Hawksley Rothschild[perception + awareness]Roll: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
[intelligence + linguistics. still at diff 5?]Roll: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
[4 successes if diff on that roll was 6]
[wp. UGH YOUR LATIN IS THIRD-RATE I CAN'T EVEN WITH YOU.]Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5) ( fail )
[clearly Hawksley really can't tolerate poor Latin]
[24 hours later he decides he will beat the bad Latin into submission - wp!]Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
[wits [agility of thought] + linguistics. diff uncertain.]Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )
[wits [agility of thought] + occult just in case liz lets me because occult is more applicable and occult is lowest but FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD]Roll: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
Hawksley Rothschild[argh jove]
Hawksley Rothschild[perception + awareness]
Roll: 5 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
[intelligence + linguistics. still at diff 5?]
Roll: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
[4 successes if diff on that roll was 6]
[wp. UGH YOUR LATIN IS THIRD-RATE I CAN'T EVEN WITH YOU.]
Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5) ( fail )
[clearly Hawksley really can't tolerate poor Latin]
[24 hours later he decides he will beat the bad Latin into submission - wp!]
Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
[wits [agility of thought] + linguistics. diff uncertain.]
Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )
[wits [agility of thought] + occult just in case liz lets me because occult is more applicable and occult is lowest but FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD]
Roll: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
MiahelesHawksley does not look back, so perhaps it does not matter what happens behind him as he leaves the Quai Voltaire with two volumes in his hand, purchased for forty-four Euros, the exchange as precise and careful as any other. The old man is pleased with the money. He counts it, and nods, there is a ritual to this exchange, see - the bills and the coins counted out.
Hawksley does not look back but: the old man tucks away the cash and pulls his folding-chair forward with a scraaaaape on the old stones and pulls the book he was perusing (a lavishly art deco volume of three Perrault tales: Cendrillon, Le Chat Botté, and La Belle au Bois Dormant.
Hawksley does not look back, so we doubt that he returns to the Quai Voltaire tomorrow or the next day, looking for the old man, who speaks Silesian and that rather inflexible French, who claims expertise in Yiddish and Armenian but not Arabic. Even if he did, he would not find him. The bouquinistes come and go as they please, and the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, there is no such man on the quai. Just a locked up pair of green wood boxes amidst the rest.
--
Sera wants to go to the Moulin Rouge that night. She thinks that there will be naked people there and she is half-right. There will be half-naked ladies there wearing many, many sparkles. She wonders if there is really a trapeze and thinks she would like to swing on it. The evenings shows are sold out as they often are but when you are rich "sold out" just means "talk to the concierge." There is a gift shop! She is thrilled to discovered the fucking giftshop. She buys a kitschy miniature of the place for 35 Euros and a square umbrella printed with vintage posters by Toulouse Lautrec, Grün, Ma Gosse and Villefroy.
They drink a helluva lot of champagne. Enough that Sera ends up on her knees in the marble bathroom at quarter 'til nine a.m., long, long after the sun has risen, throwing it all up again.
She's so happy.
She had the loveliest time.
--
Here's the strange thing, or perhaps it is not really the strange thing: when he wakes up the next day, whenever it is he wakes up the next day, the volumes are still on the nightstands, or the sideboard, or the antique Louis Quatorze What-the-fuck-ever. They should be, shouldn't they?
He bought them, didn't he?
Except, except -
Right. There they are.
--
The leather binding on the first volume is still warmer than it should be.
It feels like skin, he said to himself and then,
It is skin.
This is also true.
There is no title etched on the front page and it is indeed handwritten. The bouquiniste called it the biography of a saint who never lived; or perhaps - the hagiography. Written in verse by a woman confined at the Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune for one hundred and seventy five years, and Hawksley knows that all of this can be both true and false in equal measure because what we write, what we will, we create.
The bouquiniste was not telling the precise truth.
For example, the volume - light and fine and effervescent as the best of champagnes - is not written in verse. It is written in Burgundian which is both a descendant of Latin and an ailing cousin or perhaps now a mere dialect of French, both of which he knows in sufficient part to triangulate the meanings and the code-shifts and parse out the language in which the volume was written.
Also: it was not, he is convinced a quarter of the way through, written in 1453 or 1675 or anywhere in between. It was written in the 1920s, though it claims to have been written by one of the followers of its subject, Saint Étaín des Sorts - Saint Étaín of the Holy Spells - during her lifetime, and in the years after. The author was assuredly familiar with the Hôtel-Dieu and may have been a patient there, but only for a few weeks. It was, after all, merely a hospital for the poor. It was not Bedlam.
It is also charming; a fucking romance and the sexiest book he has ever read about chastity, or denial.
There is a kind of surrender on every page.
It is hard to put down.
--
And yet,
he does put it down, and picks up the other, and it is hard going. It is a fucking slog. The first day he decides that it is all wrong; complete rubbish, there is no goddamned point to this. It takes something out of him,
but he picks it up again, the day after. Because that is another thing he does, and this time he grits his teeth and opens it again and refused, refuses, to be defeated by the cold dry facts.
It is - it seems to be - the journal of a Roman that was absolutely recopied by a querulous monk who complained, variously in the margins about his chilblains or his abbot or the too-think ink or the priory's cat or the sounds his brothers make at night or his fucking urges and these interstitial pieces, these asides, these annotations were copied goddamned faithfully and interspersed between the dry-as-the-Sahara writings of Lucius Vitruvius Gromaticus by the next interpreter / copyist, who inserted even more strange and absolutely medieval lewdness into what otherwise begins as the rather boring and markedly technical account of Gromaticus' early work as a ballista in the Roman legions. The printer printed absolutely every annotation faithfully, making the work of deciphering the underlying -
- well, here's the thing.
The second volume is goddamned difficult.
What he figures out, when he takes it up the second time, is that it is about gravity,
and how to defy it,
and he has barely skimmed the surface.
Hawksley Rothschild[wp to keep going the next day through Lucius's book]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Hawksley Rothschild[wits (agility of thought) + academics, to come at it from a new angle]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Hawksley Rothschild[forgot to re-roll that 10]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( fail )
MiahelesHere are the players in this small strange drama: Lucius Vitruvius Gromaticus; the nameless monk who first recopied the crumbling scrolls of his life's story; the second monk (a name can be extracted from the intercuts: Etienne) who copied both Lucius' life and his predecessor's insertions with a sort of faithfulness that feels like a strangely solemn joke, except where it devolves into exigencies of medieval filth, and perhaps - perhaps - the Belgian printer who typeset it all, once again faithful to each new layer of expression, and who appears to have left out all editorial content.
After a half-dozen years in the Roman Legion (Legio VI Ferrata) as an artilleryman, serving in Gaul ( - Hawksley recognizes placenames: Lutetia, the settlement at present-day Paris; Nemausus (now Nîmes - well south in Provence); and of course, Colonia Iulia Paterna Arelatensium Sextanorum (now Arles, also in Provence), Lucius left the Roman military and joined the civil service.
