calling and not calling my ex

Serafíne

Last night Sera couldn't hold her head upright and needed repeated reminders to put on her seatbelt. Drifted the whole of the drive back to the Monaco with her temple against the cool glass and her legs drawn up but turned akimbo on the seat. Talked some between these clear, deliberate, deliberative breaths she was drawing in like she could consume something in the air itself and maybe get fractionally higher. Refused any help that might've been on offer with a stubborn, drunken persistence. Spent the first half of the night curled up more-or-less clothed in the empty bathtub attached to one of the bedrooms. Got up at six a.m. or so and puked, then crawled into bed, curled up in one corner with her stuffed rabbit. Sid sprawled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Something in that dog's history tells it that certain spaces belong to people, but the floor is always free for the taking.
--
Sera sleeps for a long-ass time. Gets up at the ass-crack of 4 p.m. or so, hung over and ready for her tea. Is about to go out into public spaces of the suite wearing panties and the hotel's silky black bathrobe, but remembers that there are more-or-less strangers around, so you know, probably they are not necessarily used to mostly-naked Cultists waking up in their space. She pulls on a worn-soft t-shirt and is now only about 65% naked. Pads out with her hair a wild tangle all around her face, scratching idly at her ass and thinking about having her tea and then: having not a goddamned thing to do with the rest of her day.

Fuck. Everything sucks.

She finds something to eat and something to toss to Sid and an abnormal amount of time trying to figure out the single-serve coffee/tea machine, feeling every inch of her hangover. What the hell else does she have to do with her day?

Michael

By the time Serafíne has crawled her ass out of bed and decided she's ready to attempt to start the day Michael has returned from whatever the hell it is he's doing with his time in Denver. It isn't seeing the sights. Not unless the sights happen to align with his mission.

Eventually he has to come back to the room and tend to his physical needs.

He's about to take off his suit jacket the second he walks into the suite. Then he sees the Cultist is stumbling around attempting to figure out life. Her options are Hang Out In The Communal Area or Retreat Back To Her Side.

"Hello, Sid!" the Euthanatos says when the dogs come over to sniff at his shoes and ankles. Crouches to greet him proper before he turns his attention to Sera. "How are you feeling?"

Serafíne

"Fucking brilliant," Sera rasps, in a voice that says she is anything but brilliant. In the interim she has gotten out both her phone and her sunglasses. The former still doesn't fucking work and she slips it back into the pocket of her robe with an almost slinking guilt. The latter she slides down from the crown of her head to shade her eyes. Nevermind that they are inside and it is October and the sun is turning its face away from the earth. "Another glorious day in paradise. Sid and I were talking about going out to Castlewood or something."

Sid, of course, is stretching, sniffing, wagging her tail. Likes it when Mike gets down on his haunches to match her, and gives him several playful sniffs before she turns in one of those playful wheel-aways like she's ready for action. Of course she is. Sera has been passed out for hours.

"Were you checking on Jenn?"

Michael

Global warming hasn't had an impact on the rotation of the earth. The days are growing shorter. They will continue to shorten until it seems as if nothing has been left behind.

Dog people are impervious to the weather. Mike is most definitely a dog person. He also seems to think that Sera was joking about going out to Castlewood. There's nothing in Castlewood but nature. That may be the sort of thing a young woman who cannot interact with other people craves. If she can't have one extreme there's always the other.

He isn't judging her. He's scratching Sid behind the ears and getting her all wound up in preparation to take her outside.

Was he checking on Jenn.

"I was," he says. Bright. It seems as though Jenn is in good shape. Then something dawns on him. It doesn't take long. "You know Jenn."

Serafíne

"I know Elijah more than I know Jenn," the creature shrugs. Wasn't joking about Castlewood and isn't reading his mind so she doesn't know where he goes with his assumptions and might not care, and it's not so much that she craves nature specifically as that she craves: strain, movement, striving, and everything that knits itself together into all of that.

Doesn't look like the sort who would go climbing, though. Not standing there in her expensive lingerie and silk robe and Prada sunglasses, still indulging her hangover with whatever the fuck she can find in the suite.

"He was telling me about you and Jenn and the dude she drew and shit. Said he was trying to get her to go into hiding while you got a handle on the Fallen, but that she wasn't having it.

"I don't blame her. That would fucking suck."

Gee, Sera should know.

"That why you're here? The Fallen?"

Michael

Earnestness even though he doesn't open his mouth to concede that Sera has the right idea in this. Even though when he does open his mouth he doesn't swear. Doesn't qualify things as sucking or not sucking. He would have said that Jenn deserved to retain her autonomy and make her own decisions. Informed consent. That's what they offered her.

The Euthanatos gives Sid a few sound thumps on the flank before he stands upright again. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his slacks and gives a quick glance to see if the dog's leash is lying around anywhere. It's the quickest of quick glances. Other than that Sera has his undivided attention.

"Yes," he says.

That's all he has to say about that. He's not averse to answering more questions and she doesn't get the impression that he doesn't want to discuss the Nephandus.

Serafíne

Her attention is on him, too. Perhaps it is not so undivided, though it is difficulty to tell given the round, reflective surface her sunglasses present to the world. Lenses large enough to obscure the whole of her eyes and mosts of her straight brows. Delicacy framing them, of course, which is hard to reconcile with her rather filthy mouth. Maybe the friendship between the Chorister and the Ecstatic is as difficult to reconcile as well.

From a distance.

Still, he says Yes and he sees that she's looking at him for more than a second or two. There is hang-time in that look, an awareness that is sharper than most who do not know her would give her credit for.

"You got a bead on 'em?"

Steady, steady, steady. Maybe she's banished her hangover already.

Maybe she uses the sickness the same way she uses the pleasure: to Work, and Work Through. Any port in a storm.

Michael

"I believe so."

Those of his Essence don't incline towards stillness. He is not quite so tall as their mutual friend the Chorister but he has a trim build that speaks of perpetual motion and that motion reasserts itself now that they're discussing the Fallen and it's occurred to his bones that he's been standing in the same spot for longer than a few seconds.

To the single-serve coffeemaker he goes.

"This is the closest I've come to zir in several lifetimes." He uses a genderfluid pronoun to refer to the Nephandus. Make of that what you will. "For obvious reasons I'd prefer to not outright scry on zir, but if it comes to that, I'm prepared to."

Serafíne

"Several lifetimes?" The lilt of inquiry in her voice even as the immediate beat of her attention drops away. Sera has opinions about reincarnation. Not possibility of it (everything is possible, everything is permitted), but about the bullshit insanity of it. Look at the shit some goddamned ancient asshole tried to do with a perfectly lovely new girl in a perfectly lovely new body not that long ago right here in Denver.

She settles her lovely ass on the back of the couch. Feet on the cushions, tea in hand. Tastes better when someone else makes it.

"You spend all of those lives hunting it?"

Michael

"I'm not sure, to tell you the truth."

The Chorister had done the both of them the favor of keeping what he knew about their lives and their individual quests to himself. He has said nothing of Sera's failed Seeking to Michael and mentioned very little of Mike's pursuit of an unaging Nephandus to Serafíne.

Must have figured it would give them something to talk about. If Sera had to stop and talk to him on her way out the door that would keep her out of trouble. Francisco Echeverría can be a conniving bastard when he really wants to be.

His coffee finishes spitting into the mug and he puts the hand not responsible for holding its handle back in its pocket. Turns towards Sera and leaves the mug sitting on the cupboard until it's cool enough to sip.

"Something tells me it's been the other way around. I have strong memories that come to me in dreams sometimes, but I have no way of accessing them while I'm awake, if you catch my drift."

Serafíne

"How long have you had those dreams?"

Quiet. Still-voiced but look, yeah. She lifts her chin and looks back at him, dark glasses gleaming, mouth mostly still. Something both quick and tender about the way she holds herself, as if she were readying to alight or aloft. Rubs the old bronze ring on her right index finger with her right thumb. Always does when she's anxious, thoughtful, pensive.

Michael

If it makes him uncomfortable to talk about himself and the past that has led him to this moment it is visible only in the way the light hits his eyes. She knows what it is to have caught a Fallen's eye. To be at the locus of a twisted mind's attention. He does not know this about her.

Elijah did say the Euthanatos is an honest man though. Ask and ye shall receive.

"Oh... since I Awakened. I'd imagine it was a package deal." A quick lopsided smile. An attempt at lightening the mood. "These particular dreams, though, the ones that led me to believe ze and I have met before, began a little over two years ago. After my last Seeking. I've been investigating zir since then."

Serafíne

"One of them wanted me when I was a baby-mage." Now he knows that about her. No one else in the city does, though. There is a bitter-sweet simmer of a half-smile friable across her mouth. She does not respond to his attempt to lighten the mood. Doesn't believe in that shit, which always feels to inauthentic, so lightly inhabited. Lightening the mood. "Didn't show up in my dreams so much as in person.

"There was another one, here in Denver? Wanted someone else more than he wanted me but took the time to let me know that he thought I'd be awesome at being one of them. Pan killed him.

"Still, made me start thinking there was something in me, you know? Intrinsic, that pulled them in.

"That made 'em look, and say, hey. There's a girl that could really start believing in oblivion."

Is he looking closely at her? Or away? Has to really be watching her to see the gleam of the track of a tear, or maybe two, sliding down her right cheek. "You wanna tell me about the dreams, I'll listen. I'm a Seer, and an Oracle. You know? Might be able to help you get to the bottom of it, find the tap root instead of chasing the seeds when they're cast to the wind."

Michael

He is looking closely at her. That tear and its companion don't go unnoticed. Unmentioned maybe but not unnoticed.

"I think that might be helpful," he says. "Thank you for offering."

Those tears tell him something Sera doesn't. Mike keeps it to himself for now.

"For what it's worth--" Having known her a grand total of an hour and all. "--I don't think there's anything in you that calls to them. Not any more than there is in the rest of us."

Oh. There's the leash.

Serafíne

"I know there's not," so she says, so she does not necessarily always believe, but hey. The surety of her bravado is front and foremost in her voice. The curve of her mouth beneath the reflective curve of her glasses. Something about the lilt of her chin, or the way her lean frame and long legs slide down from the spine of the couch. Bare feet on the plush carpet, quiet.

"Except for the fact that I'm hot as fuck and throw the best parties, there's not a goddamned thing. Everybody likes to have a goodtime, you know?

"Even when you're getting ready for the end of the fucking world."

--

He's found the leash. He can walk the dog. She is padding back into Her Half of the suite, fully intending to spend the next several hours soaking in the oversized tub and - then - what? God only fucking knows.

"You let me know when you're ready," is the last thing she says before she disappears back into her room.

Isolation.

Michael

Previously:

Pan drove Sera fifteen hours from Los Angeles to Denver. Fifteen hours not including all the times they stopped. Fifteen hours where they had all the time in the world to talk and argue. Some semblance of argument. Pan proving what an overprotective father type he can be when he gets it into his head to be.

Just before the Colorado state line they came to a draw: he was not going to take her to Hawksley's mansion. He was not going to dump her on Kalen and Grace's front lawn. He was not going to have the Euthanatos handcuff her to the radiator until she felt better.

