The Happy Heart Is A Lovely Dreamer

[Glenn]

Ariane Emory had the bedside manner of a rusty suit of armor. Some would use that same description to describe her soul. Elliot Brown was not so poetic. He also knew that she was no physician, skilled at bloodletting, perhaps, but she knew very little about humours, bodily or otherwise. She was also terrible at calming him, either in the immediate or in general.

She fought back against nature, against unnatural buffeting winds. She tried to freeze it all, freeze his fury, to settle everything in a cask of unending, unmoving, endless ice. This was how she coped. He was a different creature altogether. The rug burst into flames, and that was just the start of it. There were never a young man more likely to burn down the entirety of Myrkentown on a petulant whim. The winds fan the flame but only for a moment. Nature empowers nature. Wind fuels fire, and soon, she does not have a storm before her but a thief aflame. His arms were crossed, his eyes narrow, smoking, glowing.

"I swallow things down," his voice burned her ears. His gaze threatened to make ash and dust out of her, "and I become you. I'm not anyone but me, Ariane Emory." He was angry, furious even. He couldn't deal with the severity of what she told him, of what it meant. It wasn't a game any longer. This was more than a lock to be opened. For a moment though, in the midst of the consuming inferno, his youth shined through, fear became incarnate in the flickering of the fire. "Meet me halfway," a plea, desperate, emotion turned in upon itself, whirling about until he was able to unclench and let it go. "Or I'll find someone who will." He reached for a pendant that wasn't there and upon that realization, he stared at her all the more intently.

[Carnath-Emory]

Scribes and scholars and surgeons; how she admires them. And not only because their talents are uncommon in a world that hosts stray swordsmen of middling skill upon any streetcorner you care to visit. No, their attention to fine detail, the agility of their well-refined thoughts; their capacity to create, to soothe, to produce. A weapon who knows her limits very well has nurtured a lifelong appreciation of those men and women who surpass them. A boy in need for calming would do better in the company of poets and songstresses; alas, what he has is her, good for murder and very little else.

Two weeks ago she'd sewn closed a man who was bleeding his life out onto her foyer's tiles. Trembling hands - because she was not even a weapon then, but only a bewildered thing playing at ladylike ways - but however crudely-made, the stitches were efficient enough to hold him back just short of death. Her talent is for emergencies, and this - here - is still desperate in its way, but so much more complex...

She does not flinch back from the sudden eruption of flame; neither does she withstand it, and the grip that had been unyielding upon him is abruptly gone. The rest of her with it, standing here now, here this easy half-foot distant, eyes narrowed in their examination of a boy who burns. Was there ever a clearer demonstration of what different things they are? But:

"Good." He would scourge her into ash with his voice alone, if she allowed it; there is a degree at which even steel will soften and steam. She cannot be unaware of this. "Don't be me." Don't ever. "But that? A moment ago? It was you, and it was also an inch from panic. You find your way through it however you please. You have, now. But I will not - "

this is how it goes, like this, like this, the voice quickening into shrillness and a thousand scattered papers dashed into flight by a hasty hand,
it is a thing flung so hard that it cracks into a dozen sickly glitters, it is a silhouette fleeing into the blizzard and stupid certain death
" - have it continue. I will not have you lose your self like that. I'll meet you halfway, Elliot. More than that. I sought you out this time, mn? Not just for the company. You know that now. What answers I have. What help I can offer. What you want that I can give."

He reaches for his throat, this boy wreathed in living fire, and oh, such flames are almost more than she can stand. She is not a scholar whose flesh once suffered beneath the musing application of heated steel; she is not an assassin who once set the world on fire to guarantee his success. And yet. And yet, this subtle tension at her mouth's corners; this narrow body grown very still. The slight swallow of her throat, half-hidden beneath a tangle of necklaces. Dark feathers; the blackened steel of tiny cogs and gears; a thin string of leather hung with pale shells. A bit of gleaming darkness: the night sky swallowed by its own infinite black.

He couldn't have failed to see it, once he knew to look.

[Glenn]

Her mind was a cold thing; his mind was hot. They were similar in some very distinct ways, however. They did not process information dissimilarly. The largest difference was not in the workings of the machine but in how it was used. When they hit various walls, Ariane Emory held back. She kept information for later. She dissected it with the appropriate help when she had such things and over time when she did not, or, barring that, she might have even failed completely. Elliot grasped at what he knew and pulled in every which direction.

