[Slaughter] One day, during some silence between some innocuous conversation, likely at a pub or a bar over heavy beer, or perhaps after Sorrow has cleansed her of her taint, a ritual in which she does not feel anything, not before or after, but commits to religiously now, despite years of carelessness.
They put up a marker for him, didn't they? the sentence half finished, missing it's finer details. She tacks on an addendum: For Kemp. In the caern.
When the affirmation comes, the red-haired kinwoman pauses, stilling. Her jaw tightens a little, the tendon flexing. I'd like to visit it. Briefly. A pause, her mouth tightening. She dislikes this - something about it, perhaps the fact she visits a grave of someone she knew as nearly a child, perhaps that she must ask for permission to go at all. Perhaps all these things. Perhaps none of them. Will you ask permission for me?
Sorrow, apparently, agreed. Permission was granted from the massive Warder or perhaps one of his guardians. Maybe the Garou even know her name, the once(or still)-mate of an Adren now-an-Athro. A kinfolk with kills on the pole. Maybe they don't. The request is small and perhaps even understandable.
--
Late evening, Imogen in the driver seat and Kora in the passenger's. She pulls up onto the gravel near the chain link fence which surrounds the docks. The drive has been silent, the cheap and tired Volvo which she uses rattling and shuddering with the weight of the engine, the air conditioning pushing lukewarm air in their direction. She cuts the engine with the turn of a key, and gets out, but pauses. She walks around to the trunk of the car, fitting in the key to pop the boot. It is deliberate, her actions. She removes her gun. The holster and sets them deep inside the trunk. She removes her cigarette case, her lighter and puts them down before closing the lid firmly and turning to Sorrow.
"No hall pass required, is there?" her question is sardonic and not quite mirthful though her mouth twists. "Just walk in, do we?"
[Sorrow] The heat has returned. Day gives way to dusk, filling the steaming streets with shadows that offer absolutely no relief from the baking, omnipresent heat of the failing day. Here, at the edge of the lake, amongst the old industrial dockyards, in the shadow of the great office towers and condo developments and high-rise hotels that cluster around the groomed, reclaimed lakefront at the city's heart, there's a breeze that stirs through the rusting dockyards, but no relief from the heat.
The contrast between the lukewarm soup of the barely functional air conditioning and the honest heat of the evening is sharp, almost pleasant. Outside the cage of the car's frame, at least the air moves.
Sorrow is quiet. She has a way of being quiet that suits her, a certain reserve at odds with the bite of her rage and the reputation of both her tribe and her moon. Quiet during the ride, quiet as they exit the car, the distant sounds of the city broken only by the snap-shut of the Volvo's door in its frame.
Arms crossed loosely over her torso, she watches as Imogen divests herself of worldly things. The gun and the cigarettes. The lighter. The holster. She says nothing, her dark eyes on Imogen's hands as she tosses in the lighter after the rest, and then on the sketch of horizon visible between the barriers leading to the dockyards - through the fence marking the bawn, or the fence of some neighboring derelict, out to the smoky darkness of the lake.
"No," she answers at last, when Imogen is ready, stirring herself from the halfslouch she affected against the frame of the car. There's a faint curve to her mouth, but otherwise her mien is sure and it is serious. " - though you'll need to get a key if you need to use the restroom."
With a tip of her head toward the chainlink fence, Sorrow starts off toward the bawn, searching out one of the rents hidden inside the diamond pattern of the rusting chainlink. In the middle of all this - one of the guardians has appeared. He's a tall young man, his frame not yet filled out as the massive warder's - the bristle of a grown-in beard darkening his cheeks.
He was young, once.
The guardian doesn't block their path; he doesn't make a challenge. In fact, he reaches to drag a chunk of metal and a ruined tire from the nearest break in the fencing, then holds back the links so that Imogen can duck through.
[Slaughter] She pauses briefly before entering. A moment's hesitation. Then she ducks - though she barely needs to with her height, one hand lifting to touch the bent back section of fencing to hold it for herself. "Thank-you," simply to the Guardian before she pauses, waiting for Sorrow to make her own way through.
She does not need to be directed. She knows the way.
And so she goes.
