salvation.[1. There is no post order, but please post only once for each post I make unless I indicate otherwise.
2. Post in 15 minutes or less, and declare/roll in 2 minutes or less. "In 15 minutes" means 15 minutes from my post, not the last player to post before you. If you miss your roll it will be skipped. In character this means it automatically fails. And that kinda sucks. :[
3. You are free to multi-task, so long as you can abide by the above strictures. If you repeatedly miss 'deadlines' or are unresponsive in the scene chat, I will ask you to excuse yourself from this scene (or the other) out of respect for my time and the time of our fellow players.
4. This is a very low-risk scene both psychologically and physically.
5. Please PM me now with personal phobias, triggers, or off-limits themes (if none, no need to tell me 'none'). If you're uncomfortable with anything in the scene, IM me once (outside of the chat). If you become uncomfortable/distressed due to content in the scene and need to immediately leave, please IM or email me as soon as you are able to let me know. I don't actually enjoy upsetting my players. Just their characters.
6. Please PM me now with any relevant merits/flaws/traits I should be aware of. If none, no need to tell me 'none'.
7. Keep track of your own health and tempers. Ain't nobody got time for that. Except you. What I mean is: I do not have time for that.
8. Ask questions in the AIM chat. If I don't answer after 2-3 minutes, ping me once in PMs here. In review: AIM chat for chatter and questions, IMs for personal distress, Jove PMs for questions I have not answered within a few minutes.
9. Don't be a dick.
10. Don't forget to be awesome.]
salvation.When the sun set today, it blazed through the freshly renewed boughs of the trees, a baleful red circle both drawing and repelling the eye. Everything in sight was cast in a heavy crimson glow, the edges gilded with flaming orange. There seemed to be no break between the edge of the sun and the lines where branches and leaves should be; the world went silent for this sunset, though it flinched with dread.
When the heat grows too searing to bear, you go north. When the itch of summer's heat makes the skin crawl, you go north. You begin heading that way without quite understanding why or how; you find yourself knowing deep into the journey that you will never make it far enough to escape the heat. It seems that a great deal of time has passed, leaving you in autumn now. The leaves here are enormous: veiny orange and brown things the size of the trees they should have come from, standing tall and straight from yellowed grass, fluttering in wind that should be cold but is only hot, dry, and unforgiving.
You have been walking for -- you do not know how long. From where, you do not know, or why. There are people alongside you: three others. You do not know them, or their names. You realize: you do not know your own name. You think, looking upon the forest ahead, that there was a wall before, a low one, maybe around a portico or veranda. You're not sure. It was stone, you think. You're not sure. The sunset was red and unmerciful; you came north, and now the grass is yellow underfoot, there are leaves the size of trees, and you are with strangers and you do not know how long you have been walking with them, or they with you.
You know this: go north. You know this: you are with strangers. You know this: you are a werewolf, and your skin and bones will change shape around you, but you do not know for what purpose. You know this the way that perhaps an ant knows it is an ant, a dog knows it is a dog, a bird knows it is a bird. There is no need to question it, no need for cumbersome mythology. You are a mammal, and this is the type of mammal you are. You know that leaves are not usually that large, even if you do not know if every sunset is always so red, so disquieting, or just the one you remember.
You know that it is night now, the sky darkened, the stars and moon above. You like the moon. You do not know why, but even as thin as it is, the sight of it fills you at once with hopeful joy and maddening anger that itches at the back of your mind. You like the moon very much.
You think: the moon likes me, too.
HectorWhen the sun set today this one thought he had plenty of reason to stay where he was. Now the heat sinks into his fur and it can't roll off his tongue fast enough to cool the rest of him but he does not stop. If he had stopped he would not be here.
He accepts the strangers as he accepts the heat and the leaves and the yellow grass. This is nothing more than what it is. He knows that dark speckled through with light means the moon is here.
Part of this one wants to run to catch up with the beckoning north. He has been walking with the others this long. He does not hasten to leave them yet.
He sniffs the grass and when he's done he lifts his muzzle to the night air. Maybe it will tell him something.
CharlotteOh, she's a rare thing. A rare rare thing, fine and pale as that slivered moon she loves so well, nothing like that the baleful light of that setting sun, those too-large leaves. The wall and the sun and the wall and the trees had an ancient sort of familiarity, see. She can taste them, somehow, on or beneath her tongue. Belongs in places like this, even if she does not know what this place is or where it might be, or that there are other places like this: any of it. Walls though, walls and grounds that are groomed, with sweeping views, well ordered though not - never - tamed.
Listen: a pale girl, slender and finely made given weight by the many imperatives and attachments of her blood is among the quartet.
She is wearing her girl-skin and this she does not mind. She can feel her wolf-skin beneath her girl-skin and this she does not mind either.