Chaos and panic were two possible results to this. So, strangely enough, was realization. As Ariane would unfortunately witness, so was vomiting. He was fire, now, pure fire, no longer flesh nor blood. Something had snapped in the moment. He had seen enough. It made something click and whatever was holding him back, was containing him, constraining him, grounding him, faded to nothing. He vomited, and yes, he vomited pure flame in every which direction.

"I'm not real." He finally exclaimed, voice broken, bent over, staring down, fire dripping down his mouth in odd, unnatural rolls. Three long seconds, this continued, this pose, before he stood tall again. "Fuck that. I'm real." He swallowed down the flames and stared her down once more, flesh returning. There were a thousand reasons, a thousand thousand and she could probably recite almost half of them, but he didn't seem to care. Elliot Brown had faced quite probably the greatest existential mountain anyone had ever faced in Myrken Wood and decided to walk right through it.

That was, apparently, the easy part. All that was left was everything else. "They say things about you, Ariane. So, let's say the wrong choice is the right choice. No, it's not the right choice. The wrong choice is the best choice. No, no, ok. Look, the wrong choice is the choice that's most likely to work. It's also the choice I like more, but not cause of that. It's the wrong choice but I make wrong choices, and more than that, ok, I take wrong choices and I make them right for me. It's the most me thing I can do, and maybe I need to do me things right now so I don't fade away." He was flesh and blood again, clad in black. It wasn't how he looked that would register, but how he felt, and he would feel, very much, like a boy who carried himself as a prince not of dreams, but of nightmares. He was being terribly honest with her which meant he was being simply terrible to her. "So there's you and then there's her. And you need to tell me why I ought to walk with you instead of her through this, past the fact it's the right thing to do. You're an adult. You're responsible. You're a good person. Shut up. You are. I'm not an idiot. So tell me." There, that was that and it was clear as a the inside of a goat's mouth. Except for there was one more thing. "And know that I might listen to you or I might spit in your eye because that's maybe what I need to do. I don't know yet or else I wouldn't be asking this of you, or anyone, okay?" It was such a fine line between desperation and bravado, between petulance and honest, youthful pleading. She was so good with lines though, wasn't she?

[Carnath-Emory]

There are walls that you can reserve for inspection, boundaries which you might take the measure of as you stroll their breadth. And there are walls through which you must simply carve, and the trick, very often, lies simply in distinguishing the one from the other. What she'd become, though, had been such a different matter: there was no inspecting a thing which slipped sideways from every attempt to grasp, to hold, to know. What a thing it was, to drift inert as cautious hands reached for her. What a thing, to be reached for at all, to meet those hands without suffering a want to cut them off at the wrist.

Pure fire coughed wild into the world, and how it shudders as it burns. Flames lick at the coarse wooden walls; scattered wine and smouldering glass, and bodies scatter, morbid curiosity giving way to sudden flight. Their retreating silhouettes are swiftly lost behind the inferno. Not a fortnight ago she'd sworn to young Cherny that, given a sufficient application of heat, even stone will burn, and here they have the proof of it: structures groan and shudder beneath the pain of it, granite crumbles into ash and sparks; a ship wreathed in flame arcs lazily overhead as a shout erupts from the docks -

She does not yell at him to Stop. This is Elliot Brown being very much himself and she will not put an end to it, unless it should seem that he might play ouroboros and burn in his own flames. But there is a weapon in her hand, because she will not withdraw but still she is only her self; there is a shoulder turned towards him and steel writhes like wildfire across her skin. All of this, as he tears headlong through his shock; as she struggles to ground herself in its blaze. All of this, in the moments before the boy becomes a nightmare and the woman remains the weapon she's always been.

By the time he begins to speak, spitting sparks and coughing flame, the steel has vanished from her hand.

"Of course you're real," with a jerk of her chin towards him, and nevermind that her garments thinly smoulder. But only that, for by then a boy who already knows has begun to draw her with him down this spiraling chain of thought and conviction and conclusion and idea, and this is a journey she'll make silently. As he works his way through this, as he lays it out directly before her, and she is slightly frowning by the halfway point; into the midst of it had flung

"I'm not - "

and in that instant, black spaces yawned hungrily between them. It passes. And she passes into a silence which lingers long, long after his words are done; when she speaks again it's with a hand which reaches for one of the narrow blades hung at her hips and eyes set close upon his own.