They reached the Denver city limits and a sense of sobriety came over the priest. Part of him wanted to set aside his life back in Los Angeles just to stay a while and help. The better part of him knew that they did not need him. Not like his congregation needed him.

So Pan made a phone call to his associate and his associate gave him an address and Pan drove to that address. He parked the car in the garage and put his arm around Sera's shoulders as he walked her towards the stairs.

--

They wait in the lobby of the Hotel Monaco for no longer than five minutes before the elevator dings with a car arriving. They open to reveal a tall man with fair skin and dark hair. He wore the remnants of a three-piece suit trousers and belt and dress shirt. He is handsome and Sera can tell before he opens his mouth that he is a friendly sort.

His resonance feels like unraveling. Like steadiness. Like a storm. No Jhor stains either his resonance or his soul. A rarity in his tradition.

They greet each other as "Father Echeverría" and "Mike." Pan introduces her as "My friend, Serafíne" and him as "My stock broker, Michael." 'Stock broker' appears to be a joke. 'My friend' does not.

Serafíne

Nobody is looking at her. Strangers should be staring, you know? The heady gut-punch of her resonance, the way she looks, the way she dresses, the way she exists in the world: she was made to see and be seen, if anyone ever was.

Pan draws looks, sure. Strangers, businessmen, engineers, doctors in town for the upper GI conference, CEOs in for a meeting of shareholders, oil company execs hoping to do something, anything, to stem some of the losses. Wait: they're not actually losing money now. Making a bit less, sure. So: Pan draws glances, some people want to bask in that light, others want to shield their eyes, others want to hide, but no one looks at him the way they'd look at her.

If they could see her.

Which they can't.

--

Our Sera settled into circle of Pan's arm as if it were natural that they walk together like that. More than natural: she needed the contact after the brief stop at 719 Corona Street. God that made her sad. In the bedroom upstairs Dan packed what he thought she'd want into a twee little vintage hard-sided suitcase right down to the stuffed rabbit left to nap forlorn in the middle of her empty bed all the time she was gone and talked to her like she was there and she was, and she could hear everything he said to her and it made her want to cry when she saw his uncertainty, the concern she could do nothing to dispel.

So she cried some more than they had to sit in the parking garage for a little while before she was feeling up to getting out of Pan's car. Doesn't want him to go.

Knows he has to.

--

"Hey." IT IS NOT HER FRIENDLIEST GREETING. Sera gives Michael a banked look and a twist of a sort-of-smile that ends with twist of her closed mouth. "This is Sid."

Maybe he didn't notice the dog until she introduced it, but there it is, tail thumping a subdued but suitably eager greeting.

"You can call me Sera. Everyone does." A neat little look sideways, no point rehashing those arguments, traces of her tears still evident on her face.

Michael

Pan hugged Dan on the way out of 719 Corona Street. Didn't force it on him but he has a sense about moments that call and do not call for two people to embrace and informing a man that his best friend had come back from a failed Seeking incapable of making herself known to Sleepers and needed her things so an associate of his could keep an eye on her for an indeterminate amount of time seemed to him that exact sort of situation.

He would have stayed if he thought it was in her best interests. He does not.

So he leaves her with Mike. Sera is not at her most friendliest but he expects nothing out of her. A brief flinch of surprise but that surprise sublimates into being charmed. He gives the dog consensual scratches behind his ears and under his chin and rubs his belly if the invitation is extended.

"Sera," Mike says. Bright in tone but not obnoxious. He can sense the intensity of the impending departure and the weight of the circumstances that have brought Sera here. "I think I will. Father, thank you, again."

This, about something else. The two men clasp hands and shake before embracing again. Pan turns to Sera and gives her the tightest hug he has ever given her. One as if in expectation of this being the last time. A hand at the back of her head and a kiss to her forehead.

He has always loved her like a daughter.

And the priest is gone not long after that. Mike waiting with his eyes aimed down as if to afford them their privacy. After a time he picks up Sera's suitcase.

Life goes on around them.

Serafíne

God, she hugs him back. Doesn't want to let him go once he pulls her in like that so she balls up her fists like she could go a round or two boxing with the universe, first knock out wins. We see how that goes. And she can't stop time but she can: dilate it, right? unloop and unwhorl it, spool out seconds into seconds into memories of seconds and she could right now, but she doesn't, thinks of it, doesn't. Maybe it happens like that in memory.

Somehow Sera manages not to cry until Pan cups her skull and kisses her on her brow.

Over her third eye.

--

Even then it's something she's holding on to, holding back from, shuddering with rather than letting-go-of. Sid whines a bit, gives these experimental thumps of her tail, wants the Person to not-cry and bumps her big head against Sera's right thigh to tell her so.

Michael picks up her suitcase and Sera was going to. But he's done it so, she breathes in, still those sort-of-crying breathes, shaking inhales and shuddering exhales and it is difficult to see someone like that, right? red-eyed with grief, emotion, the raw, unvarnished darkness of it laid flat out before you, but the stranger gives her some privacy and Sera in her way is grateful.

Doesn't say anything. How do you make small talk after that?

She follows him back into the elevator, and Sid comes with, toenails clicking on the floor.

Somewhere between the 14th and the 22nd floor, though, "You take in alot of strays?"

People, she means. Not dogs.

Michael

In the presence of a weaker member of another tradition that may have been the case. She may have met with a person who could not weather the rawness of her capacity for Passion. He could weather it. If she had come at him as a stranger and laid her grief upon him Michael would not have shied away from it.

Still: he grants them their moment. He is still there when they are finished embracing. He holds to the silence when Sera does not speak.

If the dog is amenable Mike scratches Sid beneath his jowls as the elevator ascends.

You take in a lot of strays?

That strikes him as humorous. Not riotously so. But he huffs out an amused breath with the inquiry and then stops to consider the question.

"I was one, once," he says. "Now that you mention it..."

Serafíne

"Fuck." Under-her-breath, raw-and-quiet. If there is humor here, it is of the gallows sort and Sera is in a needling mood. Needs it as an antidote, perhaps, to all that rawness. Doesn't mind vulnerability of all sorts, but is also remarkably private. "Most of us were. Not that many to-the-manor-born."

--

Dark eyes lift; she's not looking at him, precisely, so much as the gleaming confines of the elevator, their reflections in the muted polish of the wood-and-chrome. Trying to imagine herself erased from the scene and still present. Ugh, creepy.

"What did Pan tell you about me?"

Michael

"No. Absolutely. You're right."

He doesn't seem as if he's trying to appease her. As if he knows anything about her situation or her struggles or the path upon which she's embarked. For all she knows he doesn't.

For all she knows he is used to dealing with the spirits of those who have gone onto the other side. He is used to speaking to those who are trapped in a past life as if he never left. The Euthanatos are a strange breed.

He is looking up at the floor indicator before she asks what Pan told Mike about her. He glances over at her curious and contained at once and then he looks straight ahead at the closed doors.

When he speaks he does not have an accent. Maybe a bit of Chicago clinging to his intonation but what Sera may notice more than that is his sense of elocution and diction. If he has an accent he can work around it.

"That you were a friend. That you knew the city well." A beat. An omission. A prelude to a joke? It could go either way. This guy seems earnest. "He didn't tell me so much as he threatened me with bodily and spiritual harm should anything happen to you while you were in my care."

Serafíne

Sera is about to ask a Euthanatos Adept whether or not anyone has ever mistaken him for a Mormon. Something about the combination of straight-up earnestness with a suit. She's just gearing up for it because she Does Not Want To Be Here and doesn't really have anywhere else to go.

But then the stranger tells her that Pan didn't so much tell him as threaten him with bodily and spiritual harm and she breathes out a kind of hooked, hitched breath. Almost a laugh, but ugh, she wants to cry again.

"I've got a place. With my friends, bandmates. Sleepers can't see me right now, though, so Pan didn't want me to stay there while this - "

Shuddering breath.

"While this lasts." Trying not to entertain the possibility that it could be permanent. "He's probably right. I'm sorry if I'm being a fucking asshole. This just sucks."

Michael

"Are you being a fucking asshole?"

This question posed in total honesty. He actually pulls his gaze away from the reflective doors to look over at Sera. Down at the dog. Encapsulate the both of them in his photographic memory in case it comes up again he can call back on an image of her being an asshole.

"I didn't think you were."

Serafíne

The creature gives a neat little shrug, refusing responsibility for any piece of it.

Changes the subject, even, as the elevator levels up with Michael's floor and the doors sigh open.

"You're alot less creepy than I thought you'd be. I really hope there's a mini bar in your room."

Michael

So they settle it. He hadn't realized she was being an asshole. If she was she isn't going to own it. The elevator opens its maw and reveals a throwback of a corridor. Dark carpet and mustard-colored walls. No sign of the outside world aside from a window at either end allowing in the sunlight and he isn't as creepy as Sera thought he would be.

Even if she were to watch the weaving of his Work Sera would find no sign of Jhor. The Death Taint. That is rare among his tradition especially as powerful as he feels.

Her statement does not amuse him near as much as the initial statement had. He can appreciate why she asks it though. He is self-possessed but not unaware.

"There is," he says. "You're welcome to it."

Serafíne

"See, I am being a fucking asshole."

This sad, wry curve to her mouth. She precedes Michael out of the elevator and swings away from him, wandering down the hallway with Sid pacing at her Sid. They move in such strange sync, the slight girl (who is, Michael can see as she walks ahead of him, sporting a thoroughly bedraggled plush panda backpack on her back, over her oversized leather coat, band t-shirt, denim cut-offs, fishnets and curb-stomping boots.

Has this gait like she's eight feet tall.

Even now.

Maybe, especially now.

--

He stops in front of the suite. She leans back against the door, watches him as he pulls out the keycard and reaches for the doorknob as the light turns green, pushes the door back, open, in. Has this scrubbed-raw feeling about her then that feels unflinchingly open, delicate, aggressive all-at-once.

"I'm sorry. I'm usually only an asshole to asshole. You're just caught in the crossfire. Probably a pretty stand-up guy for doing this."

This grimacing, brave little smile before she turns around, ducks and heads inside.

"I just really want my friends, you know?"

Doesn't say much more. Follows wherever he takes her suitcase. Unlatches it and starts unpacking, or "unpacking" then hides away in her room. Doesn't say much more. Isn't much for small talk, right now. Hates hates hates sleeping alone,

but she does, tonight. And probably for many nights hereafter.

Not-Seeking

honest gods

For no reason to which she can ascribe not that reason has any place in magick not when magick comes from blood and breath and desperation not when she can call down the fury of time with a terror-spawned scream but for no reason just after Sera swallows those three seeds an echo of a voice crawls inside her head. Maybe it was something she heard once. An earworm. It doesn't loop in on itself and it doesn't get stuck there. Passes like incense smoke heavy and sharp before dissipating again.

What I destroy you no longer need.

Her sense of time is gone. Her sense of place is strong. She knows where she is. Still has her name. A name. A name she chose but a name all the same.

