Let's call the whole thing off

Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Wed Jul 18, 2018 4:02 am

“It’s been all of a day, Sionnach. The best I can promise is that if you—” She bit the tip of her tongue and, suddenly, glanced away, shy and uncertain. “If something I did occasioned this—which it did not, but if it did—then I would be the one to know best how to repair it, an repair be required.”

She was giving herself far too much credit. If it had been something she’d done, she could undo it; anything less would be like forgetting her own name or misplacing her left foot. The other side of perfect confidence in her abilities was that one step in every direction outside of them was a frightening, unknown void.

“Anyway, it’s not going to be I who knows how much progress you might or might not have made. You forget, I didn’t know you before. There’s folks who know you best. If there’s any true change there, they’ll be the ones who could say you just what it is. You need to find them.” She raised an eyebrow, cocked a hip, looked him over more critically. “Although perhaps do try to hold off a bit on the ones who’ll skewer you on sight. They might have to be eased into this.”

There was being a good host, and then there was dragging your guests around by the arm. Fionn was large enough that it was difficult to drag her anywhere she didn’t want to go, but Glenn had the advantage of being unpredictable. Somewhere between the two she stubbed her toe on the doorsill as she stumbled after him.

“For example,” she said dryly, “you really must do something about this enthusiasm business…” and then she managed to get her arm free of him, rubbing her wrist and giving him a pointed look before she primly twitched her skirts straight again. “One day I shall tell you what became of the last fellow who tried to rummage through my things.”

She went at once to the chair she had occupied the previous day, checking the floor around it. Then behind it. Then moved to the desk she had been perching on—foolishly, since it was plain as day that there was no satchel on it and proximity wasn’t going to magically make her property reappear—before she gave him a quick, curious look. “Did you move it?”
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Glenn » Wed Jul 18, 2018 12:56 pm

"This was me, not you," which as statements meant to reassure one's self went was both unmistakable and ineffectual. Say something enough and you were bound to believe it though, or she might, given that she was claiming this anyway. That would almost be good enough. "You should see the journal of my exile." He added, then capped that with a firm addendum. "You won't see it, by the way. That wasn't an invitation. I stopped writing in it because of you anyway. Before you, I just had myself to write to. This was an event long coming, though. That's the point."

He'd outright frown again as she mentioned that she could not be the judge. "You can judge well enough whether I am a liability or not. That said, it's plain as your mole," which he couldn't currently see, but that he was using as a mental touchstone for various, likely futile purposes, so it was good to remind himself of it, "that I'm better suited for you now than yesterday even if I might have been more useful then." That wasn't the reason for the frown. "I'm not who I was when I left, Finn. I'm not who I was before I left. I'm not who I was before I fell. None of them know me. They know who I was. They know who I became. Not who I ought to be, healthy and whole and sane." Then, for perhaps the third time during this visit, he refused to meet her gaze. "One person would know. No one currently in Myrken though."

That might have explained his haste to pull her into his room. Or, alternatively, it might have been that he had no idea how guest right worked and the proper process of inviting her queenly figure in was a bit of awkwardness he currently could not absorb. Soon enough, however, they were in and she was chastising him and the satchel was gone. "No, it's rather like the destruction-of-my-entire-people bit. I wouldn't have told you that I might rummage through it if I actually did. Are you sure it's not like fairy gold? Gone by morning?"
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Wed Jul 18, 2018 2:44 pm

All the while he spoke, she stood in the middle of the room, silently rotating, eyes fixed on the floor and slowly sliding upward toward higher surfaces. Occasionally she would whip her head around and spin quickly in the opposite direction, as if the satchel might be following along behind her and she could catch it unawares. She didn’t credit him enough mischief to play her a prank—at least, not this sort of prank. If Glenn played her a prank, it would be more devious and far more subtle, and probably have some kind of irritating pointed moral to it.

She paused long enough to frown when his eyes shifted away from her. “You know,” she said dryly, “you can’t say something so cryptic about how just one person would know and expect me not to ask who.”

Though standing still, her mind went on whirling in tighter and tighter circles, a rat in a filling cask, giving the sense that the floor was tilting. Both hands squeezed the high back of the chair to root her. There was no reason, no reason, for anyone to want that bag. The only valuables she carried were the silk dress on her back and the garnet that was now back on her finger. Even a burglar could find something better and more obvious to steal—and she glanced around Glenn’s shambolic sitting room for obvious culprits—had they the patience to sift for it.

