deercountry | April 2022: Belated Catch-All

Entry tags:

April 2022: Belated Catch-All

Who: Augustine the First and ____________ (This could be you!)
What: A little bit of everything, including Bone House introductions, Event threads, and who knows what else
When: Throughout April
Where: Specific locations listed in TLs.

Content warnings for this character: Explicit gore/body horror as a baseline, probably omnipresent (high-level necromancer); callous and amoral outlook on life (jaded AF); very high likelihood of mentions of death/suicide/weaponized-sexuality in basically any and all interactions.

Content warnings for this post: Violence against dinosaurs, talking venomous-snake omen, (eventually-)sexy Tether thread at the bottom

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

It's very impressive, to see something the size of a shuttle perch on the top of a lamp-post and, apparently, just hang out and chill there for a while. It's a bit of a question, really; are these things just terribly buoyant? Are they even solid? The little orbs of light seem to be — more or less — and as Augustine has walked around Trench, slowly building up his mental map and awareness of this strange city and its strange inhabitants, he's certainly collected a fair number of those orbs — they're pretty, and why step on them if they're underfoot when he can collect them instead? They are, in fact, filling up space in his one single bag, and eventually he'll just have to kick them aside (or go back to the house in Gaze, and empty his bag, before going back out) if he doesn't want to step on them.

The massive butterflies themselves, however, are fascinating. They're brighter than the omnipresent green moonlight, for all that they've got the same shade; they seem to enjoy rooftops at least as much as they enjoy the lamp-posts, but that isn't nearly as amusing an image to look upon. Houses, after all, aren't meant to be lamps; having the built-in light be drowned out by this giant parade-float of a butterfly, and its bright green glow, though? Hilarious! What's not to like?

No matter how much Augustine is looking, as he walks around — alone, as it happens, because he has yet to figure out how to call his Omen on purpose, and Alfred is currently enjoying the relative freedom Trench has granted the fragments of his subsumed soul by means of exploring on his own — his eyes remain the same: a steady, ashen grey. This isn't to say that he isn't noticing when other people, staring, start to have the same green light shining in their eyes in a strangely reflective way, of course. After ten thousand years, he's generally quite good at perceiving little out-of-place details, as soon as he knows what details are supposed to be in place —

"A moment, there," he says, ambling close enough — being tall enough — to interrupt a Sleeper's stare. "Are you quite all right? You look a bit... checked out."

So, Augustine thinks: apparently April, in Trench, translates to "the month that involves glowing and/or fiery balls of light wandering around through the air, whether or not they pay attention to the restrictions of physics."

He thinks that the glowing balls that are small enough to be picked up — the ones he has picked up, when spotting them, often as not — the ones that can be picked up — are ~~probably~~ undoubtedly preferable to the ones that keep floating or flying around, occasionally featuring literal flames, looking like a display screen or open window between Trench and somewhere else. He's looked into a few of those; some seem innocuous, some pastoral, some heartbreakingly normal — heartbreaking at least in part because he couldn't actually get to the one that appeared to be a necropolis fast enough to try to pull anything useful out of it, before it had skittered off out of reach — while others appear intent on warping reality anywhere near them, and better not even to look too closely at them or their contents.

One lets out a truly horrific collision of a sound, missing only the sound of water-that-isn't-water to feel as though it's ripped straight from his own memories — when Augustine looks for that one, there is in fact some sort of massive station falling and collapsing, just as he expects, except that this station appears to have been located inside a gravity well, close enough to have had multiple access points from the ground below. It, too, seems to be intent on spitting small glowing balls into Trench; this is preferable to spitting, say, 'molten metal girders' or 'fast-moving chunks of concrete', Augustine supposes. The balls are... not inert — not exactly — but they also don't appear to be particularly active. The first one he picks up is blue, and feels vaguely damp, and as though it's waiting for something, and that's... it. A red one feels sort-of warm, and also expectant, and unwilling to do anything except be warm and expectant. There are quite a few of them around; he picks up the ones he sees, because maybe someone will know what to do with them...?

Another, a little later, offers up a hair-raising animal screech, a rending crunch of teeth, just that sort of average day-in-the-life soundtrack — maybe a little daunting, when it's almost directly over your head, no? Only lightning-quick reflexes (darkblood-quick reflexes) get Augustine's hand outstretched to catch the fairly-sizeable... is that an egg? ... right before it would have smashed into your head. All of a second later, that giant egg is shoved into your hands, so his are free to catch the second one trying to smash into either or both of you. So! That happened. Wacky, huh? Right in time for another ancient-apex-predatory scream, and the very tooth-filled maw of a giant reptilian monster to try jamming its way through the portal after those eggs...

