Polishing the cairn dream!
Sep. 23rd, 2010 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yukieFor posting on Kupop, y'all. XD Later on according to plotski of course. I'll have to ploink it for details, but I don't mind XD
Seraphine = Eirlys. Nicola = Vicky. I am a big enough nerd that I Tezuka'd/expy'd my own characters.
"***
Dreams are not my milieu," Seraphine said, "but they are my granddaughter's. You needn't doubt her skill or education. You certainly needn't doubt her loyalty."
"I would find that difficult to do at best," Sydney said, smiling. "Your people have no capacity for deception."
"True enough." Seraphine grinned back, feeling some of the tension seep out of her shoulders. "I was concerned this might be dismissed as a hare-brained notion at best. It seems a strange suggestion, I know, but the world of the dream does connect to every other in the Web, be it light or dark. As such - well, we may just be able to discern some trace of the Lady there."
"And Nicola has agreed to do this?"
"Nicola suggested it."
"Then I see no reason not to at least attempt. Even if naught comes of it, it certainly can't do any harm - we’ll be taking precautions to be sure it doesn’t, I’m sure." Sydney nodded. "It will be done, then. Tonight, you said?"
"The moon is just full, so her strength is heightened magically." Seraphine gestured. "As well, there are tisanes and infusions one can drink to enhance one's powers of sight, as you know. These enhance her power in dreams as well. If you lent her some power, she'd be even stronger yet."
"Would she trust me to do that?"
"You can ask her that." Seraphine turned toward the door. "Nico, just to be sure, you're certain you want to do this?"
Nicola Regardie was only as tall as was Seraphine. Her eyes were violet rather than Seraphine's royal blue, and her black hair was caught into two small braided buns on her head. Being half-fae, she had smaller ears, but they were just as mobile as were her grandmother's. She was of similar build as well - a bit stocky and quite curvy. She also looked somewhat out of breath.
"I came here as soon as Ser Riot let me," she said. "I'm sorry. I tried to be faster."
"So Ashley is running the Mediators into the ground as well." Sydney chortled. “I felt for you all when he said he would be joining Ser Isban in supervising your training.”
'Not really? With the ground-running thing I mean. Training's tiring but it's really like what I got as a Mediator only stepped up to the next logical intensity."
"He'll keep going with that up-stepping."
"If I'm needed, I don't mind."
Sydney smiled. Well, that was an attitude he knew well. "Your grandmother tells me that you offered to help us seek out the Lady."
Nicola nodded. "I did. I meant it as well. I'm not sure how much good my efforts'll do but I figure it can't hurt to at least try."
"That's quite so. I assume that you know how to defend yourself in dreams; your grandmother would have taught you such basic metaphysics when you were very young, I dare say." Sydney grinned at Nicola.
"I know how - and she did, yes." Nicola's ears were now faintly pink. "You won't need to worry about me banjaxing myself or dragging weird things home in my wake."
"You have a safe place set up in which to do this? …Oh, by the by, it's an honour and a pleasure to meet you at last, Nicola. I've heard a good deal about you from your grandmother and your mother as well."
Nicola got pinker ears. "Hopefully I'm not disappointing you."
"Not in the least. There was no false advertising, of course."
"That's good to hear?" Nicola smiled and approached her grandmother. "When would you like me to try? It won't take me too long to ward where I'm sleeping."
Sydney thought a bit, then said, "Nicola, I have a suggestion with regard to that, and I assure you that this is not just my being an incorrigible rogue… My quarters have a permanent circle inscribed, and I would be able to lend you more power in a sacred space blessed by my Goddess. And you - you follow the Five Ladies, as your Grandmother does and as your people here are wont to do. You believe as much in my Lady as I do. That will make this ritual that much stronger."
Nicola looked startled. "You just met me and you trust me to do that?"
"Of course. The question is, does your grandmother trust me to--"
"Sydney," said Seraphine, "you are being absurd." But she was smiling.
Nicola said, "If you trust me, Sayyadin Losstarot--"
"You can call me Sydney; formality isn't something I've ever insisted upon."
"I--if you trust me," Nicola repeated, a bit more squeakily, "then that's what I'll do."
"When do you wish to begin?" Seraphine asked.
"Um. I. I - whenever it's fine w-with Sydney I guess - ?"
"The scheduling is up to you, Nicola," said Sydney. "You are the Dreamer, after all."
