Ornature

On the night of the 27th of July, 2013,

(the year is important.)

Avery and Charlotte drift peacefully to sleep in their own beds. Avery in some four-poster, perhaps, draped in silver and blue, drenched in luxury. Charlotte more humbly: in her little bed, in her little room, in her little house, with her packbrother snoring in his overhead loft. There is nothing, nothing at all, that suggests anything out of the ordinary.

In the morning, they wake and immediately know they are not home.

Everything is unfamiliar. Everything, from the scratchiness of those roughspun sheets against their skin, to the hollers and the shouts outside their window -- which has no glass, only shutters -- to the smell of traildust and the unwashed masses in the air; last night's spilled moonshine; cattle, horses, mules.

Open their eyes and they find themselves in a tiny room, crammed side by side in a bed hard as a rock. Morning sun peeking through the shutter-slats, the noise and light of the hallway outside peeking through the gaps in the wall. No wallpaper, hell no. No paint on the walls either. Just raw wood with a thin layer of new varnish. Thin, thin walls, so thin a good storm might blow the whole claptrap structure down. And some woman bang-bang-banging on a door barely latched shut with a simple hook-and-eye lock, shouting through it:

"Up, up, up! Git up an' git out! You ain't paid for nothin' but a single night, and I won't be responsible for two womenfolk wanderin' around a minin' town unchaperoned!"

Charlotte sleeps curled up like a bean in a pod at the edge of her bed in the shadow of the wall and once upon a time she had a huge room and a feather bed and a view of an oak but

she likes the tinybed in the tinyhouse better.

But see: curled up and tucked into herself, like the promise of the seedling inside a seed, her head down and sometimes her thumb in her mouth. She's not sucking it no she's not a baby, but somehow she often ends up biting the middle of the nailbed in her sleep. Just a gentle pressure of her teeth over the middle of the nail.

And wakes to this with a start, with an eruption of confused movement that has her turning over and half sitting up and getting ready to yell for Erich except -

- who is beside her?

The girl's pink head turns and her pale eyes fix on the other Silver Fang and she recognizes Avery from the moot and recognizes her blood and recognizes her and is on her feet quick scramble, looking both alert and alarmed, as if she had somehow managed to sleepwalk her way into some other Fang's bed, some other Fang's room.

She inhales sharply through her nostrils and frowns at the scents in the air and looks up through the gaps in the wood at the slanting sunlight in the dusty air and looks back at the door rattling in its frame.

"GO AWAY I'M HER CHAPERONE AND SHE'S MINE."

When Avery drifts off to sleep, she is indeed surrounded by luxury. By silver and gold and mahogany, by sumptuous cotton and soft down. She is wearing silk pajamas. Outside her bedroom door there is a tray bearing an empty glass that once held warm milk and an empty plate that once held a few light shortbread cookies. There is a book beside her on the nightstand, and by 'book' we mean a lightweight black-and-white e-reader that is a companion to her tablet, which she prefers not to read on due to the strain it puts on her eyes.

Elsewhere in the house, her brother stays up too late playing video games. Her father stays up too late reading. Avery never lets herself become sleep deprived, however. She has an early day tomorrow. She has things to do.

--

She jerks awake because of the smell. Nothing about it is right or correct or permissable. She breathes in sharply, tensing, sitting upright. She feels the change in her back teeth, longing to sharpen, but holds off, eyes unblinking, and those eyes circle to the door that is being banged on. She is baring her teeth, preparing to snarl, when she realizes she's not alone in the bed. Or rather: that the person in bed with her is not someone she knows, which might have been acceptable, even if she would have needed to ask how did you get here?

No, it's a thin young woman whose purity Avery can sense as keenly as she can tell that she is not home. A thin young woman with pink hair and pale eyes who, Avery recalls, created exploding talens to be shot with a slingshot. She recalls this because Erich told that story at the moot and everyone turned to look at her.