So: it turns out this strange planet-side, ocean-side City of Trench ~~Warfare~~ has a Library. Of course it does, Augustine thinks: why wouldn't it. Undoubtedly better for the books not to be at risk of imminent vaporization in the event of a solar flare, for that matter, even if the ocean means there's going to be a pervasive dampness that the Librarians — Archivists, whatever — must always battle, in their fight for preservation.

Still, it's surprisingly soothing, not simply pleasant, to be surrounded by the Smell of Musty Old Books once again, for the first time in so many centuries. Millennia, really. Augustine wanders around, exploring, fingertips trailing feather-light across spines — book spines — without taking anything in particular down from the shelves; just getting acquainted, overall, really.

It's practically idyllic, up until he sees someone he knows, which promptly spoils the entire endeavor. The fact that it's Harrowhark — sitting at a table, poking at a ... is that a tablet in her hand? — is somehow both entirely predictable and entirely unexpected. Why wouldn't he see Harrowhark with a tablet in her hand? Well, because she was one of the new Lyctors, and a broken one at that; if the original Lyctors hadn't even been particularly willing to trust Ianthe with a tablet that had all of the Cohort's moves and information on it, how much less would they have been willing to trust her?

And yet: for all that it's oddly shaped, that thing in her hand definitely seems to be acting like a tablet, or at any rate she definitely appears to be interacting with it as if it's a tablet.

He takes a seat at the table, opposite her, and watches. Wordlessly.

(Because he's an asshole.)

Paul accepts the egg thrust at him with reflexes that, while not nearly as fast as the shadow-swiftness of Augustine's, are still honed to the edges of human capacity. It's these same reflexes that have him dancing backwards on light, booted feet as the massive scaled creature attempts its pursuit, his eyes wide and flickering with barely suppressed moonlight.

"Augustine," he says, his voice not raised but still distinctly urgent, "This seems like a good time for a demonstration of theory."

So much for a peacefully enlightening walk. Paul pivots on his heel to set the egg down on the closest soft patch of ground, and then his long, pale knife is in his hand like another kind of magic, for all the good it will do. He glances back at the animal making a disturbing amount of progress through the portal and mutters something profane under his breath, tugging up his left sleeve to reveal the cross-hatched scars on the back of his wrist.

Okay, so, first question: how far away had Augustine even been, when Yet Another Orb-ish Object started to fall out of a floating portal? Had he even registered that it was Paul's head he was preventing from getting an egg wash, before darting across the square at a dreamlike speed? — no, and also that's a second question anyway.

(Would it have made a difference, if he had realized it was Paul? ... probably not ...)

Augustine would like to have a goddamn moment, here, to examine this very strange and heavy and alive egg in his hands — and instead, Mr Predatory Megafauna has to come screaming over here, as if anyone asked for a giant saurian opinion to get interjected into the afternoon, what the hell! Augustine's egg does not get set on the ground; he also doesn't try to put it in his knapsack.

(A good call, as it wouldn't fit easily through the opening; think watermelon in a produce bag.)

Instead, a membrane grows around the egg — a new one, that is, one that looks a lot more like a fresh, untanned leather (read: skin) than a hard shell — spreading and multiplying and swaddling it into a pouch of its own, manifesting a strap that loops itself over Augustine's head and one shoulder, and then, well, his hands are free to reach for rapier and smallsword.

Most of his attention is on the Fuck-Off Big Monster, but he does spare one very brief glance at Paul, paired with an acerbic "Oh, is it, do you think? Was there any particular theory or theorem you wanted to see demonstrated, just at the moment?"

(For now, it seems, only the incredibly pointy snout is making it through the portal; as small as its cranium is, it's enough larger to keep the whole head from entering Trench.)

Edited 2022-04-28 02:42 (UTC)

There's too much happening for Paul to expend breath on laughter, but the slanted slice of his closed mouth grin suggests it.

"I'm sure you know better than I do what would be appropriate," Paul demurs, slipping sideways to present two incompatible targets for the creature to choose from. The prospect of violence may have made him rudely pragmatic, and he has enough space in his thoughts as he calculates angles and estimates the creature's reach based on its movement to spare for wondering what it might be like to truly be all but untouchable in a fight. He's seen Teacher heal from an injury that would have been overkill for any fragile human body; he recalls the devastation wrecked on his pale peach ghost.

