Trance of Ternion

Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Glenn » Mon Jan 19, 2015 9:15 am

They could have danced forever, a fairy dance, a goblin dance, a trap for both of them that they could have never expected. The memory, though, was faulty. Wasn't that a real sign of what this place had done to her? There were no wholly pure memories to construct such a trap out of. Everything began this way or ended this way. All roads led to this. Even so, it wasn't until the tendril passed through him that he was fully broken from the spell.

Gahald wasn't in his eyes but there was some bitter maturity there instead, one that mingled with a certain fondness towards her. The tendril, the spoiler to this party, to this plan, Myrken itself in the form of a creature dark and elridtch and so very, very vulnerable and with such a heart, connected them now. He saw her. She saw him. One was a story whose pages were burnt away, but that lived on in the telling. The other's pages had been drenched, and mold was starting to form, an infection. Between the two of them, though, there were enough unblemished pages to make a story of their own.

"You're a wonderful dancer, Genny. But not because of that, not dancing someone else's steps. You're clumsy," and the ball was shifting now. For a moment, a small moment, it was a different dance of his, the two of them running from rooftop to rooftop, first, and then second, through the secret passages of Darkenhold, a distraction opening up nothing less than Ariane Emory's room to them. There was always another challenge, another thing to prove to himself when really he was just trying to prove that he was alive. She was clumsy though, and he was there at every point, not to catch her but to help her up to start again. "you stumble," oh did she stumble. "You're a great dancer because you choose to dance anyway. You're a great dancer because you choose to get back up and dance again when you fall. You know what they might think, what they might say, and you dance anyway. Your way. For your reasons. I like you when you dance well, but when you dance bad, you're a treasure, Genny. A treasure worth stealing."
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Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Tolleson » Tue Jan 20, 2015 4:10 pm

Fortunately for them now, Catch had actually thrown a tantrum and accidentally lashed out that night. The real fault with the memory was that they were in it. Not just that they were in it, but that they were where they were within it. Perhaps in some small way she had purpose or knew without knowing. As a trap, it was too enticing to resist despite being fundamentally flawed, even in it’s most authentic state. Genny had seen the extravagant folly and feast at Darkenhold, the tea, the doilies; as memories went, they had been lucky for a Myrken ball.

Regardless it made the observation no less true, memories started and stopped, changed perspective and feeling, where once she was happy and herself, a moment later she was bitter and filled with righteous anger or fear. To tell the one from another was to tell the contents of a chest by the look of the key that would open it. Not practical, not impossible, but not easy, not by a long-shot.

So they are scavenged pages, scraps and half phrases that were hard to follow, broken, and burned. Skipping, gliding, and stumbling from one rooftop to another and through the corridors of Darkenhold. For a time the walls and floors and defeated locks are all Elliot.

You’re a wonderful dancer

“And you as well, but because you see past the steps, I think.”

“You feel them.”

Genny’s eyes flitted over the unfamiliar things as they ran by, but not all the halls are unfamiliar. Just ahead is Ariane herself, a firm grip at a memory Genny’s throat, holding her high against the wall.

Coughing as if affected by the ghost she stumbles and trips. Elliot might pull at her to get up, but now she is slow to rise, her lovely dress nearly all black, wind-beaten, and shredded in places from each time she had fallen. As if imagined roof tiles and the stone here could do such a thing.

“Even so, there is no where for you to steal me away to,” a wall formed several paces ahead and another several paces behind.
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Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Glenn » Tue Jan 20, 2015 4:33 pm

They were the bogeymen of Myrken Wood. Catch. Dhrinn. Ariane Emory. And somewhere, a veiled princess in a land that defied such finery and presumption. They were the touchstones of their lives; Solena, Burnie, It, Nova, Lamai, Agnieszka, Galacia, Calomel, Wynsee, Giuseppe, Jirai. Blocking points, stopping points, touchstones to take them in and out, from one memory to the next.

"This is wrong. It's not about me." In the end, though, there was just him and there was just her. In the end, they died alone. In the end, he had died alone, replaced, usurped, perverted by purity. In the end, she bled out, her sanity, her hopes, her dreams, her essence, and Zilliah watched her bleed, bandaged her but could not heal her. It shouldn't have been about him.

He was dead and she alive.

He knew himself and she was lost.