And the only sort of people she knew who would take her satchel wouldn’t take her satchel. They would wait for her to come back for it.

“You had better hope it melts away like glammed gold because those cabbage rolls are going to stink up your whole house in a day or two.” She raised a bright, brittle smile to Glenn and said in a cheerful voice that, while not loud, was projected to pierce adjoining doors, “Well, then. I don’t suppose your spies do things like go through your rooms and take anything that strikes them as odd, do they?”
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Glenn » Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:10 pm

There were certain words that, through repetition, through their impact upon those around them, held a degree of power. Before his time and hers in Myrken there was perfection. There was, of course, belief. Between the two of them there was violation and now there was liability as well. Here was another, accentuated by a shake of his head. "Discretion. Sorry."

He was not sorry, but he was more than happy to allow her to look this way and that. Again, he did not fully understand guest right but it was likely on him that something of hers had gone missing. Honestly, he half thought this was some prank of hers. The book, after all, was on the ground still where it had landed. She could have well remembered that upon stepping in.

"No. If we had actually made it to the ball, maybe." That would have led to interfering with politics, after all. "Anyway, if they did come, they would have looked at my work. That's half the point. So not my usual lot. I do, however," and he couldn't help but smile here, "pay everyone under the age of twelve in a two block radius a small stipend to tell me if anything out of the ordinary happens. So we could stumble about and ask a bunch of children a bunch of questions if you promise not to steal any of them. Otherwise, shouldn't we just consult the raven?"
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Fri Jul 20, 2018 1:40 pm

"Discretion," she intoned after him gloomily, not quite mocking, before abruptly slumping over the back of the chair, her face buried in the crook of her arm. "Discretion," she went on, muffled, "is a thing that whoever took my satchel does not possess. One, they look through the satchel, see nothing that they want (for there is nothing of note), and leave it where it lies. If I should notice anything amiss, I would suspect you had done it, you would suspect me of carelessness, and it is unlikely either of us would consider a third party. Two--"

And all at once she had flumped into the chair, sending it careening dangerously across the floor a good handspan and raking the rug before it. She sat sideways, legs dangling over the arm. "--that they would take the trouble to riffle through the whole house, opening drawers and whatnot, and take a few more obvious things, as well as the satchel, to make us both think you had been robbed. In that case I might be curious why anyone would bother taking the satchel but I might not question it too deeply."

She nudged the heel of one slipper with the toe of the other. The shoe flopped to the floor. The other followed, upside down atop the first. She slithered around in her seat until she was upright and began fishing around underneath the rustling petticoats to untie her garters.

"Three, that they would look through my satchel, realizing soon enough that the thing they might want is not there, and instead lie in wait for me to be sure it was not on my person."

Her hand withdrew from her skirts. She dropped a neatly rolled stocking into her lap, crossed her legs the other way, and began to unroll the second. All the while her voice remained bright and tinkling, brittle as icicles, a hostess at a very ill-advised party straining to maintain polite composure even as the lace curtains burned around her.

"Four, whoever took it knew full well that it would be noted, and found wanting. Therefore the loss is meant to convey some message. However, there are only two people who would care to leave such a message for me. One is my own clan, and they have no need to do so; they would contact me directly. The other is someone not of my clan, or someone in the hand of the High Queen, and they would not be so foolish as to give warning before a strike."

The other stocking dropped into her lap, and she wriggled her bare toes comfortably against the rug for a moment before bending forward over her own knees to fiddle with the back of her head. "And five, finally, is the same as four, save that the guilty party is one of yours and the message is directed toward you. That they took my satchel implies that the message has something to do with your association with me, but most of the other points remain the same. Plainly, then, the message--if there be a message--is a both sinister one and a stupid one."

When she sat upright again, her hair fell loose in a single thick spiral over her shoulder. She arranged it more neatly against her breast, then leaned deeper into the chair, hooked both hands over her knee, and smiled fetchingly at him, the dimple flashing in her cheek. "But I asked for privacy to discuss the Horn. Would you like to do that now, or do we need to search your house?"
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Glenn » Sat Jul 21, 2018 3:57 am

It was undeniable that it had been a strange twenty-four hours for him, with him acting strangely throughout much of it. Now, however, she was doing a fairly suitable impression of him and it was a sight to see. It was as if she had stolen his manic energy and was using it to propagate theories loudly and in a nice, neat ordered list, all while performing the oddest bit of casual burlesque one might imagine. Apparently she'd found another way to still his tongue (one or the other wouldn't have done it, but the combination of both, at least in this premiere performance, seemed to be managing it).

