Logs:Lost!

Lost!
Dramatis Personae Lucien, Sera
In Absentia Damien	2024-07-28 "{You might need to indoctrinate me in witchcraft, after all.}"
Location <FAE> Somewhere Else
It is maybe a good thing that Lucien's first moments in -- wherever they've come to -- are occupied heavily with looking at the abruptly ancient rowan tree that definitely five steps ago was just a sapling. It does buy him a couple alarmed and wondering seconds to let the exasperation fade from his expression -- it's already been well in hand and undetectable beneath the mingled wonder and dread in his mind. He rubs a hand slowly against his cheek and turns on a heel. "{I am starting to think I ought to have done at least a little magic evangelism, if only to avoid --}" His hand drops and just a small flutter of that exasperation breaks back through. "Wait, Sera!" Sera was broadcasting something akin to worry at the sight of the inexplicably transformed tree, but it's already fading by the time Lucien follows her into the circle of stones. She's turning to gaze around her, then turning again, delight spilling from her in heady waves. "Oh, how perfectly splendid! It really is like a fairytale forest!" She fishes her phone from her leaf-shaped purse and lines up a selfie in front of the gnarled rowan, and looks ready to cajole Lucien into taking one with her when something else catches her eye. She takes a few steps toward the cluster of many-hued lights dancing deep in the sylvan shade, but stops at the edge of the clearing. "What is that?" Her curiosity overcomes her before an answer comes, and she darts off into the woods. --- "Why shouldn't I follow them?" Sera sounds just a little petulant, but she isn't following the lights anymore. "It's safe here, right?" She gazes around in rapt wonder and growing perplexity as she tries to retrace their steps. "{It's bigger than I thought, though. Wasn't that circle just over here?}" There's no circle here, but there is a pond. Its water is clear and still as glass, but it murmurs like a trickling stream. "Do you hear that?" Sera picks her way along the pebbly bank, looking for the unseen rivulet. "It sounds like it's saying something. Or singing..." She climbs out onto a fallen log that protrudes over the water, which starts glowing as she reaches down for its mirrorlike surface. Her eyes are wide and luminous, her fingertips just inches from the bright, mesmerizing song she can't quite reach. Maybe if she leans just a little farther forward... "I do not think we know enough about this situation to simply assume that it's safe." There's an aggressive neutrality to this supposition. Lucien has been paying very close attention to the landscape around them, and there's only a small pinch in his brow when they turn around and it has definitely changed. "I really think it would be best not to just follow every single --" Halfway through, though, he gives up on this caution and just edges out onto the log. His lips compress, and he reaches down to snag Sera's purse, tugging her back up just before her fingers swipe the surface. Somewhere beneath the beautiful melody there's a sharper note, discordant and almost hissing. "Perhaps we ought to get our bearings and then," he's starting, but he's looking past Sera across the glittering water -- which is rippling, shifting, swelling as that hissing grows. "-- run." Sera gives a startled yelp when Lucien pulls her back, and she's just opening her mouth to complain when she sees the rising water. Then she's scrambling backwards and hurrying him off the log away from the pond, which has gotten disturbingly vertical. The hissing grows raw and voracious, like water hitting a hot pan, as the pond stretches out after the Tessiers. After a few paces it recedes with an angry splash, returning the forest to eerie silence. "What was that?!" Sera is breathless, her voice wavering high with terror as she stares in the direction of the now quiescent pond. "How can you not have your bearings, this is your -- your --" She fumbles her phone out again and opens her contacts, her thumb hovering over "Luci", momentarily at a loss who to call before re-routing to "Gaé". The app does not even bother dialing, just politely informs her she has no signal. "Do you really think my conservatory is this big?" Lucien is not waiting for answer here. "Come on, let's find somewhere -- relatively safe." --- This, right now, is not somewhere relatively safe. The trees around them have gotten thicker, and darker. There are vines, thick and coarse and viciously thorny. They don't exactly seem particularly More Alive than any other plants, but, somewhat uncannily, every path that has been going