He had to know himself. All that held him together, save for a dreamwitch's regard and affection for a daring boy, was his strength of identity. Rhaena Olwak had torn it out of him, had gutted him of it to replace it with her own Faberge facade but it did not fall to ashes. It was here now, an inhuman creature of Myrken's making.

"It's not about me and it's never been about us. Never ever." In that moment, as they stopped, the walls coming in every closer, as he held her hand, a hand that was never truly relinquished after the dance, the words seemed to reflect and rebound off the walls, hitting her all at once. "You're too old. You're too lanky. Who likes red hair? You read too much. I'm free. You're too sentimental. You're damaged goods. You're not from here. You're too serious. You're an ancient soul and I'm a shining star." The walls reverberated his harsh words, a young man's inner hesitations, but it wasn't the sound that would be most striking. Instead, as the walls closed in, words appeared upon them, sprawled in red, in blood, up and down and every direction again and again.

"I love her." He read them, those three syllables impossibly repeated. "Jirai." He held his hand up and the walls stopped, a dreamthief awoken to his power, even if momentarily. "No, that's not right. Of course I love her but I'm in love with her too. I'm not in love with you, Genny, but..." The walls started to crumble away, and then slowly reform, becoming a horse to replace the nightmare he had lost. He died alone, but they weren't alone now. They were together, travelling through each other's memories, but more than that, through each other's spirits, each other's essences. He saw her now as he, bullheaded and obstinate, had seen so few in his entire life, not just through his own eyes, but into her heart as well. "I do think I love you too."
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Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Tolleson » Thu Feb 05, 2015 4:52 pm

Two creatures are they, so made and sustained by Myrken’s unrelenting madness. And what does he say? Love.

“Of course it is about you.”

The words he destroys are red and hurtful, but not so different from echoes she has heard before. Still, Elliot stopped them, the walls crumbling, freeing them from whatever prison might have formed around them. Now open, and free to nothing. To a darkness, to an empty, hollow place.

“You were stolen. You were broken into two,” just as she had been stolen and broken into a hundred different pieces. At least she had hope, however slight, however unlikely; she had a body, a mind, a home.

“What can we know of love?”

She held his hand not loosely or firm, just simply held him in the dust and settling stillness as his horse reformed.

“Love was my James, who left out of duty. Love was my friendship, my trust in Rhaena. Love was my faith in Myrken. Love doesn’t see us, it has left us, betrayed us, love has failed us. Yet you stand here, with all of these things, without expectation. Love is not deserving of you, Elliot.”

She was the scrap, the leftover. The forgotten and betrayed. The bitter, losing end.

But out of all of the realities of her situation, the voices and faces and madness; worse was the simple fact that she believed it all. Whether they were words written on a wall in blood or crudely carved into the flesh of her heart, it was her reality. Her love and humanity had been stolen, inch by inch. And for all of that she clung to the madness. Surely this was preferable to awareness in a world without love, without compassion, without feeling worthwhile. Wouldn’t she only become the heartless monster she feared?

Far in the distance a little bell chimed, glinting as if under moonlight. Little more than a speck across an enormous distance, it merrily bespoke hope, it cried for control and understanding. It called weakly through the darkness.

“If you fix it, I might destroy the one person you are in love with… and everything else.”
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Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Glenn » Fri Feb 06, 2015 12:59 am

She was the scrap? She was the survivor. He wasn't even that much. He was a book whose last page had been written that refused to end. She had been distilled into madness and fear and wrath. He was the unliving embodiment of stubbornness and youthful bullheadedness. She was power waiting to be unleashed and he was powerless in the face of everything.

If you ask someone born and raised in Myrken Wood their greatest fear, the answer would always be the same, to be helpless in the face of the darkness, to be unable to protect yourself, to protect those you love. This was a very real fear. How could someone fight back against kin crawling and climbing out of their graves, against a mindwitch who transformed one's very desire to fight into a desire to give in, or against the true horrors, the creatures that most people could barely imagine.

And there they were, she with power but a loss of structure, control, an oozing wound upon the face of the province that could destroy anyone that she might touch out of love or kindness and he just a memory with no ability to touch anyone or anything directly.

When you were as stubborn as Elliot Brown, however, powerless did not necessarily mean helpless, not if you refused to see it as such.

