The Urge to Wander

Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 22, 2019 1:48 am

"No—" she said, angling closer, her dusty skirts rustling like a thousand whispers. "Not there. Here." Her words poured out in staccato breaths, nervous to speak of the affection, though she moved to show it: she withdrew the traveling pack, and instead guided his head to her knee, a motion that both begged patience and trust. Her voice might as well have been a breath; it was his, and his alone. "You could have stumbled upon a softer, and gentler, and more affectionate being than I, ser. And perhaps one with greater secrets to lend you.

"But for now, I hope I'll do."

What it was she wanted to show him came, like his, from the edge of her fingers. It started with great care, as if measuring the reactions and allowance in him. Her thumb touched across his brow, and her fingers to his temples, where they brushed through folds of his hair. Over, and over, and over, a soothsayer's repetition. She watched him, her dull, iron-colored eyes seeming to question, Is this alright? Sometimes she altered the angles of her hand, and sometimes — with an almost wistful tilt of her head — she drifted into a quiet, half-hearted hum of old choir-music.

He had given himself distance. She wanted to traverse it.

"Fascination, I think, combats fear — and confirms it," said Gloria, down to him. "I cannot stand in your shoes, or — or demand but one string of words change your mind about how you ought to feel about this—" How to speak of it, I wonder? "—about this u'ulgazh inside you. But I am unafraid of it, and unafraid of touching you, or being near it. To starve yourself closeness or touch, it unravels a man, and blunts and fogs and dulls.

"And if you will permit me, I wish to help. In understanding it, or studying it with you. To aid in giving it what I presume you were never offered by its creators: definition," she said, "and familiarity and belonging."

Her callused fingers touched his head, combed through his hair, and stroked it like it were a child's. What she wanted to show possessed but a fraction of the wondrousness of his own secret: only that she wanted to be nearer to him, and suffered no hesitation to hold him. That even a man may rest a weary head, or be reminded that gentleness, like breath, is necessary to life.

Then the question came from her, words like smoke, and to speak it sent her heart racing:

"Can you hurt someone, Proctor," she asked, "by — by telling them that you believe you love them?"
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Thu Aug 22, 2019 6:49 am

The man did not need open eyes to see her shifting posture—between sound and sensation, he observes the change. Had they stumbled upon each other at some other interval, he may not have allowed her this—or himself—not easily at least. Yet here, his sole response to her replacing his pack with her knee is a low and rasped murmur from the back of the throat, a half-measure of protest.

And only because he was tired and comfortable, despite the floor, despite the blackish sword in its scabbard, leashed to the pack by leather straps. This is not a thing one should use for a pillow. But he could have easily ignored it, and had on numerous occasions in the past months. Still, her knee proves a gentler platform by far.

Secrets. I’ve had my fill, he thought and very nearly spoke aloud. Her touch silences the voice before it forms.

Reduced to perception alone, with thought and word fading from the mind, he accepts the passage of her fingers.

Such acceptance contravenes the man’s own rules, ones that serve to guard him from unwanted vulnerabilities. But Gloria was right, to starve oneself of closeness unravels, blunts, dulls. The painful business of living was a weight not meant to be endured by one’s self alone.

To share that weight with friends is not weakness. Not even remotely like weakness.

If not for Gloria’s speaking or humming voice, he would sleep. Each traverse of her fingers seems to unravel webs of old and complex strain, a relief he is rarely awarded.

… definition and familiarity and belonging, she tells him. Things he—they—might achieve through combined effort. It is an idea that attracts him, for two minds could make great strides in the solving of mysteries. And the man thrived on this work, despite the difficulties inherent in such processes.

Look closely at a thing and observe how its illusion disintegrates.

One of his hands, formerly supported by a belted hip, slides off to rest on the floor and some folds of dusty coat beside. A sign of relaxation, perhaps, of muscles released, if even for a little while, from the diverse cares that have bound them.

But words of smoke and a thrumming heart and a particular question cause wavelengths in the peculiar geometric imagery alive behind his closed eyelids. The product of a brain left to its own computational work, here in the absence of thought. Yet thought must re-emerge and the man draws a near-silent breath to resurrect the use of his voice.

“No,” he murmurs, interrupting the seams of closed lids. In opening them, even partially, pupils respond to the introduction of light by subtly flaring and narrowing, leaving darkened green irises to their own changeable color. “And yes.”

