RP:As It Was
This is a Mage's Guild RP.
Part of the The God of Undeath Arc
Summary: Lanlan and Valrae find that they have much to discuss after freeing Quintessa from her contract with the God of Undeath.
The Mages Guild, Xalious
Lanlan tumbles into a shimmering pool of kaleidoscopic colors, following a black bauble, a blinded eye. He warps through a twisting tunnel of mesmerizing visions that bend space in on itself in ways tastes for granted, before being unceremoniously flushed into a dark room of smooth stone. There's nothing here but a couple of comfy looking chairs wrapped in cushions and buttons, and an elf. Lanlan lands mostly on his feet, only tumbling to the floor afterwards after realizing his arm was still on fire. "Put this out!" His command sounds more like a plea, as he writhes, trying to keep as far away from his own limb as he can. Cynica is still in something of a daze, having been told to expect something, but not this. It should have been Gayle or Misty, or nearly anyone else. But Cynica had his trust in other matters, if not in putting out fires.
Valrae lands less gracefully. One moment, she’s on her back in the fog forest and the next she’s spinning through a wild array of color and motion. The stomach churning journey ends with her stumbling onto the stone floor with barely a moment to catch herself from falling on her face. The arm that was still bleeding from Blair’s blade screams in protest, pain radiating to her shoulder and awaking the old ache of Tessa’s blade as a low moan escapes her. The sound is swallowed by Lanlan’s command. Or cry. Without thinking, Valrae waves her hand and murmurs, “Saoilleah.” The fire that had been creeping over his arm is extinguished with a plume of black smoke curling through the air like a lazy cat. She stands shakily, taking a step toward the archmage with her arm pulled tight to her chest. “How bad is it?” Her eyes were wide and dark as she looked him over, crowded him to inspect him for injuries and herd him toward one of the chairs. When she finally noted Cynica’s presence, the witch quietly requested they fetch a capable healer.
Lanlan moans weakly and throws his arm over Valrae's shoulder as if walking was hard so she can guide him to the chair. He looks down at his wound, just a glimpse to see. It's still smoking and parts are charred, and he doesn't know what parts are flesh and which are cloth. "That's my..." His head falls backwards and his knees drop, eyelashes fluttering. The pain was more than he can remember feeling, but the potential ugliness he sees in his wound is what sends his consciousness into flux. He comes back a mere half second later when they're at the chairs. "No not this one," he slurs, shaking his head at the chair he was almost seated in. "Look at it." He sits in the other one, which by some measure must've been better. "Oh no," he whines when he wakes up, and then he sees it again, and sinks back. "Oh no," he says again.
Soon Cynica returns with a team of healers of enough ability and discretion to be appropriate. The attention they give him seems to do a fair amount of healing on its own, and his wits seem to stabilize somewhat. They administer what seems to be a magic pebble of slate gray and glitter. In fact it's merely pressed opium and sugar flecked with gold leaf. "Stone of the immortal," Lanlan chuckles, recognizing his 'alchemy'. He swallows it.
He doesn't try to look at his arm anymore, happy to let them kneel and bend over it. Between their bodies and their moving limbs and their magical glows, he can see Valrae. Now that his pain was numbed, he thought they should celebrate. It is minutes before he realizes she's bleeding too with no one assisting her, and he raps one of his attendants quickly but lightly on their shoulder. "Hey! Don't forget her. Go."
Valrae accepts his weight, swaying only a little underneath it and pulls them both to the nearest chair. The frantic worry painted on her face made her dark eyes too wide, almost comically so, and she didn’t understand his worry with which chair he’d been placed in. It must matter for reasons beyond her. She tried to accommodate him but it didn’t stifle his objections. Lan faded in and out of consciousness with the same small complaints. When the healers entered the room she was laughing and crying and attempting to use what small skill she held in the realm of restoration magic on the worst of his arm.
“You’re ridiculous.” She mutters affectionately, moving away only enough to let them work in peace but remaining close enough to hover and worry. The witch watched them closely as they worked though, wondering if he would be left with the same scars that had marked her when they’d fought for the Xalious tree. She wished she’d had the forethought to collect the Selene blessed moon water that had taken them away from her. Would Lanlan be as concerned as she had been? She thought they might share the same thread of vanity that had writhed blackly in her mind at the sight of the raised white scars.
“I’m fine.” She waved a bloodied hand toward the healers but didn’t protest again when they pressed a potion into her free hand and took the other arm to heal. Her injury was less and easier to tend. The milk of poppy was drunk quickly. She could feel the warmth of it spreading over her chest and making her head fuzzy. It reminded her of the weeks after Quintessa’s attack, when her cursed wounds had refused to heal.
“What is a ‘Stone of the immortal’?” The witch asks him, blinking as if she were sleepy as she sits at his feet. The stone floor was cold even through her tunic as she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
Lanlan was numbed almost to silliness when Valrae asked about the stones of the immortals. As if remembering takes him back to the time, he recalls who he was the last time he spoke of them. "A tradition all but lost to time, practiced by an isolated tribe of elves who sought protection from the wild forces of magic and monster," he begins in an alluring whisper. He leans over to Valrae to share more of his secret. "The crafting of these nuggets is a process so secret, my family could be the last ones to know about it. We wouldn't know if we weren't. But they say..." He looks around suspiciously though they're in a secret room with only him and her and the people who have the stones. Then his good eye lands on her sharply to command her attention. "This is a small piece of what the gods feast on to gain their immortality. It can do the same to us if we titrate the dose. Start small, take a little more every week, you'll notice the first thing gods gain is an immunity to pain."
Soft lavender colored wraps are curled snugly around his arm, the charred clothes and dead flesh having been cut away and left in a sanitary jar. The finishing bow terminating the bandage halfway down his forearm distracts him. "Oh see that isn't so bad is it? No, and I'll get a good night's sleep tonight too, I..." He starts nodding off as the doctors wrap up their kits, and his head tilts back comfortably as his eyes close. The last thing to take is his remains. "Leave it," he commands without seeming to be aware. His eyes are open only just a crack, but a dangling pupil sees. "Waste not," he says grotesquely to Valrae. Such a sentiment would surely mortify him if he were in his right mind.