The guy on the scooter is a little taller than seems practical for the scooter but his narrow limbs and long thin neck give him a sort of grace his baggy linen pants and tunic threaten to occlude. Emaciated sure but Sera's is a practice of deprivation and she is used to wasting herself.

This entire time she has not been able to make sense of the clocks. Even the time on her phone is a haze. No way to say for sure when she received messages or when she responded to them. It doesn't matter anyway.

Her arms around his waist and she feels the distension of his midsection. How empty it is how full of air and hunger. Rests her chin on his shoulder and feels the leather quality of the skin beneath the linen. Hard bone beneath hard skin. Lets the world warp and it does warp the guy longs for speed and the scooter can only go so fast. A little under 65kph with the two of them both of them insubstantial and if the thought occurs to her at any point that she cannot describe his face that is not just the seeds she took. His face is no clearer an image in her memory than the faces of the clocks and the watches. Than the faces of the figures in the airway nights and days ago.

A turn. Another. Another. The scooter merges with fast traffic. Even if she looks Sera cannot make out the faces of the people in the vehicles either. They're going too fast.

ถนน ซุปเปอร์ไฮเวย์ เชียงใหม่-ลำปาง

So says the road sign in its native script.

CHIANG MAI SUPERHIGHWAY - LAMPANG

So says the road sign through the lens of her reality.

They take the highway around the city out past the airport everything a blur her arms and limbs numb to her what she destroys she no longer needs and then the Su Thep forest appears to her right tall and

the guy is taller than he was when she climbed on behind him at the railway.

Their speed decreases. The road becomes dirt. The sun is dipping below the horizon. Lazy heat blanketing the world. Insects drone and the sound is nothing like a song. They sound like that woman she heard screaming in the night market.

Serafíne

Her chin sharp on the hard frame of his shoulder, her cheek soft against his ropey neck. Inhales the diesel fumes and road dust, the body odor and the shift of dandruff in his hair. The sour scent of hunger and she is used to both privation and indulgence. Finds herself in the same place with both, dizzying, reckless, scattered, unmoored.

Her own hair unfurls behind them like a tattered flag.

Warps and scatters, wild, settles and reforms as their speed changes.

--

The insects' screaming song makes her -

- shiver.

despite the thickwet heat of the rainforest.

--

It isn't that they never made Claire scream. Just: not when Sera was in the room. This is how it always came to her, from the slow-drone distance, the source obscured.

She would close her eyes,

and hurt.

You think you can't bear it, but you're wrong. You can. Sometimes, that is all you can do.

--

"Stop here," she tells him, as the sun disappears and the jungle canopy envelops. Mouth against his ear, feeling him open, lengthen. The blurred features of his face a tracery in her peripheral vision. Maybe it's the seeds.

She doesn't know.

She doesn't think so.

Fuck, maybe the seeds were a metaphor too.

"I'm gonna walk the rest of the way."

honest gods

Read it in the way his knob-sharp knees rise up gradual towards the scooter handles so gradual it's like melting in the setting sun the way his bones feel longer in the press of his ribs against her own thin chest a certain slant of shoulder blades beneath her own not like wings too thin and heavy at once they are not going to fly and she's gonna walk the rest of the way.

His nose and cheeks and chin are gray though night is not caught up to them yet. Not for some time. Though there's nothing wrong with her eyes or maybe there is something wrong with her eyes. She has been moving for some time and the movement forward is not hers now.

Can she see the spire at the top of the tower as they round the bend into the forest proper? Does it matter? The trees breathe their truths at her and the cicadas scream and Claire has been dead for some time.

Time doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot now that she's lost track of it. What time has destroyed she no longer needs.

Mouth against the guy's ear and time has destroyed him too. His skin is cool in spite of the heat. Cool and dry and the gray is not her imagination. She smells his clothes. Not him.

They putter along for another thirty seconds or so. Long enough for the path to give way to signs meant for motorists Thai and English chalked together. At least the motorists have not swallowed seeds.

ประกาศจะต้องไม่เกิดขึ้นใกล้กับแท่นบูชา

says the first sign she sees

THE ANNOUNCEMENT MUST NOT HAPPEN NEAR AN ALTAR

So they pass the sign. So the guy eases up on the gas. Motor muttering underneath the cicadas screams and the temple is still open to visitors and yet they pass no cars. No bicycles.

The hungry ghost brings the scooter to a halt on the side of the dirt road and the insects stop screaming.

Serafíne

What time has destroyed she no longer needs but Sera thinks that's bullshit because she still wants right. And wanting matters and time is bullshit and nothing is ever destroyed, just changed. She can swim back through and find it again.

And again and again and again, if she wants her heart broken and her body battered like that.

Sometimes, though, she doesn't mind.

--

So: gray. She smells his clothes, not him. Maybe she smells herself. How many days in the ugly little room, how many on the train, the hitch-hiking sway of her, her spine incising a negligent curve against the hard wooden lines of the second-class couchette. Feet up, eyes half-mast, notebook open in her lap. Nothing about her in that moment rich but everything indicative of luxury. All that time. Nothing to do in the world,

except: what she wants, when she wants, how she wants.

Thirty-six hours on a sway-backed train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai? Sure. Not like she has a job to go home too. Not like there are any claims on her time,

except her own.

--

They pass the sign. It makes her smile. She lifts her chin, catches a glimpse of the spire. Pins it, holds the spire in her gaze as the coughing moped decelerates and comes to a halt. Climbs off the bike and gives her driver this sweeping look. Takes in whatever it is she can of him. No life left at all.

"I think you should come with me."

She tells him. Holds out a warm hand.

honest gods

[PAUSE!]

honest gods

When the gray man stands from the scooter he takes his emptiness with him. Sharp knees come up near as high as Sera's waist and remain bent as his back as his shoulders all bone and sinew underneath the mummy-tough skin and she can make nothing of his face until he turns towards her nothing of the stringy hair hidden beneath a wide straw hat and she holds out his hand can hear a new kind of droning in the silence left behind by frightened wildlife.

Not droning. Chanting. It sounds like the Itipiso. A chorus of deep brassy voices and she knows the way she knows she needs air that the owners of the voices are not of this world.

The gray man's emptiness hangs beneath his tunic like a pregnancy swollen beyond the time it ought to have given way to life swollen and hanging low past his pelvis swaying as he moves and when he turns towards her well on his way to seven feet tall by now she can see that he has no face. Shadows where his features ought to be sure but the only feature that is not occluded by shadow is his mouth. Shriveled lips around a needle-wide orifice.

Even without touching them she can tell his fingers are not warm.

She thinks he should come with her.

He stands and holds to his silence. If he is not looking at her he is at least aware of her. Waiting for her. Spindly arms and long-long hands hung at his side.

Something rustles in the underbrush.

Serafíne

And Sera, she - watches - him as his frame unfolds itself from the scooter. She does this peripherally, even still. Dark eyes on her own hand, and then on his, withered, sharp and spindly. Then this ever widening sweep of a look, up and down, which has the periodic intonation, the widening sweep of a pendulum set to swinging until at last: his no-face, his shriveled mouth.

The chanting in the near distance sends a shiver spiking down her spine. She doesn't bother to hide it.

She wouldn't, would she.

--

Her gaze falls back to her half-open hand, its bristle of rings, one in bronze with a lingering resonance that is not-hers. Sera thinks for a moment, as she does sometimes. Thinks. She is not given to thought and her sharp features take on an almost comically serious cast for two seconds three, five. Then she takes that ring off. Wraps her left hand around her right index finger and slips it off. Opens her leather jacket and slips the bronze piece into a zippered inner pocket.

Startles, yeah, with the rustling in the underbrush, but does not go hying off after it.
Breathes, reminds herself to breathe, breathe, breathe -

- and starts walking.

--

Sera watches where she's going, sure and follows the road, at first. But she keeps looking up, skimming the shadowed canopy for another glimpse of that temple-spire.

honest gods

Easy to say that the path is open to her and the path is what she will have it be. That there is no path. That she is the path. That the temple offers nothing that she cannot find herself and so on and so forth.

But so soon as she starts to walk the path has made itself a difficulty. Canopies hang in the way and night falls faster than she might have thought it would. It is not yet autumn in the northern hemisphere. Thailand is in between rainy seasons. The canopy has grown no taller than it ever has been. Not like the hungry ghost that drove her here.

The hungry ghost follows her. What else is he supposed to do. He cannot satisfy the void he carries beneath his shirt.

Rustling in the underbrush and something falls out of the trees once she's passed by. Hidden by the fog and the shadows cut by the foliage. Moving along ancient-slow behind her the hungry ghost picks up the body of a flying lemur. It disappears in his hand and he brings his hand to his mouth and when he lowers his hand again it is empty.

Sera cannot see the temple spire for the trees. Their green hung heavy in the sponge-damp air and the droning

chanting

the chanting carries on not made deeper for the voices' placement in the temple itself. As she walks the jungle may as well be chanting to her. Cicada carapaces hung as amulets from the trunks of the trees their dead shells amethystine as if their wings are set to flap and take the bodies to flight like calling to like but Sera pockets that soaring sun-soaked bronze ring and it does nothing to stop the flapping.

When she looks back down from the sky in search of her spire this time the world yawns in front of her. Ripples as if she were looking into a still pool and a droplet of cohesion fell from behind her and landed there. As if she were about to walk through a membrane.

Serafíne

The rustling and something falls from the trees and our Sera, who has her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket and her arms out all akimbo and the world spinning tumbled-strange around her glances back, over her shoulder in time perhaps not to see the lemur proper but its coiled little ringtail as it disappears into the hungry-ghost's mouth.

"Hey - !" This startled little yelp. Lemurs are fucking adorable. Even the ones that the street performers had leashed and chained and trained (god knows how - try not to think about it) to do tricks for tips down by the beach in Phuket and she recognizes the tail at the least. She likes: fuzzy things, Sera. Breathes in or hunches up with delight and wonder when they come her way. Has an always-open, always-bleeding heart.

There's not a body to keen over, though. Just a no-face with a shriveled mouth and a distended stomach, the stark, spare frame of exigency, of want, of privation she knows so well, from the inside and from without.

"Did it help?"

Quietly, like she's waiting for an answer. This compressed sort of compassion threaded with iron through her voice.

honest gods

And the hungry ghost looks back at her. At least aims its blank-slate face at her. Its little mouth pursed such that she could read displeasure or wonder or bemusement in the wrinkles lining it if she had anything else to go on. Just this small portal through which it funnels fuel its body does not use.

It is not a body. It is a spirit. There is a reason it can make no use of the things it consumes. Maybe the things it consumes live on forever. Maybe they were never there to begin with.

The chanting continues.

Serafíne

She wants:

to give it something. Some thing. Some spark. Some sense of satiation; not the illusion of it but the promise, right? This-suffering-is-not-in-vain.

And that's not always true; in fact, it's usually false. Most suffering in the world is in vain; is singular and solitary, is alone, in the end. Bright and clear and whole as she wants the world they inhabit to be, she knows far better than most what lies beneath.

And she does not believe in

God

or even

gods. Just people.

Who are bound to disappoint you, every fucking time. Or not, you know? That's always the other option.