Nicola nodded, ears uneven. "Th-then. Then. I'd like to start as soon as I can."
Seraphine kissed her granddaughter's forehead. When the maga was reborn into this world, she hadn't thought in a thousand years that she might meet a young man and fall in love with him, that they might have children and then their children would marry, and that she would have many wonderful grandchildren. Nicola was one of twelve altogether, and because of her curious heritage (her father, Ivarr, was a half-blooded fae, but the other half was not what one might expect), she and her brother spent a great deal of time with Seraphine. Their gifts had manifested early and a bit dramatically, and her second daughter had spared no time in ensuring that Nicola and her twin brother Zephyr had a solid education with regard to magic.
Seraphine had done likewise.
Now both were capable heartseers, though Zephyr, like his father, wore a talisman to bolster his fragile 'wards' (the hybrid nature of their innate mana left them with thinner walls about their hearts). Both were capable Dreamseers as well. Zephyr was 'when', as Ivarr once put it - he could perceive the past or future writ in symbolic imagery. Nicola was 'where', and she could travel through the dreamworld as easily as a bird through air.
This was how she intended to seek out the Lady.
Seraphine smoothed Nicola’s bangs back from her forehead, and watched the one little misbehaving strand spring back into upright position once her hand was off it. (She herself had the same ‘crest’; perhaps it was an avian thing.) “Tell me in the morning how it was, Nico. Make sure you grab something to eat before bed so you don’t wake up exhausted, and I know you know all of this already, but let me flutter at you a second more.” She hugged her granddaughter close. “Take care, all right?”
“I will,” Nicola said. “I love you. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Sydney was bemused by the easy affirmation of love; this forthrightness, he knew, wasn’t something uncommon to fae as it was to some human cultures. Further, such an affirmation was a small gift of power to the Sister of his Lady. In affirming the force she was the exemplar of, Nicola granted the Lady of the Light a portion of her own energy.
Seraphine hugged Sydney as well, grinned at him in a rather knowing manner, and then left, saying, “Sleep well, my friend Sayyadin.”
Well, then.
Nicola, who was kneading the strap of her shoulder bag a little nervously, looked at Sydney and grinned. “My grandmother’s - yeah. I know you know already. But yes.”
“She is a marvellous woman, and that trait seems to have carried through the bloodline,” Sydney replied, and Nicola turned pink again.
“Um. Thank you? ...I have all the supplies I need with me. I was planning to do this tonight, and sleep out in my grandmother’s garden, but I’m really grateful for your having invited me to do it here. I know that I’m a capable maga...er, proto-maga, whichever I am? I know how to cast a protective circle and banish and so on. But - being in someone else’s company in a pre-blessed space...I’m much less nervous about this, now?”
“I’m glad to hear it. One gets better results in magic with a calm heart.”
“I’ve tried to keep that...” Nicola put down her shoulder bag and sighed, looking suddenly unhappy. “It’s hard, though. I don’t know if my grandmother told you this, but at the start I - the first thing I did was try to call out to her. The Lady I mean. It - it worked before? Zeph had a nightmare a few months back about this fucking--ooh damn it I’m sorry--”
“I’ve heard worse,” Sydney laughed. “Go ahead?”
“This whacking great vine,” Nicola said. “Like hedge-bindweed, you know, that kind of fast-growing with the little tendrils? Or passionflower. It wasn’t normal, though. He couldn’t say why but it was just all wrong. He saw it growing out of the fountain in the Memorial Square. when he went to see what it was he said the fountain’d frozen over. Usually he can calm down fine after a nightmare, and something like that wouldn’t bother him, but he was so scared by that plant in the fountain that I panicked too and called out to her - she called back and helped us calm down.”
Nicola’s calling was usually spoken of as heart’s singing by fae; they made no distinction between song and speech. She was translating to the more common term for his benefit, though it wasn’t necessary. Sydney understood, though doubtless some hadn’t. Usually, Nicola tried to translate as literally and as close to original phrasing as possible, explaining when necessary. Fae were compelled by the geis, the vow that armoured all their hearts, to be truthful. (There was one other race compelled thus, but few inhabited the Bastion.) At times, this led to some unusual turns of phrase, or ones easily misinterpreted, but fae were quick to clarify most of the time. (When they weren’t there was a good reason for it.)
