[Sorrow] The evening is warm, the dusken sky covered by clouds. Here at the edge of the lake, everything feels provisional on a night light this - shadowed. The clouded sky blends into the dark, glassine surface of the freshwater lake, made opaque by the reflection of the shifting grays and charcoals that are patterned across the sky. The evening turns blue as the sun falls in the west, but a dampened blue - the color deep and intense without being transporting.
The moon is near full. The humidity is still stifling. Kora is dressed in her dedicated clothing - a black concert t-shirt wearing gray from age and far too many washings, and worn jeans. Both are clean, recently laundered. Her hair is still damp from a shower, pulled back from her face into a neat French braid - the style she uses only for the Caern and for battles, not bothering with the familiar rhythm of the braid most nights. Her hands are in her pockets until they reach the edge of the fence circling the bawn. There's a guardian there watching them briefly - who waves passingly, maybe gives them a hand getting under the fence before he goes back to his duties.
"Her packmates said she could see you tonight," Kora says to Roman, holding back the fence for him to climb through. "If anyone can do something about those scars, she can."
[Roman Turner] He was in those stiff dark jeans of his, always looking freshly starched and pressed. And as has been habit for nearly two weeks, he was in long sleeves and sweating like a pig at the slaughter house. Damp hair stuck to his forehead. Sweat trickled down his neck and stuck his clothing to his body.
"I feel unclean coming here like this, I gotta tell ya, it's unsettling."
[Sorrow] The fence ripples closed behind them as Kora ducks through after Roman and pulls the links back to create the illusion of a solid if rusting old fence. The air around them changes just inside the bawn. It always does. They world is a half-step closer to being whole - as whole as it ever can be at the Caern's heart, where the spirit and the flesh are nearly one again. Some faint current of tension pulled through Kora's spine eases inside. The air feels that much more clear.
Kora cuts Roman a look; sidelong, when he says he feels unclean. It is quiet and serious, and her eyes linger on his young face longer than is strictly necessary. She could reassure him. He was cleansed. He shouldn't worry. He -
- but she is Fenrir, and he is a Garou. She does no such thing.
"I know," she tells him inside, lifting her chin and jerking her head toward the heart of the Caern. "C'mon. Let's go find Bleeding Heart-rhya."
[Sorrow] (Ack! They are in the Caern tonight. I'm sorry! I've got permission to NPC Bleeding Heart, so have to get poor Roman healed. :) )
to Dr. Alexander
[Roman Turner] He felt the wash over his senses, it was better than that coming home feeling you got when family was gathered around you. It was a inner peace that he normally would find welcoming. Right now he just felt like his very body defiled the place because beneath his clothing that body was scarred in patterns he was ready to skin himself over just to remove.
"I hope she don't get sick when she see's it."
And he hoped no one else got the wrong idea and tossed him end over end in to Maelstrom or cut his head off or any number of horrible things that were going through his head.
[Sorrow] "She's an Adren Garou, Roman," is Kora's rather dry reply. "I suspect that she's seen worse than your scars along the way." They have disappeared around the corner of one of the crumbling warehouses and are walking in the shadows of the great ships that rear out of the tarmac like prehistoric whales, beached at the edge of the lake.
The shadows are deeper here, but the air feels fresher. There is a certain scent of organic rot in the air, this close to the lake. The humid ozone of city center is washed away by the wind, by the sense of expansion the closer they get to the lake's edge.
[Roman Turner] "Sure she has but they were on a Dancer and they weren't walking in to the heart of the Caern."
He pulled his sleeves down as he spoke, making sure they were still buttoned down tightly. In his chest his heart picked up speed and he hoped Kora couldn't hear the way it trip hammered the deeper they got.
[Sorrow] There is a certain steeliness to her mien when Roman responds, a certain flatness to the shape of her generous mouth that betrays her only response. Otherwise, Kora is silent. They navigate between the ships, following the long, sloping concrete apron that disappears down into a scree-filled beach at the lake's edge. The interior channels leading to the dry docks cut through the tarmac here and there, but the Garou have been here for six years, not - and make shift bridges are thrown across the narrower slips to facilitate quick, surefooted passage.
The graves are close to the heart of the Caern, too many recently dug. The mounded earth slowly settles back into itself. The monuments - particularly here, in the physical world - are a haphazard array of memorial stones slashed with glyphs and other pieces. There's a knot of driftwood here, the charred remains of the planks of a burned rowboat, there. And on, and on.
