RP:Feel It Still

This is a Healer's Guild RP.

Summary: On his way back from a long journey North, Thamalys stambles into Kimiko, presently playing with her own life on the very edge of a cliff. A tense exchange develops between the two, punctuated by the peculiarity of both Healer and Mage. In the end, the Avian leaves with a fragile offer and a number of open questions to ponder.

Xalious Mountain Range: Steep Cliff

Kimiko stands unmoving on the very brink of ruination. Her bare toes wiggle above empty space, while the rest of her feet remain absolutely immobile. Indeed, the pale-skinned girl does not even appear to breathe as her remote gaze sweeps first one way and then the other across the panorama below. She remains this way for several moments, moveless and contemplative. In a lull between gusts of wind, Kimiko's right hand drifts up, dream-slow but unerring, to halt a skein of silky hair from obscuring her vision; it is almost as if she sensed the next exhale of prankish breeze split seconds before it came. As her thin lips peel back, showing pearly perfect teeth in a hideous grin, Kimiko judders her feet in the dirt, sways forward almost to the point of no return, then settles her weight back onto her heels. The laughter which follows has a hollow, ringing sound, as if Kimiko has caught its echo somewhere and only now is releasing it.

Thamalys swooped across the foggy air as if he wanted to mash the clouds with his silvery wings - a foul mood accompanying him, the rather unexpected sight of a slender shape at the very edge of the cliff was the last thing he wanted to witness. “By the Wind…” growled the Blue, plunging from the sky in a vortex of metallic feather and ivory dreadlocks. To him, judging the landing was nothing complicated - and yet, he opted for not interfering at all with whoever it was that seemed - at first glance at least - to be toying with the idea of throwing themselves into the void. Instead, the Spellblade would have measured his feet to touch at perhaps one or two meters away from Kimiko, his wings furling a split second after into a noisy cocoon. “Looking for something?” calmly offered the Healer, not even daring to look into the eyes of mage. Something about her led to a long shiver running through his spine - as long tongues of liquid blue fire would have start dancing across his chalky skin, waiting. Of all things he expected on his return…

Kimiko takes note of the arrival of the newcomer with narry a change to her vapid grin. Even her eyes, a depthless grey, register little as the large avian lands, but Kimiko does turn her body to more directly face the stranger before addressing him. "Looking for something?" Her voice is high, melodious, but peculiarly flat. "You might say so, yes. Feeling." She touches the tips of two fingers to the place above her heart, then lowers her hand. "In here is a void. It is just like the one near which I stand, but mine has fewer clouds and many voices to fill it. Not a place to jump to, certainly." And without giving any indication that she intends to move at all, Kimiko simply unhinges her knees, torques in midair, and falls from the cliff-edge. She plunges that way, now face-up to the blue sky, pealing more alien laughter toward the sun. Only moments after she begins her descent, though, the strange woman comes to a halt in midair, a cessation of movement so sudden that it causes her to sit bolt upright. Moments later, Kimiko begins to slowly float back up toward the place from where she had fallen. Now, when she speaks, her voice is louder, and has an edge to it. "You see? Even that, it was nothing. Just a plunge, a salvaging. No blood on the rocks, but no fear. No panic. No scream." As she approaches the cliff-top, Kimiko tips sideways and sort of sprawls onto the rock, then looks up at Thamalys from this new point of vantage. "What am I that cannot feel, even when she may fall to her death, do you think?"

