deercountry | ev'ry unhallowed thing, and all the Saints arrayed against them

Augustine wakes in the woods.

The problem with this is, of course, that he hasn't gone to sleep, in order to be a waking Sleeper; he's been in the middle of an argument, possibly two of them simultaneously (a well-established routine in the First House), and he doesn't —

"I do not have time for this shite!" he shouts into the woods.

Pointlessly.

There's nothing there listening to him, after all; not even a nearby Beast.

He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes, to make the best of the walk back, and only then registers that it isn't his lighter that he's already holding, but some sort of... dragon head figurine? It isn't until he's done lighting a cigarette anyway that he goes back to studying it, twisting it and turning it this way and that — looks like half a broken gemstone rests at the base, but there's also a bit of curved metal that's cut off abruptly, where the dragon is perching.

Well, then, he thinks tiredly, and glances about for the sun — overcast as it is, he thinks he can tell where it is, which means that this way is south, and that should take him back to Trench, or at least the coast, hopefully. Right?

Wait, no, right — it isn't just light catching the gemstone that sets it glowing blue, not when the golden metal bits are glowing as well. Somewhat right of south, apparently, is the Way to Go —

At least it isn't a red glow, he supposes, given the general human consensus (and Nature's consensus) that red means stop —

(And where the hell is Alfred? Finishing off the argument back at the house?)

Augustine keeps walking.

Augustine's ankles get smashed into by a perfectly average-sized, ordinary looking fisher cat [is not a feline, does not catch fish]; ordinary in every way except for his decisive Omen-ness. Augustine has seen this fisher before, probably, though has never heard him make a sound before. Now he's letting out a soft little chuckle sound—a polite one—as he rests against the Lyctor's foot.

Not far off is the sound of Sarah King whistling, and making similar, louder, chittery-chuckle sounds of her own. When she steps into view from one side she is also dangerously close to smashing into Augustine, but she catches herself. Squints. Looks at his foot where her Omen has settled.

And then at what's in his hand.

And then, with an innocent sort of shrug—and weren't they just talking about something on the Omni? Now she can't remember—holds up her own gemstone'd figurine. "Think we're two peas in a pod, so to speak?"

"Hardly for the first time," he answers dryly, squinting at the thing in her hand, that is far and away not an Omni — and yet, her hand is still obscuring rather more of it than not, isn't it.

"You wouldn't happen to have a light, too, would you?"

"Well I obviously do not have a lantern," Sarah says wanly, though there's a hint of smile around the edges of her overall neutral expression. "But if you mean does this thing have a light—"

She flips her hand so it's set in her palm, the dragon and the gemstone that certainly could be the other half of the one he's got, though it's hard enough to tell at this distance, at least for her.

As for her Omen? He sneezes.

On Augustine's shoe.

Sarah covers her mouth with her other hand. She's not giggling.

"I should have clarified that I meant a lighter, or matches," Augustine sighs, giving a tremendously perturbed Look down at the fisher. (If he has a name, Sarah's never shared it with him; he instinctively thinks of it as King, and couldn't for the life of him remember what it was that had prompted him to do so in the first place.)

"May I? Or did you want to try to do the honors?"

If he has a name, he's never shared it with Sarah.

But he chucklesnorts up at Augustine, and then rocks back onto his back legs, and then runs over to lie on Sarah's foot instead.

"Er, no," she says, and then, to clarify even as she offers the dragon in his direction, "I left my matches at home, silly me, I do never know when I need to set things on fire. Go right ahead, solve us a puzzle."

Even if they don't ... know what the puzzle is or what solving it does next.

It's metal, not bone, not any sort of living tissue — so it isn't like he can just sink his awareness in fully, to know every part and participle of each piece, to know how well they fit together. (It isn't even limestone, a stone made of ancient dead matter, crushed together but still with a faint trace of memory of being bone, once upon a time.)

Still, he's lived and worked on enough frontiers, in the course of his ten thousand years, to have gained plenty of muscle memory for fitting together bits of broken machinery that need to be convinced to play nicely — which doesn't mean he's expecting this bit of broken machinery to mend itself, in the instant everything is lined up just right.

(It isn't even arranged quite the way he'd been expecting it to want — the dragon head points out, not in, for one thing.)

He holds it flat on his palm, between them, and watches it spin aimlessly, like a comically-broken compass.

"I'm not entirely sure what point we're supposed to take from this," he admits, his other hand touching the ivory bone cigarette case in his pocket, a reassuring weight (and fidget).