This is where it begins, you see. Lucius' love affair with gravity. The swing-arm of the ballista. The arc of the projectiles, the momentary defiance of all things earthbound. Beyond the dead-dry litany of facts, the daily grind of regimental life in a well-settled frontier, beneath it, all around it: the inexpressed and inexhaustable awe.
(Our friend the nameless monk is a very young man when he copies these pages. There are places where he gives in not to strange little fits of temper over the most minor and passing complaints and ailments, but instead to something different. Some slow-burning awe. As the work unfolds, Hawksley arrives at the realization that the first-monk recopied the diaries of Lucius Vitruvius Gromaticus on his own, late at night, using hoarded stubs of all-but-burned out candles, remelted and fed a stray bit of wick.)
After he left the Legion, Lucius apprenticed as a surveyor, searching out sites of potable water, determining whether or not each site was a viable source for a nearby settlement. Then, gradually, in the siting, planning, and construction of aqueducts.
Gravity, once again.
Long stretches are devoted to describing the surveying tools, the prospecting methods, the health risks of stagnant water, the dryest recitations of the dryest sort of days. Then a section devoted to the planning of the gradient, the construction of the conduit over rough terrain; planning the slow-descent of the aqueduct from the mountains into Nemausus. The construction of the bridges over the deep gorge of the Gardon river. The segmental support of the soaring rows of soaring arches, which seemed impossibly high.
The magic of the unmortared stones, clinging together high above the river. The emblems and symbols and circles, the spells he used, to make water run uphill. The secret name of the sky written into the rock, the confluence of forces, the necessity of movement.
A secret word that Lucius Vitruvius Gromaticus discovered, and etched into one of the footers of the Pont du Gard.
Nothing about the way this dry-dust man felt the first time he left the earth - of his own will, under his own power - but Hawksley is sure that he did.
Hawksley RothschildHe does not go back to look for the old man. What is one bookseller amongst the numbers of them in the world? He doesn't care.
Of course he takes Sera to the Moulin that night, setting aside the books, drinking beside her, pulling her into his lap during the show. He does not hold her hair while she vomits. That is what Dan is for, except -- Dan is back in the states, and Hawksley is too drunk to be of much use anyway. He does strip down with her, a bit later, and while morning bustles around them he holds her in the shower, both of them sitting on the tub, drowsing against the back of her neck while he keeps her there, his arms around her and his legs to either side of her and her musing aloud, almost singing, about how happy everything is.
But he becomes quite boring in the coming days.
He reads, and she knows -- she's known since that blue shit was going around Denver -- that Hawksley has an irritatingly studious side. When she's found him in the chantry library or his own library he finishes reading before he attends to her. He is on a sort of vacation now but for someone like Hawksley, for whom life itself is a vacation, there's not much difference. Normally, at least, he gets up and works out, he goes around Paris with her, but after the Moulin he ends up reading all day. A full day with one book, which he then literally tosses across the room in frustration, and the look on his face is so savage that for a moment it's a bit frightening. He storms out of the hotel, refusing company.
Comes back later bearing chocolates that he feeds to her individually, pouring cognac on her navel and licking her stomach clean. It's not really an apology -- what does he have to apologize for? -- but a reconnection.
Except the next day he's at it again. He's up before she is, sitting at the desk, fixated on the fucking book. And then the other. And he moves a little: from desk to couch, couch to floor, his feet towards a fire she wants to build even though it's too hot for that. He responds to her in grunts, when she's around. He makes overtures at conversation but it's very clear: she is a distraction. The fire is a distraction, hunger is a distraction. He is reading for hours, and hours, and hours, and does not notice when she leaves and only notices when she comes back because she's crawling into bed beside him, all naked and wriggling and he is exhausted to the point of irrationality but he does not resist, or refuse, when she touches him. He responds enthusiastically but nonverbally, and at least this time he sleeps enough.
Collins tells her, strolling to a cafe another day, that this happens sometimes with him. Collins does not speak much but, if asked, of course: he will accompany her. They will be naughty together, leaving Hawksley to fend for himself back in that five-star hotel. That's what he gets, loving language and words and the collection of words and the ever-expanding truth they bring his mind,
more than he really loves anyone.
Even Sera,
who he never said he loved, anyway.
--
One night he is up late. He is toying with physics and cannot be interrupted. He is holding conversations with long, long dead men. Monks and scribes. He is asking them questions that they will answer, he knows they will answer, if he can only translate their meaning more clearly. They will harken to him, because he knows them, as they know him. Time and space are, after all, as big of a joke as gravity. He talks to them in his sleep, though Sera can't possibly know this, since he is speaking Latin the whole time. All she knows is that he sounds more humble than he ever does in waking life.
There is something to be said for not fucking around when you're talking to a former artilleryman, right?
It takes time to break into the magic of it. And by then he is fierce, he is ferocious. That is: in bed one mid-day, waking her to tell her something she either doesn't understand or doesn't care about or does understand and does care about but really, really in the end all he's feeling is passion, fueled by all this knowledge, he's drunk on it, he's trying desperately to share that drunkenness with her, that high, he is trying to share with her, show her --
something.
His hands shake a bit when he reads, twitching above the page in mudras, making symbols that mean nothing to anyone but himself. He spells out the secret name of the sky, silently moves his lips to it, follows the lines on the page with the shape of his tongue.
He tries to tell her he's going to learn how to fly, but when he looks up, she isn't there, and he is alone and has not eaten all day. He has not had water. He is a desert inside, vast and motionless but not uncomplicated. He thinks, a bit madly right now, that of course he has to go. He has to go, unwashed and unfed, not realizing he is barefoot, but aren't you supposed to be barefoot on pilgrimage, to the Pont du Gard. It's far away. He can't walk. He realizes he can't walk there when he gets to the lobby, and a bit dizzied, he calls another room from the lobby,
and can Collins please come help him, please? Please. He has to go. For no reason he can name he is on the verge of tears, he is speaking half in a dead language, but he keeps saying it. Please. Please. He has to go.
MiahelesSera does not seem to mind when Hawksley ignores her to study. The first day she's not precisely expecting it; she's imagining that they'll maybe go back to find Alex-the-waiter again, and she's thinking about getting stoned and going to the Orsay, but some part of her knows, adores, empathizes with both the genius and the passion even if she does not have any fucking understanding of anything Hawksley is talking about.
The savage expression on his face makes her still, though. Makes her hold herself with a remarkable stillness and catch her breath and hold it inside her lungs until her lungs just ache. She wants to follow him and do something, do anything, but he refuses and so she lets him go. When he returns with chocolates she's curled up on the balcony, watching the sun set over the city, smoking the tail end of a joint, a loosely woven blanket wrapped around her to ward of the mild chill that comes of an evening. Smiles at him when he comes back. Accepts the first chocolate so precisely between her teeth, then takes his hand and follows him back inside.