What the fuck does she know: about ghosts or spirits or transubstantiation (okay: Catholic girls' school, she knows something about transubstantiation) but she knows this thing, whatever it is, is hungry,

and guesses that it cannot get full.

--

Knows, too, that it brought her here. And that: here is where she wanted to be.

--

"I'm sorry." When she speaks, you see - magick. The little tricks she praticed earlier. In the market, on the train. Steal the sense of language from the ether and impregnating it into the synapses of her mind and the sinews of her tongue. Can't speak spirit, doesn't know precisely that this thing is a spirit but hey. It picked her up on a moped in the at the train station. Maybe it knows, remembers, is imbued with the language that was swimming in the air around them when she stumbled down from the platform. "I mean, that you're suffering. If you're suffering? And I guess there's just shit that's eternal, like always-was and always-will-be and then there's everything else then if you're eternal I'm probably not sorry and this is all ridiculous because fuck, that is some powerful shit. Like I toy with it - sometimes - but fuck.

"But you know if you're not eternal.

"If this is a fucking transitional state " (something she knows: she feels, after all, like the moment between was and becoming) " - you can find your way through."

Pulls out the last three of the seeds she purchased at the nightmarket in Bangkok and holds them in the neat little funnel of her fingertips. Holds them for a second longer

(concentrating) then offers them to him.

If he takes them.

honest gods

Plenty of Thai folklore concerning crossroads and the spirits who haunt them. Seeds and the power of trees and new things. The deities responsible for the trees and new things. Ghosts for occasions such as sudden death and death in childbirth and death by hasty violence. Ghosts who were executed by burning and drift through the night heads intact but lungs and other viscera floating along behind them. Ghosts who eat entrails.

Plenty to learn when visiting other countries other cities even going out into the rural places of one's own home but Sera is not a folklorist. She was here to take a vacation. She doesn't know shit about ghosts.

As far as she knew this ghost was a guy an hour ago. Hours ago. Time has ceased to mean anything. Behind her the membrane between worlds has stopped its rippling dance and gone back to standing as still and permeable as if nothing were ever wrong with it at all.

The hungry ghost cants its head with the extension of her hand and the seeds nestled in the space between her fingers. Sight without eyes. Understanding without language. He cannot talk if he hasn't got a mouth. This isn't the guy she met at the railway station.

Maybe she would recognize the guy she met at the railway station if she saw him again. Maybe he was disguising himself as a living young man all this time. Maybe she's just tripping her ass off right now.

A few teetering steps graceful despite the tipping sharp nature of its form it's got to be nearing eight feet tall by now its belly distended further with the introduction of the lemur fur and all teetering towards Sera without a face to voice intent or attention and then he - it? - places its great spindly hands over the swell of its belly and bends at the knees eye-level with Sera for a moment without any eyes.

The chanting stops.

That needle-small mouth sucks up the seeds. A spasm-quick cant of its head. Inquisitive. That mouth is dry as a grave and it seeks Sera's fingers now that the seeds are gone.

Serafíne

"No."

Sharp.

Definite.

Definitive.

The drawing of a line.

She pulls back her fingers and her voice has (temporarily) this sort of cracking authority to it.

"I gave you what I wished to give. You don't get any more."

This brief, curtaining smile follows and then she turns. Knows where that membrane was. She made it herself, didn't she? Imagined it there, imagines it again. She knows where she's going now, and doesn't give a fuck about the road, or maybe she gives enough fucks about the road that it opens for her. That it unrolls beneath her and sends her tumbling straight to the base of the temple, isolated, marooned in the jungle.

Or maybe she just whips through the understory: runs, flat-out, open, absurd and fuck every goddamned obstacle. She'll fling herself over, under, through.

honest gods

[SUCH PAUSE]

honest gods

So the hungry ghost cants its head with the rebuke its blank face betraying neither understanding nor contrition and after it has drawn back from fingers that smell of smoke and dirt and filling things it now well over eight feet tall and thinner even than it was when Sera mistook it for a living young man turns its small mouth away its blank face away and with jerky coltish steps turns and adds a shadow to the congregation born of trees.

Cloud and canopy blot out the stars overhead. Hard to tell if the darkness comes from nightfall or an incoming storm.

When she passes through that membrane Sera feels no different. The sensation is akin to walking through a mist cool and fleeting but it does not cling to her skin as water would. Immediate dissipation.

As she walks through the jungle the chanting persists. The temple has been here for seven hundred years. All other things being equal it will still be here in seven hundred years. It and the chedi. The spire. The resting place of all the monks who have died in this place. Their bones entrusted to the earth that sustained them.

The lawn before the wat is empty but for her own shadow.

Serafíne

Sera makes a quiet huff when the hungry ghost steps from her rebuke. She glances back, through the inky shadows, to watch him go. Feels the strangest sort of pang but she always feels the strangest sorts of pangs, pangs that strangers never seem to feel. Doesn't mind them, though. Or turn from them, or refuse them. Does not seem to have learned the fundamental lesson that some people think our minds and our bodies want us to learn: that hurts. don't do it again.

A helluva lot of things worth doing hurt.

Sometimes over and over and over.

And you can stand a helluva lot more than you ever imagined you could.

--

But here, right, now.

No change. There and here. No change, on this side and the other. Barriers are illusions, too. Still, she steps through and feels it and then feels it gone against her skin and makes this little noise: pop, human imitation of a soap bubble popping, and keeps walking, pushing through the growth all around here, until she stands before the temple. Heads for the tunnels, first, not the spire Sometimes you have to descend before you have a hope of remembering how to climb.

honest gods

All limitations are self-imposed.

Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by craving and aversion. Suffering can be overcome and happiness can be attained. This is about as far as the paths that Buddhists and Cultists walk together. The Buddhist method of surpassing one's limits and the Cultist method are not the same. They both push themselves. But the Buddhist avoids excess. The Cultist seeks out Kamamarga.

The unwise Cultist will become dependent on her tools. She will lose her own path for never having found it in the first place. Drugs and sex and staying high all the time creates an energy that is no more constructive than a hurricane.

Sera has not found a path laid out for her here. She has been drinking and smoking and swallowing seeds for days. This tunnel is well-lit but the light is swimming as she barges out of the jungle and into its maw.

The female entity she kissed last time pushed her off a cliff. She exists on the boundary between states of being. Freedom and limitation. Gestation and rebirth. She has stood plenty more than plenty of people ever imagine possible but see: life is suffering.

No one has all the answers. She has to make her own answers.

The chanting could very well be coming from inside her head. She cannot get a lock on its origins. It is everywhere. It is the walls and the darkness.

Serafíne

Her senses are blown all-open. The smeary light beneath, the ancient carvings. There she is, this strange, drunk, sleep-deprived, hallucinating creature caught up in between the rhapsodic and the literal and the littoral. There are carvings on the wall or just the grooves from a thousand other hands, a thousand other strangers, a thousand other lives. She tips her head backwards against the curve of the tunnel, feels its elegant rise. No angles, just curves.

The stuffed face of the plush-panda-backpack catches on the grooves in the walls. She plants her hands on her thighs and then, back sort of braced against the wall, sinks and sinks and sinks until she is seated on the floor. Listening.

--

The last time she went seeking, she found the graves of her dead and scrubbed the faded stones. Couldn't see the names but:

she knows them now. Mourns them, sure. Sometimes joyfully, sometimes quietly, sometimes just heaving. Lives with the loss, the way everyone does. Wrote those stories back into her skin. On the floor of the tunnels beneath Wat Umong, Sera pulls her knees up to her chests and allows herself: to feel, all of that, again. Not just the pain, but also the joy. The love, the sorrow. The pain, the guilt. Pulls that into her body and pushes it right back through.

She allows it to shred her heart right down to its bloodiest, most rendered fibers.

She remains whole.

--

Easier than you ever imagined it could be to suffocate someone. Nose pinched shut, hand over the mouth, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry and

she still is. Though perhaps, not for the reasons anyone else could imagine.

--

This is what she gives. This is what she has. This is what she is. Her eyes closed, her throat raw, her nails digging into the meat of her palms. The shutter-snap points of crisis and resolve, the patchwork heart, the hurricane of love, and fear, loss and beauty. More than enough meat to feed a hundred hungry ghosts.

--

The temple doesn't matter. The road is wrong. The jungle, the boy, the train, the strangers, the night market. Except: they all do. Give her the space to pull herself open and wrap herself up again. The simple pleasure of strange food purchased from a stranger, nightnoise all around, the faint glow of firelight reflecting on rice paddies in the distance.

But: she doesn't need the temple, or the train, or the tunnels, or the jungle, or the nightmarket, and maybe she didn't actually need to leave the fucking room. Sometimes empties herself until she's shaking from need and sometimes she fills her every whim until it seems that the world will not, will never, could never stop its spinning and the night pulls thin like taffy and it seems that she will never approach something like sobriety every fucking again, and they're all just tools.

She has what she needs in her own hands, and her own heart.

--

The last time, She pushed her off a cliff.

This time, if needful, if necessary, if well-and-truly asked: Sera would jump.

Maybe she already has.

--

The chanting, everywhere and nowhere, does not stop. She doesn't understand a fucking word of it but the rhythm is there, the incessant drone, perfect counterpoint to the willful breaking and remaking of her fucking heart. Which she gives: as thoroughly and entirely as she gives anything, ever, as she tries to Make It Stop.

honest gods

The only way around is through.

The only way to Make It Stop is to Wait Until It Stops On Its Own.

--now boarding at gate--

Outside the temple the jungle teems and even inside the dry yet glistening walls of the tunnel the loam and the oxygen and the unseen crawling things creating a sense of held breath the chanting come to her as if out of the earth now Sera can feel the world watching her its breath held knives out waiting for her and the seeds she gave to the hungry ghost take root outside she cannot see it but she hears it feels the ground shake with it and when she looks down at the ground it is no longer sole-smoothed stone but black-and-white a checked pattern and the chanting

--ited flight eighteen-oh-two--

and the chanting goes on the chanting is a fingernail scratch over a scab quick flinch of a reminder and the walls glisten not with dew not with sublimated oxygen but with something darker something reeking of iron and the checked pattern yawns out in front of her as the walls of the tunnel pull back breaking-bone slow darkness coming in around her and she knows this darkness she knows it will end.

Darkness of the world or darkness of her closed eyes. Something whispers behind her. An accusation. A threat. It doesn't sound human. If she turns she turns towards more darkness. When she turns the voice stays behind her. If she squints into the darkness she can see shapes loping about in it. Ten-feet-tall shapes. Shapes like men. Gray skin and needle-mouths stringy hair and swollen gravity-stretched bellies this is a place of hungry ghosts none of them her hungry ghost and they are aware of her but she has nothing they want and they are not the ones whispering to her. They are not the ones who died because of her. They only feed on the things she offers them.

It does not feel as if it will end.

It does not feel as if it will end.

--onstop service from los angeles to den--

Eventually she has to open her eyes. Reality is waiting for her. Reality and an uncomfortable chair in a fluorescent-lit airport terminal and the worst migraine she's had in recent memory.

