Sunday night Kalen and Grace come to the chantry bearing an ancient-looking book, and few artifacts, and some bones. Kalen settles into the room Pan once stayed in with them, and some vigil candles and some myrrh.
Once the candles are lit and myrrh is burning he calls Pan to tell him, in a voice that is more weariness than triumph that he needs to get to the House as soon as he can and that he will explain when Pan arrives. By the time Pan gets there, Kalen has determined that is totally appropriate to be sitting vigil with wine mixed with myrrh, because reasons. He's even brought in a second wine glass, which is full and sitting near the box of bones on the nightstand, and a third wine glass because Pan could totally want wine. He seems not to have had more than a glass or two, and is sitting at the head of the bed with a half-full glass in one hand, sleepily keeping watch over the fragile bones of Archmagi Anastasius Spyridon of the Celestial Chorus which occupy the other half of the bed. Not uneasy in the presence of the dead, Kalen.
The book and whatever other items they recovered are nearby, but he has not opened the book or inspected any of the things they carried back with them. Whoever hits the doorway first, without any real preparation, is greeted with, "We couldn't leave him there. We thought you would know what to do. Shall I pour you a glass of wine and explain or do you just want to take him and do whatever it is you do? Bury him, I suppose." His tone is still more exhaustion than anything.
"Somewhere nice, I hope. Sera might want to visit him. Maybe Alexander. I might, even. He-his-" Kalen frowns. "It's perhaps a bit complicated, but I rather like him." Like. Present tense. And if the first person on scene is Kit and not Pan...look...he's tired. He's drinking with a skeleton. You cannot expect he is exactly terribly present.
Fr. EcheverrÃa[i just want to see if he could teleport if he fucking wanted to]
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
GallowglassHow fortuitous: a Gallowglass. Sunday night. He has no concept of time. He has no concept of normal times. Besides, Shoshannah lives here. And Shoshannah will certainly be awake, anxious to let a certain shadowless young man who is valiant and relentless [relentless (give me the key already)] into the House's library, and he will be so sweet about it, he will. How fortuitous: a Gallowglass, who has explored a little because he can feel Kalen's resonance about, and Kalen can let him into the library just as well as Shoshannah can, and also Kalen is his friend, student, a troublesome Flambeau. He sniffs; is that myrrh?
He knocks on the door to the room that Kalen is currently occupying, sitting on a bed, glasses of wine and candles and a box of bones, and he opens his mouth to say something, but Kalen is tired, and Kalen is...
Adam correctly deduces Kalen is expecting somebody who is not the Bonisagus.
"By all means, you should explain, though you rather look as if you need the wine more," he says. "What's in the box, Kal? Erm, this Alexander fellow?"
Gallowglassooc: that should be 'he says, poised someplace between bemused, intent, and baffled.'
Fr. EcheverrÃaEven with all the things the priest could judge the Hermetic for he has no real room to do so considering the Hermetic had to get ahold of the priest by paging him. It's rarely a good sign when someone says they need him right away and then won't tell him what is going on until he actually shows up.
Rituals take time. Rituals and prayer and other aspects of working miracles. Teleportation is a pretty big goddamn miracle.
The second Hermetic found the living room and the corridor before the library empty just now. No other vehicles in the driveway just yet. Everyone can feel everyone else always around here. One moment it is just them and the angry lingering resonance of a certain teenage Dreamspeaker.
Then a brightness comes into the house. A sunburst. The priest didn't drive out here and walk. Kalen just got off the phone with him about ten minutes ago.
The sliding patio door opens and then closes again. The two men hear the heavy bootfalls of a large person walking through the house towards them.
Fr. EcheverrÃa[PARADOX WOOO]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 9) ( success x 1 )
Fr. EcheverrÃa[LOL soak]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (3, 5) ( fail )
Kalen Holliday"How much do you think I've changed. Of course there is more wine. I was in Chile for Christmas." He sighs. "But now my count for glasses is off. I suppose that's hardly the end of the world. They're not even that far from here for me." Another sigh and his eyes trace to the box.
"No. Alexander is very much alive, last I know. This is the Archmage Anastasius Spyridon bani C-" Pan's Resonance washes over them like the sudden wash of dawn over snow and Kalen sags back against the wall.
"Pan's here," Kalen says softly. "Have you met Pan?"
SerafíneLike as not, Alexander was given the task of sitting with the spent Sera until Dan arrived to scoop her up. No use trying to get on her the back of a motorcycle, not in her state, somewhere between blithe and boneless, so worn down she was less likely than ever to resist whatever impulses might arise in her body and mind. So spent that she was fractional moments away from dissolution. Tears, laughter, grief, some transfixed, transfixing joy. Dan heard the whole of the story in the van while he drove her home. She wanted Alexander to come with her. She didn't want him to be alone. She also wanted ice cream so they stopped and she forgot why she wanted it and started to tell him about names and graves and it was all disjointed enough that Dan felt compelled to reassure the clerk behind the counter that she'll be okay. She's just coming down. Which: you just look at Sera and you believe it. She is virtually always off in some phase of flight, climbing high or coming down.