The doctors leave them. Alone at last, but still he pretends to sleep. The only sign of his being awake is the very loud, very abrupt scraping of his chair closer to hers. "We got it!" He whispers comically loud. "What do we do with it?" He instantly starts laughing, a raspy hissing noise as he tries to stifle it. Suddenly, Blair's corpse falls through the ceiling with a dramatic thud causing Lanlan's whole body to jerk in every direction. He stifles a chuckle and looks to Valrae to see how he should react.
Valrae had tilted her face toward him as he spoke, her lips parted slightly and her glassy eyes locked onto him with interest. She doesn't speak, intent to let him fill the room with conspiratorial whispers as he leaned over her and spoke of gods and family. "Your family?" She replies gently. "You've never spoken of them before." Maybe she should have been focused on the mystical stones. She wrinkles her nose and drops her hands to the floor, leaning back onto her palms. "Some things should bring pain. It's not for mortals to know of its absence." She was thinking of the Milk of Poppy she'd taken. It dulled her mind and her senses, she wondered if the stones would work the same. While it was preferred over the pain Tessa's blade had left, the feeling of muddled dissociation had kept her clumsy and removed in a way that felt not only unnatural but laced with the guilt of something inherently wrong. The comfort is a small thing compared to the splintering annoyance of moral failing.
Eventually the witch grew tired of the floor and took a seat in the free chair. The healers were packing to leave as she curled into the buttoned cushions like a lazy housecat and wished the distance between herself and Lan wasn't quite so far. She watched the illusionist with heavy lidded eyes as he floated somewhere between sleep and waking. Her boots were in the seat of her chair and leaving stains of muddy brown and inky ash. Her shoulder was pressed into the arm, her chin in her hand. She kept a silent vigil over him until he spoke again. "We could perform alchemy on it. Grow a second archmage from a jar."
She continued her quiet guard even when the room emptied. The moments spun around the room in hazy silence. She wished for a bath. Blood stained her tunic, was sticky and dried between her fingers and dark underneath her nails. The room smelled coppery and medicinal. Valrae nearly jumped when Lanlan moved, her breath hissing out in a curse as he scraped his way nearer as if he had read her mind. "And we freed Quintessa," She adds, her tone less enthusiastic. But then he's laughing and for some reason she is too. She didn't know what was funny but she couldn't help herself. The sound died in her throat as Blair's body fell to the floor. Where Lanlan was animated, Valrae became a living statue, her eyes wide and her lips parted. His chuckle tumbled like a key in the lock of her chest and suddenly she was laughing again. The kind of laughter that comes from the belly. The kind that is a little manic and a little exhausted and eventually turns to tears.
The witch presses the heels of her hands to her eyes, her shoulders still shaking. "Oh god. I killed him."
Lanlan recoils a bit as she lightly inquires about his family. "What? No it's not about them," he says. "Look." He holds one of the stones of the immortal in his fingers and squashes it, turning it easily into dust. "It's just opium. All that stuff-that was just to sell it to a higher class of idiot." He quickly adds, "but I don't do that anymore. And of course. You can't become a god just by eating rocks you'd have to... Well." This was devolving.
He let it trail off as the new focus came to his own gruesome remains, sealed in a jar that he took greedily. "Or maybe someone could use them to tailor a curse just for me," which is clearly what he was afraid of. "Or who knows what they might do they might find out how to steal my tricks! But I kinda like... Hmmm. Maybe."
By the time Blair was found to be irreversibly dead, and he laughed, and she laughed, and he laughed harder, he realized that wasn't it. "Oh Valrae no, no. You didn't kill him. He died a hero to save all of us, didn't he?" He scooches his chair even closer and, unburdened by the inhibitions of his former sobriety, drapes his decent arm around her neck, using his own body to screen the corpse from her vision. "He's a hero isn't he, and his family will be taken care of too, if he has one." By the time Valrae can look again, a shroud has been draped over him. Slate gray with gold embroidery. Maybe he starts holding her for her sake, but then he lingers in it a little extra for himself. "I'll get him taken care of and sent to his family, don't worry."
He stands up after, and looks around the room. There wasn't apparently any way in or out, but he knows where the exit is. "Why don't we go have some tea or something. Right? Let's get cleaned up and everything, look at you there's ashes all over you... You look like a toddler."
Valrae didn't seem convinced as she wrinkled her nose at the archmage. "Maybe you could. We don't know." She didn't know why she was arguing, maybe she just wanted too. "Maybe all we have to do to beat Caluss," She'd dropped her voice low, whispering the god of undeath's name as if he might be summoned by only speaking of him, "Is head out to the garden and swallow a belly full of perfectly round stones. Has anyone ever tried it? I doubt."
"Yeah, I could curse you without ever leaving Cenril with that jar alone." She confirms, her voice sleepy. "You should get rid of it." She maybe could have comforted him but it was better not to lie about these things. "But it would take someone centuries to figure out your tricks."
When Lanlan comforts her and obscures Blair from her vision, the witch lets him. She pressed her face into his chest, her tears hot on her face even as a few hiccupping laughs escaped her. "He was... He..." She couldn't finish. It wasn't that she hadn't killed before. She had, surely. She'd been in war, in the Shadow Plane and in Larket. She'd pulled a blade through Cramer's throat. But this was different. There was no war, there was no horrific crime against her or her people. Blair had been a selfish and corrupt man but he'd hardly done anything worthy of the death she'd given him. The blood that stained her hands now was far heavier than any she'd carried before. When Lanlan's half embrace lingered she was grateful for the comfort he offered.
He pulled away and she found herself mourning the absence of his warmth. "I can't let you..." She shouldn't burden Lan with the motions of informing Blair's family, readying him for a trip back to Cenril. Something bittersweet ached in her chest. Feeling selfish and weak willed, the halfhearted fight that had risen in her died. "Thank you."
Her nose wrinkles again. "Tea sounds nice... And I do not." She didn't really know what she looked like but surely it was a mess. Her face was sooty, her tears had left streaks through the ash that marred her cheeks. Her hair had escaped it's braid and was a wild tangle of gold. Leaves had trapped themselves in the curls. Blood from herself and Blair lingered on her white tunic and arms. The milk of poppy had left her too wide eyes glassy and dazed. Maybe she looked more like an abandoned doll than a toddler. As she stands, she finally looks around the room. She avoided Blair even with the shroud Lanlan had placed over him and realized there was no door. "Do we have to teleport again?"