“Either way, Zeph had that nightmare and we weren’t sure if it was one of his significant dreams or no. I mean, I can hazard a guess as to what it might’ve signified - the coup and everything - but it feels like there’s something more to it than that...” Nicola trailed off. She was silent a long while. Then, “Every time I’ve called out to her before, she’s answered. No matter where I am and no matter where she is. This time there was just - nothing.”
Sydney put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t have to speculate on how much that upset you,” he said softly.
“I know she would have said something if she could have,” Nicola murmured. “Something’s gone wickedly fucking wrong here and I want to know what. I mean, wrong beyond the coup, wrong beyond Dimetrius serving the Reaper, all wrong. The best way I can think of to look for answers about what the hell happened is travelling in dreams.”
“I’m happy to facilitate that, then, and to guard you while you travel,” Sydney replied. “As you said, it can’t hurt if proper precautions are taken.”
“The worst I could possibly find is nothing,” Nicola chortled. “I’ll do my best to come back with more than that, though, I promise.
***
When she travelled in the dreaming over great distances, Nicola became a bird. Small, with a tail as long as her body. Shaped thus she could skim over and around the dreams of others without disturbing them.
What she sought would be better seen with the eyes of a bird as well. Any trace of Lady Aurora would be faint, now, as she’d been gone some time and the emotional and spiritual residue left by dreamers faded with their time away from the realm of sleep, and with distance.
If there was no sign at all, that meant Lady Aurora was very far away, not sleeping, or both. Neither boded well.
Nicola was beyond the dreams of humans and into the astral realms occupied by fae and their exiled cousins the mazoku when she spotted it: a fine golden thread. it looked for all the world like a strand of Lady Aurora’s hair, at first glance, and Nicola immediately swooped down on it.
It was real. It was here. A sign, finally. So then she’d dreamed recently, maybe? Or perhaps the traces left by ones like her simply lasted a lot longer than did those of humans, fae, or elves? Ether way, it was a sign. It was a trail she could follow. Nicola hopped excitedly (she tended to take on avian mannerisms as well, much to the amusement of spectators) and then took to the air again. This was so much better than she could have hoped.The trail was faint, but it was unbroken, and it belonged to none other than the Lady. She knew it in her heart.
She followed it beyond the dreams of the created beings, out to the higher aetherial plane. Here lived the souls of the departed, beings of energy freed of flesh and free of sorrow and doubt after having crossed the river of trials in the underworld.
Nicola could not enter that realm, of course. Had she tried it would have been like flying into and out of a cloud. Ones who still lived in a physical body could not cross that boundary.
She half-hovered a moment, entranced by the shifting soft lights of the last great horizon, but soon enough reality intruded. The thread - it was gone?
No, not gone, but not here - Nicola landed ungracefully and heaved a tiny sigh of relief. The Lady was alive. The thread did not pass the horizon.
It stopped shy of this place, but where?
Resuming her person-shape, Nicola paced around slowly, retracing her path back from the horizon toward the everyday realm of dreams. So focused was she on the light of the fine golden thread that she utterly missed the large black stone directly in her path.
“Son of - ow what - “ Nicola shook her foot out, wincing, and then glared at what’d got in the way of her bare toes.
A pile of black stones.
No, a cairn.
But what did it mark? Nicola looked up and down along the horizon, and back the way she’d come. There was nothing apparent that it would be indicating or warning of...
...But the golden thread’s trail ended here. It vanished into the stones of the cairn.
Nicola bit her lip and fidgeted. That gave her a turn, a bad one. Was someone trying to hide the Lady’s path? Was someone trying to bar the way to her?
Nicola reached for the top stone of the cairn and then withdrew her hand sharply.
The stones were ice-cold.
Not only that, now that she looked at it, the entire arrangement resembled nothing less than a burial site.
Nicola bit back panic and then grabbed the topmost stone.
“If anyone sleeps here,” she murmured, “know that I am sorry for having disturbed you. The extent of my remorse is the depth of every sea as one. I mean no harm. My hands are open. I will restore your memorial and tomorrow I will bring you flowers.”
Slowly, slowly, the cairn shrunk in size. The stones were all frigid, and Nicola’s hands felt numb and clammy. Still, she followed the thread with the tip of her finger, marking where it vanished under or between the stones and removing those in her path.
As she went on, the stones grew colder and colder.
The last stone was enormous, and it took all Nicola’s strength to roll it aside with the bad leverage she had. Once it was settled to the side with no danger of rolling back, Nicola turned to see the path of the thread.
It went down.
Straight down.
