RP:The Secret of the Sand Dollar Part 1

The Southern Beach of Cenril

Kirien had spent half of his evening here, or rather beneath here. Slipping under the surface via one of the many crevices and caverns peppering the area, he'd stalked the shadows and followed the slow path of magma to the deep places of the world; and there he'd worked his magic away from starshine and cool ocean air, completely at home surrounded by the heavy, constant presence of the earth and its slow beat pulsing rhythmically beneath his feet. Only after hours of traversing a veritable maze of adjoining lava rivers had the seeker come across what he sought all this time, and now Kirien was returning, triumphant, to the surface, the empty satchel he'd brought down here with him now stuffed with golden glints and secrets. The night sky, unseen, twinkled above as though to welcome him back as he reached open air again, mimicking the contents of his bag in silver. His nose scrunching up some, the vampire inhaled once to clear his lungs as dirt-covered hands raised to wipe uselessly at the smears of mud marring his cheeks - and really, they only made the problem worse. Ignoring it, he hopped onto a rather unstable-looking pile of old bricks near the cliff edge and with the sea foaming and roaring below him, a noisy abyss, he sat a while to rest before attempting the journey back to Frostmaw.

There was a sudden ruckus on the shoreline, a cacophony of squarks and squeeps, the sharp snap of myriad wings and Kirien would find himself momentarily engulfed in a panicky flock of seagulls, awakened from dreams of soaring higher than the sun, and sent into a terrified flap. The cause was not immediately apparent, but the result was.. unfortunate. A hundred gulls or more swirled low about the vampire, unwilling to fly into the night, unwilling to return seaward where something frightful was felt like some perverse and backward net of fear cast out from the depths toward land. A hundred seagulls all at once amassed around Kirien, and lightened their load for the sake of terror and swiftness, in a rain of guano that spattered all below the flapping, squarking flock in fish-scented shades of yellow-grey and off-white. On the shore to the south, fish beached themselves, and the water twinkled as though festooned with yuletide lights on the moonlit ocean’s surface: a million tiny squid bobbing on the crests of the choppy waves.

Kirien could not see the gulls. He felt them though, distorting the air all around him with frenzied wing beats, their shrill cries of panic filling his ears - the emotion itself, too, brushed against his psyche in the same flighty manner; a struggling, fearful bird flapping its tiny wings. Curious as to what had disturbed them so, the vampire tilted his head upwards as though able to watch their movements, face tipped slightly to reflect starlight in his eye when all of a sudden something wet touched against his cheek and dripped, cold, following the line of his jaw. Its stench had Kirien bolting upright in surprise as the realisation of what was pelting onto the bricks around him -- and onto him -- hit the empath with as much force as that acrid smell had thrust itself up his sensitive nose. "Ah, shit." That fitting curse left his lips in a mutter as an arm came up in futile attempt to block more of the horrid guano, and Kirien leapt from the cliff. He did not go far, sliding a short ways before abruptly coming to a halt at an incredibly awkward angle granted only by his supernatural balance and ability to meld his boots to the cliff face, swinging out fearlessly over the frothing ocean as gulls continued to swirl and cry above. Perhaps they were warning him but Kirien could not understand any of their sounds, and so he moved on, further down the cliff and off southward, eager to escape the mass of birds and to discover what had startled them from their sleep.

The inevitable cod and a few straying haddock flipped and flopped, gasping for the water that lay behind them, and from which they’d fled on the approach of the abomination that had loped four-knuckled and slowly along the seabed up from its preferred abyssal depths to the shallows, accompanied by a galaxy of luminous cephalopods. Maladroit broke the water just as Kirien attained the beach, the weirdling’s rubbery skin slick and mottled, shaking water from its batlike wings. The familiar’s faceless head rose, as though noselessly sniffing about, and splashed free of the tidal wash and its chaos of frightened sealife. Maladroit rippled an aura that was eldred and repulsive, even for him, but seemed serene enough as he shuffled wetly across the silica grains toward Kirien, lifting into his clawed hind feet to walk the short remainder bipedally, so as to free up his many-jointed fingers for the purpose of mad and fervent wibbling.