So he walked with her in the sunshine with her head resting against his shoulder and a stranger's jacket around her frame and her ice cream melting into sticky rivulets down the sides of the waffle cone and over her fingers and decided that she had had a weird enough weekend that she might be better off at the chantry and that is why some time after Kalen and Grace arrive and Kalen sets up his vigil and calls Pan well: a new car in the drive. Specifically, a van.
Sera does not fucking teleport her exhausted ass there. She is sort of handed out of the van by Dan and her senses are wide fucking open - painfully, vibrantly open - and Dan's in the back grabbing the twee hard-sided 1940s suitcase and hatbox he packed for her and therefore loses control of his mad little Cultist. Probably because she can feel Pan in the air and Sera has decided she would like to say hello. She has to know the bones are there too. This breath of age or loss in the air that sobers her a bit. Mind, she still snags a bottle of tequila from the kitchen on her way through.
She'll get there after Pan. But get there she will.
GallowglassHis forehead creases as Kalen replies. He glances over his shoulder and down the hall - as he has not yet entered the room of bones and wine and candles - in response to that sudden appearance of sun-dazzle brightness, of illumination that does more than most light does when it touches Adam. There's a shadow, see; a shadow which passes over his expression, and perhaps it is just that Adam has taken in what he knows (Kalen, Archmagus, Bury, Serafíne, Alexander, complicated, calling in the Mage who Adam gathers based on everybody's remarks is the 'big guns') and adjusted the intensity of his curiousity accordingly.
"No. I haven't met Pan yet."
He watches Kalen's face when he says the Choristers name, and now his expression changes again. His forehead uncreases, and he runs his fingers through his hair.
"I'm more of a swig from the bottle man myself anyway, if you will recall," a faint smile. Does it cost him some will not to continue questioning Kalen while he waits for Pan to arrive, completely and wholly?
Yes, it does. Which is why he still asks, "Who is Alexander?"
Fr. EcheverrÃa"Kalen?"
Like he doesn't know exactly where the younger man is. If he was hoping to sneak up on this second entity inside the Chantry he doesn't do a very good job of it by calling out a name before he arrives. At least it gives Adam an idea of what's about to show up behind him. Big guy, Puerto Rican accent, raspy vowels. Hard to tell how old he is before Adam lays eyes on him but he sounds like a smoker. Like someone who's always on the verge of losing his voice.
Thump thump thump he'll round the corner in another three seconds.
Kalen Holliday"He's newly Awakened. He might make a brilliant Flambeau. I'll see what he says."
For a second, it would be possible to think Kalen is about to fling himself off the bed and toward Pan. For a second, he thinks he might too.
He does not. "In here. Did I sound that upset? There's-it's just that-" It's just that he wasn't prepared for the Avatar Storm. For watching an Archmage throw the last of his failing life into a Sending to reach them. For being overwhelmed enough that he would ask Sera to do the practically impossible. To have someone's bones. He knows how to mourn the dead, perhaps. But he has never had a body to bury.
"I don't know what to do with him. I suppose he should be buried but there is...he's not something we were forced to kill he's one of us. Not-not one of us you know. Well, you may have, actually. But...he hasn't been here on this side of the Gauntlet since the Avatar Storm."
Serafíne(Sera being ridiculous. Need this to finish mah post.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 7) ( success x 1 )
SerafínePerception plus awareness are you MAGICALLY HURT.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
GallowglassPan will be around the corner in another three seconds. Kalen speaks for that many seconds, at least; Adam turns so that he is facing Pan; steps inside Kalen's room, so that the doorway is empty of Adam, and his valiancy. Pan's first impression of Adam will be one of a young man with bags under his eyes, which are pensive and considering; of a young man who does not know how to comb his hair properly, dark, darkness, darkest. He nods a hello to the older Magi, but doesn't introduce himself. Kalen will probably circle to it.
"Am I understanding correctly, Kalen," Adam says, "when I say that you were transported somewhere and there you found yourself given a box of an Archmagi's bones? Did you speak to his spirit? Was it ... His spirit who transported you?"
A pause. "Does he want to be avenged?"
SerafíneSera is faster than Pan. Even spent and dissolving and exhausted she is faster than Pan. Lithe and light-footed especially when her feet are low to the ground, as they are today. She's not wearing heels; still in the Doc Martens she started the day in. Still, also dressed in her cut-offs and fishnets and the ridiculous leather, uh, strap that more or less covers the most important bits of chest and still in Alexander's coat likely, though sometime during the afternoon she has actually settled into it, slipped her arms through the sleeves.
The coat is far too big. That hardly matters.
