Open a Door, Weaken the Walls

[seegodhatesme]

The storm was out of season, fierce and violent and full of screaming that only the optimistic attributed solely to the wind. None of the Speakers slept easy, their wagons anchored to the trees of the first copse they'd reached, canopies billowing violently all through the night.

Morning came with more than its own share of ill luck. Typhon's canopy hadn't survived the night, and so all the grain they'd bought in the last town was soaked. Three horses had gotten spooked and tangled themselves, and one was lame. A tree had come down on the Elder's cart tongue. And the road they'd been traveling had become a ragged, impassable streambed, running away down the long slope towards the plains.

Sypha waited only long enough to do her part of drying clothes and starting the campfires before she took to the air, to scout for a solution to the road. If worst came to worse, they could leave the carts and take the horses through the brush, but there would be a better solution, she was sure of it. She flew up the boulder-strewn new stream, riding fire and wind just below the ragged crowns of trees that still met above it, keeping her eyes open for options.

Comments

[seegodhatesme]

Her gaze stays on him, head cocked as she tries to figure out how he's doing that. She believes him that he's alone, but... there is certainly something.

"I'm sorry," she says seriously, before turning her eyes towards the woods. "No, my tribe is about half a day's walk that way," she estimates, pointing downstream. It was barely an hour's flight, but the way back will be slower, afoot. She can't carry a passenger, after all. "We're on our way to Gresit, as soon as I've found a new route."

[epistemological]

"Romania," he says absently, as if to himself but there's a glance towards her, "and if we join up with your tribe, I can find you a new route."

Said with absolute certainty. Not really arrogant. Just... matter-of-fact.

"If you show me how you did that, fly... I may be able to learn. I'd give it a shot, anyway."

[seegodhatesme]

A red eyebrow flicks up, and Sypha gives him a more penetrating look. "It isn't difficult, for the right type of people. But there is very little to show."

She holds up a hand, two fingers raised, and fire erupts from where her other fingers touch her palm, a concentrated jet that she just aims up into the sky, strong enough she has to steel her arm against its force. The gesture isn't what's important, though. Not so much as her absolute certainty that she has the power to make fire, and her sheer confidence that it will obey her.

[epistemological]

He considers that for a moment before mimicking her gesture, and the fire comes to his fingertips... but it looks very different from hers. The fire that comes from his hands is a darker red, gives no light.

But it does serve.

"Something like that?"

[seegodhatesme]

Sypha's expression goes through surprise into sharp interest in less than a breath - suspicious, but also utterly intrigued. "That took took me months to get that far.

"What do you archive, Mister Sims?"

[epistemological]

"Fear."

His voice holds power, even that word something to feel as much as hear.

"Horror. Terror. All that is the awful dread that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and twists and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and hunts and rips and bleeds and die."

But there's a slightly different tenor as he shifts it a little. It's clear that there is a shift, an act of will to it. A reclaiming of sorts.

"Knowledge."

[seegodhatesme]

Suspicion sharpens over curiosity, but doesn't subsume it. Sypha folds her hands together inside her sleeves, a new gesture ready but not made.

"The Speakers serve knowledge. But we do not truck with those who love fear."

[epistemological]

"Would you accept one who archives it?" he asks after a moment. "One who knows it, eats it, breathes it, who is made from it, in some senses?"

He shakes his head.

"I wouldn't say I love it, however."

[seegodhatesme]

She holds his gaze for a long moment, her eyes narrow with thought, and then takes a few steps, circling him. Something still prickles the back of her neck, but her instincts don't mark him as a menace. Dangerous, but not threatening. Fear isn't inherently evil, her grandfather would say.

Sypha trust her instincts.

Her hands slip out of her sleeves again as she makes a decision, and one of them has two small apples in it. She offers him one. "Share lunch with me, while you dry off. Then we'll see if you actually can fly."

[epistemological]

His fingers flutter and he can't help a soft, self-depreciating chuckle.

