I don't wish to evade the world | OTA

[unsheathedfromreality]

Who: Illarion, Ives, and anyone else sucked into the chaos vortex
What: A yurtwarming party + memories and misadventures (in comments)
When: Whenever
Where: Wherever
Shakira: Shakira

Content Warnings: Will warn per prompt!

November had been a cruel month for all Trench, mired in corruption and sacrifice; December had opened no better with its piercing chill and Sleepers pit one against the other by an ancient and echoing folly. Darkbloods in particular had been afflicted with the compounding feeling of control slipping through their fingers, and even Illarion--whose dead heart was beyond most emotions (so he thought)--couldn't escape the sense that everything was about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong if he didn't rein it in.

So he'd vanished into Trenchwood to get control of his life existence and somehow ended up building a couple of yurts with Ives. Funny, how that worked out.

Forever my home (OTA-ish, with Ives, early January, Trenchwood)
With the start of the year and the advent of the Egg Moon, life (and undeath) is suddenly looking a lot more positive. Once they'd finished their house-building, Illarion noted (and Ives agreed) that there were certain forms to be upheld: They should invite other Sleepers over to visit. Invitations trickled out over Omni and Omen to people they know, informing them of a new Lamp location and offering an opportunity for food, camaraderie, and conversation away from the heated and busy confines of the Snake Den.

The square for their odd little village of two (sometimes three) is where all the action's at, for any who come looking in response to the invitation. The fire pit is the center of attention: Large enough to contain a bonfire, lined with hand-laid stone, and often host to a simmering stewpot with food enough to share. Several logs surround it at a comfortable distance from the heat, allowing ease and conversation. Ives' yurt stands nearby, just large enough to give the Giant a sheltered place to sleep, and a small covered well with attendant pail offers fresh water. The Lamp, and its Lamp Friends (decorated with ribbon for the season), are opposite the fire from the yurt and a little ways into the trees. Discreet incense burners ring the clearing in a faint pall of smoke, with scents of pine and wet moss that pleasantly smooth Trenchwood's harsher odors--and more importantly, keep the beasts away.

A path leads away from the fire, off toward the distant mirror of the Salt Lake, permanently red this month thanks to Moon Presence's... presence. Sleepers with very sharp eyes might make out the mounded shadow of another yurt in that direction.

One or both of the Giant and the shrike might be found hanging around the place if expecting guests. Ives may be tending to a fine vegetable stew, attending to various little maintenance tasks, or simply sitting at his ease by the fire. He's also acquired a pan flute at some point and is looking for any excuse to play it. Illarion's often keeping incense lit, mending gear and cleaning weapons, or when he's in the mood--and that's often, this month--holding forth in story or song to anyone around to listen.

((OOC: Let us know if you want one furry, the other, or both on your tag in!))

Comments

reasonable measurement; she's roughly breadbox-sized (please give her bread)

[unsheathedfromreality]

[The shrike keeps still throughout Thancred's reassurances, trusting the man can wrestle his own Omen into submission. That it needs to be wrestled at all is very interesting... And an observation he's not making consciously right now, with much of his focus on managing twin concerns of how much did he see, and what else might be in here? Right now, the winged stallion's fractious anger could well be a product of his Sleeper's disturbance, kept from ruffling the steady surface Thancred presents to the world.

It's a dim relief the other Sleeper's at least something like calm, after what he'd witnessed. Illarion's not much used to being disturbed anymore, not in a felt way (stirrings of corruption, then), and having someone else project relative stability makes it easier to recoup his usual dispassion.

Though the uncertainty, oh--that evokes a ragged shred of sympathy.]

I do not know. I cannot say, [he replies, wrestling some gentleness into his voice.

The blackness around them doesn't relent at the sounds of footsteps drawing near, though there's a sudden sense of presence that's vaguely human-shaped. It's followed by another, and another, all whispering in terrible unease. "Shoot it!" "It isn't doing anything. I don't know if it's even alive--" "Shoot it, for the love of Sacrifice! They're not alive to begin with!"]