Paul is human in many of the ways that count. His ability to survive harm is one of them. Social graces are one of the things he's been trained to discard in a fight, alongside conscience and hesitation, the whole of his self refining down to the edge of a knife.

How different, to be past those mortal concerns. To know that you will persist in spite of whatever the world might throw at you, however toothed and clawed and wrathful.

He really does want to see whatever Augustine finds appropriate, in this context, but he's already learned something new.

Potentially a misstep (hah): Paul has ended up fairly close to the egg that Almost Fell On Him, and that he left safely out-of-the-way (originally) on the ground. (Hopefully he won't actually step on it.) Meanwhile, of course, Augustine is wearing the other one, in a big fleshy sack that's hanging near his waist — well, hip, anyway, maybe he can shift it around closer to the small of his back if it comes to that, and maybe, maybe then it will look a little bit less like — well, let's just say maybe it'll be less eye-catching and leave it at that. Two eggs; two humans (or close enough). And one big tooth-filled maw, trying, trying to get at them, top jaw, bottom jaw, both jaws together except that they're pinned shut like that, but maybe — maybe it can sort of shove itself, hard enough, to fit more through, and then it can reach the eggs, or these little meaty rat-things, like elves but squishier, gosh it sure does love them even if it can't remember what they're supposed to be called...

Augustine, long and slender toothpick-blades in each hand, is so quick and light on his feet as he circles around opposite Paul, trying to get underneath or behind that portal — trying to stand, essentially, where the dinosaur itself is standing — that he might as well be an elf (at least to anyone who's ever watched the Lord of the Ring movies and laughed at the way Legolas walked around on top of the snow while everyone else flailed around in it up to their waists or higher, or possibly to the dinosaur, whether or not the dinosaur is fond of watching movies, given that this particular dinosaur very well may have encountered beings that self-identified as elves already, at some point in its life). The view, from behind the portal, is utterly nauseating, mostly because of how quickly it varies; it's also fascinating, from an anatomist's perspective, but if one were to ask Augustine he certainly wouldn't identify as one such — still, most necromancers looking at this view would probably also think it was pretty cool to be able to observe the structures of a living dinosaur's head through a mobile frontal section.

Augustine, on the other hand, seems more intent on making its teeth fall out.

Not all of them — not yet, at any rate — but there's a quiet bouncing pattering sound, below the portal, as a growing collection of variable dentition falls to the ground. There is also, now, a growing pool of blood, mixing with the saliva that was already being sprayed around — as the dinosaur's attempts to stuff its head through the portal become more frenzied, leaving traces of feather and scale to drift through the air, which is growing pungent with the reek of burning keratin.

The teeth rattle together, and then start to fall up, back into the air, turning gelatinous — malleable — as they go; it's not entirely unlike watching a video-in-reverse of someone spilling bones or dice from a cup, really. They meld, into a very brief, steep flight of steps — smoothed out enough that none of those all-too-sharp edges are part of the tread — and seem to settle and solidify, just in time: in a larger spray of blood, the dinosaur finally succeeds in shoving more than just his jaw through the portal, at the expense of a great deal of his hide; he bellows in slowly-comprehended agony, directly pointed at Paul; and Augustine runs toward the portal, feet light and certain on those toothy steps, spearing both blades into the small and spongy mass of the dinosaur's brain just as it appears. He gives them a sort of whisk-y movement, stirring them about, and it's just as well that brains tend not to have any real fibrous connections since neither of those blades is really meant for cutting, but whatever, it's better than letting the blades continue their stab deep enough to lodge in bone and have Augustine hang his body weight from them, to destroy the brain. That would include the all-too-real risk that the blades would be damaged or destroyed, as well.

Instead, he drops, and manages to make his landing into a very neat roll that misses most of the gruesome puddle, along with not damaging the egg he's carrying around or stabbing himself with either of his blades — coming up about a quarter of a circle away from Paul, still. And he spits, as he straightens, and wipes his chin off (ineffectively) on the shoulder of his shirt. "Oh, now that just tastes vile," he complains — and never mind how he looks so terribly alert and focused, just at the moment, rather than as if he's looking at life down a ten-thousand-year-long tunnel. "Holding steady, are we?" is directed at Paul, more than at the dinosaur.

