2024-01-24: When You Close Your Eyes
- Log: When You Close Your Eyes
- Cast: Caoimhe ni Maoilgrahna, Ruth Pauling
- Where:
- Date: January 24, 2024
- Summary: Ruth visits the ruined kingdom of Eluria in observation, and discovers a local...
<Pose Tracker> Caoimhe ni Maoilgrahna has posed.
At the turn of the century, Eluria is one of the mightiest kingdoms on the Elru Continent. But as Drifters gather to visit the Cultural Festival in Adlehyde, the news of how the Sorcery Globe descended crosses the lips of towncriers everywhere, of how the kingdom seemingly vanished overnight.
At the time, that is merely a horrific story that nonetheless too far to action. But for some people...
It is still their current reality.
The streets of the city are in shambles; many buildings are ruined, and monsters prowl the alleyways, seeking out any scraps of food or prey. And looters and bandits are still prevalent; there surely are riches and goods to be had within the shops, or within the palace -- where a powerful, dragon-like creature has made a nest.
Three such looters are here today, under the cover of night, picking away at the remains of an armour shop. "Nothing but scraps... all the good stuff's been picked clean," grunts one particularly lanky bandit, tossing away the tattered scraps of what was once a quilted jerkin.
"We'd best clear out before one of the monsters find us," his companion advises. "I heard there was a dragon--"
The air shifts. A strange, but pleasant scent starts to waft into the atmosphere; the three bandits glance around, suddenly on alert. "Where--"
A figure rises, partially hunched, from the top of one of Eluria Castle's parapets, silhouetted by the light of the Silver Star. "No! That's-- what is that--"
The figure launches, rising high into the air... and then dives into the trio of bandits, a gleaming blade of lightly translucent crystal crushing its way into the pavement in one fell swoop. The first bandit has no chance, pancaked underneath the sheer strength of the strike.
A figure, as much knight as she is beast, can be seen from within the crater where her sword descends. Billowing ice-blue hair cascades in the winds as she slowly rises.
"Beasts, all of you, unclean... even tonight..."
The other two shriek and scamper away, making for the nearest exit -- the drawbridge. The figure does not immediately give chase.
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Odessa is gone, but with the threat of the Ten Wise Men and the return of Siegfried to a murky uncertainty despite his stated goals against a clear and unambiguous threat, the mission of ARMS continues.
Ruth Pauling, known to the world as the monstrous 'Death's Door,' and to far fewer a bearer of a different but no less monstrous affliction, takes an assigned vigil about the fallen kingdom of Eluria. It's hard not to make comparisons to what remains of Celesti, even if the nature of the calamities that befell this prosperous kingdom were different from one another.
She rests atop the third story of a ruined building that gives an excellent vantage point. Near her, a fallen beast that has given her sustenance. Her spiritual presence otherwise concealed, the would-be bestial scavengers of the animal kingdom that roam here seem to give her a wide berth.
In the distance, she's distracted by what little of a stained glass window survives in the ruin that glints in the moonlight. Eyeing her rosary - ultimately a useless bauble if Xander speaks true - nonetheless is still there.
"Suffering, all of you, unending... even tonight..." She lets herself mourn. The teachings of Saint Calucion still hold, and the peace she's seen Yulie deliver to the Earthbound Dead of Zoara are no less valid for it. The ceaseless sorrow churning finds its outlet as she maintains her vigil.
A pleasant smell fills the air. This is immediately foreign, given what she kneels in close proximity to. (It is something that would not smell pleasant.)
Something on an instinctual level spikes before a heavy impact echoes through the night, where she sees the moving shapes and picks up the panicked shrieking. An ache in her left shoulder flares from sudden movement as she rises.
A murmur over empathite, as she is tasked to do, before she leaps down from her lofty perch without concern for the drop. It takes her before that drawbridge, putting her between the two fleeing thieves and someone far, far more striking in the distance.
