Griffin
Two hours ago - or three, or four, or eleventy-twelve (time has become unmoored; slipped its steady, unyielding forward-marching pace, become unhinged, all of its valves broken and the stars above them, the stars scattered through the night sky, these are wheeling and alien. Not even the new-made constellations they prick out from the pearlized midnight above linger long. Drop your gaze and they are gone and remade anew.) they stood, the pair of them, on the portico of an old manor house. Brick and stone, with the oddly hunched architecture of an ancient heap expanding and contracting over the centuries, at the whim of fortune, mirroring the fortunes of its present owners.
Ivy-covered, with leaded glass casement windows all dark except for a scattered three, which leaked or bled or smeared a suggestion of light inside.
It was autumn, then. Dry-dust leaves that stirred upwards in eddies from the ruins of crumbling stonework urns amidst the bare branches of expansive formal gardens gone all to ruin. The night-sounds of cicadas and small mammals scrabbling amongst the ruins the background chorus to their cautious survey of the facade above. The scent of winter beneath the failing autumn loam - ruinous winter, the metallic promise of snow sharp in the back of the throat; and a low moon, full and bone-white to give the ache of soft looming shadows to the shambling structures around them.
A woman, framed in the easternmost of the three illuminated windows, opened the casements with the soft shriek of metal against metal and the loud [b]crack[/b] of a loosened shutter snapping back against the stone. Rivulets of moonlight in her black, black hair as she called down to -
--
But no. Here and now, there is a widespreading dream of a tree at the apex of a rising dark hill. Here and now here is the oxbow curve of a lazy stream, which never holds the reflections of the stars long enough to remember them, each to each.
Here and now, there is the dark baying of something behind them.
Which is answered by the eerie dissonance of another call. From another direction.
Griffin limps every third or fourth step. In between, he grits his teeth and powers through it. His right greave is deformed by some blow and blood has started to leak out around the knee joint of the armor.
Before crossing the glittering artery of that lazy, star-dusted stream, he knees down on his left knee, runs the blade of his longsword beneath the darkwater, so that it sloughs off a layer of colorless [i]something[/i]. Gray on the metal, it flares glowing crimson ribbons before the color is leached out, adulterated and ultimately consumed by the water.
Another round of baying calls, answered by echoes now both in front and behind. Griffin looks up at Rue then; flashes a (familiar?) grin, the louche, lecherous edge dampened by pain, and enlivened by a certain vicious irony.
"Perhaps they're harrying us."
Guillotine Rivulets of moonlight in her black, black hair, as she called down to request a boon - to set the task - to invite the weary travelers inside. I know what you seek, she'd said, I heard it this morning from my friends. But Lady, you never leave this tower. (The tower which is a mansion which is decaying which is full of secrets and spiders and spidering secrets spinning sticky traps.) No. A smile, gentle and sad, sweet and dark, and there'd been a pang behind Guillotine's breast, accompanied by the thought: How I hate Eiluned. But she would be courteous, yes, yes she would, and without thinking about it, because she Was What She Was, and What She Was was Best, Better, Most Fit. The door hadn't opened, but when the handle was tried - a frisson of cold, a premonition of absence, of old supertition - it had been unlocked. The door which was never unlocked. And so they'd gone inside.
And so --
But that was then.
This is now.
The Unseelie Knight's companion had drawn up short when he knelt, her tall boots already soaked, splotched into a map-work of shadows, of stains, the laces dampened, darkened, wilting toward the drooping and shrivelled frost-fearing ferns. (They say that the sidhe never get dirty. They say that they just about walk on water or that water wouldn't dare it just wouldn't. But they're fools and poets. The water doesn't bow unless it has to. The water might admire. But it stains leather, just the same. The point isn't that the clothing of the sidhe (even these diminished sidhe - these exiles, long-lost, scraping themselves into the shape that their memories give them) is resistant to wear and tear. The point is that it's so mundane a detail that poets and fools don't see it. Or if they do, it doesn't matter. It's not True.)
Her eyes rest briefly on the nape of his neck when he kneels and then her eyes touch on his injury and then her eyes search out the shadows. She is panting, but ready for the echoes to become solid enough to cut. Her mouth is a hard line. Her expression is a mask worn by something furious and fine. She is not injured, is irritatingly whole, but there are signs of dishevelment. Of flight. Her hair is an unbound, tangle-ridden (hag-ridden, love-locked) white-gold, all winter and stars and mess, and she misses her Boggan nurse who'd had a way with hair, could speak a charm to bind it up, and she'd speak the charm herself if it didn't cost glamour, if glamour weren't so dear.
The flash of his grin - the heat of it, perhaps - draws her gaze downward. The hard line of her mouth quirks, but any humor might be imagined - she is too glass-cut, too glass-fine, too masked, for the truth of the matter to out. Ironic.
"Mm. Perhaps your blood is red; perhaps the air is sweet; perhaps they should savor these moments - " and nearer, now, the baying; a questioning thread of sound - " - these fucking moments - ere they meet me again. I am displeased, Griffin."
