The Urge to Wander

The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Wed Aug 07, 2019 3:13 am

The note had been left for Walter, Genny Tolleson's goodman, before Sunwake: that should Genny return, to stay put, damn you — with playful fondness, and in earnest to see you, your H'zlz.

To begin a journey, however brief, was best done before even the Glass Sun stretched its first arms, for by the time light found the grass, one's feet would already be too dedicated to the task at hand to suffer discouragement. But two days, she had told Corm McKinnon. He did not protest. He had learned otherwise. So he gave her the papers she requested, and with a blanket-roll slung across her from shoulder to hip and a small cast-iron skillet rattling at her waist, Gloria Wynsee departed.

At Sunpeak, she squatted beneath a tree off the path. She sparked a fire by pinching flint between her crumpled toes and grazing it with a knuckle-striker. A talent one with only four fingers must perfect. She boiled a lump of fat in her skillet, sprinkled in some dried meat, mixed in a dollop of mint jelly and a splash of tea. Waking Stew, Raf had called it. Either it'll wake up yer fuckin' tongue, or it'll wake up your guts. No tellin' which until it's too late.

The Sun had nearly finished its tired arc in the sky as the young woman, glistening with sweat and dulled by dust, came upon her Intended Destination. In a valley of rolling hills and speckled with trees that crawled ever-closer from the nearby woodline, an old farmstead awaited her. That she had remembered this path so well surprised her.

But to forget such a necessary entity such as this would have been a shame.

The farmhouse, shrouded in shadow, had gone mostly to dust and web. Its walls and floors were but theatres for phantoms of the mind. Once inside, she unslung her blanket-roll and spread it on the floor. She untucked her skirts from her belt, ignited the hearth (after a number of muttered curses), and awakened the taper in her travel-lantern. Accoutrements abandoned and comforts established, she took up her light and processed toward the creaking stairs that swept down, down, like an unraveling tongue, into the house's damp basement.

Slashes of candlelight led the way. Was it still here, she wondered? And did it still work?
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Thu Aug 08, 2019 11:11 am

Once, generations of a family breathed life into the hewn wood of the farmhouse’s beams, its joists, floorboards, and stair-steps. Their voices echoed up into the rafters; their gaiety and sometimes their anger also. When life leaves a place, when there is no one to make repairs, lavish new coats of wash onto the walls, no one to wisp the webs from the corners, or mend the glaze of the window-panes, a home begins to die. So it is that life itself must give life to the spaces people create, else they become the dwellings of critters and ghosts.

Ghosts that lean into the rare vision of flames in the hearth, where no new heat has worked those stones for years and years, and the remnant of the last charred wood still lies, fractured and dusted. Ghosts that dance in the shadows the firelight throws, here in the wake of old and dusty relics – a chair with brittle legs and a shredded woven seat, some jumble of weary crates whose packing fibers mice have scavenged for nests.

It does not take much of a breeze to make this once-home whistle, up high in its sunken eaves and thatch, and the sound might be forlorn if not for the new purpose this place hosts. Otherwise, there is silence but for what sound Gloria herself makes in movement.

Down, down those creaking stairs, a tongue unraveling with the advancement of her lantern and herself. Down, down into the promising chill and damp musk, where the artifacts of industry still stand in the corners and against some stony walls. Aged fuel lurks below the coal chute, where its dust seems indelible now, coating the walls and floor around there in a dull irregular shadow. Some storage bunks are here also, trim with webs and dust and just long enough for a man to lie down on and rest.

And one has.

It would not do to say he has been waiting for her. It would not do at all to say he knew she would come. Yet the architect had a way of stimulating doubts like these: Had he known, in fact? Had he, despite how impossible it might seem?

Because he himself is dusty and dusky, with no bit of shiny matter on him to reflect her lantern-light, he will be as invisible as the spirits that whisper in the corners. The minor action of gloved fingers gives rise to the weathered brim of his hat, formerly pulled low to cover his face from whatever might fall through the cracks of upstairs floorboards, and it is here that some gloss becomes visible from his newly opened eyes. Boots are crossed at the ankles and betray some days-old trek in muddy conditions; spurs betray that effort also. A blanket protects him from the litter and dust strewn on the storage bunk’s wooden planks, but perhaps the extra effort was needless - his coat just might be as dirty. There was once a time when the man’s physical presentation was immaculate, but those days are old and finery is far less important in the absence of necessity. No kings and lords to impress, no high society to attend.

He is careful not to move, nor speak a word, nor breathe so that she might hear, but only observes as his hand lowers from the slight adjustment of his brim and returns to the embrace of arms folded on his chest.