He studies her silently for a pace of seconds, something nameless present at the edges of his mouth. The eyes close again; they must, being heavy. “To admit love, or to be the receiver of it, is to accept its glorious breadth and also the pain of worry and fear it brings. Yes… and no.”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 22, 2019 12:51 pm

An assessment. A measurement. The practice of an explorer surveying new ground before ever trusting it to stay firm beneath her feet. Could he submit himself to this closeness, she wondered; could he surrender his tension and propriety and let her tend to him? The touches never verged on anything but utility: if his hair had gone awry, she would set it right. Hers were fingers that had not touched a needle in years. Had not given kindness in even longer.

Sometime after his response — his no, his yes, and the beautiful, sacrificial simplicity of equal measures in love and pain, a philosopher's keen balance over the planes of such nebulous concepts! — Gloria's body shook as if being tossed by shifting earth. A laugh. A smile. All her poor teeth on full display. "Do not fear, Sylvius Duquesne, that I ask these questions to express some secret affection for you. I love you, but never with that particular angle of my heart. I would not subject you to that terror—" she reasoned, with a breath, "—or expose our friendship to such ruin.

"So be at ease. A friend who couldn't offer herself as a cushion for a head that deserves better than a dusty pack is hardly a friend at all. Besides," she jeered, with a half-wink that betrayed her tight smile, "I have almost forgotten what it is like to be this close and — and not break a man's nose."

She glanced at the fire, stared at the coals, sought her sentiment from the heat. Milled over and over the answer to her question. And though she did not tell him, found herself very suddenly feeling ill, and desperate, and tense with fear. To admit such a thing, does it necessitate commitment? Does the sword demand to be used if drawn from its sheath? Or the shield, if given to the arm — does it mean a battle's begun?

He'd slipped his mask off earlier, that invisible layer of his face. Here, she withdrew her hand, lifted it, scraped it down from her brow to her chin.

Her voice became stiff. Thin as a reed. Fragile as poorly-made Jernoan glass.

"If people knew, I fear they would call it unnatural. Or — or an abomination. Or, at the very least, a confusion—"

She did not look at him. She said it; she says it.

"Her name is Genny."
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Fri Aug 23, 2019 3:31 am

“I was not expecting you to—” he begins, chuckling with an easy humor most rare. But he does not finish the line, feeling it unnecessary after all.

The man has not moved. He does not seem capable of moving now, feeling as if his body has begun at the tiniest level to merge with the floorboards beneath. When was the last occasion he felt such ease? The moment is clear in his memory, something he has clung to: A sun-soaked island, a woman with long black hair and pale gray eyes, a moment of kind respite between the swells of a very strange sort of trouble. Years ago now.

If ever Gloria's hand finds pause on his brow or in chaotic dark hair—wild before she ever touched it and made smoother by her effort—he would reach to encourage her to continue. She has perhaps woken a sleeping giant.

“You do yourself injustice,” he adds, more quietly. The humor has not subsided just yet. She told him she was not the gentlest, nor the most affectionate, and yet his experience tells him otherwise. A near-lack of emotional contact with anyone apart from a swordswoman, and recently his daughter whose demand for affection grows daily, the man's wholesale restriction of vivid emotion in public has effectively prevented access to kinder emotions for so long that he saw Gloria as utterly alive with these things.

With a second chuckle more breathed than laughed, he lifts his hands onto his stomach and interlaces the fingers, elbows balanced on the floor. “I will strive never to give you cause for fists,” he tells her, cracking eyes open to give her a glimpse of the gentle humor in his eyes. “So we are helping each other now. To mend, to remember kindness.” We, two half-wild things. Wary of others.

From behind somewhat hooded lids, the architect evaluates her expression now as she ponders the heat in the fire’s ember-bed. A gentleman capable of detecting subtle changes in the body has here detected the rise of her tension, the change in the way she breathes. Sees those questions swirling behind her eyes.

Away comes the mask with a pull of her hand. Her voice comes now, fragile as glass.

Still the man watches her and without a trace of intensity; only that lasting gentleness emerging from deep and genuine corridors of the heart. “Genny,” he murmurs, turning the name lightly over his accent and the old rasp low in the throat. It is familiar to him.

