No name from her, it seemed. Ennius kept his gaze on her a moment longer and looked away, letting out another cough as he wiped his lips with his wrist. His attention snapped back to the girl as she insulted him again, brow furrowing with distinct rage as he moved with uncharacteristic haste-- still slowed, in his fatigued state-- and grabbed her wrist, pulling her a bit close. His mouth, while cleaned by the skein's contents, still pushed out a breath that stank of death. His grip tightened.
"Stop. Calling me that." He hissed, using her weight to pull himself up to his feet regardless of whether or not she pulled him herself. Ennius took a tentative step along the floor and, upon realizing how emaciated he felt, leaned against the wall. He refused any further help from the girl, even raising up his stumped arm to stop her.
"Not prey." He murmured, looking out of the doorway of the room. "Go away. Annoying. Need food."
"You stink," the odd girl said as Ennius pulled her close, wrinkling her nose. "I didn't think it would be so bad. Like - like overturned soil full of rotting squirrels. I knew you were sick, but I didn't know you were that sick."
The boy now standing, she took the chance to look him over, eyes settling on his bandages. She tutted, pursed her lips, and sighed.
"And of course all that woman did was wrap you up with cloth. It seems that's all you people know to do. Tell me, would your stubbly arm grow back a hand if you rubbed it on a sheep? What about if you shoved it in the dirt with flax? No? I didn't think so. You need a little something more than food, Dead-To-Me, before you're ready to take your place."
A pause.
"Or. Lack of place? I don't know how these things work. They're all very silly, anyway."
Slipping Ennius' arm around her shoulder, she moved - with surprising strength, shouldering most of the boy's weight - across the bedroom. Passing through the kitchen, she snatched a raw sweet onion, peeled off the skin with her teeth, and shoved it in Ennius' face.
"Here. Eat," she said firmly. "And walk. We're going for a bit of a stroll."
As they walked, she continued to ramble, talking about things that Ennius, in his tired state, couldn't make much sense of, if the words made any sense at all.
" - very lucky I found you, you know. One of your kind was snatched away. Awful thing, but that's what you get when you give your name. He was smart not to, but his little cub, not so much. Wolves are far too trusting when they're raised by human hands. Feed them, pet them, and you breed the wild out of their blood. They're still wolves, but they can't hear the song anymore. Not like before."
The white-haired girl grinned with sharp teeth.
"You're gullible, too. Not an ounce of the wild in you. Gave up your name up like drunkards give their cocks - as if it's the goddess' gift to the world, and they're rightly owed a gift returned!"
In spite of his clear warning, the girl continued to call him by an obscene moniker. Ennius’ brow contorted into an expression of obvious vexation, but he said little else upon the subject and simply fell into silence as she began to ramble on to him, chewing idly on the onion with a hunger that far overpowered any semblance of revulsion at its rawness. He gnawed at it like a caged animal, messily consuming it with his one remaining hand and caring little about the girl’s reaction; it seemed he was not beyond uncouth displays, in the end, much as he would have liked to believe so. Death— or near-death, as it would seem— came with a very odd evaluation of ideals.
Ennius simply did not care. Apathy was apparent in his sluggish movements and clear disregard for the young woman that shouldered him, gaze flitting over to her as she chastised him for some odd thing he couldn’t bother himself to worry about. He was alive, and that much was certain. All else could come later.
”You talk too much.” He stated lowly, then shifted uncomfortably against the girl’s arm and side. ”And you’re cold— no less a corpse than I. Pale as one too.” The world was merely a pit, and it stoked itself with a duality. Embers and ice— no in between. From the inferno of the town to the cold embrace of a tormentor, he could not escape pain. It followed him, now. That much he knew. Ennius would learn to live with that as the scars began to turn over into calloused memory.
”Just leave me alone,” The words came out as a murmur, slower and quieter still than his own heart. ”I’ve not any desire to be a part of this.”
"Hmm," the girl murmured, glancing around the empty village before hurrying for the treeline. "If that's the case, then, Dead-To-Me, you can call me Dead-To-You."
She snorted, trying to suppress a laugh, as if she'd just made the funniest joke in the world. Then, turning her fierce eyes back upon the dead boy, she tilted her head, seeing him - him-for-him - for the first time.