(Probably.)

So here's a fun fact: there's a bedroom on the ground floor of God's house, and as of late, it hasn't really been occupied. Oh, someone might crash there, for a night or two, if needed — but it's really just been the downstairs guest room, hasn't it?

But since very shortly after Paul's birthday party, that door has been kept closed — has been warded closed, even, in the very-firmly-locked, hand-eye-coordination-doesn't-believe-in-grasping-doorknobs-anymore way — for days and days, with no audible sign of occupancy any time Gideon, at least, has walked past. They aren't wards that recognize her, either — no thoughtful yielding to her presence, whether or not she'd notice such a thing.

So it is, presumably, all the weirder when the door opens, with her looking right at it, and then Augustine the First walks through, as if the last time she saw him he hadn't been disappearing forever into the all-too-toothy mouth of Hell — no, walking as if he's just going to calmly walk past her to get to the kitchen for a fresh cup of tea.

He pauses, though, and looks at her from a few feet away, head to toe and back again, and says: "Oh, it's you, isn't it."

Paul barely recalls that he should stay out of the way, and so much for the pressures of mortality providing focus - although there's an argument to be made, one he would make, that he is focused on the most dangerous thing in this conflict.

He's seen necromancy before. He's watched Harrowhark pull apart pieces of the Leviathan like so much saltwater taffy, siphoning the life from it in great gouts of thalergy she poured into Gideon. The dismantling, the pooling of liquefied teeth, is an extension of a principle he understands, though no less awe-inspiring (and awful) for it.

He's never seen a necromancer fight like that before. Between Harrow and Palamedes and the malign stick insect of Ianthe, Paul has begun to suspect a certain congenital frailty. God is an exception, but one would expect him to be. Augustine, on the other hand, struck Paul as someone more like the others in that way. The assumption is as deconstructed as the dinosaur's brain matter by the time Augustine rolls to his feet in a flow that would make Paul's mother raise one immaculate, approving brow.

"Yes, sir," is the only conceivable answer, crisp and automatic; in a feathered creature like their twitching, lobotomized friend, this might look like the folding back of a crest in deference. In Paul, it looks like - a thing Augustine is likely used to seeing in eyes turned towards him in the wake of danger, because it's one thing to know, and another to see. Reverence takes on another meaning in the presence of a Saint, however slicked in fluids they are.

In the wake of said lobotomy — for all that rather more than one lobe of the terrible creature's brain has been ruined by those blades — Augustine's attention remains on that protruding head anyway, sparing the faintest of sidelong glances at the boy, just long enough to make any eye contact at all, long enough to see and mark that heightened reverence-or-deference — well, and that's fine and all, anyway; perhaps he'll offer fewer irreverent prompts now, hmm?

But the dinosaur is still an issue, even with its brain scrambled; there are still far too many teeth in that open-jawed mouth, which is still snapping at them — at Paul — albeit in a less-directed, more-random fashion. Or, perhaps, that makes it more terrifying, and not less?

More and more of the head is appearing, with more and more blood and gore and burned-keratin reek from the hideous edges of the portal — carving through feather and scale and flesh like the proverbial hot knife encountering butter, except without the cauterizing effects one might expect. There's something about the progression, though, that has Augustine staying where he is, ready and wary and monitoring but not striking again; something about the way it seems almost as if the body is staggering, moving forward in the absence of instruction to stop moving forward but not out of a desire to continue; something about the way the head is no longer twisting around on its neck like an all-too-aware raptorial creature, but rather almost hanging, forced at a certain angle by the portal, perhaps —

Or maybe it's the fact that he's been watching these portals for days, and has already recognized the way its diameter is no longer steady and stable, and is only waiting for the moment when —

The portal snaps closed, decapitating the lobotomized dinosaur in the process. Immediately thereafter, it begins to fall, close enough — angled enough — that it will almost definitely crash and then bounce or roll directly into Paul, or the egg by his feet, or both.

Augustine's rapier is raised, almost in a salute; he makes no effort to bat the falling head away, or stab it again, with the blade; but he does peel two fingers from the grip, pointing them together, index and middle, at the head, which —

s t o p s

— and hangs in midair, four feet up from the ground, for a solid five seconds before slowly drifting down to rest neatly upon its bottom jaw.