"It would make dying to him feel easier at least," he says nonchalantly. "Hm." Then he makes a show of moving the jar of his burnt flesh and clothes behind the chair, mostly out of her view. "I'm too strong for you to curse me anyway so I wouldn't bother," he says with a nyah nyah face, clearly very pleased with himself.
For now, he feels good about doing everything he's promised without expecting anything in return. It makes him feel good when she accepts it easily, too. And he stands up. "Woah, I feel like I'm floating." He holds out his hand, "keep me tethered, if you can." And then he would lead her to a rather unassuming part of the completely enclosed wall... And becomes rather surprised when he bounces off of it. "Wait," he says, feeling all over the wall with his hand. "It's supposed to be right--" then his hand disappears, passing through another part of the wall a few feet away. He mutters something about people always moving his secret doors, and then they emerge from the blank wall of a broom closet. There's more than enough criss crossed poles and other assorted cleaning implements to let this feel like an obstacle course. But eventually, along with a small avalanche of things, they emerge into the hallway.
As if in an unfamiliar place, he looks down two hallways and puzzles over which way to go. But eventually they find their way, it turns out they were only right around the corner from Valrae's office. He slides into the wall beside her door and waits, watching her as she moves ahead of him.
The witch takes his hand easily, moving toward him quickly. She didn't know if she could tether him, and to be quite honest the whole ordeal felt dramatic but in a lovely way. She lets him lead her, a dreamy sleepwalker covered in ash and blood. Valrae doesn't seem to mind that he can't immediately find the door and when he murmurs about others moving it she nods seriously, even if a smile was tilting the corner of her lips at the idea of it.
Navigating to her office felt like a fevered dream. Lanlan's traps and tricks were interesting and clever and much too complicated for her tired mind to puzzle together. His own personal magic, a great mystery to her, was once again revealed to her in the way of cruelness that the universe typically showed her. The jellyfish she'd seen when she was recovering from the bite of Quintessa's blade was another such moment. She was never shown these tiny feats of magic when she was in her right mind.
And so they made it quietly to her office, traveling hand in hand in the easy way of silent friendship. It was only easy because the pair of them had recently been through a great deal, or so she guessed. Otherwise, they might have found something to argue about. For now though, it was comfortable.
She waved her heavy door open with a simple hand gesture and led them both inside. The fire was already lit, the curtains drawn. The sweet scents of vanilla and oranges mingled with the spicy mulled wine brew in her cauldron. It was warm and homey and nearly enough to have fresh tears stinging her tired eyes. She'd have liked to press her face into the pillow of her settee and cry until she slept. Instead, she collected towels for the archmage and offered to let him use her enchanted bathing room first. "It's okay. I'll have someone fetch us supper while we wait."
Valrae's Office
Lanlan enjoys the warmth and comfort and familiarity of Valrae’s office, even if only briefly. He knows what a crime it would be to allow too much of the grime and debris from outside to be spread all over this place. It should be clean. He didn’t even want to touch the towels, lest he end up drying himself with grease and dirt. He takes them from her magically, allowing them to float behind himself. “That is very kind,” he says with added dramatics, bowing before her as if it was a treasure or artifact of infinite value she was giving him. Then he backs away, rising only as he faces the door of the enchanted bath.
He hesitates then, almost freezing. “Is there…a mirror?” He waits here for too long, gathering the strength to enter. It wasn’t the pain, there was none of that now. It was buried under his opium pill. It was the sight of himself. It was the scars. “They just cleaned the wound, I’ll need to keep it dry now, isn’t that right?” He consoles himself with the thought and disappears into the room, already misty with steam.
He washes the day away with eyes closed, just in case, using minute and particular care to make sure he’s cleaned every inch of himself. Once he’s done, and it feels like forever after he started, he still lingers. Just what happened back there? It seems that they were successful, logically, they accomplished what they needed to. But it felt in his chest like they failed. Another enemy. Inside these very walls. And a powerful one at that, in Karasu. Cost of living, it seems. The cost of survival.
He emerges clean, and possibly even optimistic. His hair, his eyebrows, his towel, all of them seem to dry themselves off. Once heavy and dark with moisture, they all brighten up and fluff jubilantly. And then under his towel, a robe seems to grow from exactly nothing. Gray, like most of him, but somehow still looking luxurious. Instead of the folds showing shadows, they seem to show shimmers. Slippers grow under his feet as he walks, and he leaves the towel on the rack, for the custodians.
He bets there will be a cup of tea waiting for him, and he sits by it. “That was amazing,” he says, complimenting her on her work with the magical bath. “I think I’ll have to get one for myself. I don’t know why I don’t already.” Soon their food will be ready, soon his pain will return, soon they’ll have to do something about everything that’s happening. But for just a few moments, he wanted to enjoy peace.
Valrae seems stunned when Lanlan calls her kind. Her foggy mind struggles to formulate words to string into a response. It doesn't seem to matter though, the Archmage floated away from her as if he didn't notice her doe eyed stare.
"Oh-" She takes a step after him, jared from her momentary haze. "Yes I-" He had already stepped inside before she could warn him. There were mirrors. Several of them. The room was circular and the stone of the tower. The center of the room dipped into a low, wide tub while benches that acted as stairs led into the brimming tub of water. There was a brassy lever towards the side nearest the tall frosted windows that when pulled would activate the enchantment that rained hot water into the bath. The mirrors he'd asked after loomed over the sinks, crowded with her potions, perfumes, face creams, hair tools and all manner of distinctly feminine clutter. There was also a large, ornate and gilt rubbed standing mirror that rested against the wall to the right.
She worried after him as she called for their supper and set the tea table. The witch could vividly recall how she'd fallen apart at the sight of her own fire branded scarring. She'd wept viciously, her own vanity tearing at her heart with jagged and unforgiving teeth. When he appeared again and seemed in better spirits, whatever tightness that had formed in her chest finally loosened and she offered him a sunny, if sleepy smile. "Hi," Her voice was soft. "There is tea ready."
As he made himself comfortable she slipped away. Her own time in the bathing room spanned longer than she would have liked. She slipped into the water on a sigh, letting the heat pull out the worst of the ache that hounded her body. But when it was over and she'd washed her hair with sweet jasmine and wildflower soaps, all that was left was to scrub and scrub at the blood on her hands. Between her fingernails. Trapped on her skin. She scrubbed until her skin was red and raw and painful as she wept. She did not look into the mirrors herself, even as she pressed lotions into her damp skin and combed away the tangles of her hair.