The last stone covered a hole to...to nowhere. Icy air seeped up from it at long intervals, as if the aperture were drawing breath. Nicola backpedaled in a hurry, tasting dust and ash in the air emanating from the ground.
“Oh no. No. No, no, no - “
She leaned as far forward as she dared to, peering into the hole.
Darkness there, and nothing more.
Darkness, and cold, and the scent of dust and vetivert and ash.
“No, don’t be there, don’t be there, don’t - “
The cairn and the cold and the scent of dust. The place the cairn had stood. All this, all this, all this pointed to only one possible conclusion.
The Lady was in Erebos.
Aurora had gone to the land of the dead.
She was in the company - or perhaps the custody? - of the most unkind of Dreamers.
Nicola tried so hard to be silent that when the scream came it seemed to her that it was from someone else’s throat entirely.
“AURORA--!”
There was no response from the depths. Not even an echo.
Shaking, Nicola rolled the stone back over the aperture and set to rebuilding the cairn. She thought only of that, because thinking on what she’d just seen was beyond her capacity to endure now. Slowly, slowly. Little by little. If she thought of anything but rebuilding the cairn, she would probably scream, or cry, or both.
Finally, the last stone was settled. Nicola looked at her hands, smudged with what seemed to be fine black ash.
“Why are you...?”
She fought back a sob and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. She was not going to cry. She was not going to break down like a child and run. She would - she would face this. For everyone’s sake.
Reaching into her pocket, Nicola withdrew a tiny white pebble and a dried sprig of heather. Both of these she placed at the base of the cairn - the former to mark its place to her for tomorrow night, the latter to pay her respects for the one she may have disturbed.
He was sleeping, it was said. After the war, he only slept. He slept.
He dreamed.
What did a dead god dream of?
Nicola wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
She hoped that she hadn’t managed to rouse him.
Closing her eyes, she took wing again and streaked back to her own dreaming, back to Sydney, back to the Bastion. Occupied though it was, it was better to be there than to stay here lingering at the border of death.
Seraphine = Eirlys. Nicola = Vicky. I am a big enough nerd that I Tezuka'd/expy'd my own characters.
"***
Dreams are not my milieu," Seraphine said, "but they are my granddaughter's. You needn't doubt her skill or education. You certainly needn't doubt her loyalty."
"I would find that difficult to do at best," Sydney said, smiling. "Your people have no capacity for deception."
"True enough." Seraphine grinned back, feeling some of the tension seep out of her shoulders. "I was concerned this might be dismissed as a hare-brained notion at best. It seems a strange suggestion, I know, but the world of the dream does connect to every other in the Web, be it light or dark. As such - well, we may just be able to discern some trace of the Lady there."
"And Nicola has agreed to do this?"
"Nicola suggested it."
"Then I see no reason not to at least attempt. Even if naught comes of it, it certainly can't do any harm - we’ll be taking precautions to be sure it doesn’t, I’m sure." Sydney nodded. "It will be done, then. Tonight, you said?"
"The moon is just full, so her strength is heightened magically." Seraphine gestured. "As well, there are tisanes and infusions one can drink to enhance one's powers of sight, as you know. These enhance her power in dreams as well. If you lent her some power, she'd be even stronger yet."
"Would she trust me to do that?"
"You can ask her that." Seraphine turned toward the door. "Nico, just to be sure, you're certain you want to do this?"
Nicola Regardie was only as tall as was Seraphine. Her eyes were violet rather than Seraphine's royal blue, and her black hair was caught into two small braided buns on her head. Being half-fae, she had smaller ears, but they were just as mobile as were her grandmother's. She was of similar build as well - a bit stocky and quite curvy. She also looked somewhat out of breath.
"I came here as soon as Ser Riot let me," she said. "I'm sorry. I tried to be faster."
"So Ashley is running the Mediators into the ground as well." Sydney chortled. “I felt for you all when he said he would be joining Ser Isban in supervising your training.”
'Not really? With the ground-running thing I mean. Training's tiring but it's really like what I got as a Mediator only stepped up to the next logical intensity."
"He'll keep going with that up-stepping."
"If I'm needed, I don't mind."
Sydney smiled. Well, that was an attitude he knew well. "Your grandmother tells me that you offered to help us seek out the Lady."
Nicola nodded. "I did. I meant it as well. I'm not sure how much good my efforts'll do but I figure it can't hurt to at least try."
