[Sorrow] There is a low band of clouds over the city tonight, the sharp, metallic scent of rain in the air. From the derelict caern the bright lights of the mile are occluded by an interval curtain of rain that does not quiet reach the lakeshore. The wind is constant here, scouring the concrete tarmac, battering the derelict guard shacks, the old hangers, the dry docks, the warehouses, the listing old ships rearing up from the lakeside flats like ancient bohemeths.
The pair of Fenrir are near the graves, tonight. Just a flat desolate stretch of damp earth beneath the broken tarmac, twenty or thirty feet from a low sloping pebbled beach covered in hoarfrost. The ground here is flat like the plains, the soil thin and damp. The markers in the physical world are few enough. Old stones slashed with glyphs, the odd piece of twisted metal. Nothing that a human would recognize as a shrine to the dead. And yet, here they are. Walking a path among the graves. Sorrow cleans off detritus from the graves of the Fenrir - and there are many Fenrir buried here - starting with the newest, the raw, half-frozen earth still mounded, and moving steadily back. The work is quiet, nearly meditative, and she performs it steadily, accepting whatever assistance Melody has to offer. There shadows move in vague tandem, multi-partite and indistinct.
[Melody] Melody's wearing a tan jacket, somewhat battered and bulky jeans, and purple sneakers. She certainly doesn't - in the words of Kora - "look like Barbie" tonight, though she's still a far cry from Kora's own more... bohemian look. As they walk, she generally keeps her arms crossed tight around her torso, whether from the cold or because she finds wandering amidst the dead to be overly creepy, well, it's hard to say.
She also lets Kora take the lead as they make their rounds, though she offers help where necessary. After all, honoring the dead is far more the work of a Skald than a Rotagar. And besides, Kora's been here longer. She's known some of these people - felt connected to some of these people - in ways Melody simply never will.
Of course, the work of a Skald also includes telling the dead's tales...
"So, how many of them did you know? Personally, I mean."
[Sorrow] "Fenrir?" - asks Sorrow in response, straightening from a crouch with a bit of an assist from a long-fingered handplaced lightly on the tarmac. "Or the rest of them?"
Her clothing is dark tonight, non-descript. The dark gray U of C hoodie that has become her newest winter garment. It hangs shapeless over her upper torso. The shoulder seams hit her an inch down her upper arms, and the thick cotton just looks lumpy over her arms, breasts and back. It is even loose - still - around her stomach, and the lower band is rather empty over her hips. On the whole it makes her seem larger, more ungainly, her frame defined by its widest point in profile rather than the narrowest. The hood is up, shrouds her features, casts a dark, defined line of shadow over her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
That line moves sas she looks back at Melody, up, generous mouth twisting in consideration of her younger sister. Hard - still - for Kora to imagine her a Rotagar. To adjust to a world where she's not this lone satellite of a creature, defined by two entirely divorced worlds of Before and After.
"Of the Fenrir, I knew Night's Reprieve, Wrath," she indicates the graves with a gesture of her chin, " - and Truth-in-Frenzy-rhya. Night's Reprieve was a sin-born Godi. He died defending a Fianna kinswoman from cursed Garou. Wrath was a feral-born Ahroun. Died in battle against some abomination the enemy was trying to raise in the woods. And Truth-in-Frenzy-rhya," a brief, supple twist of Kora's mouth, and a lifting glance up. Winnowing, her ability to remember. "he was my Alpha. Jarl of the tribe when I came. An Adren Rotagar, fucking badass. Probably the biggest loss to the Caern since the raising, though I - " she continues, a winging, sidelong look. "Am admittedly biased."
[Melody] She smiles faintly at the last part, a look that's more sympathy than amusement. "Linus mentioned him to me, I think."
And then her lips quirk into an expression that's half a cross between smirk and frown, and maybe a bit of sucking on a lemon thrown in - not an entirely uncommon expression when talking about their brother. "Of course, Linus had a lot of things to say about..." And she sort of gestures, vaguely, in implication sort of taking in the entire area around them. "...things in general."
And then she smiles again, and it's warm like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. "I should probably ask you about things at some point, see how much he got wrong."
[Sorrow] "Li has rather alot of opinions," returns Kora, grabbing her small bag of debris - mostly stray leaves, the odd bit of trash tumbled over the tarmac by the wind, but also the occasional tribute. An old egg roll wrapper from Kemp's grave, an empty bottle of vodka poured out over another - and standing, shoving hands into the pockets of her heavy cotton jacket. "Not all of them wrong. Some of them, though - " Here, Kora gives a narrow shrug, the gesture mostly lost in the wealth of fabric in her hoodie.
