Mango 11, Blackberry 22, Cheesecake 20
Title: It Began By a Fireside Bright
Story Continuity: The Lethean Glamour (chapter the next)
Flavors: Mango 11: seeing is believing, Blackberry 22: blow the whistle, Cheesecake 20: It's no great art, gettin' the heart of a man
Extra: Malt (Trick or Treat: C: "but she's a world in herself, you know")
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And where it ends, nobody knows.
Note: I wanted this combined with the next half, but I also wanted to post this before NaNoWriMo. Since that's not happening, this ends on a kinda-sorta cliffhanger-y note.
Holly never felt she was an inadequate artist until she'd seen a book of the old masters - Calderazza's subliminal symbolism, Marling's form, Krasteva's mastery of everything there was to master. She'd never looked twice at the senseless chaos of the emerging modernists - art was as much a science as meteorology, perhaps a little imprecise, but it was supposed to make sense, in theory, as simple as numbers and equations and practice, aesthetics plus technique. Everything that fell under modernism was a nightmare, formless and irrational, and really it must have been very popular with some - perhaps the kind of people who liked to map out their scarred mental landscapes in crayon on the high, pillowed walls of their rooms.
The thing was, Holly kind of got it now, because now that she'd been out in it longer than a few hours, she could see that the world wasn't something you could capture just right by doing sketches of Sofia's many angry faces and painting the way the sun seemed to set fire to the Abbey at dusk. There was more to it than that. People didn't always match their smiles - sometimes the smiles wore the people - and the land was more than green and brown and flowers, it was moist and had the most confusingly polarizing smell Holly wondered why she hadn't noticed before. Possibly it was because she'd never slept on the ground before, which she didn't especially regret. She was pretty sure there would be pebbles stuck in her back for weeks to come. Modernism was still art, but it wasn't at all about what you could see. It was about the way the wind nourished gooseflesh more effectively when you were feeling all alone in the world and the way a certain kind of anger felt as it boiled, scalding, inside of you and drummed war marches in your head that would not stop until others hurt as you hurt, and it was what happened to you when you felt all that at once.
Seeing Cygnelius stretched out on a long, pale table, bramble still clinging to his hair, had been like watching an early Ashton painting come to life behind her eyes, burning its nightmare into her retinas, but the nightmare was her own to map out on what walls could bear it. The nightmare was Valentio's even as he became the stark misery of a widower era Ivanov. She understood modernism now, still not as much as proper art, but she could see it all around her now. It was threefold as inspired and much less mechanical, and she thought she might like to sit down and paint her own brain someday.
Holly still absolutely hated it, and it was her own hate, not the crawling, heated wrath and madness of the impressions of Helene's mind the woman left when she mucked around in Holly's head, most of which had left her, or at least enough that she was properly nonplussed at Helene's desire to exchange blood with Lady Vera Zahl "so I can open a vein and feel her warmth under my fingertips."
Helene had a lot of thoughts like that. Holly wondered if they were supposed to be romantic; Helene never seemed sure, herself.
"Do you think we should go?" Holly said, to the room in general. Valentio glanced up from where he'd been openly petting Cygnelius's hair - something he wouldn't have dared tried a day before, and something Cyg would never have allowed - and said, "Yeah. Time's wasting, and I meant what I said about money being awesome."
"Okay. You go ahead and wake Lazarus," Holly said, standing. "I'm going to talk to your brother, see if he'd like to travel with us."
"Go for it," Valentio said, sounding possibly more dubious than was really necessary.
Gods help me not to offend him again, Holly thought, because I don't really care anymore.
* * * * *
By the time they reached Cieldort, it had stopped raining, and there rose from the earth a soft, rolling fog. Cieldort itself was a small, hilly town, made notable only by merit of its dubious past as the great capital of a fallen empire and the colorful, unusually asymmetrical construction of its buildings. If the architect had been tripping wheels, no one was alive to remember, but it was pretty obvious.
"Oh, yes," Holly sighed, falling into the chair at their small table. "This is my favorite village ever. My feet are singing praises to...um-"
"Cieldort," Cygnelius said, sitting down much more gracefully. "We're an entire province away from Arethusa now, also. Rase Reve."