She crouches, cautious, resting her elbows against her knees, careful not to let her hair sweep against the water - that is ill-luck - and her thumb leaves a print across her forehead. Gravely: "Can you yet climb the branches of a tree?"
Griffin Like she, he is breathing heavily and each breath rasps against the back of his throat when he thinks to make noise. The darkwater slips from his naked blade not like water from metal or stone, but softly and wholly - like silk from skin. The last threads and whispers of crimson in the dark water fade to gray and then black. Leave behind no more than some hint of the depths and the reflection of the ever-changing stars.
The blade cleaned, he sets to work on the greaves. Unbuckles the smashed and dented one, and begins improvising a tourniquet by way of support - from the frayed leather straps, fastened above the ragged edge of the dark wound.
He is looking up, shadowed gaze fixed on the diamond edge of her mouth as it moves. If there is humor to be imagined, he imagines it. Lays it over the gleaming surety of her like a net of burnished gold.
Then she has settled to her haunches; perspective changes. The starlight reflected in his eyes is no longer a pointillist flash, but a ring. A corona. His hair is dark and damp with sweat, dull in the moonlight. A dark counterpoint to the gleaming crown of her undone, un-spun, tangle-ridden hair.
"Smile for me," he returns, the flush of heat glowing beneath the hoarse burr of his voice. "Lady, and I will."
A heartbeat, two - enough for the baying echoes to scatter in behind them one more time, and closer now but with a hallucinatory change in position - he waits, steady, staring, as if -
- but no. He lurches up abruptly; sways with the first shock of renewed pain, then grits his teeth.
Grinds down his molars each to each.
"Aye. I can climb."
Guillotine
Here is a minor irritation - a mosquito, a needle-prick - and the look she returns Griffin is flavored with it - salted with it. Sharp, lucent. This is another place where the told-tale would not match up with the tale-lived. She is too annoyed (focused [Furious]) to smile. He waits, steady, staring, as if - and when he lurches up, she turns her head fractionally to the side, and her shoulders hitch up then fall down, a steadying breath before she stands as well. One gesture. Flowing, a pillar of moonlight all clotting, of milk and Spring-sweetness, of pale fire. Guillotine says, "Good." The annoyance damps; but the fury remains. "To that tree, there," and she offers her hand over the water, tilting her head toward something dark and hulking with spreading arms. "And if you'd do more, lend me a drop of your blood or your sweat."
Two hours ago - or three, or four, or eleventy-twelve (time has become unmoored; slipped its steady, unyielding forward-marching pace, become unhinged, all of its valves broken and the stars above them, the stars scattered through the night sky, these are wheeling and alien. Not even the new-made constellations they prick out from the pearlized midnight above linger long. Drop your gaze and they are gone and remade anew.) they stood, the pair of them, on the portico of an old manor house. Brick and stone, with the oddly hunched architecture of an ancient heap expanding and contracting over the centuries, at the whim of fortune, mirroring the fortunes of its present owners.
Ivy-covered, with leaded glass casement windows all dark except for a scattered three, which leaked or bled or smeared a suggestion of light inside.
It was autumn, then. Dry-dust leaves that stirred upwards in eddies from the ruins of crumbling stonework urns amidst the bare branches of expansive formal gardens gone all to ruin. The night-sounds of cicadas and small mammals scrabbling amongst the ruins the background chorus to their cautious survey of the facade above. The scent of winter beneath the failing autumn loam - ruinous winter, the metallic promise of snow sharp in the back of the throat; and a low moon, full and bone-white to give the ache of soft looming shadows to the shambling structures around them.
A woman, framed in the easternmost of the three illuminated windows, opened the casements with the soft shriek of metal against metal and the loud [b]crack[/b] of a loosened shutter snapping back against the stone. Rivulets of moonlight in her black, black hair as she called down to -
--
But no. Here and now, there is a widespreading dream of a tree at the apex of a rising dark hill. Here and now here is the oxbow curve of a lazy stream, which never holds the reflections of the stars long enough to remember them, each to each.
Here and now, there is the dark baying of something behind them.
Which is answered by the eerie dissonance of another call. From another direction.
Griffin limps every third or fourth step. In between, he grits his teeth and powers through it. His right greave is deformed by some blow and blood has started to leak out around the knee joint of the armor.
Before crossing the glittering artery of that lazy, star-dusted stream, he knees down on his left knee, runs the blade of his longsword beneath the darkwater, so that it sloughs off a layer of colorless [i]something[/i]. Gray on the metal, it flares glowing crimson ribbons before the color is leached out, adulterated and ultimately consumed by the water.
Another round of baying calls, answered by echoes now both in front and behind. Griffin looks up at Rue then; flashes a (familiar?) grin, the louche, lecherous edge dampened by pain, and enlivened by a certain vicious irony.
"Perhaps they're harrying us."