through here seems more and more choked with long-spiked overgrowth every time they turn around. Lucien's beautifully embossed monk shoes have long since lost their polish, dull with dirt and scuffs. "I'm quite sorry," he's saying through his teeth as he frowns at the no-longer-path that was just behind them. "It seems you have picked a terrible day to visit." Sera's progress has slowed as her dress and hose get snagged more and more frequently by the encroaching thorns. Her fear and frustration have grown accordingly, though every few steps she reels them back in again with a slapdash attempt at calm. "I'm sorry I didn't visit earlier. If God is punishing me for being a bad sister, I wish He'd leave you out of my Purgatory. Or whatever this is." She looks up at the sky -- it's weirdly difficult to tell whether it's day or night -- nearly blotted out by the dark leafy canopy. "Maybe I can..." She grasps one of the thick, woody vines and plants her foot on a sturdy-looking root in an attempt to climb up. The malignant vegetation evidently does not approve of this, because it is creaking ominously, pressing in around Sera. The shifting growth drags her, slowly but inexorably, toward an unsettling tree with a deep yawning hollow in its thick, twisted trunk. "Luci -- tabarnouche!" Her terror is sharper than the thorns digging into her flesh and preventing her escape. "Help!" Lucien's mind has mostly been bleeding a mild irritation as he retraces his very precise mental map in comparison to this fluctuating forest. The annoyance is blotted out sharp by the swell of Sera's terror -- he's grabbing, swift, at the vines that are starting to pull her, heedless of the scrapes to his palms and the tears in his tailored jacket. Though he's pulled several smaller vines away there just seem to be more, and angrier. For a moment his fear is a twin to hers; he's dropping one bloodied hand and as his other starts to reach for his kind-of-sister again it's with an unthinking and desperate: "{Please, stop}." After this he's not even paying much attention to the scrapes down his hands, just frozen in mingled astonishment and relief as the vines pull back and back, a narrow path out cleared through the quietly rustling trees. --- The makeshift duck feather raft flows gently with the river. This water also sings, but has thus far exhibited little interest in devouring them. For a while they seemed to have a hang of things. How long that lasted is difficult to estimate here. Then something ripples into and around and beneath them from upstream. The rising turbulence rocks the raft and pushes it rapidly ahead of the aquatic stampede behind them. The individual water horses look at once all of a kind and wildly divergent from one another, though all the Tessiers can clearly see are their blunt noses, unblinking black eyes, and expressive ears. The nearest ones, surfing the bow wave of their own kin, take turns pushing at the raft, tipping it perilously this way and that. Sera is clinging to the solitary mast of the raft, her fear punching outward with each blow to the immense feathers keeping them afloat. "Should we try to run this aground?" As the boat rides up steeply on one side, a faerie horse surges up to brush against Sera's cheek. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come --" dissolves into a shriek as she slips from the mast, clinging now to only the long halyard. "Why does this keep happening?" Lucien has been watching the scenery that's passing by at the riverside with a thoughtful attentiveness that turns to wonder at the appearance of the waterhorses. He hasn't actually been clinging to anything, and though he rocks precariously as the raft is tossed, he doesn't fall off -- mostly because when he slips close to one edge or other there always seems to be a horse ready to nudge him to a slightly firmer seating. He's engineering himself a steady calm, and though this is demonstrative for Sera's benefit it oddly also seems to make the leaping path of the watery herd a little less stampede. "{How often are you going to get to see something like this again?}" He's offering Sera a hand, less for actual physical stability and more just to augment the easy calm. "I think some times you just have to go with the --" He's pressing his lips together, very fleeting -- grimace? Smirk? It doesn't resolve enough to really tell. "-- flow." "{Hopefully never?