[Sorrow] This is simple. Imogen gives the strange young man her thanks. Maybe he isn't strange. Maybe she remembers him, the shadow of his face when he was younger, still visible underneath the bones and muscles of this one, changed, grown. Maybe she doesn't remember him; any of them, the Guardians who confine themselves to this twisted circuit of metal and broken concrete, the hard flats near the water's edge, the creeping, twisting, vining sort of plants that are the first to grow back, to put down shallow roots in the barest portion of soil.
He remembers her, though. His eyes are on his face, and his eyes are serious. "You're welcome," he says, holding the fencing back for Sorrow who comes after. For Sorrow, who is tall enough that she has to duck to make it through. The tines of the fence catch and pull at the twisted mass of her hair as she twists underneath, loosening the haphazard knot in which she wears it without pulling it free.
Another night, and she might give the guardian a hand with the monstrous old tire, with the scrap metal designed to conceal the entrance into the bawn. Tonight, she just falls into step beside Imogen, her long arms loose at her side, quiet as they pass through the shadows cast by the old hangers and warehouses, heading toward the raw patch of earth torn up from the tarmac, where the graves are.
[Slaughter] The Grave of Hallowed Heroes has many fresh burials this year, mounds of disturbed dirt which have not yet fully settled back into the earth. Fresh markers which are not at all weathered or worn. Even the oldest of them are barely six or seven years old. This caern is young, for all that it's seen its share of loss.
It is a caern of sacrifice, after all.
The grave they seek is not truly a grave at all. There is no mound of dirt settling slowly around a corpse. There is a charred section of hull - a curved piece of driftwood with ash clinging to its grooves. A metal carved shield, a plaque upon it, glyph work wrought into the metal. It is kept clean, but unadorned. No flowers, no trinkets beyond what is used for his marker.
Imogen tilts her head toward it, an eyebrow arching in silent question. Her eyes are dry, her mouth set steady, her jaw tight. There is little revealed in her but a thrum of tension.
When Sorrow confirms that the kinwoman is correct, this is the grave, she moves toward it, her footfall near silent on the hard parked earth between the graves.
[Sorrow] There's nothing else there. Humans bring flowers to adorn the lush, parklike expanses of their grave yards, rolling hills and old old trees, marble markers crowded into the city. Sometimes they bring plastic flowers: everlasting, if slowly fading from the sun and the wind and the rain, the work of time and the elements clear. There is an irony in this.
Sometimes they bring stuffed animals, the plasticine, unnatural fur and synthetic stuffing moldering slowly outdoors, mildew eating the fabric from the inside out, except for the most indigestable of the plastic bits at the core of it, the shiny plastic thread used to whipstitch the arms onto the body.
There are no humans buried here, in the raw earth, waterlogged from the nearness of the lake. Just a handful of changing wolves and their kin.
The sun is failing now, somewhere beyond the horizon in the west. The sky is streaked with patterns of pink and orange, the edge of a bank of cumulous clouds deep in shadow except where the last rays of the sun set it on fire. The moon is rising, too. Somewhere in the east, now, low and fat on the eastern horizon. The air is so humid that there is a fuzzy halo around the moon, and her reflection in the otherwise quiescent waters of the dark lake is an impressionistic blur.
Sorrow tips her head once, confirming. That's it. That's the marker, the ash-hardened spear of driftwood, the plaque, the empty square of hardpacked earth. They gave his ashes to Maelstrom, so there is not even that dubious comfort. Just this: spare and empty, clean.
Imogen is a vibrant thing against the grays and browns of the tarmac, the industrial wasteland turned holy place. Sorrow watches her a moment, her mouth still, her body taut underneath her worn clothing, then glances away, at the lake, the reflection of the moon cast across it, giving the kinswoman a measure of privacy.
She's silent now, Sorrow.
Here, it has a different cast.
[Slaughter] She is a series of contrasts. Pale hair, dark eyes. Bright, brilliant hair. Her skin like alabaster, her eyes like midnight. Her hair, indescribable.
It is a city caern around her. She does not fit. The grey and browns, the sharp industrial edges, the decay and disrepair. Imogen a bright spot, and remote with it, as if the concrete and grey cannot touch her.
Sorrow looks away, giving her privacy. It does not matter, not really. Imogen would be the same, whether she were watched by a thousand eyes, if she were watched by one; if she were watched by none. Her expression is controlled, her body tensed as a bow-string. Her eyes lower to the items that mark the so-called grave. Not even a grave at all, merely a marker. A memory so his name won't be forgotten.
