RP:Warmth

From HollowWiki

Part of the What You Leave Behind Arc


Summary: Kahran torments Valrae, whose open defiance seems to satisfy him. In his departure, he hints that she'll soon face a terrible test.

Cenril: Sandy Beach

Valrae ||The pardon she'd received for her crimes in Cenril had put her name and face in the Almanac again. A sketch of her likeness, though they never could quite get her mouth right, loomed under the article flatteringly titled 'Murderess Turned Heroine Pardoned'. While the front page was still reserved for news on the attack and Uma's rise to power, her little article was placed near the horoscope columns and add sections. Valrae's folded copy sat tucked under her opened bag and a half empty flask. The blanket her things rested on was the color of ripe peaches and sandy, littered with a discarded beach hat, hair ribbons and pretty seashells. Further down, the witch had waded into the sea until the waves swelled to her hips. Her crimson skirts bloomed around her like blood, moving rhythmically with the beat of the waves. The shore was still littered with debris and the blackened ash piles of the mass pyres that scarred the soft sand. Willow's body might have been one of the nameless dead that was burned, Valrae would never know. It was easier not to think about. Her mind flinched away from her memory like a hand from a flame. Irenic helped sooth her, sure. He would wrap her up and fill her with tea and push as many thoughts of love through their bond as he was able. Secretly, she'd taken to drink to numb what tea couldn't reach. For when sleep wouldn't come, for when she closed her eyes and all that she could see was the frozen expression on Crystal's face or the black water that had taken Willow. For when the screams of the labor camp she'd left in flames echoed in her chest and threatened to shatter through her ribs. But she couldn't hide forever. The family of her friends had begged to know what had become of their loved one's bodies. Lost at sea she'd told them, her eyes dry and haunted. There would be no burial rituals, no stone placed in the circle of their coven's sacred grounds. And now Valrae stood in the sea, her slim figure illuminated in the dying afternoon light by the five white candles suspend in the salted air that formed a circle around her, as she offered a prayer. "With birth the earth becomes our body, the sea our blood, the moon our hearts and wind our breath. In death may you return with peace, your body to the earth, your blood to the sea, your breath the wind. Your hearts remain to guide me. As I will so mote it be."


Lionel | A man with a tan hat keeps his gaze down low to the sand as he passes Valrae with hasty steps. He fades gradually into the snaking northern shoreline, and when he’s just a dot in the peripheral, a howling wind billows through the area. Autumnal chill soaks into the bones of those few who still number along the beach, and only a devout priest remains thereafter. He’s down on his knees with his hands keeping warm above a steady fire, where garlic cooks on a spit. His robes are like a rainbow medley of color. He’s chanting in low prayer until Valrae’s distant voice captures him from her perch upon the breakwater. The priest hoists himself up, a hard thing for a man his age, and tries to make better sense of the words. But the howling wind punctuates his efforts, and he waves his hand in irritation. “What foul weather, to deny an old man his idle curiosities. The gods are not pleased.” He kneels by the fire again, but a hooded man in a black cloak had somehow appeared before the flames in the span it took him to eye Valrae’s distant figure. “That woman’s words are not for you, priest,” the hooded figure says in a gravelly tone. The priest laughs nervously and folds his rainbow robe around himself defensively. “Share my fire with me, then, ser, but don’t profess to tell me I cannot eavesdrop every here and then. Knowledge does not come to them that express consummate respect for privacy. To learn, one must be comfortable overstepping one’s bounds. Just a bit.”


