Ornature

[Adrian] Adrian's 'home' - or, well, the first place that's more or less his own that he's ever lived, at any rate, and it feels strange to think of it as such. He knows, despite Kora not telling him, of some of what's been going on. He knows that two people he'd considered liking are no longer, at least not here and now, and this is a sad thing - but by way of making it somewhat easier to deal with, there are things to do.

There's calling Drew (who'd likely gotten his number from Moira) and letting her know he's back, there's calling Kora for the same. These things are necessary, however undesirable; not that he minds either of the women knowing he's in town, but he - like anyone else - wouldn't mind avoiding dealing with the fall out. Kora, of course, was invited to his flat when she said they needed to talk - at a meal time, because Adrian's spent the last most-of-a-week with Children of Gaia to whom such things are important. There's curry enough for both of them, set out on the table that's been cleared of academic trappings for this purpose, and the place is quite clearly that of a bachelor student. The walls are lined with built in shelves full of books, and amongst these are two clear cases full of antique weapons and tools (antique as in from a dig somewhere, pre-historic in some cases, not from the 1700s) displayed in quite an attractive manner. Over there, there's a foosball table. But mostly? There's the trappings of a man working on his masters thesis.

Kora knocks, and when Adrian answers the door, he looks as much the fashion plate as ever. "Hallo," he says, and there's a hint of a smile - pleased to see that she, at least, is alright perhaps. "Come in."

[Kora] This visit is different from the visits she made the weekend before. Then, she walked in from the either, smelling of blood and rain. Then, her name was Sorrow. Then, she had blood on her hands, not her own.

Today, she is clean. Her hair is pulled back from her face in the intricate interweaving of a French braid, which dovetails into a thick plait hanging down her back, doubled over so that the length is halved and the dark tips are tucked back up under the braid, secured with a handful rubber bands, blue and red, the sort one wraps around bundles of pencils or a stack of financial records, not the sort one finds, purposemade, in the store for securing hair.

She is dressed simply, in jeans that fit her well enough, and a pale green t-shirt, cotton shot through with something sateen, shiny. The boatneck reveals the architecture of her collarbones, though the spring colors are tempered by her black boots, the black belt cinched through the belt loops, around her hips, the braided black leather choker she wears around her neck, and the dark leather and suede bracelets she wears around either wrist.

"Adrian," - if there was an appointed time, she is either late, or early. Unless the appointed time was "sunset" or "moonrise" or something else that can be measured by movement of the celestial bodies, by the slant of light over the earth. She doesn't wear a watch. Her voice is rich and low, and her dark eyes are clear, intent. Still, the twist of her expressive mouth in response to Adrian's smile does not meet the definition of a smile, for all that it follows the fine curve of her mouth.

Just inside, she studies the apartment as she has - in the past - studied him. Takes in the cases of weapons and tools, the stacks of books. If he looks at her from the right direction, in the right light, he will see that she wears a charm that might well belong in there - chased iron, the length of a child's fingerbone, dangling from a heavy iron ring nipped through the inner cartilage of her left ear. "I trust you're well."

[Adrian] "Better than many," he says with a shrug, and his accent is a malleable thing - today, it's mostly London, with only hints of his prior upbringing. Which is, perhaps, to be expected given that he's only recently returned from time spent in England. The appointed time for this meeting was loose - 'around dinner' was all that he'd said, and 'if you get there before I do, I won't be long', though as it turns out the latter had been unnecessary. Now, the door is closed behind his guest and he nods at the table, where dinner for two is set.

It can't be particularly appetizing, this sort of conversation, and he knows it - but he also knows everyone needs to eat. Even Garou. Especially Garou. Who knows? Regardless, it is what it is.

"Time spent with family and friends was nice, and travel was uneventful. So yes, I'm well enough. Thank you." There's a pause then, and he watches her - he doesn't sit until she has, of course. It's only polite. "And I hope that you are, too. As much as can be, at least."

[Kora] Inside the apartment, Kora remains standing. Her hands are in the hip pockets of her jeans, her elbows out. The posture is easy and confident - there's nothing awkward about the way her elbows jut out, nor the way she stands in Adrian's apartment - not a stranger to him, but a stranger to the space - one who should not be confined within four walls and a ceiling. Take away the rage, though - take away that spark of vitality the kinsman can surely see, the shine of health, the faint thread of menace from the beast in her - and she could belong here. Another graduate student, maybe - in her t-shirt and jeans, in her worn black boots. Philosophy, or literature - something equally useless.

Then, her dark eyes drift from the books lining the walls (head canted to read the titles on the spines) to the table, laid out for two. The corner of her mouth quirks.

"You aren't required to feed me, Adrian." Kora says, cutting a direct look back at him, there, as he lingers, waiting for her to sit. She does move, at last, circling the cases, cutting past a stack of books, pulling out one of the chairs and taking a seat at last. " - but thank you. I'm glad your trip went well. I - " she cuts a glance down at the dishes set out, the scent of curry distinct in the air. " - I'm not sure whether you spoke with Moira, but let me tell you this before we eat."

[Adrian] "I haven't yet, no. A . . . Drew? . . . phoned me while I was in London, after you did, but she told me similarly little, other than that Moira was upset. Understandably so, from what I've gleaned."

He's a smart enough young man - it doesn't really take all that much to figure out why Moira is upset, what must have happened. From there, it's not all that difficult to guess at to whom these things happened. But then, a brief return to the other subject.

"I know I'm not required to. But I am required to eat, and it's dinner time. And my manners are hardly so atrocious as to eat in front of you." It's wryly amused, this, but that show is fleeting - soon, his face is schooled back to simple polite concern. He's full of that, this boy, even when he'd really rather not be. It's so much easier when one doesn't care about the Garou around one - for all their strength and power, for all their potential to be nearly immortal, far too many of them die, or disappear.

[Kora] Kora dips her pale head; the expression is minute, brief. Her fine features are still, then. The polite curve of her smile never reached her eyes, and now it filters from her mouth as she looks back over the neatly set table at Adrian, dressed - as ever - in the latest styles.

"My Alpha died." She is clear and dry-eyed, but there are shadows there, deep and lingering - sharpening with the words, the raw edge of her grief flashing again when she offers them to him - in her usual tone, which is rich and low and quiet. There's no hitch in her voice tonight. The roughness has been smoothed over, and she says the words without hesitation. "Kemp," she clarifies then. " - the Jarl.

"He and Moira were close. She also lost her mate, recently, and I want to be sure that she is safe. That she has the support she requires to find her strength again."

[Adrian] "I knew about Connor," he says with a nod, and if he were more like the family he'd just been visiting, he would be moving to enfold Kora in a hug - dangerous as that might be - but he does not. Still, there's sympathy in his eyes, even a limited empathy. He will never know what it's like to lose an Alpha, though he has lost family and friends, lovers too, to this war. He doesn't ask how it happened - Kemp was [is] Fenrir. There is little doubt in his mind that he went with the glory (and Glory) that all of their tribe should . . .

. . . which doesn't do anything to make it easier to bear, in the end. He hadn't known the Rotagar long, or well, but he'd seemed rather likable for a Get. Even aside from the part where he hadn't belittled or berated Adrian the way so many other Fenrir have, it had seemed that Adrian could well become friendly with him in time, much as he has with Kora (as much as anyone can with a beast of war).

