Bittersweet

Dan

Bittersweet is a slow pour coffeehouse / mixology bar tucked away on a corner of LoDo, with a changing 'gallery' of local art on the walls. This month, the featured artist is Tish Evans, a local weaver / textile artist whose work spans the functional and the fantastical. The largest piece is a wall-hanging the size of a small buffalo like a sunset woven in negative: shadows where light should be, and light where the shadows belong.

Leonard Cohen on the soundsystem (Nevermind) and a low buzz of noise from the small crowd. They do a bang-up business mornings and weekends, but mid-evening - when local bar/restaurants are crowded enough to spill out onto the street on a warm October night - the coffee bar / bar bar (and that is what the sign outside says:

bittersweet

coffee bar / bar bar

) - is sparsely populated. Among the denizens: a bearded blond guy with a button-down flannel, the sleeves rolled quite neatly up to his elbows revealing a variety of intricate tattoos, portfolio open on the table, frowning at his Macbook, drinking coffee from a ceramic mug.

River

River was doing as River is want to do right now- which was exploring.

She knew the lay of the land, for the most part. Kept an ear to the ground so she would know which gang was where and whose turf she needed to stay out of. Where people dropped dead bodies in the event she needed to go and be an investigator. In the event she needed to stand on her own two feet. River's had her fill of dead things- she wants coffee. Contemplates being a barrista instead of a dancer and there she goes, pushes the door open with a jingle and she's got on a pair of shorts paired with cowbox boots. The shirt is a little long for her, button down and probably belonging to an ex-boyfriend.

She's got on a vest and carries a purse that is the size of a small duffelbag. It houses a world of wonders and her dakr hair is worn down. This place was a coffee bar and an actual bar. She contemplates mixing both before she sees the man with the blond beard. Hasn't she seen him before.

River makes a tentative approach, tries to act cool, like she's not trying to check Dan out. Maybe failing. Probably failing.

Aidan

[nightmares]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Dan

What's the point of checking someone out if they don't notice and return the look? Maybe there's a certain aesthetic appreciation there. Maybe some folks don't want to get caught. Most do, though. How else do you know if your regard might be returned?

--

He glances up. Blue eyes framed with slight crinkles that deepen when his mouth moves, as it does not, in a brief skimming grin. Notes the bag.

"That thing looks big enough to carry around three cases of beer or a side of beef."

Wry.

He looks tired, though.

He is tired.

Kiara

One of those days. That's what it is.

The weather doesn't offer a backdrop for it, not really. It's been cloudy all afternoon but the Denver wind hasn't taken up the mantle some locals have; pumpkins starting to dot porches with their garish, grinning smiles cut wide across their sides. It's not freezing, it just feels - a little heavy. Dull and gritty where the sun slides away and even when it returns - Denver today - feels like a city with secrets. It doesn't always.

Sometimes, on evenings like the one it's settling into, it feels - promising. Those secrets, the unknowns, they feel like an enticement to come along (come find us).

-

She almost collided with another car earlier. Intersection. Palms slammed down on horns. Guy cutting her off (and nearly cutting a slice out of her car). Then her engine stalled. One of those days. She had to circle the block twice to find a park so she could make a meeting.

-

She passes a crime scene on the way to find this mixology bar she's wanted to try forever. There's police tape flapping in the evening air and the sight of the lights (cutting blue and red, blue and red) against the windows is a strange visual tattoo against the night.

There's a crowd milling around, curious stares and quiet chatter as an ambulance rolls around a corner.

Kiara picks up her pace. She's around the corner before it pulls to a stop.

-

One of those days, now - evening. The Verbena finds Bittersweet on foot. One minute there's no sign of her and then; the door opens; a swirl of perfume and energy and red lipstick. Kiara Woolfe, adjusting her bag over her shoulder and frowning at the menu.

Kiara

[Oh right! Awareness, just in case.]

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

River

"Sometimes, I like to carry a keg with me," she adjusts her purse, switches it over to the other shoulder, "true facts."