Remains of a Castle

Coming in closer to this structure of substantial size, you observe that the stone of which it is made of is actually a form of coral matter, and would usually be found on the bottom of the oceans in lore, filled by colonies of mermaids and mermen wielding tridents. You're urged to nearly laugh at the thought of mermaids. There are multiple orifices throughout the structure vertically, like doorways designed as entry points. As you stand amongst the sand, you notice a trail coming from the base of this bastion of sea origin snaking along the ground; brilliant white and black sands inherently organized by natural forces. For something so simple really, looking like a giant multi-colored sand dollar, it's quite astonishingly beautiful.

Hitting the sand in a small spray of wispy grains and small pebbles, he took a moment to shuck off his coat, now stained with guano much to his ire, and dropped it and his bag of precious shiny objects on a rock in the shadow of the cliff. Carefully Kirien picked his way a short distance along the shoreline, close to the water but not quite close enough that incoming waves washed any higher than his ankles, the empath always wary of that unfathomable blackness crawling at the edges of his vision. Once, he bent to prod at one of the fish flailing around at his feet. It flipped over, mouth agape and silently gasping, and after a second he attempted to pluck it up and fling it back into the ocean it simultaneously craved and feared; and it was as he was rising back to his full height that he came to spot Maladroit emerging from the shallows writhing nearby him. The gaunt's aura, more ominous and fetid than usual, provoked a blink and a brief pause but the vampire's lips were quirking into a grin all the same at that silent greeting. It was returned in kind, his own fingers, though possessing a normal amount of joints, giving a queer little wiggle themselves.

The sky glowered with the first glamour of a distant storm roiling in from where it spat lightning over the Black Gulf, dragging with it a throng of black-bottomed clouds, but as yet the sky above this part of the world was starry, and it was to these stars that Maladroit next lifted the blankness of his head. There would be a long moment in which nothing else occurred, and then the abomination loped past Kirien, leathern wing brushing the kit, barbed and venomous tail-tip held out of harm’s way in a gesture that might have, in any other creature, been more easily deemed polite. Maladroit moved toward the ruined castle now, and would end his jaunt in the middle of that sand-painted sand dollar, where he shivered audibly, the sound of old books burning, of something slithering through last autumn’s fallen, mulchy leaves.

Kirien spared a glance up as though imitating Maladroit beyond their odd greetings. But it taunted him, the night sky, with glints and shimmers of pale starlight that were unseen but which he knew were there, ever out of his reach like so many things he grasped for. He looked away. Static began to flicker in the air around the vampire, ozone in his nose. Perceptive as always, his head turned so he could stare blindly in the direction of the approaching storm on the horizon instead, the rorschachian cloudscape itself not drawing his attention; but it was the crackle of building lightning slowly spreading its way southwards toward them that pulled his focus there. Blinking when Maladroit brushed past him, Kirien was still a moment before he turned to follow the gaunt, sharing the other's palpable silence as he strode quietly into the skeleton of the once-castle, hands stuffed in the depths of his pockets. His mouth -had- opened to ask a question, in fact, one he knew would probably not be answered anyway, when Maladroit shuddered and Kirien paused, his ears standing tall and filled with whispers.

The gaunt shuffled over, stirring the pattern in the sands, whereon a breeze gusted across the beach, and another, soon seven of them from all directions, buffeting the black and the white grains back into place where fractal lines had been smirched by the passing of the two. As though he’d waited for those winds, Maladroit stood quiescent, swaying slightly on his hind feet, and once they passed would swing sidelong to grab Kirien by both shoulders and turn the kit toward the remnant castle so that he faced it squarely. The coral structure was not of landlubber make, and its upper doorways owned no staircases, suggesting it was once a home for creatures that had no use for gravity. And with that firm contact, Kirien would once more find his blind eyes opening to a new kind of sight. Not, this time, the strange white pixilated world he’d seen on the sea-shelf above the Elder Kraken’s lair, but vision that attuned itself to time. In one instant, he’d see the castle reduced to dust, and in the same instant see it as it was, once, in distant millennia, undersea and thronged with fishtailed beings whose mouths were filled with sharpness, whose fingers wore webbing between them, whose lidless eyes now stared upon the gaunt and his companion as though not merely the product of a vision, as the kelp swayed about them and fish swam, and the end of the world swallowed all the dust it had made of everything – all at once.