"I'll do everything I can," he says, and then hesitates briefly before adding, "Lonna's gone too, isn't she?"

Pieces fall into place, and some of them fit together with ease.

[Kora] Lonna's gone too? Her features still; and then - she nods, tips her head forward in a microgesture of affirmation.

Kora holds her body in neat control, her shoulders and spine straight in the hair, her hands on her lap, not on the table. She sits squarely there, her spine as close to the midpoint of the back as a human could hope to be. There is a faint cant to her chin, though, enough that the light catches the strands of her hair, pulls out the subtle variation of color in the pale locks, emphasized by the weave of the braid.

"Joe War-Handed will answer for our kin until there is a new Jarl. He's my Alpha, now."

She says this intently, as if they were not sitting across from each other at a well-set kitchen table, the scent of curry hanging warm in the air. "I'll give you a number where you can reach him if you've need. If someone wants to claim you. If you require add. If another Garou insults your honor, injures you, or does you wrong.

"You won't be able to attend the rite, but if you have something you wish to give for Kemp's pyre, I'll take it on your behalf. I think Moira will go." Kora pauses, looks down. Her shadow, only, is reflected in the plate set before her. The movement of light and shadow captures her eye before she lifts her chin again. "I would appreciate it if you would stay with her; or if she could stay here, the night after, at the least."

[Kora] Also!
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 6, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 8) [WP]
to Adrian

[Kora] And!
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10 (Success x 6 at target 3) [WP]
to Adrian

[Adrian] [witnessed!]
to Kora

[Adrian] The bit about Joe gets a nod, and Adrian's face is unreadable following the news - what he thinks of it is anyone's guess, though it hardly matters. Really, all he can do is hope that he continues to lack in reasons to call upon the Jarl; he's been lucky thus far in his Fenrir acquaintances, but as he sees it, he can hardly expect that luck to hold out indefinitely. Eventually, one or more of them is going to think as his father and first sept had: that he's worthless, and unworthy. Whatever he thinks of himself (and he knows he's far from worthless, and that unworthy is a rather subjective matter), it's not exactly easy to hear that sort of thing, and deal with the sort of punishment that comes from it.

Really, there's nothing he can say on any of that, so he doesn't - there's simply a new [old] set to his shoulders and face, walls falling back into place far more easily than they'd been parted.

The bit about Moira, though, is different. "Of course she can stay here. I can miss class for a few days if needs be." Something to add to Kemp's pyre gets a thoughtful frown. As stated, he hadn't know the Rotagar well, or long, though he'd been pleased with what he had known. A glance goes to the cases - the things he holds most valuable, though what they're worth monetarily has little to do with it - and he nods. "I'll send something, yes."

[Kora] "It isn't necessary, Adrian - " her dark eyes track the cut of the young man's glance toward the glass cases, the old, valuable things. Her expression, as always, is still and attentive; she watches him more steadily than a human ever would. More steadily than most Garou would. If he catches her watching him, she does not look away. " - I want to emphasize that. I won't judge you by what you give or whether you give. I'm performing the rite, and I want to ensure that all our kin have the chance to contribute; but only if you wish it."

Her voice is soft; her eyes are dark and opaque now. There is a certain attenuation about her, evident only as the seconds tick by, fold themselves into minutes, knit themselves into moments, weave themselves into pieces-of-hours. "If you need something, as well, you can always come to me. I hope that that is clear."

[Adrian] "I know it's not necessary, and that you won't judge." He does, in fact, catch her watching - and for a brief moment holds her eyes. "Except that it sort of is. As it will be when," not if, it's one of those inevitable, inalienable truths, "we lose you." As it will be if and when a similar rite is performed for Max. It's just the way it is in Adrian's mind - while a great many Garou deaths, Get and otherwise, have gone by unmarked by the kin, it's different for the ones he knows. And even more different for the ones he likes.

"Thank you," he says of the intimation that he can call on her - it's infinitely preferable to calling some unknown Fenrir. "I suppose it's lucky that I'm low maintenance and tend to stay out of trouble, hmm?" Not that Max would have agreed about the latter - goodness knows, the kin's been in enough of it since he came to Chicago. It's simply been trouble he could handle on his own, for the most part. "And I hope you know the same is true for you. And not just where it applies to Moira."

He, too, is folding in on himself, tapering; there's a shrug though, and a nod towards Kora's plate. "I wasn't sure what you'd like, so I got my favorite. Comfort food, you know." Because in some ways, his homesickness has been sated by the trip to London, and in other ways, it's been drawn to the fore - so, like many, he gravitates towards the things most familiar, held most dear.

[Kora] Kora's expression does not alter measureably when Adrian remarks on the inevitability of her death. There is only this, the faint cut of a wry look, direct as she always is. Easily, she tips her pale head forward when the young man remarks on how low maintenance he is. This remark, too, is acknowledged and then folded away with the slantcast of her pale head.

The meal continues, then. Kora helps herself to Adrian's favorites. She listens to whatever stories he has about the dishes, if he has them. She sticks to the easiest topics - British food, the best beers, what makes a decent pub, how hot a curry should really be. She may tell him - passingly - of the kebab shop in Berlin where she worked, once, for three days. She doesn't say when that was, or why she was there, or where she went when she left. Or how she came to be here, in Chicago, sitting in the apartment of a young man who was born of a line of heroes in her tribe, who has been to London and back, and is homesick, and is eating curry and breaking papadum and drinking beer with a young woman who is also a young werewolf and who will die, like the rest of them, someday soon.

[Kora] The warm spring day is sinking into a cool spring night. The city is green now. Lawn crews have been out in the parks, grooming the growing grass, trimming the early growth from the trees and shrubs. There are pear trees in bloom, the blush of cherry trees in the air, and blazing displays of tulips and daffodils along the berms and medians, in the plazas and parks of city's wealthy neighborhoods. It is still cold enough to make a jacket a necessity, when the sun sinks below the horizon and the stars flare to life somewhere beyond the orange haze of light pollution.

Kora is not wearing a jacket, though. She is dressed sparely, in jeans and a t-shirt, so freshly washed that the scent of the detergent used to clean them is stronger than her own scent woven through the fibers. She is a stark, tall thing in the wash of lights in the lobby, her pale hair pulled back, plaited tonight, the braid tucked under and secured with elastic at the end. Black cotton against her pale skin, dark bracelets at her wrists, dark choker at her throat, her dark eyes and expressive mouth still tonight.

Her reflection stares back at her all the way up in the elevator, but she does not watch herself back. There are still shadows in her eyes, through the raw immediacy has gone. When she reaches the door to the apartment (counting back, remembering the singularity of the structure on the other side, the sticky consistency of the wrapped webbing, the spare weaver's song of the place), she knocks twice, then slides her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, waiting, quiet.

[Imogen] There is not a long wait before Imogen opens the door. She had already gotten up to answer the intercom, and had merely lingered in the foyer, her shoulders resting lightly against the wall.

When Kora knocks, Imogen straightens, pausing briefly before reaching for the deadbolt. It clicks softly before the kinwoman opens the door, stepping aside to let the other in.