"You do what you need to." This, tacit agreement. "But so will I. We meet halfway, mn? Both we do this." A quietness then, to give him room to decide - and to see the weapon she holds dormant upon her open palm. A blackened grip feeds into the slender, silver blade: a cultist's knife, a subtle tool employed in work that was anything but that. To look at Elliot Brown in this moment - here - is to read her touch in every black line of him. To examine the contours of this elegant thing is to know something of the hand to which it once belonged, ruinous and striving and surely damned.

It's hers, now. And it is clearly no more a trophy than the necklaces hung at her throat.
'Responsible', he'd said, and she displays this thing like a demonstration, his honesty met in kind.

"It could be her." Quietly, now, and very nearly speculative. "There's no saying what you'd be, once she was done. Better that, whatever it is, than being Gahald, perhaps. But..." A slight shift of the shoulder. "It could be her. Me, I don't like games and I don't collect toys. Pawns. Tools. Choose whatever word for it you like. There's that. My way is always harder," and she speaks it like caution, which is exactly what it is. "No matter the circumstances. If it's me, you do most of the work yourself. It's not just given to you. And after, you know that everything was earned and nothing is owed. I'm not much good for gentleness. But I don't break things in carelessness, and I don't break things to watch them hurt, and I don't know how to give up on people that matter to me."

[Glenn]

It was disheartening really. All of the fire was very nice indeed. The flying he particularly liked. They always say that magic had a a cost, but it wasn't just magic, was it? It was wonder as well. Anything unreal had a cost. Anything out of the ordinary had a cost. Anything that should not be had a cost, otherwise, it simply would be. All of this had a cost, and he knew well now what it was. Oh, he was real, but that did not mean he shared her reality. That did not mean he possessed his old reality.

There were existential questions, and he'd chew them up and spit them out. The practical questions were far harder to do so with.

She brandished her knife and his was missing. She wore his necklace leaving his own neck bare. She made promises and they were terribly lacking, probably not even promises at all and certainly not assurances. They were true words and rarely, very rarely, was that ever enough. In Myrken, it was never enough for in Myrken you always had to go at least half way. Thankfully, he was well used to that.

"Gahald." There was a way to do this. It was plain and obvious. You started from the beginning. You understood the entire situation. Obviously, Ariane knew more about this. It was upon Elliot to slowly, surely, track it all down, to learn what she knew and carefully come to certain decisions. It was the most direct line in the world, the clearest past through the fog.

So, of course, he did anything but. Instead he focused on the shining light far in the distance. instead he tried to reach for the moon. "I could be her creature already. I'm in your dream. I'm real, Ariane, but I'm not an idiot," and maybe if he kept saying that... "She's only done right by me, because I dare. You get that, right? I dare and I'm rewarded for it. You've been there. You've gotten old and responsible and maybe you lost too much, I don't know, but you remember what it's like to dare, right? To take that leap. She doesn't need to change me." Ah, the sound of a boy trying to convince himself. "She likes me how I am. I think she liked you more when you dared too. I probably would have too." He pushed down as hard as he could on one side of the scale, really pressed.

It was still not enough. "Alright, alright, you need to know this. If we can't do it, then i will go to her, and at that point she'll know I went with you first. If I succeed, that's fine. She won't care. She'll think me clever for it. If I fail and go to her, then I'll deserve what I get and what I get will be this: She'll make sure that I'm the worst thing you've ever seen. You just lost yourself but kept everything else, Ariane. We fail at this, and she'll make sure that you lose everything BUT yourself, at my hands, and we both know I can do it too." What came upon his face was a rougish thing, a smile. "And it gets worse. Even if we succeed, I may end up just that bad anyway. You may come to regret it. You're a good person but maybe this isn't the right thing. Maybe I'm not the right thing." He was coming apart at the seams now, his body dissipating slightly. She could see the outline of him but his presence seemed to take up more than a little space. "So you're taking a chance, taking a dare on me." She had offered him such kindness, a truth of her own and he returned it in kind, with a taunting sort of kindness, a way to get off the hook with so little guilt in anyone else's eye, a truth of his own.