At least, for as long as the glyphs remain visible. For as long as someone who lives remembers to keep it clean and free of debris.
She sinks to a crouch, silent, and reaches out, not to caress the items, but to briefly brush away an enterprising weed, her fingers curling around it to pull it from the ground. After a moment, she gets to her feet and steps away.
[Sorrow] "I bring eggrolls sometimes." Sorrow's voice is low and controlled. It's an instrument: of a different sort and type than Imogen's, but an instrument nonetheless.
She is a storyteller; she keeps the memories of the place inside her, in her bones, under her skin, in her mind, and returns them on nights like these, when the moon is full. In an hour or three, when the sun has gone well below the horizon and night is full upon the land, the moon will be high in the vault of the sky, struggling to compete with the constant glow inside the city, but casting rich veins of silver shadow out here, where the abandoned land flows long and flat into the lake, the memory of the plains sharp closest to the expanse of the lake.
When Imogen turns away, stand up, the wilting remains of an errant weed curled between her fingers, Sorrow, who is looking at the moon and feeling her pull, tidal, in her blood, underneath her skin, within the spongy marrow of her bones, says, I bring eggrolls sometimes. It's quiet, her voice. It doesn't crack, though.
"Crumble them up, and scatter them. The birds come and eat them. Or other things." This is a story. The Skald's hands are in her pockets. They're killing hands, long-fingered, blunt-nailed, finely jointed. "The odd Coke. I figure, they won't have those things in Valhalla. He'll have to learn to drink mead." A moment's pause. Sorrow offers this sketch of the afterlife, and it is a sketch - skeletal - not with the reverence of a human believer, but rather with a sort of mournful solidity, the conviction of someone who knows the world is round because she has sailed its courses all the way around.
"Has learned, already, I suppose."
[Slaughter] She holds every muscle and ligament in perfect tension. She gives not at all, and tightens no more, keeping herself in an exact equilibrium, taut and still.
Sorrow speaks, and Imogen turns her head to look at her, her gaze reserved, remote as she looks at the Fenrir, the Skald.
"I thought perhaps I might bring somethin'," she says after a moment. "But nothin' came to mind." Her breath exhales sharply, on the edge of a scoff. "It wouldn't ha' mattered anyway."
A tight pause before Imogen tilts her head sharply back toward the marker. "Do you want a moment?" This kind of thoughtfulness in her is rare. It is in her to simply start to leave as she wishes. She would have done; if it hadn't been for the egg rolls and coke.
[Erika Alexander] ((Open?))
to Slaughter, Sorrow
[Slaughter] (it is, but we're in the caern. :( Kinfolk aren't usually allowed in the caern. [Imogen got special permission])
to , Sorrow
[Slaughter] (it is, but we're in the caern. :( Kinfolk aren't usually allowed in the caern. [Imogen got special permission])
to Erika Alexander, Sorrow
[Sorrow] Imogen breathes out, sharply. Sorrow breathes out. It's different; it's nearly a laugh, a certain release of tension that is not mirthless. The humor, though, is this remote thing, underscoring the shape of her words, the movement of them in her mouth.
"I'm good, Doc." Her hands are in her hip pockets, her narrow frame sketched out against the dark of the horizon, backlit by the glow of the low-hanging silver moon. The heat lingers here, captured by the pavement to radiate well after the sun has gone, and the air buzzes with summer insects. Here and there, the shadows are studded by the golden glow of fireflies hanging low in the air - some last gasp of courtship ritual, before death comes.
Turning away from the lake, she falls into step beside Imogen as the kinswoman turns to leave. "I don't know, though. Maybe it does matter, yeah?" Sorrow's tone is mild, her voice rich. It's not a contradiction, just slow. Musing-quiet. "My ancestors come back to me. Sometimes they speak to me. Sometimes I dream their stories. Sometimes they live in my skin, guide my hands."
The Skald has fallen into step beside Imogen. They're walking away from the graves, if Imogen wants to walk. Back through the ruins of the Caern, the warehouses and the hangers, the flat concrete buildings that look like bunkers, their original functions a mystery. Back through the ruins of the ships, rearing up from the flat lands like the himalayas out of the Tibetan plateau, sudden and jagged.