Then, and only then, does the Saint of Patience walk around to view the back, and then graces the beast — his trophy — and Paul with a thin smile. "I always do appreciate it when the executioner doesn't miss the target," he offers helpfully, and then starts to pat through his pockets to see if he has anything approaching a clean handkerchief left.

Gideon has learned not to fuck around with a locked door. She's from the Ninth House. That's, like, the whole point. So she doesn't check the wards, and doesn't ask who lives there. It's none of her business.

When she sees Augustine emerge from it, one day, she wishes she hadn't. Augustine does not seem particularly thrilled to see her, either, so at least they're on the same page.

"In the flesh." Ha-ha. Funny. Gideon's voice is dry as bone, as she gives him a sarcastic little wave. "How was Hell?" Asked in the tones of someone who absolutely does not care how Hell was. "It's still up for debate whether or not your Lord took the kid in the divorce. So you haven't really missed anything."

Funny thing is: Augustine cannot actually play the game of How I Met Your Mother, Gideon, because he never did — and so, instead, there's a little bit of actual curiosity (or the appearance of actual curiosity), a little bit of speculation (or the appearance of speculation), and a little bit of eyebrow-wrinkling skeptical startlement (okay, no, that one's completely legit), as he continues looking her over (now with bonus Sarcastic Little Wave).

Augustine chooses not to answer the question.

"Arguably speaking, of course, he might have been the only one with a valid claim... excepting the way I do believe you're supposed to have reached your majority, thereby making you a legal adult who is perfectly capable of taking your own self in the divorce — always assuming you aren't too busy with Harrowhark."

Not answering the question doesn't mean he isn't going to parry, of course. Cuttingly.

As it were.

(Except: he mostly just sounds blandly cheerful about it; there's nothing overtly threatening, in his tone or his expression either one, even when mentioning her necromancer.)

"I suppose it depends on how long he's been trying to figure out if he did take you, really."

So: this is new. The method of this test, anyway. The test itself is the same shit, different day.

John sits in his study, the door cracked ajar— it often is, meant in invitation that none of his wayward teens will ever take— and inspects the faint patina of silver over the whorls of his fingertips. He can feel it spreading. He'd tracked the sensation secondhand, watching another man's body turn metallic, and at the time he'd been puzzled and a little concerned. With decent men and women dropping of spooky magical maladies left and right, it's easy to be puzzled and a little concerned.

When they sic the same on him, it's a different story. It's a chess game. They know he can wrangle the symptoms if he can just crack the disease. This is a case study with a ticking clock. This is their power against his human body; a prod at John the Sleeper, testing the protection of John as God; this doesn't read as a threat so much as a dangled hint and a distant laugh.

There is a silhouette of a man on the sofa at his back, statue-still and the color of shadow on granite. John ignores him. They've thrown worse ghosts in his face already; they won't shake him with his own.

Alfred has always been far more patient than Augustine — willing to wait longer to be born, willing to wait longer to be resurrected, willing to wait longer, in general, for whatever results he sought, throughout a long (but maybe not too long) life. None of this means that he was expecting to have some fragment-of-his-self splintered off from his multi-millennial subsumption into his brother's soul; none of this means he's too stupid to take advantage of being self-actualized again, and explore.

Trench is fascinating, when you're a shadowy dark-brown self-propelled tube. He manages to fit virtually everywhere he wants to go — if, maybe, not all at once — and in most of them, is either completely overlooked, or identified as hmm, that's probably an omen, since I don't THINK there have been any other reports of Flying Snakes this month, and left alone to his explorations. Sometimes, he explores closer to home: he watches Augustine, and John, and the other residents of this house, awake or asleep, interacting with each other or operating solo. It's easy to find shadows he can disappear in, when he isn't limited to the floor, and isn't limited to any particular shape — long and thin, short and round, both at once? He can coil up however the hell he wants, and does, and watches, and tastes, and listens, and learns.

(Sometimes, he even shares what he observes with Augustine: thoughts and concepts dumped into his mind, dreaming or awake, or maybe a grip or nudge to an elbow or rib, as his brother walks down one street or another, steering him over this way that he might discover something from his own perspective; sometimes he is more patient, with the secrets he discovers, sharing them only with other Omens — like the way Ortus's shed got decorated so brilliantly — or with whatever person he happened upon, whether or not that person knows he now shares their secret.)