After a brief conversation with one of the Guardians at the base of the telephone poll that serves as the physical reflection of the Wyrmpole, Kora turns back to the nervous young Ragabash. "She's on the other side." Kora tells him. "In the Umbra. Let's go."
With that, she pulls out a small mirror, finds her reflection - and pulls herself through.
[Roman Turner] His gaze was everywhere at once. If someone could look through his eyes, they'd grow dizzy with the way his gaze touched on the graves, the lake, the make-shift passages over, the pole and Kora herself. He touched the rim of his hat with a little nod and reached to a back pocket. In a moment he had a small highly polished piece of metal in his palm that he used to see his reflection. It was this bit of metal he used to force himself through the sudden thickness to the Umbral.
[Sorrow] They find Bleeding Heart on the other side, in the Umbra, in the shadow of a warehouse whose roof has been torn off, whose interior has been planted with native grasses that once covered the prairie. The air in here is fragrant, the grasses several feet tall, swaying on the umbral winds that push through the sides of the building. The whole thing seems green and verdant, wholly at odds with the stark, industrial feel of the rest of the Caern.
The Ritemistress is starkly drawn, all bones and skin, with so little fat upon her tall, narrow frame that she seems translucent, as if she might be shot through with light. Her features are androgynous but compelling, for all that they are pinched with suffering from a pain so constant and unrelenting a lesser creature would not remember to breathe. Even in warform, she is frail, but in her human skin she seems breakable. The Fenrir, Kora knows, would think it a violation of the litany to allow a Garou so wounded to live. Suffer not thy people to tend thy sicknes.
Bleeding Heart is not Fenrir. She is an Adren Theurge of Roman's tribe, so spiritual that she seems insubstantial in the physical world, adrift and eldritch.
They enter the warehouse, the grasses up to their thighs, and Kora says, "Bleeding Heart-rhya," by way of quiet, respectful greeting, then nudges Roman foward.
[Roman Turner] This place was like a balm to his soul. It was like going from tolerable to heaven. For a moment he had been too busy just standing there with his eyes closed, breathing in the air as if he could just stay there forever. Then Kora spoke and nudged him which made his eyes snap open again. A flush rose up to stain his face even as he grinned like a nervous idiot.
"I'm sorry Ma'am...Rhya...I got kinda of lost there for a moment."
He cleared his throat, stepping forward even as he snagged the hat from his head and lowered both his head and gaze.
"I got a problem and well, Kora heard ya might be able to help with it but if you're busy, it can wait. I don't want to cause ya any pa..problems."
He'd just about said Pain because she was so frail looking he was worried if he taxed her she'd just up and turn to dust or keel over at his feet and he'd be guilty of killing his Elder.
[Sorrow] "I have heard," the theurge lifts her pale gaze over Roman's shoulder, looking back toward the Fenrir who stands near the entrance, her back turned to them now, her blonde hair a pale ribbon down her her narrow back. " - some of your story, young Fate." Her voice is a paper thing, crumbled, breathless and constrained, but alien as her pale eyes seem- otherwordly, shining-ethereal - there is an earthy compassion that enlivens them.
"Tell me your story."
She pauses, briefly here, the lines of her mouth thining as she offers the pained approximation of a smile.
"Show me your scars."
[Roman Turner] He removed his hat first and from there unbuttoned the shirt to pull it off.
"We went to try and prevent some Dancers from receiving a box that was said to hold something that would be turned against the Caern, against us. There was one huge Dancer that well, Mama Ankle Biter called forth this spirit, not the usual sort, a really huge one that showed itself as a monster sized trash heap. She bargained with it to eat the big Dancer and it did."
Jeans were unbuttoned, unzipped and shimmed down his thighs as he toed off his boots. Each article of clothing removed showed whorls in his flesh, scarring that exactly mimicked the ritual scars the Dancer had held on his body.
"Only they didn't bargain to kill the guy and I knew when he was swallowed that he weren't chewed up and was going to do what I would do if I could. That would be, I would fight my way back out. So I climbed the Spirit heap and waited and sure enough, he burst right out. We got to tangling and he grabbed hold of me and I began to burn all over and got these here scars just like his. Only thing I didn't get was his ugly, the wounds I gave him and his big ole metal fist. He had a fist like like that Hell Boy fella."
[Roman Turner] He wasn't scrawny. He wasn't Muscle Magazine cover either. He was well toned for his age, his body like most of them, held more strength than a human's without showing it externally. And he was pale under those clothes, except for the Scars and the Farmer's tan. There he stood in his boxers and socks and it wasn't his undress that had him flushed, it was the scars.