Somehow she is both aware of this mindlessness and aware of it as a relief right? A letting-go. She remembers so little she has forgotten even her madness,
and glances at the stranges who are human-strangers and wolf-strangers and says,
"Hello." Smiles, see? How strange it is to speak.
She likes it, though not so well as the moon. "I want to follow her," the moon, the girl means, with a lilting glance upwards through the too-large leaves to the slivered moon in the darkling sky. " - I wonder where she sleeps."
KeishaShe is walking along in two legs, because that is how Keisha normally walks. Her staff at her side, her sandals on her feet and a simple green sarong dress covering her. She doesn't know why she's walking this way or who she's walking with, and perhaps that sudden realization when it hits (whyever it hits) troubles her, because she stops and frowns. Her attention turns to the moon, who she likes and who likes her, and then around to the other strangers. Her hands grip the wood of her staff and then she realizes that she has a staff. She looks at it, examines the carvings that she began on it upon making her new one (which she doesn't remember she had an old one).
She looks to the wolf, the woman and the other, and takes a breath. She nods, smiles a little. "Hello. Do any of us know who we are?"
Because it's a valid question. And as she asks, she's walking again, heading northward where they want to go.
ErichAmongst their number is a boy who walks beside the girl. He is very different from her, broad where she is slender, strong where she is fine, golden and ruddy where she is silver and white. Something about them is nonetheless similar, as though they were two shoots off the same root; hybrid stalks grafted to the same stem.
It does not bother him very much that he does not know who he is or where he is or why he is. He is, and this is enough for him. As they walk the heat of the day begins to fall away, layer by layer. He looks at the moon and smiles, because he likes the moon very much, because the moon likes him too.
The silver girl speaks: he turns to look at her, his smile widening. "Me too," he agrees, and then:
the other girl speaks, the one who is not silver and white but amber and brown. There is one other in their quartet, another boy, another who is dusky and dark. The boy looks around at the four of them and he sees that he is the largest, and he thinks this must mean he is strongest, and he thinks this must mean he is to protect the others. Of course. That makes sense.
He turns to the dark girl; he seems puzzled and a little amused.
"What a strange question. We are us and we follow the moon."
salvation.They know things about themselves. Or feel them, like a pulse that one doesn't notice until you touch your wrist, your throat: the willingness to go into the unknown, and permit the unknown, and keep the unknown's secrets with it if necessary. The call of kingship, how easy it is to be the first to say this is what I want to do. The urge to protect. They feel themselves, their own humor and their own passion, but they are like half-buried boxes, and you are not sure what is inside.
A small dark spot from the sky grows larger, growing closer, and then grows wings, and alights on Erich's shoulder. It is a bird. You know it is a bird, and even: a pigeon. You are a werewolf and that is a pigeon. It has eyes as bright as gemstones, as smooth as riverstones. It hops a bit, and coos, and flutters its wings, then pushes off and circles, flying to Charlotte, working its beak in her hair. And this pigeon is known to the two of them, and is as much a friend as the moon is, but it has no name. Perhaps it never has.
Perhaps they never have.
Up ahead, dark-furred creature, there is a gate. Only a gate, standing between two stone posts. The gate is wrought, and rusted. The stone posts are covered in signs. You can read them: KEEP OUT. NO TRESSPASSING. and so on. You know what those words mean. And you know how strange they are, because to either side of the stone posts there is no fence, no wall. The gate is chained shut. You know this, now:
THIS IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD. BUT THE GATE DOESN'T WANT YOU TO GO THROUGH.
KeishaShe frowns at Hector; no, not even frowns. She scowls a little bit. It's a rebuke, even if light-hearted, and this is not the Keisha who is calm and gentle. That Keisha was gained through certain experiences, and she doesn't have those. She has no knowledge that she's "supposed" (in her own estimation) to act older than she is, and so she gives him a harsh look.
"There's no such thing as a strange question, or a normal one. There are only questions. The answers are what are strange or not."
She watches the pigeon as it circles around Charlotte and Erich, and not her or the other. She wonders about it, but only for a second because there's a gate up ahead. And for this Keisha, "Keep Out" and "No Trepassing" may as well be a big neon sign reading COME THIS WAY.
So that's what she does; she cocks her head to the side and starts walking to the gate itself, intending to try to scale it.
Charlotte"Hello," says the silver girl quietly to the pigeon and her hello sounds a bit like hello and a bit like a responsive cooing. It is smooth in her throat but there is an edge to it that you cannot quiet comprehend unless you know something of the alient beasts from which such animals descended. She does not know such things and yet:
she does. The sharp and alien eye. The darting directness. The delicate savagery.
No quarter here.
--
That is how she looks at the gate. The gate the gate the gate that bars the way and keeps her from the place where she must go.