Perhaps it isn't a surprise that he spends a great deal of his time watching God, from one crack or crevice in His study or another. He loves John intently, perhaps even as much as he has always loved his older brother; loves Him enough that he was the first to sacrifice his own life, laying it down as in the old parable — like coats in the mud — that his brother might walk beside God without suffering the touch of either Time or Death, to give Him the right hand He needed, loyal and dependable whatever the task might be, for all of their future. The fact that it took a mere ten thousand years, give or take, for Augustine himself to choose to turn away from that, has given Alfred pause; and yet, even now, he knows his brother, has been part of his soul the whole time —

So it must be John, who has changed somehow, for Augustine to feel that he had to withdraw, to act against God; and Alfred has always been far more patient than Augustine — so he waits, and he watches, and he studies God with great deliberation and the patience of an embodied soul that does not need to sleep or eat or tend its flesh in any other way, that he might come to truly see and comprehend what has happened to the mind of the Man who Became God, the God who Became Man, the Man who apparently Became a Real Asshole —

And then, maybe, he'll decide if he wants to do something about it.

Today, though — today is strange. Today is reminiscent of Peter Pan, but God's Study isn't the bedroom of Wendy Darling, and the needle-fine fangs gracing the front of Alfred's mouth/maw/tube-opening are not at all sufficient to sew a shadow back on; just as well, maybe, that Alfred spies a fine-lined strand of something, linking God to this silhouette-shadow only one seat away, reclining in identical comfort and ease.

Rubbing thumb across fingertips, in identical, duplicated movement — synchronized, but not mirrored; each hand in turn is lifted, studied, settled again, and only the fact that Alfred is a fragment of a human soul that's been extruded like so much scaly toothpaste into a shadow-shape, himself, keeps the effect from being unbearably horrible, letting it stay at a mere profoundly disquieting, instead.

He slithers, silent as snow, suspended in space as if swimming through surf, until he can settle around the shoulders of God — anxious eyes (so much black and oilslick-brown, in them, some of the best parts of the two men he loves best in all the universe, for all that his eyes hold nothing white at all, iridescent or otherwise) angling toward the sinister shadow: duplicate this, you bastard!

His tongue flicks through the air, tasting, smelling, trying to understand; there's too much metal, too much magic he doesn't know, doesn't recognize —

Does God?

Does God know what to do, to make it stop?

(Does he need to get his brother?)

What it speaks to that Paul's motion is towards the egg instead of safety is a thing he can evaluate for himself later, in long still moments after dark. If he wanted to flatter himself, he might call it kindness, but as he crouches by the egg and witnesses another small miracle at Augustine's hand, his attention lies along the cutting edges of massive teeth.

He cannot resist comparison. He cannot tell himself that Augustine averts his destruction out of any particular kindness. What he can do is wonder if he's shown enough of his own teeth to be judged potentially useful, the way that Paul rests his hand on the titanic shell of an egg that could harbor all types of cutting edges of its own.

Better useful than not. He straightens to his feet as he sheaths his knife, picking carefully through gore as he produces a clean square of cloth from inside his light coat and holds it out in offering. It's not much of one, but these are the small gestures that he's coming to rely on, since he has so little else to give. (He is his mother's son more and more by the day.)

"You knew that was going to happen," he says, not in question, flicking his gaze to the fallen head, "The portal closing." Then, coming back, voice softer and more sincere, "Thank you for the demonstration."

By the time Paul reaches his side, white flag of a handkerchief outstretched to surrender, Augustine has already enacted near-field entropy on his clothing and person, turning saurian gore into so much dust and ash to shake from his robe and clothing.

He takes the handkerchief anyway, with a small smile that's easily recognized, even if Paul has never seen it on his face — the hint-of-pride smile of a teacher or parent glad to see that the student (or child) has remembered an important lesson about good manners and polite behavior, more or less. He uses it, as well — polishing the dust from his brother's blades, with the care and love they've earned over millennia as the only way he could ritualize his remembrances, but — well, never mind that, Paul wouldn't know any of that ancient history, and why would he care about it anyway?

(He may, of course, have already registered the way the house in Gaze has gained a new flying snake of an Omen, or the way that snake has been keeping him — all of them — under observation; but why would he have any reason to link these facts, yet?)

It's only after his blades are cleaned and sheathed — after the handkerchief, now marred with streaks of greasy ash, is folded up and handed back to its owner — after Augustine has lit a fresh cigarette and taken a long drag off it — that he answers the not-a-question.

"I knew," he agrees — comfortable in it, not smug. "I've been trying to get used to this place, wandering about a bit — days, now. They get a bit..."