“Are you fearful only of what people may think? Or,” a moment’s pause, “do you also fear her response, were you to tell her?”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Fri Aug 23, 2019 5:01 am

"Genny."

It possessed a softness coming from his voice that she wanted nothing more than to capture, bottle up, and crush against herself. With the utterance of the name, the tightness disappeared from her: she had spoken it, manifested it, made it real, and nothing here had changed: the stars still danced, the fire still crackled, and he still remained. The world hadn't broken in half; it had not turned on her.

When his soft touch reminded her to continue the soothing motion, she did not hesitate to resume. Hers was a hand meant to care, yearned to care.

We are helping each other now. To mend, to remember kindness.

"In the end," the Jerno said, now that all truths had been unfolded and displayed before her, "I do not care what people choose to think. They will think such things, and there is nothing I can do to alter their minds. I am no stranger to condescension or judgment. And while I know she is resilient and capable—" Gloria's voice unraveled with greater speed and intensity, "—I loathe for the world to wound her with its cruelty.

"I fear they'll mistreat her. I fear they will forget her great accomplishments and see her but for this one fraction of her being. I fear they'll disdain her," she admitted, "if it is me she chooses to adore."

Her hand stopped. It came up, that she might squeeze the bridge of her nose with a thumb and index finger. A heartbeat pounded there, pulsed in her temple, echoed inside of her.

Then she touched him again, and the tension faded away.

"I have so much as told her; she, I hope, has so much as told me. The letters we write, they are kind and enchanting and — and I reread them to see if she has hidden some secret between the words. She seems enamored with me. She seems enamored with me," Gloria repeated, with wonder. "Of all people, Proctor. Of all the people she could choose."

Outside, night had fallen fully. Summer breathed its final gasps. The crickets and katydids belched and barked their evening songs. Those she hadn't heard in Razasan; it made her smile.

"How did you tell her, Sylvius? When you told her you felt for her, how did you say it?"
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Sat Aug 24, 2019 4:55 am

Genny.

It possessed a softness coming from her voice—a kind of softness most familiar to him, familiar to any who have known the tender sting of this. Love. There is perhaps no purer thing in existence than what the man hears in her voice and sees in the look of her.

He does not interrupt, nor interject a word, but offers her room to voice her concerns. Not only her concerns, but her wonderment. And he is struck by memory, struck by how in these moments she reminds of himself; a much younger self, wholly and thoroughly transfixed by a young swordswoman.

Of all the people she could choose. The man listens to the critters alive in the new press of night outside, listens together with her while those songs rise and fall in chorus. And reflects on the wonderment he felt in those days, the daily terror of losing her and the perfect serenity of knowing that, if even for one more day, one more moment, he had not. He feels it all, still.

It humbles him.

In this dilapidated place, there is peace. An easy quietude that wraps ‘round all things like a blanket. Despite what has been and what may yet arrive, they are alive and well in the present. Here and now, the pair of them, feeling the same emotions. Caught in the same kind of clutch.

Gloria’s questions stir into his thoughts, as her heartbeat does, having once pounded but having also calmed again.

“I showed her,” he murmurs, distant in memory. Green eyes have drawn into the shadows among rafters above and their sight is lost therein. “At first, it was all I could do. I feared I might turn her to vapor if I told her. I feared she would disappear like a dream on waking. And so I told her by showing her in every letter and on every occasion we met.”

There is much in this story that he does not say. Does not speak of a terrible illness, nor other such complicating matters at play in those days. Different and difficult times. “Then, I had opportunity to tell her.”

The man crafts a smile here, a quiet response of pleasure in the midst of remembrance. “I was terrified. To this day I do not know if she knew I was.” He turns his eyes to look up at her. “If Genny has chosen you, she will have already weighed the possibility that comes with that choice. It will be worth the risk. She may believe as you do that the world and its penchant for cruelty is insignificant compared to the strength of what is felt between you.

"Even if the world is cruel, for it is cruel, know you have a place here. At both Aithne and Darkenhold, being one and the same, you have freedom and security from judgment. Always."
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Sun Aug 25, 2019 4:28 am

A smile. "She knew. That you were terrified," Gloria clarified — a hint of playful ease in her voice. "Women know. I imagine it endeared her more to you. There are hardly prospects worth having, or striving for, which do not at first frighten us."