--
When they arrived, Sera didn't know anyone. She doesn't speak the language, either. Still, somehow, it took her just three days to make the necessary contacts to supply her with her own ritual tools - less arcane, more quotidian, than any of Hawksley's - and now she has everything she needs.
That day she and Collins leave Hawksley to fend for himself She takes half a tab of acid and talks Collins into walking her to a cafe for a coffee and a pastry and she's tripping a bit and she calls Dan not fucking caring what time it is in the states and the lights of the city are lovely, lovely, smearing all around her and Dan asks Sera how Paris is and Sera says that it is squiggly.
Sera confides her worry to Collins, after. He doesn't even remember to eat. He tells her that Hawksley gets like that sometimes. Which makes her quiet a bit, and glance at the older man's profile, pale against the smearing blur of the streets. Something quietly reflective about her, like hey, she knows, she must sort of know, she must feel it in her bones, in her skin, in the caesura between her heart beats.
And says, "Okay."
And then goes shopping.
Collins carries all her packages home.
--
That day, that day, that day he decides to go barefoot and unwashed and unfed and dizzy from dehydration and a kind of madness that builds and builds and binds itself all around him. That day he calls another room, calls Collins, and does Collins call Serafíne?
We think he does.Of course he does.
Collins is there in the lobby before her, patient and certain and sure. Please. Please. Hawksley says, He has to go. and Collins says, Of course sir. Right away sir. in the same dark and soothingly regularly tones with which he red naval histories endless to a girl fucked up on magic MDMA, half in, and half out of this world, slowly coming down from a chance encounter with enlightenment.
He gets Hawksley seated. He gets him a drink. He listens to where he must go, and assures his master that they will leave that night. They will go. Of course they will.
Sera comes back, not long after. Sweeps in from the dark street outside facing the grand park, lined with the sweetly smelling linden trees, and she smells a bit like the trees and a bit like her clove cigarettes and she takes Hawksley's hand and kisses him if he will be kissed and takes him back upstairs while Collins - well, while Collins makes arrangements - and orders Hawksley room service and tries to coax him into eating and packs a small bag for the both of them because if he is going, if he is going, if he is going in this state, then of course she is.
It is nearly midnight when Collins brings the car around.
The car, in this case, being an a dark Mercedes SUV almost identical to the one he drives in Colorado. There is a hamper with provisions in the passenger's seat, packed by the kitchen staff. Collins has a thermos of coffee. Sera has a thermos of Calvados, as you do.
Sera sits in the back with Hawksley. She plies him with food and drink, a bottle of Evian even more than her Calvados, which she drinks pretty freely. She leans against him, as he leans against the glass watching the night crawl by. Or perhaps it is the other way around. Either way, she listens to whatever he wishes to tell her, regardless of whether or not she fucking understands it.
Some part of her understands it.
Some part of her knows.
--
It is a very long drive. It would be faster if they took the train. The TGV goes 200 miles an hour but there's a goddamned rail strike and anyway, anyway. Sera falls asleep somewhere along the way. Somehow, she's still holding him if he lets her.
They drive all fucking night long and arrive at or near dawn.
That dark SUV creeps all the way up the right bank to the parking lot in front of an outdoor café overlooking the small swimming beach in the shadow of the great aqueduct.
No one else is here.
It is June 21, 2014, the longest day of the year.
MiahelesSTOP.
MiahelesSTOP STOP.
MiahelesSera does not seem to mind when Hawksley ignores her to study. The first day she's not precisely expecting it; she's imagining that they'll maybe go back to find Alex-the-waiter again, and she's thinking about getting stoned and going to the Orsay, but some part of her knows, adores, empathizes with both the genius and the passion even if she does not have any fucking understanding of anything Hawksley is talking about.
The savage expression on his face makes her still, though. Makes her hold herself with a remarkable stillness and catch her breath and hold it inside her lungs until her lungs just ache. She wants to follow him and do something, do anything, but he refuses and so she lets him go. When he returns with chocolates she's curled up on the balcony, watching the sun set over the city, smoking the tail end of a joint, a loosely woven blanket wrapped around her to ward of the mild chill that comes of an evening. Smiles at him when he comes back. Accepts the first chocolate so precisely between her teeth, then takes his hand and follows him back inside.
--
When they arrived, Sera didn't know anyone. She doesn't speak the language, either. Still, somehow, it took her just three days to make the necessary contacts to supply her with her own ritual tools - less arcane, more quotidian, than any of Hawksley's - and now she has everything she needs.
That day she and Collins leave Hawksley to fend for himself She takes half a tab of acid and talks Collins into walking her to a cafe for a coffee and a pastry and she's tripping a bit and she calls Dan not fucking caring what time it is in the states and the lights of the city are lovely, lovely, smearing all around her and Dan asks Sera how Paris is and Sera says that it is squiggly.
Sera confides her worry to Collins, after. He doesn't even remember to eat. He tells her that Hawksley gets like that sometimes. Which makes her quiet a bit, and glance at the older man's profile, pale against the smearing blur of the streets. Something quietly reflective about her, like hey, she knows, she must sort of know, she must feel it in her bones, in her skin, in the caesura between her heart beats.
And says, "Okay."
And then goes shopping.
Collins carries all her packages home.
--
That day, that day, that day he decides to go barefoot and unwashed and unfed and dizzy from dehydration and a kind of madness that builds and builds and binds itself all around him. That day he calls another room, calls Collins, and does Collins call Serafíne?
We think he does.Of course he does.
Collins is there in the lobby before her, patient and certain and sure. Please. Please. Hawksley says, He has to go. and Collins says, Of course sir. Right away sir. in the same dark and soothingly regularly tones with which he red naval histories endless to a girl fucked up on magic MDMA, half in, and half out of this world, slowly coming down from a chance encounter with enlightenment.
He gets Hawksley seated. He gets him a drink. He listens to where he must go, and assures his master that they will leave that night. They will go. Of course they will.
Sera comes back, not long after. Sweeps in from the dark street outside facing the grand park, lined with the sweetly smelling linden trees, and she smells a bit like the trees and a bit like her clove cigarettes and she takes Hawksley's hand and kisses him if he will be kissed and takes him back upstairs while Collins - well, while Collins makes arrangements - and orders Hawksley room service and tries to coax him into eating and packs a small bag for the both of them because if he is going, if he is going, if he is going in this state, then of course she is.
It is nearly midnight when Collins brings the car around.
The car, in this case, being an a dark Mercedes SUV almost identical to the one he drives in Colorado. There is a hamper with provisions in the passenger's seat, packed by the kitchen staff. Collins has a thermos of coffee. Sera has a thermos of Calvados, as you do.