Guillotine Rivulets of moonlight in her black, black hair, as she called down to request a boon - to set the task - to invite the weary travelers inside. I know what you seek, she'd said, I heard it this morning from my friends. But Lady, you never leave this tower. (The tower which is a mansion which is decaying which is full of secrets and spiders and spidering secrets spinning sticky traps.) No. A smile, gentle and sad, sweet and dark, and there'd been a pang behind Guillotine's breast, accompanied by the thought: How I hate Eiluned. But she would be courteous, yes, yes she would, and without thinking about it, because she Was What She Was, and What She Was was Best, Better, Most Fit. The door hadn't opened, but when the handle was tried - a frisson of cold, a premonition of absence, of old supertition - it had been unlocked. The door which was never unlocked. And so they'd gone inside.
And so --
But that was then.
This is now.
The Unseelie Knight's companion had drawn up short when he knelt, her tall boots already soaked, splotched into a map-work of shadows, of stains, the laces dampened, darkened, wilting toward the drooping and shrivelled frost-fearing ferns. (They say that the sidhe never get dirty. They say that they just about walk on water or that water wouldn't dare it just wouldn't. But they're fools and poets. The water doesn't bow unless it has to. The water might admire. But it stains leather, just the same. The point isn't that the clothing of the sidhe (even these diminished sidhe - these exiles, long-lost, scraping themselves into the shape that their memories give them) is resistant to wear and tear. The point is that it's so mundane a detail that poets and fools don't see it. Or if they do, it doesn't matter. It's not True.)
Her eyes rest briefly on the nape of his neck when he kneels and then her eyes touch on his injury and then her eyes search out the shadows. She is panting, but ready for the echoes to become solid enough to cut. Her mouth is a hard line. Her expression is a mask worn by something furious and fine. She is not injured, is irritatingly whole, but there are signs of dishevelment. Of flight. Her hair is an unbound, tangle-ridden (hag-ridden, love-locked) white-gold, all winter and stars and mess, and she misses her Boggan nurse who'd had a way with hair, could speak a charm to bind it up, and she'd speak the charm herself if it didn't cost glamour, if glamour weren't so dear.
The flash of his grin - the heat of it, perhaps - draws her gaze downward. The hard line of her mouth quirks, but any humor might be imagined - she is too glass-cut, too glass-fine, too masked, for the truth of the matter to out. Ironic.
"Mm. Perhaps your blood is red; perhaps the air is sweet; perhaps they should savor these moments - " and nearer, now, the baying; a questioning thread of sound - " - these fucking moments - ere they meet me again. I am displeased, Griffin."
She crouches, cautious, resting her elbows against her knees, careful not to let her hair sweep against the water - that is ill-luck - and her thumb leaves a print across her forehead. Gravely: "Can you yet climb the branches of a tree?"
Griffin Like she, he is breathing heavily and each breath rasps against the back of his throat when he thinks to make noise. The darkwater slips from his naked blade not like water from metal or stone, but softly and wholly - like silk from skin. The last threads and whispers of crimson in the dark water fade to gray and then black. Leave behind no more than some hint of the depths and the reflection of the ever-changing stars.
The blade cleaned, he sets to work on the greaves. Unbuckles the smashed and dented one, and begins improvising a tourniquet by way of support - from the frayed leather straps, fastened above the ragged edge of the dark wound.
He is looking up, shadowed gaze fixed on the diamond edge of her mouth as it moves. If there is humor to be imagined, he imagines it. Lays it over the gleaming surety of her like a net of burnished gold.
Then she has settled to her haunches; perspective changes. The starlight reflected in his eyes is no longer a pointillist flash, but a ring. A corona. His hair is dark and damp with sweat, dull in the moonlight. A dark counterpoint to the gleaming crown of her undone, un-spun, tangle-ridden hair.
"Smile for me," he returns, the flush of heat glowing beneath the hoarse burr of his voice. "Lady, and I will."
A heartbeat, two - enough for the baying echoes to scatter in behind them one more time, and closer now but with a hallucinatory change in position - he waits, steady, staring, as if -
- but no. He lurches up abruptly; sways with the first shock of renewed pain, then grits his teeth.
Grinds down his molars each to each.
"Aye. I can climb."
Guillotine
Here is a minor irritation - a mosquito, a needle-prick - and the look she returns Griffin is flavored with it - salted with it. Sharp, lucent. This is another place where the told-tale would not match up with the tale-lived. She is too annoyed (focused [Furious]) to smile. He waits, steady, staring, as if - and when he lurches up, she turns her head fractionally to the side, and her shoulders hitch up then fall down, a steadying breath before she stands as well. One gesture. Flowing, a pillar of moonlight all clotting, of milk and Spring-sweetness, of pale fire. Guillotine says, "Good." The annoyance damps; but the fury remains. "To that tree, there," and she offers her hand over the water, tilting her head toward something dark and hulking with spreading arms. "And if you'd do more, lend me a drop of your blood or your sweat."
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