I have known Sleepers to take wounds of the body, in these memories, but I did not know whether it might wound your mind to take in so much at once.

["Shoot it where? Throne and powers, it doesn't even look like it's got a head..."

Illarion's expression twitches; he turns his head toward the invisible speaker like he's hearing a familiar voice.]

...What did you see?

[grandtheftperson]

[There's a twitch, almost in the same moment from man and omen at harsh whispers in the dark, tracking the sound but not yet finding origins. Although the equine of the pair remains alert, ears perked and swiveling, Lahabrea relaxes a little. But only a little, this situation is still off-kilter, he's not entirely sure he'd accidentally let slip something he shouldn't, and this wasn't.. really over yet by his guess.

The presence of the mothbird is kept in his peripherrals, he's not worried about her.. but she's still a fascinating design.]

Well, luck's with me then, I think I'm as whole and hale as I ever am.

[Which if he were completely honest wasn't actually all that great a marker to go off of, but there's no need to get into that. Illarion is remembered, from the cold and mess of the ship, and here it's a little easier to mark that the man (?) is actually blindfolded, for all that didn't seem to be a problem.

What DID he see? Was any of it secret?

The white haired man hesitates.]

A warzone, by my guess. Lead ups to it, mayhap. The results of it. Necromancy if I don't miss my mark, but the taste of it wasn't the usual sort.

[None of it sounds, to his tone or bearing, as if it's alarming, unusual, or even for that matter remotely unfamiliar. Not for Lahabrea - or for Thancred, for that matter. Even the idea of necromancy, it's ... interesting, but ultimately not something he ever felt the need to pursue much.

As Illarion turns towards the invisible speaker, the pegasus' demeanor changes, from alert and listening to laid back ears and bared teeth, aiming another snap at the shrike with a brief half-fan of wings. He is once more intercepted and pulled away with all the ease one might expect of a person wrangling their omen before teeth have even a prayer of actually connecting.]

[unsheathedfromreality]

This, at least, is well.

[So little else was. This should be the least emotional part of the memory, if there could be such a thing, with emotion so lacking in any of it--this long stretch in the utter dark, bewildered and aching and dulled to the world. He had screamed his warning and collapsed to await his eventual fate, captured as a prisoner of war or executed a second time, scarce realizing he'd fallen outward enough to make that impossible.

(He'd reconstructed what must have happened much later, as an exercise. What had they seen, those horrified soldiers? Half an Unearthed? Half of his out-self?)

It should be the moment of least emotion, least stress, but the constant whispering--the atmosphere of terrible uncertainty, even though Illarion knew exactly how this ended--puts the shrike's feathers on end.

To say nothing of the pegasus that keeps trying to bite him every time his attention wavers. He snaps his head back toward the creature at the ((feel)) of motion on his periphery, shoulders raised as he hackles reflexively, but the threat's nullified nearly as he notices it.

Iskierka aborts a swoop and drops on to her Sleeper's shoulder, her own feathers ruffled.]

He is seeming much displeased with me. Perhaps-- [The whispering around them grows in intensity. There's a sound of a weapon clearing leather.] --Cover your ears.

[He'll be following his own advice. He doesn't know the timing to the exact second, but there's about to be a gunshot, point-blank.

The unpleasant subject of his own memories can wait until that's over and absence of light is followed by a blessed absence of sound. Or near-absence, for very sharp ears might catch a quiet, continuous, shivering rasp like a thousand beetles opening their wings one after another.]

Perhaps, [Illarion resumes, into that marred silence,] there is some peace I must make with him; I had assumed the memories themselves, these may be disquieting--but you do not seem unfamiliar with what you saw, no?

I am sorry, and not. [Sorry, that anyone had to have that same intimacy with war that he had; not, that it was not someone wholly naive to horror who'd been pulled through that with him.

But where was the other presence?]

You did not, perhaps, notice any other creature who was in all of them, but ourselves?