"I'm a might bit ugly to set eyes upon."
[Sorrow] Roman undresses. He does so carefully, nimble fingers on the buttons of his shirt, the fly of his jeans. His cowboy boots. The grasses dance and sway in the breeze, tickling his thighs. They are not ripe, not yet - but the fat, closed buds at the end of the tall stalks remind him of wheat, ripening in the field.
This place is wild. Is a memory of the wild-that-was, all across the central planes. There are insects here he has not heard since he left home; or at least, since he and his cousin signed a lease on a dilapidated old clapboard house on the outskirts of the projects in the heart of the city. Bleeding Heart listens closely to the story, her mouth pulled taut, her pale eyes gleaming in the faint light.
"The cursed one you fought was old and powerful, to know such terrible gifts. You did well to live, Fate, and see him in the ground."
Roman is flushed. Bleeding Heart remains pale and wraithlike, some moon-ghost given form amidst the waving grasses. He says that he is ugly to set eyes upon, and she simply - smiles, this taut thing, thinned at the corners.
"You do not know," the ethereal creature tells him even as she beckons him forward, " - the things I have seen."
There is such an immediate truth - such an infinite, abiding patient, such enduring pain - soaked into the words that for a moment he must feel as if his throat were closing. As if all the breath that had been insufflated from his lungs.
"Come here."
She gestures to him.
She opens her thin white hands.
[Roman Turner] This was his Tribe. This was his Elder. This was someone he must trust and yet when she beckoned him forward his heartbeat sped up. Maybe it was the thin white hands? Or maybe it was the last time someone with power grabbed hold of him with his hands, he'd been scarred like this. He had to fight natural instincts to force himself forward till he stood before him in all his nearly five and a half foot non-glory.
"I fought hard and mama managed to heal me a time in there or I'm fairly certain I'd be feeding the weeds about right now."
Here in this place it was easier to find distractions from his own worries. The rustling of the tall grasses. The brush against his flesh that reminded him he was alive. The smell, the smell here was like home and for a moment his heart danced in joy rather than longing.
[Sorrow] [Bleeding Heart - Grandmother's Touch]
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 6 at target 3) [WP]
[Sorrow] Rerolling 10s!
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 4 (Success x 1 at target 3)
[Sorrow] "I am pleased, Fate, that you fought together. That she healed you. That you defeated this foul creatue."
This is his tribe.
She lays hands on him, and her touch is astonishingly warm. There is an abiding sort of strength in her thin hands. She touches him, ghosting her fine hands over all the spidering, spiderling, slow-crawling scars burned onto his flesh, into his skin, and the gift feels like fire too, after that first comforting suggestion of warmth.
Healing the scars feelings like fire; like being burned alive. This time, it is a cleansing fire, bright and pure. His skin opens, splitting like a sausage casing over and open flame, and the scar tissue furrowed underneath is burned away. The pain is as stark and sharp as it was the night he fought the Spiral. It is worse, because he has not used his gift to resist it.
The pain is the pain his Elder bears every day and ever night that remains to her on this earth,
and like him, she is refined by it.
Made clean.
Made holy.
--
Then it is over. His breath comes back to him first, then his sense of himself. The sky above is clear now. It is clear and it is full of stars, and they are bright things, pinpointed against the darkness, and oh how they burn.
He is on his back in the grass, which winnows up around him, rich and green and growing, and when he looks down a himself, at his arms and legs, as the lean strength of his torso, he sees himself again: himself, healed. The scars gone. Bleeding Heart is standing over him, and she smiles down at him.
And then, she turns to walk away, the grasses whispering round her, the moonlight spilling down through the clearing sky showing him: healed, whole.
[Roman Turner] He tried real hard not to howl, not to scream or worse yet, whimper and cry. Not sure how much of that he managed as the pain went on and on till it finally just stopped. It was as he lay there learning how to breathe again that he managed to get out.
"Thank you Rhya Ma'am, I owe ya."
[Sorrow] Before she disappears, the Ritesmistress turns back and looks down at Fate.
"No, Fate. You do not owe me. You serve in your way. I in mine."
[Roman Turner] "But ma'am?"
He looked kind of sheepish as he sat up in the grass and ran a hand through it.
"Would ya mind if I came here again and just sat in your grass and listen to it talk to the wind and sun? I can't hear them talking in the city."
[Sorrow] "Come anytime, Fate. I think the grass and the wind and the sun and the moon would like it if you did."