}" Sera doesn't sound completely sure of this. She's clinging to Lucien's calm moreso than the halyard, now, using it in somewhat roughshod fashion to tamp down her own panic. She's not letting go of the line or his hand, though she is looking around, now. Her power, too, is stretching out tentatively beyond Lucien's comforting presence, then immediately withdrawing again. The exuberant trill of the frothing stream that carries them sounds briefly less frenetic with the momentary brush of her power and the calm it carries. "I don't know about going with this flow, but at least they don't feel...hungry?" She also does not sound as certain on this point as she would probably like. All the same, the next time the raft pitches hard she reaches a hand out toward the water, and one of the kelpies rears up its equine head to nose at her palm before submerging again. She still shrieks, but not entirely out of terror, this time. --- Lucien's clothing has had plenty of time to dry -- thank gods because his irritation levels are not at their best while hiking with wet fabric clinging to him. There have been a few more somewhat hair-raising sidetracks but they've ended without disaster. Now -- after a thorough exploration of this small cave -- he's gotten a small fire started in its mouth, the better to roast the small cache of nuts and fish he's brought back. "In the morning," he's saying with some linguistic liberty -- is it morning? Is it night? The temperament of the day has seemed to fluctuate on a whim, but probably, exhausted as they are, this is a stand-in for after some sleep, "perhaps we will have a better chance of actually reaching those houses." He doesn't sound entirely sanguine that they will succeed, or that they will find people there who can help them, or that they will find anything recognizable as people there at all, but. He's doggedly turning over the fish on their makeshift skewers as if having a small, achievable task right now will make Making Plans seem more sensible. Sera has been staring blankly into the fire for a while, knees drawn up to her chin without too much concern any longer for her modesty. Her eyes are glazed with exhaustion, her hair spiky from drying without a comb, her pale skin marred with cuts and scrapes where it isn't bandaged with the remnants of her hosiery. "If those houses are still there in the morning." But there's no indication she's contradicting him with this bit of admittedly well-founded pessimism. "I'm sorry for dragging you into this mess. I never imagined --" She scrunches her face up, affecting a pout somewhat understated for the sharp pang of grief behind it. "Never imagined I would just randomly stumble across another dimensional rift, much less one that goes to...evil Wonderland, or wherever we are." She settles her chin on her knees and lifts her eyes to the bedraggled man who isn't quite her brother. "{I keep praying for a way home, but I don't know where that is anymore, either.}" "I do not think this is entirely random." Lucien's eyes are fixed on the fire, too. His mind is much quieter, just a steady numb exhaustion that flickers in small soothed pulses at its edges with the shift and dance of flames. "{I don't know if home has ever been a where. I think home is a thing we have to make constantly, all our lives long.}" Which does not stop his grimace, and his wry admission: "{I think it does help if your where is not continually trying to kill you, though.}" "{I don't know how to make a home.}" Sera transfers her gaze back to the fire. "I think you might be the only one of us who does. {And the other Luci, also.}" She sniffles and hugs her knees closer, but does not cry. "I guess there's no sense worrying about it now. We might never get back to either of those worlds." The despair that radiates from her is muted and toothless, and easily overshadowed by a curiosity that had gone dormant somewhere between the third and fourth time something interesting tried to eat her. "What makes you think it's not random? I know some of the...things here are like folktales from Earth. Honestly, that seems kind of random, too, but maybe I just don't know enough folklore." Neither her smile nor her amusement is altogether forced. "{You might need to indoctrinate me in witchcraft, after all.}" Lucien offers the first of the crisped little fish over to Sera. "{I suspect I will have plenty of time to indoctrinate you into witchcraft. Eat up and get some sleep.