[grandtheftperson]

[He has no grasp on it himself, how someone could not have some emotion, however buried, for past events. Was he not driven daily by those same ancient memories and all the terrible terrors and hatreds fueled by it?

But it's still old, and this ... isn't his life. He can be comfortably unalarmed but shouldn't there be some tenor of emotion that Illarion himself should possess, reliving these countless moments of suffering? Or perhaps he buried it deep. Lahabrea's gifts didn't trend towards reading others' emotions, none of his kind did. They could only guess, and Illarion seems awfully controlled by his guess.

Warned of some sound, it's reflexive that he obeys but not for his own ears, raising hands to further close the pinned back ears of the gray stallion, and both flinch at the too-close report of gunfire. In the silence of its wake, his ears ring annoyingly, but it's a price easy enough to pay. He doesn't hear but can see Iskierka's aborted dive, and ruffled feathers of agitation; did she betray more accurately what Illarion hid?]

He's much displeased with everyone and everything as a matter of course. High standards, this one. Some echo of my early student days by my guess, had a lot of perfectionist teachers. Try not to take it personally if you can.

[He says it lightly, as if it's a joke; what omen, reflecting the best of a person, would be so utterly surly when paired with someone who seems anything but? Maybe it really is a joke and there's just a comfortable balance between them, light and dark, sullen and contented, a reflection of a different sort.

But there's agreement somehow in the silence that follows a question; he's familiar with all of this, stretching across eons. Even Thancred knew war well.]

Not much to be done about it. Better me than some other poor sap I suppose, some of that would have been right disconcerting to many.

[No judgment. Some of it he was intensely curious about but asking ... would that be too rude? Probably, given the circumstances.. He weighs everything he'd seen, already aware of what he's being asked without being willing to admit it; how had he appeared, before touched, before shaken? In mask and robes of office, of something before? Something worse yet? His quiet could be reviewing all he had seen, listening and watching for any signs of anything else ... changing around them.]

I admit I wasn't paying attention as much as I probably should have been, it felt a little too private to scrutinize too much. Ah, Liath maybe? Big ugly gray horse with feathers?

[The equid stomps a hoof, huffing out a long hot breath.]

There are wings in this darkness, like scarabs shifting in their corpse dens. [That voice isn't at all like 'Thancred's', not addressed to Illarion, never to anyone but Lahabrea himself, but a closer echo to that strange voice in the memories of war and violence.] But where is the soul they bear hither unto the Sea?

[unsheathedfromreality]

[The Unearthed, as a rule, lost much on resurrection. Sensation and emotion--feeling and feeling--were the most common deficits when a soul was returned to its dead body; the smooth interface of flesh and spirit was irrevocably changed by death, and never again fit together right once it had.

Illarion's senses were unusually keen for one of the undead, the more so after his blindness. It only followed that his heart was duller, in twisted natural compensation. It did not keep him from grasping after what he could feel, or remember feeling; as if emotion could be relearned and practiced into magecraft, with enough dedication.

But sometimes there was a benefit in letting the gray lassitude claim him entirely. If this vision of his own past was trying to teach him the error of that through forceful submersion in what he had been, so be it; he will witness, but he refuses to feel. To let himself be drawn back into the mire he'd struggled through then felt like erasing the progress he'd made, felt somehow like failing.

(In part, he will admit in his heart of hearts but to no one else, because everything had been so much simpler then. It had no longer been required of him to judge or to feel or to bear the burden of his own memories. He had been a strange kind of miserable, but he had also merely been, as unable to address his misery as a beast and therefore free of the responsibility to fix it.)]

I will not. If he is being your discernment manifest, [and much else besides, it seemed, though what all of that meant is a problem Illarion's saving to think on later,] then I cannot find overmuch fault in him. I am not, hm, the best influence to be around.

[Though as Thancred's a warrior of broad experience himself--from the sound of it--he's likely had worse company. Of some kind. At some point.