"Oh!"

Sarah wasn't expecting that either, but she's going to let the startle fall right out of her mouth, and then laugh it off, surprise turning to amusement. This is fine; this is as normal as anything else is in Trench. It's kind of like just living inside her odd dreams 24/7/365 or however many days are in a Trench year, actually.

"Well, it keeps spinning about, maybe try turning it and see if it stops?" If it acts like a broken compass, maybe they can trick it into being a fixed compass. "By the way, do you have any idea where we are?" Asked as if this is a completely ordinary question one asks every day, of course.

"Other than in the woods somewhere, you mean?"

He quirks a smile down at her. "Very little idea. I thought I was heading back to town — logically this should be the woods to the northwest of the town, with the fields off that way somewhere —"

He waves a hand, vaguely, somewhat to the left of the course he'd been on when interrupted by a fisher-shoe (and shoe-defiler).

"I would ask Alfie, but he isn't here, and doesn't seem to be particularly interested in changing that, either. Not even to keep flirting with you."

(Because obviously only one of the Quinque brothers has ever tried to do that.)

"If we aren't where I think, of course, we could be anywhere in all the wild world, or some world beside or beyond — but the plants I can see are all the same as the ones in Trench, which does help to indicate we didn't go too far afield. Hopefully."

The compass-like-object keeps spinning, haphazardly — like a compass in the presence of a variable-strength elecromagnetic field, perhaps; unable to determine which direction is right, and therefore trying to cover them all.

"Well. I assumed we were somewhere in Trench. I hadn't even thought—"

She wrestles with the gravity of the idea that maybe they're not. But could that have happened without Augustine's Omen? Can they end up in other worlds without them? Sarah thought they were like daemons; hopefully Augustine doesn't pick now to tell her that he has already done that.

"Anyway. Hopefully you're right!" is forced-cheery. Everything is going to be fine! "Maybe it's trying to figure out where it wants to go." Chewing at her lip, Sarah considers it. "I guess if we just—walk in a direction maybe it'll adjust?" The idea it might consider where they want to go hasn't yet occurred to her.

"Well, we can certainly aim for where I thought Trench should have been," he says, agreeably enough, as he glances around. The woods are still remarkably peaceful, with nothing at all pinging his awareness of Threats or Danger.

"What had you been planning to do with your evening today, anyway? Originally, I mean. Before the ... punching."

Before he broke his hand, and you got to feel it, he doesn't say.

"Read a chapter of my book, then go for a walk—I didn't finish the chapter, but here I am on the walk. I think I must've fallen asleep reading," is even punctuated with a yawn, for added effect; she is tired. Things have been busy around the farm and the apothecary studies that she's been putting a lot of her time toward.

Someday she will have her little produce and medicinal plant shop up and running, too, but for now at least she's able to mostly feed herself and keep her rickety old house functional.

The ghost from home who's been around every now and then hasn't been seen today.

Yet.

"I hadn't fallen asleep," he grouses, and then —

— finds himself offering her his arm, as if they're walking in a fancy park: a lady and gentleman at leisure.

As opposed to two people dumped in a wilderness where wild creatures and rabid Beasts might come at them at any moment with no advance warning, in other words.

Indeed, this is completely normal.

"So," she says sweetly, as she takes his arm in a deliberately exaggerated fashion, "Where are we headed, good sir?"

"I honestly don't know if I ought to be saying somewhere to take a nap or not, but —"

Augustine sighs, and — since one arm is occupied with her hand, and his other hand is still holding on to this strange spinning whirligig doohickey — flips said doohickey over, so that he can drag the back of his hand down one cheek, as if wiping away his bad mood.

(It doesn't actually work. He can still feel Illarion's grimly-stern focus, setting up for the duel in the yard — and he should have been there for it — the timing on this is just atrocious —)

"I don't suppose you're in the mood to watch bloodsports," he says, and it comes out rather more sourly than he'd intended. He stops, and sighs, and deliberately unclenches his jaw and relaxes his shoulders. "Sorry. Just — I'd meant to be present, for that duel."

They're already walking anyway, just... at more of an amble than a stride. (Just a walk in the park, nothing to see here, little Beasties; carry on.)

Everyone knows — or rather, sooner or later, they learn — that the Doorway never moves.

So it's remarkably strange, when Augustine is out on the porch smoking (watching the street, thinking of nothing much in particular), and his gaze settles in on the form of a discolored Doorway — coming steadily closer to the house he shares with the rest of God's household, with every blink of Augustine's eyes.