He pauses, doodling in midair with the cig: a circle, a few times over, getting more and more irregular and zig-zag with each repetition. "Wobbly, I suppose, just before they blink out — whatever it is that's keeping them stable, it admits when it's done, whether that's to make sure you can regret the absence before it's even gone, or know when you'll be making your escape, or something else."

His face is somber, grim, staring at the head or at a memory, long enough for another drag — and then he blinks, and snaps his gaze up to Paul, and offers him a crooked smile; not quite a grin, nor a smirk, but possibly a smile that hasn't entirely decided what it wants to be, for once.

"You're welcome, of course," he finishes lightly. "Lucky you that we had such a helpful volunteer for the demonstration, hmm?"

He reaches out with one toe to kick lightly at the back of the dinosaur's jaw, free hand coming down to the hilt of his rapier for balance — and then there is a very faint crinkling sound, and his expression turns distinctly pained, in a dammit, not AGAIN way.

His senses are so dulled he feels blind, in this place. Maybe because he is so far from her, pried apart by the distance of someone else's River; maybe because he's a ghost of himself, an impression taken of a soul, a fragment in some sense he hasn't yet unpicked; maybe because he is now within the domain of other, greater gods. The rules don't work the same, here. God has been humbled. He can't feel the hum of every soul on the planet around him; he can't feel the planet around him; he can barely feel out the edges of the city against the disorienting spirit-bulk of the sea.

They want him to be John. He gets that. He gets it in a fun new way every single day.

Today it's the reminder that, for all that he can feel all the kids moving around the house and the black-hole vacuum of his Lyctors, he barely has a handle on Omens at all. The blood he can scrabble at, but the smoke and twist of magic is someone else's miracle. When the snake settles around his shoulders, it surprises him, and that in itself is a horrible novelty.

He doesn't show it much: a tensing of muscle, a pause in his breath. It smooths out into a faint sigh, and he wilts forward to rub at his face with tinged-grey hands.

"Thanks, mate." He says it soft and low, heavy with— something. A lot of unspoken somethings. Ten thousand unspoken somethings, a whole aching ocean just beneath the surface. He tilts his head to look out from his fingers, and from this position, rumpled and slump-shouldered and weary, God regards one of the men he killed.

He looks at the snake as though he means to drink in every detail, to commit every glint of scale to memory. He looks at it like a miracle.

"I'll figure it out." This he says in the aimless way he has so often said it before: don't worry, don't sweat it, I'm God. It usually came in response to his First or Second Saint throwing up their hands at him. Even before the Sainthood, there wasn't much difference— except they half-believed it because they loved him, and not because they so desperately had to. They didn't yet have nothing else left.

He wonders if this fragment of a dead man remembers. He looks into those bright eyes and wonders how much is left.

At first, Alfred is pleased: he watches this shadow-form tense at his weight, as he feels the Emperor tense under his weight, but no second shadow-of-a-snake fills in his space, leaving him triumphant, vindicated.

Thanks, mate — it's a phrase he's heard ten thousand times if he's heard it a hundred; it rolls in one earhole and or the other, for all that out does a pretty cool loop all the way down and up his (very long) spine in the middle. He's busy, for the moment, making sure that his Emperor is protected, that he's safe from this strange and alien menace —

I'll figure it out, the Emperor adds, in that tone, and that serpentine head whips round to stare at Him, mustering every single ounce of indignant «Are you fucking shitting me right now, My Lord?» he possibly can.

(... wait, was that out loud? Oops!)

«Did you just miss how You-damn creepy that thing on your couch is?! — My Lord.»

Alfred considers God, for a very brief moment, in which he cannot raise his eyebrows in a disgusted expression, because he doesn't have them anymore.

«— wait, no, I take it back; this is pissing me off way too much to end my commentary with a polite title. Seriously? What the fuck!»

Augustine, in turn, may have noticed the hunger that flickers over Paul's face at any acknowledgment from the man he calls Teacher, one that finds its echo when Augustine accepts the handkerchief to clean his blades. He hasn't connected the snake to anything but Augustine himself, yet, unaware of what it means to be a Lyctor at all beyond an elevated state of being, but he understands the weight of a weapon.

(Sometimes he dreams of swords asleep on black sand under dark waves. The knife now hidden under his coat never sleeps, only dreams.)