"That's quite so. I assume that you know how to defend yourself in dreams; your grandmother would have taught you such basic metaphysics when you were very young, I dare say." Sydney grinned at Nicola.
"I know how - and she did, yes." Nicola's ears were now faintly pink. "You won't need to worry about me banjaxing myself or dragging weird things home in my wake."
"You have a safe place set up in which to do this? …Oh, by the by, it's an honour and a pleasure to meet you at last, Nicola. I've heard a good deal about you from your grandmother and your mother as well."
Nicola got pinker ears. "Hopefully I'm not disappointing you."
"Not in the least. There was no false advertising, of course."
"That's good to hear?" Nicola smiled and approached her grandmother. "When would you like me to try? It won't take me too long to ward where I'm sleeping."
Sydney thought a bit, then said, "Nicola, I have a suggestion with regard to that, and I assure you that this is not just my being an incorrigible rogue… My quarters have a permanent circle inscribed, and I would be able to lend you more power in a sacred space blessed by my Goddess. And you - you follow the Five Ladies, as your Grandmother does and as your people here are wont to do. You believe as much in my Lady as I do. That will make this ritual that much stronger."
Nicola looked startled. "You just met me and you trust me to do that?"
"Of course. The question is, does your grandmother trust me to--"
"Sydney," said Seraphine, "you are being absurd." But she was smiling.
Nicola said, "If you trust me, Sayyadin Losstarot--"
"You can call me Sydney; formality isn't something I've ever insisted upon."
"I--if you trust me," Nicola repeated, a bit more squeakily, "then that's what I'll do."
"When do you wish to begin?" Seraphine asked.
"Um. I. I - whenever it's fine w-with Sydney I guess - ?"
"The scheduling is up to you, Nicola," said Sydney. "You are the Dreamer, after all."
Nicola nodded, ears uneven. "Th-then. Then. I'd like to start as soon as I can."
Seraphine kissed her granddaughter's forehead. When the maga was reborn into this world, she hadn't thought in a thousand years that she might meet a young man and fall in love with him, that they might have children and then their children would marry, and that she would have many wonderful grandchildren. Nicola was one of twelve altogether, and because of her curious heritage (her father, Ivarr, was a half-blooded fae, but the other half was not what one might expect), she and her brother spent a great deal of time with Seraphine. Their gifts had manifested early and a bit dramatically, and her second daughter had spared no time in ensuring that Nicola and her twin brother Zephyr had a solid education with regard to magic.
Seraphine had done likewise.
Now both were capable heartseers, though Zephyr, like his father, wore a talisman to bolster his fragile 'wards' (the hybrid nature of their innate mana left them with thinner walls about their hearts). Both were capable Dreamseers as well. Zephyr was 'when', as Ivarr once put it - he could perceive the past or future writ in symbolic imagery. Nicola was 'where', and she could travel through the dreamworld as easily as a bird through air.
This was how she intended to seek out the Lady.
Seraphine smoothed Nicola’s bangs back from her forehead, and watched the one little misbehaving strand spring back into upright position once her hand was off it. (She herself had the same ‘crest’; perhaps it was an avian thing.) “Tell me in the morning how it was, Nico. Make sure you grab something to eat before bed so you don’t wake up exhausted, and I know you know all of this already, but let me flutter at you a second more.” She hugged her granddaughter close. “Take care, all right?”
“I will,” Nicola said. “I love you. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Sydney was bemused by the easy affirmation of love; this forthrightness, he knew, wasn’t something uncommon to fae as it was to some human cultures. Further, such an affirmation was a small gift of power to the Sister of his Lady. In affirming the force she was the exemplar of, Nicola granted the Lady of the Light a portion of her own energy.
Seraphine hugged Sydney as well, grinned at him in a rather knowing manner, and then left, saying, “Sleep well, my friend Sayyadin.”
Well, then.
Nicola, who was kneading the strap of her shoulder bag a little nervously, looked at Sydney and grinned. “My grandmother’s - yeah. I know you know already. But yes.”
“She is a marvellous woman, and that trait seems to have carried through the bloodline,” Sydney replied, and Nicola turned pink again.
“Um. Thank you? ...I have all the supplies I need with me. I was planning to do this tonight, and sleep out in my grandmother’s garden, but I’m really grateful for your having invited me to do it here. I know that I’m a capable maga...er, proto-maga, whichever I am? I know how to cast a protective circle and banish and so on. But - being in someone else’s company in a pre-blessed space...I’m much less nervous about this, now?”