Coming, in fact, into the yard, and up to the house itself.

"The fuck," he remarks, very conversationally and only a little bit warily.

Edited 2022-11-01 01:36 (UTC)

This Doorway's pose never changes. Standing tall, with hands wrapped around a sword. Blood drips and freezes on the sword, and roses bloom and wilt on one shoulder. It stands on the porch, now looking back out upon the surrounding neighborhood of Gaze, what is visible of it here, next to Augustine. The pillars of the porch frame it, and the Doorway remains in a natural habitat.

"No fucks," said Doorway replies calmly, flat save for enough intonation to communicate a lack of anger. This close, its facial features are more masculine, though the same marble hair flows around them.

"Oh, come now, don't sell yourself short," which is more on autopilot than not — that's coldblood-blue, just like some of the roses decorating lowercase-doorways throughout the house, isn't it? — as Augustine studies this ... this ...

What is this?

"I'm sure there are plenty of individuals throughout this fine town who would find a completely-immobile bit of statuary to be exactly their preferred bedroom partner, after all. Whether or not it becomes involved in the fucking."

The statue's face doesn't change, as makes sense being a statue. Or perhaps as it makes sense because of who the statue is.

"Good for them," Doorway says. "I still don't fuck." The Doorway that's not quite Doorway pauses. "Almost never."

"Not locally, perhaps," Augustine suggests. "Or, perhaps — only a few times a myriad, is it?"

(It's the blue that's the real giveaway, more than anything else — even the more-masculine cast to the face, compared to what artwork he's seen, of the standard Doorway — but then, he's never actually met the Pthumerian, to have more of an opinion than this.

Without moving, the statue chuckles. Augustine's caught on. "Only a few people," this Doorway corrects. They glance sideways without moving their head.

"Not that Doorway fucks around," they say, "They're still waiting for their lover to return."

(Augustine is, generally, not actually as dumb as he [makes a point of ensuring he] looks.)

"One cannot help but wonder what would happen, really, if said lover were to stop fucking off around town being a judgmental prick, and actually returned to keep their vows," he muses, and blows a smoke ring idly.

No particular reason for the thought to cross his mind, of course. No particular reason the knockoff Doorway on the porch — in the general path of the smoke ring — would have opinions on the matter, either.

"It says something when, for all that has happened even in the last week, John Gaius is still doing better at relationshps than you," they say. That is a bright spot amid the mess that was the duel on the lawn. One of a handful.

At the end of the day, that's where the wins came—relationships.

There's a moment of bright-sharp rejection, a pang that catches him somewhere beneath the ribcage — and then he processes that this not-quite-Doorway does not in fact mean him, and instead is referring, still, to the regular Doorway, cursed with the Reckoning's fuckery of behavior.

Which he, himself, had just introduced into the conversation.

(Well, and well, and well.)

"He does occasionally know what he's doing, I grant you," he says, attempting to cover up the awkwardness — that might exist entirely in his own mind, and not in the cigarette-scented air around them.

The Doorway that is Duty doesn't move. They simply are next to Augustine, shoulder to solid marble shoulder. There's a couple moments of silence, though that's not much different than what the Doorway is known for being and Duty besides.

"Even with this latest traumatic turn," they say. They pause again, a weightier pause than the crisp air biting at skin but not stone. "The duel did him good."

"Him, sure," which is — bitter, really; far more bitter than anyone who knows Augustine (the incessantly-performative, hardly-ever-genuine, shell of a man from a myriad ago) might have expected.

But then, it isn't as if anyone had asked him his opinion about the duel, had they? And few enough people had asked how he was handling things, in the wake of it — with Kiriona still in the house, and poor Nigenad trailing after her like a Greek chorus made of skeletal ghosts — with John's moods careening all over the place, like a pinball in a machine —

(How long has it been, since Augustine shared that anti-corruption tea with Illarion? Far more than a month, and yet he hasn't thought of it at all, as yet.)

"I rather doubt it did much to help the Reckoning."

A Doorway faces Augustine, serene marble but intense and focused. "What of you?" they ask. "Make a cup of bone, set one of my roses in it, hold it in your hands, and tell me."

They appreciate the attempt at smoke, but the focus has shifted. He needs more. The cigarette isn't enough. A man and his relationships need help. Before a Doorway, before Pyrrha or Duty, what comes of it ought to be the truth.