So he watched and he listened. The idea of not doing either never began to cross his mind. One half of this was certainly appealing to him and the other half was at the least unique in its supporting role. When she finally landed in the chair, he blinked, as if remember that he too was part of this conversation, that it was a conversation at all, and his features became animated once more. "Putting aside the already dismissed notion that it is I who moved the satchel," and his brain reached a sufficient point of acceleration quite quickly at that, buoyed perhaps by its momentary break, "there is one other possibility."

He was starting across the room now, towards where the satchel had been, slow and steady steps. He did not look at her. "The horn isn't everything." He finally said. "It's important, but it's not everything. He lost something else. Rhaena's death wasn't the only thing I remembered last night, Finn. At Golben, when I was on the verge of death myself, I had called for him. He came to me, unlike I had ever seen him before. I thought it another hallucination of the place, but I couldn't remember it then, not really. A fever dream. Red, like a jewel, and silver. White. The horn, but it wasn't everything. That's what he told me. That he loved me, but not to trust him for he wouldn't trust me." He looked at her then, memory having overtaken him. "Did it proceed? I imagine it didn't. We'd know if it did. He said it had to, that it would, but we're all blind to ourselves. The horn is not a horn at all." Burnie exhaled, even as he finished his ambling march.

"Anyway, Finn," the turn back to the present was harsh and grating. It was not the sort of thing that brooked compromise. "I don't see you rushing to question children, and I think you'd rather like the experience. That leaves me to wonder about the last possibility, whereas the satchel is here, right now, and you're playing a game so that I might not see it." He slowly ran his hand back and forth where it had been before. "Why? To see what I'd do? Because we lost out on our adventure at the ball and you wanted to make it up to me? Because as much as you want to leave here, you'd rather not leave me? Because you'd like to distract me from my questions even as you ask your own?" He was still waving his hand like a fool, but it was just as likely as any of her options, more so than most, and she had to admit that. "It's just a thought, really."
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:22 am

Once shoes and stockings were stripped away, it became plain that this was not a performance for his benefit: speech concluded, she drew her feet into the seat cushion and tucked them to one side, now looking more comfortable and prepared to carry on a conversation. However, she was not a lady to be oblivious to a rapt audience, even an audience of one. Once settled, she looked back at him. Her brows went up: yes, and? Rather than stowing the stockings inside the toes of her cast-off shoes, as she had intended, she made a show of stuffing them down her bodice, all the while staring directly at him through coolly half-lidded eyes, then primly hitched the neckline a little higher and cleared her throat to announce an end to the scene.

“Glenn,” she began, “I didn’t—” because the last thing she want to talk about was Catch; that was sure to stray into making her cross again.

Yet something in the way he spoke, the quietness, the way he got up and wandered as if once again lost, made her lips seal in silence. Her hand moved to gently touch the base of her throat. As he bent beside her chair, she wriggled sideways she knelt on the seat facing him, very close, with her elbows propped against the arm. One hand cradled her cheek.

Once more she wondered if perhaps there might have been something more to the glam than she intended, something which she had not put there. That she had done something to occasion all this. Only the possibility of having done it all unwitting disturbed her. The thing itself, she could not regret, in part because he didn’t seem to, but in greater part because it was meet and just for him to have his own memories back. Though they be painful, they were his.

Still, if she could have opened up Glenn’s skull, stolen the memory out of it like a jewel, and claimed it for herself, she would have done. Now she could only watch him with a small, sad smile on her face, wistfulness mingling with bitter envy. “He is lovely in His glory, isn’t He?”

She shook her head gently. “But no, mo sionnach, I played you no such tricks. I would rather hope you were playing me one; that’s the less worrisome alternative, really.”