“I’m glad to hear it. One gets better results in magic with a calm heart.”
“I’ve tried to keep that...” Nicola put down her shoulder bag and sighed, looking suddenly unhappy. “It’s hard, though. I don’t know if my grandmother told you this, but at the start I - the first thing I did was try to call out to her. The Lady I mean. It - it worked before? Zeph had a nightmare a few months back about this fucking--ooh damn it I’m sorry--”
“I’ve heard worse,” Sydney laughed. “Go ahead?”
“This whacking great vine,” Nicola said. “Like hedge-bindweed, you know, that kind of fast-growing with the little tendrils? Or passionflower. It wasn’t normal, though. He couldn’t say why but it was just all wrong. He saw it growing out of the fountain in the Memorial Square. when he went to see what it was he said the fountain’d frozen over. Usually he can calm down fine after a nightmare, and something like that wouldn’t bother him, but he was so scared by that plant in the fountain that I panicked too and called out to her - she called back and helped us calm down.”
Nicola’s calling was usually spoken of as heart’s singing by fae; they made no distinction between song and speech. She was translating to the more common term for his benefit, though it wasn’t necessary. Sydney understood, though doubtless some hadn’t. Usually, Nicola tried to translate as literally and as close to original phrasing as possible, explaining when necessary. Fae were compelled by the geis, the vow that armoured all their hearts, to be truthful. (There was one other race compelled thus, but few inhabited the Bastion.) At times, this led to some unusual turns of phrase, or ones easily misinterpreted, but fae were quick to clarify most of the time. (When they weren’t there was a good reason for it.)
“Either way, Zeph had that nightmare and we weren’t sure if it was one of his significant dreams or no. I mean, I can hazard a guess as to what it might’ve signified - the coup and everything - but it feels like there’s something more to it than that...” Nicola trailed off. She was silent a long while. Then, “Every time I’ve called out to her before, she’s answered. No matter where I am and no matter where she is. This time there was just - nothing.”
Sydney put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t have to speculate on how much that upset you,” he said softly.
“I know she would have said something if she could have,” Nicola murmured. “Something’s gone wickedly fucking wrong here and I want to know what. I mean, wrong beyond the coup, wrong beyond Dimetrius serving the Reaper, all wrong. The best way I can think of to look for answers about what the hell happened is travelling in dreams.”
“I’m happy to facilitate that, then, and to guard you while you travel,” Sydney replied. “As you said, it can’t hurt if proper precautions are taken.”
“The worst I could possibly find is nothing,” Nicola chortled. “I’ll do my best to come back with more than that, though, I promise.
***
When she travelled in the dreaming over great distances, Nicola became a bird. Small, with a tail as long as her body. Shaped thus she could skim over and around the dreams of others without disturbing them.
What she sought would be better seen with the eyes of a bird as well. Any trace of Lady Aurora would be faint, now, as she’d been gone some time and the emotional and spiritual residue left by dreamers faded with their time away from the realm of sleep, and with distance.
If there was no sign at all, that meant Lady Aurora was very far away, not sleeping, or both. Neither boded well.
Nicola was beyond the dreams of humans and into the astral realms occupied by fae and their exiled cousins the mazoku when she spotted it: a fine golden thread. it looked for all the world like a strand of Lady Aurora’s hair, at first glance, and Nicola immediately swooped down on it.
It was real. It was here. A sign, finally. So then she’d dreamed recently, maybe? Or perhaps the traces left by ones like her simply lasted a lot longer than did those of humans, fae, or elves? Ether way, it was a sign. It was a trail she could follow. Nicola hopped excitedly (she tended to take on avian mannerisms as well, much to the amusement of spectators) and then took to the air again. This was so much better than she could have hoped.The trail was faint, but it was unbroken, and it belonged to none other than the Lady. She knew it in her heart.
She followed it beyond the dreams of the created beings, out to the higher aetherial plane. Here lived the souls of the departed, beings of energy freed of flesh and free of sorrow and doubt after having crossed the river of trials in the underworld.
Nicola could not enter that realm, of course. Had she tried it would have been like flying into and out of a cloud. Ones who still lived in a physical body could not cross that boundary.
She half-hovered a moment, entranced by the shifting soft lights of the last great horizon, but soon enough reality intruded. The thread - it was gone?