There, up in the rafters, his memories. While she could not see them, Gloria followed his gaze toward the invisible theatre, for it was one all too familiar to her: filling the darkness with stories of the past and narratives of hopeful futures, seeking out words to explain and comfort and console.

Her touch trickled away from his scalp, giving a final accommodating brush. After much adjustment, some shifting, and the spreading of her own bedroll to free it from its wrinkled affliction, she lay beside him and observed the darkness of the ceiling and its rotted spyglass to the sky. Her shoulder, all brick and sinew, touched against his. A necessary contact. A reminder. A willing closeness.

I feared she would disappear like a dream on waking.

That she did not respond to him offered every sign that she listened: the blinking, the clenched jaw. the too-pressed lips. Hers was a body that physically processed its consideration, from the occasional clicking of her boots on the wooden floor as her legs overlapped, to the anxious picking of pilled wool from her skirts, as if she were but picking capers from a pickled melon.

A long quiet.

"You were courageous," she finally said, turning her cheek enough to glance at him over the wing of her bonnet, "to show her and tell her. It could have been easiest and most convenient to suffer silence. A life spent in regret and fear often seems so much more palatable than a moment of true, naked exposure. Saying what we want to, and — and what terrifies us the most.

"Showing fear is bravery. I imagine she thought you were the bravest soul she'd ever met, to speak for you and for her in that moment. Bravery," Gloria proclaimed, with the wonder of a girl seeing poetry for the first time, "beyond compare."

Despite the cruelty of the world, Aithne and Darkenhold reformed in her mind: both neither just a town nor a manor, in that moment, but places of peace and warmth. Close her eyes enough, she would have been back in those halls, among those books, even in the room where the ink had spilled, where she was younger and happy and hopeful and Duquesne left piles of books like a thoughtful ghost, replete with questions to ponder, and Ariane drifted with a soldier's listless tension through the corridors, and...

Eyes clenching so tightly shut, she feared they would burst. But it was worth that.

Because Genny, Genny, spoken of so softly, was also there.

What she said next came without precedent. To say it wounded her. It hurt. Like burning coals.

"I need you now. More than ever."
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Tue Aug 27, 2019 3:45 am

Women know.

The man chuckles, deriving more pleasure from what she’s said than he expected. And after she chooses to rearrange herself more comfortably, spreading out her blanket and lying down beside him, he reaches over his head and grasps his pack, shoving it back under for a pillow; sword and all.

In a future not at all distant from the present, he will tend that sword’s subtle nicks and then, nested in its scabbard with belt oiled and coiled ‘round it, it will be placed in a safe-box somewhere and left to its rest. He no longer needed it now, no longer for him to wear such bold weapons. The time was come to retire from a kind of life he had not intended himself to live—not the life others claimed for him over the course of these one-half and three perilous decades. The promise of it quickens; the prospect of it is equal to peace.

With shoulders touching, the pair of them can study the gloomy reaches high above, where birds have nested in rafters, and where only portions of constellations wink from the darkening sky beyond. There is a partial band of cloudiness in that clear night expanse, no clouds tonight but a mighty river of stellar matter stretched across unfathomable distances. It is this he observes now, deploying powerful eyesight to magnify the darkness and distance, to see, not deep into the cosmos, being impossible, but far enough to wonder through miles upon miles of atmosphere and the bizarre emptiness that lies just beyond it. That space where moon-spheres will hang suspended in a void seemingly without material composition.

As Gloria’s voice warms the quiet once more, he attends, musing on the fears and passions of his younger self. She narrates the story unfolding in his field of view and the edges of his mouth succumb to their smile, slow and heartfelt.

Courage and bravery, she tells him. Bravery beyond compare.

The man turns his head, enough to look at her own profile, or what he can see of her face beyond the wing of her bonnet. He had not considered his confession to be a thing of courage or bravery, yet he considers it now while the woman clenches her eyes closed and he imagines what may lie in her vision, beyond the ruddy vista of her closed lids. And he does not speak yet, as is his way, choosing to watch her and listen—even when she has no words, he listens, especially, to emotion that invariably surfaces in her speaking voice. Emotion searing the inside of her.

In simple but no less profound gesture, he lifts a hand off his stomach and offers it for her to take. And if she grasps it, even if she does not, the man will murmur to her, “I am here.”