The playfulness was gone, which meant she was a little awkward. She usually was without her myriad veils of glamourie and manners to hide behind. “In one thing you are correct. I don’t want to leave you as you are. It is not good to leave you alone with these thoughts, these memories. Men do not pass through glamour easily, but in your case, it is something more. Something strange. I would see what comes of it.” She tried to make it sound neutral, purely in the spirit of professional inquiry, but the worried little divot had appeared between her eyebrows. At last she nodded her head in concession. “And for your sake, as well. I would not have you be alone. It’s…it is easier, when the memories come back, to have someone near. Just to listen, if it’s listening you want. Or just to stay. I fear—” and she bit her lip, shut herself up. “Look, man, you look near ready to drop. I should just let you go to bed and get ready to go myself. But I fear if I do that, if I leave this all to a letter, that by the time you’re ready to write to me, you’ll shut me out again. Ignore all my questions. And it will be this great heavy thing that lies between us and you’ll never get around to talking about, with me or anyone.” A small note pride entered her voice, and she smiled. “I am much less easily put off in the flesh.”

She let the smile soften and put out a hand for the side of his face. “At any rate, I am not putting off your questions. I came here for enough privacy to answer them. I did not mean to ask about His horn. I meant to tell you about mine.”
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Glenn » Sat Jul 21, 2018 10:24 am

It wasn't the progression of vanishing clothing that had drawn his interest so much of the progression of erupting theories. Those ended even as she found a unique place to store a stocking. That draw something of a quizzical look from him but no quip. Instead of giving her the satisfaction of inquiry, he started towards her with a theory of his own, the only reasonable theory left after she had exhausted all the others.

It wasn't as if years of lost memories, or even months of them, were becoming dislodged in his head. All of Myrken had lost an hour or two after Rhaena's death, so ingrained was her power within the province, but this wasn't just that either. In the time leading up to her death, he had been a prisoner of Golben, and while he remembered his false testing of the labryinth with an even more false Audmathus, he had been subject to the magics of the place. Upon awakening, he was hit by the realization that hours had been months and, starving and near-death, with Rhaena's death so soon after, it only made sense that he had lost some of the most surreal of his experiences.

This was what he was working out as he bent over beside her, waving his hands for a satchel which could not be found.

"No," he said, as much to the side of the chair as to her, "I've not much use for kings, most especially when the k is uppercase. He spoke of our kindness, myself, Dulcie's. I'm not sure who else." For he remembered it, but not all was entirely vivid. "The Brown boy maybe? And how that shaped the version of him that you know. Kindness begets kindness, and it was that which allowed him clarity on that day. I won't acknowledge his glory, but I will say that he was lovely in his kindness, but then, aren't we all in the times so infrequent that we can reach that pinnacle?"

With that he started to stand again, though he was still close to her, or at least the chair. "It might help if you told me what was in the satchel?" She seemed in no rush anymore, however. Instead, it became somewhat awkward for both of them. "Working through these things, Finn? They're what I do. You're welcome to stay a bit longer, but I can tell this is all one, long carriage ride for you, and I'd not have you be miserable for my sake. If you're clever enough, you'll get answers out of me. If I'm just to close back up again anyway, then what answers you might get now wouldn't matter much in the future." It would mean that this side of him would be an aberration, instead of the face he showed the world. "With me and this, I think it's all or nothing for you now, queen with a lowercase q. You'll never be satisfied by half-measures."

Then she spoke of horns and he laughed, a warm, captivated thing. "Of course, if you're going to keep telling me secrets, then you're free to stay forever." His eyes focused upon her suddenly, completely. There was nothing in the world but her (and her secrets), ganconner blood or no. "Go on."
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Tue Jul 24, 2018 4:12 am

Moodily she glanced over the chair’s arm to figure out why he kept moving his hand like that. “What in sin are you doing?”

Except that no sooner was the question out than she realized exactly what he was doing. This sort of incredulous groping the ground would have made her laugh herself sick with anyone else, except that with Glenn she always suspected it wasn’t incredulity but a genuine effort to beat the glam by solving the trick, the same spirit in which he claimed to have thrown the book at her—trying to hit the bit of her he couldn’t see. By rights that should have made the effort all the more hilarious, except that this time there wasn’t any trick. Everything was going to be something to be solved with him, always. He would always look for the trick.

She flopped back again, exasperated, her head tipped so far backwards that her long queue of hair dangled over the opposite arm, nearly to the floor. “Paugh. You are most unreasonably stubborn betimes.”

With a quick flutter of movement, she was up and out of the chair as soon as he stood, planting herself before him with arms laced across her chest and with chin raised just enough that she could still look down the length of her nose at him. Somewhere in the interim she had become just a fraction shorter than he.