"I wasn't being figurative, Sypha, as kind as your offer is. The only thing I'm made to consume these days is fear. Best you keep your apple for someone who might enjoy it properly."

A moment while he goes through the knowledge of social niceties but then-

"We can talk while you eat and I dry, however."

[seegodhatesme]

She regards him for a moment, and then nods, the second apple disappearing back into her capacious sleeve. She makes another gesture at the burning stump, feeding that fire with a fresh breeze of air, and takes a seat on one of the tumble of mossy boulders.

"What do fear and knowledge have to do with each other?" she asks, to start with.

[epistemological]

He takes a similar seat on fallen tree, no doubt from the storm, and the white undershirt clings to him and makes it clear she has nothing to fear from him physically at least.

"I would say 'everything' but I am hardly unbiased." He lets his gaze unfocus (the one she can see, anyway; there's a focus on her that can't be pinpointed, coming from somewhere, that will not veer) before he starts speaking, and the words themselves hold something terrible and otherworldly.

"Fear is a terribly personal thing. Even the most basic fear you feel can be focused on one direction or another. Will this kill me? Will this cripple me? Infect me? Will this destroy everything I love? Do I know the answers to those questions?

"Do I want to? Is the enormity of them too much to handle, an endless wasteland unknown... or is every one another shovel of dirt burying you alive? Is it something physical and tangible to fear or something ephemeral and ungrabbable, something you can't fight? Is it something you can't even know or understand, something you can't see, something you think you see but... what if you're wrong?"

He turns to look at her, and the questions soon hold points, not yet stabbing in but their tips like a physical thing against her skin.

"I could ask you questions and you would pour your truths out, heave them like vomit until you were shaking and your gums were bleeding from the force of it on you. That's something any number of people fear. Others fear that kind of power turned on their friends. Their enemies. They fear what truths someone might share: old hatreds, old pains, secrets. To be Seen is horrifying to so many. To see others can destroy relationships."

He looks away from her.

"And even more dangerous is the urge to Know. The voracious, ever-hungry beast that lives behind your ribs and demands more, whispers to you of all you could do and all you could accomplish if only you Knew. All the people you could save or discoveries you could make.

"And all the people who will die or the knowledge that will be lost if you don't."

The pressure around them releases in a blink, a literal one of more eyes than she can see, as he shakes off some of... all of that.

"My apologies. I... didn't mean to answer you quite so, er, intensely."

[seegodhatesme]

The apple in her hands is forgotten, held so tightly her nails dig into it as she listens - as she feels his answer, like the pounding of rain on her skin. There’s a brief catch to her breath when he looks at her with more than eyes, the hairs on her arms lifting with goosebumps.

The urge to know. The voracious, ever-hungry beast…

Oh, she feels that part deeper than her ribs. Deeper than danger can reach.

When the pressure blinks away, it leaves a little sting behind. Disappointment. Or yearning.

She makes herself take a second to answer, holding back her first instinct this time, and taking a bite of her apple.

“Do you know about Speakers, Mister Sims?”

[epistemological]

He can tell. It's... absolutely delicious, for all that he knows that's not how he should think of this. Think of her.

This is no longer that world. This is no longer that situation.

...which doesn't make the fact that they could help with the situation as it is, the situation that now presents itself, any less tempting.

"I didn't before I met you," he says honestly, "and now I most certainly do. I know enough that if I told you all I know, you'd be even more scared and intrigued than you are now. I know it hardly helps to say so, but you should be less interested in me, if only for your own sake."

[seegodhatesme]

There’s a flash of wide grin, her blue eyes bright with shrewd amusement.

“Then I suppose we both know it’s too late for that.

“I do not have it in me to fear knowledge. I think that I would be the second side of your coin.” No, she knows she is, very certainly. “It is and always will be my life’s work to make sure knowledge is not hoarded, nor lost. Because that, to my people, is evil.

