deercountry | 09 . bone house summer

Leave it to Anna to treat the actual bewildering stuff so casually and only get tripped up on things that matter far less in the long run. She listens, leaning forward, hooked on each word that Ortus tells her.

"So the River is more like a purgatory instead of an actual afterlife," she says, calling on distant memories of theology as she theorizes. "And something is stopping it up. Something is holding back souls from being able to move on to Heaven, or—the River Beyond." Maybe accidentally, maybe on purpose. She taps her chin idly. Nothing to go on there, unfortunately.

"I know you keep telling me you aren't a necromancer," she starts instead, because there's something here, she can feel it, "But do you know about, like, the basics?" Wrong question. She pauses again. "I don't know how basic it is, actually. But do you know if there's any... man, I don't know. Necromantic benefit to keeping all those souls stuck down there? Even just, like, in theory."

And before she lets Ortus reply, she sits up a little straighter and looks at him. "And if that's the kind of question that you need something from me first before you're comfortable answering, go for it."

Heaven and purgatory are words that Ortus knows, but their denotation in Anna's usage is peculiar, as if they are discrete places and not qualities. Ortus knows well how the meaning of words can drift (and had, once, a slender notebook crammed to the margins such such observances), so his noting of this difference has something of the abstract sense of a self-taught linguist.

It does not weigh on him as her next question does. If she deceives him with false guilelessness, she plays the innocent better than any soul he has known.

The silence lasts a spell between them. Ortus arranges his hands inside the sleeves of his robes. He contemplates.

He thinks of his mother.

"I am not a necromancer," he says, looking back to Anna, his expression that the careful neutrality of a man who knows how to keep his own counsel, "But my blood is of the Eighth House. The Emperor's Pure. The soul siphoners."

He gives her this for nothing. He gives her this for Sister Glaurica, long dead, who wept at nothing and tore her robes and could not sleep in the dark, and who was never told what her love might cost her.

"The soul is a wellspring of power," he tells her, calmly, "It is also a barrier between the body and that which would swim from beneath the River to dwell within it. Either may be made fuel for necromancy. The soul may be burned, or it may be jarred aside, to draw on these unknown fathoms. The act is one of great danger, but great power, a high holy rite."

"One might theorize," he continues, as if he speaks in idle thought, "That an unscrupulous necromancer might attempt to recreate a fascimile of the River. A tributary. From there, what power might they glean from such unhallowed, unanchored souls?"

"So we are blessed that such dominion falls only to our Kindly Prince, who safeguards us from such monstrous acts." He turns to the house of the First, and without a trace of irony, inclines his head in deepest respect. "May his reign last eternal. May what is reborn never die."

Edited 2022-07-09 00:45 (UTC)

As Ortus shares this knowledge, it feels like he might also have an idea of what the whole purpose of it all could be. Like maybe something is powering it all, like maybe there's a reason that the River is stopped up like that. And like maybe, in his own less than subtle way, he is telling her exactly who did it.

"May what is reborn never die," she mutters, echoing it not like a prayer but like it's a quaint little joke that only she knows the punchline to. Is that what he's teaching them? And yet, he says something else, before the eschatological breakdown that is immensely worrying to her, that strikes her as curious beyond anything else. He's a Cavalier of the Ninth, isn't he? Or he was, at some point. Wouldn't it make sense for him to—oh, come now, Mädchen, have you never heard of immigrants before?

She takes a long moment after the end of the prayer to compose her next question in a way that Ortus might not take offense to. "How far," she starts, "is the Eighth from Dominicus? You know, how the Sixth is closest and the First is third from the star." Yes, Anna, that's hard to misinterpret. But that's the easy part of her question. Her eye slides over to the manor, and she bites her lower lip just slightly.

He's given a lot of information about souls, and what people within the confines of the Nine Houses can do with them. And he's done it without asking for a single thing in return. So, she decides, fuck it. "Would it mean much to you if I told you what the Eighth used to be called?"

This is how Ortus betrays himself: he does not startle when Anna speaks to him of what the Eighth used to be called, though such knowledge has been lost for a myriad. He looks at her, long and half-lidded, and in this cast of the light the flecks of dark churned-earth brown in the black of his irises (Ninth black, Drearburh black) are visible once more.

"It is the seventh planet from Dominicus." He does not look up to the dizzying blue sky, which would show him nothing. He gazes into the middle distance, a carefully cultivated reserve, his head slightly tilted as if he listens to a voice beyond hers, though of course he does not. Ortus has never been mad. Perhaps it would have been a comfort.

"I have never been there," he confesses, with a trace of something too wan to be wistful, the indifference left when hope is extinguished. "I would know it, all the same."

She pays attention to his reaction, and she revises her idea of immigrant to something maybe a little closer to refugee. The significance of his eye color is lost on her, but she can see something that, were she pressed, she might have also been able to identify in the way her mother spoke of Germany.

It lends a gravity to the situation, which is unfortunate because Anna is going to make it sound slightly ridiculous. "Always forget the order near the end," she says, then quietly mutters through something that sounds like it begins "my very eager mother" as she counts on her fingers. When she reaches seven, she stops as her mouth forms the word "us", then looks to Ortus.