Charlotte scampers out of the bed all knees and elbows, making Avery blink, and yells at the person. It takes everything Avery has not to laugh, but she lifts a slender hand to her lips and smiles behind it, eyes twinkling, and then with a snap of her wrist flips her covers back, turns, puts her feet on the floor,

strides over to the door, lifts the hook, yanks it open fast enough to put the person on the other side on their guard, and levels an imperial stare at the woman banging on it.

"If I must repeat my companion, for she speaks truth, I shall, though I hope it is not necessary. I will, however, add to it: you must indeed go away, but when you return, you should be offering us breakfast." Avery's eyes flicker. Her teeth show, a bit, biting the air, when she adds: "I'm quite famished."

Well; neither of them are naked. There is that, at least. Though, confined in nightgowns that go from neck to ankle to wrist as they are, they might almost prefer the former. Charlotte yells at the innkeep -- or his wife, more likely -- and Avery flings open the door to Speak To Her. The woman, thickset, thinmouthed, tough as nails from a lifetime in this or some other frontier town, scowls up at the Philodox for an affronted moment.

Can't hold her gaze, though.

"Kitchen don't open til supper at noon," she grumbles. "You oughta be gone long before then." She turns on her heel, stumping her way down the hall. Avery can see perhaps eight or ten rooms besides her own, all in a row, with a narrow hall and a straight staircase down to the first floor. The wood, the fixtures look new. The candle sconces on the walls look new. All of it looks cheap, though, liable to go up in the first blaze, fold in the first blizzard.

Meanwhile, inside the room, Charlotte will surely have discovered the chest at the foot of the too-small, too-hard bed. It is a simple, unadorned wooden box, and it contains

their clothes. Unmistakably so, because she can smell herself and Avery on them. But they are absolutely unfamiliar to her, a cut and fabric so far out of date that it may as well be extraterrestrial.

That strict certainty, that confidence, that imperious expectation with which Avery strides to the door and confronts the stranger arrests not just the woman on the other side of it from her insistence that they git up and git out, but also the pink-haired girl (is her hair still pink? Charlotte doesn't know. There's not a mirror in the room and no glass in the windows, no reflective surfaces at all in which to find her eyes and make the passage to the umbra that much easier.

By the time Avery's .. er, conference with the innkeep's wife has concluded Charlotte is crouched in front of the chest of the too-small and too-hard bed and pulling out the clothing, and she can smell hers and read it at least maybe by size though it is strange and terrible and constricting but: she is all gawk as she studies the pieces, pulling them consideringly out one after the other, separating Avery's from her own and frowning and standing up and curling her own in her arms as she glances back at Avery,

"I think those are yours,"

in a very small voice.

Charlotte takes a very brief moment then to inhale the traildust in the air, the sad, raw-wood smell of the place, the scents of strangers layered on strangers drifting down from the rafters, wrapped up in the core of the hard-as-rocks (or rather: straw and ticking) mattress, before turning her back to, well, try to dress.

Hurriedly and with a dream-like logic. Things are here for a reason, and that must Mean Something if something is no more than a signpost.

[SENSE WYRM]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

This is a time long gone, a century and a half removed from their present. It is a world in which the Weaver is only really beginning to pick up steam, pun quite intended, and a world in which the Wyrm has only really begun to turn over in its fetid sleep. The Eye of the Serpent has not yet begun to open. Though their room, their surroundings, this entire town -- if one ramshackle street stuffed with beasts of burden and men of mines can count as such -- stinks of old sweat and cheap whiskey and sour vomit and animal manure,

it is also clean in a way that they are far too young to remember. If they were to push open those flimsy shutters, they could see clear to those white-capped peaks; not a trace of smog in the sky. If they were to drink from the Platte River, they wouldn't taste a hint of chemical waste. Not that they should drink from that river, regardless. People bathe (infrequently) in that river. Animals wade in it. Laundry is scrubbed out in it, and piss and shit probably flows through it in generous proportion. Clean is not the same as clean.