The girl does not like the chains and does not like the signs and she walks beside the boy with an unconscious certainty and she smiles at the beast and there is something benevolent about this but also assured and she smiles at the girl and agrees with the golden boy.
Here is a secret: already she knows that she does not miss her name. Feels that secret like something organic in her chest.
She glances at the golden boy, alert see.
She knows he will back her up,
when something comes,
and something always comes,
and the signs do not belong there, and how dare they bar her way.
So, she begins tearing them down. Bare hands.
HectorAnd the male wolf the only one who left his home on four legs can feel in his bones that he could stand on two if he wanted but why would he want to when the ears he has now catches flapping wings before that dark spot takes on a form. He doesn't. His ears and his eyes and his nose and the moon are all good as they are.
They come to a pause and he stands alongside the other male without knowing why. Scents the airs and sees the gate and chuffs out a low firm noise: there. Not harrying or herding the others.
If he is fast he does not move so fast as to leave them behind. No question in his mind and he voices no question and what voice he has he keeps to himself.
He goes around the gate.
ErichA pigeon comes. And the boy knows the pigeon, even as he knows his own self, his bones, his strength. He is happy to see the pigeon, and the pigeon is happy to see him. It alights on his shoulder. He kisses it on its small, sleek-feathered head. It is a meek, pretty bird, neither ferocious nor even particularly intelligent, but it is adoring and loyal and terribly good with directions.
It goes to play with the silver girl. The boy smiles again to see it go.
He doesn't smile to see the gate, though. It bars their way, even if there is no fence, no wall. The wolf moves to go around it, but the boy hangs back: an eye on the silver girl, ready to defend. An eye on the gate, with its air of forbidding and foreboding both.
"Be careful," he calls to the wolf.
salvation.One will climb the gate that says you must stay out, and one will tear down the signs that say you must stay out, and one will go around the gate that you must not go around, and one will hang back, perhaps obeying the gate that says you must obey it.
The pigeon lifts from the pink-haired female's shoulder, rising upward, landing to perch on the stone post.
This is what they get, for their troubles:
The gate should not be hard to climb, and it is not. The gate might be painful to climb, and it is. Her feet get stuck. Her hands sting and cut as she grabs hold of rusted metal. Her feet slip, too. She bangs her chin on the iron. The gate rattles under her weight as though it would collapse, but it does not. It just shakes her loose, shakes her down a few inches.
The paper tears easily, as paper does. The metal signs bend and with enough prying will come loose, but they take chunks of stone with the screws and nails that hold them in place. They do come off. The posts start to stop saying KEEP OUT STAY OUT quite so vehemently, as those messages tatter to the stomped-upon grass.
Around the stone post he finds himself looking from a new direction at the one female climbing, the other female tearing, the other male standing watch. Round and round and round and round, a door that is the same on both sides.
The pigeon looks at the boy hanging back. Cocks its head and flies back, but it does not fly over the gate. It cannot. There are laws here, you see, as efficacious as gravity.
KeishaShe makes a hissing sound (as you do) as her hands are cut and she slips down off the wall with a frown. Looks at the gate, and the chains that bind it shut to them. She examines the lock, looks at the gate itself, furrows her brow.
"We need to find a key." She looks around at the others, up to the moon. Her friends (because she assumes they are friends, even if she doesn't know them). "Some way to get the lock open and get through, or we won't be able to pass."
CharlotteWhen the signs are pulled away, what are left are the chains. The chains that bar it and the doors that they secure that bar the way, properly.
And the pink-haired girl tears away the signs that say GET OUT STAY OUT because how dare they bar her and then she grabs the chains and she looks at the golden boy and she is a BEAST she knows this in her bones and she tells him,
tells them, really:
(and when she tells them she is no longer a pink-haired girl. She is large, larger, she remembers not why or what she is, but that there is a strength in her body that remains untapped.)
tells - perhaps - Keisha most of all:
"You're stronger than you look. Help me tear it down."
ErichThe boy is, indeed, hanging back. There is that about him: a sense of shyness, nevermind that he is large and well-muscled and has fists that look as though they might easily bash walls to rubble. He watches the others tackle the gate: climbing it and getting hurt for the trouble (though perhaps the sting to the pride is worse than the sting to the body); ripping the signs down; walking around it
and instantly rounding the other post, as though there is no world to either side of the gate.
The pigeon comes back to him. The boy reaches an absent hand up and scritches it under its small beak. Then he walks up to the gate, behind the silver girl and to one side of her, looking at her handiwork.
"Maybe she's right," he says to the silver girl, meaning the earthen girl. "Maybe we need to find a key. I can try, though,"
and so speaking, the golden boy abruptly bursts fur from skin, grows to an enormous and shaggy thing. He grips the gate in both handpaws and pulls as hard as he can; leans backward to leverage his weight, muscles knotted like ropes under that thick fur.