She sounds like she's not from here, or at the very least like she's not one who speaks English as a first language. Truth be told, River is from here, was born in the United States but she's spent enough time outside of the standard English-speaking populace that she doesn't have the same cadence and timbre of a native speaker.

"Can I buy you a coffee?" looks at the mug, realizes he has coffee, looks back and offers a smile anyway, as if smiling would cover up the fact that she completely missed he was drinking coffee before, "I'm River."

Dan

"False lies," he rejoins, this quick skim of a smile cutting through his beard. It reaches - but only just - his dark blue eyes. Watching as she shifts that purse, his eyes cutting across her frame - hand to strap to hand again - with a light precision that strikes one as aware rather than observant. "Now if you'd said a half-keg I might've believed you."

And so. Mouth slides from that into a slight smirk as she offers to buy him a coffee and yes, he already has coffee. Wasn't simply here to steal their wifi and he thinks about telling her that, but he doesn't.

Cuts a glance down at his mug like: yeah. "I already have one. You're welcome to buy yourself a coffee and pull up a chair, though."

--

Then he's sitting back in that chair, this long spare frame, button-down and fitted jeans and leather boots. Sits back enough and tall enough to catch Kiara's eye. Gives her a wave that could be taken as an invitation, if she's looking for one.

Kiara

So, Bittersweet. She takes two steps inside and nearly collides with a young man on his way out. It's Kiara's fault this time, she's staring down at her phone and tapping out some (vitally important no doubt) message with the fall of all that long, dark hair tumbling over a shoulder and then - jostled. She looks up, startled and is reaching to apologize when he's doing the same; adjusting glasses up a thin nose and waving her apology off, because - well - it's probably the eyes and the hair.

It usually was, with the pagan.

Still, she's breathing out and pushing back all that hair with a bracelet-laden wrist when she spots (feels that resolute splash of radiance) Dan and the hand flowers out. He gets a smile and she nods toward the bar - universal I'm going to order first gesture - before she's moving. Kiara often seems to be perpetually doing that. In motion. Moving. (Running).

She's in jeans and boots and a calf length cream trench-coat, the brunette; the bag over her shoulder is old and worn and looks battle-scarred; it's stitched at one edge; there's a feather attached to the zip.

-

Returns to greet Dan and - "River, right?" - A gesture with her coffee, Kiara's dark eyes find the other woman. "Did your pants pull through?" Smilingly, a curl at the edge of her mouth.

River

She does take the invitation, does take a moment to order coffee- vanilla chai latte- waits with the kind of careful patience that one has to have when ordering nice coffee. It comes out in an avocado mug with a nice, open top. As though she were going to read tea leaves in her oversized beverage receptacle.

She turns around, catches a look at Kiara and smiles. Raises a hand and with a little wiggle of her fingers lets the woman know that, yes, she sees her. With the curve of her lips (full, unpainted, she lets the woman know that she is pleased to see her. The first person whose name she remembered in this city. A woman, most importantly, who wasn't going to hold a pair of ripped yoga pants against her because River can be a walking ball of embarrassment waiting to happen.

She sits down, "Aaaand... Kiara?"

Waits for confirmation.

Did your pants pull through?

And this is the part where her cheeks turn bright pink. She clears her throat, takes a long drink of her coffee-infused chai drink and she sets it down. Hands on her glass, "oh, uh... no? The yoga pants sleep with the fishes."

Dan

The tables are only so large, and his is more-or-less full. The open portfolio (leather, quite as scarred as Kiara's bag) is closed with a neat sweep of his tattooed hand. This glimpse of scrawled notes, a handful of suggestions of chord progressions, little more. Then he folds up the Macbook and tucks both away in his own rather indispensible bag. Battered black leather, a Ramones pin naturally skewered through one of the stresspoints to either hide or hold together the largest of the holes where the leather and its lining have worn-through.

Leaves his phone on the table, though, Dan. He's waiting for a call.