Kora had not had the opportunity to enter or exit this way before. She had taken the Shadow, The foyer is on the edge of spacious, boasting a closet, a small side table, upon which a small bowl rests, holding Imogen's keys, her purse sitting beside it.

The kinwoman is dressed in jeans, a loosely fitted blouse. Her feet are bare, her hair is up.

"C'mon in," she says, by way of greeting, letting the Fenrir enter before she shuts the door behind her.

[Kora] "Thanks, doc." Kora returns the greeting quietly. Her hands remain in her front pockets, fitted up to the second knuckle, as she steps past the kinswoman into the spacious foyer, then precedes her into the spare living room of the expensive condominium. She is clean tonight, Kora. There is no blood on her hands; there is no blood on her thighs; the black cotton t-shirt is soft, and smells of some chemical company's idea of rain.

It smells nothing like rain, which has always smelled to her like sorrow, ozone and metal musk, some deeper suggestion of the falling sky written directly into the scent. Kora - call her Sorrow, now. Tonight, it is still her name - stands in the center of the living room, her shoulders and spine straight, her body taut underneath. The scent of sawdust in her hair.

She does not sit; not here. Instead, she stands in the center of the living room, a raw presence, for all that the moon is falling dark above them, leaving the beast in her quiet as it will ever be. She stands in the center of the living room, watches Imogen as she walks back in, the quiet slap of bare feet on the hardwood floor at odds with the heavier sound Kora's black boots make as she walks.

"We went to the Battleground," Kora's eyes are dark on the doctor's face, watching the minute movement of muscle beneath the other woman's face, feeling the inexorable pull of the woman's breeding somewhere deep in the feral part of her. "If you still want to hear the story, I'll tell it."

[Imogen] She follows Kora into the living room, but unlike her, does take a seat. It is not quite a comfortable one. She moves past the Garou and steps around the coffee table before perching herself on the arm of one of her leather sofa chairs.

She sits poised, one leg drawn in, the other stretched out, her point of balance, and watches the Fenrir. As Kora speaks, and her gaze latches unerringly on Imogen, the doctor keeps her own attention fastened. She does not flinch and does not turn away.

With her eyes on Imogen, Kora can perhaps catch the nuances of the woman's expression. The tension at the edge of her mouth, the tension at her brow. The kinwoman undoubtedly wears make up - the subtle kind which looks as much like her own skin as anything. Still, a day's wear has allowed the dark commas beneath her eyes to show through.

It has been a long week.

She is given a choice, Imogen is. In the end, she nods. She wants to hear the story.

[Kora] "You're familiar with the church," Kora begins. Her voice is low and rich; still, there is something hoarse beneath it. It is all but indetectable, except at the bottom of her register, the resonance dampened, burred. She waits just long enough for Imogen to affirm that she is. That she is familiar with the church; that she herself remembers it. " - in the Hivelands. It remains pristine, but the cursed ones and their allies built another structure on the adjoining land. A community center, with day care, a cafeteria, classes and a swimming pool, sports courts, a gym. The food was tainted; and the water, everything."

This is the story she tells.

"Just before the last full moon, the Sept sent scouts to the Church in the Hivelands, to investigate the Elk Grove Community Center. They discovered something dark in the basement on the other side, in the spirit-world - that's all Kemp-rhya and the rest knew, going in.

"They went in blind; through a long dark tunnel leading downward, black and foul. The air was humid, too. There were six of them. Kemp. Another ragabash, three full moons, and a theurge. My Alpha took point as they crept downward. There was a skirmish part-way down, a sentry spirit that they felled before it could sound the alarum." She says the word like that: alarum - as if it were a thing, a call. "Then they came to the mouth of the tunnel, where it opened into the basement. The place was thick with bane-spirits. There were a pair of cursed ones, too - pulling more bane-spirits out of the mouth of a vortex - a Wyrmhole - regularly birthing new banes.

"Kemp-rhya was a Rotagar; he was absolutely hidden as he crept to the mouth of the tunnel, surveyed the scene that the scouts before had failed to discover. Banshee followed him, stuck close to his side.

"She did not have his skill, though.
She was visible to all."

[Silence] A small improvement: he doesn't simply appear inside Imogen's apartment. He appears out in the goddamn hall and thumps on the door with the heel of his hand.

[Imogen] You're familiar with the church, Kora begins and waits for Imogen's response.

"I am."

Sorrow continues. Imogen listens.

A frown marks her brow as the Galliard pauses in her telling. "And then?" she prompts, though one imagines she can guess. that Banshee was seen. That Kemp is dead. It occurs to her that this is pointless. She does not care how or why this happened.

It doesn't matter.

The sound of pounding on her door turns her head. The heel of a palm is different than the rap of the knuckles, the sound more muted, broader.

"Excuse me."

Absent, to Kora, as the kinwoman gets to her feet and crosses to the foyer. After checking the peephole, she reaches for the doorknob. It is worthy of note that she had not locked the door after Kora's entrance. There is no sound of undoing the deadbolt, before she opens the door.

"Rohl," she greets him, stepping aside.

[Silence] At least there's this. He's cleaned up. He's changed out of the clothes that smelled of death. Washed, bathed, even razored his jaw. He looks lean and hungry, as though the rage that fills the room to the brim has eaten a hole in him.

"'Gen." He looks past her. "Kora." Not much surprise there.

[Kora] "Silence-rhya." Kora returns, standing in the middle of Imogen's living room, her hands in her pockets, down to the second knuckle. Her narrow-shouldered frame is cheated toward the door as Imogen pads down the hall to answer the pounding knock. She remains still, standing there - her hands forgotten in her pockets now - as Silence enters the room. She does not call him his human name. She cannot contain him in his human name.

Her wide mouth is still; a new tension has entered her frame, the line of her lean body taut beneath her dedicated clothing - black t-shirt, PIXIES across it in white letters - jeans, black boots laced up her calves. Her hair is pulled back in a French braid, clean - her dark eyes stark and wary, flashing over the Athro's face - the barest impression of his eyes entering her mind's eye - before leveling out somewhere between his chin and his mouth. She breathes out, turns stiffly to Imogen, lifting her gaze in the kinswoman's direction, then - a cool reservoir of breeding against the brutal rage burning through Silence, singing in the air.

"I can come back, Doc. If you'd like." Then, back to Silence. " - or stay, -rhya. If you want to hear this now, too."

[Imogen] Silence's entrance has created an abrupt change in the air. His rage sucks oxygen from the living room. It shakes what air is left, vibrating it until the very atoms seem to irritate the skin.

Imogen lets him past her as he steps in, turning away to shut the door. The rage at her back digs into her spine, igniting the nerves.

He enters the living room, and she is not far behind.

Her breeding must be a sweet balm compared to the rage. Or perhaps, worse, just another sensation to be felt in a cacophony of irritating sensations.

Kora addresses them both, and Imogen pauses before saying simply, "She and her pack went to the Battleground to see Kemp's death," to Silence, by way of further explanation. The explanation comes more or less easily. It would not have, even eight months ago.

"She's here to say what happened."

[Silence] Silence says nothing at all. His eyes follow Kora when she asks if she should stay or go. Imogen when she explains Kora's presence. Back to Kora, then, assessing, penetrating, until finally he nods -- a short, upward jerk of the chin.