HectorOnly once does the wolf circle the gate before he sniffs the air and goes around the gate again and keeps moving north. He takes with him a warning from the upright male and he gives back a whuff of agreement.
Maybe she's right. Maybe they need to find a key.
As the others work to overcome the gate the wolf trots on ahead. He does not think the gate does or does not mean anything. It is a gate and it wore a sign and it has done nothing yet to keep him from moving around it so he keeps moving past it.
salvation.There are many signs. The one with pink hair pauses in the tearing, has to pause, to tell the others what she does. When she changes, grows, becomes the strength and awe-inspiring beauty that is in all of her kind, even the ones who have forgotten it.
you are stronger than you look
They begin to use their bodies, power surging up from the earth through them as they change and tear and pull. The pigeon flies away, and into the sky, and vanishes again for a while, forgetting itself. There is no getting around the gate, for one circles. Going past it, one finds oneself passing another stone post on the other side, coming to discover the three others still standing there.
They look, perhaps, in the grass or the stone, pulling at bricks or looking in the lock itself, but there is no key to be found. The gate cannot be broken, which is a sting to the ego: it is so fragile, so rusted, so old, so brittle. They are so strong.
salvation.[wits + engimas time]
Keisha[[Wits+Enigmas]]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Hector[hokay, so....]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Erich[derp]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
CharlotteWits + enigmas
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
CharlotteThe gate is infuriating. The gate stands between her and where she was meant to go. She wants to be on the other side of it. She wants to cross. She wants to tear it down. She wants to tear it open; it looks like it should be easily ripped asunder,
and still it remains standing.
So they hunt; for a key instead of prey. Beneath her skin and in the back of her beast-mind she knows that one is not the other but the instinct remains the same: to hunt, to seek, to range. This is right and proper and the itch of it is a fine thing beneath her skin until again,
there is no key.
They cannot climb it and they cannot tear it down and they cannot circle it and still the gate blocks the way and this is the way they were meant to go and she opens her mouth and she snarls her frustration and her tongue lolls in her muzzle as she looks at the moon in the dark-velvet sky and she lowers her great head and she sinks from her beast-form to her girl form and she considers the gate again, and all the others.
And then the gate, and oh,
well.
The pink-haired girl, she knocks.
Knock-knock-knock, see? Let me in.
ErichWell, it's almost as though they've switched it right around, isn't it? Now the silver girl is knocking meekly and the golden boy is:
well, he is not a golden boy, for one. He is a shaggy wolf-monster, and he is enormous and his paws are enormous and there's all that fur and the heat that radiates off him feels like a sun in miniature. And for another: he is not meekly watching anymore but tearing at the signs himself, as though falling back on this option now that the others have been exhausted.
Or his arms. At least his arms are exhausted. From pulling.
salvation.Your blood sings in your own ears. You are pure. You are bright and strong. Things call to you, yestheydoHAHAHAHA and they are cold and angry and bitter and painful things, scary things, but right here there are others, whose blood is not so bright whose voices are not so pure, but they are with her. The large one sometimes listens.
There is no key on the ground or in the lock. She tore down the signs though. The voice yelling KEEP OUT in those bright glaring letters has quieted. She can make it quieter.
KeishaShe frowns and walks away from the gate, not having shifted form and instead having just pulled with her own strength. Why? Because that's who Keisha is.
Instead, she looks down at the posters and signs and starts shifting through them. No Trespassing. Keep Out. There's a furrowing of her brow as she starts to look for something between the overt messages.
Something Deeper.
Charlotte"Let me pass."
Not merely the knock, then.
The knock is an imperial knock, a knock of courtesy. The greeting of one shining thing to whatever abides beyond the gate. The knock is the knock is the knock is what it is.
She knocks. She says, again, "Let me pass."
--
And, then, like the boy, she resumes tearing down the signs.
Let them all fall down.
HectorWhen the male wolf comes back around the gate the final time he does as his bones bid him do and slips out of a skin made for long distances. Running and howling. The grass is different beneath his feet and the clothes he wears and the metal around his fingers hung around his neck punched through his ear don't mean anything to him.
The wolf was lithe and sharp and tan of fur with brown and red and gray run along its spine but the boy who joins the others is near as tall as the other. Thinner and darker. His hair falls down past his shoulders and he wears all black clothing. A hunting knife on one side of his belt and a medicine bag on the other.
He looks like a shaman maybe but he isn't.
He helps the silver girl and the golden boy take down the last of the signs and when the last of the signs is on the ground he glances to the others. At the girl with the staff in particular.
It is not a large gate. He is not the one to test its compliance. He's watching.
salvation.One pulls at the signs. Stupid little signs! They aren't iron or stone. Just aluminum, just paper, just cardboard. Plastic! One tears at them, til his arms are worn out from it. They are stacked and staggered.
