Rue [unfinished]

[Esyllt Ruen] The time: night.

The place: a pub -- a club? Almost a club, but not quite -- a place with tables, a place windowed in the front with thick glass, glass smoked with age, glass that gives nothing up of what's happening within. The tables in the front are barrels, and beyond this common place, around a corner, there is a hall precided over by a hanging wood and steel candleholder, and long tables, and a place where an altar may've been installed once upon a time. The ceiling is tall; it could fill with bat-song as easily as it might fill with conversation, laughter; it is filled today with music -- a band with energy.

The pub has a story about how it was a church once upon a time and people who come to drink beer brewed by Trappist monks in monasteries far over the gray Atlantic believe the story, and mock the irreverence of it, and smile at the images on the walls, touch the stones with the palms of their hands, investigate the 'patio' with its dark wooden beams (shit-crusted, white-crusted, where the hose doesn't reach) and no roof to keep the gloaming out. There is a belltower. The belltower has bells; the bells don't have tongues.

This is where Rue is, come night. This is what most people see: a girl with a halo of long, long golden hair, how it catches the light, how flawless she is, how unbearably lovely, how easy in her dusty red coat and how effortlessly poised, and she is not haunting the band, she is not playing dark lady (how could she?), she is standing with one shoulder against the wooden frame of the hallway that'll take you out onto the patio where the night air is haunting. Her arms are folded. The shadow of her jaw is graceful.

This is what most people never see, although it is as true as that other face is not. The red coat, tapestried and long; the tapesry that moves, that is also dusk-gold, the slant of light at the death of day, the scene - some old glory, some ancient, desperate hope or tragedy, how it moves if you don't pay close attention. The gleam of her - that's what most people don't see: what unbearably lovely truly is. Rue: watching the mortals mill about the band, weaving in and out of the hall, stumbling into the confessionals, foolish in their irreverence

and so fragile.

[Maialen de Xove y Miasol] Does she expect to see another here tonight? Some other self, through a mirror darkly. Maialen is dark as Rue is light; she is slighter, somehow. Softly made, but striking, the long twist of her fine black hair pulled smoothly away from the soft sculpture of her rounded features - a high, clear brow, the fine, curving cheeks, the huge, faceted eyes that all speak of impossible youth, given an ageless piquancy by the sharpness of her chin. Even human, she looks like something from another age - one of those big-eyed, staring girls dreamed up by some dutch master, creamy skin enrobed half-in-light, and somehow all-in-shadow.

She is wearing a dress, forgettable, soft and golden, that leads her soft shoulders and long white arms bare. It seems modest, somehow, until she turns, slipping through the crowd toward the patio, noiseless as a ghost, but too remarkable to be entirely by the half-sleeping strangers who shift around her, locked away from their own hearts.

Rue sees more, the slight girl elongated, made more willowy, sharper, her skin more heartbreakingly translucent, her black hair a veil of sleeping black, fine as silk. Intricately laced stays are wrapped with a half-dozen shades of golden ribbon. The flat-front is like near-armor, hard, constricting, pulling against her frame. Long skirts flare out from the hips, an intricate patchwork of lace and brocade that sweeps the floor.

Brought up short by Rue's presence, she stops, still as a starling. And stairs from a half-dozen paces away. As if she had only just awakened, somehow, to the world they share. As if she had been sleep-walking through the night until just that moment.

[Esyllt Ruen] This is true, too. This - that the world has no welcome for such as they. This is true, too. This - that they feel it more keenly than the common fae who've polluted themselves with mortality for hundreds of year, unceasing. This is true, too. This - that such might (must?) be their eventual fate: the clog of living and growing old and rotting and dying, the tedious, wearying loss of wonder, the deedless days, the blindness. And so, this also is true - when they, the host, run across each other, what can there be but a kind of rightness? A spark? A mad hope. They never left. (They did.) They returned. (They did.)

There is a second's silence.