"I'm okay with the work, Ariane. I'm okay with trying harder than you've ever seen. Are you okay with the risk? Are you okay knowing you have no idea what you're doing?" The smile hadn't faded, though he shook his head once, slowly, and the scenery itself seemed to shake. "I think that maybe I am."

[Carnath-Emory]

There's no fairness here. There's nothing to suggest that at some undefined future point, justice might be done. Even the adult, the responsible party, the lady at the window and the swordswoman with her steel - even she has withheld from promises, from any hope of soothing his raw edges. It could never have been otherwise. What she is unable to accept she is also unwilling to give, and here - where, in the company of Elliot Brown, she must be the coldness to his heat, the direct route to his spiraling chaos - all she had for him was guileless truth, the coldest thing of all.

Meet me halfway, he'd said. And presented her with his undiluted self. And received, at last, much the same in kind.

"You don't know where I've been." Except of course that he's caught a glimpse of it, now and then - in this place, in others. Surely she knows it. And still: "You don't know what I've dared, or how, or why. You certainly don't if you imagine she's ever liked me," and it's something like laughter then. A soft thing, and not regretful, not really; not at all. "There's no room in me for what she is." And on the subject of the odd appreciations of Elliot Brown she offers a shift of the shoulder, a small tilt of the hand; that, and only that. She'd already said, after all.

His cautions kill her remnant smile very effectively.

Dare, he'd said. This is not the look of a woman who is preparing to dare anything at all. These are eyes solemnly balancing the weight of cost against probability; when she turns, it is as if to pace the parameters of the worst possible outcome. As if Tragedy were a destination which the careful cartographer might chart; she paces out its dimensions, turns abruptly in the middle of it all to -

"That's always the risk, Elliot. A threat to myself is a threat readily managed," recent circumstances notwithstanding. A thin shake of her head. "You reckon me less daring because I've lost too much? No. You have it backwards, Elliot. To value something, to deem it precious - to allow that to happen - changes everything about what it means to Dare. It's not only me, mn? As you said." He's coming apart; she, conversely, is so utterly herself. Even pacing like this, for her eyes are quiet calculation and she trails twin shadows where she walks, disparate shades stuttering sometimes out of alignment.

Smiles, suddenly.

"All of these things you say. For my sake; for yours. Do you think I hadn't realised? Not the details," a wave of her hand, "but the stakes. Do you think I hadn't already chosen?" You chart out the dimensions of Loss, not because they are unfamiliar but because you can only accept what you know inside and out. You experience it. You swallow it down into your heart so that it will not eat you whole. And then, instead of hoping against risk, you can focus your attention where it belongs.

"So. Be sure. Be more sure than 'maybe'. Unless that's how you like to leap: eyes half-covered, just in case." Grins, then; wholly grins. "I don't do this because it's the right thing or the wrong thing. I do this because you are you, and you deserve to be. And because I think that between us, we can. And very much because - "

it was headlong into blizzards once, in breathless pursuit of a madman's delirium. it was desperation. it was heartbreaking terror.
this time, though. this time it's choice. this time
" - it's what I want."

[Glenn]

They had spent a nice, long, impossible-to-gauge amount of time dealing with the impracticability, the absurdities, the brinkmanship and the overdramatics. It had been backwards and upsidedown. It had been skewed and stilted and everything else. He was a raging river and she was a stone that would not be eroded.

She was a rock.

"Look, I said everything because I had to. This is a dream. There are things you do. Everything has to be specific." Dream prince speaking. He honestly had no idea what he was talking about but it felt right and so long as it felt right he could charge forward and fake everything, even with himself. He had reformed, as it was, no longer in those ornate blacks but in something more casual, dark, with a hood down behind his head. "It's like spitting in your hand before shaking. You just do it. It's important. If you don't do it, something can slip in."

Also, he was scared and confused and completely out of sorts, but there was no reason to mention that if he just mentioned everything else instead. He wanted to be himself so very badly. "This is stupid. I'm part of a dream. We know that. I have a dreamwitch that wants to, well, I'm not an idiot. She wants me to reach out and take everything that I want, that both she and I want, and to squeeze everything she hates out of Myrken, but unlike what just happened to me, apparently, she wants it because she cares about who I am, not who I'm not. And then we have you and you couldn't even get back to yourself on your own. You know just enough about dreams to know you know nothing about knowing anything."