One peers at the signs. Stupid little signs! They are thin and their words are shallow. KEEP OUT. STAY OUT. NO TRESPASSING. Variations on a theme. Some in different languages. They, unlike the gate that is meant to be walked through but is locked, do not obfuscate their intentions.
One tears at the signs. Stupid little signs! Don't they know who she is? Nevermind that she doesn't know who she is. She knows what she is. They all know what they are. She rips. The gate, being a gate, does not answer her any other way.
One takes down the signs. Stupid little signs. Stupid signs, man-made, man-lettered. Gates are symbols like walls are symbols, like giant leaves are symbols. Those might be as native as the leaves, the trees. The signs came from something else, had to have, because they have words. You never read in dreams, they say, that's not the part of your brain that works. Maybe that's a lie, to comfort you, a totem like in that movie, right? Something you can count on to assure you that you are only dreaming. Well nevermind: he knows these things, and he knows that gates are made for walking through, and signs are just spells you attempt to cast on the people who read them. He knows: spells only work on you if you believe in their magic.
--
The stone posts have holes in them, screws and nails. Bits of tape. There is a veritable cloud of signage at their feet by the end. And the gate is not rusted, they must have imagined that, and there is no chain and no lock, because the gate just stands there, the wrought iron clean and dark. It looks like it is made of soot; if you breathed on it, the particles would scatter. But touching it, it feels cold.
Iron often does. Even in summer, late summer, after a baleful sunset.
In the distance, wind moves through the trees, the giant leaves. It sounds like a sigh. A waking sigh, or a relieved sigh. The woods shudder.
The first to put their hand on the gate finds it swinging easily inward, as though it was always meant to swing inward, welcoming and unafraid. It doesn't even creak, and the landscape beyond does not change. The world is no different. Only their perception of the barriers within it.
ErichThe signs go away. The rust and tarnish goes away. All that's left in the end is a gate, powder-black and perfect, and looking at the gate the boy suddenly understands that gates are meant to be barriers, yes, but they are meant also to be portals. You can go through such things.
And this gate: it opens, as it is meant to do. Now the way is open. There is a forest; there are giant, giant, giant leaves. Maybe they are small. Maybe they have been made small by the innocence of their own minds. Their names, their lives; wiped clean. What remains is who they are, who they really are outside of those artificial and self-imposed walls, strictures, boundaries.
The boy is still a boy. He is still brave and a little shy, bright-souled, ill-considered, sometimes blundering. He looks at the open way and then he glances at the others, three of them. Then he walks through, the first step cautious, the next easier. Presently, he reduces from his monstrous form: becomes a hulking near-boy, then a boy.
Charlotte"Oh." The pink-haired girl says, after.
"Oh," listen to the note of surprise in her voice. Listen to the way it enfolds itself into something deeper and more feral, girl-surprise giving way to wolf-noise because the gait is open,
the way is open.
There are dark things everywhere.
It is dark.
There are strange dark things inside her but she is around them too, bright as the moon will be when it is full; bright as that sliver that tastes like a sickle and curves like coy lover's smile.
She is a girl and then she is a wolf because she is girl-and-wolf, she is werewolf and she folds down to four legs and she lolls her tongue and looks at the others and barks.
It sounds like an invitation.
The gate is open. Time to run.
HectorThe gate swings open. Gates are meant to keep out so much as they are meant to permit entry and maybe it's starting to come back to him. This reflection of lies in the shadows of a life he didn't take in with him. If it does he stands silent anyway. Accepts it same as he accepted the drawing north and the too-large leaves and the red that was so red it bled into everything else.
Now the silver girl goes to her wolf skin and he does not smile. He does not join her. Long distance covered on four legs already and now he is stood back and watching.
"Alright," he says to the wolf-girl. The first word he's spoken since they regained cognizance.
He steps through the gate.
KeishaShe looks from the signs up to the gate as the last of them are torn down and the gate is swung open. Well. She seems kind of silly now.
She frowns and stands, and follows them through.
salvation.The field is not vast. The golden grass is not endless. They are within a few moments, even less, of the trees, which
get smaller as they get closer, running or walking. The leaves are the right size. The trees are not. Things are coming back to them, like a voice that is and is not familiar:
"-- been gone a long time now.""How long is a long time?"
The golden, blue-eyed one hears himself ask. They all hear him ask it, if they remember.
"Almost two years."
There are other voices, their own voices -- protests, questions. Two years! How!
"It was before River died."
Oh, they remember a little there, at that name which is a thing found in nature and so it can be permitted. They remember someone dying. Death is a bad, sad, maddening thing. Death hurts very much. Some of them were not here when it happened. They know there was death. That's what is behind them, very very very very very very far behind them. Other things, too, but lots of death. And River, whoever River was, River died and maybe, maybe everything bad happened after that. Maybe whatever was lost was forgotten, at least temporarily.