Everything she had with her on the motorbike is here with her now but nothing works. Not her cellphone not her lighter not her compact mirror. The payphone will not take her debit card or the change she offers it. Airport personnel and other passengers seem unaware of her presence. No one she speaks to reacts as if they hear or see her.

Dried saliva stains her fingertips.

Sera

She has had a lot of bad fucking migraines in recent memory.

Curls there in the hard plastic embrace of the chair as long as she can stand the assault of both nausea and pain, eyes closed, fingers pinching the bridge of her nose.

Then: lurches upright. Stumbles toward the nearest bathroom to try to throw up. Nothing comes.

--

Her face is stark and hollow and mirrors are strange, strange things. Her own eyes looking back at her, stark and wide. The bright-wet line of a stray drop of tap water on her cheek. She manages one of those sink-baths that happen in airport restrooms after overseas flights, cups her hand beneath the faucet, drinks and then wants to puke again. Doesn't.

Wants to cry, too.

Doesn't.

--

And it's not like she figures out the phone, the debit card, the machinery of ordinary life, the people: do not see and will not acknowledge her presence on the plane of this earth right away or even quickly, because: she washes her face, her mouth, her armpits, the back of her neck because she doesn't want any of that. Not people, not strangers, not the next flight home, not a goddamned sausage biscuit. Not any of it.

Goes outside, sits back down in those hard, injection-molded chairs. She's so damned conscious of her own failure, it feels like her sternum is caving in.

She doesn't move, for a long, long time.

Seeking

Serafíne

"I wanna go someplace."

Not really morning, or something like morning. Her morning and it is September already. Somehow she slept away the first few days of it, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the shade, sometimes swinging in the hammock in the backyard of the blond-brick house at 719 Corona Street. Edging a toe now and then onto the teak-wood frame to send herself a-swinging again. Something cold cradled on the concave sweep of her stomach in the heat of the day. Something warm when the high-plains chill crept in at night.

The roommate are out. Dee caught an extra shift at the bakery, strange how many weddings there are in September, and Rick's moonlighting at his friend's comic book store, why not? Sera is curled up in one of the straight-backed chairs at the kitchen table wearing a worn-thin Echo and the Bunnymen t-shirt and panties with an afghan wound right-round her legs. Has her leather journal open on the table in front of her but she's mostly doodling and drinking tea and tap-tap-tapping her pencil against the wood, then the paper, then the wood, then the paper.

"We could go to Estes Park. Spend a few days camping and hiking before the first snow falls." Dan smirks there at the end, just a tiny bit though because really: one never knows. "I heard Vita has more of those shrooms you were raving about."

"Naw. I want an ocean beneath me. Let's go to Thailand."

--

Why the fuck not?

That's how they end up in LAX two days later, Sera wearing sunglasses so large she looks vaguely insectoid, an arm looped through the crook of his elbow. He has charge of the passports, she's got a skull-studded clutch slung cross-body by a gleaming chain and a plush panda-bear backpack, because fuck you, and another eighteen hours or twenty hours and somehow it is tomorrow or yesterday, because certain lines were crossed, and they are checking into a beachfront villa at an exclusive resort in Phuket. He tries not to think about the luggage fees or the cost of the first class tickets or the work schedule he had to rearrange in order to come with her ("five days, Sera. tops.") because he's not like certain Hermetics with whom she used to travel. Can't disappear for a day or a week or a month on a whim, chartering a private plane to take him wherever the fuck he wants.

As self-directed and fulfilling as his work is, Dan still has a fucking day job. Obligations, expectations. Responsibilities other than her.

--

But god the elegant dislocation, the maddening colors of the ocean, the rhythm of the ocean, the warmsand between his toes. The disconnect between the lush chaos without and the understated serenity within. Everyone assumes they're rock stars. Or, well: she's a rock star. He must be a member of the band.

--

She's the one who's sober. He gets smashed, pretty on the regular. Starts this flirtation with a British architect working in Singapore that first delirious night they get there that turns into one of those torrid vacation affairs for the three remaining days of the architect's Phuket vacation. The dude's name is actually Eustace though he doesn't look like a Eustace, not at fucking all. Sera's lovely, indulgent, strangely reserved right but: happy for him. Drinks tropical green-tea smoothies on the beach, soaks up the sun, topless. Turns golden.
Has all of her bikinis tangled together in a twee hard-sided hatbox and only ever untangles the bottoms.

--

Then the architect is headed back to Singapore and there's another day or two before their return tickets and Sera tells him she wants to rent a scooter like the locals and head inland, head upriver. Hit Bangkok or something, see some goddamned temples and he points out that none of her goddamned luggage will fit on a scooter, does she remember that it took three luggage carts piled precariously high to get them from the baggage claim through customs?

What the hell are they gonna do with that shit?

Eh. They can leave it.

She rented the little villa for a fucking month.

--

"Fuck, Sera. I said five days, tops."

--

He packs a green army duffle he brought along for dirty clothes, she packs that stupid panda backpack, which fits more fishnets and leather skirts and short-shorts and tees than you think. Wears her combat boots and her cropped leather jacket and that's how they get back to Bangkok. Two days in a cheap rooming house near the nightmarket, windows open, the thrum of the crowds constant, that slow-drone of neon from the clamor of streetsigns outside. He's pretty sure that foamy red soup they had was blood. Sweet, lemony raw fucking blood, and god knows what the Chinese liquor they served along side it. Smelled like feet with the raw kick of rubbing alcohol that sent the whole world tumbling, end over end over end.
No idea what came next or how they ended up back in the rooming house, but he's pretty sure that Sera and magick are the reason he didn't wake up with the world's worst hangover the next day.

--

She practically pushes him into the taxi, come morning.

Kisses him on the temple, tender.

"Go home, get your work done. I'll be fucking fine. "

"Be home soon."

"Five days, tops."

--

Two and a half hours later, he's back on a plane as it banks and climbs into the sky, Bangkok scattered beneath him. That same sense of dislocation, though everything seems emptier, right? grayer now. After all, he's alone.

honest gods

Though the night markets maintain their posts through the daylight they are shells in the wan gray of a rainy season afternoon. Tables bare of wares and the foot traffic diverts itself to find the places still open. Roasting meat and half-dressed women swarming out in the streets and the languages all swarming themselves little songs all dressed as transactions and Sera can hear the world going on whether she returns to bed after Dan leaves or whether she mills around her room deciding what she wants to do with her solitude.

Buses chug down the road beneath the window. Temporary neighbors return home long after late and their voices laugh out in the corridor.

Can she remember the last time she was hungover? Is she hungover now? She does not lose time. She is time.

When she opens her eyes the next time maybe from a nap maybe from a groan maybe from a blink the world outside her room has not changed. The night market still slumbers. Holds its breath even holds onto the promise of what dusk will make of it but the sounds of the city the buses and the bicycle bells and the soup made of speech all of that comes to her as if through a curtain. Not muffled. Out of focus. Bleeding away and soon to leave her world exsanguinated.

On the other side of the door she can hear two voices but not their words. Just as muffled as everything else but constant. Steady.

She cannot feel her hands. The time on the bedside alarm clock is LED and red but she cannot make out the numbers. They all blur together.

Serafíne

That was an early flight or a late flight or god-fucking-knows but there was sun and strange-bare-streets. An old man sweeping the sidewalk with a palm frond. Last night's mascara smeared beneath her eyes made her look like a raccoon, some little fucking bandit. She caught a glimpse of her reflection against the bullet-proof glass of the clerk's enclosure on her way back and then back in the room sat for a few minutes at the open window, one bare leg tucked elegantly beneath her, forehead against the window frame, attention drifting as she watched the gray-morning world drift by, not-thinking, simply be-ing.

Until she had to pee.

--

Gets up, pads to the bathroom. Empties her bladder, washes her hands, scrubs her face clean.

Does a shot of something, who knows what it is, then grabs a bottle of filtered water and crawls back into bed. This bed: a strange bed, the world all around. Buries her head in the gray, deflated pillows and slides back into sleep.

--

For a while.

--

"Mmph."

Makes that noise when she wakes up in maybe the exact same posture because she likes making noises, we were meant to be and to sound and to listen to the hum of the organs in our skin. Cough and scratch and startle-awake (whatisthis/whereami) except she's listening and aware and Aware and alive to shit and the world looks like it did and feels like it did and breathes like it did and bleeds like it did before - right?

Wrong.

Erect in bed she listens like this to her heartbeat and watches the frame of the window but only from its periphery. Glances at the clock, looks away, rubs her eyes with those numb hands. Looks back.

Breathes in, a little sharper now, her heart beating and slides out of bed. Bare feet on the dirty tile. Takes her three seconds to pull on her garter belt and shimmy into her leather skirt, another two to pull on an old concert tee.

The voices outside the door.

She grabs her combat boots and thigh-high stockings but doesn't pause to put them on, just kinda sweeps them with her like she's going to manage it while hopping on one foot and stumbling own the stairs.

Never was the sort to look first, she always just leaps, right? But there's this moment when she's in the little alcove, the little vestibule, spine sharp against the wall and hands too full to reach for the knob so she drops the boots and pulls on the stockings, one by one. And she's listening not for words outside but the rhythm of her heart in her chest, all the strange little noises her body makes. Then she picks up the boots in one hand and reaches for the knob with the other.

Opens the door.

honest gods

All of the light has left the corridor.

The thing about her corridor and the thing about the absence of light: this is not an internal structure. The rooming houses this close to downtown are many of them open-air structures not unlike cheap western motels with airways connecting all of the rooms rusting wrought-iron rails meant to keep the drunk and the uninhibited from tumbling off the first or second floors to make a mess down below.

When she steps out onto the corridor call it an airway when she steps out onto the airway the concrete is dark as night for the fluorescents are off as one would expect the fluorescents to dim themselves in the daylight and she can see the grayness of day beyond the airway but the sun's light does not penetrate a dense and unseen curtain drawn across the railing.

She opens the door. Warped perception. A yawning sensation perhaps. Everything shifting sideways a bit. The voices reveal themselves to belong to two figures that are not right outside her door as the decibel level ought to suggest. If she stands still long enough her eyes will adjust to the dark. If she does not stand still she has her other senses.

One of the figures is tall and solid. Dark in wardrobe and dark in coloration but not dark in spirit. Somehow Sera knows this. This figure wears a watch on one bare wrist but she can make nothing of what it says without light. The other tall as well but not so tall as he. She does not need height for what she seeks. Darker skin and leaner more powerful limbs and her hair hangs in thick healthy ropes around her shoulders. Gold bands around wrists and biceps have no light to catch.

It smells like loam out here.

Will she follow? she asks. Sera hears it in her head. Her ears have nothing to do with it. Underwater telepathy.

Sera cannot hear the words he supplies in answer. Only that he answers.

The bands around the woman's wrists and arms change color in the darkness. Transforming. She plants her hands on her wrists and Sera cannot see her eyes but she can feel the shift of her gaze as she turns to look at the Cultist in the dark.

Serafíne

It smells like loam out here.