[Roman Turner] "Thankee Ma'am." He smiled wider as he reached for his clothing. He'd figure out something that would please her too. "I look forward to the conversations and talk of rain."
The moon is near full. The humidity is still stifling. Kora is dressed in her dedicated clothing - a black concert t-shirt wearing gray from age and far too many washings, and worn jeans. Both are clean, recently laundered. Her hair is still damp from a shower, pulled back from her face into a neat French braid - the style she uses only for the Caern and for battles, not bothering with the familiar rhythm of the braid most nights. Her hands are in her pockets until they reach the edge of the fence circling the bawn. There's a guardian there watching them briefly - who waves passingly, maybe gives them a hand getting under the fence before he goes back to his duties.
"Her packmates said she could see you tonight," Kora says to Roman, holding back the fence for him to climb through. "If anyone can do something about those scars, she can."
[Roman Turner] He was in those stiff dark jeans of his, always looking freshly starched and pressed. And as has been habit for nearly two weeks, he was in long sleeves and sweating like a pig at the slaughter house. Damp hair stuck to his forehead. Sweat trickled down his neck and stuck his clothing to his body.
"I feel unclean coming here like this, I gotta tell ya, it's unsettling."
[Sorrow] The fence ripples closed behind them as Kora ducks through after Roman and pulls the links back to create the illusion of a solid if rusting old fence. The air around them changes just inside the bawn. It always does. They world is a half-step closer to being whole - as whole as it ever can be at the Caern's heart, where the spirit and the flesh are nearly one again. Some faint current of tension pulled through Kora's spine eases inside. The air feels that much more clear.
Kora cuts Roman a look; sidelong, when he says he feels unclean. It is quiet and serious, and her eyes linger on his young face longer than is strictly necessary. She could reassure him. He was cleansed. He shouldn't worry. He -
- but she is Fenrir, and he is a Garou. She does no such thing.
"I know," she tells him inside, lifting her chin and jerking her head toward the heart of the Caern. "C'mon. Let's go find Bleeding Heart-rhya."
[Sorrow] (Ack! They are in the Caern tonight. I'm sorry! I've got permission to NPC Bleeding Heart, so have to get poor Roman healed. :) )
to Dr. Alexander
[Roman Turner] He felt the wash over his senses, it was better than that coming home feeling you got when family was gathered around you. It was a inner peace that he normally would find welcoming. Right now he just felt like his very body defiled the place because beneath his clothing that body was scarred in patterns he was ready to skin himself over just to remove.
"I hope she don't get sick when she see's it."
And he hoped no one else got the wrong idea and tossed him end over end in to Maelstrom or cut his head off or any number of horrible things that were going through his head.
[Sorrow] "She's an Adren Garou, Roman," is Kora's rather dry reply. "I suspect that she's seen worse than your scars along the way." They have disappeared around the corner of one of the crumbling warehouses and are walking in the shadows of the great ships that rear out of the tarmac like prehistoric whales, beached at the edge of the lake.
The shadows are deeper here, but the air feels fresher. There is a certain scent of organic rot in the air, this close to the lake. The humid ozone of city center is washed away by the wind, by the sense of expansion the closer they get to the lake's edge.
[Roman Turner] "Sure she has but they were on a Dancer and they weren't walking in to the heart of the Caern."
He pulled his sleeves down as he spoke, making sure they were still buttoned down tightly. In his chest his heart picked up speed and he hoped Kora couldn't hear the way it trip hammered the deeper they got.
[Sorrow] There is a certain steeliness to her mien when Roman responds, a certain flatness to the shape of her generous mouth that betrays her only response. Otherwise, Kora is silent. They navigate between the ships, following the long, sloping concrete apron that disappears down into a scree-filled beach at the lake's edge. The interior channels leading to the dry docks cut through the tarmac here and there, but the Garou have been here for six years, not - and make shift bridges are thrown across the narrower slips to facilitate quick, surefooted passage.
The graves are close to the heart of the Caern, too many recently dug. The mounded earth slowly settles back into itself. The monuments - particularly here, in the physical world - are a haphazard array of memorial stones slashed with glyphs and other pieces. There's a knot of driftwood here, the charred remains of the planks of a burned rowboat, there. And on, and on.
After a brief conversation with one of the Guardians at the base of the telephone poll that serves as the physical reflection of the Wyrmpole, Kora turns back to the nervous young Ragabash. "She's on the other side." Kora tells him. "In the Umbra. Let's go."