She had come for the printing press, still here and swaddled in the canvas that protects it.

The very edge of his mouth betrays a quiet smile.
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 08, 2019 3:18 pm

The darkness and stillness of the basement did not dissuade her. Though she hesitated at the final stair, as if standing on the edge of a precipice, the purpose became clear: to withdraw from her satchel a pipe of clay before she hung the lantern upon an iron hook.

She spread contagious fire to another candle, and used the butt of the candle to tamp down her coltsfoot — and to light it. Orange embers burned in the cup of the pipe. Smoke rolled into her mouth, then came from her nostrils in long ribbons. Smoke drifted like mist around the crown of her bonnet. Though the scant orange light, flickering and winking against darkness, did nothing to light the distant corners of the basement, it was more than enough by which to operate.

No ceremony: she bit her pipe, ran a finger along the mound of canvas, then wrenched the cover away from the great machine.

The wonder beneath still forced her to catch her breath. It makes words, she had once proclaimed, and the moment she'd first seen the contraption was etched like a woodcut into her brain. A fond memory in a time of so few. The girl — no, woman — took a long pause to observe the mass of mechanisms and creation, all its bolted widths of wood, forged connections, and monstrous levers. Beside it, she was larger than she had ever been, a body of all shoulders and work-mettle, taller than almost any man and dark as burnt oak. Years had turned her larger in every conceivable way: her feet wore bigger boots, her hips a wider belt, her neck a thicker collar.

Her lone hand reached out for the joists of the printing press. Like touching an old friend.

But she never made contact.

Instead, she grazed a thumb across a nearby shelf. Examined the pad of her finger. Her brows knitted curiously.

Then she picked up the edge of the canvas, and thumbed it all the same.

Her shoulders suddenly stiffened. Shot forward. With a fighter's poise.

The canvas fell from her grip.

Her boot slid back. Her hand danced across the side of her skirt, then down to the bend of her knee, and beyond. She withdrew an object from her boot. A knife, small and stern, appeared in her fist, held underhanded and nearly hidden by her forearm.

She stood still as stone.
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Sat Aug 10, 2019 8:36 am

Motionless, save the rise and fall of his chest for the breath that flows there; motionless still when her instincts warn her of another presence and she responds with form, readiness inscribed in her every limb.

The man is especially interested in this.

And for some long seconds does nothing but study her from his position of rest here in the shadows of the bunk’s lowest platform. At the edge of his awareness, sensitive olfaction detects what was once stored here – burlap satchels of potatoes, leeks, corn, wheat. Apples, for a time. He breathes it, recognizes those decades-old scents at the same time his attention clings to the young woman’s alert posture.

At last he unfolds his arms, uncrosses his boots and swings them down to the cold floor, leans forward now to emerge from the gloom of the bunk. As the glow from her lantern-light makes him into something more tangible than a fathomless dark shape bleeding out of the basement's abandoned furniture, it throws further detail of his weathered appearance into view and she will know the silhouette. There is but one brimmed hat like this one, but one style of coat whose faded elegance of length and cut and weight behave this way, but one source of calm movements like these.

And but one set of eyes like his, visible below the cant of his hat brim.

He will wait for her to know him, to adjust. They had been apart for some time now and it may take moments for the mind to lay down its defense and remember. The man takes two slow steps forward to give her a better view, to show her his hands are empty of weapons.

And he gives her something more in the form of voice, with the fading accent rasped and familiar. “I hope you have no cause to use that,” a gentle nod toward her hidden weapon. Sensitive ears heard the blade whisper from her boot, subtle and near-silent as its transition was.
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Sat Aug 10, 2019 2:25 pm

She could have been cast from bronze, so great was her stillness. Even the smoke from her pipe — still burning in the vicegrip of her teeth — seemed to slow, as if it feared even its faintest movement might warrant distraction.

You should run.

But not every vagabond meant her harm.

You ought to flee.

This was an abandoned structure, after all. A home that belonged to nothing but the land upon which it stood.

You have no claim to this place.

Yet, her fingers tightened so surely around Liam's handle that her knuckles creaked like the hinges of an old door. Hers were not eyes which could pierce darkness, so as movement stirred — her heart played a wild, rapid rhythm beneath her ribs — she sharpened herself like an arrow-point, twisted her heel, and prepared to either spring forward or leap backward. Finally, she saw him: the length of a long and indistinct coat, the width of a hat. Did not recognize him, exactly, but knew him to be a living, breathing being. Her shoulder swiveled. The arm clutching the knife raised, leveling it toward him, the arch of her index finger laying across the spine of the blade as though pointing at him alongside the edge might guide her true. And then—

I hope you have no cause to use that.

