12-13-2015, 05:14 PM
The roadside inn that they have entered is dimly lit but warm and outside of the rain. Golden-yellow candle light whispers along the walls in rounded whorls of radiance, causing the gnarled shadows that manifest between the creases of wood furnishing and clothing to appear much more bulbous. Kanaya Maryam can hear a draft of wind whistling through the rafters, although it could very well be some carrion bird that has slipped inside to escape the bone-chilling deluge outside of this dark and stuffy hall.
As Brother Devon helps himself to a meager meal of a few bits and bobs of vegetables and crumbs of questionable breadstuff, Kanaya waits calmly alongside him and steadfastly ignores any stares turned their way, her nose primly upturned as she inspects the low ceiling hanging overhead. Small shadows, some alarmingly large and quick, skitter across the wooden beams above. Unsurprisingly, this place appears to have a rat problem, and a rather great one at that.
After about a quarter of an hour of the two motley travelers doing nothing even remotely threatening, most of those in the establishment turn back to their drinks and vittles and the lively chatter from earlier returns with a vengeance, albeit a tad subdued.
“Anyway, as I was sayin’—“
“You’re always sayin’ something, Theo.”
“Well, yeah, but I’ve got somethin’ to say about a lot o’ things. Anyways, this big ol’ wolf was—“
“Ha! You think wolves are bad! Try fighting a bear in the Siberian winter, with nothing but a leather belt and a can of—”
“No one asked you, Frank!”
The barkeep still keeps an eye on them, but the other is focused solely on the task of clearing the wooden countertop of gritty residue. His wrinkled features look like a puckered bruise-purple prune, spider-webbed with dark shadow and a sour attitude.
Kanaya’s gaze returns to Brother Devon as he finishes his meal. He asks her about finding some way to acquire more bread from the barkeep, but as her eyes drift back towards the man’s downturned face, wrinkles all like the fleshy black veins of a shellfish, Kanaya frowns reproachfully. No, they have already overstayed their welcome enough as it is. It would be best not to push it, at least for now.
“You could always summon food using Omnilium, you know,” she tells him. To be honest, she was a little puzzled about why he did not choose to do that in the first place, although she certainly isn’t complaining. It had been nice to step outside of the rain for a time.
She looks at him again only to find that he appears to be surprised and more than a little bit delighted by this news. He moves to summon something at once, holding his hands out before him much like his earlier trick with the chalk, before Kanaya cuts off the process by abruptly seizing his arm, eyes wide and her orange and yellow horns dipping precariously close to the crown of Devon’s head.
“Not here,” she says, her eyes flickering this way and that to make sure that no one is observing them. Her voice lowers to a whisper, urgent and almost perfunctory. “Omnilium is a precious substance, Devon, and it is highly sought after. I am sure that you have noticed that we are not exactly in the company of friends…” She trails off, watching his face for any signs of comprehension or mutual understanding.
Devon blinks at her, and then pointedly at the hand that she has wrapped around his wrist. Ill at ease, Kanaya quickly releases him. The mage’s face grows more serious than Kanaya believes she has ever seen it. He scratches idly at the side of his beard, thoughtful. “Ah, I understand. How will I pay for the meal I just had, then?”
“Leave that to me,” Kanaya replies, wringing her hands tensely together for a few seconds before rising to her feet.
She slips away and waits for the man behind the counter’s gaze to switch from a suspicious squint to something that could pass for affably interested. The jade-blood feigns at digging around in the folds of her dark cape, as if searching for the currency that everyone here seems to be simply obsessed with, all the while calling a few drops of pure Omnilium to her hands.
The jade-blooded troll places the Omnilium droplets into the palm of the red-boned man with an arrogant, squared look to his jaw. He accepts the payment with little fanfare, deigning to give her a gruff nod. Kanaya returns to Devon’s side, and the two travelers once again step out into the rain, a flood of tension and suspicion trickling out behind them.