"Keep these talismans,"
says someone else entirely, not the deep timbre of the first voice, not one of their own. They don't know what the talismans are. Or what they're for. They don't know what they have on them is familiar and what isn't. Is the staff a talisman? Is the bead, the metal piercing, the pigeon? But someone told them to keep them. Whatever they were.
--
The trees are very small, and the leaves are the right size.
They come upon a clearing, which to them is the size of a boot-heel. Something is in the middle. Something small and shining and curled up and sleeping and thumping its tail in its sleep and with red-gold fur and twitching ears. Very very small, and smelling of autumn, smelling of barley in the wind and smelling -- for here such things have a scent -- of music. Something dreaming.
A little wolf. Tiny enough to fit in the palm of even the pink-haired one's hand.
The moon likes him, too.
CharlotteDoes she have pink-hair here, too? In this form. She runs and they run through the gate and things change and the horizon comes closer and recedes. The trees are too large and then very small and the leaves are the right size and that is enough. There are scents in the air and they are vibrant as a anything, they are a chord that strikes some note of familiarity in the fibers of the muscle of her heart.
The trees open up and here is a clearing and there is a very, very, very,
very,
small wolf.
It could fit in her hand but she does not have hands.
She has paws.
She lopes closer, closer.
The moon likes him. Her nose is warm. She wuffs and nuzzles the dreaming little wolf. Smells his music.
HectorThey all hear and they all remember and they all know death to be a thing that doesn't go away. It's there waiting for all of them just as wakefulness waits at the end of a dream but all dreams end eventually.
This one's hands are heavy with all the jewelry he wears. He walks light on his feet. Even as the echoes come back at him and them he walks through the field and he listens to the voices. Glances over at the other male once. Says nothing.
Talismans?
And here the clearing. Here something small enough to trot upon if attention doesn't come before the step. He sees and he scents the air though he stands on two legs and he stands idle frowning but not confused.
He crouches at the edge of the clearing and does not mean to disturb the sleeping wolf but how is he to know his presence won't be a disturbance.
KeishaShe doesn't understand what's going on. Memories, some that she may recall, are coming back to her and she is confused. So she goes with the others and she looks at the small wolf. She drops into a crouch, reaches out gently to touch her lightly.
salvation.With a wet nose coming close, the tiny wolf's ears flicker. She is enormous, compared to him; her tiny nuzzle rocks his entire body. It makes him open one eye, peering at her drowsily, but without fear. A shadow swoops overhead; the pigeon is the size of an eagle. Maybe they are small. Maybe the light plays tricks, maybe the bird is closer than it seems.
No matter. They remember:
shadows tearing at them in some other wood, a darker wood far from here, more to the south. God, how far have they come? Ripping at their clothes, raking claws into their skins, wounding their souls more than their bodies. How did they survive such an attack? Flashes of light, bursts of water over their flesh from shattered something-somethings. They tore -- they tore something away from all of them, and they wandered on, less hurt and less bloodied but
something was happening to them, as they walked. So gradually they didn't even notice.
It's easy to forget the most important things. You just have to keep going.
--
The wolf thumps his tail as he is woken. He snorts and stretches and rolls up onto his feet, spry. He wags his tail to see them, barks. And they understand:
"HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK."
ErichThe silver girl becomes a silver wolf, and the silver wolf runs ahead. See her go, like a bolt of silk let loose. That swift, that smooth. The boy follows, at first walking, then breaking into a trot, then running outright himself. On two legs instead of four he is not as fast as a wolf, but he is fast: fast and strong and athletic, blessed in raw and physical ways by the moon who likes him.
The trees grow small and small and smaller still. This does not quite seem to make sense to the boy, but then: nothing really makes sense. Things are beginning to come back to him, an existence before this one nudging at the corners of his consciousness. In a way it lifts the simple contentment of ignorance; it makes him, for the first time, begin to wonder
who am i?
where am i?
why am i?
But then they are at the clearing, which is tiny as a palmprint. They gather around and look down and there is a wolf there, a tiny wolf, curled up and dreaming. The silver wolf nuzzles the little wolf; the dark girl touches it. The dark boy does not touch it, and neither does the golden boy.
--
The little wolf wakes. Another piece of the past comes back to them. The boy blinks suddenly, and his brow creases with a frown that looks and feels odd, new, out of place. He rubs his face for a moment. He looks down and the little wolf is wagging his tail up at them now, telling them all that
THEY WILL BE A PACK
and the boy understands this to be a good thing, a happy thing, though he does not quite understand. "Okay?" he says, uncertainty making the word a question. He thinks for a moment. "You're very small. Do you want to ride on my shoulder like my pigeon?"