Were there seconds that passed between the woman's readiness and her surprise? Or was the transition immediate, like a candleflame blown by a gentle breath?

Beneath her bonnet-rim, the Sun-scorched eyes suddenly grew deep. Deep as oceans. Distant. Knowing.

The knife clattered thoughtlessly to the floor, and if Sylvius Duquesne did not move, the young woman that came hurtling toward him might have won her way. And if she were victorious? Hers was an embrace so graceless, so powerful, and so full of coiled strength and longing that his feet likely would have had no chance to remain on the ground.

"You—" she cried, both a shout and a laugh. "You!"

Sometimes, not even the most diligent students of language and rhetoric could find any other word to say.
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Sun Aug 11, 2019 5:29 am

Her Sun-scorched eyes grow deep as oceans, recognition whispering into the mind behind them. He sees it and lifts a hand with care, pinching the crown of his hat to remove it and the shadow its brim claims upon his face.

The knife in its collision with the floor plays a tune for the basement’s dimensions, its surfaces. In the man’s hearing, its clatter however small or brief causes vibration in the atmosphere here that continues on for moments afterward, long after the initial sound has ended. Pinging from one wall to another, slowing down in contact with the more dense stone of the walls and floor, and speeding through porous matter, these wooden objects, beams, boards, fabrics, bodies.

But these vibrations, these minute shock waves from a relatively brief and harmless clatter, are secondary in his perception of the present. He cannot not hear them, feel them even, but they are quickly made insignificant by Gloria’s response. Would he expect her enthusiasm? Brace himself for the onrush? Perhaps, but he does not move from her path and in the last second he has to prepare for her embrace, he can only spread his arms a little wider to accommodate her.

Losing grasp of his hat, it falls to the floor and rolls enough aside to be out of the way of boots. Once he has recovered his breath, the man finds himself laughing aloud when his student—his friend—manages to lift him off the floor. No easy feat, because people are so rarely allowed this kind of intimacy with him, and because he is well built, taller than Gloria by inches at least. He’s enfolded her shoulders tightly in his arms, and when he eventually regains the use of his boot-soles, newly connected with the floor, he places his gloved hand gently onto her bonneted head and leans his jaw nearby.

For a moment, eyes close to the mild gloom of the basement and he must wonder—if even for a moment—if she was a figment of his making. Such strange and compelling things had occurred, so much time had seemed to pass for him, so much time that he felt she might not be real. Surreal, even. But the power of her embrace, replete with longing, anchors him in the present and becomes his proof of life. And quietly, privately the man is surprised by the well of emotion he experiences, having not anticipated how much he needed to return here to those places and people familiar to him. His places, his people.

“You are grown,” he murmurs against her bonnet, with the remnants of his laughter drawn down into a more solemn smile. He had missed time in this place, with her, with others, and there was much to learn about what had transpired during his absence. Such things would emerge in time, soon enough but not yet.

After a moment, his hands lower in the loosening of his arms and he grasps her shoulders. Holding her away enough that he might study her in his way, his eyes, green eyes that respond uniquely to lantern-light, offer their own embrace. The man’s gaze could be enveloping, sometimes acutely uncomfortable for its steadiness of focus and observation, but his evaluation of her is not so leveled, gentler by far. She is taller than he recalled, stronger. She carries different cares now and he knows their measure, though not their origin, in the changes he sees in her features, in her eyes.

“Gloria,” he says, speaking her name like a ‘hello,’ and years or months seem to melt away. “Forgive me for startling you.”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Sun Aug 11, 2019 9:43 am

She saw him, and it was a wondrous sight to behold. Time had bedraggled him, but only with the distance of years could she so immediately recognize both the fractional and vast changes of his form and his face. Was that gray, like spilled dye, among the hairs of his beard and head? And why, even with his great height, did he seem...smaller? She'd lifted greater stacks of paper and scuffled with larger folk than he, but few men — with perhaps the exception of her par'dak, whose face was but a blur anymore — stood as tall and as reverently in her mind as Proctor Sylvius Duquesne.

Gloria. He said her name. Against him, tucked beneath the jawline, and willingly small, she discovered succor. And drew perhaps the deepest, most orderly breath her lungs had known in years. His smell...

Candles. Burnt wicks. Sand for drying letters. Leather. Wet leaves. Light, had light an odor.