Grey and somber buildings are sharply sketched against a water-strewn canvas, darkness bleeding like streams of black pigment across the landscape, grainy and blooming in great rounded smears. The sky sobs wretchedly, tears dribbling down from steepled rooftops and loose shingles.
Someone crosses the street, a huddled phantom whisking through a gloomy and sullen wood. The trees are almost skeletal; shadows prowl their bony-fingered boughs, sleeker than midnight oil seeping across a still pool of water.
They pause at the threshold of the door a moment, Kanaya’s cape giving a silent velveteen murmur as she turns to face Devon and looks him sternly in the face. He is receptive, cobalt blue eyes intelligent and lit up with gentle curiosity. Kanaya recalls a flare of light hardly comparable to a strike of lightning in its quickness, and instructing a friend on how to wield that light long before.
Her voice is soft and trembling uncertainty sheathed— sheathed, much in the same way that her weapon of choice is, the whirring chain paler than sun-cured bone.
“Yes, well,” Kanaya begins, gathering her thoughts, for they are walking many paths of life at once and she has great trouble differentiating between one and the other much of the time. She continues, “I do not believe that we are being closely watched now as we were before. You could summon some bread at your leisure now, if you would like to.”
The mage seems pleased with this statement, and after a moment of excited rambling at her, he asks what she thinks he should summon, because that bread from inside was fairly horrible and he is sure that everyone knows it, including her.
Kanaya knows this, but she is quick to confess that she is unsure of what he should summon. Perhaps some meal from his home universe that was particularly good for long days and long nights of rambling over hills and vales with calloused feet. Some foodstuff that filled his stomach and made the trek across that last stretch of land that much more bearable.
Brother Devon thinks on this, his blue eyes thoughtful and gleaming, no doubt with musings of home. Kanaya does not have a home any longer, and she did not for a long time before her entry into this Omniverse, but she can say that there were a certain motley few who were very dear to her heart. Their company alone was home.
A flickering of summoned Omnilium draws her out of her reverie, and the distant stare in her eyes is blinked away as if it were a drizzly grey morning and she had been caught between the realms of sleep and wakefulness a moment before. The rainbow glow laps around the mage’s fingertips, shining like liquefied opal filtered through strumming harp strings of starlight.
She peers curiously at his hands, waiting. She has not heard much of human foodstuffs, although she suspects that they are not much different from her own planet’s— at least in the general concept that leads to their creation. Flavor and aroma would of course be a major driving factor, but one could never be sure if a certain odor hanging around a dish could actually determine whether it was satisfactory or not.
It could be some sugar-dusted pastry streaming red-tinged juices from a gelatinous berry goop layered within, or perhaps a simple wrap of thinned water and flour, salted and speckled with sun-warmed kernels of corn, or fresh and crisp vegetables with an earthy tang encircling each bite. Truly, the possibilities are endless, and Kanaya awaits his decision with an immensely interested tilt to her head.
What she does not expect is for a sloppy fixing of two slices of slightly-dampened, purplish bread with a heaping slather of fruit jam and brownish peanut butter tucked in between the bread slices. She has a distinct feeling that this particular concoction may be found in the lunchboxes of schoolchildren everywhere, and for those who are hard-pressed for time when searching around for something, anything to consume. It appears to be simple, yet efficient.
Kanaya approves.
When she asks him about his choice out of simple interest, Devon rambles on with some reasoning that sounds almost exactly like the assumptions she has already made. Kanaya nods, her curiosity satisfied.
They set off at a walk, an easy pace that allows for them to skirt around mud puddles but still sets up an absurd squelching in the soggy dirt, like the croaking of dozens of frogs. Crystalline droplets of water catch in Kanaya’s eyelashes, but the backwards sweep of her hair and neck is shielded by the high collar of her cape. Devon’s hood is drawn over much of his face, but she can still see a delighted smile spread across his lips through his ruddy brown beard. He folds the sandwich up in paper for later, and it is presently tucked into his pack for safe-keeping.
