Anima

Ian

Life was in bloom in Rocky Mountain National Park. Not just the verdant green of the grass and trees, but the bustle of tourists wandering its many trails. When Ian woke up that morning, the air was 70 degrees and clear. Perfect weather for hiking. He passed a number of people on his way to Longs Peak, most of whom were only there for the day. As the elevation went up, the ambient temperature started to chill, and the steady line of hikers thinned out to only a few. Up on the mountain, it was still winter. The ice and the snow made climbing treacherous.

It was the third day of his camping trip, and he was seeking something more than what he'd found so far. The ground. The trees. Rolling forests that seemed to go on forever. Above the mountain, the sky spread out in a vast expanse of blue.

But to get there, he'd have to climb. So he did.

It was easy going at first. Meditative, even - ascending the rocks by instinct and muscle memory. By the time he was halfway up the peak he was alone, and the air had turned cold and biting. The sound of the wind was a low howl. From a distance it seemed a lonely picture: one man climbing away from spring's welcome embrace toward the unforgiving remnant of winter's last breath.

A couple of times he might have slipped, but he was careful, and Ian always did have a knack for keeping his balance. Somewhere around late afternoon he paused to rest on an outcropping jutting out from the rock face. Leaning back against he cold stone, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply of the thin mountain air. His arms and legs ached. His pulse was beating hard against the inside of his eardrums. He could never seem to get enough oxygen out here.

anima

Not many people out today. Tonight: not at this hour, not in this space, not on this particular day. Not up here, the scrubby treeline left behind somewhere near the beginning of the trailhead. Now, the sun is sinking behind the ragged edge of the frontrange mountains among which he climbs and the warmth of the day is rapidly disappearing. From where he sits - atop a rock wall overlooking the scrubby wallow of a treeless valley that has only started waking itself to the thought of spring, above a band of striated granite damp the runoff and snowmelt he can see the ship's prow prominent beneath the greater bulk of the mountain. The outdoor solar privys nestled beneath another prominent little ridge that will take quite the scrabble to get down.

The trail up the peak: maybe tomorrow then, and only if he remembered his ice axe and crampons - that much he recognized from nearly the first glimpse of Long's Peak at the trailhead this morning. Closer now, he can see how much of the climb will be on snow and ice: a wallow up the glacier, the long traverse over a snowfield, hard rock scrabbles and then crosswise up a long, steep couloir. Most people wouldn't tackle a climb like that alone.

Ian isn't most people.

The night's gathering in, though. Out here the stars are spectacularly spangled - but still not bright enough to light the trail outside of a full moon. Time to find a place to camp.

Something about the horizon tonight.

That glow.

Ian

He had his gear with him - packed tightly and efficiently into a backpack that he carried strapped around his torso. For this particular journey, it was only the basic essentials: food, water, rope, axe... but there was a tiny single-person tent, should he have need of it. The round-trip climb was about 15 hours - six or seven to the top of the peak. He hadn't really planned on stopping, but sometimes plans change. The daylight disappeared faster than it seemed it should have. How long had he been out here?

Ian got to his feet carefully and surveyed the landscape above and below him. Wind gusted past, blasting his cheek with a few sharp crystals of snow. The glow on the horizon pulled his gaze back to the sky. He watched it for a few long moments, then turned and began the steep ascent toward the snow. He needed to get out of the wind, and it would provide more shelter than the bare rocks could.

anima

Sometimes the day disappears faster than it should. Sometimes the edges of the world close in upon themselves, then crack open again come morning. He is alone on the trail, night around him. Below the thin glow of sunlight reflected upon the surface of a shallow mountain lake. The skeletal frame of a ranger's cabin, blackened at the eves and around the boarded-up windows tucked into the leeside of the ridge he both eschews and skirts on the shores of the lake. An elegant fringe of ice crusts over the protected southern shore. Everywhere ice, the winter ice has melted. Even as he hikes up toward the snow, he crosses these nameless, snaking little rivulets that find every channel in the rock.

Has he been here before? Both the trail and the mountain take on a different aspect after dark. The sharp fin of the Ship's Prow gains a ragged prominence as the ridge he follows tucks lower and skirts beneath it. The mountain beyond gains both bulk and prominence - dark and darker against the luminous night sky.

Rock beneath his feet now. Then snow in the slope at the bottom of the couloir.

No one else in sight.