At arm's length, she felt tiny again. All she managed, after dabbing at the horizon of her cheek with a trembling thumb, was, "You've shrunk, ah—" an observation that transitioned into a whole-chested laugh while she wiped furiously at the dampness under her nose. Her gaze, even this close, was transfixed, as if enspelled by the same wonder that accompanied the discovery of constellations and gemstones. "And fallen from grace, like — like the seraphs of old myths, skulking about in dusky basements and startling women at their work! But I'd prefer no better fright. Oh, let me see you better; stand here, in the light."

Her lone hand imprisoned his, afraid to let go.

"No letter would suffice. Forgive me," Gloria Wynsee said, "for a child's fear: that in all this time, you might have forgotten me."
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Sun Aug 11, 2019 12:45 pm

Time had bedraggled the man. He seemed leaner than he had been last they spoke, yet her embrace of him would disclose how much strength there was in his body, as if all matter had been hewn down into the most capable muscle. Only tremendous physical challenge over prolonged periods can accomplish this result.

While time took from him, it also gave.

She is right to suspect some gray in his unshaven face and in the black crop of his hair, close-shaven but grown out somewhat on the sides, longer and tousled from weather on top. It is a rugged look for him, a fitting one, grays and all. Hard-won, if not premature, evidence of what prolonged effort will accomplish. That he had not gone wholly gray ten years ago is miraculous in itself. But the man remains young, into his thirties but not past them, not by some years yet, and he seems only wiser and calmer than he had been. As if he had finally taken his greatest burden and laid it down.

“Shrunk,” he echoes her with amusement, crafting some quiet laughter from his chest. “Gravity will have its ways, it is sure.” And there is more truth in this remark than she can know. A gentleman still, he reaches into an inside breast pocket of his coat and retrieves a simple kerchief, offering it to her.

Into the light she leads him and she will find the change better here, with more detail to view. Something rough-hewn lives here, sharing space with a refinement he will never lose, but this new thing is not entirely the work of the desert. The sands are upon him and her sense of smell is right to have isolated that familiar flavor—this, however, this is something stark and irregular and wholly mysterious. It evades definition, but whatever it is it seems an agreeable addition to his presence.

“If you print the tale of my skulking, make me out to be noble at the least. I would not want to be made more of a specter in literature than I already am.” And while there is better light for her to see by, the architect continues his observation of her with a smile still in residence at the edges of his mouth, increasing there in the midst of his comment. His green eyes still own their animal shine, here especially in the midst of his study of her, and visible when the room’s shadows and the lantern’s glow generate conditions for its appearance. This is, if only in part, how he sees when the light is gone. Like a thing nocturnal. She has grown up, a woman now, a girl no longer. Evidence of her trials and endurance are here for him to see and the man understands keenly in the moment that he will never fully know their number or measure, regardless of what she may choose to tell him in the time ahead.

He encloses her hand in both his own, firm with this gloved embrace. It is pure reassurance. “No letter could have reached me. There is nothing to forgive and no chance in all existence that I could forget you.” He pauses, allowing his smile to diminish, to transition into a set of mouth solemn and gentle. His eyes lift somewhat toward the ceiling, which is the floor above, and then lower to her again as he both hears and smells the hearth she made up. “May we sit by the fire upstairs? I chose a rather poor resting place. It is cold.” Years in the desert still have him preferring the heat of fires, even in summer. “I want to know about you. Everything I have missed.”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Sun Aug 11, 2019 1:41 pm

There were — and always had been — secrets about him. And he was one of the few that Gloria Wynsee felt unwilling to try to crack like an egg or shatter like fine crystal; he had, since the first day of their meeting, commanded both a courtesy and respect from her the root of which even she could not have explained. His secrecy was a pure and authentic artifact. He had never hurt her with his secrecy. He had never aimed to hurt her with it.

He had never turned his secrecy against her.

Nameless, where had he been? Ask a desert girl to forget the desert, and try as she might, its grains and simplicity never flitted far from the mind. The heat stayed in the blood; the heat, like a packaged Sun, rested in the flesh. A glance away from his eyes to his boots, to his trousers, to the rest of him.

"A gentleman," she said, not with a courtier's wonder, but a student's low-chinned respect. She took the kerchief; she dried her nose, and stuffed it into a skirt-pocket before leading the way upstairs.

Toward the ghost of a sitting-room, where age-old conversations still stuck in the Aithne wood.