With that, she pulls out a small mirror, finds her reflection - and pulls herself through.
[Roman Turner] His gaze was everywhere at once. If someone could look through his eyes, they'd grow dizzy with the way his gaze touched on the graves, the lake, the make-shift passages over, the pole and Kora herself. He touched the rim of his hat with a little nod and reached to a back pocket. In a moment he had a small highly polished piece of metal in his palm that he used to see his reflection. It was this bit of metal he used to force himself through the sudden thickness to the Umbral.
[Sorrow] They find Bleeding Heart on the other side, in the Umbra, in the shadow of a warehouse whose roof has been torn off, whose interior has been planted with native grasses that once covered the prairie. The air in here is fragrant, the grasses several feet tall, swaying on the umbral winds that push through the sides of the building. The whole thing seems green and verdant, wholly at odds with the stark, industrial feel of the rest of the Caern.
The Ritemistress is starkly drawn, all bones and skin, with so little fat upon her tall, narrow frame that she seems translucent, as if she might be shot through with light. Her features are androgynous but compelling, for all that they are pinched with suffering from a pain so constant and unrelenting a lesser creature would not remember to breathe. Even in warform, she is frail, but in her human skin she seems breakable. The Fenrir, Kora knows, would think it a violation of the litany to allow a Garou so wounded to live. Suffer not thy people to tend thy sicknes.
Bleeding Heart is not Fenrir. She is an Adren Theurge of Roman's tribe, so spiritual that she seems insubstantial in the physical world, adrift and eldritch.
They enter the warehouse, the grasses up to their thighs, and Kora says, "Bleeding Heart-rhya," by way of quiet, respectful greeting, then nudges Roman foward.
[Roman Turner] This place was like a balm to his soul. It was like going from tolerable to heaven. For a moment he had been too busy just standing there with his eyes closed, breathing in the air as if he could just stay there forever. Then Kora spoke and nudged him which made his eyes snap open again. A flush rose up to stain his face even as he grinned like a nervous idiot.
"I'm sorry Ma'am...Rhya...I got kinda of lost there for a moment."
He cleared his throat, stepping forward even as he snagged the hat from his head and lowered both his head and gaze.
"I got a problem and well, Kora heard ya might be able to help with it but if you're busy, it can wait. I don't want to cause ya any pa..problems."
He'd just about said Pain because she was so frail looking he was worried if he taxed her she'd just up and turn to dust or keel over at his feet and he'd be guilty of killing his Elder.
[Sorrow] "I have heard," the theurge lifts her pale gaze over Roman's shoulder, looking back toward the Fenrir who stands near the entrance, her back turned to them now, her blonde hair a pale ribbon down her her narrow back. " - some of your story, young Fate." Her voice is a paper thing, crumbled, breathless and constrained, but alien as her pale eyes seem- otherwordly, shining-ethereal - there is an earthy compassion that enlivens them.
"Tell me your story."
She pauses, briefly here, the lines of her mouth thining as she offers the pained approximation of a smile.
"Show me your scars."
[Roman Turner] He removed his hat first and from there unbuttoned the shirt to pull it off.
"We went to try and prevent some Dancers from receiving a box that was said to hold something that would be turned against the Caern, against us. There was one huge Dancer that well, Mama Ankle Biter called forth this spirit, not the usual sort, a really huge one that showed itself as a monster sized trash heap. She bargained with it to eat the big Dancer and it did."
Jeans were unbuttoned, unzipped and shimmed down his thighs as he toed off his boots. Each article of clothing removed showed whorls in his flesh, scarring that exactly mimicked the ritual scars the Dancer had held on his body.
"Only they didn't bargain to kill the guy and I knew when he was swallowed that he weren't chewed up and was going to do what I would do if I could. That would be, I would fight my way back out. So I climbed the Spirit heap and waited and sure enough, he burst right out. We got to tangling and he grabbed hold of me and I began to burn all over and got these here scars just like his. Only thing I didn't get was his ugly, the wounds I gave him and his big ole metal fist. He had a fist like like that Hell Boy fella."
[Roman Turner] He wasn't scrawny. He wasn't Muscle Magazine cover either. He was well toned for his age, his body like most of them, held more strength than a human's without showing it externally. And he was pale under those clothes, except for the Scars and the Farmer's tan. There he stood in his boxers and socks and it wasn't his undress that had him flushed, it was the scars.
"I'm a might bit ugly to set eyes upon."