Thamalys frowned, as the girl revealed the object of her peculiar quest. Clad in tattered black trousers and a rather loose shirt that some ages ago must have been white, the Winged Beast carried both the tools of his trade: the Gossamer Halberd laced on his back, Stain - the Cursed Blade - lazily swinging at his right side. An untidy coil of ivory dreadlocks cascaded on to his chest and shoulder, framing a cruel face that no one in Lythridel would have ever defined as beautiful. Instead, thin, cracked lips opened into a pallid grin, only remarked further by the solid blue of the Avian’s eyes. Every single inched of his skin, covered into tattoos that seemed to constantly twitch and twirl, most of them shaped in the form of ivy and flames. His journey north had meant nothing but bitter disappointment - he was tired, long hours flying into the rain on his old shoulders. A part of him just wanted to help the mage taking her last step - what was to be missed? He shook his head, trembling at the very evil cowering in his mind || Almost… || chuckled in perfect silence the Ancient Black who shared his soul. And yet, the Blue had no desire to listen to the foul temptations of such horrid guest. He was about to enquire further, when the mage jumped off the cliff. “No!” yelled the Spellblade, scrambling to twist on his heels and follow after her. Apparently, no need. Punctuated only by the heavy breath of the Avian, the girl’s magic brought her back, indeed without a single wrinkle on her brown. “That, miss, brought to - me - some feelings indeed…” panted the Blue, each fibre of his tall body still tense to the edge. “I suppose that’s something for you to ponder? Just because you appeared to have lost your way of feeling things, you are still very much capable of making - others - to feel them. Whether for good or bad, I cannot tell… what are you, you ask…” kept going the Winged Beast, pacing the ground with renewed suspicion, his gaze never for an instant failing to lock upon the shapes of the mage. “I fear I might know a fraction of the answer to that question… and if that is the case, there is little I can do to help. Pain - do you feel pain? We can arrange for some of that if you would be keen. But before anything else, pray tell… do you have a name?” The Blue was genuinely fearing that he was about write down yet another Necromancer ’s name upon his already long list - but, he had been wrong before… and as a Healer, he was somehow interested in that peculiar being. Perhaps the Wind wanted to give him something to think about upon his return after all?

Kimiko ponders the words of the enormous man now standing above her, and as he speaks, a strange transformation grips her countenance. At the mention of the feeling she has apparently brought about in him, her lips curve into something that looks almost like a kindly smile. It remains in place even as he speaks of pain, and asks whether or not she feels any. Attempting to lock eyes with him, still smiling, Kimiko raises one slim hand to her mouth, seizes the web of skin between thumb and forefinger in her teeth, and tears it wide open. Blood flows, but it seems...thicker, somehow, than it ought; instead of gushing forth, it oozes in a sluggish rill across her palm, then lazily snakes down her wrist. Kimiko's tongue slips through her smile to taste the blood, then withdraws. Her eyes do not change; they are as empty as before. "An answer, I think," she says. "The blood is sweet, but spoiled. Like a peach two days too soft. If it is to your taste, though..." She extends her wounded hand upward. "Another answer. I am Kimiko. At least, that name is as pretty as any other I have been given, and better than the worst of them. The Chained. Soulless. Hollow-Voice. Girl of Yesterday. That one came from a poet's lips. I misremember her name, but her..." Kimiko trails off here, and now a careful observer might notice that her eyes have taken on a faint, wistful cast.

Thamalys watched the mage dancing in between what he would have defined emotions - but that she would have probably dismissed as some shades of self with nothing attached to them. A broken thing - he thought of her. He still remembered, how that felt. Long ago, when it was his turn to feel void and without purpose, others came to bring him up into a new life - an existence of service, of intent, of duties. His gratitude knew no bounds. What did he have to offer then? Nothing - exactly as this very girl who stood in front of him - somehow defiant, positively - in his mind - insane. His perhaps irrespecutful, impulsive thoughts gained momentum when the girl teared open her own flesh. He was about to put forward a comment, when she dared to make an offer. He screamed, his Avian pride struck at the very core: “Taste?!” spat the Blue, a roaring blaze of fire mounting from his very own skin, “do you truly seek to end yourself, Kimiko-of-the-many-names? Of all that we hate, nothing will ever come closer to the Vampire! Albeit…” and similarly to the hesitance in the girl’s voice at the end of her speech, so the Blue stuttered and his booming growl reduced to a soft muttering, as he painfully remembered that the very first to offer him help after his fall was in fact one of that kind - a loyal, if tormented to the extreme, soul thanks to whom the Spellblade still stood to that day. “No, I would never drink anyone’s blood. I have spilled much, and that is enough to me. An enigma, that is what you are still to my old eyes. I shall not give you another name for your collection… not yet, at least.” He would relax to some extent, then, crossing his arms - the last embers of the fire which was threatening to raze the cliff soothed themselves into nothing. “Tell me, then - as stories are bound to be laced with feelings after all - how old are you? Who gave you those sad names? Tell me, and perhaps you might find yourself to feel something still…” he would not dare to sit, yet - at the very least, though, his bony hands are further away from the lethal blades the Winged Beast carried with him - it was a start, albeit one treading on very dangerous ground indeed.

