sleeve and undershirt ends and his gloves.

     And that voice.

     Between hands that aren't moving at all, silk gathers all the way at the seams until the bunch becomes a painful knot at the small of the back, a cicada buzz droning betweeen the ears, and the raw creeping bath of flesh that doesn't quite stay in its assigned place for every inch between the two. There is a subvocalism to his light tone, a 'transmission' echo from the deep, a hundred leagues away and a thousand fathoms under, raw and grasping at the threads of her.

     The labyrinth fortress is no longer relevant, if it ever was, the events of 'today' not carrying a lantern into the tenebrous dark. All that is left of 'today' is what will be left behind of all things in a thousand years: nothing but black ash beneath the boots, black ash and the audacity of shock and dismay by those who still paw mewling at the edges of their own mind.

     The young man does not move when she reaches for him, and her hand sinks far further into him than it should. Into the interstitial of him. Into his reflection. Her hand disappears all the way to the wrist with her rage, her fingertips vanishing into ripples that spread six feet wide, six feet high, and six feet under, as if she were merely reaching into a pool of her own reflection. The nondescript man sits upon his throne, placid and pensive, even as the slither of intensely cold flesh licks along her submerged fingertips, the slender tip of a vast Brobdingnagian thing curling into the spaces between fingers she cannot see, the 'weight' of the thing sagging and pulling the watery ripples fabric-tight over his broken image.

     "A 'person' rages," he explains.

     The man is standing now, with the skittering, violently hissed whisper of painful motion drawing a razor-sharp line down her wrists, and along and to her right. vThough her every footstep raises scarlet red in the basalt beneath her, there is no evidence that the man has moved at all, his hands at his sides now, the back of his grey coat facing her. His hood is now down, and the black flare of his hair can be seen as he watches off into the distance. To look at him is to feel the world tilt by unnoticable degrees, the skew stretching and straining what 'is' as inexorably as gravity itself.

     "To rage is a natural response to living in these incomprehensible times. As the beauty of tragedy and loneliness mount, a person is given to rail against their perceived inustice. A preconceived notion of care suggested by the original guarantors and stewards. But that preconception, borne into us is as all things we are. A misery convenant of lies we tell ourselves."

     The young man's first movement is to look up, into the shivering trepanations of the sky, the thousand needlepoints of the stars. "But... mercy was a thing we lived with, once. A time where prayers were heard. That all of the contrivances of our noble world were levers not yet broken. There was a time where 'loneliness' was not our birthright. A heady poewr. A lavish time. ... and so I repeat."

     A slow blink, of unseen eyes that cast an obscene cerulean light on his shoulder as he turns his head slightly.
     "If there was a single prayer that could have been heard. If there were still 'mercy' in the world. What would you have wished for?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

    The hand that disappears into the Stranger's self is gloved, but the Stranger would know the grip would be human.

     It's the metal ARM that has its palm on the ground, supporting her-- the one she uses for hurting, and shooting. For moving and freeing.

    It's part of that hidden language to the parts that make up Gwen: which hand she uses to greet or welcome a person could be a marker of what she feels about them, even if the action would be the same with either.

     It was her left hand that she punched Leo, twice. He likely would not care that it was her left versus her right fist; her left is just as effective at delivering a punch.

     Her control of her ARM is that precise; it is, to her, another arm. Even if she could handle delicate porcelain with it and never risk the handle getting crushed underneath her fingers, she still would use the left hand. A grand rugged mug may get the right hand, still. She'd feel how cold or warm the drink was, regardless, save for the extreme ends of temperature.

    So even if she had thrust her right hand at the Stranger, she would still feel how cold that other side felt, and percieved the edges of something massive on the other end.

    Gwen doesn't know why she even defaulted to her left hand; the stranger never needed a 'gentle' touch. But how is it really gentle, any more than one end of a sword versus another? Both wrists ache. She as to draw back, falling backwards onto her bottom, scarlet staining the basalt like the weak rays of a strained sun underneath her.
    