"So maybe it does matter," this is conversational, and Sorrow's voice is provisional. She says maybe as if it were a thing-in-balance, subject to weights and measures. " - some act of memory made concrete. Like an echo."
She's quiet then. There's an underlying tension. The moon in the sky, the rage in the air: but memory is the work of her moon. Writing the dead back into the world and Sorrow engages it with a bone deep seriousness that lingers in her even after - now, quiet, tense with memory and awareness of the kinswoman walking beside her.
[Slaughter] I'm good, Doc.
With that, Imogen turns away and starts away from the Grave of Hallowed Heroes. She does not look back.
Sorrow ruminates, and Imogen is briefly silent, before finally, saying quietly, simply: "I hope that gives you comfort."
She walks back toward the the caern opening, pocketing her hands in her jacket.
[Sorrow] This earns Imogen a look: dark-eyed, sidelong, the lift of her chin animal, the gleam of light across the surface of her gaze feral as they walk. Quiet, still and contained, with her hands in her pockets still and her body moving underneath, the sweep of her gait as she walks - just so.
Then, "Thanks," and she is looking way. The fencing circling the bawn, the city beyond the shadows, ablaze with light. There's a breeze from the lake, full of the scent of vegetal rot and exhaust fumes from pleasure boats out humming in the dark. Then: the ritual. Finding the rent in the face, the place where the links are split, where the barrier zippers open as she tucks her hand into the diamond weave.
The guardian is there again. Or still. It is dark and he is pulling something heave on a make-shift sledge created by lashing together an old wooden shipping palet with nylon ropes. Height of Mountains stops, silent, and gives Sorrow a hand rolling the giant tire away from the exit. He pulls the chain links back for Imogen again, quiet.
[Slaughter] This time, she exits the caern without a word. She breathes a little more easily in the open air. Out of the mystics and holiness of the Garou's sacred place. Her eyes shut briefly, before they open and she heads toward the car.
A pause at the trunk to unlock it and lift the lid. She arms herself again, and gathers the accouterments of her nicotine addiction, before walking around to the driver's side. The doors were left unlocked. No one would dare steal a car from this close to the bawn, even if they don't know why.
She starts the engine and rolls down her window. A pause.
"I appreciate this," she says; and without waiting for an answer, puts the car into reverse and pulls away from the fence, the caern, the graves, the grave.
They put up a marker for him, didn't they? the sentence half finished, missing it's finer details. She tacks on an addendum: For Kemp. In the caern.
When the affirmation comes, the red-haired kinwoman pauses, stilling. Her jaw tightens a little, the tendon flexing. I'd like to visit it. Briefly. A pause, her mouth tightening. She dislikes this - something about it, perhaps the fact she visits a grave of someone she knew as nearly a child, perhaps that she must ask for permission to go at all. Perhaps all these things. Perhaps none of them. Will you ask permission for me?
Sorrow, apparently, agreed. Permission was granted from the massive Warder or perhaps one of his guardians. Maybe the Garou even know her name, the once(or still)-mate of an Adren now-an-Athro. A kinfolk with kills on the pole. Maybe they don't. The request is small and perhaps even understandable.
--
Late evening, Imogen in the driver seat and Kora in the passenger's. She pulls up onto the gravel near the chain link fence which surrounds the docks. The drive has been silent, the cheap and tired Volvo which she uses rattling and shuddering with the weight of the engine, the air conditioning pushing lukewarm air in their direction. She cuts the engine with the turn of a key, and gets out, but pauses. She walks around to the trunk of the car, fitting in the key to pop the boot. It is deliberate, her actions. She removes her gun. The holster and sets them deep inside the trunk. She removes her cigarette case, her lighter and puts them down before closing the lid firmly and turning to Sorrow.
"No hall pass required, is there?" her question is sardonic and not quite mirthful though her mouth twists. "Just walk in, do we?"
[Sorrow] The heat has returned. Day gives way to dusk, filling the steaming streets with shadows that offer absolutely no relief from the baking, omnipresent heat of the failing day. Here, at the edge of the lake, amongst the old industrial dockyards, in the shadow of the great office towers and condo developments and high-rise hotels that cluster around the groomed, reclaimed lakefront at the city's heart, there's a breeze that stirs through the rusting dockyards, but no relief from the heat.
The contrast between the lukewarm soup of the barely functional air conditioning and the honest heat of the evening is sharp, almost pleasant. Outside the cage of the car's frame, at least the air moves.
