deercountry | let me look at the sun

Entry tags:

let me look at the sun | open

Who: Paul Atreides, open
What: Event catch-all
When: Month of December
Where: Archaic Archives, streets of Trench, the forest's edge, memories
Notes: Go ahead and contact me at

terriblepurpose or by PM if you'd like to discuss any starters or suggest new ones! For tagging in your character's memories to Paul, feel free to start with whatever your preference is.

Content Warnings: Violence, body horror (lockjoint), death, religious extremism, extensive Dune spoilers, suicidal ideation, funerals, grief

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[This is not a memory Palamedes would expect to dwell on. He's been wondering if that is the logic of it, having been pulled through a few others' memories himself before at last being deposited a visitor into his own; what point is the magic of this place trying to make? What mistakes, what fear is he meant to ruminate on at a dinner party?

(That he can think of one instantly is beside the point — A dinner party!)

He stands witness, shoulders squared tensely and arms folded tight against his chest, one hand curled under his chin, watching himself sit at this table crowded by, honestly, weirdos. A muscular young woman in skull paint sits at one elbow, alternately stuffing her face and flexing for the teenager on her other side, while the other Palamedes spends the majority of his dinner chattering ceaselessly about titles and rankings. Scholar and Warden float out of his lengthy explanation, above the warm rumble of conversation.

For all intents and purposes, despite how some people at this party are literally painted up like skulls and the waiters seem to literally be skeletons, this is a friendly dinner party between colleagues and almost-friends. The Palamedes at the table looks comfortable, engaged in conversation, having a decent time — and his other half is somewhere, the other all grey-clad figure at this table, not as engaged. (Every glance at Palamedes could be the glance before a knife between his ribs, after all, so Camilla the Sixth could be having a better time.)

But it's a nice party. The atmosphere is friendly, the conversation flows — and often into strange topics, which a knowledgeable visitor might be able to pinpoint as more necromancy from context. It's a very nice time, and somehow, most of the people gathered around the table are enjoying themselves.

Standing against the wall, Palamedes the Witness is not enjoying himself. It's subtle, in the total stillness of him and the tight furrow of his brow; the look he fixes this dinner party with is intense in a way that suggests, well — any manner of things, and none of them entirely pleasant.

Eventually, and without looking away from the table, he says:]

You can speak; this isn't the kind where we're forced to participate. Someone would have killed one of me by now if it were.

[Doubles are suspicious! Anyway, hi.]

I was wondering about that.

[Paul smiles, a soft twitch of his mouth under the sunken hollows of his eyes.

Palamedes, Warden and heir of the Sixth House, and Paul perceives the context now like it's written on the air. There are lines of force and influence here expressed in every subtle gesture and every slight look, not least of which are found in the witness Palamedes' retrospective gaze. No great wonder that Paul had felt a kinship and recognition before, even without knowing why. Paul's been at this dinner party, even if he hasn't been at this dinner party, with its macabre attendants and grim looking guests.

Paul hadn't thought of this. He doesn't know how he couldn't, except that maybe part of him flinched from the possibility. He doesn't have the right to do that anymore.]

I can make this go faster if you want me to, I think. I've been able to slow things down. [He leans back against the wall, tilting his chin up as he looks at the aged and sagging ceiling.] Which doesn't make sense. None of this makes sense.

You don't have to tell me what this is. [Not that he imagines Palamedes feels a burning need to clarify things to him.] At least no one's trying to kill us. You're right. That is nice.

...but if someone is going to try to kill us, or you, I'd appreciate a warning.

[The dinner continues, all pleasant chatter and the occasional appearance of skeleton waiters. Palamedes glances at Paul only briefly before his gaze snaps back to the table; no, there isn't much about this that makes sense. Whose memory is this, if the two of them can stand over here and watch Palamedes from outside himself? Has someone rooted around in the dredges of his soul to impose this dinner party on the world for some unknown reason?

It concerns him more than the memory itself that there's something out there capable of doing this, but his attention is too split between understanding the work and watching this dinner happen again, from out here, to focus on that now. No; it's this goddamned party.]

Not us, [he concedes, about the murdering. No, the two of them are safe, unless — well. For lack of a better comparison - and startlingly many similarities - Palamedes has been comparing these excursions into memory to his time in the River, and if that holds water (ha) and they can appear here, then surely something else could venture in with ill intentions...