Silence then. Elliot Brown was thinking and if there was any lingering heat from the fire of a few moments before, it was now gone, drawn back into him, because thinking was never an easy task. She would be able to see her breath. Finally, he would look down at his hand and spit into it. Finally, he would look back up to her and spit down, even as he held it out. "This is because we made a deal, Ariane. Part of that deal was to keep safe what was precious to you. I'd like to make them safe enough so that you can dare again." He shrugged a shoulder, arm still outstretched, spit, slightly icy, slowly running down his hand. "I can't do that in here, can I?"

[Carnath-Emory]

She means to object. She means to, and very nearly does: superstition, this is. Tradition cut loose from reason, and it does not sit well with her; it never has. And how was it said to her, once? Weeks ago she'd have struggled to recall, syllables scattering and slipping free of her mind's grip; in this strange hour, they come almost unbidden. A problem in the mind is generated, he'd said; the day was fine, the moment fraught. It throws down roots, thrives not only on what the mind feeds it but on outside influence. A child who is taught to fear a thing will fear it trustingly, hearing the words, knowing the fear, so that over time a great hindrance has been cultured there--that child, made adult, will suffer for the impression made upon him while young.

Superstition. So that a man flinches from the flame whose warmth he craves; so that a boy spits on the hand which he offers her. She's of a mind to refuse - theirs is a sober endeavour, and to be approached in kind; under any other circumstances very likely would have. But to look upon Elliot - here; to look past the habitual swagger, no - to add its exaggerations to the picture he presents of his self - is to read the fear he'd never confess, no matter what his words imply. A man who must have heat and cannot stand the flames which generate it: he subdues the hearth by means of a poker wielded with cool precision; redistributes smouldering coals, arranges splintered logs into exacting order until there's no corner of that fireplace that has not yielded to his will. A boy who is at once lost and imprisoned - and freedom, freedom was both his definition and his yearning - surrounds them in rules of his own design and insists that they are binding.

She'd watched in silence, as he spoke; watches that hand now.

"This is because that deal goes both ways. You know that. Don't you?"

Words freeze in the air between them, words crystallised upon her lips when she spoke. There was something bluntly definitive in his gesture; it had all the ring of absolute conviction. So does this: the moment that she spits, and they shake on a collaboration sealed in ice.

[Glenn]

The deal went both ways. Their spit became icicles in their hands. Elliot Brown smiled almost despite himself.

"I never really wanted the deal to go both ways. I never really wanted the deal. I wanted what I couldn't have. That's all I ever want, Ariane, and I always get it. That's the point of life I think. You get as much as you can while staying yourself. If you ever need to stretch or change to get more, you just become more of yourself." The words hung out there, frozen as much as anything else. "Whatever she made me," his fire had died down a bit but not necessarily because of her coldness, except for in that he wasn't fighting her anymore, "it's the opposite of that. It's the opposite of me. So we'll fix it, right." Not a question. It just was.

He could have let go now, even with the ice, even with the cold, even with the words hanging between them. He did not. Instead, "you'll come back for me soon, right?" What else would a boy who lost everything say? Even the bravest boy there was.

[Carnath-Emory]

In all the hours of their odd, disjointed acquaintance, this stands as the one moment in which they exist in perfect accord. Under any other circumstances, Elliot might never even have realised it - she spends no words to mark the occasion, makes no gesture to announce it. But: you just become more of yourself, he said, and how she smiled as he spoke the words; small and sudden and fierce. Anywhere else, it mightn't have mattered - but they are waking dreamers here, these two, their hands bound by ice and by more than that yet; he surely knows.

"That agreement, it goes both ways because that is what I choose for it to be. As simple as that, Elliot: your choices and mine." On the subject of wants, a hundred words lurk behind her lips, and none of them are slated for him. He hasn't the means to buy them from her - What does Ariane Emory want?, a man once asked; of the many who'd asked, he was the only to ever receive a response. Elliot, though, lacks the means and certainly the interest; in any case his needs lie very much elsewhere, and: "We'll fix this," she smiles instead, solemn and sure. "That's rather what I do, you see?"