No, not gone, but not here - Nicola landed ungracefully and heaved a tiny sigh of relief. The Lady was alive. The thread did not pass the horizon.
It stopped shy of this place, but where?
Resuming her person-shape, Nicola paced around slowly, retracing her path back from the horizon toward the everyday realm of dreams. So focused was she on the light of the fine golden thread that she utterly missed the large black stone directly in her path.
“Son of - ow what - “ Nicola shook her foot out, wincing, and then glared at what’d got in the way of her bare toes.
A pile of black stones.
No, a cairn.
But what did it mark? Nicola looked up and down along the horizon, and back the way she’d come. There was nothing apparent that it would be indicating or warning of...
...But the golden thread’s trail ended here. It vanished into the stones of the cairn.
Nicola bit her lip and fidgeted. That gave her a turn, a bad one. Was someone trying to hide the Lady’s path? Was someone trying to bar the way to her?
Nicola reached for the top stone of the cairn and then withdrew her hand sharply.
The stones were ice-cold.
Not only that, now that she looked at it, the entire arrangement resembled nothing less than a burial site.
Nicola bit back panic and then grabbed the topmost stone.
“If anyone sleeps here,” she murmured, “know that I am sorry for having disturbed you. The extent of my remorse is the depth of every sea as one. I mean no harm. My hands are open. I will restore your memorial and tomorrow I will bring you flowers.”
Slowly, slowly, the cairn shrunk in size. The stones were all frigid, and Nicola’s hands felt numb and clammy. Still, she followed the thread with the tip of her finger, marking where it vanished under or between the stones and removing those in her path.
As she went on, the stones grew colder and colder.
The last stone was enormous, and it took all Nicola’s strength to roll it aside with the bad leverage she had. Once it was settled to the side with no danger of rolling back, Nicola turned to see the path of the thread.
It went down.
Straight down.
The last stone covered a hole to...to nowhere. Icy air seeped up from it at long intervals, as if the aperture were drawing breath. Nicola backpedaled in a hurry, tasting dust and ash in the air emanating from the ground.
“Oh no. No. No, no, no - “
She leaned as far forward as she dared to, peering into the hole.
Darkness there, and nothing more.
Darkness, and cold, and the scent of dust and vetivert and ash.
“No, don’t be there, don’t be there, don’t - “
The cairn and the cold and the scent of dust. The place the cairn had stood. All this, all this, all this pointed to only one possible conclusion.
The Lady was in Erebos.
Aurora had gone to the land of the dead.
She was in the company - or perhaps the custody? - of the most unkind of Dreamers.
Nicola tried so hard to be silent that when the scream came it seemed to her that it was from someone else’s throat entirely.
“AURORA--!”
There was no response from the depths. Not even an echo.
Shaking, Nicola rolled the stone back over the aperture and set to rebuilding the cairn. She thought only of that, because thinking on what she’d just seen was beyond her capacity to endure now. Slowly, slowly. Little by little. If she thought of anything but rebuilding the cairn, she would probably scream, or cry, or both.
Finally, the last stone was settled. Nicola looked at her hands, smudged with what seemed to be fine black ash.
“Why are you...?”
She fought back a sob and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. She was not going to cry. She was not going to break down like a child and run. She would - she would face this. For everyone’s sake.
Reaching into her pocket, Nicola withdrew a tiny white pebble and a dried sprig of heather. Both of these she placed at the base of the cairn - the former to mark its place to her for tomorrow night, the latter to pay her respects for the one she may have disturbed.
He was sleeping, it was said. After the war, he only slept. He slept.
He dreamed.
What did a dead god dream of?
Nicola wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
She hoped that she hadn’t managed to rouse him.
Closing her eyes, she took wing again and streaked back to her own dreaming, back to Sydney, back to the Bastion. Occupied though it was, it was better to be there than to stay here lingering at the border of death.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-24 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-24 01:43 am (UTC)Writing the last part honestly scared the fuck out of me XD; I mean, I come at it with the memory of House of Leaves and all the creepery therein, and thinking of Dracula's subbasement, and full knowledge of how demented Thanatos used to be (he's looking sheepish XD) - I was so hoping that kind of crawling dread came across. Like the feeling you get watching J-horror with the plot stringing you along, teasing you with the Big Boo but never delivering and then giving you something that makes you feel like your stomach dropped ten stories.
...I talk a ton XD
no subject
Date: 2010-09-25 07:58 pm (UTC)