"Right. They're singing their rapture to Rase Reve in general and Cieldort in particular, then. Well, or they're still screaming, and it's just music to my ears because clearly I hate them."
"You're going to hate them even more when this is over with. This is a map of the province," Cygnelius said, laying it out on the table, and the corner of his mouth twitched as he saw what else it now was. "Valentio...just forget it. Never leave me."
Holly leaned in to look at what had caught his attention, but Cygnelius smudged the charcoal script and began speaking again. "This is us, right around here - Cieldort doesn't merit its own marker anymore, but it's close enough to Denton that we can assume ourselves to be at that marker. From here, we'll have to cross through the Nevers again, cut through bayou country, and meander westwards towards the capital."
"That's almost the farthest point from where we are," Holly said. "And we're walking the entire way?"
"We ran out of funds somewhere around the Marchfield Grays," Cygnelius said. "And we still have to find enough silver to stock up on necessities and occasionally sleep at hotels. We don't have any choice, unless we come across a respectable windfall."
"We were conned," Valentio said blithely. "But it's okay, because we got him back. If we were ten minutes earlier we would have got our money back, too."
"Really not important at the moment," Cygnelius said. A waitress - tall and young and tan and lovely - appeared by his side and smiled, its brilliance directly aimed at Valentio. "Hello, my name is Tasha. Would you like anything to start you off today?"
"I don't know. What's good?" Valentio said, grinning rakishly. Tasha lit up, soft and smoldering like a candle in the dark, laughter in her eyes. "We have excellent shrimp saganaki. The best you'll find."
"I have no doubt," Valentio said, his smile less fake. "I'll take that, then."
Tasha took the rest of the table's requests and sashayed appealingly into the kitchen.
Cygnelius sighed, rubbing his temples, and said, "We are not even going to be here long enough for you to light her fire, Valentio, unless you go and have it out in the kitchen."
"And that's exactly why you never light any fires," Valentio said, grinning expansively and sprawling comfortably in his seat. "That, and you actually say lighting fires. Really, Cyg, chill out."
Cygnelius rolled his eyes, but that was the end of it.
* * * * *
There were ways you went about things, rituals and rules and immutable facts.
One: Tasha was hot, and two, blatantly just as into getting tapped as Valentio was in doing the tapping. From there, the rituals and rules varied, but in this particular case there weren't that many. There was also, as Cygnelius had kindly put it, no time, but sometimes flirting had its own merits. And hey, you just never knew these things.
The lunch was worth it, and Valentio wasn't one to deny an "on the house," especially since he had so little money left from the healers after crossing the Nevers, so he smiled back, the slower, less extreme one that worked twice as well, and tipped her a little extra. Her smile widened, and she pressed a note into - Holly's hands, actually. Well. Easy come, easy go, Valentio always said. Unless this turned into a threesome, which - well, stranger things had happened. It just didn't seem incredibly likely, and it didn't get any likelier when Tasha swiped a knife off their table and aimed for his head, angry enough that her face seemed to be flickering between human and not quite. Well, you just never knew these things, too, sometimes. Sometimes they were as lovely as they seemed, and other times, well...
Holly was the one who restrained their waitress, finally, with a short spell that froze Tasha in place and, with a sound like falling pins, rid her of whatever illusion kept her fresh and pretty.
"Ohgod," Holly said, voice queasy, like she'd never seen a revenant before. It wouldn't occur to Valentio until much later that she probably hadn't. "I'm going to be ill now."
Sometimes there was a little of this, too.
The only other worker didn't even blink, just said in a voice most people used to discuss running out of eggs, "Huh. That's the fifth employee this week. Damn shame. Tash was family, too."
"This happens a lot, then?" Holly said, her voice tremulous. Tasha's employer grunted. "It's been a problem for two weeks, but it's only been bad since the other day. If anyone's been missing for more than a day, we've been told to bring them to Maurand's for observation. I would have, but - but it was Tash. Guess not, after all."
"I can do the blessings, if you need it," Valentio said. "I'm from Dannareth."