"I knew others here too. Sandman was Silence's last packmate. Died the same day Kemp did, and between the two of them it nearly drove him insane. I was half-convinced he was going to slaughter me when I told him. Probably the only reason he didn't was that his mate was there. Imogen - " a brief, narrow frown, considering. "Slaughter. Have you met her yet?" She makes a quiet noise in her throat. "Most of those left don't remember him, not really. Not in a way that matters, yeah? But she does."
A sharp, sidelong glance, back to Melody. "C'mon," she continues, swinging the bag toward the dancing lights of the barrel fire they can see in the middle distance. "Let's get warm. And you can spill the sort of misinformation Li's spreading."
[Melody] She nods, apparently taking it all in. What she makes of it inside the privacy of her own thoughts, however, she certainly doesn't enunciate.
And then she's trailing along behind Kora as she starts off towards the fire, and Melody perhaps bites back another comment about the "homeless" motif that seems to define so much of Garou life in the city. Are you sure this isn't a Bone Gnawer Caern...?
"Well, you know. For one thing, I'm pretty sure he's halfway convinced he should be conking you on the head and dragging you off for your own good."
[Sorrow] This earns someone a quiet snort, a low laugh, mostly withheld, contained inside the cage of her chest. There's a cold wind tonight, the damp sort that gets under one's skin, into one's joints. Sorrow hunches her shoulders forward as ward against the cold as they walk, her hands in the pouch pockets of her hoodie, the bag swinging with her gait, bumping against her thigh with each moving stride.
"More than half-way. He wouldn't even make his sacrifice to Maelstrom until I earned my rank. Spent his first two months here telling me everything that was wrong with the place, and still does that regularly."
Then Kora shoots Melody a hooded glance, lifting her chin in a glancing movement. Light shines across the surface of her dark eyes. "Why do you think I'm here?"
[Melody] "So how long before he goes out and slays some giant monster solely so he can try and get 'promoted' over you, then try and pull rank and order you home?" The smile and the tone of her voice probably help blunt some of the potential bite from that comment, but still, Kora almost certainly knows it might not be as ridiculous a thought as she's made it sound. Or, at least, it might rankle a bit because he's certainly got an opportunity to try and steal himself some glory while she's effectively sidelined by her "condition".
She starts to open her mouth, probably to throw out a comment about Linus' litany of "everything that was wrong with the place", but stops when Kora asks her own question. And then she looks at her with a sincere (and seemingly sincere sincerity, not feigned innocence or deliberately implied ignorance) look, meeting her eyes.
"To be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea why you're here. No judgment, no assumption that this is a horrible place to be, or an important place to be, or anything. Bias free. Tabula rasa." And then she smiles faintly. "So, why ARE you here, Kora?"
[Sorrow] "Whatever he is," returns Kora, a certain narrow twist to her mouth. "Linus isn't a gloryhound. Trust me. I've seen my share of them, especially since I've been in Chicago. A place like this attracts them like a lodestone, yeah? Every misfit cliath with a half-baked idea about taking the war to the Wyrm, making a name for him or herself hears the story of Caern, it's founding, rewrites the story with him or herself in the starring role, and bam. Here they are, passing through for a moot or two before moving on.
"I'm here for that story, too. On the most basic level. I'm here because I have a duty to those dead. Here because Fenrir raised the Caern, because more of us died defending it than any other tribe. I'm here because my Alpha's buried here; because I stood in front of the Sept and told them his story, then burned his corpse in a fucking rowboat we reclaimed from one of those boats.
"When I came back to the States, I flew in on some military cargo ship from an airbase in Iceland. Could've taken a moonbridge from my home sept to one of the big ones up north here, but I wanted to find a place that was both mine and Fenris', yeah? All those years at Vindur und Ringing I was both awed and smothered by the weight of history. So," a glance over at Melody, here. "Chicago. First day I was here, Kemp, he was Jarl, then, offered me a place to stay. I've been here ever since. Stormhammer and all the rest, they've got more defenders than they need. Here, every hand means something. This place is a fucking promise, a reminder that we can still win battles, even wars, and I'm here until I die."
[Melody] She's quiet as Kora offers her own explanation. Her own attempt at putting meaning to her choices.
