Trance of Ternion

[Tolleson]

Zilliah’s wind had won, he had tamed the surge of a threatening storm. That was why he was here after all. Not that in this state she would know, not that she would understand. But now, around her, the breeze softened, even the lovely clover ceased movement; the flame that formed her hair began to slow and stop, as if time held it’s breath. The beat of her heart followed too, slowing and growing louder now, a gentle bass beneath them.

The once weeping Genny stood, her dismay subsiding slightly with her hand snatched. She looked at the hand on hers and at the boy it belonged to. And she held it, her fingers wrapping around his. Levitating, drifting up with him rather than be pulled along after him, she calmed.

But two of Genny remained.

Do you know what your brother feels?

“Tenny.”

Perhaps it is different, what she sees and what is. Her eyes softening might say it more than words or even the slight tightening of the grip she held upon the boy’s hand. To her, his hair is red and he is tall, even for his age. His freckle-covered face is a mirror of her own and suddenly this Genny is Elliot’s age, the flame of her hair fell to regular locks, long and wild. Her voice is soft, a mild plea; the tone familiar as if between two who have known one another all their lives.

“Don’t go.”

But two of Genny remained. And the scowling woman held him too. She was an anchor that sought to keep them planted or weigh him down. Her distaste soon hidden by a scarf warn from ear to ear, a lovely dress in red and gold, decorated with gems and small bells, replaces the tattered black.

[Pantha]

His patience with the boy is wearing thin. When he flits to and fro asking questions, he just stands there staring forward. There is the feeling that he is watching, always watching, even with his back turned. More cryptic words, so, so many of them, and none of them give him any insight as to why this is happening. “Enough.” Asking Genny about her brother is the last straw.

The world around them becomes blinding white and all the is left when all parties can focus their eyes again is a white-washed world of nothing, Elliot and the two Gennys left to float hand in hand in the nothingness minus a fae. The vast emptiness is split before them as the great violet eye yawns open to stare at them. Both incarnations of the girl will feel only peace and warmth in the light of the fae's watchful eye as the process of bringing her mind back to the waking world has begun. Elliot, however, will hear the sound of the fae's voice as the faintest of sighs on the wind. -You are a foolish boy, too foolish for your own good. What we do is our business. You dare come here and question my motives and confuse her more? Give me a reason not to wake her.-

[Glenn]

He had gotten complacent. It was easy, even natural, for a teenager just on the verge of escaping those years to do so, especially when he was met with success and freedom. This was a brand of success and certainly a brand of freedom, even if it was the Myrken sort, twisted and bent. He had visited the dreams of those with strong personalities or strong horrors in their past, but never with the sort of power he dealt with here, never with the sort of paradoxical tumult that came with two dreamers sharing far more than they ought to. He'd gained a level of control over his environment, something to be used to stabilize or disrupt. That was snatched from him now, by Zilliah, yes, but even by Genny.

"Hey, come on." He sighed, first to the Genny floating with him, the one he actually cared to talk to, the one that he might have felt a bit of a kindred connection to a bit, the girl gobbled up by this province and its machinations. That was a dead end though, an snake eating its own tail that would always take her back to her own insecurities.

Instead, he looked to the other, the second of the third, whose hand he also held, the anchor. "You'll listen to me at least, right? I'm..." But then the world slipped away.

"Hey," because Zilliah was threatening, because he had the hand of a girl and a woman, and because this wasn't going to end like this. He squeezed the hand of the woman, the stern Genny. "I dare, Zill. It's what I do. I'm Elliot Brown. It's what I do, and guess what, maybe it's what she does too. You got power too, right? I can feel it," to the woman again. "That same sort of stupid power that messed everything up. Maybe the same sort of stupid power that he's got. He thinks he's the sun and the moon and that elf face of his means we got to do what he says but I say you do what you think is best so you're not just going to take this right? There's three of us and one of him and I say we outvote him and talk if we want to talk and maybe we can talk with him too because I don't get too many chances to talk to people I know anymore and stupid Zilliah is running from some stupid decision he made and I don't think we ought to let him because you don't seem the sort to let anyone get away with anything, not him, not me, not you." The words were strange, falling upon them all like percussion, not a hammering sound but instead a rhythm, looping around so that all the sounds landed within a matter of moments, before unveiling like an accordion. Somehow, it all made sense though, far more so than his usual way of rambling on sentences that made no sense.