Dannareth was a fact all its own, these days, and an exception to a fair few rules.
NAME Levander's eyes widened almost comically, and Valentio rolled his eyes, making the effort to smile. "It's done with. That's a yes?"
It was.
There were different sorts of ceremonies for the undead entirely, and Valentio knew every subtext and variant. First, the decapitation, which stopped the body's longing for the gray stuff but did nothing for the soul - and if the soul was present for the cremation, it was the person who burned along with the flesh. From there, the ashes were mingled with salt and soil from the person's place of birth, then given the blessing of whichever deity they favored and, if at all possible, their guardian spirits. The person and the skinwalker shared the same body, and even after the blessing and burial of the ashes in an iron box, the demon was still there, hidden, bound, and pissed off; funerals and wakes were disallowed for that very reason. The fewer people gathered near the dead, the better.
The blessing took long enough that even the girl's parents, inexperienced with the ceremony as they were, could tell something was off. Valentio didn't bother telling them they were throwing it all off again. It wasn't the entire truth; it felt almost like there were two demons using Tasha Rollins, and only one of them inside her. It shouldn't have been possible, not even with Skinwalkers. And yet.
Valentio made to repeat the benediction again, and partway through the second word, the ashes gleamed like stars and fizzled like cigarette ashes, disappearing completely. It was as much a sign that something was wrong as anything else, but the surviving Rollinses seemed convinced it was all over, and Valentio wasn't going to deny them that, for now. For all he knew, everything was over, where Tasha was concerned.
Cygnelius and Holly waited by the Crow's Nest Inn, apparently having found common ground in the kind of theoretically theoretical magic that only those with a more intimate knowledge of magic than most people had of the backs of their hands typically understood.
"By the way, Holly - what was in that napkin the skinwalker waitress gave you?" Valentio asked Holly, later that afternoon. Holly saw the note in her head, written in slightly smudged, intimate red lipstick -
"Holly, Holly, my sweet folly,
come fade under my blade
and make me jolly.
(You know where I am.
XXX Your better half)" -
"Nothing," Holly said. "Just...a bit of change, that's all."
Story Continuity: The Lethean Glamour (chapter the next)
Flavors: Mango 11: seeing is believing, Blackberry 22: blow the whistle, Cheesecake 20: It's no great art, gettin' the heart of a man
Extra: Malt (Trick or Treat: C: "but she's a world in herself, you know")
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And where it ends, nobody knows.
Note: I wanted this combined with the next half, but I also wanted to post this before NaNoWriMo. Since that's not happening, this ends on a kinda-sorta cliffhanger-y note.
Holly never felt she was an inadequate artist until she'd seen a book of the old masters - Calderazza's subliminal symbolism, Marling's form, Krasteva's mastery of everything there was to master. She'd never looked twice at the senseless chaos of the emerging modernists - art was as much a science as meteorology, perhaps a little imprecise, but it was supposed to make sense, in theory, as simple as numbers and equations and practice, aesthetics plus technique. Everything that fell under modernism was a nightmare, formless and irrational, and really it must have been very popular with some - perhaps the kind of people who liked to map out their scarred mental landscapes in crayon on the high, pillowed walls of their rooms.
The thing was, Holly kind of got it now, because now that she'd been out in it longer than a few hours, she could see that the world wasn't something you could capture just right by doing sketches of Sofia's many angry faces and painting the way the sun seemed to set fire to the Abbey at dusk. There was more to it than that. People didn't always match their smiles - sometimes the smiles wore the people - and the land was more than green and brown and flowers, it was moist and had the most confusingly polarizing smell Holly wondered why she hadn't noticed before. Possibly it was because she'd never slept on the ground before, which she didn't especially regret. She was pretty sure there would be pebbles stuck in her back for weeks to come. Modernism was still art, but it wasn't at all about what you could see. It was about the way the wind nourished gooseflesh more effectively when you were feeling all alone in the world and the way a certain kind of anger felt as it boiled, scalding, inside of you and drummed war marches in your head that would not stop until others hurt as you hurt, and it was what happened to you when you felt all that at once.