When she emerged herself, she was wrapped in a fine cotton robe and her hair was braided away from her bare face. There was no kohl lining her eyes, or glamor blushing her cheeks attractively.
The food must have arrived. It sat chilled on the tea table along with two cups of tea. The witch stood awkwardly for a moment, unsure if Lanlan was sleeping truly or had only chosen to rest his eyes. When he did not answer her soft call, she chose a downy blanket to place over him and took a wool one for herself. Then she sank down into the chair next to him at watched him breathe before sleep eventually took her into a blissfully empty embrace.
Lanlan was moisturized, medicated, and asleep. As an elf, he doesn’t need sleep, but he likes it as a small indulgence, and sometimes dreaming can be a bit like practicing. Usually he has some control over the nature of his dreams; not so, this time. A whirlwind of danger and doppelgangers and people named after soup…! He awakens with a jolt in an unfamiliar place. Or rather…it is familiar, but still unexpected.
It’s several hours later now that he wakes up, still in the predawn darkness, and demanded upon by an escalating throb in his arm. He moves naught but his eyes at first, as if revealing himself could alert predators. He narrows his eyes on Valrae as she comes into focus. She must’ve given him the wrong blanket, since his was clearly of a much higher thread count. For an eternity, he wonders what to do. If he stirs will she wake? If he leaves would he be rude? With a subtle manipulation of the airs surrounding him, he draws a fluffy feather by its stem out of his blanket. I tiny breeze floats it up in a whirl toward the ceiling where it slowly, slowly, slowly falls in front of Valrae’s face, landing gently on the tip of her nose…
If the witch dreamed, she recalled none of it. The feather's brush against her nose stirs her into the waking world again but she doesn't open her eyes. Instead, she curls further into herself and presses her face into the high curved back of her chair on a sleepy sigh of contentment.
Reality settled around her slowly. She was distantly aware of Lanlan, though she didn't yet know if he'd woken. The fire was nearly out and the room carried a chill. The lingering smell of their dinner, her portions still untouched, sent an ache through her belly. Still, she didn't want to open her eyes. She wanted to float in the midnight haze of the darkened room with Lanlan at her side. Content to let the Xalious wind press snow flurries against her misty window and the world slide by this stolen moment of peace.
Without opening her eyes and with her voice still carrying the softness of sleep, Valrae whispered, "Kasyr is dead."
Lanlan tracks the path of his floaty projectile up to the point that it lands on her nose. Then he closes his eyes again so he can wake up after her stirring. He heard her stirring, it was only a matter of time now. Suddenly she spoke. It was soft and low, and he wasn’t sure he could’ve heard it right. He was doubly surprised because she seemed to know that he was awake, and if that was true, then did she know about his feather? He held his breath and just stared at her, before the meaning of what she said began to sink in.
“That’s impossible,” he says flatly, the maelstrom of emotions adding together to make a muted sort of numbness.
She'd only been testing the words. It was the first and only time she'd allowed herself to speak them. She hadn't even told Khitti yet. But Valrae knew that Lanlan might be awake. Some phantom pain speared through her chest to find that he was. She wasn't sure if she was relieved or remorseful for it.
Her eyes open slowly. When she straightens, the feather falls into her lap. She doesn't speak yet, instead blinking at the archmage with a small frown bowing the corners of her lips. She looked pale and somehow younger in the dying light. There was no glamor or makeup on her face now, only unbridled sorrow and vulnerability. "I watched him die." She offers, grief darkening her voice.
“If that’s true, I would’ve known,” he sounds a little bit angry now, as if she must’ve forgotten what she did. A guitar string made of his illusion magic, stretched from him and her and met in the middle. One of his arm slithers out from under the down blanket she draped over him and he curls a finger around the ‘cord’ that connects them. He plucks it several times. For emphasis. As it rang out its hollow and fake twang, he adds, “Remember what happened last time he died? I do. Monuments to my own…how would I miss perishing myself?” Yet, he knew she wasn’t lying. She wouldn’t randomly pick a time like this to lie about something he would be this invested in. It just didn’t make sense. “When did he…”
She watches him grapple with the weight that she'd been holding onto and feels sympathy softening her face. She doesn't argue again. The witch sat mutely as she watched him pull at the ties that bound them.
Valrae doesn't immediately answer him. Instead, she leans forward to pick up her cold soup. She moves the spoon around the nearly solidified mess of potatoes and winter squash. "A few weeks." She finally admits. She didn't know why guilt crowded her throat now. And she had no answers for him. The silver bind that connected them to Kasyr was intact, though it's thread was so thin now it was hardly more than a whisper. Because she'd tried, she also knew now that while it would still lead to Vailkrin it no longer led to Kasyr and it no longer offered her the comfort of his presence. It was a strand of magic untethered, bound only to the place where he'd fallen trying to ascend. Or perhaps succeeded. She no longer knew. "We... He discovered something. I begged him not to try..."
The words die in her throat, blocked by the nameless emotions that crowded there as tears stung in her eyes. "Don't be angry."
As Lanlan's wits gather, as he shakes off the foggy grogginess of sleep, he grows more patient. Part of it was for Valrae's sake, because she wasn't as used to Kasyr dying as he was. Part of it was for his own sake, because he would never get used to Valrae crying. He breathes in...and out. "You could've told me," he says with an edge softened much by his affection. "I'm not angry. Did he tell you when he'd be back? Last time it was about six months." He hated to be the one to tell her this, to impress her with Kasyr's feats of death defiance, and he tried to make it sound as ordinary as could be. "I'm sure it seems like a big deal to you and you must've thought it would be a big deal to me too." Though he tried to hide it, there was still an edge of bitterness in his voice.
She sat down cast as she waited for the bite of his anger, for accusations that omittance was the same as lying, for this news and its delay to somehow be twisted into intentions she harbored to wield against him like a knife. When it didn't come the witch didn't know what to do with herself. The softness of his tone eased the tension of her shoulders and broke whatever dam that held the tears in her eyes. When she looked up at him again they were sliding over her cheeks.
"I'm sorry." She says abruptly. "I wanted too. I did. I-" She didn't know why she hadn't. Possibly because the thought of him enjoying the news would have driven a further wedge between them. But she couldn't say that. And none of that mattered after what he said next. "Come back?" She echoed. "He'll come back?" There was wild hope in her eyes.