[Tolleson]

Just whose dream is this.

Zilliah was strong, he was lovely and certainly apt. His deft fingers wove thoughts and songs unheard by ears. He painted entire worlds for her in dreams with graceful strokes that swept away nightmares, hiding them under a rug or beneath a floorboard that they might be forgotten.

Did somewhere they set in a kettle to boil, with only time before she cried out?

The direction was Zilliah’s to be sure, but the dream? Did they share a space between both their minds? Or did he rest in hers, a watchful guardian keeping contained the pieces that sought to spill.

Despite how fluid his movement, how gentle his crafting of worlds, he was not always so delicate. His temper got the better of him, even now and the world is filled with a searing light.

“Elliot Brown,” the words came plainly, with realization, with purpose and in a blink, both the girl and the woman are gone.

Zilliah might feel the void that is left, but he was beside her beating heart, her flesh and blood. He would see, would hear, would know that she did not wake.

Perhaps it is the sort of unconscious self-defense mechanism of a half-waking mind?

Perhaps it was a break in some pathway between them?



'Focus,’ Rhaena whispered in her ear, ‘focus,’ the bells she braided in her hair rang jovially with each wrist turn. At first she’d needed to touch her, to feel her hand to find the path into her mind. Then there was Gloria and Agnie, two minds, meters apart, and she had reached and reached. And forgot. ‘Focus,’ the bells tink-tinked.



Somewhere beyond the white and empty space, behind an unseen wall, in another place, is the sound of small bells.

You’ll listen.

You got power too, right.

You don’t let anyone get in the way.

How hard would it be to find the mind of Ser Elliot Gahald, to do as Brown requested?




“You wish to talk?”

[Pantha]

What power did Elliot think he had absorbed by collecting the rain? What power did it all have, if any? Had it all been an illusion? With Genny so -aware- now, so focused here in the nothing, it becomes frighteningly apparently that what he had witnessed was more like a training session. Had any of the threats been real at all, or were they just as fabricated as the nightmare scape? It was all so she would know what to do when he is not there to guide her.

This is Genny, His Genny, who was able to break that barrier with him even when he had taken his own eye from his forehead. She had done it as she had with Rhaena, with touch. In all those months, it had only been her mind to reach him but now another has grown and it is this eye that lords over them now. Is seems to be as tall and wide as a man but if they go to touch it, it seems just out of reach, always out of reach. Instead of waking, she chooses to focus, the stay here and confront Elliot and so he allows it. The eye in the sky just watches, saying nothing more to Elliot as Genny's mouth takes over the questioning for them both in her more subtle, kind way.

[Glenn]

Somewhere in Myrken is Elliot Gahald. If he sleeps, it is the sleep of the just. If he is awake, it is with the clarity of the just. Confident, strong, focused. Maybe she would reach him, if not in this moment, then soon.

For now, though, Elliot Brown is too much of a presence, too much pent up emotion and teenage angst. He had aged not at all in the last year and then he had aged too much as well, intelligence without wisdom, things he had seen with emotions he was still learning to understand. So now, Genny searches and he fades, the words instead coming from every direction, not just one or two. "You think I'm going to ask about them, about Niall and about Gloria and about whoever else, but I'm not. I know he's out there living my life and I'm in here, living everyone else's dreams and I know that it's unfair and wrong and broken all of it, even me seeing what I see, but I don't want to know right now. I can taste it and you can show it and I don't want to know it."