But at the dinner: no, not them. He won't trouble Paul with theories about what might be lurking outside the edge of this space, uncertain as he is about where that edge exists.]

These are necromancers, [he says instead, as he moves away from the wall to walk around the table, hand idly tapping the backs of the necromancers' chairs.] The rest are our cavaliers — partners who can put up a fight. She's mine: Camilla.

[A nod to the memory of Camilla in her seat, a momentary fondness; then Palamedes proper comes to a stop behind a different pair of chairs: a woman with thick glasses and a warm disposition, and another woman slender and tired with illness, pretending very well to be interested in the first's conversation. His hand rests on the back of the bespectacled woman's chair with a lingering gentleness unlike the way he'd tapped the other chairs to point out the necromancers, some pointedly restrained emotion. But it isn't her his gaze remains fixed on, between the two.

(Funny, he thinks, that she hadn't bothered to look at him when this dinner party was real, either; and he had been such a blind fool in turn to assume with his heart—)]

How do you make it go faster? The mechanism, that is. I'm powerless here.

[Oh, and that irony is sour in his stomach, but please tell him this memory-power thing. He'd love to think about something else.]

[If Paul could overhear Palamedes' thoughts on these 'memories' he'd find a certain consolation in not being the only one questioning their origin. This isn't how memory works, even for minds trained in retention and recall. No mentat could do this, and he doubts any Reverend Mother would dare try.

But then, yes, that leads into the question of: if these aren't memories sifted from a human mind, in all its fallibility, where do they come from? And every book he's read is silent on the subject, every Trench citizen he's asked gone blank and reticent to the point he only asked a handful of times. (Sometimes, it's felt like the library is keeping something from him, an intuition he can't back up with any evidence except the absence of it.)

That's the theoretical. The practical is that watching Palamedes walk around this table, his hand touching this and that, his expression heavy and grey, is like pressing down hard on a deep bruise. (She's mine: Camilla, and Paul makes special note of her face.) Paul flexes his gloved fingers with an audible crunch, a grimace twisting his mouth, and starts to roll up his left sleeve. If Palamedes wants to talk about anything else, it's literally the least Paul can do for him.]

You were right. Blood is thematic. [There are shallow scabbed lines running up the back of his left wrist like gills that testify how far he's explored that.] Where I'm from, this isn't called magic, but the principles...they're more similar than different.

The mind affects reality everywhere. When you reach for a glass of water, your hand moves because your mind tells it to. The connection is more direct here. Moving the glass without moving the hand.

You're not powerless here. You just don't have control. [For what it's worth. Paul offers Palamedes a faint, understanding smile - he can't imagine what this is like, for someone who's used to being able to move glasses without his hands, so to speak, but he's not unfamiliar with powerlessness.] You're the locus of the memory, the most important aspect. The motive force of all of this comes from you, your ability to imagine the alternative outcomes - even the improbable ones, like everything speeding up. All I do is anchor one possibility over the others.

[It's barely an explanation, and he knows that, and he knows Palamedes will know that, but the truth is that it's all he's sure of. The same techniques are described as working for completely different reasons in different places; the scope of choices people make in how they practice their magic dizzying. The common feature is always, however, the focused application of will.]

So if there's anything else you'd rather change, I can try. [Despite rolling up his sleeve, he hasn't gone any farther than that yet.] Or not.

[He hesitates, and he shouldn't ask, but:] Who is she?

[She's beautiful, whoever she is, a pale pressed orchid, but the way Palamedes is looking at her isn't how Paul has ever seen a man look at a woman he thought was beautiful.]

[Paul's explanation, spotty and theoretical as it is, is — well, a relief would be affording Palamedes' mind with an ability to relax that he still hasn't fully realized yet. He feels a brief pinprick of satisfaction about being right, about the blood mattering.

Still, he doesn't feel like the locus of anything. This dinner party plays out while he watches, removed, touching chairs and wandering around the table like a ghost. The question of how this space has manifested, by whose means, itches at him again; is he the anchor of this space? Need his will remain stalwart lest the whole thing collapse? He's fairly sure he wouldn't know how to lose focus even if he tried; he's spent too long holding himself together that he's certain he's doing it even now, out of habit, while he drums his fingers on the back of Abigail Pent's imaginary chair.