Given the moldering state of the long-abandoned furniture, the once-seamstress had sprawled her blanket-roll upon the boards in front of the hearth. In her cast-iron pot, a lone candle flickered, that it might be primed for later reading. All in new silence, she invited him closer, even used the hem of her layered skirts to beat soot away from the bricks of the hearth for him. There she knelt, and in a battered tin cup, poured him a bit of wine from a bottle shaped like a fish. "One traveler's needs are — are another traveler's gifts to give," she said. Jernoah had never left her tongue; it weighed on her, with all its damp inflection and sharp edges. "I live, and I breathe, and this is enough. I only recently returned to Myrken Wood, both out of necessity, and out of longing. I busied myself too intimately with Ruann, and with the more unpleasant edges of Port Zenith in Razasan.

"I hope you'll not be too disappointed; I've been long, long away from my reading. A poor student if you've ever seen one—" And the laugh came again, as genuine as the subtle discomfort that twisted her dark face. She patted her bonnet, ensuring its angle. Her voice stiffened. She stared at the tips of his boots. "I cannot remember if — if you know. Or if you ever heard. It's been so long, I fear I cannot remember specifics or dates where departures overlap with events. I—" Up, then, with the lone hand, to scrape vigorously at her forehead. A nervous habit. Then a breath. Steadying.

"I have a little girl," Gloria said. "Like you do. Did you know?"

The fire popped. She jabbed at it with an ogre's finesse, prodding the fresh coals with wood.

"I thought of you often, and fondly. I wondered if you fared well. I sometimes found myself worried, for when a brain tells itself stories, it often cannot stop telling them, even when their endings are cruel. Tell me where a man goes that even letters cannot find him."
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Mon Aug 12, 2019 3:23 am

The weathered pack is dropped near one leg of the fireplace. Its contact is heavy, eliciting low noise in the room’s planking, and from its bundled gear the hilt of his sword juts. The weapon is perhaps the only clean object he keeps, the leaping tangle of wolves that form its basket are without a single speck of dust. He had taken the time before resting to wipe it down, administering diligence not only for the weapon’s sake but also his own. Alongside the pack, the man drops his blanket in a heap and his hat follows suit nearby.

She uses her own skirts to fend the soot and it draws his attention, not that darkish dust itself but the woman and her action. As she pours some wine for him, he watches her face or what edges of it he can view. And before he opts to sit, the man reaches to take the cup and murmurs his thanks to her for this generosity, liking what she said of travelers’ needs and travelers’ gifts. A good saying, he thought.

So she too has been gone a while, visiting distant places, and returning to Myrken now with the same compelling forces that have driven him back. Necessity. Longing. He takes a drink of wine, appreciating the form of the vessel it was poured from, and leans to set it upon the flush hearthstone before he joins it there, and her. Sitting with his back to the leg of the fireplace, here where he tossed his blanket, the man chuckles quietly in response to her confession—and he spies the subtlety of her expression, making the stiffening of her voice and the vigorous rub of her forehead unsurprising. She is preparing her words. With knees up-drawn and weathered boot-heels lodged in some gap between floorboards which keeps them from sliding, the man relaxes his shoulders with a near soundless exhale. To sit with a friend must be counted among the finest gifts.

Yet before he can offer some comfort regarding her studies, or the lack thereof, she offers him something first—a fact that does surprise him and draws stillness into his features, re-orients his gaze from the surface of his wine back to her. A little girl, she tells him. She has a little girl.

“I did not know,” he admits, and the calmness of his voice softens the moment of silent ponderance that elapsed between her words and his. The edges of his own mouth are ready for a smile, but he waits to craft it. His hand, still with the cup among its gloved fingers, lowers into the gap between hipbone and thigh, and it is in this moment that his gaze betrays the steady focus of his observation, a vital cornerstone of his personality with which she is all too familiar.

Eyes are pools of thoughtful shadow, searching the contents of her face with constancy, watching for those subtle details that lend him perspective on emotion, on the contents of the mind itself. The edges of her mouth, the corners of her eyes, her forehead. Even as her prodding of the ember bed—this, too, shall speak—rouses sparks and blue-rooted flames, and even as she continues, directing the conversation toward him, the man is quiet and watchful. Maddening, if one allowed it to be.

But it is not yet time to talk of where he has been that letters cannot go, not just yet. He had questions for the woman, questions whose answers would tell him about her sentiments. Is she happy and is this a positive development for her life. “Your child,” he poses gently, “what is her name?” His hand extends from his belted hip to place the cup of wine near the fire to warm and he leans forward, resting loosely folded arms on his knees while the fire-glow turns his dusty spurs a dingy gold and makes shadows from the leather-bound buttons chasing one another up the back of each tall boot. These, for a horseman in the desert. “And her age?”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Mon Aug 12, 2019 4:42 am

"Twenty days," she said, with the flash of mathematical difficulty tightening her lips. "Eight months. Four years. Her name—"

Pause. The kind one takes before reaching out to touch flame or awaken a sleeping beast. Anticipating pain, but yet wondering too greatly whether this time, this time, will be different.