If Kimiko is surprised at the offense and outrage Thamalys shows at her offer of a taste of her blood, she does not show it; indeed, her smile seems to grow a trifle broader for a moment before settling back to its former shape. "A name I would have from you before much longer," she replies, apparently not replying to anything he has said. She lowers her still-bleeding hand to her side, presses it for a moment against the skirt of the plain but slightly raggedy white dress she wears, then moves so that she is seated on the ground facing Thamalys; if her much-diminished height next to this man gives her any concern, it is not in evidence. "How old am I? I am just a little older than my first memory. Do you have it in your pocket, perhaps?" A trill of girlish laughter, as if she is either charmed by the image or making sport of the avian. "As to who gave me names, I know not. The names are snowflakes, but the people who made them are just a blizzard. All I know when I think of them is howling and numbness and clouds. Within and without. Howling and numbness and clouds." Suddenly the little woman is on her feet, all four and a half feet or so of her, and she is pacing to and fro, keeping well back from the cliff-edge now. Her tiny feet kick up little puffs of dust and pebbles as she moves. "Do you know what that is like? To not know anything? To not feel anything? Do you?" She almost screams these last two words, her voice gone harsh and dangerous. Faint bluish light spills from the fingers of one hand; it is formless and inconstant thus far, not coalescing into any form that might signal an attack, but whatever Kimiko might say or think to the contrary, something is happening here.

Thamalys was being tested on one quality he was awful at: patience. The girl made no sense. “My… pocket?” would have whispered the Avian in disbelief to nobody in particular, just as she pressed on. “Yes” he simply noted the Blue in answer’s to the Mage’s questions. “As a matter of fact, I once laid exactly where you are standing now…” - and he would point a long finger toward her - “… with no memory of myself, not even a name. You have many still, I had othing, I felt pain, and old age, and a rage I could not understand… but I had no purpose, I was nothing. Now, look at you…” he went on, tilting his massive cranium to one side, as if mildly amused in witnessing some potentially rather lethal magic brewing within the girl. “Look at your hands - what is it that you are trying to achieve? Do you have control upon your very self? If not, I cannot help you in the ways of the Healers, but via the way of the Spellblades only” It is a threat, and not even a veiled one. Everywhere he looked he saw danger - every detail of the girl reeked of it, but a Healer he was before anything else. “Or, you can do what I did, Kimiko - to allow yourself to be helped. How, I do not know - my guts tell me I cannot be the one to lead you through a new section of yourself… but others will come, if you let them. Give me your hands, child…” suddenly offered the Blue, with a single mighty step positioning right in front of the Mage. His own magic would have protected him from whatever she might have been about to conjure - or so he thought. Again, he had been wrong before, but this had to be fate: to take the hand of a broken creature on the very spot he was lifted to a new self… "the Wind had played this well…” muttered the Winged Beast while tempting to reach her hands after all.

Kimiko glances at her hands when directed to do so, but makes no comment on the slowly growing nimbus of blue energy around one of them. "What is self?" Kimiko asks. "To have control of a thing, should I not understand it? Your question is ignorance...but come." The blue energy is nowhere to be seen now, and Kimiko extends both small hands to grasp those of the avian before her. She has no conscious desire to harm this man, in this moment, but some semblance of her broken, chaotic nature may nonetheless be translated to Thamalys by way of their skin-on-skin contact. "What I feel comes in flickers and licks. A brief tingle of pleasure. An echo of heartbreak. Malice and contempt, like scum on water. Faint, formless fury. Sadness like the end of the world. Joy to make me burst." With each explanation, facilitated by their shared touch, Kimiko, in some way she does not fully understand, tries to share the essence of these sensations. "Do you feel? Do you know? Do you understand? This is self. This is Kimiko, the tiniest piece of her." Unknown to the little mage, there are now tears in her grey eyes, tears which do not fall. They have no impact on her voice, which is firm, high and somehow remote. "She died, you know. I...died. I don't know how. But these fragments are everything I have left." Her head lowers. "And I want it back.”