Clean is also relative. For -- though this world is far purer than the one Charlotte exists in -- it is not perfect. The Wyrm is here too, thinly, faintly, but pervasively. Not in that badtempered woman that recently departed her companion's Presence. Not in this room, these floorboards, this air. But here nonetheless, here in town, like a bad residual scent left by rotting meat that has since been through out.

The woman tells her the kitchen doesn't open, tells her to be long gone, and Avery just snarls at her, unashamedly. She slams the door and it rattles, nearly falls off the hinges. Avery's eyes are dark; she was not merely threatening the woman when she said she was famished.

Charlotte has a chest and is going through it. Avery blinks, tipping her head, told that she thinks these clothes are hers.

"They most certainly are not," she says, more like a child stomping their foot than an adult backhanding another adult. She huffs a breath outward and goes over all the same, reaching up and grabbing at the neck of this stupid nightgown to start tearing it open, if that's what it takes. Buttons? Something? She wants it off her throat, and tugs at it until it is at least a bit loosened. Or torn.

Avery lowers herself to a crouch beside the chest, lifting a shift from the gathered clothing. And then discovering a hoop skirt, the width of which seems ridiculous by modern standards but was actually quite narrow for the time. Her eyes widen slightly in something not entirely unlike horror. "My goodness," she murmurs, and then realizes: she has to do this. She really does. A spark goes off. She decides that she's going ot have osmeone make her a dress like this when she gets home, oh yes she is.

The delight in her eyes is short-lived, however, but she glances at Charlotte and nods. "Yes. Well," and begins to open her nightgown, unlacing it, turning her back on Charlotte as well more for the other woman's sake than her own. Avery is hardly shy. And they dress.

So they dress. Charlotte is shy and there's no real place to hide and this thing has weird buttons and is all one piece and she wants to put her legs through the arms but she knows about elaborate dresses no matter how much she pretends otherwise so in that dim little room, see, they dress and when they're done Charlotte turns around to do the line of buttons that no-doubt march up the back of Avery's costume with its hoop skirt and crinoline and Charlotte turns around to ask Avery to do the same for her own rather simpler gown and it is true Charlotte is unsmiling in the costume and she swallows but -

it is not Avery's fault.

"I'm Charlotte," she says, very quietly while Avery laces her up. "It doesn't smell too bad here, but there's some smell around anyway." Erich always knows what Charlotte means but Erich knows Charlotte and Avery does not but Charlotte doesn't know that half the time she is incomprehensible.

"I bet there's food in the kitchen anyway," when the dressing is done Charlo"tte peeks out into the hallway and then pulls back inside. Bread and stuff or pies of nothing else. Do you wanna find it?"

The hallway has not changed since Avery's glimpse of it. Well, no: one of the other doors has opened and a man -- unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, and only barely dressed comes out. He is pulling up his trousers as he goes, belching last night's gas up from his belly as he sways down the hall toward the commode.

There's actually an indoor commode in here. What luxury!

Avery manages the dress all right. She considers the corset but decides against it, because no. So no corset, no lacing up her back of whalebone, just shift and hoop and crinolines and skirt and waistcoat and so forth. They do help each other. Avery must ask and Charlotte is kind enough to assist, and then Avery helps her, as well. She's smiling all the while, despite herself.

She wishes for a mirror so she could arrange her hair a bit, but finds a light-colored bonnet with a lovely ribbon that she decides will do nicely and puts it on, tying it under her chill. There's also a shawl; July is not nearly so hot right now, she notices. Still hot, though.

She's going to melt. But she will look fantastic doing so.

--

"Charlotte," she says, smiling, "that is a lovely name. I remember the wonderful things your packmate said about you at the moot."

It doesn't smell too bad. Avery pauses a moment, sniffs, then nods when she realizes that Charlotte is not talking about the smell. "Thank you," she tells the Theurge, and walks with her to the door in her pretty laced-up shoes and her rustling skirt.