His hand. Hers. He could have drawn his back, by now. Well-acquainted with the feeling of letting go, her fingers could have let his own slide gently away.

don't let me fall away, a lady had whispered; the night was long, the hour late. it was the end of everything.
don't be gone, a swordswoman had breathed - weeks ago and years ago, into a long and lasting quiet.

And when he speaks these words her other hand joins the first, its clasp certain and sure. "I'll come back for you." But are the features of this strange landscape not becoming slowly indistinct? "I won't leave you here," but the world is stuttering apart around them, a fragile and disintegrating chaos. His name, dim and distant and it is the last thing that he will hear.

But two nights later, they begin in earnest.

[Carnath-Emory]

One town is much like the next, when the town is small and its population nondescript. This landscape qualifies: hardly a building tops two storeys in height, and the main road is the only road, unless one's feeling particularly generous about the flattened dirt that spiderwebs here and there from the paving. There's movement here - signs of life - but not much of it: a rooster crosses her path, iridescent under the dusky evening light and strutting proudly as if these were Razasan streets; in the distance, a slipshod bonfire has attracted a few indistinct figures.

A whisper of conversation; firelight flickers in liquor-bright eyes. They're passing a jug back and forth even now.
A murmur of steel: well-clad youths playing at swords, sometimes laughing and seldom in earnest. Steel hardly holds their interest, save for how it shines.

Thin clouds of dust, with every step her boots make upon these narrow paths: the loose, dry soil. She is content with the lengthening shadows, this dark-haired thing, and her eyes are not much for firelight or for men dressed too well for their surrounds, or even for the merry-cheeked girl who's just run past her, out into the dusk to fetch laundry down from its line. The motion her eyes anticipate is very different indeed.

[Glenn]

High places. It was always high places for him. He had uncanny balance. Oh, alright, it wasn't uncanny. He honed it by falling a lot and that made it more canny than anything else. He liked being above the world. He liked being above the dirt. His family farmed it. He rose above it. By climbing, you could see the expanse of all possibilities around you. You could jump this way or that. It was all down, but everything in life was down. All Myrkenites knew that. There was nowhere else to go. Unlike everyone else, though, he could control which way he fell. That was the true freedom of a thief.

The high places weren't so high here, but he still reached for them. He still looked down upon her, sitting with his legs dangling over the side, kicking at the very top of a wall again and again idly. "You chose this. Before it chose you. Now you've chose it. I guess I like that. I wonder why you chose this though." Chose, chose, chose, and a question instead of a supposition. Elliot Brown was learning patience the only way he could, out of necessity. "Are you back with the Duck-Noose? Do you miss him? Nah, it's not that. You chose this for me." Then, with a little laugh, he asked "What sort of woman chooses to dream about the desert?" It was an unfair question, a false question. It was like trying to send ripples across a lake already frozen. It was his gift to her, a Myrken gift.

[Carnath-Emory]

It was always high places, for him. Not so much for her, not here - but oh, to have seen she and Cherny both, just days ago, perched upon Darkenhold rooftops like gargoyles. And all because she would have that boy flee the memory of difficult lessons, of a cold-eyed lady and page after page of nothing -

and because, having shed the last remnants of silken airs and delicate fragrance, a swordswoman made for steel had wanted so badly to steep herself in violence again. The dangerous climb, the long fall; to hurt, to be very hurt ...

"It's a little - obvious. Don't you think?"

She'd found him, or he'd found her; in a place like this, is there even any point in making the distinction? To find Elliot Brown, one must note the held breath which precedes the reaching hand, and wait for the moment in which his frank little smirk begins to drink the air dry. Catching the shadow of his dangling legs, one must only look up...

"The prince of the streets, every rooftop a throne," but there's a grave-eyed smile to temper that. Relief, perhaps. Kindness, except that she never has been, not really, not here. A person inclined to doubt this need only note the way that With draws a glance that is like a shout; like a wordless warning, as well.

In a place like this, a moment's silence seems to lengthen into years.

"Not a thing for your concern. Mn?" That, when she speaks again, and distant laughter underscores those words - there, by the bonfire; lazy laughter and a diffident collision of steel. Her gaze wanders; returns quietened, and by the time he speaks his question, the one she'd chosen to properly answer, silent laughter lurked in the shape of her mouth. "The sort of woman, Elliot Brown, who knows what flowers are worth. This, though. This is no desert," and her eyes allow a sidelong glance towards this world; her eyes, slightly frowning. "Or it wasn't to be..."