Much to think about, and yet — the frenzied light of wondering dims in his eyes as the topic swings back to her in front of him. She is exquisite, a truth separate from all feeling, because no matter whose will powers this place, Palamedes never forgets a detail; she is an embodiment, a symbol, perhaps the true locus this memory spins around for is it not just here to make him angry all over again—]

Necromancy is finite; a construct needs a power source, as does one of my wards — I, on my own, could handle a few sustained minutes before I need another shot of thanergy, unless I wanted to do something drastic.

[Never mind that now; he's glad at least that the thing Paul must here witness is dinner, and not what comes much later.]

It makes one critically aware of their limitations, from a purely conservationist standpoint. I can fiddle with this many bones until I bleed out of every pore, I can spin up this many spirits until I pass out; that kind of thing. And, always, it comes to an end. Thanergy is transient by nature.

[Another necromancy lesson, free of charge. Palamedes shifts, stepping back from Abigail's chair with a sigh and looking towards Paul — and the scabbed cuts on his arm — again. He smiles, tired around the eyes.]

I have a feeling that mucking about in these visions is about the same. Thank you; you have a generous soul. But what happened here is fixed, and I — I'll endure.

[He'll live, Ha Ha. Okay. With a touch more pep he taps the very corner of lovely Cytherea's chair, to finally get to the other question:] She lied to us. More than we were all naturally going to lie to each other in the spirit of inter-House relations, that is. She lied to us, she killed, she replaced; then she had the gall to tell it back to me like it was fascinating and sympathetic.

[He shuts his eyes and shakes his head, stepping away entirely. Regret burns in him for not seeing it sooner, but — it's done. It's happened. He looks at Paul.]

I would like to leave this room. Can you make that happen? If I'm the center and the rules are made up anyway, there might be more than blank nothing outside.

[There is a part of Paul, cold and empty, that listens to Palamedes tell him about his betrayal and wants to suggest- and the rest of him recoils from a vivid mental image, a ripple of panic cresting in his chest before he smothers it.

A generous soul, Palamedes says, and Paul considers an age-old question: is the kindness of an act diminished by a selfish motive? Does it matter that Paul is using these memories to prepare himself for one of his own? Is his compassion for Palamedes worth less because it's now clouded and blurred with Paul's personal hatred?

Sour guilt in the back of his throat, Paul leans on the side of yes.]

If you know what's behind a door, we can open it.

[He could theorize on why that is, but that would take time. Instead, he brings his right glove to his mouth and pulls it off with his teeth, revealing darkened and stiff knuckles. But never mind that: he scrapes at the scabs on the back of his wrist with his fingernails, gathering a gritty sort of dust underneath them. He'll have to tell Palamedes that he's right about the costs of blood magic, too, but he's going to do that - later. It shouldn't take too much just to open a door.]

Tell me which one, and we'll go. [He stops, then, and takes a quiet breath, releases it slowly. What does he say? What can he possibly say? And he understands why Duncan couldn't bring himself to speak, except-] I'm sorry. For what happened to you. That you had to come back to this.

[Palamedes opens his mouth to suggest that that's objectively not how any of this is supposed to work, but ah, again: he doesn't really know, in here. One of these memory-spaces he'd been dropped in kept changing around him, travel unnecessary, to say nothing of how this place is not the River. No, he would have figured it out by now; the ghosts would be ghosts, and a handful of them wouldn't be here, and so on.

So, then: Paul says they can open a door. Palamedes manages a grim kind of smirk, as if opening doors is the thing here that's been the most troubling to remember.

First things first, then. He comes back around the table to Paul's side again, deliberately looking at his hand — something to remember for later — and shakes his head. The murmur of dinner conversation goes on behind them, half-ghosts of a handful of people Paul has loved and respected, and—

Oh, actually. He taps Paul on the shoulder, motioning for him to take a quick gander at Gideon flexing at the dinner table and Harrow being, well, Harrow-y in her sulky paint. First things first:] I should have mentioned those two; the Ninth, for when you see them around.

[They tend to flock to the same places Palamedes does, so it's merely an inevitability. He sighs then and rolls his shoulders, like waking himself up from an unpleasant daydream. The half-memory of a Lyctor gives a wheezy sort of giggle somewhere behind him, and for a brief moment he wants to put his hand around the sound and squeeze.

But no.

So.]

Thank you, by the way. Technically, she didn't do anything to me — but thank you. [That "technically" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting, but never mind it as Palamedes heads for the door into the corridor, motioning for Paul to follow.] Lucky for us, I remember every door I've been through here. I'll warn you: it doesn't get much prettier.