The moonlight above casts a great shadow that reaches further across the drawbridge than the rifle-bearing vagrant's hunched over stature should, eyes shadowed as dull copper hair further obscures it. A figure, as much vagrant as she is beast, rising slowly in turn to match the figure with the ice-blue hair beyond those fleeing.
The vagrant smells of death, of the musty air after a foggy rain. The winds do not flatter her features.
There is silence.
<Pose Tracker> Caoimhe ni Maoilgrahna has posed.
The figure slowly rises from where she's collapsed into her crater, and the scents of the night touch her nostrils and inform her of what has changed. Someone has moved, from a higher perch... someone with a truly great and imposing presence. This is not the scent of one of her usual prey.
Slipping off off the bandit and prowling onto the street, the ice-blue haired knight hefts the great, holy sword back onto her pauldroned shoulder; she moves slowly, but with great deliberation. Her right arm hangs limp, with no visible signs of mobility, and her snow-white armour is most broken there, from the shoulder to the fingertips.
In their lives, they were knight and soldier; they served under various banners, fought for king and country, literal or proverbial. But now, Celesti and Eluria are naught but ashes to the wind, and arguably, they've long since expired along with them. Nothing but vestiges of horrors brought about by grim circumstances.
Ruth can see the knight's leg muscles tensing, experienced as she is -- and that's all the tell she gets before she launches herself in one of those superbly athletic leaps forward, towards her position, the great sword still held over her shoulder -- the only way she can support such a large weapon in her state.
She stops about five metres away from Ruth. She does not stand at a full rise, as if the weight of her broken right arm and her great sword is too much, resulting in a severely hunched posture, barely supported by her legs.
Her eyes do not see Ruth, for they are shrouded by a black blindfold. But her head is turned to her regardless.
"Petrichor and gunpowder, with an aftertaste of death," she whispers with a somewhat husky, breathy tone that is as slow and deliberate as the rest of her, as she lightly licks her lower lip. "You are no mere vagrant."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
By now, the two bandits that were fleeing for their lives would be long past Ruth. Even her own sense of the relationship of predator and prey - of the mortal fear that calls to some sort of esoteric hunger - finds its rare suspension in sizing up the knightly figure whose very armor might just be as a shed skin that yet clings.
A tensing in Ruth's hands is all the tell - and preparation - she gives to the ice blue-haired woman's rapid approach, no flinching beyond the displaced air of her impact at five metres away. Even the shadow Ruth casts wouldn't smother those colors here in the black of night.
She can't see the eyes. Her own gaze rises to meet what cannot, through the blindfold, as the woman before her whispers descriptions as if akin to a taste, a flavor. Her own posture is fully upright, even as the weight of her rifle upon her left arm would beckon her to slouch. To let go, of strength she both boasts and no longer has at the same time.
She sees the way her right arm dangles, and her left arm - though more functional in comparison - twinges in pain as if envious of a limb that was finally allowed to be let go of.
"That perfume... fresh. Clean. You're hurt, but you haven't stopped." A smile creeps on her lips that doesn't match the tone of her voice in the least, as if soft, concerned, and even horrified.
"...You're no mere knight."
Her gloved hands twitch again, feeling their material, as something rises from her right forearm - the one closer to the greatsword-bearing knight. The color may be lost, but not the feel of it.
Sorrow, knotted and tangled in contradictory feelings. Guilt. Shame. Regret. Despair. A sensation foreign to Elru, but no less... foul.
A faint display of what lurks underneath, as if it were a hand offered in greeting, the faint glow of violet light starting to shine from her eyes as what lurks within is poised to take its leave of the shell it hides within.
"I'm Ruth. Ruth Pauling. I come from Zoara... from the lost kingdom of Celesti. And you..."
<Pose Tracker> Caoimhe ni Maoilgrahna has posed.
The scent of the perfume is a mixture of rose and the stranger scent of something metallic, with middle notes of jasmine and peach blossoms. A luxury, for a broken, desolate wasteland such as this, but also...
