Illarion Albireo (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unsheathedfromreality) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2022-05-16 04:23 pm
unsheathedfromreality) wrote in deercountry2022-05-16 04:23 pm
Real & Half-Real: Chapter 2 - Nephele-That-Isn't
Who: A brave party of rescuers and their intrepid support staff
What: Pocket dimension shenanigans to save a missing Sleeper
When: Two insane days in May
Where: Nephele-that-isn’t, which isn’t Deer Country either
All at once–one day, in early May–the portal’s finished, and the planning is as near to done as it will ever be. All at once, it’s time to venture into Nephele-that-isn’t, and retrieve not one but two Sleepers who’ve gone astray.
The team assembles in the clearing by Argonaut’s abandoned shrine, in a darkness lit by glowing CRTs and the green, green moon. The portal itself, and the world beyond it, casts a light all its own–and one by one they step over that rune-etched silver threshold, and one by one vanish into another story than Trench’s own.
Like being sieved through strands of glass and fire. Like being picked apart thread by narrative thread as the Words themselves that write the universe flash before stunned eyes in the seconds before they’re erased and something worse substituted. Moments of fleeting alignment between passager and host-creator come in stopped heartbeats and empty lungs, in the memory you’ve been dead for years and the cold slide of steel between ribs.
Then that second-that's-years is over and deposits its captives beneath an alien sky, with sun and ring and stars and moons foreign as any far-flung land. Some travelers wear skins and magic to suit those stranger heavens; some have been changed by the logic of the half-world half-story to better fit its weave.
With a changed nature come changed senses and abilities–and those in the skins of shrikes, with eyes to see, may notice much more if they look.
All can see one grim fact, however, on entering the world: Any clock, any watch, any Omni now displays 48:00:00 or its analogue equivalent... And begins at once to tick down.
[[ Part of the Real & Half-Real player plot! Navigate to other plot posts: [OOC] Interest Check | [IC] Prologue | [IC] Iskierka's Notes | [IC] The Portal & the Plan ]]
What: Pocket dimension shenanigans to save a missing Sleeper
When: Two insane days in May
Where: Nephele-that-isn’t, which isn’t Deer Country either
All at once–one day, in early May–the portal’s finished, and the planning is as near to done as it will ever be. All at once, it’s time to venture into Nephele-that-isn’t, and retrieve not one but two Sleepers who’ve gone astray.
The team assembles in the clearing by Argonaut’s abandoned shrine, in a darkness lit by glowing CRTs and the green, green moon. The portal itself, and the world beyond it, casts a light all its own–and one by one they step over that rune-etched silver threshold, and one by one vanish into another story than Trench’s own.
Like being sieved through strands of glass and fire. Like being picked apart thread by narrative thread as the Words themselves that write the universe flash before stunned eyes in the seconds before they’re erased and something worse substituted. Moments of fleeting alignment between passager and host-creator come in stopped heartbeats and empty lungs, in the memory you’ve been dead for years and the cold slide of steel between ribs.
Then that second-that's-years is over and deposits its captives beneath an alien sky, with sun and ring and stars and moons foreign as any far-flung land. Some travelers wear skins and magic to suit those stranger heavens; some have been changed by the logic of the half-world half-story to better fit its weave.
With a changed nature come changed senses and abilities–and those in the skins of shrikes, with eyes to see, may notice much more if they look.
All can see one grim fact, however, on entering the world: Any clock, any watch, any Omni now displays 48:00:00 or its analogue equivalent... And begins at once to tick down.
[[ Part of the Real & Half-Real player plot! Navigate to other plot posts: [OOC] Interest Check | [IC] Prologue | [IC] Iskierka's Notes | [IC] The Portal & the Plan ]]
a.
A soft step forward that's so light it almost doesn't make a sound, like his foot never even brushed the grass, as though he fears disturbing the roots of the great tree. Perhaps the old man is dead. Most things that Kaworu is fond of seem to be kept from him by death, either theirs or his own. Before he can say anything, the mass shifts at his presence, a talon catches the soft underside of his palm and flicks blood down his arm and his onto his white sneakers. It spares him having to speak. (It doesn't heal.)
"I don't know." Is the answer he gives. His outline is distorted, strange, like he stands on a layer of the world that is ever so slightly beyond world they stand in. The space that is the edge of his body seems too sharp to be real though sometimes, it slips backwards, as though trying to fade him into the background, into the rest of the world.
"But I came to find you. It doesn't matter to me, right now."