“Oh, aye, and it took you no time at all to work yourself through the last set of things. I’ll just slip back and put the kettle on while we wait, shall I?” She made no effort to move out of his path. “I don’t want be clever enough. I shouldn’t have to be.” Her dark eyes grew stony once more. “If I want something badly enough, I’ll take it. You know that now. But if you set compassion as some sort of reward for being clever enough, you may keep it.”

In the face of his laughter and his avaricious leering, so much like her own, she delicately turned her back to him and glided away, simply because she knew the sharp stab of annoyance from having that look ignored and wanted to punish him for it. Now she wished she had not mentioned it at all. But now she felt bound. This was more important that her petty petulance. She had promised. It was his people. He would want to know, as much as she would want to know were it her own folk. Some things superseded others.

Perfectly silent, she took care to keep herself on the rugs, following them around the room like a little maze. Her fingers trailed over the hubbed spin of a book on a table, over a brass candlestick with a nearly new, unlit candle set in it, over the table’s beveled corner as she passed by. When she turned back toward him, she gripped the candlestick in both hands. With a sudden vicious twist, she jerked the candle free. The heavy holder thumped to the floor.

Between her hands, the taper darkened from wax-white to weathered ivory burnished to pearlescent luster by the oils of many hands. Her hands pulled apart as if drawing out a skein of smoke, and the candle’s skin hardened into bony striation, a spiral knotted with carvings that over the course of numberless years had worn to flat, featureless echoes: the arch of a horse’s neck. A round eye. The outline of a fanged mouth. Once it had been embossed along its length with a parade of these stiff figures. Once, too, the spiral had ended in a sharp tip, now nipped to a flat disc bored with a hole. The wall of the open bell was as thin and delicate as a seashell, a pale gold morning-glory, something less inclined to chip or crack than to simply melt.

There was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was. No one who looked on it would ever consider it to be a seabeast’s tooth or an artifact of carved, bleached bone. One knew because it knew what it was, what it had once been. Its voice, should it be sounded, would be an ancient, mournful cry of rage.

She had meant to hand it to him, but now that the thing was in hand, she could not bring herself to uncoil her fingers from it. It was nearly as long as her arm shoulder to fingertip. Once she had had a dream—was it a dream—where she had gone looking for it and it was gone. Now it was here, the first time she had laid eyes on it in nearly six years, and though it was impossible, even fatal, for her to believe her own glams, she could not shake the feeling that it was real.

“In the First Days,” she began, and then there was no need to speak further. The story awoke from whatever deepest whorl of her brain it resides and began to uncoil itself, stretching to fill the room between them, until the air was hot and moist as a kiss and the cracks in the plaster turned to green veins pumping sap. The floor groaned softly as it bulged, boards bent like taffy and then snapped as vast silver ferns unfurled. The room held its shape, barely. It managed to retain corners and a ceiling. An incongruous chair stood like a relic from a shipwreck tangled in vines, its original purpose no longer recognizable. Outside the window, the city street basked in the lazy afternoon light…but the window went dark, blotted out by the body of a sway, lumbering beast as tall as a haystack, longer than last-night’s carriage. Its red-brown fur hung in matted locks. The glass creaked dangerously as the beast's bulk brushed against it; one pane gave way with a snap and a brittle tinkle.

The glam held but a brief breath after the story ended, then silently fell apart. The room stepped out of the shadows of what had once been, and the sun shone indifferent through the unblemished window.

“And before you ask, He already knows all this,” she added quietly.
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Glenn » Tue Jul 24, 2018 3:30 pm

He met her stormy eyes with steady ones. This may not have been his home, but it was his sanctuary away from it. It was his prison, but it was a comfortable one. He was more comfortable here than in the carriage. He didn't begin to flinch. "First, you know as well as I that if you just take it, it loses most of its worth. I wouldn't want that for you anymore than you want it. Anyway," He shook his head, but with no attempt to draw back in the least. His nose all but brushed against hers, back and forth. "Just because I want to give you something freely doesn't mean I well know how. That's where the cleverness comes in."

Then she had turned and then she began her work. He was, again, a captive audience, neither contesting the fate of the candle, or gawking or gasping at the arrival of the horn. His eyes stayed steady and focused. Here, giving into the belief of what was before him helped. She changed height around him. She changed clothes. This was not far from that, not really. It was different when there was no need for friction.

Maybe that's why she felt so emboldened to envelop him in the story.

The world shifted around him once again.