Sorrow is quiet. She has a way of being quiet that suits her, a certain reserve at odds with the bite of her rage and the reputation of both her tribe and her moon. Quiet during the ride, quiet as they exit the car, the distant sounds of the city broken only by the snap-shut of the Volvo's door in its frame.
Arms crossed loosely over her torso, she watches as Imogen divests herself of worldly things. The gun and the cigarettes. The lighter. The holster. She says nothing, her dark eyes on Imogen's hands as she tosses in the lighter after the rest, and then on the sketch of horizon visible between the barriers leading to the dockyards - through the fence marking the bawn, or the fence of some neighboring derelict, out to the smoky darkness of the lake.
"No," she answers at last, when Imogen is ready, stirring herself from the halfslouch she affected against the frame of the car. There's a faint curve to her mouth, but otherwise her mien is sure and it is serious. " - though you'll need to get a key if you need to use the restroom."
With a tip of her head toward the chainlink fence, Sorrow starts off toward the bawn, searching out one of the rents hidden inside the diamond pattern of the rusting chainlink. In the middle of all this - one of the guardians has appeared. He's a tall young man, his frame not yet filled out as the massive warder's - the bristle of a grown-in beard darkening his cheeks.
He was young, once.
The guardian doesn't block their path; he doesn't make a challenge. In fact, he reaches to drag a chunk of metal and a ruined tire from the nearest break in the fencing, then holds back the links so that Imogen can duck through.
[Slaughter] She pauses briefly before entering. A moment's hesitation. Then she ducks - though she barely needs to with her height, one hand lifting to touch the bent back section of fencing to hold it for herself. "Thank-you," simply to the Guardian before she pauses, waiting for Sorrow to make her own way through.
She does not need to be directed. She knows the way.
And so she goes.
[Sorrow] This is simple. Imogen gives the strange young man her thanks. Maybe he isn't strange. Maybe she remembers him, the shadow of his face when he was younger, still visible underneath the bones and muscles of this one, changed, grown. Maybe she doesn't remember him; any of them, the Guardians who confine themselves to this twisted circuit of metal and broken concrete, the hard flats near the water's edge, the creeping, twisting, vining sort of plants that are the first to grow back, to put down shallow roots in the barest portion of soil.
He remembers her, though. His eyes are on his face, and his eyes are serious. "You're welcome," he says, holding the fencing back for Sorrow who comes after. For Sorrow, who is tall enough that she has to duck to make it through. The tines of the fence catch and pull at the twisted mass of her hair as she twists underneath, loosening the haphazard knot in which she wears it without pulling it free.
Another night, and she might give the guardian a hand with the monstrous old tire, with the scrap metal designed to conceal the entrance into the bawn. Tonight, she just falls into step beside Imogen, her long arms loose at her side, quiet as they pass through the shadows cast by the old hangers and warehouses, heading toward the raw patch of earth torn up from the tarmac, where the graves are.
[Slaughter] The Grave of Hallowed Heroes has many fresh burials this year, mounds of disturbed dirt which have not yet fully settled back into the earth. Fresh markers which are not at all weathered or worn. Even the oldest of them are barely six or seven years old. This caern is young, for all that it's seen its share of loss.
It is a caern of sacrifice, after all.
The grave they seek is not truly a grave at all. There is no mound of dirt settling slowly around a corpse. There is a charred section of hull - a curved piece of driftwood with ash clinging to its grooves. A metal carved shield, a plaque upon it, glyph work wrought into the metal. It is kept clean, but unadorned. No flowers, no trinkets beyond what is used for his marker.
Imogen tilts her head toward it, an eyebrow arching in silent question. Her eyes are dry, her mouth set steady, her jaw tight. There is little revealed in her but a thrum of tension.
When Sorrow confirms that the kinwoman is correct, this is the grave, she moves toward it, her footfall near silent on the hard parked earth between the graves.
[Sorrow] There's nothing else there. Humans bring flowers to adorn the lush, parklike expanses of their grave yards, rolling hills and old old trees, marble markers crowded into the city. Sometimes they bring plastic flowers: everlasting, if slowly fading from the sun and the wind and the rain, the work of time and the elements clear. There is an irony in this.