And in that second, Rue does not pretend to have expected Maialen's to coalesce out of the hall, sweet as a shade, nor does she pretend to be less than surprised. Rue is too proud for such deception; it is easy enough to know that. The dark other is paused, still and startled; Rue is taken aback, but she has the advantage of position, the doorframe, the doorway, folded arms to unfold, an elegant eyebrow to, after a beat, raise in arch inquiry (wonder).

Rue unfolds her arms, and her hand (devoted) does not fall to the hilt of a sword hidden behind the folds of her coat. No: not hidden; when she moves, the coat parts, and the gleam of it is there, dark metal and pale horn, unjeweled. At first meeting of eyes, Rue's were lambent - were luminous - the color of moonlight gathered in a silver cup, a twist of honey from some distant star - and their expression was a simmering thing, sharpening, intense. They mellow as the second wears on, the shock fades almost entirely, replaced by something not-wry, but amused.

"You." Beat. And - her voice pitched low, to ford the distance, but find only its target. "Maialen Xaranzana Ofema Beatrix Maelchisarro Girre de Xove y Miasol nic Ailil." Beat. "Lady." The dip of her head is - well; it is haughty, but it is what it is: it is acknowledgment of similarity, of sisterhood in the absence of others closer to her heart. Her hands are at either side, held out; it is not a bow, and would never be a bow, but it is reminiscent of a bow, something polite and courteous and faultless and aloof. Rue, for all her intensity, is a separate-thing, always.

"You are unexpected, but welcome. But - come hence, why? The wild hunt? The horn-song, the - " here, coming out of that almost-but-never bow, straightening, a clean, cutting step taken forward. " - city's tragic mystery? A brave new world?"

Rue never pretends to be anything less than archaic. Pride, again - pride.

[Esyllt Ruen] ooc: ahem. Ofemia Beatriz.

[Maialen de Xove y Miasol] A Gwydion.
How droll.

The Dreaming does play these tricks.

The Ailil's composure returns by degrees as she wishes it; she must prefer the illusion of surprise for the moment, she allows it to settle around her fine features, to linger in the spark of her faceted eyes, two twist the soft, supple bow of her soft, supple little mouth. A touch of sweetness, there, a honeysuckle kiss.

There is no sword at her side; just a jeweled dagger at her waist that seems to be meant to function as jewelry rather than defense. She has one hand on her falling skirts, pulling them up for ease of movement, just enough to reveal jeweled slippers nearly a match to the dagger, but flat and soft as kidleather.

As some sweet thing, skinned.

"Noble knight of House Gwydion," the other returns, the sweep of her eyes like the edge of a razor made of moonlight. Which is to say: somehow gleaming, sharp and soft. "The Lady Esyllt," like a concession, she returns the not-a-bow with the soft of graceful little curtsy one expects from such a shadow-made thing. One slippered foot behind the other, the faintest little give, the sort that shows her creamy shoulders, soft flesh bound by hard stays, off to elegant effect. She was made to drift around the edges of Court, not hie off to the wilds of nowhere, this one.

Look at those foolish skirts; that singular dagger, more broach than weapon, gleaming against the flat planes of her stays.

Still: however unexpected. "Perhaps I've come to seek my fortune. And you?"

[Esyllt Ruen] "Rue," she says, fair-creature, gentled, gentle, her mouth curving - a casual blaze of a smile. That first step forward -- ; Rue has a long stride. No skirts for her; just that coat, just tall boots and breeches tucked within, a certain insouciance about the belt, and black beneath the red and gold coat, black and black again so she looks like a kindling thing, a thing being kindled, a warning, a dream of stars. Maialen may think Rue means she's here for rue, some sad story; if she does, she is corrected, thus.

" - Rue, now and here, with no court called; Rue when," her gaze flicks, dismissive, toward a cluster of people, sweaty, red-blooded, panting, mortal people, dying all the time and really, sometimes, a lot of the times, she is not enamoured, "thus situated."

; -- but that first step forward. It brought Rue near Maialen, for the ease of conversation. "So: walk with me." Her head: she tips it.

Light chases.

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