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That silhouette, that stance, child-small but not child-vulnerable--not physically-- Illarion's horror is instant and deep. Half's at himself and the blood on his talons; half's at this first and fatal evidence his mind is gone, for he'd witnessed Kaworu's death and the hallucinations so often wore the newly dead to torment him with guilt.
And yet. And yet, he is Argonaut's creature through and through, for there's a dim and struggling hope beneath the horror that moves him to ask,
"Little bird?"
He struggles--visibly, he struggles--against that horror, unclenching his bloodied talons, and reach out toward that familiar-and-not presence. It feels Throneborn; it feels like Kaworu. It could be a demon, and he could have just doomed himself by reaching.
Yet how could he not, after all these weeks? How could he not?
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Kaworu approaches and presses his face against one of the overgrown, distorted talons. He knows there's danger but he doesn't carry.
"I'm sorry. This is-"
This is my fault.
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There's no horrifying moment where he feels his will wrenched away from him again and overwritten. There is only a quiet apology and an explanation that trails away into silence--that doesn't need completion to speak volumes.
"This is not." Between one instant and the next, the talon Kaworu's leaning against is a hand, is joined by Illarion's other hand as he cradles the angel's face and leans in to kiss his brow.
"This is not your fault, little bird. You do not have my foolishness on your shoulders." Cruel to rest anything else there, after all that evil men had freighted on him.
More quietly, in a tone that breaks subtly with emotion the shrike can't otherwise articulate: "I have missed you sorely."
no subject
"It wasn't... You did it to save me." Perhaps, when he was new to the trench, he would have thought Illarion meant the foolishness of trying to save him. But now he can tell himself that's not so, it couldn't be so.
"I missed you too."
no subject
It doesn't change the reality behind it, either: That he'd have done exactly the same thing to save Tabris, as much as to avenge him. Lord of Hell, give me back my son.
Illarion swallows back the ashy taste of his own failure, and the impulse to pull away again from guilt and his own monstrosity. He's an unfit parent, years out of practice, warped through death--and yet he'd gotten here by neglecting his duties, and damned if he will keep up the trend.
He steps forward and pulls Kaworu into his arms, tucking the boy's pale head beneath his chin. "I am sorry to have taken myself away. I will not, again."
If it's possible for him to escape the trap he's made for himself. If it's possible for any of them to do that.
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“Don’t. Or I’ll be angry with you. You need to come back with us.”
no subject
But he's a shrike. They know what each other look like. They see the names no one else does, blazoned on their wending banners. They see the monster-in-flesh even when it's folded away like a switchblade.
There's more than that to this one. The mantle of it fills the hollow of the tree with unilluminated brilliance, the true inverse of light.
Atreus pushes back his hood. He undoes his goggles with two hands, tugs down his scarf with one, and he looks at a man he recognizes better than he recognizes himself anymore.
"That's right, Old Man," says the young Prince, uncrowned, with eyes that are flat and dark and watchful, "No more sleep."
They both know that there has been no more sleep for some time now. Or Atreus would think they both know that, but here he stands, reassessing the things he thinks he knows for what must be the thousandth time in a handful of hours.
no subject
(Dukeling, his subconscious corrects, and, you know that shape and that voice, except it's not the one he knew in Trench.)
--proves hostile. "Stay there," he orders, the words tense and bitten-off.
Then lagging recognition catches up with him, and with it the plunging feeling this really is all a product of his mind--for while Trench might change Sleepers capriciously, why would he instinctively recognize one who'd been so-changed?
Familiarity where it didn't belong was an ill sign. It corrupts, pillar-wise, the surety he'd felt just moments ago that Tabris was real, that Sayo was real, that they've truly come for him; it suggests the nightmare is undergoing a new evolution the same way it had grown when he began to wander it.
Yet what can he do about it if it has?
No more sleep, Paul-that-isn't says, and that much is true: Real or not, this will not let him be even if he does curl back up in the tree's heart.
His feathers vanish once more, the too-tight hold on Kaworu easing. <<"No more sleep,">> he agrees, low and toneless. <<"What,">> has happened to you, no, wrong question, >>"what's happened since last we spoke?">>
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"Teacher found us. We've been living together in a big house. I'll tell you about all the things we do... like throwing parties and baking and sometimes everything burns." He inhales, burying his face in Illarion's shoulder for a brief second as though nestling into the remnants of his plumage. "Then we found the notes. All of your notes. Then we came here to find you. To save you."
A tug.
"We have to get out of here."