Three simple words, for one indisputable truth.
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 29, 2019 7:38 am

His hand. She, at first, did not see it, but felt it: the disturbance of the air, the shifting of shadow as light crashed across it from the hearth. Gloria Wynsee possessed no unique sense, no capacity for greater perception than any other clumsy human, but the gift of this decrepit place was its silence. Everything was audible, and everything worth hearing.

To perform the careful labor of a seamstress, her hand had suffered profoundly: the tips of her fingers might as well have been stones, callused nearly to petrification; a network of scars traced old (and new) stories of physical combat across them. A thin film of sweat — that crude, black stuff that Jernoah had given her — warmed her palm. An ever-present curse. The subtle tremors of buried fear collapsed under the grip of his hand.

I am here.

Breath.

The fullest unraveling of her composure. The iron fell away. She could have melted through the floorboards.

She squeezed. She held it. She turned her head, so that beneath the shadow of her bonnet, her dark face peered out and belied its hardness. "I tremble at the prospect of making a mistake. Impulse and — and reaction are my natural tendencies; I demand to live in the moment, because for all that instinct has forced me to make poor decisions, hesitation has caused me to regret those I never came to make.

"If here I act—" her cheek turned, and so did her gaze, visualizing margins of error and possibilities illustrated like smoke spark, "—I may dare too strong and too stringiest a response, and damage further — even with good intent — the only home I have come to know. And a lost man's life. And whatever memory of him stands firm beneath the canopy of his previous accomplishments.

"Or—" Now, seeking out answers in his face to questions that were but vague mist, "—I do nothing, I bury my instincts, and refuse decisive action. In turn, I damn our foolish little home to a repeat of the past, and watch as one overzealous soul sacrifices the lives and livelihoods of others for a tomorrow which cannot be guaranteed."

To Gloria Wynsee, the world had always been one built of extremes. Severity: a problematically Jernoan trait, where time was no luxury.

Up came her hand, still holding his, and she ground his knuckles into her brow as if trying to knead the thoughts out like dough.

"Is it too much to ask, Proctor, to be heard for the fears this place has infected me with?"
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Sun Sep 01, 2019 1:21 pm

The hand of a woman deeply acquainted with struggle; a hand that whispers truths with its discreet tremor.

And not once in the midst of these vulnerable minutes have the man’s eyes turned from her, or wavered in the slightest. Watching always with the calm measure of their green and the perceptive shadows of their pupils; wells of quiet, hard-won fortitude.

But not absolute, this resolve; not absolute in any sense. A wholly steadfast human being is the stuff of legend alone.

He listens, meditating on the fears she expresses, the uncertainties of her position. And despite the gravity of her admissions, the way she works his knuckles into her brow draws a subtle smile to the edges of his mouth, a thing that influences the composure of his eyes also.

“It is not too much,” he murmurs, “to want to be heard or to be heard in fact. If this is a place in which the voices of those who call this home are unwanted, then it is the first challenge to be overcome.

“Too much has occurred for lanes of discourse in this place to be limited to those few who may reserve rights for themselves alone, who may claim to have the one way, the one solution, for no one person obtains truth absolutely for all others. This is the hubris of gods and dictatorships, not the democracy I hope we seek. No, you must not bury your instincts or refuse action, for in this way you drape yourself with more regret and apply needless damage to your self. And then how will you live? With more burden. Our goals are to reduce burden, not the reverse.

"Your voice is essential, Gloria. Essential."

The architect’s hand, though not so deeply engraved with the same rigors as hers, carries its callouses and its wounds; all the evidence of tumult and labor. Fingers tighten around her hand, a firm and steady pressure. But the man takes this moment to breathe, to consider the choice of his words. “I cannot advise you not to fear, for fear is a governing hand — it stabilizes and limits. Fear of one’s tendencies, one’s nature, underpins the conscience. And if you have a conscience, you are self-aware, aware of others, and aware of the ways in which you may lend harm where you intended only good. That you are concerned with these things makes you invaluable in this place. Without conscience, we are reduced to statures less than human and then all discussion of fairness or improvement becomes worthless.