There is no one to be seen or heard— no soul sits out on their front stoop to greet any random wanderers in the street, be they friend or stranger. Kanaya seems to recall that there was some great tragedy recently— or mayhaps long ago, time works distortedly and in inscrutable patterns between verses. One might be gone for days and only minutes will have passed in the next realm over. It is like an imperceptible drip in the plumbing of the universe, a leak from some great faucet of temporal flow that dribbles incessantly in the night which may never be repaired. One day, Kanaya thinks that this small drip will dribble into a faint stream, and then into a great torrent of rushing water, until finally all of the floodwaters break loose and all of time is swept away into oblivion, into such an utterly lifeless state of nonbeing that not even a whisper of doomed timelines will be left.
She confides all this in Devon, and not much more. But, Kanaya was never one for Time. She was more about Space, for even the wide, expansive, wonderful, and star-stippled fabric of the cosmos can be repaired with simple needlework. Sylphs are quite good about such delicate matters, weaving frayed ends back together until they flow in perfect symmetry. To counter the chaotic behavior of Time, there is always Space to maintain order. It is the one thing which Kanaya understands down to the very fibre of her being, and which she will profess as truth to every ear willing to listen.
The steady drip-drop-plink of water along awnings and chimney tops accompanies Kanaya and Devon with each step. A stray scattering of buildings, built up like termite mounds with little order and precision to them, is spread around them across a flat plain of dead grass and even deader spirits. The air smells clean, but if one were to tip their head back they would be stricken with the impression of drowning.
Kanaya suspects that, if Darkshire was not so elevated above the murky swampland below, the basin of scraping limbs and mudbugs that has so consumed all of her energy since her arrival here, that a fair amount of shallow graves might have been vacated during the night only to be discovered bobbing someone’s porch step amongst other floating debris.
They are nearly on the outskirts of the town when a shrill voice calls out from behind them. Devon turns immediately, but Kanaya takes a moment to glare out into the fog smothering the lands before them, imagining the stone walls of a dreary castle rising up out of the gloom. When the voice persists, she resolves herself to her fate and turns at well.
A small human child stands, barefoot, in the rain. Her knees are knobbly and she is wearing a dress that seems to be little more than a rag hanging off from her shoulders. It is dotted with faintly orange sunflowers, which are just as grubby and worn away as her stringy brown hair and thin cheeks. Kanaya cannot tell from whence she came. She looks to be little more than three sweeps old.
Devon stoops down in the dirt before the young girl, and a muted conversation begins that the rainbow drinker cannot quite hear, as deafeningly loud as the rain is in her ears. It ends with him digging around in his pack and presenting the sandwich from earlier to the girl, which she accepts with a wobbly grin. Several of her teeth are missing, and the gaps are wide and dark in between them.
Kanaya moves nearer just in time to hear Devon ask after the girl’s name.
“Olive,” she says, partially stuffing the crust of bread into her mouth and garbling her words around it. “Olive Prendergast.”
Brother Devon smiles, turning his head to look at Kanaya over his shoulder. “That’s a beautiful name, Olive is. Now, tell my good friend Kanaya what you were saying earlier, Olive.”
The young girl gives Kanaya a slightly distrustful look, but with some gentle coaxing from Devon speaks up. Her eyes grow tearful as she speaks, and her voice wavers in between pointed marks of trepidation and distress when she lowers the sandwich from her mouth. “My best friend’s gone missing, my dog. His name’s Ham. I think someone took him!”
Her bearded companion looks at Kanaya as if this says it all, while in fact it says very little. As her lips start to curve downwards, Devon stands and leans in so that the child cannot hear when he urgently speaks to her.
“Kanaya, I really think we should help her out,” he says, and then directs a reassuring smile at the small girl standing a few strides away. Kanaya frowns a little more, brows drawing closer together. “I mean, it will only take a short while. I am sure it will be hanging around here somewhere— nothing as serious as what she’s implying.”
Kanaya sighs, looking again towards where she knows Castle Dracula lies in the mist-wreathed steppes.