"So you're just a gloryhound too, in a way. Just not your glory." Smiling again, defusing what could otherwise be taken as insult or mocking with mood and tone. Joking. Slathering unpalatable observations with a warm chocolate coating.
"Suppose the question of the hour is, do you think any of those hands actually accomplishes something? Or is it just a case of feeding hands into the grinder until you run out of hands?" Again, her tone doesn't sound judgmental, or even dismissive. Certainly not the way it would have sounded if Linus had asked. If anything, Melody almost sounds like a therapist, asking overly neutral questions about your relationship with your mother. "And would you say that you can make more of a difference here, than, say, somewhere else?" She frowns a bit again. "After all, if there's any truism about Garou, it's that there's always a dyke somewhere in need of some fingers."
She pauses for a moment after saying that, a slightly odd look passing across her face, as if realizing after she said it that a cruder person could read double entendre into that. And possibly make comments about Black Furies or something.
[Sorrow] "Jesus, Dee. I'm starting to wonder if I'm on the Oprah show," returns Kora, winging a sweeping look back at the younger Ragabash. When Melody calls her a gloryhound (for someone else's glory) Kora offers a faint, narrow sort of shrug. Just one shoulder, up and down beneath the oversized hoodie.
There's a faint, subtle hill here, in the physical realm, mirroring the hill leading to Maelstrom's place in the center of the Caern, at the heart of the thing. Kora's chin lifts in the direction of the hill. The edge of the the hood pulls back, disinters the twist of her hair at the nape of her neck, spilling fine strands down underneath the oversized hoodie she wears.
"Ever seen a totem like that, a spirit of the Wyld, living and thriving in a place like this?" Kora asks, quietly. Question with a question. Answer for an answer. "I've not. And imagine, ten years ago, that thing was - sleeping, or buried under the earth, inert, dormant. The Caern's a fucking miracle, every day it lasts. It's a promise that we can still win the big battles, no matter what the hell else is going on in the world. It's the first blow, maybe in the last battle. Maybe just in the next last battle, like when Half-dan the Old took back Vindur und Ringing from the fallen ones, yeah?" Her passion is quiet, rich and low. Still: it's there, in every syllable, every phrase, every movement of her voice.
To the last question, Kora merely shrugs. Breathes out a quiet breath. "I don't think about that. I made the sacrifice and pledge to Maelstrom. My word's my word. That's all."
The pair of Fenrir are near the graves, tonight. Just a flat desolate stretch of damp earth beneath the broken tarmac, twenty or thirty feet from a low sloping pebbled beach covered in hoarfrost. The ground here is flat like the plains, the soil thin and damp. The markers in the physical world are few enough. Old stones slashed with glyphs, the odd piece of twisted metal. Nothing that a human would recognize as a shrine to the dead. And yet, here they are. Walking a path among the graves. Sorrow cleans off detritus from the graves of the Fenrir - and there are many Fenrir buried here - starting with the newest, the raw, half-frozen earth still mounded, and moving steadily back. The work is quiet, nearly meditative, and she performs it steadily, accepting whatever assistance Melody has to offer. There shadows move in vague tandem, multi-partite and indistinct.
[Melody] Melody's wearing a tan jacket, somewhat battered and bulky jeans, and purple sneakers. She certainly doesn't - in the words of Kora - "look like Barbie" tonight, though she's still a far cry from Kora's own more... bohemian look. As they walk, she generally keeps her arms crossed tight around her torso, whether from the cold or because she finds wandering amidst the dead to be overly creepy, well, it's hard to say.
She also lets Kora take the lead as they make their rounds, though she offers help where necessary. After all, honoring the dead is far more the work of a Skald than a Rotagar. And besides, Kora's been here longer. She's known some of these people - felt connected to some of these people - in ways Melody simply never will.
Of course, the work of a Skald also includes telling the dead's tales...
"So, how many of them did you know? Personally, I mean."
[Sorrow] "Fenrir?" - asks Sorrow in response, straightening from a crouch with a bit of an assist from a long-fingered handplaced lightly on the tarmac. "Or the rest of them?"