He doesn't sit. Or even take his shoes off. He comes in just past the foyer and leans his shoulder to the wall, listening.

[Kora] Kora repeats herself. Imogen hears, again, the prologue. The church; the community center; the taint. The scouts who investigated, and who failed to find the Wyrmhole. The team that Wyrmbreaker assembled to descend into the basement. This time, though, she names the Garou who followed her Alpha into the tunnel, who descended into the blind heat of the basement: Ankle-biter. Banshee. sklora-Myrgen. Cold Death. Moving Mountain. The names are always strange in human tongue. Otherwise, the words she chooses are spare, plain and direct.

She tells Silence the same story she told Imogen, her narrow body turned toward him, her dark eyes respectfully lowered. Even so, it is difficult for her to look at him and see human skin; and see how human skin can contain so much rage.

The precipice is the same. When the retelling of the prologue is finished, Kora shifts her body language subtly to include Imogen in the telling. Her dark eyes move, minutely, from the kinswoman's direct gaze to Silence's face, without meeting his eyes - or even coming close.

"They saw Banshee at the mouth of the tunnel, and charged. There were two cursed Garou; four bane-spirits, more being born from the Wyrmhole. The cursed Garou charged at Banshee. Mama Ankle-biter was in the center of the group, the only theurge. She began summoning a spirit to close the Wyrmhole, and the banes swarmed her. My Alpha took down one of the cursed Garou. Banshee and Cold Death killed another - not before he ordered the bane-spirits to kill the Theurge. One of the banes attacked Moving Mountain, but the rest clawed toward Mama Ankle-biter.

"sklora-Myrgen and my Alpha threw themselves between the bane-spirits and the theurge. sklora-Myrgen took the brunt of two attacks, and was badly wounded.

"My Alpha took four blows. The first two did not touch him. The third wounded him.

"The fourth killed him. He did not rise."

She pauses, her generous mouth flattened, her body tense, her hands still sunk in the terribly ordinary pockets of her worn jeans. There is a flare of anger corded somewhere in the undertone of the words as she speaks them, as the story of the fight unfolds. It is the spark and hiss of a match; the flare of a candle, dwarfed by the modi's rage - but it is there underneath it all.

"We fought the battle five times. Once as they fought it. Then: four more. We each intercepted the blow that killed our Alpha.

"It killed War-Handed and Gut-Song. Blood Summons and I survived, but fell unconscious from the force of it.

"The rest fought better after that. They closed the Wyrmhole, eventually.

"That's the story."

[Imogen] Silence leans against the wall, barely inside Imogen's condominium, making no attempt to make himself at home.

It is perhaps a little disconcerting. Two Garou, both with their shoes on, both standing in her living room. And Imogen, crossing the room, her body slight, breakable and fragile.

She takes her seat again on the arm of the sofa chair, turned toward the Garou. She watches Kora while she speaks. She does not frown outright, but there is a tension to her brow, to her jaw, her mouth as the Skald speaks.

There is silence at the end, a stillness. Then Imogen stirs, straightening. Kora is more easily in her line of sight than Decker - she looks at the former, only.

"Thank-you."

Simple enough.

[Silence] Shrouded in so much rage, Silence is almost divorced from it; the way the sun will flame out a camera and leave a paradoxical darkness in its place. The heat-lightning of his primal presence crackles and lances around him, but the modi himself is expressionless, listening, his lips now and then twitching as though he wants to snarl. When he first heard of Kemp's death,

(James was freshly dead in the back of the Barracuda.)

he flung everything in his den at the walls, crushed it all, broke it. For a moment that same promise of violence is in the air, curdling it, turning it hard and cutting as blades. Near at hand: he could throw the kitchen table. He could batter the stereo system to plastic and metal in one or two punches. He could --

do what he does, which is nothing at all. Which is: to shift his weight faintly. Close and open his eyes, a slow blink. He knows he should feel grief. He knows he should mourn the man who was once a packmate to him. Who was a brother to him still; whom he loved, though he didn't even fucking like him. He knows he should have something more to say, something to ask. He should tease the details out. He should ask for the specifics. Who. When. Where. What did they do. Every iota. Every minutiae. Everything, until he can reconstruct the scene in his mind; until he can judge for himself

who was right
and who was wrong
and what the sum total of Kemp's death meant.

None of this comes to mind. He cannot summon the thoughts, the feelings. Silence doesn't say anything after all. He snarls -- a short, rough, coughing noise spat from a human throat, through bared human teeth. Then he levers off the wall, turns on his heel. The door's jerked open too fast. The tongue catches the groove and shakes the frame. When it slams shut behind him, it rattles the windows in their panes.

They can hear his heavy footsteps going down the hall toward the elevator. Short visit.

[Kora] This is what she does: witness the solar flare of rage around Silence, her eyes open, just averted from the center of the whirlwind. Her jaw is set, her lips drawn back against her teeth. Kora does not close her eyes, though she holds herself with the taut expectancy of someone anticipating a blow when he coughs out an inhuman snarl through his too-human through.

Then, the opens and slams shut. The windows rattle; in her mind's eye, in her imagination, the building itself shakes. That's how some would tell it - the tower itself shook from the force of his rage - though she is too plainspoken for such histrionics.

The truth is enough.
The truth is worse.

"Doc," - this is later, after the windows have stopped rattling, when the oxygen has returned to the room. When the rage that hung around them like a cloud of combustable sawdust awaiting the errant spark it requires to explode has leaked away. Kora turns stiffly back to the kinswoman, her muscles aching from the tense line in which she has held herself since she arrived, a different sort of afterburn. Her voice is quiet. It always is. " - the rite is tomorrow. I'll come for you, if you want to attend. Or take you later, after it is done, if you prefer that."

[Imogen] Her attention had turned as Decker had snarled, her eyes had followed him when he stalked toward the door. She had not flinched as the door had been whipped open, and slammed shut.

One of her neighbours is currently home and having a very bad night. Tense and unsure why, they turn on the television and try to find something cheerful to watch to cure them of hteir insomnia and soothe them from bad dreams.

Kora speaks, and the doctor turns to look at the Skald.

"I thought of something else yeh might want to burn with him," she says, as she gets to her feet. "Eggrolls."

A shadow of a pause, barely more than a breath. "I'll attend the rite."

[Kora] Her acknowledgment is spare, a faint tip of her pale head, the sweep of the lights across the crown, the intricate interweaving of the French braid in which she has secured it. Then, wetting her lower lip with the tip of her tongue, Kora reaches into the hip pocket of her blue jeans, pulls out a folded piece of paper, holds it out to Imogen as she rises.

"I found a letter among his things. If you'd like to read it." The paper is held between her fore and middle finger. If Imogen makes no move for it, it disappears quickly.

[Imogen] To refuse to attend the rite is weakness. She will attend, not because she wants to, but to say that she will not is tantamount to saying that she cannot bear to face it.

To refuse to read the letter would be much the same.

There is much that Imogen does simply because to do anything else would be weak.
She refuses to be that.

So, after a moment of looking at the letter held in Kora's hand, she steps forward, reaching out to take it. She does not open it or even glance at the handwriting, visible through the paper, and on one side where Kemp had labelled it.

"Give it back to you tomorrow, shall I?"