But: Sera is faster than Pan, and she is not silent, so the priest can hear her behind him, not so much thumping, though. More, well. Sera-noises. They probably involve Moroccan bracelets and bicycle chain necklaces and the way leather moves.
Sera jogs the last few feet to close whatever distance there is, and wraps her arms around him from behind. Here is the press of her fucking tequila bottle against his abdomen. Here is the press of her forehead against his spine. Just a hug right; just a sighing hug.
Then she's murmuring, "Estás herido," and there is something arrested about the declaration. As if, right now, just thinking about that wounds her. So she moves with a deep inhale, straightening but not quite letting go, to plant a kiss on the center of his spine.
They can - perhaps - feel the tangled skein of her magic in the air. She sort of circles the priest then, never quite breaking contact. The look she gives Kalen when she comes into view is one of absolute empathy.
Adam asks several questions of Kalen. Sera who has appeared at Pan's flank like a very strange growth and still has an arm around him and her head tipped against his body, answers, but only one -
"He wants to be Known. Remembered."
Fr. EcheverrÃaHe must have come here right from the church. If anyone was hoping his first introduction to Adam would not send stereotypes flying around this is a disappointment. He's wearing black cowboy boots and black slacks and a black short-sleeved button-down shirt. Hung up his vestments and took off the fucking white collar at least but he has that Sunday High Mass incense smell still clung to his clothes and his hair. The knees of his slacks scuffed like he was kneeling for a time.
And before he can ask his first question or answer Kalen's a Cultist Disciple has hurtled out of the corridor and clasped her arms around his midsection. He's thinner than he used to be. Last summer when the fires were burning and he had a spare tire and extra fat laid overtop his muscles.
His hair is mostly white and he'd shaved his face just before Palm Sunday but he won't shave again until after Easter. The stubble is mostly white too. He is halfway through his forties and looks it.
"Nah, estoy bien," he says to Sera, "no tengo dolor," but he doesn't shake her off.
They keep saying He. He He He.
"Who is he?" he asks of the box of bones. Before anyone can answer he turns to Adam: "Who are you?"
Kalen Holliday"The Archmagi Anastasius Spyridon of the Celestial Chorus," Kalen says softly, sadly, his eyes trailing back to the bones. "He was caught on the other side of the Gauntlet. Trapped." There is a pause, but at least he has resumed making more sense. "Time moved differently there. More quickly. He spent...a very long time alone." He looks up, but it is not Adam, or even to Pan. No, he looks at Sera who understands how fucking horrible everything was.
"Before he died, as he died really, he created a Sending. It crossed over and found us. Brought us back to the realm where he had been trapped but he had been dead then for a very long time there. We took the book he meant us to find and a few things that hadn't crumbled to dust and his bones. It didn't didn't seem right to leave him in a place he had named Purgatory.
"We thought you would know what to do with him." He clearly intends that statement for Pan, but he is still looking at Sera.
He leaves Adam to introduce himself.
Serafíne"No," Sera is murmuring, her cheek against Pan's chest now, her arms - those rather voluminous leather sleeves - wrapped around his frame. She is wearing very little make-up this Sunday afternoon, evening, whatever it is, which may make her face seem somehow unfinished to anyone used to seeing her in her usual heavy eye make-up. Kalen is looking at her, watching her with that remarkable directness and she is looking back at him, and perhaps what she says, to Pan, is also what she says, to Kalen. "estás herido.
"It's okay, though." The language shift brings out the hint of an accent rarely heard in Sera's voice. The sheerest hint. Something about the precision of the consonants. The elision of the plurals. "You'll be fine."
This brief, luminous hook to Sera's expression, then a slanting glance upward at Pan's profile and the bristling growth along the line of his jaw.
"The magics he cast to keep the denizens of the realm out of his sanctuary were fading. We knew they'd be gone soo."
Then drops her temple back to his chest and turns her head to plant another kiss on his chest. Inhaling.
SerafíneExtending. Difficulty: 7 + 1; -1 (focus) -1 (taking time this damn time) -1 (quint)
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 4) ( fail )
Serafíne(Goddamnit. PLEASE DO MAGIC. MAGIC IS FUN.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Serafíne(Paradox)
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneSoak.
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 7) ( success x 1 )
GallowglassHe wants to be Known. Remembered, Serafíne says, and Kalen has not yet mentioned the book, so Adam's eyes do not yet wander over to it. When the lovely, oh, enthralling creature answers, Adam looks at her directly from where she springs, like she just grew out've the forty-something priest's side, and then he folds his arms across his chest. This is not a defensive gesture; but he is settling into the place he is standing, and so he folds his arms.
Who are you?
"Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass bani Bonisagus."
Who is he?
The young man without a shadow wishes to ask more questions because he is nothing if not questing; he still restrains himself, perhaps out of respect for the bones.
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