A unique scent, sent downwind, that coats to one's being. It's a way in which she tracks her prey, when she doesn't have sight.
The knight's expression tauts slightly at the creping smile on Ruth's lips, as if she can smell it. "Celesti. I see. You have ventured quite far from your homegrounds... and you bear the foul, intoxicating scent of what now lurks within this city."
The great sword, which must once be ornate, fashioned with a hilt studded in mystic jewels that are now cracked, pitted or missing, shines ever so softly.
"... the intoxicating scent of the miasma that now shrouds this realm. The Holy Sword hungers for its destruction. But not tonight."
Her tone is still slow and deliberate, not betraying even an iota of aggression despite what she's shared with Ruth.
It is clear that she speaks of Malevolence, but she doesn't have the vocabulary for it. Perhaps unsurprising, and a clue -- she hasn't been to Ignas and Aquvy where so much more of what's happened with it has been taking place.
"Did you come to drink deeper of it?"
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
An expectation, a shot in the dark as to whether their natures are linked to the corrupting miasma that Ruth herself harbors no small amount of. Hellions are creatures of conflict, only at best three stray thoughts away from letting their worst take will, shape, and action through them.
The faint, soft shine of the blade in seeming response might resonate more than the words that follow of the Holy Sword's hunger for its destruction.
But not tonight.
Her emotions cling to the icy blue-haired knight's spoken convictions of the blade she carries like a magnet to iron, eyes closing as she centers herself to she who stands a grim vigil in this fallen kingdom of Elru.
'Did you come to drink deeper of it?'
"I bear it," she says, words measured, as if to speak them is to be the dam that helps keep it locked in her heart, "and I come as a friend." She who bears what the sword wishes to destroy, an enemy, but yet to speak as a friend.
A contradiction. To hold fast to two things that both cannot be true at once...
"...How long have you been here? Are there others with you?" She can't sense them. The likeness between them, even without the same driving nature, is striking to her. It's not unusual for her to stake out and be by herself for weeks at a time. At one point she sat in place out in the field for a month, during Odessa's most active times.
<Pose Tracker> Caoimhe ni Maoilgrahna has posed.
Caoimhe knows not of the nature of Malevolence, not even its name -- but whatever she has lost with her arm and her sight, she has clearly gained in turn with scents, and a determining sense beyond the dark, perhaps...
Perhaps, guided by the sword that so looms over her, as much threatening as it is a weight for her to bear.
"The average person lasts not even two days under its influence. They all turn... one way or another, they become beasts, unable to bear the weight of their own conscience," the knight shares. "But you..."
There's a similarity in the way her lips quietly creep into a smile, to Ruth's. "You have been carrying that weight for far longer... perhaps because you are more accustomed to heavier sins still."
There is silence, however, as Ruth asks how long she has been here, and if there are others with her.
"I have stood vigil ever since the fall of the Sorcery Globe. Yes, ever since then... there is no end to the wickedness that visits this realm."
Since the fall of the Sorcery Globe -- that's easily six, perhaps even seven years.
"And, yes, there are..."
Her stance shifts; the Holy Sword sloughs heavily off her shoulder, and descends onto the cracked streets, where it plunges into the ground, easily shattering stone. She falls slowly with it, as if leaning against it for support.
Her tone gets a bit less lucid at this point, as if she's drifting off and speaking to someone so much farther away.
"My dearest comrades are all here with me..." The knight brushes her hand somewhere near to her pauldron, but she's not... indicating at anything in particular -- not a person, and no less an object.
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Ruth listens intently to the unnamed knight's recount of what must be Malevolence has done to everyone around her. Not even two days, under its influence. 'They become beasts, unable to bear the weight of their own conscience.'
Ruth's eyes idly trend to her right hand holding her weapon, that wrapped rosary around an exposed forearm into a glove that can never fully hide her understanding about what the shape of a heartless monster's hand truly takes. Bereft of claws, scales, or disproportionate size, her hands alone took hundreds.