Seeing Cygnelius stretched out on a long, pale table, bramble still clinging to his hair, had been like watching an early Ashton painting come to life behind her eyes, burning its nightmare into her retinas, but the nightmare was her own to map out on what walls could bear it. The nightmare was Valentio's even as he became the stark misery of a widower era Ivanov. She understood modernism now, still not as much as proper art, but she could see it all around her now. It was threefold as inspired and much less mechanical, and she thought she might like to sit down and paint her own brain someday.
Holly still absolutely hated it, and it was her own hate, not the crawling, heated wrath and madness of the impressions of Helene's mind the woman left when she mucked around in Holly's head, most of which had left her, or at least enough that she was properly nonplussed at Helene's desire to exchange blood with Lady Vera Zahl "so I can open a vein and feel her warmth under my fingertips."
Helene had a lot of thoughts like that. Holly wondered if they were supposed to be romantic; Helene never seemed sure, herself.
"Do you think we should go?" Holly said, to the room in general. Valentio glanced up from where he'd been openly petting Cygnelius's hair - something he wouldn't have dared tried a day before, and something Cyg would never have allowed - and said, "Yeah. Time's wasting, and I meant what I said about money being awesome."
"Okay. You go ahead and wake Lazarus," Holly said, standing. "I'm going to talk to your brother, see if he'd like to travel with us."
"Go for it," Valentio said, sounding possibly more dubious than was really necessary.
Gods help me not to offend him again, Holly thought, because I don't really care anymore.
* * * * *
By the time they reached Cieldort, it had stopped raining, and there rose from the earth a soft, rolling fog. Cieldort itself was a small, hilly town, made notable only by merit of its dubious past as the great capital of a fallen empire and the colorful, unusually asymmetrical construction of its buildings. If the architect had been tripping wheels, no one was alive to remember, but it was pretty obvious.
"Oh, yes," Holly sighed, falling into the chair at their small table. "This is my favorite village ever. My feet are singing praises to...um-"
"Cieldort," Cygnelius said, sitting down much more gracefully. "We're an entire province away from Arethusa now, also. Rase Reve."
"Right. They're singing their rapture to Rase Reve in general and Cieldort in particular, then. Well, or they're still screaming, and it's just music to my ears because clearly I hate them."
"You're going to hate them even more when this is over with. This is a map of the province," Cygnelius said, laying it out on the table, and the corner of his mouth twitched as he saw what else it now was. "Valentio...just forget it. Never leave me."
Holly leaned in to look at what had caught his attention, but Cygnelius smudged the charcoal script and began speaking again. "This is us, right around here - Cieldort doesn't merit its own marker anymore, but it's close enough to Denton that we can assume ourselves to be at that marker. From here, we'll have to cross through the Nevers again, cut through bayou country, and meander westwards towards the capital."
"That's almost the farthest point from where we are," Holly said. "And we're walking the entire way?"
"We ran out of funds somewhere around the Marchfield Grays," Cygnelius said. "And we still have to find enough silver to stock up on necessities and occasionally sleep at hotels. We don't have any choice, unless we come across a respectable windfall."
"We were conned," Valentio said blithely. "But it's okay, because we got him back. If we were ten minutes earlier we would have got our money back, too."
"Really not important at the moment," Cygnelius said. A waitress - tall and young and tan and lovely - appeared by his side and smiled, its brilliance directly aimed at Valentio. "Hello, my name is Tasha. Would you like anything to start you off today?"
"I don't know. What's good?" Valentio said, grinning rakishly. Tasha lit up, soft and smoldering like a candle in the dark, laughter in her eyes. "We have excellent shrimp saganaki. The best you'll find."
"I have no doubt," Valentio said, his smile less fake. "I'll take that, then."
Tasha took the rest of the table's requests and sashayed appealingly into the kitchen.
Cygnelius sighed, rubbing his temples, and said, "We are not even going to be here long enough for you to light her fire, Valentio, unless you go and have it out in the kitchen."
"And that's exactly why you never light any fires," Valentio said, grinning expansively and sprawling comfortably in his seat. "That, and you actually say lighting fires. Really, Cyg, chill out."