}" He's already carefully rearranging several expenditures of energy in himself to get ready to take first watch. --- "Seraphine," the fairy echoes softly, their -- its? -- large violet eyes keen and captivated. They're tall and slim and distantly insectoid quite apart from the soft iridescent wings and the even softer feathered antennae. "Such a lovely name for a lovely maiden." Sera watches mesmerized as they lift one hand, turn it with impossible grace -- there are definitely too many joints in those long, slender fingers -- and just barely grazes the peach fuzz on her cheek with the backs of their knuckles. Her eyes flutter shut, her pleasure shivering through the space between them and beyond. "And such a generous one, too," they purr, their antennae tasting the air, their smile sharpening with hunger. The other fae nearby have come gradually alert, too, and though none of them draw closer physically, there's a sense of proximity in every pricked ear and twitching nose and sidelong glance. A vague, incipient fear has seeped into the steady waves of power rippling out from Sera, now, and she starts to pull away, but then the fairy tips her chin up with the velvety pad of an index finger until their eyes meet. "Dance with me, Seraphine." Lucien is the one breaking this eye contact, firm but not aggressive as he nudges Sera back, meets those insectoid eyes with his own. "I've no doubt you are an excellent dancer, but unfortunately we already have promised appointments to keep back home and our time is not quite our own. I've no idea if we will even find our path home let alone come this way again, but if we do," his bow is small, and puts him just that much more between the creature and Sera, "I am sure she will be equally flattered by your offer in future." Sera blinks hard when her gaze untethers from the bewitching fairy, and the desire bound up between them dissipates. Said fairy, meanwhile, emits a somewhat unfriendly chitter at Lucien, which sounds entirely dissonant beside their mellifluous voice. "Ah, a pity you cannot stay." A quick flurry of their wings propels them abruptly closer to Lucien, their purple eyes searching him with evident approval. "Seraphine's brave companion is also welcome to return for a dance. Or to send me other partners. My court is friendly towards exotic beings from your world." But they do draw back, sweeping a low bow. "Fare you well." Sera is still breathing a little hard, but has largely regained her bearings. She executes the best curtsy she can manage given the state of her dress, then hurries away with her hand tucked in the crook of Lucien's elbow. She only looks back once, and with the cold shock of her terror tears her own eyes away, this time, studiously avoiding skin contact with Lucien. --- Are they any closer to home, who can tell. They don't seem, at least, to be imminently closer to death, so that is something. For all his many new cuts and bruises, the filthy and disheveled state of his clothing, the frazzled bone-weariness Sera can feel stretched taut across his mind, Lucien is managing to project an impressive outward air of polished courtesy. He's radiating very earnest attentiveness that seems -- in his expression, at least -- not at all irritated by the many (many) digressions and backtrackings this very chatty stranger has been making. Eventually he peels himself away from the discussion after offering in return a warm thanks and a small handful of the nuts they've been snacking on. "We may at least find safe water down this path." He's staring up into the trees after the bounding path of their fickle guide with a small wrinkle of his brow that does not entirely encompass the bemusement in his mind. "I am less certain of the shelter he spoke of, it seems likely it is -- squirrel-sized." --- Sera carefully fastens her little gold hoop earring around the Magpie Queen's slender and already much-adorned ankle. "It fits perfectly, Your Majesty." Her anxiety at the prospect of handling fae royalty in this way has faded as she's drawn along into the Queen's exuberance, and in turn drawn Lucien along with her. The Magpie Queen inverts her head to peer at the new treasure, lifting that talon to jingle her many anklets. "Oh! See how it glitters!" She plainly thinks she got the better end of this trade. "I'm sure your Magpie Queen hasn't got anything quite so fine! Not," she adds magnanimously, "that I would look down on my royal cousin." Chattering happily, she glides down from the branch, hopping a few steps one way, then the other to be sure she's standing in the middle of the glade. Then she fluffs out her feathers with an air of great importance, which makes her look bigger, of course. And bigger, and bigger, til she's towering over the Tessiers as though she'd been a giant magpie all along. All of her baubles have grown with her, and if she were to return the earring now it would fit around Sera's waist. She crouches down low and beckons to her passengers with an unnervingly huge and sharp beak. "Up you go, nestlings! But I really do think you ought to try growing your own wings. They're so very handy!" --- For once their sleep has come in