Last night it smelled like cat piss and rotting cabbage and that sort of vomit that is mostly-alcohol and patchouli and pot and roasted fish and lemongrass and heavy, resinous incense and diesel fuel and rust for some reason a bit like coconuts, god knows why, but mostly like cat piss and rotting cabbage.

Now, it smells like loam.

And here's Sera coming out of the room into the airway carrying her boots but already shifting her grip to start to step into the first one as she hip-checks the swinging door open when it tries to closer itself on her, inhaling in a way that has her perk her neat little head like a hare that has caught-scent of a whole damn field of carrots even as she stomps her way into the first boot. The second.

Nothing elegant about the way she fumbles her way through tying the long laces while walking down the breezeway toward them but there is something: eager about it. Lively, sort of clattering, and then both boots are on her feet and tied enough that they will stay on and she is not likely to fall over the laces and she's no longer half-bending over but rising upright, reaching to pull her curls back from her face. Somehow she always has an elastic band when she needs one. That's not even magick, it's just the kind of girl she is. So: ponytail.

--

It's not that she takes specific time to let her eyes adjust so much as the fact that still-getting-dressed gives her that time and she's looking eagerly from one to the next. She makes her heart seize, this little fillips, and he - well.

"Following isn't really my fucking thing, you know?"

Although: right now, she is. Following, right? Striding toward them, wondering if the way is peeling dark-streams and pinpricks of light all around her like it does whenever spaceships wanna go fucking fast in the goddamned movie. Wondering if she has a tail, like a comet.

Which makes her want to wiggle her ass.

Though she refrains.

Will they let her join them? She wants to. Wants to through her arms around his neck, though she's a little more wary of her. Sharper, brighter. The ropes of her hair. The thunder of her own heart.

--

"But I'm pretty down to seek. Where the fuck are we going?"

honest gods

He knew Sera wasn't going to follow.

She knew Sera was here to seek.

Attuned to everything even in the absence of light and Sera knows the way she knows they speak though she cannot make out the sound that an air of acceptance blows out of the female figure's lungs with that question. Acceptance in the cant of her head. Watchful eyes though hidden Sera can feel them on her face. Acceptance sure but in the next beat of the drum in Sera's chest she is moving one bare foot forward to jut herself in front of him. Reduces him to shadow.

Sera does not wriggle her ass. Sera does not throw her arms around his neck.

Somewhere in the distance a young throat screams with a voice like broken glass. Distant very distant and it has nothing to do with any of this.

"Where do you want to go?" she asks.

Serafíne

Yeah, she's sliding out, hipslung. And she never was tall and she didn't pack even a single pair of heels for the trip from Phuket to Bangkok because the first pair she tried the spiked heels looked like they'd tear right through her poor panda-backpack's faux-furry skin. Here she takes up space because she needs to, because she does, because sometimes it feels like something inside of her is the edge of the horizon and the storm beyond it, the bright, mysteriously-lit expanse of it. The strange, elsewise promise inherent in it.

And sometimes she just wakes up and wants a cup of tea-and-whiskey.

And it's all so fucking hard to fathom, that she doesn't really try.

But see: wants a cigarette, wonders if she has them, wonders if it matters, wonders if they would appear if she decided that she wanted them. How physical and how ephemeral and how much does it really matter.

She has gone out ahead of them, see.

She has turned around and is walking backwards with hands in her pockets rummagerummagerummage for the case-and-lighter.

Where do you want to go?

And fuck if she has time to answer it. Or, even really hear it.

That scream in the distance in the very distance that has nothing to do with any of this has her turning, listening, rising to the balls of her feet, fingers curling inward to skim her palm. Another sense of dis/location, a sort of un-doing.
(Gonna call it: Correspondence 2/Mind 2. More mapping than scrying but using the emotion in the scream to isolate the source and get an impression of - where/what?)

Serafíne

Magick Stuffs! Er. Coincidental: difficulty 5. (-1 focus)

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 4, 4) ( success x 2 )

honest gods

Though he speaks in a language Sera understands the words do not reach her. They are meant for the female figure accompanying him and the female is no more of a mind to answer him than Sera is to answer her.

By now he has become little more than the impression of a figure stood in the shadow cast upon shadow by she. The bands around her wrists and biceps taking on a darker cast as if they are absorbing the darkness changing it though the darkness adjusts to nothing else but Sera.

For now the darkness holds.

I thought she was, too, she says.

The effect commences a stitch. Sera can make nothing of its source or strength unless she focuses and tugs.

Serafíne

It is: less that she is not of a mind to answer (she is of a mind to answer, though her answer is like as not to be her almost universal and at-least-to-Hawksley nearly always unacceptable I don't know. Everyone else she knows in this time and this place and this position except maybe sometimes Dan accepts her I don't know, which is often a cipher for her specific brand of bullshit. But hey: Sera does not think they would accept it. Knows they wouldn't.) and more that she is distracted by the scream. Hooked by it.

Caught.

Between.

Feels that like a hook in her spine and a vague, unsettling chill.

There is a sort of bristling about her except she is focused. Pushing. That shout has nothing to do with any of this. She hasn't answered them and doesn't know.

Some piece of her wonders if the door she's been trying to shove her skinny ass through is already starting to close behind her.

The rest of her, though, is everything/nothing.

Everywhere, and no where at fucking all.

(Extending. Dif +1)

Serafíne

Roll!

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

honest gods

The door is a metaphorical door. No whine of hinges or swatch of light cut through the shadow to tell her that it's opened or that it's preparing to close. A door only present in that piece of her wondering about it. Not even the same door perhaps. The door is whatever she wants it to be.

As Sera focuses on the voice without the voice she cannot fathom into solidness takes its form and he disappears. The she meanwhile works a kink out of her neck and the rolling of her spine rattles little metal bands securing the ends of her braids. Small symphony.

That scream is come up out of the night market. The streets comprising the night market. Empty but not dead. That scream has the strength and character of a woman in distress but she is drunk and Sera can make nothing of the strength or character of the person or thing that made her scream nothing of the trajectory of her distress or the immediacy of it only that there is a woman in this city and that woman screamed once and then fell silent and she could search for others who are screaming but this one particular woman is screaming for no reason other than she is drunk and something agitated her and it is nothing to which she needs attend.

An echo. A blink.

The next Sera knows she is back in her room. She is where she was before she heard the voices. Her boots are where they were before she went to collect them. She still cannot feel her hands. She still cannot make sense of the numbers on the face of the clock by the bedside.

Outside the voices are talking again. The same voices in the same place with a different cadence. A different tone. Still as if they are inside her head though she can make no sense of the actual words.

Serafíne

"Oh my fuck."

--

The strange feeling like a compass needle inside her has become demagnetized. There's no more north, there's just the bath of glycerin in which to float.

--

She wakes up like she woke up before and this time it is: changed. Altered.

A knot of something she cannot quite name ties up her viscera. This time she doesn't reach for her fucking clothes, just the bottle of Chinese liquor on the nightstand, through which the fuzzy, nameless, formless should-be-numbers shine. Stands up with the worn-thin sheets unspooling from her body. Doesn't bother getting dressed. Keeps on going, barefoot, barelegged. Black lace hipsters and an oversized Duran Duran t-shirt with Simon Le Bon's peeling face over her left breast. Every single one of them is wearing a fedora.

Picks up the bottle and unscrews the cap and takes a slug and screws the cap back on. Carries it by the neck as she walks barefoot to the door to her cheap little otherwise-mostly-empty double.

Except maybe there's not a fucking door:

that's what she decides.

That's what she tries to walk right through.

Maybe she just bloodies her nose.

honest gods

If she were a mad scientist or a reality hacker that door may have proven itself no more than a momentary distraction. She could have willed herself through it. That is not the card that Sera holds in hand as she stumbles out of bed for the second time that day or at least the second time within the span of her own cognizance for all she knows it isn't the same day at all but she does stumble into it though she does not stumble into her clothes or her boots. Does not stumble into anything other than a bottle of liquid that smells heavy of metal and rubbing alcohol.

That and the door.

To her credit she does not collide with it hard enough that she cracks the cartilage or ruptures the tiny blood vessels in her nose. No blood splatters the floor. But she does feel a rush of stars and the white-out of her vision. Not enough to stun her really. She could keep moving if she wanted to.

When the door opens Sera cannot hear the click of the latch releasing or the keen of the hinges. It opens and what light she has afforded herself spills gray out into the airway. She cannot hear the voices because they are not speaking. One of the forms crosses in front of the threshold as a shadow and keeps moving. The other is an unknown variable. The other could be behind the open door or waiting on the other side to where the first first crossed. Where they were before.

Light beyond the airway. Darkness contained to it. The only difference now is Sera is wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and underwear. The lingering burn of ethanol in her throat.

Serafíne

"Fuck."

Vulgar, yeah. So she collides with the door that she had briefly decided was a goddamned metaphor, but a door but a whatever, some of that bullshit the counselors always tried to pull out of their asses. Sunlit exteriors, dark shadows within. Blinds slatting in these bands of light. The institutional burn. (Let's explore what the barrier here is to - )

- the barrier here is the fucking door. The barrier here is the darkness and the strange silence and occluded shift of light and dark. She takes another shot right from the mouth of the bottle, still holding it by the neck. Saunters down the narrow dark airway following if not the cadence of voices (because: silence), then instead the strange unnerving deja-vuness.

"I guess I want to go to the nightmarket," she remarks, conversationally, to no-one. Or, perhaps: to Her. "I mean, unless that question was supposed to be rhetorical or metaphorical or like, some kinda songwriting prompt for a vision board, in which case, I have no fucking idea. I was thinking about Wat Umong, too. But if we're doing that now I should probably go put on some clothes."

honest gods

When Sera steps out of the room to address the darkness and the shadows within she sees the taller of the two the male of the two is stepping back into shadow again. As if he has been in motion this entire time. Maybe he was the one who opened the door. It doesn't matter. Sera is talking to her.

Unless Sera is talking to no one. No one is here.

"Should you," she says.

Sera only has two choices. She can stand and talk to the shadow-swathed woman or she can turn back towards the door. With her back to it Sera has no assurance that the door is where she left it.

Serafíne

The shadow-swathed woman then. The man gone, that edge to her, that presence.

And now: blocking her path.

Serafíne stops, just then, on the threshold perhaps. Between never and now, and she could turn around and go back in the room, right. Close the door or put on clothes or find the window and dive out of it, into the street. Crack her head open on the sidewalk. She wouldn't be the first Western girl with half-a-dozen substances swimming in her blood-and-fat-and-sweat who broke her face or at least her leg that way.

Wouldn't be the last, either.

"I don't care too much for shoulds, either."

Studies the woman. Her own eyes dark, ticking back and forth over her features. Hard to tell if she's looking up, or looking down, or eye-to-eye.

"And I don't know if this shit's really real or just real, but either way, I can go now.

"If I need clothes maybe I'll find some on the way."

--

"The last time I saw you, you pushed me off a cliff."

honest gods

Clothes. Neither the fading man or the shadow-swathed woman have any opinion on the state of her dress. One of them is used to seeing her barely clothed. The other is barely clothed herself.