Ian

[Per+awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN10 (2, 4, 5, 5, 7, 9) ( fail )

Ian

Somewhere in the world, it was still daytime. Somewhere, but not here. Standing at the base of the Diamond, Ian looked up and surveyed what he could make out of the sheer cliff face. It was dark, but he saw better in the dark than most people did. (Better, but not perfectly.) If he was going to make camp he'd need to follow the keyhole trail past this part of the mountain, into the more gradual slope where the snowdrifts piled against the wall.

If.

But he wasn't tired. And the stars looked beautiful tonight.

"Are you there?"

He said it quietly, almost as much to himself as to the mountain, and the winter winds stole the words away from his lips even as he said them. He didn't expect a response. Another moment, and he hesitated. Looked out across the snow. Then turned and started to climb.

Ian

[Dex+Ath]

Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (3, 3, 6, 6, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Ian

[And again!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 1 )

anima

Are you there?

Ian asks and there's no response. No formal response - though he doesn't seem to expect one. Merely the arcing echo of the wind, funneling over the ridges. There's no response, but that does not stop him, no.

He starts to climb.

--

Here is a familiar rhythm, a familiar path against a familiar obstacle. The loose strength of his wiry frame against the unmoving, implacable rock, breath harsh in his lungs, fingers aching, thighs burning. The stars pinpoint-bright overhead, the seam of the sky -

Difficult angles in the dark, but he pulls himself up and up with ease.

The slope sharpens and the holds grow less certain, more rare, and still he hangs on.

Somewhere above, silhouetted against the impervious sky, this sketch, this shadow of movement. Fleeting - rising, faster than he is, mind, and with an almost impervious ease.

Ian

The climb here was more dangerous than any other part of the peak. A steep drop descended below Ian's feet, stark and cold and unforgiving. A couple of rock chips skittered down the side of the cliff, dislodged by his hand where it gripped a crack in the stone. The sound they made on the way down was deceptively gentle. The climb was slower than Ian would have liked, given the wind and the darkness and the fact that he had to stop periodically to reaffix his rope tether (lest he slip and fall.) But the landscape here was beautiful at night, the slopes and forests below stretching out far into the horizon.

It became a rhythm, almost. Like dancing or running. The sharp crack of the spike going into the rocks. The reach of his arm - seeking, holding, pulling himself up to the next ledge. The rocks were cold and sharp beneath his hands, the surface under his feet slick enough to be worrisome. He'd done this before - not here, but on other mountains. He knew how to be careful. And he was (careful.) But he was also hungry. The sore heat from his arms and legs mixed with a prickling sensation in the subdermal layer of his skin. Some crawling, impatient drive. A need to move. To climb. (To hunt?)

Something was there. High in the shadows. The flicker of motion caught Ian's attention and he stopped still, his body pressed against the rock-face as he looked up, searching.

His heartbeat jumped. After a few beats, he kept climbing. Faster now, trying to catch up.

Ian

[Per+Alertness diff 7 -2 (acute senses)]

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 5, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 4 )

Ian

[And Dex+Ath again, diff 9 this time]

Dice: 8 d10 TN9 (1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 1 )

anima

The flick of motion in his peripheral vision, somewhere above. Some plateau, some rockledge, which dissolves into a near-perfect stillness that does not even seem to breathe when he tips his head back: pauses in his climb, and look, stares, seeks.

There, again, rising, and now his efforts redouble and he is on the move. Struggling - straining to go faster but there's a rhythm to this that cannot be rushed. Driving in the anchors, moving the rope that keeps him safe, assessing each new hold, practically blind on an unfamiliar rockface, which only sharpens its prominence.

He can follow the lilting movement of whatever it is above him darting quick and light-footed, before it disappears far above.

He could go faster if he dispensed with the protections, and simply climbed.

Or hell, maybe he's confident enough that he can find and track whatever it is again: in his own time.

Ian

He could go faster, yes. Though it was, by all accounts, an unwise thing to do. Scaling an unfamiliar peak alone in the dark was already pushing the bounds of what any sane climber might hope to get away with. And at this height, if he fell... he might very well not survive.

Ian was not suicidal. He had been... once. A long time ago. That moment seemed both close and very far away. One could add up the things that he had survived, and suddenly falling off a mountain no longer seemed like the worst thing that could happen.

Maybe it was frustration, or maybe it was the sense that somehow these things (these man-made things - ropes and anchors and the synthetic shield of his clothing) did not actually belong here. Ian took a breath to steady his heartbeat and ripped the anchor out of the rocks. It took a few moments for him to free himself of the encumbrance of his gear, but once he did, he reached out over the dark expanse of space beneath him and dropped it all into the void.