Sometimes they bring stuffed animals, the plasticine, unnatural fur and synthetic stuffing moldering slowly outdoors, mildew eating the fabric from the inside out, except for the most indigestable of the plastic bits at the core of it, the shiny plastic thread used to whipstitch the arms onto the body.
There are no humans buried here, in the raw earth, waterlogged from the nearness of the lake. Just a handful of changing wolves and their kin.
The sun is failing now, somewhere beyond the horizon in the west. The sky is streaked with patterns of pink and orange, the edge of a bank of cumulous clouds deep in shadow except where the last rays of the sun set it on fire. The moon is rising, too. Somewhere in the east, now, low and fat on the eastern horizon. The air is so humid that there is a fuzzy halo around the moon, and her reflection in the otherwise quiescent waters of the dark lake is an impressionistic blur.
Sorrow tips her head once, confirming. That's it. That's the marker, the ash-hardened spear of driftwood, the plaque, the empty square of hardpacked earth. They gave his ashes to Maelstrom, so there is not even that dubious comfort. Just this: spare and empty, clean.
Imogen is a vibrant thing against the grays and browns of the tarmac, the industrial wasteland turned holy place. Sorrow watches her a moment, her mouth still, her body taut underneath her worn clothing, then glances away, at the lake, the reflection of the moon cast across it, giving the kinswoman a measure of privacy.
She's silent now, Sorrow.
Here, it has a different cast.
[Slaughter] She is a series of contrasts. Pale hair, dark eyes. Bright, brilliant hair. Her skin like alabaster, her eyes like midnight. Her hair, indescribable.
It is a city caern around her. She does not fit. The grey and browns, the sharp industrial edges, the decay and disrepair. Imogen a bright spot, and remote with it, as if the concrete and grey cannot touch her.
Sorrow looks away, giving her privacy. It does not matter, not really. Imogen would be the same, whether she were watched by a thousand eyes, if she were watched by one; if she were watched by none. Her expression is controlled, her body tensed as a bow-string. Her eyes lower to the items that mark the so-called grave. Not even a grave at all, merely a marker. A memory so his name won't be forgotten.
At least, for as long as the glyphs remain visible. For as long as someone who lives remembers to keep it clean and free of debris.
She sinks to a crouch, silent, and reaches out, not to caress the items, but to briefly brush away an enterprising weed, her fingers curling around it to pull it from the ground. After a moment, she gets to her feet and steps away.
[Sorrow] "I bring eggrolls sometimes." Sorrow's voice is low and controlled. It's an instrument: of a different sort and type than Imogen's, but an instrument nonetheless.
She is a storyteller; she keeps the memories of the place inside her, in her bones, under her skin, in her mind, and returns them on nights like these, when the moon is full. In an hour or three, when the sun has gone well below the horizon and night is full upon the land, the moon will be high in the vault of the sky, struggling to compete with the constant glow inside the city, but casting rich veins of silver shadow out here, where the abandoned land flows long and flat into the lake, the memory of the plains sharp closest to the expanse of the lake.
When Imogen turns away, stand up, the wilting remains of an errant weed curled between her fingers, Sorrow, who is looking at the moon and feeling her pull, tidal, in her blood, underneath her skin, within the spongy marrow of her bones, says, I bring eggrolls sometimes. It's quiet, her voice. It doesn't crack, though.
"Crumble them up, and scatter them. The birds come and eat them. Or other things." This is a story. The Skald's hands are in her pockets. They're killing hands, long-fingered, blunt-nailed, finely jointed. "The odd Coke. I figure, they won't have those things in Valhalla. He'll have to learn to drink mead." A moment's pause. Sorrow offers this sketch of the afterlife, and it is a sketch - skeletal - not with the reverence of a human believer, but rather with a sort of mournful solidity, the conviction of someone who knows the world is round because she has sailed its courses all the way around.
"Has learned, already, I suppose."
[Slaughter] She holds every muscle and ligament in perfect tension. She gives not at all, and tightens no more, keeping herself in an exact equilibrium, taut and still.
Sorrow speaks, and Imogen turns her head to look at her, her gaze reserved, remote as she looks at the Fenrir, the Skald.
"I thought perhaps I might bring somethin'," she says after a moment. "But nothin' came to mind." Her breath exhales sharply, on the edge of a scoff. "It wouldn't ha' mattered anyway."