“Very well,” she says, turning to face the pair. Her face softens when her eyes land upon the child, her posture becoming a bit less stiff. “We will search for the barkbeast.”
As Brother Devon helps himself to a meager meal of a few bits and bobs of vegetables and crumbs of questionable breadstuff, Kanaya waits calmly alongside him and steadfastly ignores any stares turned their way, her nose primly upturned as she inspects the low ceiling hanging overhead. Small shadows, some alarmingly large and quick, skitter across the wooden beams above. Unsurprisingly, this place appears to have a rat problem, and a rather great one at that.
After about a quarter of an hour of the two motley travelers doing nothing even remotely threatening, most of those in the establishment turn back to their drinks and vittles and the lively chatter from earlier returns with a vengeance, albeit a tad subdued.
“Anyway, as I was sayin’—“
“You’re always sayin’ something, Theo.”
“Well, yeah, but I’ve got somethin’ to say about a lot o’ things. Anyways, this big ol’ wolf was—“
“Ha! You think wolves are bad! Try fighting a bear in the Siberian winter, with nothing but a leather belt and a can of—”
“No one asked you, Frank!”
The barkeep still keeps an eye on them, but the other is focused solely on the task of clearing the wooden countertop of gritty residue. His wrinkled features look like a puckered bruise-purple prune, spider-webbed with dark shadow and a sour attitude.
Kanaya’s gaze returns to Brother Devon as he finishes his meal. He asks her about finding some way to acquire more bread from the barkeep, but as her eyes drift back towards the man’s downturned face, wrinkles all like the fleshy black veins of a shellfish, Kanaya frowns reproachfully. No, they have already overstayed their welcome enough as it is. It would be best not to push it, at least for now.
“You could always summon food using Omnilium, you know,” she tells him. To be honest, she was a little puzzled about why he did not choose to do that in the first place, although she certainly isn’t complaining. It had been nice to step outside of the rain for a time.
She looks at him again only to find that he appears to be surprised and more than a little bit delighted by this news. He moves to summon something at once, holding his hands out before him much like his earlier trick with the chalk, before Kanaya cuts off the process by abruptly seizing his arm, eyes wide and her orange and yellow horns dipping precariously close to the crown of Devon’s head.
“Not here,” she says, her eyes flickering this way and that to make sure that no one is observing them. Her voice lowers to a whisper, urgent and almost perfunctory. “Omnilium is a precious substance, Devon, and it is highly sought after. I am sure that you have noticed that we are not exactly in the company of friends…” She trails off, watching his face for any signs of comprehension or mutual understanding.
Devon blinks at her, and then pointedly at the hand that she has wrapped around his wrist. Ill at ease, Kanaya quickly releases him. The mage’s face grows more serious than Kanaya believes she has ever seen it. He scratches idly at the side of his beard, thoughtful. “Ah, I understand. How will I pay for the meal I just had, then?”
“Leave that to me,” Kanaya replies, wringing her hands tensely together for a few seconds before rising to her feet.
She slips away and waits for the man behind the counter’s gaze to switch from a suspicious squint to something that could pass for affably interested. The jade-blood feigns at digging around in the folds of her dark cape, as if searching for the currency that everyone here seems to be simply obsessed with, all the while calling a few drops of pure Omnilium to her hands.
The jade-blooded troll places the Omnilium droplets into the palm of the red-boned man with an arrogant, squared look to his jaw. He accepts the payment with little fanfare, deigning to give her a gruff nod. Kanaya returns to Devon’s side, and the two travelers once again step out into the rain, a flood of tension and suspicion trickling out behind them.
Grey and somber buildings are sharply sketched against a water-strewn canvas, darkness bleeding like streams of black pigment across the landscape, grainy and blooming in great rounded smears. The sky sobs wretchedly, tears dribbling down from steepled rooftops and loose shingles.