Paul is more a boy than he ever lets himself think he is, and there are few vulnerabilities so pronounced as the unacknowledged ones. He follows Augustine's explanation with barely less gravity than he showed at the demonstration laid out at their feet, and when Augustine offers him that crooked smile a smaller mirror of it tilts Paul's own mouth. He fixes it to his mind with a reflexive twitch of anchor-memory, a sliver of the man who must exist underneath the facade - and it shifts to a frown at the crinkling and the pain.

"Nephele's last revenge," he says, sympathetically, suppressing the urge to ask if Augustine is all right, or if he needs help. A broken or battered toe is well within the realm of a Lyctor to heal, from his understanding.

"That's where I think it came from, at least," he adds instead, crouching down beside the toppled head. It's still warm under his hand when he reaches out to touch it, heated by an alien sun. "I hope this isn't what ends up happening to us."

The look Paul gets, when he glances back up at Augustine from beside the head (large enough to dwarf him, really, at least while he's crouched like this), is... blankly uncomprehending, in only the way someone who did not just break his toe could be.

Also, the way someone who has no idea what Paul is talking about.

"Nephele?" he repeats, questioning — all while pulling his rapier back out of its sheath, and carefully tucking it under his arm while he unhooks its scabbard from his belt; a real song-and-dance sort of production, this, for all that it's done with a minimum of fuss or actual production value — but what use is a weapon's sheath if it's easy to remove from a person? Augustine has done this ten million times, if he's done it ten thousand; his muscles know these actions better than most others; et cetera, et cetera, whatever, once the sheath is free he's tipped it over, opening to (a relatively dry patch of) the ground, and starts briskly twisting, shaking, and tapping at it, until a small, crumpled (and pierced) piece of paper flies out.

"What are you talking about?" he asks lightly, in a tone that probably makes it equally clear that he has no damn clue, that he's genuinely curious, and that if Paul decides he's Keeping Secrets at this late juncture, well, that's stupid, but it's his choice and Augustine won't actually push — and begins the reversal of the procedure, putting his scabbard back on his belt, putting his rapier back in its scabbard, not wrapping the strange scrap of note around the blade again; not this time.

Never mind that every time he's misplaced the damn thing, it's ended up back in his rapier's scabbard — ever since he first found it, in that very strange abandoned house with the evil attic.

The Smell of Musty Old Books has always drawn Harrow to it; it's so easy and predictable to find her here that one might forget that she spends a good half her time with Teacher doing healing work and Blood Ministry.

Of the other half, half of that is probably here.

The scents are familiar, and the way the light falls on the shelves, and the dampness and the crowdedness—it's like her Ninth House library just enough, and there's always so much to learn that she's got to perpetually take notes on. It's much easier to do that with the Omni than on paper (paper) ...

While she may not be able to sense a Lyctor's presence the way she can the average living being, paranoia and general distrust fill in where necromantic sense cannot; she is still just aware enough of Augustine's eyes on her to lower her hand and look up from her Omni to the gaze that seems to have fallen upon her. Point for Harrow: there is someone looking at her who she cannot necromantically perceive, indeed. It is not an unattended Omen, which may have been what she expected.

Harrowhark mirrors Augustine's expression back at him with the intensity turned down to microexpression for approximately five seconds, then picks her Omni back up.

Technically speaking, of course, taking Augustine's bland expression and turning down the intensity probably just results in a fairly blank expression — for better or worse.

"It's awfully tempting to throw a quotation at you, here, about books," Augustine remarks, eventually. "But I've never been as prone to that as Teacher, so I suppose I shan't start now."

(Theoretically.)

He tilts his head enough to start reading the spines of the works she's collected, or at least the visible ones, rather than actually... asking.

The titles are semi-explanatory in most cases: they are Trench medical texts, or Trench's equivalent thereof. They are about blood and Beasthood, and one of them is very specifically The Use of Marrow in Sleeper Anti-Corruption.

Harrow keeps up the blank expression.

But she says, in a tone as sepulchral and intense as Marshal Crux's, "From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore," in a way where it is nearly impossible to tell that she is being playful, and it may genuinely take Augustine a minute.

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April 2022: Belated Catch-All

Bone House [Gaze]: Everyone's Favorite Sketchy Uncle

1. Migration of Moonlit Butterflies

2. Wonderkind

[Harrow: the Archives, relatively early April]

cw: self-harm scars

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For Gideon

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3. A Rousing Game of Tetherball (for the Emperor Undying)

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