The fact that she didn't know about Kasyr's habit for dying somehow stirred something akin to joy in him. He actually rises out of his seat with vigor, and throws the blanket off him with abandon (it folds itself in midair and lands neatly on top of an end table)! He tries to play it off coolly. "Well you know, Valrae," he begins, as he moves over to her selection of teas, or more accurately, away from the tears streaming out of her. "We all deal with grief differently, and sometimes maybe even a little selfishly..." He thought he would remember which tea she picked for herself last time by the time he came over, but he didn't. "And luckily we weren't depending on him for anything right this second..."
He turns to face her when he gets to the important part of his spiel. "But of course I forgive you. Anyways, yes. He'll come back." He wasn't entirely sure how the mechanism worked, he just knew that it did. Whatever brings Kasyr back to life was a mystery to Lanlan. He holds out a hand to her, and a pristine handkerchief of silky softness and lavender color and smell appears in it. "I can't believe he didn't tell you! Sadist."
She watches him stand, suddenly animated, with stunned confusion. She doesn't know why he's accepting her delayed truth so easily now, even if he did manage to throw in a back biting comment, but she knew when to accept small victories. There was something else though. Knowing now that what she'd witnessed lacked permanency and that this hadn't been revealed to her by Kasyr himself, she felt... Angry.
Valrae tosses her untouched bowl onto the table carelessly, the loose and gelatinous soup spilling over the side a bit as she presses the heels of her hands over her cheeks to swipe angrily at the tears. More burned in her eyes as anger crept hotly over her chest. "That..." The witch stands abruptly after him, her own blanket falling to the carpeted stone floor as she crosses toward the hearth.
Her movements were quick and carried the harshness of her anger as she fed the fire with nearby wood. With the wave of her hand the candles that were near burst into light and flame that burned perhaps a little too hotly as they melted with thick rivers of pooling wax.
When she turns on her heel to face Lanlan again he's offering her a handkerchief and voicing her own anger. She accepts it with trembling hands. Though she doesn't know why, this additional act of kindness and tending to her needs makes a fresh wave of tears fall from her eyes. "Bastard." She seemingly agrees. "He watched me beg him not to try ascending and said nothing!"
It was better than he'd hoped. She was finally as mad at Kasyr as she always should've been! In his chest he knows it's the wrong kind of anger, but he's restraining some small jubilation nonetheless. Still, he frowns at the sight of her dropping the blanket on the ground, and he opens his mouth to complain. Perhaps wisely, he closes his mouth without a word, and leaves it, turning away from the crumpled wool.
What a puzzle, that even when she's finally so angry at Kasyr, he doesn't even get to know. "What kind of tea do you like in the mornings, again?" He asks her, demonstrating in this moment what a nice friend he is, in stark contrast to Kasyr. He's getting water ready to be heated, and he's getting clean cups ready with their dainty little spoons, and then he stops. "What was it he was trying to do? That last thing you said." He's frozen, focused on nothing but the next syllables.
Valrae was too distracted to answer his question. She began pacing around the office, like a lion pressing against the confines of a cage. Or maybe a small cat. She steps right over the discarded blanket, unaware of Lanlan's discomfort over its careless discarded state.
"This doesn't even make sense." She informs him, her back turned momentarily before she paces back towards the chairs. She takes the seat he'd previously occupied, sitting atop the folded blanket. "We- He found something in that book he stole." She tells him quickly, "About Vailkrin. About the truth of it and how it came to be." She didn't worry about being overheard here, her walls were guarded against spycraft both mundane and magical. "That the truth of it is one of an unclaimed domain. Something that had been built to claim." She shudders remembering the dark, cold room. "Kasyr knew that if Caluss found out, if he took it for himself we would be lost. He chose instead to... To try claiming it for himself." Her eyes trail back to the silver bond between them. "I watched Kasyr die but... If we're still here and the bond is still here... I don't know what it means."
Lanlan is still frozen in place when she begins talking again, but gradually, very mechanically, he moves his arms like they were a puppets. He was no longer invested in the actions, they were just for show. He's still quiet, letting her say as much as she can as he puts some flavor of tea in the slotted cavity and pours water of some temperature over it and into a tea cup. He does this twice. "Okay," he says with calmness born of emotion so dire it can't be evoked through word or bodily movement. "Then what you're telling me is, the exact thing we're trying to prevent Caluss from doing, is the very same thing that Kasyr just did. And you helped him do this." His body moves over to hers and he offers her a cup of cold water mixed with leaves while he sips his own.
"And you helped him do this," he repeats. Already his mind is spinning with conclusion after conclusion, acrobatically flipping from one to another.
Valrae's head jerks back, as if he'd stepped over the wool blanket and slapped her. "Helped him?" She repeats. "Helped him?" She's standing again, her cheeks flushed with anger and dotted with lingering tears that glittered like starlight freckled across the sky of her rosy skin. "I tried to stop him, Lanlan."
She doesn't take the cup of cold tea he offers, ignoring it completely to direct some of that anger on to him now. The unfortunately close and available target. "You're not going to stand her and start accusing me of things I had no intention or desire of doing." She says firmly. "If you'll remember, I made my opinion on immortality and godhood very clear. You cannot be so empty headed as to assume that I would think anyone was suited for it." But she wasn't done. Crossing her arms around herself defensively, she continues. "And really, Lanlan, in all of your endless ego could you really believe I would have helped anyone but you for something so... so..." She was fumbling now, too angry to find the best word for how idiotic she found the delusions of godhood and grandeur were. "Ignorant." It fell lamely from her lips. Valrae was not a woman interested in grand feats, worship or ascension. She valued work, hard work, and cleverness, and most of all self sacrifice. This was exactly what she'd thought Lanlan had proposed when he'd revealed the contents of his own book to her. If she would have chosen to help anyone reach godhood, it would have only been the man standing before her now just as she'd promised him before. That he would assume otherwise was an insult to her character.
Lanlan frowns at his cold water mixed with fragrant foliage. "So you went to Vailkrin to stop him, is that what you're telling me?" Somehow he knew, that was not what she was doing there. But he's waiting for her to finish talking. "My ego? Okay, my ego." Then at the end, he was waiting with such exuberance for her to spell out exactly what the word was to describe what Kasyr had done, that his ear must've grown three sizes just to hear it. "Ignorant! Ignorant!" He spits a shredded tea leaf out. "This dam tea is..." he plops the cup back down on her table. It almost splashes. " Then he sits back in the chair with such force it slides several inches backwards and he considers that it could've even scratched her floor. If it did, then she deserves it.