"Bossy," he scoffs, incredulous; after a moment he actually turns to look at someone who is, somewhere, Pyrrha Dve, and somewhere else is the ghostly remnant (revenant?) of Gideon the First, and somewhere enclosing the two is a solid cosplay of a Pthumerian. There's a jaded, exhausted disbelief in his gaze, but there's also something almost John-like —

— which is to say, slightly manic.

"The hell good is that supposed to do me?" he asks, rather than doing as asked/ordered/suggested. "You want to ask me about the duel, fine, but why the rigamarole?"

(Because rituals have purposes, of course — and his blood is too corrupted right now to register that.)

"Make a cup of bone, set one of my roses in it, hold it in your hands, and I will tell you," Doorway responds. It was hard to win a blinking contest with Pyrrha or Duty or Gideon the First when any of them are made of flesh and bone. Made of stone, they need not blink. Their decision is as firm as the stone that becomes them.

They wait. They are good at waiting. They are so much better at waiting than you, Augustine.

Irritated — vastly irritated — Augustine reaches for the rose, first, or — maybe for the shoulder that the rose is on, with so many nice helpful bones involved in its composition, yes? Use one of those, that'll show her (them) — no.

His fingers close on cold marble, and cold marble is all he feels, however deeply he looks.

His face is twisted in a scowl, therefore, when his hand drops down to pluck a rose away so carelessly, as if the intent to cause a startled, painful wound was never there in the first place. (It's still there, now.) He spares a pisiform, instead, the cup erupting fully-formed from the base of his hand, caught even as it breaks free of his mending flesh, beheaded rose mashed bitterly into a haphazardly-ugly socket.

(Harrowhark would have made a work of art from the request, unable to imagine otherwise, no doubt; she also would have had dozens of bones on her person, rather than having to use one of her person.)

"Are you happy, now?" he demands, thrusting the bone-cupped rose up towards their featureless face, heedless of the glittering swirl of dust still trickling from his wrist; heedless, too, of the way there is something darker even than his blood, itself, in the mix.

Doorway watches with as much or little judgment as ever. Corruption frays nerves and pulls at loose threads already dangling, emotional wounds unhealed that fill with resentment and loneliness and anger. If no one asked Augustine how he felt, so too had Augustine not—to their knowledge—raised the issue the way he needed it. Relationships went both ways. They are doing something now.

They eyes weigh heavily upon the inelegant crude concave structure of bone that could, most loosely, meet the definition of a teacup. Ice crystalizes out of the air to fill the cup. Once full, heat licks at it until it melts and beyond melting until it reaches the right temperature for tea. It needs time to steep.

If the display of magic cost Doorway something, their countenance doesn't betray it. Indeed they could sleep, standing, and look no different.

"When were you last happy?" this Doorway asks Augustine instead. As though, when he were in such a state, they could be happy.

Bone is not the most efficient conductor of heat.

This is notable, and important, since even a Lyctor is going to have to endure discomfort, if nothing else, if holding on to something that's boiling-hot — when human flesh denatures a solid twenty-one degrees centigrade cooler, at least.

Augustine watches ice condense from the air, and melt into water, and come to a boil, all quite quickly really — and is left to stare, bemused, at the boiled rose in the sad-sack cup he'd made. Somewhat tentatively he reshapes it; his mind has not yet reached the conclusion of beverage, blinkered as it is, but it's clear that there is something that Pyrrha intends for him to do with this thing, and he'd prefer not to spill it in the meantime.

The question gets a delayed-reaction quizzical look; what does happiness have to do with anything? Why would he have been keeping track, anyway?

"When were you?"

"Fighting someone's evil twin in their memory last month," this Doorway answers. "Wrapping friendship bracelets around goats with my kid. Arguing about human nature with Wake. Kissing Gideon for the last time in Canaan House."

None of those lasted long. Short moments between greater pain, depression, and the brink of giving up on everything.

"Even in the deepest of our miseries, moments of happiness come, if for no other reason that to turn the knife harder into our guts."

They watch Augustine, while their wounds weep blood and roses blossom and die. "Drink the tea, Augustine," this Doorway that knows him says. "Drink it, and when you have finished, tell me how you are doing and what you need but lack."

I'm here its presence says.

ev'ry unhallowed thing, and all the Saints arrayed against them

Lost in the Woods — SARAH [locked]

this is 10/13, by the way!

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masked and unmasked — PYRRHA [locked]

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CW: references to suicidal ideation/poor mental health