Someone crosses the street, a huddled phantom whisking through a gloomy and sullen wood. The trees are almost skeletal; shadows prowl their bony-fingered boughs, sleeker than midnight oil seeping across a still pool of water.
They pause at the threshold of the door a moment, Kanaya’s cape giving a silent velveteen murmur as she turns to face Devon and looks him sternly in the face. He is receptive, cobalt blue eyes intelligent and lit up with gentle curiosity. Kanaya recalls a flare of light hardly comparable to a strike of lightning in its quickness, and instructing a friend on how to wield that light long before.
Her voice is soft and trembling uncertainty sheathed— sheathed, much in the same way that her weapon of choice is, the whirring chain paler than sun-cured bone.
“Yes, well,” Kanaya begins, gathering her thoughts, for they are walking many paths of life at once and she has great trouble differentiating between one and the other much of the time. She continues, “I do not believe that we are being closely watched now as we were before. You could summon some bread at your leisure now, if you would like to.”
The mage seems pleased with this statement, and after a moment of excited rambling at her, he asks what she thinks he should summon, because that bread from inside was fairly horrible and he is sure that everyone knows it, including her.
Kanaya knows this, but she is quick to confess that she is unsure of what he should summon. Perhaps some meal from his home universe that was particularly good for long days and long nights of rambling over hills and vales with calloused feet. Some foodstuff that filled his stomach and made the trek across that last stretch of land that much more bearable.
Brother Devon thinks on this, his blue eyes thoughtful and gleaming, no doubt with musings of home. Kanaya does not have a home any longer, and she did not for a long time before her entry into this Omniverse, but she can say that there were a certain motley few who were very dear to her heart. Their company alone was home.
A flickering of summoned Omnilium draws her out of her reverie, and the distant stare in her eyes is blinked away as if it were a drizzly grey morning and she had been caught between the realms of sleep and wakefulness a moment before. The rainbow glow laps around the mage’s fingertips, shining like liquefied opal filtered through strumming harp strings of starlight.
She peers curiously at his hands, waiting. She has not heard much of human foodstuffs, although she suspects that they are not much different from her own planet’s— at least in the general concept that leads to their creation. Flavor and aroma would of course be a major driving factor, but one could never be sure if a certain odor hanging around a dish could actually determine whether it was satisfactory or not.
It could be some sugar-dusted pastry streaming red-tinged juices from a gelatinous berry goop layered within, or perhaps a simple wrap of thinned water and flour, salted and speckled with sun-warmed kernels of corn, or fresh and crisp vegetables with an earthy tang encircling each bite. Truly, the possibilities are endless, and Kanaya awaits his decision with an immensely interested tilt to her head.
What she does not expect is for a sloppy fixing of two slices of slightly-dampened, purplish bread with a heaping slather of fruit jam and brownish peanut butter tucked in between the bread slices. She has a distinct feeling that this particular concoction may be found in the lunchboxes of schoolchildren everywhere, and for those who are hard-pressed for time when searching around for something, anything to consume. It appears to be simple, yet efficient.
Kanaya approves.
When she asks him about his choice out of simple interest, Devon rambles on with some reasoning that sounds almost exactly like the assumptions she has already made. Kanaya nods, her curiosity satisfied.
They set off at a walk, an easy pace that allows for them to skirt around mud puddles but still sets up an absurd squelching in the soggy dirt, like the croaking of dozens of frogs. Crystalline droplets of water catch in Kanaya’s eyelashes, but the backwards sweep of her hair and neck is shielded by the high collar of her cape. Devon’s hood is drawn over much of his face, but she can still see a delighted smile spread across his lips through his ruddy brown beard. He folds the sandwich up in paper for later, and it is presently tucked into his pack for safe-keeping.