[But it's Paul's turn, then, to bleed them into a musty hallway. Palamedes nods.]

[Paul skims his gaze over the Ninth House, possibly not carefully enough - or possibly he's not being careful enough with himself. Memory formation is impaired by sleep deprivation, and it's not so much that Paul is choosing not to sleep as he is forgetting to. Spending hours moving through other people's memories is making time harder to keep track of as it dilates here, contracts there, and there's never enough of it.]

The Ninth. I'll remember them.

[He nods, trailing Palamedes to the door. Paul steps to the handle and holds his hand over it, as if just about to grasp it. He has a theory about doorways and thresholds in these memories, about the way that boundaries shift and fold, and how belief interweaves and underpins everything. Palamedes talks about magic in terms of concrete theory, but Paul wonders if he feels it too, the places where you know things without knowing how you know them.

This isn't how it should work, but it does: Paul closes a hand full of hardened blood, moving from observer to actor and back again as he twists the handle, and a place that didn't exist here before has always been on the other side. Given what he saw at the dinner, he's not sure what to expect by doesn't get much prettier, but he'd rather be haunted by macabre halls of gore than watch Palamedes in that room.]

See?

[He steps forward into the hall first, alert and cautious. No one should be able to see them, nothing should have changed in the transition, but he's never done that before. When nothing continues to happen to him, he looks back at Palamedes.]

She did it to people you care about. That's worse. [He says it like a simple fact. The sky is blue, she killed people you loved, and it's worse to survive without them than anything else that could have been done to you. He says it like it cuts his tongue.] Let's go.

Is it?

[Is it worse to live in a world without Dulcinea Septimus, without the Fourth and Fifth? It can be another kind if heartbreak, Palamedes thinks, and maybe he tells himself it's not worse for his own sake and maybe it's so he can live with himself after leaving Camilla. Either way: is it?

He's not sure either answer is a relief; he isn't looking for an answer regardless. The hallway, then, with the precision of his own memory and the lingering suspicion that someone or something could very well be bending that around, too. It's not gory, at least, just old and sagging; floorboards worn from foot traffic in some places and sloping miserably from damp and lack of upkeep in others, a dingy mausoleum.

Palamedes feels better in the hallway, still, peering down to the left and then the right with a mix of stupid nostalgia and academic fervor. This isn't, by all accounts he's aware of, possible: and yet. Here lies Canaan House down to the grain he recalls it by, and he wonders for a moment if it's even still there in reality. If the whole thing hasn't sloughed off miserably into the sea.

Where to first! What a concept.]

I'll show you around. Let's call it an endurance test: your blood and my sheer force of memory.

[And like that it's a scholarly puzzle again, to press against the boundaries of this memory bubble and wonder who they might find if they can pop it. Palamedes is aware that isn't at all the intention of this exercise, but if the powers that be are just going to lay a malleable expanse in front of him...

Ah, but right:]

Let me see your hand.

[Paul has no right to give Palamedes the brief look he does, the subtle incline of his head and raising of his eyebrows in disbelief as Palamedes asks if this is worse. He could pretend to himself that it's entirely reflexive, but it isn't, and he doesn't.

He does still have the decency to look ashamed of himself as he looks away. Maybe he'd feel differently if he had ghosts, if he could strip the flesh from his dead family and send their bones walking around a dead house. Perhaps dying here is more trivial, the loss less acute or not present at all, just a transition to another state of being. What does he know about it? Nothing, and how dare he assume otherwise.]

A test. [Paul takes in his surroundings, and in the midst of everything else, he finds time to think that necromancers have over-committed to an aesthetic style at the expense of good taste or health. But Palamedes seems less wretched out here, so again: what does he know?] I'd like that. I'm trying to get as much practice as I can before this is over.

[And yes. His hand. Paul fights the childish urge to act like he doesn't know what Palamedes is talking about:] It's not too bad. I'm taking care of it.

[But still: he raises his right hand and offers it to Palamedes, not quite looking at him or it. Paul really doesn't think it's that bad, yet, compared to some of the illustrations he's seen of darkened crystalline blood jutting out of skin. His joints only look deeply bruised, the crystals that grind under his skin still small enough to let his fingers mostly bend the way they're supposed to. It hurts, but pain is - pain just is. It exists. That he has to bite down on something to muffle a scream when he first moves his hands after waking up is trivia.]