This is what Zilliah always dreaded from the youth, the emotion that spilled out, that threatened to sweep the fae away, that drove him absolutely mad. "And no one came from me and no one believes me, and I don't care and you didn't do a damn thing Zilliah, and I don't care. You just threatened to send me away. You threatened. To Send. Me. Away! I'm lost in the void here and you threatened to send me away so you could grope Genny or whatever the hell it is you're doing." Or protect her. He gets that. He understands it, but it was sort of hard to care. So instead, he isn't going to care about anything. He had just wanted to talk but in face of this, it's hard. It's so hard.

"I'm here now, Genny, and you didn't know me well, and he doesn't know anyone well but himself, so I get it. This is how I am now. I end up in people's dreams and I poke around, and I see what I want and I take what i want and maybe do what I have to." Then, more softly, almost resigned, he'd look to Genny, reforming once again before her. "You're real close to breaking aren't you?"

[Tolleson]

Was waking ever a choice? Sometimes it simply happened and others, her reality had become the world within her mind. Where was the line between dream worlds and the elaborate metal world, her waking world, the world that had been created to house all the minds and voices and memories visitors left within her?

She had blinked away, her dream, her existence within it, gone. She had reached out with the hand of her mind, fruitlessly, like a specter through all the physical barriers that lay between her bed above the bakery, to Gahald. And like a rope being pulled on both sides, to suddenly be let go on the one opposite, her mind tumbled back, recoiling. And with Zilliah there to catch her, she returned.

But Zilliah was right, she no longer dreamt.

Like Elliot she was a disembodied presence for a moment, a voice from all around and no where.

You think I am going to ask about them, about Niall and Gloria…

“No, I don’t suppose you would. I think you already know.”

There is a an uneasy, flat line that grows on her lips as she reforms, a single body with it’s hair of flame. Perhaps she had only caught part of his rather crass tirade towards Zilliah. Or all of it.

If she had, she didn’t show it. Leaving his words towards the fae as their business, perhaps. Mostly expressionless as his form solidifies before her she looks upon him respectfully, but her voice reflects the kindness he speaks. Matching timber and song, it’s almost identical with only the words to change.

“You should leave what you find here, well alone. It is dangerous and I am no longer dreaming, Elliot,” there was a glance at Zilliah’s omnipotent eye as if her mind could touch it, even if try as she might to reach it with imagined hands, she could not. It was a gentle sort of reassurance, confidence, an subtle gesture thanks.

Close to breaking, no.

She had broken some time ago.

[Pantha]

Zilliah knows where Gahald is and he also knows of the affection a certain young man has for this young knight. It had crossed him mind more than once that Gahald might become something more to the boy and Zinniah as they age. Such outcomes are questionable now that Elliot is proving himself to be...whatever you call this state.

His thoughts of the boy seem to stretch and expand, to reach outwards from the dream and in this state, it takes him a moment to realize what Genny is doing and reel her into their shared space. Perhaps his own considering of the boy and knowledge of where he might be is enough to sate her from going further with it so one is left to question if he could have stopped her at all if she had truly wanted to reach the helpless boy.

He is still able to handle her and take the emotional verbal railing Elliot gives him and translate the words into rational feelings instead of taking them at face value and taking offense. It is pain, rejection, and the fear of adolescence speaking to him but he still sees him as a hurt and lost friend. As Genny returns, so too does the fae and the world around them. The whiteness comes into focus, the eye fading away as his physical form manifests next to his dear, broken Genny and takes her by the hand, the other held out welcomingly to Elliot.

“He wants our help.” Genny tries to frighten him off when he points out the state of her well being. “He knows the danger or he would not have come.”

Around them the world grows smaller and they find themselves in the fae's living room in his great tree. It is a safe, familiar place where they might find common ground. “I am sorry, Elliot. Let me try again; how can I help you.” He excludes Genny in this as she is already fractured enough as it is.