Still gives them both a quick-wry-smirk, more for Kiara in that moment than for River - but that's familiarity, more than anything. The function of it. "There some particular reason you are throwing yoga-pants into the river?" (Sleep with the fishes, see). Gets a glimpse of River's frothy coffee-thing, "Is it the coffee you like in that, or the rest of it?"

Kiara

River's embarrassed and Kiara's smile grows a little at the edges. She's taken her coffee black - perhaps that says enough. Still, when she says the pants sleep with the fishes, there's a flash of sympathy there. She makes a soft noise of it as she finds a chair - maybe hooks in one from another table if room is too cramped - and settles in this flourish.

Bag hung over the back, legs neatly crossing at the knee. Those boots, which have rather a tendency toward complicated laces that criss-cross up the length and a zip that runs along the side - those are black too.

"Technically, it's all your fault, Dan." She begins with a pointed little lift of fine dark brows. "We were playing the game you started and River here went for a spectacular throw," River gets the benefit of Kiara's eyes, then. They tick over to her and she delivers this little wink with her mouth still edging that little flux of teasing humor before continuing, raising her coffee to her mouth to sip from it when she concludes.

"And gravity took offense to her prowess. And Alexander's, as it turned out."

A beat, she swallows. Contemplates Dan for a brief pull. "Hey, how's Sera?"

River

"The rest of it. I like chai, but I like chai that lives dangerously. I don't like the coffee aftertaste- espresso lollipops, jelly beans, tiramisu-" she makes a face, nose scrunches up and she shakes her head, "-I like covert coffee."

But there was the question fo the yoga pants, realizing she didn't really carefully dodge that particular question well enough, River clears her throat. Tried to think of a witty reply but, at the end of the day, she's not the best with witty repartee; she's average. Honesty is the best policy and she meanders to her point.

Kiara covers this rest of the story and here she is trying to hide behind her coffee cup but it wasn't working. So! The Euthanatos, who was supposed to be bestowed with the kind of dignity befitting a wheel turner, cleared her throat and relaxed. Or tried to relax and ended up cross her legs to keep from figiting too bad. "When I got home they had unraveled to the point of being leg warmers so... they have failed me for the last time."

Dan

"When gravity fucks you over - " he is not precisely laughing, but there is humor in his lengthy frame, skimming over his underlying - what is it. Tension? Something like it. "Disbelieve."

Still though: the reference to the game, et cetera. His gaze slides from Kiara to River and there is a different note: first seeking, then recognition. One fits itself into the other, like a placing of puzzle pieces. "That's where I've seen you before."

River is confessing to enjoying covert coffee then: so Dan does not suggest that next time she's here she try a plain, slow-poured something. You're a coffee person on you aren't. River doesn't seem to be. Dan's so hipster it hurts, right? But he's not an ass about it.

--

Then Hey, how's Sera? flick of his gaze back to Kiara and something like hang-time there. A second really, no more. And it is not so much that tension asserts itself, as it is a lessening of his temporary ease. "Tan, I suppose. Last I heard from her, she was still in Thailand."

Kiara

The talk of coffee pulls at a thread of memory. Corona Street, not so long ago, but months, now. Kiara hadn't been in Denver so long and there was a party - Dan had quizzed her on her preferences and she remembers it now in that abstract, fuzzy-at-the-edges like an old photograph way:

(French press or drip?

Press.

Woman after my own heart)

There's some awareness of that time in Kiara's expression as she watches Dan and in the way her mouth adjusts itself into something a little less joyful. Just - aware. Not without concern, perhaps. Somewhere tied into it. "She does love the sun. Why am I not surprised?"

Then, simple: "If you hear from her, tell her I said I want a souvenir. Something cheap and ridiculous."

Maybe she's been letting River recover her dignity, but Kiara's eyes return to her, now. "How is your friend? I got the impression she wasn't totally sold on whether or not I planned to do something dastardly with you both the other night?"

Dan

His mouth quirks, Dan, this glimmer of affection, yeah, or maybe respect framing the edges of the expression, which is otherwise banked and closed but not shuttered. "Will do." is the only assurance he offers Kiara.