Lionel | The priest tends to his roasting garlic. “Now come, share my fortunes with me. Eat.” He begins to pluck the cloves from the spit, but the hooded man places a too-thin, bruised and blistered hand upon his hand to stop him. “No.” The priest gulps hard and pulls away his hand. “Very well, ser. You can choose not to partake, of course. That is your right. By the gods’ grace, I shall not ask you to leave, however. ‘Tis a cold night and fires are too few and far between.” The hooded man seems to smile through the shadows obscuring his face. “You claim the gods are gracious, but also displeased. Are they not also humble, but vain? Has it not been said that the gods are both protective and vengeful? Destructive but also creative?” The priest tries to put on a happy air, folding his arms around his chest. “Ah, you wish to learn more about the gods, my friend. I would be glad to avail you to the knowledge I have gathered. Yes, ‘tis true they are a great many things. The gods are mysterious, but we can infer their desires through signs. For example…” The hooded man grabs the priest’s forearm and thrusts it into the fire. The priest screams in pain, then in horror as his whole arm melts to ashes. Valrae will surely be alerted to a terrible transgression behind her. The aggressor pulls away his hood with his free arm, revealing the face of Kahran. “I know the gods better than you ever could, priest. And the fire isn’t rare; it’s everywhere, and you shall feel it burning utterly now, in your final breaths.” Kahran tosses the rest of the priest’s body into the fire, incinerating the body too rapidly for magic not to have been involved in some way. The fire is instantly snuffed out thereafter, leaving the sickening stench of garlic and sweet-melted flesh and a cold, black, starless night from which Valrae will see a pair of too-bright sky blue eyes staring at her from the darkness. “Come,” Kahran intones. “Share the warmth.”


Valrae let the candles sink into the water. She watched the small flames blink out and their white bodies float under the waves until they sank from view. The sea had swallowed the sun by the time she waded back to the shore. The gossamer and silk of her skirts were heavy as they clung to her legs. Her hair was carelessly free around her, dark honey tangles in the fading orange light and damp where the curled ends had touched the waves. The magic she'd wielded wrapped around her like the dripping cloth of her skirts. Her shoulders were sun reddened and free, her bodice loose and informal. Her cheeks were pink and windblown. By the time she'd returned to her blanket, a sudden gale had descended the beach. It carried something more than cold with it, had the witch turning her gaze down the stretch of sand to where a fire burned. A shudder rolled through her but with nothing more than her senses seeming to be amiss, she turns back to her things. Valrae only just managed to wrap her shawl around her chilled shoulders when a scream shattered the rhythm of the sea and the whine of the wind. Her heart slammed to her throat, her eyes snatching back to the fire. Her body moved of it's own accord, before her mind could piece together the scene of a hooded figure dragging the priest into the flames. Her skirts were heavy though and her bare feet found no traction in the sand. The scene was moving too fast. Her shawl slipped from her shoulders and floated down in her wake. She watched the priest die as a strangled cry wrenched from her throat. The only sound now came from the pounding of her own blood in her ears. Her hands clutched at the bunched, damp fabric of her skirts as her eyes adjusted to the settling darkness, now void of firelight. Bile rose to the back of her throat at the stench. A new cold settled into her bones, deeper than the chill of the wind that stung her cheeks. Kahran's voice echoed in her crowded mind. "There is no warmth here." Her answer falls from trembling lips.


Lionel | Kahran plucks a garlic clove delicately and plops it into his mouth. Too-thin lips move up and down in a bizarrely inhuman fashion as he chews. While he finishes his bite, the whole world seems to shift. The sunless sea tilts its hues from deep blues and stark blacks to an impossible magenta with streaks of cyan like parallel lines on a piece of paper. The sky retains its dimness, but it’s been switched to slate gray, the color of rainclouds but oddly uniform, as if some cosmic architect struggled to give texture to a piece and it came out flat and eerily symmetrical. That same haunting symmetry pervades through the sand, which still feels coarse and proper to the feet but is patched together in rows and columns of the little mineral particles. Cenril itself is no longer a series of nearby towers and wood-roofed structures but rather a collection of obsidian obelisks all to the precise heights of the buildings they’ve replaced. The docks are gone entirely, but where once there were boats there now rest geometrical shapes with the suggestion of boats. They float in the magenta sea, bobbing up and down in exaggerated jerks. Kahran wipes his oily hand and takes a few slow steps toward Valrae. “Oh, but there can be. There can be.” He nods solemnly. Lines of blue-hot flame sear the sand directly ahead, cutting Valrae off from easterly escape. Lines appear to her north and south as well, both sides of the patchwork sand, in the distance so that she might run toward them for a time but never pass through them without great magical effort or physical punishment or both. Only the sea grants her escape, only the pinkish sea. “Ample warmth, witch. Why not wade in those waves anew and see what hosts you’ll find in this strange plane’s aquatic approximations? I am told -- although I have not seen for myself, I must admit -- that there are monsters even in the shallows which would -beg- to eat a woman alive.” He pauses, places his index finger upon his scarred cheek, and smirks. “Your alternatives are clear: accept my invitation, joining me where I stand… or fight your way out, as many witches would choose. Should you fail, even death shall not be so sorrowful a thing as the pain, the humiliation, the -barbaric- treatment so many of your ilk suffer so richly at the whims of evil men.” Kahran stares knowingly.