"Uranus," she says, emphasis on the first syllable. "Named for the god of the sky, from a civilization that believed in that kind of thing. I think we sent some unmanned crafts there, but nobody could ever live there before the Liberator of Death, blessings and peace be upon him, came along." Deciding she can give slightly more, she adds, "The Ninth was called Pluto, if you were curious. If it adds anything else to it."

At the naming of the worlds, Ortus seems to swell with a great and ponderous dignity that forbids even the imagining of any sort of crude interpretation of the syllables Anna so particularly pronounces. It is the name of another god. It is the name of a pale and gleaming world he will never see, but whose heritage he bears. It is not, in the slightest respect, apt.

(Ortus has never slapped anyone. He had never been so tempted as he was by the sour milk spill of the Eighth's Master Templar.)

"Pluto," he repeats, rolling the word in his mouth like a marble, leaving the other acknowledged in its absence, "What was it named for?"

The Eighth was his mother's world. The Ninth - Pluto - is his, for all its cold cruelty. The pale columns of bone in the Anatasian, the heroes of their House laid out in stark and solemn repose; the great chapel and its echoing pews; the whispering dark cloisters. Yearning clenches his gut in a bout of unexpected sickness, rises unchecked in his eyes.

This is, Anna thinks to herself, one of the biggest surges of emotion she has seen come from Ortus in the short time she has known him. And that is all the evidence that she needs to treat this with seriousness. After all, it's not every day someone decides to divulge information that's been lost for 10,000 years. And she can see, even with half as much sight as most people in Trench, how personally important this is to him.

She steadies herself, and she doesn't affect any kind of voice to make it sound more dramatic; if anything, she sounds like a professor—or maybe a tour guide at a planetarium. She's absolutely been one of those before, after all. "Pluto. Named after the Greek god of the underworld." She thinks back to Bulfinch, and thinks of what little she's picked up of the Ninth, and thinks of what it must feel like to be members of a House that, according to Gideon, is just absolutely the shitnastiest place in the Dominicus system (no doubt as decided by the Dominicus system). And she knows what she will say.

"People feared him, because that's what you do with dead things, right? And of course, the god who ruled the realm of the dead would be awash in death himself. He holds the key to the rivers of the underworld, where all souls go when they die. Acheron, Phlegethon, Styx, Cocytus..." She holds out four fingers on her other hand and shakes it like she's trying to remember a fifth, but it escapes her. So she shakes her hand out dismissively, then rests her elbow on her thigh and leans forward to put her head in her hand.

"But everyone forgets that seeds grow underground, too. Everyone forgets that the tallest trees, the healthiest crops, the most beautiful flowers, they all come from the same pitch-black underworld. They forget that sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to find the light from above." She's emphasizing these things for a reason, yes. There are a thousand other things she could talk about with Pluto—the god, or the planet. None of them are exciting, and none of them are very useful. So she ends with a very simple, "I always thought Pluto got a bad rap."

The name of the Eighth inspired no mirth in him. Next to nothing inspires mirth in Ortus, who approaches the whole subject of levity with the nervous suspicion of one whose experience of humor had been, on the whole, on the bludgeoning end of cruelty.

This seems, at first, to be such a thing again. Another comic blow in the long litany of comic blows that left Ortus the roundly clownish flinch of a human being that he is. The name of a dead god of death, for a tomb planet where dead rivers ran dry, and all the blood of their House was used to flood their banks to whelp one last little, lonely god of death, who called him back across the River with her keys and her terror.

I always thought Pluto got a bad rap, Anna says, in well-meant effort to soften the leaden strike, and he pins his tongue between his teeth as if he is a child.

He does look at the sky. It burns his eyes to do it, brings a welt of saltwater to their corners.

"Only half-apt a name," he says, and he hears himself only distantly, "Such is often the case with allusion."

She watches his reaction, trying to figure out whether she's said something right. There's something about dealing with poets that makes her extremely aware of her words, though she's only really run into one other in the past. He was no less mysterious, and probably carried with him a great deal of depression. But he was also a sentient, human sword, so maybe the comparisons can get drawn back a little, huh, girl?

Instead, then, she adds on to the idea of how apt the name really is. "Could be because of the allusion," she says. "Could be because it was named by an eleven year old girl from my grandparents' time and the only time we ever visited it was a fly-by seven years ago. The Ninth House was a mystery to us." And, with her eye towards the manor, "All of us."

Edited 2022-07-14 00:36 (UTC)

Rarely is Ortus at a loss for words. He often exercises his discretion in whether or not he utters them, but the words are there. They have been one of the few unshakable constants.

He does not have them here. He hardly knows where he would begin to explain. His shoulders turn in, his hands shifting on his lap without settling anywhere in particular, a troubled look creasing his face as he lowers light-stung eyes trailing sparks in his vision to the earth.

"There are scholars of the Nine Houses who have spent the whole of their lives searching for less knowledge than this. For remnants and scattered fragments, buried in what remained of the pre-Resurrection corpus." He allows his eyes to draw shut, shaking his head. "I should rejoice to be so blessed."