Sera sits in the back with Hawksley. She plies him with food and drink, a bottle of Evian even more than her Calvados, which she drinks pretty freely. She leans against him, as he leans against the glass watching the night crawl by. Or perhaps it is the other way around. Either way, she listens to whatever he wishes to tell her, regardless of whether or not she fucking understands it.
Some part of her understands it.
Some part of her knows.
--
It is a very long drive. It would be faster if they took the train. The TGV goes 200 miles an hour but there's a goddamned rail strike and anyway, anyway. Sera falls asleep somewhere along the way. Somehow, she's still holding him if he lets her.
They drive all fucking night long and arrive at or near dawn.
That dark SUV creeps all the way up the right bank to the parking lot in front of an outdoor café overlooking the small swimming beach in the shadow of the great aqueduct.
No one else is here.
It is June 21, 2014, the longest day of the year.
He is the Right Eye of the Sun.
Hawksley RothschildOh, it takes some convincing to get Hawksley to wait until that night. He's not so weakened -- he hasn't gone more than 24 hours without food, no more than twelve hours without water -- that he couldn't overpower Collins in a heartbeat, nevermind Sera. He has to be convinced with logic and patience and lots of it, and after Sera gets Hawksley back upstairs and after Collins supplies him with sustenance and after he is talked into bathing and dressing and not going barefoot, he is...
well. He is impatient and irritable, neither of them understand, and he is sullen and twitchy, his fingers moving against the leg of his jeans, his eyes on the skyline, looking to the south with a feverish brightness to his gaze and a high color in his cheeks. But he waits, and they get the car, and Collins begins to get in the driver's seat and Sera to the back but Hawksley tells them to stay. He will take food and water. But all he says is that he wants to go alone.
Maybe some part of her understands it, maybe some part of her knows.
Maybe not.
--
It is dawn, and it is the beginning -- the natural beginning, not the man-clock beginning -- of the longest day of the year. Hawksley pulls the car over when the sky begins to lighten. He gets out and he locks it. He does something strange there.
He leaves his shoes in the car. He begins to walk the rest of the way, past the cafe, to the overlook across the beach. He looks at the aqueduct, up at it, and then:
toward it.
MiahelesThere is a paved road that ends in the small parking area beneath the closed café and above the empty beach. Small wooden frames, like arbors, dot the the sand. The rising sun makes their shadows long, and strange, but not so long, and strange, as the 2000 plus year old aqueduct rising astonishingly out of the scrubby Provençal forest.
It is still cool. Even a hint of chill, where the wind plays over cool waters of the Gardon.
There are three layers of arches. The whole of the structure rises more than 160 feet. He knows how the first two layers of arches were fitted with perfectly carved stones, angled each to each to defy the downward pull of the earth, set in place without mortar. He knows that there were spells written into the stone. Woven into the water. Hidden in its foundations and etched in some places in plain sight.
Lesser buildings have fallen and and been rebuilt and fallen and been rebuilt and fallen again. This massive monument still stands.
The road becomes a path, more dust than gravel, although the there are stones underfoot, aren't there? Sharp and painful.
The path cuts away from the road and starts to rise toward the middle level of aqueduct, which is also a bridge across the Gardon.
Overhead, the shadow of some predatory bird against the sky, wings spread wide as it rises on a thermal,
effortless.
All around him, the scent of acacias.
Hawksley RothschildNot all Traditions, but many, know that there is a price to be paid. There is pain to be endured. The bare feet are Hawksley's first offerings to the magic he feels here -- no. Second offering. The first was the struggle of the study, the unlocking of the language. The frustration he unleashed on his manservant and his friend, things he will need to repair later. The bare feet he can cope with, the sharp rocks and brambles he can ignore for now. For all his privilege, all his expensive education and delicate upbringing, Hawksley can tolerate quite a lot.
When he chooses to.
--
The further he goes the more he feels the magic here, lingering long, long after its creation. It is dizzying, and it makes him feel a bit drunk on it. A bit wistful. A bit aroused. He allows himelf a small smile as he heads up towards the bridge-channel, the conduit for water that is also a place where his bare feet can take him but that is not where the word is.
He remembers that. He wants to see the footers. It will take him from the sky. He looks up at the shadow, breathing in deeply as it passes over him, and changes direction. That is the thing about the sky: the earth shakes and the sky tears itself apart with storms, but when the earthquake ends the ground is broken. When the storm ends, the sky seems untouched. You can trust the sky. It will be as it will be, for --
he thinks of it now, ages later. He never told Serafine why birds fly. She'd like the answer. It has a bit to do with how stupid most birds are, how blind they are to their own miraculous power. It's a little joke he has with himself. He'll tell her, he resolves, if she cares to know.
Hawksley begins going down. He will find the name of the sky, carved into the footers of the Pont du Gard.
Hawksley Rothschild[stamina!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Hawksley Rothschild[wits + awareness]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
MiailhesThere are always paths. Whereever you go, someone has passed before. Here, the shadow of this great aquaduct - built with both a sort of wresting and arresting knowledge of how things work and - beneath all that, within it or inside it - an absolute defiance of every goddamned accepted rule of how the world works, how it moves, how the earth should be separated from the sky, how our feet should remain on the fucking ground - is a ridiculously popular tourist attraction. Strangers come from all over and wander over the wellgroomed paths and walk the bridge spanning the lowest level of arches. There is a paved road that runs alongside the Gardon here on the left bank, and that unpaved, graveled walking path that rises to the level of bridge.
Barefoot, he descends.
The closer he gets, the more massive the structure seems. Soaring overhead right? The sun is starting to crest the horizon, bathing the sand-colored limestone in the first leading edge of golden light.
Hawksley does not know when he leaves the rather freshly laid asphalt of the lower road. Not specifically, but the asphalt is no longer beneath his feet. He scrabbles through some low scrub, onto the rocky slabs framing the deep gully on which the foundations of the lowest tier were made, and finds himself directly beneath the vault of a rising arch. It is lovely. Such find work; giant ashlar courses, so beautifully fitted that the seams seem to have been carved in rather than fitted. The stones directly over his head weigh several tons and have resisted time and tide and water and wide and gravity for two thousand years.
There has to be magic here.
--
There are marks in the stone. From this vantage point he can see some of them. The odd bit of medieval and/or enlightenment graffiti, or - down here - the marks the masons left in the stone, directing placement.
FR D II.MI.
What he needs is further down; across the channel, on the foundation stone set on a rocky little island in the middle of the river. He can feel that. The pull of it beneath his skin.
Just as he can feel that he is not alone.
--
She is dark haired and dark eyed and dark skinned and she stands on the rocky beach perhaps five meters from where he stands. Lower, closer to the water but also, because she is not enshadowed, closer to the sun.
Something eglantine about her, see? Both sweet and briar.
Her feet are bare.
She watches him with a sort of imperious inquisitiveness. Chin lifted, eyes hooded.
"It is farther than you think."
There are sigils worked into her skin.
And he knows: whatever else she is, she is made of words.