Thamalys nodded in approval, seeking to catch a glimpse of the girl’s soul. The moment their hands touched, he knew that he had no hope to understand the whole - perhaps no one could, surely not the Mage herself. “Ah, the irony…” he shook his head, a sad grin blossoming on that ugly old face. “I seem not to be able to catch even a single shade of what you are… ever-changing chaos… my kin is not meant to meddle with such cacophony. We stand true to our logic, and to that we vow ourselves… you on the other hand…” and at that moment he would have left her hands with a sigh, almost a sound of resignation and denial. “Whilst nothing of all that can be seen on your face… or…” he had to stop as she welled up. Perhaps she did not know - how - to feel anymore? He told her that much. “I do not understand you, no - I would not lie. But there are tears in your eyes, and powerful emotions stirring beneath your skin. Perhaps you forgotten how to cherish them - perhaps you’ll find them again. The whole, you are looking for the whole picture… that might never come back in full. I stopped searching for mine long ago - everything I found, I regretted finding. Do you know where to start, Kimiko? Who took your life? Who gave this un-life to you?” He could not betray his disgust. She was indeed undead - despite everything he learned, he still felt an instinctive hate toward those things. He lived to feel the Wind on his skin - they felt… nothing, precisely as she said. However, this one seemed to not be at peace with it. How peculiar…

Kimiko takes one measured step backward as Thamalys releases her hands. She raises her head now, blinks twice, feels the wetness of tears, and flicks her tongue out to catch one. "Salty," she murmurs, then falls silent for a moment. "No, sir, I do not know who took my life, or who might have scattered it to the winds. But it was mine. And I. Want. It. Back." This pronouncement is delivered with deadly, measured coldness, and although Kimiko may seem almost childlike of appearance and voice, there is something inexorable in this declaration which is, all unknown to her of course, likely to further validate the avian's hatred of the undead. As quickly as this darker aspect has come, though, it flutters away, transient as a moth-wing, replaced by something that is almost painfully vulnerable. "Maybe you are right, since I am not. Maybe progress comes not from finding buried shards but in building new. Or in finding some purpose to fill me and drive all such notions out of my head in the first place. Yes...perhaps a vessel." Something seems to light in her eyes briefly at this thought before fading. "Or perhaps that last is what I was meant to think, when I was brought back. It does feel...familiar. But what is familiar is compelling, even when it is not good for us, yes? Yes." She claps her hands together sharply, just once. "Is your mind a tangle yet, sir? Have I made you regret the vantage of this cliffside? Perhaps this was not a good place for you after all." She chuckles. "Or perhaps I do myself too much credit.”

Thamalys exhaled an apparently endless volume of air. It was like trying to catch a lighting bolt - nothing about the Mage seemed to stand still for long. “Yes, Kimiko, you have managed to confuse me - mightily, in fact. I am sure a part of you would rejoice at that - as to why, though, I cannot fathom.” Slowly, the Blue turned on his heels, his mighty frame obscuring sunlight for a moment. “Know this - I have no time or indeed interest into riddles of any sort. But, if a time would ever come for you to know who took your life… I might be convinced to lend my blade to your quest. If!” and here the Spellblade was forced to stop a step already in the making, his (bare, as per usual) foot dangling into mid-air, “you are truly seeking to renounce the un-death. I have seen stranger things happening after all. Farewell - for now - Kimiko-of-the-many-names…” said the Winged Beast, already moving away from the girl in a swirl of silver. “My name is Thamalys - ask any of the Healers, either in Larket , Frostmaw or Cenril, they’ll know where to find me….” and with that last salutation the Blue would melt away into the stony profile of the path. Some of his original irritation had now been replaced by a deep sorrow he knew he could not fix. “Wind, give her - something - anything…” pleaded to the fresh air the Healer, ambling onto the track with an even heavier pace than usual. What a horrendous day that turned out to be after all…