He appreciates, though, her circumspection.

And sentiment.

--

Hangs around a little while longer, more background than foreground. Excuses himself to take a call not long after. Steps away and outside, where he digs through pockets and pulls out a kretek. Not a habit he indulges in much, except when Sera's around, but now he smokes it while he chats.

Later he might return. If River or Kiara or both are still there, he might suggest that they meet up later. Friend of his is playing at The Black Sheep - the set'll start about 10 if they're interested.

--

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.

H O R S

Kiara Woolfe

[Yay, people! I'm going to go type something.]

Kiara Woolfe

Fall was settling comfortably into Denver.

The trees beginning to shake off their leaves and leaving drying shells scattered over footpaths and manicured lawns the city over; the mountains turning brilliant shades of honey-gold and deep crimson red on the horizon and the weather starting to subtly shift; breezes bearing the intention of cooler days to come. Thursday afternoon in the city limits had dwindled into a pleasant, breezy affair. It was still warm enough for layers to be disguarded under the warmth of the sun, clouds scattering across its path.

Still the weather for lounging on the grassy expanses Washington Park had to offer; littered as they were of recent days with curling, crumbling leaves. You still found the poets with their heads buried in books, stretched out on the ground with their shoes beside them; feet bare to the world. Still the mothers pushing strollers along the winding pathways, dogs chasing balls and the glinting promise of the lake, birds diving and settling on its surface to glide along, shaking their feathers and dipping their faces into the water.

The face of a city that changed and within it - the ones who saw the other side. The shadows that fell, the noises and the ugly.

Kiara Woolfe wasn't to be found lounging on the grass as late afternoon sunlight slanted across it, she was on one of the park's many basketball courts, seated on the side beside a chainlink fence, tying her dark hair back, a basketball housed between her feet. She was the sole occupant of the court aside from a lone bird; perched high on the fence, watching her progress with tiny, anticipatory movements of its head. When she rose, scooping up the ball, it startled and took flight with a rustle of feathers.

Kiara moved out onto the court, the sound of the ball echoing as she began a slow circuit.

Alexander

[Awareness?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace

[Awareness?]

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

Grace

This place, man. This fucking place.

Last time Grace was here it was to inspect the remains of a woman-chimera with four arms who'd put a good friend into... let's say mental distress. Almost getting your face ripped off will do that to you.

Then, there was everything that happened after.

She doesn't even really know why she's here, other than perhaps something in her that wants to show the monsters who's boss. Don't show your face here anymore, right? We live here too, and we like this park.

Well, territorial, tribal ideology never sit well with Grace. She'll make an exception for dead things who like to reshape people into horrified and horrifying monsters. Call it the line beyond which Grace Evans will actually categorize a person.

Anyway, it's with that thought in mind that she's in the park today, dressed in her jeans and bite-proof grey turtleneck jacket, paying a great deal of attention to what's going on around her (while simultaneously shoving her head in her cell phone and walking). She hears the basketball. She feels the pulse of the world. She looks up, and starts toward the court.

Kiara Woolfe

[Awareness, perhaps?]

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

Kiara Woolfe

[All of time and space is the Verbena's.]

Alexander

[Because I need to know if he fluffs or not for the post... Arete: Spirit 1, Entropy 1. Sensing the gauntlet, looking for weakness. Coincidental, TN4. +1 for trying something new, -1 for taking his time.]

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

Kiara Woolfe

[Playin' some ball. Dex + Ath.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Alexander

Kiara may not have been drawn here to lounge on the grass, but Alexander? Well, that’s exactly where he can be found. Not so far away, at a familiar spot near the lake, he’s lying on the grass. It’s not particularly uncommon to find him here, although his visits maybe aren’t quite as frequent as they used to be. There’s still hope in the visits, though. Hope that he’ll meet someone again, hopefully in better circumstances. Until he learns how to do more than look into the spirit world, this is the best chance he has for that meeting.