[Kora] "Sure." Kora says, quiet. Releasing the paper easily, looking away, toward the dark windows, their reflections evident on the rattled panes of glass as she does so. Her hands return to her pockets, the front ones, slide in to the first knuckle. " - 'night Doc. I'll see you tomorrow."

Then she steps neatly away from the kinswoman, circling the spare furniture of the living room to foyer.

She lets herself out, Kora.
Neither the windows nor the door rattle in their frames.

The door snicks quietly closed behind her.

[Imogen] "Goodnight," Imogen answers, simply. She lets Kora see herself out.

Alone in her condominium, she puts down the letter on the coffee table, unopened. Her fingers push through her hair. The elevator has long since risen to retrieve the Fenrir Skald, and begun its descent.

A little later, she leaves the apartment, herself, the weight of her guns cool against her back, settling her coat about her body as she steps out into the hallway, locking the door before heading for the lifts.

[Moira] Sunday night. Easter.

A day of rest to the Christian faithful. The celebration of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. Moira didn't much care for it. It was just another holiday that had strayed far away from its original meanings and became commercialized by chocolate bunnies and colorful plastic eggs. The kinswoman of the Fenrir sat at the round kitchen table in the loft apartment she currently shared with a roommate and ex-coworker from Hill House.

The blond Coggie kin wasn't at home, out of town for the weekend visiting relations. Which left Moira to her own devices. She had remembered the warning on the answering machine that told her not to go out and do anything stupid. So, she didn't. Instead, her laptop sat open and she poured over a file or two, researching land developments for her newest employer.

There was a half-filled bottle of Green Spot whiskey sitting on the table several inches away from her with an empty, unused shot glass. Her gaze straying from the monitor to it every now and then.

[Sorrow] Sunday night. Easter. The mystery of the open tomb.

Moira is sitting at her kitchen table, in the warm coccoon of the temporary home, her features bathed in the unnatural illumination of the laptop on the kitchen table. There are pictures of lots and vacant buildings, neighborhood plat maps and local blogs. There are home-for-sale listings and legal notices in the paper. Property transfers, in dry flat script.

Then, the space between seconds bends, and the air in the otherwise still apartment blows past her fast enough to lift her hair, as if she were standing with her face to the wind, when the still air is displaced by the sudden presence of a familiar frame in this unfamiliar space. Here is Sorrow, tall, straight-shouldered, narrow-framed. Her blonde hair is loose down her back, blonde and blonde, except for the last half-dozen inches, some long-grown-out dye job.

Her pale skin is stark white, the blood drained from her, and her eyes are terrible, clear and dark. There is water on her cheeks, water in her hair, the scent of rain on her skin, and under that, blood. She has washed it from her hands and her arms, scrubbed her pale face clean, but blood remains on the thighs of her jeans, stiffens the hem of her black t-shirt.

"Moira," she begins, her voice stark and raw, the echo of the words lingering in the shell of her ear. "I have news."

[Moira] The sensation startles the young kin. It sends a shiver racing down her spine, skidding across the spare skin of her shoulders and arms, barely covered by the thin cotton of a black camisole. Silver and gold twinkles at her throat, catching the light in a bright glimmer of two round objects that dangle from a chain, nestling into the hollow of her throat.

The simple gold band of a woman's ring clicking against the half dollar sized coin of the wolf-head medallion Kemp had given back to her.

Her body jolts upright, the chair falling back as her calves shove against it, tipping it over. She turns, bracing against the edge of the table as her hand reached for the thick green bottle of expensive whiskey to use as a weapon. It is lifted up by the neck, turned over quickly and brought up with a start. Blue eyes narrow and then widened as recognition strikes a sense of clarity into Moira's brain.

"Kora!" Her voice is loud, carrying the name with an echo throughout the small kitchen to bounce against wood cabinets and marble counter tops. Her grip lessens on the bottle for a second, but fingers immediately tighten - knuckles turning white.

"What do you mean you have news?" Black hair spills in waves around her face, pooling across her shoulders to fall down and gather over the soft swells of her chest. She can feel her heart start to hammer loudly in her ears, breath catch in her throat. She was shaking before Kora could even get the words out to tell her.

"Kora?"

[Sorrow] Moira says her name twice; there's no look of acknowledgment from the Garou, at the kinswoman's naming of her. She has one name tonight, the name she was given by her tribe, and it is wholly different than the name she was given by her mother - who only wanted to escape them. It is raining outside again; a warm spring rain, gentler tonight than it was the night before. Still, sometimes the wind rises, whips up from the lake, rattles the panes of glass in the windows, lashes rain against the glass.

Sorrow's shoulders are damp, and the thighs of her jeans. Her hair, too, is darker for the rain, at the crown, sliding in a mass down her back. Humans look each other in the eyes, direct, when they tend such terrible news. Sorrow looks at Moira now, meets her eyes with look that is spare and unrelentingly direct.

"Kemp died."

She offers the truth, plain and unadorned. She offers sorrow, without measure.

"He didn't come back to us."

[Moira] Kemp died.

Two words. Two very simple words is all it takes to shatter the world. The weight of the bottle is heavy in her hand, arm dropping down to her side as fingers begin to lose slack on the neck, it dangles precariously from between the first knuckle, threatening to escape from Moira's hand and fly to freedom and the floor.

He didn't come back to us....

The bottle of Green Spot finds freedom and destruction, released from Moira's grip to strike against the tiles, exploding in a wet sticky mass at her feet, green glass splashing like tiny shining stones in the kitchen's light. She brings both of her hands up to cover her mouth. Her breath drawn in until she couldn't breath, lungs contracted as every inch of her becomes so tight and coiled up the kin might shatter if touched.

"NO!" It is a strong sound that one word, it tears from Moira's throat - her voice twisted and snarling as it snags on heavy sob. Blue eyes become watery and red she tries to hold back the shedding of tears, but even that Moira cannot control. "You let him die?"

[Sorrow] You let him die?

The whiskey bottle shatters; glass shards are everywhere. They smell like the bottom of a barrel, just tapped. In the darkness, on the hardwood floor the alcohol has the color of enshadoweded blood, but not its viscosity, and not its warmth. The blood on Sorrow is dry now, old. It was old when she took her portion of his body, and carried him with her pack.

You let him die? Moira demands - and there is a moment between breaths where the young woman inside flinches before the beast flares all around her, a tinderspark of anger to the hazey cloud of stark rage and shock that has yet to yield. Sorrow bares her human teeth, her fine, mobile mouth pulls back from them into an expression that can only be read as rictus - before she finds the threads of her control, her constant, abiding will, the ancestral memory that bathes her conciousness in the lessons of a hundred lifetimes.

"I felt him die."

Her lips come together, her mouth is held stiff, but closed, beneath the worn, blood-stained clothing she wears, Sorrow is lashed tight as a yardarm made ready for an oncoming storm.

[Moira] There is rain beating down on the city outside, tapping a rhythm on the windowpanes as it grows stronger for the briefest of seconds. The sky lights up in a brilliant shade of violet and white-hot light as it flickers and flashes, streaking in crackling lines to bath both Garou and kin. The kitchen sparks with that light for another second, and then dies down to the dull tones of fluorescent lighting.