Then he pulled off his gloves, and his hat, and his coat. Each of these things went down the mountain, discarded. The wind was cold. Finally his boots and socks. He always did move better barefoot.

He was in danger of exposure now, though a Life mage always had ways to combat that. Regardless, he started climbing again. Faster, easier. More like the lithe creature that moved in the shadows.

Ian

[Stamina]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Ian

[Wits+Alertness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

anima

Ian sheds all these things, divests himself of human accoutrements and human gear and gear and human protections: not simply rock anchors and the light and strong synthetic rope he bought, but other, simpler things. Climbing boots, climbing gloves, hat and coat. The warm woolen socks: drops them down below him into darkness.

If he doesn't come back and gather them up before the morning, the strange occasion of finding all these things littering the trail will lead the earliest group or two of hikers to call the park rangers. Maybe there'll be a small missing person's hunt, to make sure there's no one lying in a gully with crushed vertebrae and a broken leg.

No matter.

--

There's laughter. Not precisely audible and really quite far from human: the sense of it begins when he flings down the first anchor. Builds as he strips himself down to certain essentials. Physical: spiritual. Laughter: more inside him than without him, felt more than heard, the tattoo of it against the back of his skull, quite as coy as he is. Not precisely mocking, but hardly gentle. Call it: challenging.

--

He climbs: naked.

This is dangerous, and any other climber would call it damn near suicidal: an unfamiliar cliff face, a cold, often snow-bound path lost in absolute shadow, only the sky shining, illuminated, above. Searching, blind, with fingers and toes for each little perch, always maintaining three points of contact with the face of the rock. Muscles aching, trailing the path of a swift shadow barely visible.

Wait.

Not trailing.

Ian hauls himself up over the edge of the cliff face and finds himself on the edge of a ridge that eddies out into a gentle snowfield rimmed with tall, dark pine trees heavy with snow. He knows that he is well above the treeline and yet: here they are, so dark where they are not drenched in snow and limned with reflective moonlight. The bulk of the mountain on whose shoulder this wood sits is massive, prominent. The wind sharper, colder still. Beyond this one peak: even taller giants rise and rise and rise like black teeth against the luminous sky.

All is quiet. His breath is harsh in his throat and both fingers and toes are lightly abraded. He's freezing. Nothing is moving but he is not really searching out movement. He is thinking quite differently in this precise moment: anticipating rather than following.

No need to follow when you can lead.

Ian

[Life 2 - Resist Cold, coincidental diff 5 -1 (focusing with blood) -1 (practiced and/or taking his time)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Ian

Somewhere during the climb, the mountain became larger: his intended destination now only a stop on a much more arduous journey. Ian's hands grasped the edge of the cliff as he pulled his weight over the edge, numb fingers clawing at cold stone. The air was freezing, striking sharp against his exposed skin. Every joint and muscle in his body ached from the climb. Where his feet touched down, blood stained the snow. Breathing deeply of the dry winter air, Ian got to his feet and surveyed the landscape - the tall pines and the looming presence of the mountain as it reached up into the black sky.

A voice uncoiled somewhere in the back of his thoughts: coy, feminine. Laughing. A challenge?

This is why he was here, standing in the snow with naked, bleeding feet. Because he needed to try - needed to find that part of himself that was more than a collection of mundane details. The name on his birth certificate: Ian Tao Lai. The things that he owned: a nice car, a collection of art films on blu ray, a closet full of overpriced clothes with designer labels. The jobs on his resume: dancer, model, bartender. Beyond that, what was he? Life. Hunger. Instinct.

Human? Animal? Was there a difference?

He was also something else - something more than both of those. And that part of him was why he was here. Without evolution, life became stagnation.

Kneeling down, he curled his fingers into the snow and scooped up some of the blood from his torn feet. He closed his eyes and drew a line down the center of his forehead; the line of his nose - down to his lips, where he tasted salt and copper. He focused on his heartbeat - on the blood moving through his veins, keeping him alive, keeping him strong. And he bared his teeth as he pushed with his Will, asserting his existence against the creeping chill of the cold. Speeding up his slowing heart. Warming the core temperature of his body.

He felt it like a surge of primal energy. His breath was a sudden gust of heat in the cold air.