It wasn't to be. It needn't remain so. Watch, now; watch as dusty earth sprouts thin summer grass; look, look how it drinks down the sands. Ducal colours wash soft across the men's garments, there and then vanished in one moment and the next, and with it comes the scent of something roasting over those flames, a hint of thin smoke winding up from chimneys -

"Do you think I didn't choose - back then? When all I cared about was - arranging the world as pleased me? But you chose as well, sometimes. Yes? Duck confit," and the mouth yields a small, small smile.

"So. How do we begin."

[Glenn]

"It's obvious because it's right. " Simple words, simply put. A little petulant maybe. "I'm not some idiot who's going to go out of his way to seem clever all the time." No, that would take far too much proactive planning and that only seemed possible when he had a very specific target. "Or mysterious for the sake of being mysterious. That's what a prat would do, right? I think we all know people like that. Gloria's like that. She's still alive, right? Don't tell me if she's not." A dismissive wave of his hand. He simply couldn't put up with bad news right now, not too much of it at least, even if it was the annoying sort (and all news about Gloria Wynsee was annoying). "We're not kings and queens, Ariane," he added almost as an after thought. "A throne's whatever we make it."

She asks a question and he has every desire to run right over her answer. He didn't really want to know what was going on out there at all. He didn't want to know how long it'd been. He didn't want to know what he had missed. He didn't ask about Niall. He didn't ask about Nova. He didn't ask about Solena or Catch. He would sooner ask about Cherny or Agnieszka, about people that didn't matter. Gloria had been a lapse in passing, and only because she was so irritating, one just couldn't keep her out of mind.

Instead, he speaks over her. "No." That demanded a pause. It didn't get it. "No, you don't. Someone created that. Someone chose. It wasn't you, though. That person wasn't you. Do you really think that way?" He sniffed, putting his nose up which gave her a very good look at his nostrils. "Back when I, Ariane Emory, only cared about petunias, I was a very silly thing indeed." His chin shot down so that he could glare directly at her. "That wasn't you and don't you dare say it was."

[Carnath-Emory]

The things she might have told him: of Cherny's unlikely, inevitable devotion; of Gloria Wynsee - except that, past the measured confession an Inquisitor once drew from her, she hasn't spoken once to anyone of what passed between she and Gloria those weeks ago. Not one word: unable and fiercely unwilling, she had let questions go unanswered days ago and she is not about to be otherwise now. "Glour'eya lives." That, instead. "She fought her way through this, and now she does well enough. And Elliot," she can almost grin, despite the words; her mouth makes some attempt at it. "Your throne's wherever you choose to sit yourself. Who doesn't know that?"

They continue to gather, down there by the bonfire. Silhouettes against leaping flames, as indistinct in their outlines as the more distant buildings prove to be: this is a small township as recreated by an imagination seldom exercised. Upon the dark horizon, mountains whisper old songs to unguarded minds; amongst the gathering strolls another throneless prince, tall and musing. His eyes are a cool hunger, and what they see, they claim as a matter of birthright.

His words tumble over hers, crowding for space. It's alright. It's better than almost anything else it could have been. A lifetime ago she'd put an end to that sort of assault by putting the boy's back to a wall, but there's none of that this evening - and that she wants, this once, to believe, is such a small part of the reason for this. "How much of it was me?" Agnieszka had made an accusation, and it was not even very accusing; Agnieszka had simply stated it like a fact mutually understood, and her tone wasn't even resentful. Easier, perhaps, if it had been. Look what you've done to me, the Chairwoman might have shouted, as if it were inconceivable that her teacher of old might have chosen to systematically dismantle her. As if it weren't simply what one would naturally expect -

"The thing that I was, or the thing that was me; the thing which is dead now, and of that I am very glad." But he has her laughing then, despite herself and despite their circumstances; laughing, of a sudden, and: "Orchids. It was orchids; I tore apart his gardens so there'd be more room for orchids," and there's a hand raked back through her hair as she slumps back against the wall; there's a lingering smile, as she shakes her head. "Know this, Elliot: what wears your look and styles itself Gahald, it has - no semblance to you. There'll be no question who you are, when we return you to your self."