"Fine," he says very sharply. "You wouldn't willingly help someone do this, but it sure seems like you did by accident then. So he tricked you. He lied to you to get you to do whatever it is that he needed doing. And then when you realized what it was for, you tried to stop him. Right?" He feels like he's lawyering for her, but it might be just as much for himself. She truly mustn't want to help him do something she was so adamant against him accomplishing for himself right? Or was she just like everyone else who thought there were prizes for many but not for him? No, no it was a trick, she was tricked. But as he sat there, it dawned on him. "But then...you hid it from me. Is this why?"
Valrae rolls her eyes. "No. I went to Vailkrin because he called me through the bond." She informs him, watching as he sets the ruined tea aside. "Yes! Your. Ego." She wasn't backing down, even as he tossed himself so hard into her chair that it slid against the stone floors. "Of all the times to think highly of yourself, you magically forget to when it comes to assuming my intentions. I wouldn't have chosen to lose Kasyr either but I never would have helped him in this before I would have helped you." She looks at him helplessly, holding out her empty hands. "I wouldn't have chosen anyone but you even if what you're asking me to do is lose you."
She thought silence might follow her admittance but he was still arguing instead.
"We were just talking, he... He told me he made a deal with Macon to protect me." She stops talking then, remembering instead. She hesitated to tell him the rest of the conversation and a storm of emotion clouds her dark eyes. "He told me that he somehow managed to get Macon to vow not to attempt murdering me until Caluss was defeated and to never move against anyone of house Azakhaer." She looks away then, remembering that he'd then offered to turn her. "And then..." Her arms cross over herself again. "And then he offered to turn me so that I would never have to worry about Larket again."
She turns away from Lanlan, taking her own seat again. "After that, he led me down into some sort of chamber. He told me what he found as we stood over the precipice of something... Hungry and dark. I still don't know what it was. He didn't reveal to me his intentions until it was too late." She felt shame burning her cheeks as she finished telling it, "I tried to hold on to him, to pull him back. I begged him, Lanlan." She finally meets his eyes again. "I didn't tell you because I am ashamed."
Lanlan is spinning so fast in his mind he can barely slow down enough to hear what she says to him. She was telling the truth, he knew that, but this time the truth wasn’t good enough. “Now it’s a lot more than my ego that’s at risk,” he says, with a sardonic chuckle. He rubs his gloved hands together and then up and down along the tops of his legs. “And now there’s not just a god who wants to kill me along with everyone else, there’s a god who would want to kill me in particular, because he hates me. And what can I do? What can I do? What can I do.” He shakes his head again and falls silent before her words catch him. “You wouldn’t lose me,” he says, still attempting to process the gravity of what she was saying. It was the only thing he could address. “I don’t know what to do now,” he whines, almost pleading at her.
Then he actually laughs. “A deal with Macon…to protect you?” He couldn’t form words. “Because you’re in danger from Macon…I feel like I’m the only one who pays attention sometimes.” Wild torrents of so much raw magical power that an archmage, a high priestess, and a coven of witches couldn’t contain it spun just behind his eyes. Then she mentions his scheme to protect anyone from house Azakhaer, and his amusement dashes down. It was almost like he was thinking the words as she said them. “To be like him,” is all he says. His whirlwind of emotions leaving him and leaving his countenance solemn and bitter. “Of course,” he says. But he chippers back up again quickly. “But you didn’t! Of course you didn’t, you would never willingly become something like that, would you. You would never.”
Somehow this too was a victory for him, champion of a fight he didn’t even know was being fought. Consciously, at least. He pressed his advantage further. “As if I wouldn’t protect you. If you needed protection that is, which you don’t.” He stood out of his chair now and crossed the room, back over to the tea, where he found a new cup. “I can’t believe he would even try that,” he says. “It’s abhorrent. To make you into one of those? And then! You know he’d have control over you, right? Complete control over you. That’s what he wants.” He fiddled with the cups and the pot, unable to figure out how they go together and merely fiddling with them.
He ends up abandoning the whole endeavor, spinning to lean against the table as she finishes her version of things. He was cradling an empty cup now. It made no sense to him. What she was describing made no sense. “He just threw himself into godhood? I don’t understand. Never mind. So you couldn’t stop him.” He lifted the empty cup half way to his mouth before stopping. “Don’t be ashamed,” he says. “Just tell me what happened next.”
The witch doesn't answer his pleading questions, only shaking her head. Even still, the untethered bond promised him safety. At least, as far as she knew. But because she could not be sure, and she knew he would pick her assurances apart until he found the heart of unknowable truth, she did not mention it. She couldn't offer him any peace. The look in her dark eyes suggested she was sorry for this but it was another thing she left unspoken between them, carried only through hope that he might somehow find a way to understand without words.
It was his next assertion that she found the fire to argue. "I would." She counters, bitterness and sorrow dripping from each syllable. "I will." The finality of those two words sent a nameless ache through her chest. "When you... When you do what must be done to stop Caluss you inherit all that he is. Undeath." A chill crept over her, causing her to wrap her arms around herself. "I don't know how you could even consider it, fathom it... Becoming like him. But it's because you are selfless enough to do it..." Valrae shrugs. "That is why I choose you." She drops her hands to her lap. "And at the end of it all I will lose you and you will lose yourself as you are now."
She wasn't sure she was ready to talk of the offer Kasyr made her. It was a comfort to her to hear Lanlan speak of it with the same conviction and disdain that she carried in her secret heart. "I would never." She repeats in a whisper. Never willingly. Warmth crept into her as she wondered if it was because he understood her. Her heritage, her pride, her deeply rooted belief, and her fears or if it was only because of his own disdain for Kasyr that he spoke of vampirism in such a way now. Because Valrae would like to see only the best in the man crossing the room for tea again, she chose to believe it was only because he saw her. The truth of her. This choice was only further rooted when he added that he believed she needed no protection, that even if she did he would be there. A smile, sunny and bright despite the conversation, tilts her lips and lights her eyes. "I don't. Thank you for saying so."
"I don't know what he wants..." She admits carefully, her voice soft, "But I know what I want and it isn't that." No matter how bruised she felt over Kasyr, she couldn't believe his intentions were for anything more than to keep her from harm. No matter how the offer seemed to disregard all that she held sacred and her humanity. He'd spent so long as a revenant and never any time at all as a witch. He couldn't have known.