He moved with the wind like a grain of sand, whirling about the outskirts of the castle's remains and drifting, hither to thither, tracing a light path through black and white grains touched by the growing breeze. Three-sixty turns brought him about numerous times on his wandering way as lightning sizzled with more intensity in the air, fizzing around him, almost tangible. The vampire only paid marginal attention to it now, focused on creating patterns in the sand while he patiently waited. All at once the wait ended, for he found gnarled hands clamping down on his shoulders in the wake of those winds and Kirien spun along with the movement, turned toward the structure rising up into the night sky and into nothingness in his perception; and that perception changed suddenly with the contact, as he had almost expected and perhaps hoped for, but it did not melt into that ethereally beautiful and confusing mesh of white pixels and unimaginable colour. No, instead he saw a myriad of different instances of this location in time, all crushed together to form one image, and it felt as though he were underwater even when he also swore he could taste dust and death in his mouth. Swaying in time with the pull of water that was not there but was, he reached out a hand to try to touch something, anything, of what he saw - fierce beasts or kelp or fish alike.

There are places in the world spoken of in whispers, alluded to in ancient scrawls scraped into rock, places where the Four Roads of All Things meet, and meld, and time and space are thus mingled and all is One. Such places exist not only in the dim recesses of forests and the bowels of mountains, but in the parlours of elderly women and next to lamp-posts, in horse fields and fighting arenas. They are rarely seen, but often felt as a shiver, a shudder, a sudden déjà vu, and those with the Sight have ever been employed to seek them out. Upon them are often built palaces and labyrinths, churches and blood-letting altars. This was just such a place of convergence, and Maladroit gave Kirien the peace – as it were- to take in the jangle of times that crashed together here, letting go of the kit as the sand dollar blazed of a sudden with the magic of long-gone seafolks. The gaunt’s fingers weaved mad baskets of nothing in the air, though Kirien’s newly warped perceptions might glimpse the cat’s cradle of fibrous light wending between them, every new wibble bringing the filaments to a new configuration. And as Maladroit spun the threads of time, so too did time itself settle like an ocean after a storm, into gentler waves that left the pair underwater and countless generations in the past, while the ancestors of the merfolks swam by, some of them jolted by the pair of unlikely ‘ghosts’ come to wander their palatial home. Kicking into a swim, Kirien in tow, the gaunt pushed them through a school of sardines and through the most elaborate of the many high-up doorways into the palace. Like ghosts they passed guards armed with tridents and coral knives. Like ghosts they flickered through the gills and tentacles of immense carven sea-beasts, until the statues let them go and they entered a hall of sorts, a bubble within the coral that was white and almost spherical. It walls were rich with carvings, and it was these the abomination wished the kit to view: the ancient histories, the prophecies, the stories of the seafolk who’d grown and flourished and faded away long before any land creature had grown so swelled of brain as to walk freely upright, let alone been possessed of art or language.