"I've given her none. Too many dangers accompany the truth of a name. When I speak of her, I call her Soodsy. In Ruann, they call her—" Do you even remember? "They call her Elkalie. And in time, she'll come to create her own name. That's safest; that's the safest way, especially now. But neither ink nor paper constrains her, nor damnation of — of birth or surname." It is a wonder to her that, in the midst of this explanation, her mouth and her jaw ached as if beaten. She realized, only too late, the source of the pain: a wide and proud smile, broken and cork-colored teeth be damned, so vast that the corners of her dull-stone eyes smiled too.

A long moment passed, where neither spoke. Then, as if sensing something, she gingerly reached out her only hand and cupped top of his knuckles.

"You were present, whether or not you know it. Whenever I composed a letter, or — or spoke on my own behalf. Whenever successes came to be, or danger mounted. Good and fine teachers, they take up residence in the mind, and with distance grow wiser and even more beloved. Far as you might have been, you were never distant."

His autonomy mattered. So she withdrew her hand, took up the wine, and swigged it. Only a dash. She consumed fermented drinks not because she desired them, but because she must — wine when water was not present, and when no fire was there for boiling. Her momentary grin demanded no depth of self-reflection be too heavy for the pleasure of new company; he was here, both friend and Proctor, like a mirage she could not believe. "There are stories to tell, of my stint in the fighting pits in Razasan, and surviving pirates on the Violet Flats. But there's only so much to drink, and so much light..."

She leaned upon a hip, untangled her boots from her skirts, and sat more leisurely upon the floor, eyes never leaving him.

"What called you away? What trials awaited you?"
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Mon Aug 12, 2019 6:26 am

The man absorbs every inflection, every intonation of her voice and every change in her demeanor. Every second of her proud smile from its first glimmer.

And he cannot help but loose his own smile to match, genuine in its measure and ready to be made from the moment she gave him this news. She has told him all she needs to here in the introduction of her child’s existence in the world, and he is reminded of a conversation they once had. A talk of possibility, even if fantastical, on a visit to this very farmstead and the printing press housed in its lowest quarters. “I am happy for you and for her, for Soodsy. Is this what I shall call her, and is she in Myrken with you? I am eager to meet her.”

Her choice of words does not escape him, raises questions regarding the other half of the child’s parentage and why such discretion is vital for the child’s sake. Gloria would tell him what she wanted him to know and in her own time. Until then, he would not press her to elaborate.

“Adeline is here. Perhaps they will enjoy playing together. I fear my daughter has far too many toys, a great many distractions, and an equally great desire to share with friends.”

What she tells him next lures some quiet solemnity into the outermost edges of his mouth, lends his eyes a subtle kind of welling—not of tears themselves, no, but of the same emotion that might bring them, were he the sort to endure such rivers. The architect is and has been stalwart in his command of expression, allowing only those emotions he intends when in mixed company, or the wrong company altogether. Gloria is another matter, however, and though his features may not reveal much, his feeling lies in the composure of his eyes themselves and in the way that his free hand moves to tighten, firmly, over hers.

There was great weight in the burden he carried, that owing to very specific decisions he has made, ones not in the best interests of those closest to him, he has left each one them without the support they deserved, without the kind of support he could—and wanted—to give. And yet his absence was essential, unavoidable, in its very nature the hand of fate. Etched, literally etched into his own flesh.

“I am honored,” he says, finding some words and voice at last, “to have been held so close in your mind, despite distance.” He cannot tell her how he cherishes the words, ‘good and fine teachers,’ but the man need not speak it to convey it; the eyes betray such volumes. "I held you close in mine. Each day." Perhaps this is why it seems as if, in some way, no time has really lapsed between them.

“Then we will resume the telling when drink and fire are plentiful. Soon, for tales of fighting pits and pirates cannot be resisted for long.” He pauses, offering the texture of his coat sleeves some attention now while he composes thought and sentiment, a process evident by the subtle flex of jaw and the angle at which his eyes are downcast. She will have some relief from his close watch at last.