“Yet to allow our fear, our concerns, to go unmanaged leads to paralysis. Fear, being the root of courage, can be harnessed. And we will need to harness it if we intend to walk the lines we mean to walk.” This, spoken to himself as much as to her. Were they not similarly unsure? Unsure of how to proceed, how to delineate a clear path through the uncertainties that lie ahead. “I do not know in what way it is best to move forward, for you or for myself, but I understand it is the act of making decisions that begins to dissolve such uncertainty. Begin with the choice in front of you, weigh it and yourself carefully. Do this with the next one that arrives, and the next. Each decision informs what comes after, just as one builds a structure, taking care with placement from the ground up. We make the best decision we can, having what experience and knowledge we have at the time, being true to purpose in every instance. If — or rather when — we fail, we learn but we do not stop searching for solutions and we do not regret, knowing we did all that we possibly knew to do.”

The man studies her profile, still. And here draws a breath, filling his lungs slowly and with care. “Perhaps you craft the notice you came here to print? Perhaps this is that first decision to be made, the first step toward clarifying direction.”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Mon Sep 02, 2019 12:23 pm

Here, something broke. The amulet of her previous composure, crushed somewhere within her breast, dangled precariously from its chain.

Your voice is essential, Gloria. Essential.

"Then why does no one choose to listen?" she said, with a frantic demand that was far more fitting of the young Jerno who'd wandered into Myrken Wood, and not the poised woman who lay beside him now. "I have spoken my truth, and speak my truth, Proctor. To everyone I encounter — everyone — I am received as little more than a common fool, as though my intellect is too low or my brain too base to comprehend anything beyond the most basic concepts. I feel tremors—" she stammered, "—under the earth, because I have been at the crust when it cracks wide open.

"I have seen people hurt. I have hurt people. I have seen beings die," she whispered, going very suddenly still, immobile, clutching to the reassurance of his hand. "I — I have killed them, too. Because I have been bent and twisted into positions which necessitate it. Because the selfdom of others has demanded that I do the filthy work when they are too afraid to act."

She could have exploded. Duquesne had seen it before, perhaps once or twice: when her patience grew too thin and the attacks upon her capability became too sharp, she was apt to put the coiled muscles in her shoulders and arms to a greater use. Here, filled with that potential — not from him, but from the unseen audience of they floating indistinct and unseen in her conscience — she might as well have been a laying statue. For she feared (Nameless, she feared; the sudden fury built up like acid in her throat) if she ceased being still, it would all pour out of her: a hot, ceaseless ribbon of aimless and unnecessary violence. A child's tantrum.

But such things, adults suffered too. Whether or not they wished to admit it.

She sought out a balm in his eyes. Until she turned, then, to her blunted elbow, to her thigh, and up, up, to her feet. Her skirts cut a coarse sidewinder path through the dust and debris on the floor, their heavy layers dashing left, right, left, right, against the firm stalks of her legs. When she abruptly ceased her pace, the fabric lashed like a whip, and she turned, and, and—

Duquesne had seen this before, too. The mobility of a body whose mind refused to be quiet. When the thunderhead of thoughts became too loud and the bones and sinews must move, lest they crumble beneath the weight of a too-stuffed brain. Had he, in his study, not done much the same? For Gloria had witnessed it in him countless times as he instructed, or as he examined books and their spines for the perfect complement to a lesson. But his did not possess this unique trait: namely, the squeezing and unsqueezing of her lone hand into an near-dwarven fist, and how it drummed (thuk, thuk, thuk) against the thigh of her dress with such intensity that it might leave marks beneath.

Determine a decision. Clarify direction. Dissolve uncertainty.

The fist slowed in its rhythm.

From across the common room of the dilapidated home, Gloria watched him, never blinking. She might as well have been an arrow nocked in a tightly-strung bow, drawn back, drawn back...

"I want for Myrken — every man and woman and child — to have the means to know and identify and prevent the dangers that have plagued us in the past. They ought to know; they ought to — to have a place to learn, Proctor. I want to invite them; I want to offer the knowledge, and I want to teach them. I want you to teach them."

Then poised, aimed, fired, a whole other disparate thread of thought—

"Glenn Burnie is compromised. He is not to be trusted. At best, he threatens to upset the fragile balance of our little home. At worst, he invites it to war."
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Mon Sep 02, 2019 4:34 pm

“Remember,” he says, taking care with his words and the pace by which they are spoken, desiring to encourage, not squelch her passions. “The people in this place have endured the rise and fall of many, many outspoken persons. Grand schemes with momentum and either promise or failure written into them, for the most, each one causing waves of disruption without ever persisting through trial.”