Speaking of which: where is his pigeon?
CharlotteCharlotte (she does not know that she is Charlotte, but somehow she knows that she has a name now, a name that belongs to her the way the name River belongs to -
belongs to -
names below to things. So, Charlotte thinks that the small wolf does not want to ride the small wolf wants to run wolves were meant to run not ride.
HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK.
the small wolf barks and she barks back, and there is a spiraling sort of brightness to her tone that begins to shade itself into a howl, a paean, a ululating song.
It is worldless. It does not have a name.
After all that darkness, some part of her knows, or believes, that this is a better way to be.
Here. Now.
KeishaThe memories, they flash and they hurt. They pain her, emotionally and spiritually and she flinches as they come to her. But they are just memories. "Just." Right.
More importantly, the wolf awakes, and it is happy to see them. It says they will be a pack. Does it feel like it shouldn't be? Like she has something that fills that? She isn't sure. Maybe. But for now, because it makes the little wolf so happy, she smiles.
She does not say yes though. Just smiles.
salvation.They came here for a reason. They came her to find something lost, lost for almost two years. They came with talismans to protect them against something, but those talismans were torn from their very bodies. They are themselves, and they have purpose, and they are in... the spirit world. They are in a place with its own standards that defy both natural law and the inexorable rules of logic. They find a gate made to open and trying to keep them out, and they think
someone made those signs.
They find something that must be lost, look how small he is, look how delighted he is for the company. Look at him wagging his tail, growing foot-sized from palm-sized, now he is up to their knees. He is very excited, his eyes bright gold, the autumnal light gilding the edges of his fur. What a pretty thing he is, and the tall golden one says okay to the pack idea, and tells him he is small.
"I AM GROWING!" he barks back, not in anger but excitement. "SO WE CAN BE PACK."
They all have names. Not easy to find, it's right on the tip of your tongue, but you can remember ... the W... the War... the Warder. The Warder in a cold place, not summery at all, telling them to go north. No, he said to cross over, to find what was lost. They know this. They all have names, and cannot recall their own, but the name of this lost little one is coming back to them, slowly, slowly.
Maybe it starts with a B. There's an N in there somewhere.
He wags. Cocks his head to the side. "WE ARE A PACK. THIS IS OUR DEN. HELLO."
He is waist-high now.
CharlotteHe is growing. He is growing so-fast and he is growing SO WE CAN BE PACK and she barks-back and remembers the W- W- Warder, the places-that-were and the darkness. Here are names too.
She is beginning to remember names too.
She remembers, you see, that she has a name.
That she does not want a name.
--
Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. This is the rhythm when she returns to the small-wolf. Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. Familiarity, comfort, challenge. Comfort, affection, challenge.
She barks again. He is growing!
And for now they are a pack.
BARK.
But this is not their den.
When he is done growing, she knows, they have to go.
Wefindyou. she tells him. Comefollowus.
She tells him.
Home.
Though she hardly remembers what that means.
ErichHe's right, the little wolf. He is growing. Or maybe they are shrinking. The boy is a little worried about this latter possibility, and he looks often at his hands, his palms, to try and determine if there's any subtle shrinkage going on. Probably not. He looks at the wolf again; now he is knee-high. Now he is waist-high. Is he still getting bigger? Wolves aren't supposed to be much bigger; the boy is quite sure of that.
"We can be a pack," he says slowly, "but ... I don't think this is our den. No. Our den is back that way. Where we came from. And ... and across. I mean, across. Across the curtain."
He looks to the silver girl for help. She has a name. The idea is a thunderclap in the boy's mind. Names: what a novel concept. Her name is ... is ... it starts with a soft sibilant sound, sh he thinks. The entirety escapes him, but that is okay: she seems to share his mind.
HectorHe is a werewolf and they are in the spirit world and a body that stays in this world too long will shrug off its body and stay here forever. Not as a punishment but because everything here is a reflection. Reflections have no use for substance. They're born of and beyond real things.
This he knows. Not his name and not his home and not what brought them here. Only echoes these but he knows now this is not a dream.
At least he thinks he knows.
As the little wolf grows he rocks back on his heels to give it space. The wolf-girl tells him. Found and follow. He stays crouching until the little wolf who is no longer so little who smells like someone he can and cannot remember has come up past his waist and then he stands.
They have to go across the curtain. He knows this would be an easy journey for him. Like stepping through an unlocked gate. This side calls to him more than the realm does but he knows.
He takes a step back but he doesn't leave without them.
salvation.Brandon. Possibly Brian. But he is accommodating to Charlotte's nuzzling and nipping and he is playful, wagging happily at the attention. He bumps his head on hers. He wants a pack so badly. He needs a pack he has been so long without a pack, his pack, he could use a pack.
BARK.