“So did you land in my path on purpose, or were you put here?”

[epistemological]

"If you're asking if it was my intention, certainly not," he provides. He has his own ideas of how he ended up there, who would have put him there. He won't share them, or not exactly.

"But I have no doubt I was put there one way or another. The less said about it the better."

The Web is subtle but her influence spreads as much under ignorance as with knowledge.

"I have no desire to hurt you or your people. They are... well, in short, they are as close to a people of my own type as any in this world. I can't say that I don't come bringing darkness with me, but there is... protection, of a type, to being informed. And that I can do for you and yours."

[seegodhatesme]

“In this world,” she echoes back, one red brow raised in interrogation. She makes no effort to sound casual; the question thrills her to ask. “What is your world?”

[epistemological]

"A very different one," he explains, and that makes him sound tired. Not with her. With... all of this. "A fallen one, for all intents and purposes. One where everyone left was half-mad and tortured by fear to the point of breaking every day and night. A world without hope."

[seegodhatesme]

That, of all the things he’s said, puts a chill down Sypha’s spine, and she straightens on her rock. That frisson of awareness of being watched suddenly feels colder. Heavier.

“Is that- the darkness you have brought here?”

[epistemological]

"Yes," he says honestly, "it's a darkness that now has its claws in this and thousands of worlds. It isn't what I wanted but apparently" all too human frustration, "what I wanted doesn't matter, as per usual."

A sigh.

"I doubt it will ever be like it was on my world anywhere else, however. They learned their lesson. They almost destroyed themselves. They'll be more careful next time."

[seegodhatesme]

"How ominous," she says seriously, thoughtful.

"So they will be more subtle. I am not sure if that is good, or bad."

[epistemological]

"Better, I assure you, though not by much. What they will take, they will take in pieces, in drips and drabs, in children and fools and people in the wrong place at the wrong time."

He breathes out slowly. This is his reality now. No sense in being upset about it, at least until he finds Martin. If he finds him.

[seegodhatesme]

She leans back on one hand, watching him.

“The wrong place and time. Such as a country counting down the days until hell is unleashed to cleanse the land?”

[epistemological]

"Given how they've operated in the past, I don't believe they'll try anything on a large scale for centuries." A pause. "But I'm very curious what it is you're talking about."

[seegodhatesme]

Centuries. Okay, that lets the knot behind her breastbone relax a little. They aren't talking about something immediately urgent.

"In the end of winter, the Bishop in Targoviste burned a woman at the stake." Sypha's expression is far from opaque; the fact still fills her with sick fury, independent of the consequences. "A doctor, but they called her a witch. Lisa Tepes," she adds, because the name has been passed among the Speakers, not to be forgotten. "And then a fire storm appeared in the shape of a man - her husband. Dracula. The Church is trying to spread that he is Satan, but he's not.

"His wife was already dead. And now he's sworn vengeance on the entire kingdom. In one year, he said, he'll wipe humanity from Wallachia. We have about four months left."

[epistemological]

"And what's being done about it, exactly?" he asks, because he's still... him. He's still the man who walked into the building they were going to do the Unknowing in. He still went to the chilly north, into the unending darkness, to try and end an endless night. He is broken and he has had pieces of his humanity torn off of him and thrown to the winds but he always had more of that to spare than most would have assumed.

He still cares about all the unnamed souls who might drown in the sea of blood this man aims to make. Dracula.

Christ, that sounds ridiculous.

[seegodhatesme]

Sypha snorts, derisive. "The Church are denying that anything will happen. Though many of the clergy have disappeared, it is said. And some people are leaving, the wise ones. Others cannot, or they believe the church."

[epistemological]

It's very clear from his expression that none of that is terribly surprising to him. The Church means exactly nothing where he came from and he hasn't been terribly impressed by what he's picked up from here about them on this plane.

"And you? You don't have the air of someone who just lets terrible things happen to people... if I may say so."