It would be an easy thing to say it does not matter to the shadow-swathed woman whether Serafíne comes or not. The easy thing is not the door through which a person achieves enlightenment. Stasis will kill the hardiest of machines. Even machines require maintenance and upgrades and machines do not bleed but Serafíne is not a machine. She is flesh-and-bone. She would survive the impact if she were to jump out of the window but didn't she turn back time to stop a Quiet-wrapped young man from doing that just a few weeks ago?

Rhetorical questions have no place in this world. She isn't sure if it's real or not. The last time she saw this woman she pushed her off a cliff.

Hard to tell if it's his voice or her's. Either way:

What now, querida?

The light reaches the staircase. The world beyond fogged as the faces of the clocks and the watches and the two figures come to call on her. The motel room door as clear and real as anything she could feel with her hand. If what she wants is realness she can walk through that door sure she still has free will but if what she wants is realness that door will not open once it has closed again. Not into this world.

Serafíne

What now, querida?

--

That's his voice.

No, it's hers.

And Sera stands on the threshold, mussed and half-dressed, bottle-in-hand and nothing else. The door behind her. The fuzzed out world in front of her, spare shoulders set at an angle that is stark and slicing. She has been harrowed. Hollowed. And she watches-them with a slant-wise look, trying to pull the threads of his profile out of the shadows into which he has disappeared.

He makes her feel: safe. Wholly and entirely, safe, in a way that makes her want to cry.

She makes her feel like there are wings being carved from the muscles framing her spine. Like air's leaking out, and light in. So: not-safe.

That's cool too.

--

What now, querida?

Sera kisses Her, if She allows it. Full on the mouth, breathing in, the way you do sometimes.

This neat little shrug, then-and-there.

"Fuck, I guess. Let's go."

Takes a moment then to close her eyes, to center herself. To find a spark, a thread, a tug of sensation. Once it was an iron needle with a golden thread stitched through the meat of her thumb. Now she looks for another thread, spark, sensation, tug, urge. Turns and follows it:
down the airway. Down the steps, maybe. Out into the streets. Out into the city. Whereever it leads.

honest gods

Last time She allowed it.

She is the goddess of transformation. Of change. She takes down dead timber to make room for new growth. Watches over the newly dead as they shuffle off to what lies after life. Bringer of violent rainstorms to keep the rivers flowing. She is praised by the Yoruba and the Guanches and the Lucumí and the Candomblé. People who have seen their lands taken over and their waters staunched.

Last time She allowed it. This time she takes a step back. Pointed sure but this is not the end. A certain turn of her body and Sera can see the sheathe of the machete strapped across her back.

Fuck, I guess. Let's go.

So Sera closes her eyes. That scream again or another scream and she is not listening. She is feeling for a thread that isn't there. No one has stitched a tether to her. She is her own tether. She can go wherever she wants to go. She is time.

When Sera opens her eyes again the shadows have gone. Beyond the airway the entire city is dark but the light has come back into her world. Neon lights a herald of the life come back into the night market and the music come up from tinny transistor speakers and the throng of shoppers native and foreign alike. Laughter. Laughter more than screaming. Someone is still screaming. She will stop eventually.

So: down the airway? Down the steps? Out into the streets.

It isn't going to lead her. She has to know what she wants if she's going to go anywhere.

Serafíne

So. She opens her eyes and the shadows are gone and there's no tug and no thread and no guidebook. Just herself. Her Self, in the filthy airway.

And Sera stands there for quite a long moment, mouth seamed, shoulders tensed.
Alert, waiting. Searching her periphery for the places where the seams of the world are starting to rip. The tick-tick-tick of her eyes. The first pleasant punch of the shots she took from that bottle of cheap god-knows-what-it-is liquor wrapping her spine and warming her belly.

--

So not-out. Not right away.

--

Sera goes quite deliberately back into the room and puts on her goddamned clothes. Among the things she wants is to: not get arrested or picked up by paramedics and taken away by who the fuck ever. Gets dressed. Cut-offs and fishnets and a crop-top. Leather jacket over that. Feet stomped into her boots and the boots laced up. All the shit left in the room bundled back into the panda-bear backpack. Passport and a credit card and some cash in the skull-studded clutch slung over her body. Leather journal and her pens wrapped up with underthings and bikinis and thigh-highs and t-shirts in the panda-pack, with a book of Mina Loy poems. iphone in her right front pocket.

Puts on some lip gloss and mascara and lines her eyes and when she leaves the room is as empty as it was when she arrived.

She isn't coming back.

--

Hot in the city today. She has her hair pulled back. Barters in broken Thai for a silk-screened sarong she wraps around hips and a handful of gum-and-paste bracelets and an old iron ring with a chip of rich red glass in the center as saturated crimson as a burmese ruby. East some khanom krok piping hot from the pan and buys some strange, prickly little fruits on a stem and another bottle-of-booze and some hashish. Drinks three beers in a open-air cafe, two of them sitting on a stranger's lap. Never catches his name, but she didn't really want to, anyway.
Is kinda fucking lit but still manages to make it to the station for the night train to Chiang Mai.
Buys a second class ticket and kicks back, feet up, head cushioned on the panda-pack. Buys some larb and flatbread and luk chub through the open window as they are passing some station, somewhere in the dark. Shares the luk chub with a toddler who gets it smeared all over his face then falls asleep in his mother's arms.

The train lurches and rattles and heaves and shudders and squeals and jerks. Sometimes it stops, for no reason, in the middle of nowhere. Dark land sleeping, stars so goddamned bright in the sky.

Drowses, wakes. Chats with strangers in her stumbling Thai - which is, magick. Everyone has a story.

--

Who-knows-how-long-later (there is: a sponge-bath and a face-scrub and a pit-wash and a change-of-clothes in the cramped W/C and beer and sticky-rice for breakfast and then takes three of those seeds she bought back in Bangkok. the gods only know what they are, but there are already tracers framing her vision as she packs up her toiletries and exits the W/C, mouth all minty-fresh, thank you, Listerine) and she stumbles off the train in Chiang Mai.

The sun's up. She has no idea what day it is.

All these guys on moped and tuktuks lining up to earn a few baht as taxi-drivers. She sees one guy on a bike balancing a wicker cage with chickens on his head, a child on the handlebars and a woman behind him hiking a suitcase up over the backfender. Picks a guy with a little red scooter and haggles for a ride to Wat Umong. Ends up paying four times the going rate and she'll give him an even-better tip on the other end. Climbs up behind him and wraps her arms around his waist and rests her chin on his shoulder. Lets the world warp itself around her, her long hair flying out behind.

Byron

Justin

[Mind shield, as per usual - diff 4 -1(practiced)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Justin

[Extending because reasons, +1 -1 (focus)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 7) ( success x 2 )

Justin

[Oh crap I forgot Nightmares >_>]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )

Byron

If they find him hard to find it's by design that they cannot track him the way one can track a body fallen down the bottom of a dark pit calling out for help the way they could find Kelsey or they could find Lydia. The way they could find Dick Fairchild. People who don't go into this with intent but wander in and lose their way or never had a way to begin with.

Kelsey's fine now and no one has spoken to Lydia and Dick is... well. Dick is Dick.

The Cultists Work their Work and their bodies are empty but their spirits are full and their hearts are full and they know the way they know in which direction the sun will rise the general direction in which they can find Byron and they know that he occluded himself more than once and blipped across their mental maps more than once and it might have been intentional and it might have been an accident.

Doesn't matter which it was. They can see through Time and the cracks-through-the-glass paths he can take and they make a decision. Go to his house. He lives in the area though he hasn't always lived in the area and in some of the paths he lives past today and in some of the paths he doesn't and some of them cross over into each other and that's just the way Time runs.

In this time they find him and his menagerie in a mixed area residential and commercial. Wide well-kept alleyways with ornate gates. Squares instead of stretched-out lengths of nothing. The sounds of a party trickles through a plaza in the center of a block.

They can hear the music. They can hear the echoes of conversation. They can get to the plaza where their minds and their mind's-eyes tell them Byron reigns through one of the alleyways.

Someone laughs and the laugh turns into a scream but it's hard to tell with drugs if it's the scream of an uninhibited or the scream of an unfortunate.

Serafíne

It has been: such a long day and such a long night and such a long span of weeks to come back into this ritual and now that long day and night are closing into this precise moment in a strange section of a strange neighborhood where the strands of time sift and curl and shake themselves like the layers of an onion until these things intersect:

their presence here. and his.

Serafíne is tired and sober and hungry and there's an odd sort of ecstasy in the Work that is carrying her through to this moment when they're standing outside the edges of a party and the throb of the music and that soundcloud of crowd noise rising in a way that feels both organic and natural and fucking ominous and Sera, she breathes in the air the way you do ozone, tasting it shallow and clear in the back of her throat.

What is she wearing? Oh yes: Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, shit-kickers, fishnets, and cut-offs. Well, she reaches up and pushes her long fingers through her hair, shakes it out so it falls properly away from her fucking side-cut, so you can see the dark fringe of her hair, the grabs the hem of her t-shirt and takes it off and now she's wearing a black push-up bra with red lace accents and fishnets and cut-offs and fuck if she doesn't look like she's ready for a goddamned party.

Two things, then.

The first: her canine tooth through the soft tissues of her inner cheek, until the blood ruins. The sharp spike of pain that opens and briefly contracts her eyes dilated wide open from the darkness and deprivation and ritual. She breathes out sharply and tastes the wash of blood in her mouth and opens her eyes and opens her eyes even as she sends out her senses, bright and seeking.

The second: a quick gauging glance at Jim, then Justin, largely nonverbal but clear because then she just starts walking, Sera.

She looks like she came to party and she's going in the front door.

Serafíne

Per + Awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

Watch the Weaving Dif 4 -1 (focus)

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (10, 10) ( success x 2 )

Jim

Jim's ears perk up as the raucous din of revelry becomes a laugh that transforms into a howling scream. Maybe it's release. Maybe it's pain and horror. He can't tell, but he looks intent on finding out, crossing the plaza toward the sound, intent on it.

His sandals slap on stone as he gobbles up the distance, and he finally slows. Looking to the other Ecstatic and the Verbena with them, as if to reassure them he wouldn't go racing off into the breach.

Not without them.

His dress is disheveled from a day's exploration. Exploration of a place within himself that had become overgrown, a place he needed to hack and slash at to clear and make habitable again. A place of mindfulness and focus. A place of asceticism and restraint.

But when his eyes turn on them that stoicism has taken on a new resilience and strength.

"It sounds like he's trying to wake up the entire neighborhood," not just the sound, and not in the way a loud party might. His tone says he's referring to a more shaken and starling awakening.

His gaze goes back ahead, on the path they're taking toward that place and that location where Byron is (hiding? waiting? scheming?). And when they come upon that location, he takes it in, takes all of it in with a sobered awareness, trying to seek out the runs pulled in the tapestry with his newfound clarity.

[ Perception + Awareness ]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Justin

Justin's involvement in all of this had so far been limited to the periphery. Serafine had gotten him caught up some the other week at the park when she'd asked if he'd come with them to find Byron. To find the rest of the drugs. Hopefully, to stop him from hurting other people. Maybe she'd expected him to hesitate, but he hadn't. He'd said: Yes. I'll come. (Of course.)