[Glenn]

Was the fae genuine? Who knows?

He didn't know. He never knew. All that ever really mattered with Zilliah was to get a reaction. So long as you had some reaction from the fae, then you were reaching him, impacting him, affecting him. You were part of his life and within his attention and friendship might be built on that, more a measure of quantity and degree than quality. For some, it would be a problem, but Elliot Brown was a brash and direct young man. He was one who could appreciate sensation of all sorts. It wasn't that he understood, nor that he was kindred, but instead that he experienced something independently that just happened to coincide with the fae's own nature. Most others couldn't say even that.

Now, though? Now Elliot's guess was that Zilliah was deflecting again, out of selfishness, for Genny's sake.

That wasn't it at all though.

"I didn't come to you, Zill. I just arrived." He was fading in and out now. "I was just here, and I didn't mean to be here, because I never mean to be here, or there, or anywhere. Look, I just show up, ok? I can't control it. I kind of can sometimes, if someone's like a light in the distance, but I don't know what that light is until I get there." Did he want help? Maybe, but that's not why he'd come now. Instead, he did what he usually did. "It's kind of the other way around, Zill. I think I'm here to help her. He turned, and as he turned the entire dream shifted forty-five degrees to the right. "Genny, I think I'm supposed to touch. I take things, and I leave other things behind, but most of all I move them around. You don't feel right. You don't feel like you." He turned back to Zilliah, and he'd snatch a hand. The world shifted back to its original position as he did. "Let's help her, together, and then maybe there'll be someone complete and whole and able to help me." He was so earnest, so straightforward, so direct. He was Elliot Brown, just another key to the intricate lock of Zilliah's heart.

[Tolleson]

Zill took her hand and she held his limply, but willingly. It was a comfort to see the familiar place grow around them, but then again, it was a fragile thing. A thin veneer of reality, through which she seemed to stare, the opacity of the remembered but imagined place in flux as her mind tried to reconcile knowing it was fake with hoping it was real. As if seeing the shadows behind one-way glass.

“No,” her head was already swaying left and right in disagreement with the fae or refusal to Brown, but it was the undulating ground, like a stomach full of butterflies; a manifestation of fear, that shook below them.

“He does not, nor do you,” her words snapped more with fear than anger. They played at one another with crafted words, but there were reasons she stayed away, shied from even her closest friends. Zilliah was the only one outside of Rhaena and Lamai with the mental capacity to defend himself from a reckless power she’d yet to fully harness. Even wielding with intent had brought consequences and questions; had it even been her own intent?

Despite her words, her hand remained. “No,” repeated, her tone fell to a more somber note as hopelessness sank into her heart. Gloria, whole and fully realized before her, looming. She was solid and still, unlike the fluid, expanding space of the room immediately behind her. Half remembered fragments began to propagate over and through what Zilliah had only just built; pieces of furniture that defied physics, a window that looked out over a sunny field was fixed upon a book case, and a vase with flowers atop a table where sat a figure in shadow, a ruined man. Even though he is barely identifiable as a man, he has gravity.

It was her fault.

And the knowing of this shook her.

Even her body safe and away from all of this, lying in her bed, she would find the pillow moist from the few tears that escaped.

“You know what I feel like?” An almost smile that did not convey as it might if it were upon physical lips, not here under the weight of the disheartening air. “You are sweet to think to try.”

The shaking slows, but does not entirely subside.

“And I would try to help, truly, but in my doing so you are in greater danger. Ultimately, you trade one nightmare for one greater,” and that was only when she had unintentionally tried to help Gloria. Who was to say he wouldn't be trapped within her mind, if he wasn't already, or worse yet, she might completely destroy what little was left of Brown.

[Pantha]

It took a while but the fae finally got some sort of explanation of how and why the boy is here. The helplessness of the boy's plight does stir something near pity in him and his lips pull down into a slight frown as he projects this emotion right back at him.