"I don't think you get it, Genny. It's not about whether or not you deserve love. It's about taking it. It's about making it." He would admit the latter as a possibility as well. He may have been a thief, but he was a denizen of Myrken Wood first and foremost. "We're given nothing in this world, least of all what we deserve. If you want love, you take it. You put yourself out there. You admit it and explain it. You give it and then if you're not given it back, you take it. And then you fight like hell to protect it. I failed, you failed. Love didn't fail us. We failed it." She didn't hold on tighter to her James and he was too blind to understand until it was too late. "I loved myself too much. You didn't love yourself enough."

She threatened him, threatened everything he cared about. His kindness, his attempts to make things right, even in the face of his powerless, would turn the world to fire and ash and she would be the light that burned. She offered him a very simple future and he denied it without consideration, as only he could. "No. She was made of lies. She was propped up by them. She hid behind them. She dressed in them. I look around here, Genny, and all I see is hard truth, okay? That's it. You couldn't escape to her world even if you tried, because you'd always know deep down, it was a lie. People wanted to believe the lie because it was prettier, because it was easier, because it was more pleasant. It hurt them to even touch anything else, to think about it. I know what that's like. To run away from the hurt and run towards what's easy." Across rooftops and away from pain and responsibility and everything else. He knew that well, as well as anyone, and he had plenty of time here imprisoned in the dreams of the Myrken populace to think about it.

"The world's changed. They've changed out there. There's no more accepting easy lies when there's a more worthwhile truth. I've seen them, their hopes and their fears. If I fix it, I don't know what it'll become, what you'll become, but it won't be that. It's worth finding out, Genny. It's worth so, so much. Maybe I can't take love now, but I know it when I see it, and you're capable of it like no one else. Maybe I can't make love honestly, but I damn well can steal your heart and share it with the world." The dreamscape started to crack and tear. It started to fizzle, the very darkness itself, and in its place was a door, and she knew well where it led. It did not matter how far away that pleasant itch of tinkling bells might have been. That door, attached to nothing and everything, would lead to it. He ran one hand through his own hair, shutting his eyes, exhaling. When he opened them again, they were full of a daring disregard, a youthful wildness, a rebelliousness that was the only power he had left. "Try to stop me if you can." And he reached for that handle.
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Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Tolleson » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:42 am

Had it been months or mere moments? Together they had fought in the summer glade over the prone body of a boy who only physically resembled the young man beside her now. They had argued, and talked, and danced, they had run over rooftops, destroyed words, the very idea of a thing, and they dared now to break the world in which they stood. It was more than she had ever done with any one person in the real world. Elliot had become her friend, honestly and truly.

If the entire purpose of life was having a passion for just one thing, one driving desire, one love, then the choice was to follow Elliot’s advice or parish from fear induced inaction. Within the span of a quick breath her hand raised too. She might have meant to stop him but as he went for the door’s handle her raised hand fell, covering his. She didn’t stop him; she joined him. It was solidarity.

Here, in the dissolving dark, you suddenly know, as if you have known all along:

The fae had shown her the labyrinth, the wolf, and the sweet, sick, honey-blood of the madman’s mind. It is nothing that words can express, it is an experience like witnessing beauty and tasting terror. Though Zilliah withstood, her mortal mind strained to comprehend, to rationalize, to squeeze the whole of another mind within the space where before only one had fit. And Catch had such a mind, filled with so many foreign memories and irrational conflict. Eventually though, the cracked, rigid confines of her mental capacity eroded like topsoil, easily pushed aside and even he fit. Accomplished only with diligent, deliberate training it had taken years, but space had been made. Tunnels had been carved, great hedge lined labyrinths, the library, halls that looked as Darkenhold, rooms that were Burnie’s office and the Dagger’s common room, the forest, entire beaches and an ocean that stretched as far as imagination. Every space skillfully crafted with what patience and control Rhaena had taught her. The places from her memory were easy to carve, but there were places that didn’t belong to her. Some were the Golben, the tea house, or other places she, herself, had never been. Vast and beautiful, it was a daunting landscape constructed out of necessity and intent, but so often used as a stage for half remembered things where she struggled with reconciling history, reality, and her own experience. It left her questioning; it had crippled her with a helplessness, fear and uncertainty, unable to trust her own senses and memory.

She felt the fear as all Myrkeners do, helplessness in the face of darkness and the inability to protect the people she did care about even when those people had stopped caring for her. But she was also the darkness and within that knowledge a greater, more base and fundamental fear had grown.