When it ended, he was down on a knee, hand outstretched, as if pushing back against the wind, or the span of years, or even the creature that had been outside. His other hand was steadying him on the ground. He had no idea when he had dropped down, maybe in the midst of that hard, harsh winter that reminded him of the aftermath of Golben so.

The wildness had returned to his eyes. He could stand stoic against her words or against her shift in height, against the appearance of the horn, but not against this. Usually neat hair was sweaty, unkempt again. A thin line of blood ran across his lip as he unclenched his teeth against it. He breathed in deep through his nose and exhaled through his slowly opening jaw, outstretched arm falling to pair with its brother. Sharp, defiant, passionate, alive eyes burst upwards to bore through her heart.

"Even at my worst, my very worst, Fionnuala," there was no invocation with that word, just a severe lack of inhibition and a path of least resistance: He didn't want her name, just her attention, "my most inhuman, I decided that I wouldn't, couldn't use Catch's horn as a weapon. When I had no lines left to cross, when I was empty in every way that mattered, I wouldn't, not even to save all I cared for. What does that say for you and yours?"
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Wed Jul 25, 2018 4:45 am

A white candle rolled across the floor and hid under the table. The woman bustled forward, scooping up her green skirts before she plunked unceremoniously to her knees before him, clearly distraught, her teeth fretting at her own lower lip. If he craved her attention, he had it in abundance. Frantic desire to help clashed against the hard-learned habit of don’t-touch she had picked up from the tultharian. Her hands hovered helplessly just above him as though he were sealed in a clear glass egg.

There was more, but in such a state as he seemed she had no heart for it—less heart than she had for any of this. She rushed through the rest: “A very long time after that, Morgana—one of the Sister-Queens, our great queens—used it to banish one of the Fomóraiġ, a giant from the First Days. It was so terrible that she forbid it ever be used again.” She half-chuckled, uneasy. “But of course, someone did. Someone always thinks that their need is so much different than anything that came before it that the Law cannot possibly apply. It took away her enemies…but it brought the giant back again, and it nearly destroyed us. It passed out of the High Queen’s line to ours, back when the Nialls took the High Court for a time. After we lost the Courts, we held onto the Horn and my…mo máthair arda, my grandmother’s grandmother…she gave it to the gods. That was under High Queen Leabharcham, mother of Herself. Leabharcham was wise enough not to try to get it back; she thought it better off with the gods, too. It was my father who stole it this last time. He says he took it back to keep it from Herself, for fear she’d use it against us, but I think in his mind he might have been looking to use it against Herself, if it ever came to that. But now it has fallen to me. I don’t want to use it. No one should ever use it, ever. It never should have been taken to begin with. It’s cursed.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper half-confession, half-apology. “I have been sent with a unicorn’s horn halfway round the world to the very feet of a unicorn without a horn. What am I to make of that?”

She raised gaze to meet his. At once her face crumpled and turned downward. One fist clenched against her breast, as if the sharp dart of his stare had struck its mark, and a tiny, creaking keen, barely audible, escaped through gritted teeth—a theatrical gesture, over-exaggerated, yet, too, oddly primitive and ritualistic, and thus painfully sincere. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that, I’m sorry…ah, gods, you’re bleeding…”

She patted her sleeves in vexation, wanting to do something for him but already knowing she had nothing to offer. The stocking, but the thought of fishing between her tits to press something that had covered her dirty foot against his mouth was hilarious in a squeamish sort of way. Finally she wrapped her loose coil of hair around her fingers and, leaning forward, reached to dab the red trickle at the corner of his lip. “I know I promised. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
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Niabh
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Glenn » Wed Jul 25, 2018 5:27 am

She was above him, beside him, before him, and it was all he could do to keep himself steady, to keep the world from spinning. Her idea of a balm, before she could brave a touch, was to continue on with her tale. He had unleashed his stare, his small speech but she had counted with pure knowledge. In hearing it, he was still, not writhing or keeling further, just still. Meanwhile, far too vivid images burst through his mind with every name and every deed, no immediate fault of her own.

He was still processing, still recovering as she moved in to finally reach for him, not with hand or stocking, but with hair. Unbridled passion gave way to the faintly familiar sparkling of a mad brilliance. "This feels like a ritual," he noted, head tilting ever so slightly, well within the grip of dissociation now. "What shall we be, at the end of all of this, Finn? Will I truly just be dust? A short song for a long queen? You can imagine what that thought does to me, how it drives me." He didn't stop her because he couldn't stop her.