As Valrae watches him turn back to face her, a new cup in his hand, her smile falls away again. "I don't understand it myself." She admits carefully, "We were... In some ancient hidden chamber. There was power there, something hungry and dark. When he dropped his lyre, it broke and... As it broke he began to..." A sudden paleness passes over her. "He faded? Disintegrated? He simply ceased to exist. I don't know how else to describe it. Whatever he'd done... It ended him. I don't know if he'll return, and if he does if he'll be the same or... More? Less?" It was her turn to plead. "I don't know, how could I possibly know?"
She’d be as powerless to help him as he is to help himself. Over the course of breaths he’s managed a quietude, accepting some silent resolution. It lingers through her account of what would happen to him. What he would do to himself; apotheosis. Ascending as Xalious did, and maybe even Kasyr. This was long to be his end. More accurately, his destination. Though she’s correct, he could never fathom becoming something so grotesque as a god of undeath; he would never want to be something so foul in life. But gods are above such things, and he believed he would be too, when he transcended mortal concerns. Yet as he is now, a mortal, he’s able to be stunned by a mere word. Selfless. What luck that she should be so wrong about him! He doesn’t feel lucky though, he feels badly about something. “I’m not sure you understand me as I am now,” he says, a bitter edge on his tongue tilting between accusing and confession. What grace did he earn by lying and then keeping silent? It was nothing to let a friend mistake him now that the horizon was just ahead. What friends did he keep when they were wrong about him?
He abandons the conversation about himself and gods, because it was too tempting to do something foolish. “Of course, it’s outrageous! You can’t protect a grape by turning it into a raisin,” he says, joining in with a smirk at his own ridiculousness. “If you change yourself to survive then do you survive if the old you is gone? No, I don’t want to imagine you being something else,” he says, without seeing the irony.
“He wants to take you from me,” he answers quickly, concerning what Kasyr might want, but he quickly amends it. “From us! From all of us, who know you as you are.” He’s doing well. It’s so rare she agrees when passing out demerits to their colleagues and friends, but this was a good vein. He shouldn’t spoil it. He should save it for later.
He listens, and ponders, perplexed by her description of Kasyr’s ascension. “I always imagined there’d be a tower of light with the brightness of a thousand stars, whisking you away to the heavens…” It was like a fond memory, and a dreamy smile danced on his lips until he remembered; he hates this. “That’s how it was described in the accounts of Xalious, at least. He was a special case though.” To his dismay, she continues to moan over her friend’s fate, and his first instinct is to shame her. “Why do you even care? He made his choice and it was a selfish one.” His tone is harsh and conclusive.
Maybe it was by instinct, or experience, but he quickly tries to soften his condemnation retroactively, before she can jump to his defense. “It seems selfish anyway, but I don’t know why he did it. We needed him here.” What a thing to admit, and he regrets it instantly. “Anyway, we have work to do. We have to do something about that eye.” He produces a large, obviously ancient tome from behind his two sleeves with a crisscross flourish of his hands, and it lands flat on a table. “When Xalious and his friends (or whatever they were) destroyed that monstrosity, they used a piece of it.” He finds the page quickly and points out the passage, some lines of text written in dark smudging ink in the shape of symbols that mean nothing to most, but he remembers. “I don’t have my cipher with me but it says they used its tear.” He plants his gloved hands on the edge of the pages, flattening them. “Sometimes they call it a tear, sometimes they call it a jewel, I think the words mean the same thing. Sometimes.” He drifts back to his tea and lifts it delicately to his lips. “Obviously we can’t use it at all, Caluss will use it to kill us as soon as we touch it.” He stares at her, as if she already knows the answer and is just waiting for the chance to share it with him.
A look crosses her face at his words, one that spoke of deep hurt. As if he'd accused her of some great sin, some huge moral failing, and suddenly there were tears springing to her dark eyes again. Her lip trembled but she did not speak, nor did she weep. "Well it hasn't been for lack of trying," She jabs back, her tone matching the bitterness of his own. If Lanlan hadn't wished to be wounded by her unclear picture of him, perhaps he shouldn't work so damned hard to be such a puzzle to work through. Maybe he'd never asked for her faith, but he had it now, and Valrae wasn't letting it go so easily, no matter how he pushed her away.
"A raisin?" The offense in her tone was softened by the laughing edge as she wrinkled her nose. Like mist in morning sunlight, Valrae's anger faded around her. It was too heavy to hold. But the sadness was harder to shake, especially in the face of the irony he missed while it had hit her squarely atop her golden head like a hammer. The knowing look she narrows toward him now was as sharp as her words as she quips, "But you're happy to let me not only imagine but face such things."
She doesn't speak as he quickly corrects himself, only tilts her head toward him and casts him a more thoughtful glance. Something fragile and sweet and aching rested in her chest as she watched him. "As I am now?" She repeats. The witch wondered if he knew what she'd truly wished to ask him in that moment. Instead of waiting for him to figure it out or run from it, she continues. "Human, frail, fleeting." She shakes her head. "I'm sure that's how he sees me. All of us perhaps. Immortality is a burden I would never wish to carry. I could see it weighing him down every moment I looked at him, couldn't you?" What she was truly asking now he might know. 'Are you sure you want such a burden, Lanlan? Have you thought this through?'. But they both knew there was no changing his mind in this. Perhaps less so now that Kasyr might have beaten him to the punch. She hadn't considered how this might chafe against him, though she should have, and regretted not telling him sooner just as much as she regretted having to tell him at all.
Valrae almost laughs at his picture of ascension. Knowing better, she fixed a mask of seriousness on her face and only nodded. "I'd never even attempted to picture it but I think it might have been somewhere between both things." She admits. When he asks her a question she cannot answer she only shrugs her shoulders. "Because he is my friend, no matter how selfish." She can only nod again as he softens and mentions their need of him against Caluss. She was surprised to watch him produce the tome, thinking he might yet still be weak from what they'd just accomplished, but she should have known he would prefer progress over idleness. He was the Archmage, after all.
As he pauses in his explanation, Valrae only blinks back at him sleepily. "Will it?" She challenged. "I carved it from him with the athame. His power is still held within it but it is no longer connected to him. We cannot touch it directly but it can be used in a ritual to end him." She sounded surer than she was. Still, with the magic between them severed, as long as they kept the eye shrouded it could be the most powerful tool they currently held. It could be the key to ending the current God of Undeath.