Cygnelius rolled his eyes, but that was the end of it.
* * * * *
There were ways you went about things, rituals and rules and immutable facts.
One: Tasha was hot, and two, blatantly just as into getting tapped as Valentio was in doing the tapping. From there, the rituals and rules varied, but in this particular case there weren't that many. There was also, as Cygnelius had kindly put it, no time, but sometimes flirting had its own merits. And hey, you just never knew these things.
The lunch was worth it, and Valentio wasn't one to deny an "on the house," especially since he had so little money left from the healers after crossing the Nevers, so he smiled back, the slower, less extreme one that worked twice as well, and tipped her a little extra. Her smile widened, and she pressed a note into - Holly's hands, actually. Well. Easy come, easy go, Valentio always said. Unless this turned into a threesome, which - well, stranger things had happened. It just didn't seem incredibly likely, and it didn't get any likelier when Tasha swiped a knife off their table and aimed for his head, angry enough that her face seemed to be flickering between human and not quite. Well, you just never knew these things, too, sometimes. Sometimes they were as lovely as they seemed, and other times, well...
Holly was the one who restrained their waitress, finally, with a short spell that froze Tasha in place and, with a sound like falling pins, rid her of whatever illusion kept her fresh and pretty.
"Ohgod," Holly said, voice queasy, like she'd never seen a revenant before. It wouldn't occur to Valentio until much later that she probably hadn't. "I'm going to be ill now."
Sometimes there was a little of this, too.
The only other worker didn't even blink, just said in a voice most people used to discuss running out of eggs, "Huh. That's the fifth employee this week. Damn shame. Tash was family, too."
"This happens a lot, then?" Holly said, her voice tremulous. Tasha's employer grunted. "It's been a problem for two weeks, but it's only been bad since the other day. If anyone's been missing for more than a day, we've been told to bring them to Maurand's for observation. I would have, but - but it was Tash. Guess not, after all."
"I can do the blessings, if you need it," Valentio said. "I'm from Dannareth."
Dannareth was a fact all its own, these days, and an exception to a fair few rules.
NAME Levander's eyes widened almost comically, and Valentio rolled his eyes, making the effort to smile. "It's done with. That's a yes?"
It was.
There were different sorts of ceremonies for the undead entirely, and Valentio knew every subtext and variant. First, the decapitation, which stopped the body's longing for the gray stuff but did nothing for the soul - and if the soul was present for the cremation, it was the person who burned along with the flesh. From there, the ashes were mingled with salt and soil from the person's place of birth, then given the blessing of whichever deity they favored and, if at all possible, their guardian spirits. The person and the skinwalker shared the same body, and even after the blessing and burial of the ashes in an iron box, the demon was still there, hidden, bound, and pissed off; funerals and wakes were disallowed for that very reason. The fewer people gathered near the dead, the better.
The blessing took long enough that even the girl's parents, inexperienced with the ceremony as they were, could tell something was off. Valentio didn't bother telling them they were throwing it all off again. It wasn't the entire truth; it felt almost like there were two demons using Tasha Rollins, and only one of them inside her. It shouldn't have been possible, not even with Skinwalkers. And yet.
Valentio made to repeat the benediction again, and partway through the second word, the ashes gleamed like stars and fizzled like cigarette ashes, disappearing completely. It was as much a sign that something was wrong as anything else, but the surviving Rollinses seemed convinced it was all over, and Valentio wasn't going to deny them that, for now. For all he knew, everything was over, where Tasha was concerned.
Cygnelius and Holly waited by the Crow's Nest Inn, apparently having found common ground in the kind of theoretically theoretical magic that only those with a more intimate knowledge of magic than most people had of the backs of their hands typically understood.
"By the way, Holly - what was in that napkin the skinwalker waitress gave you?" Valentio asked Holly, later that afternoon. Holly saw the note in her head, written in slightly smudged, intimate red lipstick -
"Holly, Holly, my sweet folly,
come fade under my blade
and make me jolly.
(You know where I am.
XXX Your better half)" -
"Nothing," Holly said. "Just...a bit of change, that's all."