The man thinks he may hear his student boiling on the inside; a great voice demanding to break free. When she pushes herself to her feet and punishes the floor with her boot-soles, skirts in audible locomotion, he remains where he is, keeping the floor and fire company. Regal and tragically abused boots cross at the ankles and he folds an arm under his head as reprieve from the hard angles of sword slung through his pack, with green eyes in close watch of her as she works loose some of the pressing agitation churning in her like ocean under storm.

“It is therefore no wonder many do not have cause to listen — would you, would I? if so many tried and failed to bring sustainable change, leaving only havoc in their wake? Proclamations must come after you have shown them you and your voice are reliable; do not start with words, but act instead. Serve.” From inside a tailored coat cuff, its long row of buttons lending some spec of former nobility to his otherwise rough-hewn state, the man withdraws a sliver of fragrant wood and calmly chews its end. His mood remains meditative, as it has been; for the topic at hand, especially, he chooses this state of mind. Myrken had a penchant for dislodging reason and reason is the man’s most prized faculty, a first line of defense against tides of chaos.

He observes her fist slow its abuse, a sure indication of thought in motion behind her eyes. And while she stands there like a nocked bow, he remains quiet, offering her uninterrupted silence in which to compose her ideas, knowing she would speak them after — this being the rhythm of their lessons, and their talk beyond those lessons as well.

She delivers her wishes with clarity then, and the architect’s mouth is affected by a quiet smile, yet he had not anticipated her desire to have him teach. This is new. He lowers the sliver from his mouth and muses on a response. Before he can compose, she fires — and gives him pause.

Will she be close enough to notice the shift of pupils, or the stir of green color among irises, or the quickening in the architecture of his gaze? “Those are strong accusations.” A careful pause here as he lifts the sliver back to his mouth; seconds pass for the process of thought. And when he resumes, his voice has not changed from the calm measure it has employed all this time. “Tell me what makes you say this. Substantiate your claims.”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Mon Sep 02, 2019 6:06 pm

Reason, in this moment — and many others — often fled her. Often, she had never even realized as it slipped from between her fingers and she was left with impulse and anger. Here, though, she had begun to recognize reason's flight: feel the frantic gearwork in her brain spinning without its teeth; sense the receding attention of those around her; read their diminishing resolve, the tightening language in their bodies. All these, the subtle hints of her journey from reason to irrationality, to emotion, to—

She scraped her hand down her face. Breathed into her palm. Smelled, briefly, her own breath. Neglected teeth. Sprig of afternoon mint. The bite of shared wine.

He chewed wood. A curious habit. His quiet, directive demand — Substantiate your claims — sent her, very suddenly, back to Darkenhold. To rooms filled with Sun, where architecture, the man's quiet pride, reigned as an embodiment of the hard lines of law and the soft sweeps of philosophy. She watched, almost obsessively, that bouncing sliver of wood, that totem of thought. Not his eyes, but it; it became her audience, and she cast her words at it. "One—" she proclaimed, ordering her thoughts in simple trappings, the way he'd taught. "He admits living beneath the influence of another being's power in order to grow resilient against it. But Glenn Burnie is in possession of a famously impotent will, and his mind has been a proving ground for madness. He is in no possession of reasonable judgment, especially as — as an emissary of Myrken Wood.

"Two," the woman continued. "If its weakness to iron is any indication, he communes with — with a faery being." Tightened teeth imprisoned Gloria's clear disgust. "We lost eleven children, Proctor, to faery power. Eleven children, and at the behest of whispered words and gentle magic. The same influence that drove Rhaena Olwak to her tyranny, and bent our town beneath it. The same influence at Glenn's proverbial throat.

"The same influence this creature used to try to warp my mind when I encountered her outside his residence in Razasan.

"The same influence—" her heartbeat leaped to harder pace, but then immediately slowed with a breath, "—that I have linked to written reports and eyewitness accounts here, in our very own town, regarding the theft of powerfully poisonous plants. Memories stolen, dashed, and altered, that her crime would not go punished."
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Tue Sep 03, 2019 5:06 pm

The woman delivers her argument. And her teacher — her friend — listens to every single word. It is more than mere listening; the man assesses, nodding slowly as he does. Were it not for the grave contents of her message, he would commend her on her form and delivery, but this is no lesson in Darkenhold’s Library of Lords. They have moved beyond that now.