If you want the crystals, I can save some of them for you. They're supposed to be valuable for magic. I haven't had any crest yet, but maybe the smaller ones are worth something too.

[If Palamedes goes looking for an iota of evidence Paul is kidding, he isn't going to find any. After all, isn't that what they're here for? The exploration of magical and scientific curiosity.]

[If Palamedes catches that look (he does) then he studiously pretends not to, unwilling to pick at the scab of what that look might want to ask him. Part of him already wants to stop in the middle of this imaginary hallway and shout that of course it's horrible, it's world-shattering and lonely and empty to lose the people he loves, more than any terrible deed that could have been done to him. Of course it's worse to go on. But hypocritically he left Camilla, acted on a reckless high of righteous fury and desperation, and after eight months and change, well — one has time to think about the apologies they owe, and to whom, and for what.

And Paul doesn't know all the things Palamedes has done, besides, and maybe one day he'll tell him this one; but for now there's a thick line drawn around some things he's done, to keep him from allowing himself a crumb of guilt that will topple any focus he will ever have again.

So Paul can look at him like that if he likes; he's welcome to his assumptions. Palamedes tsks at the state of his hand as he takes it and turns it over to see the crystalline bruising. Delicately. Still, this is already enough to be a concern, Paul.]

I want you to be able to use your hands. [...And,] I didn't think something like this would follow someone into a purely psychological space.

[That's some scary attention to detail, and another pin in the board for how the rules (if there are any) actually work around here. Moreover, it means he will have to go find Paul as soon as they leave this false Canaan House, before his hands become completely useless.]

Don't be so eager to go under the knife. It's only in your hands?

[Paul doesn't believe Palamedes' seeming ambivalent acceptance not because he suspects some defect in his character, or even really because he isn't sure how death is handled in a society built on it. He doesn't believe Palamedes because Paul can't imagine a future for himself where he ever again feels anything but what he felt in the stilltent, like he's become the dying nuclear heart of a collapsing star: a gravity of vengeance rending the universe apart at its basic laws.

But that's the same kind of secret as Palamedes is keeping, one that's a someday. Paul will let the moment where they hung between them pass; he doesn't want to talk about any of it either. Besides, he can move on to a more straightforward kind of confusion. Palamedes is talking about him like - but of course, Paul realizes, he doesn't know.]

No. It's up to my shoulders in the arms, some in my lower legs. [He says, a neutral accounting of fact.] I think it stays with me because I'm doing most of the things that accelerate it here, or because it's integrated into my self-image.

I'm Bene Gesserit trained. I didn't tell you before. That's another thing. [Paul seems comfortable letting Palamedes turn his hand this way and that, as if he's used to being handled by professionals.] I didn't have all of my memories when I came here. I was waiting to see if they'd come back - they did - but I have to wonder if it's related to this. Apparently it's not uncommon for Sleepers first waking.

[He stops himself, mouth quirking up at the corner ruefully.] I'm trained to be able to monitor myself well, redirect and control circulatory functions. I shouldn't tell you any of this, by the way. The Sisterhood is protective of their secrets. But I don't think even they have agents this far out.

[And if they wanted him to keep their secrets, Paul thinks they shouldn't have already tried to kill him.]

I should have been able to keep this from happening at all. [His lighter tone drops a little again as he glances at his knuckles, but he rallies himself.] So it's been...educational.

[Palamedes hums, eyebrows raised as he peers at the state of Paul's hand, both concern and curiosity. He doesn't, ah — well, it wouldn't be helpful to idly comment on how he didn't forget a single thing, but then, he supposes he has more experience with holding himself together than the average person. Or the Bene Gesserit trained person, a phrase that means absolutely nothing at all to him.]

I'm excellent at keeping secrets, [he offers, a little wry.] We don't welcome many visitors on the Sixth.

[So he understands, at least in the most basic sense. This Sisterhood sounds perfectly normal, which does not necessarily mean perfectly safe. He taps a knuckle experimentally, just to see what response that gets.]

You're crystallizing in every limb? [buddy.] When we're out of here, I'll come find you, we'll cut them out. Think of it as further education.

[By which he mostly means don't object, but details. Don't, though; it is not optional.]

Who knows; maybe I'll look as bad as you by the time I get there.

[ha ha how ironic would that be huh]

In the meantime, I don't know how to tempt these memories into letting us leave, so I could show you where Cam and I stayed, if you like. Unfortunately, most of the interesting places in here are incredibly haunted.