Her eyes catch on the man that goes by, her lips curling in distaste. She shakes her head. "I should think we'd get poisoned eating here, actually," she says, and pauses a moment to return into the room, looking for more. Which she finds. In the chest.

"Oh, my," sayeth Avery, lifting up a pair of holsters with what appear to be loaded revolvers. She lifts a brow and looks over at Charlotte. Then she begins looking for what seems most natural to her: a pocket in the skirt. Avery smiles when she finds the semi-concealed pocket and just slides the firearm in, rising to her feet again. "Lovely," she says, a bit viciously, and offers Charlotte her arm. "Now. Shall we go on a stroll and discover who has crafted this elaborate ruse, or what our purpose here today is?"

Also:

as Charlotte lifts those crinolined, hooped skirts out of the chest, she discovers under them: WEAPONS.

And Charlotte finds: not resolves, but a lady's archery ensemble. A bow that she can carry but not conceal as it is nearly as tall as and perhaps taller than she is, and a quiver that she can fasten around her waist with the arrows bouncing quiet in their leather case with every sweep of her step. And best of all: a slingshot. A small pouch. Charlotte does not trust the pouch to contain her own talens but she ties it onto the belt that holds the quiver in place anyway and then she's ready and she glances at Avery and then down at herself and back at Avery again in all her finery and -

"You look very pretty," in a low voice that sounds pretty shy and is all eyes-averted as she says it and takes Avery's arm to go exploring. Charlotte sniffs then, holding the bow in her free hand and wondering of she should fit it across her body of if that's silly She doesn't know so she holds it as they head down the hallway toward the stairs and Charlotte makes a grossed-out face when she sees the other upstairs resident and then a cloud over her face.

"Sometimes when you're in a strange place you shouldn't eat the food anyway," Charlotte informs Avery, all solemn. "Sometimes the food keeps you there."

And down the steps (if steps they find) they go.

"Why, thank you," she tells Charlotte for the compliment, smiling winningly at her. "You, my dear, would be pretty no matter what you wear, and the addition of the bow and quiver draw the wolf out in your eyes where it belongs. I am quite pleased to have you as my cohort."

As they leave, Avery does not bother to close the door behind them. She has her gun, she has her wits, she has fang and claw, she has a Theurge at her side, she has a great outfit, and her shoes even fit. What could possibly go wrong?

"As in fairytales," Avery says simply, with a nod, because she knows: when you go under the green, you must not eat or drink anything they offer you, no matter how sweet it tastes, no matter how lovely it appears, no matter how starved you feel. You will be trapped in Fairy forever, then, won't you? She knows those stories. She is not even pandering to The Weird Theurge when she accepts this, nods, agrees with it; she is utterly serious, completely sincere. At the moment she is wearing a hoop skirt, carrying a six-shooter, shading her eyes with a pretty bonnet, and walking out of a room with a straw mattress with a pink-haired girl carrying a bow and arrow.

Down the stairs they go. The creaking, wobbly, none-too-dependable stairs. Everything about this -- this hotel, if they had to give it such a name -- speaks of its newness, its recently-built-ness. Everything about it also speaks of its flimsiness, its shoddiness, as though even its owners don't quite expect it, or this new gold rush town, to survive very long.

There is, however, a small common area downstairs stuffed with little tables and chairs. A bar with unlabeled alcohols in hazy bottles. A proper Old West saloon-and-inn, it seems, complete with slatted batwing doors through which they can see the facades of the buildings opposite and, beyond them, the pristine cut of the Rockies: familiar enough that they know at once they have traveled only in the when, not the where.

They are still in Denver. A different, long-ago Denver. The air is so clear. The mountains seem within reach, they are so sharply visible.