Her clothing is dark tonight, non-descript. The dark gray U of C hoodie that has become her newest winter garment. It hangs shapeless over her upper torso. The shoulder seams hit her an inch down her upper arms, and the thick cotton just looks lumpy over her arms, breasts and back. It is even loose - still - around her stomach, and the lower band is rather empty over her hips. On the whole it makes her seem larger, more ungainly, her frame defined by its widest point in profile rather than the narrowest. The hood is up, shrouds her features, casts a dark, defined line of shadow over her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
That line moves sas she looks back at Melody, up, generous mouth twisting in consideration of her younger sister. Hard - still - for Kora to imagine her a Rotagar. To adjust to a world where she's not this lone satellite of a creature, defined by two entirely divorced worlds of Before and After.
"Of the Fenrir, I knew Night's Reprieve, Wrath," she indicates the graves with a gesture of her chin, " - and Truth-in-Frenzy-rhya. Night's Reprieve was a sin-born Godi. He died defending a Fianna kinswoman from cursed Garou. Wrath was a feral-born Ahroun. Died in battle against some abomination the enemy was trying to raise in the woods. And Truth-in-Frenzy-rhya," a brief, supple twist of Kora's mouth, and a lifting glance up. Winnowing, her ability to remember. "he was my Alpha. Jarl of the tribe when I came. An Adren Rotagar, fucking badass. Probably the biggest loss to the Caern since the raising, though I - " she continues, a winging, sidelong look. "Am admittedly biased."
[Melody] She smiles faintly at the last part, a look that's more sympathy than amusement. "Linus mentioned him to me, I think."
And then her lips quirk into an expression that's half a cross between smirk and frown, and maybe a bit of sucking on a lemon thrown in - not an entirely uncommon expression when talking about their brother. "Of course, Linus had a lot of things to say about..." And she sort of gestures, vaguely, in implication sort of taking in the entire area around them. "...things in general."
And then she smiles again, and it's warm like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. "I should probably ask you about things at some point, see how much he got wrong."
[Sorrow] "Li has rather alot of opinions," returns Kora, grabbing her small bag of debris - mostly stray leaves, the odd bit of trash tumbled over the tarmac by the wind, but also the occasional tribute. An old egg roll wrapper from Kemp's grave, an empty bottle of vodka poured out over another - and standing, shoving hands into the pockets of her heavy cotton jacket. "Not all of them wrong. Some of them, though - " Here, Kora gives a narrow shrug, the gesture mostly lost in the wealth of fabric in her hoodie.
"I knew others here too. Sandman was Silence's last packmate. Died the same day Kemp did, and between the two of them it nearly drove him insane. I was half-convinced he was going to slaughter me when I told him. Probably the only reason he didn't was that his mate was there. Imogen - " a brief, narrow frown, considering. "Slaughter. Have you met her yet?" She makes a quiet noise in her throat. "Most of those left don't remember him, not really. Not in a way that matters, yeah? But she does."
A sharp, sidelong glance, back to Melody. "C'mon," she continues, swinging the bag toward the dancing lights of the barrel fire they can see in the middle distance. "Let's get warm. And you can spill the sort of misinformation Li's spreading."
[Melody] She nods, apparently taking it all in. What she makes of it inside the privacy of her own thoughts, however, she certainly doesn't enunciate.
And then she's trailing along behind Kora as she starts off towards the fire, and Melody perhaps bites back another comment about the "homeless" motif that seems to define so much of Garou life in the city. Are you sure this isn't a Bone Gnawer Caern...?
"Well, you know. For one thing, I'm pretty sure he's halfway convinced he should be conking you on the head and dragging you off for your own good."
[Sorrow] This earns someone a quiet snort, a low laugh, mostly withheld, contained inside the cage of her chest. There's a cold wind tonight, the damp sort that gets under one's skin, into one's joints. Sorrow hunches her shoulders forward as ward against the cold as they walk, her hands in the pouch pockets of her hoodie, the bag swinging with her gait, bumping against her thigh with each moving stride.
"More than half-way. He wouldn't even make his sacrifice to Maelstrom until I earned my rank. Spent his first two months here telling me everything that was wrong with the place, and still does that regularly."
Then Kora shoots Melody a hooded glance, lifting her chin in a glancing movement. Light shines across the surface of her dark eyes. "Why do you think I'm here?"
[Melody] "So how long before he goes out and slays some giant monster solely so he can try and get 'promoted' over you, then try and pull rank and order you home?" The smile and the tone of her voice probably help blunt some of the potential bite from that comment, but still, Kora almost certainly knows it might not be as ridiculous a thought as she's made it sound. Or, at least, it might rankle a bit because he's certainly got an opportunity to try and steal himself some glory while she's effectively sidelined by her "condition".