Kirien fell but it felt as if he were flying, just for a second before the water of millennia past caught and wrapped him in its cool arms, swaying in constant motion. He'd learned to be wary of the water after he'd lost his sight and its enchanting nature had been swallowed instead by a black, impenetrable abyss of sightlessness and unease; for the glittering spangles dancing on the tops of cresting waves were only whispers; and the endless shift of colours in the sunlight, from blue to turquoise to aqua green, embellished with golden highlights where sun struck the water; and all of this beauty had been lost to him in shifting whirls of nothingness. Yet right now Kirien was fearless and seeing, struck with wonder at the staggering workings of the gaunt close by. They called him hellish - an abomination, unnatural, disturbing. Kirien felt he was everything but that, in these moments when Maladroit shared with him the awe-inspiring sights and sensations of the world and worlds beyond it. Time and space coalesced here and he saw things he should not rightly see, blind or not, lost in an ancient undersea landscape full of life. Here, he was a ghost, a wraith traversing time and long-forgotten kingdoms, swimming in an ocean of memory and whispers. With his wings, a tiny replica of Maladroit's own, unfurling in quiet delight behind him as they ripped their way out from beneath his sweater, he swam, kicking and winging his way through the palace with the gaunt at his side. An unlikely pair as ever, they ducked under the carven tributes to fearsome beasts and moved through likenesses of massive undersea giants, until they came across that white rounded room with walls peppered with carvings. Such things had always been of interest to Kirien, recently especially due to it being one of the few ways he could read these days, and so he'd be driving himself through the water to press curious palms against the impressions of seafolk history. It was habit, to touch and feel every contour of those pictures even when he could currently see, and slowly he began to map out as much of the wall as possible, fingertips to coral, awestruck mind carefully memorising everything.

Maladroit had his own purposes for being here, and floated off to press his blank face into this shallow dip or that around the walls, webby hands splayed against the white coral as he did so, lost in reveries so strange as to be half beyond his own otherworldly understanding, while the kit inspected the glyphs. Weaving between them, circling the room, came a shoal of tiny, extinct octopoids with human-like eyes and feathery extrusions on their tentacles which fanned about them like the fronds of spectacular, alien ferns. When Maladroit was done, he sank into the central portion of the sphere, still as a gargoyle, and merely waited for Kirien to finish his ‘reading’.

Kirien looked to Maladroit once or twice as he read, the sight granted to him currently prompting the empath into glancing around more than he normally would, taking in the other's movements as his hands gently ghosted over ancient glyphs and memorised all their contours. Able to read and look elsewhere at the same time, he watched the gaunt with some measure of curiosity and a deeper-set feeling; a sort of silent thanks that he'd yet to properly express. How did he go about that, anyway? Various ideas were quietly considered while Kirien traced the rise and fall of sacred buildings and the tremendous feats accomplished by this ancient undersea people, and their battles against huge marauding carnivores. Eventually, after scouring as much of the room as he could, he pulled back and pushed away from the wall to join Maladroit again, tiny wings giving a little twitch to the gaunt as he swung round, surrounded by groupings of tiny feathered octopi, and raised his left hand. His palm pressed lightly to the abomination's featureless head and he poured as much of that unspoken gratitude through himself; for giving him vision again in so many ways; for crossing time with him to reveal the hidden wonders of the ages past and bear witness to the beasts dwelling in deep places; for allowing Kirien to better connect with and understand the world; and for existing, altogether. Who needed words?

Maladroit accepted the touch as he did everything else – blankly - and offered nothing that could be construed as any kind of response. Yet, he reached toward one of the octopi, his fingers once more committing their spiderish dance through the water. The little creature flipped and pulsed its feathery arms their way, until it took up a station as a sort of many-legged satellite around Kirien’s head. Then the gaunt would point to one portion of the sphere, where the glyphs reverted by sheer age into pictographs. Trailing over to the carving, Maladroit carefully showed the kit crude pictures of a great mer-king and his army fighting off not one but two Elder Krakens. As the story unfolded, it was clear that one of the unimaginably colossal sea-beings had perished in the war, the other shown skulking away to a distant gulf, with the sign for ‘neverending’ beside it. The gaunt seemed highly emphatic that Kirien pay attention to this tale, jabbing his clawed forefinger into the coral until a tiny piece crumbled off. Then a long, blank stare at the kit, and Maladroit apparently decided it was time they were going. As he made for the gauntlet of statues, the feather-fingered octopus was still circling Kirien’s head like a strange little moon.