Instead, his mind started to lurch forward without him, tugging his lip upwards ever so slightly in the process. "How did he do it, your father? What did he tell you? What details did he give? Did he boast?" Did he lie? Did she know? Was she certain? What cost did he pay? Was she the cost yet unpaid? Did she know? Could she see these questions within his eyes? For all that was on his lips was a small but eyecatching second wave of blood.

"You promised not to do it without warning or permission. You did not promise not to do it at all." He was still using both hands to support himself, but now he traded floor for her left shoulder, trying to pull himself up from a supplicant's position to at least something resembling the beginnings of vertical. "That was a compromise because I understand. I want you to be comfortable in communicating," and that was too much, too soon. It was the world comfortable that did it. A reach too far, three syllables? Four? Whatever it was, he was placing more weight on that forward hand, supporting himself upon her all the more.
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Wed Jul 25, 2018 3:00 pm

She chuckled softly, because of course he would ask that; of course his first thought would leap to his own place in all this, battered though he was. “Who knows? Who know what we shall be? I am not sure even what we are right now. Wasn’t that some goal we set ages ago—to bridge the gap and figure out what we were to one another? For now, we are here. May we just deal with here now, please, before you go gallivanting off toward destiny and death and dust?”

She should have let it go. Left it to a letter. Whatever had become of him had left him with a different, less-predictable fragility and he wasn’t ready for it. He thought he was, of course, because he thought himself ready for anything, but there wasn’t any need to put him through this just now. There was no crisis. Things could wait.

Paugh, was this what regretting was? Did it always build up and up like this once it began? She felt like a hound that had rolled in something nasty and needed two washes to get the smell off. How did tultharian ever get anything done if they were always in the middle of wishing they’d done something else?

The scrim of blood on his teeth was oddly alluring. Red, not blue. She sucked her own teeth, swallowed, and kept her eyes downward while he spoke to keep from watching his mouth while he asked his question. Still she felt a pinprick of apprehension. She did not have much Sight, but most Tuatha possessed a touch of it, and in any case one scarcely needed the Sight to guess Glenn suspected something. “I think it was something dreadful,” she told him bluntly, almost sullenly. “I think he cares so little for himself that he didn’t care what became of him as long as he got what he wanted. I know he’ll never tell me what it was, though. He would only say it was worth it.”

Her thumb caught the second dribble of blood but only succeed in smearing it. She tried again, ball of thumb scraping the bristle on his chin, but then the situation just became embarrassing. She half-smiled, not yet as brave as her own mother, who would have licked her thumb and wiped away the smudge no matter who or how old he was. “This is the second time in as many meetings you’ve ended up on the floor bleeding,” she teased. “Can we take this part out of the ritual next time? Let’s come up with some other tradition. Going fishing. Something less perilous.”

His hand on her shoulder took her by surprise; for a moment she mistook it as retaliation for touching his face and gasped softly, one hand going around his wrist, her hard shoulder flexing to stone under his hand. Then she understood. “Ah-ah…careful there, easy.”

Bracing herself more firmly on her knees, she extended her other hand to catch him under the arm and help him rise. “Then I am very sorry I gave you no warning,” she said sincerely. “And very grateful that you should understand. I must take more care of my host.”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
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Niabh
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Glenn » Thu Jul 26, 2018 12:59 am

In the face of her chuckle, what could he say? "I don't galavant. Rescind that." That was likely a futile attempt to buy for time with irreverence. He didn't galavant and maybe he wasn't ready, but his will was certainly stronger than his body (or his mind). He continued to push both well past their limits in the face of his malignant (or serene? likely both) reactions to the glamourie. He was still looking down, but much of that was because the colors around him were too vibrant for him to easily process. It was as if he had come out of a cave and into the sunlight. Everything took time to adjust.

It was almost a mercy to turn back to practical matters, those of her father and the horn. Yes, he suspected, perhaps only due to the similarities between him and the man. He knew what he'd do. He knew what he'd pay. He knew what he had paid in the past. "Back a step, so we might have clarity. What does he ultimately want? Queens and High Queens. A malaise of conformity even if not existence." Burnie only had short bursts of words in his arsenal currently. There would be no speeches even if there might be a few barrages. "To overturn the system would be to wash away his life's meaning. To overthrow the queen and replace her with you? With his hand steering the ship, you being the ship?" Then with renewed focus if not vigor. "Answer that first, then this: how would he use the object against her? Can it be focused? Your people or mine? One person or many or all?" It was, perhaps, not a question he would have voiced so directly just a few minutes before, for it showed a hand and a state of mind. It also rather demolished his defense that her people couldn't use it without destroying the totality of his own and thus their own hope at survival.