And when it was over, he looked down at the snow-blanketed woods and began to run, heading for the trees, and toward the rising peak of stone behind them.

anima

Hmmm.

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Ian

[Dex+Ath]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 6, 6, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Ian

[and again!]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

anima

Hmmm.

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Ian

[Stamina 1]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Ian

[Stamina 2]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )

anima

Ian no longer feels the cold. Smears: the blood-stained snow over his face and mouth and chest, remembers that a heart beats beneath the protective shield of his sternum. Reaches inside, feels it beating, and starts to move.

Runs: flat out over the snowfield, steeper than he understood in the darkness. Hurtles himself toward the treeline, kicking up snow behind him as he goes. The world is bright over him: shining stars, brilliant sky,

and then: dark and dark and dark. Every sound cushioned by the heavy branches of the pines and deadened by the deep drifts of snow. Harder to run here than he imagined at the start: on two legs he has to plow through drifts that are knee deep, even thigh-deep and the work itself is exhausting, but he pushes through. Framed by the harsh rasp of cold (he does not feel it) dry (that he feels) air in the back of his throat, which pulls the whole of the drifting world into a peculiar sort of focus.

Gradually he becomes: aware, you see, that he is not alone.

He is shadowed by another, larger and more graceful, unhindered by the drifts through which he has to force himself. This coy presence, at the edge of his vision again - lashing movement and a certain - goading - challenge inherent in the bend and sweep of its frame in his periphery.

When he finally surges past it (and somehow the wood seems much, much deeper than it appeared, somehow the peaks he was seeking seem quite as far away, now, as they ever did) Ian might be forgiven for feeling a certain - primal - surge of triumph.

Ian

He’d chased the winter from his lungs, but winter was not a thing so easily conquered. It was there in the snow and in the dark. In the press of chill that slid over his skin. As he ran, the drifts grew deeper, clinging to his legs as he pushed his way through them. He wasn’t running out of urgency, or to pull away from the shadowed, graceful creature in his periphery. He was running because he could. Because the pain and the struggle and the coursing of his blood made him feel more alive.

When he noticed that he’d pulled ahead, he stopped. His body went still, poised in the deep snow like some kind of predator, his posture and his gaze steady and alert. How much could he see here? The darkness was thick between the tall, blanketing pines. He turned to regard the creature who’d been shadowing him, eyes drifting over the shadows in search of something that yet moved. Did she stop? Or did she dart past him?

Almost, he spoke again. But that kind of language felt wrong here. So he crouched down in the snow and tilted his head and watched; listened. The scent of pine resin was sharp in the air, mingling with the cold clarity of ice and earthy minerals of the stone mountain. Even here, in this inhospitable place, there was life.

Ian

[Sensing Life: Life 1, diff 4 -1 (practiced - using his heartbeat as a focus)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

anima

There: a shadow. Another shadow that sweeps and surges - yes, past him now, while he pants in the darkness.

While he: watches.

While he: listens.

While he reaches out through the strange shadowed density, the close-wrapped stillness of this place to touch the patterns of the world around him, real and unreal, layered bright together.

She does not have precisely that sort of tattoo against his magical senses - and yet he can sense, dimly, faintly, dully, the silvery connection between the two. If she has a beating heart: it is simply another iteration of his own.

Which is larger, stronger in his chest than he has ever before understood before.

--

She is moving again: fast and faster now.

He will need more than his own two legs to keep up with her.

Ian

He remembered a time, once, when he had been something other than human. When his body was not what it was now. The memory of it still felt oddly close to him, though that Awakening had been... years ago. He remembered the way his paws felt ghosting along the ground. The way the brush of wind had seemed like electric current against his face. The way that everything had been sharper, clearer, more alive. He remembered the weight of it, and the ready responsiveness of all that muscle and tendon.

He also remembered the reason why he'd changed - and the reasons why he'd walked away.

This was not that night, and he was not the same person he had been then. When he opened his senses, he sought some deeper connection. A grounding link to the Tapestry around him. Perhaps he was looking inward - for what was this place but a landscape inside his own heart? Was he trying to understand her or himself? Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe there wasn't a difference.

She wanted to run. So did he. He wanted to run and to climb until everything else in his mind disappeared - empty but for the surge of his blood and his breath that screamed I am here. I exist. I am alive.

The rest of his clothes were left discarded in the snow. Whatever he was, whatever he could be, they would only get in the way. And then he ran. The snow was thick and heavy and clung to his legs, but he ran anyway. Pushed through it. Pushed past the aching exhaustion in his limbs. And all the while he could hear his heart in his ears, beating deeper and heavier and louder.