Hands of someone, something far more beastly than the apex predator she slew earlier in the day for their meat.
Accustomed to heavier sins still. She can only wonder if this woman knows, when seeing that smile.
It's almost like looking into a mirror, from the handful of times someone's told her how her smile has creeped them out.
Her eyes widen at mention about the fall of the Sorcery Globe, and the period of time in which she's been here with the 'others' Ruth asks about.
The shifting stance, the plunging of the blade sends shockwaves that even challenges Ruth's footing as her own bayonet blade plunges into that same street with almost comparable force for how she balances to stop herself from toppling over. Her right hand parts to clutch at her left shoulder from that awful twinge of pain, and that eerie tone of voice...
She's been told of how she gets when she's at the cusp of letting the worst of herself take the wheel. The likeness in gesture between clutching her own arm in pain and where the icy blue-haired woman seems to signal isn't lost, as a faint hiss escapes Ruth's throat.
"Stay with me," she says, clenching her left hand against where it grips on the now planted rifle, "I see so many screaming when I close my eyes." Most of all, the sight of one of them burning, and she never got to see his face as he left her before she could know what he saw in her. To be here by herself for so long...
"Elru's fallen," she continues, "but... there's others out there. Taking what they have, what they lost... to places that have yet to be. You don't... you don't need to stay here, even if you can't ever leave," it's almost pleading, like some part of herself might be trying to speak to something a lot closer that has oft refused to truly listen and bridge the gap that might see her strong enough to take leave of her path - even if it is its own strength to keep going.
After all, there's so many times and places she can never leave every time she closes her eyes.
"...Come with me," she says, firmly placing her right hand back on the shaft of her planted weapon, to strain to pull it back out of the stone it is now embedded in.
Malevolence fills the air anew as it runs down her left arm to fuel strength of someone who despises the legacy she willingly carries on her person, once again at cusp of emergence in channeling her discordant strength.
<Pose Tracker> Caoimhe ni Maoilgrahna has posed.
Caoimhe is unable to see the rosary, but... as Ruth's hand wraps around the rosary, her head lulls to one aside as she shares:
"Candles, and the lily of the valley... the scent of the cleansed pews before service. So faint, but... you carry Granas with you."
It's absolute nonsense; Ruth's rosary has been with her for so long, wrapped around her arm, that no scent of the churches of Granas that it once may have come from should be there. And yet, she identifies it correctly.
Caoimhe is unable to see Ruth clutch at her injury, from the way her left arm and shoulder twinge in pain, but she can hear the tautness of muscles, the faint scent of the shifting figure.
"You, too, bear a wound."
It's a plain observation on its surface; yes, Caoimhe's right arm looks to be destroyed, and will never regain mobility; Ruth's left, while still of some service, frequently delivers her pain that she has to manage.
But there's more wounds than that.
Ruth urges her to stay with her, and while there's no visible change in her demeanor, her chin lifts up slightly. And when she shares of how so many screams when she closes her eyes...
"Within your nights, chaos and fire are your bedfellows."
Ruth invites her; that she does not have to stay here, that are places that have yet to be. Even if she understands that a part of her will never be able to leave.
And more directly-- an invitation, as Ruth pulls her own embedded weapon from the stone. There is silence, for a good ten, fifteen seconds. And then the Malevolence fills the air anew...
"There are no screams within my nights. Only a cold sweetness, that sings to me..."
The knight rises, taking the holy sword out of the ground to something that almost approximates standing straight; but it's clear that she's unable to, and it's not long before she rests the sword on her shoulder once more, the only place that can support such a weight.
"I am Caoimhe, devotee of Granas. Report to who you need to, if you will, it matters not." Did she sense or hear the empathite radio from earlier, somehow?
"There are still beasts to hunt."
Her name shared, she suddenly lurches into the air once more, on powerful movements that are more beast-like than human; she lands vertically on a broken wall, and then leaps once more to land on a rooftop, and disappears deeper into the city.
The full moon is cold, tonight, and another beast howls...