Hawksley RothschildHawksley stands in the arch. He hurts a little, to stand there, looking at the stones defying gravity while he remains bound to it. He stretches out his hands -- he wants to follow the arch with his touch, knowing his fingertips will fall away from the stone when his reach is exceeded. He knows, and yet he trusts anyway: the rocks will not fall on him. He will not die here. They will not plummet.
He leaves the arch and goes to the water, though. Water is as potent as sky, though never as warm.
There's a woman there, and he hesitates. He stands in shadow and tips his head.
"What is?"
Miailhes"The other side."
Her smile like a kiss of flame at the edge of the bounding sky.
Smoldering, see.
"What you seek."
Hawksley RothschildHawksley frowns slightly, his brows tugging together. He wades into the water, jeans around his ankles soaking and dragging, but the water cools and soothes his feet. "The other side of the sky, you mean," he says.
MiailhesThe current runs swiftly here, but the land is dry and baking. There has been no rain for days so: clear water coursing over carved stone, swirling around his ankles. Force behind it, right? This powerful want: for solace of sinking. For the sea.
"Mmm."
The noise she makes is a kind of half-assent, or perhaps merely acknowledgment of his clarification. Beneath that noise, or around it perhaps, her eyes are shrewd,
and sharp,
and watchful.
--
And still he can feel the tug beneath his skin - some core, some kernal, some seed of that fucking magic above him, rooted in the center pier, on the rocky island in the middle of the gully.
--
"What will you do next?"
Her question seems, somehow, more-than-rhetorical.
Hawksley RothschildHawksley shrugs.
He lifts his hands, and the motion of his body is primordial, godlike, the icon of what is beautiful and strong and golden. He pushes his hands into his hair, which is thick and strong. That's what we love about these things: the pale eyes, the fair hair. The intimations of youthfulness and strength. The essence of beauty is something else entirely.
His hands fall, and he looks at her, shaking his head. "I don't fucking know." A beat. He looks at her, both affronted and earnest. "I work hard," he insists, right at her. "In every way you can imagine, I work. Everything that you're doing here, saying to me, everything about this experience and what it leads to is something someone has gone through before. Something I've gone through before. The death mages and life mages and fucking cultists all have it right when they talk about cycles. Someone has been here before, and someone has written it down, or thought about writing it down. It's there, and I can understand it.
"I found the book, and I ripped it apart to get at the meat inside. I found the words and the names and the paths and now I'm here. I'm looking for the name of the sky, because if I have its name, it will be mine, and it can't get away anymore."
Hawksley waves a hand at her, almost dismissive. No: not almost. "You're not the sky. And if you are, you'll name yourself to me now, because that's why I'm here. And if you aren't her, then I don't have any use for you."
MiailhesThere is such steadiness about her and nothing like affront. This seriousness that absorbs both his earnest immediacy and his insistence.
And,
she is unnatural,
she is unblinking.
There is an oily skim of swirling something in the dark pool of her gaze, which is never clouded or occluded.
She holds up a finger, a staying finger: the first on her right hand.
"When you have the name - will you use it?"
Hawksley Rothschild"Yes."
This savage, this flashing in his eyes that almost turn black for a moment. This hard, this furious, this... this he says like a word that began the world. This he says: fiat.
Miailhes"Then go."
An equivalent savagery. An undercurrent of satiation.
She flies at him, and pushes him into the water.
Hawksley RothschildHawksley grabs her. Oh, she flies at him, shoves him into the water, and he grabs her upper arms as rough and as hard as she shoves him. He goes down, hitting his hip on a rock and it stings and he just snarls, holding onto her. "Tell me your name," he says, not caring if its the sky anymore. She's not going to shove him around and not tell him her name.
She gets dragged into the water with him. "Your name!" he says, all but barking it.
Hawksley Rothschild[stamina!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )
Miailhes??
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
Miailhes??He grabs her - by the arms by the hip - seizes her and pulls her with him and her body does not feel like a human body. She is made of paper and of shadow and of flame, but not of the ordinary striations of human muscles and human hearts.
It was a kind of invitation, wasn't it?
To violence, to striving, to strife and she both dissolves and unfurls herself in that moment.
And yet: he has the sense of her breathing, of her struggling, of her exulting in the struggle, her body the words whip and lashing and -
The river is a torrent, thorough, pounding, furious. The current stronger than he could have imagined when she threw herself at him, when he dipped his ankles in the water, when he looked down at it running clear over the rocky channel -
"I am the Guardian of the Second Gate!"
- she tells him, shouting, over the torrent, dissolving somehow into it. Being pulled apart as Hawksley is thrown together, until he is slammed onto the rocky island in the center of the of the river, where the first foundation stone was laid.
He crawls up onto dry land.
He looks up, and finds the inscription on the 6th block from the top of the stone, on the cutwater, and reads:
MENS/TOTVM/CORIVM/CAELVM/TENEO
the whole skin of the sky has been measured and known
Framing the inscription, the simplest of glyphs - no more complex than the impression of a sandpiper's step against the sand.
Hawksley RothschildGuardians. Gates. There's so many gates out there, all of them guarded. He smashes against the rock, and she becomes something else.
He becomes a living thing again upon the rock, crouched on it, soaking wet now, and the words call to him, saying themselves aloud in his mind.
What he reads makes him smile. He sighs, and reaches out to touch them, brush his hand over them, touch the glyphs, stroke them with his fingertips. He touches them far more lovingly, more gently, than he touched the guardian. She is gone now, and these words still stand, eons after their inscription. Why wouldn't he be fond of them?
He says them aloud to himself.
MiailhesThose old stones are warm beneath his hand and bathed in golden light and he can feel the thrum of power beneath his fingers, can't he. The power bound into Word and word bound into Power and between the two is the place where that which cannot be simply decides that:
it is.
--
The sun is rising, see. The light it sheds goes all slantwise and threads the canyon over which the bridge arches in long and long-fingered shadows, few of which touch him,
golden creature that he is.
--
He says the words and they feel so goddamned right on his tongue. The beginning of a spell or the end of one, perhaps, where it spins itself back to its beginning, wrapped in both intention and will, writing itself into the substance of the universe. Writing the substance of the universe into its own vellum.
He has to look up to read them and to reach up to touch them and he both looks up and reaches up, practically on his fucking tiptoes to find the articulation of each letter's groove, the first cut, the first point of contact between chisel and stone.
He says them, and he says them aloud, and he says them aloud to himself and there is a kind of sigh, that is both a clenching and a letting-go. Strangely familiar, aren't they?
Haven't they always been inside him.
Hawksley RothschildSo:
the stones are warm, because they are sunlit.
he feels power, because it is there.
the sun is rising.
he says the words and feels out the reaches of a spell within them, but nothing happens, no effect to the spell.
Hawksley frowns. He exhales, and looks down at the rock he's standing on, the water around him, at other stones, for -- perhaps -- a missing piece of a spell.