His eyes fly wide as Charlotte barks that they found him, and so now he should follow. He looks around, and his crest falls, his tail drooping. "not here?" he whines at her, and at Erich, who is also telling him that not-here is their den, he and his new 'pack'. He goes over to the other one, long-haired male one, and bumps up against him. "tell them here, here is good."
It is unlikely that Hector will tell him any such thing. The wolf droops, saddened.
No, Brian is his name-name, only one of his names. There's another N, another R, a gleaming red glow from the horizon, but it is the wrong direction, it is a name that means the very bright and the very cold.
--
A thunderclap: that is what it is in their minds. His name is Northern Sun. He has a name and it is Northern Sun. His name is also Brian, and he has been lost in the spirit world for almost two years. They came to find him, the four of them, to bring him back to his pack, to help him find his way. Theurges go missing often enough; maybe they each, for one reason or another, felt a measure of pity for his packmates left behind
HIS PACKMATES WHO ARE ALIVE AND WAITING FOR HIM, OH GOD.
They have packmates. They all have packmates behind them, waiting for them. Oh. God. And Northern Sun has been without his for almost two years, they without him, barely feeling him alive, not knowing why he had not returned from beyond the veil.
Because he forgot.
Because he didn't have a talisman.
Or because his was torn from him, too.
--
One of them feels his name returning like a whisper, a breath before a poem: Hhh, hhh.
Another feels it encroaching, coming closer, unwanted, fearful.
Their names are returning to them. The world will return to them. Like all gates, this gate is meant to be opened, meant to be walked through. If you can just remember that it is there. If you can just remember that the barriers between are nothing more than an illusion held in place by spells that you only choose to believe in.
Names are spells. Those spells, if believed in, call them back to their lives. And their truths. And their packmates.
ErichNorthern Sun.
That is his name. This tiny-wolf, this small-wolf, this medium-wolf, this full-size-wolf who is now their packmate. Only not. He is not their packmate but he is a packmate, his pack is out there, they are waiting for him,
his name is Northern Sun.
The boy looks thunderstruck. He is wide-eyed and stunned and sucking a breath to give the news, which he thinks is good news, it must be good news, but then: what comes out is --
"Charlotte!"
And he rounds on her, his silver sister. He laughs aloud.
"Charlotte. You're Charlotte!"
CharlotteHe gives her a name. He pins her in place. She is whining. It is an animal whine. It is in the back of her throat, this whine, not precisely of protest but of something else that remains nameless as she is for another three -
- two
- none seconds.
--
And she remembers two. Her name and his name and their names and Northern Sun. Erich says,
You're Charlotte, and the wolf becomes a girl again and she is a different sort of girl now that she is laden with a name. She knows the things behind him; the dark things she can fee scritch-scritch-scratching against the recurve of her mouth.
She swallows them.
She is a girl named Charlotte and she is not laughing but she looks at Erich with a familiar affection,
and names him.
"And you're Erich."
With an odd little smile.
Then looks to Northern Sun. And says,
" - and you're Northern Sun. Come back with us. Your pack is waiting."
HectorBefore he remembers his own name he knows he has a pack on the other side unassured of his presence. That he has a mate far from here and they will have a baby any day now and if he never came home his mother is there with her. Not their names but their faces and the tethers they offer him. He knows.
And he knows these two before him. Knows they fight together though they are not pack. Stands while they remember and he waits and then he reaches out to shuck aside the velvet curtain. Maybe they can pass through with him. If not they're strong enough to do it on their own.
He does not will not promise not to leave before Northern Sun does but he stands while the wandering wolf decides whether or not to follow.
salvation.No one names Hector, but no one needs to. Hector knows things they are not meant to know. Hector knows his name. He knows the name of his mate and the considered names of his child. He knows he has a child coming. He knows the names of his packmates, current and former. He knows Erich and Charlotte, and knows Keisha. It comes back. It starts to come back.
They came to get Northern Sun because no one should be lost for so long. They came, instead of his pack, because of what this place is: memory-stealer, name-stealer. They would remain here, a whole pack of Garou, and stay with their packmate.
That is why they wanted wolves from disparate packs, with at least one of their number staying behind. It's the only way they could make sure they'd hold it together and get home again.
Home again, home again,
something-ity something.
--
Northern Sun wags slowly. They are not his pack. But his pack -- he remembers. He wuffs at them, and looks at Hector, who is drawing apart the laces of the veil to move through it. They cannot be carried on his strength of spirit. They will have to use their own. They will have to use their own, and hope that the prodigal will go with them.
He sniffs, and chuffs, and his tail does not wag. He shakes his furry head.
"My pack."
The veil is parting. On the other side is Northern Colorado, the outskirts of Fort Collins. It'll be a long run back. But their packmates will be waiting for them.
All of them.