[Paul doesn't flinch when the knuckle is tapped, but his mouth does twist as he breathes out through his nose. The offer of help keeps him quiet a while, listening as Palamedes jokes about his own joints (and he thinks that Palamedes had best be joking, which goes to show something about human hypocrisy). He barely even stirs at the mention of things being 'incredibly haunted', something that would have otherwise had his immediate attention.]

...it's hard to reach some of it. [They're a heavy seeming few words, as if knowing relief is at hand makes it possible to allow that, perhaps, Paul finds his body working against him more disturbing than he wants to admit.] I'll send my omen to lead you, after this.

And I'd like to see anything you want to show me. We should be safe enough, whatever there is here. And if not, I'll see if we can go further out. Apparently, someone once ended up going far enough sideways to end up in another memory.

[Details on how were frustratingly sparse, but he thinks that being attacked by anything that somehow violates the one rule that has seemed consistent so far (inside is dangerous, outside is safe) would be quick motivation to figure it out.]

No, that's unnecessary; there's nothing out there.

[There's... clouds. If Paul is passionate about clouds. But the great and vast and honestly a little overwhelming expanse of sky and light is nothing compared to the dark and dusty quarters of the Sixth. Palamedes thinks so, anyway. Call it nostalgia; there was a brief enough time when Canaan House was full of intrigue and potential, and the competition was fierce but relatively friendly (and frankly, an accessory to the real challenge, because nobody was going to best him at necromancy).

He makes one more survey of Paul's joints before releasing his hand; he'll remember. He just needs to bring some appropriate tools and it will work out.

Well, as he gestures for Paul to follow, since they are heading Up to the Sixth's weird little hidey hole, another thought:]

It's going to be uncomfortable at best to get those out — you know that, but fair warning anyway: it's going to hurt like hell. Even for a... What do they call someone with your training? I doubt it's "sister."

[He did say Sisterhood, but Palamedes has the sense that Paul is something of a unique case. A lot of unique cases have wandered into his daily life in the past yearish, so...

But during: up to the Sixth rooms, which are as dark and dusty as he'd left them last. Every surface covered in flimsy and Palamedes' tight handwriting, stuffy and dim from the covered windows, ah — delightful. He is ready wondering just how accurate a recreation this is, hmm...]

[A freak is perilously too close to the tip of Paul's tongue, his guard lowered by a number of things: Palamedes' solicitousness, the way this place feels like it can hold secrets better than a grave, his own increasingly frantic efforts to understand what is happening to him. But he laughs instead, polite, worldly, barely audible.]

It's forbidden to train outsiders, so there's no word for it. Of course, that means it happens enough there should be. [He can't deny to himself: there's a pleasure in taking even this petty of a revenge on them, mocking their precious secrecy.] A witch's son, maybe.

Not that - my mother isn't a witch. But they call her that, sometimes. [He doesn't know if he should sound as defensive as he does; maybe he's insulting Palamedes indirectly.] The Lady Jessica. She's the one who trained me. It's usually mothers.

Anyway - I'm good with pain. Don't worry about that.

[Including the self-inflicted kind, if that embarrassing little outburst on his part is anything to go by.]

[It strikes Palamedes in a way that it simply hasn't until this moment how young Paul is. Perhaps a boy valiantly (well, in his own little way) defending his mother does that, regardless; adding a dollop of youthfulness no matter the age. It makes him smile, if only a little.]

My mother is an Archivist. [Conversationally; he definitely pronounces the capital A.] Maybe you ought to come up with your own word.

[He doesn't comment further on the pain, although he puts a pin in it. Paul's insistence that he can handle pain is, hm, noteworthy? In its own way. Palamedes isn't planning on going hog wild with a scalpel, or anything, but he considers — well.

He'll bring a tin of biscuits or something. A book. A distraction.

He hums and looks at the nearest wall, lifting a corner of a piece of flimsy. The notes are, as expected, all there; given he remembers them all, it makes sense as much as anything else in here.]

I don't know how we get out of here beyond... Well. Did the magic stag happen to you, too, in any of these?

[It was weird! It just showed up! But for the sake of Paul not overexerting himself on blood magic, they can probably idle until a magic stag shows up. He's ready to do that.]

[Paul and Palamedes both know the old truism: real men of learning conduct their horrific experiments on themselves and those they know.