Some of that could have been right disconcerting to many, though, gets a hiss of agreement out of Illarion.] If,

[Sigh. As the facts have already been seen, he feels he's got some obligation to put them in their proper order. But that tugs against his instinctive desire to hide all of this, to be as much a cipher as his lack of a public name implies.

The right choice is obvious, however.] If understanding would ease your mind, on any of it, you may ask me. I will explain what I can. Though I thank you, also, that you did not look too deeply.

[So much of it was so painfully private, even if the world seems to be telling him it should not be. Why couldn't it have been pleasant, private memories, at least? He had those. He wouldn't mind reliving them, with company or without it.]

It is-- [oh, that voice is familiar enough to make the feathers on his neck stand on end, a reaction mirrored in Iskierka.] --possible, he is who I noticed. [There had been feathers.

He might almost be able to convince himself, if he tries. It would be a far less disconcerting explanation.

The question clearly had not been meant for him, but it's one he can address, and fell in line with his offer to Thancred.]

No soul returned to Navia this day, though he wished it sore. [There is another sound under the rustling: A quiet, dry sobbing from a throat nearly closed.] Though I wished it. The gods did not allow it.

[grandtheftperson]

Ahh, who is a good influence to be around, in truth? You could find a flaw in any saint if you look hard enough.

[With Liath apparently willing to relent his efforts to bite for now, Lahabrea cautiously frees the pegasus, who shakes his head and mane as if to be rid of flies, settling his wings back along his flanks.

The explanation is reasonable, Omen and Sleeper, though untrue. Something to offer in the wake of no other explanation, no truth that could possibly be far more unsettling. Maybe it wouldn't be pursued, and any secrets between them remain mystery. As much as Illarion's willing to explain, there's a sense to it that perhaps it would be less comfortable if he did so, and prying might be ...impolite at best.

Would Thancred barge ahead regardless? Not with an ally.. but a stranger? A more-or-less stranger.]

You owe me no explanations, friend. Certainly not if this place has tricked you into revealing a troubled past you'd prefer to keep private.

[There's a low, humorless chuckle; he'd have to get more reputation points surely, do favors, make promises to allow such a discourse to be more comfortable and less forced.]

You are far from your star and its possessive gods now. If I may be so bold as to ask.. does the peace of the Underworld still elude you, or do you not wish it?

[unsheathedfromreality]

[A quiet, humorless chuckle escapes Illarion at that.] Relatively, then, let us say that I am a more-bad, a worse influence than many. But I am taking your point.

[Iskierka turns her head sharply as Liath folds his wings, keeping her faceted eyes on the other Omen in watchful wariness. For himself, her Sleeper is content to relax his guard against the pegasus. Even were he to get bitten or kicked out of the blue, it's not as if he would suffer much for it.]

I--thank you, again. I was not tricked, as such, [and certainly he'd been ghosting about looking in on others' memories, so turnabout was fair play,] but perhaps was not expecting my devotions to reveal me at such depth.

[He appreciates the decency; it is itself a step toward his trust in the future.

Thancred's next question is far easier to answer.] Here in Trench, as a Sleeper? I could not die permanently did I wish it. Though this aside--

[The word trails off into the whispering silence. That brief sound of sobbing is gone again.] --I do not know I wish it, any longer. There is much that is left undone, that I must do, and I cannot so lightly abandon my post.

[grandtheftperson]

I wouldn't be so sure. There's always ways.

[That they might not be commonly known is another matter. Death did not elude life forever, not even for his kind. And there were very few rumors of people over a dozen decades old, if Trench didn't allow people to die that number would be very different..]

Living merely to accomplish a task isn't much of a life, [Notes the raging hypocrite, who is perfectly content to ignore that fact.] Though of course I can't well counsel you on what you SHOULD be doing with it, but there is more to existing, even ... as prey of necromancers, than mere duty. Is there naught else?

[It suits Thancred's life and Thancred's voice even if it was a dire insult to everything Amaurotine, who lived only to accomplish something and then went gratefully or even eagerly to their eternal rest.]