So he'd met them at Sera's place or Jim's place or wherever they'd all agreed to meet up and driven with them to this place where it sounded like someone was having a party to end all parties. And while the others moved ahead with determination, Justin actually stopped.

Still. Listening. Like he was trying to decide something. Then he crouched down on the balls of his feet and ducked his head and closed his eyes and put his hands to his ears and started whispering something low and unintelligible and half-formed.

When it was over, he stood and followed.

He was wearing a jacket. A gun sat holstered against his chest beneath it.

[Life 2 - dialing down the acute hearing cause seriously that shit will make his ears bleed - diff 5 -1 (practiced) -1 (sure we'll say enduring resonance fits)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (4, 5) ( success x 2 )

Justin

[Also! Per+Awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Byron

To the ones who know no better the aura in the air is the same as any other congregation of celebrants and college kids on a summer when they have nothing else to do. That Saturday afternoon tension-wire drawn back like the game of beer pong could stay easy and free or it could conjure up old memories gone as warm and miserable as the liquid in the bottom of the cup after too long in the sun. Like a fight could break out because the music is so loud and the conversation starts to glint with a razor's edge after too long.

Yet you walk by and you smell the grill and you hear the lilt of the laughter and you see the toned legs beneath the hems of the sundresses and you look anyway. Isn't until the sun goes down and folks have had too much to drink that the lilt of danger sets in and danger draws a certain breed of folk.

Danger and the drugs but the drugs are a promise and as the three Awakened come upon the place they know that it is the place and they have a choice of alleyways but every alleyway is the same. Paved not with filthy asphalt but bricks and some of the bricks have little sprigs of green pushed up through them and no windows up the sides of the alleys for they belong to businesses and some of the walls have chalk graffiti and they pass a smattering of Sharpie graffiti but it lurks in their periphery and it blinks out when they look at it. Blinks back a second later as they pass into the plaza.

Kiddie pool pilled with hose water. Beer pong table made out of discarded doors and sawhorses.

They can feel the drug in the air and Lydia said there was more of it but she didn't tell them what it would do or what it was mean to do other than open the mind and as they draw towards the center of it there's a flash

-- and they see what happened here or what is going to happen here as the hippies and the burnouts all drank out of plastic cups and sprayed each other with squirt guns and lay out on the grass or on the picnic tables and they smoked grass and laughed and then it all turned wrong--

and then they can feel it all start to unravel like even the air itself knows of the wrongness of this the impermanence cigarette smoke drifted in front of an open window only for it to snap back again. Can't escape if you keep taking hits.

And scattered overtop of the ghosts of those who came before are a dozen young people in denim and cotton their eyes glazed but not from magickal causes though they exude an air of expectation like someone's gone off and come back and the music is so loud here and two of the young people are screwing around. Big tanned boy picking up a smaller girl with unruly processed hair and they're both laughing but the girl is shrill and uncertain.

No one notices the interlopers because people ought to come and go. People ought to take the vibe with them.

Byron is inside. He'll be outside in a moment.

Serafíne

Sera's got her t-shirt slung over her right shoulder and she's sweaty because it's summer and it's a warm night and there's the kiddie pool and that -

oh, flash of memory gives her such an immediate and heartstopping pause that she is not recalled to this place and time until the shrill and uncertain shout of that girl (being picked up by that big boy) hits some central part of her lizard brain and pulls her back to now and she knows it is now as in where-she-is and swallows against the yawning hungry (which is physical and otherwise) in her and saunters around the courtyard.

Flashes those other kids a quick little peace sign and she looks like them except: cooler and edgier maybe and if a daylong ritual of denial doesn't give a girl like her the glazed-out eyes of a burnout nothing will.

Sera hipchecks the guy and glances up at the girl and grabs his wrist all "Put her the fuck down, man. You're harshing the vibe." Because of course she just fucking said that, and she waits to make sure either the shrieking girl is into being manhandled or has actually been put the fuck down as she keeps going around the courtyard. Picking up three or four of the beer pong cups, tilting them, sniffing them, feeling them for residual.

Plastic cups. In that vision the ghosts drank from plastic cups.

That air of expectation, though, that open door and he'll be down in a moment.

Sera gives Jim a look and Justin a look and the open doorway a fucking look and she cannot help it. In that moment she shivers, all physical, like something strange and dark and changing just crawled up the ladder of her spine.

"Shall we?"

And, if they agree, she does.

Jim

Jim is not behind Serafine when she interrupts to see if it's a matter of King Kong kidnapping Ann or Tarzan rescuing Ann, but he's a step to the side, not meeting the young man's stare and possibly catalyzing an already testy situation, but watching from his periphery should he need to step in.

And on they go when it's resolved, if it gets resolved, if anything in this mess, this tangle of magic and emotion, could ever get resolved. It seems more like a sustained reaction.

And then there is that open doorway. He looks to it too until Serafine questions him and Justin.

They shall. Jim nods his agreement first, ready to meet Byron at that door, or past it, or whenever time and fate will cause their two opposing forces to contact one another. He steps forward with them to do so.

Byron

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (4, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Justin

Sera wasn't the only one of them who had to remind herself of the difference between memory and here-and-now. Justin, at least, wasn't so likely to be consumed by his own. But there was this quiet hesitance about the way he approached the party - the way he moved through the guests. And he looked almost sad as he watched them.

But he didn't say anything, and he didn't seem inclined to abandon the two Cultists, so when Sera looked back and asked in that silent expression if they meant to follow, he did.

Serafíne

Somehow they're through the door and on the bottom landing of a concrete walk-up. The buzzing of electricity from somewhere upstairs and the echo of the party from outside beyond them and Justin's not there anymore. It's colder in here than it was outside. All that concrete keeps the summer out and chill in and Sera grabs her t-shirt and slips it over her head as they start up the stairs.

Can feel Byron's presence above them and this Work will be harder but they're still in that denial stage, in that head-and-physical space and she says fuck it and grabs the metal railing and tightens her hands and climbs the stairs, rather quickly, pausing on the landing or outside the door as Jim joins her and when he does she reaches for his hand.

Jim

Jim can feel it around him. The party jumps and skips but he leaps and bounds. He'd seen the end of these roads. He'd seen these young faces grow old, these nubile and hale bodies grow withered and broken and used up. And he can only imagine what the awakening of such drugs might do to their fragile minds. Minds unsure and unwilling to believe in their fragility until already broken.

Where he sees revelers he sees not ghosts, but the walking dead they will become in search of their next fix. And then he imagines Bryon. For money or clout or maybe some sickened delight, some social validation, whatever his ends spreading the hits out amongst them and greater Denver.

Like party treats for a Festival of the Damned.

That shiver he'd seen down her spine has made him consider it, but now he doesn't hesitate. It's probably the first real intimate contact they've had all day, their hands meeting, fingers on fingers and the sweat of palm mashed together as they grip to one another in this twisted maelstrom.

[ Crime and Consequence. Mind 2 and Time 2. Coincidental + 2 - 1 for taking their time and - 1 for blowing a Quinessence. Difficulty 3. Casting in concert with Serafine. Blowing a WP. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

(Mind 2 / Time 2. Coincidental 5 -1 (resonance appropriate))

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Byron

Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (2, 2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

Countermagic

Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (5, 6) ( fail )

Jim

The connection to that looming future and all the misery and despondency it will create, makes him squeeze back at Serafine's hand. He feels her Avatar, clung beside his own, reach out to try and diffuse the charm and its hold on Byron. The boons it grants. And his own does the same.

[ Countermagic. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (6, 7, 7) ( fail )

Jim

[ Perception + Larceny. Fucking WP. ]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Sera squeezes back; they're standing on the landing, outside an open fucking door, looking into a drug den with the kingpin of sorts inside. Can feel the magic warping in and around and through him and the magic potential in the remaining charms scattered around and pull the bleakness of potentail futures back into the presence and inflict him with his own ghosts and -

- there's still the magic; he's still stoned. He's still stoned and drifting on the magic and the future-memory and he probably doesn't even really see them when the Rite ends (god knows, really, how long it took, but her knees are stiff and the cold is colder and the party downstairs has shifted and Sera does not let go of Jim's hand until they're inside, searching through the old stiff couch and the discarded vials and the cheap-ass furniture and the stiff, stale scent of old cigarette smoke and someone's open-mouthed, sandpaper-eyed panic and inside the apartment Jim finally lets go of Sera's hand to start searching through the cabinets in the laminate kitchen, where the only food is a jar with one pickle and moldering mayo and a half-dozen old pizza boxes deliquiescing into nothing-ness and she's tucking the first aid kits into a plastic bag and Jim's found the rest of the stash and then, downstairs -

- those fucking kids, man.

They're going to be here for a long fucking time.

Jim

Floorboards. Check. Mattress. Check. Under the dresser. Fall bottoms? Closet. Inside jackets, pockets, everything soaking up that primal smell from Byron's den of love and lustmaking. In the end Jim has amassed a good pile. He almost misses the first aid kits.

Almost.

But he doesn't drawn to them in the last-place-he'd-look kind of way, adding them to the pillowcases full of haul he's uncovered.

Cleaning him out. He's lost his privileges, and yes, these things are privileges, not rights. Ones the Ecstatics have the power and duty to revoke. When he's finished he finds himself sitting on the edge of that bed, trying not to imagine what has happened on it, though he can smell and guess. It's in the air. He no doubt used users, used their addiction for himself, used himself, and this is what Jim finds himself solemnly contemplating.

A wake up call.

He looks up to find Serafine stuffing the kits into a plastic bag. Nods, as if shaking himself out of the reverie he's stuck in.

Standing again.

Tired, but not too tired to help.

"We've got to keep them here. In one place. Where they can't hurt others. Keep them from hurting themselves," he says to her in a way that she might get the idea of what he's considering. "They're our responsibility. Their shepherd's gone to the corner to think about what he's done. We put him there."

Jim

[ Mind 2 and Correspondence 2. Warding the revelers to the party. Coincidental + 2. Base is 5. Dropping a Quintessence. Difficulty 4. Dropping a WP. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 3, 3) ( fail )

Jim

[ Forgot to click WP on the last. So 1 success. Extending. ANOTHER QUINT to keep it at 4. He only has one left after this. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Sera's just standing there, with her arms crossed and her eyes hazy and her body taut and her throat aching and this place feels -

this place feels -

this place feels -

Oh, she breathes out. Looks from the window, shrouded by an ugly old blanket, to Jim and the light in here is ugly and spare and it makes them ghoulish in the whole ghoulish place. He has his pillowcase and she has the first fucking aid kits and they have everything, they have cleaned the bastard out and she breathes out a long slow sigh, tired.

"Show me what to do."

And reaches for his free hand with her own.

Serafíne

(Mind 2 / Correspondence 1 - Keeping revelers at the party!) -1 dif for quintessence

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

[Mind 2 / Correspondence 1 - participating in Jim's ritual] Difficulty +1, still -1 for quint.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]