He seems to be watching the lake, but that isn’t really where his attention is at the moment. The bottle of water that he’s slowly turning over and over in his hand might, to those who know him and how he Works, give the hint that his attention is elsewhere. There’s also a frigid, frozen chill in the air around him as his will bends reality just a little. Not enough to do anything obvious to those who aren’t attuned to such things. Just enough to deepen his awareness of the border of this world and its mirror. Scratching at the boundaries, looking for areas of strength and weakness.

He’s there for a while before other sensations start to make their selves known. The pulse of the world not so far away. The razor edge of fluttering wings. The gathering of Awakened. Letting go of the effect, he pushes up from the grass and heads towards the basketball court to meet the familiar – and not as familiar – presences.

Dan

Tall guy in black skinny jeans, a fitted flannel shirt open over a t-shirt. Blond hair, blond beard, hints of tattooes flashing at cuffs and collar like the evidence of ink on a scrivener's hand. He has a battered leather bag slung across his tall, spare frame and is walking with a long-haired brunette in a flowing, flowered skirt that billows in the wind. She, in turn, is walking this bright yellow-and-orange fixed gear bicycle along the path. Has a basket on the front and paperflowers woven into the weave.

He's smoking a cigarette. Well, maybe it's a cigarette, except she asks for a drag and he gives it to her while they stand at a cross-roads, looking not-at-all like park-people. He catches a glimpse of Grace or maybe of Kiara, though. Takes back the cigarette and touches the brunette's shoulder and says something low by way of farewell. She climbs on the bicycle, nevermind the way her skirt blows in the high plains wind, and keeps on going. He turns and lifts a hand toward - well, someone. Maybe a couple of someones. Maybe whoever will return it.

"Grace," Dan says, overtaking her with his long strides and lanky frame. Then, "Kiara," when they reach the basketball court. Listens to that peculiar ring of the ball against the court - elastic and resonant, all at once. Taut.
"Fancy a game of HORSE?"
Wry grin at Grace. Maybe a challenge.

River Vasquez

River doesn't know anyone here except Farrah. They haven't been to the park together but they have gone and gotten a new wardrobe. She's got a couple job applications tucked into her oversized purse and there she is, walking around the park with a pair of awfully high heels thrown into her purse so she can walk around and enjoy the feeling of the ground on her feet. It was starting to get cold, too. Or, at least, colder than the perpetually perfect San Diego.

Her hips swayed when she walked, exaggerated and like she was bopping along to some song that was playing in her head. The strut said it all: River was bouncing along to the Beegees Stayin' Alive. She doesn't really care where she's walking, just that she is walking and then this: she notices the sound of people on the basketball courts. She doesn't know who they are, but she is curious enough that she wouldn't mind seeing what tthey were doing.

A heel turn and redirection later, the dark-haired woman bops down the way to see people. She's got on yoga pants. Yoga pants and an oversized shirt and a sports bra that is more restrictive than a sportsbra has any right to be. No sir, nothing on River Vasquez was moving unless she damned well wanted it to.

And thus, the ball of sunshine bops over to the basketball courts.

Grace

"Neiiigh?" Grace says, flashes Dan a smile. "Oh, wait. That sounds like no. I mean, yes. Unless that means you want me to ride you, in which case -- no."

She quirks her head, though not at anything in particular. Maybe analyzing her own speech for its utter strangeness. "How do you play horse? Also, hi Kiara."

Hi, sunshine. Well, that's different. Grace turns away from the court, looks the new one up and down. There, a little tick of the head upwards, like 'hey'.

Kiara Woolfe

The brunette navigates the court at a slow jog, bouncing the ball between her hands. She's a lean creature, the Verbena, with finely shaped features and dark, expressive eyes. She feels a little like a fixed pulse to the world and a lot more like the first flush of exhilaration. Nature in perpetual motion, that's the sense Kiara Woolfe gives as she lobs the ball toward the ring and watches the neat arc it cuts through the air, watches it hit the ring and wobble inside.

There's a flash of teeth at that, a private (or so she believes in the moment) surge of satisfaction.