Hawksley Rothschild[wits + awareness]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4) ( fail )
Hawksley Rothschild[wits + occult?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1
MiailhesIt has to work right? It has to work. It has to work for him and every path has been walked and walked before and every word has been spoken and every spell has been spun,
wrapped itself tightly around the spindle of some Awakened heart or mind or tongue and unleashed itself on the unsuspecting world, all those sleeping minds,
and he has found the key and he has spoken the key and the key should fucking work, right. That's what happens next -
(a key is nothing without a lock)
(Hawksley, your feet are on the ground)
- so he is looking around and perhaps there is something expectant in the look he casts all around him and maybe there is something imperious about it and maybe as he searches: the stones, the shadows, the great, heaving arches of the massive and ancient bridge for whatever it is he needs, whatever it is that is missing, whatever he must find, whatever he requires to make it work, that imperiousness becomes shadowed with something else, because he's reaching out, he's feeling for something and he cannot begin to find it, to sense what is gone, what is wrong, what is -
and then it comes to him,
that a key is nothing without a lock,
that his feet are on the ground,
that he has found the words written into the skin of the stone,
and now,
it is time,
to climb.
Hawksley RothschildHawksley's soul is a primitive thing. It has existed for eons before he took this form. Perhaps he was once an amoeba. Perhaps he has been a lemur. Perhaps he has been a prince, a queen, a god on earth. Everything that is has always been, in one form or another. Everything that is will always be... in one form or another.
Hawksley's mind is a learned thing. He thinks more inwardly, he thinks more historically. He does not shudder at the idea of following an already laid path: he would not read, if he did. He would not climb atop the shoulders of those who have come before him, knowing that at some point he was them. What word has been written that there is not some chance he wrote it, in another life, or thought it? What path has been beaten that his feet have not already been on? The multitudes who have gone on pilgrimage do not diminish the holiness of a place. Following the path others have walked ties to you them, and intensifies the magic of that place, and of each step it takes to get there. When many eyes have read a book, does it not have more power in the world, for good or ill?
There are magi who crave discovery, who thrive on it, who need it to go on. The newness of a thing, the uniqueness. They don't dwell where they have been before; it would feel like a kind of death.
Hawksley is not like them. To discover is only to return to a place you have forgotten. To create is only to renew what was already made. And this is not a loss.
Of course he takes the path that is already there. The steps carved, the footprints laid. It is the way that has been set, it is a physical manifestation of language and ingenuity. His species created steps. His species carved them into stone faces to make the climbs easier. There are steps at every palace and majestic tomb. Steps to go up to the sky, down into the earth.
Hawksley goes skyward.
Hawksley Rothschild[willpower 1!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
Hawksley Rothschild[willpower 2]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Hawksley Rothschild[willpower 3!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )
MiailhesHe climbs, god he climbs, barefoot and driven, sought and seeking, he forges the river again (and no, no it is not a torrent, it is summer-low and swift yes but not deep enough to threaten to drown him, to harrow him, to carry him away) and gains the opposite bank and scrabbles up over the rocky ground where scrub little olive trees cling to the slope and he gains the road -
which is not asphalt, but is instead paved with hand-carved stones worn to hollows in the middle by all who have walked before -
and looks up at the great span of the bridge and scans the slope and finds, set therein, the path upward.
The stairs some stranger has set into the side of the gorge, has carved from its bones or perhaps brought here and set here, and his feet are torn and bruised and perhaps a bit bloody, the stairs he climbs are worn, shallowed in the middle from everyone else who has ever climbed to these heights, and he knows, somewhere deep in his bones, he knows, as he has always known, that the path he must climb will be much, much longer than it seems, and he can see the sun running over the vault of the sky, the light shifting, and he pushes himself, spends himself, climbs with only the chafing rhythm of his own harsh breathing to keep him going,
and it has been an hour, it has been hours, he doesn't fucking know he just knows that time is passing and he is moving constantly, shadowed by the forest, with only the occasional glimpse of the bridge through the branches or the sky above it, but he keeps going,
by the gods he keeps going, this surging, resurgent confidence bright and restive beneath his skin, this want, this need, this desire,
and the shadows are changing, and the sun is somehow no longer aslant but overhead, noon he thinks, noon and he keeps on going, another turn, another and another and another, and he should be there by now, for fuck's sake,
and ask he climbs Hawksley gradually becomes aware of another, shadowing his movements, and this time the stranger is a boy, a boy of no-more-than-ten, a boy with blond hair and a deep and abiding golden-ness about him, glimpsed occasionally, laboring alongside Hawksley, then gone, then back again, and the boy has long articulate limbs and his eyes are nothing-but-white and he wears a simple white shift, belted at the waist, with a single bronze armband on his left arm by way of adornment, and the boy says nothing to Hawksley unless Hawksley addresses him first,
just climbs alongside him, with no suggestion of heavy breathing, or anything like the demand, the toll the climb takes on Hawksley himself.
Near the end (there must be an end. He knows that. There was, after all, a beginning), each step becomes harder. He reaches again,
he pushes himself,
and beneath that push, he can feel what it would feel like to stop, to breathe, to stay, right? Because he's tired. Because this is bullshit. Because - but he doesn't stop, and he doesn't stay. He keeps climbing those stairs that are ever-unfolding, like an MC Escher study,
until
they
stop.
--
The view is breathtaking. The gorge, covered in its dry, scrubby wood. The bridge, this vast construction, erupting over the firmament, all golden in the light of the setting sun.
The conduit, where the water ran through a trough as tall as a man, though perhaps not quite so tall as a Hawksley. The boy, sitting on a stone, legs swinging in a low and childlike rhythm, as he watches Hawksley rather intently.
There is a gate, beside the boy. It is open.
Hawksley RothschildIt was some kindred spirit who carved these steps. Brother, father, ancestor, mentor. Hawksley pulls himself hand over hand where he needs to, grabs rootwork and stones where he has to. The climb is more difficult than he thought it would be but he assaults it anyway, enjoying it a bit, enjoying the pressure, the drive, the exertion. He likes challenges that he chooses himself. This is one.
But after a while, he is tired. After a longer while, he is flagging. He pants. He sweats. He has scrapes here and there, bruises. He climbs anyway, because that is how you work out your body: just one more. just one more. You keep going until you can't, and you stop telling yourself I can't when your feet and hands are still capable of moving, your arms capable of curling, your breath capable of cycling. Hawksley is still some distance from I can't.
He is some distance from it when he notices someone else. He looks, as you do. He smiles at the kid, the little priest-boy, the little demigod, whoever he is. He thinks: that boy is doomed. Young gods, the golden strong boys, usually are. They get murdered by their uncles or betrayed by their brothers. They almost always come back to life somehow. Hawksley doesn't worry about him. He climbs with him, conserving his breathing, but he doesn't feel so alone on the climb, and it makes him a weird sort of happy to be accompanied thus.