beds, luxuriously soft and dressed in silky-cool sheets smelling just faint of jasmine and embroidered with the pleasant dreams of those who slept here before. It's been some time since Lucien properly slept last, but perhaps unsurprisingly he's been up a while before Sera all the same. There's a fresh set of clothes laid out on the foot of her bed for her when she wakes, at once more ethereal and far more practical than the tattered remains of her church clothes and oddly fitting her just right. Lucien has not, quite, finished paying off the debt from the bounty of practicalities their hosts have packed for the journey, and that's evident enough from the sounds of breathless delight spilling from behind the cracked door of his adjacent bedroom. Though he's only just finished, one of the several colorful petal-haired youths in bed with him is already demanding more. He's paused just long enough to take a drink of water before acceding, permissive: "Alright. Has anyone shared with you before our earth tale of how the blue waterlily came to hold a particularly protective blessing? Once -- and this was quite a very long time ago -- the King of the Demons was searching for a wife..." --- The marketplace turned out to be a bridge, which turned out to be a long chain of barges meandering across the dark waters. Merchants come out of the mist on boats, rafts, and aquatic mounts -- or selves -- of all descriptions along either side of the bridge to hawk their goods, services, and more esoteric trades. Has Sera gotten taller on this journey? She holds herself taller, anyway. Lucien can feel her power stretched out around them, questing for what they have come to find, using his neurochemistry to keep her own stable. "'Buy passage from the marketplace,'" she repeats under her breath as she investigates the kiosks on either side of them. "But where? There must be a thousand people here, and this...this..." She shakes her head and just shows Lucien the gradient of otherworldly lives, sharp and bright like myriad stars, and a much more diffuse set of processes, seemingly omnipresent. Ahead of them, the bridge splits into two lines of barges and rejoins again, leaving an expanse of empty water in between. Sera shakes her head. "I don't know if anyone's selling passage here, but we could at least buy some supper." --- They've been waiting quite some time for their quarry to appear. For a while Luci was content to wait in silence, as though here in the wide open meadow they are tucked into this would somehow assist with the hunt. As one hour stretches into the next, though, he's been attempting, in some vain hope, to add to the notebook he has started diligently keeping. Helpful notes on local plants and animals. Creatures who might assist them and creatures who definitely will not. Cryptic instructions they have been given and should probably heed. Cryptic instructions they have been given, potentially in malice. He's flipped it to the crude in-progress map he's been working on -- it has more than the earth-standard number of cardinal directions on its compass and it is these that he is currently consulting with his sister on. "{-- I think fair and foul have been reasonably static, but rhythm and wild don't seem quite as locked to each other as we first thought. I think if we veer slightly mourningwards --}" It's somewhere around here that his train of thought is interrupted by a shift in the light overhead. It's subtle -- a shimmery wisp that looks barely substantial, just a curl of something misty and very faintly rainbow dancing across the sky. Lucien is reaching for his bow, eyes narrowed as he looks up. "-- let's hope this shoots as far as I've been promised." --- The endgame is unspooling fast, but Sera's opponent still has not spoken a single word. It's not entirely clear they're even capable of speech, lacking anything resembling a mouth or, for that matter, physical substance. They do, however, play chess by Earth rules, without any variant pieces or colors or dimensions, which is a rare thing in these lands and a cause for much spirited discussion from the audience. They pick up their remaining bishop and hesitates, the tenebrous non-substance of their hand(?) turning the piece over a few times before setting it down firmly on a diagonal to the black king. "Check," says a tiny gossamer-winged person who has appointed himself referee over this game, with duties that consist largely of keeping the captured pieces in line. Sera tilts her head slightly -- not entirely because some of the referee's companions are braiding her hair -- and glances at the amorphous shadow sitting across from her. "Interesting," she says, and moves