[Awakening] ...death comes in threes - 2 of 3
Play song HERE.
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She tied you to the kitchen chair,
She broke your throne - she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew an Hallelujah.
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah.
---
The back of his head exploded in a cloud of blood and brain matter frozen into a vaguely crystalline structure.
Still frozen in place his eyes seemed to follow her as the gun dropped back to her side. Her vision blurred by the excess saline collecting there. Everything around her face was burning hot with the rush of blood just under the skin. Maisie buried it into dead man's chest. Settling herself between his outstretched arms, guns still held out like a giant action figure.
[Time began to melt.]
The weight of time began trickling around her in tiny fissures that the Acanthus barely noticed. Morrison Paige was both alive and dead - for as long as they all could be frozen, could be fused in a single moment. The trickling grew to currents. Morrison slowly began to move, his hand lifting to settle on the top of her head - his gun falling slowly toward the ground. He held his student close for a moment before time came crashing through. Reality pulled both Morrison and Maisie to the ground, the girl dragged down by his lifeless weight.
She did not remove herself from his body. The other two mages in the room stepped outside after a moment - and ten minutes later she joined them, covered in gore, quietly resigned.
"You okay--?"
She merely nodded. When Blackwood followed with a question about the body, she looked up robotically spitting out options that had as much meaning to her as laundry, or income tax. Words. Words. Words.
"I'll take care of it." She nodded agreement with his words somewhere between grateful and numb.
Maisie and Bill left the building near the other - ominously silent. They managed to get booze, and by the time Bill guided her to the ultimate conclusion, the Consillium gathering, she had already wrapped in the scent of liquor and increasing levels of numbness. That crooked grin.
Maisie never forgot her mask.
Arriving, Maisie hugged Ashri-El, and pushed into a seat. She proceeded to marninate her mouth and throat in the taste of Tennesee whiskey. Ash hovered somewhere near her, or the shadow of someone Ash-like. She wasn't sure. She didn't quite remember. Conversations about the increasing thunderstorm. Conversations about a Ladder being built in India. Words about Morrison. Questions about the red splattered gore coagulating across her chest and sleeves. She drank it all into layers, each interaction was translucent, as if they could be stacked, and the edges would meet perfectly together.
Maisie tuned out the sound of lighting, and its increasing frequency, the trembling walls of the building. Or the crackle of electricity that filled the air. Instead choosing to wallow in the dulling of her senses. Beyond her, all around her hushed conversations were happening. They talked about the relative successes and failures and what it all meant - Maisie submerged herself within the voices and questions letting them pour over and around her - lifeless. Floating.
A bolt of lightning hits the building.
Enter the Lich.
---
Maybe there's a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah.
---
As vision returned to the gathering the Lich stood in the center. His face drawn and skeletal posed in a perfect sort of anger, "You killed him! He was a good man and you killed him--" THe air around him crackled and all eyes were riveted on the figure except one. Who stared at her bottle, the edge of her thumb tracing against the outer edge.
She licked her lips.
Resignation.
Maisie was only peripherally aware of Blackwood, and Ash who moved to confront the Lich. She lifted the bottle to her lips - "just let it be done..." The Lich beyond her seethed, narrowing on the two men who spoke for the concillium. "I demand payment. One for One. I will have my due..." And from the Lich's tightened fist slipped a cold grey ring....
Everyone watched were it was pitched.
Breath baited - it sailed through the air.
Blackwood saw the ring sailing toward the Consilium, toward the youngest member who wrapped herself around the whiskey bottle in self-pity. But Ash [...David.] saw it first, and with a quiet breath, leaped upwards to snatch that ring from its natural path.
Its nothing special.
You don't need to be a master of fate and time to get that feeling. That sense that something is about it happen, something so big - no one touched by it would be the same. Its a very natural thing. Its a sense of the thread of life [..and death, and love, and rage, and joy and...] that connected we few sentient figures. For a second it shuddered as every person in the room reacted to the singular action.
At that - catch.
To watch long brown fingers wrap around the metal object, and trace the lean forearm downto the shoulder and finally the face -- Ashri-El. [....its as simple as tea leaves, as cards, as the progression of wind chimes on a breeze...] Her drunken lips part in silent protest: No.
All sound has been sucked out of the room.
She cannot hear Candle begin to wail, or Jenny begin to weep. She cannot hear the crash-splatter of glass the bottle of whiskey collides with the wooden floor. She cannot hear Blackwood's curses, or Duo's chair falling backward -- only the quiet whirring -- the whirring of dust. The ashes as Ashri-El blows backwards and finally rolls around the room coating them all in his sacrifice...
---
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
but love is not a victory march
Its a cold and its a broken Hallelujah.
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah-
Hallelujah.
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