It was a fear that surpassed all of the shadows and nightmares, rooted in small seeds such as the memory of receiving a letter from her brother that left her abandoned in the once unfamiliar Myrken. Yet, it was a fear she faced each day, a silent endurance, a steady diligence that left her perpetually alone in the foreign places she herself had built.

Do you see her real strength, the great, quiet capacity to do everything she could in order to maintain a world where nothing changed?

Notions of hope, of love, even the deepest, most hidden and reckless, rage had begun to stir. It was the introduction of Elliot to this mind held in a vice, forcibly repressed and alone. And he wanted to unlock it, to open it; damn the consequence.

When the choice was to take love or lose it forever, her answer came simply.

“I will take it,” a chance, a risk, a willingness to fight, not just defend.

One of her hands he held, the other was held by her. A wild glance up from the knob caught his willful glance and reflected it back, laced with something else, something she had almost forgotten, trust.

“You came upon us as in dream. But I am not dreaming anymore. Elliot, you were an insufferable shit. But you are changed, you have grown, even here, and you are wonderful.”

Before the failing dreamscape crumbed entirely around them she pressed and pulled at the door handle that they might enter together.

“I will bring you back,” leaned in as if on the other side of the door might be a great force, she almost whispered, her tone implying she would do this or die trying.
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Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Glenn » Thu Mar 12, 2015 1:41 am

There was so fine a line.

It was a mercy for both of them that he was not nearly sophisticated enough to realize it. Rhaena Olwak had gutted his old memories and created new ones. He was the ghost in the aether, a dream image, a stamp, the dye left behind by a pressed flower. Now, though, through his intervention, Genny had something not dissimilar. Oh, she might not remember all of this in the morning, but she might, and even if she didn't, it would have an effect. This would change her forever. Rhaena Olwak had played god and here he was. He'd claim his intentions were different, but then she had claimed to only want the best for a boy who had been dealt an unfair fate.

Of course, the fact he had no idea what he was doing, that so much of the heavy lifting was Genny, not himself, that he was so lost and desperate and had only found this dream by chance? Well, it was not the same, but it was such a fine line.

And it was one that Genny now promised to walk as well. He was not just an image. He could change and grow, expand and contract. He was a soul trapped in a surreal world he did not make, and in this moment that lasted forever, through the desperate compassion and stubbornness of two people so thoroughly shaped and broken by Myrken, he found a soulmate.

He was insufferable still, despite her words, but he had grown through seeing the inner heart of so many and through losing so much at the very height of his youthful vigor. And she had grown the capacity to suffer so much more. All she had to do was find her own strength in the face of seeing those so much stronger than her falter. Her faith in the pillars that held up her world had been shattered. But in their infinite moment, he showed her that none of that mattered if you could just stand tall and hold up your own world yourself. You made your faith in this world. It wasn't that he had faith in her, because to Elliot Brown that wasn't important. What was important was that he knew she could have faith in herself, and now she did as well.

He smiled to her, making it as insufferable as humanly possible, but there was a twinkle in his eye that the smile couldn't reach, fond if exasperated. Their hands turned the knob in unison. Their hands opened the door.

And then he was gone and she was alone.

Genevieve Tolleson had the power to pull him back to his body, within reason, within range.

That body, however, was nowhere to be found in Myrken Wood.

She may have been grounded for the first time in over a year but Elliot Brown was adrift once more.
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Re: Trance of Ternion

Postby Tolleson » Fri Mar 13, 2015 7:53 pm

Those so much stronger than her had faltered. Were they ever, really, stronger?

When she wakes whatever candles had been were burnt through, the apartment is empty and cold. There are fresh tears on her cheeks and a damp patch left on her pillow. Elliot is gone. She is alone.

It was unexpected, impossible, but perfect. There were memories, some vague and others sensory and specific as if they had truly been in a real place in real time, together. In that time, everything had changed. Being alone was not loneliness and her faith had not been lost, merely misplaced. There had been something terrifying and empowering in finding a faith in herself; in knowing that she held the power that had once so readily been invested in others.

In this moment, she is aware of her heart beating, the soothing noises of life that comprise the silent night, and the quiet stillness within her mind; for the first time in a very long time her thoughts possessed clarity. Lying in bed she turns her head to see the half moon smiling wide at her from beyond the window whose curtains are spread.

Thank you, Elliot Brown.
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