Paul takes Palamedes' advice into consideration - it would bring him up to, what? Three names or four, for whatever it is he's supposed to be? And maybe he's being facetious with himself, his own little private joke, but. He also hasn't thought of that as an option before, to choose a name for himself.

A distraction is good, so he seizes on it.]

I'm somehow not surprised to hear you come from a line of scholars. [Paul smiles back, also just a little.] The stag is consistent, and it's either duration or resolution that brings it, in whatever form that takes. I tried communicating with it, but it either didn't want to speak to me, or couldn't.

[Paul is not especially thrilled to admit to failing to talk to a magic deer. He looks over Palamedes' shoulder, trying to make out what he's reading, for something else to focus on.]

So...we wait. [Unless Palamedes has changed his mind about resolution, so to speak, but Paul doubts it.] Look at something 'incredibly haunted'. Ghosts are real, then?

[These are necromantic notes, for sure — identifiable only because Paul knows that much about Palamedes, certainly, because the notes themselves are a lot of gibberish and lines drawn with arrows and circles. Here and there a number, a set of initials and a series of question marks, the word "theorem" more times than is necessary; sometimes another, separate handwriting joins Palamedes' scrawl, with corrections or suggestions that even read like dry commentary.

It's Work. He glances over his shoulder at Paul, moving slightly to let him see the flimsy more clearly. Ghosts Are Real, well, if Paul insists...]

Don't think I'm not hearing that you talked to a stag, [silly! tell him more!] but of course ghosts are real. With the correct formula you can call one up — I'm using "call" here generously, of course — and talk to them. A soul that's died suddenly or especially violently can linger around as a revenant, thanks to the release of thanergy; we call it apopneumatic shock. Revenants stick around until they... finish what they set out to do. Usually.

[Usually.]

Necromancers can do the summoning, provided there isn't interference from something else and assuming the soul hasn't gone irrevocably insane in the River. There's the issue of time being a factor sometimes, as well; those bodies in the beach ships, for example, were too far gone. Despite meeting the other criteria. Getting ahold of one of them would take an amount of thanergy that could be much better spent elsewhere.

It was worth trying.

[It was for Knowledge, Palamedes - but then Paul is silent, rapt, as Palamedes pours out more information about necromancy. The last time he heard about it, he was a blank slate, but he's thought about it often. As he's poured through the books on blood magic he's cobbled together, he's wished they were more like this, for all of Palamedes' opaque references and the way his thoughts flash like supercell lightning.

(He wonders whose handwriting joins Palamedes' on this wall of those thoughts seared on near-paper, suspects he might be able to guess.)]

Why would the soul go insane? [There's so much to ask, but that catches his attention first. Paul moves around the room a bit, hands folded behind his back, and soaks in more of it.] Is the River the path to the afterlife? That would settle a few debates.

[This is all academic to him. He's now fairly confident magic isn't real in his world, if only for the fact he's never heard of anyone using it to kill someone. These are other people's dead; his own haunt him more abstractly.]

That I don't know. [Fun! This, the concept of souls going insane in the River, is much more fun than the dinner party downstairs. He wonders briefly if it's still happening, if it continues while they aren't around to look at it, and if so, then have Magnus and Abigail...

Well. The River.]

The River and other liminal spaces aren't my area of expertise. I've been told that traversing the River without a considerable amount of thanergy and a life to return to would be... [He waves a hand, moving to take a seat at a rickety, flimsy-covered table in an equally aged armchair.] Inadvisable.

[He considers the facts, call them. Aha. He wonders if Paul should know these things - if anyone outside the Nine Houses should be burdened with the true breadth of their bullshit - but it's not as if the River is here.

It's a squid-filled fucked up ocean. Very different. Nuanced.]

As far as I'm aware, the River is it. Someone from the Fifth- [mmph] -would be able to tell you more; they have a gift for talking to the dead. Holding a soul together takes focus and energy, far more than when the soul is contained in its own original body, particularly when it's someone else's. Most people aren't prepared to do that when they die, so let's say that they drown, whether they die suddenly or after a long, long time.

[A beat.]

Metaphorically drown, that is.

[Paul has stopped walking, at some point in Palamedes' explanation. He has stopped looking at anything on the walls. He is simply standing there, looking at Palamedes, with eyes wider than they were even on the ice, when he first saw magic.

He had told Palamedes he was sorry about his losses assuming that, if the soul was real in the way he was inferring, there was an end, if the soul was not eternal, or an afterlife, if it was. The idea that any one of those pleasant seeming people downstairs are now insane ghosts lost in a River leading nowhere was not one that occurred to him.]