Kora felt him die. They were pack mates, they shared that spiritual bond only permitted between werewolves, and wolves alike. Moira had glimpsed it once, such a bond that was nothing more than a fleeting memory in the back of her mind. She looks away, downcast her head as her eyes shut tightly.

Her hands uncoil from her mouth, lifting up to drag through black hair and shove it all back out of her face, like it was an annoyance to her. She hated the feel of it, hated the Fenrir that stood in this kitchen with her, hated the overwhelming sensation of grief that erupts inside of her. She knew this day would come, but not so soon... not today.

The convulsions that rupture through the kin are visible, Moira shakes as she feels her legs start to give out from under her and sinks down to her knees. Not caring as she can feel shards of glass bite into her calves. Her voice quivering is rather soft, "What killed him..."

[Sorrow] "We're going to Battleground," Sorrow replies, quiet. The words are likely meaningless to the kinswoman. We're going to Battleground. We're going to the battleground. The phrases are so close as to be indistinguishable. Her voice is raw, underneath. She has said this before; she has given this much of the story, worst than most others.

We don't know.

" - to find out." Moira sinks to her knees, her dark hair a cloud around her face and shoulders, the broken glass grinding into her unprotected flesh, even the shallowest of wounds made more painful by the pool of spilled whiskey on the floor, laving the cuts, washing the sharp and bitter and clean. Let the blood run clear.

The room stinks of alcohol. It seems, too, far too small. There are too many walls, too many lights, and the sweep of the storm is made distant by the well-built windows, by the well-sealed doors, by the warm of this human-built place, with all its humming gagdets, all its artificial connections. Moira sinks to her knees, and Sorrow steps forward, the spilled whiskey rippling out from her every step in concentric circles, expanding the stain of the spill on the floor. Even with Moira, she sinks to her haunches and reaches out, pulling the girl up from the floor with a grip from beneath her shoulders, then shifting her grasp on Moira to carry her, one arm threaded beneath her arm, around her back, the other beneath her thighs - literally carry the other woman out of the puddle of spilled whiskey and shattered glass, out of the kitchen toward the living room, the couch, stopping twice to still the girl's struggles, balancing her weight with a knee as fulcrum beneath reaching the couch and setting her down, carefully.

"I'm going to call someone." Sorrow announces, boxing Moira in with her tall body. "Okay?"

[Moira] Moira can't hear the words that follow. The answer to her question isn't the one she wants to hear, isn't one she understands. A shadow passes over her, Kora swims into her peripheral. Nostrils flare out, breathing in the smell of alcohol, the faint stench of blood that may start to well up in tiny cuts from the biting teeth of glass. She ignores the sharp stings of alcohol-soaked cuts, her body trembling of its own violation has gone limb.

The female Skald encircles her, arms reaching out to find a hold on the Kin and lift her up. Moira tries to struggle, her hands and arms pulling close to her body for a second as her head snaps up to stare directly at Kora. She is has the strength of a fussing child in her struggles, going weak in the Skald's arms.

Once they exit the kitchen and find a new place in the living room, Kora sets her down on the couch. Moira retracts from her instantly, pulling her legs up to her chest, wrapping her arms around herself and looks away. Hair falling across her face, sticking to wet cheeks and temples as the flood of tears roll down to her chin quietly. Her chest rises and falls in quick pants, air rushing in and out of her nose.

Kora mentions something about calling someone... she blinks once, lips part to speak as her tongue felt thick in her mouth. "Who?"

[Moira] (limb-limp)

[Sorrow] Sorrow seats herself on the coffee table, across from the couch, leans forward, her forearms braced on her thighs, her elbows pointed sharply outward. She is lives Moira's storm of grief at a terrible, dry-eyed remove, her gaze stark and bright, her every muscle in her lean frame snapped taut. There is something of a ripcord to her - behind all that, waiting to be unleashed - but not now. Not here. Not ever here.

"I'm going to call Adrian. Okay? I'll ask him to come over and stay with you until you're stronger - "

The lights in the kitchen cut through the living room, long strands of boxed light shine on Moira's tear-stained face. Sorrow leans over, curves her long-fingered hands over the girl's cheek, pulling strands of black hair out of the tracks of her tears, smoothing them aside.

[Moira] Every night for the past couple of weeks guilt has gnawed at her from the inside at the sudden loss of a mate - of Connor, who was snuffed out even before Moira could get a chance to really know him; it had made her numb. Now, the news of Kemp's death, stirs a turmoil of emotions that she has tried not to feel, it opens up old wounds and tears clean new ones. Kemp had been something to Moira that Connor might have one day become if he'd lived long enough.

She sits still, seconds ticking by as an ache starts in the center of her chest that begins to spread down into her stomach and makes her feel sick. A narrowing of eyes to form slits on the Garou sitting in front of her. She jerks her head back in a sudden motion as Kora reached out to smooth back the hair from her cheek.

"Stop." Her voice is harsh and low, a snarl hissed out, "Don't touch me." Kora was going to call Adrian, to stay with her until she was stronger, which insinuates that Moira was weak. She felt it, even as shakes uncontrollably on the couch. Moira swallows the lump forming in the back of her throat.

[Sorrow] "He loved you." The touch was passing; not it is finished. Sorrow's skin is hotter than even Moira's grief-flushed cheek, and in the wake of her touch, the ambient air is cool. Beyond that, she does not react to Moira's sudden, lashing snarl - Sorrow with her dry eyes, with her wet cheeks. Sorrow, with her fine voice gone raw underneath, as if it had been scrubbed by diamond dust. "Whatever passed between you, he wanted you to know."

Then she rises, in one smooth, controlled motion - stands straight, circles the edge of the coffee table, allows Moira whatever space she wants to have.

"You will be permitted into the Caern to attend the rite, or to visit his grave. I staked my honor for you, Moira. And, in some ways, his. I know that you won't disgrace him. We will do the rite on the night of the New Moon. You have time to decide whether you want to come then, or later."

Then, circling away from the young kinswoman, Kora finds a her cheap cell phone in her pocket, makes a quiet call that last - perhaps - a minute and a half before returning. "Adrian is away until mid-week. I'll call Drew."

[Sorrow] Imogen is left alone in the living room for five minutes. Her kitchen sink runs the entire time. The water drums its familiar pattern on the stainless bowl, interrupted now and then - stopped, filling hands, a glass, some leaking vessel - to sluice through in a great deluge.

Then Sorrow returns. Her hands and arms are clean, washed of the blood. She has scrubbed her face clean, too. Water is still drying on her cheeks and brow; her hairline is dark with wet, but her dark eyes are still clear. Now, her news delivered, the words spoken, the evenness of an ordinary night broken open by them, she feels ungainly in the sparse surroundings, the precise, spare orderliness of Imogen's home.

"There will be a rite," she continues, her voice clear in the room, soft but still too loud to her ears. Underneath, it sounds as if her vocal cords have been scoured with sandpaper - " - when we come back with the story." - until the blood runs. "I spoke with the Warder. He will allow you, Tristan, and Moira to attend the rite, or visit the grave, whichever you choose."

[Imogen M.] Outside, rain soaks the windowpane, streaking it, pattering against it. When the wind blows, the rain lashes, but more often than not it simply falls arrhythmically, a pit-patter.