In the past, moments of silence like these were ordinarily characterized by impressions of sadness, burden, emotions left untouched. But the man demonstrates not one of these, not one thread of the former weight he once endured. His demeanor is one of reflection, composed by the virtues of a far quieter mind, and by the indexes of experience that preceded his arrival here. Still a gentleman, still a lord—these attributes being woven into the tapestry of his heritage, they cannot help but manifest even when coat-hems are trim with dried mud long since flaked away, even when elegant seams and expensive cloth and equally expensive leather betray tremendous abuses. His father will have long tired of rolling in the grave over his son’s ragged look, the cut of his hair especially, being much too heathen.

The architect lifts his head and breathes with the same action, filling lungs with familiar atmosphere as he looks up into the rafters, into the sagging and pitiful thatch above them. There, where the thatch has collapsed fully and left a great hole, he can see the night sky glistening with stars. Constellations bright and dark at once. Diamonds, a nursemaid in his father’s house once told him, a great many diamonds. Souls, a seer in his mother’s house once told him, many millions of souls.

But they were none of them right. Not right in any sense. “Were I to tell the story in any other place but Myrken Wood, folk might think me mad.” He lowers his gaze and looks at her, some animal shine roused at the edges of his irises in response to firelight. It is there and gone in a mere second.
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Mon Aug 12, 2019 7:14 am

"But you are not mad," she said, with simplicity. "And I would never think of you in such a way. Could not, and shall not." Others might have spoken the words with the kind of soothing tone reserved for wary children. But hers was a tone that was both sword and shield: matter-of-fact, and particularly forward. In defense of him. Poise against the world. "I've...encountered madness as of late. Not within myself, but observed it in others. The proof of it, or just the vestiges."

Spoken as if she knows it, or knows of it.

The burning confidence of youth.

"Adeline," comes the interruptive tremolo, as if the word itself was a thing of beauty. "How does she fare? Her sewing? Tell me she's abandoned it, if she despises it; a girl's better fit for swords and diplomacy than needlepoint, anymore. How old is she? What interests does she harbor? Are there any boys whose elbows I ought to turn to splinters for mistreating her? Any other young women, for that matter?" The barrage of questions spilled out of her with the ferocity of a frothing river, as if the name itself brought her new energy and life. She leaned forward over her knees, as if prepared for action, that the very mention of Adeline might invigorate her, awaken the Fierce Prrotector she fancied herself before the world had grown so large, so confusing — with the Red-and-Gold Summer, with the broken Ariane, with Razasan, with her own daughter...

Back, then, on her haunches. The bloom of her skirt collapsed around her like a deflated mushroom. And back, too, to Soodsy, their conversation an organized chaos.

"Mine, she — she lives in Ruann; they ensure her safety. You know this place. Its capacity for destruction and ruin. I want order for her. And comfort. At any cost," she reasoned.

But why Gloria was here and not in Ruann, she did not say. She looked up at the sky through the thatch with him. She wondered if they looked at the same pin-prick in that black and endless canvas. She found a dull star, easily forgotten, to give her attention to, and quietly damned its too-bright neighbor for trying to blind it from the sky. I held you close in mine. Each day.. He looked, and she felt it, but never drew her gaze away from the sleepy summer firmament stretching in all its dull purples and brilliant blues above them.

"Who you are is who you are," she said, nearly a whisper. "If you've changed, then I shall bear no judgment and possess no fear. With five years come and gone, the world is new.

"And so are we."

Something. Something...

The fire crackled. It knew nothing amiss.
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Duquesne » Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:31 am

Some sound emerges from his throat, rasped from old damages, and it accompanies a slow smile. Gloria was the truest of allies, a force. She had developed a keen sense for the ways of things, though he understood such acquisitions come at great cost. It was tribulation that brought wisdom and he quietly fears what circumstances have delivered hers. “It is a troubling thing, to see madness, to feel its touch.”

But troubling also to walk its sheer line, aware that one single false move will thrust one into that realm of irrationality with no certainty of ever leaving it after. Once touched, it could sometimes be difficult for one to remove the tarnish.

“Adeline loathes sewing,” he murmurs, lowering his folded arms from his up-drawn knees to lean back against the pillar of the simple fireplace behind him. One boot extends further than the other and he slackens his legs a bit, allowing himself the relaxed posture. “In fact, she refuses to practice with needles unless they’ve something to do with surgery and she now has a skill for stitching the wounded, animals and people.

“But no boys,” he adds with some relief, and here the first evidence of that former temper whispers just so. Something about the man’s eyes. As protective as Gloria in this matter, no doubt. “I think perhaps her cousins have given her grief, but she possesses a bit of a temper herself.” He looks at her, amusement and regret mingling together on his face. “She has inherited some of my more unpleasant aspects, which makes her a challenge to manage. Strong-willed, independent of mind and pursuit, to say the least of these things.”