"You're a part of this, whether you like it or not. As much a part as the other four, if not in the same way. A hole in a tapestry draws the eyes just as much as a golden thread, you know, a lull in a song as much fascination as the highest highs and the lowest lows. There is something special, in silence, a counterpoint to is-being, an argument against what's known."
A solemn second of silence spent in pensive staring. Then, another tug at his arm, once more shouldering his weight, and they moving off into the woods. They walked over root and crag, up and down muddy slopes, seemingly directionless if not for the determined forward movement of the girl's otherwise haphazard strides. There was an almost imperceptible change. One moment, they stood at the top of a mound in a clearing - the next they travelled down it, and the mound was nowhere to be seen. The woods seemed taller, darker, and the moon overhead glowed with vanilla light as thick and frothy as fresh cream.
A stream trickled, nearby, and the girl led them to it, moving to the crystal clear water's edge.
"Drink," she said, scooping up some of the water with her hands and holding it to his lips.
Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there! He wasn't there again today, Oh how I wish he'd go away!
“Best watch it Owain, everyone might be comin’ to ‘er fer stories ‘fore long.” Laurent said with his own laugh on his lips. Something in the guardsman letting them though left him with a giddy feeling, like he was a boy getting away with some lie over his parents. And what a place did that lie get them? How was it possible to build so much out of stone? Raising a new home in Coda was always something that took a village’s worth of hands, so how many had that tower taken alone?
How could all of this have existed only a week away through the forest and he had never spied it while he was up round the Widow?
The sights came and went, all manner of things, the new fascinating and the old just different enough to make him stare.
“Aye; watchit dove, he might steal away your stone.” Laurent muttered as they passed a boy surrounded by caged animals. He squinted at the covers of books, how could a table hold more than Coda ever had?
Had.
With a shake of his head Laurent pushed a stray thought away before it could take root. He followed the others, a half discarded thought shading his mood.
“Place like this should ‘ave something that can help.” He said. Had to be some reason why Anceliene wanted to head this way.
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
"Pale," Ennius muttered to himself again. "I'm calling you Pale."
What followed was a bout of silence on the boy's part. Her words did little to quell the rising anger in his stomach, worse than the sickness he had purged at the mender's house-- how dare she call him a hole, how dare she imply him dead. Try as he might to muster the rage into something actionable, however, the feeling came and went until he was swallowed once more in apathy. She stared at him; he stared at her. Nothing was said between the two, and Ennius merely stared ahead at the forest.
The odd increments of their travel seemed to be the least of his worries. Pale had given him much to think about, and each bit was as nonsensical as the last. He was no figure of complexity, nor was he special. Empty was his mind, and empty was his heart-- only creased eyes that stared at the creek, mouth gently sipping the water from her palms before he dipped his lone hand into the depths and bore his own to drink. Ennius did not look to her, nor did he speak. Their time together was spent in silence, only the passing ambience of nature surrounding them both. How easy it would be to give himself to the woods, to slip beneath the waves of the brook and disappear. She had said it herself-- he was a lull. Truth was in her appraisal that not even he could rationalize.
The guard let them pass with nothing more than an amused smile. Anceline nodded at his injuncture not to commit any acts of banditry at the tip of her sewing scissors as if he had been serious; as if willing to take anything seriously, being completely out of her depth in all of this.
Well. At least one part of that was true.
They managed their way past the guard, far enough for Owain to start twitting her about lies. Anceline thought about letting it slide, and knew she probably ought to, but it had been a long travel, and if the Mender's supplies had made it easier, it still hadn't been easy. "And what do you think they'd have done if they thought you brought me here against my family's will, Owain?" Maybe her tone was a little snappish, but it was a good point, and one she thought he was missing in his determination to laugh this off. "I think teeth might be the least of our worries. If he's a good man, you'd be in danger. And if he weren't, I would."
She left it at that, perhaps a bit primly, and focused on navigating her way through the marketplace. Anceline was certain she had never seen so many people in one place all at once, not even on Coda's festival days. The last festival day had been...
She closed her eyes for a moment, unsteadily. Anceline didn't think she'd ever stop seeing it, the people of Coda slain, death all around them. She made herself draw breath once more, steadying herself, her eyes wandering to the caged dove. Like as not, it would be dead by the time the darkness fell - but she had not the means to save it. She couldn't even save herself.
Laurent muttered something about the dove as well, and Anceline cast him a sidelong glance, wondering what that had been about. Perhaps she wasn't the only one hiding things. The crowded marketplace didn't seem to be the place to ask about it, though. Anceline didn't know who might be listening, or who might care about what they heard, but memories of black-clad soldiers hunting for a Prima were never too far from her mind.