She had decided to fingerpaint upon his face with his own blood, and the awkwardness and absurdity of it all managed to disrupt that ironclad will as much as anything else. "If you want ritual, you can soak up my blood from the Dagger floor. There's enough of it there." It wasn't some sort of manly boast, just a matter of fact. Burnie was a bleeder, uniquely able to inspire everyone to tap the vein. Still, despite only being able to rise with her help, he seemed less disoriented than the last time. Of course, that had been less focused a glamour. This had been a story buoyed by information before and after. Maybe it wasn't that at all. Regardless, he was affected (perhaps afflicted), but it wasn't quite the same.

"I do understand. It's like talking for you. It might even be your primary method of communication." There was a fevered undertone to his oh-so-clinical words. "I can't deny you it. I would be a poor host to try." Once on his feet, he'd stumble back half a step. There was no way, in this moment, that he'd lean into her if it could be presented. At best that'd lead to more dancing. He refused to entertain the notion of 'at worst.' Instead he all but bit his lip again as he focused on steadying himself. Then, with a slight tilt of his head that almost sent him keeling back over the other way. "Did it hurt you to break a promise?"
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Re: Let's call the whole thing off

Postby Niabh » Thu Jul 26, 2018 8:48 am

He hadn’t answered. Again. This time it hurt. He had once convinced her that he meant it, the one time he had ever really convinced her of anything, but either she had misconstrued or else he had never really meant it after all. Perhaps there really was no good word for the two of them. Or perhaps this was not the right moment. He was still sorting things out. Another letter for another day. Quietly she set the matter aside, with the sense that this time, it might be for good.

It was one thing to acknowledge her father’s perfectly obvious plans in private, amongst intimates, and quite another to have Glenn summing them up to her face as if she’d never suspected them. She quirked an eyebrow, visibly irked. “It’s not so simple, Glenn. Ultimately, he wants Cnoch-na-Niall, and Cnoch-na-Niall is all I am bound to give him. We are very open about it: I get the High Seat at Court and he gets his mother’s lands back at last. That creates its own set of complications, but we’ve planned for that.” And if Father tried to double-cross those plans, she and Ainrid had a second, secret set of plans for that, but that was none of Glenn’s concern. Privately she believed that her father might not survive his own victory by more than ten years. There might not be enough of him left to live on once his purpose was fulfilled.

She shrugged a shoulder, resigned to the possibility, not particularly saddened by it, consoled by the fact that Father would not have her pity even if she offered it. “It would be much simpler to say he wants nothing more than revenge. That’s part of it. It would be simple to say all I want is peace, and that’s part of it, too. But there’s just as much a part of him that wants peace and just as much a part of me that wants vengeance and the two are entangled, his and mine and both together.”

Stooping suddenly, she picked up the brass candlestick, fumbled under the edge of the settee for the escaped candle, and turned them thoughtfully a moment in her hands. Poor little candle in its moment of glory. It was nice that it had been a thing that could glow. Then she fitted the two together and set them back to their place on the table, touching them tenderly. “The Horn calls the Hounds. The Hounds proceed the Horses. The Horses bear the Hunters. One or all, the Hunters care not. They will harry whatever they are bidden.”

An eerie echo in her mind. She felt she had told him this long before, somewhere else.

She largely glossed over the remark about his blood, though she heaved a silent sigh and clucked her tongue. At the end of the day blood was usually better off inside than out, and if it must be out then better it be for pleasure than pain. She had a feeling he was almost proud of it. A pity his pride couldn’t stiffen him enough to stand up straight. She hastened to him when he wobbled, whether she was welcome or not, and got a hand on his back. “Oh, for pity’s sake, will you please sit down? I already feel bad enough over this. Where’s your bed? I’m tying you to it.”

Near enough to look him in the eye, she glared at him, stubborn and cross, jaw jutting out. “It was a promise. Not an oath. I am not bound to keep a promise, which is all the less honor for me that I did not.”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
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