A silence will follow and she will not be unfamiliar with it, nor find it unusual — maddening, perhaps, for all the momentum built in her — for he was ever careful to measure his responses, especially to matters of tremendous weight such as the one at hand. But the first aspect of his response is to move, for so casual a posture as the one he’s maintained is no longer appropriate. He removes the arm folded beneath his head and sits up, collecting his weight onto one boot to aid in his standing from the floor.

For seconds, he is framed by the red-orange burn of the fire behind him, and if not for the weathered state of his coat, the man might seem to absorb that light. It would be an illusion, of course. But still —

He steps toward her, towing august volumes of coat-skirts behind, the hems nearly dusting the floorboards. And when he finally slows to stop a mere few feet from her, a board creaks under the shifting weight of his boot. He’s removed the sliver from his mouth and holds it among left-hand fingers, rolling it lightly between their pads; a mere expression of the thought and seriousness occurring behind his eyes.

“If you will permit a temporary aside,” he begins, studying her; a particular gaze she has already been acquainted with, close and unwavering, “tell me more of the eleven children lost. Everything you know to be fact, everything you know to be rumor.

“And then tell me of this influence you say lies at the heart of these affairs.”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Wed Sep 04, 2019 11:30 pm

He had always been tall, both towering in her memory and in the very moment where they stood. Sylvius Duquesne, a nugget of hardened sap drawn out between two fingers, bore a scarecrow's height and a king's majesty. While she stood nearly eighteen hands high, he could have peaked sixty, even seventy. Hundreds. He strode near, coming forward like a draught-ending storm — but for a moment, the fist of acid in her belly began to twist and turn, and she realized she was nervous, dreadfully so.

Wanting to please. Wanting to impress. To be perfect.

He does not expect that of you, Glour'eya.

"Fact—" said she, voice belying its confidence with a tremor. "It was the Storyteller's tongue that fractured Rhaena Olwak and awakened her absolutism. And the Storyteller served a creature named — named Fiona, who gorged herself on our children. She drew them to the woods, and she ate them. They walked one by one into her jaws." Gloria stared at a point beyond Duquesne's broad shoulder. "They followed promises of enjoyment. They listened. They wandered to her, influenced and yet believing theirs was — was a free will. And they died.

"Cherny. Cherny almost—"

The practiced elegance of Gloria's words faded, very suddenly, like a dollop of ink diluted in water. She felt small. Small and ill. Save for the flicker of the occasional lash of firelight, her skin, black as coal, might as well have been lifeless. Her lone hand kneaded so fitfully at the hip of her skirts that it left handprints of tarsweat.

She liked having him here. She liked him. She loved him. In the face of a mad world, where children perished and everyone demanded she was wrong, Duquesne listened. He had always been a guidepost; she wondered, sometimes, if he tired of it.

"Fact—" said she. "Fiona and the Storyteller were creatures of faery. Fact: Glenn's new compatriot is of the same ilk, and while I cannot be sure her blood is theirs, I cannot blink coincidence nor the dictation of my instinct. I cannot stand by and allow another little boy to witness that inhumanity and violence. I cannot give us to that so freely, and imagine it a necessary sacrifice in the name of progress.

"Rumor—" said she, wiping an inadvertent gleam of spit from her lip. "Gloria Wynsee relishes dispute and defiance. She desires to be an offense to prosperity, and stands in the way of others because she wishes only to — to dash their hopes. She satisfies herself by speaking in opposition to everything. Her myopia is fear, and only that. Her nature is to be disagreeable for disagreeability's sake."

Then, curious and disconnected, Gloria reached out for the sliver of wood, and if he allowed, she would take it; she'd chew it, too, like he did.

"I hold no ill will for the sake of it alone, Proctor. I believe no creature only exists to serve the imperative of her blood or progenitors. But in Razasan, Glenn Burnie's compatriot turned on me for spite; she sentenced me to death to preserve herself, and if it were not for my fist, I would have lost my life.

"How am I to trust, as the future unfolds, that she will treat Myrken Wood and its children any differently? And why is it so cruel that I demand reassurance?"
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