She starts to open her mouth, probably to throw out a comment about Linus' litany of "everything that was wrong with the place", but stops when Kora asks her own question. And then she looks at her with a sincere (and seemingly sincere sincerity, not feigned innocence or deliberately implied ignorance) look, meeting her eyes.
"To be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea why you're here. No judgment, no assumption that this is a horrible place to be, or an important place to be, or anything. Bias free. Tabula rasa." And then she smiles faintly. "So, why ARE you here, Kora?"
[Sorrow] "Whatever he is," returns Kora, a certain narrow twist to her mouth. "Linus isn't a gloryhound. Trust me. I've seen my share of them, especially since I've been in Chicago. A place like this attracts them like a lodestone, yeah? Every misfit cliath with a half-baked idea about taking the war to the Wyrm, making a name for him or herself hears the story of Caern, it's founding, rewrites the story with him or herself in the starring role, and bam. Here they are, passing through for a moot or two before moving on.
"I'm here for that story, too. On the most basic level. I'm here because I have a duty to those dead. Here because Fenrir raised the Caern, because more of us died defending it than any other tribe. I'm here because my Alpha's buried here; because I stood in front of the Sept and told them his story, then burned his corpse in a fucking rowboat we reclaimed from one of those boats.
"When I came back to the States, I flew in on some military cargo ship from an airbase in Iceland. Could've taken a moonbridge from my home sept to one of the big ones up north here, but I wanted to find a place that was both mine and Fenris', yeah? All those years at Vindur und Ringing I was both awed and smothered by the weight of history. So," a glance over at Melody, here. "Chicago. First day I was here, Kemp, he was Jarl, then, offered me a place to stay. I've been here ever since. Stormhammer and all the rest, they've got more defenders than they need. Here, every hand means something. This place is a fucking promise, a reminder that we can still win battles, even wars, and I'm here until I die."
[Melody] She's quiet as Kora offers her own explanation. Her own attempt at putting meaning to her choices.
"So you're just a gloryhound too, in a way. Just not your glory." Smiling again, defusing what could otherwise be taken as insult or mocking with mood and tone. Joking. Slathering unpalatable observations with a warm chocolate coating.
"Suppose the question of the hour is, do you think any of those hands actually accomplishes something? Or is it just a case of feeding hands into the grinder until you run out of hands?" Again, her tone doesn't sound judgmental, or even dismissive. Certainly not the way it would have sounded if Linus had asked. If anything, Melody almost sounds like a therapist, asking overly neutral questions about your relationship with your mother. "And would you say that you can make more of a difference here, than, say, somewhere else?" She frowns a bit again. "After all, if there's any truism about Garou, it's that there's always a dyke somewhere in need of some fingers."
She pauses for a moment after saying that, a slightly odd look passing across her face, as if realizing after she said it that a cruder person could read double entendre into that. And possibly make comments about Black Furies or something.
[Sorrow] "Jesus, Dee. I'm starting to wonder if I'm on the Oprah show," returns Kora, winging a sweeping look back at the younger Ragabash. When Melody calls her a gloryhound (for someone else's glory) Kora offers a faint, narrow sort of shrug. Just one shoulder, up and down beneath the oversized hoodie.
There's a faint, subtle hill here, in the physical realm, mirroring the hill leading to Maelstrom's place in the center of the Caern, at the heart of the thing. Kora's chin lifts in the direction of the hill. The edge of the the hood pulls back, disinters the twist of her hair at the nape of her neck, spilling fine strands down underneath the oversized hoodie she wears.
"Ever seen a totem like that, a spirit of the Wyld, living and thriving in a place like this?" Kora asks, quietly. Question with a question. Answer for an answer. "I've not. And imagine, ten years ago, that thing was - sleeping, or buried under the earth, inert, dormant. The Caern's a fucking miracle, every day it lasts. It's a promise that we can still win the big battles, no matter what the hell else is going on in the world. It's the first blow, maybe in the last battle. Maybe just in the next last battle, like when Half-dan the Old took back Vindur und Ringing from the fallen ones, yeah?" Her passion is quiet, rich and low. Still: it's there, in every syllable, every phrase, every movement of her voice.
To the last question, Kora merely shrugs. Breathes out a quiet breath. "I don't think about that. I made the sacrifice and pledge to Maelstrom. My word's my word. That's all."
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