The limp hand is grasped firmer as the dream spirals out of his control as Genny steadfastly protests any such help. It shakes the dream-scape around them and the frown deepens. His own horrors are manifest and more bodies touched by her hand are conjured – men charred to a crisp by his former lover the evening the fae had taken her along to rescue Treadwell – an evening he had left Genny behind, her life in danger but she had bravely found and bound her brother.

It is this Genny now that holds him by her side with the command of no that resonates through this false world. If Elliot had not taken his hand so firmly, it might have washed Elliot away entirely from the fae's influence. This may be a one time chance, for both of these broken creatures he holds so dear – a sentiment he cannot help but share to them both no matter how hard he tries to hide it from them both at times.

“No,” he echos, but the pitch of his voice is calmer, more focused and he gives both hands a squeeze. “No, I cannot fix you alone, either of you. If you do not let him, then I may call for James and Lamai. I will not let you spiral to madness.” And now to Elliot, “Or you haunt and shape the dreams of innocents.”

[Glenn]

This was just a glimpse, a moment in time. He would soon be gone from them and they from him. He'd be alone again until he found the next dream and they would move on with their lives wondering at what they saw, at the strange dream, and whether or not it could have a basis in reality, pondering lost opportunities and mild regrets. "I'm not sweet. I'm not a moron either, got it? I've been stuck in people's dreams for months, Genny. I can understand your problems. Zilliah can understand your problems too. You got betrayed by the things you believe in, right? By yourself most of all. My body is possessed by a bootlicking pretty boy with a sword, right? He's hurting things I care about and I can't stop him, him being myself. My body. My amazing, deft, hands." He flexed the hands, cracked not one knuckle but a thousand. This was a master thief, a rogue of rogues, and he was in her dream and let her try to stop him from doing what he wanted.

"That's what's going on. Maybe I understand. Zilliah shuts himself up in a god damn tree so he doesn't hurt people just because he loves them too much, just because he sometimes wants to feel something other than hate for himself, except for when he does, he can't control what happens. We get it. Stop being so damn blind. We get it, and I'm here, and he's here, and maybe it's not my choice, but it's my choice what to do while I am here, and you're not taking that away. His choice. My choice. My risk." All talk, but words had meaning in dreams, and especially from him, especially here and now with such power floating through the air. "So yeah, we're going to help you. Me and Zill here, and if you refuse us, he'll bring a whole bunch of other people.

"Here's how we're going to play it," said the ringleader to his expert locksmith. "We're going to travel to the center of her heart, you and me, and we're going to unlock the door to it, and see what's broken, and then we'll stab the madness in the back and the two of you can get back to making a weird looking brother for Zinniah or whatever."

[Tolleson]

Zilliah holds her hand tighter, but it is useless here. Her hand might well be water or air, or closer yet to a passing thought. As a gesture upon a meaningless projection of her physical form, it’s impact was mild. But his sentiment, the warmth of his care steadies her and settles the ground. He knew the danger and yet, he was here. Unwise, illogical, and reckless, how could either of them bear it; and yet it was comforting.

The thought of Lamai and then, more impactful, the thought of James, settles the dust to perfect stillness. All that she had conjured of Gloria and the scene of a half remembered visit to a recovering man, a shadow; it all falls away. Her heart rose ever so slightly, with ease and grace, such a soft fondness for a moment and then fell. Filled like a brick weighted bag to the bottom of a well. How could she face him, or even consider something that might put him in danger. Or Lamai and her child. Did they even know?

As for Elliot. He relates a betrayal of self. The boy explains his plight, compares to her and surprisingly, it resonates. Perhaps because she knows how it must feel to hurt the people one loves without intent. To have lost control of actions and feelings; having no sense of self or identity. Or perhaps there is something deeper, subtle and small, that with his rambling words, stubbornness and deafening deft hands he was more than a little like her brother.