I see. [His voice is careful, as he thinks it through. He has to assume that his initial shock at learning this isn't completely abnormal, although it probably happens at a younger age.] Maybe we should-

[And he can't go through with it. He stops, presses two aching fingers into the bridge of his nose, and shakes his head.] I keep saying things that make it worse. You should have asked me to turn her into a statue of salt, something like that. I'd have been better at it.

[Well—

That isn't what Palamedes expects. He hadn't anticipated anything, really - is this not just academic curiosity? - but oh, to have that last piece slide into place and realize Paul is still thinking about her is...

Why salt, he thinks, and he doesn't ask. He takes off his glasses and drops them on the table with a little clatter, leaning back in the armchair with a hand rubbing over his face. Okay; they're unpacking this. Or they're circling around this. He's certain the distinction doesn't really matter.]

You can't make this worse, [he says, half through his fingers, and it's a gauzy web of reassurance over a brick of fact. This isn't real, this whole thing. This happened. It's over. Paul cannot, objectively, do anything that will worsen the circumstances of this dinner party or anything else at Canaan House, because—well, Palamedes doesn't want to belabor the point to himself, either.

This was a ghost lesson until twenty seconds ago, so hold on.

To the ceiling he says,] I already handled it. The others helped.

[Probably. Then, as he lifts his head and squints, spectacles-less, at Paul, now is the time to ask:] Why salt?

Symbolic. And less terrible than anything else I thought of.

[Paul says it flatly from behind his hand, his head still bowed. When he drops it and looks up, he only looks tired, and still sorry. There's another chair, probably one that Palamedes' 'others' sat in, once, and Paul drags it in Palamedes' direction instead of speaking further. He sits down, arranging himself with his hands flat on his thighs and his back straight.]

I'm glad you have that, at least. [His revenge, that is. Paul had been wondering. And that explains more of Palamedes, Paul thinks, although he's finding the necromancer to have depths and facets he wouldn't have predicted.] The point of these is to hurt us, have you realized that yet? It took me a while. They say it's meant to bring us together, they don't say what the mechanism is. But it makes sense, doesn't it? Surviving shared hardship is a bonding agent, so -

[He gestures: all this. His voice has been nothing but quiet and tense, not a whisper, but not intended to be easy to overhear. Now it rises again, and he looks directly at Palamedes, and lets his face and voice be unguarded in their sincerity:]

But you helped me when I had nothing, and I'm in your debt. That was real. And no, there is nothing I can do for you here, I know that. How could I? You've barely met me.

So I'm sorry, that this is how I know. If I ever did, it should have been from you. And I should have said that at the start.

[The point of these is to hurt us. Palamedes hums, picking his glasses up to fiddle with the arms. Yes, he had a feeling; he's yet to wander into one that's been pleasant all the way through. The air in the room feels that much stuffier, from a discomfort that has nothing to do with the covered windows; nor Paul, who is so damnably earnest that it would make Palamedes smile, if they weren't—here.

Ghost lessons. Dinner party. He asks himself, Does it hurt?, and recalls with idle non-surprise that of course it does. The dull familiarity of heartbreak and loss and rage and all else that's congealed in his chest for months is still there; it has been there. Maybe that's why he can wander through this memory without participating, or losing himself in the emotions; what do these powers that be think—that this is something new?

He drums his fingers on the table's edge. He sticks his glasses back on, lets out a breath he wasn't aware of holding.]

Thank you. [All other platitudes, oh-no-don't-worry-about-it, no-it's-nothing-really, all feel clumsy and trite. Thank you, for the honesty. He'll remember it.] Despite our mutual paranoia about this thing, I think the damned bonding agent might've worked. Sorry about my mess.

[Ha. Really, though. He sits back, looking at the covered window as if it's not actually covered, like perhaps he's going to sit here and wait it out in silence—but no, it's barely thirty seconds before he sits up again. There's an itch at the back of his mind: resolution.]

There is something you can help me with, but you only have to get me to the door. Then, I think we can go.

[And deal with the next thing, unsaid in how he doesn't at all try to make subtle the way he glances at Paul's crystal-bruised joints. Resolve and move on, tidily. A nice thought.]

Edited (do not mind my phrasing adjustment) 2021-12-22 06:06 (UTC)

a very special dinner party

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