Anna takes a moment to wrangle the weight of those words. Not that Ortus considers it a blessing, no, though that's certainly heavy enough on its own. But really, it's the idea that she's this sort of... living archive of a time that Teacher remembers, but refuses to share. That his disciples may know, but based on her conversation with Gus, have likely forgotten. For an entire solar system, ten thousand years in Anna's future, she is the only living, willing connection to their past.

It's a lot to put on her shoulders. The bench creaks again as her weight shifts, her hands pressing into it like she's making to get up but not quite getting there yet.

"I can't tell you what to do," she says, "But I wouldn't think of it as a blessing." For a reason she's not planning to discuss, she smiles, closes her eye, and mutters something that sounds like "dammit" in a slow realization. Then she tilts her head back so at least one of them can still be looking upward. "If we don't learn from history, not only are we doomed to repeat it, but we lose an essential piece of what makes us human. So think of me as just... righting a wrong."

She doesn't sound like she's going for magnanimity at all; her voice has barely changed from the casual, scratchy tone she normally uses, even if it's a little softer from trying to make this conversation more private. "You know, if you want."

The woman sitting next to him is like and unlike the one Ortus spoke to on the network. Her irreverence remains, but much of the brashness seems to have left her. Or perhaps there has been, instead, a greater change in his perception of her than any alteration within her.

Perhaps nothing is so simple as to be wholly one thing or the other. The world rarely has ever been so, in Ortus' experience.

"You have come to me for answers, and yet it seems I am the one who kneels as supplicant," he intones, gravely, but some of the strain has left him. He beholds her from the corner of his eye, affixing her phrasing to memory. To describe it as a wrong, to know it as one, instead of a tragic accident of history...it is a thing he must ponder at greater length.

"I would be greatly in your debt, were you to tell me more of this history." Their history. "It would be tiresome, I think, to continue in repetition."

Anna smiles warmly at the offer, letting her past come back to greet her directly in the face. If she'd known she would be sharing her knowledge with someone who needed her as a primary source, she would've taken that planetarium job way more seriously. But hey... maybe her life is unfolding in the right direction after all.

So yes, she smiles, and when she speaks next it's as a friend. Aspirational, perhaps, since she really doesn't know anything about Ortus beyond what she's picked up from everything subtle and understated in his glances, his behavior. Maybe one day. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I can keep going. But you wouldn't be in my debt." She wriggles her Omni out of her pocket and holds it in her open palm in front of her. It briefly flashes on an outdated version of a document that she clicks through, hopefully quickly enough, to bring up the infographic that Palamedes knows well.

"I was working on mapping Houses to existing planets. It would've been a lot easier if he'd resurrected them in order, but we can't always get what we want." She points at the one labeled Sixth and says, "Mercury." And for the First, "Earth."

Ortus' first friendships after the age of seventeen began under much more dire circumstances than this, although the stakes are no less high than they once were.

He leans over to look at her Omni with reticent carefulness, allowing himself a certain closeness reserved for companionable comfort within the claustrophobic walls of the Ninth, and beholds a map like he has never seen. He extends a hand, forgetting his scraped knuckles, and hovers over the Eighth, traces to the Ninth. It hardly seems so far as it did when he imagined it.

"It was not the order of Resurrection, but of their founding," he says, with a brush of reverence to the words, drawing his hand back, "Each House raised up by a Saint or hero."

She claims he will not be in her debt. He nevertheless sees an opportunity to furbish her with coin in kind.

"I would tell you what I know of them, if it would aid your efforts," he offers, nearly shyly.

Founding, instead. That makes a little more sense. He went to Mars first, then—well, everyone was trying to get there already, and he probably had to do the least work of it all. That actually makes a lot of sense. She smiles, both at the knowledge and at the closeness. She hadn't expected this to be the foundation of their friendship, but she settles in a little more like she's getting comfortable with it all and fixes him with a smile.

An idle gesture at the projected screen of her Omni opens up a blank note document in a separate tab, and a hard light keyboard comes from the bottom into her lap. Her attention is not on any of that. "I think it will, Ortus," she says kindly, genuinely. Like she can think of no better way to spend this time than listening to him talk about the Houses, no matter how long it may take. "At your leisure."

For all the travails of this conversation, for all the weight of what has been disclosed, there is a part of Ortus' heart that thrills with quiet, disbelieving wonder at how swiftly she agrees to listen to his stories. He knows she has reasons beyond pure aesthetic interest, and he cannot say the same is not true of his own motivation, but still. It is not unwelcome.

He smiles back, a faint, tentative, nervous thing, the shape still not easy on his mouth. He clears his throat softly, straightening his spine so that his lungs may move with ease, that the column of his throat will sing true.

"I will begin with the Ninth," he says, with sureness that comes across him all at once, "Last founded of the Houses, built by Anastasia, God's mortal Saint and the first of the Tombkeepers' line..."

And so it goes.

09 . bone house summer

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head for a wrap?

sounds good to me!

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