Words did have meaning in dreams and she listened, long and quietly so. To the powerful, calm of Zilliah’s explanation and the acceptance of risk by a boy who had already lost so much. As for her reply, more was said in the settling stillness, the nervous silence, and the feeling like a slow, deep, and pensive breath as trembling fear mixed with the crisp, sweet air of hope.

Her mind was agreeing, hoping, wanting reprieve, even if her words were restrained by fear.

So when words finally came, they hardly held content worthy of being spoken.

“I don’t see how this is possible… and Zilliah and I are not joined,” the words are flat, but clear. If she had denied that they were married or denied an even more scandalous nature of their relationship in person, her cheeks would be red and her anger visible. But here, it is a simple truth whose corresponding emotion barely finds register among the other more prevalent feelings and fear.

[Pantha]

Elliot in here is dangerous; Gahald out there is equally dangerous. Elliot reminders him of Niall and it brings forth the fresh memory of the girl alive and the painful hug he had given her. His hands, even here, are covered in dozens of delicate rings which bite ever so slightly into Elliot and Genny's hands as he squeezes them. Somewhere in the back of his mind, there was the reminder that Gahald was a friend of Cherny's, beloved to his dear Zinniah.

He is isn't given time to comment on that but the feeling is it has been a long time that the young man has lived that life. The sound of Elliot's bones snaps him back to attention and the rant that follows from the boy directly at his way of existence has him at attention. The assessment isn't disputed and he even seems compliant in this plan of Elliot's.

Around them, the horrors disperse an the world settles. It is Genny who reacts to the crass comments given by Elliot as to the nature of their relationship; the fae only shrugs both of their comments off. He finds some amusement in the way she worries of Lamai and her child but still seeks him out when he ought to be tending to his daughter. A daughter who is well on her way to bonding with Cherny.

“Even she fears loving me.” His grin becomes wicked and he laughs at them both. He lets go of Genny's hand and steps towards Elliot slowly. “If you think you can fix some of her darkness, I would be thankful.”

[Glenn]

On some level it was a violation and Elliot was acutely aware of that, so much as he was acutely aware of anything, which unfortunately (or fortunately) for Genny's sake just wasn't much at all. No, she was patronizing and powerful and she was in need of help. Let Myrken Wood tremble whenever Zilliah and the rogueling were in agreement on something. It was rare and it was troubling. The fae was a creature of impulse, a slave to it, really, and Brown wasn't all that much better, two agents of intertwined chaos, but apparently, in this moment, caring chaos.

They were in agreement and Genny had told him that it could not be done. Positive encouragement. Negativity to rebel against and a well meaning youngster that was more dream than human. He had been blessed by Galacia and then set free by Rhaena. That was one interpretation. The other was that he was nothing more than a pale copy, a remnant of something well-improved upon that had become corrupted and perverted, a fallacy in the system of dreams that canvassed this land. Even so, that would probably make him more emotionally mature and formidable than the fae. It made him something else as well.

The dreamstuff was pulled from the the clouds, the books, now somewhat obscured to all but a thief, from the very ground beneath him, all pulled within, and then pushed outwards, transforming, matter that shouldn't exist, rolling and churning as it surrounded Genny's body. With Zilliah supporting him, this would continue, unless she could somehow stop it. If not, she'd find herself changing in the oddest way. She would grow, not in a literal sense but in a metaphorical one. Larger and larger, her hair becoming the grass, her skin the ground, the white of her eyes the clouds spotted within the remaining color of them, now the sky. She was no longer a figure within a dream, but the dream itself. Two lone clouds remained. Black ones left over, dark and terrible things tamed by a stubborn young man who would put a bride upon the world just to see it buckle. The dream was now Genny and Genny was the dream and somewhere, at the very center of it, was the heart of all of this.

The black clouds had congealed into fierce stallions, still storming within, breathing out lightning and shaking the very ground with their hooves. "Come on," he would say matter-of-factly to his companion, letting go of his hands. "We have a ride ahead of us."