    She hadn't missed the noise of his voice, or how perceiving him with her eyes only produces a similar result, confusing both senses as they try to perceive what either is taking in.

    Casting her arms over her knees, Gwen looks up, frowning, taking in his question.

    Her memory of Lan's confusion, when she sank into the dark threads, runs predominantly in her mind. "Let Lan go. That is, when Lan wants out of your plans, let her go." She breathes and forces a small exhale through her nostrils. "That's my request-- my prayer, if we're doin' that."

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

 
     And yet, the nondescript man was never touched.

     The piercing azure light flowing over his shoulder darkens with the slow shuttering of his eyelids. When a creature is so naturally still and silent, even the smallest motion can be deafening. Every inch of their words are a conspiracy of winding touch, a continuum of vast and indifferent flesh-that-isn't. In the context of him, it doesn't matter at all whether her hand is fake, or real.

     The body does not understand madness, in whatever form it takes.

     The young man stands with her awhile, waiting for her to get her bearings. The ground is at once harsh and cradling, the unshakable sensation of movement trickling beneath her legs, as if she were ever perched upon a great fen, as if creatures vast and incomprehensible flow just beneath the surface of her, just beneath the surface of that bright scarlet mark. THe base slither of a ghost who lives too much to be dead flows beneath her as the nondescript man waits at her side patiently.

     "You seem to think I control the 'choice' of others."

     The young man turns, a single print of red left in the imprecise basalt as his boot moves. A hand opens, a glove proffered pointedly to the drifter. The way the nondescript man offers without looking is a frivolous affair, a politeness offered without even so much as turning his palm upwards. The gesture is fleeting, and it is temporal. It doesn't take much to feel the mind stretch to its limit, the violin tightness of the strand of thought pulled until it breaks, and he never truly lifted his hand at all. A moment in time to be seized or set aside.

     "The truth of a crime is not something that can be unknown. People learn it, and then convince themselves that the crime is something different, that their own hand in it is something different. Through their own preconceptions and their own notions and there own choice, they try to move the levers of the world to realize a greater one that suits them. Only to notice that this indifferent world is not obligated to be kind. That the 'time' in which there would have been an ear for a plea was lost ages ago."

     It doesn't take much choice for him to no longer offer to help her up, to have never made the offer in the first place.
     If she does not accept, she fill find herself underneath the shadow of his sword, the gleaming silver curve shining beneath a bifold moon.

     "....only to realize they were alone, all this time."

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

    Something gargantuan was on the other side of that 'reflection', but the sensation of something large moving around her does not stop once she's pulled her hand out.

    She knows it like she knows when she feels a horse moving underneath her, instinctively knowing some measurement of nervousness or tiredness, or how to coax a response with minute motions of her body and voice. She'd know the horse's body like it was an extension of her, and treat it the same way in a way she wouldn't her Gear, despite keeping up with its own demands.

    Obviously, this isn't a horse, just like a horse is not a Gear simply because it's smaller. This is something large, and it moves, and its edges cannot be described within her body's sense of self.

    Gwen takes the moment she hadn't done so earlier, trying to get a sense of it, and failing. It is what it is.

    She will move on.
    
    ".... You're right," Gwen breathes. "Even our definitions are definitely different, you... don't force decisions." At least, the ones Gwen referred to with her own prayer.

    "So maybe that's why I can't think of something to 'pray for'--"

    A hand is offered, Gwen's hand reaches for it, reflexively, without thought. Even if her conscious mind rebels, the subconscious can be a different matter.

    "--it's never that simple, is it?"

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

 
     It's hard to stand on your own two feet.