Their unkind hostess is glaring at them from the corner, where she appears to be mopping the floor with a bundle of greasy rags on a stick. It's hard to say whether she's cleaning the place or simply spreading the gunk around. Behind the bar, a thin, sallow man -- the innkeep, one supposes -- eyes them distrustfully. The skinny one has a quiver around her waist, for godsake, what sort of ladies were these? He is not sorry to see them go as they step through those creaking doors

and out into a pandemonium of men, animals, dust, wagons, high-altitude sunshine.

The whole of the town is one street. They can easily see the ends of it -- six buildings away to their left, ten to their right. Beyond the ends of the town, the trail stretches off: straight into the east, lost in the morning light. Straight into the west, winding up the mountain to where that precious yellow metal might be hiding. Everything about the town looks new, somewhere between a couple years ago and a couple days old. Everywhere is the sound is hammers, saws, shouting, hooves. At the ends of the street, new building-frames are coming up, like new teeth sprouting beside the old.

They can see the staple establishments: the general store, the feed store, a couple other inns, one of which may or may not double as a brothel; those pink curtains are suspicious. A bank! A post office, whose sign has been crowded by a new handpainted sign announcing MAYOR'S OFFICE as well. A jail. There are wagons filing in from the east, dozens of them stretched over however many miles they can see. There are men leading mules into the west, picks and axes and hammers and carts in tow.

There is also a boy just outside the inn, leaning against the watering trough. About a half-dozen animals there, more mules than horses, shying at the sight of the wolves. The kid doesn't shy, though. Fifteen or sixteen years old -- a grown man in this world -- he looks the ladies up and down and then spits a stream of tobacco at their feet.

"Took you long enough. Boss told me to gitcha." He straightens up, jerks his head in some amorphous direction. "Follow me."

"Oh, uhm," and Charlotte blushes in the hallway and down the stairs so that the color is furious in her cheeks by the time they reach the common area of the saloon and inn, treading across those raw and filthy floorboards past that raw and filthy mop and Charlotte lowers her head just a big and watches all of the strangers warily and says to Avery in a very low voice, " - that's really nice of you. Uh, I'm pleased too 'cos you're very proper. But I really don't wanna be pretty I wanna be - "

Out through those swinging doors into the chaos of the street. It is too much for Charlotte to take in all at once except for the clarity of the air, the brightness of the sky about the filth down-below.

"scary."

A narrow shrug beneath the straight lines of the dress, which may just be a riding costume of some sort.

"At least a little bit scary, I mean."

--

Then the boy; outside, Charlotte is grossed out by the stream of spit and gives him a sharp look and forgets to be shy for that moment; then -

"Where're we going? - to the boy, even as they start to follow. A brief drifting look toward Avery's profile. "What's your boss's name anyway?"

"You can be both," is all Avery says to that, and she would know, because

she is.

--

That boy. Spits. At Avery's feet.

And she is hungry and proper and impatient. She unfolds her arm from Charlotte's and nearly goes for his throat with her hand, but stays herself just in time to exhale huffily and begin following him. She glances back at Charlotte, as though to apologize for nearly moving to threaten this young man for being so repulsive, but Charlotte asks a good question, and Avery does not interrupt his reply.

That earns them a mystified glance. The boy's haircolor is almost indeterminate under his battered hat and his ... apparently protective layer of dust. His eyes are sharp gray, though, the eyes of a budding gunslinger.

"Sheriff John Lark? He's the boss. Everybody knows him. Why the hell he called you two in here, though. Ain't my place to advise him else-wise, or I would."

The kid stops. He's standing in front of the jail, turning to face the questionable ladies. Hikes a thumb over his shoulder, "In there. Don't dawdle now, he's been waitin' since sunup an' he ain't gittin' any more patient."

--

The jail: two cells, iron-barred, one stuffed with two snoring men, the other with three. One appears to be passed out. One has his back in the corner, shaving his nails with a short, blunt-looking knife. The third man's hanging his arms out of the cell, leering at the females as they enter.

"BAWS," he brays. "BAWS, YOU AIN'T TOLD ME YOU WERE HAVIN' LADY FRIENDS COME OVER. BAWS."