While Kora cleanses herself of her fallen packmate's blood, Imogen does not remain in the living room. She gets up, her bare feet quiet on the floor, and disappears down the hallway toward the apartment's bedrooms. One door opens, then closes a few seconds later.

She stands in the silence of her bedroom, and stares briefly at the window. There are no lights on, and the rain casts irregular shadows, created by the light passing through. She watches the patterns without seeing, her chest rising and falling with the rhythm of her deliberate breaths. She does nothing and makes no sound.

She hears the water turn off, and turns away, pulling open the door and stepping back down the hallway. She returns to her living room as not long after Kora does.

Her hands smooth over the curve of her jean clad thigh, a meaningless gesture before she slides her fingers into the pockets of her jeans. They slide as deep as the first knuckle, her thumbs hooking into her belt loops. By this, her hands are still.

She watches the Fenrir woman when she speaks; she carries herself stiffly, tightly. Her posture is perfect, if rigid. Her jaw is clenched.

"What would the rite be like?"

[Sorrow] When Imogen returns, Sorrow is standing, facing the windows - not the walls, blank and spare, not the inevitable, merciless clock mounted to one of them. This room is lit from within; the shadows cast by the raindrops against the glass are far less distinct. The city lights visible through the panes are smeared as if by some painterly artiface into streaks of color, illuminated but, instinct, impersonal.

The question catches her unawares. Imogen can read the surprise in the creature's chased pale brows, rising over her dark eyes. Sorrow tips the pale crown of her head away from Imogen, lifts her jaw and chin toward the kinswoman - the animal cant with which she must be, by now, so familiar from these beasts in human skin - and studies her face. Her gaze drops to Imogen's hands, then flickers back to her eyes.

A spare moment passes; something pulls taut in Sorrow's jaw. "We will build a boat," she says, the rawness in her voice more clear now. " - or find one. For the rite, we will put his body in it, with trophies from his kills. Charms for his next life. Alcohol or - " the smile that flares here is a wintry one; little more than a spasm of pain. " - hot chocolate. Pictures of his son, if you have them. Reminders of his life in death. Then, we will build a pyre, and burn it all until it is ash. If the Mistress of the Rites deems it fitting, we will give it all to Maelstrom.

"While the pyre is burning, we will tell his story. The Skalds, and the Fenrir, and the Galliards. Anyone who wishes to speak, from dusk to dawn, so that the Aesir in Valhalla know who is coming to him. So that they know what they have gained, whom we have lost, and what he means to us."

[Imogen M.] Imogen's eyes are dry, almost unblinking as Kora speaks, a tension at her brow speaking of a frown the kinwoman does not quite permit. Her elbows are drawn tight to her body, her fingers rigid, where they are stuck in her jeans' pockets.

There is distance between them and Imogen does not move to close it. Nor does she move to make herself more at home or comfortable. She stands as she is, her feet cool on the hardwood floor.

She swallows reflexively - in that gesture her emotions breaching the surface then settling again.

A pause. "He built a catapult a few years ago. To throw snowballs at other Garou. It would be worth burning."

[Sorrow] "We'll burn it, Doc." The words are constrained. Sorrow is looking away again, out into patterned darkness, the striated lights smeared against the windows. Her arms are stiff at her side, held taught and straight at the elbow, defining the narrow line of her rigid frame, as if she had been constructed of right angles, right angles alone, nothing more.
"We'll burn it. Maybe - " here, she offers another strained smile. This one has some sort of terrible light behind it, though, like the promise of dawn on the darkest night of the year. " - someone has a snowball. In a freezer somewhere.

"Maybe the spirits of Fenris' brood will make it snow."

---

Sorrow's eyes are dry, but her face is wet. Baldr's brother took an oath

His hands he washed not nor his hair combed
Till Baldur's bane was borne to the pyre

- but Sorrow lives in this world. She has already washed her face and hands. There is something in her throat that does not belong there. It started the size of a pea, a bean, but it is a living thing, grief that is rage, rage that is grief, and like a seed it grows. She swallows hard against it.

"You know Tristan, right?" she looks back up, her face stark, white. "Will you tell him?"

[Imogen M.] Her mouth moves slightly as Sorrow suggests that Fenris' brood might make it snow. The expression stretches her mouth, but offers no light to her eyes.

"Perhaps."

She continues, she asks of Tristan. "I do," she says. "I will. He'll want to attend the rite, I imagine."

Her gaze moves, shifting toward the window, then back again.

"Does Rohl know? Silence."

[Sorrow] There is a moment, then, where Sorrow turns away from the window, looks back to Imogen. The greatest spasm of her grief is passed; her skin is white, and her eyes are dark, but clear and so direct. Imogen will tell Tristan. Sorrow lifts her chin in Imogen's direction. "Thank you."

Then, with the last question, Sorrow's gaze sharpens somehow. As if she were a blade passed over a whetstone, casts sparks. "He should have heard the howls. Or - " The cliath shakes her head, her loose hair rippling in the artificial light. It was raining in the spirit world, and she can still hear the song of it from her hair, smell the rain musk when she moves. "I don't know."

Her voice is stricken, raw. Then, "I will find him next. I will tell him."

[Imogen M.] She shakes her head slightly. "I can."

A flick of her gaze away, toward the clock, still measuring the seconds, inexorably. The tendon in her jaw shifts as she tightens it again. The tension in her jaw has been relentless, making the joint ache with pressure.

She turns back.

"Thank-you," she says, abruptly, deliberately. "For coming to tell me. You should get back t'yer pack."

[Sorrow] "I think the rite," this is her farewell. " - will be under the new moon."

Sorrow says nothing more.

She'll return, when they return, the battle that felled him under their skin, again and again and again. Inevitable. Invariable. Changed by their presence. Charged by their presence, and still: inevitable, already written into the records of the world.

She will return, later: with word of the rite. She will return, later. For now, she turns and finds her reflection in the stormcast windows of Imogen Slaughter's 9th storey condominium, stark white against the painted darkness. She turns, and finds her reflection - steps through -

- and is gone.

[Imogen M.] A spirit leads her, her gnosis diminished in the exchange, seeking the red-haired woman with Fianna blood in her veins.

Perhaps Kora describes her to direct the little air gaffling the way it needs to go. Maybe she gives a variety of details. Fianna-born, Fenrir-claimed. Musician, doctor. Gun-wielder and mated. No children.

Whatever it is, the air gaffling dashes off, chattering at itself in whispers as it forces the Garou to fairly run to keep up with it. It darts and swerves, dips and dives, and for all intents and purposes, appears to be having a gay old time.

Its joy and glee is a sharp contrast to the purpose of this visit, the motive behind it. It is likely a stark contrast to Kora's mood, a sharp and dark irritant.

It leads her from the docks toward more affluent areas of town. Warehouses give way to office buildings give way to apartments stacked atop of restaurants and stores. Eventually it leads Sorrow to a building, half visible in the umbra, it's supports and struts made of webbing, crawling with spiders. The world here is grey and monochrome, from the gauzy pale webbing to the tiny grey arachnids which scuttle over them. The ground beneath Sorrow's feet is grey, the sky above, the colour of old tin.

Water falls with a whisper of spirits, a murmur of sound. When droplets fall over her skin or her fur they hum.