[Sorrow] Roman undresses. He does so carefully, nimble fingers on the buttons of his shirt, the fly of his jeans. His cowboy boots. The grasses dance and sway in the breeze, tickling his thighs. They are not ripe, not yet - but the fat, closed buds at the end of the tall stalks remind him of wheat, ripening in the field.
This place is wild. Is a memory of the wild-that-was, all across the central planes. There are insects here he has not heard since he left home; or at least, since he and his cousin signed a lease on a dilapidated old clapboard house on the outskirts of the projects in the heart of the city. Bleeding Heart listens closely to the story, her mouth pulled taut, her pale eyes gleaming in the faint light.
"The cursed one you fought was old and powerful, to know such terrible gifts. You did well to live, Fate, and see him in the ground."
Roman is flushed. Bleeding Heart remains pale and wraithlike, some moon-ghost given form amidst the waving grasses. He says that he is ugly to set eyes upon, and she simply - smiles, this taut thing, thinned at the corners.
"You do not know," the ethereal creature tells him even as she beckons him forward, " - the things I have seen."
There is such an immediate truth - such an infinite, abiding patient, such enduring pain - soaked into the words that for a moment he must feel as if his throat were closing. As if all the breath that had been insufflated from his lungs.
"Come here."
She gestures to him.
She opens her thin white hands.
[Roman Turner] This was his Tribe. This was his Elder. This was someone he must trust and yet when she beckoned him forward his heartbeat sped up. Maybe it was the thin white hands? Or maybe it was the last time someone with power grabbed hold of him with his hands, he'd been scarred like this. He had to fight natural instincts to force himself forward till he stood before him in all his nearly five and a half foot non-glory.
"I fought hard and mama managed to heal me a time in there or I'm fairly certain I'd be feeding the weeds about right now."
Here in this place it was easier to find distractions from his own worries. The rustling of the tall grasses. The brush against his flesh that reminded him he was alive. The smell, the smell here was like home and for a moment his heart danced in joy rather than longing.
[Sorrow] [Bleeding Heart - Grandmother's Touch]
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 6 at target 3) [WP]
[Sorrow] Rerolling 10s!
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 4 (Success x 1 at target 3)
[Sorrow] "I am pleased, Fate, that you fought together. That she healed you. That you defeated this foul creatue."
This is his tribe.
She lays hands on him, and her touch is astonishingly warm. There is an abiding sort of strength in her thin hands. She touches him, ghosting her fine hands over all the spidering, spiderling, slow-crawling scars burned onto his flesh, into his skin, and the gift feels like fire too, after that first comforting suggestion of warmth.
Healing the scars feelings like fire; like being burned alive. This time, it is a cleansing fire, bright and pure. His skin opens, splitting like a sausage casing over and open flame, and the scar tissue furrowed underneath is burned away. The pain is as stark and sharp as it was the night he fought the Spiral. It is worse, because he has not used his gift to resist it.
The pain is the pain his Elder bears every day and ever night that remains to her on this earth,
and like him, she is refined by it.
Made clean.
Made holy.
--
Then it is over. His breath comes back to him first, then his sense of himself. The sky above is clear now. It is clear and it is full of stars, and they are bright things, pinpointed against the darkness, and oh how they burn.
He is on his back in the grass, which winnows up around him, rich and green and growing, and when he looks down a himself, at his arms and legs, as the lean strength of his torso, he sees himself again: himself, healed. The scars gone. Bleeding Heart is standing over him, and she smiles down at him.
And then, she turns to walk away, the grasses whispering round her, the moonlight spilling down through the clearing sky showing him: healed, whole.
[Roman Turner] He tried real hard not to howl, not to scream or worse yet, whimper and cry. Not sure how much of that he managed as the pain went on and on till it finally just stopped. It was as he lay there learning how to breathe again that he managed to get out.
"Thank you Rhya Ma'am, I owe ya."
[Sorrow] Before she disappears, the Ritesmistress turns back and looks down at Fate.
"No, Fate. You do not owe me. You serve in your way. I in mine."
[Roman Turner] "But ma'am?"
He looked kind of sheepish as he sat up in the grass and ran a hand through it.
"Would ya mind if I came here again and just sat in your grass and listen to it talk to the wind and sun? I can't hear them talking in the city."
[Sorrow] "Come anytime, Fate. I think the grass and the wind and the sun and the moon would like it if you did."
[Roman Turner] "Thankee Ma'am." He smiled wider as he reached for his clothing. He'd figure out something that would please her too. "I look forward to the conversations and talk of rain."
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