Happy, even when that's just about the only thing keeping him going.
To the very top.
Hawksley stops there, finally, panting, finding a place to lean his back, a place to stretch out his legs so they don't cramp. He looks around for the boy but doesn't find him, not at first. Closes his eyes for a few seconds, trying to regain his breath. He opens them again, looking around again, swallowing his own saliva as he can. He sits in the shade and looks at the boy and he smiles, lopsided and endeared.
"What's your name?" he asks, his voice rasping.
Miailhes"I'm the Guardian of the Third Gate," the boy says, with his strange eyes, which feel both: blank in their whiteness and also somehow: all-seeing. And Hawksley smiles at the boy and the boy smiles back, and smiles bright, canting his head all childlike, boylike, see - this inherent and irrepressible curiousity that is bred-into-the-bones-of-him - for all that there is an answering sharpness to his gaze, the way it catches and snags and sort of chirrups on Hawksley.
The boy keeps swinging his feet, an articulated rhythm, that, like the beating of some echo-chambered heart. He looks a little considered and a little thoughtful, this worm of consideration between his brows, "Maybe I have different names otherplaces, maybe you can figure them out someday,
"But that's who I am, here.
"You wanna know something?" The boy glances up the corridor of the conduit, then back to Hawksley, mildly conspiratorial. "I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do."
Hawksley RothschildHawksley has a feeling he knows who the guardian of the first gate was. Old man. Young woman. Little boy. He watches the boy as he sits in the shade, catching his breath. The boy is a bird, the boy is a demigod, the boy is a sacrifice. He exhales. "Of course you are," he murmurs.
The boy may have other names. Hawksley just nods. He wouldn't put it past the universe. They all have lots of names, don't they?
He follows the boy's gaze, then looks back at the boy and what the boy says makes his mouth cock a smile. "Welcome to my world," he says, in weary but wholehearted agreement.
After a moment, his hand presses to the ground, and he starts to lever himself up. His legs are tired and his back is tired and his arms are tired. He shuffles toward the gate, reaching out a hand to the kid. "I think I'm going to walk across the bridge. You wanna come?"
Miailhes"Sure!" The boy says, with enough recurve of excitement in his voice that some deeply American part of Hawksley may even hear the echo of words that aren't there: that'd be swell!
Wouldn't it just?
The boy jumps down from his perch, hits the packed earth without a sound and reaches out to take Hawksley's hand in his own. And the boy's skin is warmer than Hawksley could have imagined before they joined hands, as if there were some banked fire beneath his flesh, lighter, too -
all hollowboned,
little bird, little raptor, little demigod, sacrifice -
There is a metal gate set into the frame of the conduit. It is already open, just, but the boy reaches and grasps it and where he grasps the metal it melts, just, conforms to the shape of his hand, and the boy opens the gate wider and in they go
The conduit is six feet deep. Water ran through it for six centuries, long after Rome fell, long after men stopped tending to its works, and still it stands, and that's not precisely where they are right now, is it?
- still, it is not especially wide, just wide enough for one and the boy walks abreast of Hawksley but there's not much room, so instead he walks on the lip of the wall, at the very edge of the bridge.
"How are you getting down from here?" The boy wants to know, as they walk. "Are you going to fly?"
Hawksley RothschildWhen they touch, Hawksley makes sure to only hold the boy's hand lightly. He walks through the gate with him, noting how the boy changes the gate but not remarking on it. It was made for one, now for two. They pass through together, and he listens to his feet on the dust and stone. He listens for the boy's feet, and does not hear them.
The boy asks him a solid question, and Hawksley huffs a bit of laughter. "Are you going to teach me?"
MiailhesAre you going to teach me? Hawksley asks, laughter in his voice, the hint of it.
The boy, the strange-eyed, boy, who is not a boy at all, still considers the question like a boy, a very serious sort of boy, the kind of boy who thinks so hard he seems to be thinking with his body as much as his mind. The narrow point of the frown between his brows seems and feels so strange when set against the counterpoint of their colorlessness and it is difficult to sense the expression for the lack of focus, but -
"I don't know." Says the boy, Very Seriously. "I don't know if I could. I don't know if I'm supposed to either. You and I are different. I'm just the Guardian. I don't change things the way you do." And Very Earnestly.
"I could tell you how I learned, though."
Hawksley RothschildThe boy is a bird. The boy is hollow-boned, the wind could pick him up and lift him aloft or dash him to pieces. He already disdains gravity, Hawksley can tell that the way he can tell anyone is like him. But the boy doesn't know, isn't sure, says 'supposed to' and Hawksley feels some lessening of the kinship between them, because he thinks so rarely of supposed to, he cares so little for it.
He cocks his head. He lets go of the boy's hand, and he crouches in the conduit, leaning his back against the stone wall. "So how did you learn, Guardian of the Third Gate?"
Miailhes"I jumped."
The boy says,
and the boy smiles. Oh, how he smiles, like a flightless thing given wings, like a man who has made peace with his own demise. And there is perhaps a challenge in it, the sharpened edge of it that - with a slanting glance - is given a nigh-sinister edge by the blankness of the boy's eyes.
"The first time I fell, and I smashed against the rocks, and it hurt, and I died, and I was reborn, and that hurt too.
"The second time I fell, and I smashed against the rocks, and I died, and I was reborn.
"The hundredth time I fell, and I smashed against the rocks, and I died, and I was reborn.
Hawksley crouches in the conduit, his spine against the stone, and the boy, well, he hops up then. To the lip, to the framing edge. Light-footed. Bird-boned.
"Then one-day I flew. That's the only way I know to do it."
He is walking so precisely along that edge, the boy, one foot in front of the other. And he shrugs, this insouciant little curve of her spare shoulders.
"I suppose you would have to cast - " Is there a creeping hint of disdain for all these forms? Oh, yes. Oh, oh yes. The need for them, the necessity of them. After all, the boy, one day, he just flew. " - a spell, and then jump."
Hawksley RothschildFor all of that, Hawksley listens. He's arrogant, he's selfish, but when he is interested in something, he listens. He listens, wondering about attempts three through ninety-nine. He closes his eyes, opens them again after a while, watching the boy walk delicately, easily, with emptiness to either side.
"What if the jumping itself is a spell?" he asks.
MiailhesThat arrests the boy.
Arrests him.
He turns and he fixes Hawksley with that no-color stare and his head is canted in a way that is, yes - delicate and arrogant and predatory, in the way that all things that fly are delicate and arrogant and predatory, in the manner and immediacy of youth.
The blank eyes search Hawksley - he can feel them, physically, all seeking - and then he turns and lifts his chin and considers, you see, the horizon.
The place where the earth meets the sky, where the sky falls to the earth, where -
Glances back. Shrugs, not quite diffident but nearly-so.