She's dressed as much for the occasion as the weather, the pagan, in a pair of soft grey sweatpants that are tied loosely at her hips; in a fitted shirt that adheres to the curve of her spine; her middrift is bear where it cuts off and the dark lines of a tattoo are visible, teased at the edges where the hem rises as she reclaims her ball and turns to sight the sensations creeping along her skin.

The bite of Alexander, the shifting, keen sensation of Grace. Others, too. Some Kiara can't instantly place, that has her pause. Raises a hand to cover her eyes and look across the rolling slope of a hill, beyond the fence and the dappling surface of the water. The ball is tucked under an arm and she's still in transit as Dan appears, as they're greeting her.

"Hey Grace, Dan." There's a flush of color in the Verbena's cheeks, it suits her alarmingly well. "Do something fancy, shoot for the hoop. Next in line has to copy you or create their own." She raises her eyebrows in Dan's direction, gently directs her ball his way with a dragging edge of a smile.

"You can lead us off if you want. Show us what you've got."

Dan

"I'm not one to insist on universalizing my own experiences," says Dan, and maybe he's smirking a bit behind the shadow of his beard, while also rather precisely pinching off the cherry of his cigarette(?) and then stomping the ember to ash beneath the heel of his Converse All-Stars. He's wearing them for fashion, not function. That smirk mingles with a vague, bemused grin. " - but, you've never played HORSE?"

A lift of his chin, wordlessly returning Kiara's greeting. Falls silent as she explains then game, then reaches out to take the basketball as Kiara passes it his way.

Those are musician's hands, not a ball handler's, but still. Can't be a lanky guy from middle-America without playing some basketball, someday, somewhere.

"You do a 'round, repeat the last shot. If you make it, great. If you miss it, you get a letter. Once you've spelled HORSE, you're out. Last person standing wins."

He takes a minute to lift his leather bag over his body and set it carefully aside, then gives the basketball a few experimental dribbles, hand-to-hand before shaping a drive toward the basket.

First shot is simple: a lay-up.

Dan

Dan retrieves the ball as it comes through the basket and passes it to Grace.

Dan

(Lay-ups are easy, dif 4 if you guys wanna roll!)

Alexander

Alexander wanders over with no great rush. There doesn’t seem to be any great disaster at this exact moment, nothing that needs to be rushed towards or away from. And let’s be honest here, he is more likely to be rushing towards it – partly in case anyone else is in danger, partly because he’d just want to know what was happening. Apparently he thinks the cat just got unlucky.

Yes, Alexander heads towards the court. He’s not dressed particularly differently from the others this afternoon. He wasn’t unfamiliar with colder climes, so the trousers favoured by the others are replaced by cargo shorts. The guy seems to like his pockets. Above that, a black sleeveless tshirt covered by a red flannel shirt, worn open and untucked and drifting vaguely in the breeze. Some walking boots and a rucksack, now shouldered, completed his attire for the moment. It wouldn’t be entirely surprising to find him with something tucked away for if the weather changes for the worse, though. He’s lived here long enough.

He pauses at the gate to the court to watch what’s happening, and to wait to be noticed. As if they wouldn’t have picked up on his approach any more than he picked up on their presence here. But he doesn’t want to distract anybody from their shot.

Kiara Woolfe

[I just like rolling to see how badly the dice roller crushes my dreams. Hup, hup. Lay up.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 4 )

River Vasquez

[awareness: are these *gasp* unique people?]

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

River Vasquez

She is bright, a literal brightness that comes with warmth, that comes with the first rays of the sun that come back and fight their way through the vestiges of winter. There's a sort of determination that comes with those first sprouts of life that poke through the snow, something that is intent on becoming more than just grass.

But the other woman acknowledges her, the one who doesn't quite ping on River's senses as well as one would imagine, but we digress. She runs her hands over the rail, looks back when she feels the pull of something frozen on her senses. She turns around, regards the other stranger in a sea of them. She smiles, something bright and relaxed.