He studies his gloved hands, taking note of the scars in the leather as he has done many times before, and he makes loose fists just to test the material and its flexibility. This is what his father could not understand—leather only started to become comfortable when it was this broken in, this battered. Satisfaction is a ghost at the edge of his mouth.

“I have feared bringing her here, all her life, and I do not know if I have made the right choice in terms of her safety.” He tugs the gloves free and sets them down beside his thigh, then takes up his cup of wine. It has warmed since he placed it near the embers and he takes a drink, savoring the temperature and taste. There was no wine where he had been, only some distilled substance that often doubled as liquid fuel. “Yet I had no other recourse. Gloria, she declared she would live here with me else she would be drastic. We quarreled for days before I left on financial matters and two days into my work, I received a letter from my brother in whose care she’s been for some years, explaining that she had ‘escaped her bonds,’ as she called it, and run away.”

The man pulls in a slow and deep breath, for the first time betraying weariness. “She traveled a solid forty miles on foot before she was found.” And he can only shake his head, unwilling to think of how he felt then and how he felt once they were both confined to the same sitting room afterward. It was the day he realized he was surely doomed—his twelve-year-old daughter had the power of storms. And yet. She was savvy in her flight and even now he cannot help but feel some pride for it despite the wholesale fear it struck in him. “Now she is here and enduring the compromise she accepted, to be always in the company of her guards. But as you say, this place has a capacity for destruction and ruin and is very much without order and I—” There is no need to finish the sentence. A silence, and then, “You are wiser than I to keep Soodsy in safety elsewhere.”

He drains the last of his cup and sets it down on the hearthstone with the tiniest of clinks, takes time to study the glow the fire builds on its rim. “The world is new, and so are we, “ he echoes her, lifting eyes to hers, studying her a moment while she observes the stars there through the open slump of the thatch above.

“Tell me what brought you here,” he asks, with a need for diversion, “to the printing press.”
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Re: The Urge to Wander

Postby Rance » Mon Aug 12, 2019 2:59 pm

The anecdotes about his daughter would drive most dull men to the aforementioned madness; but Gloria, even in the midst of his fatherly distress, finds herself laughing — when appropriate — at the younger Duquesne's willful disobedience. "Forty miles? You've raised a curious adventurer, Proctor. The blame falls entirely on your shoulders." Here, a smile of her broken teeth, to demonstrate the fullest good humor of her criticism. "But with respect, you employ the wrong verb: a young woman cannot and should not be managed, else she becomes a terror to no others but herself.

"Being a young woman in this world is—" her chin tilted, her eyes finding a dark spot on the wall, "—hard. Men — our brothers, our fathers, our leaders — find it both instinct and imperative to form the world like clay for us. From some, it is kindness, and from others, control. But charity is neither breath nor sustenance."

A mischief flashed upon her dark features, simultaneously apologetic and jeering.

"Fire the guards. That you presume she has agreed to this compromise after forty miles of freedom and discovery means she is all too good at sneaking past their eyes. Suffer the loud ones, like me, but fear the quiet ones and — and their machinations. She is already too good if she has you convinced that she is agreeable to your terms." But his pensive reflection does not go unnoticed: he wears a par'dak's weight on his shoulders, all the burden and baggage of humanity's most impossible and unlearnable profession. Parenthood. He could navigate books and maps, studies and plans, treaties and texts with ease. Yet here, she glimpsed a vulnerability in him, the faintest second-guessing of the self, written across him like so many age-old cantos.

Have I done right by her?

Have I done what must be done for her?

Is she happy?

Did all parents wonder the same? Here, Gloria reached out, and affectionately pumped her fist against his shoulder.

"You have done as correctly as you are able, and with the best of intentions. She'll know it only when she is older, and when you are old. I have faith in you, and — and always have."

Because this was a truth as hard as stone and diamond: Sylvius Duquesne, however dark the tunnels of his regret, was a good man. Goodness required neither purity, nor complete fairness, nor constant justice; it required, to Gloria, only one thing. To try.

As for the printing press? Wine in the bottle sloshed; she found herself bored already by the taste, and slung her elbows across her knees as she leaned forward and leered into the fire. "The Myrken Wood Meetinghouse nears its final renovations. Its Council is not only dormant, but nowhere to be found. Announcements must be made. If the members find themselves bored by their appointments or unavailable to fulfill them, then the task is simple:

"Build a new Council. Make this place safe for your daughter," the Jerno said, "and mine."
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