     The world's four degree tilt is infuriatingly omnipresent. The nondescript man's grip is firm, strong enough to pull her upright without much visible effort on his part, and soon the only evidence that she had ever fallen is the crime scene of bright scarlet her rump leaves behind. Soon, the vague shiver of potentiality -- a world in which she found herself his 'enemy,' and forced to eat the earth -- would disappear, sheathing somewhere down the back of her mind as easily as a sheathed knife.

     To try and get a sense of the leviathan things moving subterranian to the world is to hear the faintest song o warning, and it is in some ways a mercy that she does not delve too deeply into the things that squirm just beyond her comprehension.

     The nondescript man's pensive, lost, disastrous mien remains as he releases her, his hand lowering to his side as he steps away from her, the space between them growing by a scintilla. "The decisions that a person makes are their own, and the truths they discover belong wholly to them," the stranger intimates. He keeps the space between them with the same chilling reverence and stewardship one would at the funeral of a distant relation, one for whom a regret was stoked, one for whom no love was yet still lost. "What they choose to believe in is a consequence of their understanding of that 'truth,' and how far they go. For some, they recognize the freedom in indifference. For others..."

     She can feel the subtle change of his expression in every fibre of the space, a carelessly neutral sunset.
     "She believes, and believes, until she finds that no god came to weep over her grave."

     She tells him it's not that easy, and the notion gives the nameless, anonymous drifter pause.
     For a long time he pauses.
     "....it was, once."

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

    It's not hard to imagine herself in that setting; she was before. She still is, in that sliver of possibility that closes itself, like a lone patch of pavement over a widening spread of downward flowing water.

    She's still angry, but it's been blunted by the fog of the mind, caught as she is in this prism of uncertainty.

    "Is this what you see in Lan, then?"

    It's not that easy. 'It was, once.'

    It's like hearing the melody a drop of water makes after walking through a desert. She pursues it, drawn forward as her previous hesitation was carved away.

    ".... Then." She starts stepping towards the Stranger; even if the distance may continue to grow, it's a measure of manner and intent as it is a physical act.

    She'll pursue that pause.

    "You asked me, so now I'm gonna ask you: if you were in the same position as me, what would be your prayer?" Gwen's tone is neutral, her gaze as direct as it can be as she walks, earrings swaying with each step.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

 
     "....No."

     It takes a long time for the answer to come, as if the individual threads of what was said took time to work themselves free ot the loom, to scatter sprays of the unfinished tapestry, colorful and vibrant across the grey and black confessional. He doesn't seem to be paying attention for very long, the tenuous grip on his mind surfacing only briefly, only for a moment, as the nondescript man in grey's form twists, flickering in a stretching, painfully sharp blip of energy, temporarily breaking him. For the space of a firefly's flight, she is trying to pin down two entirely seperate ghosts, the strain of 'pure will' mauling the fibers that are, before twisting them back together anew.

     A breath, a second, and her subdued anger has a definite focus once more.

     "Do you think those born in the sun have a greater birthright to mercy? To the suffering of this world, and the endless attentions of the meagre titans that remain? Creatures are born in the dark and live their entire lives there, struggling to get a glimpse of the light. Some of them are faint of heart, too terrified to leave the nest, and so are content to live their years in agonizing mediocrity. Others become addicted entirely to the promises of those in the dark, and live short, brutal, insipid lives. All of these, living outside what one would consider the 'norm'. And why should that be?"

     She approaches him, step by step, and the world creeps and sways with every motion, the sickening tilt of the world steepening the closer she gets. He is aware of her approach, and his attention lifts. Ever so slightly, the danger of seeing 'his light' is not so far off. If he turns to face her...
     "The sun burns everyone, in time. You should know that."

     By the time she is close enough, she may as well be climbing to meet him, the man never having moved beyond his initial spot, but pushing through to get close to himis to besubject to his madness pressure. To be close to him is to feel the ankles ache in the climb. To be close to him is to feel the eyelids open on eyes you did not know you had. To be close is to feel the electric sense of pure, violent, powerful inspiration turned black and ink over the skin. To see crows in tongues of black flame, and to slowly -- painfully -- look past him, and see what it is he sees.