[unsheathedfromreality]

This is so, that there are being ways. Though perhaps it is not right to seek them. Many of the Sleepers, here, who were in Sodder's nightmare before this place--they are taking comfort in death having no real hold on them, and no great consequences.

[Seeking and finding a permanent death for himself would throw that all in doubt. To say nothing of the specter it raised of Sleepers murdering each other permanently. Beasthood or corruption would provide ample excuses, were the method easy.

Were it not, could it be done in such secrecy that no one would ever know... There is still his duty, even if Thancred quite aptly points out the problem with that.

It gets a wan, reflexive smile out of Illarion.] This is wisdom I would use on anyone not myself, who has said what I do.

[It does him no harm to admit it.

And, with someone who has already seen a hint of the worst of his life, there's no harm to admitting a little more--] I do not know if there is aught else, for us. We have not been at leisure to discover it, back home. And Trench, mm.

[Trench had opportunities he could explore, if he wanted. Chances to reclaim an identity beyond his role as teacher, advocate, guardian, hunter--if he wanted.

"If he wanted" being the key wrinkle, and it is so hard to want something he cannot cast as an objective. Much easier to make the good of others his goal--it had been one already--and work at it with all the focus of one undead.]

I do not think I have given Trench much of a chance. [That didn't mean he will now, but Lahabrea's not the only hypocrite here.]

[grandtheftperson]

[That's something he's going to have to circle back to - Sodder's nightmare. It's not something he'd heard discussed before but it sounded importantly relevant.]

Do you want to? Give it a chance, I mean.

[It's a bit more of a prying question, though it's still carefully steering away from the nightmare that surrounded them, a past he had no place in.]

If I might be so bold, if you are concerned about ...not punishing yourself enough for assumed sins, that may be awaiting you upon returning from whence you have come. Here, is there harm in a reprieve?

[unsheathedfromreality]

[The shrike considers that question in an overlong silence. If he could want something, would he wish to give Trench a chance? It puts the question at an additional philosophical remove, making it all the harder to give it an answer even approaching truthful.

(It's long been his practice to stick to the truth where he can. Among all the other ethical considerations, it also made it harder to cross oneself later.)

Even with the reformulation, the question's intractable, so--he defaults to obligation.]

I do not know "want" enters into it, [he finally says, slow and thoughtful.] If the Waking World has taken me as its own creature, I am expected to make something of my time here. This is what we woke up knowing, not so? In this, I am obliged.

[It's still a task to be accomplished, pathetically. He knows that, and knows, if Thancred's in any way attentive to what's being said, this limitation in the shrike's thinking will be obvious.

So be it.]

But there is no harm in reprieve, no. Or it would not matter, if there were, for I cannot return myself to it. What will be, will be.

[It sounds hollow to his ears. Resigned.

But then resignation had tainted his every action since the moment they're standing in.

Something's finally moving out there in the black, gathering itself and stumbling away through that state more profound than mere darkness. He did survive, after all.]

[grandtheftperson]

[When the Ascian speaks again, his tone is bemused, something mimicked in the thoughtful cant of the pegasus' equine ears and slow flick of silken tail.]

Hm, and what is that 'something' you're to make your time out of, I wonder. Who is your champion here? .. No, your. ... Oh, hells. Your patron. I can't get the word right, it has sounds that aren't really found in my star. What do they do? What do they think you should be doing? If that's why you're here..

[Then perhaps that should be pursued! Whatever that may be, from feral savagery to dancing naked in spring-flower fields, or anything else.]

If 'tis spreading despair and misery then you have great experience in it by my guess. But mayhap they're not so harsh, like Madam Generosity and her winding warm paths in the snow. And even if your task is bringing suffering, then going about your business with a merry heart sees to that task more whole-souled than unwillingly dragging heels, and see your 'something' done sooner and better.

[But Lahabrea's willing to bet it's nothing so dismal. The wolf perhaps, or some patron who favors grim reminders.]