He didn't so much Will the change as accept it - surrender to it. The way he had that night all those years ago.

Ian

[Be a tiger, Ian! diff 8 to start, definitely spending WP - will extend as much as he can]

Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (4, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Ian

[diff 9]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (1, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Ian

[down to 3 WP, and again]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (5, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Ian

[aaand again]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (3, 7) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Ian

[last WP!]

Dice: 2 d10 TN9 (3, 7) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

anima

)Ian sheds his clothes and it is not clear how he manages it. This is not the fumbling strangeness of human thumbs and cuffs and collars, the inevitably inelegant dance of getting out of his goddamned underwear. There is far less work, and it takes much less time, than it took him to shed all that gear, back on the physical mountain he was climbing when he came:

here, wherever here is.

Ian sheds his clothes and he does it virtually with a thought.

Steps out of them or perhaps wills them away and then moves again, surges forward, the drumbeat of magic in his body and in his lungs, in his heart and in his blood, a hungry arc bright against the framing darkness.

He runs.

He works.

He Works.

He moves: reaches for something he remembers, now more with his body than his brain, folds himself back into his body and begins to peel what is essential out of himself. No longer on two legs - though somehow not precisely four - he is low and elegant - little more than a shadow surging beneath the overhanging pines. As the elevation rises, the drifts deepen and yet: like her - he glides over them now, rather than floundering through.

Soon enough they leave behind the piney woods. Rising still, snow and ice a skim coat over the shoulder of the mountain that seems both metaphorical and actual: which rises and rises and rises, above them, absolutely wreathed in mist, opaque and dense. There is a kind of triumph radiant in her as they run, as they rise that he can feel but beneath and above that, always the push, the urge, to movement, to rise. She would challenge him all the way to the summit -

- but he has spent himself so thoroughly, exhaustion (of the will, if not the body) begins to assert itself beneath and around the exhilaration of the hunt.

Ian

Triumph, yes. Exilaration - visceral and unguarded. They both felt it. And they ran together now, swift and agile as hunting animals. The wind played patterns in the soft fur that now lined his skin, and when his toes flexed there was the presence of something sharp and hooked. The landscape looked different like this - even the slimmest shards of moonlight were bright and luminous.

He'd given everything he had to find this place - both within and without. And he was tired now, more than he could remember having been in a very long time. The exhaustion went down to his marrow, and deeper still... a spiritual as well as physical exhaustion. But he was happy, too. How could he not be?

I am here to be here. Like these rocks and sky and snow.

Some mountains could not be scaled. Perhaps this one was one of those. Perhaps he'd given everything he had and could go no further. But she would challenge him all the way to the summit, and he was yet standing. Moving. Breathing. And he would climb until he couldn't anymore. Perhaps that would not be much farther. Perhaps it would be farther than he could imagine. (He had already come that far.)

So he grasped the stone wall with his clawed hands and began once more to haul himself upwards, looking upward as he did - toward the mist and the dark, opaque sky.

Ian

[Str+Ath]

Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Ian

[Stamina]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2) ( botch x 1 )

anima

Do di do.

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

anima

Some summits can be had the first time a mountaineer chances a ridge. Others are eternal, somehow: they require long sieges, endless assaults. What he knows - and there is a point where it knows it so clearly and thoroughly that he must understand it in the very marrow of his bones - is that he has come as far as he can now. He has spent himself. And still she is there - peripheral, residual, harrying and leading and rising rising rising. He can go no further.

There is something - (yes) - new in him. Some opening. Some shift, which is paradoxically both smaller and greater than himself. And yet: he digs in his clawed hands, to drag himself still further, leaves behind the windswept ridge on which they had been racing, and follows her into the clouds.

Colder here, sharper, strange. The mist wraps him right 'round until he can see no more than his forepaws in front of him, the face of the rock. And there is more here, stranger things, the murmuring of voices he cannot quite distinguish, which still somehow make his heart - well - seize. By which we mean: stop, only for a moment, but wrenchingly so, before it thunders back to life.

And then: then - something else, disorienting and disconcerting, or perhaps it is the elevation. Everything goes blank: black. Creates itself and comes undone.

Conciousness deserts him.

Ian knows nothing more.

anima

(Ian will awake the next morning still on the trail: he has 4 lethal dmg from a bad fall, WP 0, and Arete 3.)