"Shut the fuck up, Rollins," his neighbor one cell over snaps, sitting abruptly up in his cot. He sees the women too. Tugs a forelock. Flops back down; promptly snores.

The deputy guarding them is sitting on a plain wooden chair behind a plainer wooden desk. He is young, early 20s, blond. He's painstakingly writing a letter in a wobbly hand. Passing him, Avery and Charlotte can see the beginnings of a letter:

Dearest Anabelle,

and he nods at them as they pass. "Ma'ams," he says, and goes back to his letter.

There's an inner room. Thick walls, thick oaken door. A big desk, grand for this dusty little town. A big revolver right on the tabletop, within easy reach. Behind the table sits Boss, Sheriff Lark, the man who apparently summoned them. Or called for them. He has hair dark as a raven's wing, greying at the temples. A severe, gaunt-cheeked face marked by sun and wind and a bullet-graze to the cheek. Blue eyes, very pale, like light glinting off the barrel of a gun.

He is unmistakably kin to the Nation: a Shadow Lord, besides.

Like his underling, he too is writing, but it does not appear to be a personal letter, and his hand is swift and sure. As they enter, he studies them a moment. Then he throws down his pen and barks a short laugh. "A lawman and medicine man, they told me, and wouldn't give me names when I pressed. Well, now I know why." He stands, affects a small bow. "Ladies. Shut the door and we'll talk."

Charlotte frowns at the boy thoughtfully and catches, see, the sharp edge in his eyes. Her pale brows are drawn together and her gaze lingers on him for some time, as if stuck, and it is the horror she feels everytime he shifts that wad of tobacco in his mouth, every time that browish, staining spit sluices across his stained teeth.

"You know your mouth is turning to brown goo."

This when he tells them not to dawdle.

--

In the jail, she's all alert, darting glances at the prisoners, alternatively wary and ... well, warier, the animal sort of wariness that human strangers in groups larger than three or four tend bring out in her. There's enough politeness in her that she does dip her head and avert her eyes from the man who tugs respectfully in their direction, but she shifts her grip on her bow, thinking about how the sweep of her skirts against the floor sound like the movement of the window through winter-bare trees.

Soon as they're in the Sheriff's office, Charlotte resolves to let Avery do the talking. He tells them to close the door and she returns around rather swift, finally letting go of Avery's arm to reach and pull the door solidly closed.

Avery's eyes are cool against the boy -- for he is a boy, and younger even than her brother, who will be a boy to her even when he becomes a father in his own right. She intends, at some point or another, to show that would-be gunslinger just why anyone would call upon her for aid.

When they reach the jail, she pauses, turning to look at him. It's a moment after Charlotte has told him that his mouth is turning to brown goo. "You," she says, directly, her voice weighted with authority but soft as velvet, "will learn to speak to me with respect. You may learn on your own, if you can. Or I will instruct you."

Her eyes stay on his for a moment longer, cementing the certainty she speaks with -- it is not a threat, it is not a request. It is an inevitability. He may choose his own path from there. After that moment, Avery takes her eyes off of him again, walks into the jail, and looks around, observing the prisoners without judgement or concern. She walks steadily, slowly toward the room they're being led to, and when she is inside, she reaches up, unties the ribbon from under her chin, and removes her bonnet. She shakes out her hair, and there is sunlight aplenty here to shine off of it.

A lawman and a medicine man, he asked for. They sent him two ladies, one with a bow and arrow, one with a fucking bonnet.

Avery inhales the smell of him and considers it. She turns to look at Charlotte, wondering what the Theurge makes of this, but Charlotte is quiet, and Avery slowly turns her gaze back to Sheriff Lark. The door is closed. Avery steps forward, hair loose around her cheeks, brushing her shoulders.

"You may call me Merriweather. My cousin you may refer to as Miss Lightfoot. Now," she says, and then gracefully seats herself across from him, perched on the edge of a chair, folding her hands on her lap, "what seems to be the trouble?"