"Because you Willed it so? It would work. And you'd soar." Neat, the movement of his shoulders. "Or it wouldn't. And you'd fall, and smash against the rocks, and - "
Hawksley knows the rest.
Hawksley RothschildThe way he works magic -- some magic -- is by gesture. By motion. By reaching out to the invisible forces of the universe and physically manipulating them, as though they are real. As though they are strings to pull, or paint to move around on a canvas. It's his best way. Not the drawing and the chanting, not the for-decoration-only athame that lives under glass in his library because he never-fucking-uses-it, not goblets and staves and certainly not wands though,
yes,
he has one of those too, and it's very nice indeed. Hawksley is a cultivated primitive. Hawksley is a learned savage. Hawksley is a physical, cerebral creature, and it makes him as dangerous and as fallible as it makes him glorious.
Of course for him, falling itself can be a spell.
Hawksley puts one hand against the wall he leans on and rises to his feet. And he keeps his eyes on the boy's eyes, his so blue and the boy's so empty and open that they can absorb and contain everything. He stands in the conduit and lets go of the wall. And then he puts his foot on the air, against the air a few inches above the rock, as though a step. Air is matter. Everything is matter and energy. Why should air be less than a rock? Why should he not be able to walk on it?
Without touching the boy, the stone, he begins to lift his other foot to step up a little higher. Onto nothing. Into air.
Well: he tries.
Hawksley Rothschild[forces 3-which-he-does-not-have / coincidental because liz says so / -1 for quint and -1 because I am pretty sure the resonance around here is pretty well sun-drenched and soaring]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
MiailhesHe takes the first step,
and he rises.
Hawksley Rothschild[MOAR]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Hawksley Rothschild[who needs quint or sleep let's do this]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Hawksley Rothschild[from the brim to the dregs!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 2) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
MiaihlesOnto nothing /
/ into air.
-
Onto nothing.
Into air.
-
He takes one step; and then, perhaps, another and a goddamned 'nother, and listen: his feet are not merely falling rather-more-slowly than they otherwise should be. The air is solid. And he is rising.
He is rising, climbing an invisible staircase through the evening air. The first three steps, four steps, five steps bring him above sides of the conduit, and from there:
he
keeps
rising.
Perhaps the words are in his head, mirror to the gestures, the last shreds of an old, old spell, the key that required a lock before it could open up the sky.
The earth is spinning far below him, the sun lowering, this long, slanting blade of light brilliant from the horizon. The gorge and the rocky canyon covered with scrubby, dryland forests, the gray-green olives and the spry, spindly little oaks, and sunlight on the water and the water moving and every part of it so goddamned small, so impossibly removed, so far away.
The boy is shading his eyes against the sun. His pale-white no-color eyes, watching the progression as Hawksley rises,
and rises,
and rises,
these minute shifts, these tiny angular corrections as the angle of his gaze rises, and rises, and rises, too.
Soon enough they are level. Hawksley standing on the goddamned air, six feet above the level of the conduit. Six feet and then another, see: another spell, another expenditure of will, this reaching that is at once brutal, punishing, and exhilarating, and the boy whose bones are hollow, whose scapulae twitch right? with the memories of the wings he has grown and the wings he has shed and the wings he has had severed from his body and the wings that he has worn that melted beneath the heat of the sun.
The boy is breathing. Breathing.
He opens his mouth.
He smiles at Hawksley,
and steps off the side of the aqueduct,
and soars.
Hawksley RothschildDaedalus built the dancing floor for the princess Ariadne. It was the wooden cow that housed her mother Pasiphae, allowed her to mate with the precious white bull that the gods made her lust for in vengeance against the king Minos. He built the labyrinth where Ariadne's half-brother the Minotaur was imprisoned, the Minotaur that was killed because of a ball of thread Ariadne gave to Theseus. Over and over, his creations had terrible consequences. Over and over, they came back to haunt him and all lives intertwined with his.
Why was he imprisoned on Crete? For killing his nephew, who might have been a rival. Why was he imprisoned on Crete? For his knowledge of the labyrinth, so that it would not be given to others. Why, why did they make his son stay with him, a man whose hubris seemed limitless and lethal to everyone around him? Icarus was warned. Icarus was taught and then he was warned and it made no difference. Daedalus was so proud. Icarus was so joyful. The sun was so warm.
Hawksley knows the flaw in it all: Daedalus thought he needed wings. He taught his son: you must have wings to fly. And when the wings fell away, they would fall, it only makes sense that they would. If you need wings to fly, you cannot fly without wings.
Hawksley, though.
He knows why birds fly. And Sera, you were wrong, it is not just because they can.
--
The whole sky is measured. It is not the words but the knowledge, as all words ultimately are: language is only a smokescreen for meaning, a translation of truth. Hawksley pulls himself into the sky, step after step, til he is chasing a boy who may be the Guardian of the Third Gate and may be Icarus and may be every golden son who has failed his father by dying. But they do not die. They do not fall. The boy lifts, soars, and Hawksley
lets out a cry that may be a scream but sounds like the voice of an eagle, an exultation. He throws his arms to his sides, feeling himself lifted by the chest, by the heart, driven forward by will and adoration into
what he adores.
--
Oh, they fly. This is flying. He goes as high as he dares, he feels his own power under his feet and in his chest and in the air around him. He closes his eyes but hovers, letting the sunlight drench through him, closer than it has ever been, turning him to gold. He does not fall because he has no wings of feather and wax to melt. He lives in the sky, and if there are tears on his face for a few moments then they dry easily, quickly, because it is so dry up here, and the sun is so very hot.
He does what he has been waiting to do for -- god. Since he was a child. He dives, terrifyingly fast, plummeting, and he skims his fingertips through the surface of the water, the current where the second guardian wrestled with him. He sends her a blessing. He rises again, going in the direction of wilderness, emptiness, but he does not seek privacy to practice the incredible destruction his newfound power allows him.
Hawksley will learn to manipulate fire and lightning and all such things, of course. But really:
all he ever wanted was this.
This is everything he ever, ever wanted.
--
It ends. It has to end, inevitably ends. And when it does he is in the Middle of Nowhere, France. He can still hear the water but he has currently forgotten north and south, but that is no great pain; it's a flick of his mind to orient himself using other magics, even if his will is borderline exhausted.
Hawksley kneels on the earth and for the first time in a very very very long time he doesn't hate it. He does not despise the gravity or the earth itself. He places his hands on the ground and he feels the air moving through his hair and over his very, very, very tanned skin, feeling a glowing coming from his bones. He feels his heartbeat and he feels the universe around him and he has trouble remembering, already, what it was like -- what he was like -- before this.
It's going to take a long time to walk back to civilization. A reverse pilgrimage. He's okay with that. He is okay with everything, right now. As he walks back, he is touched by the sky, still within the sky, and he and the sky are co-conspirators. He looks earthbound, but
he and the sky know better.