"The first thing I noticed was that tower," she said, instead of all of that. The tower was hard not to notice, after all. "I don't know what it's for, but I think maybe we try to find that out. It'd be best to figure out early if that's where we need to go or that's where we need to avoid."
"Yea, yea, and then I'll be outta the only job've ever been good at," Owain replied to Laurent with a laugh, clapping the man on the shoulder. "Not a head fer farmin', not a hand for fightin', an' now even me tongue's been taken from me by a lackless girl with a pair o' too-sharp scissors!"
He grinned between Laurent and Anceline - but his grin faded at Anceline's words, posture shifting from a proud walk to a slouch, eyes growing dark. Drawing in a deep breath and pushing it out through clenched teeth, he looked up at the tower. It seemed foreboding in this light. A dark spire, face that stared them down cast in heavy shadow from the early sun.
"Reckon that's where we'd find out 'bout the guards, too," he said. "Would be good to earn a bit o' coin. Do somethin' as work to take our mind off things, too."
Shouldering through the crowd, he pushed ahead, moving to the foot of a long staircase that led up above the rooftops of the street. From there, a parapet ran perpendicular to the tower, a bridge connecting to a cavernous doorway. Guards lined the path, standing statue still as people milled in and out. The crowds were less, here, and the clothes finer, faces clean of dirt or grime. Uncaring to how much he must stand out, Owain pushed ahead.
"Place looks a bit off," he murmured, more for himself than his two companions. Still, he approached one of the guards near the door and nodded his head.
"Hae," he said, giving a wave. "Heard there was guard work to be had."
---
As Owain pushed ahead, the shadows of the sun seemed to swim to Anceline. They shifted and moved, a living thing, curling and coiling between the mingling crowds like an angry pit of snakes. Then - from behind her. A familiar voice.
"Anceline!"
Were she to turn, she'd catch a glimpse. Her father, hand outstretched, worry setting deep lines across his brow. Only a moment before the crowds covered him, and again just the shifting shadows remained.
---
The guard looked between Laurent and Owain, eyes settling on the former.
"You look like the proper sort," he addressed the man. "Know how to wear that sword, and got a seasoned look in your eye. You done guard duty before?"
He tilted his head to Owain.
"Kid looks fresh, though."
Owain grit his teeth, indignant anger flashing across his face.
---
"Hm. Pale. Pale." She rolled the name over in her mouth, savoring it, pronouncing it with an almost musical lilt. Then, she nodded, seemingly satisfied. "If that's the game we're, then I'll call you Hush. A lull in the song, hm? It fits the meter of the hour, nice and short."
Wiping the dampness of her palm off on her tattered trousers, she grinned at him. The water had been cool and refreshing. It quenched his thirst in a way that left him feeling - better, not well, but better - as if the chill had helped wake up his still-groggy body. The moonlight seemed brighter now, purer, shining through the trees in thick beams of gossamer silk, and the only sound, save for the stream, was the gentle wind blowing through the leaves.
"It's time to go now, Hush. Your friends will be waiting. Not now, but soon enough. Shortcuts are swell, but they can only take you so far, so we really must make haste."
Ennius snorted at the appellation with the same apathetic air that had pervaded him for most of their trip through the woods. "Better than being called dead." He stated, voice cracking with hoarseness at the end as if he were too frightened to speak the word. Dead. There was a finality to death. There was irrevocable loss in it. He'd seen the look in his father's eyes beneath the weight of the forge, vacuous and unfeeling as if all essence of being had been drained and left to rot upon the ashes. Ennius had known his father his entire life, as most sons did, and the cadaver trapped beneath rubble had not been him. On a good day, the boy could have caught a twinkle in his mentor's eye as he'd worked, or a brow furrowed in absent concentration. But that corpse, sullen and broken-- no. A look into the eyes was all he had needed to know.
Worse still was the reflection that stared back at Ennius in the running brook. As he peered into the water, he saw that very same gaze.
"They aren't my friends." He stated plainly, standing up on two feet to look out at the woods proper. Distant and unfocused, his eyes soon found Pale once more, though not without a moment's consideration. "They're the only ones left, then? From the town?"
Ennius waded into the stream, not bothering to look over his shoulder. His legs carried him forward, as they could do little else.