her king out of harm's way to opens the file for her rook. "Check," the referee declares before she has a chance to, "and mate in three." Sera blinks at the little person, startled. Her opponent topples their king and in the same fluid motion rises, bows, and produces a small glowing orb from somewhere within their darkness, depositing it into the palm of Lucien's hand. Several others in the audience are also paying up without any apparent ill-will, though one of them does admonish the shadow player, "I told you, you should have used the hound pieces. Or at least a few more horses." --- The slender glowing thread they've been following is disappearing off below, its wan light soon enough swallowed in the darkness. Some caverns back the walls themselves glowed, soft and glittering, but here it's a chill and heavy blackness that presses in around them if they stray even inches too far from their delicate guideline. Maybe that's a good thing, because it keeps Lucien's face mostly shrouded, obscuring the dread that's set into his expression. From his mind there's nothing, and maybe that's more alarming still, feelings chained down the thorough meticulousness he might use to chain up a particularly vicious beast. He moves very slow, breaths measured and carefully near-silent in the dark. Not that it would be particularly audible anyway over the rasping sounds that are hissing up from the canyon beyond, growing louder in time with the erratic tugs on their unspooled thread. Though he cannot speak (dares not speak) there are instructions, of a sort, in the intricate careful work of his mutation. A methodical shifting just beneath the quiet surface of his mind, bundling fear and determination and anger and pain into a hefty weight, tense and just waiting to be sprung. As the slithering grows closer, one hand is reaching back along the thread to find Sera's, and hold on tight. --- Even with two passengers, the puca gallops faster than any earthly horse, but their pursuers are gaining nevertheless. From a distance, the host looked like a line of dark clouds, roiling with thunder but no lightning, driving hard against the wind. Now that they are nearly overhead, the thunder resolves into the beating of hooves and wings and stranger things punctuated by the exuberant cries of the otherworldly hunters. On their mount's unsaddled back, Sera holds tight to Lucien and anchors herself in his steady calm, but through her senses he can feel the pure, intoxicating thrill of the wild hunt beckoning to her. She buries her face in his shoulder and squeezes her eyes shut. In desperation, the puca sprouts not one but two extra pairs of legs, and starts to pull ahead of the host. The sudden uneven acceleration shakes loose Sera's grip on both her brother and her power, and in that very instant one of the hunters swoops down to snatch her up. "Luci, help --" Her high and panicked plea cuts short when her power wrenches free of him and realigns with her abductors' ecstatic triumphant as they carry their prize off into the sky. "No!" Lucien's strangely morphing mount wheels in time with his furious cry; where a moment before they had been fleeing in breakneck terror now they are chasing after the swiftly retreating pack. There's just a hint of flickering flame coming from the puca's eyes -- maybe it's spreading, because there's a similar dancing flicker where its hoofbeats are no-longer-quite-hitting the ground. Lucien has drawn his bow, taken aim -- but for all the burst of energy, his mount isn't, currently, winged, and their hunters-turned-quarry are already high overhead. Lucien looses his arrow anyway, and where it flies it seems almost to rend a path, streaked with bright light, through the roiling cloud distant in the sky. But where the pack has wisped apart it closes ranks again just as swift, and is gone. Lucien's next arrow is trembling, now, where it is nocked, no hint of the steadiness of his first shot. His eyes stay fixed up to the sky a long time, but eventually he lowers the bow, breathing ragged as he bows his head again against the inkblack mane of his mount. The thunderous beat of its hooves drown out his voice when he whispers a name against the wild hairs -- which is appropriate, perhaps, it's not the right name anyway. That doesn't stop him from trying it again before -- at once resigned and determined -- he lifts his head. Tucks his arrow back into its quiver and turns his head up to the sky. There's nobody around to hear, but when he raises his voice this time, the very grassland around him rustles with the ethereal song, echoing the name back from each leaf and rock and blade of grass far -- far -- into the distance.