A lack of any noticeable response had perhaps been expected because Kirien only smiled in the face of that almost ever-present silence. He withdrew after a moment, gaze lowering briefly to take in the familiar but secretly missed view of his own hand - he wiggled his fingers once, stony digits reacting in a relatively normal manner but the sight was enough to summon a slightly broader smile to his lips. Looking up, the vampire drifted along with Maladroit to that one section of wall of particular interest to the gaunt, the octopus-turned-satellite following to swirl lazily about his head as he leaned to inspect the images. The ancient tale was brushed over with a fingertip, curiosity becoming wonder, then melting into something more difficult for him to name, even though it was his own feeling. He looked to Maladroit, expression questioning: the remaining kraken that had fled into darker, unimaginably deep waters in the wake of that vicious battle was the being he had met last time, right? Once more Kirien traced over the imagery and the rough-carven sign for never-ending before it appeared that his guide to this shard of the past intended to leave; and after a pause he shifted to follow, winging his way along through the water and after Maladroit. The octopus, he noted, seemed content to accompany him and earned itself a little grin and a swish of white-tipped tail from the fox as they passed under the wavering shadow of a stone kraken's tentacle.

Returning through the last vestige of that ancient mer-king’s once vast empire, hurled up onto the land as the sea receded from the world’s shaking and shuddering throughout its many ages, Maladroit led the way back to the sea-runed sand dollar which still was glowing faintly. Kirien would experience that same sense of all-time-at-once, terrifying glimpses of the future, dazzling visions of the past. When the design’s flares ceased, the odd pair stood on a rather ordinary beach before a remnant castle, whose history was forgotten by all but the vampire and his anomalous guide. The gulls had pecked a midnight snack from the shore, gulping a few stranded fish before heading back to their sandy roosts, and the storm had clearly been and gone around them – or why else were the pair drenched to the skin and the sand strewn with shells and bits of wet kelp? One argument against such a plausible explanation might be that Kirien still had that peculiar little octopus flipping lazily around his head, for all the world as though it was still underwater, though the creature, as inexplicable as it was, was rendered moreso by being not only demi-transparent as it merrily swam through thin air, but by being entirely visible to Kirien himself.

Upon reaching that glowing sand dollar, he felt as if the world was wrenched awkwardly on its axis once more as they began their journey home, past and future whizzing by and whirling, dizzyingly fast, before and around him. Kirien almost wanted to stretch out a hand and see what scrap of time he could grab hold of next, but all too soon everything was out of reach, like the stars above his head; and that undersea empire of the distant past was merely a teardrop suspended on a sunbeam, and then his borrowed sight blinked out. Taking a moment to readjust to his own sense of perception and recall the reality they were present, the vampire was turning toward Maladroit, brushing kelp off a dripping shoulder, when that tiny octopus spun into his vision, clear as anything and moving as though the air was water. He blinked, once. "Huh." Its slow dance was watched a moment before he shook himself off a little, his tail bushing out a bit as it dislodged the water weighing it down, and then he looked to the gaunt nearby. "…The world's a pretty big place." And old.

Maladroit would not have had anything to say to that, even had he the necessary means to do so. The gaunt stared blindly at the blind vampire and his excitable new companion, allowing silence to be his farewell. Then he was loping back toward the water, then vanishing into it with a smooth dive that left the swishing tip of a barbed tail the last to be seen of him – for the present, anyway.

Kirien grinned. He had no problems being answered with silence, as was the gaunt's way, and he wiggled his fingers in a short wave of equally-quiet farewell to the abomination before he disappeared into waters that were once more an abyssal black in his sight. This story was absently added to the list of fantastical tales to tell Jolie when such an opportunity came about, and after a short time of pensive thought and idle dancing with his queer new cephalopod friend, the empath left the remains of the coral castle to collect his coat and bag, almost forgotten. He headed back toward Frostmaw as he'd intended before he'd been caught up in a storm, and in spider-webs and droplets of time.

...Explaining the floating octopus to his coterie mates would be an interesting venture.