Anceline didn't know what she had expected from the tower, but this wasn't it. Maybe she'd been expecting something more ominous, or some sort of strange vision telling her which way to go or what she was supposed to do here, if only she could figure out how to interpret it. When she approached the tower, though, it was... a tower. Black, ominous, and crewed by people who didn't seem to be all that different from the guards out front.
She wondered where along the way she had lost the part of herself that accepted normal things as the way things should be. With everything having been so strange lately, Anceline had simply expected them to keep being strange. The return to regularity was as much of a sudden shock as any of the rest of this had been.
Anceline closed her eyes for a moment, maybe to rest them. She would pretend that was what it was, anyway - would pretend it wasn't because she was courting some sort of vision that was going to tell her which way to go or what she was supposed to be doing. Go north - for days and days, that had been the only certainty she had known, but now she wondered if she had ever really been certain of that at all. Was this all it was? Were they simply supposed to... reach Opus, and start again? Build new lives here, like normal people, like none of anything had ever happened at all?
Her thoughts were restless, but their tumbling provided no answers. Anceline opened her eyes again, slowly this time, wondering what she was supposed to say now. The boys had been keen enough to follow her vague directives up until this point, but if she didn't have any directives to give them, what then? Was she meant to take charge of their lives? She wasn't their mother. None of them had mothers here, no matter how much they sorely needed them.
'Anceline!'
A name, and a voice - one to pass through her clouded guard and call her attention instantly. How could she not know that voice, when she had heard it at the knee all her life? Her head turned, a glimpse of a familiar figure through the throngs of people before he vanished, once again, all too soon.
"Wait!" She couldn't know if he would hear her, but how could he not wait for her? He was here for her, after all, wasn't he? Wasn't that what they were all here for?
Laurent and Owain were speaking with the guard - Anceline had missed most of what had been said, already, lost as she was in the image of her father before her. She took a step, but stopped once more. They had gotten her here, and she couldn't just leave them without a word. Her father would come back, now that he knew she was here. She just had to be patient, didn't she?
The deeper into the heart of the city they went, the more Laurent felt himself being out of place. There weren’t as many people here as there were on the streets below, but here things felt just out of reach. More than just the fancy clothes, more than the looming spire, no, it was a feeling that was more personal. In Coda, rest them, everyone knew everyone at least by face, but here eyes only ever seemed to catch for fleeting moments. The three of them were a strange sight to be certain and people stared, but they were quick to look away when gazes caught.
The guards too stood there stiff as signposts, offering not much more than their presence. An implication in that, wasn’t there? A disquieting feeling settled itself into his gut as he followed Owain over to a pair of guards standing at-ready by a door. Right, the man below had mentioned they were in need of extra hands. The rations they had wouldn’t last forever, and Laurent doubted sympathy meant less than the click of coin in this place.
“Aye, I’ve spent more than my share of nights up on watch.“ Laurent said, giving the man a nod. Unfortunately it seemed the man had a good eye and he had marked Owain well enough. Laurent gave him a sidelong glance before looking back to the guard. “He’s a good head on his shoulders, dependable, swordplay could use some work but those things can be taught, yeah? And as I hear it, yer looking for hands —“
Laurent froze, a word half formed on his tongue cut short. He shot a glance at Owain as he felt something cold creep along his back. The smell of smoke, of death, of roasting meat, scoured wood and the bodies— he blinked.
“What’d she…?” Laurent turned hard on his heel as he looked back to Anceliene. “Your father? You can’t mean, he isn’t— where did you see him?”
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
They walked for hours, Pale and Hush - they walked for hours, days, months, and years. They walked for minutes, and seconds, and for a span of time that passed before a second had even been born. It was timeless, this place. The moon hung in the same place in the sky, the stars, in fixed, spiral lattices around it. And the trees - the trees seemed to whisper every time the wind blew.
No, not whisper. Sing.
Come nearer, come nearer, come nearer to me, Dance on my carpets and ride on my breeze, Throw your arms wide in my canopy sky, And drift in the shade of my peace.
Pale seemed to move forward carefully - even erratically. She darted from side to side, crawled under arching roots, and even hopped back and forth across the little creek three times. She kept a careful eye behind her, and anytime Ennius strayed from her path, she paused, hands on her hips and frowning. Finally, they broke the edge of the forest, and - somehow - sunlight shone where the moon had just moments before hung. In the distance, a massive tower rose above the surrounding plains, satellite of smaller buildings - still towering, only smaller in comparison - kept tight in a wall around it. Pale seemed reticent to leave the tree line, though she pointed happily at the city.