Lanlan shrugs and turns away as Valrae’s eyes well up. He knew who he was, sometimes, and that’s exactly why he resisted being known by others. Especially the ones he cared about, because they’d never forgive him. Or maybe they would, but what if they didn’t? He moves on with a coy smile, “Yeah a raisin. You know it gets all the life sucked out of it and turns shriveled and ugly.” It was the perfect analogy, a raisin is exactly like a vampire. Then he was truly confused. “Face them? No I would never let you become a raisin, Valrae. If I could help it.”
“Yes as you are now, of course,” he says, wondering if he’s missing some deeper question, but powering through anyways. If it was important she would bring it up, he decided, without really believing it. “Like a mayfly,” he nods, agreeing with her perception of humanity. He wasn’t old enough to understand the weight of years either, but he remembers his people’s thoughts on the matter. Mayflies are born in the morning and die at night; so quick, so brief. The connotation was also that they were pests. “That’s what the elves say.” Then its back to the god talk. It was beginning to grate on him, like she was knowingly shoving the guilt of the lie back in his face again and again, but of course she wasn’t. Was she? “I’ve died before,” he says, and a chill runs up his back and into his shoulders. “I never want to do it again.”
“Some day people will see that I was right about-” there’s a rustling sound coming from somewhere in Valrae’s room that puts him immediately on edge. If there was a spy here… He holds a finger to his lips as he slides his glass wand out of a sleeve. “Some day,” he continues as before, while approaching an ornate looking wardrobe at the other end of the room. “People will see that I was right about everything, about Kasyr.” He raises musters a tiny charge into the end of his wand, and it goes from nearly invisible crystal to a miraculous magenta. “About Caluss,” he says, pausing to listen, but possibly for dramatic effect too. “And about-” He flicks the energy out of his wand and suddenly her wardrobe’s feet fly up and face the wall, and the doors fall open. A pile of clothes falls out of it, and something else in the pile. Something flopping, tangled up and confused. “What the-” A pink peacoat slides off the top of the pile revealing a kind of animal horn. “Medora,” he says with disappointment and relief.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he says. “She has excellent taste in clothes. If you find that any of them are…” he pushes a pile of clothes off Medora to reveal her innocent furry face, busily chewing away at some elegant piece. “Destroyed!” He accuses her as he reveals her, while she looks innocently unphased. He too looks innocently at Valrae, “I did tell you not to let her in your clothes closets…” He did not.
She was rolling her eyes even as she laughed as Lanlan deflected, describing how she might be as a raisin instead of acknowledging the irony. Her nose wrinkles as he compares her to a mayfly. “Rude.” She decides, shaking her head. Valrae was about to say something more when his tone took a darker turn, perhaps to remind him that he’d died more than once, but her mouth snaps shut as she thinks better of doing so.
The rustling and his own immediate switch to tension had her straightening in her chair, her golden braid slipping from her shoulder to swing lazily at her back. Her brows raise as he continues to speak, brandishing a wand. Her own was nowhere near her, which felt foolish now, and the witch felt a bit helpless as she watched him. Magic hummed in the air as the wand changed and the wardrobe sprang to life. She found her feet then, her heart pounding as the contents tumbled toward the floor.
“Medora!” She pronounces, at exactly the same moment as Lan, though her tone belied delight rather than disappointment. She crossed the room with him to inspect the small vandal, a hardly contained smile pulling at the corners of her lips. “Not destroyed!” She mock argues with Lan, reaching out to scratch below her soft chin. “She’s a fashion innovator.” This was said with a great deal of pride and a firm nod. “Isn’t that right?” Valrae asks the jackalope, picking up the decidedly ruined gown that surely cost enough gold coins that the street girl that hid in Valrae’s heart might have mourned for. Just a little.
Her look turns thoughtful. “If Medora is here…” Her dark eyes examine the pile of clothing on the floor. “That must mean…” She leans down, scooping up a silky cream cloak that looked more plump and wiggly than the rest of the clothes. “Aha!” She exclaims, revealing the near twin of Medora. “The second criminal.” Dust looked as guilty as a jackalope reasonably could. He was much skinnier than Medora, his amble bottom trembling pitifully as he looked up at them with glittering, moon round eyes. Val picks him up, his back legs kicking, and promptly kisses his pink nose. He thanks her by sneezing in her face. “Trouble makers.” She accuses the pair of them.
Lanlan tsks at the state of Valrae’s once fine clothes. As she holds it up it unfolds, and displays a symmetrical and tattered snowflake pattern, created when Medora chewed clean threw multiple layers. He gives it a second thought. “In fact, you might be right. It’s a little rough, amateurish, but…” He smiles proudly at the little beast, and his voice turns up an octave as he addresses her directly. “You’re a little tailor aren’t you?” Medora is quite exasperated at Valrae now, having stolen her meal before she could finish, and hops huffing toward Lanlan where she flumps over onto his foot. Lanlan then realizes that he just used the voice that was only for him and Medora to hear, and callously slides his shoe from under Medora’s flubs. “Since you two seem to be getting along so nicely, I think you wouldn’t mind keeping her in here for a while? I need to go and prepare for certain contingencies. The last few archmages left without a plan in place in case of their departure or demise. I won’t be doing that.” Surely his return to a very somber topic would be enough to erase what she just heard. But then he adds something else. “Sir Dustolomew, you are looking very, very healthy.” Then he nods at the jackalope, bending into a slight and courteous bow. Regrettably, Lanlan didn’t have any raspberries or strawberries on him, so he couldn’t offer anything Dust would appreciate. His long and silent endeavor to win the affection of both jackalopes would be put off, for now.
With that, he hands Valrae back her teacup and begins making his way for the door. It’s a gradual, somewhat forced effort, there were still so many things left unsaid, unexplained. Soon he might miss his chance to ever say what needs to be said. His hand falls on the doorknob and pulls it across his waist. “If you need anything, let me know,” he says. Now wouldn’t be the time either, it seems. As he leaves, he closes the door behind him, it appears. But the meerest breeze pushes the door open an inch. Just enough for Medora to turn one of her antlers into it and crack it open enough for her to slip out behind the archmage. What a horrible mistake he’s made, accidentally leaving the door open just enough for Medora to follow him out.