A little ways away, a light spirit dances in the cusp of a metal elemental, a street lamp in the tellurian.

She is led up the side of the building to the ninth floor, prompted to climb it, the webbing catching at her, and sticking softly. A few smaller spiders crawl closer, then scurry away when she moves. At the ninth storey, she is led through a gap to walk down a hallway, surrounded by metal elementals, groaning mightily beneath the weight of the others above them.

The apartment at the end of the hall - she reaches where there would be a door - the air elemental dances through, making a soaring sound of joy - mission accomplished.

[Sorrow] There are other choices Sorrow could make. She could leave, climb back down the sticky superstructure, find her way to the street, slip from this world to the other in some shadowed alcove, some bolt-hole, walk through a door as if it were a door and find her way back, counting in the back of her mind, the steps and the storeys, staring her way through the challenge at the security desk, pushing her way past the doorman.

She could knock.
She could walk through the front door.

- there's blood on her hands, though. There's death in her dark eyes. There's a reason the Nation calls her Sorrow.

In lieu of the alley and the street, the doorman and the elevator, the counting of steps and the memorizing of directions, Sorrow walks follows the singing air elemental through the suggestion of the door, stands on the flimsy net of patternwork that defines the building in the spirit world and first - looks. And then - looks at her reflection. And then - steps through.

---

There is a distinctive pop in the apartment. It is not the first time a Garou has entered Imogen's home in this manner. It is, however, the first time this Garou has entered Imogen's home in this manner. It is the first time this Garou has entered Imogen's hom.

Sorrow is tall and spare, and her hair is loose. She has blood on her hands, smeared on her bare arms, on her jeans and her t-shirt. The t-shirt says PIXIES on it, white letters on black. Dr. Slaughter has seen it innumerable times before. They wear the same clothes as they wear the same skins - because the clothes are woven into their beings, and become their kins.

None of the blood is hers.

Still, there is something stark about her pallor. An ER physician would read it as shock. They would not be wrong. A Garou would read it as rage. They would not be wrong. So: stark in her pallor, contained, her body stiff and lashed, her dark eyes appallingly clear, her voice more quiet and direct that Imogen has perhaps ever heard it before, Sorrow pushes through the Umbra, steps into the Fianna doctor's apartment, the song of the air elemental still a sharp burr under her skin, an irritant she cannot shake, and turns in a circle on her heels, looking for Imogen.

When she sees her, she says. "Doc. I have news."

[Imogen M.] The gauntlet bends, then tears, the pop the sound of the air sucking through the gap made between the worlds and then abruptly cutting off.

Where there had been no one, there is now a person - a familiar form. Where there had been the smell of wood and leather, there is now added scents of blood and sweat and Rage. It smells like burning ozone, like scorched oxygen. The smell of the Umbra lingers in the air, but Imogen can neither name nor describe it, other than feeling vaguely unsettled.

Under normal circumstances, she would be relived when it faded. An easing of tension she had not even known she had.

She is seated on an armchair in the living room, one foot tucked beneath her body, the other on the flat and bare on the floor. She is dressed in jeans, a pale blouse, her hair pulled back and absently out of the way, held in place by a covered elastic.

Her apartment is sparsely decorated and pristine. There is no television set, no DVD player. There are no photographs on the wall.

Kora does not belong here - a beast of blood and bone and marrow, of Rage and death. Of earthly, messy things, with her earthly, messy news. She stands out, a beast dressed in a human's attire. A stone dropped into a still pool, causing ripples across a once smooth surface.

The kinwoman straightens from her chair, turning sharply toward the intrusion, her leg unbending, her other foot coming to the floor. It is not entirely sure what she had expected, but it had not been this. Kora can see the doctor's dark eyes touch the blood on her hands, on her arms, on her jeans and t-shirt. Where blood would smear after carrying a body.

I have news, Kora says, and the woman's jaw tightens, her mouth clamps shut. She does not need to be told why Kora is here. The purpose at least, if not the details.

She does not need to be told that this conversation is not one she wants to have.

There is a clock on a wall somewhere and it ticks the time. It breaks the silence and ticks five times before Imogen lifts her chin, and undoes her mouth.

"Who?"

[Imogen M.]

[Sorrow] This has happened a thousand times a thousand times a thousand times. Not in this place. Not in this city. Not in this metalskinned building, where the pelting spring rain is a distant sound on the shuttered windows rather than a present thing, direct and immediate, a song of the sky to the earth.

It is raining. A poet might say something about that, mark it foolishly, give it meaning, make it rhyme, but Sorrow is not a poet. She is a messenger. This part is easy. In this world - contained and spare, without the usual distractions of modern life - where the ticking of a clock marks the passage of time, regular as a heartbeat, unerring as a metronome - Sorrow stands with her arms loose and her gaze sharp, clear.

Who? Imogen asks.

"Kemp." Sorrow says. Her voice is quiet as the ticking of the clock behind them.

She meets the kinswoman's eyes, then. Dark blue against dark blue.

Sorrow is the first to look away.

[Imogen M.] There is a split second of reaction. Barely the space between a heart beat. The clenching of her jaw, a spasm in her mouth. A flinch of pain.

She shuts every last inch of it down. Closes her face until it is merely a mask. Flattened mouth, unrevealing eyes.

Sorrow looks away first, and Imogen keeps her eyes on the Garou. After a moment, she deliberately closes the book she was reading (The Aeneid) and leans forward to set it down. By now, she has looked away and her eyes come to rest on the back of the book - a small photograph of a bust of Virgil, followed by a sea of text, a photograph of the translator balancing it at the end.

Three more seconds. The unrelenting ticking of the clock keeps the time.

She turns back.

"How?"

[Sorrow] The clock keeps ticking. Sorrow looks at the relentless little machine on the wall - finds it by the noise, by its shadow in the corner of her vision - before returning her dark and clear-eyed attention to Imogen.

There is a moment cut into the spaces between the seconds delineated by its unerring tick-tick-tick where Sorrow is fractional!seconds away from destroying that damn thing. Pulling it from its moorings in a cloud of drywall dust, tearing the metal from the plastic casing, breaking open the batteries or the clockwork findings, hidden within - all the metal gears, all their inevitable teeth - and strewing them around Imogen's pristine apartment. This is when it happens: between tick and tick. Then, it passes.

"In the Hivelands." Sorrow begins. This time, she does not look away. She knows, in her bones and her blood and her marrow, inside the skin of her, that Imogen will not look away, either. The story is sparse. It is all that she knows. "He lead the assault on the Hivelands, on the center the Hive used to poison the church. He died there. They brought him back, and told some story about how he fell. What -

lessons

- they learned. We are going to go to see it for ourselves. When I know it all, I will tell you." Then, the slightest concession. Beneath the control, Sorrow's voice is raw. "If you want to hear it all."

[Imogen M.] She had not looked away as Sorrow had offered her sparse story, but at the question, her eyes close briefly. They open again, still dry, and still direct. The tension sings in her jaw, in the line of her spine. She sits straight in her seat, on its edge, unreclining.

"I don't," she says, the words clipped at their edges and sawed off at the ends. "But come and tell me it anyway."

A beat.

"The kitchen's behind you," she says, "You can use the sink to wash -" -- "the blood off."