Valrae is still. As her world shifts, rearranges into some unsettling mockery of what was once her home. The sky above her changes, the sand below. The power she'd cloaked herself in wanes. Her eyes, dark and wide, lined black with kohl, remain fixed to Kahran's face as he steps forward. "No," She whispers without conviction as the flames spurn to life around her. The sea, unfamiliar now and discolored beckons yet she makes no move to run. It's as if her feet are cemented to the eerily smooth sand around her. Her body pulses with tension, her fight or flight reflexes stalling and causing her to tremble weakly. Her breath is caught in her chest. Panic is wrecking her mind, tossing it like a raft in storm boiling sea, and she can't clear her mind from it's raging fog.. Until he mentions her people. Suddenly, she steps forward on an exhaled breath, her chin tilting higher just a fraction. Her wind tangled hair floats behind her, captured by a breath of wind. Her skirts still cling to her, sand to the bottom hem, her ankles and her feet. "What do you know of me or mine?" Her eyes have lost the glassiness of her fear, are filled now with rage. The witch continues to walk until she's standing just a breath away from Kahran. The man who starred in all of her newest nightmares, the man who had taken the lives of her dearest friends, the man who had opened the sky until it belched evil. The man who could easily end her. "Your whims are the very same that ended the lives of witches, of good Cenrilian people." Fear still clutched her heart tightly but stubborn pride and bitter anger forced the words from her lips before sense could stall them. "So, send me to the sea. Send me to fire. I'll suffer the pain of death sooner than suffer through another evil man" She spits the words like venom, as if fear didn't crouch in her heart as heavy as a stone. "Gloating his power over me."


Lionel | Kahran stands head-and-shoulders taller than Valrae, but in that fleeting moment she seems to be in control in ways that go beyond mere size, and he knows it. Yet his smirk never fades, nor do his curious, scholarly eyes cease to study her diligently. “Yes,” he rasps. “There it is. The warmth. It needed only slaking.” He lifts his hand and points to her, but then he swivels his head so that his face regards the southern blue fire instead. “Cling to your earth a little longer, witch. Cling, and suffer accordingly.” A blaze erupts between them, controlled and steady and orange, casting light upon garlic and the ashes of a dead priest. “You’ll find your gods soon enough.” The sky turns to black night, the sea to sunless blue, the obelisks to Cenril, and Kahran disappears. Valrae has returned to the Lithrydel she knows, not whatever it was she has just experienced. A man is dead before her, but the fires barring her passage have flickered out of reality and she may leave this place.


Valrae sinks into the sand the moment Kahran's figure blinks away. The stench of garlic and burned flesh curled around her again and this time she vomits. The cold never leaves her but she stands. The witch kicks sand over the place she was sick and the ashes of the dead man. She says a prayer for him. Sand clung to her as she collected her shawl, wrapped it about her trembling shoulders, collected her things. The woman pulls a spare candle from her bag, lights the wick with the breath of her magic, and places it in the sand for the man whose name she'll never know. Left undisturbed, it would burn until the sun rose on Cenril again. And even as Valrae returned home, to her husband and her fire, she felt cold.