A tight pause before Imogen tilts her head sharply back toward the marker. "Do you want a moment?" This kind of thoughtfulness in her is rare. It is in her to simply start to leave as she wishes. She would have done; if it hadn't been for the egg rolls and coke.
[Erika Alexander] ((Open?))
to Slaughter, Sorrow
[Slaughter] (it is, but we're in the caern. :( Kinfolk aren't usually allowed in the caern. [Imogen got special permission])
to , Sorrow
[Slaughter] (it is, but we're in the caern. :( Kinfolk aren't usually allowed in the caern. [Imogen got special permission])
to Erika Alexander, Sorrow
[Sorrow] Imogen breathes out, sharply. Sorrow breathes out. It's different; it's nearly a laugh, a certain release of tension that is not mirthless. The humor, though, is this remote thing, underscoring the shape of her words, the movement of them in her mouth.
"I'm good, Doc." Her hands are in her hip pockets, her narrow frame sketched out against the dark of the horizon, backlit by the glow of the low-hanging silver moon. The heat lingers here, captured by the pavement to radiate well after the sun has gone, and the air buzzes with summer insects. Here and there, the shadows are studded by the golden glow of fireflies hanging low in the air - some last gasp of courtship ritual, before death comes.
Turning away from the lake, she falls into step beside Imogen as the kinswoman turns to leave. "I don't know, though. Maybe it does matter, yeah?" Sorrow's tone is mild, her voice rich. It's not a contradiction, just slow. Musing-quiet. "My ancestors come back to me. Sometimes they speak to me. Sometimes I dream their stories. Sometimes they live in my skin, guide my hands."
The Skald has fallen into step beside Imogen. They're walking away from the graves, if Imogen wants to walk. Back through the ruins of the Caern, the warehouses and the hangers, the flat concrete buildings that look like bunkers, their original functions a mystery. Back through the ruins of the ships, rearing up from the flat lands like the himalayas out of the Tibetan plateau, sudden and jagged.
"So maybe it does matter," this is conversational, and Sorrow's voice is provisional. She says maybe as if it were a thing-in-balance, subject to weights and measures. " - some act of memory made concrete. Like an echo."
She's quiet then. There's an underlying tension. The moon in the sky, the rage in the air: but memory is the work of her moon. Writing the dead back into the world and Sorrow engages it with a bone deep seriousness that lingers in her even after - now, quiet, tense with memory and awareness of the kinswoman walking beside her.
[Slaughter] I'm good, Doc.
With that, Imogen turns away and starts away from the Grave of Hallowed Heroes. She does not look back.
Sorrow ruminates, and Imogen is briefly silent, before finally, saying quietly, simply: "I hope that gives you comfort."
She walks back toward the the caern opening, pocketing her hands in her jacket.
[Sorrow] This earns Imogen a look: dark-eyed, sidelong, the lift of her chin animal, the gleam of light across the surface of her gaze feral as they walk. Quiet, still and contained, with her hands in her pockets still and her body moving underneath, the sweep of her gait as she walks - just so.
Then, "Thanks," and she is looking way. The fencing circling the bawn, the city beyond the shadows, ablaze with light. There's a breeze from the lake, full of the scent of vegetal rot and exhaust fumes from pleasure boats out humming in the dark. Then: the ritual. Finding the rent in the face, the place where the links are split, where the barrier zippers open as she tucks her hand into the diamond weave.
The guardian is there again. Or still. It is dark and he is pulling something heave on a make-shift sledge created by lashing together an old wooden shipping palet with nylon ropes. Height of Mountains stops, silent, and gives Sorrow a hand rolling the giant tire away from the exit. He pulls the chain links back for Imogen again, quiet.
[Slaughter] This time, she exits the caern without a word. She breathes a little more easily in the open air. Out of the mystics and holiness of the Garou's sacred place. Her eyes shut briefly, before they open and she heads toward the car.
A pause at the trunk to unlock it and lift the lid. She arms herself again, and gathers the accouterments of her nicotine addiction, before walking around to the driver's side. The doors were left unlocked. No one would dare steal a car from this close to the bawn, even if they don't know why.
She starts the engine and rolls down her window. A pause.
"I appreciate this," she says; and without waiting for an answer, puts the car into reverse and pulls away from the fence, the caern, the graves, the grave.
Post a Comment