Ornature

It is the evening after the eclipse; the moon waning from its dizzying peak. In this old, old Caern, tempers ride lower. Restive spirits calm. The earth abides.

The days feel short now, and shorten with every successive turn. Though only a little past the dinner hour, it is quite dark already in the heart of the caern, which is where Charlotte has come to meet her tribesmate, her auspicemate, the wolf she will challenge for her rank.

Veiled-Heart is already present when Charlotte arrives. Tall and slender, with hair black as coal worn loose down her back, the Fostern is a handful of years older than Charlotte at most. Her limbs are long and her fingers bony. Waiting, she crouches on her haunches in the dry dirt, her eyes pale and bright.

It took Charlotte moons to understand that her reputation had grown enough that she could - should, perhaps - challenge for a new rank. The summer came and went and turned itself into fall and the fall -

- well, it is October. Short but still-warm days bracketed by long, chilly nights. Everything turning upon itself, now. Everything going to ground, preparing for the coming winter.

Three moon-cycles to understand and another moon-cycle to work up the courage to find Veiled-Heart and utter the words that bring them here today, near the heart of the caern, where the earth forgets itself so thoroughly that even the experienced theurges can, on certain nights, become disoriented and lose their way. Forget what they meant to remember, remember what they meant to forget.

She comes though. Human-framed, human-formed, human as she was born, live-wire taut but also strangely calm. This challenge is as natural as the turning of the seasons. Some part of Charlotte that is more wolf than girl knows that it is time. That it is long overdue, even.

So, this lovely, awkward, finely-framed girl, such a shining example of purity that her madness seems sometimes tangible to those who love her, finds Veiled-Heart where she crouches. Charlotte has a messenger bag slung across her body, where she keeps her little tricks and bribes, and shifts it - yes a bit awkwardly - over the new Mexican Sprite t-shirt she got (just because) after the first one was ruined many moons ago and gives Veiled-Heart a weird little wave by way of greeting.

"Uhm. Hi. Do I have to - like - say it all again?"

The formal challenge. The laying out of names and ancestors. It took them a solid half-hour the first time around.

Veiled-Heart, seeing Charlotte, stands at once. The motion is a poem: so spare, so pure. They are born of a finer stock than most. A madder stock, too, but at their best they are incomparable, these faithful of Falcon.

"No." A quick shake of her head. Something of that same bird-quick precision in Veiled-Heart. Perhaps that is what drew Charlotte in the first place, more than the tales -- everyone has tales, after all, and most of them so flattering you don't know what's true and what's false -- of honor and dignity and wisdom and accomplishment. Perhaps what drew Charlotte to this Fostern, this Theurge, this Silver Fang in particular was a certain secret sense of shared sisterhood. The same, the same, nearly the same.

"We don't have time for that," Veiled-Heart explains. "It seems your challenge will be a practical quest rather than an exercise in ritual, Charlotte." Like so many others who respect her, Veiled-Heart refuses to use Charlotte's derisive deedname. "You are aware of yesterday's eclipse?"

"Oh." Charlotte's heart is already beating, beating faster, beating brighter, beating like a bird beats its wings as it takes to air: the pumping specificity of muscle, the grasping desire for the sky, which she hardly remembered until she took to wing again. "Oh - "

Sharper, brighter, a practical quest makes her smile, you understand, quick and brief and unguarded.

"That's cool. 'Course I know about the eclipse. We watched it all - howled for her going and danced for her coming. Well, howled actually too but a different kind of howl that was more like dancing, is what I mean.

"What do I need to do?"

Veiled-Heart allows a brief smile for that. "Unfortunately, one of the spirits of the Caern didn't share your joy at the occasion," she says, perhaps just a touch dry. "A small Lune who was terrified by the thought of the earth's shadow swallowing his patron whole -- particularly since he makes his home in this particular caern, dedicated to this particular totem.

"He is a being of negligible power, but he is one of ours. If you can find him, track him, and convince him to return, then perhaps you will earn a better name than that which you now bear, yes?"

Charlotte has tucked her hands around the strap of her messenger bag and is holding on to the strap, worming it about as she considers the task at hand and where she might start. And there is still that odd and lovely wariness to her, which feels both animal and girlish in turn, particularly when Charlotte speaks with a virtual stranger.

Or, no. Not a virtual stranger.

Charlotte stands rather more upright and speaks rather more forthrightly and allows her curling little smiles to come more easily with Veiled-Heart now than ever she might have in the past.

"Okay, uhm. Do I get to ask a question? That's not the question I want, though. I want to ask: where was the last place anyone saw the Lune before he disappeared?"

"Right here."

Veiled-Heart takes a step back. She passes her hand through the air, as though slicing through water. In its wake comes a soft, subtle glow, strengthening beat by beat until it is bright enough to see by.

Like magic. Sometimes it is unthinkable, unfathomable, the eldritch power in the hands of a Theurge. They all have Gifts, prescribed and preformed little bits of primordial power they can draw upon, but the magic of Crescent Moons is different. More malleable. Stranger. In the right hands, far more powerful.

And to think: this is a mere Fostern Charlotte looks upon; one small step -- perhaps not even that, now -- above her.

--

In that new glow, Charlotte can see that the spot Veiled-Heart knelt over is not entirely the same as everything else in the vicinity. There's a subtle silvery sheen to the earth. And if she looks closely, there is a pattern there as well -- dirt blown in radiating lines from the center, as though something detonated here, or perhaps ascended from this spot.

Charlotte gives Veiled-Heart a darting glance. She is - briefly - breathlass as Veiled-Heart cuts through the air itself, light emanent in the wake of her hand, but then Charlotte is following the line-of-light to the place on the ground over which the other theurge was kneeling.

There Charlotte sinks to this neat little crouch on the ground, tracing the the sheen, the radiant pattern in the soil, the small and subtle signs that Something Happened Here: explosion, implosion, ascent.

And Charlotte glances up, a bit more sober, with that odd and bird-like solemnity cut through by a quick and sudden smile.

"Okay." See? The lines gleaming around her eyes. "I can take it from here."

--

She doesn't need a mirror to cross so close to the Caern's heart. Not Charlotte. The barrer between worlds is thinner for her than most as it stands, and here she can slip through it like water through a sieve.

Charlotte crosses over.

So the challenge begins.