"There. That's where you're to go," she said. "I told you I knew the way - a special little path. I like my shortcuts, you know."
---
"Aye, that we are," the guard replied to Laurent. "And we're willing to train those that don't - son? You alright?"
But Laurent's attention had been pulled away, stolen by Anceline's cry. Owain, too, seemed to forget what caused him to grumble, eyes instead going wide. He met Laurent's gaze, almost looking frightened.
"'M - sure it's someone else, Ancie," he said slowly. "Far as I know it, he wouldn' know to come here, yea?"
Owain strained, looking for a sign of the kindly innkeeper in the bustling crowd behind them. He'd been among the bodies. He knew it. He'd seen it with his own two eyes, smelled - goddess be, the smell was something he couldn't forget. Sweet and acrid. He visibly recoiled, hand moving to cover his mouth.
But there was no one there. No one any of them knew. Just a crowd of strangers, in a strange city. A crowd of people living their own, separate, untouched lives.
"Ancie, I think ye need to lie down a tad," Owain said, tone cool. "We'll figure out a thing with this guard business, maybe get a bit o' coin fer a place to stay."
He looked at the guard, who nodded.
"Paid on signing," the man replied. "Enough for a spot at an inn, between the two of ya, and you two'd get free lodging in the barracks."
What was wrong with them? Anceline put her hands on her hips, indignant. "I know my father."
Do you, though? Do you really?
Do you know anything any more?
But he had been there. And he had called her name. "He said my name," she repeated the thought aloud, as much to convince herself as to convince the other two. This wasn't... right. Nothing was right here. Everything was sideways, at cross purposes to what she expected. It should have been exactly what they needed, a fresh start in a new city - but Anceline couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong, wrong - very wrong.
If Laurent and Owain had answers to that, they weren't giving them. She wanted to blame them for that, but she couldn't, not really. They were just as lost as she was in all of this. They were doing their best. It wasn't good enough - just like her best wasn't good enough - but they never should have been having to do it at all. They should have been home, watching the birds or making pies or doing whatever it was they usually did. Not here, not mixed up in all of this.
She needed... answers. Someone to tell her what to do and where to go and help make sense of all of this. Anceline glanced towards the guard outside the tower. He didn't seem to have the answers that she needed, but he had some answers, anyway. Maybe it was a start. Maybe... it wasn't a start, but it all came back to the beginning, didn't it? The men in armor, the bright shining blades, blood on the ground and the city and the chalice spilling over. Would Owain and Laurent be fitted for the black armor next, and move out to the next town with their blades raised against people who had once been like them? Who had those soldiers been, before they had been soldiers?
Anceline wanted to shy away from that day, but she made herself remember, made herself hold it in her mind. This time it was she who asked the fated question:
Ennius seemed to pay the subtle machinations of the forest little mind. Rationality seemed to elude much of his surroundings since the girl had visited him, and it eluded him still as he crept through the twilight brush. He was not used to such darkness. It showed in his disorientation. When he was lost, he sought after Pale, eyes wandering to find the radiance of his guiding star amongst the midnight sky that grew in droves around him. When they finally reached the edge of the woods, Ennius blinked— then shut his eyes, hand raising to block out the sunlight that scathed him after what felt like a week of darkness.
The boy stepped forth, tentative steps crunching leaves bathed in a frenzy of luster. After realizing that there was an inkling of white missing from the urban vista, Ennius turned to look over his shoulder, frowning.
“Aye, I don’t doubt you, strange s’all.” Laurent said, a strain to his words as he looked out into the crowd. Seeing spirits? No, none of them had slept well this past week and she had lost so much — was it any wonder she was seeing ghosts? He had seen the man, or what remained of the man, so it had to be not much more than the stress and sleepless nights. His fault for not admitting what they both saw? Laurent forced himself to take a breath. He looked back to Owain for a moment before turning back to face the guard.
Meet the Prima? In Coda you could, but in a place like this? Wouldn’t they hide her away at the very top of the tower? Or maybe that’s just how things were in Owain’s stories.
“Would be helpful if we could speak to ‘er.” Laurent said, “been long on the road, uh, could you also recommend a place for our friend to stay?”
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//