"The game just started," she said in a voice that has a fair bit of an accent. More Cuba than United States, but very familiar with English.

Grace

Ooh. Game. Some sort of sportsball game. Right. Horse.

Grace bounces the ball on the court, eyes flitting to the cold spire of Alex, and she smiles at him. Then, it's time to earn her letter. Or not. Who knows, she might just do the thing right.

She walks up to the spot where Dan shot from, and peers up at the hoop.

"Well, I didn't spend a lot of time outside when I was a kid. Jumping chollas and oppressive heat will do that to you," Grace says, and she doesn't follow that up with 'oh yeah, and none of the other kids would play with me', but there is that too. She has people to play with now, so. What does it matter?

[Dex + Ath = copying Dan's layup!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (1, 1, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

Not bad, nope. Went through the hoop at least. Grace assumes that counts, and picks up the ball to throw it to Kiara.

Kiara Woolfe

There are days when Kiara feels acutely connected to the world around her. Feels the way every tiny hair on her body reacts to stimuli: the sun, the gentle, curling breeze, the brush of fingers, the rough give of her basketball. The awareness of others, like her, who were at once a part of and more to all of it. She feels it today, beneath the afternoon light. The prickle of her senses - a hand raising to cup the back of her neck and she twists in a slight, fluid motion to watch Alexander's approach.

The edge of her mouth retains that same smile she'd offered Dan not a few heartbeats ago.

"Hey," she's studying Alexander now, her dark eyes absorbing a hundred tiny details about the man she knew by sight, by sense, but barely at all. The frozen lake in winter. She gestures at his rucksack, resting over a shoulder. "Unburden yourself and come join the game. I'm ambitious enough to want to see how I rank against everyone, today." Her smile widens and a dimple flashes into a cheek. "It's the day for it."

Then, warmth. Inviting and bone deep.

She turns to River, inclines her head. Her hand falling away. "It has," agreement, consideration. "You're welcome to join too, if you want." This briefest tick of eyes over her figure and she turns back in time to catch the ball lobbed her way by Grace. She moves across to take up the other woman's place, canting a little smile sidelong as she does. "Not bad, Evans."

Then, her face adopts a slightly more focused expression, eyes on the hoop, her entire body sings with it. The anticipation of landing the shot. When she makes it, her shirt lifts enough to reveal the full design of that tattoo on her lower back, a spiraling shape with a line cut through it. It gives the impression of something vaguely oriental, some designation or belief inked into the pagan's skin.

Her shot sinks into the hoop neatly and Kiara makes a tiny hop-step of satisfaction.

Dan

They're all Special People, resonant, the signature of their magic charging the air around them so distinctly and assuredly. All Special except for the guy with the roughly worked head of blond hair and the wallet chain and on and on and on. Him? He's ordinary.

Gives Grace an ordinary little grin/smirk in response to her ellipses of understanding. Then gives her a few beats of applause when she makes the lay-up. Watches the ball as she passes it to Kiara then his eyes cut back to Grace as she walks or maybe-jogs across the court and out of Kiara's way. Drops his mouth to Grace's ear and mutters something.

(Muttered: "It's all physics, Grace.")

Which he knows would never make sense to Sera, who does not believe in physics. He figures Grace does, though.

"Game just started," the guy affirms to River, either in echo of overlay of Kiara's statement. "No one has an H yet." Is: retrieving the ball from beneath the basket or maybe wherever it rolled after that shot - bending low and scooping it up with long-fingered and rather deft hands, tossing it back and forth like he's deciding whether or where to go when his phone rings.

Or rather: his phone starts playing the opening riff to The Breeders' Cannonball.

Which means: his phone rings.

He has the presence of mind to toss the ball in Alexander's direction (hey! join the game!) even as he's reaching for the phone in his back pocket. Pulling it out, putting it to his ear. Maybe he gives them a gotta get this but isn't that obvious?

"Hey. Where the fuck are you?" He might be overheard saying as he walks off, pausing only long enough to grab the bag he dropped off when he stepped onto the court.

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.