There is no one to be seen or heard— no soul sits out on their front stoop to greet any random wanderers in the street, be they friend or stranger. Kanaya seems to recall that there was some great tragedy recently— or mayhaps long ago, time works distortedly and in inscrutable patterns between verses. One might be gone for days and only minutes will have passed in the next realm over. It is like an imperceptible drip in the plumbing of the universe, a leak from some great faucet of temporal flow that dribbles incessantly in the night which may never be repaired. One day, Kanaya thinks that this small drip will dribble into a faint stream, and then into a great torrent of rushing water, until finally all of the floodwaters break loose and all of time is swept away into oblivion, into such an utterly lifeless state of nonbeing that not even a whisper of doomed timelines will be left.
She confides all this in Devon, and not much more. But, Kanaya was never one for Time. She was more about Space, for even the wide, expansive, wonderful, and star-stippled fabric of the cosmos can be repaired with simple needlework. Sylphs are quite good about such delicate matters, weaving frayed ends back together until they flow in perfect symmetry. To counter the chaotic behavior of Time, there is always Space to maintain order. It is the one thing which Kanaya understands down to the very fibre of her being, and which she will profess as truth to every ear willing to listen.
The steady drip-drop-plink of water along awnings and chimney tops accompanies Kanaya and Devon with each step. A stray scattering of buildings, built up like termite mounds with little order and precision to them, is spread around them across a flat plain of dead grass and even deader spirits. The air smells clean, but if one were to tip their head back they would be stricken with the impression of drowning.
Kanaya suspects that, if Darkshire was not so elevated above the murky swampland below, the basin of scraping limbs and mudbugs that has so consumed all of her energy since her arrival here, that a fair amount of shallow graves might have been vacated during the night only to be discovered bobbing someone’s porch step amongst other floating debris.
They are nearly on the outskirts of the town when a shrill voice calls out from behind them. Devon turns immediately, but Kanaya takes a moment to glare out into the fog smothering the lands before them, imagining the stone walls of a dreary castle rising up out of the gloom. When the voice persists, she resolves herself to her fate and turns at well.
A small human child stands, barefoot, in the rain. Her knees are knobbly and she is wearing a dress that seems to be little more than a rag hanging off from her shoulders. It is dotted with faintly orange sunflowers, which are just as grubby and worn away as her stringy brown hair and thin cheeks. Kanaya cannot tell from whence she came. She looks to be little more than three sweeps old.
Devon stoops down in the dirt before the young girl, and a muted conversation begins that the rainbow drinker cannot quite hear, as deafeningly loud as the rain is in her ears. It ends with him digging around in his pack and presenting the sandwich from earlier to the girl, which she accepts with a wobbly grin. Several of her teeth are missing, and the gaps are wide and dark in between them.
Kanaya moves nearer just in time to hear Devon ask after the girl’s name.
“Olive,” she says, partially stuffing the crust of bread into her mouth and garbling her words around it. “Olive Prendergast.”
Brother Devon smiles, turning his head to look at Kanaya over his shoulder. “That’s a beautiful name, Olive is. Now, tell my good friend Kanaya what you were saying earlier, Olive.”
The young girl gives Kanaya a slightly distrustful look, but with some gentle coaxing from Devon speaks up. Her eyes grow tearful as she speaks, and her voice wavers in between pointed marks of trepidation and distress when she lowers the sandwich from her mouth. “My best friend’s gone missing, my dog. His name’s Ham. I think someone took him!”
Her bearded companion looks at Kanaya as if this says it all, while in fact it says very little. As her lips start to curve downwards, Devon stands and leans in so that the child cannot hear when he urgently speaks to her.
“Kanaya, I really think we should help her out,” he says, and then directs a reassuring smile at the small girl standing a few strides away. Kanaya frowns a little more, brows drawing closer together. “I mean, it will only take a short while. I am sure it will be hanging around here somewhere— nothing as serious as what she’s implying.”
Kanaya sighs, looking again towards where she knows Castle Dracula lies in the mist-wreathed steppes.
“Very well,” she says, turning to face the pair. Her face softens when her eyes land upon the child, her posture becoming a bit less stiff. “We will search for the barkbeast.”
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Gamzee Makara Wrote:S’aight. After all, dogs have a tendency to motherfuckin’ bite.