     A vast, incomprehensible mountain of carved, mad stone. One whose lines and crags follow no known natural aplomb. A mountain so heavy it takes seven chains to hold it to the earth and keep it from sinking into the sky. Each chain is the size of a battleship, and to see the pure black obsidian night they anchor in place is to feel the pure shrieking white blast of static in the back of your mind, to see a single eye the size of a comet open, shriekingly blue with Ideia

     Everything goes quiet as he thinks. It only takes him a moment to answer her.
     "I would pray for the time to have heard the end of her song," the man thinks aloud.

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

    It's as if the question cleaves him in two, as much as the offer of a hand cleaved the two possibilities of her. It's not a perfect parallel, however-- if it was, Gwen could have better comprehended it in the moment.

    Instead, his next question comes.

    'Born in the sun'. She could take it figuratively, or literally. Gwen raises a question, attempting to cleave a fuller meaning with a single strike.

    "The city you 'fell' from-- would you consider them all 'born in the sun'? I seem 'em as people bound by their circumstances. Just a mirror to the 'Lambs' they look down on from above. Solaris, Veruni, the Ten Wisemen, Zophar, the darker parts of the Elws' research, everything-- a bunch of people findin' out the sandbox ain't just got them in it, and that there's only so much sand to go around."

    There is a threshold there, as she stops, hearing his next words.

    The Icarus in Gwen steps forward, almost out of spite, maybe anger, but also pursuing a threat of truth, having grasped one thread that seemed to lead out of the Minotaur's maze.

    No one could ever accuse the courier of not being stubborn, especially to a fault. The element of restraint, of being the 'enemy' being cleaved from her own earlier decision, she struggles and persists, as the world twists and turns around her, and the air grows thicker.

    Only a fool would mistake a poison as something that needed to be overcome, rather than avoided.
    ======
    Only a fool would stop halfway.
    ======
    Only a fool would take this man's hand.
    ======
    Only a fool would regret the path they didn't(did) take, instead of the path they (didn't take)took.
    ======
    Only a fool would r e g r e t

    One Gwen stands, having decided to never close that gap. She grins, and says, "... Heh. That's a pretty poetic answer."

    The other is collapsed beside the Stranger, hands over her eyes, mouth open, trying to will away the compulsion to remember what shade of blue looks down at her from the sky.

    The last is buried, cleaved from possibility.

<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.

 
     The trickle of white static from the sky is oppressive, mad, coruscating. It is the sort that shrieks in the ear in the way a beloved pet meets a gruesome end, too far to do anything and too inevitable to have ever prevented. A white noise burst of sound that rearranges every notion in the head to something far less charitable. The sound is at once the birth of mad self-determination and the death of hope, all at once. To see that 'monument' is to know that it is a thing that is real, that exists, that can be.

     The mild-voiced man looks at it with sad blue eyes, the glow from the mad sky seeming to reflect off of his broken irises. In his 'space', that white blast is subtler, softer. And yet there are those who still stand in its light unimpeded. There are those who crumple beneath the weight of the truth, asnd it is every rope in the world that is drawn tight with her, as her logic follows along what he says, making connections, suppositions, preconceptions.

     Her reply is the lightest breath outward, resigned.
     "There is much you have yet to see and know."

     There is a mild comfort in the weight of the nondescript, unimportant man's gloved grip along her shoulder, soothing and inimitably calm as her mind is broken, folded over and seared out once again. That 'idea' of her is treated to the utmost veneer of care and the blasphemies of soothing touch. If one were given to the flight of fancy, one could imagine that he commiserates. "...poetic," he repeats, a tiny, bitter smile on the edge of his face.

     "For now, you are required elsewhere."
     The hand raises from her shoulder, as he shows she who stands the press of his fingers, just out of sight of the woman on her knees.
     A single snap of the fingers, and it's all over.